At 91, my mother refuses to behave as others think old ladies should

My mother has never done what other people wanted her to. Now that she is 91, her refusal to behave as others think old ladies should is as strong as ever.

Sometimes she has regretted her natural contrariness. Her headmistress pooh-poohed her desire to be a speech therapist and tried to persuade her to attend university. Her teacher believed she had what it took to succeed academically – and for a girl from Manchester in the 1940s, that was a rare compliment – but she took offence and dug her heels in.

Now and then: Jane Caro’s mother.Credit: Courtesy of Jane Caro

My mother did not become a speech therapist. She did shorthand and typing and became a secretary, a role she did not enjoy. She did end up going to university, thanks to Gough Whitlam abolishing university fees, but not until she had migrated to Australia and raised four children. To my alarm, she did the HSC at the same time as I did, and enrolled in the same university.

Macquarie University in the mid-’70s was full of highly motivated, fiercely feminist adult women who’d grabbed the chance previously denied them. They were referred to as “mature-aged students” and they left us recent school leavers in their dust. My mother was a straight-A student. I was a straight C.

Our uni was also a hotbed of left-wing politics, so once again my mother’s contrary nature came to the fore. Despite her feminism, she was much more conservative politically then than she is now (another example of her refusal to do what is expected). She had fierce debates in her history and politics tutorials, battles she would energetically recount as we drove home together. She had a much better time in her English literature classes, where her sharp analytical mind and contempt for received wisdom came into its own.

I remember she wrote a superb essay about Jane Eyre in which she argued that Mr Rochester’s mad wife was a manifestation of repressed female sexuality and the fear Victorians had of the chaos that would ensue if it was ever released. You can see why I gave up competing with her.

Such was her determination to go her own way that she became an early and very active member of the Women’s Electoral Lobby, stood for pre-selection for the Senate for the Liberal Party, and was the founding president of the Liberal Feminist Network – a group that fell victim to John Howard’s clean sweep of the so-called Liberal “wets” when he became leader. Though how anyone could consider my mother wet, I cannot imagine.

Eventually she trained as a relationships counsellor and worked with the counselling arm of the Uniting Church, Unifam, even though, true to her contrarian nature, she is emphatically an atheist. I know she was an exceptional therapist because I have been on the receiving end of her wise counsel all my life and have benefited immeasurably from it.

“Her fury at those who speak patronisingly of the ‘vulnerability’ of the elderly when opposing their right to choose their own death is a sight to behold.”

She has been a determined supporter of voluntary assisted dying (VAD) for as long as I can remember, and her fury at those who speak patronisingly of the “vulnerability” of the elderly when opposing their right to choose their own death is a sight to behold.

She loudly objects to the fact that there are never any elderly people represented on the worthy panels debating this issue and, frankly, she has a hell of a point. When she hears doctors talking piously about their conscientious objections, I’m afraid her reaction is unprintable.

Mind you, regardless of whether she ever accesses VAD – finally legalised in NSW in May – she has clear plans about how she’ll go if anyone ever dares try to cart her off to a nursing home.

Thanks to their good genes (I hope I’ve inherited them) she and my father remain fiercely independent. They have seen every play and film. They give lectures at the University of the Third Age (my mother’s special subject is dictators – especially Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Mao), and their social calendar is more hectic than mine.

When she does go – and just like her near-contemporary the Queen, she will – she will have lived, and then some.

She does not have a cowardly bone in her body, and what a gift that has been, particularly for her daughters.

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