What
is it about mothers?
Get
chatting with another woman who aspires to ‘write’ and chances are, when the
barriers are down, when you’ve both ’fessed up to your lofty ambitions - think
Alice Munro, Amanda Lohrey, Chloe Hooper - and you ask politely ‘So, Cassandra,
(or whoever,) what’s your story about?’ Cassandra will reply, ‘Well I’m trying
to write the story of my mother. She was such an interesting person.’ And Cassandra won’t be the only one. In every
writers’ group of ten people there’ll be three or four women planning to write
about mother.
Once
I would have been all ears because, by some amazing co-incidence, I too was
thinking of writing about my mother!
What are the odds? But a decade or so later it’s hard not to let my eyes glaze
over and hope for someone to say, instead, ‘I’m thinking of writing the story
of that drainage contractor I wanted to run off with when he was working on our
septic system.’
Drusilla
Modjeska started it all with Poppy. She has a lot to answer for. The blurb on the
back cover of my old edition says:
In this book, Drusilla Modjeska sets out to collect the evidence of her
mother’s life. But when the facts refuse to give up their secrets, she follows
the threads of history and memory into imagination.
That
is, when she could neither remember, nor find evidence for, the facts about her
mother’s life which would give meaning and continuity to her story, Drusilla
made it up. With stunning results.
When
my mother died more than a decade ago and my sister and I were struggling to
make sense of some of the things we subsequently learned about her, this
approach seemed just the shot. Very liberating indeed. Oh, we loved her dearly,
our Mum, but she could be contrary and she had more secrets than the KGB. So,
inspired by Drusilla, liberated from the confines of truth and accuracy by her
brave mix of facts and fiction and sure that this would lay all my demons to
rest, I too set about writing about Mother.
Here
was my chance to celebrate the trials she had borne with strength and a wry good
humour, the poverty and narrowness of her world which she had overcome, her
capacity to recite poetry and make up stories that made us, as children, flee
squealing in excitement from the ghosts and goblins that had hunkered down
since her terrifying childhood to re-emerge and haunt ours. Here too was my
chance to honour her bravery in sitting for months with a dying friend saying
yes, I will help you die if it becomes too terrible, while also memorialising
her respect for every living thing from black snake to butterfly.
But
wait. Here also was my chance to explore those times when she had ridiculed us
for experimenting with make-up, laughed at us with her friends because we
couldn’t swim (no-one had taught us and we weren’t allowed near the creek),
rejected the gifts we had made for her as feeble efforts to buy her love.
So,
back then, I wrote. Reams of it, mother love, mother revenge, mother-the-mystery.
Ninety thousand words of purging - some facts, great slabs of imagination,
whatever gave continuity to her story. In haste I printed it and sent it off to
a major publisher. Oh, how I now cringe at the thought! But they were kind and
you know what they said? Something along the lines of – we were very interested
in your story etc etc blah blah, but – and these weren’t quite the words though
the meaning was clear – we have enough
material about mothers already.
But
hey, I was satisfied. Amazingly, someone had read it all, there were little
ticks and a few long lines down the side of various passages which could have
meant anything – ‘Must show this around for a laugh!’ or ‘Step aside, Alice
Munro.’ I was not to know. And there my effort ended.
In
the meantime I continued to hear, without any instigation on my part, other
women talking with bewilderment, rage, love or passion about their mothers.
There were mean mothers, adored mothers, saintly mothers, unfathomable mothers,
flaky mothers, martyred mothers and many of them the intended subjects of
about-to-be written memoirs or new works of creative fiction.
Many
years later I find myself writing again. I have more time now and I’ve shed all
of the angst that drove that first embarrassing manuscript.
The
current manuscript is fiction. No,
really. My mother’s not in it. She tries to be from time to time, muscling in
to different characters with her sage green eyes, her habit of singing to
herself every morning, her inborn resolve to ‘just get on with it’. But that’s
about it. I’ve exorcised her and come to terms with her, loving her and
understanding her a whole lot better than before I spent all those tortured
years on that first manuscript. I’m okay with Mother now.
So
when a dear friend rang me from afar a while ago and said ‘I’m thinking of
writing a story,’ I said ‘Great! Just find a punchy opening and go from there’.
And she said ‘I have already. Listen
to this… I can remember exactly where I
was when I decided to kill my mother.’
My
heart skipped only a beat or two and then I said ‘Go Girl! You’ll find out
heaps about yourself and loads about your mother. And it’s way cheaper than five
years of psychotherapy.’
*
