July 26th, 1919.

 July 26th, 1919. A child is born in a terrace house in Day Street, Leichhardt. The parents name her Jean Isabel. A few blocks away on Parramatta Road, Model T Fords were just starting to fight it out with the trams here in Australia.
 In the ensuing decades, she will go on to have many adventures, many children and many more heartaches. She will refrain from drinking and smoking tobacco until she marries in her early twenties. At which point another, larger war will begin that will forever change the fabric of the relatively genteel landscape she had known. That global war would end in 1945. The peace so desperately sought by the broken twentieth century world even now has not been fully realised. The marriage would end in 1965. In her heart, the peace Jean Isabel (a thoroughly 20th century woman) so desperately needed would not find its way to her in her lifetime.
But she inspired, she cajoled, she pleaded and punished, she led and acquiesced, she brutalised and nurtured, encouraged and derided, she wilfully ignored and occasionally meddled, she loved with boundless tenderness, she snarled and screamed like a banshee when she was in her cups, she failed miserably and succeeded with mad abandon.
She mothered as mothers always have, as mothers always will.
And at 1 AM on the 26th July, seventy nine years later, she would draw her last breath with most of her strange, fragmented children around her. Each one beautiful and unique and hopelessly individual in their strengths and modest successes, each one virtually interchangable and identical in there frailties and crimes.
And so, some 97 years after your birth, some 18 years after your passing, I send my love and thoughts to you, Ma.

Jaysus, how you loved this song...