Mama

My mama had dancing legs. Long and lean. She loved jeans and flat sandals and country music and camping.

I hate all of those things.

On the ‘Australia Day’ long weekends of my childhood I would sit in the back of a car with excitable adults headed to the country music festival in Tamworth. At Hexham we would swap cars. I would get out and go to my grandparents’ or Auntie’s. Mum would continue on. Without me.

This year I met a boy I like. He was going to Tamworth. I had no plans for Easter. I wanted to see him.

But really, there was ghost I had to visit.

I drove in anxious anticipation as the country rose up around me. Green and gold and auburn, blink-and-you-miss-them towns with signage from the 60s, the pathos of roadkill, the porches of country hotels with David Ireland-esque old men drinking schooners of Tooheys New and swatting away regret-filled memories, and the heated, melting smells of Christmas holidays.

In the town itself I walked along Peel Street and imagined my mama walking with her friends, in her jeans and her sandals and her cowboy hat. She’s drinking beer and flirting and singing all the words.

I try to call her to ask which was her favourite pub so I can have lunch there. She doesn’t answer.

Mama is in a wheelchair now. She would love to wear jeans and sandals again, but she never will.

Everyone loves her. She talks to the nurses and the cooks and the other residents, no matter how far into dementia they have disappeared. I know this is how she would have been in Tamworth, going from pub to pub and from performer to performer. Drinking it all in. Everyone’s friend. I know that now, because today I walked the streets of the beloved home of her heart and saw it through her eyes.

But back then I didn’t want to know. I wanted her all to myself.

When I was younger — before we had to put mum into care — if I would arrive at her house and she had country music playing I would tell her to turn it off. I am not coming inside until it stops!

I never really understood why I hated it so much. But this past week as I unpacked it with a boy I like, who plays guitar, I could see the tender root.

When mum went to Tamworth, she left me behind. I missed her. Her life away from me was terrifying and I didn’t understand it.

Now, I am older. And possibly wiser. I see how much this snatch of time gave her the chance to fully be herself without the country music demands of a hopeless ex-husband and five hungry children.

I walk down Peel Street and try to walk in her footsteps, with her jeans and her sandals and her dancing legs. I imagine this festival in the 70s and can see her here with the friends who brought her to life from the darkness of her everyday struggle. In this odd little town that is now iconic I am filled with compassion for this young woman who still has a life of heartache ahead of her. One day soon she will no longer be able to wear jeans or sandals or dance on those long lean legs. She will lose it all one hot December day when I am home for Christmas after my first year of uni.

I find a souvenir shop and buy her a t-shirt commemorating 50 years of the Tamworth Country Music Festival.

She will love it.

It will make her cry.