Her pain was my pain. Very early on I sensed it was my job to make my mother happy. But time and time again, I failed.
My mother was an unhappy immigrant who dripped tears onto my head while combing my hair. She missed her own mother, her village, her language, and found nothing to love in her new country. She dragged her melancholy around like a heavy winter coat, and each year, she’d slip one more stone into its deep pocket.
It hadn’t always been this way. In post-war Yugoslavia, she was a cheerleader in President Tito’s youth brigades, helping build a new society. Spirited and pretty, she attracted my father who persuaded her to follow him across the oceans. Later, she wondered why she had trusted a man who changed his mind as easily as his brand of cigarettes. “He stole me away and broke his promise of a better life,” she lamented. It was his fault that she had so much to mourn, and she would find ways to punish him. In time, she would punish me more.
My father settled us in a housing commission area where nobody spoke our language. Some of our neighbours had trouble staying out of jail and were far more interested in cheap alcohol than converting to my father’s Communism. By the age of five, I could read a Serbo-Croatian industrial manual, yet the day my mother reluctantly released me to the schoolyard, my only English words were ‘I want ice cream please.” Children circled me like yelping pups. I babbled in Serbo-Croatian and they fell about laughing. When I read my first schoolbook at home, jumping from the top line to the last, my mother asked, “What is this?” “That’s how ‘englezi’ read,” I assured her triumphantly.
Ours was the rubbed-raw mantra that sacrifice and hard work would deliver a better future to make up for all that was lost. The bar was set high. I would be a lawyer or a doctor but at home a dutiful daughter. Along the way I would give birth to grandchildren who respected their grandparents; they too would graduate as lawyers and doctors. The albatross around my neck had two heads, squalling from opposite worlds – the village my parents had left but recreated, and the wider world they resisted and feared. I would successfully navigate it for them, and never abandon them.
The writer and her mother in the early 1960s. Source: Supplied
Upgrading to a more affluent suburb, where we were even more out of place, was an ace card in our immigrant dream. My parents secured the house next to my high school to keep close watch in case the forbidden lolly jar from the outside world led me into temptation and the life of a streetwalker – an idea that was already in its bud.
Moving upmarket lifted my mother’s spirits, and for a short time, she hung up her coat of stones. With spade-like hands, my father grew plump tomatoes and proudly inscribed the Yugoslav flag across our front lawn with a colour palette of pebbles and succulents. “You must be Czech... lovely country, lovely people,” observed a neighbour, admiring the flag. “Knew a chap once from that neck of the woods. Name was…erm, never could pronounce it.”
We hung out with our tribe, the women baking almond tortes tall as steeples, stitching silk tapestries; the men sampling each other’s eye-watering home brews. Matchmakers sprinkled icing sugar on pastries as delicate as butterfly wings, and planned my generation’s future while we huddled over the latest rock vinyl. We held on tight to our traditions – sweaty folk-dancing, concrete-mixing driveway parties fuelled by djezvas of Turkish coffee, in which you could stand a spoon – or two. As far as I know, the matchmakers never paired me up with anyone.
My mother seemed content when we first moved but it never lasted. First her father died, then her mother, then her sister in a car accident. The tyranny of distance meant she was never there to say goodbye, tethered instead to her difficult husband and wayward daughter. There was no wooden floor in our moody house, only layers of brittle eggshells. The finest crack triggered my mother’s deepening psychotic episodes, like modernist art in my bedroom, phone calls from male ‘outsiders’, or simply colouring my hair. The violence she unleashed at my sins became scarier because I never knew where she would find her next weapon – a branch stripped of leaves to make it sting more, a wooden spoon, or the hose from the vacuum. She perceived strangers rattling at our gate, abducting me while I dreamed of leaping over it to join in their fun. What would it be like to drink in a pub, jostle with hundreds of young people at a rock concert, chant slogans at street demos, bring colleagues home for dinner?
My father was her ready accomplice. “You’re killing your mother; you’re giving her cancer” was the cue to touch her neck and moan about her raw deal, a daughter like me. But the only burgeoning lump was my guilt and the shame of bringing dishonor to my family.
My father was not kidding when he said, “A good daughter only leaves her family to marry or she will be called a prostitute. Bring home a stranger and I’ll greet him with a gun.” Their citizen-spies must have spotted me with a man on the street – the most immoral of tripwires in a double life doomed to dob-ins, slip-ups and snares. Even my dreamworld was not my own. Zealous for concrete, my father had cemented me into his patriotic creation on the front lawn, and I carried my mother on my back from room to room, though none were ever to her liking.
Most people want to be found; I longed to be lost – a missing person even the cops can’t find. No more fibbing and sticky interrogations, no more cultural toggling. In my fantasy, I stepped off the cusp into a new life free from reconciling muddled images – the links between prostitutes, successful lawyers and doctors, and dutiful daughters. One thing was clear – I did not want to be any of them. There had to be a way to vanish before my mother bottled me like her jars of pickles and screwed the lid on tight. For already, I could feel the weight of my own coat of stones, cut from the cloth of my mother’s.
Miranda Jakich’s parents on their wedding day. Source: Supplied
Just when I thought my mother could not become more unhappy, the Balkan Wars of the 1990s broke out. The Second World War had left her emotionally scarred but also given birth to her country, and now that country was at war with itself. Predictions about the stillborn nation of Europe were coming true, not peacefully but through atrocities and genocide. The world watched in horror, neighbours and shopkeepers commiserated; we ate our meals in silence and prayed for the miracle that never came. My mother’s apron strings tightened around me and the albatross dragged on my neck. I learnt that unhappiness is a very deep pit, and that if we did not take care, my mother could fall into the darkness and take us down with her.
A community meeting was called in a workingmen’s club so that local people could support families affected by the war. There were egg sandwiches and scones that my mother politely refused. I wondered how much she understood with her limited English. She looked uncomfortably out of place and showed no emotion. My own knees were knocking against each other and I wished we hadn’t come. My mother raised her hand and stood up to speak. “My people….” And there she froze. I have no idea what she wanted to say. A grief counsellor came up to us and handed her his card. She buried it away, like the failed recipes at the back of her cookery book. She spent hours on the phone to family in Dalmatia, Belgrade, Zagreb, and ran up a huge phone bill. When the generals moved their armies across hills and valleys, she moved with them. When the iconic bridge of Mostar fell, she turned her face to the wall. My parent’s all-consuming worry diverted attention off me and they almost forgot I existed. “It took a war,” I remarked to a friend. “But it would be so wrong of me to wish the war go on.”
It was the loneliest of times. Ancient poison curdled affection overnight. Old friends no longer drank our wine; we were shunned for refusing to hate. I let them go even though my mother condemned me for feeling ashamed of ‘our people’. She carried stones; I would plant trees. A grove of wattles for new friends, tall eucalypts to mark my wobbly steps towards freedom, and at the centre, a figtree I called home. It was my place of belonging and certainty, for the only certainty about war was that there would be others, and this one forgotten. So grief stricken were they to see their homeland awash with blood, my parents hardly noticed I had one leg over the gate. By the time my mother looked up from the war, she could not see me for the forest of verdant trees.
In the toxic years that followed, my parents and I dug thorns into each other’s skins; we were as corrosive as acid. But old age changed everything. Anti-depressants, masquerading as blood pressure tablets, mellowed my stern mother in her decline. The critical perfectionist disappeared along with most of her dementing brain. She giggled at my lame jokes and stopped demanding grandchildren. Finally, I was enough for her; even calling me her rose, so nice. Her old woman’s world was no longer divided into ‘my people’ and bogeymen. When she threw away the stones, she freed me too. Had the government handed out happy pills in immigration packs upon arrival, it would have made life a lot easier for my family.
I asked her “Who’s this?” pointing to a photo of my late father. “I don’t know.” “And who’s this?” pointing to Tito because of course, she will recognise him. “You,” she replied. I took it as a compliment. They say that when the time comes, the dead beckon from the other side. Gather they did at the base of her bed. She indulged them in chitchat before waving them away, not quite ready. They spoke not one word of English for they were her village friends; that’s how I know the afterlife is full of long haul travellers who enjoy a good gossip.
My mother took seven long months to let go of her troubled life, turning cold and bluish, then rallying and asking for a frothy coffee. A medical mystery, the doctor called her, and that she was, all her life keeping secrets, storing disappointment, sliding stone upon stone into her coat pockets. As I dripped morphine into the corners of her mouth and she became more irrational, it was our time to slay each other with cruel accusations, or whisper forgiveness. At her funeral we laid branches from the backyard olive tree on her coffin. There was not a dry eye. “She was there,” said a friend. No doubt she was, checking to see her sworn enemies had not shown up or whether my dress revealed too much cleavage.
The writer with her mother in 2018, just before her mother passed away. Source: Supplied
Her ashes will make the long journey back to where she was born – because I promised. She will have her village back, and I will keep mine with my own heroes – storytellers of a different kind.
Even as my mother was dying, even when I had control over every part of her vanishing body, she could still kneecap me with one cold sideways look. My mother held onto her power until her last breath and even now she is gone, she returns to scold me in my dreams. But then I wake, and choose my own trove of stories.
This entry was chosen from nearly 4000 entries to be jointly awarded the Highly Commended prize in the 2021 SBS Emerging Writers' Competition on the topic of 'Between Two Worlds'.
