The Lovely Lady returns.

I’m a very happy lady today, twirling in anticipation’s good arms. Tomorrow night I’ll be out at the airport eagerly looking for my mother’s face amongst the crowd. She’ll emerge, like magic, with the others who have been transported through the air from Mumbai to Melbourne.

Her face is the easiest face for me to find, her movements second nature to me. The way her skinny little legs jerk at the knee as she walks, how her child-sized hands unthinkingly pat where her handbag should be and mostly the way her white teeth dance and her bright eyes flash on her dark skin. Her eyes are always in motion, scanning each scene. On neighbourhood walks she will often stop mid sentence and launch a thin arm into the thick of a suburban garden and pull a sweetly scented flower to my nose. A hidden flower that would never call for my attention.

She’s bringing me duty-free perfume. I asked for Happy by Clinique and she rings me a few days later to confirm the name after visiting the department stores of Mumbai asking for ‘Happy clinic’ perfume. I giggle stupidly at the other end of the line at a life time of hilarious miscommunication.

I used to hate my mother when I was a teenager. Even now those words, ‘hate’ and ‘my mother’ in the very same sentence terrify me. I want to lessen that feeling I held against her as a teen; I want to use the word ‘resent’ or ‘dislike’ instead, but I would be lying. Back then as a teenage girl so pumped full of a confusion that rode the wave of rage, I had such a strong desire to completely sever the connection between her and I and I tried everything I could. I stopped talking to her, I stopped eating the food she cooked, I stopped wanting to know about her culture. I hated the saris she gave me to wear, I hated the history that was woven into the silk. I reacted against everything I thought she liked. I cut my long dark hair off like a boys one night in my room with a pair of blunt scissors. I pierced my nose but she thought it looked pretty, so I took it out and had my tongue pierced instead. She did not think this was pretty, this made me happy.

Earlier this year, my mother reminded me of what she considers to be one of the most awful moments of her life. One school afternoon she walked past my 15 year-old friends and I in the shopping centre in the town where I grew up. She saw me with this group of school kids and proudly came over and said ‘hello’. I with my summer school dress hitched up my soft girl-thighs, took a drag of a cigarette, blew smoke in her face and muttered ‘bitch’ under my breath as she turned away realising that I was not going to publicly acknowledge her.

This story actually makes me feel shame right down to the pit of my stomach, even now as I write this.

I never budged an inch in my anger towards her. And perhaps the really terrible part of this memory is that I have no recollection of this moment that had so obviously devastated her identity as a mother. I don’t remember this moment, it has wasted beneath my other teenage near-misses and disasters. I don’t remember because I never considered her at this time in my life.

My mother used to tell me this story when I was growing up about how she had wanted a little girl so much that every Tuesday she would go to church and look at the stained glass window of Mother Mary and pray for a daughter. Like a good Hindu and a product of the world’s most secular nation, she decided it was not enough to stick to one god or one religion. She tried everything, she asked Mary, Jesus, God, Vishnu, Shiva and all the goddesses to help her to conceive a girl. She already had two boys but she wanted a girl as well. She took a risk, she was three months short of her 43^rd birthday when she had me.

This story used to make me uncomfortable when she would tell it in my teenage years, at birthdays or on my ‘good’ days when I was behaving myself for some overseas and unsuspecting visitor. There was the part of me that resented her sense of want and what this story represented. It made the stakes of my existence bigger than anything I thought I was capable of giving to her, so it was easier for me to destroy it all than to live within the parameters of what I thought I was supposed to fulfil. But there was also a part of me that always loved to hear that story. It made my rash teenage flirtations with danger safe because I knew there was a place that had been created just for me, which I could return to no matter how fragile or tiny or jagged my ego became.

I have puzzled over why I had this fraught relationship with my mother because she offered me nothing but the most stable love I have ever known in my life. Only questions arise, moments of insight. I grew up in a fairly racially conservative part of Victoria, did I hate her for the skin colour she gave me? Or for marrying a European and blurring the boundaries of cultural identity? Or was I playing power games with her and my father, setting them off against each other? Siding with the one who struggled to adapt to the power dynamics of the family? I don’t know. Maybe I just had enough teenage self-loathing to hate the one person that reminded me most of myself. Maybe it was all of these things, like lost threads rolled together to create one ball of useless, unconnected snippets to entertain my frantic teenage hands. But I sigh now and think so much wasted energy fighting. I want to go back as my wiser-older self and shake me, the teenager, until all the rage that was in me falls on the ground, powdered and sweet, like icing sugar.

But instead I’ll drive out to the airport tomorrow, humbled by a mother’s love. I’ll be thankful that there were those events and family crises that shook me out of my self-indulgent reverie. I’ll find her amongst the crowd and she’ll take my hand and I will feel so little, yet so changed, so grown up.In the morning I’ll spray myself happy with the ‘Happy clinic’ perfume as I laugh and settle her back home.

P.S. Anyone who had a similar mother-daughter experience may be interested in The Birth of Pleasure, by Carol Gilligan. It shed a lot of light on my teenage years.

P.P.S. Thanks for all your comments on my last blog. There was no lunch, just a week full of sighs and messages from the universe like 'it's okay to fuck - and it's okay to fuck up'. Thanks Audrey apple of my heart!