On Motherhood

 My mother always says that her greatest achievements are her three children.  This is not to say that she was a helicopter parent, or the type of person who tried to (re)live her life through us.  She did not get any vicarious “see what I am responsible for” pleasure from any of our achievements, nor did she ever push us towards any activity or group because she’d wished for the chance herself as a child.  Even when we wanted to do things she really, really didn’t want us to do (like that time I decided that spending a year on exchange in Brasil was a great idea), she always supported us.  Unconditionally.  She simply wanted us to have all the chances and the choices that were possible, and she did everything she could to manage family life to make these things possible.

When I was a kid, I felt like we had pretty much everything we wanted and needed.  As an adult, I now understand that there was a lot of budgeting and being careful and going without unnecessary items to make sure that all the financial things worked out correctly. 

My mother was a stay-at-home parent; my father was the one who earned the money.  They’d agreed on this principle prior to marriage and stuck to it for our childhoods.  Relatively recently, my mum and I were talking about my Nan (her mother), who’d been a full-time working (single) parent from the time my mother was 11 or so.  “I decided then,” my mother told me, “that if it was at all possible, I’d always be at home with my children when they were there.  Always.”

My Nan was a working parent by necessity – my mother’s father died when she was young, and there were pretty limited social services to help widows and families in 1960s Australia.  My Nan was also an exceptional mother, and an excellent example of a brilliant human being.  My mother and my aunt never wanted for anything essential, and they always knew that their mother would be home with them if she could . . . but at the time, my Nan had to have a job.

And so we cut to the mid-1970s when I was born.  My parents were living in a town in the Western Australian desert, where my father worked at the local airport.  He was an electrician, and his employment worked on two-year cycles – he was always employed by the same corporation, but it wasn’t always in the same location.  He’d been in Perth for a while, Darwin for two years after that, then it was off to a place called Meekatharra.  That’s where they were living when I arrived, but medical complications required a relocation via the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and I was born in Perth.  And that’s another thing that my mother, my eldest daughter and I have in common – birth marred by medical circumstance.  My mother was born by emergency caesarean at seven months, my birth was precluded by medical airlift to a specialist hospital, and my eldest was born with pneumonia and not breathing and spent four days in Special Care after birth.

I cannot remember a time in my life where my mother didn’t tell everyone how amazing I was.  And not just me – when my sister and then my brother came along, she talked them up with the same level of cheerful supportiveness as she did me.  When we each got married, she then added our spouses to her “let me tell you about my amazing children” repertoire.  And when the grandchildren came along . . . well, she continued just as before.  Actually, she’s probably more effervescent in her commentary about the grandchildren.  She will often regale me with stories of my nephews (the eldest belonging to my brother and his wife, the two younger belonging to my sister and her husband), telling me how fantastically well (insert nephew’s name here) has been doing at (insert sport, activity, job here) and how proud she is of him.  It doesn’t matter if I’ve heard this from said nephew’s mother or father, she has to give me her (always slightly more shiny and amazing) version of events.  Having compared notes with my sister and brother, I know she does the same thing with my three children to them. 

Pre-smart phones, my mother carried a “brag book” with her.  There were at least a couple of photos of each of us (children, children-in-law, grandchildren) and she would pull it out at every given opportunity to tell people (mostly people she knew; occasionally random friendly strangers) about one or many of us.  Now she has a phone with stored photographs, she uses that instead. 

I asked her once what she did if someone told her they didn’t want to look at her photos.  She looked at me, genuinely shocked.  “Who would say something like that?” she asked me. “You’re all so interesting – of course they want to hear about you!”