Sometimes I gaze at my two‑year-old son with his big, blue eyes and soft, blond hair and one thought in particular overwhelms me.
Just how much my wonderful mum would have adored him. He’s so amazing, so funny, so gorgeous and, knowing how much Mum loved babies and children – she was a midwife who had seven of her own – I just know she would have gone crazy for him. It’s a realisation that stops me in my tracks every single time. Sadly, my mum, Johannah, never got to meet her first grandson.
She died in December 2016 from leukaemia when I was only 18. I lost the one person who loved me unconditionally and had always given me reassurance and support.
The hardest part of becoming a mother myself has been not having my own around to witness it. When things went wrong in labour, I cried out to Mum, asking her to help me. After my son was finally born, the pain of knowing she would never hold him brought fresh agony.
Social media star Lottie Tomlinson lost her mum Johannah to leukaemia in 2016 when she was 18
Lottie believes her mum ‘would have adored’ her two-year-old son Lucky
And whenever I hit challenges – such as breastfeeding struggles – I didn’t want to ask anyone else for help. If I couldn’t ask her, I told myself, I would just have to work it out for myself, which has obviously made life harder still. But I guess my stubbornness was yet another expression of my grief.
With this in mind, you might well wonder why I named my son Lucky. Particularly when I tell you that two years after my mum’s death, my precious little sister, Fizz, also died, aged only 18, from an accidental drug overdose, having struggled to come to terms with Mum’s death. It was a devastatingly shocking way to lose my best friend.
There’s no denying that life has been incredibly hard on our family. But underneath it all I do feel lucky; as someone who is no stranger to tragedy, when good fortune does come I appreciate it even more. And I was overjoyed to be able to have a child with the man I love.
My partner, Lewis, and I decided our son’s name halfway through the pregnancy after Lewis mentioned that he was working on a deal with a man whose business partner was named Lucky. I instantly loved it, without discovering until after his birth just how deeply connected to it I already was. Someone asked if I’d named my son Lucky because of Fizz. I had no idea that the Latin roots of her full name, Félicité (Felicitas), meant lucky. It felt profound.
This also reminded me of Mum’s courageous spirit; she chose The Luckiest by Ben Folds to be played at her funeral, which said so much about her character.
The influencer is pictured with her partner Lewis and son Lucky
Even when Mum knew she was going to die, she still considered herself lucky to have had us all.
As a family, we have been dealt some dizzying highs as well as those crashing lows. My older brother Louis was in what was then the world’s most famous boy band, One Direction, and his astronomic rise to stardom changed our fortunes for ever.
We grew up in Doncaster, in a three-bedroom house in a little place called Bessacarr. Mum had moved there with Louis as a single mum in the mid-1990s. My dad, who she fell in love with and married within the year, had been her next-door neighbour. Louis was nearly seven when I was born in 1998.
Fizz came along two years later, followed by our twin sisters, Phoebe and Daisy, in 2004. We girls shared a room, sleeping in two separate bunk beds. Life was hectic, but I loved it.
Mum was the centre of our world. Her career as a midwife was demanding, but she always had time for us; she had a solution for any problem we took to her.
Unsurprisingly, Louis spent his time singing and being musical. Fizz was smart, unique, outspoken and opinionated. She had the biggest heart, the kindest soul. The twins, who were identical, were a naughty double-act, tricking their teachers, who couldn’t tell them apart.
Growing up, Dad had a drinking problem. When he was drunk, he’d argue with Mum and things felt chaotic. They divorced when I was 13. I’m proud to say Dad is now healthy and sober – after Mum died, he went to rehab and got himself clean. Despite my parents’ split, we were a normal family until Louis went to an X Factor audition in 2010 when he was 18.
Lottie’s brother, One Direction singer Louis Tomlinson, with mum Johannah in 2015
Lottie, right, with her little sister Fizz, who died two years after her mum from an accidental drug overdose
When Mum said he’d been put in a boy band we thought it was a joke. She sent us a picture of Louis, Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Zayn Malik and Liam Payne on a flight of steps at Simon Cowell’s house. I was speechless. I never got used to coming home from school and seeing our front garden full of girls and journalists waiting for him.
About a year after my parents split, Mum met her second partner, Dan. We moved into a bigger home and they had another set of twins together, Doris and Ernie, born in 2014. I’d always loved babies, and was hands-on with my younger siblings.
I found school a struggle. I was anxious and shy and wasn’t academic like Fizz. When I failed to get the grades to enter sixth form, Mum suggested I make a career of my love of beauty products. The year before, during the summer holidays, she had arranged for me to do work experience with One Direction’s hair and make-up artist Lou Teasdale, at her London agency, The Book. Now she suggested I assist Lou on the One Direction tour.
What should have been a week’s work experience in the US saw me staying for the rest of the world tour.
My career as an Instagram influencer was taking off as I began working with brands – later launching my own tanning brand Tanologist – and building a huge social media following. I grew in confidence, and returned home a mature young woman forging my own career.
In early 2016, I was still readjusting to being back in my old surroundings, catching up with old friends, when I received the terrible news that Mum, who was just 43, had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia, a severe form of blood and bone marrow cancer. Her partner Dan broke the news over the phone with Mum in the background. She couldn’t bear to tell me herself.
Fizz had struggled to come to terms with her mum’s death. She is pictured at a film premiere in London in 2014
It was hard accepting Mum’s role within the family had suddenly and dramatically changed. She’d always been the centre of our world. She had all this strength and knew all the answers. Now, she was laid up in a hospital bed, helpless. Her situation was out of everyone’s control.
From the start, Mum said we couldn’t tell anyone, not even close friends. She was the sort of person who didn’t want people feeling sorry for her. But I found it quite hard and lonely not being able to tell anyone close to me.
Watching Mum fade away was painful. When her doctors said there was nothing else they could do, I lay on the bathroom floor and sobbed, convinced I wouldn’t survive losing her. For a while, she was allowed out of hospital for daily visits to Louis’s house in London, and for my 18th birthday, she managed to organise a celebration for the entire family.
She hired a tepee for the garden and we had a buffet-style picnic. My birthday cake was decorated with all sorts of edible cosmetics such as lipsticks and eyeshadows. It was the last birthday I had with her, so the memory is bittersweet, but that was my mum all over, still making the effort to make us all feel special.
Mum passed away, eight months after her diagnosis, on December 7, 2016. Grief hit me in waves. I’d try not to let myself get upset or cry, then it’d all come out, in the most unbearable pain, and I’d sob uncontrollably.
I found purpose in helping my grandparents look after my younger siblings. Phoebe and Daisy were 12, and Doris and Ernie were just two.
But I couldn’t believe I’d never be able to wake up in the morning, come downstairs and see my mum again; we’d never even speak on the phone again. It’s those simple, normal moments that I still miss the most.
I’ll never get over this, I thought. I’ll never be able to live without my mum. But I knew I had to try. I moved to London, where life was all about working hard and partying harder. This was a release, and let me temporarily park my grief. But I didn’t know anyone who’d experienced what I had, so I couldn’t relate to people on a deeper level. Girls my age still had their mums, which felt emotionally isolating.
Lottie and Lewis are expecting a baby girl in January. She is pictured at a Lucky Girl book signing in Manchester last weekend
And I was worried about Fizz, who was at boarding school in London doing her A-levels.
We’d go out together and I noticed her taking things further than everyone else. It seemed like she’d gone from feeling numb over Mum’s death to being hit by how overwhelming it all was. Now she was trying to get that numbness back via drugs and drinking.
Her boarding school would call saying she’d stayed out or missed curfew. She began distancing herself from the family, going missing for days, ignoring messages. Louis and I realised she was partying and taking drugs, doing anything she could to escape the pain of losing the only person who ever understood her. We showed her love and support, we got her professional help – but without Mum nothing ever felt enough.
I agonised over whether to go on my much-needed holiday to Bali, but in the end I thought we could be in this position for years; I couldn’t never go away.
Three days into the trip, I heard that Fizz had gone missing. Her phone was off, she wasn’t replying to text messages and I couldn’t get hold of her friends. I felt panic-stricken. I was sitting on my hotel balcony when Louis called to say Fizz had died. I just remember screaming. Over and over again, I kept screaming: ‘No, my baby sister, no.’ The pain was all-consuming.
Losing Mum was terrible but, because she was ill with cancer, death always felt like a possibility. I never thought we would actually lose Fizz.
My anxiety went to a whole other level after that. Before, most of it was general worry. But now, I could be on the motorway, sitting in the passenger seat of a car, and suddenly be convinced we were going to crash and die. I’d walk into a shop and worry that someone was going to grab and kill me. Some days I wouldn’t go out because I kept fixating on when the next bad thing would happen.
After losing her mum and Fizz, Lottie says there were days she wouldn’t go out ‘because I kept fixating on when the next bad thing would happen’
One day, I was in the car with Lou – she went from being my boss to becoming one of my closest friends – coming back from a work trip and we started talking about Fizz. I began screaming. In that moment it was the only way I knew how to communicate the pain, anger and sadness I was in.
‘Why?’ I kept screaming. ‘Why?’ I wanted to know why Fizz had been taken from us? Why Mum? Why me and my family? Why?
Lou suggested I go to therapy. Having someone to speak to, who had an unbiased opinion about everything, a place where I could dump what I needed to say and clear my mind, somehow lightened the load and made day-to-day life a bit easier.
I learnt that talking about grief is so important. During the pandemic, I wanted to help make grief less of a scary subject for other people and started working with the charity Sue Ryder, which offers bereavement support. Today, I’m a patron and help lobby Parliament for better access to bereavement counselling.
I met my fiance, Lewis, in 2020. Our connection was so strong and I quickly started trusting him in a way I’d never imagined possible. We’d only been together a few months when I became pregnant with Lucky. It was unplanned and I was scared. I was still only 23, focusing on my career and in a new relationship. But somehow being pregnant made me feel close to Mum; like I was stepping into her shoes by becoming a mother.
But I felt sad that she couldn’t share this journey with me. I had questions I knew she’d have the answers to. Time and again I wanted to ask her: is this normal?
I was desperate to give birth naturally, but at 37 weeks the baby stopped moving as much and I had to be induced. Labour wouldn’t start and after two days I was told that, if I wasn’t dilating by morning, I’d need a C-section.
I was so upset. I went for a walk and I remember thinking, silly as it sounds, why hasn’t Mum helped me with this? She’d know how much I’d want to give birth naturally. And then I said out loud to her: ‘Can you please help me?’ An hour later, my waters broke. Lucky was born the next day.
She says becoming a mum ‘has replaced something in my heart that I thought was lost forever when Mum passed away’
I experienced such intense emotions after giving birth. I felt scared that something was going to happen to my baby; just looking at him made me cry. I remember thinking: ‘If anything ever happens to you, I’ll never survive losing you.’ After experiencing the worst things that could ever happen, twice, that fear felt very real.
But being someone else’s everything, which I am to Lucky, is comforting. Becoming a mum has replaced something in my heart that I thought was lost for ever when Mum passed away.
Something about that bond has stepped in for the mother-daughter relationship I lost.
Before Lewis, I was cynical about being with someone for ever. I couldn’t believe things could last. Mum had died. Fizz had died. And my parents’ marriage hadn’t worked out.
But when Lewis proposed to me last November, I could see the future spanning out in front of me and didn’t hesitate to say yes.
My younger sister Phoebe’s a mum now, too, to a little girl, Olive. Because I’d already had Lucky, I was able to fill the gap of Mum not being there and answer any questions she had. That would make Mum happy.
As a family, we all have an awareness of how short life can be, which makes us love so much harder. That’s the positive that comes out of all this heartbreak. We were always close, but it’s made us more protective of each other and so loving.
I miss Mum and Fizz so very much. Having experienced such deep sadness in my life, I’ve also found great joy. I’m getting married, I’m pregnant again – our second baby is due in January. I have a career I love, a beautiful relationship with Lewis and a strong family I can lean on.
So, you see, despite everything, I really am a lucky girl.
Lucky Girl: Family, Falling And Finding My Way, by Lottie Tomlinson, is out now (Blink Publishing, £22).
To order a copy for £19.80 go to mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937. Free UK delivery on orders over £25. Promotional price valid until August 23, 2024.
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