I want it now

My Dutch grandmother, a woman of scruples, a woman who held fast to her religious beliefs even under pressure, kept camphor balls in her apron pockets during her pregnancies. 

An uncle told me this recently, when I visited him in his retirement home, this uncle, my mother’s younger brother, and one of the only two left now of my mother’s large sib ship of seven. 

I had read a short memoir of his childhood, and somewhere the words: 

‘The unusual habits of mother during her pregnancy, especially in her choice of food, made her vitamin deficient and could have given her children a form of rickets as our dentist pointed out.’ 

I was curious, and asked my uncle about his mother’s strange eating habits and he talked about the lack of vitamin D from the harsh long winters in Holland and how his mother fed her family cod liver oil.  

He did not mention her eating habits, only this peculiarity. 

My uncle described how from time to time, as his mother went about her housework duties, she dipped her hand into her pockets and pulled out a camphor ball.  Then she put it to her nose and breathed in deeply, as if from a snuff box, but only when she was pregnant, my uncle told me, and only when she had those strange cravings that pregnant women can have, not otherwise. 

It seemed an odd habit for a woman of scruples, a woman whose religious observances bordered on the extreme.  Mass every day even in the snow and cold and the rosary every night.  

She was an expert at self-denial.

Self-denial takes practice.  

I remember when I first decided to get a grip on my television watching as a thirteen year old.  I sat in the classroom and the Latin teacher, Mother Eleanor, was going on about the importance of learning our verbs.  About the importance of putting aside time every night to practise them. 

I pitched myself in my mind to the end of the day.  I saw myself come home.  I saw myself go into the kitchen and spread at least four slices of bread with margarine and jam, then I went to the lounge room where my brothers were already stuck in front of the television and I joined them. 

I put my sandwiches on the arm of my chair and eat sandwich after sandwich as first Bugs Bunny, followed by the likes of Daniel Boone or Robin Hood flashed across the screen.  Then my father came home and I bolted, along with everyone else, no longer hungry for dinner, no longer keen on sitting together as a family, but having to go through the dinner ritual regardless. 

During the Latin lesson that day I decided I would stop watching television.  I would give myself time from the moment I came home to do my homework and then I would get good at Latin. 

I would deny myself for a greater good.

They’ve done experiments with small children where they sit each child in front of a lolly and tell them that if they can resist taking that lolly for five minutes – not sure exactly how long, but about five minutes – then they can have two. 

The researchers do this test to demonstrate the development of impulse control and of will power.    

Some kids can do it.  They can hold out for the greater reward but others cannot.  They want it now. 

When I shop with my husband for some item that is of significant value, a new chest of drawers for instance, or a computer upgrade or some such thing, he likes to look, to compare, to consider and then to go home empty handed, with the intention of returning the next day or the day after that once he’s satisfied this is the best thing to buy. 

Me.  I see it.  I examine it and think about it.  I reckon it’s okay.  Enough value for money, a good quality product, it will do the job.  I want it now.  Why wait till tomorrow or the next day to buy it when we agree we need it and can have it now?

In this way we are different.  But over the years I have noticed some of my husband’s caution has crept into me and some of my impulsiveness erupts from him.  Just some. 

My husband is still a great one for window-shopping.  It’s nothing for him to go off to a farmer’s market and come home with some small token, a bunch of radishes for instance, whereas if I were to go to said farmer’s market I’d feel almost compelled to buy stuff we might not need, stuff that interests me perhaps, expensive butter from nearby farms, venison from a local supplier.  We might eat it eventually but we do not need it. 

I will want to buy something for our children, too, but my husband is happy to feast his eyes on the displays and come home empty handed. 

And then I get to another part of my uncle’s memoir where he talks about his mother’s response to the fact that five of her seven children left home as young adults to live far away in Australia, in New Guinea and in Brazil.

‘Every time somebody leaves, it takes away a piece of my heart,’ my Dutch grandmother said.  And no amount of scruples, impulse control or camphor ball sniffing can stop her heart from breaking.   

A trip to the beach

Here's the short story I posted about earlier.   You might like to read them all.  Mine's second in line.

http://www.lanecove.nsw.gov.au/Community/Library/Pages/LaneCoveLiteraryAward.aspx

A psychological sandwich

I am my mother’s daughter. When I was in my early twenties, when I first began to develop a will of my own, when I first discovered the thrill of rebellion and quietly thumbed my nose at my mother’s religiosity and what I then saw as her prudery, and began to favour the company of men – what I have called my ‘promiscuous’ years – my mother took to writing me letters.

My mother writes letters still even though we live less than twenty kilometers apart. She writes to all her children as a means of stating her case.

My mother's letters to me are ‘psychological sandwiches’. They begin with protests of her love for me. The middle carries the sting. What do you think you are doing? Who do you think you are? Behaving so loosely with men. Where are your morals?

Then she might end the letter with a short vignette: her memory of me as a little girl in a yellow jumper and tartan skirt, after she had come home from hospital with my new baby sister, when I was less than two years old and had been left in the care of my godparents, the Kaandorps, for over a week.

In her letter my mother remembers me then as the little girl who threw herself into her mother’s arms and wept for the sheer joy of being together again. If only, my mother writes, if only she could give to me now the things I needed then. It is as if she wishes that I had never grown up, that I had never entered into the world of adulthood, of conflict and of challenge. If only I had stayed little, then our bond might be secure.

I have been reading Nancy Miller’s Bequest and Betrayal:memoirs of a parent's death, a book about adult children who write about their parents after death. Are these memoirs eulogies, songs of praise for parents now gone, or are they betrayals of parental secrets?

I suspect I could not write about my father as I do now were he not dead. Now he is dead, I am safe.

Will the way I write about my mother change after her death? My mother in my mind has undergone so many metamorphoses, from the woman I adored as a small child to the woman I became scornful of, though not in adolescence, even in adolescence I felt protective of her and needy, to the frail old woman she has finally become, of whom I feel protective in a different way. It took a long time before I dared to feel critical of my mother in any way.

It was later in my life, in my twenties and thirties when I had embarked on my analysis, only then did my image of my mother start to crack. Only then did I come to feel critical of her, for her religious intolerance, her manipulative tendencies, and her tendency to pretend that all is well when it is not.

I have my mother’s name, all three names, Elisabeth Margaretha Maria. It is a Dutch tradition to name the second daughter after the mother, and the first daughter after the mother’s mother, a tradition that again alerts us to the significance of mothers in a woman’s life.

I did not name my first daughter after my mother or any of my daughters directly after me, but my husband insisted and I agreed to the idea that they should all have my name as a second name. Equality you might say. Their first names however belong entirely to them.

Even now I can imagine my daughters writing in the future about what it means to them to each share their mother’s name between their first and last names.

In my family of origin, we each bear the name Maria, another tradition, religious this time, a means of asking the Blessed Virgin Mary to look over us all. All except the oldest, who again according to Dutch tradition was given his father’s name in its entirety.

When we were little we laughed at the fact that even the boys carried the name Maria in their collection of personal names, Simon Peter Maria, Franciscus Wiro Maria, Michael George Maria and Gregory Paul Maria. Such odd names they seemed to us growing up in Australia in the fifties and sixties when most people’s names were Celtic and Anglo Saxon with the odd immigrant name from the Mediterranean or Europe thrown in for good measure.

Names matter, they are identifying features, they become part of our sense of ourselves and of our identity.

In the days when I fancied I might write a book in which I had hoped each of my siblings might contribute a chapter, I also imagined a paragraph on each of us, suggesting parallels between our first given name and the way in which our name reflects our personalities.

As usual I am running off into too many ideas, too many ideas to follow. One leads into the other and the track becomes unwieldy. It is difficult to back track to where we have come from. Sorry.