Keeping Mum

Keeping Mum
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 7, 2015

My mother has a wind-up toy that has been in our family as long as I have. It’s a little tin duck in a bright orange waistcoat, perched on a metal tricycle. A silver key cranks the clockwork motor hidden under his seat and he takes off, tiny webbed feet pumping the pedals, a blur of duck a l’orange on the loungeroom floor. Then, as the mainspring slackens, he begins to tire, pedalling slower and slower in diminishing circles. Exhausted, he finally whirs to a halt. That duck has faithfully entertained all three of my toddlers, tolerating their knocks and drops and their chubby little fingers overwinding his key. He was built to last, much like my mother.

“Look,” I said to Mum last week, inspecting the toy’s flaking paint and chipped wheels. “He’s getting a bit worse for wear.”

“Well, I’m not surprised. We all wear out eventually.”

As Mum stood up from the table – too briskly – she grabbed the back of a chair to steady herself.

“Dizzy?” I asked, suddenly worried. “You have had breakfast, haven’t you?”

Ignoring me, she strode purposefully into the kitchen.

“You know I can’t eat first thing in the morning!” she said as she filled the kettle.

She clattered a cup onto a saucer. I could tell she was kicking herself for failing to hide her unsteadiness. Above all else, my mother prides herself on being spry.

Her daily constitutional is to ride her bike on a seven kilometre loop of the golf course – fast, and without a helmet. When she hears the postie’s motorbike puttering into her cul-de-sac, she jogs across the front lawn to the letterbox, just to prove to herself she still can. This from a 79-year-old who’s numb from the knees down; who trips and stumbles now that she can no longer feel her feet.

“Idiopathic peripheral neuropathy,” declared her specialist a month ago, as he pricked her ankles with a pin. “Can you feel that?” he asked, working higher up her shins. “Nope,” she said. “Do it harder.”

He raised one eyebrow at me.

“Idiopathic means we don’t know what’s causing the numbness,” he explained. “In old age, we fail gradually and randomly. The nerve endings in your legs are no longer sending messages to your brain. I suggest we run a battery of tests to try to find out why.”

In and out of hospital she went to be probed and prodded. A CAT scan of her brain one day; an MRI of her spinal cord the next; an EMG to test the electrical activity in her muscles – so many medical acronyms in search of a prognosis, all procedures tending gloomwards.

Between her appointments, Mum began a quiet rebellion by gardening barefoot, contrary to doctor’s orders. A life-long recalcitrant, she continued jogging to the letterbox, risking a fall. She snorted when a young intern suggested a walking stick would aid her balance. She turned to jab playfully at me with an arthritic finger: “Don’t you dare!”

“Okay,” I grinned. “No walking stick for Christmas!”

When her neurologist next suggested a lumbar puncture to test her spinal fluid, she protested: “Good grief! Is this really necessary? Some things can’t be fixed, you know.” For the first time, I detected a note of helplessness in her voice.

I went home distressed. Was I complicit in these medical interventions? And for what? The slim chance of a cure? Was this really just perseverance in the face of pointlessness?

Here was this daughter’s dilemma: Did my relentlessly independent mother want me to take care of her this way: with more doctors, more tests, more management? Would I remain a comforting presence in her life if I continued to interfere with her wishes?

Even now, I naively think I can protect her with vigilance. I feel uneasy when she fails to answer her phone. I worry when she’s too tired to eat dinner. We’re in the process of trading places, she and I, but there are no coming of age celebrations when mother and daughter swap roles.

Yesterday, I stopped by her house to find her in a darkened hallway, halfway up a ladder, trying to change a light globe.

“Mum! What are you doing?” I said, unable to hide my alarm. “I thought we agreed – no climbing ladders.”

For once, her ailing memory provided an alibi. “I never agreed to that,” she said, looking down defiantly. “And I’m perfectly capable of changing a light bulb.” The shaking ladder proved otherwise. For my mother, an indignity of ageing is conceding defeat.

As I hugged her goodbye and swung onto my bike for the short ride home, I repeated two questions I’ve been asking her this past year. “Are you happy, Mum?”

“Yes.”

“Are you lonely?”

“No.”

For now, that’s all I care about.