You deserve a letter of your own

The year she turned eighty-five my mother wrote a letter to all nine of her living children. She wrote it by way of apology.

I imagine she wrote this letter seated at her round table in the dining room of her tiny unit at Park Glen, the retirement village to which she had moved five years earlier.

She wrote it on a sheet of lined foolscap paper but by the time my older sister had photocopied the nine copies necessary – at my mother’s request – the lines had disappeared.

My mother must have written in her best handwriting, as the words are legible, unlike in earlier letters she wrote to me alone.

There were three things that struck me after I read my copy of my mother’s letter:

How I would respond?

How might others respond?

And who received the original?

It was clear mine was a copy and somehow it became a measure of my position in the family, one of the many. It also became a measure of the position of the many in my family, all except my older sister who in the end took the original back to my mother, after she had made copies for the nine of us, including one for herself.

More recently, this same sister was clearing out her garage and she came across, not only her copy of my mother’s letter to us all, but also another letter my mother wrote to her alone.

‘Of all my children,’ my mother wrote, or words to that effect, ‘Of all my children, you deserve a letter of your own.’

My sister read out my mother’s letter over the phone and we wept together hearing again our mother’s thoughts about my sister’s hard life and her pain.

To this, I added a pain of my own, the pain of not being the one of all those children, not the only one but one of the eight children who, by default did not deserve a letter of our own.

I decided then, should I ever write such letters to my children, I will not write a group letter, instead, individual letters to all my children, each letter expressly designed to address the child in question.

I recognise it’s not so hard for me. I have only four children and nine is a long line of letters to write.

It’s not surprising my mother should choose to address us all equally.

Most of my siblings, as far as I know, did not respond in any way to our mother’s letter.

I presume they read it.

I presume they felt something in the sting of it, but as far as my mother had told me at the time, only three of her daughters talked to her about her letter.

Not one of us wrote back. And I include myself here.

I acknowledged my mother’s letter but it did not occur to me at the time to wonder what it must have been like for her to write such a letter and also to be met with silence from most of her children.

I’m twenty years of age away from reaching my mother’s age at the time she wrote this letter, but it occurs to me now that she wrote from the wisdom of her years and although one of my brothers disparaged her efforts as manipulative, I wonder whether a degree of empathy is called for after my mother’s long life, lived to the best of her ability, however much littered with mistakes.

My mother’s letter is one long apology and one long explanation of her position in making the mistakes she made.

She wrote it when she was eighty-five years old. It deserves recognition.

 

 

 

 

Collections

In my fourteenth year, we moved houses from the inner suburbs of the east in Camberwell to the outer southern suburb of Cheltenham and during that move I took care to ensure that certain of my things came with me.

Precious things I had begun to collect earlier that year.

What is it about adolescence that we begin to see life differently, when the passage of time seems to race ahead so we’re constantly in a hurry, or else, the passage of time seems to drag with every hour, an imposition on your capacity to entertain yourself.

Or so it was for me, especially during the long summer holidays, when we had hours to spare. That’s when I began to collect the treasures of my life, the ticket stubs from the first movie I ever saw at the Balwyn Cinema, The Swiss Family Robinson. There on the big screen, a film which in my memory I confuse with Treasure Island,  Long John Silver and his peg leg.

I collected holy pictures in a cigar box my grandfather had thrown into the rubbish. Brazilian stickers glued to the front and the box itself of thin balsa wood, delicate to handle with its flip lid and still smelling of tobacco.

I collected slips of paper on which people who mattered to me, among them my favourite teacher, had written a few words of instruction, a message about when and where to meet, a sign always of our connection.

In the new house in Cheltenham, all white walls and shining laminated bench tops, stiff venetian blinds and no curtains, given my parents could not afford the extras, we took to putting our things into rooms in an orderly manner.

There was no room for clutter in this new house, at least not in the beginning, at least not while we could see the effects of newness all around us.

And so I needed to collect my objects in small containers, which I could stack neatly in the back cupboard of the bedroom I now shared with my younger sister.

It was a time of hopefulness, this moving time. A time for new beginnings that did not last long before my father reverted to his drunken marauding self and the once white walls developed the stains of what they soon witnessed and lost their innocent glow.

My husband and I bought a new car recently and the smell of the interior reminds me of this new house in Cheltenham. It’s pure unblemished state.

I have loved the sense of newness in most things I encounter. New shoes before they’re scuffed. New clothes before their crinkled and stained. New ideas, before I recognise in them something of the old ideas on which they’re based and they become familiar.

Everything becomes familiar over time and over time things get old. Old and no longer so useful.

These days, I am surrounded by many old objects, including the trunk below my writing desk that is filled to the brim with the memorabilia of my adolescence, collected since my fourteenth year and continuing well into my early twenties.

I have a large key in mock wood folded over itself so that people could sign the inside in honour of my then coming of age when I turned twenty one. I also have the pale blue gold embossed autograph book I received at the end of my primary school years and into which many of my friends and several members of my family have penned small verses. This from my brother:

The night was dark and stormy

The billy goat was blind

He ran into a barbed wire fence

And scratched his never mind.

I laughed at such verses then. Salacious to my young mind, not so now. Twee now, but that’s the way it is with so many elements from our past. They lose their piquancy, their sting, their fresh smell. They become musty, old fashioned and down right boring.

But I do not have the heart to get rid of them yet.

Next year, I tell myself I’ll get a skip placed strategically in the front yard and I’ll clear out my writing room into it.

I’ll clear out this room to make room for new ideas and fresh papers, though these days, papers become unnecessary when so much is available on the internet.

It’s not the same of course. Those material objects, the ones we can handle, the ones whose colour fades over time, hold the greatest pleasure for me, even as the typed or handwritten words on fading sheets of paper all but disappear.