My son would never meet the grandmother who adored him even before he was conceived. A month before Mum died she wrote a letter to her grandchildren. When we talked of my future we imagined I’d have two children, not one. In her letter she told the imaginary two children of my future how to make a paper mat, a lesson she’d learnt from her time living in Nigeria. In the early 1970s my mother was in voluntary service abroad, teaching science and English in a hut full of children of all ages. In the A4 exercise book Mum wrote in for her grandchildren she said:
… it is best – I think I have learnt – not to make your mind up that only one thing is right. Actually the world is always changing and so are you – so each day, each moment is the time to decide what is right then.
Here is a poem I wrote about all that:
The Meaning of Life
The meaning of life is really quite simple
One minute you’re up –
The next you’re a pimple.
It ain’t that ‘they’ hate you,
And it isn’t all fate
It’s just that the world’s fishing
And you are the bait!
My mother was an only child because she was adopted and her adoptive parents couldn’t afford to have any more children. I was an only child because my mother and father separated within a year of my birth and my mother never had the kind of stable relationship again that would have allowed for another child, and she wasn’t in a financial situation where she could raise two children as a sole parent and give them the kind of life she’d want for them. I shone as an only child of an adoring single mother. My father was also an only child, because allegedly his parents only ever conceived once. I too will have one child – to conceive and bear another child would be to play Russian roulette with my oestrogen. Too much woman can kill you, I now knew.
Three generations of only children whose parents wanted more.
Throughout my experience of breast cancer I read about other people’s journeys, for want of a better word, with cancer. The idea of the self is stripped, ripped, dissolved when you’re going through chemotherapy. What you once did is no longer; what you are is surviving day by day, running the gauntlet as ghosts of the dead reach out to trip you up. Come die with us, they say.
The Bronx-born memoirist Vivian Gornick talked of the idea of self – the one that is shaped for the reader as a story progresses – as the organising principle of good memoir. In The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, she writes that the question being asked in memoir is: ‘Who am I?’ Who exactly is this ‘I’ upon whom turns the significance of this story-taken-directly-from-life? On that question the writer of memoir must deliver. Not with an answer but with depth of inquiry.
The awareness of even having a self was challenging during this period.
My mother, alive and dead, helped me to access my selfhood. My mother’s mothering gave direction – shaped my life – as my devotional love for my son was shaping his life. She taught me to examine my actions and reactions. I didn’t always welcome this training in self-assessment. I didn’t always like what I saw.
Underneath our raised Queenslander were boxes of memorabilia. In one of my clear-outs I picked up an old diary of my mother’s and opened it. Mum’s familiar fast-flowing script was there. It travelled at 45 degrees across lined pages and turned into thought bubbles and spidery plans. I must stop letting Josie take responsibility for my life and in turn stop her turning to me to tell her what to do, she’d written. I shut the black A4 diary and dropped it like a hot potato. It fell onto the dusty concrete.
The kind of house I lived in was typical for our inner-city suburb. Herston sits like a retro chair beside the modern sofa that is Kelvin Grove: a suburb of students, renovators and people inhabiting old buildings that’ve seen too much of life. Herston’s elegantly shaped Queenslanders recall a time when the backyard fence wasn’t visible from the back door. A 100-year flood came to the suburb in 1974, and then again 37 years later in 2011 (early for its century). When the floods burst the banks in the city and surrounding suburbs it went on to create an inland tsunami, changing many people’s lives: from short-term blackouts to deaths in the family.
Most homes in Herston sat on high stilts and their occupants lived on the top floor, due to its history of going under. Those who had dared to build in their underfloor space to make a cheap third or fourth bedroom would risk losing everything in it to a mud surge in the 2011 floods.
When I witnessed another builder’s truck outside a neighbour’s home I heard the experienced builder with scars on the back of his hands say: Stuff the termite-caps, you try fishbowl proofing an entire floor, mate.
My mother had been right. I’d relied on her as the final judge on my decisions. Instead of studying sciences alongside psychology with a secret goal of switching to medicine later, I took women’s studies on my mother’s advice. This sliding-doors moment wasn’t her responsibility, but mine. I wasn’t honest with her or myself. We’re each our own best expert, I guess. We know the answers to our questions, even if we refuse to acknowledge it.
This revelation hung in the dull air of under-the-house. My heart was beating fast. I picked up the book again and tried another page. Mum talked of being lost, so very lost. This was the darker side of mothering my mother: that deep, cellular task of being responsible for her during my life and until her death.
