Defying the Gods
Experiments in writing the devil away
I’m going to write something now that I feel like I say constantly but I’m pretty sure I’ve never actually said out loud, or written. I’m not sure. Sorry if I have. I feel superstitious about writing it—in a positive way—meaning, perhaps if I write it I’ll defy cancer. I’ve always had this thought that if you say things and play them out then they won’t happen, like in the My Sweet Guillotine era in Paris where I trained myself to see accidents and horror all the time because I felt that if I did the Gods wouldn’t let bad things happen. Like the Gods wouldn’t bother or something, because I’d beaten them at their own creative game. I saw incredible scenes. I’m not entirely sure of the psychology of that, they said PTSD but I do think it was defiance of the Gods.
I’m 50 and a half now. At this age, Mum had cancer without knowing. She would be diagnosed at 52, but by that stage it was so spread it had to have been growing for some time, probably many years. I am thinking and talking about her incessantly, in my head, not only because I always have, but also because since 50 I’ve had this curious sensation of living alongside her.
My life, until 50, never felt in line with hers. I think of the milestones: my eighteenth birthday when I had sex beneath a tree. I was still living at home, going to university, experimenting with porno lines I thought boys would like during sex beneath trees, which they didn’t. A baby, full of shame. When my mum was 18 she would already have been a full-time nurse, on the wards at Box Hill, helping people, seeing her first dead body. She took up smoking that day, she told me. I see her in that doorway in her starched white hat, Winfield at her lips. I see the man’s naked corpse. (She hadn’t smoked, by the way, in 30 years when she got cancer. Like that should matter.)
Twenty-first birthday. She would have been a midwife by now, soon to be hitched. A dry wedding to my dad in his school chapel. A ravishing couple. Grown-ups. I’m not sure if she had a twenty-first birthday party. I did. She planned with me a garden party in the lovely old house in the Botanic Gardens. An affair far more elegant than I was - a high-heeled bogan with a ticket around the world, decades from having children as she had, or caring for anything but myself.
We were still very much mother-and-daughter. She wouldn’t tell me of her early sexual experiences. I irritated her with my stories of sex and drugs, I wanted to provoke her, challenge her. We studied in the dining room together and procrastinated in front of late-night soapies, but we were in different worlds. She was a mother of four, a nurse and now a masters student and researcher. Her life was serious, full of responsibility, something I didn’t know and only wished only to flee.
The day my boyfriend and I moved into the scungiest tobacco-stained cottage in Brunswick, I called her, weeping. She arrived with bags of cleaning supplies, put the gloves on me and showed me how to grow up.
For my thirtieth, fortieth birthdays she was long departed. I remember both hers, in varying vaguenesses.
But her fiftieth is crystal clear. Dad arranged a surprise dinner in a suburban restaurant with a private back room. He told her to dress up for a special family dinner, the five of us. My sister was in Canada. I got ready with Mum at the house; she was beaming, beautiful, proud to be celebrated by her grown family. She wore a black dress, stockings and high heels, her thick dark hair blown in waves around her shoulders, perfume, what was it, Red Door. We drove together in dad’s car and the host directed us through the restaurant. I was beside her as she walked through that door. She veritably burst as she registered her thirty closest friends and family, eyes of love and admiration upon her. There’s a photo. Dad’s puffed chest as he makes his grand speech, hand on her shoulder. Her laughing, tearful face, full of light, life.
This is where the line begins. Where our lives paralleled. Something I could only know if and when I lived myself until 50. Let me try to describe it. Since my own 50th birthday I feel her in the things I do, the way I move. I feel her alive in me, or is it me in her. It’s as though a streak of her is both beside and inside me. A line that is drawn close to my body, that I am following but not crossing, like a train track but not fixed, a dotted line but unbroken … it swims beside me, like a wake, but never behind me, or in front, always beside, untouching. And it has its own momentum, it is not created by mine. It’s too simple to say I feel connected to her, or with her; it’s as though our lives have become in sync somehow, me right now, and her back then … simultaneous. I can sense - not know, just sense - what it is she was feeling and living back then, as though it were happening right now. A sort of double life.
She is 50. Now she has her own car - a little Mitsubishi Mirage. It might be brand new, I doubt it, but it feels new. It is silver, with plates PPG something, so she nicknames it Pippi. She fangs up Eastleigh Drive with it, blaring the Priscilla Queen of the Desert soundtrack. It is the first time I remember my mother having something that is hers alone. My brothers help her ‘modify’ the car, adding ‘spoilers’ and a racing steering wheel and other ‘extras’ to make it more fun. My youngest brother is fifteen, the same age my daughter is now. I identify with the feeling in her body of her youngest child (my only) being old enough to thrive without her close mothering. She enjoys the process of the car with the boys, their budding manliness, taking care of her now. Pippi has her own parking space at the Mercy Hospital, where Mum has a new job as research midwife, a role they have invented for her as she is one of the first midwives to have completed a Masters of Nursing, and currently undertaking a PHD. Her subject is chemically-addicted pregnant women. She is operating a clinic out of the Mercy in which she is interviewing female addicts, to find new ways to help and improve services for them. She also acts as intermediary between doctors and birthing women, for their research projects. She is both on the caring/nursing side as well as the research/ advancement side. She is in heaven.
She has her own office, high among the treetops of the Fitzroy Gardens. I take the elevator up her neat, luminous space. It has a door. It is hers entirely. Her books, her chair, her photo of my sister in front of the Eiffel Tower. Not one corner of any space I’ve known has been hers, even her closet was our cubby. She gazes out across the city, and down upon the tiny people below. She writes. She thinks. We descend for lunches, meet for coffee in the park in the shade of the hospital building.
We are friends. I am twenty-four and studying theatre and living in the ex-scungy house not far from her office. I want to say we see plays and films together but I don’t think we do - she still goes home at night to the boys and dinner and the dishwasher. But one night we go to a family friend’s 21st birthday party in a city bar, and I smoke and she shares my cigarette and we dance together and drink too much, and she holds my hair back at the Night Cat later as I spew. She doesn’t reprimand or shame me. She is free too.
At the holiday house in the Otways the summer of the rash and the annoying dry cough, I bring a cake from Brunetti in my car, feeling very mature and happy. Mum and I bathe together in the spa, drinking champagne (fizzy cheap wine). She washes my hair and I wash hers. I try to be unashamed of my adult body, she is proud of her own, which has not only remained excellent but is readying a new independent life, free of heavy lifting. She does marathons. She is in love - there’s a photo of it down by the fence, the two of them beaming in the dappled sunlight. I will covet this photo.
I am trying very hard to find sense via these words, as I type. I am thinking of the sea at the end of my street, how I plunged myself in it on my 50th birthday and how she met me there. It’s something she’d have done daily, but I do not. Since then, I look at Matt, and my daughter, and I feel Mum looking through me at them, observing and adoring them. In their eyes I feel her too sometimes, reflected back. It’s a sense. A ripple. Entirely physical, never thought. I’m not sure what this sense of doubling is about, or for, but it has its own force. Inside of my body there is just this intrinsic sensation of her, alive, at this age - grounded and filled with wonder, determination, joy.
I feel how young she was. I feel like I’m just getting started.
I remember her saying those exact words.
But I’m just getting started.
Did she say them out loud? Maybe she said them in her head, and I heard them. I’m not sure of the difference any more.
Maybe it was but there’s so much I want to do.
53 is a terrible number. I hold my breath as friends arrive at it, and sigh long as they surpass it. The devil says 53 is coming for me too and I write these words as protection - HA - saw you first.
Perhaps if I’d been awake and creative and smart enough to think there was a chance that Mum could die at 53, I could have thought it hard or written it and it wouldn’t have had to happen.
