About a Boob

My mum, Beth Batchelor, was diagnosed with breast cancer at age thirty nine. What does thirty nine look like? Well, sometimes, believe it or not, it looks rather like this.

During the twenty years she moved through various chemos, remissions, brachii therapies and episodes of the old radiator radiating her vitals until she glowed, Beth learned to call cancer her 'friend'. Fairweather friend perhaps? Indeed not! For it stayed with her through thick wig and thin hair, through donut tunnels and through involuntary eyebrow waxes. Mum had a lifelong companion in cancer and, as such, we had to find ways to laugh.

Indeed, it was very funny when she shrunk her wig.

It was hilarious when we then went out for coffee, me with my handbag and mum with her inch of baby soft grey regrowth, and an old friend bumped into her, 'Beth! Love your hair. Where d'you get it done?!'

It was titillating when her pop in prosthetic breast slipped to her waist during a pertinent prayer time in church one Sunday morning. 'Oh my Lord, 'struth, dear God, please let me rise up, or at least my left breast, to greet your ever present presence. And where is the bloody superglue when you need it? Amen.' (Or something similar. Dad remembers it all too well. And in fact, despite what I've made up here being a little stretch of the truth, what she probably actually said was probably actually more hilarious.)

And it was incomprehensibly hysterical when this happened...

About a Boob

My mum found a teatowel and stuffed it in her bra.

That was back in ‘83 when she drove a bright blue car.

Mum was sick for quite a bit so we had to help out
to clean and do the dishes knowing mum she still had clout,

for if we made excuses like whose turn ‘twas to dry up
she’d just pull out her teatowel which would make us all shut up.
Yep, Mum she just got on with it - on that herself she prided,
the scar went where the left one were - she looked a bit lopsided.

But soon it was now Christmas (the America’s Cup in Perth)
she finally got her plastic jelly boobie, oh what mirth.
So out she chucked the teatowel and in the boob did go
opposite the real one snug and quite incognito.

Rarely did it wibble wobble as with Beth it travelled
rarely did it flip or flop ‘less bra straps did unravel.
And roam it did with Bethie B in her Datsun 1200
through rain and sunshine, heat and when it snowed and hailed and thundered

No Bethie’s boob did never leave her side, well, so to speak,
a matching piece of plastic jelly, complete with little peak.
Mum she made a resolution one day in mid summer,
'I’m going to get fit,' said she, 'take inches off my bum, huh?'

And every Saturday morning from then for years to come
my Mum and I would head out for a swim in the blue Datsun.
Off we’d tootle, 6am throughout the 1990s
off to do our morning laps and burn away calories.

Lap on lap, and lap on lap we swam and were so fit
and mum was proud as punch that very soon she’d lost a bit.
Her bathers were so stylish and the boob sat in its place
and after several years of this mum could have won a race.

And still the years they spun and flew and mum and I kept swimming
fit as fiddles, lap on lap and home we’d drive, both grinning.
And hang our towels out on the line and hang our bathers too
all rinsed and clean and then we’d have a cuppa, as you do.

But...one morning, like so many Saturdays, our duty done,
mum emptied out her swimming bag, stood standing in the sun.
Her look was rather quizzical. I could not work it out.
She counted up her togs, her towel, but something was left out.

Until, with horror, finally mum cried, ‘I am a fool!
I’ve left my bloody boob alone and sitting at the pool!'
And so we raced, (we were a pair of nutty looking women)
in our bright blue 1200 back to where we’d been a swimmin’.

I begged the lovely poolguard, PLEASE let us in for free!!
With mum, all matter of fact of course, ‘I’ve left my boob here, see!’
Sure enough, when we raced in, sick with fear and worry,
alone, bereft on the changeroom bench going nowhere in a hurry…

sat Bethie’s favourite boosie, stoic, wet and floppy.
She snatched it up off we tootled in our blue jalopy.
And cried until the tears were pools, ‘til the moon rose up that night
and never ever did again that boob leave Bethie’s sight.




Elise Batchelor October 2010 For Pink Ribbon Day

donate at: http://www.pinkribbonday.com.au/Home.htm

Beth Batchelor, circa 1991.

 PS. That bit about the teatowel threats may have been a stretch of the truth. I adore my sister but despite any teatowelled threats, she was never inclined to dry the dishes (Love you Marg).

Zorro of the North West

You know, I get it, I really do. Having been a Melbournian for twenty years, I understand the need to make haste for the pool whenever the sun peers out from behind a cloud. After all, that cheeky golden grin may only last five minutes. And there are three more seasons yet to expect in that day. Maybe four times over. And maybe including snow.

But when you live in the desert, somewhere like the north west of Western Oz in my home of seven years, oh how quickly you come to expect the heat. In summer our temperatures remain at about forty degrees celcius or so. I don't get in the pool now until it hits at least 37 degrees. Thus, when winter comes and the days (although still lurid blue and ceaselessly sunshiney) crawl below thirty degrees, the idea of swimming is simply ludicrous. Unless, that is, you're on holiday here. Unless, perchance, you're just visiting. Unless, oh yes, you're from Melbourne.

This poem is for my beloved Melbourne, for friends who visit and provide us a winter laugh by diving in deep. And for anyone else on our planet who would eagerly jump into the pool, in the Pilbara, in winter. I'll be in to join you soon! Try...November. 

Of course, by then we have cyclones. And they're another story entirely.


North West Superhero


The plane was right on time,
the heels were quite refined,
the general Savour Faire was ripper mate.
No one had drunk too much rum
with ties ad infinitum
arrived from chilly Melbourne to our state.

And out they stepped this pair
with faces worn by fear
of dodging trams and tumbling black umbrellas
in freezy winter breezes,
frappéd with chunky sneezes
and pale, these two were salty white, I tell yas.

She was, from head to toe,
dressed inn black, uh huh, you know
just how it is when you forget the sun.
Forget you ever could
go out without your hood,
without your bits snapped frozen - that’s the one!

He though, let’s call him Paul,
escaped the eastern squall
deciding that he’d try to match the trend.
A walking suit in I.T.,
today he’d donned a flannie,
a metrosexual sin, let’s not pretend.

So Paul and his dear wife
(so as not to cause strife,
let’s call her Flower, a floral pseudonym)
were here for seven days
the heady heat to praise
and had on their agenda just one thing.

And with their little boy,
the cutest cuddly toy,
Paul wanted but to live the tropic dream.
He stripped off instantly
for all the world to see
which caused a royal shock and some to scream.

(Now, just a small aside,
a turning of the tide
to put this keen display into perspective -
Flower: pragmatic, British
refined and never skittish
and Paul: stuck long indoors a corporate captive.)

But there he stood, defiant
and rather uncompliant,
gazing through the gates and not quite nude.
Not nood as one might say, but
Nyuuuude, called Flower, ‘Hooray!’
‘We’re here to swim!’ cheered Paul, ‘So let’s go dude!’

For them, the height of heat,
a temperature to beat
of thirty three, or two, or one, at dawn.
For them, insanely hot,
for Pilbara folks, quite…not
with me there in a jacket on this morn.

Too brrrrrrr for me by far
but Flower’s pool wear, it starred,
‘twas elegant with brimmed hat, sunnies, cream
and I shivered inside out
as I watched them swim about
living what we call the ‘Pilbara Dream.’

It’s the dream of bright hot days
of gold, that Yabu* haze,
of singing, dancing sunlight under trees
of floating through the water
and dressing as you oughter
in nearly next to nothing in the breeze.

And when they were all done,
their time out in the sun,
Paul joined his lovely Flower sipping tea,
‘My darling Paul, you’re burnt;
I thought you might have learnt
your skin can’t take this; you’re more pale than me!’

‘I know, but I’m the man!’
Paul took his darling’s hand
and then she burst out laughing through the air.
‘Oh Paul, you missed a tad
of sunscreen, my dear lad!’
‘So what?’ replied young Paul scratching his hair.

The feat, remarkable,
now irreversible,
a lightning bolt burnt right across his face.
‘My love, you look like Zorro
and probably will tomorrow,
a streak scorched Pilbara superhero. Ace!'

Well, Paul, now marked, was chuffed,

burnt beautifully, enough,

their lightning trip now took on greater meaning.

And my bones chilled as they'd swum

but God, did they have fun

and ZORRO! of the north west flew home gleaming.

 

© Elise Batchelor 2010
* 'Yabu' means 'gold' in aboriginal Wongatha language