Kathy Lette

Pictured: Val Lette and Kathy Lette

Her adolescence on Sydney’s southern beaches in the 1970s was captured in Puberty Blues – the book the teenage Kathy Lette co-authored with a friend. With a string of other popular books behind her, the author and columnist now lives an expat life in London with her husband, Geoffrey Robertson. Kathy’s relationship with her mother has always been a strong one. When Kathy’s son was diagnosed with autism as a toddler, she says it was her mum who saved her sanity.

My mother gave me the greatest gift imaginable – three sensational sisters. We are great mates and love each other unconditionally. Well, there are a few conditions. Everyone must take their turn with the washing up, wine pouring and gin buying. But the only thing we really mock fight over is who is at the top of Mum’s speed dial! We had the usual teen nightmares, when the generation gap seemed wider than the Simpson Desert, but through all our ordeals, Mum maintained her love and warmth. She’s witty, wise, and wonderful. It must sound as though where there’s a will, I really want to be in it! But I’m not being sycophantic or sentimental. Just ask any of my friends – they’ve all asked Mum to adopt them. Especially Ruby Wax, who wants to draw up legal papers.

My mum, Val, was a teacher. It was her absolute vocation, just like her mother before her. She was principal of infants and primary schools for as long as I can remember, and was absolutely adored by kids and parents alike. People still contact me all the time on Facebook and Twitter to tell me what a great teacher she was. She has that ability, that gift really, to see the potential in all her little charges, no matter how snot-faced, ankle-biting or just plain annoying.

My earliest memories of Mum are cupcakes and fairy stories and endless fun. It was a happy and carefree childhood. The most dangerous thing in a ten-mile radius was a bad oyster (the family home is on Oyster Bay). The lack of misery and hardship does not make a great childhood for a writer though – I’ve long contemplated suing my parents for loss of book royalties for bringing me up too happily. How could they be so friggin’ inconsiderate?

My mother was always ahead of her time. She went to St George, a selective school for clever girls, just as her mother did before her. She was at teachers’ college by seventeen. When she started teaching, she received six pounds a week. She gave two pounds to her mother, banked two for an overseas trip and lived on the rest. By twenty-one she was bound for Britain by boat, with a hat box and a gaggle of girlfriends, with whom she still meets once a month in town. All five of them lived in a tiny bedsit in Earls Court, boiling their eggs on the gas ring and hot-bedding. When they weren’t teaching, they hitchhiked around Europe – long before it was fashionable.

She was a brilliant role model in that she inspired her four daughters to stand on our stilettoes and not ever wait to be rescued by a knight in shining Armani. That may sound pat, but it’s a mantra of mine now and a lesson I always pass on to high school girls when I’m giving talks.

All through infants and primary school, I seem to remember that I had the only mum who worked. I was born in 1958, and the sixties was that era of lobotomised domesticity. It’s captured so accurately by Betty Draper in Mad Men. Women were supposed to be decorative and demure – a life-support system to a womb. Having a mother who not only worked, but was also in a position of authority and power, ingrained into me the idea that women could do anything.

The Aussie men I grew up with disproved the theory of evolution – they were devolving into apes. In the Sydney suburbs in that era, ‘Germaine Greer’ was simply rhyming slang for beer. Mum says that when she read The Female Eunuch she was riveted – the book voiced so many of her secret thoughts and ideas. Germaine was like a front row forward feminist – a ball-kicker who cleared the field for the rest of us. Mum says she spent months defending Germaine at every suburban dinner party or barbecue. People would start badmouthing her and Mum would reply: ‘Have you even read the book?’ Of course they hadn’t, so she would give a persuasive précis and slowly convert all the neighbourhood wives. My mum did go on to become Toastmistress champion of Australia, by the way, so she has a powerful way with words and a velvet-voiced delivery, which is magnetic and convincing. But feminism only went so far. She was supposed to represent Australia in the International Toastmistress championships in America, but with a full-time job and four kids, that was an impossibility.

I can remember winning writing competitions from the age of eight. My darling dad, Merv, was high up in the Post Master General’s Department (PMG) at the time. They organised lots of painting and writing competitions across the state, and I seem to remember often winning the writing awards. I found all the rosettes and ribbons recently, hidden under the lining of Mum’s linen press, which I found deeply touching, as we’re not a sentimental family. Although we are loving and very huggy, we don’t go in for a lot of big-noting. Affectionate teasing is our emotional modus operandi. ‘Not a half-bad effort’ is the equivalent of a Shakespearean love sonnet. And ‘good on you’ is like winning the Nobel Prize.

Because Mum was a teacher, she was obviously devastated when I dropped out of school at sixteen. Really traumatised! I always say that the only examination I’ve ever passed is my cervical smear test, but I was actually a straight-A student. Well, apart from maths. I am totally innumerate. (I cling to the old joke – how does it go? Why are Aussie women so bad at maths? Because men are always telling them that six inches equals ten.) I so wanted to be a writer and couldn’t wait to get out into the world to find things to write about. I couldn’t understand why teachers spent all those years teaching you to talk, then just made you shut up. I do regret it now, though. I’m an autodidact – which is clearly a word I taught myself.

Getting an honorary doctorate from Southampton Solent University a few years ago was the highlight of my life – and my mum’s. She was even more thrilled than I was. When the University rang me to ask for my head size for the doctoral cap, I remember saying: ‘Well it was much smaller before you asked me that question!’ I wore that bloody cap everywhere – to the shops, to the gym. I even wore it in the shower, covered in a shower cap! Leaving school prematurely was a great incentive to succeed – just to prove to my academic mum that I could make it some other way.

What my mum and I do share is a love of words. We are cruciverbalists and do the Guardian crossword every day by Skype. And we get it out in record time, too.

My mum has only recently confided in me about how much flak she had to put up with when Puberty Blues was published. I hadn’t told her about the manuscript or shown her any of the content – it was so raw and racy. But apparently she received anonymous phone calls and letters berating her for having such a scandalous daughter and telling her she wasn’t fit to be a teacher. You must remember that the generation gap was Grand Canyon-wide at the time and parents had no inkling of what their kids were really getting up to – the drugs, the sex, the drinking. That older generation was so easily scandalised. My poor parents needed to strap some shock absorbers to their brains. I’m sure there were rows and rows of raised eyebrows when they attended their respective churches each week – Mum was Anglican and Dad was Catholic – but they kindly kept that from me.

Both my mum and dad were products of wartime – frugality was in their nature. Plus there were no handouts. My mother’s father was a bus driver and my father’s father was a policeman. My parents were determined to make a better life for their family, and, as they both worked, they banked my mother’s salary and lived on my father’s wage. This meant that we could eventually afford a built-in swimming pool. That was a luxury. Most people had an above-ground Clarke pool. We also eventually had a rumpus room – the height of architectural chic. When I was twelve they took their long-service leave and we headed off around the world, in a campervan, all four girls packed in like sardines. It was the most exciting adventure, although we whinged to them much of the time about how much we missed our boring friends and how much we wanted to go home for a battered sav and a lamington, ungrateful brats that we were.

We lived in London for five months and went to Peckham Girls Comprehensive School – it was terrifying, like a minimum security high school – before traveling all over Europe, from Portugal to Turkey, via Italy, Switzerland, Greece, then on to America. We drove from New York to San Francisco, through hurricanes and tornadoes and dust storms and heat waves. It was so courageous of them, when I look back. I wouldn’t bloody well do it now. Dad did all the driving and navigating – and all without sat nav – while Mum conjured up three meals a day from the tiny gas ring and washed all our undies in that tiny sink.

My parents brought us up to either work or study. When I did leave school, to become a hippy first and then a punk, squatting in a terribly run-down terrace in Wooloomooloo, I had every awful job going. I emptied bedpans in a hospital (hence the toilet humour, right?), I waitressed, made bathplugs in a factory, transplanted seedlings in a nursery – you name it, I’ve done it. Nothing inspires you more in life than a bad job. I sold underwear at Woolies to old ladies and I kept thinking: ‘I know I’m smarter than this.’ So when I was seventeen or so I went on to get a column in the newspaper, and then published my first book (co-written with a girlfriend) by age nineteen.

I’m not really motivated by money, but with my parents’ stories of the Depression and the war shortages soaked into my psyche, I do like to be secure. I love to look around and think: ‘I bought all of this with wit and words.’ I actually wrote this house. My gorgeous apartment in Potts Point, overlooking Sydney Harbour, is entirely bought from my book royalties. And that’s a good feeling.

Much to my mother’s horror, I’m not frugal. I follow Oscar Wilde’s mantra that if you take care of the luxuries, the necessities will take care of themselves – so I’m always pouring champagne down my friends’ necks and taking them out to swing from chandeliers.

I think my Mum and I must look very alike. Women would often stop me on the local Hurstville bus and say: ‘You must be Val Grieve’s daughter!’ I hope I do look like her, as she’s so lovely – to me anyway. We share a love of laughter. Mum’s humour is drier than an AA clinic. She’s also Wikipedia with a pulse, and a walking thesaurus and dictionary. During family Scrabble, we all defer to her as the oracle.

Personality-wise, I just wish I could be more like her. My sisters and I can’t get over how selfless and kind and thoughtful she is. Whenever I stay with her – and she’s well into her eighties now – she gets up in the morning to cook my breakfast and squeeze my orange juice and walks a few miles to the shops to get my favourite fish for dinner. Plus she’s the world’s best grandma to her eight grandkids who also all adore her. I don’t think any woman really appreciates all the sacrifices her mum made for her until she is making the same sacrifices for her own kids. The sleepless nights, always taking the burnt chop, the knowledge that you would take a bullet for them without a moment’s thought. Plus, seeing your mum laughing and playing and delighting in her grandchildren gives you an extraordinary window into the past, because this is how she was with you. It’s the most nourishing feeling.

I do feel guilty about my teen years. I was a truly terrible teenager. As soon as I got taken hostage by my hormones, I turned into Attila the teen. I’d been school captain and sports captain and starred in the school musicals and been top of the class – but then I transmogrified overnight into a surly, snarly, boy-obsessed malcontent. Mum tried every strategy – kindness, crossness, grounding me, reasoning, restraining. All failed miserably. I think at one time there was even talk of sending me off to a school for uncontrollable girls. But luckily, love won out.

Mothers and their teenage daughters have more wars break­ing out on a daily basis than the Balkan States. Teenage daughters seem to have an ‘I find my mother contemptible’ clause written into their contracts. The biggest area of conflict with my own mum was boyfriends.

When my own daughter went through her terrible teens, it helped to remember all the grief I’d made my own poor mama endure – all those years of eye-rolling, third-degree sarcasm and Neanderthal boyfriends with three-grunt vocabularies.

The truth is, besides feeding and watering and prodding with a foot occasionally to see if it’s still alive, there’s no foolproof method of raising a teenager. But the joyful news is that they do come through it. By twenty-one I’d re-emerged, full of love, light, laughter and devotion to my darling mother, as did my own daughter – although, when she went a tad feral and momentarily rejected me during her teen years, I did allow my mum a little light gloating.

By the way, my top parenting tip: if a rabid teenage daughter does get loose in your home, do not under any circumstances approach it. This creature is armed and dangerous. It has teeth. Back slowly out of the house and sleep on the nature strip. And if it ever screams at you: ‘I wish you’d just die!’ take a big gulp of wine and a drag on your fag and simply reply: ‘I’m doing my best, darling.’

What I learned from my Mum is:

Don’t sweat the small stuff.

You’re of pioneering stock.

Nobody can make you feel inferior unless you let them.

Laugh and the world laughs with you, cry and your martini gets salty.

I wish I’d inherited her ability to cook the perfect cupcake. But I’m so, so glad I don’t have her terrible singing voice. I keep thinking it will turn into a tune, but it doesn’t.

One big difference is that my mother’s generation didn’t like to talk about sex and relationships. There was some brief, cursory chat when I was twelve which involved awful sanitary towels with belts, but apart from that it was the mother-daughter film at school. Ugh, do you remember those films? It’s a wonder the Pope isn’t ringing us up for tips on celibacy.

My generation tried to be the opposite. We want to talk about every nuance of sex and relationships and mucous viscosity. Of course, our daughters react to this with horror. My darling daughter only wanted to use the word ‘period’ if it was next to the word ‘Jurassic’ or ‘Hellenic’. It makes me laugh now to think how teenagers would rather die than be seen in public with their parents. My own daughter went through that stage. Living with a teenage daughter is like living with a little dictator – you’re not allowed to laugh, sing, dance, wear short skirts or be seen in a ten mile radius of your child!

My husband has never said to me: ‘You’re just like your mother.’ And if he did say that, it would be a compliment. He’s more likely to say: ‘Can’t you be more like your mother?’ What I covet is her patience. I’m of the ‘instant gratification takes too long’ school of thought. I also covet her deep kindness – Mum always gives people the benefit of the doubt and sees goodness in all.

The trouble with our mum is that she made it all look so easy. Having a big family of funny, raucous, boisterous kids seemed the most natural thing in the world to me. It never occurred to me not to want children. And then when the snooze alarm went off on my biological clock, I thought I’d breeze through it all, just like Mum. I definitely had days where I wanted to put my kids back into the condom vending machine for a refund. The great thing about being a writer is that it’s cheaper than therapy. I turned all that angst into a comic novel called Mad Cows, which was made into a film staring Joanna Lumley.

If there were an Olympic medal for grandmothering, Val would win gold. She is the best grandma in the world. She has eight grandchildren – all four of us had two kids each – and she has partly raised them all. She’s let them beat her at dominos and cards and destroy her house to build forts and cover her in green make-up and glitter, which she’s occasionally forgotten about and worn to church.

My mother is so young at heart, it’s hard to believe that she’s now a widow in her eighties. When my darling dad died suddenly from blood clots, we were devastated. Even though I’m an independent, feminist career woman in my fifties, I just felt like a little girl in desperate need of her darling daddy. It was only when he passed away that we truly understood how vital he was to our stability and happiness. He’d been our rock.

My mum and dad were passionately in love their whole lives. They met just before she left for London. Dad saw her off at the docks in Sydney – then drove all night like a bat out of hell to be waiting for her ship in Melbourne. She must have been gobsmacked with delight. Then, when her ship left port, he drove his old clapped-out jalopy all the way to Adelaide to wait on the dock again. A month or so later, he broke his collarbone in a game (Dad was a front row forward for the Canterbury Bulldogs) and couldn’t play for while. His idea of convalescence was to follow his heart to England to continue their courtship. It’s practically a rom-com.

I really do think that it’s not until you have your own babies that you fully appreciate your own mother. You experi­ence first-hand all the sleepless nights, the caring and mollycoddling, sticking out your hand in restaurants so your baby can spit out some offending vegetable, unknotting pee-stained shoelaces with your teeth – all the things she once did for you. Clearing up the vomit of the little creature whose poop is also leaking up its back, you think to yourself: ‘My mother did this for me once.’ The delayed gratitude washes over you, as it does each generation. Looking back, I don’t know how my mother juggled everything, but she managed to combine kids and career at a time when not many women did so.

My mother’s warmth and compassion really saved my sanity when my son was diagnosed with autism when he was three. This is a diagnosis which drags you into the dark. My darling boy had become a plant in a gloomy room and it was my job to drag him into the light. But I couldn’t have survived that bleak, terrible time if I hadn’t been able to confide in my Mum.

Mothering a child on the autism spectrum – well, it’s kind of like trying to put together a giant jigsaw puzzle without the benefit of having a coloured picture on the box. There is no owner’s manual. It’s like finding a baby under a spaceship and bringing him up as your own.

My dear little boy had walked and talked early. He was so bright, advanced even. Then at about fourteen months he just suddenly lost his language. I’d presumed he simply had a chronic case of glue ear or some other minor ailment, so the word ‘autism’ slid into me like the sharp cold edge of a knife.

I can remember sitting in that doctor’s waiting room in shock. He’d reduced my cherished child to a black and white term. But to me, my little boy was full of the most vibrant colours. I felt disbelief, followed by dismay and then a fiercely protective lioness-type love.

Denial is a common response of parents in my situation, so there were years and years of alternative medical rounds, trudging through a labyrinth of social workers, speech and occupational therapists and top pediatric psychologists. For years I trekked here, there and everywhere, in the endless search for experts. My son had so many tests, he must have thought he was being drafted into the elite astronaut program. And Mum was with me every step of the way, often pouring alcohol.

I hate to think how many doctors’ children I have now put through university! Social workers were always telling me that being the mother of a child with special needs would be a challenge, but an exciting one. This is about as accurate as the captain of the Titanic telling his passengers that they were in for a diverting dip in the briny. But at least with Mum we could laugh at the more ludicrous moments and drink gin at the sadder times. And she took him for a few weeks a year so my husband and I could escape – go lie on a beach somewhere, sip cocktails with umbrellas in them and read inferior fiction.

The social isolation was so hard at times. The parent of a child with special needs suffers from creeping loneliness. I used to call the playground sandbox the quicksand box, as other parents, fearing some kind of leprosy-like contagion, would abandon my son and me, leaving only a numbing silence. Unusual behaviour is so often criticised by teachers and shop owners as bad parenting, with a crisp reprimand that you’ve obviously raised a ‘spoilt brat’. Parents of kids with special needs too often just suffer in silence. I don’t know how I would have survived all those bleak, emotionally draining, confusing years without the love, wit and warmth of my family. They accepted my quirky, brilliant boy for who he was and celebrated his differences. My family and I now know that there is no such thing as normal and abnormal. Just ordinary and extraordinary.

What I’ve learned from Mum and Dad is that friends and family keep you young. A gathering with my three sisters is nature’s penicillin and so much cheaper than therapy. The other way to stay young is to never, ever turn down an adventure – which is why Mum and all four of us girls are planning a river cruise in France next year.

I’ve bought five tiaras, five berets and five captain’s hats. No doubt we’ll have to be hospitalised from hilarity. Those French had better bloody well look out. And if they annoy us in any way, we can always get Mum to sing.