“Well, then, that’s all that matters,” said Anne in the same brisk, sensible, placatory tone that used to drive Ellen to distraction when she was fifteen. “You don’t need to listen to me. Look at my history. What do I know about men?”

“Nothing,” said Ellen. “You know nothing.”

Her mother raised her eyebrows and lifted her teacup. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Well, you did,” said Ellen sullenly. She really was behaving like a teenager. Where was all her advanced emotional intelligence today?

“I am sorry. I’m truly sorry.” Anne clumsily patted Ellen’s shoulder. “You still look very pale.”

“Probably because I’m pregnant,” Ellen said and dissolved into a luxurious flood of salty tears.

I called in sick on Tuesday and went to Avalon Beach again with my new boogie board.

I have never done such a thing before. It’s not how I was brought up. My mother would be bewildered. She thought a regular pay packet was a wonderful thing; something a woman especially should never take for granted. I can still hear the reverence in her voice when she told people about my very first position out of university. “Saskia has got herself a job.”

I remember how baffled she was when I once said something about “job satisfaction.” “But, darling, they pay you!” She was worried I would be rude to the boss. She would have thought taking a sickie was crazy, risky and very bad mannered.

Sorry, Mum. I needed a “mental health” day.

“Mental health,” she would have snorted.

She didn’t believe in modern maladies like depression or anorexia. A friend’s son was diagnosed with clinical depression and Mum was disgusted. “What’s the silly man got to be sad about? He’s got a good job! A wife! A baby!”

She believed in grief over death and joy over birth and love and marriage and plain wholesome food and a spick-and-span house. Anything else was just “being silly.”

I wonder if she would have said I was being silly when I fell apart after Patrick broke up with me. She adored him, and Jack too, of course. She thought of Patrick as her son-in-law and Jack as her grandson.

I assume that Patrick would have met the hypnotist’s parents by now. The thought of him chatting to the hypnotist’s mother, being polite and trying to impress her, as if my sweet mother never existed, as if my mother was just practice for the real mother-in-law—well, that just fills me with an almighty torrent of rage.

I’ve stopped picking up the phone to call my mother. I did it for months after she died. I even dialed the number a few times, before I remembered and quickly slammed down the phone, before some stranger answered. I don’t hear the phone anymore and think, “That will be Mum.” But I still miss her. Every day.

I understand, intellectually, that the death of a parent is a natural, acceptable part of life. Nobody would call the death of a very sick eighty-year-old woman a tragedy. There was soft weeping at her funeral and red watery eyes. No wrenching sobs. Now I think that I should have let myself sob. I should have wailed and beaten my chest and thrown myself over her coffin.

I read a poem. A pretty, touching poem I thought she would have liked. I should have used my own words. I should have said: No one will ever love me as fiercely as my mother did. I should have said: You all think you’re at the funeral of a sweet little old lady, but you’re at the funeral of a girl called Clara, who had long blond hair in a heavy thick plait down to her waist, who fell in love with a shy man who worked on the railways, and they spent years and years trying to have a baby, and when Clara finally got pregnant, they danced around the living room but very slowly, so as not to hurt the baby, and the first two years of her little girl’s life were the happiest of Clara’s life, except then her husband died, and she had to bring up the little girl on her own, before there was a single mother’s pension, before the words “single mother” even existed.

I should have told them about how when I was at school, if the day became unexpectedly cold, Mum would turn up in the school yard with a jacket for me. I should have told them that she hated broccoli with such a passion she couldn’t even look at it, and that she was in love with the main character on the English television series Judge John Deed. I should have told them that she loved to read and she was a terrible cook, because she’d try to cook and read her latest library book at the same time, and the dinner always got burned and the library book always got food spatters on it, and then she’d spend ages trying to dab them away with the wet corner of a tea towel. I should have told them that my mum thought of Jack as her own grandchild, and how she made him a special racing car quilt he adored. I should have talked and talked and grabbed both sides of the lectern and said: She was not just a little old lady. She was Clara. She was my mother. She was wonderful.

Instead I said my brief acceptable little poem and then I sat back down and held Patrick’s hand, and afterward he helped me bring cups of tea to my mum’s friends and chatted so charmingly to the old ladies, and I never thought, I no longer have a family, because Patrick kept holding my hand, and Jack was going to be running into our arms at Sydney airport, and I knew that Patrick’s mum was planning on leaving a big bowl of her beef stroganoff in the fridge because she knew it was my favorite.

Four weeks later he said, “I think it’s over.”

My mind kept going around in endless circles. If I ring up Mum to tell her about Patrick, I’ll feel better, but Mum is dead. If I tell Patrick that I can’t believe my mum is gone, I’ll feel better, but Patrick doesn’t want me anymore. If I take Jack to the park or a movie, then I’ll feel better, but I’m not his mother anymore. If I go and see Maureen, then I’ll feel better, except she’s not part of my life anymore.