My mother had been emotionally fragile all my life. It gave me, I think, a heightened sense of foreboding about losing her. My worst fear hovered in the shattered air around me as I sat on the floor in Melbourne, hundreds of miles away from her. As soon as I hung up I booked a flight north. I forgot about university lectures and assessment, about the rock I wanted to climb that weekend. It was the start of a pattern that would consume the next years: I would be regularly pulled by some internal magnet back to my mother’s side.
I was a driven young woman studying statistical basics, brain functioning and varieties of theories behind why humans act as they do, according to Western psychology. Within the thick folders of background readings there were no how-to guides for a young woman to face adulthood without her mother.
I got on a plane and flew up to the Northern Rivers.
My mother’s lumpectomy was performed at Lismore Hospital. As she lay in the recovery area after the surgery, I waited in her room. For some reason she’d been allocated a bed in the children’s section, and the walls were plastered with colourful fairies. This cheered me – until a senior nurse came in. We need you to help with your mother, she said. She looked like someone trained on the wards before nursing went tertiary: no-fuss, capable. She’s distraught, she said. We’re worried she’ll try to bolt. And she’s disturbing the other patients.
I went in and Mum was open-mouthed hollering as if she’d woken from hell instead of a general anaesthetic. I leant forwards and held her face next to mine. I’m here, Mum, I said. It’s over. The surgery’s over. You’re all right now.
Mum calmed down. I couldn’t make my body move, she said. I woke in my head but couldn’t get the nurse’s attention.
Lismore is a town known for flooding, ferals, rednecks and a flourishing arts scene. I’d lived there for one year as a 19-year-old, studying philosophy of psychology and Japanese at the local university. I had my first adult relationship with a local GP, who was 15 years my senior and tried to help me calm my chattering mind with meditation. I kept the Vipassana practice longer than I kept the relationship.
In Melbourne, in my 20s, I found my people: climbers, thinkers, and eventually B. In the run-up I sought life with a capital L: travelling, sex, climbing, studying, drugs and dance, art. I was trained in feminism by a mother who’d fought since the 60s for equality. What was good for the gander was good for the goose. My body was mine to enjoy. I slept under a mosquito net in Thailand and climbed the country’s limestone cliffs straight off white, sandy beaches; I taught climbing in Vancouver and sold outdoor kit to kind Canadians. I would tell them polypropylene thermals make you stink during long-haul trekking and to go for the merino ones instead. Sometimes women’s cheeks would flush, though they were happy to have someone talk about it.
I returned from living in Canada early, after the news that Mum’s original breast cancer had metastasised to the lining of her womb and surrounding organs. By this stage she’d married a very damaged Geordie. My mother was alone and unsupported in hospital because he didn’t want to leave their dogs behind in the house. This was a precursor to what would come later. He wasn’t looking after his wife, my mother, so I had to return to Australia to do so.
When Mum was first handed her ticket to the kingdom of the sick we had to cancel our real around-the-world trip. All the payments for tickets and hotel bookings in Tokyo, London, and Lake Victoria, Africa, were sent back to my mother’s bank account to pay for her cancer treatment.
We never got to enjoy the thrills of travelling together on a mother–daughter adventure, though we did return to England together once to visit family, including my mother’s adoptive and birth mothers – one of whom would be dead within four years of Mum’s diagnosis of lobular invasive breast cancer.
I didn’t know it at the time but my mother took a softly, softly approach to her breast cancer treatment. And as the dutiful daughter, I had to believe she’d make the best decisions to stay alive. She was an intelligent woman, a tertiary teacher. I assumed she’d know the right course to take. I didn’t challenge her. In fact, I didn’t know how to.
My own first cancer scare came in that same decade, when I was 28. It was taken seriously because of my mother’s history, so an oncologist ordered a mammogram and ultrasound, and palpated me. She determined it wasn’t cancer and didn’t need a needle biopsy. I had pert, young breasts, but they were lump prone. I didn’t believe I had cancer then, even though the process of meeting with an oncologist had frightened me. My mother’s story isn’t going to be mine, I’d said to myself.
Seven days after my GP’s phone call, I walked into the Mater Private’s surgical reception area. It resembled a European hotel. Some people were docked into booths with their iPods plugged in. Others held crisp daily newspapers fully opened and resting along their own leg-table, ankle against a knee. The place had the smell of a new car’s interior.
But this freshly renovated waiting room was a false front. Through the swing doors we would all endure
