Too Close To Call

Too Close To Call
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 28, 2015

As I passed the second-hand shop, a tableau of office bygones caught my eye. There beside a hulking green typewriter was an old teledex – a slim Bakelite box filled with cards stored in alphabetical order – exactly like the one Mum used as an address book when I was a child.

Hers was shiny and black and a font of all important phone numbers. At the press of a button, the lid would spring open to reveal the names and addresses of everyone I knew (and lots of mysterious people I didn’t). Mum was particular about printing surnames in easy-to-read capitals. As friends’ lives shifted, she crossed out old addresses and inserted new ones until some pages became a hash of geographical confusion.

I don’t know why I can still conjure Mum’s address book with such photographic precision. Perhaps it’s because our social lives depended on it. Or perhaps because Mum was always asking me to fetch it. For a long phone call, she’d carry her cup of tea to the armchair beside the phone table. That was my cue to make myself scarce.

Eavesdropping was a cinch when the home phone was tethered to the wall. I always knew who Mum was talking to because a verbal handshake began every call (“Hello, Pam? It’s Joan!”) Conversations played out while I half-listened, doodling on butcher’s paper at the dining room table, or doing my homework, waiting impatiently for her to finish. I didn’t dare interrupt, or try to distract her. Mum was either available, or off limits.

Today, my younger children are always pawing at me when I’m on the phone. The pair of them compete for my attention. They know I work from home, but I’m still expected to arbitrate every squabble and supervise every craft project. On deadline last week, trying to concentrate amid their myriad interruptions, I heard myself shout: “Just give me a minute!” Where did my children get the idea that their needs are more important than mine?

In the 80s, when I was a kid, parenting theory encouraged benign neglect. When sundowners at Mum’s tennis club turned into late night parties, I curled up under a picnic blanket on the back seat of the Corolla. By midnight, the carpark was full of kids asleep in their parents’ cars. Try that these days and you’d be arrested.

I marvel at my childhood freedoms. Graylands wasn’t the most genteel of suburbs, but I roamed the neighbourhood on foot, or looped my suburb by bike. On any slow Sunday, had you asked Mum where I was, she’d have paused, steam hissing from her iron, and shrugged: “Oh, she’s around here somewhere!”

As the summer holidays dragged on, I spent boiling January afternoons at the local pool, unsupervised. I’d time how long I could hold my breath underwater or bungle a swan dive with a belly flop off the top diving board. Friends were optional extras. Today’s parenting mantra – “safety in numbers” – hadn’t been invented.

“Keep your wits about you,” was all Mum ever said. Aged 11, flying solo on the swings at the park, I was approached by a strange man asking even stranger questions about where I lived. Heart pounding, I blurted “I have to go now,” and bolted for home. Mum suggested I steer clear of the park for a few days. Had that happened to one of my children now, I’d have put our street in lockdown and called the cops.

In one generation, the definition of parental success has undergone a telling transformation. ‘Good’ mums used to be those who encouraged their kids to be independent. Now, we measure our mothering by how well we keep them monitored, managed and tethered to us. We justify our ever-present involvement in their lives as essential to their survival.

A few weeks back, I listened to a teacher give a talk at my teenager’s school. He described a parent who’d rung in to complain about her son’s disappointing marks on an important project. “I don’t understand,” the Mum argued. “We worked so hard on that assignment.”

I, for one, am struggling to find the middle ground between being suffocatingly present or dismissively absent. I lurch from one parenting quandary to the next, filtering the parental do’s and don’ts proffered by others. Should I allow my 8-year-old son to walk the 200 metres to school alone? (Not yet, I’ve decided, despite his wails of protest.) Can he and his little sister play cricket out on our street? (Yes, but only if I’m there to monitor traffic.)

Half the time, I’m sure my worries and anxieties about what might happen are just scary thoughts – the continuous chatter and judgment of a too-busy mind. Best I stop thinking about whether I’m a good or bad mother, and start recognising that I’m both. And neither.

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.

Mind Games

Mind Games
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday August 15, 2015

I stood uneasily in the cavernous carpark, marooned in a concrete mausoleum. I steered my trolley left and right around grids of pillars and bays. No boxy black station wagon announced itself with the press of my key; no tail lights winked their happiness to see me. I had lost my car in the supermarket carpark. Separation anxiety set in.

After several more minutes of rising panic, I went into hyperdrive. ‘This can’t be happening,’ I chided myself. ‘How could I forget where I parked my car?’

I replayed my arrival an hour earlier: I’d driven off the street, down the ramp, turned left and lucked a space close to the escalator. My brain seized upon ‘escalator.’ That’s it! There are two them in this shopping centre: one at each end of the carpark. I was circling the wrong escalator.

I strode to the far end of the building. There – in exactly the spot I’d pictured – was my station wagon, rear end on display, nose to the wall. I felt a wave of relief. I loaded my groceries into the boot and drove up the exit ramp to breach the daylight. But a nagging sense of unease stayed with me all afternoon.

Is this how a mind starts slipping away? One lapse of concentration in an underground carpark and my memory had failed me. Had I reached that stage in life when forgetting becomes more important than remembering?

I grew up thinking mindlessness was an automatic condition of old age. Dementia stole my grandmother in her 80s; two uncles in their 70s. In recent years, Alzheimer’s has all but erased the sweetness of a favourite aunt. In our family, forgetting is a red flag.

In her 80th year, Mum’s memory has suddenly become an unreliable companion. Some days, forgetting becomes all-consuming. She is repeatedly distracted by the whereabouts of her keys, her wallet, her phone. Last Wednesday, I answered her mayday call and joined the search for her missing keys. We discovered them in the garden, plonked on the lid of the recycling bin.

“Now I remember!” she said. “It’s rubbish day. I had to unlock the side gate to bring the bins in.”

‘It’s no big deal, Ma,’ I said, noting her exasperation. “At least they weren’t in the bin!” She relaxed and gave me a hug. (In our house, keys favour the top shelf of the fridge, the laundry bench and the window sill above the loo.)

I worry Mum’s fickle memory will sabotage her fierce independence. Already, she’s painfully aware of the small gaps appearing in her daily routines.

“Do I need to take these pills here?” she wonders aloud as she make me a cup of tea. “What are these white ones for anyway?”

She tells me how on bad days, tiredness dims her mind and makes her conversation flabby and repetitive. She describes her frustration when mid-sentence, a word sits just out of reach, refusing to come when called for.

“That’s when I’ll say something stupid,” she says, “trying to cover up my embarrassment.”

“It happens to everybody,” I reassure her. I’m already an expert at clumsy word spillage.

I notice Mum is now clinging to her diary. It’s her antidote to forgetting: a painstakingly transcribed almanac of appointments and errands, birthdays and passwords. Her diary is stuffed with letters and receipts – life’s paperwork, held together with an elastic-band.

“Just a minute,” she’ll say down the phone, when I suggest we meet for lunch. “Let me write that down.” Remembering has become hard work but forgetting has not slowed her down.

She’s still the gadabout she’s always been. Her life is a whirlwind of coffees and dinners and concerts. Her evening constitutional is a seven kilometre bike ride, or an hour’s walk along the beach. She catches the train to every Eagles home game. Afterwards, hoarse from barracking, she’ll take herself off to dinner ‘somewhere nice.’ She’d walk home in the dark if we’d let her.

Now and then, we sit together in a windowless waiting room, hoping a doctor will give her pockmarked memory a name. “Nothing wrong here,” they’ll say, inspecting the report from her latest scan. “Age-related memory loss, we call it. Getting old’s no fun, is it?”

“Better than the alternative,” she shoots back, enjoying her joke.

Last week, as she waltzed in our back door to join us for dinner, I asked if she’d remembered to put her bins out.

She smiled and settled herself onto a stool.

“Nope,” she said. “Remind me again when I leave.” She leant over and whispered to my youngsters. “At least I’ve never forgotten where I parked my car.” The kids snickered.

“Pretty funny for a Tuesday night, aren’t you Ma,” I said, dishing out the casserole. And then I faltered, spoon in mid-air. “It is Tuesday, right?”