You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (26 page)

This was a time when my mother and I wholly despised each other, when any sign of nurturing on her part would propel me into another burst of juvenile delinquency and her into going down to the local river and hitting herself on the head with rocks or whatever ritual it was grieving mothers of her generation were compelled to undertake during times of crisis. I once bullied her into such a frenzy of rage she actually wrestled me to the ground, much to the horrified shouts of my onlooker pacifist father. Both being on the short and round side we must have appeared to all and sundry like two babushka dolls engaged in a fight to the death, though it didn't feel comedic at the time.

‘When?' she would scream as I shoved her off me with all the grace of WWF wrestler Ricky ‘The Dragon' Steamboat and raced out the front door to run wild. ‘When did you turn into such . . . an
arsehole
?'

Time healed us, created a bridge between the slights and the lies and the mistrust, and we moved as adults into a warmer, more comradely partnership.

She was—and remains—a very good mother; open to any and every discussion, and a proponent of creative, generous living at all times. Though she's never been one of those women described as ‘born to parent'. There's an expectation that these delightful nurturing instincts set certain females apart from their sisters, draw a line in the sand of compassion that may rarely be crossed. A propensity for tea parties, a ‘way' with dolls, tending to a scabbed-up knee with concerned frowns: these are the character traits of a very pleasant somebody born to make babies. Those failing to similarly measure up are spoken of in mean-spirited, disparaging terms. ‘She's not very
motherly
, is she?' remains, as a character appraisal, on a par with ‘She takes a while to warm up' and ‘I just think she really enjoys the music of Jack Johnson.' Display an iota of awkwardness when playing with a child and you are dismissed, pitied, slotted into the stiff-backed category of Cruella de Vils or wicked stepmother types who would rather skin puppies than do anything so maladroit as nappy changing.

Motherhood fit my best friend Gabi like a glove. She had a big European laugh and squeezed people hard and affectionately on the arm when they were talking to her and everybody I knew was kind of in love with her and that was just fine by me. Gabi had an enormous bosom and the sort of perfect round bottom everybody liked to put an admiring hand on as she walked past, even strangers. If you saw her you would instantly want to rest your face on her chest and tell her your secrets. She was like the walking embodiment of the Tom Waits
Rain Dogs
album cover.

In our twenties we developed a beautiful kind of symmetry. After the insistent passage of skin-graft bonding where we took not a step without permission of the other, the whispered insistence that from now on we should experience each of life's lessons hand-in-hand or not at all, there came a distinct lull in proceedings—a perfect, unbroken calm, where we simply found joy in co-existing and seeing the world through the same set of eyes. And then all of a sudden one of us rather startlingly managed to fertilise an egg and everything that we had known up til that point seemed obsolete. I made coffee. Gabi made babies. The atom had split.

I was living with her and her American partner—a oneman band who toured the world wearing a lycra jumpsuit and a motorcycle helmet with a telephone receiver glued to it—when, out of nowhere, she announced that they were pregnant. It came as somewhat of a shock to all three of us. Certainly, there had been many a wine-soaked conversation about one day moving to the country and starting some sort of ukulele collective with our respective partners and various future children, but that seemed a world away. Gabi was still hiding up the back of rock-fogged gigs, and drinking too much on the weekends, and performing a variety of absurd living room aerobics—Denise Austin-style legwarmers and all—with me as ever by her side. We travelled together, and wept in each other's arms, and collapsed in noisy hysterics in the middle of crowded shopping malls, but most of all we always understood exactly what the other was going through. We empathised and listened and felt. And now she was entering a mystifying world I had scant idea of past archaic copies of
Where Did I Come From?

I didn't really have any other close girlfriends who had been knocked up. The ones on the burnt edges of my social circle seemed to just drift off into that vaguely terrifying world of afternoon paddle pools and hideous postmodern rock 'n' roll baby tees and were seen again only on the occasional wild night on the tear where they left their offspring in the hands of an understanding relative and hit the town with a vigour that bordered on demonic.

‘I am going to get
so fucked up
,' they would announce determinedly, lining up the shots, ignoring the fact that their nipples were leaking through their shirt, and occasionally snapping out of an exhausted, dead-eyed stare to yell ‘WOO-HOO' like someone who had awoken from a coma and suddenly found themselves at a baseball game. We would welcome them back into the hedonism fold, asking polite questions about how their anal tearing was healing up, and then watch in silence as they were carried out about five minutes later unconscious and covered in pinot noir.

Obviously I was for the most part thrilled for Gabi. She was a patient, nurturing soul, the gift of mama ran through her blood and she was no doubt going to make some wide-eyed infant blissfully happy. It was more a fear of the unknown that froze me up. I thought that perhaps motherhood would take the spirit of the wicked from her eyes; propel her into making friendlies with other harried, underslept women who had survived that dark night of screaming sobs and leaving me and my paltry concerns about Facebook and snake-hipped guitar players for dust. I was afraid—in the most patently selfish way—of losing her forever. That she would have to, by the decree of nature, love somebody else more than she loved me.

Over the course of nine months she went from being foxy, self-assured '50s bombshell Gabi to foxy, self-assured '50s bombshell Gabi with a massive novelty beach ball shoved up her jumper. She felt vomitous in the kitchen, sighed longingly at brandy shots whilst sticking with soda water, and the requisite amount of months later produced a creature so breathtakingly beautiful we were all awed. She had done it, crossed over, and I could only now make noises of empathy regarding her experiences. When she spoke of Delilah I would nod and attempt to understand, but the innate perception I had once shared with her was missing. Our friendship had become a song without lyrics.

Sometimes, though, I would just sit and admire her endless patience; the way she would explain the concept of chopsticks eight hundred and three times or spend seven hours constructing a baby drum kit which Delilah looked at with contempt before choosing to instead play with a booger she found on the floor which may or may not have originated in her own nose. I pondered how I would do it differently, or how I might attempt to ape her methods if I had my own child.

I had become an inadvertent mother at the age of twenty-four when I fell in love with a man named Sime who had a six-month-old daughter. Both the relationship and the child were unplanned. He and I had been friends for years—had even dated, briefly and shyly, at the ages of twenty-three and nineteen respectively—and spent the majority of our time together since happily introducing our various partners to each other and co-existing in the summery orbit of the mid-1990s Fitzroy music scene. It was a heady time, full of interminable VCA funk bands like Cranky and Dylan Lewis's Brown Hornet who played on Thursday nights at the Evelyn or the Rainbow or the Empress. They all had horn sections and each band member was inexplicably allowed at least one nine-minute solo in every song. These were the sorts of gigs people attended and sat on the floor gazing up at with a dumb intensity, or leaped about in front of the stage as though poked with an electric cattle prod in the name of being a ‘free spirit'. We undulated from pub to pub, a mass of high spirits in beanies and vests and the odd misguided terry-towelling three-quarter-length shorts sold at Ministry of Style on Brunswick Street. Sime sang in various bands, beautifully, and spent his downtime making sculpture or working at the Vic Markets. He had big black eyes and corduroy pants and he played the harmonica. Offstage he would sit in dark corners alone rolling cigarettes and staring into space and everybody thought him to be deliciously moody. He began a timorous love affair which produced a child, to the apparent surprise of all involved. They called the baby Edie—a tiny, serious creature with eyes as deep and knowing as her father's. When Sime's relationship with Edie's mother faltered and he found himself temporarily homeless, I suggested in the spirit of friendliness he come and live in the bungalow out the back of my house. One night we both came home drunk and kissed, unexpectedly. ‘All bets are off,' Sime said. We kissed again. Fireworks exploded over Melbourne. We guessed that was probably a good sign. Two weeks after that we decided that it was probably worth all the shit we were going to get from our respective ex-partners and that we should leap into a love affair headfirst.

He never forced motherhood upon me. He always saw Edie as his responsibility and insisted that I should just go about my life as normal and if I ever felt like doing some picking up of child or pulping of broccoli in my spare time I was welcome to. For the most part I saw her as a mysterious little bundle he tended to in the bungalow every second day. I would watch her in Sime's arms and feel slightly overwhelmed. He had made a person. I made coffee.

Motherhood had always seemed an odd, unlikely future for me, on a par with suddenly waking up one morning and loudly announcing, ‘I think I rather like the idea of being an amputee for a bit' and determinedly sawing off a leg. I had never shown a predilection for breeding the way Gabi had. When children were handed to me I went straight into consternation mode and held them awkwardly, stiffly, like a Lego attachment stuck on the wrong way. If they started crying there would be an instant sense of panic from both of us, me looking around desperately for adult assistance while the wracking sobs grew louder and more insistent and in need of proper grownup care. If none immediately arrived I would stuff the child under the couch til the crying grew mercifully silent. (‘What's that strange muffled noise coming from the sofa?' ‘Not sure. More wine?')

‘Children sense fear,' Gabi would say, trying to coach me through the more difficult aspects of Holding a Child 101.

‘What, like
dogs
?'

‘Kind of. Like dogs with an inbuilt fire alarm.'

By three months into our relationship I was so outrageously in love Sime could have asked me to drink a mug of mucus each morning and I would have cheerily complied, so long as it was
his
mucus. He was a capable, warm, engaged parent and I envied the ease with which he interacted with his daughter. If he could do it, I wanted to learn. I imagined us pushing Edie on a swing, riding a horse on a beach, making a bed as a family and collapsing in fits of giggles beneath clean white linen.Those were my expectations of parenting. I had no point of reference outside of Kmart commercials and any film ever screened on the W channel between the hours of midday and 2 pm.

When he handed over baby and bottle I would stand there, arms and legs jutting out, like a halfwit coat-stand.

‘But what do I
do
with her?' I would hiss at him.

He smiled.

‘Just hold her.'

It was an impossible task, getting a grip on this squirming giblet, this molten lava. She was all softness and damp skin, cinnamon aromas. As I tried and tried again to wrangle her into the bath or hoist her screaming into a high chair, I could hear the continuous mantra pulsing through my head:
this
child is not yours
.

I wanted to love her as my own but in those dark moments of frustration when I was helpless with rage and bewilderment, I was starkly reminded: she was somebody else's daughter and she was, for all intents and purposes, a stranger.

One day when Sime had pressing engagements at the Vic Markets he asked how I'd feel about spending a few hours alone with Edie while he went to work.

‘Don't feel like you have to say yes,' he insisted. ‘I can ask my mum.'

‘Oh, come
on
,' I said with breezy assurance. ‘We'll be
fine
. I
love
kids.'

He looked at me doubtfully. This was the same girl who had been left alone with his daughter at the Healesville Hotel for five minutes while he went to the toilet and announced with a perplexed frown upon his return, ‘I think some vomit happened.'

Sime left more phone numbers with me than he knew people with phones, gave me a long hug for bravery along with a searching look which indicated he would come and hunt me down if anything bad happened to his child and he wouldn't be responsible for his actions, and then he closed the door behind him and I heard his car drive away.

Edie was in her high chair. She and I stared at each other for a long, wordless moment. One of us blew a gentle little snot bubble out of her nose, I can't recall who. Eventually I spoke.

‘Well,' I said. ‘I suppose we should start to get to know each other a little.'

It's difficult to get to know somebody who can't speak. I was used to showing off, trying to win people over with my collection of anecdotes and impressions. I held no faith in my personality without witty riposte, and children had a tendency to be unimpressed by an ability to wisecrack. Also I needed a straight man to work off. ‘Hey, way to shit yourself ' just doesn't cut it when the response is a blank gaze and small stream of drool, though obviously in the case of Nick ‘The Wogboy' Giannopolous this sort of thing warrants a standing ovation.

A strange maternal instinct was supposed to kick in at this exact point. There was supposed to be a signal, or a whistle. Real women looked at babies and started instantaneously lactating. I was supposed to feel a yearning for baking pie. Instead I just wanted her to stop staring at me like Bride of Chucky.