When Penny was fifteen months old, I became pregnant again with our third child. Once again I was delighted and couldn’t wait to see what the random combination of our genes would produce this time. Bill also seemed pleased. But the equanimity of our life was shattered when my brother Richard, who had joined the Department of Foreign Affairs, was posted to Japan as third secretary in the Australian Embassy.
Bill occasionally said that he felt trapped by marriage and babies at the age of twenty-six, before he had really had time to travel and experience life. Despite these feelings, he seemed relatively content with his lot. But Richard’s departure upset the emotional applecart and triggered an intense desire in Bill to travel.
He didn’t tell me how he felt, but I sensed a distance between us, and I would find him sitting on the old fruit tree in the back garden gazing up at the planes as they flew overhead. At the time he was paving the terrace at the back of the house beneath the walnut tree. He dug furiously in the soil for days using the end of his spirit level to make holes for the bricks, and in his frustration he wore half an inch off the end of his metal tool.
We still were not good communicators; I was at odds to know how to help him, and I felt lonely and depressed myself. Several months later Bill McCoy suggested that Bill apply for a fellowship in radiology at Harvard Medical School. He leapt at the opportunity and cheered up immediately, and I was so relieved by his change of mood that I agreed. He was accepted, and so we made our plans. I would stay with Mum for the last two months of my pregnancy, have the baby, and three months later take the children and Mum to Boston. Mum was delighted. Since Dad’s death four years ago she had lived alone, and she was hungry for company. Bill was thrilled not only because of the career opportunity the fellowship represented, but also because he could travel.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. Trained and accustomed to placing the needs of my husband before my own, I sat in front of the fire after dinner night after night preparing his clothes for departure, even sewing nametags on his socks. But as Bill’s anticipation mounted, I became more disturbed. I think my subconscious mind knew that I was about to shoulder a huge burden— the delivery of a new baby, caring for three small children plus my lonely and ailing mother—alone. I suppressed my fears because I didn’t want to stand in Bill’s way, and I couldn’t confide in Mum because she was so looking forward to our coming to stay with her. I became quite upset and developed nominal aphasia—difficulty remembering the names of people and things—obviously a symptom of my anxiety.
After weeks of preparation we rented our house to friends, Bill packed his bags, and we moved the babies and all our stuff to Mum’s house. The night before Bill left, we slept in Mum’s double bed at the front of the house, bathed in the perfume of wisteria blossom, while a bird sang like a nightingale all night. I lay awake, nestled in Bill’s arms, dreading his departure.
On the way back from the airport after seeing him off, we were so anxious that Mum and I had a terrible fight in the car. I can’t remember what it was about, but I later realised that she was as worried as I was about the new situation. Both of us were shaken by the intensity of our anger, and we agreed to have no more fights and to live in peace for the next five months. We had a big job ahead of us.
When we got home, I sat on Mum’s empty double bed, and reality hit me like a ton of bricks. Here I was, seven months pregnant, alone and unsupported, with two small children and a lonely mother, all of whom depended on me to be strong and secure. I had let my most important reliable support disappear from my life, and I would miss him terribly. I sat on the bed, and for the first time I was able to cry. Mum discovered me in the bedroom sobbing in despair, and she hugged me; but still the load remained on my shoulders.
Some days later I received a letter from Bill, written on the plane between Adelaide and Sydney, telling me he loved me and thanking me. But I don’t think he fully understood the awful situation I was in. He was happy to be free. I was glad for him, but how would I cope?
Mum and I quickly settled into a daily routine, which seldom varied. We got up early, I bathed and fed the babies, while Mum, who was still working as an extension officer for the South Australian Department of Agriculture, showered and dressed for work. After she caught her bus to the city, I spent most of the day doing housework, washing, cleaning, ironing, and taking care of the children. In the evening I drove with them into the city to meet Mum, having prepared the dinner. The kids and I watched Mr. Ed, then I put them to bed, and Mum and I watched news and current affairs shows while we ate.
She and I thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company. In the two months before the new baby was born, we established a closer and more supportive relationship than ever before, perhaps because we were both caring for the children and were united in our love for them. Mum was as supportive as Bill had been, perhaps more. I developed the bond with her that I had always longed for; I think she could now give me some of the love she had been incapable of giving me as a child, because as grandmothers are wont to do, she loved these babies without reserve. There is a quantifiable difference between a mother’s love and the love of grandparents—I think because mothers are so caught up in the everyday practicalities of life that they don’t really have the time or luxury to revel in the beauty and perfection of their babies.
Mum particularly adored three-year-old Philip, who slept beside her bed in a little wooden cot. Because of her arthritis, she kept a bucket by the bed so he could urinate in the morning without her having to trundle him down to the bathroom at the back of the house. She rarely mentioned her own feelings, but it was clear that she had never really recovered from Dad’s death. The signs of her despair were there: when she drove to country centres in South Australia to help rural women redecorate their houses, she refused to wear a seat belt, and she drove around corners in neutral gear. She was normally a good driver, and I think she took these risks because she didn’t really care whether she lived or died. She also started smoking again. The joy she experienced in living with me and the children, however, gave her a new raison d’être.
As time went on, her physical health gave me increasing concern. Sometimes her arthritis was so debilitating that she had difficulty even holding a knife and fork, and she could not eat unless I cut up her food for her. At night she was in constant pain, taking anti-inflammatory drugs that gave her indigestion and peptic ulcer pains. She was also increasingly short of breath, though she never complained and was quietly brave.
Mum’s close friend Jo, who was big, fat, and caring, scolded me because I often wanted to talk to Mum when she got home from work. “Your mother is tired, she needs her sleep,” said Jo. “You should leave her alone.” Jo knew Mum was very ill, and she tried to force me to acknowledge this. But I was proprietorial about my mother and felt Jo had no right to interfere with our relationship or the way we lived together.
I should have understood that my mother had significant health problems. But there was another dynamic at work—if she was really sick, I didn’t want to know. Losing Dad had been bad enough; but I couldn’t face the thought that I could lose Mum as well, especially now, when I was feeling so alone and fragile. Denial is a very powerful mechanism: looking back, I see what a huge part it played in my emotional reality at this stage of my life and probably always had.
Perhaps, too, I didn’t want to upset the newly harmonious relationship Mum and I were enjoying. We had established our own routine, I had settled down to accept Bill’s absence, and I no longer felt as lonely as I had done at first. I lived for Bill’s letters from Boston, which arrived every three or four days. He seemed to be having a good time, and wrote about his job at Harvard and the respect he felt for his renowned boss Ed Newhauser and equally renowned colleague Dick Wittenborg. He made new friends, whose photos he sent, as well as photos of his new abode (a small room in the Judge Baker Building at the Children’s Hospital Medical Center) and copies of the children’s pictures which he had framed and placed on his desk. He said he couldn’t wait for us to arrive, and I felt the same way. So the last two months of my pregnancy were not difficult, and I began to relax and to feel relatively calm and confident.
When labour began at an ungodly hour on the morning of August the 17th, Mum drove me to hospital and left me there; she had to go to work that day. This was the first time I had laboured alone, without Bill, but I felt strong and managed to keep on top of the pain using my breathing exercises. The labour lasted fifteen hours. During the second stage, however, when the agony was unbearable, I grabbed the nitrous oxide mask, inhaling with such desperation that I knocked myself out. I came out of the soporific haze to hear the doctor telling the nurses that I had been stupid to lose consciousness. I had sufficient presence of mind to tell them, “I heard every word you said,” and they apologised.
I gave birth to a fierce-looking little boy whom I named William after his father and George after Bill’s father. I was still being sewn up, my legs in the air, when Tony Corbet, who was the paediatric registrar, strode in to inspect the new infant. It was great to see Corb, though I did feel I was not in the best position to receive guests. However, considering what close friends we had been, it was almost as good as having Bill there.
Mum came rushing in, took one look, and delightedly announced that the baby looked exactly like Dad. I was thrilled, too, though I experienced the usual postnatal depression two or three days after delivery. When I discovered a rock-hard, painless lump in my left breast just below the clavicle, I was convinced I had breast cancer and persuaded my poor obstetrician Les Poidevan to give up his Sunday tennis game to check it out. But it was only milk engorgement.
While Mum was at work during the day and I was in hospital, Penny and Philip were cared for by Mum’s next-door neighbour Irene. After eight days in hospital I returned to a house of chaos. Penny was very quiet and withdrawn; Philip looked lost and confused and had cut his hair diagonally across his fringe, ending up at his hairline on the right side. He had also discovered the laundry bleach, and little white hand marks now decorated his dark blue corduroy trousers.
Poor Mum—she simply hadn’t been able to cope on her own with two lively toddlers. I was shocked to see how exhausted she was. She could hardly walk without gasping for breath, and in the mornings after she got up, she would sit on the yellow plastic stool in the kitchen and cough and cough until she lost her breath. I’d never heard or seen anything like it before.
At some level I knew she was irreversibly sick, but I was frantically trying to handle two children under the age of three plus a new baby, and I couldn’t face the truth. In any case, what could I do? I saw that she might not be well enough to come with me to Boston as arranged. I was aching to see Bill, but I couldn’t possibly leave her behind. It was very difficult, and I had nobody to consult. Richard was overseas, and Susan was living in Montreal with her architect husband, John Ballinger. For the first time in my life I had painful decisions to make and nobody to turn to. I was terrified.
It all started to get to me. Some mornings I was so tired after feeding the baby during the night that I could hardly get out of bed to bathe and feed the children, let alone gather enough strength to drag ourselves into town for the passport photos, visas, and so on, for our trip to Boston. Three children and a sick mother was just too much of a load for me to handle, and I began to lose my temper with Philip and Penny, screaming at them, sometimes even slapping them in sheer frustration. Philip grew bewildered, Pen very quiet. I was like a madwoman, taking out my rage and fear on my beautiful babies. And it’s interesting: as I did so, a tape played in the back of my head, “That’s right, Mum did it”—the mark of Cain handed on from generation to generation. Meanwhile the baby slept like a dream all day. He liked to socialise at night; Mum and I were exhausted, but he was not to be ignored. If we left him left alone, he screamed blue murder until one of us—whoever was less tired—went to his basket in the dining room and gathered him into her arms. Several hours later when his social requirements were satisfied, he slept.
I remember lying in bed one morning eyeing a huge mound of diapers and children’s clothes, unable to move let alone decide what to pack for the trip, when Bill’s sister Judith Miller arrived and selectively packed them for me. Judith was very comforting; like me, she cared intensely about her family, though we had little else in common. She was a staunch friend, particularly then, and I remain eternally grateful for her help.
Gradually Mum’s health improved enough to make the trip. I bought two white leather harnesses so I could keep hold of Penny and Philip, and we all set off for the airport. The baby was now three months old and was still totally breast-fed. This was convenient in one way, but also tiring because the body uses a lot of nutrients to produce enough milk for a thriving, growing baby.
We kissed relatives and friends goodbye, and off we flew to Tokyo, where we were to stay for ten days with Richard and his wife Alison, who was also in Foreign Affairs. I was apprehensive before I boarded the plane: my postnatal hormones were still causing me to be extremely sensitive to the baby, and every fibre of my being was geared to protect him. I gave a sedative antihistamine, Phenergan, to Penny and Philip on the plane to quiet them. But they didn’t respond: quite the reverse. They screamed up and down the aisles for nine hours like a pair of monkeys, almost tearing the plane apart. Just as we were about to land, they lapsed into a deep coma. So Mum and I staggered off the plane carrying two unconscious children, a baby, and all the accompanying baggage. I later discovered that Phenergan, which is still used as a paediatric sedative, can paradoxically also be a stimulant.
Richard and Alison lived in the suburb of Aoyama, fifteen minutes from the centre of Tokyo, in a house leased by the Australian Embassy. It was spacious by Japanese standards, managing to accommodate two extra adults and three children with the minimum of inconvenience. We saw comparatively little of Richard, who was investigating the crash of an aircraft with Australians aboard into Tokyo Bay.
I found Japan fascinating, and so did Mum. Ali showed us around, and she and Richard took us on a car trip to Mt. Fuji and around the beautiful Japanese countryside, every square centimetre of which was cultivated. In 1966 there were still neighbourhood bathhouses, and in the evenings the streets were full of people in their kimonos and wooden sandals (gettas) carrying their soap and towels to the baths. Mum loved the simplicity of the Japanese life-style and the architecture.
One day I went to the hairdresser, who covered my head with a warm cloth, gently and sensuously massaging my ears. I came out of a reverie fifteen minutes later to see Penny with her white-blonde hair braided Japanese style and tied with red ribbons. What kind, sweet people the Japanese were, I thought. My blond children fascinated them, but they love all small children. They give their own extraordinary adoration until the age of five, when children are kicked out of the nest and expected to perform at school, and their lives become a lot tougher.
Ali had found the Australian diplomatic service to be even more sexist than I had found the medical establishment. In the 1960s university degrees were the springboard to careers for men, though not for women. In Canberra, where the Department of Foreign Affairs was based, women public servants received 20 percent less pay than men for the same work. When they married, they had to resign and become “temporary” without superannuation or annual leave, and the department was reluctant to recruit or train women or to give them responsible work. Alison was just as well qualified as Richard, but when she married him and they went to Japan, she had to give up any thought of a diplomatic career. (This situation did not change for women in Foreign Affairs until the Whitlam government came to power at the end of 1972. Two years later Ali, who had been studying Japanese and making her name as a broadcaster and writer, rejoined the foreign service, now with equal pay and permission to work in the same post as her husband, provided he was not an ambassador.)
When the time came for us to fly on to the United States, I grew worried about the flight again. Richard had told us about the kinds of injuries the passengers had sustained in the Tokyo Bay crash, making my fear of flying ten times worse. I was so anxious that I had difficulty sleeping those ten nights before we left. Eventually we boarded a TWA plane for Seattle. The last part of the trip was very rough. Each time the plane slammed about as we dropped altitude, Mum said: “We’re landing now,” but in fact we were not. I was so terrified that I nearly leapt out of the plane. But we landed safely, got the luggage and the children to a hotel, and fell into a deep sleep for fourteen hours.
When I ordered breakfast the next morning, a trolley arrived covered with perforated rubber matting and laden with jugs of orange juice, huge quantities of toast, cereal, butter, jam, and eggs. My first meal in the USA! I was shocked by the quantities of food, far more than we could ever eat.
Delighted that we had finally made it—even if we were on the other side of the continent—I sent Bill a telegram. He didn’t reply, which surprised me a little, and we flew on to Boston. When we got off the plane, there he was waiting outside as we descended the steps, holding two red roses, one for Mum and one for me. The moment I set eyes on him I knew how much I had missed him, and I could hardly wait to be held in his arms. He greeted the children with tremendous love, but I had to wait for about ten minutes before my turn came. Perhaps, I thought, he was embarrassed to show too much emotion in public.
Bill drove us to an apartment he had rented that day. It was on the second floor of an old white wooden house in Jamaica Plain, across the road from a beautiful lake called Jamaica Pond. There was no bed for Mum. Bill said he hadn’t had time to find one. I suppose he wanted us to himself, and I don’t think he knew how sick Mum had been, or what she had done for us. Unwell, jet-lagged and exhausted, she had to go to the home of Oscelio Cartaxo, a Brazilian colleague of Bill’s, to spend the night. I felt terrible.
My worst fears about her health were confirmed when I showed Bill her chest X-rays. His face turned ashen. “They’re the worst X-rays I’ve ever seen,” he said quietly. Mum’s shortness of breath was caused by severe pulmonary fibrosis, a rare complication of rheumatoid arthritis, and she had obviously been in right heart failure. We both knew there was no treatment for this, and the prognosis was grim. We didn’t discuss the subject any further: I still preferred not to face reality. Not after Dad. Not so soon.
What were my initial impressions of America? I never expected to really like it, because of the propaganda and films we had seen in Australia depicting ugly streets littered with neon signs and advertisments, with guns and violence at every street corner. I was quite unprepared for the beauty of New England. Bill took us for drives in Vermont and New Hampshire where the scenery resembled postcard pictures or Norman Rockwell paintings on the covers of the Saturday Evening Post. So people in America really lived in houses like that, I thought, it was not just some lovely fantasy. Mind you, I was absolutely overwhelmed when I entered a supermarket. I had never in my life seen such an array and variety of food: it seemed almost decadent.
Soon after we arrived in Boston, Mum flew up to Montreal to stay for a few weeks with Susan, who was expecting a baby. For the first time in five months Bill, the kids, and I could be together as a family unit. I felt as if an enormous load had been lifted from my shoulders, and Bill was also very happy.
Years later he told me something which quite shocked me: when he left Australia, he was troubled, thinking our marriage was in difficulties and that a separation might help. Now that we were together in the States, we were much more comfortable and relaxed with each other, so he must have felt that his theory had been vindicated. He was very sweet and grateful for everything and set about getting to know his children again, including his new baby. We became closer than we had ever been, sleeping in a state of marital bliss with our baby in a string crib at the foot of our four-poster bed.
This peace and harmony lasted only five days. One afternoon when the babies and I were taking an afternoon nap, I heard a car door slam downstairs. It was Mum. To my dismay, she had returned early, apparently missing, as she said, “my babies.” I think she felt that Philip, Penny, and William were hers.
Thus began five months of purgatory. Bill understandably felt threatened by Mum’s proprietorial attitude towards the children, and every night when he came home from work, he and she would fight. Almost anything would set them off—politics, history, the treatment of the children. Either she baited him with a provocative remark, or something he said irritated her.
Bill’s difficulty with Mum had more complicated causes than just jealousy over the children. She challenged him even more than I did, and that could not have been easy for him. She was an older woman like his mother, yet she did not give him the kind of uncritical love that emanated from Dot. This was all the more difficult for him because he initially had been attracted to Mum’s intelligence and charm. In fact, he told me half jokingly that he had fallen in love with her almost before he knew I was around.
I was the emotional meat in the sandwich, loving them both but having no idea how to handle the situation. If Bill thought I sided with Mum in any way, he refused to speak to me. I felt miserable and guilty. On the other hand, the thought of being rejected by Mum made me just as unhappy, if not more so. I needed love and closeness so badly that I felt I would do almost anything to gain approval, and so I ricocheted between the two, often being rejected by both. I should have told both of them to take a running jump at themselves and grow up, but I was not sufficiently strong or emotionally mature to stand up to such powerful personalities.
I became increasingly distant from Bill, and I also pulled away from Mum. In the end I sided with Bill against Mum. In a strange way I felt that she would understand my decision: after all, she had always told me that if her own mother had lived with them and caused any difficulties, Dad would have asked his mother-in-law to leave the house without hesitation. But making this decision, of course, did not mean that my guilt was any the less.
Mum planned to travel on to Europe, but she had to rest for several months until she grew stronger. We moved her into an apartment around the corner so we could be alone. Even though she was delighted to have her own TV set, enabling her to follow American politics, which she found fascinating, she was terribly lonely. I saw her enormous confidence begin to disappear. Five years earlier she had lost Dad; now she must have felt she was losing her daughter and grandchildren.
Indeed, I stopped sharing my feelings with her, and I no longer confided in her about the children. She felt so alienated when I pulled away from her that she was even tentative about coming around to our apartment during the day, presenting herself at the door with a peace offering such as a bunch of bananas for the children. But I wasn’t free to tell her how I felt and why I had pushed her away, because I thought it would mean being disloyal to Bill.
Our time together was painful, our newfound intimacy and love dwindling into stilted little conversations on walks around Jamaica Pond. Things came to such a pass between us that when Mum asked me to deliver her case down to the Boston docks for shipment to Australia, I did so reluctantly and with resentment. After all she had done for me!
But during these same months Bill and I were unable to sustain our hard-won new intimacy, and it gradually slipped away. As it ebbed, I saw that I had lost out on both sides and was alone.
Mum was growing thin, but she was still determined to go to Europe. Her courage was extraordinary. She intended to join a tour group—people she had never met in her life before—and travel with them all over the continent, including Eastern Europe. Just before she left, a riot took place in the Roxbury area of Boston between the police and the black population. The next day Mum boarded a bus that headed straight into the middle of it. She questioned everybody she could find and returned with a wonderfully detailed account of the whole event, much to the astonishment and admiration of our Boston friends. This was Mum at her best—unafraid, gutsy, and unquenchably curious.
On the day of her departure I delivered her to the Greyhound Bus terminal, for the trip to New York and the flight to Europe. I felt relieved and glad that she was going and this difficult period was over. I kissed her soft cheek goodbye. As I walked to the door, I looked back to see her face collapse and her little body shrunken inside her purple and blue print dress. I never saw her again.
That night Bill and I opened a bottle of champagne to celebrate our freedom, but I couldn’t drink it with enthusiasm. And for Bill and me, Mum’s departure changed nothing. We might still have been half a world apart.