At times, before cancer, I wanted to straighten my feminist spine and roar: Let women stay at home with their children until school age if they please. As one highly intelligent and successful friend asked, But what do you say at parties when people ask, What do you do?
Where did feminism go wrong?
When my friend posed that question, Celso was six months old and still nasogastrically fed, refused to eat or drink, and frequently vomited day and night. He also required physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy and close monitoring by specialist doctors. So my answer to the question would’ve been: I’m a full-time mother. And sometimes: I’m a full-time mother of a high-needs baby.
To break down my response more fully I would have to say: One, I don’t go to parties. Two, when did we cancel out mothering like it doesn’t count? And if mothering doesn’t count then my answer to What do you do? would be, Nothing: right now I’m just a mother at home. On your curriculum vitae there are no spaces for how many children you’ve cared for or parents you’ve nursed. That space is left blank. The years of lost employment.
I wanted acknowledgement of a hard job done with love and no pay. But the irony was that, after breast cancer, stay-at-home mothering wasn’t enough for me either. I was as bad as my friend’s question.
Helen Hayward, author of A Slow Childhood, sidelined a successful career to care for her children until she was in her 50s. She nailed the feeling for me in an essay, ‘My Children, My Life’:
What credits my sisters and me in the eyes of the world, and to some extent our own, is the work we do on top of the families we raise. Every day, I pour as many hours into my family and housekeeping than into my writing and editing, yet I’m recognised only for what I do beyond the home … My children give me enormous pleasure and pride, a love so profound it escapes words. But my sense of identity and worth, and my inner buoyancy, stem from my work beyond them … We’re not content simply to put our children to bed at the end of the day and put our feet up until morning. We refuse to accept that love and ambition don’t go together: we’d sooner toe the party line that career and family are happy bedfellows than accept the awkward truth of how hard that is. Even if the price is to be forever on the go. Yes, we’ve sacrificed our free time. But at least, we tell ourselves, we haven’t sacrificed ourselves.
It was winter in Brisbane. The weather was perfect. It was possible to garden at noon without a hat, for instance. I pulled down the winter box of clothing from atop our old three-door dresser. I took out the clothes I wanted for the coming cooler months, and folded and packed my summer dresses and tops. I put away a few of Mum’s remaining clothes, clothes she made herself and took to hospital. On her favourite felt shawl, a faded green and lilac piece with wild snaking threads throughout it, a blob of toothpaste remained.
My mother brushed her teeth twice a day in hospital, leaning against the sink for support with her face close to the mirror, with effort. She still bothered to floss in full knowledge that she wouldn’t survive another few months and her teeth would burn out of her jaw at cremation. The blob was five years old. A memento of her last days in hospital. My hand flew up to cover my heart. Oh Mum.
Over ten years of recurring breast cancer my mother tried intravenous Vitamin C injections, an alternative chemotherapy from Germany delivered at a sophisticated-appearing centre situated across the beach in Manly, Sydney, psychic surgery, diets, practising a visual meditation where you rid yourself of your disease, and emotional work, believing the cancer might have roots in her deeply held sense of trauma as an ill-placed adopted child. She left her academic career in Sydney and moved to the Northern Rivers, a place she valued for its lifestyle and expanse of beautiful beaches and sub-tropical rainforest.
It didn’t work.
Like some death knell it struck again every two years. In 1997 she had recurrent local disease in the same breast and underwent another lumpectomy. Again she refused adjuvant radiotherapy. That year we spent Christmas with friends in Canberra. The healing wound became infected and opened up on Christmas Eve. I packed the wound with gauze as nurses had shown me to do, but the situation was beyond my abilities. Mum and her best friend, Tess, spent the rest of Christmas Day in accident and emergency with a residential doctor who appeared to be 11.
In 1998 the cancer reared up again around the time of her birthday – same breast. This time Mum had a mastectomy and her lymph nodes removed. Prior to surgery I’d called a ‘meet’ of all her female friends for her birthday, and after a yummy fusion meal in Byron Bay I went around the table and asked everyone what they thought Mum should do: lumpectomy or mastectomy. Mum had agreed to follow her friends’ advice even if she didn’t want to. The hands-down decision was for a mastectomy. Mum’s health insurance hadn’t kicked in yet so I did a call to alms with all our friends and family, and generated enough to take the sting out of the operational costs of surgery in a private hospital. As Mum’s oncologist was private, so too was surgery.
My mother had non-typical secondary breast cancer – it had metastasised to her ovaries and part of the addendum of her stomach. The surgical response to this was a radical hysterectomy. The year was 2000. After surgery she commenced
