Mum’s the word for love
IN his wonderful anthology Fires, the late US poet and short story writer Raymond Carver talks about how the often mundane state of being a parent was the defining influence on his career.
Carver was an alcoholic who wrote (beautifully) in fits and starts between drunken binges, menial jobs to keep the landlord at bay and, most of all, between addressing the many incessant tasks that come with having kids.
In Fires, Carver recalls the moment the gravity of his status as a dad hit home.
He was sitting in a laundromat in Iowa City in the 1960s waiting to do five loads of washing.
His wife was working shifts as a waitress at the time, and Carver had dropped their kids at a play date, and needed to get the washing done in quick time so he could retrieve the children before it got dark.
The laundromat was packed and when one of the machines became free, an elderly woman cut the line.
Carver sat with growing anxiety, looking at the time, as she stuffed her clothes into the machine. When the clothes finally emerged, the old woman gave them a squeeze with her hand, decided on second thoughts they weren’t quite dry enough, and put them back in for another cycle.
“I remember thinking at that moment,” Carver writes, “amid the feeling of helpless frustration that had me close to tears, that nothing – and, brother, I mean nothing – that ever happened to me on this Earth could come anywhere close, could possibly be as important to me, could make as much difference, as the fact that I had two children.
And that I would always have them and always find myself in this position of unrelieved responsibility and permanent distraction.”
It is such a wonderfully clever piece of writing in that it extracts a vast truth from the most humdrum setting.
It is an essay I found myself revisiting this week in the leadup to Mother’s Day, an occasion that has been ritualised into a lunch-and-flowers exercise, but one that merits deeper thought and discussion around the actual state of being a mum.
Children are the axis around which family life revolves. Having children requires that at times – sometimes seemingly all the time – you must drop everything. It is still the women who do most of the dropping. Most of us dads do a good line in frequent acts of parental selflessness. I heard a new term this week, Duber driver, to describe the state of being a male parent who performs unpaid chauffeur work around town taking children to sports practice/ music class/parties/sleepovers. It’s a term to which I can relate.
But for mums, the heavy lifting is constant and heavier, the one-percenters more crucial, the impact on career paths, sleep patterns, external interests more profound.
I am certainly not saying that is the way it necessarily should be but even in 2019, it is still the way it usually is.
None of this is to suggest that children are more burden than blessing. On the contrary, it is difficult when you have got them to imagine life any other way. But children are life-altering things, and it is mothers who have their lives altered to the greatest extent.
The extent to which women will drop everything was underscored in my own home this week by a set of circumstances that required the kind of logistical gymnastics that form the backdrop of parenting, the backdrop of mothering and, importantly, the backdrop of grand-mothering.
My wife went on a short and well-deserved holiday to let her hair down with a group of old girlfriends, all of whom are mothers, too.
This holiday was a reward for a moment of maternal sacrifice.
She took it because she has just quit her job. She loved her job but it required her to spend 22 weeks interstate each year.
Had she continued, she would have missed out on seeing our son start primary school.
That single fact made a hard decision simple. It was a decision she made for herself but it was a decision that was rooted in maternal love.
In her absence this week, and needing a hand juggling the kids at home because of working early shifts on breakfast radio, I did the precise thing I did since the very first word passed my lips as a oneyear-old. I called Mum.
“Having children requires that at times you must drop everything. It is still the women who do most of the dropping”
Without any hesitation, she moved in for the week so she could look after the boys in the mornings before I could return home after the radio show to resume my part of the parenting.
She bathed them at night and read to them while I cooked dinner for her and Dad, while I knocked up school lunches for the older kids, and prepared for my job the next day.
Mothers, and grandmothers, bring a seamlessness to our existence. It is for this reason that “mum” is almost invariably the first word we utter as children. “Mum” says reliance, assistance, comfort, support.
If it’s dumb stuff or a good time you’re after, be it a raspberry on the belly or a kick of the footy, by all means call out for dad. Call him, too, if you’re stuck at a party because your boyfriend’s too drunk to drive.
But when it’s that kneejerk, drop-everything, all-encompassing support you’re after, mum is the word, as it was for me a few weeks ago when I rang Mum for help this week.
To all the mums out there, and to all the mums in my life, including my late grandmothers, Happy Mother’s Day.
To pinch a line from Raymond Carver, we thank you for your unrelieved responsibility, your permanent distraction and, most of all, for your love.