My Mother’s Water
“Of course, I love you,” my mother used to say when I mooned around the house looking sad, “I cooked you up,” and I would think of secret water, the primordial waters of her womb – always dark, always enveloping, always noisy. Naturally, I can’t remember being cooked up inside my mother’s womb and then duly delivered into a chill Canberra winter. Can’t remember my first glimpse of rain, the dark, skeletal trees outside the window, my nine-year-old brother in his hand-knitted woollens, about to set off on a fishing trip with our father. I don’t suppose I’ll remember the moment of my death either – isn’t that strange?
When I was a teenager and we were living in Auckland, my mother loved to swim in the small pool in our back yard. She was in there all the time – even in winter when the thermometer plunged; you couldn’t keep her out of it. She would implore us to join her: “You’ll feel so much better after a swim,” she would say, letting herself through the door in her bedroom that led directly to the pool past the ladder ferns that brushed your legs when my father forgot to trim them. “You know you’ll love it once you’re in there.”
We watched her swimming lengths, her head cocked awkwardly above the surface to avoid getting water in her ears. Sometimes she wore a ruffled bathing cap with clusters of white rubber ‘petals’ and her lopsided breaststroke sent ripples shimmering across the surface. Then she would put her feet on the bottom and place her hands flat on the side, bouncing gently up and down to exercise her legs. By then her knees were getting painful, and she wasn’t keen on walking far, but in the buoyant water she could move freely and forget about her irritable husband who had taken early retirement and seemed unsure of what to do next; she could stop worrying about her anxious, self-centred daughter.
In summer she invited our neighbours to share the pool and sometimes they beat a hasty, giggling retreat down the steep path beside the garage after discovering her stretched out naked on the terracotta tiles like a lizard enjoying the sun. We would hear this amusing anecdote at one of the regular street parties at Caroline and Ray’s place across the road. My mother was considered eccentric by her extended family, her friends and some of our neighbours – something that may have bothered her but probably didn’t. Perhaps some of this strangeness had rubbed off on the daughter who had recently dyed her hair green and didn’t appear to have a job. The neighbours sympathised with my father who seemed constantly harried. In the weekends he busied himself in the garden, vacuuming the pool, checking the pH levels and trimming the hedges. There were constant arguments about his use of household chemicals – slug bait around the lettuces, chlorine in the pool, and Roundup to kill the weeds popping up in the humid summer months. My mother complained that her skin smelt of chlorine after she’d been swimming, and my father would reply, “Do you want to swim in a pool filled with green slime?”
For my mother the swimming pool was a sensual and private space. It was where she could float with her arms spread wide, her breasts and toes just cresting the water’s surface and her throat open to the blissful sky that was hugely comforting because it made you feel so small and insignificant – like an ant scurrying across the row of blue patterned tiles that formed a pleasing decoration beneath the lip of the pool. The cool blue vault above reminded you that all things will pass – even the weightless body you currently inhabit will no longer be the unfathomable source of joy and pain that it is now. For me the pool was a more public space – a watery stage where I could rehearse my sexuality for an imagined male gaze. There’s a photograph of me in my early 20s wearing a knitted orange swimsuit; my eyes are heavily made up and my hair is dyed platinum blonde. I’m sitting on the edge of the pool, staring at the camera and trying to look sultry, but my lip has curled and the seductive look I’d hoped for is more like a sneer.
I never thought of my mother as physically strong, but one day I was astonished by her strength when I dived off our boat and became entangled in the rope tethering the dinghy to the stern of the yacht. My arms hit the rope and I flipped forward and hit the water hard. When I surfaced my head hit the dinghy, which had been pulled towards the boat as the rope tightened. As I flailed in the water, unsure of what was happening, I felt someone grab my hair and yank me roughly towards the surface. Afterwards, my mother told us she was surprised by her lightning-fast reaction and the strength she suddenly found to hoist me out of the water. In that moment, as I stood shocked and dripping on the stern of the boat, we both knew she loved me.