Alice is coming to meet the babies and to stay with us for almost a week. She has a very different background to me, with none of my advantages. Her family is poor, she is uneducated, her father was violent, and she was fostered out. Many of the worst things you can imagine happening to a person have happened to her.
I met Alice when I was doing volunteer work at a Women’s Community Centre interstate. She lived in the area and used to drop in. She is in her early forties with greying, shoulder-length brown hair, smaller than average height, overweight-to-obese and has one bulbous, wandering eye. Despite many of the differences in our lives, we found common ground and got on well. She has a wicked sense of humour and often made me laugh.
Alice has come to visit a few times now. The first time was a disaster. Frugal with my leave, I didn’t take any time off work. Not only that but it rained for the whole time she was here. She didn’t see anything of our town and was bitterly disappointed. We talked about it afterwards and agreed that next time it would be different.
The next time it was better. I took some time off, we went out a bit, and she met some of my friends, which she enjoyed. She loves meeting people and having a good chat. She liked my friends and enjoyed some new experiences. First time eating a pink grapefruit – and Indian food, including naan bread. First time using Skype, seeing my sister and nephew from America. First time visiting our big flower show in spring. Almost illiterate, she borrowed a book of ours and within a couple of weeks of her return she had read it through to the end. The title had caught her attention: Veronika Decides to Die.
Alice’s poor start in life set her up for a lifetime of chronic diseases: asthma, diabetes, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, dental problems. The risk factors are there too: smoking, little exercise, being overweight, sometimes poor eating habits and lots of fizzy drinks. She has a gambling problem, mental illness and understandably doesn’t find life to be a very easy journey. One of the things I admire about her is her sense of humour in the face of such adversity.
Alice couldn’t wait to meet our babies. She wanted to know everything: whether we were giving them dummies, how often they were feeding, whether they were smiling yet, and did they share a cot. Did one wake the other up when she cried? Did they get bad wind or have colic? She had some tips for burping (rock them on your lap from one leg to the other) and for settling a tired baby (swing them from your hips while you are standing up). She had learnt from experience – her son, before she had put him into open adoption when he was a baby (‘open adoption’ meaning she could see him a few times a year).
Over the next week she spent every spare moment holding one or the other, singing songs to them (she knew many), tickling them and chatting to them in baby language. We went shopping and she bought the babies some colourful children’s books. She gave them a baby suit each when she arrived and bought them another one during her stay. All this from her meagre pension.
When the babies woke at around 3 am for their nightly feed she was often there to put their dummies back in. She cooked for us once or twice. But perhaps most impressive of all was that Alice, who had chain smoked for more than twenty years, gave up smoking while she was here so as not to smell of cigarette smoke around the twins.
During her visit Alice was beset with her usual array of illnesses, had a strict pill regime and was also battling a very painful stomach that she attributed to the side effects of some of her medication. Her hair is a barometer of how she is doing. If it gets matted and sticks up like the top of an old paintbrush, it’s often a sign that she isn’t well. Her stomach pain sometimes got the better of her during the visit and her hair was consequently untended. She looked like she had just rolled out of bed.
Once they had got past her sometimes rather wild appearance, my friends also found common ground with Alice. She has the ability to draw talk out of people; listening intently and making them feel heard. With Steve’s cousin who came to dinner in particular, she drew her out asking all sorts of questions, until the cousin had relaxed completely and chatted about each of her children, her paid work, her volunteer work in a large hospital, her day-to-day life, and many other things in between.
My apprehension at the length of Alice’s visit disappeared within a couple of days, and when I found myself singing her the nonsensical song ‘Susanne is a funniful man’ with full snorting, whistling and raspberry sound effects as my grandfather used to sing to us, I realised that I was enjoying Alice’s company and would be sorry to see her go.
I had a few minutes’ wistful thoughts about her moving here and looking after the babies as they grew up, and how she would enjoy it for the couple of days a week we’d need, with us paying her what we would give a childcare centre. She seemed so much happier and almost forgot her troubles and pain when she was with the twins. But I knew it wouldn’t happen. Alice’s son doesn’t live here for one thing. Nor does her doctor of twenty years, with whom she has built up an important bond.
‘Will you miss me?’, she asked, the day before she left, as she played her Donkey Kong computer game. ‘How much?’
I was sorry to see Alice go, and she was sorry to leave. Things aren’t as stress-free for her at home, and she knew it would be a challenge to stay off the smokes now that she had given them up for a week.
I’ll call her up in a month as I do every month, and have a long chat about how she is and how the babies are doing and every little thing that they are up to. I hope they continue to know her as they grow up. She enriches our lives. I hope we make a small difference to hers.
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