The joys of smoking

One of the cats is limping and I fear she’s hurt herself.  But when we take a closer look at the paw she
protecting, there’s no sign of damage. 
I’m slow to visit the vet, given the cat appears to be pain
free, despite her limp which is becoming less pronounced, and at the same time I
think of my shame at not being one of those pet owners who races off to the vet
the moment their beloved animal shows the slightest sign of ill health. 
I’m the same with my children – slow to respond – unless they
are obviously ill and in a way that suggests a doctor’s attention is
necessary. 
Does it go back to my childhood when a visit to the doctor
was almost unheard of?  My mother used to
go, in my memory in relation to women’s business, mostly to do with the making
of and the aftermath of having babies. 
Otherwise, we stayed away from doctors, and my father
attended to broken bones and the like, as when my sister fell out of a
tree. 
My sister told me later, how our father had made a makeshift splint on her
leg and left her to a sleepless and pain filled night before he decided this
one was too much for him and she was off to the hospital for a plaster
cast. 
In the back of my mind, I have thoughts of visiting both the
doctor and the periodontist and neither thrills me. 
The doctor for a pap smear. 
That event happens every two years and for me ever since I was 21 years
old or thereabouts when I first entered into a sexual relationship. 
Forty years of pap smears, you’d think I’d get used to
it.  The speculum, the cold thrust, the
doctor’s gentle hands.  
I only go to
women doctors these days for pap smears but in my early twenties it was only
possible to see male doctors and I tried not to let it bother me. 
Until I met my husband, I did not have a regular GP but
followed him into his GP’s surgery to see a Doctor John Pettit, a kind man
who’d have been in his forties when I first met him. 
He smoked cigarettes in the surgery, which even then came as
a surprise to me.  I was still smoking,
too, as was my husband, but somehow we were on that initial wave of people who
knew smoking was dangerous and needed to be abandoned if you wanted to live to
a ripe old age. 
Even after my husband and I finally managed to stop smoking –
more easily because I’d discovered I was pregnant and no longer craved
cigarettes – though I still dreamed of smoking. 
I kept it in my mind that if something bad happened,
something worse than death itself, I could always go back to smoking, and would
not care. 
It became my default position, rather like my thought when I
finally finished my work at the Southern Memorial Hospital’s Community Care
Centre as a social worker and moved into part time private practice as a
therapist after I had that first baby, I could always go back to being a social
worker if all else failed.
For years, it was a comfort to me, that thought, both thoughts:
that I could resume social work and take up smoking again if everything else became
impossible. 
But it’s never happened, and these days I have no desire to
smoke whatsoever, though sometimes I enjoy the smell of someone else’s
cigarettes, unlike my husband who is one of those serious anti-smokers, despite
his past. 
As for social work, I doubt I could get a job as a social
worker any more. I resigned from the social work association about thirty years
ago and no longer feel that way inclined. 
It occurs to me, I often have a default position in my head, a
place or a person or a thing to which I can revert, when all else fails.  
Once upon a time, it included ex-lovers, the men I’d
rejected, not the ones who rejected me.  And
now I’ve moved beyond that. 
No more default positions for me, other than the occasional
fantasy of winning Tattlslotto – not that I ever enter it – or of finding a
publisher for my book. 

Long, striated and with sharp edges

We have a pot bound tub of mother-in-law’s tongue in our back
yard, which has toppled over in the wind. 
Strange, given the plant is so heavy that the wind has
dislodged it or maybe its upended state has more to do with the number of
fronds.  The pot has lost its centre of
gravity. 

There it sits on its side like a beached whale or a creature
otherwise out of its natural habitat. 
My husband tells me they named this plant after mother in
laws and their tongues because each leaf is long and striated with sharp edges.
Why do mother in laws get such bad press? 
Why does the term itself evoke a shudder? 
Maybe it’s the ‘in law’ quality of it that adds to a sense of
distance, a sense that mothers in law are difficult people, people to keep at a
distance, people with sharp tongues. 
Fathers in law don’t cop it in the same way.  There’s no plant called father in law’s
tongue.  Why then this generalised
expression to evoke criticism and awe? 
Mind you, my mother in law left me cold. 
The first day I met her, I was in my early twenties, not long
after I had met my husband to be.  In
those days it was still considered risqué for young people to share a bed
before marriage and my husband and I began sharing our bed from the night we
met. 
After a week, my husband to be asked me to spend a few days
camping with him in Mansfield.  His uncle
owned a farm there, and attached to the farm in some outer field there was an
unoccupied shepherd’s hut, which this uncle had said we could use instead of
tents. 
I had so enjoyed the company of this young man, my husband to
be – though I did not know this then – it seemed a reasonable proposition we go
off camping. 
My husband to be in those days lived in a share house in
Camberwell. I lived with my sister in Caulfield. 
On the day of the trip, I drove my car to my husband to be’s
house with my bag of clothes and together we collected bits and pieces from his
shared house for the three nights of living it rough. 
On the way to Mansfield, we took a detour through Croydon to
collect some pots and pans for cooking from my husband to be’s family home. 
We did not discuss beforehand the notion that I would meet my
mother in law to be for the first time and I wandered into the house,
unprepared. 
Perhaps my husband to be had hoped his mother would not be
home – an unusual expectation given she rarely moved outside of the house.
Sure enough, there she was at the kitchen sink, her favourite
place, near to the stove where she spent her days cooking biscuits and cakes,
which she piled into tins and stored in the fridge for whenever visitors came
by. 
My husband to be introduced me as a friend to his
mother.  She put out a thin hand and
offered a half smile.  She seemed to size
me up and down, perhaps pleased to see her son in the company of a young
woman.  He had been in the company of
other women before me and these relationships had not worked out. 
‘We’re going to Mansfield to camp in Uncle Joe’s hut,’ my
husband said to his mother.  He might as well have told
her we were off to rob a bank. 
The look on her face, and I knew it instantly.  Her face became that of a mother in law in
stereotype: slits for eyes, a knitted forehead and clenched chin. 
She said nothing, as she dragged out the old pots from the
back of her ovenware cupboard, but it was clear she disapproved. 
To the day she died, her disapproval continued, but it was
met with my own, given I took sides with my husband who had not had an easy
time with his mother.  This woman who
burned her son’s copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover; this woman who told her son
he would never be as good or as great a man as the parish priest; this woman
who told her son he was too difficult by half. 
No wonder then, my mother in law should disapprove of me,
too.  My husband to be and I were accomplices in crime who
lived in sin.  
Today, I am the age of my mother in law when we first
met.  I have one son in law already and
another joining the ranks next year.  Two
other potential sons in law hover on the sidelines. 
What sort of mother in law will I make?