Hello Mother

I’ve always loved the theatre and whenever I travel, I will see a play.

During my recent trip to San Francisco, friends had recommended the pastry shop, Tartine, so while I sipped my soy latte and munched on a fruit scone, I read over the Arts section of the San Francisco Chronicle to get a feel for the theatre around town.

I came across a preview for The Normal Heart.  

The Normal Heart focuses on the rise of the HIV-AIDS crisis in New York City between 1981 and 1984, as seen through the eyes of writer/activist Ned Weeks, the gay Jewish-American founder of a prominent HIV advocacy group.

As in all good theatre, this production touched me in ways I could relate my own life.  

One of the beloved characters had contracted HIV and in a following scene, his doctor tells him the grim news that the virus has progressed to full blown AIDS.

Facing the audience, the grown man cries: “I want my mother.”

The attending doctor casually enquires: “Can you call her?”

“She’s dead,” he replies.

My mother died when I was 21 – five days shy of my 22^nd birthday.  Her own father died when she too was 21.  I remember asking her: “Do you miss your father?”  “No,” she had said. “It’s so long ago now.”

It’s been a difficult road without my mother.  I have a father and brother and their male influence in my 20s was undeniable. Essentially I became more like them dropping any hint of feminine.  I was male in a female form.   I chased the boys and usually got them - but never for long.  I was too strong and overt.

There were many happy times in my 20s, the young and heady lifestyle is undeniably intoxicating, but I transgressed many weekends in a haze of booze and cigarettes.

My father met his now wife when I was 26.  The subsequent years were some of my hardest.  I moved to Darwin before I was 30, and back again, via Sydney for a year, by the time I was 32.  I’ve been in Melbourne six years since.

There have been several occasions where I have wanted to yell to a listening audience: “I want my mother.”

I’ve certainly felt it.

I miss her humour and her being.  The fact I’ve put off having a child because she cannot be here to support me in the role of motherhood because it is just so damn hard child rearing without that maternal presence.

Very often I’ll signal my mother through prayer.  And she’ll throw me the occasional hottie.  I know it’s her doing – she liked a good looking man as much as I do.

As previous blogs will attest, the Top Gun fighter pilot; the irresistible Tristan; and later our Saint, Bede.

Mum appeared in a dream around the time I was reconciling the end with Tristan.  She and I were sitting at a table talking.  I had spoken the circumstances of our union and how its end had made me sad. 

My mother, who had been listening attentively, said in a casual manner: “Of biscuits and bread.”

“What does that mean?” I quizzed.

“Of biscuits and bread,” she repeated as the dream trailed off.

It’s neither here nor there; it’s just the way it goes.

I later relayed my dream to the wise and wonderful Peter, and he put a new spin on its interpretation:

Biscuits are sweet.  Bread is nourishing.  Do you think she was simply pointing out that Tristan was sweet - but not nourishing enough to be long lasting?

Maybe.  This explanation made sense.

I asked my mother once what her favourite food was. 

“Bread,” she had said.