Re-posted from my private blog...
Mum, I am very proud to say that all three of your children are
in complete agreement that you gave us the absolute best childhood any
of us could have hoped for.
Our hope is that through the following stories and anecdotes
you will see how wonderful a Mum you truly are to us. I know you didn’t want a
speech until your 60th birthday (apparently so you would have another 5 years
to bribe us with niceties!) but it’s time you knew how much we appreciate and
thank you for everything you have done for us.
With so much to say (me, not her this time!), let’s start at
the beginning…
Mum was the fourth of six children born to our Ma and Pa and
the youngest of their three girls. While there aren’t many photos from her
early years she was, by all accounts, a shy little girl, nicknamed ‘Taffy’ by
her Ma, with whom she shared a very close relationship.
Despite this, Mum was convinced she was adopted after she
discovered a little heart-shaped mark on her eyelid one day and she imagined
that it meant she was part of some royal family somewhere who would one day
return to claim her, as she had the special insignia to prove it. But alas, it
was not to be, even if Ma was the spitting image of the Queen Mother!
And so she stayed a good Catholic school girl, who generally
stayed out of trouble - except when the local priest asked her to get behind
the wheel of the car and drive him to another town, when she was about 8 years
old!
And in another example of being in the ‘wrong place at the
wrong time’, there was the day she was teasing her younger brother Brendan and
he chased her around the outside of the house, until she decided to run inside
and slam the door shut behind her. Only, it was a plate glass door and Brendan
crashed through it, slitting an artery in his wrist and spurting so much blood
that every square inch of the verandah was covered in it! I’m not sure if there
was any retribution for this, but she managed to make it through her early
years relatively unscathed and after completing her leaving certificate at
school, she attended business college and then began working.
After a while, Mum decided to take a little working-holiday to
New Zealand, which also meant she had to face one of her greatest fears –
flying. It was her first trip overseas, she was all by herself on the plane and
she cried her eyes out from the moment she boarded. But through her tears, Mum
noticed a young lady sitting across from her who was also visibly upset but had
the additional hindrance of traveling with a baby. Well, after talking briefly,
Mum felt so sorry for her, she reached into her purse for something to ‘help
her out’ and ended up giving her the equivalent of two weeks wages!
Although she doesn’t like traveling much herself, she did yet another
remarkably selfless thing when Luke was about 10 years old. She went back to
work to save up money to send him and Dad on a father & son holiday to
Queensland, which Luke still says was one of the highlights of his childhood.
For Mum, it is all about her children and that is the way she
has always been. I don’t know if I should admit it, but I can barely remember a
time when we were kids when we ever lifted a finger. Mum did everything for us
- made our beds, tidied up our mess, did all the housework and chores at home
and yet still gave us pocket money!
She also let us play as we liked. She has quite the passion for
creating a wonder-world for kids and I must say, she is very good at it.
Sometimes at night she let us turn off all the lights and played hide and seek
in complete darkness, which was terrifically terrifying (and meant the whole
family had to play).
Greg and I loved it when Mum made us a Balloon Room, filling a
little alcove between the bedrooms with balloons, where we could play for
hours. She helped us make forts and caves under the dining room table and
behind the lounge and once gave me a stack of blankets so I could go live
inside an old wardrobe on the back verandah.
Unfortunately for us little kids, the toilet in our house was
right out the back - quite a distance from the family room - so venturing out
there alone was quite scary. So our dear Mum used to sit on the back step and
talk to us while we visited, then she would open all the other doors for us so
when we flushed, we could make a jittery run-for-it all the way back inside
again.
While we were most certainly disciplined at home, there was
also an element of letting us kids roam free. Mum allowed us to do almost
anything we wanted, especially if there was to be some good fun involved. We
held our own garage sales, selling or swapping our toys with other kids in the
street (although she did have one rule: no Barbie dolls allowed!), let us carve
out a race-track around the house and ride our bikes through it and when Greg
threatened to run away from home (which he often did), Mum helped him pack his
bags and then waved him off from the back door. From there, he made his way to
the shed at the end of the garden, where he busied himself setting up house for
the afternoon, before forgetting why he had ever left and soon returning inside
to join us for dinner.
Once, while we were holidaying at our caravan on the coast,
4-year-old Greg went missing one afternoon. Not that anyone in our family
noticed… Mum often let Greg cruise around the caravan park on his little green
bike – which had no pedals! His little legs had to run as fast as they could
for him to get anywhere and although they laughed about his ‘Fred Flintstone’
style transport, I honestly don’t think it ever occurred to my parents to put
pedals on his bike like every other kid had.
So when Greg was gone for a number of hours, it didn’t ring any
alarm bells because Mum probably just figured he couldn’t have gotten too far.
Well, Greg had gone on quite an adventure and we soon found out that he had
actually joined the circus! Someone had found him under the big-top with a
bunch of clowns and started a search party – for his parents!
Taking great joy in every little thing we did (which of course,
made us feel pretty good!), Mum was fascinated by Luke’s aptitude for anything
technical, praised my drawings and marveled at Greg’s inventive stories. I
don’t think she realizes how positive and optimistic she is, but Mum has always
been extremely encouraging of us in whatever pursuit we chose and we all recall
her saying to us that we could be whatever we wanted to be.
When Greg as a young boy decided he actually wanted too be a
little girl and asked for a miniature pink kitchen for his birthday,
that is exactly what he got. When he wanted to dress up in girls clothes, Mum
draped him in jewelry and did his make-up. Our every whim was catered for. But
Mum did draw the line when Greg was asked what he wanted for his 5th birthday
and his excited reply was ‘Bosoms!’. (We thought he meant the big rubber bosoms
we saw at a novelty shop at Luna Park, but he later told us he actually wanted
real ones!).
But on a more serious note, it was always Mum who encouraged us
to study hard and stay at school (or in Greg’s case, just go to school).
Knowing how seriously Mum took our schoolwork, there was one time that Greg was
very worried about showing her his Year 9 report card, fearing her reaction about
the teacher’s comments on his behaviour. He put off showing her his results
until the end of the school holidays, when he sat her down and started reading.
The first comment was shocking, chastising Greg for his lack of effort, bad
attitude and poor results ‘And that’s the teacher that likes me!’ said Greg.
Well, Mum just about collapsed onto the floor from laughing so hard and much to
Greg’s relief, that report card provided hours of entertainment for our whole
family, who can all laugh for half an hour just thinking about it!
There were certain experiences in life Mum wanted us kids to
have and she did everything in her power to ensure we had them. Like wanting us
to have a good education, encouraging us to study, go to university if we
wanted too and ultimately, hoped we would obtain good jobs (while fervently
praying we would find the right person to marry, and so far, those prayers have
been answered!).
But Mum also wanted us kids to experience the simple pleasure
of sitting around a nice, warm and cosy open-fire in the fireplace at home. So,
one cold day when Dad wouldn’t get any firewood (because he knew he would be
the one cleaning it up afterwards!) Mum walked all the way to Uncle Brendan’s
house to use some of his. She lugged it home and lit it up and it was only
later we found out that the wood she had gathered was from a stack to be
discarded - because it was covered in lead paint! ‘I thought it smelled funny’
said Mum. “You bloody goose!’ yelled Uncle Brendan.
It should be no surprise that Mum was no good with an open
fire, because I actually think she has something of an aversion to heat. I
remember the air conditioner constantly being on, even in winter. And this
might also explain why she is not at all interested in slaving over a hot stove
or cooking up the simplest of dishes – even putting together a salad has her
perplexed!
When we were growing up, I think we had the same 7 dinners on
rotation each week, mainly things that could be put in a dish and baked - like
a roast dinner, potato pie and hot pot (or as she said recently, ‘Let’s call it
casserole, it just sounds a lot better’). Actually it was just the other
day I was on the phone to her and she was flustered. In a spin because she had
to get dinner started (ie. put something in a pot and apply heat). ‘I’ll call
you back’ she said, and then five minutes later I got the call and she seemed
worried at first, ‘The corned beef won’t boil!’ she cried before her resolve
quickly changed, ‘Oh well… Too bad!’ as she laughed it off.
If we’re talking about cooking, I should also mention her
sewing technique, which was to throw away the needle and thread in favour of a
much more convenient and agile stapler. So this is how Greg lost a
pocket when he needed a braid sewn onto a school shirt as Mum just stapled
right across the top of it – Kapow! Kapow!
She wasn’t a cook, she wasn’t a seamstress and Mum, you most
certainly were not a hairdresser – which I found out the hard way, when
I begged for a fringe at the front and lost about 95 percent of my hair in a
single swipe of the scissors! But it must be said that what Mum lacked in
cooking and other domestic skills (apart from vacuuming and dusting, which were
her main repertoire), she more than made up for with her sense of humour and the
single chocolate-on-chocolate cake she made annually for one of us ‘lucky’
kids. It was delicious and we all looked forward to it. Yes, we had birthday
cakes on rotation too!
Birthday parties were even rarer. I got mine in 1986. Greg is
still waiting and praying for his one…
It was because of Mum’s strong religious faith that we were all
baptized and went to Catholic schools. She always made a point to get to know
her local priest well and was once very active in a weekly prayer group that
met often at our house (much to our delight, because all the lovely ladies
would bake cakes and leave the leftovers for us).
There was also a time that on Friday afternoons we would go to
religion lessons with all our cousins from our extended family on Mum’s side.
We were quite young then and our only memories are of colouring-in pictures of
the nativity but this was good practice for us, because we spent all our time
at mass on Sunday doing the same thing. Except there, we would stand up on our
seats and display out works of art, waiting for the congregation to silently
applaud us with fairy claps while Mum watched on proudly.
Mum always had interesting ways of explaining things to us
kids, like when Luke was just a baby and she took him out onto the balcony of
their unit so he could watch a plane fly overhead. ‘Look!’ she said, ‘A
mechanical bird!’ - much to the amusement of the neighbours on their balcony
above. When I asked her to show me where our house was on a map of Australia,
she pointed to Darwin and said ‘That’s our house, right there’ - which of
course I believed completely and later had a heated argument with my
kindergarten teacher about! She also explained to us that the shadows of
fingers on the overhead projector at Mass were God’s hands moving the words to
the music up and down and that thunder was the sound of angels moving the
furniture around upstairs for God.
But I loved it when she showed us fairies dancing on the walls
and it wasn’t until much later we figured out she used her compact make-up
mirror to reflect sunlight around the room, very inventive and so exciting for
us kids!
Mum loves children and is fantastic with young kids. They love
her enthusiasm and she seems fascinated by every little funny or cute thing
they do. So, it’s no surprise that after all her own kids had gone to school,
Mum decided to do child-minding from home. And of course there were a great
many other mother’s who jumped at the chance of our Mum looking after their
children. And so it was that our house would be filled with, at times, up to
about 10 other kids that Mum kept nourished and entertained each day and
somehow managed to convince them all to have a sleep at the same time in the
middle of the day, (which from my experience makes her deserving of a medal or
at least an honorary doctorate of early childhood studies!).
With all the kids around and Mum’s zest for life, there was
always something exciting going on in our house. So much so, we noticed that
the lonely middle-aged man who lived down the street from us would walk past
our house on the way home from work particularly slowly, thoroughly enjoying
all the goings on of the ‘woman who lived in a shoe, she had so many
children…’. But Mum genuinely loved it and after we would tell her about
our day at school, she would excitedly tell us all about the kids, the funny
things they’d said and done and fill us in on what had happened that day on our
favourite TV shows Mulligrubs and Sooty.
Our Mum was a stay-at-home Mum in every sense of the word,
except for when she took us on night-time escapades to the local library and
thus, gave us a healthy appetite for reading. Here, Mum would indulge in her
hobby of checking out the latest crime novels and devouring even the thickest
of books in an hour or two and almost certainly in one evening. Actually, Mum
read so fast and so often that she began to get confused about what books she
had read - after a while they all sounded familiar. So she devised her own
system of keeping track of which books she had read by marking her initials on
the inside cover. Other avid readers copied her and soon she got to know the
reading habits of the other borrowers, sometimes remarking ‘I wonder if J.B has
read this one?’ or ‘E.W would love this!’.
Mum was there to hold our hands on our first days at school and
was always happy to help us with homework and assignments. Actually, she was
often the sole researcher, author and illustrator of our projects - which we
both thought we had gotten away with, until one of my teachers wrote a note
saying ‘Margaret, your handwriting seems to have improved immensely overnight!’
When Mum did return to the workforce and was gone even before
we woke up in the morning, she would leave us little notes with words of
encouragement and some advice for the day, which I really wished I had kept.
She was however only too keen to come home or spend a day with us when we were
sick, as she always put her family first. In fact, sometimes it was her idea
for us to stay home for the day and play, as long as we didn’t breathe a word
of it to Dad!
She helped us do everything we wanted to do and also supported
us in everything we didn’t want to do – for me it was school sport, ballet
lessons and being asked to represent my class as a Councillor for our student council,
which Mum helped me get out of when she instructed Luke to give my teacher a
good telling-off, which he promptly did!
And in a very now-a-days way, but unheard of back then, she let
us attend parent-teacher evenings with her because she felt if the teachers had
something to say about us, we should hear it too (and I guess she didn’t want
us to shoot the messenger!).
More recently, it seemed that almost overnight Mum went from
not having touched a typewriter (let alone a computer!) for about 10 years, to
being completely tech-savvy. She almost entirely taught herself how to use the
internet, mainly to indulge her continued interest in true crime. She now
subscribes to Court TV where she watches real criminal trials online and
recently took great delight in telling me that she has worked out how to do a
criminal background check on anyone we know – ‘as long as they are American!’.
But her main hobby these days is EBay. ‘I’m a sniper’ she tells me, gleefully
snatching up yet another genuine antique for a ridiculously low price, before
sending Dad out with a truck to pick it up.
I am not alone in my awe of her fantastic finds. There have
however been some dubious purchases, like the giant plastic rat she bought for
99 cents to scare my brother!
The other day Mum showed me a photo of her father Pa’s
magnificent garden and said ‘If that’s not obsessive-compulsive, I don’t know
what is!’ and then went on to make the analogy between herself and her home
being like his garden. Mum has certainly taken home decorating to new heights,
literally. There is artwork - the most amazing painted canvasses, oils,
charcoal, portraits, landscapes and every other type you could imagine -
spanning every wall of her house, from floor to ceiling. She recently started collecting
wall-vases and already her collection is vast, taking up the wall space of
almost an entire room. There are unique pieces of furniture all around the
house, old-fashioned sweet shop signs in the kitchen, a shoe-shine step and
drawer at the front door, porcelain dolls in cabinets, leadlight angels in
doorways, ornate mirrors everywhere, even a family of wooden ducks in the
garden.
It was also at her insistence that a pool
be installed to act as a ‘grandkid magnet’, and other things like a cubby house
which is an exact replica of their house and a swing set which is currently on
the roof of the house (But Mum, if you want Livvie to go on the swings, you’ll
have to get it down from there!). In fact, she is so determined that her
grandchildren will have fun (Fun Goddamnit!) at her house that she has
even bought an eerily life-like child… named Joey…so they will have
someone to play with when they visit! But Mum, when they go to their Grandma’s
house, guess who they want to see and spend time with?
Both our parents have never been drinkers
(in fact, I think this is one of the reasons why Mum married Dad, she wanted a
man who would be a good father for her children and we think she chose very
well) and Mum was always quick to warn us of the effects of drinking alcohol.
But as kids, we were fascinated by it and
I remember one day my younger brother Greg and I begged Mum to give us some
alcohol - ‘Just a little bit, Mum. Pleeeeeease?’. And the after much carry-on,
she caved in. ‘Alright’ she said, handing us an entire bottle - of Spumante
(little did we know it was non-alcoholic). Then she sat back and laughed as she
watched her 8 and 6 yr olds down the whole lot and stumble around the place,
apparently drunk by the mere thought of it!
I think it was also around this time we
begged Mum for a puff on a cigarette and perhaps thinking we would be repulsed
by the experienced, she presented us with one each, lighting them up and
instructing us to smoke the entire thing. Well, I took one puff, coughed and spluttered
and never touched another one again, whereas Greg … well, let’s just say Mum’s
little plan had a 50% success rate.
In later years, she would do almost
anything to protect our little brother Greg from hearing about someone (even
Luke or myself once we were of age) having had a good time if we were, God
forbid, drinking. But this didn’t stop her from spilling the beans to me one
day, admitting that when she first started work all those years ago, she went
on a harbour cruise where they were serving cocktails. It was here that she had
her first (and only) taste of the lovely beverages that simply tasted like
orange juice, only to look up from the boat to see the whole city lit up in a
spectacular show of lights and fireworks. Although I think this is where the
story of Mum’s drinking days ends because there were no actually fireworks in
town that night and Mum was nursing a killer hangover the next day.
When I asked Luke and Greg to email me
their memories about Mum for this speech, they both replied immediately, each
detailing (terrifying) stories about her driving. ‘How on earth did we survive
being driven to school or mass by Mum?’ wrote Greg, ‘The woman who speeds
around corners!’ and Luke, who remembers that Mum would drive faster and faster
if she was being tailgated and recalled the times she hit a tree, a workbench
in the garage and once, the gates at church!
I vividly remember Mum taking me to
hospital when I broke my toe, except she parked the car so far away, I had to
hop about 2 km to get there!
But the most enduring memory we have of
Mum is when she cleaned out the car after one of us kids had been sick - only
she used a hose and flooded the whole thing with water! Despite all this, we
are however very proud of her for teaching herself to drive again a few years
ago (after a haiatus of many years when she was chauffer driven) so she could,
among other things, go swimming at the Olympic pool. But I think it’s just as
well she’s got a pool in her own backyard now because… well, the roads are safe
again!
We especially love it how our Mum can so
often look at the world with such wonder, like recently when she saw the new
television ad for Cadbury’s chocolate and she marveled out loud at all the
little chocolate people in their little chocolate world, and exclaimed, ‘Just
look at that! That is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!’
Their advertising sure works, but Mum has always been a fan of sweet delights
and I remember her telling us the story of how when she was a child, on a hot
day (back when shops weren’t air-conditioned and even fridges were rare), she
would race to the local corner store where the shopkeeper would sell his melted
and spoilt chocolate for only 1 cent each. Her love of chocolate continued into
adulthood, when her only request each birthday was homemade cards from each of
her kids and a box of Darrell Lea Soft Centres. She even got a great big egg
from the Easter Bunny each year, hidden somewhere in the garden for her to
find.
I believe it was Mum who started my own
chocolate addiction when she would bring home small presents and treats from
work. I’m pretty sure that she only had to walk about 100metres from the train
station to her office, but she would manage to find some really great little
treasures and I vividly remember her giving me my first delightful little box
of truffles.
When her little 18-month-old great-niece
was visiting recently and slipped outside her house, crying after the fall,
Mum’s initial reaction was to run to the pantry to find her a bite-sized
chocolate bar, because “Kids need chocolate. It makes them feel better.’
It was this event that has left me in no doubt of her status as bona-fide
grandma.
On that note, I must say that apart from
being a great mother to us, she is also a wonderful Grandma (or ‘Mimi’ as she
is known) to Livvie. She is as generous as her own Ma, giving Livvie so many
gorgeous little (and sometimes big!) gifts and telling me there are still
cupboards full of things for her, which she will have to ration out over time.
Mum is always thinking of her granddaughter, misses her when she’s not visiting
and will humour me by staying on the phone whenever I call her to let her
listen to how much Livvie is laughing at something or to hear the funny noises
she is making, even though she, of course, stops doing it as soon as I pick up
the phone. It’s been great to share these things with Mum.
Luke wanted me to be sure to mention that
Mum chose a very special woman to be her role model in life – her own mother. We have all learned a lot from Ma, a great woman who touched our lives in so
many ways and who continues to do so through her daughter and the way Mum
treats us, her treasured children.
Mum, thank you for everything you have
given us, because you have given us everything.
We love you and Happy Birthday
from all of us!
...for 'scootering'.
She paints shoes on all the animals!
