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This is ENTHUSIASM with Kate Leaver. It’s like a hug, but it’s an email. Written by a woman whose greatest life skill is to be enthusiastic about the things she really, really likes. Also, very good at enthusiastically disliking!!! Strong opinions may be applied to anything, including but not limited to potatoes, Claudia Winkleman’s whole vibe, social justice or Meg Ryan’s return to romantic comedies. Come and have feelings with me.
Hey. I’m going to talk about my mum in this post. If you do not have a mama, or you have a difficult relationship with yours, or you’re trying to become a mother yourself, and this is too painful to read, I send you enormous love and gently suggest reading sumfing else. Come back for my thoughts on the Britney Spears memoir next time xx
I’ve been thinking about mums. Mine, specifically! But also: mums in general.
If we’re lucky, they love us just so stupidly much. Even at our worst.
And yet so many of us have the audacity to decline their phone calls? Roll our eyes when they fuss over us? Say “ugh, mu-um” even as fully grown adult human beings?
My mum has done so much for me. Brought me into this world, raised me, given me great hair. But if she so much as takes a sip of coffee while she’s on the phone to me! Or, heaven forfend, tries to conduct a conversation while sucking on a throat lozenge! I behave like she has wronged me deeply.
It’s like, she’s made me so sure of her unconditional, unwavering love, that I’ve gone, OK! Let’s test that, mum! What if I was unreasonably impatient with you forever?
I call my mum every morning. We never hang up without saying “I love you.” She knows, and I know, the relationship that we have. I am grateful for her in a way I don’t even know how to communicate. Perhaps that’s why I snap at her; it’s my inability to ever thank her enough, escaping, one dumb little comment at a time. I’m embarrassed that she’s been so wonderful to me and I communicate that by tutting every time she sends a text message with the keyboard sounds on loud.
Comedian Nick Kroll has a new comedy special out. I haven’t seen it, but I have watched this one minute 16 second clip approximately 27 times. He so perfectly captures this mother-specific impatience.
I have no shorter fuse than with my own mother!!! After all she done! Why?
One theory I’m working on, with no relevant expertise at all, is that we must evolve to be annoyed by our mothers so that it’s easier to leave home and live our own lives.
It’s a tough gig, being a mum. I haven’t signed up for it personally, nobody should be obliged to, and I am astounded by how many people do.
The ratio of effort to gratitude is wild. In individual mother-child relationships but also in society at large! We put aside one special day a year for flowers and pancakes in bed, but on all other days it’s just like… prohibitively expensive childcare, insufficient healthcare, and crushing, contradictory, dangerous, impossible standards.
Oof, OK. Let me tell you about my mum, I want to tell you about my mum. I’m proud of her and she’s so cute.
Sara “Sally” Tayler was born in England, which is why she’s obsessed with squirrels and foxgloves and Winnie the Pooh. She moved to Sydney when she was four years old, she’s still there. In her twenties, she starred in Australian soap operas Sons and Daughters and The Young Doctors. My grandma did, too!!! I am extremely proud of my soap opera lineage and yes, as a family, we are naturally dramatic.
Mum’s acting career was cut short when she had a baby and decided to put the baby first.
That baby. Was me.
Then she had another! My sister.
She retrained as a therapist at 54, got remarried almost a decade ago, and now she’s grandma to the two best girls in the whole world. I could go on (and on) about how generous and affectionate and compassionate she is. Her emotional intelligence, her loveliness, her warmth.
INSTEAD, I’d like to share with you the top three funniest things my mum has done. I have to get the balance right on sentimentality and humour! Besides, these wee anecdotes are a shortcut to getting to know my mum: she’s nice! But she has a hilarious wicked silly streak and it’s possibly that I’ll miss most when she’s not here.
Stole a cardboard cutout of Kenneth Branagh from a cinema foyer.
November, 2002, Sydney. We’d just seen the second Harry Potter film. My mother asked a Hoyts employee if she could have the smaller-than-life-size cardboard cutout of Kenneth Branagh as Gilderoy Lockhart from next to the popcorn machine. The answer was no… Mum grabbed him, put him under her arm, stage-whispered “run, girls” and took him home with us. She called him “Kenny” and he stood in our living room for years.
Confronted a group of teenagers at Laser Zone.
You know Laser Zone? The family activity where you put on a vest, run around a maze in the dark, and shoot people in other teams? At the end of a game, they print out the results and each player is called something like “Superman” or “Zeus.” When we went one time, the results indicated that a player called “The Hulk” had shot mum more than any other. She walked over to a birthday party of teenage boys and said, “Which one of you is The Hulk and what is your problem with me?” Legend.
Called her garden gnome “SLAG”.
My mum came to visit recently. I made her decorate garden gnomes with me, as a gentle mindful mother-daughter activity. She called hers SLAG, I called mine Ian, I cherish them more than I can say.
Ian and Slag live in my kitchen. I look at them every day and every day I imagine them saying, “Be nice to your old mum, she’s done so much.”
Listen to Ian and Slag.
Be nice to your mum. She’s done so much.
Maybe you’d like to tell me about your mum? Why she’s so cute? Or the funniest things she’s done? Or confess that you, too, are weirdly impatient with someone in your life?
Sons and Daughters was a teenage ritual for me after school...How amazing. Love this bittersweet writing and the idea that frustrations and tenseness can come from fear of losing love. Thanks for sharing.
One of my favourite things about my Mom is that she doesn't believe in an afterlife but is also afraid of ghosts. She legitimately does not think anything happens to our "souls" when we die. She thinks we simply cease to exist. But she is terrified of ghosts. I don't ask her to think about this to hard, mostly because I love it about her so much and think it's sort of adorable.