Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  He offers her a seat near the nurses’ desk.

  Sure thing, Joan. What exactly is the problem?

  She sits down heavily, as her eyes well with tears. I haven’t slept for nearly two months and I just can’t take it anymore.

  Jonus seems mortified as she begins to sob quietly. Oh, come on now, he blusters. Where’s our strong dependable Joan? This isn’t like you at all.

  That’s all very well for you to say, Jonus, she whimpers, visibly embarrassed by his manner. But I just can’t go on like this. I need to rest. Even for one night. I just don’t feel like myself at all.

  Sensing that something serious is happening, both to my mother and to their relationship, Jonus immediately takes charge, as I suspect a man of his energy might. His friendly tone changes slightly as he straightens up beside Mum’s crumpled body.

  First thing tomorrow, I’ll book you in for some sleep therapy, he announces. It looks to me like a long rest will do you the world of good. Get your body back into its old routine. Believe me, I’d go in there myself if I had half the chance.

  You have a special ward for sleep therapy? I ask, marvelling that such a place might exist in a traditional hospital.

  Ward 6B, he replies briskly.

  Ward 6B, I echo.

  Ward 6B, he snaps back, with a comedian’s timing. Joan, you can stay there for a few days, a week if you want to, and get back on your feet. You’ll be as good as gold in no time, he promises, and, unable to restrain himself a moment longer, he taps Mum lightly on the back. We can’t have you getting sick and stressed on us, he continues. We all need you too much.

  He springs to his feet as he prepares to move on. I’ll get cracking on getting you a bed, he promises. So you can get better and get cracking on the music for our Anzac Day concert. Is it a deal?

  He holds out his hand for a shake. Mum takes it limply, exhausted, I imagine, at the thought of doing anything at all, let alone organising a concert for this energetic, overwhelming man.

  He drops Mum’s hand quickly and takes mine instead before leading me a little way up the corridor. Your mother’s not herself, he tells me, hanging an arm around my shoulder and steering me away from Mum. What’s been the problem?

  I don’t really know, I answer honestly. I know she hasn’t really slept at all for weeks.

  Letting go of my shoulder, he signals confidently back to Mum. Well, he says, turning abruptly back to me, we can fix that problem for a start and then see what happens. Ring Ward 6B tomorrow and check that your mother’s bed has been organised and then bring her in as soon as possible.

  As he begins to move on, he calls back to Mum who is slouched over on the seat, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief. Righteo, Joan, he assures her. We’ll get you back on your feet before you know it. And then we’ll all be singing again. Remember the vowels … A-E-I-O-UUUU …

  He sings an arpeggio for each vowel sound as he backs away from us down the corridor, deftly swerving around nurses as he goes, as if, along with his many other skills, he also has eyes in the back of his head. Then he is gone, a whirlwind of activity and advice. I sit beside Mum and smile reassuringly.

  Sleep therapy sounds good, do you think? I ask, teetering between optimism and anxiety.

  Anything sounds good, she answers.

  On the way out we call in to see the baby again, but Mum is restless to leave. Driving home, we discuss the possibilities of sleep therapy. I imagine soft music wafting through corridors, meditation tapes lulling the sleep-deprived into slumber, soft curtains blowing in the spring breezes. I once spent a summer playing meditation music in the hills behind Byron Bay. I saw ex-junkies, incest victims, the bored, the depressed and the broken-hearted soothed by the vibrations of peaceful music. I always hoped that these things would one day slowly creep into the mainstream and even believe for a moment that they may already have arrived at hospitals for the wealthy and the well-insured.

  It turns out Ward 6B is the hospital’s psychiatric ward, something I discover when I ring the hospital the next day to confirm Mum’s bed.

  Is there anywhere else she can go? I ask the nurse in charge of admissions. I mean, she’s not mentally ill. She’s just tired.

  Oh, don’t worry about it. She sounds eager to get off the phone. Lots of women come in here to regulate their sleep patterns. You’d be surprised by how many patients we see with similar problems to your mother’s.

  But there will be some kind of therapy, won’t there? My unease is immediate, as is my sense that things are moving forward too quickly.

  The nurse, though, presses on. Absolutely, she insists. The doctor will see her and decide what course of action to take.

  Will they talk with Mum about ways of dealing with stress? I ask anxiously. Relaxation? Meditation?

  You’ll have to talk to the doctor about all these things, she says, obviously not wanting to waste any more of her time on the phone. All I can do for the moment is tell you that your mother’s bed is ready and she can come in anytime.

  I don’t feel comfortable about taking Mum to the hospital and try to dissuade her from this first step into institutional care. But I have been away too long to establish trust between us so quickly. In her eyes I am still the rebel daughter, used to opposing everything she says, just for the sake of it. So I buy her some new undies, help her pack, even joke with her that we should just look at the whole thing as an adventure and that things will settle down and get back to normal in no time.

  During the drive to the hospital, the weather seems too perfect for such an occasion. The jacaranda trees, so recently hung in hazes of purple, are lush and benign even though their time of full flowering is over. We’re in Mum’s car for this trip: a blue Hyundai Excel, the first of its kind in Australia, which she and Dad bought with his superannuation back in the late eighties. It runs more smoothly than my old car and after regular cleaning and servicing it smells as if it’s still new. Mum is not entirely comfortable with me at the wheel; she still associates me with many wayward things, including driving recklessly. I can’t really blame her for this; my lifestyle has hardly given her reason to think I am one hundred percent reliable about practical things. But she is insecure about driving herself now, so has conceded the keys to me for the first of many drives I will make with her in the passenger seat.

  The psych ward is in one of the oldest sections of the hospital. I imagine I can smell sweet antiseptic and Dencorub long before we arrive there. Mum is suddenly uncertain, just like I am, when we arrive at the hospital doors. I feel her resistance beneath my arm as I guide her through the main entrance, past the chapel, the reception desk, the newsagent, gift shop, café and chemist. We walk carefully, arm in arm, looking around us like children from a fairytale about to enter a dark and forbidding place.

  The head nurse meets us at the psych ward’s reception desk. Gloria is large and soft, a physical combination that seems to perfectly reflect her matronly demeanour. She is maternal and efficient with round, wet eyes. She begins her introductions in a breathy voice that gets breathier as she goes on. The new ward we’re building for our patients will be bright and sunny, she says when she sees me look anxiously at the gloomy rooms. I swear the rooms are like hotel suites.

  There are no private rooms available at such short notice, so Mum is allocated a bed in a large room at the end of the furthest corridor already occupied by two heavily made-up elderly women and a girl who introduces herself as ‘Betty with bipolar’. While Mum’s admission papers are sorted out, I stay close to her, sitting beside her in the plastic chairs which smell of Spray ’n’ Wipe and lavender. I am still beside her when a nurse with a tray stops in front of us and hands Mum a pill at the same time that Betty strokes Mum’s cheek and says ‘hello’ again. Betty wouldn’t be more than fifteen, but she already smells stale and old. Her teeth are yellow under swollen red gums and her greying hair is a further shock in someo
ne so young. She seems neglected, unnaturally puffy and hungry for attention. I look at Betty and then at Mum, and for a moment I can’t bear to see the thread that holds them together, to see Betty’s vulnerability reflected in my mother’s tired blue eyes, in her slim body defeated by its fatigue, unable to remove herself, through either her will or her energy, from this irrevocable step.

  Gloria gives Mum a glass of water to wash down the pill. I stand up and hover uneasily.

  If you don’t mind me asking, what’s the pill for? I enquire. I try my softest, least threatening voice. I’m Joan’s daughter, I whisper, stricken suddenly by some subterranean urge to apologise to this harried woman for being here. I’m looking after her.

  There. I’ve said it. What I never thought I would say: I am looking after my mother.

  Gloria smiles at Mum. It’s just to help you calm down, Joan, she says. That’s what you came in for.

  Placing my hand on Mum’s arm, I say in my most easygoing voice: I thought she was coming in for some sleep therapy.

  Yes. Gloria places her hand on Mum’s other shoulder. We’ll take care of that a little later. We’ve just got to settle her in now.

  Mum seems oblivious to the subtleties of what is taking place above her: her daughter and her nurse, like two sentries standing guard over her. Gloria’s in charge, though, as she helps Mum up, encourages her to swallow the pill quickly and move away from me.

  All the information’s been sent down, she tells me. You should go and have a rest yourself while we take care of Mum.

  She calls my mother ‘Mum’. Generically, I suppose. How many mothers who come into the psych ward for a rest does she call Mum? Perhaps it’s too hard to remember so many names. Perhaps she calls everybody Mum, even women who haven’t given birth. I’ve always believed that we are capable of mothering and fathering each other, so it’s nice if she calls everyone Mum. Does she also call the male patients ‘Dad’? My mind races around these ridiculous thoughts as I watch Mum being led down the corridor towards her room. They’re trained in this sort of thing, I think more rationally now, trained to deal with families that don’t want to let their loved ones go, that don’t trust complete strangers to understand what is at stake when their mother or father walks through the hospital door and away from the familiarity of their care.

  Four days after admitting Mum, Gloria pulls me aside on my way to visit Mum. She wheezes slightly when she breathes and I notice an asthma inhaler sticking out of her front pocket.

  Have you noticed a lot of changes in your mother since she’s been here? she asks, obviously concerned. We’ve been having trouble getting the dosage right. The average patient we get in here has a far greater tolerance for these sorts of medications than your mother seems to.

  Gloria is solicitous and courteous, but her gaze is constantly distracted, like a sentry, I think, still alert after a long watch.

  The problem is that your mother’s never taken sleeping pills or tranquillisers of any sort before, has she?

  I know Gloria wants a shorthand answer, something she can fit on the black dotted line on the hospital form, not an in-depth analysis. So I ask, in as friendly a voice as possible: Is this a problem?

  Most women over the age of fifty, she tells me, are taking something to help them sleep or settle their mood. And most women who come in here have already developed a certain tolerance for medication, so we prescribe accordingly. Your mum, however, is different.

  I don’t know how to address Gloria’s assumptions about what ‘most women’ do, but I can hear Mum’s voice somewhere in my head telling me not to ask so many questions, telling me to just go along with things. I am in her world now, the world she trusts. I owe her, at least, my effort to be polite, to try to support what she would do in regards to her own body.

  I keep my voice even as I finally speak: As far as I know Mum never took anything to help her sleep.

  My answer appears to satisfy Gloria who seems prepared to end our conversation. I’m not satisfied, though.

  We actually thought there was some sort of sleep therapy program in here, I query.

  Most of our patients want the sleeping pills, she asserts gently.

  I understand. But I’m sure Mum doesn’t want to become dependent on sleeping pills, I reply, already feeling like a troublemaker. I’ve got to ‘pull my head in’, I remind myself, doing a passable imitation of Mum admonishing me. She’d be right too. Using the word ‘dependent’ is too pre-emptive. But after years in the music scene I’m paranoid about drugs of any kind.

  It’s not a question of becoming dependent, Gloria continues evenly. Your mother hasn’t slept properly for weeks. Months perhaps. And her body needs a chance to catch up. We’re just trying to facilitate that process.

  Facilitate the process. I feel uneasy, as if I am hearing a foreign language. How long will this process take? I ask. What I mean is, how long will she be in here … on the medication?

  She glances over my shoulder.

  Well, that’s not for me to say, she answers briskly. You need to talk to your mother’s doctor. Do you have authority to do that?

  She seems keen to end our conversation. I feel guilty, demanding.

  What authority do I need? I ask without guile. I’m just staying with Mum for a while.

  There is a commotion in a nearby room. Gloria has a quick gasp on her inhaler as she walks away without answering my question. It sounds like Betty, who, in the short time I’ve been visiting the hospital, has revealed a compulsive habit of hopping into bed with the other women patients. From the outside, it looks more logical than mad, this lonely sick girl wanting to cuddle these maternal older women, whom even Gloria calls Mum. But in here it is crazy. Or it is driving everyone else crazy.

  My throat feels as dry as Betty’s sounds. I listen intently as her screams are muffled. I still feel uneasy, but I remind myself to take a deep breath and then a few more. Inhaling and exhaling lightens my mood and calms me down. I tell myself as I breathe that I can come and go as I please. Hospitals such as this one are a part of my mother’s world to which I am making a brief visit. I only intend to stay a little while with Mum, until she’s better, then move back to my own life.

  I walk on past the open door of a small single room in which I can see Betty being comforted by two nurses. I keep walking. Years of travel have taught me how to keep moving, how not to get involved. There are some basic conventions of the stranger passing through: you keep your eyes and ears open and you say as little as possible. So I smile sweetly and make a promise to myself as I head down to Mum’s room that, like a traveller in need of rest, I will only stay a little while longer in Brisbane – at least until Mum is weaned off the pills which are being prescribed for her and which she is now taking every night to help her sleep.

  ONE FINE DAY

  When I was a teenager, after I’d forgotten my dream of being the best violinist in the whole world, I dreamed of being a forensic scientist. Another dream was to be a private detective, to uncover the secrets lying beneath the surface all around me. Later, these occupations never presented themselves to me as real possibilities, but during the time I am in Brisbane with Mum I begin to tape many conversations and interviews with family members and with friends. I don’t do this secretly, as a real private detective might; there are no hidden microphones or clandestine operations involved.

  Later, I will translate these recorded voices, conversations and dialogues with family members and friends into words, stories, and sometimes into songs. These testimonies also contain stories about my father and my grandmother, who I will subsequently come to know much better long after their deaths. Many of the recordings I make, though, are with my mother. I do this as a kind of research, to have a record of our relationship and the experience of coming home. They are also a record of Mum’s voice, the only thing about her I had ever really known. But other things emerge as I go through
this process of recording, transcribing and reading Mum’s words – a sense of exploration and discovery, the things I had longed for as a child. This adventure does not unfold in faraway exotic countries, though, but in the house where I grew up. This is the greatest discovery, perhaps, of this homecoming. Through this process, I will also have a chance to finally get to know my mother and learn to hear her voice as the instrument through which her own divine whisper speaks.

  I can’t really say I ever knew my mother. I knew who she was; I knew her name and what she did. I can describe her activities (and in her many letters over the years she presented herself as a sum of her and her family’s activities) and perhaps the timetable into which she fitted her – and our – life. I can say she was a singer, a teacher, a student, as well as a mother and a wife. I would never think to say she was ‘just a housewife’, even though she was a wife who also did most of her studying, teaching and singing in the house. But the divisions between her home life and her work life were hardly distinct. She did like her restful moments, though, and was a great fan of the afternoon soaps on television. She liked to plop down on the couch in the lounge room to watch them in the interlude between her afternoon and evening activities. These included teaching, writing articles on singing and teaching for newsletters, as well as talking to parents about their children’s music practice and exams and – when her kids were still at home – preparing afternoon tea and evening meals for the family.

  But I can’t say I knew her. Not on the inside. Not the way that later I knew others. Or came to know myself. I only ever sensed her through the soundtrack she provided for my life, from the past to the present, from the songs she sang around me when I was a child to the songs I wrote myself and sang to her when I returned to care for her and the disease which eventually will claim her voice, the only thing about my mother I ever really knew.