The Cottage

Some years ago, when the world was a happier place my husband who was an Anglican minister at the time, and I decided at our almost retirement stage in life, to test the real estate market regarding our financial capabilities. Retirement was looming and the prospect of being dependent on rented accommodation was unappealing. Insecurity of leasing plus the fact that we would be unable to keep a dog pushed us on towards our seemingly unattainable goal.

Priests do not get paid huge salaries and so I was working in town away from his Parish to bolster the coffers, only returning home at the weekends.

Our plan was to become eligible in the eyes of the bank for a mortgage. Well, this was managed at some personal cost and excitedly we bought our little lavender-coloured, weatherboard cottage in a country town closer to the capitol than where we were currently residing and where I was working.

I exchanged the bedsit for the cottage and proceeded to partially move in. Built in the 1830’s for a shepherd it was extremely small but oozed charm.

We were happy with our purchase and started to clear out truckloads of extraneous stuff from previous tenants like grubby old carpets, ghastly make-shift cupboards, and to re-arrange the garden; in other words, make it into the home we wanted.

In a previous life I had jointly owned and lost a pretty colonial house through my first husband’s disastrous financial decisions; so after sixteen years as a single mother raising sons (the disastrous effect that my then husband going guarantor for a total stranger can have on one’s long-term finances is a story that may be written down about the track!) this purchase was super important on many levels.

After a couple of winters where the toilet was outside and the winters awfully long and cold, we carried out a couple of upgrades to our house such as installing a new bathroom complete with — wait for it! —an indoor toilet. Brilliant! So, we invited my mother, the snob, to visit.

Her devastating and cutting remark to me as she walked along the verandah to the front door was:

“Dear, I didn’t know you bought a hut!”

So much for bringing joy, appreciation, and approbation into a daughter’s life. Her lack of generosity hurt as her opinion had mattered to me at that time. Amazing the effect words from someone close especially one’s Mother, can have on one…

I just heard some words quite recently, that ring true, and are quite close to the bone. These words I heard today were courtesy of Oprah Winfrey and went something like this. Our parents are human. They quite possibly cannot live up to our idealised version of how they should be in "our" view as parents. Basically, in the words of the spokesman, some people have a 10-gallon capacity to love whilst others have a lesser capacity, say a 10-pint capacity.

So unfortunately, the juxtaposition of a child, any child really having the 10-gallon capacity to love but living with 10 pinter parents, can only be fraught with emotional problems. Too sad. Here unfortunately it is my mother who was a 10-pinter!. Not deliberately in her case, just a non-understanding on her part as to what love is. A lifetime lived without knowing how much love can go AWOL thereby finding itself missing in daily interactions.

I can only assume that my siblings feel much same.

a. a. gallagher

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Also published on Medium

https://vocal.media/stories/the-cottage-flaf6z0yo2