A Shameful Lapse in Taste

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When my mum was in her late seventies to early eighties, widowed and living alone, I was a little shocked by the kind of novels she borrowed from her local library – mostly romances, indifferently written by authors not known for their literary prowess. She would get several at a time, and apparently enjoyed them. My mum, who had always had such good taste in her reading matter!

I was also a little disappointed in her that she no longer engaged with ideas and/or the state of the world in the form of current affairs programs on TV. She had always had such a keen intelligence! In fact, the evidence was that she still did, and yet (from my point of view) she was dumbing herself down in these ways. 

I tried to rationalise it. 'She's an old lady,' I told myself. 'At her age, if she wants to waste her time like this, I guess she's earned the right.' She was housebound, and many of her friends had passed on; I thought I should be thankful that she could find pleasure in her reading and viewing, however deplorable the content seemed to me. But it was hard to fathom how she could sink so low.

Now here I am, in my late seventies, widowed and living alone. I am far from housebound, I'm very glad to say, and have somehow acquired such a busy social life that some weeks I am glad if I have a whole day at home. But in other ways I am following in Mum's footsteps. It's rather startling.

I promise you I have always had excellent literary tastes, and still have. Yet (thanks to the lure of cheap or free books on Amazon Kindle, which often turn out to be Book 1 of a – still cheap – series) I quite often find myself reading and enjoying indifferently written romances by decidedly non-literary authors. The ones available these days frequently have some erotic content that probably wasn't in the ones my mother got, but I don't know that for sure – I so despised her choices back then that I never actually read them.

I do use the  'look inside' feature before buying. There are some which are so pathetic I couldn't bear to subject myself to them, and don't, but most can keep me entertained despite the atrocious editing (or lack thereof).

Furthermore, nowadays I seldom watch any of the excellent current affairs programs available on Australian TV. (Except Q&A, in which public figures, often politicians, are quizzed by a thoughtful audience. I still find this entertaining – and it reinforces my prejudices, which makes me feel good.)
I'm not sure why this change has happened.

I can explain to myself the disengagement from the current affairs programs. I've experienced more than enough grief, horror etc by now, either in my own life or as an observer of world affairs; I'm not going to rub my nose in any more. I still keep abreast of the news and read some commentary online. e.g. in The Guardian; that'll do me. But what about these lowbrow books?

I don't have any romantic partners now, let alone sexual ones; but then, I don't want to go to the bother anyhow. Relationships take work, and I've never been much interested in one night stands. In any case I don't really find elderly men attractive. (It was different with Andrew; I loved him.) And although I have in the past had some relationships with much younger men, I can't say any are showing up on my doorstep these days. Even if they did, would I want to exert myself? I'm enjoying my own company and that of my platonic friends (mostly women). So I suppose the books might be some kind of substitute. My choices often contain things like dragons, vampires, feisty heroines and handsome but somewhat 'damaged' heroes, all of which I'm a sucker for (in fiction if not in life, where I have learned to prefer emotionally mature men). But the happy acceptance of barely adequate writing, even alongside my continued love of beautiful writing, that's a mystery!

'What you resist, you become'? There were many ways in which I strove not to be like her, but it seems that, in some respects at least, I am my mother's daughter.

My Mother and Me

A friend on facebook posted, on Mother's Day, the truth about her relationship with a difficult, fault-finding mother. A little different from the eulogies most people were posting! In response, I found myself airing the truth about my relationship with my mother:

My mother didn't like hugs with me when I was a child, because it might mess up her hair and outfit. I don't remember that we ever hugged as long as she lived. A cool kiss on the cheek was about it.

She was phobic, and passed several of the phobias on to me. I have managed over the years to reduce them to mild rather than completely crippling. I was also very conscious of not passing them on to my own children, and it appears I succeeded in that.

She tried very hard to teach me that appearances matter, and to run my life on what other people (the most conservative and conformist ones) might think of me.

She failed in that. I was born non-conformist!

She was basically selfish, though she was so timid and fluffy that few people outside the family realised that. She was petite and pretty, and she had 'helpless little woman' down to a fine art. 

As I grew older, there were many ways in which I was more the parent and she the child, even when I was just a schoolgirl. My Dad’s refrain, in any time of difficulty, was, ‘Don’t upset your mother.’ It was understood that she must be treated delicately, and protected from life.

She succeeded in teaching me that the way I look is far from beautiful, which is a serious fault, and that being myself is not good enough — attitudes I have had to fight within myself all my life.

She may well be the reason I cannot tolerate any association with the kind of people for whom everything you do is wrong. I mean that, if I’m around them in any big way, I become a nervous wreck and have to get them out of my life.

She was very controlling, and continually invaded my privacy — and other people’s — right up into my adulthood: reading personal letters and diaries, for instance; and eavesdropping blatantly.

As a consequence, I was very protective of my own children’s privacy. Once, when I asked my Firstborn why he never showed me any of his essays, which were getting good marks at school, he said, ‘Oh, I thought you’d just find them in my schoolbag.’ It had never occurred to him that I wouldn’t look in his schoolbag and read his work. It had never occurred to me to do so, nor that other mothers did so as a matter of course.

On the other hand, my Mum was very big on not spilling family secrets. We must not ‘air our dirty linen in public’. This meant always presenting a facade of happy families no matter what was really the case. (Rows over money; Dad drinking too much and having serial infidelities; my brother wetting the bed for years; Mum frequently taking to her bed for days while dosing herself with Relaxa Tabs…)

I remember childhood dreams, experienced as sinister nightmares, in which things were literally being swept under the carpet.

I survived by stubbornly sticking to my own opinions inwardly, even while having to outwardly pay lip-service to her ideas — and by having nothing to do with her for a period of ten years after I had children of my own.

That was partly because I didn't want them influenced by her in the ways that I had been; but mainly because I couldn’t tell which of my thoughts were really mine and which were her voice in my head. I believed the only way I could find out for sure was to completely separate myself from her. It took a long time, but it worked.

Six years of psychotherapy — for several reasons — also helped.

And I learnt to count my blessings, even if blessings of omission. Some children are physically abused. Some are burnt with cigarettes, raped, their bones broken. They may be starved and their health neglected. Some are killed by their own parents. None of that happened to me; nothing even remotely like it.

A death in the family saw her reach out, and we reconciled. She had aged and softened; so had I. I finally realised that she actually did love me, underneath all that, and was the victim of her own upbringing too. 

I also realised that I actually did love her underneath all that.

My little boys, meeting her when they were past infancy, loved her and she them. By then she wouldn't have dared try and interfere in their upbringing. They couldn't understand why I had cut her out of my life and theirs for so long.

My eldest opined that her second marriage, to my dear stepfather, must have made her so happy that that was why she was nicer than the woman I'd experienced. He may well have been right.

Our values remained very different for the most part, but late in her life she expressed respect for the fact that neither my brother nor I was materialistic.

She became more honest in old age. We were finally able to have some good conversations, and to enjoy each other’s company in some ways, even find moments of true rapport.

I remained defensive with her, however, and — I now think — unnecessarily disagreeable at times. (Even though I also did things like taking care of her in my home when she was ill.)

I was still afraid to let her ideas too far into my head; still afraid that she could take me over if I didn’t adopt a policy of ‘the best defence is aggression’. But we didn't have many disagreements. I had the power now. She had been intimidated by my ten years of silence and was afraid to offend me.

She couldn't understand, either, why I had cut her off. She kept looking for some particular incident in which she must have been to blame. I finally explained about needing to become my own woman; I don't think she grasped it. 

I was with her when she died. (Of old age, in a nursing home.) It was the most confronting moment of my life. The mother-child relationship, even one so fraught as ours, is basic. 

Even in our worst difficulties, even during our estrangement, I always knew deep down that if ever I was in desperate straits with nowhere else to go, I could knock on her door and be at home. I never had to put it to the test, but to this day I retain the unshakable conviction.

For me her death was huge.

It’s only in hindsight that I wish I had understood better how afraid she usually felt, and how much that influenced her behaviour. But I was a child. And later I was an adult trying to overcome my upbringing and find my way to my real self.

Now I look back and recall how artistically talented she was — at piano, embroidery, copper work; even, when she tried her hand at it late in life, poetry. I'm glad I inherited some of that. (Unfortunately not the music.)

I thank her and my Dad for being totally aligned in valuing reading and education, and encouraging me in both. I thank them for being proud of my precocious gifts for English Expression, particularly in writing, and even more particularly in poetry, and for encouraging that. I thank her for knowing that librarianship would be the perfect career for me, and steering me towards it when I was uncertain of my direction.

I talk to her in my head occasionally, in a friendly way. I can do that, now that I am clear which thoughts are my own.

She’s been dead eighteen years. I get along with her a lot better now.

Writer's Journal (exercise): My mum was a cat

My mum was a cat. A tame, domestic cat. She liked her comforts. She was a timid one, a  scaredy-cat who liked to stay close to home and to her people who made her feel safe. There, she was happy to be cooed at and petted. My dad liked to stroke her, and we kids were not allowed to interfere with her comfort. She came forth occasionally and ventured out on to the street, so long as someone safe was with her to protect her. She liked to lick the cream off life, and she hated loud noises. She didn’t like swimming or hiking, or getting into the dirt, and she hated mice and was always intent on destroying them. She was very private about personal matters, even secretive. And she was oh so fastidious about her person. You never saw my Mum ungroomed. She had an aloof air with people she didn’t know, and if she didn’t like you she would simply freeze you out by ignoring you. She had great dignity, my Mum, and she was quite vain. She knew she was very decorative to look at.

Writer's Journal (exercise): Paddleboats

I love all kinds of boats, always have, and I’m very happy aboard any kind of craft.

When I lived near Mildura as a schoolgirl, I first saw paddleboats in the flesh so to speak, and they took my fancy in a big way; but it wasn’t until years and years later when I was grown up and married and living in Melbourne that I finally got to go on one.

We made friends with some people Mum knew, when we were visiting Tassie, and they had the idea. The ‘we’ I speak of was Bill and me, husband number 2, to whom I was married for 27 years. He was a boatman, an abalone diver with his own boat, and had a skipper’s licence, so he insisted he had to drive the thing, that he was reqired by law to do so. There were seven of us on board, Mum and Bill and me, and two other couples. There were a few ructions about Bill wanting to be skipper all the time; the other blokes didn’t see it his way. Mum soothed him down so he let the others have a bit of a go. But he kept muttering that he’d be to blame if we ran into trouble. We didn’t of course.

It was interesting to me to see Sunraysia as a visitor — that place where I spent two years of misery finishing school and suffering a stepmother from hell. At the time of our paddle boat jaunt my dad was in an old folks’ home, suffering from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. We took Mum with us to see him. They had managed to be friends after their divorce, but my stepmother was fiercely jealous of Mum. So the visit was a sneak expedition. It was sad for her to see him like that, but sweet for him to get a visit from his true love. I’m glad we did it. Also we met friends of friends up there, including a woman who reminisced about my stepmother, who had been her hated schoolteacher. That pleased me very much. 

I liked the pelicans along the river, and I liked lazing on the top deck and writing poems.

Writer's Journal (exercise): The Emerald Ring

I remember the emerald that Mum used to wear, a big square cut emerald in a ring on her right hand. Her left hand was for the wedding and engagement rings. She was a woman of taste, my mother, and wouldn’t have dreamed of wearing rings on every finger as her daughter now does.

I loved that emerald ring! So did she. We used to look at it together, at the way it caught the light, at the way it was cut with a sort of double edge inside the gold setting. We were both upset when one of those edges got a chip. Even then, it was many years later that I realised my mother’s ring was glass, and that she must have been well aware of that all along. But she used to call it ‘my emerald’ and I knew that dad gave it to her. I now have a different interpretation of the way she smiled when she said  to her friends, ‘My emerald,’ flashing the ring. They would have known too, of course, and openly. It was a little joke between them as they agreed it was a beautiful ring. It was. I can still see it now, that deep green — and the size of it. A real emerald of that size would have been worth a great fortune.

My mother’s opal ring was real enough, but it was a doublet, two pieces of opal stuck together. It was deep blue and green. I liked fire opals best, still do, but Mum’s opal was very beautiful. She didn’t wear that often; it lived in a drawer. She always said she would leave it to me, but one day when my Aunty Kathleen was admiring it, Mum had a sudden fit of largesse and said, ‘Here, have it.’ Years later she said, You wil leave it to Rosemary, won’t you?’ Aunty Kathleen did, but by then it was not what it had been. No-one told her she shouldn’t put it in water. With a doublet, that changes the glue so that it shows through and ruins the look of the stone. I still have Mum’s opal ring, but I don’t wear the poor, pale, discoloured thing.

I wonder what happened to the emerald? Perhaps she threw it away after she and my dad divorced. She could have had real emeralds in her second marriage, but she went for diamonds instead. She left me her three-diamond ring which she was so pleased to have bought in Singa[ore for much less than she believed it was worth. It is an impressive ring, but when I wanted to raise some money recently I found that I couldn’t sell it. No-one is buying diamonds that size now. They are quite big, but not big enough.

All in all, I think the great big green glass ring was probably the best value, in terms of the pleasure it gave.

Writer's Journal (exercise): Un-Australian

Well, that’d be my Mum for starters. Migrated from India with her family when she was 15.  She was Anglo-Indian, not dark-skinned, so people heard her accent and not only the English bit — she went to boarding school in England from the age of 7. People still ask me sometimes if I’m English. I must have absorbed something of Mum’s way of speaking. And yet she lived in Australia from the age of 15 until she died at 83. She said that in Austraia she was taken for English, and when she went back to England on a visit, everyone said how Australian she sounded.

When did she go from being a foreigner to being an Aussie? Oh yes, I suppose she and her family got naturalised and all that; she was certainly an Austraian citizen. But don’t some of the other nationalities who come here get naturalised too? It still doens't make them Aussies in the eyes of their critics.

We love to have peoople to hate for their difference. I remember when I was a kid, it was the I-ties. Now they are old stock, many gneerations here.

I always say I’m dinkum cos I was born here — but I don’t drink beer or tea, don’t bet on the Melborne Cup, prefer poetry to sport, and don’t profess to be Christian.