In Her Mothers' Shoes

by Felicity Price

  If only it had been different, if only her mother was vibrant, like Mum. Even though she was twenty years her senior, Mum could run rings around her mother. Mum would say carpe diem, seize the day, and she’d live each day as if it were all that mattered, rushing around in her little red Honda Civic looking after Dad, after the dreaded Great Aunt Doris before she’d died, after any sick or lonely soul she knew. But Kate didn’t think Liz had carpe-d diem for some time. How she ever got herself over to London was beyond imagination.

  Having thought this day would bring her face to face with her identity, she found instead she had even less idea who she was. She’d thought meeting her mother would provide the answer. But instead it raised the same question: who was she? She knew one thing for sure: she might bear physical similarities to her mother but their personalities were dead opposite. Her quiet, shy, unassuming mother, who refused to allow herself any emotion, who lived her life through her family but wanted to deny her first daughter’s existence: where did Kate fit in with that?

  She hadn’t expected this. She’d expected … what? Fireworks and starshells; resonance and recognition: to find someone she looked just like, someone who thought like her. There was an undoubted physical resemblance, even if Liz didn’t see it. But their way of thinking was worlds apart. If their genes were the same, their spirit was quite different.

  What about Mum? In many ways, Kate felt she was more like her. Not just the blue eyes and brown hair – the only physical similarities they shared – it was more than that. She had the same seize-the-day impatience to be getting on with things, to have lots of friends and experience as many cultural and social events as she could fit in, to be determined to make a difference and be stubborn if anyone tried to stop her.

  Perhaps she was an amalgam of both her mothers? Nature and nurture: a product of both.

  But the harsh reality was that Liz didn’t want to acknowledge even a physical resemblance. What similarity Kate had found had been brushed away; she was beginning to doubt if it had been there at all.

  Kate walked into town and wandered round the shops in a desultory way, not in the mood to buy anything but with nothing better to do than try something on. But nothing seemed to fit, everything looked wrong. The trousers made her bum look big; the shoes made her feet look like paddles; the earrings were too dangly; the lipstick drained colour from her face.

  Reaching the end of Lambton Quay, she crossed the road to where her father had been hit by a taxi forty-eight years ago, just before he got married: the same government buildings, probably the same busy traffic – such an innocuous stretch of road, but so dangerous. And so damaging for Dad. The doctors had said, years after his diagnosis when more was known, that the shortening of his left leg by an inch that day, its failure to heal, followed by poor conditions in the tropics when he’d been stationed in New Caledonia during the War, would most probably have brought on multiple sclerosis.

  She stood for a few moments beside a bus shelter and watched the traffic whizz by. Someone was trying to cross the road, jaywalking, ignoring the crossing lights. She wanted to call out, warn them of the inherent risk this spot held. But in an instant, they were across and the traffic continued to roar past, erasing the footsteps from the road.

  Crossing carefully at the lights, she climbed the hill to Parliament Buildings to see if her friend Vanessa in the Minister of Tourism’s office had time for a coffee. But she was in a meeting.

  Suddenly she felt very tired. James had woken her at five in the morning wanting a feed and had then refused to settle, so there’d been no more sleep. She’d expressed more milk to join the store in the freezer and got ready for the day. Now she wanted nothing more than to get home to David and the kids, tell him all about her day over dinner, fall into bed and go to sleep.

  Except what was there to tell? Would she be honest and tell the truth: that her mother was a bit dull, that there’d been no connection, no great burst of emotion or mother-daughter bonding? That it felt like a second rejection? Or would she maintain the myth? The myth she’d clung to since she was a teenager, the myth that her mother was someone special, someone to be celebrated.

  The biggest lie she’d ever told was that her mother - her birth mother – was German royalty, a countess, a Hapsburg princess. She was thirteen; in all other ways honest, forthright and generally regarded as a good girl. She always had been; she had to live up to her status of being special, the chosen one. With such a reputation, she thought she’d get away with it.

  What on earth had she been trying to prove?

  She knew she wasn’t the only angst-ridden, pre-pubescent girl wanting to distance herself from her mother, wishing she came from a family far away, a family connected to the world of glamour, wealth and fame, a family removed from her own ordinary, humdrum, small-town existence.

  But German?

  She blamed it on Hardy Kruger. At thirteen, he was her heart-throb. Square chin softened by a dimple, with slicked-back blond hair and eyes unbelievably blue, he was the archetypal Aryan. Drafted into the German army during the War, his film career cast him many times as the archetypal Aryan soldier, inducing her to become a temporary war-movie aficionado – as long as Hardy Kruger was in the movie, she’d see it. But it was his starring role in Howard Hawks film Hatari! with John Wayne that spurred her on to join New Zealand’s Hardy Kruger fan club.

  She’d seen that movie eleven times. She’d entered all the colouring competitions, cut his photo out of all the magazines she could find, even nicked a poster from one of the movie theatres and hung it on the wall directly beside her bed. Every night as she lay there waiting for sleep, she’d been helpless under the unmoving gaze of those over-enlarged grainy eyes.

  So when Vicki-Jane had asked, ‘Who is your real mother then?’ the answer was already fully formed.

  They’d been talking about mothers. And because Kate had rowed with her mother that morning about whether she’d be allowed to stay the night at Vicki-Jane’s and because her mother had won, Kate was in need of revenge.

  ‘She’s so Victorian,’ Kate had said. ‘She’s no idea how things have changed.’

  ‘She never lets you stay out late.’

  ‘She thinks it’s late.’

  ‘What, ten o’clock? That’s not late.’ Vicki-Jane wasn’t a face-value kind of friend. She liked to probe, to stir things up.

  ‘I know. She just doesn’t get it. I tell her everyone else is allowed out. It’s so archaic that I’m not allowed to stay the night.’

  ‘Maybe she knows you better than you think?’ Vicki-Jane’s eyes twinkled with amusement.

  ‘How could she? Anyway, she’s not my real mother.’

  There was a moment’s stunned silence.

  ‘What?’ she said eventually. ‘Are you adopted?’

  Kate nodded.

  ‘I never knew that. I always thought your mother was, you know, your real mother. She looks so like you – brown hair, blue eyes.’

  Kate winced. Whenever anyone said that, it made her mad. As if matching a couple of physical traits could make you belong.

  ‘Mum says that’s because they selected babies as close to their adoptive parents as possible in those days, so they’d fit right in.’

  Fit right in. She’d been chosen because she had the same colouring, but she’d never felt that fit.

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘That I was adopted? Oh, as long as I can remember. Mum and Dad said they told me as soon as I was old enough to understand.’

  ‘And did you ever wonder where you came from?’

  ‘I have for years.’

  The distinctive apricot and sea-green coloured cover of The Chosen Baby book her parents used to read to her at bedtime every night flashed before her eyes. She could see it quite clearly, the toddler clambering across the bars of his cot, puffy white clouds in the background, his eyes searching distant skies for happy-ever-after. And inside, the same green and pink toddler standing in a cot, arms rais
ed, being picked up by a beautiful woman with dark hair and an apricotty-pink face. Behind her was a handsome young man of similar hue. Why were the colours so garish? Perhaps the paintbox of time had duo-toned the idealised illustration of the perfect family. But all along, she’d known she was the green and apricotty-pink child in the cot; all along she’d known how lucky she was to have been chosen by her Mum and Dad to live with them and her grandparents in a big house with stairs to climb and lots of toys to play with. All along, she’d accepted that was where she came from – that she was chosen out of a book.

  ‘So did they tell you about your mother?’

  ‘No. But I met her once.’

  ‘You met her? Really? What was she like?’

  ‘Very pretty. You know, blue-eyed like me, but blonde. She was German.’ Kate was on a roll. There was no going back.

  ‘German?’

  ‘Yes, German. She had an accent. She’d come out to New Zealand just to find me.’ She took a deep breath and continued. ‘She told me she was a Hapsburg princess.’

  It had seemed so right at the time, hardly a lie at all. The moment she’d said it, she believed it to be true. Vicki-Jane was understandably incredulous.

  ‘She can’t be.’

  ‘Yes. That’s what she said.’

  She couldn’t remember what happened after that. Vicki-Jane had brought it up again several times and Kate had quickly learned what a good memory you needed to be an accomplished liar. The more she said, the more mired she became in ridiculous detail, detail she couldn’t substantiate. She’d looked up Hapsburg in Encyclopaedia Britannica and soon realised princesses were a bit thin on the ground. But she’d ploughed on. Too late to take it back, to admit she’d made it all up.

  Why had she done it? Until her teens, she’d been a goody two-shoes and had never, that she could recall, told a lie. But puberty seemed to change all that. She’d lied about her birth mother; she’d lied about going out with boys because as far as Mum was concerned, they didn’t exist; she’d lied about going to flute lessons when she biked off instead to hang around Boys’ High with her school-friend Trisha; she’d lied about going to school when she’d been in Cathedral Square milk bars looking for boys. What was the matter with her? Vicki-Jane never bunked school or hung out with boys – unless they were horse-mad like her. Vicki-Jane would never lie to her mother like that or to her employer, like Kate had done at the Social Security Department.

  Deep down, Kate knew that the fable of the Hapsburg princess came from some part of her being that needed to belong, that needed the touch and physical acknowledgement of her own flesh and blood. Just to know who her mother was, a name, something real she could hold on to, a photo maybe, to know if she was still alive, something tangible that could fill the lifelong emptiness and end her search.

  She couldn’t remember exactly when she’d first thought about finding her mother, when she’d first wondered who she was. She could remember Mum telling her how brave her mother was giving her up so Kate could have a better life.

  ‘Better than what?’

  ‘Better than she could give you.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because she wanted you to have a better life.’

  And so it went, round and around, without Kate ever gaining much of a clue about the reality of it.

  She could also remember asking if her mother was allowed to have any more children and if she’d be allowed to keep them next time. Her best friend Vicki-Jane had a brother and she’d wanted one too. In fact, she’d wanted to go one better: she’d wanted a sister. Vicki-Jane didn’t have one of those.

  Just a month older than her and living right next door, Vicki-Jane had been her closest friend since she was two. They’d sat next to each other at primary school and often walked there and home again together, chipping away at the icy puddles with heavy brown lace-up shoes on wintry mornings, snapping flowers from gardens and scattering the petals along the footpath in the summer.

  By Standard Three, Mum had become exasperated. She’d seen the pair of them as double trouble – twice as naughty when they were together, getting lost in the thick bamboo, shooting at each other with home-made bamboo bows and arrows, and wading across the shallows to the tiny island in the middle of the Avon River.

  If they weren’t in the park, they would be up on the garage roof, shooting arrows down from their home-made fort, or down the back of their neighbouring quarter-acre gardens, trampling around the vegetables and climbing the many trees.

  Some days, they’d climb over the back fence and trespass in the neighbouring high school grounds, burrowing in the huge dirt piles to make tracks and bridges for their toy trucks and cars, hoping the caretaker wouldn’t tell them off and send them back home. Mostly he didn’t.

  But they got into trouble at primary school in other ways, for talking in class and passing notes to each other, and to other kids as well. Vicki-Jane was a ‘bad influence’, Mum said. The solution, Mum decided, was to take Kate out of primary school a year early and send her to the girls’ school next door, the one where they’d been playing in the dirt pile.

  Luckily for her and Vicki-Jane, their parents rarely spoke. They were chalk and cheese: Vicki’s parents were horsey, racing, duck-shooting, whiskey-drinking types; Kate’s had never been to the races or touched whisky in their lives. Without knowing it, Vicki’s parents had decided the very same thing. The girls’ initial despair at being parted during school hours soon turned to joy when they discovered they were both bound for the same school at the same time. Their parents were less than thrilled.

  Vicki-Jane had been like a sister – better than a sister, really because they were the same age and their interests were mirrored. They fought like sisters too from time to time, but there were too many things to do together to sulk for too long.

  It wasn’t until they arrived at the new school, made new friends and drifted apart that Kate’s yearning for a sister began. She thought of making one up. But after Vicki-Jane, no imaginary sibling could be as much fun. Besides, one imaginary family member was more than enough to keep tabs on.

  Making stuff up about your origins, she’d since learned, was what the adopted child was prone to do. Which made a neat parcel of predictability out of that spontaneous lie about German royalty. She still felt warmth flush into her face whenever she thought of it.

  Her children would never know that longing, would never need to pretend they had another, better, family somewhere else. Amelia and James were her flesh and blood. She remembered the shock of the heel-prick test when she and David feared they harboured cystic fibrosis in their DNA, and the guilt she had felt for not even knowing if that could be possible. That guilt had been the impetus for tracking down her mother and finding out if there were any genetic surprises lying in wait. Like cancer.

  She knew she should take more care of herself, take things easier, not get so stressed over trying to do too much; she’d read somewhere that stress was supposed to raise your chances of getting cancer. And she knew she should lose a few pounds. But how? She couldn’t think of anything that she could cut out to remove some of that stress - she couldn’t give up work because they needed the money to help with the mortgage – and she had no free time to get to the gym.

  She made herself a promise to eat the sort of healthy stuff everyone was telling you was good for you – good for losing weight and good for staving off diseases like diabetes and cancer. She would stop drinking. If David could do it so could she. He’d announced on New Year’s Day that he wasn’t going to touch another drop and he’d been true to his word. She’d heard that alcohol could lead to cancer; why tempt fate? She would read up about the foods and vitamins that were supposed to help prevent cancer, take some tests even. Before her resolve weakened, she marched herself into the nearest bookshop and browsed through the lifestyle section, checking out tips, buying the one that seemed the most sensible. With that resolve ticked off, she found a café and ordered a pot of English Breakfast. While s
he waited for the tea, she looked in her bag for something to do and found her Filofax. Flipping through to today’s date she found the piece of paper she’d ripped from her teenage diary and smiled as she opened it. She’d meant to show it to her mother at lunchtime, to tell her how all her teenage diaries were dedicated to her – by name. Mum had told her, long ago, her birth mother’s name.

  ‘All I know is that her name was Elizabeth and she was from Wellington. I can’t tell you anything else.’

  ‘Can’t tell me? Or won’t tell me?’ Kate had said when she was old enough to feel angry at being denied her birthright. But it didn’t matter what she said, whether she tried to wheedle it out by being nice, or needle Mum into shouting it out in desperation, she never found out her mother’s surname.

  So she started each entry: ‘Dear Elizabeth’.

  While she waited for her tea, she started to read:

  ‘Dear Elizabeth