Jacob and Ethan, Julia and Sarah

Jacob and Ethan, Sarah and Julia

Ethan is three months old now.  The pure mystery of early babyhood is giving way  to the sparkle of sociability, easily elicited and radiant smiles.  A silly adult tongue poked out, a bit of tongue clicking and he comes to the party with a beam of delight.  Conversely he shoots looks of piercing blue reproach when he’s hungry or inexplicably uncomfortable.  He belongs to this world now and the shades of where he was before he came to us seem to have lifted.  He has become a good baby with no more wild unreasonable crying.

         It has taken me a while to feel close to my second grandson, perhaps because he came to us with so much less trouble.  His birth was well managed and left his mother ready and able to pull him into her maternal orbit.  Jacob, on the other hand was hauled into the world by forceps after a long labour.  I shall never forget the blind wonder that filled me when  I saw him looking with black eyes at Ruth’s pale and exhausted face.  He looked wise and exceptional and I felt oddly subordinate to him.  Ethan, on the other hand, seemed to slip into his role quite quickly and be just quintessentially baby and he had his mother’s blue eyes as well. Until quite recently my love for him was simply that of an experienced grandmother who knew all about babies.  And then things changed even though nothing really happened.

         I went to lunch at Mungo and Ruth’s house this Sunday.   

Ethan was in his baby bouncer and Jacob was loving him in his own ferocious way, lunging at him, squashing his little cheeks until the smiles collapsed into indignation and Ethan began to cry.

“He’s not liking it Jacob.  Be gentle”  His mother and I reproach in chorus.

Other humorous suggestions from Jacob like “Let’s put the baby in the stinky rubbish bin”  have made us all wary of ever leaving the pair alone together at this point in their  relationship.

 I was feeling very low on Sunday, having just returned from visiting mum in England again. Jetlag was part of it but mostly I was wrestling with grief  at mum becoming simpler, without much memory and with impulses that belong in early childhood.  The journey home to Australia was imbued with unholy joy at getting away from having to witness it all and guilt at being so relieved to leave the mother who still loved me, but in such a different way

There is always a measure of guilt too, at leaving my sister Sarah to do all the visiting when I’m gone.  Curiously though, she doesn’t have the difficulty that I do in dealing with mum’s changed state of mind.  She, maybe rightly, sees mum’s diminishing intellect as a natural way to bow out of life and nothing to be grieved over.

“And she’s much nicer to me now.” Sarah says.  Certainly Mum and Sarah have a rather jolly combative time when they are together these days.

“What are you doing Sarah?

“Nothing” she says as she abducts mum’s limp old bras from the cupboard and substitutes nice new ones from Marks and Spencers.

“You’re doing something”

“Well, mum” Sarah has decided to come clean, “Look at these new bras.  Really pretty.  Pretty pink” she puts on a speaking to a child voice.

“Yes, it’s a nice pink” concedes mum “And what’s that?”

“It’s your old one. It’s not comfortable any more” She drops the grey undergarment in the bin.

“You can’t do that!”  There’s a bit of a ritual bicker but mum forgets and it’s all OK.

Sarah seems to grow in stature from her victories over our little parent whereas I feel, fool that I am, a childish sense of abandonment belonging more properly to a funeral.  

I try, when I’m on my own with mum to catch the fragments of the person I once knew and I often ask

“What is it like to be in your head now?”  She tries to tell me.

“Its uneasy” she said one time.  I find my instinctive need to empathise takes me on strange journeys.  I don’t know if it’s really like this in an amnesiac mind but it seems like outer space with debris floating about.

“Can you tell me something?” she says after we’ve been sitting in companionable silence for a while.

“Yes-“ I prepare for an emotionally challenging question.

“What exactly is Passover?”

I’ve brought my Ipad with me and it is a godsend with its huge branching store of knowledge and rubbish too.  It’s just what we need but every time I open it I need to try and explain what it is.

“What’s that?”

“It’s like an encyclopaedia”

“How does it know everything?”

“It’s all in the atmosphere and it pulls the information out – like a radio if you think about it – it pulls the noise out of somewhere”

Together we ponder on the miracle of my Ipad and I learn more about Passover and its rituals than I ever would have done were it not for mum’s question and Wikipaedia.

Another day

“What’s that truly awful song.  It’s an awful song”

I reach for the Ipad.  She says musingly

“Little man you’ve had a busy day”

“It does sound awful” I agree.

It seems unlikely but I type the words in and to my amazement it’s a Paul Robeson song and mawkish beyond belief. It went on…”someone stole your kiddycar away”

We move on to his more famous songs “Swing low sweet chariot” and “Nobody knows the trouble I see”

“That one always seems a bit silly” says mum.

Another day she’s restless and angry

“I want to hear about something really nasty” she says.  I think its probably bath day and the chivvying has put her in a bad mood.  Ian Brady, the child murderer has been in the news this week.  He wants to be moved from a psychiatric hospital to prison where he hopes he can starve himself to death more easily.  I look up Ian Brady and read it all to her.  We move on to  Jack the Ripper and the black and white photos of all the people who might have been him.  I ask mum what it is about real life murders that has always fascinated her.

“It’s so extreme” she says “It’s the most extreme behaviour there is.”

A carer comes in then with cups of tea and little scones with jam and I am relieved to be back in the less extreme world of the care home.  I leave soon after and go back to my B and B.  I know I should get something proper to eat but I can’t summon the energy.  After a day with Mum surfing the space of her mind the reality of Waitroses seems dwarfish and pedestrian. I want minimal human contact.  Fortunately husband Grant has sent me a bottle of gin in a spirit of supportiveness.  I mix it with some pink grapefruit juice I have and settle in to munch on a chunk of cheese until my own mind blurs enough to let me sleep.

We had many beautiful, batty afternoons enhanced by the flowers that bloom outside Mum’s window – huge red poppies and lanky foxgloves, plump English roses.  While I longed for wattles and tough gum trees I couldn’t help but be newly amazed by these flowers from my birth country.

I have always maintained that amnesia is catching.  Maybe it is a consequence of rapport.  Mum has for many years  been maddened by not being able to remember the names of actors.

“What is his name? And I loved him so much.”

I know who she’s seeking but I too have lost the name.

 “It’ll come back” I say and it often does, usually to her first.

Similarly, after a while, mum’s uncoordinated thoughts and occasional hair raising lack of inhibition crept into my way of being too.  I began to savour the joy of her childish impulses instead of cringing at them.  We get dropped off at the local pub one day and there’s a wait before lunch can be served.  Mum is impatient but stimulated by the different environment in which people are absorbed in their own conversations despite being in her presence.  She rarely leaves her room in the care home and if someone comes in she is necessarily the focus of attention.

“When I am in a place like this with lots of people,” she says “I feel like standing on a chair and singing a song”

“What song?” I ask.

“How much is that doggy in the window”.  I go to the loo and leave her for enough of a minute to forget the idea but the thought of disturbing the civilised ambience of  the country pub is not without its charm.  All those exclusive groups of people joking together.

“A loud laugh betrays an empty mind” pronounces mum loudly and immediately produces somberness around the bar and a glower from the landlord.

“Are those what you call skin tight jeans?” A girl looks round at us in an unfriendly way.

“That man’s shorts are much too short”

“Mum stop making personal remarks” I say

“But they are the best sort.” She laughs wickedly.

Lunch comes and we retreat soon after.

The closer I got to mum during those weeks the further I found myself from ordinary people.  Once, being tired after my day with mum I lay down on the grass in front of the care home to wait for a taxi.

“I’ll have a little nap in the sun” I thought. An anxious woman came up to me and asked if I was all right and suddenly I realized how odd it must have seemed for me, pushing seventy myself, to be curled up alone on the grass in front of an old people’s home.  Like mum I was letting my impulses have free reign. It is a curiously liberating feeling to do what comes naturally without any thought of appearances.  Just once more I indulged myself on the way back to Australia.  It was at Perth airport.  It had already been a trying morning and I was randomly selected for a body scan. I became my mother, outraged and uncomprehending of this ridiculous demand for cooperation – lift arms, spread legs etc.  I had a tantrum.

“I’ll strip naked if you like” I said to the aimiable security man. “And I’m never coming to Perth again”

“Can I help you with that?” he asked, as I struggled without dignity to get my backpack on again.

“That’s the first nice thing anyone has said to me today”  Just as with mum, the quicksilver tantrum had slipped off down a drain somewhere and I went on my way slightly appalled at myself.

         When I finally got home I rang sister Sarah, thinking to thank her for all the stuff she’d done for me.  Actually I was missing her.  We’d been together so much and though I didn’t realise it, I wanted more of her than just to accept my thanks.     Some demon of depression made me say

“Can I ask you something and will you answer me honestly?”

“Yes” said Sarah who believes honesty is a virtue.

“Were you relieved when I left?

Of course I wanted her to say no and she missed me and so on but the tangle of love that is being sisters is not like cotton wool, more like raw fleece full of barbs and spikes and it doesn’t do to clutch it to your bosom as I was trying to do.

“I did my best” said Sarah.

And so we quarreled on the phone.  We said things we shouldn’t have said and she told me how she’d spent her whole life being warned not to upset me, pinch my boyfriends and so on.  The curdle of shame and anger that I felt would have made a pig sick.

I look at fierce Jacob and little complacent blue-eyed Ethan and I can see that it’s not easy for Jacob even now and never mind later on.  I ask him

“Is it better to be a big boy or a baby”

Without hesitation he says “A baby”

Quite suddenly I’m sorry I was so horrible to Sarah on the phone.   I say to Jacob

“You know he won’t always be a baby.  One day he will be as big as you and he may be the best friend you will ever have.”

And when it’s morning again in England I think I’ll get on the phone to Sarah.

I look at Ethan and a little private recognition begins to sprout in me.  He’s just like I had been and I love him for being the second one too.  He creeps into my heart.  I pick him up and sling him on my shoulder as one does and am so happy to have two grandsons, one big one small, one brown eyed and one blue.