Beverley Stevens

Word Count 880

‘I miss New York‘ reads the billboard on the drive home from the office. ‘I miss my Mum’, I found myself thinking, her recent demise not far from my mind.

But in reality, I don't.

I didn’t miss her when I went away to university. I didn’t miss her when I was overseas for eight years, though she rewrote all the letters I wrote home to send on to my grandmother. And, I didn’t miss her when she died.

‘What’s there to miss?’ said my sister.

Growing up, the house was immaculate, the kitchen swept every day, dishes dried and put away the moment a meal was over. The clothes she made kept us warm. She could back a trailer and organise the logistics of a six-week camping holiday for six children. But the affection she lavished was threadbare. Once we’d all grown up, she wiped her hands of it all and got back to golf and gardening.

She did come to help out with ironing and weeding when I got home from giving birth to my first child, but she didn’t bake apple pies or want to be part of her grandchildren’s lives.

I think she missed out.

She didn't want to talk to me when I was being treated for breast cancer. She’d phone for an update from my husband, and hurry the call to an end if she couldn’t avoid speaking to me.

My father would ask ‘How are you?’, wanting to know. From him, there was warmth despite the quick temper which made us kids wary and kept us at arm’s length. We were drawn to his intelligence and warmth, put off by his sudden turns to anger. Like him, the stand-alone compactum where his shirts and trousers hung and his socks and jerseys were stowed was short and squat. Its toasted tobacco smell prickled my nose when the door was open with an aroma both intriguing and repellent.

But the paucity of warmth from Mum didn’t make the responsibility I felt to her as she grew old any less. Luckily for me, my sister Trish lived much closer and took on her care with energy and zeal, at least at first.

Even at a distance, coping with Mum’s decline was wearying. We struggled to make sense of it. It was a recurring topic in phone conversations with my sisters as we tried to figure out what we were seeing and what best to do. Perhaps it’s dementia, perhaps not, perhaps there isn’t an easy explanation. Perhaps we’ll be equally difficult. We didn’t want to be mean-spirited. But we were floundering, not knowing if we were dealing with a stubborn adult or a wilful child.

For a start, she’d never been unwell in her life until now. She wasn’t equipped to deal with aging and illness. Stiff upper lip was the way she grew up and she dealt with our childhood ills and injuries brusquely, no fuss or sympathy.

She seemed to be in denial, hadn’t thought ahead to old age and how to cope. She was certainly not aging gracefully. In fact, she was behaving like a little girl, helpless, with tears and tantrums to get what she wanted. And what she wanted was to live with one of us, but none of us could cope with that.

We recalled that she didn’t help us when we were ill or struggling to cope with young kids. Not that we held it against her – we wanted to be better than that. But, we said to each other, there are limits; there’s only so much we can do. We don’t want to have to force her into doing anything against her will. Though if we needed a precedent, she and her sister lost no time putting their mother, our grandmother, in a home after she fell asleep in the bath one day.

Still, we go out of our way, and for much too long, to help her stay in her own place. We visit, helpers come to clean, volunteers keep her company, nurses supervise her medications. We arrange for the Driving Miss Daisy service to pick her up and take her to appointments, but Mum takes exception to something that the driver says and that’s the end of that. Frozen meals are delivered each week but she grumbles about the repetitive menu and the tasteless food. So we find someone to come and cook, but they don’t do scrambled eggs the way Mum likes and that arrangement falls over too. In time, her health declines. She breaks a hip in the hospital bathroom and there’s no option but to accept rest home care.

When she died nine months later, aged 90, we were saddened but relieved. We got our lives back. Trish got her blood pressure back down to safe levels and was allowed to drive again. In time, we could look back with a modicum of affection and compassion at the photos of Mum as a baby in a christening robe, as a schoolgirl in a gym tunic, a debutante in a white ball gown, a bride in an ivory satin wedding dress, and a proud young mother in a 1950s printed cotton frock.

But still, I don't miss her. And I’m sad that I don’t.

Beverley is a writer of creative nonfiction by night and a web writer by day. Her work has recently been published in leading New Zealand literary journals, Landfall and Headland, and in the Longridge Review. She lives in Wellington, New Zealand where she’s been developing her creative writing skills through workshops and courses over the last several years. You can follow her on Twitter @beverleystevens