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.