I am recruiting friends who run for the Mother's Day Classic local run. These runs are obviously run on Mother's Day (here in Australia that is second Sunday in May). They are to celebrate Mother's Day and to raise funds for breast cancer research. My mother died in 2006 from breast cancer related complications. This year Mother's Day also falls on her birthday (her 77th birthday). So it seems a really good day for me to run in her memory.
Mum had a hard life in many ways. Her father died when she was 6 years old, leaving my grandmother a single mum of 6 children, my mother was the second youngest. As this happened in 1940s Australia the support for my grandmother was not always the best but this was compounded by her having too much pride to accept financial aide from others (including her Church). My mother was bitter about this, but strangely often was the same herself. I am bitter about my mother's pride that prevented her from asking for help (financial and other) and I wonder if I am the same? I don't feel I am and often struggle to understand this kind of pride in others. Even in the brief times that I have not worked and been supported by my husband (or boyfriend at the time) I haven't felt constrained or trapped or obligated in any way. Naturally I pulled my weight around the home but that is just a logical thing to do. He worked, I kept house. Still I must remember to ask my children when they are grown into adults if they resented my inability to ask for assistance?!!
My parents divorced when I was 6 years old (yes I am keeping an eye on the Universe - my eldest is 6) and my mother never re-partnered. Like many single mothers who don't re-partner she worked. In her case, she continued to work. My parents were radical in the 1970s - even for South Australia - my father was a stay at home dad and my mother who was a professional (school teacher) went back to work. She worked in the Catholic system even though she was brought up a Seventh Day Adventist. When my father left us for the last time (I think my mother shut the door to him returning) and they divorced my mother continued to work - now becoming that increasingly common late 70s early 80s phenomena - the single working mother. There are three of us - so it could not have been easy.
Mum was lucky that her work coincided with our schooling so holidays weren't a nightmare for her. However she pretty much did it on her own. I have memories of a few weekends at dad's and the odd week in the school holidays but that ended anyway when we moved from South Australia to New South Wales in 1983. The idea of the inter-state move was to get closer to my mum's family for their support but it didn't ever really happen. In fact in hindsight it was a foolish move. Her family didn't help her out, our schooling was interrupted and dislocated (for example I ended up being too young to go to high school and had to repeat year 6 - the principal in my new school in NSW didn't factor that in when he kept me in the grade I had been in in SA despite the fact I was well over a year younger than my fellow students) and she sold our house and couldn't afford to buy here in NSW in a suburb that was "nice enough". Thus the family lost its only asset and gained... well a hybrid NSW/SA accent.
Then in the mid-80s she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She still had three kids in high school then so she was quite scared of the outcome. For whatever reason surgery was chosen and she lost her right breast and a fair bit of tissue up into the arm pit. They stuck her on tamoxifen which seemed to work. Although I was in Year 8 my brothers were in Year 11 and 12 (let us face it, I was also the girl) so I was the one that ran the household, cooking, cleaning, shopping and visiting her in hospital. Famously bringing in her clothes except for her underwear for her to wear home. My brothers didn't visit her in hospital AFAIK but I did and I brought her flowers and trashy novels to read and talked to her until I got kicked out. I probably talked about the boy next door who I had a crush on but who asked my other best friend out and not me (a story that I could repeat ad nauseum up until I met my now husband - who incidentally tried to chat up my best friend first before realising that it was the short red head who had the brains i.e. me). I then arranged for mum to be picked up and driven home by a helpful neighbour and continued to run the house until mum got better.
And mum did get better but work got harder and harder for her. Eventually when I was in Year 10 she stopped working full-time and switched to casual teaching work. This made finances quite tight. This pattern continued until the landlord in the Blue Mountains jacked up the rent one too many times and mum now being on a pension was able to move into a housing commission rental house. By then I had moved out of home and so had the middle child. So mum and my eldest brother moved to the Shoalhaven where she lived out the remainder of her life on the pension in a housing commission house.
In the late 90s a doctor somewhere along the way took mum off the tamoxifen saying the cancer was gone and there was no need. The cancer came back a second time when my husband and I moved to Canada in late 2000 (I made a trip home to see her and got caught up in 9/11 as a consequence). They removed it from her collarbone where it had eaten into the bone rendering it fragile with lace-like holes. After that she could no longer drive or carry heavy objects (including when he was born her first grandson my eldest Ryan) She went back on the tamoxifen and it went back into remission. To this day I am angry at that unknown doctor for taking her off the tamoxifen because I am convinced she would have remained cancer-free and would as a consequence not lost the ability to drive and hold her grandson.
By the time my first child was born in 2004 mum was showing the costs of her hard life - she had health issues, osteo-arthritis and osteoporosis and a form of Alzheimer's. We didn't realise it at first but when I got a call in the depths of sleep deprivation with my first child about how the next door neighbour was an axe-murderer and that a nice policeman had shown up to tell her (nice policeman was in fact a TV policeman) I figured that things weren't quite as they should be. We then spent the next 12 months trying to get her evaluated and housed in an appopriate care facility. It finally happened when mum was taken to the hospital in an ambulance after calling the police to investigate a murder in her yard. The hospital kept her for a while and then miracle or miracles a place was found for mum.
At first mum hated it. And cried when we had to leave after visiting her. That was awful. Then we brought her back to her house for a nice Christmas (that I cooked for of course) and I spent most of the day with her in the toilet trying to get her to come out and cleaning up her accidents (for some reason she wouldn't sit down) when I finally got her out she only ate some of the food then went and had a lie-down. She didn't care about her gifts or the gifts I had bought on her behalf for the family. It is in my mind the worst Christmas I have ever had. We took her back to the home early and she was so happy to be back. She got worse very rapidly after that and soon she was what they call a head on the bed. She was barley responsive and visits to her involved feeding her and talking about things with little reaction or wondering who the hell Vi and Frank were and whether they had finished building their house (yes in 1967 apparently). I did get a smile and tears when I told her I was pregnant with child number 2 but then not long after my first child's second birthday we got the call that she was dying. That the cancer had come back again and this time was causing all sorts of things to shut down. The three of us dropped everything and went to be at her side but she hung on grimly for nearly an extra week. I got very sick with a stomach virus so stayed home and my mum chose that night to die. In fact she waited until she was alone and then she died.
Now 5 years later I will run on her birthday and Mother's Day in her memory. I hop I run well.
In Loving Memory of Mavis.
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