Mum

It’s the day after the 2025 Federal election and Labor has romped home to a resounding victory against the Liberal party. I’m sitting in the front room reading an article about Ocean Vuong and yet again, these two disparate events lead me back to my mother.

She was a free-ranging thinker with an ability to find meaning and debate across all kinds of topics. I wonder what she’d have made of the latest political results and Vuong’s experience caring for his dying mother. I use these two unrelated topics as an illustration of how my mother’s brain could work; nimbly leaping from one topic to another whilst maintaining an uncanny ability for shrewd and insightful points of view across all manner of subjects. In life it drove me totally nuts.

Ma always shouted from the bleachers in support of my writing yet equally she placed a bet both ways by wanting me o get secretarial training for the almost certain possibility that I’d wind up destitute. Not because I was a prolific writer that couldn’t cop a break but she had intimate knowledge that her second born was/is lazy as all heck and she knew writing would never be sustainable. She’d have read the article about Ocean Vuong and would have wanted to dissect his trajectory and compare it to mine. I’d have resisted all efforts to engage because I’d have latched on to the subliminal message of ‘failure’ when in fact, now that she’s gone, I know her genuine curiosity was wide and all encompassing, but when it was shone on her offspring, the reaction was to be acutely suspicious of her interest. Growing up, my mother had ambitions for her offspring and I for one never lived up to them.

And the latest election results would have instigated much discussion to understand our political positions but equally to lay out her reasons for why she would have voted for candidate A but maybe not their party etcetera and so on. And invariably she’d have provided an angle that I would’ve dismissed with my usual impatience and only later understood the wisdom behind her thinking.

What does one do with the grief that accompanies this ‘too late now’ sadness? I use these clumsy attempts at jotting down stuff on this here metaphorical page to understand the mess of it all. Perhaps the only thing I know is these attempts won’t provide a fixed answer but it will momentarily assuage an ongoing search for clarity and reason.

I think about my mother’s illness and unlike Ocean Vuong with his mother, I was not there to properly care for her in those terrible, unrelenting hours, days, weeks, months before her death. I left that to my siblings, to friends etc to do that for me. I absconded on my duty of care. I don’t even grapple with that fact. It simply is and I am a reduced person because of it. One day I’ll properly examine this and maybe writing about it today is a s-l-o-w process of understanding my culpability in those terrible years.

I think about the direction of my life and whether my mother would approve of any of it. How novel is that - wanting a mother’s approval (even in death)?! I look at Monique’s new chapter and I have such pride in her grit but it’s alongside a sense of WTF because that used to be me who’d be basking in my mother’s pride. Now I’m the one casting about, growing panicked because I sense my inherent laziness kicking into high gear which is an utterly deadly combination for me. Lord knows I could use my mother’s bracing advice and lashings of her unrelenting energy to chivvy me out of my complacency.

And of course, in life, I would totally ignore any and all of her wisdom. Maybe in death there might be a different ending.