Thank Goodness my Mother is the Woman she is

Thank Goodness my Mother is the Woman she is....

Because if she wasn't, I certainly wouldn't be who I am and my life would have been very different.  Let me explain.

A few weeks ago I went with a friend to see "The King's Speech", which I loved.  However, there was one scene when Loeb asked the King if he was left handed even though he writes with his right hand.  The King stumbled through his reply, telling Loeb that when he was 5 he was forced to write with his right hand and coincidentally that was when he started to stutter.  This revelation hit me like a bolt out of the blue because family legend has it that when I started school the good old nuns in their wisdom, insisted on making me write with my right hand and I developed a dreadful stutter.  My mother, God bless her, went up to the school and insisted that I be allowed to write with my right hand.  This was no mean feat in 1954 when the Catholic Church was all powerful and priests and nuns had to be obeyed unquestioningly.

I digress here, but to give you an idea of my mother's will, another legend in our family involves my oldest brother, Maurice, who wanted to be a teacher and applied for training college.  Unfortunately, he was turned down, but only temporarily, because mum made an appointment with the Director of Education and told him what a terrible mistake he was making not giving Maurice the opportunity to train as a teacher. Maurice remembers to this day the Director asking mum to wait outside while he spoke to Maurice and he said "Well we know what your mother wants, but what do you want?"  He got his place at training college and had a very illustrious career in Education, firstly as a teacher and then an Inspector. He was responsible for integrating the Catholic schools into the State system and was Secretary to Picot who created Tomorrows Schools under the Lange led Labour Government.  Maurice liaised between Mr Picot and David Lange.  He then set up the Education Review Office.  Today, Thurday 7th April 2001, Maurice is receiving the New Zealand Order of Merit (the old MBE) for services to Education and the Community at Government House and you can be assured that a very proud mum will be taking all the credit for his achievements!  She is actually a bit peeved because Maurice and Claire have received a private invitation to dinner with the Governor General on Friday night and she isn't invited!

Anyway, back to stuttering.  So this got me thinking.  How did mum realise why I started stuttering?  So I took her out to breakfast and asked her the obvious question.  I also wanted to know how much she knew about King George and his stutter and she told me that an "Australian fellow" helped him.  She didn't know about the lefthandedness though.  She told me that when I was 2 she decided to "encourage" me to use my right hand and I developed a dreadful stutter, so she took me to the Doctor and he told her to let me use my left hand. God bless him too!  Well, in those days Doctors obviously had far more power than nuns because she listened to him and the stutter stopped.  When I started school and the sututter returned, she was up to that school in a flash. 

I still stutter to this day when I get upset or angry, although now it's more about not getting the words out in the corrrect order than actually stammering.  But seeing Colin Firth in that movie trying to get his words out,  made me realise just how different my life would have been if my mother was not the woman she was.  A lesser person would have been intimidated by the nuns and an arrogant person would have forced me to use my right hand.  So thank you Mum - you gave me an easier life all because you had the courage to stand up to authority at a time when women weren't supposed to do so.

I now know that I'm one of the 10% of people in the world who are lefthanded and what a pain that is.  It is defiitely a righthanded world, even though we have made inroads with things like ironing cords.  For years I struggled with cheque books and now that I don't use them any more, I have the embarrassment of turning the EFTPOS machine in the opposite direction so I can use it.   I always feel bad because the merchants are just being helpful pointing it towards my right hand.  Giving directions is another joy (not).  Somehow I always say "right" when I mean left and vica versa.  My ex husband threatened to tattoo left and right onto my hands when we were travelling through Italy and France because I woudl say "turn Left" and point right.  Ah the joy of travelling on the wrong side of the road!