That one day of the year

There’s a note written on the back of an envelope on my desk this morning.  I remember it now. I wrote it in the middle of the night after waking from a dream.  I have little inkling of the dream, though once I consult the note on the envelope all might be revealed.

Yesterday I went with my mother to visit her cardiologist.  Her heart seems fine at the moment, blood pressure 125 over 70, better then mine.  That one leaky valve seems to have stopped leaking.  Her heart is smaller and functioning well with the aid of medication. 

I mentioned to the cardiologist that my mother had lost her sister recently and he listened patiently as my mother went over the story again, about how she had not expected her sister who was six years younger to die; how it is so much harder when her sister is so far away in Holland; how she could not even go to the funeral. 

I’ve been distracted by a phone call from a colleague asking questions about another colleague and suddenly I feel I am dragged into the mire of politics, which is perhaps similar to the issue of sibling rivalry and all the ugly emotions that get stirred up when families and professions are in conflict.

Enough said, back to my mother.  Earlier in the waiting room as we waited for the cardiologist to materialise my mother mentioned the fact that tomorrow is Mother’s Day. 

I have reservations about this day.  It stirs up mixed feelings. 

‘I’m not interested in Mother’s day,’ my mother said, as if she had read my mind, 'but your brother, F, came during the week with a huge bunch of flowers.' 

My aversion to Mother’s Day must have started long ago when I was young.  My mother told us repeatedly then how she was not interested in Mother’s Day.  It was a commercial ploy to get people to send money, she said.  

I’ve tended to agree.  On Mother’s Day we feel obliged to honour our mothers whether we want to or not.

And for me, even if I wanted to acknowledge my debt to my mother on Mothers Day and my love for her, it would be marred by the fact that the opportunity arrives on this one particular day of the year when someone else dictates that I should honour my mother.

My mother with one of her babies. I've yet to ask if she recognises this one.  It could be me.  For years I've been on the hunt for a baby photo of me.  It's not easy.  This photo is poorly focussed and given my mother has had so many children, she must identify each by extraneous variables - the location of the photo, the dress she's wearing, the time of year.  

I have tried to urge my children not to feel obliged on Mothers Day. 

It was easy when they were little.  Their school might have orchestrated a card or a stall and a small gift, but thereafter the day was as any other. 

As our children grew older and could make up their own minds, they were less inclined to make a fuss in much the way I have not fussed in relation to my own mother.  

My mother has urged us not to bother on Mother's Day and yet underneath I sense her desire that we do so.

Do I want my children to acknowledge me on this special day?  I’m not sure.

The same applies to Father’s Day.  These are days of ritual and perhaps they go further than mere commercialism.  They stir up feelings of ambivalence in some.  For others they might become a way of fulfilling obligations, that one day of the year event.  After that it seems we need not acknowledge our mothers at all.

It is the seemingly compulsory nature of Mothers Day that troubles me. 

And as for the dream: I went into the ‘exterocet’ by clicking on to an arrow that led to the other side of a blog.  In my dream the exterocet was Internet speak for white space.  Terrifying white space.   No one had been there yet.  It was the equivalent of hell.  

On the surface, this snippet of dream makes little sense, but there’s meaning there, if only I can unpick it.  

My mother hums

We take the yellow bus to Camberwell. It smells of shoe polish. It smells of leather. I sit beside my mother near the front. Today it is just the two of us, my mother and me, and we are taking the bus to Camberwell to shop.

I want to complain about my mother's plans to buy my sister pantyhose. I am older than my sister and I am still in socks. Why should she have stockings before me?

But I do not want stockings. They are too grown up. Pantyhose are the new thing - stockings like tights that go all the way up to your waist. You pull them on like trousers and do not need to support them with a suspender belt.

How I hate suspender belts. I wear them in winter for school. Mine invariably loses the little bobbles that I poke through the hooks to keep the stockings in place. Once I lose the normal bobbles, I use three-penny bits but the coins are not attached except by the force of the stocking through the hook. They easily come adrift and I wind up with a threepenny bit hanging around my ankle underneath the stocking, which sags on the side where the coin has come loose.

Pantyhose belong to a new breed of women, modern women, not twelve year old girls like my sister, besides I should have them first. I am nearly two years older. But I do not ask for them and my sister nags. She nags and nags and drives my mother to buy them for her, even though we do not have enough money for such items.

My mother hums. She must be nervous. The bus turns the corners too fast and I slide across the seat right up against her. My mother's body is hard and soft at the same time. She has lost her stomach muscles, she tells me from having so many babies.

An ambulance screeches past. Its siren splits the air. My mother hums on as though she has not heard. I watch the driver’s neck. It has uneven black stubbly bits that run down and hide under his collar. The bus driver has fat stubby fingers that work the gears whenever we slow down to stop.

My mother looks ahead, still humming. Her nose juts out hooked. She is proud of it. Aquiline, she says, like an eagle. A sign of aristocracy. My mother is proud, but she sits hunched over in her old green coat with her handbag on her lap. She does not wear pantyhose. She wears stockings held up with her girdle. The girdle is pink, skin coloured. She wears it to hold in her stomach muscles on account of all those babies.

My mother is fat and frumpy and I am pleased about this. I would not want a mother who looks young and is pretty. Mothers should look like mothers.

My mother fiddles in her handbag for her compact. It opens with a puff of powder; sweet and tacky to smell like Lux Soap. My mother dabs the powder on her nose. She does not want her nose to shine. She squints into the compact’s tiny mirror and smears on a line of lipstick. Glossy and red.

My mother was very beautiful once. We have a photograph. In it she looks like a movie star. She gazes out from the photo with movie star eyes, with a wistful look, as if she is performing for a camera.

The top of the bus brushes against the branches of street trees as we turn corners. At Stanhope Street it stops for an old man who fumbles in his pocket for change and nearly falls over when the bus starts up again.
‘Pull the cord,’ my mother says. ‘We mustn’t miss our stop.’
I am taller than my mother. The cord like a skipping rope is taut till I pull on it. A loud buzz and the driver slows down. We walk towards the shops along an alleyway that leads to the train station.

My father will kill us all. The thought pops into my mind and I want to push it away but it will not go away. He will kill us all one by one. He will start with my mother move onto my sister and then it will be my turn. He will work through the girls and then start on the boys. I have not yet worked out how he will do it, but I know he will.

Not yet an orphan

What a day I have had. It is too busy at the moment by half. Once again I resist the basics, like hanging out washing that has sat in the washing machine overnight. I rationalise it is because of the rain. I have also failed to ring my mother. Every time I try she does not answer. I worried at first until I spoke to my older sister who tells me that in the evenings my mother takes out her hearing aide and turns up the television. She cannot hear a thing. So I must keep trying and maybe during the daytime. My mother does not watch television in the daytime. She is far too disciplined for that.

And busy she tells me, what with activities in the home, trips to doctors, her bible reading group and reading generally, she has no time for television by day but she likes to read in the evenings, once she turns off her TV.


My mother, I think to myself, is the sort of woman who will die in her sleep. Not yet I imagine, but one day soon enough. She will die in her sleep because it is the least painful way to go.

Imagine it. Imagine that last night alive. You follow your usual routine. For my mother the news on television, a few programs till around ten o’clock when her eyes start to feel heavy and then a visit to the toilet and the long struggle into her nightclothes. Finally she will put her dentures into a glass beside her bed and pull out her favourite book. She has been reading Ann Tyler of late.

My mother has always been a gluttonous reader. She will read for sometime, a fresh burst of energy with all the effort getting into bed has taken and in time her eyelids will droop again and she will make the supreme effort of switching off the light before falling into sleep.

She will mutter a prayer under her breath before she slips into unconsciousness, before her unconsciousness slips into oblivion and sleep becomes death.
Then my mother will have made her exit from this world in the same way she made her entrance, oblivious to the hardship and suffering around her, which is not to say she has not suffered. My mother knows intense pain but her way of dealing with her pain is one of looking on the bright side.

And now it occurs to me. This might account for my resistance to those who seek always to create lovely images in life, my hostility to those who resent my efforts to present different and less attractive facets of life, those who might prefer to die in their sleep oblivious to the pain of moving on, from those who rejoice in the struggle. Those who claw at the last vestiges of their lives, those who insist, I’m not ready to go yet. I want to stay.

My mother imagines these days she will live until she is 96 years old. It used to be that she imagined she would die at 86, the age of her father when he died, but she moved past that age. Now she has a little over five years to go on her reckoning.

What this means for me? For me at the age of 57 I am still not orphaned. None of us, my siblings are orphaned. My oldest brother in his mid sixties still has an intact mother. It drags back development. We must wait until we are next in line and by the time we get there assuming my mother’s death precedes that of her children, we will be so close to the possibility of our own deaths age wise, we already are that way, that we will have little time to ponder on the subtleties.

A childhood fantasy

We take the yellow bus to Camberwell. It smells of shoe polish. It smells of leather. I sit beside my mother near the front. Today there are only the two of us, my mother and me and we are taking the bus to Camberwell to shop.

I am angry with my mother. I want to complain about her plans to buy my sister pantyhose. I am older than my sister and I am still in socks. Why should she have stockings before me? But I do not want stockings. They are too adult.

My mother is humming. She must be nervous. The bus turns the corners too fast and I slide across the seat right up against my mother. Her body is hard and soft all at the same time.

An ambulance screeches past. Its siren splits the air. My mother hums on as though she has not heard it. I watch the driver’s neck. It has uneven black stubbly bits that run down and hide under his collar. The bus driver has fat stubby fingers that work the gears whenever we slow down to stop. My mother is looking ahead, still humming. Her nose juts out hooked. She is proud of it. Aquiline she says, like an eagle. A sign of aristocracy.

My mother is proud but she sits hunched over in her old green coat with her handbag on her lap. She does not wear pantyhose. She wears stockings held up with her girdle. The girdle is pink, skin coloured. She wears it to hold in her stomach muscles.

My mother is fat and frumpy and I am pleased about this. I would not want a mother who looked young and was pretty. Mothers should look like mothers. She fiddles in her handbag for her compact. It opens with a puff of powder; sweet and tacky to smell, like Lux Soap. My mother dabs the powder on her nose. She does not like her nose to shine. She squints into the compact’s tiny mirror and smears on a line of lipstick. Glossy red.

My mother was beautiful once. We have a photograph. In it she looks like a movie star. She gazes out from the photo with movie star eyes and a wistful look. Performing for the camera.

The top of the bus brushes against the branches of street trees as we turn corners. At Stanhope Street it stops for an old man who fumbles in his pocket for change and nearly falls over when the bus starts up again.
‘Pull the cord,’ my mother says. ‘We mustn’t miss our stop.’
I am taller than my mother. The cord like a skipping rope is taut till I pull on it. A loud buzz and the driver slows down. We walk towards the shops along an alleyway that leads to the railway station.

My father will kill us all. The thought pops into my mind and I want to push it away but it will not go away. He will kill us all one by one. He will start with my mother move onto my sister and then it will be my turn. He will work through the girls and then start on the boys. I have not yet worked out how he will do it, but he will. A train rattles through the cutting nearby.

The mid point of the wheel

Tomorrow I leave for the Blue Mountains. For five days solid I hope to write. I hope to lose myself so deeply in my writing that for this short time I will transcend the usual humdrum of my daily writing and get to somewhere I have not been before, ‘wheeled and soared and swung through footless halls air’. These words come to me from a poem I met as a child , ‘High Flying’ by Walter Magee. It begins, ‘Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter silvered wings, Sunwards I’ve climbed and chased the sunless mirth of sun split clouds and done a thousand things you have not dreamed of, wheeled and soared and swung my eager craft through footless falls of air...
and while with silent trembling heart, I've trod...put out my hand and touched the face of God’. (I have muddled these words. If I were a worthy soul I would Google them for you and correct them, but it's late and I must be away early, so if you are interested, you will need to search for yourself, or accept them as they are here, a muddle from my memory.)

I have started to pack, at least in my mind. It’s an easy thing to pack for one. After all the years when the girls were little and I needed to pack for them as well. I need also to put out five shirts for Bill who is colour blind and cannot select his own shirts and ties without disastrous consequences, at least he will worry that the consequences will be disastrous. He lacks confidence in his own taste, at least in colour. For the rest he is artistic, with excellent sense of shape and texture. Sometimes he gets to work in non-matching socks.

Tomorrow morning I will get up at 4 am and leave the house fifteen minutes later. I will drive my own car and leave it in long-term car parking to the airport. The cost of a weeks parking is the equivalent of one taxi fare, so I save money this way. Although I have discussed the matter of my getting to the airport with various members of my family and all express the wish to drive me to the airport, it seems to me, it’s too ridiculous a time, Monday morning at 4.15 am to inflict on any of them. Therefore I should be the only one inconvenienced by this trip – I should drive myself there and back seven days later.

I am a nervous traveler. Whenever I rehearse the experience in my mind I panic a little. I can see myself getting lost, or misreading signs and missing my plane or in this instance my train, first from Sydney airport where I will arrive at 7.00am during peak hour and then on to Central station. From Central station I need to make a three-hour train trip to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. I look forward to this leg of the journey. Three hours on a rocking train, three hours where I will still be on land but moving swiftly through space, three hours during which I can doze, read, or look out through the window at a new landscape.

I feel the need to write a brief farewell blog, a farewell for one week only. A bit like the dinner my husband wants to share tonight to mark my absence for a week. Not too special a dinner – I’m not going away for long – but to mark the occasion nevertheless.

We mark absences and returns in our household with fervour. No one can sneak away unnoticed, not like one of my brothers did on his eighteenth birthday many years ago, or Maggie May’s sister. She writes about this in a blog that eats at you with its poignancy. No, we mark our farewells and hellos.

It’s worse when I go because I am the ‘mother’, and mothers, not always but perhaps more often than not, are the mid point of the wheel around which all the spokes circle.

I wear the weight of my responsibility seriously and I am troubled at this end by my planned absence.

Someone needs to worry incessantly about the dog, as there will be a man here to help install a new gate and the gate will inevitably be left ajar from time to time. Someone will need to keep the dog in mind for the times when the gate man is here. The under pinners are also coming on Monday to help us to rectify the enormous cracks that have erupted in the front walls of our house.

They will work outside but one day at least my husband will need to take time off work to watch as they hoist the house up on jacks before they pour concrete into the huge holes they will have dug beneath the perimeter of the house to force it back in place. Hopefully this will help to rejoin the cracks.

I can put five shirts and ties for my colour blind husband in advance, one for each working day of the week I am away. I can make sure there is enough milk in the fridge to last the week and enough toilet paper. For the rest, my children, the ones living at home are old enough by far to look after themselves, as is my husband. Still I worry about them.

I worry about all the little things that they can take for granted, though taking people for granted is a dangerous pastime and one none of us should ever indulge in for too long, myself included. When we take others for granted, as Art Durkee has written elsewhere in relation to the business of expectation, we will inevitably trip up, not to mention the pain we cause the other person who is taken for granted.

So my absence shall be a good thing, painful for those at home to some extent only. The days will pass quickly enough and apart from my youngest who needs me more for transport and a general holding in mind function, the others will do just fine. And so will I.