For My Mum

Yesterday was my mum's birthday, God bless her.

A few years ago I was at a party where everyone was crowded around just outside the back door of place while they took turns at slagging off their parents. Either the mum, dad or both of each person was in some way a retard, asshole or directly or indirectly responsible for a critical flaw in the person's personality. Their parents either made them bitter by withholding necessary affection or made them gay by smothering them with too much. They either held them back by not providing them with sufficient resources to get a leg up in life or broke their spirit by cracking the whip too hard. Maybe they just sent mixed signals about what it meant to be a good parent.

I couldn't take part in any of it. The fact of the matter is that I'm not a mental case. Don't read me incorrectly, I'm hardly perfect, but when it comes to all things parental I haven't got too much to complain about. I kind of like my parents, and when taking a retrospective view of the decisions they made in rearing three kids in Australia, I can't fault too many of their choices. They managed to churn out three more or less stable, successful adults. We'll overlook for now the little part about none of us being married or with children, despite all three of us kids now being in our mid-thirties. That's a separate post.

More than anything else, my mum helped mold my expectations about women in society, and she did it for the better. Coming from a working class background, my mum wasn't really expected to do much with her life other than hold down a job as menial as, say, a receptionist or typist, and that was if she opted to work at all. A quick inspection of my grandmother's life reveals that she was content to spit out a few kiddies and call it quits right there. Instead Mum opted to become a senior chemistry teacher at high school. So there you have it, Mum was the science-type person of my house and Dad, also a teacher but in his case of such "soft" stuff as geography and history, was—and kind of still is—the comparative luddite. Want to know something about maths? Ask Mum. Need help with fractions? Ask Mum. Want to see something really cool done with magnesium? Ask Mum. That's not to say that Dad was crap, but compared with Mum it just wasn't his bag.

One of my favourite stories of her was from when she was teaching at Cabra College, a Catholic high school in Adelaide. At the start of the day she gave her students a cup of beetroot juice to drink. The students were then informed to pay close attention to the colour of their bodily secretions as the day wore on. The kids loved it. Each time they took a piss they'd check the shade of what was emanating from their urethrae. That mum of mine has a great insight into the minds of teenagers. I think the kids really respected her after that whole beetroot juice episode.

The ramifications of being imprinted by such a woman at an early stage live on. The reversal of society's established gender roles seemed more like the rule to me than the exception, and putting an enjoyable spin on science probably had a lot to do with me winding up working in that arena. The older I get the more I appreciate the things my parents did for my brother, sister and me. I hope you had a happy birthday, Mum. I hope you'll have a lot more.