Editor’s Note

Up and down and round and round we go — trying to keep fit in the garden has been a challenge, but as Ben Trovato wrote in a hilarious satire of the “lockdown police” spying on their neighbours, “nobody dare even mention that they miss being able to go for a jog for fear of being labelled a selfish, entitled mass murderer”. I get it. Last week we had a screaming-red, handwritten note delivered to our gate because one of our household (I’m not a snitch) had the audacity to ride their unicycle a few metres into the road to check its tyre. Who knows how long that neighbour had been waiting at her gate for a moment of impropriety on which to report. Trovato again: “The suburbs are infested with the kind of people who, had they been living in Berlin in 1938, might have been inclined to whisper, ‘Psst, Sturmscharführer, there are |Jews living in no 7’.”

But I digress. There are two things that’ve made running circles in the garden bearable. One is the privilege of having the garden itself. The other, the recommendation of a podcast, The Ballad of Billy Balls. It’s ostensibly about iO Tillett Wright’s investigation into the death of her mother’s lover, which predated her birth and yet defined their relationship, but it’s actually about their incredible bond of love. It’s the story of a relationship that’s weathered storms — a child growing up steeped in her mother’s grief and drug addiction-fuelled psychosis. In the end, it’s a story of the unconditional love and devotion of the narrator for her mother, despite her mother’s many flaws.

As Nora Fanshaw, the family law attorney in the film Marriage Story says (paraphrased here): “We can accept an imperfect dad …. the idea of a good father was only invented 30 years ago … mothers will always be held to a different, higher standard … It’s f**cked up but that’s the way it is.” Next Sunday we celebrate mothers — their faults and virtues — so remember the Golden Girls line: It’s not easy being a mother. If it were easy, fathers would do it.