on the Mother

on the Mother

Irish catholic; dirt-poor, bloody big mob, Father (school principal) (can’t swim); smokes cigarettes at the beach, thirty-five raucous 10-year-olds wear-themselves-out in the water, sing; Crocodile Rock, laaaaa la la la la laa, stingers pulled off, sprayed with vinegar, Father, shifts house seven times, Father - waiting to hit a jackpot, gives spare change to Saint Vincent de Paul - can’t afford it, in that regional town of old farming stock, but townies, like the rest. Mother; devoted to the Father and the kids, and hardy fruitcake to break your front teeth, a beautiful workhorse to say the least, alcoholic Father, broken Mother, wayward Brother, Sister, Brother; took care where she could, flew the coop at twenty-three, took a six-week-cargo, a flightless arrow through the Pillars of Hercules, an au-pair; states she lost the gift-of-the-gab, still speaks fluent French, name: Maureen, but us grandkids, we just call her Biggie.

on my Mother; primary school, dad reads Huck Finn to the class, wonderfully calm reading voice, dappled-light memories, younger: Brother, Sister – older: Brother, Sister, Brother, Sister,             “poor, strict, catholic mob”, “dad’s devout as the devil but nice fella”, “was in training for the seminary until”…high school; cracks appear, not well liked, a bit too quiet, “strange family that one”, some kind of ostracism [always been afraid to ask], only one true friend – an outsider as well - gets part-time work with a Potter, likes the feeling of moulding the clay, birthing Eve from the backwater, the mud and the grime, first tentatively, and then again and again, not particularly skilled; though as it seems, neither was the creator?

~

She feels like racking off; racks off, year; 1984, works on a kibbutz, lives on a rooftop above Damascus gate, rumblings of the First Intifada, returns home at a loss, smokes four to five cigarettes on the drive from Roleystone to Subiaco, ends up moving south, works at a heritage listed pub, meets Dad, feels sorry for him, serves raw meat patties on a first date, becomes round with my brother; elliptical, petulant, some kind of parting… Presto.

Brother, Sister, in quick succession, [myself] a little bit down the line, Dad slings bricks from the mud-board to the wall, the wall grows up quick - so do us kids. Mum: dedicated, somewhat wistful, spends remaining money creating CD collection better than the Boomer Dads’, better than the Cobain obsessed kids smoking weed in the park’s only remaining melaleuca, her favourite though: Did Ye Get Healed?

reads aloud to me in their bed, the one with the yellow sheets; Treasure Island (illustrated) cover-to-cover, Storm Boy; Magpie Island; Blue Fin; Blueback, cover-to-cover, Tom Sawyer; Heidi; The Last of The Mohicans (illustrated) cover-to-cover, Fantastic Mr. Fox; the Twits [I’m trying to read to mum now], James and the Giant Peach [I succeed].

~

Saturday night 6:30pm, mums at church [I’m there to], deals with my whinging, I tell her its abuse to make me go, it’s 2007, I’m fourteen, I don’t know the word is loaded, on the car ride home, I tell her: that’s it’s stupid she kept her Maiden name, why didn’t she take Dads? Mine? my Brother’s? my Sister’s? the name of the husband? what right did she have to keep part of herself? she sits stonelike and quiet - an Oriel Lamb out in her tent – tells me: “Men might own this world, but that doesn’t make it right”, wonders if her son is lost already.

~

Friends stay, friends go, friends stay again, say; “your Dad is great, but I don’t think your Mum likes me”, “doesn’t say much does she”, I mumble condolences, friends, girlfriends, girls that are friends, they sleep in my bed, I go sleep on the couch, my anger breaks on an unshifting, inscrutable shore [so it appears]. us kids move out, filter overseas and outward, my Brother accepts old Yugoslavia as an appropriate backdrop, my Sister, a two-by-one in the suburbs, mum and dad are satisfied we’ve escaped the monoculture; “gods’ country” as the locals call it (my classmates that never left).

and Mum, still living in this so-called-paradise, stops going to church, [Reason, still to be decided] maybe allegations made truthful, or a simple disillusionment in the father-and-the-son, a vision of Magdalena outside the useless tomb, the wayward wiles of the blonde Palestinian. meanwhile I rip through my twenties, Charon calls too many good friends across the river, some opt to go, most (as if blown apart by the prevailing south-wester) get dragged off in the fading light of late February, on one such occasion mum catches me in the hallway of our empty family home, she hugs me like a crab to a dry rock, it’s a second before I realise she is sobbing, I’m 25 years old, it’s the first time I’ve seen Mum cry. Oriel Lamb out in Her Tent, Oriel Lamb out in Her Tent, Oriel Lamb out in Her Tent. 

~

 Mum now spends every waking hour with grandma Biggie, at night she dreams the dry bronze hills of Jerusalem, the River Jordan, smoke rising from rooftops, [it is strange, I’ve begun to dream them too], Biggies on her last legs, she smashes the corner of the skirting board with her walking frame, breaking the banks to let forth the tide, a vision of Queen Leto not to be confined inside, untethered, her children do battle upon the sacred junctions between prairie and streetcorner, Mum (again); dedicated, slightly wistful, I wonder if she’s been healed, i don’t think so, at least not yet.

~

Lastly, Mum is down on the tideline, collecting all that is amphibious: buoys, cowrie shells, smoothed beer-bottle-glass, and her favourite: shark eggs; blown apart by Poseidon, Motherless - as they are now - she picks them up with the utmost care, holds them tenderly to her chest, a lonely grey-haired woman collecting flotsam, those little souls that shouldn’t have been lost. on the Mother I wonder so many things, but my lips are sealed, the debris; however, that at least, I know, is in safe hands.