Why Mothers’ Day is just another Sunday
MAY 9TH, 2016 — POST 126
On November 1st, 2010, the Day of the Dead for those playing at home, my mum died at the age of 47. Even though I haven’t seen it, I know her death certificate reads “October 31st”. My mum died in Tenby in South Wales: the time difference between Sydney and Tenby meant that her dying on there on October 31st was her dying here on November 1st. In some sense then, when I was told, it was old news. She hadn’t just died. She was already dead. But as far as I was concerned, she’d be dead for a lot longer than any difference in timezones might poetically indicate.
Mum moved to Wales in 2000. It’s an easy year to remeber for a number of reasons. The last year of a new millenium. The first year of a distinctly new life. In 1999, my dad’s mum died which had us — my dad, my younger brother, and I — looking for a new home. We moved into this place in the first months of 2000 so if you’re keeping score, that year was when I lost a mum and got a new home. But mostly I remember the year because it was the first time that, because of all the familial stress compounded with the stress of moving, I didn’t get a birthday party. On February 23rd, 2000, I was 8. I’d left the age of 7 and my mum in the previous decade. Forever my mum will be a resin-embalmed statuette of the 1990s.
Mum worked for Pricewaterhouse, later PricewaterhouseCoopers, a company I have only a marginally greater understanding of now than I did then. I didn’t really need to understand what she was doing, I just know she worked a lot. When she and my dad separated in 1996, a year before I started school, the morning and evening duties became outsourced to one nanny or another. Those pre-7AM and post-8PM glimpses of my mum were glimpses of a woman willing herself up the corporate ladder. The hard cut of her thick black hair mirrored in the hard cut of her skirt suit, a look I lament the loss of possibily more than the body that supported it. My mum, with degrees in science, realised that she was smart enough and good looking enough to play in the world of finance where she could be paid more than enough.
I’m not really sure what my mum did once she was home and we were in bed. But I know that every for every kid at preschool or primary school that had a birthday party, I had some insanely elaborate costume to inhabit. So she must have been sewing a fair bit. She’d sewn me a wizard costume, a fact she’d a decade later tell me was her divination of the Harry Potter craze of the early-2000s. I was a pirate for another kid’s birthday. Her best work was a lion costume, sewn out of thick fake fur with the texture of steel wool that nearly broke her sewing machine. It was hot and incredibly itchy but when I pulled it up, wrapped the headpiece with mane over my ears, and felt the thick tail swinging behind my arse, I was a lion. Which made me get annoyed when everyone kept asking me “What are you supposed to be?!” “Are you a bear?!”. Though I think mum got even more annoyed than me at these comments.
Our weekends with mum were nothing if not kinetic, provided that’s what she wanted. Between swimming lessons and kids’ parties, we’d go to The Spit to see her “new boyfriend” race yachts. (It was this guy that years later I would learn was the enabler of mum’s infidelity that drove her and dad apart.) He’d drive us around in his Range Rover, take us to his recently-built house in Lane Cove. He had a juicer, an invention I found fascinating at the age of 5 or 6. You just pushed apples into it and out came a cloudy, sweet juice. A whole bunch of apples for not much juice.
It was another boyfriend that took her to Wales. It was this boyfriend who became not-her-boyfriend whilst in Wales. It was another guy that, spying mum drowning her sorrows in the pub he owned and with the kind of Irish courage only 4 pints of Guiness will give you, proposed to her on the first night they met. Mum declined, but never to let opportunity (and his categorical familial wealth) go, three days later she accepted his second attempt.
I remember when the papers were signed for dad and mum’s divorce. She’d come back to Sydney to take care of her “affairs”, presuming she’d swan in and sweep my brother and I up off to Wales. As my parents were only separated, the divorce was agreed to by my dad on one condition: the kids stay here. Even though I remember mum sitting on the card-table-turned-dining-table at dad’s new apartment, the papers spread out, us boys and dad looking on at her like some regal matriarch who’s flourish of ink could change the fates of entire territories, I can’t for the life of me pretend to know what she was thinking.
Mum died at 47 from secondary cancers after being treated for cervical cancer in the early-2000s. Between 2000 and 2010, I’d only seen her three times: twice there, once here, for about 4–6 weeks at a time. We talked to her over Skype a day or so before she died. I say “talked”. She more just lied there moaning, drugged out of her fucking mind on a cocktail of painkillers. And my brother did most of the talking. Dad couldn’t say much from crying. I didn’t really have anything to say.
She’d already gotten me used to a life without her in it.
