‘My son told me plainly that now that we are older and retired and doing our retirement activities, we needn’t think that we can be a part of their doings—camping, going out for meals and so on. We can’t expect to do what we do as our well-earned retirement pastimes and then take part in what they do as well. I wanted to tell him that the retired years are all about spending extra time with our families, sharing family time. But he just shut me out. Apparently what I’m talking about isn’t acceptable to him,’ said Christine sadly.
‘I don’t intend to drag on in the world until I am utterly deserted and in so much emotional pain that I can’t cope. I find that notion dismal indeed, let me tell you,’ Robyn said. ‘One day when it gets too much I will simply take an overdose of everything I can lay my hands on. The day after they bury me they will have forgotten me. I wonder if they will be able to come to my funeral?
‘Probably have a previous commitment, as they say when I ask if they want to do something with me. Or just, “Busy,” laughed Claudia. ‘I’ll go into limbo and they will hardly remember me. Won’t even notice that there’s a gap in the family. I’m starting to feel old and it seems to be what old people do—look back to better times when their families were close and the younger generation was prepared to give them some love.’
For a while they concentrated on the generous helping of scones, jam and cream still sitting in much of its enticement before them, earnestly working their way through the last of the luscious morning tea until they could see the bottom of the floral plate.
‘While we have one another at least we’ll have some love,’ Annette murmured around her last scone. ‘You know, sometimes I remind myself of my mother when her Alzheimers was setting in, poor old love. She used to cry and say she wanted things back the way they were and of course that couldn’t happen. Poor darling didn’t have the capacity to converse the way she used to but was still at the stage where she could feel emotions and express them lucidly. We tried but we both knew the limitations. But that’s how I feel. I want things back the way they were when I was an integral part of the family and we talked and laughed. I felt worthwhile then, not used up.’
Soon Veronica, lost in thought, pondered,
‘My friend Helen told me this story, saying that she loved her son with all her heart. But one day when he had been married some years she heard his wife refer to him as having been “dragged up”. Sitting at the table having a meal, they all were, nice as you like until some subject of contention rose its ugly head. “While you were being dragged up,” the wife said right there in front of Helen who had reared him. She said nothing because it doesn’t pay to say anything. She said she’s simply not allowed to voice an opinion. The couple of times she did it has ended badly.’
‘Yes, I know what you mean,’ said Carmel. ‘I rang my son one night for some reason and I heard his wife saying in the background, “Oh, so we’ve even got a special little voice for mummy, have we?” I said nothing, either, just went on talking to him on the phone and pretended I didn’t hear. But it hurts and it all mounts up. And then you hardly ever get asked anywhere.’
‘They think any attempts to get close are emotional blackmail,’ Claudia put in. ‘My friend Barbara told me about how a few years ago she had a terrible haemorrhage and ended up in the ICU. Her husband rang the family and they all came to see her. She was lying there bloodless and weak with tubes of blood and saline going into her and a catheter coming out of her. She reached out to her son, asking him if they could be close again like they used to be. She said she was sick and afraid. He didn’t answer and of course things never changed. No further effort was made to see her once she had gone home from ICU.’
‘I’m hearing where you’re coming from, as they say these days,’ said Christine with a laugh. ‘I had a heart incident. The doctor called it a heart attack and I had to have surgery. This was before my husband passed away and he let my family know. And they all came but my son looked at me all the time they were there as if he loathed me.
‘I hadn’t asked him to come but obviously he felt obliged to although he would rather have been elsewhere doing other things. My heart’s been broken in reflection. I would never let him know under any circumstances should I be admitted to hospital again. It wasn’t even my doing. It was my husband who rang him.’
‘My dear old mother used to say, “Don’t run after them. Don’t ring them up and try to get in touch with them every weekend. Let them come to you.” But they won’t and they don’t. If I don’t make the effort to keep in touch they don’t have time or hardly ever do at best,’ said Paula sadly. ‘And I miss them so every day of my life. In actual fact, I could say my heart is broken, too, without any exaggeration.’
‘When my boy was young I thought we had a special bond. We seemed to. Instead of it getting stronger over the intervening years it’s gone completely now, somewhere after he hit his thirties. I daren’t even ring him up because he’s too bored with my conversation to talk to me and he plainly lets it be known. But I’ve heard him talking to his stepmother on the phone and it’s a different story with the reception she gets,’ said Robyn as she put her cup down and looked thoughtfully into space.
‘I occasionally get invited to their homes for a meal or to celebrate a special occasion. I love that time,’ said Carmel. ‘There’s one daughter I don’t see. She is not interested in me or my welfare at all. Never was, when I look back. Lived for herself, always. Twice divorced. Blonde hair peroxided straight out of a bottle, looking for all the world like straw. After the second divorce she became obsessed with dating and so on. Wouldn’t care if she never saw me again. She herself is round-shouldered and more then a little stooped these days when I see her at a wedding or whatever, so what does that say about me and my posture?
‘I said I’d come to see her over the last school holidays. She said she wouldn’t be home the first week and we couldn’t decide on a day in the second week. She never contacted me and school went back without a word from her. So many school holidays have gone by like this over the years since she left home. Par for the course, really,’ she mused sadly.
‘Strangely enough I seem to have accepted it now after decades. Maybe because I know I won’t have to worry about it all too much longer. I know she loved her grandmother and I know she loves her father. Me? Nah!’
‘What do you think went wrong there? asked Claudia of her friend.
‘I’m not sure,’ Carmel replied with all the sadness of the world in her eyes. ‘She was a premmie baby and I didn’t get to hold her until she was six weeks old. I’d say it may have been a lack of bonding or something similar. I certainly loved her to pieces but it seems we have no bond nor did we ever have one. At least she didn’t have any bonding feeling for me. She possibly bonded with one of the nurses who attended to her in the nursery for all those weeks.
‘We had a falling out. I thought we’d made friends and got past it but apparently not. Even her children are not prepared to be approached by me. I’ve tried over and over with no success. The latest was my granddaughter’s birthday. I rang and asked her to come and see me. She said she would. But when push came to shove and I tried to fix a date, the granddaughter wasn’t game to cross her mother and kept ignoring my attempts to contact her. Not replying to texts or voice messages. When I spoke to her outright it was apparent she was too afraid of her mother to go against her and see me. I was really, really sad. But my hide’s getting tougher as the years go by and she keeps on treating me like this.
‘My lovely little friend, Joy, says not to go there, not to allow myself to keep on getting hurt and that’s about what it amounts to. I simply have to cut my losses as they don’t return my calls or texts. At Christmas time I asked the younger generation of hers to have a Christmas gathering. None of them replied to my invitation so I guess I’m no more than a joke. It’s as if I’ve ceased to exist for them and I by trying to contact them I’m only giving them a laugh at my expense.’
Carmel
sat for a while pondering her previous statements feeling a little better for having spoken about her heavyheartedness.
‘That my children should drift so far away from me was unthinkable until a few years ago,’ she added. ‘But the family seemed to split apart when I was no longer able to have them all gather at my place for barbecue lunches. They would all come and have a jolly time, but I simply got beyond coping. My old legs couldn’t manage all the preparation time and the running inside and out and the cleaning up afterwards. I got too old and tired and there was no one to do the honors any more. So we ceased to gather as a family. They simply all stopped coming and it broke my heart. I know some of them gather at their father’s. They go there but they don’t come to me.’
‘I’m not allowed to voice an opinion,’ Robyn stated. ‘If I do I’m cut off. Guess I’m the most disposable commodity there is. Their friends, partners, children are all allowed a differing opinion but if I have one I’m cut off in a trice. This happens at the slightest sign of discord. They sign me off as I’m the easiest to get rid of. No empathy, no sympathy.’
Veronica spoke up quietly. ‘You talk about all the modern forms of communication and gadgetry and technology. I have a very dear friend, Delia, who I went to stay with recently. We were talking family and she has been estranged from her ex-daughter-in-law and grandchildren for years. Only grandchildren she’s got. She keeps a bit of an eye on their doings on Facebook and lo and behold, there was a picture of a lovely baby girl on her granddaughter’s page.
‘My poor dear friend was gobsmacked, to think that she had become a great-grandmother and she had not even been informed. The baby’s name was not mentioned. Even Delia’s son, the grandfather of the baby, hadn’t been told. I was devastated for her. How cruel is that?’
Claudia nodded in agreement. ‘Yes. Facebook has a lot to answer for. If there’s trouble in a family Facebook can make it so much worse. I used to have a bit of a look at my family’s doings and maybe even add a little comment but one by one they blocked me. So I wouldn’t even lower myself to try to see what they’re doing now if that’s the way they feel.’
Christine said, ‘I was reading a book the other day that quoted Plutarch as saying, “Love begets love”. That hurt me deeply as I haven’t found that to be the case at all. Yet I firmly believed that it was so once upon a time.’
Annette spoke up again after wiping tears from her eyes. ‘I adored my family and couldn’t wait to be a mother. I swore all my life that my family were the most important thing in the world to me. People come and go, strangers come and go, but your family is always your family, forever and ever. I told them that, always,’ she recalled.
‘But there, I mustn’t resort to waterworks,’ she added with a laugh. ‘My daughter, Carrie, says they don’t mean to be hurtful by not contacting me. “It’s just that we never think about you,” she tells me. Gratifying, hey? So this is what it all comes down to.
‘I wanted nothing more than to be close to them, to watch their children grow and be a part of all that. Now their children are all grown and both generations of them go to great lengths to keep me from knowing what’s going on in their lives in case I ask to be a part of it, like you’ve all said in one way or another, my dears.
‘My first husband, George, made me have an abortion with my fifth pregnancy, otherwise he would have thrown the children and me out onto the street. I never forgave him for it,’ said Annette, opening an old and aching wound, ‘But I guess it didn’t really matter much in the long run. That child would just have treated me as the others do now that they are well and truly grown up. Who knows? Maybe it would have been the one who gave me some warmth and comfort in my old age?’
Annette had asked the unanswerable question, her lips pursed in concentration.
The friends all nodded their heads and smiled. Who was to know how children would grow up and treat their parents? They had all been loving mothers but their outcomes differed widely from many other women they knew whose children and grandchildren kept in touch regularly.
Christine spoke slowly, as if telling someone else’s story.
‘My daughter used to tell me until not so long ago that there would always be a place for me at her home, they would always be available to me. Christmas Day was coming up and I like to have a meal with whoever of my family is available as I’m not capable of cooking for the whole crowd any more. I knew she and her husband are having a big family Christmas Dinner there for his family.
‘So I said to Erin, “What about me? When do I come?” and she replied, “I don’t know. We’re having the other side.” There was no mention made of my coming at any time. What about this place that was always supposed to be there for me? Finally I was asked, but I was terribly hurt.
‘The place that was supposed to be there for me is never mentioned any more.’ Christine smiled, ‘Superfluous now,’ she finished.
‘I had to have stents put in my coronary artery and went to stay with my daughter who was in the city at that time,’ said Carmel. ‘My husband and I arrived a few days before my procedure was to take place as Vivian’s son was in hospital and I’d wanted to be of comfort to her but she didn’t want or need such comfort as I had to offer. She was so irritable and hostile with me that I spent the first night in tears before going in to hospital to have the procedure done in a day or so. By that time she had warmed to me slightly. I hadn’t needed to come down until the day but I thought to be of some comfort to her. She didn’t need or want it, though.
‘Then when I’d had the stents in I came straight home to my house a hundred miles from the hospital the next day after having the procedure because I was just too uncomfortable to go back there, she was so unwelcoming. I’m sure she never even noticed how she hurt me or how awful she’d been to me. That was her right as a hostess, I guess.
‘Vivian and her family, also my son and his family who were in the city that day never came near me in the hospital when I had the stents in. I felt I simply had no choice but to come home to Dawson even though I was supposed to stay close to the hospital for days in case of bleeding.
‘I was unwelcome and hightailed it out of there as soon as I could get the rubber on the road. These things are often not stated aloud but are implied well enough so that you know what the truth of the matter is, that you’re not wanted.
‘Thank God I can say my mother was never unwelcome in my house or my car or any function or any part of my life. I would never have invited her to stay or to be all day in a car with me or at a party and then made her feel uncomfortable and in the way.’ Christine was a thin, frail old woman with all the life worn out of her by her grumpy, gloomy old husband who had passed away some years previously. He had made a point of always trying to come between Christine and her mother but had never succeeded. It often seemed to Christine that this had been his mission in life and when her mother had passed away he had died not long after, his life plan apparently thwarted.
‘I know what you mean, dear. I call it the Policy of Exclusion,’ Paula chimed in. ‘Having lived out my allotted span, I’ve seen this behavior in action many times. Women, not only family but also so-called friends think this a tricky way of showing their priorities. They ask you to come to their house or in their car or whatever the occasion calls for.
‘But then they pointedly ignore you and when someone else who they prefer comes along they make a flying dive for them, hug and kiss and welcome them, exclaim all over them and openly flout their joy at finding this wonderful person to be still alive in the universe, hoping you’ll notice that you don’t measure up to the importance of this other person. And you do notice, believe me you do. All this after they’ve spent hours with their nose in the air where you’re concerned. They’re giving you a message without saying a word and thinking you’re too stupid to know you’re being put on the periphery.’
The group of friends chortled loudly, all having experienced these lessons in being snubbed at some stage in their long lives.
‘No wonder the Bible says life is supposed to be three score years and ten,’ added Veronica. ‘Enough, that’s enough. I don’t really want to die but I don’t really want to live either. I have little or nothing to live for. The future is only more of the present and the novelty has worn off that, I can tell you.’ Her voice was acidic, edged with hurt. ‘I have a great hollowness inside me that will never go away now, I think.’
‘But then I’ve always taken things too seriously and let them hurt me too much. When I had my first boyfriend one hundred years ago, we went together for two and a half years, on and off—mostly on. I tried to be a what was classed as a decent girl and not get into trouble and disgrace my parents.
‘However, little did I realize that this boy was only with me until he got to go the full nine yards . As soon as that happened, he put his hat over it and ran, as the old people used to say. Told me he’d be back. You couldn’t see him for dust. Put his tail between his legs and ran in case I should happen to expect any commitment or find myself in the pudding club,’ she laughed.
‘I often think about him. What a fool I was to love him when he was tearing around behind my back trying to win as many hearts as possible and then come back to me to have a conquest, while I was eating my heart out loving him. Before you could say “Jack Robinson” he was living with another girl. What a muggins I was as a young woman!’
‘My grandmother used to say “Don’t turn over rocks if you aren’t prepared to see the fearful creatures that live beneath them.” I try to leave the rocks in place but sometimes they rise up of their own volition and show me their unpleasant underbelly,’ Robyn told her friends as she began to load her wheeler-walker to return to the bus depot. ‘Underbelly of a rock, hey? Is that what’s called a hard place?’
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