The Night my Bum Dropped

by Gretel Killeen

  11.52 p.m.

  I tuck into bed and do a sit-up. Then before I go to sleep I start to worry about how expensive the kids are to raise and wonder whether I should have kept a running list of their expenses so I could give them an invoice when they turn twenty-one.

  11.55 p.m.

  I realise it’s probably too late for an invoice, I haven’t kept any receipts, and if I really wanted to do it accurately, I’d have to include the hair, tanning, manicure and frock expenses incurred when their father was courting me because, to be fair, the tally should really be done from well before conception.

  11.57 p.m.

  I realise, too, that when it’s time for me to die I will be very tired.

  11.57 ½ p.m.

  I now understand why they called retirement villages ‘resting homes’.

  11.58 p.m.

  I can imagine dying but can’t imagine ever leaving my children. I imagine that I will continue to care for them even after I’m dead. I will watch over them forever. I feel this so strongly in my heart.

  11.59 p.m.

  I love the fact that I know them so well. I love the fact that I know Frog likes his Milo melted with hot water and then the milk added. I love the fact that Tadpole wants her Milo scooped with a tablespoon but only stirred with a teaspoon. I love the fact that I know they both like their raisin bread toasted with the dial on two and a half and then buttered so that the butter goes precisely to the edges, and then Frog wants his toast cut diagonally into triangles and Tadpole likes two perfectly rectangular slices.

  I love Frog and Tadpole so very much. I love the fact that we can sit down on my bed to enjoy breakfast and ‘someone’ (i.e. no one) will spill their juice all over the floor, and Frog will tell Tadpole that she’s a ‘choad’, which is apparently a penis that’s wider than its length.

  I know that for years and years to come, long after they’ve left the nest, I will rise, make two packed lunches, iron some burn marks into several articles of clothing and then go and form a queue outside the bathroom.

  Midnight

  I go to the bathroom to clean my teeth and the noise wakes everyone. Frog sends me a text from his bed that says, ‘Good night butt-wipe bum-head I love you.’

  I reply, ‘I love you, I miss you, be careful, have fun, did you wash your face?’

  Midnight and fifteen seconds

  Tadpole sends me a text from her bed that reads, ‘Night mum I love ewe.’

  I reply, ‘I love you too,’ but accidentally send the text to my accountant.

  I am a Camel

  I wonder now whether it’s not so much the raising of the children and being a working mother that has contributed to the apparently expanding Ache in My Heart syndrome but the fact that, as my children get older, they don’t need me in such a hands-on way any more. I mean, of course this doesn’t explain the ache I’ve had in my heart since I was three, but it is possibly a contributory factor to the fact that the ache has increased recently.

  Before I had children I described motherhood as ‘like passing a camel through the eye of a needle … and then looking after it for the rest of your life’. When I came up with that description I was in my early twenties, but now I’m questioning my motherhood analysis. I think, in retrospect, that I left a few words out and the quote should actually say, ‘Motherhood is like passing a camel through the eye of a needle and then WANTING to look after it for the rest of your life.’

  We hosted my son’s farewell ‘dinner party’ for twenty-two of his closest friends three days ago and I’ve just found another beer bottle wedged in a pot plant. The mess wasn’t too bad, someone was sick in a frypan, the outdoor lounge chair collapsed, the living room floor needs to be revarnished and twenty-four hours after the event two guests were discovered somehow sleeping under the couch, but after nineteen years of raising my son I was relieved that the fallout was so minimal. (After all, my son is the boy who once dried a wetsuit in the clothes drier.) So all in all the mess in our house wasn’t too bad, but I now realise that the mess in my head may take somewhat longer to tidy up.

  The head-mess has nothing to do with the dinner party, but has everything to do with my son leaving home. I imagine that all mums feel this when their babies prepare to leave. My boy is the first to fly the coop but the writing is on my personal ‘wailing wall’ as my daughter champs at the bit to also study overseas in just under a year. As a mother I’ve lived with the hovering notion of Empty Nest syndrome since my children were conceived, but I didn’t need to take it seriously until now. I treated it as ‘mother mythology’, along with ‘crusts make your hair curly’ and ‘kids will grow up to live barefoot, bearded and busking with a one-stringed banjo if their mother doesn’t volunteer for tuckshop duty’. So it’s only now, as I find three ‘dinner party’ shoes in the vegetable crisper of our fridge, that I’m forced to truly contemplate the reality of a child leaving home. I wonder whether my son is ready to face the big wide world. And I wonder whether I’m ready too.

  I begin to write him a letter containing all the advice that I can call to my frontal lobe while distracted by the discovery of a dinner party potato that’s been used to wedge a window open. The letter is intended as a list of everything I’ve learnt in life but my mind is blocked by the ache in my heart. I recall the advice I gave myself when I was a teenager: ‘Sometimes life is like needing to go to the toilet in the middle of the night, because you really don’t want to get up and do it, but you feel so much better when you have.’

  I wonder what advice my children would give me for dealing with the next stage of our lives. I’ve talked to my daughter about how seemingly cruel life is, that a mother can give so many years of her life in order to build strong, brave, independent offspring who are then so strong, brave and independent that they get up and move out. I’ve told her that the situation mothers face is not so much ‘empty nest’, but actually ‘empty life’ … and she tells me that I should change my hair colour.

  Jimmy tells me that now is the time to start doing something for myself. I listen but I know he doesn’t understand that the very nature of being a mother means that you’ve forgotten how to do anything just for yourself because motherhood is about thinking of others, above and beyond and to the exclusion of yourself. It’s about eating the burnt chop, and deriving an enormous sense of achievement from managing to match washed socks.

  Toulah tells me that now is the time to create the life I always wanted. This statement leaves me gobsmacked because I have been leading the life I always wanted and that’s exactly what I feel is slipping away! I wonder what some people imagine motherhood is like. Do they think I’ve spent twenty years kidnapped by midgets and being forced to hug them? I haven’t been in prison all these years. Sure, there are times when motherhood feels like home detention, and quite frankly, enduring your child’s adolescent years can feel like an abusive relationship, but motherhood also overflows with simple precious moments, like the time my children suddenly pronounced that they’d both decided to become vegetarians and could therefore only eat sausages.

  I don’t need to think for long to know that the extremes of marrying personal exhaustion with tireless love have extraordinarily made me happy.

  Sarah, single, childless and hugely successful, tells me that I have to grab the bull by the horns and write a ‘to-do list’ of all the things I can now do in life. Sarah lets me see her ‘to-do list’ for inspiration. It includes such milestones as, Walk across the Sahara in stilettos, Kiss someone who loves you, and Swim with the sharks. They’re all highly admirable pursuits but I feel I’ve been doing their equivalent every day for nineteen years.

  All my friends are worried that as soon as my children go, I will hook into a relationship with a ‘needy nothing nobody’ just so that I will have someone to look after. And to be honest, I’m a bit worried about that too.

  I begin to question now why so many kids stay at home well into their late twenties. Perhaps it’s not because the kids are on a free r
ide, but because their parents don’t want their kids to leave. Of course they love their kids’ company but perhaps more pertinent is the fact that as long as your kids are still taking up all your time, you can postpone asking yourself the big, big question … what the hell am I going to do with the rest of my life?

  My son knows that I’m distressed because every time I look at him my eyes well with tears (but at least I’m hiding my true impulse, which is to try to poke myself and my daughter into one of his suitcases). I tell him that I’m scared of the nothingness of being alone and he says that my perspective is wrong and the only thing that’s changing is my level of hands-on responsibility. He says, ‘We will always be together, even when we’re apart, and now is just the time when the roles start to change and we begin to look after you.’ As my children hug me the way I’ve enveloped them all their lives, something finally registers. You mean I can come and stay with you and leave my wet towels on the floor, borrow your clothes and look in your crowded fridge and yell ‘There’s absolutely nothing to eat!’? My mind begins boggling as I realise my world is not shrinking, it’s actually expanding, and we are doing it together. I feel happier as I remove a dinner party bread roll from the CD player. I will of course still have to structure a whole new life, but in the meantime I contemplate posting my washing to my kids overseas … and wearing an enormous puffy ski jacket like the Michelin Man, to see whether that makes my bum look any smaller.

  5

  ‘Dad, can I ask you a private question?’

  ‘Of course you can. You can ask me anything at all, just so long as it doesn’t relate to my personal goals and/or ambitions, my past, my future, my successes, my failures, my finances, my friends, my family or politics, anything emotional, anything psychological, anything philosophical or anything to do with piles.’

  ‘Okay, Dad. Well, here we go. Just wondering whether you think my bum’s dropped?’

  ‘Daughter, I’m a religious man and I’m your father, so as far as I’m concerned you don’t have a bum.’

  It’s Odd to Think

  So, I asked my dad for help with my predicament, and at this stage I’d kind of also asked my mum, but I didn’t ask any of my siblings for their advice because it’s difficult to ask all ten million of them and if you don’t, then someone will feel left out. Families are so strange. We love them, we hate them, we identify positive similarities, we reject shared negative traits, we seek an identity separate to them, yet when even a distant family member dies we grab a day off work for bereavement. We want to be with our family but then we fight, we say bad things about our family but if anyone else says anything even vaguely derogatory about them, then we defend our family with a vengeance, we move to different countries just to be away from them yet they’re the first people we call should we need anything, from a bone-marrow transplant to a spelling-bee sponsorship.

  A friend of mine decided that his family of fifteen didn’t hug enough. So he invited them to his house for lunch one Saturday and one by one, when they entered the kitchen to offer assistance, he grabbed them and gave them a long embrace. The result of this was that rather than create an atmosphere of bonhomie and bonding he managed to completely terrify every family member and they all found a reason to hurriedly leave within thirty minutes of arriving.

  Meanwhile, another friend of mine is a successful singer-songwriter and whenever one of his songs comes on the radio his father turns the radio off.

  On the other hand, a man I know was so proud when he learnt that his son was gay that he wrote it on the annual family Christmas card.

  Seasons Greetings, One and All

  P.S. Gavin is a homosexual

  The DIY Family

  Of course, as we get older some of us avoid the ravaging roots of the family tree, distance ourselves from our blood relatives and create a new family through our friends. While this sounds delightful, full of plonk, laughter and placenta-planting ceremonies out by the clothes line, the actual rules of engagement with a ‘family’ of friends can in fact be much more difficult. The reason for this is quite simply because suddenly your relationships are those of choice, and you lose the shared-DNA privilege of blaming anyone but yourself for the messiness of your entanglements. Interestingly, one by-product of these ‘relationships of choice’ can sometimes be that they help you to realise just how much you relied on the comfort of semi-annual resentful contact with veritable strangers (i.e. relatives) who are obligated to pretend they like you even if the only thing you vaguely have in common is the fact that all of you have distended earlobes.

  So what are the rules when hanging out with a family of friends? And what about friends who consider you to be part of their family, but you don’t consider them to be part of yours? What indeed, because on top of all of my Ache in the Heart/Bum-Drop Turmoil of late, I received a text message at ten o’clock last Sunday morning that read, ‘I love you. You are the most important person in my life.’

  The text wasn’t signed. I wondered whether it had been sent to me accidentally, or whether the sender had assumed that we were so close that I would have their name and number stored in my phone. But what is the etiquette when it comes to replying under such circumstances? Do you ignore it on the assumption that it was a drunken or mis-sent text, or do you reply ‘I love you too’ and risk actually losing the ‘friendship’ because they did send it to you accidentally and you’ve put too much pressure on the relationship? Or even worse perhaps endanger your own life by engaging contact with someone who has such tragic drug, alcohol and sociopathic tendencies that they just send random texts to people they don’t know in the hope that the recipient will one day feel safe enough to be lured to a meeting place where they will be bashed and then eaten?

  It’s at these moments that you long for the restrained and resented parameters of the biological family where someone can tell you that they love you and you are perfectly within your rights to yell in reply, ‘I DIDN’T ASK TO BE BORN!’

  N.B. I did reply to the aforementioned text one day later because my religious and moralistic upbringing has led me to believe that it would be rude not to. I wasn’t sure what to write so in the end I just wrote, ‘Yay, yeah, ditto.’ Unfortunately I sent it while driving and while the phone was on predictive text so it was only later that I realised the message had not come up as ‘Yay, yeah, ditto’ at all but instead as ‘bite a loudink’.

  I realised this shortly before I learnt that my procrastination meant that I sent my message too late, as I apparently sent it at the precise moment the lonely and desperate recipient was hurtling the 150 metres from the city’s harbour bridge. Nevertheless, the recipient’s biological family invited me to give the eulogy at the wake because they found the phone and saw my text and ‘bite a loudink’ is apparently what their family says to one another when they really want to say, ‘I love you.’

  My New, New Best Friends

  I was invited to speak at the ‘loudink’s’ funeral. Turned out he was a ‘he’. Turned out his name was Terry. Turned out he was also a bit of a show-off. In fact, it was quite a display at the service when his coffin was wheeled into the crematorium furnace and we discovered that he’d requested fireworks be placed in it.

  I didn’t want to make too big an emotional commitment with the eulogy for Terry. One, because I was finding it hard enough to emotionally commit to myself at that moment, and two, because I didn’t know more about the bloke than his name, and for all I knew he could have been a serial killer, a drug dealer or one of those people who scratches his private parts in the confines of a crowded lift. So I simply spoke in sweeping generalisations and used a speech I’d downloaded from an internet site called Intimate Eulogies for the Unknown.

  Terry’s relatives, on the other hand, were very keen to have me deeply, deeply associated with Tezza as soon as they recognised me from the TV (which they managed to do, even though I was wearing a black veil over my face, because my bag was pickpocketed by one of the pallbearers and he read my name
on the credit cards in my wallet). Conversely, their sudden desire to associate with me only made me want to disassociate myself from Terry’s family, despite our Shared Tragic Loss, because you can never trust anyone whom you suspect wants to be your friend just because you’re ‘famous’. Maybe they thought my fame made me powerful, maybe they thought I was wealthy, maybe they thought I could introduce them to a glamorous sex-fuelled uber-existence of celebrities. Maybe they didn’t realise that I was in fact a hopeless celebrity – an exhausted, shy, single mother of two who, though seen on the occasional red carpet, was only ever there after cooking the kids’ dinner and was invariably smelling of burnt chops.

  Celebrity and Moi

  But not only did I have fundamental external responsibilities that prevented me from performing as a celebrity, I also simply did not have the nature. I guess this is not surprising, considering I grew up under the influence of a time-honoured religious philosophy that explicitly stated that anyone who drew attention to themselves could expect to be dragged ‘three or four mile behind a wagon led by four galloping mules’.

  I wish things had been different. Other ‘celebrities’ appear to have a wow of a time. But I just couldn’t get the knack. I dressed like a table setting, was hopeless at the chitchat, tripped over on the dance floor and posed for photos in such a manner that there is not one in existence that doesn’t make me look like my face is just one huge nostril. In fact, the only ‘celebrity’ whom I ever met who was actually more of a doofus than me confused her Botox with her detox and now she can’t lift her own drinking arm.