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Authors: Mary Moody

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As a flower child of the sixties I felt passionately that my children should grow up surrounded by pollution-free green fields, eating nothing but organic, home-grown fruit and vegetables. However I also had a fairly well-developed work ethic and
couldn't see myself floating around a free-love commune or living completely off the land. The compromise was a house and large garden in the mountains where I could work as a freelance writer and still give our children a healthy lifestyle, plus all the home-grown vegetables I could force down their throats. It was here that I taught myself to garden. I quickly discovered it was more than just a practical acquisition. It was a passion.

In 1980 our second son, Ethan, was born in the front room with a midwife, neighbours, pet dog and older children in attendance. By this time David's son Tony, now aged eight, was also living with us, so we were a large and boisterous family of seven. I would have happily continued producing babies as I adored being pregnant and giving birth, but David had financial reservations about supporting such a large tribe. I rather reluctantly undertook surgery to halt my fertility. It occurred to me then—and has often since—that as it was his desire that the baby-making finish, it should have been him to brave the surgeon's knife.

During these years when the children were young I continued working as a freelance journalist and author, an ideal career for a young mother because it meant I could basically work from home. In the beginning developing the disciplines necessary to juggle a busy family life with magazine and publishing deadlines wasn't easy, but my sense of survival took over. I quickly discovered that if I didn't work consistently or if I left everything to the last moment (as most journalists inevitably do) life deteriorated into a nightmare. The secret was good organisation and an ability to cope with long days. I usually started early by taking some time in the garden before getting the kids up for school. I worked in the morning, shopped, cooked and did housework in the afternoon and tried to knock
off for a beer and to start cooking dinner by five in the evening. We had a wide circle of good friends and although we were often fairly broke, these years were really the best for us. David was away an awful lot during that time. For almost twenty years he spent the greater part of each week at his office in the city; then, when actually filming, he would be away for weeks or even months at a time.

Being an independent producer in the Australian film industry is not the most financially secure of professions. We were often anxious about when the next bundle of money would come or where it would come from. So it was essential for me to keep working steadily as a backstop to the ups and downs of David's career. The saving grace was having my mother around for company and support; without her the lonely evenings after the children had gone to bed would have driven me mad. Mum had a fine mind and a wonderful, wicked way of handling people. She passionately followed the daily news in the papers, on the radio and television, having herself trained as a journalist. She read voraciously, was devoted to her grand-children, loved to cook, and loved to help care for the animals: as well as dogs, cats, chickens and ducks, at times we also had guinea pigs, sheep, goats, rabbits and fish. Right up until her death at the age of seventy-six she could still take down shorthand at 140 wpm and do all the newspaper crosswords every morning. The only downside was Mum's increasing dependence on the bottle for nightly enjoyment, and the repeated falls she had of an evening weaving from bedroom to bathroom.

On the up side, David and I both loved our working lives and were constantly stimulated by our various independent writing and filmmaking projects. Our weekends were very lively
indeed—always a loving reunion when David came home on Friday nights, followed by two days of lavish meals, entertaining, bush walks, open fires, good music and visitors from the city. It really was the good life.

In 1992, after twenty-one years of this happy cohabitation, David and I took the plunge and got married. It had taken us this long even to think about marriage because David and his previous wife Kathleen had never actually organised a divorce, even after more than two decades of separation. They did start proceedings twenty-odd years earlier, but David so infuriated the sitting judge by debating with him the informal arrangements that he and Kathleen had made for the care of Tony, that the case was subsequently thrown out of court. So they remained legally bound for the entire time we had been together producing our large family.

Although I publicly avowed that getting married was just a good excuse for a party, in truth it was the formalising of the commitment we had made so many years before. Our wedding ceremony, which was meant to be a brief prelude to a sumptuous Italian feast began by being slightly comical, then rapidly degenerated into a farce. The celebrant decided the occasion was deeply romantic, and therefore deserving of much hand-clasping, teary eyes and poetry reading. I had never intended it to be like this, indeed I loathe overly sentimentalised ceremonies of any description. I carefully prepared the celebrant with some succinct words we had written, explaining to her that we were already quite an old ‘married couple'; in spite of this, she insisted
on treating us like a pair of eighteen-year-old star-crossed lovers. I couldn't make eye contact with David for fear of dissolving into hysterics, and one glance at our now almost-adult children revealed that they were finding the whole thing more than a little embarrassing. I am convinced that most marriage celebrants are frustrated actors who relish the opportunity to overact their socks off. But it provided plenty of laughs during the six-hour-long lunch, and we certainly didn't forget the occasion in a hurry.

By the mid 1990s Tony, Miriam and Aaron had started leaving home to pursue their various educational options. Although life became easier with just one teenager at home, my career suddenly became extremely busy and demanding, with television segments to film and monthly magazine deadlines to meet, as well as book contracts. About this time my mother's health started to deteriorate. She didn't like being left alone in the house, which meant we had to make sure there was always someone around to keep a watchful eye on her. If I was away filming, one of the children would come home and stay with her; sometimes it would even be one of their friends, as she had attracted a large retinue of young followers who had adopted her as their surrogate grandma.

Then a strange thing happened. Miriam, who was in her final year of university, announced that she and her boyfriend Rick were going to have a baby. Before our youngest child had finished school David and I were going to be grandparents. Whatever happened to those years in between when we could enjoy having paid off the mortgage and have some peace and quiet? Have some time to ourselves without babies and high-chairs and bathtoys?

Yet becoming a grandmother, I quickly discovered, was one of the sweetest joys of my life. Miriam had watched with fascination while her young brother Ethan was being born at home; now in turn she opted for a homebirth in the small townhouse she and Rick shared a few kilometres from her university in Canberra. Seemingly without effort, she gave birth to Eamonn in May and completed her degree at the end of that year.

Our lives changed dramatically in the next few years. Mum died suddenly of a ruptured aorta—attributed directly to her heavy smoking. During her last two years she had been extremely frail and had had numerous falls. Fortunately the impact of most of these was softened by her state of inebriation. She seemed half pickled most of the time, although I only ever saw her drinking in the evenings. Yet throughout those last few years her spirit and sharp mind never diminished, so her sudden death caused us all a great deal of shock and grief. But there were happy changes too. During this period Miriam married Rick and they moved back to the mountains where they subsequently gave birth to two more sons, Sam and Theo. Aaron and his girlfriend Lorna, not to be outdone, produced their baby, Hamish, about the same time as Sam was born. Four grandsons in five years. Quite a surprise for someone not yet fifty.

For years I had dreamed and fantasised about living overseas for a period of time—perhaps for a whole year. Although David—in the course of his film-making—had done much more travelling than I had, during the past decade I managed to squeeze in several forays into Europe, the UK and America, mainly to photograph beautiful gardens for my pictorial library. In our travels together David and I particularly loved Ireland, Italy and France. We often talked about the possibility of
dropping out for while and living abroad. Financially it always seemed just out of reach, and now that our lives were filled with small grandchildren, the idea of escaping seemed even further from reality.

Suddenly, with my fiftieth year looming I decide to take some affirmative action on my own behalf. I will take six months and spend it alone. I decide to go to France. It seems the most comfortable and the most affordable option. And David and I have always loved being there, whether it is Paris, or the Loire Valley, Normandy or Provence.

While I am not feeling unduly stressed or dissatisfied with my life, I am beginning to ponder a few simple truths. I realise I have never lived alone and that for most of my life I have lived under the same roof as my mother. I have needed to work from the day I left school—through pregnancies and babies and child rearing—and my working life has escalated into a series of hectic deadlines and pressures and high expectations. I have been, for almost twenty years, the primary carer for our children, with David away so much of the time. I am a grandmother and a mother simultaneously, the two stages of my life having merged into one. More importantly, I realise that I have never had time in my life to stop and think. To be reckless or irresponsible or just plain lazy. Perhaps to sleep in or to spend the whole day in bed without actually being sick. To wake up in the morning and wonder
What will I do today?
, then to roll over and go back to sleep.

I realise that for many, many people at my stage of life, both
men and women, the idea of stopping and dropping out for a bit is simply not possible. For me it will be difficult, but I am determined to make it happen.

It is time to let go.

2

I
F YOUR PARENTS AND
the circumstances of your childhood shape you as an adult, then I certainly must be the product of mine. I can only believe that my personality and my character strengths and weaknesses were forged during a growing-up period that was a bit of a roller coaster, bouncing along with many highs and lows. Now, as a woman of nearly fifty, I am aware that my childhood memories and sensations were both good and bad. The setting was certainly one of the really good things. The Sydney harbour suburb of Mosman during the 1950s and 60s was a heavenly place to grow up, both for its physical beauty and for the safety and freedom allowed children during those innocent years. Once you learned how to swim out of your depth, the beach became yours to explore without adult supervision. There were plenty of safe places away from the sharks—a sweeping netted area, a small but crystal-clear rockpool, and the baths—as well as rocky headlands to explore, massive fig trees along the Esplanade to climb and gloriously clean stretches of sand that were seldom crowded. At times my
brother Dan and I had Balmoral beach entirely to ourselves. We knew every rockpool and channel and understood the best times to swim according to the tides. The only danger was the summer sun which scorched our fair and freckled skins, creating the embryo cancers that decades later we are having frozen from our hands, cheeks and foreheads.

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