Serenity

I’ve never actually witnessed R— making her snapshots of serenity.

I imagine she makes them at night or early morning.  Perhaps they formulate over days, maybe weeks.  I also imagine she sits in her favourite chair, glasses on, and builds up in her mind an overall image with intricate detail at the tip of her needle.

Her embroidered needlework makes me smile.  The characters or themes seem familiar, and in some cases, they are indeed family. It’s like viewing a sunny snapshot with Australian colours and lighting, movement as well as stillness of moments.  I’m not sure how this liveliness is possible given that it’s thread on canvas but it must be the serenity that is imbued in her crafting hands, her mind’s eye and her sharing of these sublime stills.

Grandchildren

Grandchildren

My mum

My mum told me a story about her workplace. I need to paint a picture here though so allow me to drag out some broad paintbrushes.

Mum has worked in furniture factories for as long as I can remember. When I was a child she walked to work in a nearby suburb. It wasn’t a particularly charming walk or premises. Imagine a cold rusty tin roofed factory with no heating except for a stingy bar heater brought from home. In the middle of an industrial wasteland. Less traffic than now, of course, but hardly the resting spot for pedestrians and bird watchers. Most of the other labourers were family friends, people who’d come to Melbourne from the same village or those nearby in the Campagna region. Mum eventually got her driver’s license at around 38 and broadened the distance of her selected workplaces to at least two suburbs away.

The work is supposedly not easy but mum breezes through it. She upholsters, assembles, adheres veneers, fabricates frames, sews industrial fabrics and fillers and so on and on. A new job was sought by her after two factories in closed up shop. She told me when she showed up for the interview there were 45 men and one woman. She was that woman. There was a certain amount of eyebrow raising. This tiny woman has come here for the work of men? She was asked to assemble something so they could see how quickly she could do it. I suppose the halting English and lack of ‘look at me, look at me, look at me’ grandstanding hadn’t convinced them. Until she fabricated whatever it was they timed her with. She got the job.

This is the force that is mum . She has worked all her life. I mean that literally. As a toddler she worked on the family property akin to a market garden setup with livestock too. It was a matter of life and death in order to help her parents salvage whatever assets they could after crippling debt incurred by her father’s brother. At the age of eight, she practically raised her newborn sister freeing up her mother to do the daily baking or washing or cleaning of rabbit hutches and goodness what else. My mother is not afraid of hard work. Hard work needs to be afraid of her as she will tackle it with a huge running jump, slap it down, clean it up and leave all other contenders aghast.

Now the story.

There’s nothing glamourous about furniture factories. Blow-ins come and go perpetually. Mum hears it all. There is often boredom and disdain thrown her way. Why should they listen to her? They have degrees and diplomas donchknow? Now these are mum’s words so perhaps there is something lost in the translation. I presume the juniors (well younger and junior to mum) have attended TAFE or some other training course and need to let her know that they carry these credentials. No matter, they don’t seem to last long and mum is still there. She took a day off last week for personal reasons and showed up the next day. She was shocked as there was a backlog of work. Her two ‘colleagues’ had left to go home as they didn’t know how to proceed without her instruction. She laughed out loud all day as her lack of formal qualification never seemed to stop her from getting on with it.

Anyway back to the story.

Her employer had been approached to tentatively employ a young man as part of some work experience programme. Mum doesn’t know all the details. She says he has autism but his carers or ‘teachers’ as she called them haven’t given her all the details. It sounds as if he is part of a formal group pf young people all seeking training for future work prospects. He trains under her. She loves it. He is about 21 and lives with his parents. At first he seemed anxious and could not really look at her and engage with her. Slowly, they have come to chat and trade tidbits as they work side by side

She claims to have a giggle when he shouts out stuff intermittently so I presume he has Tourette’s Syndrome. He says “I need the money!” or “I need a girlfriend!’. He tells her about his weekends. There’s a spot of nightclubbing. She tells him to have fun but always remember to save his money. He in turn talks seriously to her about saving his money just like her. In the same breath he shows her the gold jewellery he recently bought. She coos over it.

Her boss asked her last week how it was going. Should they keep him on? She answers plainly. “Yes, I want to keep him here.” He works hard and is gaining confidence and mastery over his trade. He wants to work whereas the blow-ins always act as if the work is beneath them. She sees no reason to let him go. He is the only one out of his group that has a job. This guy, with his own existentialist questions, tells mum he wants to thank her. He says if it wasn’t for her he would be on the dole.

I don’t know how accurate it all is but I do know that mum sometimes acts cautiously around non-family individuals. She can appear reserved. I think it’s mostly shyness and a fear of risk taking. This was a bloody nice risk to take. Hear, hear mum!