Claire Halliday

Pictured: Vilma Halliday

What did Claire Halliday’s mother teach her? That people are complex and have reasons behind the things they say and do. Claire’s career as a feature writer for some of Australia’s leading magazines and newspapers has been built on the idea that everyone has a story. In the case of her own mother, it’s definitely true.

Mum’s in her late eighties now and I’m still learning about life from her. Some of the most confronting lessons have been intensely personal ones. I have learned to admit to faults in my own behaviour and the way I’ve reacted in different situations, and acknowledge that there have been times I could have chosen to be more polite, or more patient. Not just with my parents, but everyone.

But I’ve also learned that regret is a wasted feeling. You can’t change the past. What you can change is the way you respond to the events in your life and how you choose to live the rest of it. For a long time – right up until I was in my mid-forties – when I was around Mum for any length of time, I’d adopt the attitude and tone of a snappy, sullen teenager. It was like our relationship was trapped in 1985 and we were both still carrying old tensions into every new interaction.

Up until about three years ago, when we finally found some fantastic accommodation that we can return to when we visit from Melbourne every year, my husband and I used to cram into Mum’s house each summer to stay in Adelaide for Christmas – two kids and two adults squished into my old bedroom and the two little ones sleeping with Mum in her bed.

It wouldn’t take long for the niggling to start – I would get too easily frustrated and she would react to me also. They’re not my husband’s best holiday memories.

But there are lots of good times to look back on. Childhood for me was fantastic. Classic 1970s memories of beach holidays and freedom to roam around with the neighbourhood kids and come home to a mum who was always home. Mum did work part-time by the time we’d been at primary school for a couple of years but she was always there to see us off to school and always there to welcome us back home again. It felt safe.

I gave Mum a hard time when I was a teenager. Now that I have four children of my own – including two teenagers – I can’t imagine how I would cope if they did one quarter of the things I got up to. I’m lucky they’re using their energies in different ways – for now, at least. I was all about being as outrageous and challenging as possible, and I was angry. She was too, in many ways. It takes all the knowledge I have as an adult, with all the things I have learned about myself, her life, and the world in general, to really understand that.

It was the perfect storm, really. Mum was 40 when I came along and so by the time I hit the teen years and got my period, she was going through menopause – a house with two females navigating their own versions of hormonal stress, with the added tension of me not handling various events in my life and acting out pretty badly. It wouldn’t have been fun for her.

I was eleven when I found out I was adopted. I’d forgotten the age detail but a few years ago I reconnected with one of my best primary school friends, thanks to social media, and he told me he could remember the day I came back to school – he said it was grade six – and told him all about it.

I had always felt different in some way within my family – through no fault of my mum, dad or my older brother – and so when I decided to turn the little key in Mum’s locked bedroom drawers one day when she was at work, and I found the adoption certificate amongst the other papers there, those feelings I’d had made more sense. At the same time, it was still a shock, and I spent the next few years feeling displaced and pretty confused about a lot of things. I switched between romanticising the ideas about why my birth mother might have had to put me up for adoption – almost against her will because of pressure from strict parents, perhaps – to feeling completely let down that she hadn’t loved me enough to want to keep me for herself. I took those feelings out on Mum – my adoptive mother. It was a weird time.

I went from being pretty much a straight-A student in primary school to being on the brink of adolescence with this news that I wasn’t completely who I thought I was.

By the time I was in my second year of high school, I’d begun reinventing myself any way I could. I’d cut and dyed my hair, pierced my ears too many times, failed lots of the subjects I’d stopped caring about, became a vegetarian, wagged school, and had taken to my room with a record player to obsess over meaningful lyrics and dream of being a rock journalist.

I think most teenagers feel a distance from their parents at some point. I just didn’t get Mum at all. The best anecdote to show how different I felt from her is all about the Beatles. I’d discovered their music in a major way. Most bands I loved tracked their influences, in some form, to some aspects of the Beatles. They were – and still are – my favourite band. A cool bit of Adelaide-related Beatles trivia is that, when the band came to Australia in 1964, Adelaide actually gave them the biggest crowd they ever had anywhere in the world. They stood on the balcony of the Adelaide Town Hall and 300,000 people packed the streets to see them. Before that moment, there was a motorcade from the airport in open-top convertibles and people lined the main road to the city, the Anzac Highway, to watch them drive past. The Anzac Highway is about a two-minute walk from my childhood home, where Mum still lives, and so I asked Mum to tell me about the time she saw The Beatles go past. But she didn’t see them go past. Mum had a hairdressing appointment. She was at the hairdresser – on the Anzac Highway – and wasn’t fussed about any of it. It meant nothing to her. I still get frustrated thinking about it.

By the time I was in high school, my Dad was running the sheet metal engineering business that he’d inherited from his father into the ground through some silly business decisions. Dad had an increasingly slack attitude to his understanding of his own value and the quality of work he provided for people – poor Mum had to deal with the worry of unpaid invoices from customers and a growing amount of debt. To say Dad was an alcoholic paints a picture of a raging, angry drunk, and life wasn’t like that at all, but he did drink too much and it did have an impact. He would head to the factory at 6 a.m., do a few hours work, then disappear. Mum was working at the factory as his receptionist and office admin person and she would be left there, dealing with the guys on the floor, who gradually became fewer and fewer as the work dried up. She found out later that Dad would be at the pub down the road when it opened at 11 a.m. – having a quiet wine or two and chatting the other barflies. He’d head back to the factory, do a bit more work, head home by 3 p.m. or so, start on the cask wine, and shortly after dinner he’d be ready for bed. Mum would be left on the couch to watch TV by herself.

She must have felt really lonely, but I was too wrapped up in my teenage problems to realise it, and I’m sure my attitude just added to it. From my perspective, I was caught up in feelings of: ‘I don’t belong here.’ I wasted lots of time wondering how I had ended up in this very suburban, working-class family. I felt like I was meant to be part of a bigger life, somehow. I felt trapped.

Once I turned eighteen, I was able to apply for non-identifying information to find out some of the basic details about the people who had conceived me. I received the reply – a letter that told me the height and hair colour and age of both my birth mother and birth father, and I remember feeling like it was something I couldn’t discuss with Mum. She just shut down anytime I tried to talk about anything to do with adoption and wanting to find out more about where I came from. I felt like I was betraying her.

I’m not sure what I was hoping to find, or what I thought would happen to my life. I think I was longing to find out that my ‘real’ mother was an artist and my dad was a writer or something – anything that would make me feel like all the creative dreams I had about writing and music and film-making might have had an origin somewhere – but the news was that she was a 19-year-old nurse and he was a 21-year-old postal worker. And they were both short – and from Tasmania. I remember feeling disappointed I had come from such mundane stock.

When the adoption laws changed in South Australia a few years later, I took the next step and applied for my birth certificate to find out my birth mother’s name, but I didn’t tell Mum at first.

I’d seen lots of adoption reunion stories on midday movies so I was under the impression that I’d have this amazing reconnection with my birth mother. The reality was that she wasn’t interested at all. Once I had her full name, which was a bit unusual, it only took me about half an hour of detective work at the local post office – before the days of the internet – looking at interstate phone books and making a few phone calls before I found her address and number. I went home and called her straight away. In hindsight, I should have thought more about what to say but I just couldn’t. I felt like I’d already been waiting my whole life. That phone call was the most difficult, most awkward call I’ve ever made. It’s a blur now but she must have asked for my address because a couple of days later a letter arrived in the mail. Just two small, firmly worded pages of neat cursive handwriting, but packed with a lot of information. She told me that I shouldn’t cry for what I didn’t have. Her own mother had died when she was a little girl and she told me that I should be grateful to have been chosen by a nice family and have a mother who’d adopted me.

The distance between Mum and I was huge by that time and I’d already moved out of home to live with some friends in a share-house, so it was something I kept mostly to myself. By then I had immersed myself in the world of seeing live bands and being obsessed with the boys who played in them, playing the part of the unhappy young woman with low self-esteem, looking for someone to love me. There was always this feeling that Mum couldn’t possibly understand any of my feelings or what it was like to be me. Most children have that idea about their parents, I suppose. You tend to be quite self-centred when you’re young.

I think, generally, kids have a way of taking their parents for granted and not showing any interest in their lives or background or experiences. I see that myself with my own children. They don’t mean to be disinterested in a rude way – they just have other things on their minds and they don’t seem that keen to find out about the life you might have lived before you became their mum.

Who knows what I’ll tell them about all the details of my life if they eventually ask? There are definitely some things I’d rather they never knew.

I remember conversations with Mum about her childhood here and there – I was always fascinated by hearing tales of her growing up in WWII and what it was like to have two older brothers away at war, plus a dad who was sent to Darwin to do his duties as an older man on the home front. Mum and her mother were home alone in Adelaide for most of the war.

Mum loved her parents and her brothers so much. As her mum and dad aged they came to live next door in the maisonette that was attached to our own maisonette and when my Pa eventually died in his sleep there one night, Mum took on the role of carer for her own mother. When my grandmother’s dementia got too bad, she had to go into a nursing home, and I remember a real sadness about Mum when both of her parents were dead.

Losing both her brothers over the years was something that also had a huge impact on her. It must be strange to be the last one alive in your family. There are so many stories and memories that just stop being revisited when the people who lived them with you aren’t there anymore. Then, when my dad died about twelve years ago, Mum had to create new routines.

Mum had always told me that her family was fairly poor growing up. I knew she had always studied dancing and wanted to be a ballerina but didn’t really have the money for proper tuition and training – something I think was one of the biggest sadnesses of her life. Mum also loved classical music – we had music playing at home every evening when I was a kid. Dad’s tastes would be for artists like Frank Sinatra and Cleo Laine and Glenn Campbell and John Denver – and Mum loved them too – but when it was just her she’d put on records of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or pieces by Mozart and Tchaikovsky. She’s told me lots of times – even recently – about how they once had a piano in their house that they were looking after for one of her aunts, and how she’d always wanted to play it and that the lady down the street had offered to give her lessons. Mum was really excited about it but then her aunt decided to take the piano back. ‘And that was the end of me playing the piano,’ Mum says.

Mum also talked a lot about her days as an usherette at the old Regent Cinema in Adelaide and, weirdly, I had a part-time job there as an usherette myself when I was about eighteen. She loved her days at the Regent. I think she worked there through her mid-twenties into her early thirties before she married my dad. For years, she’s always attended at least a couple of reunion lunches each year. I think they’ve only petered out in the last few years. Almost all of her friends have died now. She’s one of the only ones left.

She’s never driven a car so she gets around on public transport and has always been very active. One day she’s on a tram to the city, or to the beach for a walk along the jetty, another day she gets picked up by the council bus to go to a community lunch; she has line dancing class another day and she also goes swimming with some other people around her age in an aqua exercise class. Then she volunteers at the local primary school one morning a week – reading with the grade one and grade two classes. That’s starting to slow down now, though. She’s not really enjoying life in the same way she used to. She has a favourite quote she says comes from Bette Davis: ‘Old age ain’t no place for sissies.’

Now that her memory is slipping away, I am kicking myself that I never sat down with her to get her stories on audio or video. You think you have time to do these things and you mean to, and then the opportunity is gone.

I moved to Melbourne when I was 21 to get away from an abusive boyfriend. I used to go back to Adelaide a couple of times a year to visit Mum and Dad and my friends, but the gap between us was a chasm at times and, even though there aren’t any more fights and I call her a couple of times a week, it’s never much more than surface chit-chat. She’ll ask about my kids and I’ll tell her and I’ll ask about what she’s doing that day and that’s about it. We’ve never had that relationship where I would talk really deeply to her about anything personal and important in my life. I know friends who are like that with their mums and I kind of envy it but I admit that, in part, it was my own making.

When I was in my mid-twenties, a big secret came out that gave us all a shock.

I’d just been for a visit and then the phone rang a few days later and Mum told me she’d pay for me to come back on the plane because she had something really important she needed to tell me face-to-face. I remember thinking that one of my parents must be dying – cancer or something – but she wouldn’t share anything on the phone so I booked my flight and headed back to see what the fuss was.

I’d barely set foot in their kitchen when she blurted it out. She’d had a baby with another man she’d had an affair with – before marrying my dad – and she’d become pregnant and given the baby up for adoption.

The reason the secret was out now was because that baby – a daughter – had tracked Mum down.

Life is full of surprises. That’s something else I’ve learned.

The full story is that, even though Mum never had the luxury of having full-time dance training, she must have been good and she had a job as a dancer in touring musical theatre shows with JC Williamson, which was a very well-known Melbourne theatre company. She must have been incredibly naïve and got swept off her feet by one of the male dancers and they actually got married. Trouble was, he was gay, and my poor mum didn’t have a clue.

So there she was, moving from Adelaide to Melbourne to dance in musicals with a theatre company that toured Australia, and married to a guy who never consummated the marriage because he didn’t actually fancy women.

Mum’s had a real bitterness about that, her whole life. I don’t blame her. The way she found out was that she walked in on her husband in bed with another of the male dancers. And that was that. The marriage was annulled and Mum was embarrassed and devastated. He continued on with a career in theatre and ended up in London, apparently, but Mum went back to Adelaide and working at the Regent, and then ended up in an affair with the married manager.

For me, it wasn’t so much the shock of finding out my mum had a baby and adopted it out that had an impact – it was that I had to watch my mum reunite and have a relationship with her own daughter. It was what I had wanted my birth mother to do with me, but mine wasn’t interested at all. The daughter, Michelle, was accepted into our family with open arms by everyone and suddenly there was an extra extended family joining us for birthdays and Christmas. I think it was fantastic for Mum to reunite with her daughter. For her, it was a chapter of her life that now had some closure – there was no more wondering about what had happened to the baby she’d given up. My Dad accepted it all – everybody did. It was different for my brother too because he was Mum and Dad’s natural child, whom they’d had before Mum lost another baby boy and found out she couldn’t have any more children. For him, he actually found a new person he was related to, but for me, it was something more unusual and complicated.

Michelle and I got along fine but she understood my feelings of displacement. It was another dent in the relationship between Mum and I, too. I took the frustration I had for my own birth mother out on her, I guess, and all the times I felt she’d closed me off from conversations about my own adoption, I realised she must have been thinking about her own daughter out there somewhere. It’s a bit of a soap opera.

Watching Mum reunite with her own birth daughter made me want to give my own birth mother reunion another chance, so I used a business trip as an excuse to contact her again. She was living in Perth, and even though my trip was to Darwin and I’d only tacked on a side flight to Perth in the hope she might see me, I rang her to say that I happened to be in town and asked her if she might have time for a coffee. I could tell she wasn’t impressed, but she told me to give her twenty-four hours and she’d let me know. She did call – and gave me the name of a cafe and a time. I’d never been to Perth but when I drove the hire car into the car park of a massive shopping centre – and this was on a busy Saturday morning – and discovered the ‘cafe’ was little more than a coffee counter in a food court, I should have just left. But I didn’t. I met my birth mother, for what I’m sure will be the only time in my life I’ll ever see her. I drank a bad latte while she sipped at a cappuccino and punched out medical facts about my familial history, as if that was the only thing that must have mattered to me. I asked her to stay for a second coffee but she told me that she didn’t have time because she was running late to meet her daughter and go shopping for her formal dress.

Ouch.

That was that.

I spent a lot of time taking that stuff out on Mum – I mean, my adoptive mother. My anger was misplaced. It took me ages to move on.

Now I’m in that stage of life, like a lot of my friends, where things are turning and myself and my brother are having sometimes daily conversations about Mum’s health and wellbeing – wondering what can be done to get her into a nursing home, or whether that is really the right thing to do. She switches between expressing her loneliness, despite all her activities, and telling us she wants to stay living at home.

It’s made me think more deeply about my own old age and how I might want to end up and things I might be able to do to try to feel happy and settled and fulfilled.

I can’t predict the future but I’m hoping to live a life where I don’t leave ambitions unfulfilled and to try to achieve all the things I want to do. It’s what everybody wants, I suppose.

I’m not sure how my own children will judge me when I’m older – with four very different views, I presume. I figure that, as long as I am happy, I am in a better position to help them find happiness. That’s all any mother wants for their children, really.