My Mother, Queen of the Pixies
Feisty mischief-maker, opinionated, original beauty hunter, Aussie, with the emotional strength of an Olympian.
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Dear Beautiful Humans,
For Mother’s Day, I’d like to tell you a story about an extraordinary woman I call Mom.
Narelle Mary Ryan came flaming into the world like a meteor, on November 15, 1932, at the same time that her mother died.
She grew up in Sydney, with a warm and wonderful dad who survived the battle of Gallipoli, an older brother, and a couple of step-moms/families. She went to school during WWII wearing a lifesaving backpack and endured regular air raids.
My dad summed up her childhood thusly: “Your mother was a ragamuffin who grew up on the shores of Sydney.” Remove four words, and today we’d call that a million-dollar lifestyle. Hers wasn’t.
In her early 20s, she lived in London, modeling and designing hats. Years later she told me that English men always wanted to “pounce before dinner.” She did not approve, nor did she relent, and advised me to hold the same standards. “No pouncing on an empty stomach!”
She returned to Syndey and lived with friends in an apartment on Darling Point. This was when my mom met my dad — a “goddamn Yank bastard”—who Boeing very kindly sent over for some airplane business. They met at a party. He called. She ignored him for four days. He kept calling. On the fifth day she took the call, heard my dad’s bass-baritone opera singer’s voice, and she was ready in 12 minutes. They had dinner together every night for six weeks straight.
My dad flew home, my mom waved goodbye and assumed they’d just had a fun fling.
Several long-distance phone calls and a proposal later, my mom boarded a jet plane for North America, where she married a man she’d known for three months, to live in a strange city that was wet and chilly, where women went out in public with their hair in rollers, where she lived in a tiny log cabin that was drafty, and where she knew not a single person. There was no decent beer or good bread. The water was too cold to swim in, even during the summer. Rough for an Aussie water baby.
My dad was a weight-lifting nut. He showed her how to lift barbells lying on his piano bench. She gave him what-oh-what-for, and did not lift one barbell until she was about 60, when she was good and ready. But back then, in the beginning, she must have had her fair share of What Have I Done moments.
After four years of marriage, I was born, my brother came next, and she got down to mothering—without having been mothered herself, and with a husband who traveled for six-week stints, and no family nearby.
Family activities included hitting a lakeside beach to watch the sunset or walking to a viewing spot to watch the moonrise. One summer we road-tripped to a bunch of national parks. We had picnics with buckets of fried chicken. I stood beside her after the sun slipped away, the horizon was stripes of gold and red, and the first star twinkled. She exclaimed over and over:
“Have you ever seen anything so bloody beautiful?!”
As a kid this made me cringe; as an adult, I wrote a poem about it, “So Bloody Beautiful.”BLOODY BEAUTIFUL
Summers we collected in picnics, so many
picnics. You rushed us down the grass slopes with
buckets of chicken, we ran to catch the last traces
of sun. “Bloody beautiful,” you cried, “have you ever
seen anything so bloody beautiful?” I flinched, looked
away. One dusk, at 16, grounded and night-starved,
I ran out on dinner; you followed me down
the gravel walkway, sat on the night-stained dock while
I lost my body underwater. You washed my hair
three times; I rinsed the soap off in the lake, three times.
Over the pines, the moon rose, almost full. We sat
and watched and I saw it that night, so bloody beautiful,this peace under a July moon. We walked home in it,
the tips of our fingers touching, barely but just enough.
We’re both Scorpios and bodies of water call to us. Los Cabos, circa 2010. My mom wasn’t concerned about “fitting in.” Consequently, I grew up doing pretty much what I wanted (lots of sports), without worrying what other people thought about that in 1974 (“who is that girl doing all the sports??). That’s freedom.
After my mom sneezes, she’ll say out loud and in a public setting, “God bless you, you gorgeous creature.”
Energetic, curious, devouring: that’s my mom. The two of us have traveled to Greece, Rome, Northern Spain, Ireland, Austalia, and around the U.S. We’ve taken a million walks, gone for thousands of swims, and hundreds of hikes. Also: ballet, theater, opera, symphony, museums. Her appetite for life and living—even at 91-and-a-half years old is UNSTOPPABLE
One Labor Day many years ago, we walked to a lakeside beach near my parents’. It was unusually warm. We were hot. The water was smooth, glittering, and Mount Rainier was right there. “I want to go in,” I said. “Me too.” she said. “I think we can do it.” We found a rocky entrance, took off our clothes, and had ourselves a skinny dip at high noon on a holiday.
My mom and I are like opposing reflections of each other: My mom never had a mom, and I never had kids. So we have:
One mother who doesn’t know what it’s like to be mothered, and one daughter who doesn’t know what it’s like to mother.
(She is also blonde with blue eyes; I am brunette with hazel eyes, and yet some people think we look strikingly alike.)
My mom is currently 91 years feisty, and is ROCKING IT. She lives in a retirement home three miles from me. Her husband has left for his next adventure. The last several years weren’t easy: my dad’s dementia unfolded in slow motion. He became blind; she moved him into an adult family home so he could be properly cared for. Covid hit; she was living alone, in Arizona, a plane ride away from her kids and family. Three brutal years, and several challenging ones before that. She didn’t complain. She also didn’t put on false cheer. My mom still sat in a chair outside her front door, sipped her tea and admired the blooming cactus. This woman turns toward beauty as a way of life, good times and bad. Amazing.
She loves her new community, and her airy apartment with a view over the courtyard and its beautiful garden. She’s made friends, they laugh and get up to mischief. My mom’s an extrovert. One of my dad’s favorite things about her was how she made friends, how people loved her.
About 95 percent of the time I say, “Hey mom, do you want to ______?”, she says YES.
Recently I said to her, “You know mom, your eighties were tough. But your nineties, they’re roaring!” She laughed, and said in my dad’s way, “Oh, isn’t that something.”
You sure are, Mom.
At the beach in Cabo earlier this year.
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lust for life-Narelle!
What a great read. Thanks for sharing.