Of mothers and such

 Happy Mother's Day!

Let me start this by stating that I do have the best mother in the world.

Sorry, all the rest of you, but she was such a good mother, even when I was a spiteful teen hating everything in the world but with the focus on the few who loved me most?  She wasn't the top of my hit list.

Wasn't fourteen shades of that for EVERYONE?

Paris is 13 years and nearly 5 months old.  We are at a sweet spot this week.

I am choosing to believe it may last forever, because I do NOT want to be on the other side of that.

I mean, it may be my memory playing up on me, but I don't recall 14 year old 'Salina, and I am willing to plead dementia but I am hoping that it is instead that I had a charm.

Doing a bit of digging into the family foliage of late, but really don't have time and resources yet lined up to take it at all seriously.

However, I would like to pay homage to a few remarkable "Matriarchs" unearthed.

My great-great-grandmother Hannah, who at 8 moved with her family to the other side of the world from Cambridgeshire to Central Victoria; as a very young lady then moved to help extended family in the newish city of Adelaide; married, was widowed and had a baby - or vice versa - but within a few years was back in Central Victoria; met an Irishman and married him; left her daughter with her parents and had another 5 children during which time she moved between Victoria, the United States, Hawaii, New Zealand and Queensland, while dealing with the death of another child, the severe illness of another, the financial perils of being married to her husband; then was abandoned by said husband while she had a defiant daughter who had argued with her father about matriculation and attaining her credentials as a teacher - she won, he disappeared (I will never know if the two were connected), a second daughter who had nursed her while she had been bedridden for the previous several years (yet miraculously arose from said sickbed upon his departure) and two teenage sons.  Now, I don't have sons and therefore cannot even begin to guess what bringing one of them up must be like let alone two, but everyone survived.  GGG Hannah actually lived for another 30 years after her husband left her - and in that time her daughters were her most devoted handmaids and she got to participate in the upbringing of her three grandchildren.

The great-great-Aunts - these were the heroines of my childhood - the Great-Aunts (as my mother and her sister called them), or the Aunts as known by my grandmother, her sister and her brother (and anyone else who knew them) - were two of the most beautiful women in the world.  They were strict and staunch but also loving and kind.  They plucked these children from the wilds of the North and had ensured that they were clothed, fed, and most importantly, educated.  "Never Trust a Man" was their dictum, not (just) because they were harridan spinsters, but I now realise because they had lived experience.  Always have something that you can fall back on, and the most effective something that you can fall back on is knowledge.  Perhaps the reason that Aunt Jane had her family-famous ball of rubber bands was indeed because she had to account for every penny and every piece of string while still showing a front of being genteel and proper.  The reason Aunt Sarah was so terse about keeping within your lane was because she knew just what a tight grip you had to keep on your independence because you could never afford to let go.

 

My grandmothers and their sisters and sisters-in-law, who took turns in looking after not-always-lovable in-laws in turn, who did all the thought-load of a household pre-refrigeration, pre-electricity, pre-phones.

My mother and my aunts, who tried their best to give us skills in how to be the best that we could be and gave us the ultimate power of believing that we would always be safe because we were surrounded by people who would be there for each other at every turn.

Unwittingly or not, at some point in the above generations, the family story became  "perhaps a freak squall on Sydney Harbour" rather than "never heard from again and assumed dead when they had to sell the family home 27 years later" (or indeed "died interstate intestate and no mention of marriage or children on the certificate").

I am learning new awe of these people and just how they got through.  Happy Mother's Day to all of them, and thank you.