Sweet Surrender (14 page)

I left for home less than a week before Christmas, promising to return as soon as I could manage it. I knew that Ken had become dependent on me for emotional support, partly because I managed to lift the mood in the house, introducing some extra warmth and humour. When I was not around Margaret was inclined to go into her shell, to stop talking much and to sleep more. I could see that my presence in their home was greatly needed, but I also knew that my work and family commitments made it difficult to spend more than a few weeks at a time away from home. Once again I felt torn. For years, it's been a tug of love between France and Australia, between my village house in Frayssinet, and David and the farm. Now I was being pulled three ways. My sister and her doting husband needed me more than I had really been needed by anyone for many years. I laughed to myself, remembering the sense of freedom I had experienced when I first escaped from responsibility and lived alone in France for those heady six months. Here I was, seven years later, very much in demand and no longer the free spirit I had planned to be.

Over the past few years our Christmas celebrations have become more frenetic as family numbers have swelled and the time I have available for planning, shopping and preparation is more limited. This Christmas was no exception. I landed back in Australia knowing it would be a rush to get organised.

Realistically I only had two days left to purchase the food, to buy gifts, and to decorate the tree. But even though I was doing all the shopping in Bathurst, and not going down to Sydney, I managed without a drama. We have abandoned exchanging presents between the adults – there are just too many of us – and concentrate on catering for the children. This made my task easier. I always start by buying every child a book and go from there, checking with their parents to avoid doubling up with someone else.

This would be the first time Miriam, Rick and the boys would not be coming to the farm for Christmas. They were living separately, of course, and Miriam didn't have a reliable car for the long drive. Airfares for five people were out of the question. Aaron and Lorna were also coming separately, and these changes in marital relations made life a bit more complicated. My brother, Jon, always comes down from northern
New South Wales and stays for two or three days, and this year my other brother, Dan, who lives in Bathurst, would also come out to the farm and stay overnight. Ethan, Lynne and their two would drive over from the Mountains. And Tony and Simone were coming from Sydney. So it would be a pretty full table, as usual.

I must admit to feeling more than a little sad, however, that Miriam and our grandsons would not be with us. Apart from last year, when I stayed with Margaret and Ken, we had always spent our Christmases together. Just as I loved being woken by my own overexcited children at the crack of dawn on Christmas morning, so I derived huge pleasure from seeing the excitement in the eyes of my grandchildren. David has always thought our celebrations over the top, but for me it's such a happy time of year and an excuse to spoil the kids and overindulge in food and wine.

This year we were having our celebratory meal on Christmas Eve, in the European fashion. This had been decided for practical reasons, because early on Boxing Day I had to drive to Sydney to start work on a five-day-a-week radio show for the ABC. I realised that if I cooked our usual hot lunch on Christmas Day, I would probably end up feeling tired and frazzled, and I needed to be fresh and relaxed for the show.

It seems that every Christmas has its own drama attached to it. Two years ago, while cooking the lunch, I set fire to a tray of duck fat that was heating in the wood stove, and our smoke-filled kitchen was invaded by uniformed men from the local bushfire brigade. It was pandemonium. In fact, looking back over the years I can recall one hysterical incident after another…

The year Miriam was carrying a bowl of cooked pet food out to the fridge in the garage to make room in the kitchen fridge, and accidentally bumped into the door jamb (I believe a dog was jumping up trying to get at the food). The bowl split neatly in half, slicing a deep gash in her wrist that required a mad dash to the hospital and more than a dozen stitches.

The year my brother, Jon, threw a bone into the garden and our sooky springer spaniel, Spot, lunged for it at the same moment as Jon's Staffordshire bull terrier. The terrier latched onto the spaniel's loose cheeks and ripped the flesh apart – again there was blood everywhere. On that occasion I called our local GP, who sutured the wound while sipping on a cold beer.

The year I removed the muzzle from Miriam's Jack Russell terrier after lunch, and he promptly slunk off and massacred two of our ducks. The sight of David running through the paddock holding aloft two ducks dripping with blood and shouting angrily is one I don't think our grandchildren will ever forget. And so it goes on.

This year was no exception, except that the dogs were a bit better behaved. I was cooking the enormous turkey in the electric oven and, as usual, had the wood stove going for the roasted vegetables. As one of the children walked past it, the electric stove sent out a blinding flash and promptly exploded – a thin wisp of black smoke emerged from the back. We all got a terrible fright, but fortunately no one was injured. As it was Christmas Eve I feared that it would be impossible to find an electrician, but miraculously we managed to track down a cheerful bloke who agreed to drive out from town and have a look.

Eventually the oven was working again, and the meal went ahead without another hitch. The dramas that punctuate our family Christmas get-togethers have amusement value but, quite frankly, I could do without them given that the day is fraught with activity and large numbers of overexcited children and probably far too much champagne and red wine. One year, perhaps, David and I may just go out to a smart restaurant for lunch and I can relax and let someone else do all the work. On second thought, it's highly unlikely!

Over January, ABC Radio allows its regular presenters to take a long break, which gives the network a chance to try out new program ideas
and presenters. Libbi Gorr has done quite a bit of work over the years filling in as a guest presenter, and it was she who suggested to the ABC's programmers that together we would make a good combination on air. The idea of two women presenting a show was a bit of a novelty, and they went for it. We had already had a brief try-out when the regular evening presenter on ABC Radio's 702 channel, James O'Loughlin, was unable to do his show. Without notice we jumped in, and it had seemed to work. The chemistry between us was good and we tried to create a show which was lively and entertaining.

Our summer program ran from seven until ten o'clock in the evenings, Monday to Friday. Traditionally the first hour has always been a quiz with audience participation, and since the quiz is one of the timeslot's most popular fixtures, we decided not to fiddle with it too much for fear of alienating the loyal audience.

The content of the next two hours was open to us. We wanted to have a mixture of light and more serious interviews, throwing together everything from arts to politics and socially relevant themes. It was fun coming up with ideas, but also a lot of hard work. We had a smart producer to help us, but every day we burned through four or five ideas an hour. We wanted the show to be fast-paced and a bit quirky. One of the main problems was finding interesting people to interview in January. So many Australians are away on holidays at that time of year, and it proved to be a logistical nightmare finding ‘talking heads' to discuss the topics we were sourcing from local and interstate newspapers. As a cost saving, the January shows are broadcast nationally, and that further complicated matters. Perth was three hours behind us in Sydney, which meant that Perth listeners couldn't phone in for the quiz, or make comments when we called for listener feedback. The ABC doesn't like national shows to appear Sydney-centric so we never mentioned that we were broadcasting from the corporation's studios in Ultimo.

Libbi and I have very different presenting styles, and this, I suspect, gave our shows a certain charm. She always asks left-of-centre questions,
while I'm much more pragmatic and straightforward. We tend to make each other laugh a lot, and this can be dangerous. One night, I slipped some rather risqué questions into the quiz, and Libbi was unprepared for them. She started to laugh and had to turn off her microphone as tears poured down her face. I tried to keep the show bouncing along until she recovered. The next day an ABC manager gave me a light rap over the knuckles, and reminded me that at 7 pm many children are still listening. I toned it down for the rest of our time on air.

One of the things I loved about radio was that we didn't have to spend hours being primped and preened by make-up artists and wardrobe people like we did for our TV show – we could turn up in daggy clothes without a dash of mascara or lipstick on, and the audience would be none the wiser. We could also choose our own content and interview subjects, steering away from the trivial topics that we so often found ourselves having to discuss on
The Catch-Up
. The immediacy of radio is so compelling. Being able to talk back and forth with the audience throughout the show was very stimulating: listeners often had such amazing thoughts and experiences to share. No celebrities required!

Just as motherhood defined my sense of self in the decades from my twenties to forties, so becoming a grandmother has enriched my life over the past fourteen years. I know a young woman who had a child in her twenties and her mother refused to take on the role of grandmother.

‘People think differently about you when they know you're a grandmother. They think less of you . . . they think you're old,' she said.

I have the reverse view. I am delighted to have this gaggle of small children in my life and I mention them to all and sundry whenever I get an opportunity. I don't whip out dozens of photographs and bore people to death, but I love recounting funny anecdotes about my relationship with the children and their relationships with each other. They are all so different and yet they also have so much in common. Nothing makes them happier than to all be together at the same time, at the farm, being cousins.

Caius, the youngest, talks about ‘the cousins' constantly. Whenever he comes out to Yetholme he asks if any of the cousins will be there and is crestfallen if I say they're not around. I have printed out photographs
of them all together, playing, and put them up on the wall in the family room so that in between visits he can be reminded of the fun they had last time.

In January, while I was still doing the radio show, Miriam managed to get up to the farm with the boys and one weekend we were able to have a full family reunion with all the children and their parents. They wanted Christmas again, of course, so I bought another ham and cooked a turkey for Sunday lunch. The children climbed the huge old cypress tree out the front and galloped around the paddocks like free spirits. It's snake time of year in this district so they must all wear long pants and boots before stepping off the verandah. The woodland part of the farm has suffered greatly from the long drought and several of the older trees – probably more than two hundred years old – have simply toppled over because of dryness around their root systems. This has made the woodland an extremely dangerous place and I have banned the children from playing there, which is a shame because it was always one of their favourite haunts. I love the fact that, when they are here, they are outdoors much more than inside. I ban daytime TV unless it's raining and I often pack them a picnic lunch and send them off on an adventure.

Miriam and I were now communicating much more effectively and she seemed, slowly, to be getting back on her feet after what had obviously been a very difficult year for her, managing a lot of the time on her own. The boys had been spending forty percent of their time with Rick and the rest with their mother; Rick and Miriam had worked out a schedule that suited them both and seemed to work quite well for the children.

As a mother and grandmother, I had to think carefully about my role in all of this. There was no point expecting Miriam – or indeed any of our children – to behave, react and make decisions in the exact way that I would have in the same circumstances. It's easy to maintain happy accord with adult children when things are going smoothly, and
it's only when a spanner (such as separation and divorce) is thrown into the works that these relationships can become strained. I knew that I wanted to retain my affectionate bond with my ex-son-in-law and ex-daughter-in-law, but also that I needed to offer unconditional love, support and acceptance of my children and their choices – while supporting my grandchildren through it all as best as I could.

One aspect of this new arrangement which I found curious was that Miriam was now able to lead a double life. For part of each week she was a full-time single mother with a lot of responsibility on her shoulders. Up early getting the children moving for school; organising their uniforms and breakfasts and packing their sandwiches for lunchtime. After school it's homework and music practice, dinner and bedtime.

During the weekdays and weekends when their father had the children, Miriam could revert to being a single girl again. She had lopped her long curly locks and now had a brilliant blonde cap. She had lost weight, as many of us do during times of emotional stress, and was wearing more outrageous clothes than she had since her days at university. I found this change a bit unsettling but I realised that she needed to find herself again. To re-establish herself as a sexy, gorgeous young woman. She couldn't just sit at home feeling sad and sorry for herself, and by all appearances she had no intention of doing so. She was out there in the wide world, reconnecting with her school and university friends on Facebook and My Space, and meeting new and interesting people. Miriam's quest for momentary freedom from responsibility mirrors my own escape to France back in 2000. It's just that she's only thirty-five and I was turning fifty when I took the plunge. I tried not to be alarmed but it worried me, this new way her generation had found to interact. It was a whole new world to me and I had to keep reminding myself to embrace the new. Accept the changes. Go with the flow. The boys had learned to be much more independent and when I visited them in April I was impressed at how organised and self-sufficient they had become in the last twelve months. Without two
adults to care for them at once they had to develop skills and take on responsibilities. That in itself is never a bad thing.

Nevertheless, I challenged her a little, and while visiting I put forward the theory that she was actually enjoying this new arrangement. That single life had certain benefits. She could be a mum and enjoy all the pleasures of raising a family of bright boys without the complication of also having a husband to deal with; then she could be an independent, single girl for a few days and rediscover her younger self.

She smiled and agreed with me. She's having a lot of fun.

Back at the farm, when I was visited by Lorna and her kids one weekend, I tried my theory on her. Perhaps she too was enjoying handing the children over to their dad and heading out for a few nights of freedom.

‘Is it like this for you too?' I asked.

‘Not really,' she replied. ‘At first I loved the freedom but these days I often feel lonely even when I have the children. After they have gone to bed I'm on my own and it's not really all that much fun.'

I've realised that listening and offering support rather than judgement or even advice is fundamental to keeping the family together after these major life changes. Whatever I do, I must not impose my desire for the status quo. I must move on, as they have done.