Mother of all visitors
By Sheryl-Lee Kerr
I have just undergone the ritual visit from my Maternal Unit.
Mum
arrived bearing news that I am worth $100,000 and three camels
if I
marry the nice Saudi chap she bumped into in Syria last week.
She adds, with a twinkle in her eye, that while she gets the
money
and I get the husband, she'll let me keep the camels if I ask
nicely and
keep my room clean. (Gee, that's incentive.)
The problem with visits from your mother, or any other guest for
that matter, is that you always know they're there.
Even when they're creeping around in the middle of the night for
reasons ranging from the dumb (“I wanted to find out if I left
my
socks in the lounge room”) to the ridiculous (“I thought I heard
your cat miaowing in your linen cupboard”), guests have all the
silent-running capabilities of a hyperactive five-year-old in
the
confectionary aisle.
Heaven help us if they weren't “trying to be quiet”. Speaking of
which, I knew my mother was really here when, at dawn, a
panicked
noise emanated throughout my house last week which sounded
awfully
like: “GET UP, GET UP, YOU'LL BE LATE”.
I peeled a reluctant eyelid open and found an agent of darkness
(looking eerily like Mum) hovering overhead, convinced I was
oversleeping because my alarm was going and I wasn't.
I tried groggily to explain there was a certain protocol I had
to
follow each morning or my limbs wouldn't function properly.
For instance, there's five minutes of denial as I pretend my
alarm
isn't really going. Ten minutes of pretending it's not a week day
and that's actually me, not the radio, singing La Bamba.
Thirty minutes
spent hoping the alarm will self-destruct in 10 seconds if I
don't
accept this mission.
Seven more minutes of acknowledging I should probably get up
soon.
Five minutes of acknowledging that I just acknowledged this.
Three minutes of acknowledging that I am now so late that I only
have time to get about one shoulder and half an arm wet in the shower.
And then, and only then, do I consider getting up. By which time
my
alarm has usually stopped anyway.
Unfortunately, my mother didn't appreciate the subtle nuances of
this and just gave me the same look as she would when I was a
10-year-old.
And so it was that, at some ungodly hour, under threat of having
three camels parked on my porch (along with a husband), I was
awake,
dressed and railing at the universe.
But even when guests are not in your house at the moment,
they're
still anything but unobtrusive. That's why we call them guests.
A
little known fact is “guest” comes from the latin
Guesshowwewillmake
yourlifealivinghellwhenwevisit.
And, indeed, they get to do peculiar things to us, while we get
to say over and over: “No really, that's fine; hardly noticed at all ...”
Guests and your food also have a special relationship. When they
depart, they leave behind things you'd never want to touch, like the half-eaten
spinach, prawn and baked bean quiche they picked up a week ago. And they strip
your fridge clean of all the things you hold dear in this world, namely
chocolate and chocolate. (Which, frankly, should be an indictable offence.)
Not that I can really complain ... my recent guest was amusing,
left behind a goodly part of my chocolate stash and, best of
all, no
camels that I could see.
© Sheryl-Lee Kerr &
The Advertiser, 11 August 1998.