I can’t do it! They don’t understand, my mother had said.
Her back was hunched over, her feet were planted firmly on the linoleum and she had a tissue over her open mouth. Her whole face seemed wet. I sat down with her and hugged her.
I’ll hold your feet the whole time so you know I’m there, I said and made eye contact with the technician, who nodded approval then reached for the lead coat.
I would ground her, something I’d done my whole life. She was safe with me. And I was safe with her. I was loved unconditionally and knew it. I would never leave her like her own mother had at birth.
The MRI machine appeared claustrophobic; it was like watching my mother being posted into a crematorium kiln.
Patients cry in hospital because they’re scared, because they’ve received bad news or simply because they’re ill. I was reminded that day that my mother’s crying wasn’t like anyone else’s. If the breadth of a mental health breakdown was a landscape, my mother sometimes appeared stuck in the middle of one, Wuthering Heights wild and on the verge of falling over a cliff.
As an eight-year-old I wrote a poem that said my mother’s shoulders were made of fine-bone china. My teacher had me walk into the other classrooms with their low, metal-legged tables and read it aloud, as the other children stared up at me. I declared my mother’s vulnerability to all my young peers in my big voice.
The world washed through my mother with its grief and joys. She told me she felt skinless most of her life.
In our Sydney days, Mum and I lived on the top floor of a three-levelled home, owned by an architect and a social work academic who specialised in critical reflective practice around dying, death and palliative care. Mum once flooded the bathroom so badly the water leaked down into the architect’s study, destroying a project-in-process nicely displayed on his tilted drafting table.
Are you trying to become a fish and swim away, Piscean? I’d said to Mum on discovering her wildly throwing towel after towel down onto the bathroom floor to soak up the water.
She’d giggled, Yeah.
During the 80s Mum and our academic landlord and dear friend had a lot to do with women’s rights around reproductive health. I went with Mum to a conference in Canberra, Liberation or Loss?, organised by the National Feminist Network on New Reproductive Technologies. I was 12 so I went into a well-run day-care-type setup on the Australian National University’s campus. That many women in one place meant that many mothers needed their children minded so they could give lectures, run workshops (like my mother did) and attend talks.
During the writing of this book I approached our lovely one-time landlord (who became a family friend) for insights on my late mother’s feminist and adoption activism during the 80s and early 90s. It was a period of time when I was too caught up in my own childhood and early adolescence to remember or know how my mother, as an adult, operated in these other worlds. Your mother harnessed the pain of her own experience to advocate for social change, she said.
I agreed, reflecting that I too leveraged my own experience, as my mother’s carer then later as a breast cancer patient, to advocate for better health outcomes for those affected by cancer. A different agenda, but one equally imbued with a need to make a difference where possible. Mum was driven to change the laws around what she called the black hole of an adopted person’s parentage because her own experience of this informed her very existence. She did not want women to experience shame and stigma, like her birth mother had, just for having a child out of the sanctioned environment of marriage to a man.
Heather, our friend continued, was a policy activist who championed for good social policies that didn’t mirror the harm done by her own experiences, harm and distress that was ongoing. She acted against exploitation and commodification of women’s bodies. Though she had the imagination to be able to reach across her principled position, like me with my son.
I’d babysat this friend’s adopted son and taken him swimming in the pool next to Luna Park. He was a sweet, gentle soul whom I’d loved. As a budding photographer I’d taken his picture as part of my portfolio to get into Mr Kovak’s class at the Canberra college I changed to in my last year of school. The focus was sharp and you could see the white squares of the window frames he sat next to reflected in his eyes.
I guess political and personal practice don’t always speak together, our friend said. That’s likely the case for you and I also.
Mum sat on the National Bioethics Consultative Committee (NBCC), formed in 1998 as an advisory committee to the Australian federal government. After the Liberation or Loss? conference the NSW Women’s Advisory Council formed a working party to push for a national body to oversee the use of new reproductive technologies – hence NBCC. Mum represented a feminist perspective on emerging technologies that moved beyond the then-current concerns about artificial insemination by donor (AID) to issues like in vitro fertilisation, surrogacy, genetic engineering and euthanasia. AID now seems archaic as a concern at all.
NBCC disbanded the year we moved to Canberra: 1991. My mother and Sister Regis Dunne were the only two dissenters on NBCC’s final report endorsing legalised surrogacy. NBCC was reformed into a committee with a more medical framework and stands today as the Australian Health Ethics Committee.
We went on to talk about her grandchild and my son. Our old friend’s Scottish burr made me smile. After all these years in Australia her birthplace still counted in her
