Lydia was a little shorter than Katharine with a pretty rounded face framed by straight gold hair. Her olive green eyes flashed with intensity. She’d inherited full lips and English skin from my first husband, Steve. Born just two years after her older brother’s death, she was almost a female version of Sam, apart from the fact that she was left-handed. But from the start she made it clear she was in nobody’s shadow.
Lydia never called me Mum. I don’t know why. She’d just come into the world assuming we were equals. I wasn’t entirely happy about being called Helen by my toddler daughter, specially when strangers dipped their heads curiously and asked where the poppet’s mother was.
She’d seemed unruffled when Steve and I separated soon after her first birthday. Later on, she’d learned to love Philip as a father.
Nevertheless, the impact on a child born into a grieving household is incalculable. From an early age Lydia appeared burdened with a need to heal the world. While her friends hummed tunes from Sesame Street, she sang ‘Stand by Me’. At the age of five she declared herself vegetarian, forcing me to lie about the content of the sausages on her plate. She even refused to eat chocolates moulded into animal shapes.
I’d hoped Anglican girls’ school might provide the consistency she didn’t get being ferried between two households every second week. The school chapel was one of the few places where her loyalties weren’t frayed. The Virgin Mother could be relied on to keep her mouth shut, and God wasn’t about to argue over custody. She fell in love with the vicar and asked to be baptised.
We’d had our ups and downs, especially when Philip was transferred across the Tasman Sea to Melbourne, Australia. Thirteen-year-old Lydia, railed against changing schools and countries. Once she’d made the adjustment, though, she became a high achieving all rounder.
Her final exams resulted in a scholarship to Melbourne University at the age of seventeen, and a bewildering array of degree options. She chose Economics and Political Science.
While her marks continued to be stellar through her undergraduate degree, the only work that put light in her eyes was with disabled people part-time.
She went flatting, then took a year off trailing through the Third World. With a lifetime’s experience stored in photographic files on her phone, it was time for her to settle down. All she had to do was babysit her old teddies in her fabulous new bedroom and resume her studies.
I was too infatuated with the new house to notice that our older daughter had something else in mind – a project which was about to challenge me emotionally, mentally, spiritually and in several other ways beyond my imagination.
Inspiration
Teachers appear in many forms
Lydia and Katharine wasted no time injecting personality into their bedrooms. We heard thumps in the ceiling as beds were shifted, pictures hung. Junk shop expeditions were made. Katharine brought home 1950s movie posters and a floral bedspread. She lined her walls with books and draped party lights around her window.
Lydia didn’t want me to see hers until it was finished. I already had a vague idea what was in there – not much apart from a chest of drawers and our old queen-sized bed. The fact she was sleeping in a bed of marital dimensions would have driven Mum to distraction. (‘What’s a twenty-three-year-old girl doing with a bed like that? Fancy encouraging her to have loose morals under your own roof!’)
While Lydia was busy decorating, she invited her boyfriend over for an exclusive preview. Tall and good-looking with dark hair bunched in a ponytail, Ned was a part-time jazz pianist. He had ‘one or two issues’ which Lydia assured us were managed with medication.
Beaming, Ned nodded politely at me before bounding upstairs. I didn’t mind Ned. At Rob’s engagement party we’d danced together to ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ – a song that always reminded me of Mum peeling the eczema off her hands.
The eczema would’ve burrowed into Mum’s bones if she’d been around to see Ned lumbering downstairs the next morning. His fisherman’s jumper was fraying at the cuffs. I couldn’t tell if the shadow on his chin was designer stubble, or just plain neglect. Everything about him screamed ‘work in progress’.
Ned hummed nonchalantly as he poured himself a coffee. We’d never had a hummer in the house before. Lydia had spent the night at his place a few times, so I didn’t mind him staying over. In fact, I was more comfortable knowing she was tucked up in her own bed, with or without a boyfriend.
Philip wasn’t so happy. Striding into the kitchen in his work suit, he greeted Ned briskly and sat across the table from him. The temperature dropped several degrees as the two males eyed each other over the cockerel on the cornflakes packet. I got the impression there was one rooster too many in the room.
After Ned had gone, I asked Lydia if I could see her revamped bedroom. She shook her head. There were a couple of finishing touches she wanted to make. She’d show me later on, she said, after work.
‘Who have you got today?’ I asked.
‘Teenage boys,’ she replied. ‘We’re taking them to the aquarium.’
‘So you’ve got someone to help?’
‘Yeah, they’re pretty immobilised.’
Waving goodbye from the verandah, I watched her stride down the path to the grey bus parked outside. How she managed to transport her clients around in it was beyond me.
Whenever she drove my car, she could barely execute a parallel park without scraping somebody’s paintwork. In charge of the bus, she became a different person – capable, co-ordinated.
‘Have you got a licence to drive that thing?’ I called, only half joking.
She shrugged, climbed into the driver’s seat and gunned the motor.
The occasions I’d seen her load clients – some with feeding tubes and oxygen tanks – on board, I’d felt humbled. No way would I have been that selfless at her age. Lydia and her friends walked their high-minded talk.
Some people criticise Generation Y as selfish, living off their parents and being perpetual students/layabouts with an impossibly high sense of entitlement. Some even blame the L’Oréal advertisement ‘Because You’re Worth It’. Personally, I’ve never known a more idealistic lot.
Lydia’s involvement with disabled people began when she was sixteen and her class was encouraged to do voluntary work for a term. Her friends went for easy stuff like charity shop shifts. Our daughter had to go for something more demanding, which was how Alice, five years older than Lydia, burst in on our lives. While Alice’s mental disability was mild, her personality was storm force.
The first time she came to our place, Alice’s megaphone voice made Katharine dissolve into tears. Our visitor took a particular shine to Rob. While I was cooking dinner, Alice demanded to take a bath. I asked Lydia what we were supposed to do, but she hadn’t been given guidelines.
I ignored Alice’s unconventional request until her shouting became unbearable, upon which I filled the tub and handed her a towel. Hovering anxiously outside the bathroom door I asked if she was all right. ‘Fine,’ she yelled, and could I send Rob in now?
We ended up seeing Alice every week for about five years, gradually learning to respond to her demands as firmly as she made them. No, she couldn’t have three pizzas or a sleepover in Rob’s room.
After working with Alice, Lydia went on to care for many others whose needs were more complex. She learnt how to transfer clients out of wheelchairs, feed them through tubes in their stomachs, give medication and change adult nappies. She worked in a psychiatric hospital for a while, and as a respite carer.
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