In Her Mothers' Shoes

by Felicity Price

  Penny gasped.

  ‘I’m fine now,’ Kate attempted a reassuring smile. ‘I had a mastectomy and a replacement at the same time, then chemo – the works. It was a long time ago.’

  ‘I’m so sorry it had to be you.’ Penny gazed out to sea for a moment. ‘I got breast cancer too. Just a couple of years ago.’

  Now it was Kate’s turn to draw in her breath.

  ‘Like you, I went through all the treatment and, like you, here I am today.’

  Their tea went cold while they shared treatment experiences and reflected on how different things might have been if it hadn’t been detected at such an early stage.

  ‘Does Liz know?’ Penny asked.

  ‘Yes, I wrote to her when I found out and thanked her for the warning. It probably saved my life.’

  ‘She never said. But then she wouldn’t; she wanted to keep you a secret.’

  ‘I was hoping the secret would be out in the open now, that everyone would know.’

  ‘She’s made a start with me. I’ll see if I can push her to tell the kids.’

  The sun was casting an orange glow through the living room when Kate realised how late it was. They’d been talking for nearly three hours without noticing the time passing, as if they’d known each other all their lives. Kate had to go. She was supposed to meet her friend Vanessa for dinner in Courtenay Place – an arrangement she’d made in case she suffered a similar disappointment to the day she’d met her mother – before catching the last flight home. It was just as well she hadn’t planned on an inaugural dinner with her siblings – that would have to be another day. Because she was going to meet them, she was sure of that. Penny had promised – well, at least she’d said she’d try.

  ‘They ought to know about their sister Felicity,’ she said then caught herself. ‘Sorry, Kate. It’s funny, I’ve always thought of you as Felicity. I can’t get it out of my mind.’

  Driving along the motorway back into town she made the resolve that somehow or other she would get to know her brother and sister.

  She’d always been stubborn. David once said, when she was hounding him to fix the bathroom door – a job he’d put off for weeks because she suspected he didn’t know how to do it – that she was one of those irritating people who just never gave up. ‘You’re like a dog with a bone,’ he’d said.

  As she coasted down the gorge road, she got out her bone and began to gnaw at it.

  There had to be a way to make it happen. She’d been asking Liz for twenty-three years to tell her kids, to let Kate meet her siblings. What if Liz never told them? It certainly seemed that was the likely outcome. From what Penny had said, Liz would keep avoiding the issue, change the subject, put it off as long as possible – forever if she could.

  What was so frustrating was that she’d already met Rick. She could just pick up the phone and tell him the news. And it wouldn’t be that hard to find her sister Jessica through official records. Maybe that was what she should do. Just tell them. Write them both a letter and let them know she existed.

  And yet – she had promised her mother she wouldn’t tell.

  She decided to leave it a bit longer, to give Penny a few weeks to see if she could prompt Liz to make the move. And if she still wouldn’t budge, a letter was the only alternative.

  Her mother was proving an enigma. She wanted to be able to understand her, to stand in her shoes and find out what it had been like all those years ago – and what it was like for her now. But how to get through to her? They were like chalk and cheese. They might look alike, but their personalities came from different worlds.

  Would she have been more like her mother if Liz had kept her instead of adopting her out? What would she be like? She’d often wondered.

  There was no Domestic Purposes Benefit when she’d been born, no support system for women who decided to keep their own babies, which accounted for the fact that so few did. Even a cheap Cuba Street bedsit would have been beyond her mother’s means with a baby and no means of support.

  Kate knew she’d been lucky; she’d enjoyed not quite a silver-spoon existence but certainly a silver-plated one. Not that her parents were wealthy; they’d had to go without so she could have extras like music lessons, ballet classes and swim school. And how had she rewarded them?

  Kate wasn’t proud of her teenage years. All her childhood, she’d been compliant, a chameleon, adapting to her adoptive family to prove that she fitted in – she genuinely believed she might be sent back to wherever she’d come from if she wasn’t a good girl. But in her teens, she’d broken free and rebelled. It was as if she’d been holding it all back, waiting for the right moment.

  She blamed it on hormones. One day, she’d woken up to a moon crater of acne across her freckled face and a constant sense of pent-up fury winding her up so the only possible reaction was to explode. That’s when the war had begun.

  Poor Mum. She’d given her a terrible time. As if she hadn’t had enough to worry about with Dad deteriorating slowly. Pity she hadn’t been able to see it through her mother’s eyes at the time; she mightn’t have been such a cow.

  For the first year or two, the arguments were comparatively low key – that is, you wouldn’t have heard them on the other side of the street – but by the time she’d turned fifteen, they were epic.

  Once upon a time Dad would have taken more control and given her the strap for bad behaviour, but she was too big for that at fifteen – and besides, he’d never have been able to catch her.

  He used to. But she’d become more cunning as he’d become less mobile. She remembered the autumn when she was thirteen and in big trouble she’d been able to hide in the overgrown asparagus patch in the back garden. Guilty of wading through the river in its deepest part, almost up to her neck, with Vicki-Jane and her brother Michael, and coming home not only very late but also very wet, she hadn’t needed to see the belt in his hand to know she’d be in for it.

  The asparagus bed took up a large rectangle down behind the tall privet hedge where a neat vegetable garden was filled with all the greens any normal girl detested: broad beans, Brussels sprouts, silver beet and, every year, a seemingly inexhaustible supply of asparagus.

  The first week or two, Kate would happily eat the spears of asparagus that Mum carefully turned to mush on the stove but after that, it started to lose its appeal until, as the end of the season approached, it made her literally gag.

  It was long after the season was over, when the remaining spears had grown to over three feet high and surrounded themselves with a thicket of lacy fronds of greenery, that she’d run into the middle of the asparagus bed, pushing through the swathe of tall stems, to escape the stinging pain of another hiding. Hidden by the thick growth, she’d remained undiscovered, slowly drying out under the warm afternoon sun, occasionally worried that Dad might set a match to the whole bed, like he did every autumn to burn off the dried tall fronds. She imagined being chased out of her hiding place by tongues of flame, like the rabbits she’d seen once in a Movietone News trailer fleeing from a farmland fire.

  But Dad had given up his search. It was nearly dinner time, when the hunger pangs outweighed the fear of Dad’s leather belt, before she ventured back inside.

  She couldn’t remember his reaction when she finally reappeared, but she could remember that the punishment for the crime had long been forgotten and the strap returned to its dressing table drawer.

  She didn’t hold any grudge against Dad for the strap; it was what fathers did in those days. When Vicki-Jane and she had compared notes, she’d been grateful her father was so merciful and that he got the belt out so rarely.

  The belt had long disappeared by the time that record bout of two hours and forty-eight minutes began. When it was over, she suspected Dad was so relieved that he could hear himself think again – and hear the television news – that retribution was the last thing on his mind.

  She couldn’t even remember what the argument was about, its epic duration having acquire
d more significance than the actual row itself. She remembered an impasse that must have come about the two-hour mark when Mum had gone into the study with Dad and closed the door firmly behind her. She recalled raised voices – most unusual between her parents – and her mother coming into the kitchen quite some time later, her eyes red, her manner quite distracted. But Kate hadn’t had the sense to leave it there; she recalled threatening to leave home and her mother had gone ballistic. She still felt bad whenever she thought of it, not the least because it was just one of many similar rows when she’d said vile things to her mother she later regretted but never said so, and never apologised. And now it was too late; Mum had died last year.

  As she descended Transmission Gully, Kate looked across the harbour towards Wellington – the sea now comparatively calm and blue under a clear sky with only occasional scudding clouds. She’d waited long enough. She decided she would confront her mother; she would demand to meet her siblings. If Liz wasn’t prepared to tell them, she would.

  ~ ~ ~

  But it wasn’t that simple.

  She wrote to Liz, telling her how disappointed she was that Liz hadn’t kept her word and told her children. She delivered her ultimatum.

  Liz didn’t reply.

  Kate didn’t know what to do. What if her letter had tipped Liz over the edge? What if Liz had been admitted to hospital again? What if the unthinkable had happened and she’d died?

  Then the earthquake happened. Magnitude 7.1 on September 4, 2010 in the early hours of the morning, waking Kate up and throwing her and David out of bed. Immediate family was all that mattered. Followed by extra demands at work, additional shifts, people’s heartrending stories to be told. Injuries were reported, but no deaths. Timing had been everything – most people were asleep in their beds and out of harm’s way.

  Once the phone was back on, among the many callers checking if she was okay was Penny. Kate learned that yes, Liz was at home; yes, Penny had encouraged her to talk to the kids; no, she hadn’t heard from her since. She promised to give her sister a reminder.

  Weeks slipped by. China, glasses, photo frames, the TV set – so many smashed things to be photographed for insurance then replaced, so many family treasures lost forever, so many things now to be fixed on shelves with Blu-tack in case there was another big quake.

  There was the usual rush into Christmas, family to be accommodated, presents to buy, celebrations to be arranged, including the annual family Boxing Day party at her home.

  It was the big aftershock that day that became the turning point for Kate. Although not one of the biggest aftershocks, it was shallow and centred not far from Kate’s home; and she was in the kitchen at the time getting ready for the party. But instead of terrifying her, this earthquake made her mad.

  Boxing Day was when the Stewart family got together to talk about their year and catch up on how all their kids were doing. Every time they got together though, Kate would feel the odd one out, the ugly duckling. Her cousins were all tall, striking, with a beautiful bone structure, cheekbones, hipbones even. Kate couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her hipbones. Two of her cousins had been international models – they still looked gorgeous, they still towered over her. Next to them, Kate never felt she belonged. Even though her cousins were possibly the nicest people alive, even though they always included her, treated her as one of them, she still felt a fake. It wasn’t that she didn’t like being with them, it was just that she didn’t feel she deserved it.

  With Penny she no longer had that odd-one-out feeling. With Penny she almost felt she belonged. She could almost believe she was ‘one of us’.

  Boxing Day was a turning point. It was the day she decided she simply had to meet her brother and sister and persuade Liz to tell the rest of her family about the daughter they never knew she had. She wasn’t going to be kept a Hamilton family secret any longer. Maybe it was the effect of the constant aftershocks, maybe it was all the champagne. It soon became evident that the earth moving throughout the annual family get-together had been all the reason everyone needed to get thoroughly sloshed. Another aftershock? Grab the wine bottle to stop it falling and pour another glass of bubbles. She’d been glad to have her family around, glad she wasn’t on her own every time the house twisted and shook and the glass doors rattled on their hinges. After all the wine, she could almost believe she looked as good as her cousins.

  ~ ~ ~

  Later that week, as soon as the library reopened, Kate sat down in front of all the electoral rolls and looked up the names Liz had given her years earlier. It took longer than she thought, but at last she found the addresses of her two siblings.

  Back home, she got out her laptop and wrote – and rewrote several times – two letters. It then took her over a week – and a raft of New Year’s Resolutions – to pluck up the courage to post them.

  Christchurch

  January 5, 2011

  Dear Jessie

  This letter may come as a bit of a surprise to you but I can think of no other way to do this but to write and tell you that your mother, Liz Davidson (nee Hamilton), is also my mother.

  I was born on March 17, 1951, at Essex Hospital Christchurch. Soon afterwards, Liz had to give me up for adoption, as was the custom at that time. Since then, I have had a very happy life (with, of course, its ups and downs) and have tried to make the most of every day. My adoptive parents loved me deeply and gave me everything they could.

  However, they never hid from me the fact that I was adopted and I always had a hankering to find out who my birth mother was and whether she had her own family. Over 20 years ago, I traced Liz and wrote to her. Not long afterwards we met, in Wellington. We exchanged photos, memoirs, stories, and we have kept in touch since at Christmas time.

  She told me she had two further children, and a little bit about each of you. I have often asked if I could meet you but she has repeatedly said she couldn’t cope with that yet and asked me to wait. In 2000 I was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer and it occurred to me then, and has occurred to me since as I get older, that I didn’t want to die without giving it my best shot to meet you. I wrote to Liz and asked her again but she refused, saying she wasn’t well and it would be too stressful for her. She said she might be up to it some time in future. I didn’t die, as you can see, and have made a full recovery, but the desire to find you lingers on.

  In the last few months, I’ve asked her again. She said she would do so and even arranged for us all to meet. But it never happened.

  This time I don’t feel able to hold back. I would very much like to meet you, even if just only once. I know it will be very difficult for you and may take you some time to come to grips with this, and I will understand if you don’t reply immediately.

  I have lived in Christchurch most of my life, have a husband and two adult children.

  I haven’t included a photograph at this stage as I felt it might be a bit much all at once. However, I’m happy to send one if you like. I have seen a photo of your mother when she was young and there is quite a resemblance with photos of me at a similar age. I don’t know what you look like, so I don’t know if there is anything in common.

  I will be in Wellington in February and March and could meet up with you then if you are up to it.

  I have also written to your brother Rick, whom I met once many years ago through my work without knowing he was my brother. I have found you all from the information Liz gave me, plus looking up the electoral rolls.

  I don’t know whether Liz is frail or simply afraid of the repercussions, but if it would be too stressful for her to find out that I have told you about me, you may choose not to tell her I have contacted you. I suspect that is what she would prefer. If you want proof without going to her, I could supply it.

  The next step, if there is one, is up to you.

  Kate Stewart

  It had seemed so easy when she had left home that morning to drop the two letters in the box on the way to work. But poised
in front of the narrow grey slit in the Post Office wall, Kate’s arm suddenly felt weighed down with lead, sending a message to her brain that allowing the envelopes to be bitten off and swallowed by the postal flap was possibly not the right thing to do after all.

  She was being entirely selfish. That she knew for certain. She had written the letters – almost exactly the same, apart from an acknowledgement to Rick that they had already met – in self-centred fulfilment of her own desire. But what if her siblings didn’t share that desire? What if meeting their unknown sister was the last thing they wanted? What if her surprising news tore the family apart?

  It was this last possibility that made her hesitate on the footpath, envelopes poised in front of the letter box.

  ‘Kate, fancy seeing you here.’ It was one of the insurance brokers she’d befriended covering earthquake recovery issues.

  ‘Good morning, Philip. Collecting your mail?’