These are samples of my work. The first is an excerpt from a work in progress and the last one is a complete short story I wrote about my son, Paul. I hope you enjoy them.

Lauren

Excerpt

Dripping Side Up

It was 1976. January the 16th was my cousin, Denise’s birthday. We spent most of the day at the beach. I was working on a script for a ‘Star Trek’ type play, where I (of course) was to play the lead female role. I called my character Galadriel after Tolkien’s Queen of the elves. I was very engrossed in my writing, but managed to drag myself away for swims and walks on the beach.

The next morning we’d had breakfast, and were all sitting in the lounge planning the day. Would we walk, or swim, or collect crabs and shells? The phone rang, and was answered by Aunty Jenny. She said ‘Hi’ to Aunty Trish in her usual animated manner, then went very quiet. We all froze – something felt very wrong. Jenny seemed to crumple a little. She looked at the ceiling, biting her lip, then transferred her gaze to Grandma, ignoring the rest of us who were also watching her face. ‘Sit down, Mum. I’ve got bad news. Pam’s passed away’.

Mum was dead.

Grandma sank heavily into an armchair, covering her face with her hand. She looked old; so very, very old. A wail, long and loud, came from deep inside her. Jenny replaced the phone, and moved, weeping silently, to her mother’s side.

Denise, Mark and I were ushered out of the room. We walked to Ladies’ Beach. It seemed like I was in a dream or a play – it was all so unreal. My feet hit the sand heavily as I walked, my footfalls repeating the word dead, dead, dead. The beach was beautiful. The sun still shone, the sea still beckoned, and the gulls still called, but the holiday was over. Things would never be so carefree again. I had a deep sense of guilt and self-hatred –if I’d been with her, maybe she’d still be alive.

***

It was years before I knew the full story of mum’s death. She had been on parole, and one of her conditions was that she kept out of pubs. She’d fallen and broken her wrist, and had been to Wellington Hospital to have it plastered, and pick up a script for painkillers. Mum had very chalky bones in her wrists; as a teenager she’d started deliberately breaking her wrists in order to avoid school and other tasks she found unpleasant, and as an adult spent a lot of time with wrist casts on. At times she broke them simply to get pain-killing drugs. She’d grow sick of the casts within a few days of their application, so would cut or soak them off. As a consequence, her bones never had a chance to heal properly.

On her return from the hospital, newly plastered, she’d stopped off at a pub for a ‘quick one’. She’d been recognised at the bar by an off-duty cop, who approached her to tell her to leave. She’d pulled a pocketknife on him, so was arrested and charged. She was bailed, pending a court appearance in a day or two, and returned to her little flat.

There were no kids there and no Rod. Tala, her Golden Labrador, had been put down because Rod didn’t like him, so the flat was empty of all life. Did she feel abandoned? She had a bottle of barbiturates from the hospital – over 600 of them according to the coroner’s report.

She went to bed, where she took a handful of pills, washing them down with milk. She wrote a letter to her brother David (not Jenny’s husband) asking him to care for Shelley while she ‘went away for a while’. She rang Aunty Trish a couple of times, in a disturbed state. Before she slept she went to the neighbours’ place. She was very agitated, and told them she’d be going to jail, and her kids would be taken from her. The neighbours tried to calm her down, and sent her home. She went back to bed, maybe took some more pills, and went to sleep. Alone. Forever.

She was 32 years old.

Some hours later Rod returned to the flat. He’d been out drinking and had forgotten his key. The door was locked, so he climbed in through a window. He found mum dead in bed, her body covered with pills from the spilled bottle, a half empty pint of milk at her side. Rod called the police, who took mum to the mortuary, where Trish identified her. Trish had called us at the Island. The holiday spell was broken. My mum was dead.

***

After the doctor had seen Grandma, Aunty Jenny organised the boat to take us from the Island. There was talk of bringing mum back to Rotoroa for burial. Grandma was really upset, I was numb. Uncle Dave drove us from Auckland to Wellington.

I don’t remember arriving back at Grandma’s place. Tracey was already there, as were a lot of mum’s brothers and sisters. Shelley was in Christchurch with an uncle, and wouldn’t return until after the funeral.

Grandma and some of her daughters stripped the flat where mum had lived. I’d never seen it, and they dismantled it without showing me it, or telling me that’s what they’d planned. That was the most upsetting thing to happen in those first days.

Mum’s possessions were taken to the bach, and piled in the main room there. I spent about an hour lying on her bed, smelling the tobacco and her ‘mum’ smell in the dark green curtains and bed linen, remembering how proud she’d been of sewing them herself. I cried there for the first time, and rocked myself, wrapped in her blankets and my memories of her.

Uncle Michael found me there, and led me back to the house.

Mum’s body was with the coroner’s pathologist, and hadn’t yet been autopsied, so no date could be set for a funeral. It was decided I should go to Papatahi to stay with Aunty Liz, and spend a couple of days in peace there. That time passed very quickly; I read a bit, and wandered around the farm, visiting my favourite places from all those years ago. I abandoned my script; I didn’t feel the least bit like the invincible Galadriel. Besides, that all seemed a bit juvenile now.

I felt empty and small and terribly guilty. Maybe if I’d been with mum, I could have talked her out of dying. I’d failed in my responsibility to her. How could I ever forgive myself? This forgiveness eluded me for over twenty years.

***

We returned to Wellington after a couple of days. Everyone was still making a huge fuss of grandma. I couldn’t understand it; she had eight children and only one of them had died; we had only one mother, who was now gone forever – surely that meant our loss was about eight times as great. With a bit of maturity and kids of my own, I can see I was wrong, but it was both confusing and irritating at the time.

Uncle Dave and Aunty Jenny took me to the funeral home to say goodbye to mum. She was in the one on the corner of Adelaide Road and Riddiford Streets. As we pulled into the carpark we became aware of a group of plain-clothes cops in the burger bar across the road, who seemed to be watching us. Uncle Marau, himself a former cop, called Central Police Station to complain. The cops still wouldn’t leave mum alone.

Mum was in a room by herself, in an open coffin. She looked pale, cold and lonely in her new white nightie. Her hair was shoulder length and coppery and longer than I remembered. She’d lost weight. I stepped forward to touch her face. Uncle Dave appeared behind me and placed a hand on my shoulder; I thought he wanted me to step away, so I did. He only wanted to comfort me, but inadvertently stopped me from saying a proper farewell. I’d said goodbye to mum so many times before, but this was the first time I truly didn’t want to leave her; things were really fucked up. I wish I could have kissed her goodbye, smoothed her hair, touched her face.

I had wished for mum’s death on occasion, and had rehearsed it a few times already in my mind. I think this helped me through the period immediately following her death, and added a sense of unreality to it. Tracey and I were both quite matter-of-fact that mum had died, and play-acted a degree of indifference we really didn’t feel.

The funeral was short. Uncle Dave gave a moving tribute, and spared all the bullshit. No one was told how perfect she’d been – she’d been far from faultless. Tracey stayed at Grandmas with an aunty; Shelley was still in Christchurch. I was mum’s only girl to say goodbye, and perhaps the one she would have least wanted there; hadn’t she sent me away time and time again? Some of mum’s mates sat at the back of the crematorium, barely recognisable in their good clothes and sobriety. I was very glad to see them there.

***

Mum was such a complex character, so much fun at times, and so loving, and protective. So keen to educate, and pass on her sense of wonder and delight at the world. I remember her waking me at different times to watch a comet or an electrical storm with her. She’d lead her three girls in wild dances in the infrequent Whyalla rain, and roll with us in the ‘green New Zealand grass’ if we found any on our travels in Australia. She’d hold our hands in town, and skip down the street with us, or go ‘people spotting’, where we’d observe strangers and decide what they were like based on what we saw. I still find myself doing this at times (I do try not to skip too much in public though.) Oh, she could be a great mum, but her flip side was never far away; she could be indifferent, suddenly violent, and very cruel.

Tracey was overweight as a child, and mum would sing ‘Roly Poly’ to her, while cuddling her in bed. Tracey is now underweight, and keeps a very tight rein on her eating. She doesn’t like to think what could happen if she were to lose control and become fat again.

Mum loved us, but would leave us alone at home, or have us ‘babysat’ by abusers so she could go drinking with her mates, to whom she was intensely loyal. She would keep us home from school to keep her company while she skived off work. When I was twelve, she told me (with a needle hanging out of her arm), never to try drugs. A year later she told me not to use ‘any old shit’ but to come to her, and she’d make sure I got ‘decent shit’. Despite her illnesses and her problems I can remember some very good times with my mum. I treasure those. When I’m sad, tired or sick, I want my mum; the strength of this longing still surprises me. When I got through medical school, I so much wanted her to be proud of me; I think, somehow, she probably was.

Mum’s personality had so many facets. She was as inconstant as the moon without its comforting predictability.

That’s how I’ve come to see my mum, as a lunar being - my mother moon. For many years I’ve looked for her at night; sometimes there’s less of her to see, as she floats in the sky wrapped in the soft shadow of the earth. During this phase she casts less light, but on these darker nights she is no less real to me, my sleeping mother, my Mother Moon. I miss you still.

***

It’s now 22 years since mum died. I’m five years older than she ever lived to be, and I’m at last becoming aware of my mother as a person; she was flawed, sad, special and full of need. When I think of the day at the funeral parlour, I replay it in my mind. This time I touch her. I see myself as if in a dream. I reach for her, lift her from her casket, and hold her close. I rock her, and stroke her forehead, and tell her that I’ll miss her. In my mind she is very small so I can hold her easily; strangely I’m smaller too – a little girl, cradling her favourite doll. There I sit, a young child, maybe three or four years old. I’m in a little rocking chair, cradling my dead mother doll in my lap. I rock her, and croon to her. I brush her hair – shoulder length and coppery – back from her cool forehead, an act she has performed for me several times in my short life. She is so fragile, cold and vulnerable, my dead mother doll. I hold her and rock her for a long time, my tears falling on her porcelain face. Then when I am ready, I kiss her forehead and lift her gently back into her coffin. I am once again fourteen and she is thirty-two.

Who was she, this mother? When I’m lonely or sad I miss her and cry for her, but for whom do I cry? Although at times she was an appalling mother, she’s the only one I ever had, and I know she loved me.

She was so many people: the woman who woke me to listen to the thunder, she that danced in the rain, the fearless climber of fountains and the one who staggered roaring drunk down a busy street to get away from her children. Or is she the one who sat on my chest, and tried to squeeze the life from me? Or maybe the woman who, on a warm November morning, reached over to me and smiled, tousling my hair. I now know she was all of these people, and she probably felt as confused about her many facets as the rest of us did. She was a good person, too, but a very flawed one. Oh, how I miss her!

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Paulie

"Hello Muvver, my old trout." Paulie greets me in his slow baritone. His smile stretches at a leisurely pace, fattening his apple cheeks, and pushing his smeary glasses a bit further up his nose.

One giant hand holds a new car –"an MG, Muvver, in British Racing Green." He pushes the car along the polished wooden benchtop, and demonstrates its ‘awesome suspension’. He knows I’m a Philistine about cars, but still patiently tries to explain their virtues to me.

"Come here, sweetheart, and give your old mum a hug."

"O-kaayyyy. No kisses though Muvver – remember I am growing into a man." Paulie starts High School tomorrow, at 13, a year behind his peers. He is already five inches taller than I am, and as he shambles in close for a quick hug - car still firmly clutched – he towers over me and smiles. He pats my back patiently with his free hand, as though he wishes to burp out of me this strange compulsion to hug him.

I squeeze this lovely young man – my youngest son – with a fierce love and a desire to pass to him the courage to face life every day as a person who has ‘different’ imprinted all over him. Paulie doesn’t fit our world’s pattern of normal – he is someone who sticks out. He has no power to change this.

Paulie has a lovely face – beaming with joy one minute, as blank as a pat of butter the next. His is an open face – no traces of guile. His blue-grey eyes are shielded by thick glasses, which correct a bad squint – the result of severe long-sightedness. The spectacles magnify his lashes – stubby and blonde - the colour of the hair that is thickening on his top lip and chin. The hair on his head is short – a number 2 all over – otherwise it sticks straight up from the scalp, giving him the look of a hearth brush. His high forehead conceals a busy mind, a brain that just doesn’t make the right connections.

He has worn glasses since he was ten months old, and looks naked and terribly vulnerable without them. Indeed, his confidence plummets if he ever breaks or loses them, and he remains in bed until a new pair can be bought. This is despite the fact that when he is wearing them, he looks over his glasses as often as he looks through them. Perhaps this is because there are usually traces of all the major food groups smeared over the lenses.

Paulie loves to move. The coordination centres in his brain are a little jumbled, so he is clumsy. After dropping a cup, or tripping over his feet, Paulie will hit the offending body part, trying to ‘teach it a lesson’. It hurts to watch him punish himself, but this is a behaviour we haven’t been able to modify.

Paulie runs with his whole body, a kind of lurching, pumping run, involving movement at almost all joints. He is fast – not quite as speedy as Forrest Gump, after whom he styles himself, but fast enough. He is a Special Olympics runner, finding safety in a large group of other disabled athletes. Here, he isn’t the only person to pull the waistband of his tracksuit pants up to his armpits, and tuck the legs of his pants into his socks. Here he is accepted without a second glance.

Paulie loves people, all people, even though they are frequently cruel to him. He is teased and taunted by those who don’t know him. "Handicap, handicap, fuckin’ mental handicap" from kids who attend a neighbouring school. The kids at his own school have loved and protected him. I fear for him in the new environment he’s about to enter, and hope the high school kids he meets will get to know him quickly. He gets stared at by adults in the supermarket, and the street; some of them seemingly afraid they’ll catch something if they come too close to him. They’d be lucky if they did ‘catch’ his capacity to love, to empathise, and to embrace difference. I have learned to reply to their whispered "What is he?" with a smile, and "He’s my son Paul, a lovely young man".

The stares and taunts hurt Paulie, although he tries not to show it in front of his aggressors. These are the nights he cuddles up close, asking the questions that tear at my heart.

"What happened to me, Muvver – why is my silly brain a bit slowed down? Why can’t you fix me, mum, you’re a doctor."

I can’t fix Paulie – nobody can. Should we try, anyway? He is a loving, thoughtful, loyal young man. He is physically strong, and has a beautiful shape. He makes more of his I.Q. of 55 than some ‘normal’ people make of their considerably higher ability.

I can’t fix Paulie, but would love to fix the world he must live in. Why can’t we accept, if not embrace, difference; tolerate, if not love, our neighbours. What would it take to make this world a friendlier place? Paulie has enriched my life, and that of many, many others. He, along with other intellectually disabled people, has so much to teach about courage and tenacity, about tolerance and love.

Tomorrow he enters the big world – High School. Although he will spend much of the day in the sheltered "special needs’ unit, he will be exposed to thousands of new faces, new people, all reflecting the bigotry of the world that has produced them. I hope it is a positive experience for him. I know if any of his fellow students take the time to get to know Paulie, they will be greater for it. Perhaps this is Paulie’s task in life – to better the world for all of us.

He’s doing a fine job so far.

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Copyright © 1999 Dr. Lauren
All Rights Reserved