IT WAS A SUNDAY night when I finally crumpled. I looked like a dark-haired alien sitting hunched over my laptop. A saggy singlet, once tight and flattering but now solely reserved for bedwear, was hanging off my curved torso. I looked away from the screen, craning my sore neck up towards the ceiling of my bedroom and rolling it one way, then the other. I rolled my shoulders too, and allowed myself to close my eyes for three glorious seconds.
My phone pinged. A message from my mum. It was 9.52 pm.
Hi Linda. Do you have a minute now to call me?
My heart sank. Shit. No, I didn’t have a minute, I was working to a tight deadline. Biting down on my bottom lip, I typed out a hasty message in reply.
mum, i’m still working. it’s almost 10. is this urgent? can you text me instead?
My thumb hovered over the send button. My mum was the most dominant person I knew. Her messages were usually about matters most people would think of as trivial, but to Mum, were life-defining and urgent. They often came late in the evening, when her owl brain switched into overdrive. Four months earlier she’d texted me at precisely 10.01 pm after we’d spent the afternoon together.
Linda, I need to tell you that I saw some long hairs sticking out from your nose. You need to cut them every two weeks to keep them short and neat. It doesn’t look good and I do mine every two weeks too. Have a great week and see you for dinner on Wednesday. xx
While these interactions may have seemed a little overbearing to an outsider, I knew that details mattered to Mum, and these conversations were loaded with love. She always wanted what was best for me. Wasn’t that the general pursuit of any committed parent?
Besides, whenever I tried to wrest back some control, my new boundaries were always quickly overcome by the guilt I felt about disappointing her. In recent years, I had attempted to laugh Mum’s comments and their frequency off while still appeasing her. On this night, as I sat hunched over my laptop, my gut told me the phone conversation my mother wanted to have, and whatever she was fretting over, could wait until the next morning.
I tossed my phone back on the bed without sending a reply and refocused my body. I had a deadline to meet. I tapped the space bar and the audio file on screen began to play. Two voices. A lengthy interview between me and a friend who was speaking tenderly about love and loss. My eyes unfocused as the minutes and seconds played out alongside the audio. In my head was a cheerleader pleading, ‘Come on, Carmelinda. Just one more hour, then you can have a big fucking cry and go to sleep.’
But there was a little clenched fist in the pit of my stomach that was becoming harder to ignore. I glanced at the date in the corner of my laptop screen and sighed heavily, thinking of my boyfriend, Magnus. We hadn’t seen each other for almost an entire year. We’d been forced apart when the pandemic broke out—he was living in our home in Los Angeles while I was back in my teenage bedroom at my father’s house in Sydney. I had forgotten what it felt like to hold hands with him or hear his voice without the metallic compression of the phone speakers. We sat on video calls day after day, month after month, telling each other we had to smear ourselves with a little more patience; we had to politely wait this thing out until the borders reopened and we could be together again.
That belief worked most days. But there were also moments that highlighted the space between us, and all the ways that screen time just didn’t cut it.
The night before, we’d found out that one of his friends had passed away suddenly. It was a shocking and surreal piece of news that circulated rapidly through our friendship group and seemed inescapable on social media. I felt horrible that Magnus was grieving alone, locked down. The tragedy magnified the distance between our two continents. There was a heartbreaking silence after I hung up from a call.
The uncertainty of waiting for the world to open up was a slow-burning series of blows that I had adapted to, but not without question. Would Magnus and I make it? Would it be worth it? How much longer did we need to tread water? Watching couples choosing groceries next to me in the supermarket was triggering. I would look at those everyday lovers and think, How good you have it, with this kind person next to you holding the plastic basket as you fill it, shuffling sweetly down each aisle, stopping by the freezer to look at ice cream, tapping your bum as you pay at the register. You lucky fucklings.
I looked at the high school photos on my bookshelf, the piles of mixed CDs, old magazines and tacky memorabilia displayed along the shelves. Though I’d moved back into this nostalgic room almost a year earlier, I had an irrational fear that if I changed anything it would make my homecoming more permanent than I was willing to accept. This way, I could fool myself that I was staying overnight, a guest in my own historic room. The longer I spent in my father’s house, the more I was filled with a very specific sort of self-loathing—I was desperately grateful to have a home I could come back to, and felt incredibly guilty if I didn’t eat dinner with my dad at 6 pm each evening, but I was also channelling a bratty teenager who wanted to be left alone.
I’d been filling my days with work. The routine helped, and it was a distraction from the minefield of emotions that bounced around my chest every day, just waiting for an opportunity to ricochet out of me.
Taking a short breath in, I pushed on with the arduous process of editing my podcast, pausing every ten seconds or so, then rewinding and re-listening.
My producer Amelia was in New York and would be awake in a couple of hours. We were working around the Australian and American time zones, a two-woman factory of sounds. We were in classic deadline mode; I’d barely moved or stretched my body all weekend.
I glanced at my darkened phone. It had been two minutes since Mum had texted me. I wasn’t a horrible daughter, I just had to prioritise my very limp energy. I wanted to serve my podcast’s sweet, loyal audience, and my emotional grievances were not their problem. But what if it was urgent, and Mum needed my help? Everything can wait, I reminded myself firmly, rubbing my aching jaw. Everything … except for her.
With a sigh I tapped Mum’s name into my phone and hit call. She answered immediately and asked me what I was doing.
‘I’m working on something that’s due tomorrow morning.’ I hesitated. ‘Do you mind if we talk tomorrow instead? I have to do this now and I’m not feeling so good.’
‘Are you sick?’
‘No, but one of Magnus’s friends passed away last night and it’s been really sad. And I have to get this work done now and then get some sleep. So can we chat tomorrow?’
Mum was silent. A couple of seconds passed. Yes, I thought to myself. I felt a deep and surprising relief that she understood this was not a good time for me. After bottling it up all day, it was nice to tell someone how I was struggling, even in its most abridged version.
Mum cleared her throat. ‘Mm, well. When it’s someone’s time to go, it’s their time to go.’
I was a little taken aback by the coldness of her tone, but I wasn’t especially surprised—tenderness wasn’t a big part of Mum’s playbook.
‘Now,’ Mum began, taking a breath before continuing in an assertive, business-like tone, ‘I need you to check something very important for me right now, Linda.’
‘Okay,’ I answered slowly.
‘Do you have a mattress protector on your bed? Because if you don’t, I need to buy one for you. It’s very important you have one on your bed—’
She continued, speaking even faster now. She had noticed her own mattress protector was getting old, and she was thinking of buying a new one, and so what about me, did I have one, how old was it, what sort of condition was it in, did it fit my bed? And what about the mattress itself, did I shift it around, top to bottom, on a regular basis? She did not wait for me to answer any of her questions.
I couldn’t believe it. I thought she had listened to me, had heard my grief, but she hadn’t. I listened to her silently, trying to squash my disappointment and fury.
It was too much—the pressing deadline, the death, the never-ending long-distance relationship, the embarrassing adolescent surroundings, and now this? I started to cry. The pent-up drops, long overdue, spilled down my face. When I spoke, I could hear the exhaustion in my words.
‘Do I have to look now, Mum? Please, why are you asking about this?’
‘Why are you being so difficult, Linda?’ Mum snapped back. ‘It will only take you two minutes to check.’
‘It just doesn’t seem important right now.’
I shrank into my hunched shoulders even more. I didn’t want to fight with her. There was no point. Mum was impossible to bend. And now her anger was sharpening towards me, her voice growing loud and shrill. I swallowed my outrage. Surrendering. There was only one way out of this conversation.
Swiping at my tears, I walked around to the side of the bed that wasn’t weighed down with laptops and notepads. I had Mum on speaker, and she was still bellowing as I used my free hand to rip the top half of the sheets on one side of the bed down. I threw the pillows violently onto the floor, a noiseless tantrum that went unnoticed.
‘Mum, I have a mattress protector already.’ My sobs were audible by this point. ‘I’m looking at it now.’
‘Hmm. Where did you get it from? How new is it? I’m going to come over this Friday to check—’
I began to interrupt her, but she continued speaking over me. Finally, I snapped. All the tension that I had been pushing down rushed to my head. A dark tone came out of my mouth; a calm, murderous hissing.
‘I told you what you wanted,’ I said. ‘I told you this was not a good time. You have to let me go.’
She continued over the top of me: ‘I’m just telling you, you need to take care of things, Linda, because you don’t take care of things like this and I know what needs to be done—’
I began repeating versions of ‘let me go’, spacing the words out through gritted teeth.
‘Let me go.
‘Let. Me. Go.
‘Let me get off this phone call.
‘You have to let me. Get off. This phone call. NOW.’
It occurred to me that I couldn’t tell my mum I was going to hang up, and nor could I actually hang up on her. Eventually she ran out of steam, and my repetitive sentences outlasted hers.
‘Okay, okay, goodbye, Linda,’ she said with a sniff. ‘I was just asking you something very simple. Have a good night.’ Then, dismissively, she added, ‘Don’t stress so much.’
She hung up and I was left gasping in the sudden silence. My chest was heaving from the tension. These kinds of phone calls had become a regular occurrence, but this night was different. I had never spoken to my mother so directly; so furiously. While I hadn’t raised my voice, I had spat out a deep resentment. Now I felt compelled to kick the walls and howl into the night. But not at her. At myself.
I was furious that, as a fully grown adult, I still could not stand up for myself honestly. I was angry at my mother, but she was too easy to blame. I was the one letting it happen. The realisation unfurled like a tiny note from inside a fortune cookie. It was typed out clearly in my brain; this was not confined to my relationship with my mother—it had happened in other areas of my life too. I thought of the relationship I didn’t leave for years because I was afraid of the hurt it would cause. I thought of that morning, when the barista overcharged me for my coffee and I smiled, paying for what looked like a whole table’s worth of avocado toast.
Deflated, I lay back on my crumpled nest of sheets. I was editing a podcast episode about dealing with loss, about treating yourself with kindness, and yet I didn’t treat myself with that kind of respect. I was unable to maintain any sort of boundary between work and life; between the way I viewed myself and the way others viewed me.
Squashing my own wellbeing so I could get tasks completed wasn’t a perfect technique, but it had worked for a long time. My need to perform, to please everyone and to ignore any negative emotions of my own had made me an achievement-focused people pleaser. I’d thrown that expression around in jest many times in my life, mocking myself for taking on too many commitments, too many favours. Tonight was no different—while my heart was begging to take a moment for itself, I was still surrendering to every beck and literal phone call that came my way.
I thought about all the times I’d ignored my true feelings and shown up for the approval of others. I scanned through memories of my previous relationships, the times I’d lied to myself at work so I could keep going, and I thought of my mother. The aim to please, the struggle for approval, always with her face in my mind.
I sat up, pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes. Tomorrow, I told myself, could be a fresh start. The tears slowed and I took a deep breath. My left hand grazed one of the laptops on the bed, a reminder that there was work yet to be done. Amelia would be awake soon, and expecting my feedback. I twisted my body back to the screens. I didn’t have the energy to fight the voice in my head that had ruled the last three decades of my life, the voice that told me to keep going, to be perfect, to stop complaining, to work hard, to do my duty, and to do it with pleasure. Tomorrow, I’d be stronger. But tonight, the voice would win.
I tapped the space bar softly and the audio resumed.