Back in the Age with a Mother's Day piece

On Mothers’ Day I ponder the fact that it took becoming a mother, 27 years ago, to teach me about God’s love.

I have always had trouble believing that God isn’t at worst angry, at best disappointed in me. I find it excruciatingly difficult to accept that God loves me no matter what.

There are all sorts of reasons for this; one of them the fact that when I was growing up, God was generally referred to in metaphors that were not only male, but intimidating.

‘Lord’, ‘King’ and ‘Judge’ were three of the favourites. And even the more benign ‘Father’ wasn’t always helpful for a generation where even the good dads weren’t around much.

As a young woman who was either pregnant or breastfeeding for almost ten years solid, I was thrilled to discover some feminine images of God, even in the ancient, fiercely patriarchal Bible. You have to really go looking for these, but the fact that they are there at all is remarkable.

One of the most beautiful is Isaiah 49, verse 15. ‘Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.’ There was no way I was going to forget my kids. And God loved me, and all of us, more than this.

Among other Biblical images was this one from Acts 17, verse 28 that I dwelled upon through four pregnancies. ‘”For in God we live and move and have our being,” as even some of your own poets have said. “For we too are his offspring.”’ 

That description is surely that of a foetus in the womb – surrounded, protected, nurtured and supported by its mother, whether or not it knows it.

Or from Psalm 131: ‘But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.’

Then there are the words ascribed to Jesus in Matthew 23, verse 37. ‘”Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.”’

One Sunday I sat in church, breastfeeding my third baby as communion was offered to me with the words, ‘This is my body, broken for you.’ I was struck by the fact that my baby was feeding on me, and in a mysterious way, I was feeding on Christ. 

In the communion service we talk of broken body and shed blood that gives life – something very familiar to any woman who has given birth.

Weaving these images of God through my life as a mother over quarter of a century, I begin to learn, little by little, that God loves me, and everybody, better than the best parent.

Life lessons

Over the last month, my life has been dominated by work. The big conference – 400 people, five days – that I event manage every 18 months is almost upon us and my head is full of a million things both big and small that must be remembered and done. It’s impossible to do this task perfectly; the best I can hope for is that the punters don’t realise how close to the wind we are sailing a lot of the time, how my little duck feet are scrabbling, wild and panicky, while I probably look calm and organised and even, mostly, smiling.

This last week I have worked long hours and have regularly become completely overwhelmed by what needs to be completed before an utterly inflexible and very public deadline. At times I am so beset by all there is to do that I become immobilised and do nothing, or flit from task to task, never quite completing anything, scatter-brained and ineffective. One night I came home in tears of exhaustion and self-pity. The next ten days feel like a long dark tunnel that I will never get through.

This past week I have had to re-learn several things.

One: at times like these I realise I’m completely unambitious in terms of my day job. I never want to have one of those all-absorbing careers that you take home and eat, sleep and breathe. Living like that for a few weeks every 18 months is fine, but that’s enough. I am grateful to have a day job that I enjoy and that, although it takes the lion’s share of my time, doesn’t take over my head.

Two: that wisdom that grown-ups are meant to know and that despite my five and a half decades, I forget again and again – that this too shall pass. One way or another, in ten days this will all be over and my life will open out again with that delicious sense of spacious time I associate with the ending of exams. And, given past experience, the conference itself is unlikely to be an unmitigated disaster.

Most importantly, the lesson of perspective. Friday’s paper carried the horrific story of hundreds of workers killed in Bangladesh when their crumbling factory collapsed. These victims had baulked at entering the dangerous building and had been forced to do so with threats and even violence.

Not only do I have a job that won’t kill me, life is full of other wonders too. The various vines that swamp our back verandah are every autumn shade from lemon to gold to burnt orange to burgundy and shiraz. Walk in our front door and your eye is drawn down the long passageway straight to the French doors framing this fiery wonder. It is quite breath-takingly beautiful. Last night we went to a 49^th birthday party that turned out to be the surprise wedding of two dear friends. And yesterday we had the rare occurrence of four of our six kids-and-partners around our meal table. Life's good.

I love a good frock

‘It must be getting cold,’ half a dozen of my colleagues commented when they saw me last week. ‘Clare’s got her legs covered.’ True enough. For six months of the year, all I wear is shorts at home, and at work, apart from the occasional skirt, it’s frocks all the way.

After I threw out half my clothes recently my husband took pity on me and, together with our older daughter, invested in a birthday gift of two very fine frocks from a shop I had often walked past wistfully and never dared to enter. I was reminded all over again of why I love this garment.

In summer, nothing is as cool (in both senses of the word) as a frock. There’s always something special about frocks, something that says fun, even if it’s a daggy old raggy old thing. 

For years, my frock of choice, especially for a working day, has been a classic shift – straight up and down which suited a straight up and down shape. I’ve had a silvery grey Country Road shift that I got second hand fifteen years ago, and I still dust it off every spring. One favourite navy linen shift that I found at an op shop lasted about a decade until it rotted and ripped at the back, one hot, sweaty day. Just as well it was lined.

I’ve never been one for your classic fifties-style shirt-waister, although they can look great and remind me of mum who looked elegant in such garments. I’m not averse to a floral occasionally, and I’ve recently got into those wonderful dresses that are extendable by having a tie at the back.

As a kid, my sister and I mostly wore hand-me-downs from other missionary kids and things mum made us which was fine until I went to boarding school when I was seven. There, apart from a bunch of locals who were daygirls, most of our peers were extremely wealthy, and got about in the coolest gear. We lived alongside stunning Parsi girls from Bombay, lustrous dark-haired beauties from Madras and, among others, the twin daughters of Oberoi who started the hotel chain.

It was the second half of the sixties and they would appear nonchalantly in mini skirts or bell-bottoms, with Jackie Onassis sunnies and, what made me most envious of all, what we used to call ‘Go-go watches’ – big, colourful time pieces with wide straps and bright colours, with outsize faces that were sometimes the shape of a flower. It was like being in San Francisco in the summer of love and being the only one in a tweed skirt and twin set and a lady like little wristwatch. It was torment. 

There was an occasion, and only one, however, when I turned heads, and I’ve never forgotten it. For craft one term we did dress making, and I created (sewing by hand, the only sewing machine in the school was an old treadle Singer that belonged to the school tailor) what felt like the height of sophistication – an ‘A-line’ dress that was the bright pink and hot yellow of the go-go watches I coveted so desperately. My frock was a sixties swirl of these colours, daringly short with wide sleeves. That week, when I changed out of my uniform every evening and donned my new creation, I garnered more compliments than I’d ever had in my life.

I remember thinking to myself – I was all of eleven – that it was almost worth living in the dull chrysalis of daggy missionary-kid gear for five years, just to get that much reaction when the butterfly me finally emerged. 

School in Australia was more of the same – on a scholarship at a private school alongside rich girls with up to the minute everything sartorial. But you get creative if you love clothes and don’t have much money. I and all our kids are op shop geniuses. You develop a kind of sixth sense for sales and for cheaper end department stores that have some surprisingly good stuff. 

I seldom buy clothes in what I think of as ‘real shops’ – shops that aren’t either second-hand or Target. But I am more than happy to accept a gift from a shop that is not only real, but even well, classy. 

My two birthday frocks are really a bit too good to wear to work, but I did anyway, to show them off. It was worth it too – it took me back to that wonderful episode when I was eleven and swanned around for an entire week in an A-line frock of bright pink and yellow.

 

The emptying nest

We moved our youngest out of home on a perfect Melbourne autumn day, the last of daylight saving. She’s 19 and had been looking for somewhere for ages – happy enough with us and we with her, but desperate to take the next step of learning to live independently. It was time, and at last it all came together, lack of rental history notwithstanding: a suitable ‘town house’ and two compatible mates.

I’ve not often thought of seventies buildings as attractive, but this one works. Sure, there’s a lot of brown brick, but there’s also good use of light, well-planned spaces, and for our girl (lucky enough to move out with two guys, who don’t seem to care where they sleep) the biggest bedroom with her own balcony looking through the branches of a tree to the quiet street beyond.

After her first night there, we arrived at the door fresh from the supermarket, bearing gifts: a plastic laundry basket laden with cleaning tools and products – stuff for washing clothes and toilets and dishes and floors, Panadol and band-aids, tomato sauce and apples and green tea bags and a big bright coffee mug, along with admonitions that the cleaning gear was not for the exclusive use of the only female in the establishment.

Over the next few days, I watched in amazement as our grotty teenager with the room where we haven’t seen the carpet in years, set up a home. Her bedroom was instantly pretty with artfully placed books and fairy lights and photos. The bathroom gleamed, the kitchen was homey with colourful canisters and candles and lamps, cushions and a low table, the little smoking area in the back courtyard was charming with its folding chairs and table made of milk crates.

Providentially, it was hard rubbish collection in the City of Moreland the week she moved out, and the kids set up their place largely courtesy of other people’s rubbish. A dated but perfectly serviceable sofa and two arm chairs, a brand new mop I found on our street, a complete seventies brown and orange dinner set from the mum of a friend. All week I scoured the pavements for chucked out milk crates with which, I’ve learned, you can make a bed base or a set of drawers.

One of the things I’ve most enjoyed about parenting grown kids is watching them move out and set up for themselves. I love visiting them on their territory, seeing how they arrange things and manage their lives, how they have somehow emerged from our did-our-best parenting into decent human beings who are very much themselves. 

Setting our girl up and sharing her excitement, also takes me back to the thrill of moving out of home ourselves. My bloke and I moved out of home to get married, so there was the added frisson of romance (we were kids of the seventies, we didn’t live together first) to the whole heady mix of new independence and setting up a nest. Wedding presents meant something back then, they were a dire necessity; we had nothing. We moved into our seriously ugly flat with a double mattress, a card table, some posters for the walls and a gorgeous old camphorwood chest that is still one of my favourite possessions. 

The flat was as ordinary as they come, but we thought we were Christmas. Like our daughter, we revelled in being grown-up, in paying rent and bills and having to fork up for every morsel on our card table, every roll of toilet paper.

My husband has been a lot more emotional than me about the emptying nest – he’s always been a big softie. Part of the thrill of moving kids out for me is the sheer revelling in more physical and psychological space, less chores to do, more time to read and write and be still and silent.

That’s part of the story. But the day after she moved, when we called round to drop off some stuff, I simply had to walk back to our house, timing exactly how long it took. Twenty-seven minutes. Perfect: close enough to drop by often, far enough to have our own space.

Much as I love this next stage of having more time and energy for the things other than mothering that I feel deeply called to, if I’m honest, I would like all my kids to move out to a maximum of 2.7 ks from our place. Perhaps her siblings, who have moved to Beechworth, London and the Isle of Mull could take note.

Take me to the river

The highlight of our Easter camping (itself a highlight of my year) is swimming in the remoter stretches of the Mitchell River. Our campsite is a couple of hundred yards from the water, and I end up on the beach by myself as often as not – just the river and me.

I shuck my clothes off and plunge in, there’s a minute of breath-gasping chill, and then it’s bliss for however long I choose to stay.

At first I swim hard upstream, making little headway against the current, till the shock of the cold has worn off. Then I strike over to the far bank and nose around there for a bit, before cruising back down with the flow and starting all over again, the water all around me like cool, liquid silk. 

We first exist surrounded by fluid in the womb, so it’s natural that we feel at home in that element. And it’s small wonder that rivers have always been special. They can deal death, but mostly they are life giving; throughout human history, settlements have been built along them, and they feature prominently in mythology and religion.

For the ancient Greeks, the River Styx formed the boundary between earth and Hades. In the country where I was born, bathing in the Ganges guarantees instant salvation, and liberation from the endless round of re-birth. 

In the Christian story, John baptised people in the Jordan River; even Jesus requested this rite of immersion representing repentance. Numerous soul-stirring gospel songs tell of crossing the river Jordan (death) to get to eternal life on the other side.

River Jordan is chilly and cold, hallelujah

Chills the body but not the soul, hallelujah.

The Jordan features in the Hebrew Scriptures with the wonderful story of Naaman  - a powerful military commander of the King of Syria, who suffered from leprosy. His wife’s Jewish slave girl said that his disease could be cured if he would just visit a prophet in her home country. When he did, the prophet Elisha told him he would be healed if he bathed seven times in the Jordan. The mighty Naaman was disdainful about this muddy creek – don’t we have gorgeous wide, glistening rivers at home? His servants told him to get over himself and just do what the man said and when he emerged from the murky waters ‘his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child’, the story goes.

The Mitchell this year is somewhat Jordanesque. There has been recent rain and the water looks like strong milky tea. We lug it up to the campsite in buckets and, after it has sat for a while, a sludge of mud lines the bottom and, cavalierly, several of us drink from the top, ending up with crook tummies on our last day. 

Swimming in a bush river is when I have the most powerful sense of being one with the universe. I move at the river’s pace, silently. I am deeply embedded in the bush, but without any crashing around, as happens when I am walking. I see the duck, the water monitor, the swiftly flickering fish. The escarpment on the opposite bank, out of whose rock trees grow, looks benignly down on me. The tops of the hills are bathed in sunlight long before the river itself is – early morning there is whispy mist rising eerily off the water. 

For Hindus, moving water is considered purifying, as it is believed to both absorb and remove impurities. When I swim in a wild river, rather than moral impurities, the river seems to carry my troubles and anxieties away, buoying me up, reminding me of the eternal and surrounding me with a sense of my small, grateful place in the scheme of things.