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.

Forget Me Not

Forget Me Not
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 15, 2014

Something about her was different. She looked smaller than I remembered. The hunch of her shoulders had become more pronounced. Gone was her trademark copper rinse, her hair now blowsy and grey. “Auntie G!” I called, spotting her several trolley lengths away in Coles. She was holding open a freezer door, studying a shelf of frozen peas, but didn’t react. I parallel parked my trolley and leaned over. “Auntie G!” I repeated, touching her lightly on the shoulder.

She jerked around and stared at me. “It’s Rosi,” I said, sensing her confusion. Perhaps I’d frightened her? She gave me a wan smile but no glimmer of recognition. I began to feel uncomfortable. What should I do next?

“Do you need a hand?”

“I can’t find the icecream.”

“Oh, that’s on the other side. I can never find it either.” She brightened and nodded when I said “I’ll show you where it is, shall I?”

Cupping her elbow, I gently steered her round the corner, stopping beside the icecream cabinet. She looked relieved.

I’d always had a soft spot for Auntie G because she’d produced my favourite girl cousin, Elizabeth, who was 36 days younger than me.

Sleeping over at Lizzie’s house, I found the noise of her riotous family overwhelming. As an only child, I was secretly thrilled (and occasionally terrified) to witness Auntie G berating her disobedient tribe.

Their house had a backyard swimming pool, a glamorous addition to any 1970s childhood. On a summer afternoon, we kids played Marco Polo and Pool Ponies and practiced our underwater handstands until our fingertips puckered and the soles of our feet pruned. Auntie G leant over the balcony and dropped down a couple of fraying towels. We lay on them, tummies down, dry-roasting on the hot bricks. She’d send out a plate of her coconut macaroons, left over from a dinner party the night before.

Now, aged 78, my Aunty G has dementia. She’s newly diagnosed and still in denial. Her family struggles to manage her decline. She defends her memory lapses with angry outbursts, slipping into the personality of someone else. But Auntie G is not yet in need of care. The good days still outnumber the bad.

Two years ago, I came across Auntie G in the centre of a busy road in West Leederville. She’d abandoned her cream Camry in the middle of an intersection and was standing aimlessly beside it. Drivers were dog-legging around her, windows wound down to sticky-beak at this surburban oddity. I pulled over and got out of my car.

“Oh! Thank goodness you found me!” she said anxiously. “I can’t seem to find Lizzie’s house.”

“You can see it from here,” I said, pointing back down the hill. I wondered how my aunt could have driven past it.

She thanked me and climbed back into her car, swung it around and coasted down the hill. I watched her park outside her daughter’s house. I drove home feeling alarmed.

It was not my first glimpse into mental frailty. My uncle Don, Mum’s only sibling, succumbed to dementia after a career as a concert pianist, academic and mathematician.

The tragedy of his retirement was the swift unravelling of his mind. First he lost the ability to pick left from right, distinguish between cup and kettle and recognise a dollar coin in his wallet. Then it erased his encyclopaedic memory of Schubert sonatas and Brahms concertos until he could no longer play two- finger Chopsticks or sing along to Three Blind Mice.

To watch him, at 76, regress to a childlike state was frightening, but there were lovely moments. His disease bonded him to my two youngest children. He never tired of their knock-knock jokes, cackling at their made-up punchlines. He gleefully joined in their games of hide and seek, bolting for the same empty wardrobe every time. Like them, he startled at loud noises and needed help cutting up his dinner.

The end came quickly and cruelly, four months after a traumatic move into a nursing home.

On occasion, I contemplate my own future. What if my genes, too, are predisposed to intellectual decay? I remind myself it’s normal to be constantly searching for your specs. As I stand in the laundry (what was it I came in here for?) I feel uneasy. Is this how it starts? The foggy brain? Conversations that falter as I try to force an elusive word to crystallise in my mind. The embarrassing pause as I yet again forget the new soccer coach’s name.

Last Monday, as I dashed around the supermarket, I spotted Auntie G again. She was filling a paper bag with potatoes. She waved at me across the fruit crates. “The mangos look nice!” she called. I bought two on her say-so.