At the grocery checkout, one of the ways I kill time is to watch strangers compare notes on their children. Here is sixty-year-old Ruth, who is clearly rolling in money. Ruth boasts about her son Kenneth, who has recently married and started his own podiatry clinic. Behind her, twenty-something Eileen wrangles with her three-year-old son Timofee, proclaiming he’s begun to shit into a plastic receptacle, rather than in his own pants. Ruth and Eileen coo over each other’s stories, even though they exist within two completely different worlds. Ruth is slathered in enough twenty-four-carat gold to look like a Christmas tree; hunched Eileen wears a shirt that says Zero to Bitch in 0.25 Seconds and doesn’t shampoo. Yet the pride in their children is something mothers share. Silently, Ruth and Eileen both acknowledge each woman doesn’t care about the other’s child. But they pretend, and wait their go to boast, in a polite and respectful public forum.

For whatever reason, my mother won’t feign interest in your children. When she accosts people to discuss her own five kids—in checkout queues, waiting rooms, across the stalls in public toilets—the other party is usually happy enough to listen. They wait their turn, expecting Mum will soon pause for breath, giving them an opening to talk about their own children. But Jenny has no lungs. Instead she has a cavity that houses a solid metal device, indestructible like a blackbox, which plays a monologue on loop. The recording says: “My Benjamin. You know he almost has his Ph.D.! When he gets it, you will have to call him Doctor Law! Haha, that is a joke, because he’s not really a doctor—he won’t be able to help you if you’re sick. I call this ‘Jenny’s Joke’. Also: you know my Tammy? She won a very high-up photojournalism award—she gets those skills from her mother!” And so on. It’s unstoppable. Jenny could be in a plane crash, her bones shattered, her corpse charred and passed through numerous flames before being tossed into the ocean like a ragdoll. When the rescue team got to the shore and found her partially-exposed skeleton washed up, her jaw frozen open in a smile, still, they would hear her: “Ah, my children. So proud, so proud.”

When we’re at the shops together, I’ll leave Jenny at a clothing boutique, telling her I’ll pick her up when I’ve finished running errands. When I get back, she’ll have commanded the entire staff around her digital camera. Look! Here is Andrew, scowling at the camera! Here is Candy, holding a piece of fruit! So proud. Sometimes she’ll whip out my graduation photo from her wallet, taken after I’d finished my Honours degree. In the photo, my fringe is completely lifted up and tucked under the scholar’s hat, which shows off a luxuriously long expanse of forehead, excessively shiny from a combination of excess sebum and an overzealous flash. It gives the impression I am bald. Also, it suggests the contents of my face are located south, and tightly squeezed together, like a series of slits on the bottom of a potato. After scrolling through the photos with the boutique staff, she’ll aim her digital camera at the cashier. “Here!” she says. “Now you will have a photo with my doctor son!” We pose uncomfortably, as strangers do; whereupon I take Mum by the wrist—gently but firmly—and pull her out of the store. “Lovely to meet you,” she says, waving on her way out, not even looking at them. “You’ll have to tell me about your children next time.”

None of Jenny’s five children are the mandatory lawyers, doctors, accountants or dentists that come with most models of Asian migrant families. We’re not homeless or casual methamphetamine users, but our jobs aren’t mindblowingly impressive either: teacher, tender coordinator, photographer, writer, student. So the extent of Mum’s pride is surprising. Jenny sometimes tells me she is so full of pride, she could burst. To my ears, “burst” is an interesting word. It implies something pushed to the edge, pressed against a threshold—like a pus-filled sore, say, or packed bag of garbage. These are items that “burst”.

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My youngest sister, Michelle, recently moved out of home to study in Brisbane, ninety minutes from where we grew up. Homebound and alone, Mum suddenly found herself with a lot more time on her hands. For the first time in a thirty-one-year career of motherhood, Jenny was free. Divorced and childless, she joked about inviting strange men into the house and having sex with them, though we knew this was an impossibility. She always reinforces her pleasure at being a “born again virgin” having “sealed over again”, emphasising that she didn’t believe in sex before marriage. “No ring, no ding,” as she puts it.

One of the ways she celebrated her emancipation was to promptly let her driver’s licence expire. She’d hated driving, having driven us everywhere for three decades. “Why should I drive?” she asked me on the phone. “The shops are right across the road. I can catch the bus to visit you, and there’s public transport here. Where else do I need to go now?”

“But public transport is so slow there,” I said. “What about emergencies?”

“Are you stupid? Your mother can speak English,” she said. “I’ll dial Triple O, wait for an ambulance. What’s the big deal? I can do anything I want.”

However, thirty-one years of fulltime motherhood deprives a woman of hobbies. How to pursue yoga when there’s Babel-like towers of laundry to do? Why take up needlecraft, when you speak with divorce lawyers all day long? Mum started calling me, telling me she felt lonely. Every time we spoke, the television would be on in the background blaring, whether it was eleven in the morning, or eleven at night. When I asked her why the television was on so often, she said, “When you live alone, the TV is important. And it doesn’t talk back, unlike some children. It’s my best friend.”

It’s my best friend. I found this comment alarming. When children leave home, you assume it presents some new, adventurous frontier for a parent. But more often than not, when kids leave home, their world expands at exactly the same rate their parent’s world contracts.

Between us, the Brisbane-based siblings made an effort. Whenever something came up in town—a movie premiere, an art exhibition—we’d make sure that Mum knew about it. We’d manufacture reasons to ensure she regularly left the house, so we didn’t come home one day to find her dead, face-down in a wilting salad in front of Deal or No Deal. Once notified, Jenny would spend weeks preparing for the visit, packing entire suitcases for a ninety-minute overnight trip. Events scheduled for July warranted phone calls in April. How much would it cost? Should I catch the 1.15pm bus to Brisbane, or the one before? Because the one before has a 15% discount, so would it be worth it?

“Should I bring a blanket?” she’d ask. “Is it cold in Brisbane?”

“It’s summer,” I’d reply. “It’s pushing thirty every day.”

“Yes, but is it cold? Because I saw on the weather—”

“Mum,” I’d say.

“Yes?”

At this point, I wanted to tell her this was no big ceremony. That going to the theatre, seeing a film, or watching my friends play a gig were everyday types of things, that we went to similar events regularly.

“We have blankets,” I’d say. “Just come.”

If an event in Brisbane involved one of us directly, the frenzy leading up to it would be much more acute. One time, we slipped. Tammy was studying photojournalism, and was organising a photography auction to raise money towards her graduating exhibition. Between exams, assignments and brutal in-class sessions where students defended their work orally, it was a stressful period. Tammy sent out emails about the exhibition, then left it to us. We forwarded them on, sent out SMSes between ourselves, and assumed everything was set.

It’s a poor excuse. But in a family as large as ours, it’s almost inevitable that at some stage, you’ll be the last to know something very important. Failing to tell Mum about Tammy’s auction wasn’t a purposefully malicious act. But in retrospect, negligence is still a form of abuse. Oh, I’m sorry: I’d forgotten that I left my baby in that unventilated car. Whether or not we meant it, our failure to tell Jenny about the auction yielded one catatonic mother. We’d assumed we’d emailed her, and I’m pretty sure we did. But it was only a few months ago that I taught her how to use a mouse.

“Why does everyone email nowadays?” she asked. “All you children have the time to email one another—‘email this’, ‘email that’—and no one has time to pick up the phone and call their mother? One day, you think: ‘Oh, maybe I should call Mum!’ But hello! Jenny’s dead! Yes! You have a dead mother. Then how do you feel? Not even knowing your own mother is dead! You feel so awful, I cannot even imagine. You vomit from guilt. My dead body will stink up the house. That is how dead I will be. Stinky dead, because no one calls Mum.”

So on the night we headed over to the photography auction, held in a shiny building shouldering the river, drinking wine, admiring art, and making ridiculous bids for photos and laughing, I can only assume my mother was home, by herself, watching television and eating a meal for one. As much as I’d like to imagine she was somewhere else, I know this is impossible. Where else could she have been? Nowhere.

In the weeks that followed, we would ring her to ask about her day, hoping our forgetting the photography auction wouldn’t come up again. Because Jenny speaks in non-sequiturs, we sometimes felt safe. She moves between items without discernible segue. She ate a pear that morning, because her throat was sore; the next-door neighbour’s obese son was rude to her; she was currently boiling an egg. Then, out of nowhere, she would bring the auction up again.

“I still can’t believe no one told me. It’s the first step of Tammy’s graduation, and I wasn’t there.”

“Mum. Haven’t we gone over this?”

“How did I not know?” she asked. “You know how? Because no one told me. Mummy’s heart is broken.”

“It was a low-key thing,” I tried. “It’s not like you’ve missed out on Tammy’s graduation.”

“But I’ve never been to an auction before.”

“This was just a fundraiser.”

She sighed. “You know why no one told me? Because I tell you why. No one calls.” She coughed a little. “You know, one day, you’re going to come back home and find me—”

“Dead,” I said. “I know, I know.”

After a few minutes of this, I would tune out. My mother has perfected circular breathing techniques for guilt-talk, or perhaps it’s another internal black box recording on loop. Either way, it’s fascinating how the mind can block it out to get on with other tasks: eating porridge, shopping for CDs online, hanging out the laundry, surfing the internet for homosexual pornography. However, the way she brings you back into her conversation is by starting to cry. “Are you listening to me?” she asked. But I couldn’t respond. My mouth was filled with oats, and I was lazily scrolling through the pornographic news website Fleshbot.

“Huh?”

There’s a deadly silence—a rare occasion, considering it’s my mother.

“Nothing,” she said. “Mum never says anything important.”

Later, to explain herself, she made this analogy. “If your boss forgot to call you to an important meeting, how would you feel? Motherhood is my career.” She does have a point. On the last census, she refused to check the box marked ‘home-maker’. She ticked the ‘full-time’ employment box, and in the blank next to ‘occupation’, she simply wrote ‘mother’.

It’s been seven months now, and the phone battles have more or less stopped. Wounds have at least scabbed over. From my perspective, things started to get better when Tammy graduated. At the ceremony, Mum literally could not sit still. She was swollen with pride, retaining it the way pregnant women retain water. “Ah,” she said as Tammy received her certificate. She wiped away a tear. “Mummy’s so proud, she could burst.” She clapped until her hands were sore, and later cooed over the way the university had embossed the certificate. Tammy let Mum have it, knowing Mum would keep it in better condition. It shares wallspace with another framed document: her divorce papers. Tammy’s degree took a total of four years. Jenny’s divorce took a protracted seven.

When I go back to visit Mum’s place, I sleep on the sofa. Jenny has a hoarding habit. The beds are evolving into shelves. For now, it’s a problem, but it’ll be remedied when she moves to Brisbane, something she’s decided upon to “be closer to her children”. She laughs at the bravado of it all, cupping her hands over her mouth. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself,” she says. “Is it real? Am I really moving to Brisbane? It’s crazy-crazy-crazy. Crazy times for Jenny.”

When I sleep on the sofa, I’m usually woken up by one of two things. The first is her photocopier, a travel-sized contraption the size of two Encyclopaedia Britannicas side-by-side. She will photocopy everything: articles I have written, real estate brochures we’ve shown her, a mention of one of us in the newspaper. The other noise is her camera. While I’m lying there unconscious, my mother takes photographs of me. It’s her thing. Other times, she has been known to simply sit on the side of the bed as we sleep.

“Mum, Jesus. What are you doing?” I croak.

“Nothing, don’t worry. I’m just watching you sleep.”

It’s chilling, really. What’s awful is that sometimes I have an early morning erection. My mother, an erection and a camera: the entire situation is disorientating and inappropriate.

“Why?”

She looks at me as though I’m an idiot.

“Because it’s my hobby.”

“Well, it’s weird,” I say.

She shrugs. “That’s my job. I’m your weird mother.”

Then she holds the camera right in front of my face and takes another photo. Having just woken up, the flash almost blinds me.