Susan Duncan - Finding Esther

 

I'm going to tell a story about my mother. It's very hard to stand up to your parents. And it took me until I was about 49 to actually say to my mother, well, actually to stand up to her. It was Christmas, and she was staying with me, as she stayed with me for the past 30 years at Christmas and I just had a breast removed, and my lover had dumped me. And I told her this, she knew about the breast, but she never knew about the lover because he was fairly inappropriate. And she looked at me and she said, “Well, men don't like mutilation.” [audience laughter] And I didn't quite know what she meant for about two minutes. And then when I realized what she'd meant, I was so enraged, I said, “This is the last time you'll be spending Christmas under my roof.”

 

We got through Christmas. I took her home to her home at the foot of the Blue Mountains. And I returned to my home, which was an idyllic little tin shack on the edge of Pitwater, where the only way home is by boat. And it's on the back of the Ku Ringai Chase National Park. A beautiful physical world, a place where I felt at peace. Over the next 12 months, of course, I spoke to my mother. But Christmas rolled around again, and I couldn't quite ban her from lunch, but I banned her from the house. I said, “You're not staying with me. You can come, but you're not staying.” So, I booked her into a hotel nearby hotel just a sort of short boat journey away. She had lunch. We got through that, no blood on the walls, pretty good.

 

And I went to pick her up on the fourth morning to take her home again to her home at the foot of the Blue Mountains. And she was waiting for me in the foyer of the hotel. And she was beautifully dressed, as she always is, because as she's told me all my life, she actually did look like Jean Harlow as a young woman, [audience laughter] although she didn't really think Jean Harlow was particularly attractive. But people said she looked like her, so she supposed she had to accept that she looked like Jean Harlow. Anyway, as I picked up her suitcase, she handed me a piece of paper, and I opened it up, and it was the bill. [audience laughter] And I looked at it and I thought, there's an extra zero.

 

And I looked at the list, the itemization of everything, and she cleaned out the minibar every night for three nights. And I said, “How much whiskey can a woman drink?” And she looked at me and she said, “Medicinal.” And then she said, “Will I be staying with you next year, it'll be much cheaper.” And you know, I love that about my mother. I love that toughness, that ruthlessness, that desire always to have the last word. And I respected it means we don't get along that well, but I respect it. About six months later, she had a fall. And then about six months later she had another fall. So first she broke her left wrist, then she broke her right wrist. And it was the moment that I realized that there were a whole lot of decisions that I would have to make.

 

My father is dead and my brother is dead. And I realized in a strange way that this was probably the moment that my mother was going to start becoming my child. And I had to work out a way to get her to have a look at a retirement village. Christmas came. I kidnapped her on the way home to her home, took her into this retirement village, opened up this door to this gleaming one-bedroom apartment with a little slushing creek going past. And I said, “What about this?” And this same woman who told me that she didn't want to move out of her own home ever because she knew where everything was, said, “I want to be here in two weeks.” And it was so easy, I panicked. I thought, “My God, she's going to be 10 minutes away.”

 

So, I went back home to my husband, Bob, [audience laughter] and I said, “She's going to be 10 minutes away.” And he's a very wise man. And he said, “Susan, there's a moat between us.” [audience laughter] And then he looked at me again and he looked a bit more serious this time, and he said, “She's not an Olympic swimmer or anything, is she?” [audience laughter] No, no, Olympic swimmer. We moved her in. We fitted it out just so beautifully, as though she was a new bride beginning a new life, which is in fact what she was. And then went back to her house to clean it out, to sell it for her. And I started going through the cupboards, and every time I opened a cupboard, it was filled with magazines.

 

Now, when I was working as a journalist, I would ring my mother and say, “Look, this month I've got a cover story if you're interested.” And she would always say, “Oh, I don't think so. The magazine's just too expensive at the moment. I don't think so.” And here was this house stacked with magazines. All of them had my stories in them. And I just couldn't get my head around all this. So, when we'd finished with the house and we'd gone back, I said, “Esther, the house was filled with magazines, all my stories. Did you read my stories?” She said, “Oh, people gave them to me. People gave them to me because they saw your name in them.” And I said, “Well, did you read them?” “Oh, I don't know. I can't remember.” Because to give a compliment would, I think, have killed her. [audience laughter]

 

Time marched on. It was Christmas again. And I wrote a memoir. Now, I always tell people who are about to write memoirs not to use them as a way to get back at people. However, my mother was a large part of my memoir, but I would never hurt her. I really wouldn't. And the underlying basis of our relationship is love. There is no question about that. And there's also duty, because duty, I think, in family is the nuts and bolts love you just take for granted. So, I wrote this memoir, and it was Easter, and she came to stay. She was allowed back under the roof. And I sat her down in an armchair in the sitting room. And I noticed something that I'd never really noticed.

 

She was this little sparrow in this giant armchair when all my life she'd been this huge woman who just took over whatever room she was in. And I realized I'd never thought of her as being a moment older than 53. And here she was. She was 87. So, she sat with this manuscript on her lap, and I expected probably that she would say, “No, you can't do it.” But before she even turned the first page, she said, “Susan, I have secrets, too.” And it was this moment where I thought, maybe actually, the two of us are finally going to break through. This is going to be the beginning of a new relationship. A relationship that's all about understanding and all about respect and everything you want a relationship with your mother to be. So, I pulled up a stool.

 

It was terribly Dickensian when I think about it. I mean, there I was, sitting at my mother's knee, and I'm 56 years old or something. But it was this huge moment, and she began to tell me her secrets. And I couldn't help smiling because my mother has this shocking memory for anything that she doesn't want to remember. Totally selective. And yet when she was telling her stories about being a nurse in Darwin six days after the bombs were dropped, the detail was extraordinary and fascinating. And I listened to these stories. And then she said, “I had an affair.” And I thought, “Well, I mean, who hasn't?” [audience laughter] And fortunately, I didn't say only one.  [audience laughter] And so I got the sense that this was a big moment for her. So, I said, “Yes.” And she said, “he was married.”

 

And I realized in that moment that my mother, remember, she's 87. She grew up in a generation where to even think of premarital sex was a death wish, a married man was a guillotine. For her, this was the greatest shame imaginable. And she'd carried this lump of shame around in her chest for 60 years, and she'd never told anyone about it. And I realised in that moment that the reason she'd been tough with me was not because she didn't love me. It was because she feared for me. She feared that I would make the same mistakes that she would make. And the closer I came to making those mistakes, and I made all of them and a thousand more, the tougher she got, because she was more and more frightened.

 

She read the manuscript and with great grace, far more, I ever have shown under the same circumstances, said, go ahead with it. And then she said, “You know, you've lived the life that I always wanted to live.” And I said to her, “You gave me that life.” And that's probably the only compliment I've ever paid my mother, to my eternal shame. Christmas rolled around again. And my mother's always been a drama queen. The end of last Christmas, at the end of last year, she had a heart attack. And she ended up in hospital in intensive care. And I went and sat with her on the first day she was there. And I could see she was terrified of death, absolutely terrified. And she was saying, “I'm not frightened. Your father's there, John's there. I know I'll be looked after. It'll be all right.” But she was terrified.

 

I thought, perhaps this is a time to talk. Perhaps this is a time when maybe once again we will break through. She was not well. I left. I came back the next day and the bed was empty. To be truthful, the first thought I had was freedom was just flicked through, just like that. And then it was replaced with the most enormous regret. All those stupid little things that I'd hung onto, because children are far less forgiving of their parents than their parents are of children. Stupid. What was it all about? Pride and ego. Ridiculous. So, I was sitting in this room thinking, idiot, idiot and this doctor walked in and he said, well, can I help you? And I said, “Yes, I'm Esther Duncan's daughter.” And he said, “Oh, didn't we tell you?” And I said, “No nobody rang me.”

 

And he said, “Well, we've transferred her to Royal North Shore.” [audience laughter] I said, “Oh, why?” He said, well, “We're going to give her a triple bypass and a heart valve replacement.” And I thought, “Okay, so--” [audience laughter] I drove to North Shore really quickly, and I went into the hospital and she'd had by now all this surgery. And the doctor said the big problem is dementia with patients of her age, if they get through the surgery, you have to worry about dementia. So, I went in on Boxing Day, and she was lying there, and she'd had this major tube that they have down their throat removed, and she was asleep. And so, I actually grabbed her hand, which was probably the first time I'd seriously touched her with affection for years. Or she me two-way street, okay.

 

So, she opened her eyes, of course, I snatched my hand away [audience chuckle] and she looked at me and she said, “It's Boxing Day.” I didn't think you'd come in today. And I thought, well, there goes dementia, she's okay. [audience laughter] And then she looked at me again. I said, “How are you feeling?” And she said, “Well.” And actually, her voice was very scratchy because of the throat. And she said, “They've given me 10 years guarantee.” And I thought about it and I went, “Oh, 100, 101, 102.” And we looked at each other and we laughed and we laughed and we laughed. And then she looked at me again, and she got that glint in her eye when she knows she's absolutely on a roll and she's about to throw the dagger. And she said, “I think I can stretch it to 15.” [audience laughter]

 

And I looked at her again and then that glint just got even brighter. And she went, “I win.” [audience laughter] Thank you.