It makes me cold to look at you

I have a small nick on the tip of
my finger which hurts whenever I press it down on the keys.  I helped one of my daughters to pack up
the contents of her house the other night and made the wound worse.  The dry blackness of newspaper ink
seeped into the cut as I wrapped up her drink glasses one after another and laid them
out in a box.
I hope the glasses make the journey
safely today.  I will help to unwrap
them at the other end this afternoon, once the removalists have carried all the
boxes from one suburb to the next. 
My daughter is not moving far, at least not geographically but
emotionally it’s a huge move, as moves tend to be. 
Another of my daughters took a look
at my desk the other day, strewn as it is with papers and books.
‘It makes me giddy just to look at
it.’
Her words resonate with my mother’s
words.  When I was a child and refused
to wear a jumper even on the coldest of days she said to me repeatedly as I
remember ‘It makes me cold to look at you.’  I wondered then how my lack of clothing could so affect my
mother as she pulled her thick cardigan around her shoulders and shivered.
 How easy it is for us to affect one another.  Even a glance, a scrunching of eyebrows
a wrinkling of the forehead can say a thousand words and leave the person on the
receiving end in paroxysms of despair. 
That is when we know one another well. 
But even when we don’t know one
another well, looks can still kill. 
A car pulled in front of me the
other day.  I had not noticed the
car there on my left in two thick lanes of traffic until it had pulled in front of
me.  I held back to let the driver
in.  I saw his window go down and
his arm shoot out.  I had expected
a wave of acknowledgement. 
‘Thanks,’ he might have gestured,
but no.  He gave me the bird.  That’s the expression people use when
someone points up their rude finger. 
Their rude finger, their index. 
It did not shock me so much as
puzzle me.  What had I done
wrong?  Why had I offended
him?  I assumed it was a him.  The arm looked like a his but it may
have been a hers, her index finger, her offence. 
It matters little in the scheme of
things.  It matters to me a little
less than the way I felt on another day when I had pulled out in front of another car ahead and momentarily blocked the path of an on coming car – nothing
dangerous, everything in slow motion – 
at the junction in Camberwell, and the person driving the car coming
towards me, which did not in fact need to slow down much before approaching my
car, wound down his window – again it was a he   – and spat a great gob of whatever
onto my wind screen. 
There’s something shocking about being
spat at, however much I might have deserved a reprimand.  This one got under my skin such that I
cannot forget. 
On another note, I’m getting cold
feet on the Keiser training.  To
think I’d need to do this exercise twice weekly for the next however many years
puts me off. 
On the other hand, is it so
bad? 
And on the other hand, it’s
expensive.
On the other hand, how might I feel
in the long run when I no longer need to carry around my burden of guilt for
neglecting my crumbling bones?
At least I have managed to get a
bandage onto my wounded index finger. 
It no longer hurts to type. 
If only other wounds were always so easily
healed.

Truby King babies

Now in her nineties, my mother tends to remember the events of her
childhood as if they happened yesterday, while the events of yesterday, events
even of five minutes ago, she forgets.  Things slip from her mind but not
her childhood.  Her childhood is her greatest companion and comfort. 
My mother’s family as she now remembers them.  
These days when I make my routine weekly visit to my mother in her
retirement village room, she will tell me again and again how happy she is in
this glorious room that overlooks a small walled garden filled with roses and
in the centre an overflowing mulberry tree, and she will remind me of the
pleasures of her childhood.  
            
‘I can’t get this song out of my head.  You’d know it.  Oh my
papa.’  My mother shakes her head  as if to dislodge the tune and the
words, but they will not shift.  All day long she has heard the music in
her head. 
‘I loved that song,’ she says.  
I do not bother to ask for an explanation.  It is obvious.  My
mother was her father’s favourite and he hers.  Her beloved father with
whom she walked to church arm in arm.  Her beloved father, a school
gymnasium instructor, a man of short but powerful physique, a man who
disciplined his unruly sons, especially the second, the one below my mother,
the one who was his mother’s favourite.  The other five children missed
out, or so my aunt, my mother’s only sister, maintains.  
By the time they arrived their parents were
already worn out.  My mother, the oldest, considers this a nonsense. 
Long ago my mother told me about the influence of Frederic Truby King in
her life.  Her first babies were Truby King babies whenever my father was
around.  But in the middle times he was either away at work or off
fighting in the war and she could mother as she saw fit.
My mother preferred the times when my father was away she told me because she was then left free to care for her babies, to follow their whims, to put them to bed when
they were tired, to feed them when they were hungry, to hold them when they
needed holding and not to follow the rigid dictates of Truby King as
interpreted by my father. 
As a follower of Truby King my father insisted on discipline.  Four
hourly feeds.  The baby was to be held only for feeding and changing of
nappy then back to bed for the next four hours with no interference from
mother. 
They might cry, these Truby King babies, but they soon learned it was
pointless.  Their cries would go unheard.
My mother talks about this time now as an aberration.  She thinks
it stopped when there were more babies because it was all too hard for my
father to police.  I was therefore not a Truby King baby nor the one below
me, nor any of my mother’s other babies born in Australia.  
Only the first three missed out. 
I’ve read up on Truby King.  His adopted daughter Margaret wrote a
biography on her father whom she adored.  He was born and lived at the
same time as Freud, and although also a psychiatrist by training, he took an interest not in the psyche but in the body and in preventative  health care.
He trained a troop of mothercraft
nurses to deal with what he considered to be ‘over-feeding’ but the notion of
systematized four hourly feeding came from a Dr Thomas Bull in 1850.
 Truby King pushed it further until people like Dr Spock and Donald
Winnicott turned the tide and helped people to realise the importance of
feeding as an emotional experience that cannot be systematised and deserves
respect and encouragement.
It turns out that Truby king had wanted his mothercraft nurses to become
friendly advisors to the mothers in their care but instead these nurses
tyrannised the mothers and insisted on order and rule bound behaviour in much the way
my father thumped the book of rules at my mother.  
My mother then lost her
confidence and her babies suffered.  
But who am I to judge the past?  I can only speculate and wonder.