To mark out the generations

I wore my daughter's purple sandals a few days ago and looked down at my feet.

  

They could be the feet of a younger person.  They could be the feet of a teenager, and something inside me recoiled. 

'Mutton dressed as lamb.'  

When I was my daughter’s age I revelled in the fact that my mother was a frumpy woman who looked her age.  

I saw other young women around me whose mothers looked almost as young as their daughters, or at least they dressed as though they were the same age, with firm tight gymmed-out bodies and I recoiled.

Did I want my mother as a frump to mark out the generations?  

A Freudian might say it was about sexual rivalry - mothers and daughters.  Just as a mother is coming to the end of her sexually active life, a daughter is entering hers.  There’s no room for both.  Or so we like to think.  

The women in my family of origin are all shapes and sizes.  We span a ten year time slot from oldest girl to youngest.  There are brothers slotted between, but here I refer only to the girls because as girls we were bunched together - the girls versus the boys.  

My older sister erupted into her adult, and to my mind, sexual body and I once thought it revolting.  I wanted to stay young, even as another part of me longed to grow breasts of my own.  

Childhood seemed then a safer bet to female adulthood with all that adulthood entailed, from the beauty of breasts to the ugliness of pimples.  

I wanted none of it.  I wanted all of it.  

My older sister prepared one day to go into the city to meet friends.  I watched her as she sat at the dressing table.  She dabbed powder from a tight compact onto her cheeks on top of the stuff she had squeezed from a pink bottle of what was then called foundation.  

My sister spread it well concentrating on the blotchy bits of her face to cover any blemishes.  Her face makeup caked on like a mask, she then smeared her lips, a deep pearly pink with a touch of purple. The lipstick suited her blue eyes.  She pressed her lips together and puckered to even out the stain, and then dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a handkerchief.  

She wore a tight woollen jumper, with a V neck that accentuated her cleavage. Winter time and her skirt was also made of wool, hip hugging and knee length above her black tights.  She wore low heeled  black shoes, middies, that clicked as she walked across the concrete footpath on her way from the house. 

I could walk her to the station if I had wanted but by then my jealousy was intense to the point that I could not bear the comparison any longer.  

Me, four years younger and every bit the gawk, torn between growing up and staying small. 

My mother's story

‘Why,’ I ask my mother, ‘do you always look on the bright side?  Why this need to compare your lot to that of others.’  

To my mother there is always someone worse off, even in the worst of circumstances.  

She gives me a wan smile.

‘We lived through two world wars,’ she says.  ‘We were hungry all the time.’  

My mother draws a deep breath. ‘Once I woke in the night and someone was chopping down our tree.  It was not really our tree but we called it our tree because it was on the other side of our house and we had planned for a long time that it was ours.’

My mother dabs a tissue to her nose.  She goes through tissues as though she has an unlimited supply.  The wastepaper basket beside her chair is filled to overflowing with these tissues.  I think of them as my mother’s tears, the ones she can no longer shed.

 

‘Everyone everywhere was chopping down trees for firewood,’ my mother goes on.

‘I woke my husband and he went outside and chased them away.  By then the tree was half hanging and so he chopped it right down and managed to get it over the back of our fence. We were staying with my parents at the Marnixplein.  We had just managed to get the tree over our fence when the German soldiers came and shot their guns in the air.’  

My mother hesitates, whether for effect or out of her memory of this time.  I can see the garden, the fence, the tree in my mind’s eye as if a scene from a movie.

‘Just in time,’ my mother says in her lopsided English, ‘because now the tree was inside our back garden.  It was ours.  Still, we were hungry all the time.’

My mother takes a fresh tissue and folds it in four, ready for the next dab of her nose.

 

‘Once we went on our bikes to the north of Holland and we brought with us things.  I brought a beautiful table cloth, what I had embroidered for my mother.  It took me a whole winter to sew. 

The farmers didn’t want money, they wanted stuff.  Someone took the table cloth and we got something to eat for it.’

My mother is on a roll. Tissue, nose dab, wastepaper basket and words.

 

 ‘Once there came beggars to the door.  My mother offered them what we were eating.  They looked at it, smelled it and then went away.  Even they did not want it.  Some people who were really rich, they could buy on the black market and they did.’

My mother stops again, as if to take stock of her memories.

‘What you got when it was time to eat, very little.  My mother would dish up for everybody a little and everybody made sure that the one next to them didn’t get a crumb more.  People started to hate each other because there was never enough to satisfy your hunger.’

I feel a slight thrill inside at the mention of the word ‘hate’.  My mother rarely owns up to such a powerful emotion.  She never owns her hateful feelings – at least not out loud, at least not to me – but here she is telling me that she too knows what it’s like to hate.

‘It took quite a long time till the war was over and then we heard that from Sweden there would come planes and they would drop  packages of margarine, of bread and butter.  Everybody got their share and you saw people, they were so starving, sitting on the street.  They got the food and they started to eat it.’  My mother’s eyes gleam with the memory.

‘But my mother said, “Don’t do that.”  It’s not good to start eating when your body was so hungry.  You have to eat a bit at a time.’  

She looks down at her hands in her lap and as if unable to bear the sight of them empty, my mother  takes up another tissue.

 

‘I had somewhere a photo of myself and I was that skinny.  Never in my life have I been as skinny as then.  There were photos of my dad and mum and they looked ten years older.

My mother around this time in a blouse she embroidered herself (the birth date above belongs to me, strange that someone has accidentally given it to my mother who was born 5 October 1919, strange but understandable given my mother and I share the same name).

My mother continues, ‘The priests in the country churches said, “If you have family bring them here.  Let them come.”  Because there’s nothing in the city.  In the country, not so.  In Heilo where we had cousins, next to them was a farmer. They had milk.  The family said bring your baby and little child and we can feed them here.

 

‘We went on our bikes without tyres and my husband had a little cart behind his bike.’

The story shifts here. My mother has told me that my father had a bike with a cart in which my older brother, then something like two years old, traveled.  My mother pushed her pram with the baby, who later died and is buried in Heilo.

 

My older sister who died at five months of age during the Hunger winter of 1945.  I have wondered what she would be like had she survived.

 

And what it might be like if I were the third daughter and not the second.  

Why should I worry?

There I was crouched under the weight of the summer sun with a head cold.  My nose ran, my sinuses blocked up and nowhere could I find sympathy from any of the people who occupy my life.  They too were caught up in the heat. 

So I took myself away.  I locked myself inside my study and turned on the fan.  It whirred its way into the day.  No more activity for me.

‘You can’t stop,’ my daughter said. ‘I need your help.  Besides, mothers don’t get sick.  Mothers stay well.’  She stomped out of the room.

   

My mother plans to live till she’s one hundred. 

‘That’s six more years,’ I told her on my last visit.  ‘That’s a long time.’

‘But it’s something special to live to one hundred.  There’s no big deal in being ninety-five. And time goes so fast these days.’  My mother wiped her nose on a tissue and threw it into the  wastepaper basket by her chair.  My mother goes through tissues like they are breaths of air.  ‘I don’t do a thing these days,’ she went on, ‘but that’s okay.  I should be allowed to go slow.  I’m ninety four.  I deserve a rest.’

I do not repeat the mantra, ‘if you don’t use it, you lose it’.  Why not stop still in her chair and do nothing?

Why not sit each day surrounded by books, the trashy Mills and Boon type of novels my mother reads, all are readily available from the library in her retirement village; all she can read these days for the large print? 

My mother reads these books the way she eats chocolate.  I never bother to ask her what each book is about.  I suspect she could not tell me.  She reads books like people read the trashy magazines in doctors' surgeries –  eye candy, fodder for the mind. 

‘Why should I worry?  My mother asks me yet again.  A rhetorical question.   She does not expect an answer and I’m not inclined to offer one. 

‘Why should I worry about my children?  There’s nothing I can do about them.  They have their lives.  They make their own decisions.  I have nothing to worry about.’

When I sit with my mother as I do at least once a week and she tells me yet again how much she fails to worry, does she see the skepticism in my eyes?

Probably not.  She refuses to wear her glasses, except to read.  Glasses do not suit her sense of the fashionable.  Glasses make her look old.  And so she can barely see.  She will not see.

 

Those three wise monkeys come to mind. 

Another father

There was a time when to catch sight of my therapist outside his consulting room sent my heart quivering and turned my legs to jelly.   I saw him one day at the check out of a supermarket in Glenferrie Road in Hawthorn and hid behind the shelves to get a better look.

I wanted to take my place in the queue behind him.  I wanted him to see me and my two small children.  I wanted him to recognize me outside of his consulting room, but it felt wrong.  I might trip over in my awkwardness, drop the shopping, stutter out words of greeting, flush red before the man in whom I had confided for several years, twice a week, in the dark safety of his consulting room. 

Now here he stood in the glare of the supermarket lights, fumbling with his wallet to pay for the milk he had bought.  I watched as the teller loaded his milk, two cartons into a plastic bag and handed him the receipt. 

Did my daughters notice any change in me?  The sudden spike in my sensibilities.  The sudden urge to stop, to stand back to wait, when normally I rushed my way though the supermarket intent on the next task. 

I had no one to tell, only to wait until the next session when I could tell my therapist that I had seen him in the supermarket, that I had spied on him from afar, that I would have wanted to talk to him but all courage had left me high and dry. 

And he could then tell me how much he had become like my father, but a different father, too, one I wanted to avoid as much as ever but also one I wanted to meet.

Misfortunes run in threes.

My computer mouse disappeared last night somewhere between six pm when I left home for a party and returned at 11 pm.  Its disappearance has left me with an odd sense of dislocation.  

I could not begin to use my computer until I had access to its insides.  

And then this morning when I woke to make my first cup of tea, I found the pantry had been invaded overnight by ants.

I put these two events together as though they are linked, as though I have been jinxed; and I start to look for a third mishap to make the picture complete.  So far I cannot find one. 

I had feared this party last night, as one arranged by good friends but filled with people who belong to a particular group of old friends from the advertising world.  They tend to gang together and exclude outsiders.  

Last night, I was determined not to be left out.  I was determined to gate crash my way into any conversation that looked inviting.  

As it turned out, this became unnecessary.  We wound up at a small table on the periphery with a couple of friends outside the advertising group who go back many years and a new couple with fascinating stories to tell.

 

It became a night of nostalgia about the day each of the three couples met the other half of the couple for the first time.

 

One couple had been together for over forty years. My husband and I for thirty six, and the third couple have been together – unmarried, the woman hastened to add – for seventeen years.  

The third couple’s story seemed by far the more glamorous in that they had met in Pakistan and lived an extraordinary life before the roof blew off the halcyon structures of the nineties and no one could live like that any more, even those in advertising.

 

At one point, there was a generalised complaint around the table about the new world order:  It was so much better in days gone by - education better, recourses better, thoughtfulness better.

I don’t buy this line.  There are things that might be ‘better’ today and other things far worse.  It depends on your perspective. 

Maybe the third miserable event for me for the day can be the weather.  

We are expecting temperatures to rise again to the near forties, Celsius that is, another scorcher.

 

All the leaves are brown, but the sky is blue.  Bright blue with a blazing sun and the leaves have lost their green through sun burn, so the words of the song, which I presume were written to apply to autumn, do not apply so well here.  

Brown leaves and with a northern orientation you'd expect to hear of the space before winter, but here it can signify a hot summer.  

The burned leaves tend to be on the exotics, those plants that are not indigenous.  The cherry tree in our backyard is stone dead.  The one in our front garden survives, but with no green leaves left to cheer us over the summer.

 

The leaves on the star magnolia have dropped in distress but there are still flower buds waiting to burst, so it might survive.  

We cannot use too much water and we cannot wrap the entire garden in shade cloth.  One scorching day is enough to burn leaves to a crisp.  They will not revive till next season. 

You, who live on the other side of the world, have other struggles in the cold.  I do not wish to be you.  I’m happy enough in my heat, only sometimes, like most others here, I wish it were not quite so intense.