by Mary Moody
The down side is that too much thinking can lead to all sorts of neuroses; some people who suffer physical and mental ailments do so because they simply aren’t busy enough, they have too much time to imagine all sorts of problems in their lives: at least, that is what I have always believed, probably quite arrogantly. I also tend to the view that reflection can be left until old age, and that too much agonising detracts from the actual living of one’s life. I intend to use my thinking time for a little light reflection. Not navel-gazing.
In reality, my days in France fill up naturally without effort. Instead of sitting alone in a café, making a cup of tea last for an hour and staring at the passing parade, I am struggling to keep up with a diary of social engagements and excursions to new corners of the area where I am living. I barely have time for washing clothes and writing letters home. Driving the car can be good thinking time, but I always seem to be in the company of others. Walking, too, is ideal for solitary thought, and this is where I finally manage to let my mind wander back and forth over my life without restraint.
One of the things I mull over while striding through the countryside is my journey as a mother. Before I undertook this trip to France I had already reached the unhappy conclusion that I was not the world’s most effective parent. I wished that I could turn back the clock and have another go at it, back to the point at which my children entered their teens. I realise in retrospect that I set out quite deliberately to be a very different type of parent to my own. I was determined, from the start, that our home would be harmonious, without all the highs and lows and histrionics that I associated with my own troubled childhood. That isn’t to say that David and I didn’t have our disagreements, but they were usually conducted in rooms well away from the children or in whispers in the middle of the night so my mother couldn’t overhear and be upset. If we did have an argument that became a little heated it was always very much under control, without ever spiralling into the likelihood of the sort of physical anger that so terrified me. Without totally keeping a lid on emotions, I wanted to ensure that family relationships always floated along on an even keel, which I realise now was quite an unrealistic expectation.
To achieve my goal I established ways of dealing with relationships that involved humour rather than confrontation. In managing David I would send him up or tease him into cooperating with my version of the way things should be done, instead of nagging him or becoming angry or upset. He probably didn’t realise that I was manipulating him, but my comedy-led strategies seemed to work brilliantly. I dealt with the children using very much the same technique. I was more inclined to laugh off their temper tantrums or defiant behaviour, and as a result our household was generally quite jolly and relaxed most of the time. I took the view that children didn’t need to be lectured about the virtues of right and wrong, about good versus evil. My parents had constantly harped on the virtues of their political beliefs and by moralising they tried to establish themselves in our eyes as examples of ‘right headed’ individuals. My method was to lead by example instead. I rationalised that by being kind and considerate, helpful and good natured, everything would naturally flow from that. The problem is, it doesn’t always—children can take advantage of a parent who is always trying to keep the peace, and who never delivers stern warnings about the rights and wrongs of life.
I also assiduously avoided putting any pressure on the children to achieve too highly, something our parents had done to us but without backing it up with any of the support and assistance needed to help us compete and succeed on a high level. My brother Dan in particular suffered as a result of my parents’ tremendously high expectations of him at school. They constantly talked about him studying law or medicine, yet never really got involved with his studies or school work in any practical sense. Although naturally gifted, he ended up opting out of high school and it was many years before he returned to his studies, eventually completing a masters and doctorate in Canada, all of his own volition.
So instead of pressuring the children to be high achievers, I got thoroughly involved with all their school and sporting activities, spending years being a canteen mother, a fund raiser and an active member of the P & C, in every sense quite intentionally doing the exact reverse of my own parents. I never actively encouraged my children to underachieve, mind you, but I did minimise the idea of striving hard for success, of struggling a little to aim higher. I was quite content for them to float along through their school years, although Miriam somehow developed her own desire to achieve; by the time she reached the last years of high school she became such an obsessively diligent student that I actually tried to lure her away from her studies at night if I thought she was overdoing it, and tempt her to stop and chill out for a while. She generally ignored my pleas.
On the negative side, I always had a tendency to cover up my children’s mistakes or failures in an attempt to keep them constantly happy and to prevent any kind of unpleasant ‘scene’. I sometimes even did the boys’ homework so they wouldn’t get into trouble at school, but only theirs, never Miriam’s—she was a natural academic and quite cheerfully took care of all her own school work and study. The boys somehow were much more dependent on me for support, and I found myself constantly finishing off their school assignments and running around madly getting their research projects together so they wouldn’t feel any sense of failure. The fact that their marks were often not all that great, especially with my maths being so pathetic, was not the point. They were getting the work in on time. I was reluctant to correct their spelling mistakes, lest it damage their fragile little egos, and I am now confronting the fact that I did them a grave disservice. This overprotective style of mothering I now realise simply does not prepare children for the real world.
I made all sorts of other mistakes too. I was always ready to bail my children out of trouble, to give them money when they got into debt, or make excuses for them when they made mistakes. I was completely indulgent and totally blind to their various faults and foibles. However the very worst thing that I did as a parent was to prevent David balancing my softly softly approach with a little more discipline. He was away from the household so frequently that I reasoned he had no right to appear suddenly on a Friday night and start calling the shots. I was the one doing the day-to-day management of the children, therefore I should be the one to make all the crucial decisions. I soft-soaped the issue by convincing him that he would become the family ogre if he spent all his time at home whipping the boys into line. So he backed off and let me run with it, which probably wasn’t such a good idea.
I know I was great at managing babies and toddlers by giving them a lot of time and affection and satisfying all their physical needs. But teenagers are more complex. Instead of making a stand I crumbled under their new-found power. I rationalised that it was better for them to socialise at home and I allowed the house to become a nonstop party venue, especially when David was not at home. There were always stray teenagers sleeping on sofas and piles of cushions on the floor, and I turned a blind eye to a lot of the goings-on involving sex, drugs and rock ’n roll. I felt that because they were safely under my roof, with a fridge full of food and some form of parental supervision, everything was fine and dandy. At various times the children’s teenage friends stayed for weeks, even months at a time. I remember David coming home one Friday night and seeing a young man with his head well inside the fridge.
‘Are you actually living here, Scott?’ David asked.
Startled, the spotty youth replied, ‘I guess I must be.’
All these youngsters loved the warmth, the relaxed atmosphere and the abundance of good things to eat and drink in our house. They swigged their way through dozens of bottles of my homemade beer, until I stopped brewing to prevent them from getting drunk and vomiting over the back verandah every weekend. They all loved my mother—many had no relationship with their own grandmothers—and they lolled about on her bed, smoking her cigarettes and listening to her reciting Shakespea
re’s verse in her inimitable fashion.
My permissive attitude towards childrearing, I have subsequently read, is not at all uncommon among baby boomers, who try to keep their children as friends during their teenage years rather than maintaining any real level of discipline. Fortunately my own children emerged relatively unscathed from this haphazard parenting method, although they well might not have; sadly, many of their friends have suffered physical and mental damage from being allowed open slather during these formative years, especially in the area of drug taking. My middle son, who is now aged twenty-five, says he wishes I had been tougher with them in this respect. Now I can only agree. I am sure the next generation will bring their children up very differently.
But after thrashing myself thoroughly for my shortcomings as a parent, I can still look at my adult children with a strong sense of pride in them as young adults. They are a group of interesting individuals, all successful in their chosen endeavours, all extremely fond of each other and very close-knit and loyal as a family group. I guess, like me, they are survivors.
I also spend my walking time contemplating my mother’s life and the years we spent living together. While it was greatly strained during the years of her marriage breakup and nervous breakdown, our relationship was instantly healed at the birth of my first child, a daughter. It was quite amazing how Mum’s spirits lifted when Miriam arrived on the scene. Suddenly she was more positive, as if she had something to live for again. So perhaps I was fortunate to have had my first child in my early twenties, as it was the catalyst for a satisfying and long-term reconciliation with my mother.
Living in such close physical proximity to her for more than twenty years longer than most women, I really got to know and understand Mum with an intimacy that would otherwise not have existed. She rarely got sick, but when she did I nursed her. When I got sick, which seemed to be much more frequently, she doted on me like a child. She dashed up to the shops and bought lemonade, made chicken soup and tenderly checked on me every half hour. She took over the care of the children and seemed to revel in being totally in charge. I remember being sick a couple of times before she arrived on the scene, and as every mother knows, it’s pretty awful being alone at home coping with toddlers when all you want to do is crawl into bed. Having my mother in the house made it possible for me to have time out. We rarely had disputes about our domestic roles, yet we never formally discussed who would do what; we both just saw what needed to be done, and did it. Most of the time our relationship was one of easy companionship.
From time to time over the years Mum and I had deep conversations about the past, especially about all the things that went wrong within our family. She spent a lot of time reflecting on various events in her life that troubled her deeply. In particular the suicide of my father’s first wife Veronica, whom she never knew, caused Mum a lot of pain; no doubt she identified strongly with the destructive nature of my father’s behaviour, and knew how closely the situation had driven her to the brink of suicide herself. We often had a cup of tea at the kitchen table and talked about Veronica, how she must have felt as a young woman alienated from her own family because of her unacceptable marriage, and then abandoned emotionally by the man she had obviously adored. She must have been truly desperate, knowing she was leaving behind two young children. In those days of course little was understood about depression, and no help was available to her.
Mum was also haunted by the memory of my little sister Jane who died almost fifty years ago. She always remembered Jane on her birthday and on the anniversary of her death, and over the years when various of my friends had miscarriages or stillbirths or cot deaths, she always relived the terrible pain of losing a child: it was an unbearable agony from which she never recovered. A lot of her ongoing grief was caused by helplessness, anger and guilt. It’s unthinkable now when parents are encouraged to stay in hospital with their sick children, to sleep beside them in the ward, that my mother and the women of her generation should have been so sharply dismissed from the hospitals where their children were being treated. Mum was actually told outright that mothers being present in the ward prevented the children from recovering. That children ‘acted up’ when their mothers were in attendance and so were more likely to remain on the sick list for longer. Parents were not consulted about treatment options, nor informed about the progress of their children’s illness. Jane was in hospital for an unbelievable six months, and my mother was only able to visit a dozen times. She never really understood what was actually wrong with Jane—there had been various theories, including TB, but no definitive diagnosis was ever made. Only a week before Jane actually died, my mother had been told by the hospital that she was ready to be discharged and come home at last. My mother was incredibly excited, although daunted at the prospect of caring for a sickly child in the midst of such constant family turmoil. Then one day at 2 am a phone call came. Jane had died suddenly in her sleep. My mother took the call. Stunned, she woke my father with the news—he would have been deeply in sleep, having downed his usual half flagon of claret. Later when Mum described his reaction she always shook her head with disbelief.
‘He just grunted and said “Good”, then rolled over and went back to sleep.’
I was always outraged whenever Mum retold this story, even more so when I realised that she had somehow managed to come to terms with his heartless response. I think that Jane is buried somewhere at Rookwood cemetery, without a head-stone. There would have been no money for much of a funeral, especially if my father felt so indifferent. Jane’s death certificate stated that she died from pneumonia, but this was never a satisfactory explanation for Mum, who felt in her heart that her baby daughter had faded away from lack of love.
My mother’s attitudes towards these tragedies in her life tended to vary according to how she was feeling when recounting the story, and how much whisky she’d had to drink at the time. When maudlin, she was more inclined to forgive my father his ‘sins’, and dwell only on the positive and lovable aspects of his personality. She used the tragedies as an explanation for his behaviour, a rationale for his drinking. But when she was stone cold sober her attitude was much harsher and less forgiving. These mother and daughter soul-searching sessions were quite valuable for me, a form of therapy that helped me put some of the unhappiness of my childhood where it belongs. In the past. Sadly, I don’t believe Mum ever resolved the past for her own peace of mind. She still carried a lot of anger and bitterness and was never able to accept the role she played in the dramas of the tumultuous twenty-five years of her marriage.
27
THE SEASONS CHANGE ALMOST overnight. With just a few cold evenings the summer seems to be over and the days are growing shorter at a quickening rate. I am accustomed to a more gradual fading out of summer, and even though there’s a brief respite with a few precious warm days, there is a chill in the air that’s impossible to deny. The landscape, too, changes just as dramatically. Late summer harvesting of maize is hurried along, and the fields are quickly ploughed for the winter wheat crops. Where just a few days ago were tall stalks of green, ripening corn, suddenly there are bare fields with freshly turned, ginger-red soil that looks luscious in its fertility.
The vineyards are spectacular in their russet phase now that the harvesting of grapes is over. From an elevated position—and so many of the old fortified villages are on hillsides with fantastic views to the fields below—the varieties of grape are obvious, as each block of vines turns to a different shade of red, orange or yellow. It’s a dramatically different view to that of just a few weeks ago. A patchwork again, but a completely new one that is even more beautiful, if this is possible. The woods are now golden shades of yellow and pink. There seem to be no red foliage trees, but the poplars are breathtaking in the intensity of their yellow leaves while the chestnut trees turn pink for a day or so before changing to brown and dropping their canopy. The chestnuts themselves are falling, too, and I am intrigued, never having seen them before. The circular
seed pods look like some toxic Australian sea creature with sharp spikes that make them tricky and painful to pick up in my bare hand. The locals gather chestnuts for market and they well know the trees with the largest, plumpest nuts. They wait until the seed pods burst naturally and shrink back, revealing the glossy brown husks which they then collect with long, wooden tongs to avoid contact with the piercing spikes. The chestnut harvest brings the small and shy red squirrels out of the forest, and I see them scampering along the road verges gathering a storehouse for the long winter ahead. They are more endearing than the large grey squirrels that seem to have overrun the UK, and even though they are considered rare, I see half-a-dozen during the first week that the chestnuts are falling.
It’s easy to imagine the farming families here feasting on wild boar and duck breasts and goose fat for generations, but that simply is not the case. It’s not all that long ago that the farmers were peasants with no hunting rights in the woods, which were reserved solely for the upper classes, and so they relied on the wild chestnuts as a major source of protein. Chestnuts are still treated with some reverence. At St Caprais there is even a chestnut festival in early autumn with a community meal or repas held again in the village square, but this time inside a large white marquee because of the autumn chill. There are fewer people and no live bands thumping out music, but the atmosphere is just as jolly with the farming families gathering to dine on pork and prunes with a side serving of mashed chestnuts. It’s a hearty meal, with all the usual courses—soup and salad and cheese and tart—and again so many bottles of vin rouge that I simply lose count. This time the children have decorated the tent and the tables with colourful cartoon drawings of chestnuts, each one showing considerable imagination. The chestnuts riding horseback catch my eye, along with a couple of jaunty, plump interpretations that look a bit like Jock. I can imagine my grandsons having fun drawing these comical creations.
