I will continue to do most of the driving because I can’t help but feel unsafe with their hands (fingers) on the steering wheel and yet ironically, it is my driving that will cause the most terror for Mum. But even though she fears for her life every other second in the car (despite it not often being the first week of June or 11:11), Mum will still find the time and fingernail to point out things she considers interesting, hoping that I will agree with just how fascinating they are.
The older they get, the more it seems that what makes us laugh, what engages us, what causes us stress or concern, is drawn from an entirely different well to that of our parents.
Our time together will necessarily be one of increasing unsteadiness. I will have to walk more slowly so they can keep up, my elbow or hand will need to be easily accessible to help them remain stable. I will have to serve as their personal guide through a world that’s changing at a dizzying pace, placing their bodies and minds in a constant state of anxiety where I serve as a shield, of sorts.
Mum and Dad will insist they’re fine and don’t need much help. Yet in their tones of voices, in a slight hesitation of movement and within their sometime-timid eyes, I will see I have no other choice. I will step up as countless other adult children have done before me and are doing right now.
It will be a constant test of patience and if we let it, the situation may drive us crazy. But we worry because we love them and want the best for them, just as they do for us. It is, frankly, as simple as that.
* * *
I may take the mickey out of what my parents do and say, but if you lined up every child ever born in the order of most fortunate to least, you wouldn’t have to move very far along the line until you saw my appreciative little face. Similarly, I know I have taken a lot of that for granted. At least I used to. These days, I’m well aware of what privilege means.
While the challenges I forced upon my parents throughout the years weren’t exactly the most horrific imaginable, I nevertheless confess that it can’t always have been easy being my mum or dad. As I wrestled with internal and schoolyard demons, often my natural state of being was one of silence. Not an ignorant I’d prefer to be anywhere but here typical teenage boy silence, but rather an Oh god, I hope he’s not thinking about doing anything stupid to himself quietness.
I think it must have been particularly treacherous for my father to navigate the young man I was turning into. My sport-loving blokey father with his small-town mentality, facing up to the reality of having an overly effete, unathletic and utterly soft-bodied son, who obsessively collected Cyndi Lauper and Meryl Streep clippings and gave up on cricket after one failure of a season to try his hand at playing the double organ instead. Yes . . . the double organ. I was a teenaged son who, more often than not, was mistaken for being a girl.
I’ve never asked Dad, but these character developments must have been so confronting for a country boy like him and yet, not once, not for a single millisecond of my childhood (or adulthood for that matter), did I feel that my father did not love or accept me. On occasion, it must have been nearly impossible for him to feel proud of me (for anything other than my academic achievements at least), and yet I can distinctly recall his words to that very effect echoing throughout my years. If there was anything different about me, he either simply failed to notice or didn’t give two hoots.
I may believe that it’s a parent’s duty to love their children unconditionally, yet I can’t help but feel that with what we put them through, it’s somewhat of a miracle so many of them do. Dad maintained his love for me during years I could find nothing other than repulsion and loathing for myself. Our history is not without its run-ins or complications, but unlike so many boys around the world in my same situation, whose fathers’ own beliefs and opinions force an unbridgeable chasm between them, that has simply never been the case for Dad and me. How easy it would have been for him to hide behind fear, ignorance or embarrassment. Not my dad.
I count Jude among my closest friends, without whose wisdom, humour, intellect and capacity for positivity I would be a less kind, less balanced, less driven and less creative person. It may have taken Janette’s influence for me to deconstruct the boundaries between child and parent but the end result has more or less been the same.
My parents have been together for about half a million hours. That’s 1.8 billion seconds. How they’ve done it remains so incredible, it was once a three-part special on Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
These days, whatever Dad thinks of the club, he zealously drives Mum there each afternoon (unless they’ve had a barney, then those privileges will be revoked and Mum will be forced to sip ginger beer and drive herself), and then he meets her at 5pm precisely for pick up, just after he’s had his second bath of the day.
Mum, I may have mentioned, refuses to watch television during the day. To her, daytime TV watching is a sign that you’ve given up on life. Whereas, I’m not sure what Dad would do with himself all day without his telly. It’s not often they can agree on a movie to watch of an evening. Jude is a gay man trapped inside a suburban mother’s existence. Give her an all-singing, all-dancing spectacular and she’s set for the night with jazz hands at the ready! Not exactly the action Dad is hoping for.
Mum is book smart – she always has one on the go, she knows a hell of a lot about the world and her vocabulary is outstanding (whether she chooses to employ that when pronouncing ‘pumpkin’ or not). Mum is also street smart – she has a worldliness and wisdom about her that means you know, despite her sky-rocketing blood pressure, she’ll be just fine.
By contrast, Dad’s gregariousness makes him a naturally warm and therefore liked person. His skills as a salesperson are phenomenal and he has a knack of getting what he wants out of people in the nicest way, like yesterday when he convinced me to turn airplane mode off on his phone . . . again. Even though I’m acutely aware of this skill of his, I still manage to fall for it time and time again, on an almost weekly basis.
It’s starkly disappointing that, as they drift further into old age with its myriad health issues, scares and surgeries, we tend to see our parents’ genuine love and affection for each other mostly when the threat of one of them being taken away is overwhelming. Nothing quite tests their acceptance of the status quo, taking what they share for granted, as the merest hint that one of them may be suffering or that the other could wake the following morning to a suddenly quiet and desolate-feeling house.
They may at times be considered each other’s worst enablers. Mum with her choice of what to buy at the supermarket and cook for Dad, and Dad with his driving Mum to the club and ensuring she always has wine in the fridge. Aren’t they equally to blame for staying largely within their daily routine, for not pushing each other to try new things or get more active in an attempt to prolong their health? But, conversely, I strongly doubt they would have made it through the past seventy-five to eighty years as relatively unscathed as they have, had the other not been there for moral, financial, mental and physical support.
I consider it one of my greatest personal triumphs that I (and they) have lived long enough for me to appreciate ‘Judith and Peter’ as so much more than ‘Mum and Dad’. They are each complex and flawed human beings, the sum of billions of seconds worth of experience, the vast, vast majority of which I remain unaware of and was not present for. When I looked at them as a combined entity of ‘Mum and Dad’ it was easy to under-appreciate their individual identities and how each has had a profound impact on me. It’s so much more than genetics, though of course these play an enormous role. It’s also more than just the environment I experienced growing up. As we humans each get to know ourselves better the more we age, we look again and again to the most dominant personalities in our lives and question the good and the bad in ourselves, and where we would be, who we would have become without those influences.
We can be quick to judge ‘Mum and Dad’ for their parenting skills, but it’s all too easy to forget they’re just people who happened to have brought us into the world. Sure, there are certain responsibilities that come with making the decision to have children but, later in life, I’ve found that it’s my responsibility to understand them for who they are outside of their status as mum and dad. And that’s warts and all.
Rather than jumping to conclusions about their actions, a holistic understanding of what makes them tick might be more beneficial than any amount of therapy we feel our parents have driven us to. Just as we morph into becoming the parent of our parents and, in a sense, lose our individual identity in their eyes to become the deliverer of the task at hand (that is, being their nurse, personal secretary, IT consultant, chef, personal shopper, gardener, mechanic, cleaner, driver, music button turner-offer and whatever other job we take on for them) so continues the circle of life. In turn, we patiently wait for our own kids to appreciate who we truly are.
‘Come on, Jeff, let’s head off,’ I say. ‘Miss Helga will be expecting her dinner.’
‘I couldn’t be prouder of you two,’ Dad says, with tears again brimming his eyes. He gives me a long, firm cuddle. ‘You’ve made your mother very happy with this decision,’ he whispers into my ear.
‘I think we’re all happy with it,’ I say to him. ‘Love ya, Dad.’
‘Love you too, Skeet.’
Jeff gives Mum a kiss and thanks her for the tea and the surprisingly in-date and vegan biscuits she had on standby in the pantry.
‘Bye, Mum,’ I say, throwing my arms around her. ‘Thanks for agreeing to buy that cottage in Gloucester.’
‘Never again,’ she says. ‘I will never believe another word you say.’
‘I’m surprised it’s taken you nearly fifty years to realise!’ I tease.
‘What are you up to this afternoon?’ Jeff asks.
‘Guess,’ Dad says flatly.
‘Well, we’ll drop you off to the club, Jude. Saves you the trip, Pete.’
His eyes brighten. ‘I can get straight in my bath, then. That all right with you, Jude?’
‘Yep, come on then. Thanks, Jiffy.’
As we leave the house, I hear the water running into Dad’s bathtub. He’ll lay in it until it nearly gets cold, watch a bit of telly, then go to collect Mum from the club at precisely 5pm.
It’s a short two-kilometre drive from Mum and Dad’s house to the club and, disappointingly, had we thought to fill up at the end of their street, we would have saved ourselves 0.4 cents in fuel.
‘I still can’t believe how convincing you two were!’ Mum says.
‘Took you a while to work out the whole Helga thing, Jude.’
‘Well, I couldn’t say Neuhaus, so I had no chance.’
