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Mothers and Daughters and a Photo's Story

My daughter has never forgiven me for not giving birth to her early enough for her to be alive in the sixties.

I don't think that there's anything I haven't forgiven MY mother for, but I'm of a different generation. We are a more forgiving lot.

My daughter was about sixteen when she hissed her accusation at me. "Why didn't you have me earlier? I missed out on the whole sixties. YOU had them but not me. It isn't FAIR!" There was real venom in her tone.

When she was three she had complained that I wasn't like the mother in the Meadow Lea commercial. She wanted to take me back to the hospital to get a replacement. At least she'd moved on from that. Mothers have to be thankful for small mercies.

Today I am remembering my mother - Hazel, or Chris, depending upon whether you are family or friend. This is because it is her birthday. Well the fifteenth of January was her birthday, although for forty five years she celebrated it on the twelfth, as her own mother had gotten it wrong. Nothing was ever clear-cut in Hazel's life.

Hazel would have been eighty three had she lived to see this century. I think it was the American anthropologist Margaret Mead, who said that granddaughters and grandmothers get on so well because they have a common enemy. Well I'm not so sure about that, but I do know that my daughter Ebon and my mother were as close as they come.

Here is Hazel just before she became very ill. She's the one in the middle. My daughter is on the left, and I'm on the right. The bike belongs to none of us, but Ebon wanted it in the photo.

We are in Pelham Street Carlton (Melbourne) about to go back into a restaurant where we were having lunch. I was about to give a talk at Melbourne University - hence my attire.

The dog on the rope is Ebon's. It was called Iggy - short for Iggy Pop. If she wasn't alive in the sixties, Ebon sure as hell was going to make up for it.

I can see too that she's wearing my sixties boots that I gave her. I think they go rather well with the Spanish mantilla full of holes. Unfortunately you can't see the road-kill that she was also wearing that day; she'd left it draped on her chair in the restaurant.

I like the way that Hazel is wearing her beret in that jaunty fashion. Hazel lived in fear of looking like a member of the blue-rinse set of old ladies. She used to say she'd sooner be bald as have that rounded ball of blue fluff around her head.

Unfortunately the chemotherapy that she was shortly to have made that wish come true. Two years after this photo was taken, my mum died of breast cancer. I am remembering her today. I am glad that someone took the snap. It brings back a happier memory than the later ones that invoke her illness.

And to my daughter Ebon - I am very sorry Ebon that I couldn't defy medical science and give birth to you the day I was born. Yes you missed out on the sixties, but I gave you one hell of a grandma!

I don't remember my mother in her hey-day in the left-wing theatre in Melbourne. Well I wasn't yet born (sorry Ebs). But I'll close with an image of her back then. It is nice to have an memory of the departed old as they were when they were very young.

Good bye again, Haze. I close with the lines from the Bard that you wanted me to live by. And another photo - one of when you were young. That's her second from the right.

This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Kate Juliff
New York
January 2005