A Mother's Legacy: Honoring My Mum on Mother's Day

[00:00:00] Carter: G'day guys, and welcome to a special episode of the Touched Out Podcast. Today is Mother's Day in Australia, and this is a hard topic for me to discuss, um, but one that I think would be very, very cathartic and healing and beneficial for me to put out into the universe, and one where I can honor my mum and have something, uh, in her memory live on forever through this podcast.

[00:00:28] Carter: Uh, this podcast is, uh, large in part, Because of her and, yeah, I basically sit somewhere between grieving her and honoring and celebrating my wife, uh, and the mother of my children, uh, every year on Mother's Day. So, this is the story of my mum and, uh, we'll see how we go. There might be some tears, there might not be, but.

[00:00:52] Carter: This is all for her. So my mum was born to parents Bob and Sheila in Waverley, Sydney, on August 7th, [00:01:00] 1954. Her very early years of life were shared with Sheila's parents until Bob accepted teaching positions that took the family to the West. Northwest, Southwest, and the border of New South Wales over some years.

[00:01:12] Carter: The eldest of five children, Mum was the first in the family to experience the many challenges of country living. My Aunty Jo recalls Mum waving a tennis racket over her head to ward off plovers, which is a type of bird in Australia, in the school playground in her daily sightings of snakes during summer months.

[00:01:28] Carter: She had a long bus trip home from Eula Manbrae to Coonabarabran when she began high school, but also many wonderful opportunities for activities like horse riding and farmstays. I'm sorry about my son coughing in the background. At 17, mum began her early working life in Tumbarumba at farmers and grazers.

[00:01:47] Carter: After my grandmother passed away, the family moved to Albury in 1972, where mum began her adult life. Mum loved a good laugh and had such a wicked sense of humour. She always saw the funny side of things. She was passionate about her [00:02:00] work and always gave her utmost in any position she held. I am one of three children mum gave birth to, with me being the youngest.

[00:02:07] Carter: Mum and dad separated and subsequently divorced when I was around the age of five. In the aftermath, life for everyone changed. All of a sudden, we weren't a family unit, with my brother staying with my dad, and my sister and I with mum. I was too young to really grasp the true emotional impact it had on my parents, or my siblings.

[00:02:24] Carter: A lot of my early childhood memories are dulled by an emotional cloud. I would often catch my mum having a little cry to herself and in those moments she would stop immediately for my sake and we would just lay together cuddling. But as things tend to do, life carried on and we found some form of rhythm in our new home.

[00:02:39] Carter: She carried on working tirelessly and became a mature age student while also holding it down as a single parent. Now, as a parent myself, I look back at those times and I wish I had have cut her more slack for not being as present as I wished her to be. Mum was no stranger to mental health struggles and from those days onwards I always knew her to be on antidepressants, but she never really shared with me the true [00:03:00] impact her mental health had on her.

[00:03:02] Carter: Mum loved to garden. She was incredibly proud of her curation and took immense pride in it, as well as being a very important self care strategy for her. Through the years, mum changed jobs and we moved house several times before she met a new man. She hadn't looked so happy in years for which I was truly elated to see.

[00:03:19] Carter: Mum and I moved from our town in New South Wales around 97 98 to a new and unfamiliar town, the next state over, in which she then married her new partner. I was very happy for her, but around this time I developed a deep sadness due to moving away from an entire life I was familiar and comfortable with.

[00:03:35] Carter: I left behind my then best friend Andy, who was from Minnesota. Andy was very upset with my moving and opted to return to America to live with his father, and we never saw each other again. Life moved on. Everything was different. We started fresh with mum now being a wife to my stepfather, a man who I never quite got along with and we never saw eye to eye.

[00:03:53] Carter: But still, seeing mum so happy made it somehow worth it. Mum quickly made many new friends and found her passion [00:04:00] in her job. with a local plastic surgeon. She began playing tennis competitively again, until an unfortunate accident left her with a snapped Achilles tendon. This is the last time I really remember seeing Mum be as active as she was.

[00:04:13] Carter: Around 1999, I came home from school and Mum was sitting silently at the dinner table waiting for me. She asked me to come have a seat and naturally I thought she had found something in my bedroom that I should not have been in possession of. She looked nervous and the air was thick with tension. First of all, I'm going to be okay, she said as I sat down.

[00:04:29] Carter: But there is something that I need to tell you. The final words she said to me before our lives changed forever. Darl, a little while ago, I felt a lump in my breasts and I had some tests done to see what it is. I got the results yesterday and they've confirmed that I have cancer. Tears. Instant tears. I knew next to nothing about cancer apart from what I'd seen in movies and most of the time those movies didn't have happy endings.

[00:04:53] Carter: The rest of the conversations white noise in my memory now replaced by a strange ringing when I try to recall what she said to me. All I knew in that [00:05:00] moment was that my mum was dying, and that I was still all alone, in a new and strange town. She began chemotherapy almost immediately. Remembering her in those times is bittersweet.

[00:05:10] Carter: She was determined to beat this thing, and watching her warrior spirit come out was truly inspiring. She shaved her head on her own accord because, and I quote, No way. I am letting the cancer take anything more from me. She was empowered with any outlook on life. She didn't want to waste a single second and took any and every opportunity.

[00:05:27] Carter: She had to smell the roses and have a laugh to this day. One of my fondest memories of her was after she'd shaved her head and bought a wig, we visited her hairstylist Mark. Mark was not aware of mom's diagnosis, and as we sat in the waiting room, I could see mom with a mischievous grin on her face. Mark appeared saying, G'day Helen, come through and we'll give your hair a wash.

[00:05:47] Carter: To which my dear mum replied, Oh, I can't be fucked getting up Mark, wash it yourself. In which she ripped her wig off and threw it across the salon, with it promptly landing with an audible thud against Mark's chest. To this day, I have never since heard a [00:06:00] gasp, or the deafening silence that followed quite like it.

[00:06:03] Carter: Whilst mum sat back in her chair belly laughing like an absolute champion. Those happier memories became a little less frequent as the chemo sessions progressed. There was no avoiding it at that stage. Mum was sick. Really sick. She dropped weight. She spent a lot of time crawling between her bed and the toilet to be sick.

[00:06:19] Carter: And only had just enough energy to look after herself and spend quiet time with her husband. I tried my hardest to be strong for her and not complain in any way about how alone I truly felt. But as a side effect of my tough exterior, internally I suffered. My grades slipped, and I was getting in trouble in school.

[00:06:35] Carter: Getting caught stealing and generally acting up in any way I could that would gain me any and all attention, good or bad. I spent a lot of time angry at myself for my actions over that time. As time went on, mum's chemo sessions lessened, and she seemed to be getting back to some form of normality. Then came the news.

[00:06:52] Carter: Remission. What did that mean? Is she going to be okay? She wasn't sure what the future held, but for the time being, she isn't going [00:07:00] anywhere. She began devoting her time to volunteering and community work with several different charities involving breast cancer. She helped organize the Relay for Life several times and joined a dragon boating team that was made up entirely of breast cancer survivors.

[00:07:12] Carter: The camaraderie and friendships formed in that group of ladies was something my mum held very very close to her heart. By this stage, I was a typical angsty, moody, and downright arsehole ish teenager. A chip on my shoulder in what seemed like the world against me. I rebelled in any way I could. Alcohol?

[00:07:27] Carter: Sure. Marijuana? Sign me up. Numbing my trauma was my business and business was good. I became incredibly devious. and developed an incredible knack for blatantly lying to mum when she would catch me doing something I shouldn't be doing. Looking back, she definitely knew, but I think she just felt helpless and had just finished fighting for her own life that she was a little too burned out to really face my bullshit head on.

[00:07:49] Carter: This was life for a while. I was lucky enough to never get caught up in any real life changing trouble, but my schooling suffered a great deal and my habits worsened. By the time I was 18, Mum had been through several more rounds of chemo with [00:08:00] subsequent remissions. I don't have a great deal of memories in my later teen years.

[00:08:04] Carter: It was a lot of parties, a lot of shit behavior, and a lot of pushing everyone away from me. I felt like if I made myself not care about the people in my life, I would be protected when the day came that they left my life for good. I'll skip forward a few years as by this time I was an adult, out on my own in Melbourne city, with a whole heap of battle scars from the absolute shit show I put myself and everyone else through in the years prior.

[00:08:24] Carter: I had by this time developed enough emotional intelligence to truly connect with mum, who was now on her third time being out of remission. We spent as much time together as possible with Mum travelling between her home and Melbourne to see myself, my sister, and her children. She was a grandmother now, a job she did not ever take lightly, and she adored my nieces and nephews more than anything.

[00:08:43] Carter: She still had not lost her sense of humour and frequently made jokes that nobody ever found quite as funny as she did. Mum and her partner eventually separated around 2012 2013, in which she moved to Melbourne to be closer to her grandchildren. She was happy. Her own little three bedroom unit in the western suburbs, [00:09:00] nobody to answer to or share any part of herself with.

[00:09:03] Carter: Something I don't believe she had ever had the pleasure of in her life up until that point. She spent her days gardening, drinking wine and seeing friends on top of soaking up as much time with her grandkids as possible. At this stage, I had gone through a pretty messy breakup of my own and mum was happy to have me move in with her, to share in company and help around the house.

[00:09:22] Carter: By this time, Mum's cancer had yet again returned, 15 years after her original diagnosis. She still was determined to stand in defiance of this disease, and would never let it define her. More rounds of chemo. I would drive mum to her sessions just outside the Melbourne CBD. The drives to and from were often filled with car karaoke, and we would belt out Creedence, Clearwater Revival, Toto, and any other bangers from the 60s, 70s, and 80s that we could think of.

[00:09:48] Carter: But still, the cancer grew, and by the beginning of 2015, mum was getting more sick. As a side effect of the cancer, her abdomen began filling with liquid. She would then need to have her belly drained every two [00:10:00] weeks, with anything between two to four liters of fluid being taken each time. The cancer wasn't going away.

[00:10:05] Carter: Mum was getting tired. She'd fought for so long, and tried so hard, but the journey was beginning to grow tiresome. Mum began discussing the end, and that she'd fought long and hard enough. She ceased her treatments. The months following were spent having incredibly hard, vulnerable, and honest conversations with Mum, in which we shared parts of her life, and herself with me, that she had never shared before, and I likewise did the same.

[00:10:31] Carter: We cried together and laughed together a lot. We would watch her favourite movies, and watch ones that she'd been wanting to see. But she was growing more tired and more sick. She was only able to tend to her garden for a few minutes a day, and she'd have to go back to bed. The timeline of 2015 went both incredibly fast and slow at the same time.

[00:10:48] Carter: As 2015 was drawing closer to the end, and Mum's health had begun declining rapidly, she became angry at the drop of a hat, a fury of which I took on the chin as penance for the shitstorm I [00:11:00] put her through in my younger years. She began spending most of her time switching between bed and the couch. Then it changed to switching between bed and her mobility chair.

[00:11:08] Carter: Then her mobility chair and her in home hospital bed. Then pretty much just always her bed. My sister and I split shifts being mum's full time carers, a job in which we did not take lightly, nor we ever complained about. My sister and I sat together and agreed we didn't think mum had much left in her.

[00:11:25] Carter: Days later, we were forced to call for an ambulance due to her declining lucidity and health, and I watched Mum being stretched out, knowing in my soul that she'd never return to her home. She spent her final days in hospice care in Werribee Hospital. My sister and I stayed together at Mum's house in a blur.

[00:11:43] Carter: We received a phone call from the hospital the evening of 21st of the 12th, 2015, saying Mum didn't have long left, and to come see her and prepare to say our final goodbyes. We made a phone call to my brother telling him to jump in the car and travel from his home which is around 3 hours away. [00:12:00] Some of mum's siblings had also caught a last minute flight and had been staying in the house with us.

[00:12:05] Carter: We arrived at the hospital and mum was barely awake, but awake enough to look up at us, smile and tell us she loved us. And that she had fought for 16 long and tiring years and that she couldn't fight anymore, but would try to hold on for our brother to get there. Her breathing was labored and what little light was left in her eyes was dimming by the minute.

[00:12:25] Carter: She wanted so badly to see her older son and say goodbye, but he was still some distance away from arriving. We placed our hands in hers and told her she didn't have to fight any longer and that it was okay for her to rest now and that we were so proud of her for fighting through it all to gain an extra 16 years with us.

[00:12:43] Carter: And with that, her eyes closed for the final time, and then her breath slowed to nothing over the coming minutes. She was gone. After going to war with cancer for so long, she was gone.[00:13:00] 

[00:13:00] Carter: My mother passed on December 21st, 2015, surrounded by her family. Almost 8 years have passed, and I'm still picking up the pieces of my heart that broke that day. My grief appears often and without warning. I spend birthdays, holidays, and Mother's Days in a daze. For what holiday could I ever truly be happy without her?

[00:13:21] Carter: I grieve the loss of a mother in law for my wife, who I know my mother would have loved and treated like a daughter. I often daydream of them in the garden together. A wine in mum's hand and a beer in my wife's talking about me and laughing at the silly things I do. I grieve the loss of a loving grandmother to my three children.

[00:13:40] Carter: I long to witness the love my mother had for my nieces and nephews be rained down on my kids. I grieve and I miss. And I heard and almost eight years later, my pain remains, you never truly recover from the loss of a loved one, let alone a parent. You just make ways to carry on and try your hardest to [00:14:00] remember them and celebrate them in a way that would make them proud.

[00:14:04] Carter: So not only is this special episode of the podcast dedicated to my mother, but the entire podcast itself, because I know that if she was still with us, she would be nothing short of the proud of the man, father and husband and person I am today. And I owe so much of that to her, and the sacrifices that she made, and the fortitude that she possessed.

[00:14:26] Carter: She truly was one of a kind and I miss her with every fiber of my existence, every second of every day. Happy Mother's Day, Mum. I love you.