Il faut se défendre

Sunday 15 January

At 7.40 mum is at my door.

“I was knocked out last night as if I’d been hit by a ten ton brick. I’m off to make our porridge.”

“I’ll come and join you.” I start to get out of bed.

“No rush. I can measure the porridge myself.”

I wait a while but yearn for company. I am ashamed of my preoccupation with the antics of Moo Hefner. If Mum knew about my forays into social media she would be just as disappointed in me as am I. Photos splashed all over Facebook of young strangers drinking jugs of what looks like Coca-Cola in a white spa in the Sounds makes me feel I don’t know the person I married; the father of my children.

I sheepishly come into the kitchen and ask mum what she thinks of social media, not being too specific, and she says film stars used to do this as it was part of their job. The girl who posts from the Sounds is a receptionist at a day spa. Mum asks, “Why do common citizens have to be in the public eye?”

“They have followers,” I tell mum.

“Like Jesus,” mum says in a touchingly funny reply.

We move from people who are as important as ants to ants themselves. Mum says, in the didactic fashion of a good mother, that I must finish Moana Minim, Janet Frame’s book about a house ant who falls down a crack and becomes a garden ant and sleeps under a dandelion petal. The moral here, I suspect, is that if an ant can fall down a crack and adapt to a new life so can I.

We move from ants to tea in bed in the mornings, which mum doesn’t like anymore as she no longer has Dad to read the paper with and drink tea from a silver pot. We girls used to take turns to make the tea and toast in bed in the mornings. We were about 8 when we started to pay our way, and I remember Moley yearning for her turn and our yearning for her turn too. The silver tea pot was brought out again for afternoon tea every school day and we would sit down at 4pm and eat sandwiches and caramel slice, and this would see us through till dinner at 8 as Dad liked to lean against the fridge and tell mum about his day at the office while we supposedly did our homework. We were terribly European looking back on it. Dad used to ask questions at dinner time. One night he asked, “Who is the President of France?” and Maryse said, “D’Artagnan,” and I was so jealous of her knowing the answer until Dad said, “No darling, he was a musketeer.”

Mum has put a list on the fridge written by Mahoney, her eldest grandchild:

· to clean chopping board sprinkle w/ salt and rub with cut lemon

· to avoid crying with onions wipe chopping board w/ white vinegar

· Eggs – to remove shell of hard boiled eggs add ½ teas. baking soda in water.

Mum says Mahoney’s approach to food is didactic in the sense that those who love good food generally love life.

Mum says that Rita Angus had a didactic approach to food and in her quest for self-denial and austerity fed my grandmother half a kumara when she came for dinner.

Mum asks if I’ll marry again and I think of Carla Brunei who was once asked why she had taken so long to get married and she said “no one ever asked me till Sarkozy.”

I am terribly tired today and getting married again is the last thing on my mind. I look at my sore tummy with no belly button and the bruises fading to brown like the magnolia flowers outside that won’t fall from their tree. I feel a sense of sadness at the fading of my life, brought on by ill health knocking the wind of vitality from my sails. Mum doesn’t know of my sad thoughts as I don’t think she has them being a Libran.

She says merrily, “Ash, a house is an extension of oneself and drinking coffee stops diabetes.”

Gus rings to say he has found a baby mouse which hasn’t opened his eyes yet and what should he feed it. I say, “Get a dropper and put egg and milk and honey in it.” He says that’s too complicated and, “Will I go to hell if I put it straight back in the garden?” We settle on oat milk and some shredded paper in a plastic container in the garden should mother mouse be out looking for her lost baby. He sends me a picture of baby mouse whom he has christened Owen and I’m wondering if it’s a rat as it does have a very large tail.

Moley arrives all dressed in white with a brown splodge on the back of her shirt.

Mum tells Moley that I leave the lights on. “I don’t,” says Mole, but to mitigate her goodie goodness says she leaves drawers open like Dad used to. Mum springs to Dad’s defence like a tigress, saying he was very well house trained and never wore the same suit two days in a row. I admire Moley for sticking up for Dad’s few faults as it makes him human. Mum, who likes to be good as only children do, says she always turns off the lights, puts away all the dishes on the bench, and closes drawers as this is a sign of a job completed.

She has been trying to piece together the timeline of her grandmother’s birth in Paris from old faded documents handwritten in French.

She says that my grandmother Louise has been the focus of her attention as people will be interested in her in the future. Jamie says you die twice; the second time when people say your name for the last time. Based on this principle Louise will not die for a long time but nor will an ancient cousin of ours called Winnie Winsome . Winnie had a habit of shirking off to the bathroom when there were dishes to be done. When one of us used to disappear at dishes time we would call out, “Where’s Winnie Winsome?” then die laughing at our wit.

Frankie arrives and throws herself on the couch.

“You young people love the couch but I like to sit upright,” says mum. Frankie announces she’s reading Prince Harry’s Spare and says it’s so juicy he sings like a canary. Mum and I say we won’t read it on some maternal didactic principle which encourages Frankie to brag that she paid $60 for it.

“How’s mum?” Frankie asks mum.

“She’s a well behaved patient.”

Frankie laughs and I know Charley has been doing skits on me hunched over and walking slowly.

Frankie has one child and mum says, “Your mum had 6; ridiculous! Have a glass of wine.”

As I watch them interact I feel the disconnect between the generations. We are time travellers from different worlds. Mum says her father Danny would say il faut se défendre. One must defend oneself, and there is a sense of that... a sense of defending one’s relevance by defending the times in which we lived. I want to defend mum ,I want to defend myself against the brazenness of youth which has a great power to make old hearts weep or rejoice. How we treat our parents no matter how tiresome they may be is a true measure of our own character.