She: OK.
Me: I'm writing in San Francisco today. Woot!
She: How does that feel?
Me: Amazing. Last time I was here I wasn't feeling anywhere near as good as I feel now. I feel like myself, you know? Something essential has come with me this time and it's good. I chose to spend a chunk of time alone today. Came to a lovely tea shop instead of a coffee place, ordered a pot of chai, and now I'm tapping away on my new laptop, which is fabulous.
She: What do you want to write about your mother?
Me: Just what I knew about her life, kind of what I wrote about dad a while ago.
She: OK, go!
Mum was the third of eight children. She was born on February 10, 1939, the same year as World War 2 broke out, but several months sooner. She had two older sisters, and would be followed up by four brothers in a row, then a baby sister.
She told me that sometimes nana would put the three girls to bed, and in the morning when they got up there would be three dresses hanging up in the kitchen -- nana had made them overnight.
Mum's father, Reginald, died when mum was only 15. Joanne, the baby, was just 2. So nana brought up eight children on her own. Mum did talk a lot about growing up feeling poor. She said she and her sisters didn't have the proper school uniform, so the nuns made them stand at the back of the line on the way to mass. Mum also said something about taking a pack of sanitary pads to school on the carrier of her bike, thinking that was pretty special, but being laughed at by other girls. She probably had her own nightmare first period to deal with.
They went to dances, made their own clothes, and by the looks of the old black and white photos in the photo box they had a good time. They wore lipstick and earrings and pearls, and looked quite stylish. Apparently nobody was allowed to leave the house to go out to a dance before the family rosary was said. And any boys who arrived to take the girls out had to kneel down and say the rosary with the family. For those of you who don't know, the rosary consists of saying, in a row, 50 Hail Marys, in groups of ten with an Our Father in between, and some miscellaneous other Hail Holy Queen type prayers at the end. You kneel for the whole thing, and it seems to take forever. Everyone had rosary beads in those days, for keeping count of the Hail Marys and the whole procedure. I got a set of rosary beads that belonged to Sid, dad's father. I have been trying to get rid of them to an appropriate family member (thinking that since I don't have kids of my own to leave them to, I might as well see them off into another branch of the family), but nobody wanted them. Meanwhile I've been wanting a set of Mala beads -- 108 beads on a string for counting meditation mantras. I got the inspiration to check out the rosary beads one day recently, and discovered that one round has 54 beads on it, so if I go around twice, I get 108 mantra counts. Not sure what the grandparents would think of using rosary beads for mediation, but really, what's the rosary if not a meditation -- repeats of the same thing, to help focus the mind. Perfect.
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Mum married dad when she was 20. The match was a bit of a worry for her older sisters, one in the convent and one not. There is a letter between them, discussing the engagement and questioning dad's character and suitability. He was a bit of a party animal, and five years older than her too. But they married. Mum had a very stylish dress, the bridesmaids (mum's sisters who were not in the convent) wore red velvet. It looked like a really lovely wedding -- it was on July 25 1959.
(An aside here. Dad looked really good too in his suit, but apparently the pants were many sizes too big for him, and they ended up pinning the pants to the armpits of his shirt to get them to look half decent. He had to keep his jacket on all day. He used to say "The guy who measured me for those pants must have stuck his ruler right up my ass to get the legs that long!!" Roar with laughter.)
Another story, and I don't know if it was true, or made up to prove how chaste mum was. On their honey moon, they had to go to a doctor so he could confirm to mum that sex was normal and what was happening was the right thing to be doing. It sounds ridiculous. It was always followed up with another story about mum's sex education. She and her little sister were in bed one morning, laughing at the sparrows "piggy-backing" on the power lines outside their window. Nana asked "Do you know what they are doing?" Mum answered "Yes!" And that was that. Mum thought they were piggy-backing.
Mum also said that she didn't want to go to Mass on Sunday morning if she and dad had had sex on Saturday night, because she thought everyone in the congregation and the priest would know what they'd been up to.
All this seemed and still seems a tad unconvincing, but it could be true I suppose. Mum was the first of her siblings to marry, so she wouldn't have had any advice from her sisters. But I doubt nana would have sent her out into the world with that little preparation. These stories were told in the context of us being warned about how important it was to be "moral" (not have sex before marriage). Our mother had been so utterly chaste when she got married, and we should be the same. But it's just as likely to be the result of trauma. (How would this kind of thing even come up in conversation? After a few drinks, when we were a bit older. It's strange... the family stories were definitely themed around dad having a cruel upbringing (poor dad) and mum being 125% pure and innocent (good mum). Interesting.)
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One night when mum and dad were engaged, they had a fight. Dad was dropping mum off in a car, and things blew up to the point that mum gave dad back her engagement ring, got out of the car and slammed the door. Dad wound down the car window and threw the ring into Queen's Park (just across the road from the Baird house) and drove off. I always imagine the wheels smoking as he took off. Mum was horrified that he'd thrown away the ring, and spent a couple of hours trying to find it in the dark, in amoung the long grass and weeds under the huge macracarpa hedge. She couldn't find it, and got in a panic, and ran through town, crying, all the way to the Ward house (it probably wasn't raining and thundering, but let's just say it was).
That was a long run in a party dress and shoes, right across town from 174 Kelvin Street to XXX Tweed Street. She ran into dad's room, and found him sound asleep, with the engagement ring safely hanging on a nail in the wall beside the bed. They made up. It kind of sums up their relationship. Mum was always the dramatic, emotional one. Dad had things under control, but was a bit of a trickster.
I don't know how they got engaged, and I wish I did. Maybe aunty Pat would know.
Before she got married, mum worked in an office. I don't know what she did there. It was just a stop-gap before marriage. It must have included typing, because she could touch type, and liked to impress us by showing us how she could type without looking what she was doing. She also used to do that while playing the piano, but starting the tune (she only knew one, Moonlight Sonata) on the wrong key, but playing it anyway... we really thought that was hilarious.
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