I begin to lose words. ‘Let’s turn the page,’ I say to my son in a stationery store. He snorts with laughter. ‘Do you mean go to the next aisle?’ I nod absently. I start to replace nouns with sounds – ‘Where’s the flippy?’ I ask my daughter. I mix up my words – ‘Get ready for the kitchen,’ I tell them. ‘Put on your toothbrushes.’ They find this endlessly hilarious. I struggle to name this operational deficiency. Let’s call it presence for the sake of communicability.
My children regularly recall me from my thoughts because what comes out of my mouth no longer makes sense. ‘No, the sunface, that’s the one,’ I say, as the children roll around with laughter. ‘Papa, Maman wants us to use the sunface,’ they roar. It takes me a few moments to register that they are laughing at me, to remember what I was saying (and why), to decipher what I might have meant. I am slow, it is so slow. ‘Why did I say that?’ I ask, and my daughter will tell me. ‘You want us to use this sunscreen,’ she explains kindly. Their questions have become increasingly challenging – either because they are growing older and more complex, or because I am so absent, so completely unable to focus.
In truth, I am not even thinking about something else – my mind is like an ocean that just wants to lap, lap, lap against the shore, and maybe drift in the memory of a previous life, one before the borders closed, when I was swimming out to visit a shrine on a tiny island off the coast, holding a small crustacean in my hands as the waves sparkled in the hot sun.
Interruptions
‘Maman, what would it feel like to be nothing?’
Poem
I scrap out a quick poem sitting on the toilet one morning and leave my pen behind on a stack of French parenting magazines. Later I find that one of my children has used the pen to underline seemingly random words in one of the magazines. I flick through the pages, marvelling at the endeavour: two or three words are underlined on each page, some from headlines, others from articles, some even in the small print at the bottom of full-page advertisements. Some words are just underlined with a wobbly blue dash, others are harshly underscored. I take the magazine to my desk and press it flat, typing out the words in order:
dans parents sérieusement triste qui restera que maîtresse perçoit
à fonde Maman confinement intellectuel chauffer séparation une
enfant Maman ne d’être projection faire classe que origines opus
seul de résister décalé comptines dinosaure humains soit famille
veut par posés sportifs
As I translate, I shift a few of the word forms around and ensure that the conjugations agree, and a poem emerges:
In seriously sad parents / who will only remain teachers / we
can perceive that at heart, Maman, intellectually confined, will
separate, via heat, from her child / Maman: not a projection /
made only of her class origins / containing an opus / must be
solitary. / To resist the quirky nursery rhymes / the human dinosaurs /
to be family / requires an athletic response.
‘Maman, intellectually confined, will separate, via heat, from her child.’
Expectation
I chat to my neighbour over the brush fence. I can almost feel the ghost of a cigarette and a floral apron, as if this were the 1950s and I had six children. I am telling her about the chicken paella I am making, and she is explaining her keto diet. We watch the children skateboarding in the cul-de-sac. The next morning, she slows her car to lean out the window and ask me, in a bright, friendly voice, ‘How was dinner?’ ‘It was disgusting,’ I reply. ‘I had to chuck it in the bin.’ She stares at me blankly, and then says: ‘That is not what I expected you to say,’ before driving off.
I am filled with a sudden and frightful glee. I cannot do things, I am making rubbish. A bit like this. What I am trying to make. Sudden and unexpected shit. Quelle misère.
Great talents encourage great incapacities, but maintaining an
inability to cook an egg or drive a car won’t make you into a genius.
– Sarah Manguo, 300 Arguments
(But won’t it? a part of me whispers.)
Bullshit
My favourite French expression is n’importe quoi, translated variously as ‘whatever’ or ‘what nonsense’; sometimes rendered in subtitles as bullshit. Whenever I say it to the children they shriek with laughter – so unexpected it is for me to round on them in French for whatever absurdity they are trying to tell me, to convince me is real. My personal translation for n’importe quoi is ‘humbug’. It doesn’t have the same feel in the mouth, on the tongue, but if my mother had said ‘humbug’ to me as a child, I too would have hooted with delight.
Parameters
We have clear parameters to our movements – to minimise contagion, we must not cross state lines. The border elbows out into hard corners at the top and sprawls out as raggedy coastline below. Mapped edges that once delineated a silhouette to be printed on tourism material now rear up at us like walls of stone. We are surrounded by an uncrossable moat. We buy lanterns and sleeping bags and a camp-stove. Cut off like this, we commit ourselves to a different kind of adventure, a sort of moonshine ailleurs, ‘elsewhere’.
Silence
My children are suspicious of silence. If I am silent, something is wrong. We are not a naturally quiet family. They do not like me to be silent. They like me to chatter, to laugh, to respond, to engage. I have to explain if I want to be quiet, if I want them to be quiet. I am tired, I have a headache. I often want to be quiet. I often ask them to talk to each other, instead of to me. I tell them I cannot multitask; I cannot talk while making breakfast, eating breakfast, reversing the car, driving the car, folding clothes, measuring flour, running a bath, or thinking.
Sobriety
I begin to think about addiction and escape. I stop drinking entirely in some inexplicable pact with Nietzsche – something about being committed to being with, or in, the grief of life. Relentlessly working at the coalface of lack, without lubricating or looking away. Nietzsche had a lot to say about alcohol, about its numbing, dumbing effects. In Ecce Homo Nietzsche includes sobriety as one of the reasons why he is so clever. ‘Alcohol is bad for me,’ Walter Kaufmann translates, ‘a single glass of wine or beer in one day is quite sufficient to turn my life into a vale of misery … [I] cannot advise all more spiritual natures earnestly enough to abstain entirely from alcohol. Water is sufficient.’ Nietzsche is also against coffee, declaring that it ‘spreads darkness’. Besides alcohol and coffee, Nietzsche famously had a lot of negative things to say about women, about the English, about his fellow Germans. Some things I discard, derisively, some things I polish, some things I put in my pocket for later.
Not drinking is not hard, but it is awkward. Drinkers are sloppy, and women like me (read: intense, drowning, wilful) are meant to drink to defer the pain of mothering, to stake a claim to their rock’n’roll past, as part of a performance of fuck-it hedonism. Not drinking delineates me as puritanical, joyless, exhausting. Combined with my absence from social media I am basically Amish. I haven’t learned to say I don’t drink in a way that doesn’t make me sound like an alcoholic. I rehearse sometimes in my head – It’s not for me; Not at the moment; It’s not my thing. ‘You don’t drink?’ a man asks me carefully on New Year’s Eve, after I clumsily refuse his offer of a drink. ‘She’s on a philosophical quest,’ my husband explains helpfully.
This is an extract from Gemma Parker’s The Mother is Restless and She Doesn’t Know Why (Simon & Schuster Australia), available now at your local independent bookseller.
