And you may call me . . .

 When I was a kid, I called my friends’ parents, my parents’ friends and essentially every adult person Mr or Mrs or Miss.  By the time I was in my teens, there were a couple of Ms thrown into the equation.  Even my first boyfriend’s parents were Mr and Mrs Matthews; he called mine Mr and Mrs Lourde.  I don’t recall ever even knowing my teachers’ first names.  There were also the friends-who-functioned as family – my mother’s best friend and her husband were “Aunty” and “Uncle”, as were my Dad’s best man and his wife (and I still call them this now, even though I’m in my 40s).  The only family friends I can remember calling by their first names were our next door neighbours – for some reason, they were always Ella and Terry, and their kids called my parents by their first names. 

Nowadays, I’m the grown up, and without exception all of my children’s friends (and all of my friends’ children) call me “Meg”.  When I volunteer at my children’s school or work at the local kindy, the kids call me “Miss Meg”, but that was about as formal as it ever gets.  Truth be told, I’d feel weird being called “Ms Lourde” (or the Mrs version, using my married name) by the children that I know.  I still think of “Mrs Lourde” as my mother; “Mrs Married Name” is my mother-in-law.  And the only kids who call me by the aunty tag (and I actually prefer tia, not aunty) are my nieces and nephews.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that a fair number of my friends started having children relatively young – I’d only just turned 25 (and was four days into marriage) when the first of our close friends became parents.  I was still getting used to the idea of being a Mrs myself at that point, so the notion of our friends’ daughter calling us Mr and Mrs didn’t even cross our minds.  That set the scene for the rest of our friends’ kids – I was just Meg.  I did have one friend who liked her daughter to call adults by a formal title.  She was ok with her daughter using my first name, so long as there was a title before it, so that was the first time I was Miss Meg.  Another friend’s daughter always saw my husband and me together, so she assumed we shared a name – until she was about five, irrespective of if she was addressing us together or individually, she called us Marcus-and-Meggie (always in a sing-song tone, too).  I must admit to being very sad when she finally realised we had separate names and stopped using our combined name.

My children used surnames for their school teachers (with essentially all of the female teachers getting called something that sounds more like Mizz that Miss or Ms), but call most of the adults that they know by their first names.  The exceptions to this are a few of my father-in-law’s friends – he introduced them to my children using Mr or Mrs, and so that’s what we stuck with.  When first introducing my kids to a new adult, I do ask if they’d prefer my children to use their surname rather than a first name, but I can’t think of a single adult who has opted for that.  Even the adults who teach their after school classes go by first names (occasionally with a Miss or Mr in front).  And everyone seems perfectly happy with that.

On the topic of goodbye

 

My Nan always hated it when I went away.  Given I’ve spent most of my adult life in a different state (or country) to where she lived, sometimes we’d go a year or two between visits, and so she felt that each goodbye may well be the Very Last Goodbye.  Every time she hugged me when I was leaving, she would cry.  Every single time.

The first time I left Perth, on my way to Brasil for a 12 month exchange programme, my Nan made me promise that I wouldn’t come home early if something happened to her and Pa. She wanted me to stay and enjoy my exchange.  At the time, she was 66, Pa was a decade older.  I was pretty confident that they’d be ok, and I made the promise based on that.  As it turned out, my father, aged 46, was the one who got sick and required surgery to prevent him dying.  The surgery was successful.  I stayed in Brasil for the full year.

When I moved to Brisbane, Nan was just shy of 76, Pa was almost 86.  I still remember driving away from their house the last time I visited, a couple of days before I flew to Brisbane, the two of them standing on their driveway and waving until we turned the corner, Nan crying the whole time.

Every time we visited her (or she visited us), it was the same.  At the point of farewell, Nan would get upset and start to cry, then apologise for being “a silly old thing”.  Every time she would say something that indicated she was considering this to be the (potentially) final farewell.

Pa would get emotional, but he never seemed as worried as her that he’d never see me again.  Given he was ten years older and had several quite significant health issues (including the fact he’d technically died from the heart attack he’d had in his sixties) he was statistically more likely to die first, and we all knew it.

The very last time I saw Pa was on New Year’s Day, 2010.  I was nearly seven months pregnant with my eldest, and my husband and I had been back in WA visiting family for Christmas.  We stopped in to see Nan and Pa on the way to the airport.  Pa waved us off with a smile, promising to come visit when the baby was born.  Nan waved till we were out of sight, crying the whole time.

About a week later, Pa had a fall and they did a brain scan as a result.  They discovered he had numerous tumours in his brain; he declined all medical treatments except pain management.  He couldn’t hear well on the phone (he’d been mostly deaf for years), so I sent my mum emails that she read to him instead.  He insisted to the doctors that he needed to make it to mid-March because there was a great-grandbaby on the way.  He made it to the first of February.

His funeral was huge.  I know this, not because I went, but because my in-laws went.  I wanted to go, but both my mum and my Nan asked me not to come.  They were both concerned that flying back across the country at eight months pregnant wouldn’t be good for me or the baby (even though my obstetrician said I was fine to fly).  And so I stayed home.

Over the ten years that followed, there were multiple visits back and forth.  Nan accompanied my parents to our place several times; we went back to WA every year or so.  Nan’s last visit to Brisbane was in late 2015 to meet our son.  She was 89; he was 18 days old.  She always talked about visiting us again, but we all knew it was too long a flight for her anymore.  Instead, we saw her when we went back to Perth, the first time a year after her final visit to us, then for our son’s 2^nd birthday, when he sat on her lap while she sang him happy birthday.  She still got emotional at farewells, and it had grown to her getting teary on the phone when it was time to say goodbye.

Early last year, we flew to Perth for the first time in two years for a family wedding and my mum’s 70^th birthday.  Nan had been in hospital for an operation, but she was in pretty good form.  She loved seeing our kids, gave them lots of hugs and kisses, loved that we came to visit her house while she was convalescing.  And then she had a stroke.

The stroke happened while we were still in Perth, and I got to see her a few times afterwards.  I held her hand, stroked her hair from her forehead like she’d done for me when I was a child, and told her that I loved her.  Although it was sad, it was lovely to have that time with her, and to be there for my mum.

Nan died in April, and her funeral should have overflowed the room, like Pa’s did.  But she died at the height of COVID restrictions, so there were only ten people at her funeral.  I didn’t go to her funeral either – the restrictions left me stuck in Queensland, watching my Nan’s funeral via a livestream.

The irony of it all was that she was so badly affected by the stroke that the last time I saw her, she didn’t even know that I was in the room.  After all those years of tears and worry that this may be the last time she’d ever see me, my Nan was never even aware of that Final Goodbye. 

Living Away

 I’m the eldest of three, and the third of five grandchildren on my mother’s side.  Although my Nan’s family is large (she was the third of nine; my mother has 27 maternal first cousins), our particular branch of said family is not especially big.  My parents grew up in almost adjoining suburbs; they met at a church youth group when  Mum was 11 and Dad was 14.  They dated on and off from the time she was 14 or so and married just shy of her 21st birthday.

My mother’s sister had two children, each of them had two children, and the eldest of those grandchildren has a child as well.  My siblings and I have six children between us.  My dad had two sisters, and I have five cousins from his side.  My aunts and their families always lived on the opposite side of the country to my parents, so I’ve never met two of those cousins, and the most recently that I saw any of the older three was nearly 20 years ago.  Between those five cousins there are at least six children, but, again, I’ve never met them. 

Growing up, my family spent a lot of time living relatively distant to the rest of the family.  The maternal side of the family (my Nan and Pa, my aunt and uncle, my two cousins) lived within 120kms of Perth, as did my paternal grandfather.  My paternal grandmother died just after I was born.  For much of my childhood and early adolescence, we lived in a variety of small towns in the middle of nowhere.  Two of those towns were in the desert; one doesn’t even exist anymore.  Two others are on the north west coast and are now relatively large and prosperous (although small by world standard) cities.  We did live in Perth for four years when I was young (my brother was born in Perth), but we in a very outer suburb of the city, roughly 30 minutes from our closest family members in the state and a two hour drive from the most distant.  Even when we lived the furthest away (about 1600 kms), we still managed to visit at least once a year.

My husband’s immediate family live slightly further south of Perth than my grandparents; his maternal relatives are all on the East coast.  His father is an only child whose parents died before my husband and his siblings were born, but my father-in-law had three close friends who were like brothers, all of whom live in and around Perth.  It was amusing to discover that one of these friends was the father of my good friend Pedro, and even more entertaining to work out that when I’d gone to Pedro’s 21^st years earlier, my (then future) in-laws had been amongst the gaggle of grown-ups celebrating inside.

My father-in-law grew up in a small town about 60kms from where my parents live, and he met my mother-in-law when he was stationed near her family home with the Air Force.  After they married, they moved around a lot for his - my husband also lived in a town that no longer exists.  When my husband was about 7, they settled in the same town they still live in now, on the opposite side of the country to the rest of my mother-in-law’s family. My sister-in-law, her husband and their two daughters live slightly south of my in-laws; my husband’s brother is the only one to have left the state – he’s been in Darwin for years.

With the exception of the six years we lived in the North during his childhood, my brother has always lived in Perth.  He’s never lived further that 20kms away from my parents, and he has a preference for more rural living with plenty of space around.

My sister loves to travel.  Entertainingly, she met her English husband in Perth when he was working at a local hospital as part of his medical training.  When he went back to England six months later, she went too.  She married him several years later, and they spent many years moving backwards and forwards between the UK and Australia.  Their first son was born in the UK, the second in Australia.  Both of the boys have dual citizenship, as does her husband.  They’ve been living in Perth, in a bustling inner-city suburb, for over six years now.

As for me . . . well, there was the year in Brasil at 18.  Moving across the country to Brisbane with my husband at 27.  After three years here, we went to Canada for three more, and we’ve been back in Brisbane for over 12 years.  Much of my adult life (and the great majority of my married life) has been spent a great distance from my extended family.  All three of our children were born here.  The only house we own is here.  Our friends and our life is here.  We go back to Western Australia every year or two, but only to visit.  Home is here.

Having moved so much as a child, I don’t actually have a sense of a “hometown”.  I don’t have those old primary or high school friends that I catch up with on a semi-regular basis.  I’ve never been to a single high school reunion or catch-up.  None of that bothers me. 

The entertaining part in all this, however, is the fact that we’ve lived in the same area for the entirety of our children’s lives.  Our two youngest have only ever lived in the same house; we lived elsewhere when our eldest was born but we moved here (eleven streets away from our previous home) when she was nine months old, and she has no recollection of any home other than this.  My daughters have been at the same primary school since they started; their brother has joined them there this year.  My girls have done many of their after-school activities for several years.  They've been in the same speech and drama classes together for three years.  They’ve both also been learning to sing with the same choir (with the same group of friends) for four-and-a-half years; this afternoon, my son will be joining the same choir, albeit in the “young singers” group. 

My children have had a continuity in location and school and surrounds that I didn’t really experience, and I’m quite enjoying it.  I don’t even think that I’m enjoying it on their behalf – I had a lovely childhood and had the chance to visit lots of places, meet new people and move around.  Actually, when I was young, I loved to move house – it was fun.  I genuinely think that adult me is appreciating the continuity – the ability to stay and to be in one place, rather than have to go through the adult-related issues of moving (which takes work), organising schools/activities for the kids (more work) and making new friends of my own (the toughest work of all).  I like the familiarity of it, the comfort of community and the feeling of belonging.  That’s not to say that I wouldn’t be up to moving again.  It would just need to be for a very good reason.