Memories...

Sitting and looking through very old family photos recently turned me to a few tears. When Mum died a few years ago I had sat at the computer and put a whole story together, showing photos of her from around about age 3. She was so lovely, involved in stuff that she had never thrown us in or out as we grew up. 

She wore Red Cross dress up in her teenage years, she loved the beach, she danced with Dad and won competitions. She stopped dancing when she was married and had kids, but she had so many other things to do – ran our home, organised barbecues and holidays for us, took us into swim club, helped us with our homework, bought a piano for us and encouraged me to learn the violin and my older sister the guitar. She would encourage us to play outside with our neighbours’ kids, and we knew what time we had to be back in. 

In the evenings, once every week, she and Dad would play cards in our lounge with their friends. We were in bed… that’s where we were to stay! 

Mum never had any real bad illness throughout her life. She chose, after her fifth child, to have her womb removed, but she was not sick. Her mother, my Gran, wasn’t sick, neither was Aunt Audrey, yet Mum’s own brother, Brian, was epileptic and lived in a hospital home and came to visit us every now and then. He died when I was young (somewhere around 8-9 years old, I think) in an epileptic seizure. 

My Dad was the other man who had been caught out with an injury – he sawed off his left fingers working up at Waikato Hospital before my brother was born. That never stopped Dad from being a successful builder his whole life. I don’t think I know of any other builders these days who survive through their employment with only 1.5 hands! 

My brother, Wayne, had been born very normal. Mum loved him – her first child – and yet he became very sick at around 6 months old. She was so upset, asked around and not listening to doctors who wouldn’t diagnose what was wrong with him. She met a person who had been on a conference in the USA at that same time, and who diagnosed something like gastrointestinal (I knew what it was but now I can’t remember exactly!). Mum ‘fixed’ him, but he had suffered a brain injury which has lasted him his whole life. Still, it didn’t stop him with becoming a poet, volunteering with Red Cross, and marrying about 15 years ago. 

Throughout his life Mum became involved with IHC and workshops in which Wayne worked. When the last workshop he was in, which was in an area which had moved into where we used to live, closed the workshop down, he worked in a venture group there, similar to the Lifeline which operates here. These days he’s still living at his home, with his wife, and – as far as I know – listens to his music. Mostly country. 

My older sister and two younger sisters never seemed to have the problems which came with Mum in her males, although my younger sister, Fiona, has apparently become mild epileptic. I hope she will always survive if she has seizures. They can’t ever be as bad as what killed Brian!

Throughout our youth my sisters and I had so many books. Mum, her mother, Poppa and Dad’s mother gave us books, and we grew up with them. I still remember Poppa giving me Laddie, written by Gene Stratton-Porter. (Actually, I never even knew until I looked up Wiki today that Stratton-Porter was female!) Mum and Dad gave us Enid Blyton – Famous Five, Secret Seven, The Enchanted Wood, The Children of Cherry Tree Farm. I loved these! FF and SS would go with us whenever we went across town to Gran and Poppa’s place on alternative Sundays. Cheryl and I would read one each that day. 

When Mum was younger – before she got married – she loved swimming, and later when we were around she and Dad would take us to the local swimming club. I was somewhere around 7 or 8 years of age when I did my mile certificate. 

Back to the health. Dad had diabetes, and had strokes after he retired; I think the first one was at my sister’s Kinohaku property where Dad had built her a wee cabin. I know that he had had at least 3 of these horrible things. That was what, in the end, killed him.  After he died Mum lived alone, still in the house that Dad had built for all of us (he’d built this second house that he and Mum had together ever lived in!). I moved to Australia in 2005, and sometimes I really regret that Mum wasn’t entirely looked after by her own family. She died in 2007, also from diabetes which she’d gotten a few years ago, and it was shutting her down. We should know about this, but I don’t really think everyone will ever understand, yet diabetes was the only real illness that Mum had. And which didn’t come on to her – or Dad – until they were old. 

At the start of this I spoke about how the men in Mum’s family seemed to get illnesses. Why am I writing about them? Because I am so very grateful to my father and my mother who kept us healthy, kept us in a safe house, loved us.

And I still do love them. Think I will forever.