baybeasts

My mum would have been 61 today. 61! It’s hard to imagine her growing old. I just know that she wouldn’t have done it gracefully - she would have fought it every step of the way. Her hair would still be long and auburn (dyed, of course), her clothes velvet and flowing, and her laugh as vibrant as ever. She would have loved our boys, I know that for sure. I often used to tell her that I would never have kids, and she would laugh and say ‘You wait, you’ll have six!’ There is so much that I wish I had asked her, about her labour and birth (I know I was born on the dining room table with hippies meditating in the next room but I don’t know who was with her or how long it took or any other satisfying details) and about me as a baby (my aunts didn’t meet me until I was nearly one, so there is nobody who cares enough to remember). I look at Huey and I can’t play that game, that ‘how is he like me as a baby?’ game that so many people can play. Every day I think about the conversations that she and I are missing out on, in this new phase of my life.

I am also fairly sure that she would have been madder than ever. When she died six years ago, she was so up and down, and it was in the middle of a psychotic episode that the heart attack hit. Somebody found her on the side of the road, in her favourite town two hours drive from where she lived (she always got in the car when she was psychotic - it’s a miracle that it wasn’t a car accident that carried her off). I don’t know if being a nanna would have grounded her or made her crazier - maybe a bit of both.

We’re missing so much in the way of the family support that most people take for granted. My mum gone, my father unknown (I am the product of a one night stand in northern NSW in the era of the Aquarius Festival), only a distant and dysfunctional half-brother in the way of siblings. And bean - well, her father is absent and she is an only child, so her mum is really it in terms of close family. It’s no wonder she feels a bit of pressure from us! I feel sorry for our kids - no aunts and uncles, no cousins, only one grandparent who tries to do her duty but doesn’t seem to care deeply for them. We feel it most at times like now, when we are all sick (except Huey!) and so, so tired.

That’s why our friends and cousins and aunts have become so important to us - they look after us and listen to us, but mostly importantly they dote on our boys, and we need that so badly. And nanna Kate isn’t totally absent - her imagined warmth towards our boys lights up our hearts. And our house is full of her - her paintings that Arlo loves (every day he points at them and we talk about them with him), her plates that we eat off, her couch that we sit on (the beautiful green one in so many of our photos) and her books that line our walls. And she herself sits in the corner of our living room, in a small plastic box covered with red velvet. She’s finally visiting me in Melbourne like she always wanted to, until I can take her to her favourite beach up north and finally set her free in the waves that she loved so much.