It is so hot here today...unbelievably hot. At 8am it was 85% humidity and already 26C we are now close to 40C which is 104 F....Ahhh I just love summers...

I was born in late summer - February is the hottest most miserable month of the year here in Australia because after months of heat everyone is just about fed up with it and it seems to be a meaner sort of heat thanthe earlier months...my sister next down from me was also born in February and on the same date... we are not twins but it is funny although we are sort of opposites in that she feely admits to being predisposed towards pessimism where as I am generally an optinist...and we both laugh about this as if we each got a bit too much of the quality that the other one should have been given... we have an understanding... both being Aquarians... poor bloody mum...two of us in the one house.

Some time back I wrote about the day I was born (hey - and conceived....mum remembered!!!) and considering no airconditioners then nor even fans in our home it must have been a hellishly hot time to have a new baby to take care of along with other toddlers...

Her pale blue eyes twinkling with mirth, her smooth, fresh skin blushing like a young girl's, my sixty five year old mother finally gave in and released her secret with an exhalation of air. Her shameful secret was that yes, she did know exactly the time I was conceived.

"It was the night of the Ball. We hadn't been to one since before we were married, your father and I. Anyway, your father's mother looked after Veronica and June, rather grumpily too. It seemed beyond her why anyone would want to go to a Ball. I mean what use was it. I'm sure she didn't think we would want to go to a Ball, not with two toddlers. I hadn't been to a dance for four years! Anyway, we didn't get home till the early hours..."

"What time exactly was that mum?" I asked, leading her into a story I knew she wanted to tell. She wasn't sure how to put it into words, after all her life of respectability. I sat at her little table, in the mid afternoon, eating yet another of her Tim Tam biscuits.

"It was about three o'clock in the morning. Your father had been away working for a few weeks and had to go away again the next day. That's how I..." she stopped short, "Don't tell anyone will you Therese. Your father said later that we should have danced all night. There! I've said it.!" she said with relief.

I was amazed and pleased. Amazed that she would actually remember, with all the events that had happened in her life since then. Pleased that she felt that she could say these things to me. Delighted to imagine my young mother and father, were human just like the rest of us. It marked a real softening in our relationship, as I began to see her more as a person in her own right, not just my mother, my sisters mother, my children's grandmother.

After she died, as I was disassembling her home, I can remember crying for ages over a grotesque mug that I had bought her, which fitted perfectly the occasion she had related. It was a large cheap pink mug, in the shape of a pregnant woman, and had written on it 'I should have danced all night.' Mum and I laughed raucously over that mug and the event, in the privacy of her little home. The generation of years between us as we enjoyed the joke, for a moment not mother and daughter, just two women.

I was born at seven o'clock in the morning. It was a blisteringly hot February. My mother had two active toddlers, and told me she was very tired and hadn't been well. She said that on the
afternoon of my first, and almost last day in this world she was
feeding me in hospital and she just fell asleep. A nurse
discovered us like this, me with my face going dark from lack of oxygen, mum sleeping in the awful heat. I was raced away and returned much later. Mum said she was wide awake after that. Of Dad there is no mention. Always present at the beginning of us children, he was like most men of the times very absent, at this most dangerous of time for his wife and child.

Few Australian women even had the presence of a friend or mother at the birth, leaving us more abandoned than most people of the world who have at least close family. This unnatural custom has thankfully gone
out of style of later years.

Sometimes I think it has gone too far in the other direction.

(Mum taken in 1950 with my eldest sister Veronica four years before this... she was a grumpier baby than me ; )

(She is the bruiser on my left... I am the sweet little blondie - and no she is not patting my head she would have been pulling imy hair out I reckon and can't you just tell which one became the Social Worker who "knows all about life and won't talk to me these days... she's assessing the situation as usual and making her judgement).

We still call veronics Atilla... of the Hens and her fist to chest salute was a precursor of bad things to come...but we got it all sorted in childhood and great mates these days...