Blog 2 - Monday 1 January - Day 1, Arriving at Maman's

On New Year’s Day, I walk out of North Shore Hospital. I am feeling hesitant to leave my old-fashioned spaceship, where you can’t touch wood to unjinx something because there isn’t any wood. The artificial world of hospitals is inhospitable.

I am walking somewhat bent over to protect my stomach, which feels like a stricken fledgling is sheltering there. My eldest child, Minty, who was born knowing more than me, is encouraging me to walk, assuring me that if I don’t get moving, I will be a permanent invalid. She is dressed in lycra and looks like a beautiful beetle, with her skin as flush as a cream hibiscus and her blonde tresses falling like candle wax. She has a patch on her arm and urges us all to test for diabetes, as my father apparently had vague signs of it at 80.

My discharge notes from the hospital say I am not to lift anything heavier than a full kettle, and they don’t want to see me again unless I get too hot or too cold, vomit, or fail to have a motion for three days.

Minty is driving me to my mother’s house. I am so relieved that I have somewhere safe to take my terribly aching, morphine-deprived abdomen, and someone to tend my battered state of health, which has punched out the lights of my optimism. I am under no illusion; I cannot survive toute seule. Yikes!

Minty and I drive over the Auckland Harbour Bridge, which was built in 1954 with four lanes for 200,000 people. A few lanes have been added like hair extensions, but so precariously they are closed when the wind gets up.

We arrive at Mum’s house and walk through the corridor, where cows are painted on the walls, a wooden duck in black boots and a furry Bambi hide behind plastic flowers, and a rabbit—once a doorstop but now retired—sits on a small chair.

These woodland creatures do nothing but wait for Mum’s great-grandchildren to run past and pat them, in that perfunctory way of children whose real mission is to eat animal biscuits from a special tin with pictures of Winnie the Pooh on it.

Mum’s apartment looks relentlessly over a harbour where sailboats, container ships, and cruise ships glide past Rangitoto, which stretches out languidly, exhausted from the job of erupting.

Mum’s house is like a painting with little pale lines that thread through the carpet like whispers, books with matchbox toys in front of them, and paintings everywhere except above the fireplace because Mum doesn’t like things centred.

I am aware that to have a successful stay with my mother, I will need to adapt my behaviour, conditioned from flatting with two fully grown but temporarily homeless huge sons and an exuberant, appallingly behaved Springer Spaniel who is prone to biting after a difficult childhood from which I rescued her.

Mum is waiting at the door for her new flatmate, and the three of us go through to a room where three chairs that slightly rock and a two-seater couch are designed to encourage conversation while sipping tea, coffee, wine, or beer, as absolutely no visitor to my mother’s house ever leaves without mental and physical refreshment. We sit together and have a pot of tea. I curl up contentedly, conveniently forgetting that although I am a child, I am also a grandmother, and poor old Mum a great-grandmother.

After Minty has left, Mum takes me to my wing of the house to rest. I lie in solitary splendour until I emerge for the news at 6 p.m. and a thimble of red wine before dinner at 7 p.m. Mum has cooked a little lamb chop, which she has cut into slivers as fine as fingernails, which sit on gently tossed greens and sautéed potatoes. This is followed by ice cream, strawberries, and a pink biscuit which is a bit stale. We watch two episodes of The Queen’s Gambit, followed by a cup of camomile tea with a Sablés de Retz biscuit, which is a French form of a Krispie biscuit, just that little bit more mysterious, like a French person’s scarf.

Mum tucks me into bed in a pair of her blue wincey pyjamas with koala bears that smell of Lux flakes soaked in daytime. My head and my aching body tumble into clouds as Mum gently pulls down the transparent black blinds that invite the night in, so neither of us will be lonely. She whispers to me, “Darling, these blinds are designed for just the right light.”