Stable

My mum was a nurse for all of her working life, loved it.

Well, there was an enforced break when she married. She has a very formal letter congratulating her on becoming engaged to be married, thanking her for the service she had provided. And wishing her well in her new life, of not working, because now she should go away and be a good wife.

I had never even thought of such things, I knew that my parents had been together on the farm when my brother came along, followed by me a few years later. I had always thought that was just a choice they had made, that dad was the sharemilker and mum was my mum because it was a full-time thing being a mother and also helping him with all the tasks that make up farming life.

She eventually went back to work when we moved to the big smoke of Hamilton, New Zealand and it made a huge difference to our lives in lots of ways, good and bad. I remember, I think, that for a long time Thursday was mum’s week day off and she would take us to the huge local shopping centre when we got home from school, and we could often choose something small to take home and have amongst our things in the bedroom my brother and I shared.

A wooden mouse with a leather tail is one trinket I remember taking pride of place on the little shelf above my bed. Next to it was a huge white rabbit’s tail my friend Andrew Irvin gave me out of the blue one day at school. I was always a bit conflicted by that because I absolutely loved Watership Down, it was one of the first adult books I ever tried to read (unsuccessfully) and the movie with Art Garfunkel singing the title song was my favourite bar none in about 1977 or 8.

Growing into adulthood I began to collect first edition books. I found a hard cover of Watership Down at a fair in a community hall in the northern suburbs of Sydney, it wasn’t in very good condition but it had the beautiful, slightly sad, cover I remembered my paperback edition having. When I looked online all the copies for sale mentioned how they hadn’t aged very well, that the paper discoloured a great deal and the covers faded badly, as if it had been a bad year for bookbinding. It’s in amongst my most treasured still.

Thursday nights we would have a dinner mum could take some time over and often it was a roast chicken with tons of potatoes, followed by apple crumble. I think that would still be my death row meal.

Mum used to be very honest with us as we sat around the dining table, looking back I think that it was part of her coping, her therapy for the work she did. Sometimes I think Dad was pulling a bit of a face wondering if she should be quite so honest when we were maybe 11 and 8, but he has always trusted her implicitly with everything else so I guess he just carried on eating his chops and cabbage.

She spoke about how amazing she thought blood was, how it could take all the things we eat and drink and breath and turn them into energy.

Very early on I remember her telling me about how men sometimes loved men, and women loved women, and it was in their blood and asking them to change would be like asking them to drain the blood out of their body.

She told me about comas. Mum’s weakness was The Young and the Restless, she would often sit down and eat her lunch watching. In the holidays she would let us watch sometimes. I loved that characters had names like Snapper. There was always someone in a coma.

Mum told me how a coma was not a nice nap, how difficult a decision it was for doctors to place someone into an induced coma, knowing what came on the other side.

She worked in recovery often, most of the time back then I think. Many of the people she nursed didn’t survive, and she would tell us about the end and being there, with the people conscious sometimes and not others.

She would know what it was she was going back to, on the next shift the next evening. Patients would have been described as ‘stable’. She told me that wasn’t a very good word, that it was a long way from stable to good.

Now that I think about it, she must have so often driven back to work steeling herself to the news that the person she had nursed the night before as they came out of surgery was not going to be there, hadn’t moved on to the wards, had passed away. I was a firefighter for a lot of my working life and often thought how lucky I was that my work came in short bursts, you were never going to see the same people again. You could pretend that everything had turned out fine, if that was what you needed.

I thought of her when I first heard of Boris Johnson going into hospital, I hoped they would describe him as better than stable. And how most people would have heard the news, and the word stable, and thought, well that’s alright then. She would have read that word in the New Zealand Herald, and thought of the nurses in his ward.