| Contents > Coffee at Nanna’s by Danuta Shaw |
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“I was speaking to Nanna,” Mum would say, “and we think that you shouldn’t send Alexis away any more. He should stay more at home.”
I end up biting my tongue, trying to stop myself from justifying an absence of maternal care. I have failed in my ethnic performance of motherhood. For us peasants, that role is as divine a calling as it comes.
Nanna points to a vase on the table, three long stems of orchids dip their blooms towards the lace centerpiece. “They’re mine.” She sings. “I grow them.”
There were years when I would walk into my Nanna’s house around the time of my birthday. She would bundle me up with ten or fifteen stems, and tell me to come back later for more. Now she counts three stems as an abundant wealth of orchid blooms. It is like the way she tells me about her rations during the war. “They feed me real good, Danuta. They give me more than others. Coffee and black bread in the morning. A piece of sausage on Sunday.” The way we measure privilege changes according to circumstance: this too appears to be performative.
I visit as much as I can, after I drop the kids to school, and when nobody else is around. With a prompt, Nanna will tell me about her father, or about how things were in Poland before the war. She will tell me how hard she had to work, and how the people here never knew the sort of work people like her had to do. She will tell me that my mother always had strange ways about her, and how hard she tried to keep her alive. Nanna will start talking, and will always be sad to see me go.
Sometimes I listen to her because that is what I am supposed to do. Likewise, at times Mum and my Aunty visit her because that is what they should do, and likewise Nanna will sit there and ensure them that the house will be theirs when she dies. There are performances we must all make. Yet, underneath the performances, in between sips of coffee, there are stories of real worth. They are worthy because they are windows into a place where I can never go; they tie me to meanings that have intrinsically influenced who I am as a person. They explain why we wrestle with each other, and why we question motives with tenacity. The stories explain the ways we don’t understand each other, and create a language which permits us to construct paths between us. Who my Polish grandmother and I are intersects and tessellates with all the others in our lives, and by looking closely enough we can discover ourselves in the mosaic.
Like Red Riding Hood making her way through the wood, coffee with Nanna constructs a map of experiences which lead me to many of the places and understandings that cumulatively form our home. At times Nanna and I are captivated by sunshine glistening in clearings of wildflowers; other times we are distracted by thoughts and then we can find ourselves accidentally in the dark places that hide memories of central Europe and an Australia that doesn’t exist today. These are the places where our family wolves lay in wait, and always we are on the lookout for wolves.
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| Contents > Coffee at Nanna’s by Danuta Shaw |