All their families

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Joanna Mendelssohn

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Joanna Mendelssohn's biography and other articles by this writer

In June 1998, my mother became younger than my youngest child. It was night-time when the phone call came. I was in the middle of the dinner chaos and children's homework mixed with the usual evening competition over television programs. The voice on the line said that Mum had been run over in the street. It was serious.

On the way to the hospital I cracked the usual jokes about Mum and her resilience. "I hope the car's all right," I said to the children. "Grandma's never liked cars and she could do some real damage."

The casualty clerk put us into the quiet room that hospitals keep for telling bad news. I'd left my glasses at home and could not read so for the next hour or so I thought about my mother and the way she would simultaneously express supreme self-control while acting to outrage those around her.

In the 1970s, after Dad died, Mum worked for some years as a stenographer in the Department of Taxation. She wore elegant pants suits and rubber thongs. For more than 30 years, until the night she was run down by a careless driver, Mum only ever wore thongs on her feet. At work, her office supervisors circulated memos about "inappropriate footwear", but Mum ignored the complaints, claiming they could not refer to her. She felt immune to her colleagues' stares and comments, and angry at their intolerance. When Mum was a child, shoes had been a luxury; bare feet were the norm. Later, she realised that thongs gave some protection but kept the feeling of freedom. She enjoyed her eccentricity. She said everyone gossiped about her anyway, so she may as well give them something to gossip about. Nevertheless she was relieved to retire on medical grounds after suffering a mild stroke.

Mum's habit of wearing thongs was not the main reason she was unwelcome at the local RSL bowling club. That was her choice. Dad did try to bring her into his social life. Once she even offered to help out for a charity day. As she later told the story, the members would buy their beer by the jug and the profits for the day went to Legacy. However, when the drinkers went to play the poker machines, Mum, who hated both gambling and drinking, would empty the jugs. She claimed it was because they were abandoned and she was just tidying up, but she was not asked back. Dad did all his drinking at the club because, except for rum for the Christmas cake, there was no alcohol allowed in our house.

Dad spent most of his time down at the club. He became bowls secretary, organising the draw for the games. He was there all weekends and many evenings, except when he was at the main RSL club. The companionship of mates was a fair substitute for marriage. Mum's connections came from her church and various voluntary women's groups. After Dad died, she became close to a young couple at the church who had bought a house up the street. She'd spend much of her time there and looked after their two children with rather more affection than she had shown to my sister or me. Even so, Paul and Jan didn't call her by her first name, and the children called her "Coleman". Mum never had the gift of intimacy.

A YOUNG DOCTOR FINALLY CAME TO THE QUIET ROOM AND TOLD OF BROKEN BONES, massive trauma and a poor prognosis. She asked if they could take risks. Mum always took risks. I signed the papers. In the next few days, when we visited her in intensive care, she lay as remote as she had been through most of my childhood. But then, one day, as I held her hand, a once almost impermissible intrusion into her space, she stirred, and in that movement our relationship changed. Mum was suddenly so vulnerable, so helpless. I knew I was responsible for her and her care.

Families are like this. Their dynamics change without warning. The composition of a family changes by birth, death, accident. People join or leave with or without fanfare. The politicians' beloved mantra of "family values" seems predicated on mother-father-children in white-picket-fence-land, but even here nothing is as it seems. Connections are made and broken behind lace curtains; only the participants know the real stories.

When Mum regained consciousness her personality had changed. The family doctor said the accident had broken her carapace. It was a striking image. From being distant, remote and self-contained, my mother was suddenly vulnerable, needy and hungry for affection; her shell had been broken. She had always been repelled by physical contact but now she needed to be touched, held, kissed. She cried at her helplessness and was pathetically grateful for our presence. For some weeks morphia gave her hallucinations. She lived in a brightly coloured delirium where strangers with telephones and trolleys had taken over her house and she was trapped in the garden unable to move. She cried for me to bring her grapes from the fridge. She was not allowed to swallow, so we wet her mouth with a cloth. One day, when she was not expected to live, Mum whimpered that she was cold and was on a coastal steamer with grey fog blocking her vision. She asked to see Nick, my son. When he came to sit by her bed, she lay staring at his face until she fell asleep. It was in the weeks after she finally came back to life that my mother spoke to me in the voice of a little girl and said, "I wish you were my Mummy."

SO MY MOTHER BECAME MY CHILD. After a year in hospital, then a failed attempt to return to her own home, she moved into my house with four children; and we all cared for her. This is hardly an unusual family model. In Australia, just over two per cent of the population describe themselves as "primary carers", and a further ten per cent say that they assist in care. Of these, almost all of them (89 per cent) are caring for a close family member. The numbers seem small, especially as many of the carers are partners, not children. It could be that in our increasingly individualised society we are losing old communities and connections. Throughout the world, across all civilisations and all times, the extended family is the norm. The old live with the young; sometimes to care for them and sometimes to be cared for. Mutual care is at the very core of what it means to be human. Retirement villages where the old stay segregated only became popular in the second half of the 20th century, and even then only in the West. Compartmentalising parents and infant children into neat suburban blocks may be a developer's dream and make good business for the real estate industry, but people are more complicated than that. The only constant in any family is change.

The household I established with children, mother and dog, bore little resemblance to the tense fibro cottage of my 1950s childhood. I work full-time, but because my employer is a university I was able to do much of my work at home, using a broadband connection. I was able to work in the small hours of the morning, the best time for writing. The children brought Mum into their lives. They read Harry Potter aloud after her glaucoma made it hard to read. They played their music at the usual volume and she found unexpected enjoyment in the heavy beat of All Torn Down by The Living End. She liked going to the cinema, something she hadn't done for years, but preferred the fantasy adventure of The Mummy Returns to the realism of The Dish. For her, the tension as the scientists tried to record the moon landing was too much high anxiety. When she watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding she laughed so much that her incontinence pad was soaked through.

Mum had always enjoyed shopping but now, without the carapace of her earlier life, all shopping excursions were major events. After a few unfortunate occasions, like the time she insisted on pink hotpants and a leopard-skin top, I realised it was easier to take her to our Italian greengrocer where she adored the abundance of food. He flirted with her outrageously and beamed when the bill tipped $200. I think it is fair to say that Mum found our inner-city lifestyle exotic. This may be why she was no longer shocked when I served wine with dinner, although she did not drink it. To help her memories of times past we installed cable television and she had spent many happy hours watching the black and white movies of her youth. Our dog became "my puppy". She gave him her food and held him in her lap. When she lay in bed, looking out at the garden or the children playing on the swings in the park, he would come inside to lie under her bed, lick her fingers and make her giggle. Such indulgence from someone who would never allow animals in her house. Later, as she became even more fragile, the children would change her nappies at night when I was teaching; feed her, give her night-time medication and put her to bed.

One day, when I entered the house, the sound of visiting children, the smell of dog and the sight of clutter took me aback. I realised why my life seemed oddly familiar. I had unconsciously modelled the management of my family on that of the family of my childhood friend, Anne. My house even had something of the ambience of her gloriously untidy girlhood home. She was the eldest of six tumbling children whose parents were able to relax with them, who treated material possessions as things to be used. There was no scandal if a toy was broken.

The family of my childhood home was so fraught there was a special liberation for me in crossing the road to adopt Anne's family and its casual comfort. Looking back, I can see that one reason for this relaxation is that they were (relatively) affluent and, even more important, young. In my memory, all the other families in our street were survivors of the Great Depression with fathers touched by war. Their histories could be seen in the brittle tidiness of the gardens; the slow shuffle and the absent stare of the man up the street with shellshock; the man at the back with his glass eye who had been left for dead by the Japanese; my father's bleak moods. The little-spoken stories were a part of the legacy of World War II. The Great Depression that preceded it had hit Australia hard. My parents and most of our neighbours had known poverty. They appreciated the comforts of the postwar age of affluence but were worried that the past might return.

But Anne lived in a brick house. Her parents had no memory of schooldays without shoes, of bread and dripping for dinner, and none of their friends died young. Their careless generosity was mingled with a sense of collaboration within the extended family. Games could be won (and lost) without screaming. Meals were eaten with good cheer, followed by communal washing up. Television was permitted.