A
DAY IN THE LIFE OF MY MOTHER
Edited version published:
Frankie #28
(Mar/Apr 2009)
In
both the realms of quantum physics and anthropology, it’s often
said that you can’t observe something without changing whatever
you’re observing. It’s a profound statement—one I probably
first heard watching Jurassic Park or something—and it came to
mind when I watched my mother pull out a yoga mat she hadn’t used
in months, and lay it in front of the television.
You see, usually, when
I gently suggest she should exercise more, Mum dismisses me. In her mind,
she doesn’t really see the point. “But all your kids have
left home now,” I tell her, “so you’ve got the time.
You really should be moving that body. It’s good for you, and you’ll
sleep better.” So I suggest a few things to her: getting back into
yoga, going for walks, learning to swim.
However, Mum’s a strong
believer in the phenomonon of incidental exercise, and even has her own
term for it: Jenny’s Exercise of the Month. If she has to chase
a bus, that’s Jenny’s Exercise of the Month. If she has to
walk to the grocery store three times in a day—because she forgot
something each time—that back-and-forth pacing also counts towards
her monthly quota.
But today, she knows she’s being observed for
a story, and has scheduled some activities to make things interesting.
First, she leads me through various yoga exercises, the first one being
a warm-up that involves lying on her back, clutching her knees to her
chest, and rocking gently, round and round.
“This is massaging
my lower back,” she explains, squriming like an upturned beetle.
Later, she forms a bridge with her body, her butt pointed towards the
ceiling. "Now the blood's feeding my brain.”
Fifteen minutes
later, she’s all done. “Well, that’s Jenny’s
Exercise of the Month,” she says happily, dusting her hands.
For
32 years, Jenny was a full-time mother to five children, all of us with
various conditions and special needs. The need to go to gymnastics classes;
the need to attend tenpin bowling squad training. Now divorced, and her
youngest child having moved out of home, Mum’s on her own, in a
big empty house.
Needless to say, the television is on constantly. After
yoga, when we sit watching television together, I realise we have something
in common. Not a love for the small screen, but the fact we both need
massages. But while I go to chiropractors and remedial massage therapists
to treat my twisted muscles, she’s invested in various implements:
a textured rolling-pin contraption for her feet; an ethnic wooden ball
device for her hands.
But the centrepiece of her holistic approach is
an electronic massage machine: an orange latex cushion with rotating
metal “hands” inside. Switched on, it looks like a foetus
trying to claw its way out of the womb. When I offer to book her in with
a masseuse, Mum says she doesn’t like people touching her. The
last time she got a massage, the woman stroked her boobs. She didn’t
like that.
"Anyway, I'm used to no one touching me,” she says. “It’s
been a while. If anyone touched me now, I'd probably have a stroke and
collapse from the shock.”
Throughout the day, when I ask what she’s
up to, Mum says she’s “Busy, busy, busy.” A busy day
means a packed free-to-air TV schedule. In between countless news bulletins,
her afternoon viewing revolves around The Bold & The Beautiful. For
a woman who will travel 100 kilometres just to see foreign arthouse movie,
part of me is mystified as to why she watches a show she refers to as
Staring, Staring. “See: the whole episode, they just keep talking
and staring at each other,” she explains. “Staring, staring;
so much staring. They just keep staring each other.”
In the middle
of the show, I question whether she’s been watching too much television
lately. Frustrated, she shoots back that I roll straight out of bed and
hop onto my laptop straight away. “You’ve got a box; I’ve
got a box,” she says, trimphantly. “So it runs in the family!” Lacking
any better response, all I can do it sit there, massaging my tired feet
with something that resembles a cross between a rotating dildo and a
corn-cob, thinking, “Touché, Jenny. Touché.”
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