URSULA "MARY" BRENNAN

My mum is almost 66 years old, but she seems much younger. She’s a young soul my mother – most times I feel she is younger than myself. Because of this she can come across as being naïve and somewhat simple, but she’s not. My mother grew up in Wilston, an inner suburb of Brisbane – she was an unplanned child & had two teenage brothers when she was born. Their names were Noel & John. Everyone in my mothers family is now dead, her dad when she was a teenager her brother Noel when he was 42 & John when he was 39. My nana outlived her two sons & died when I was 12 at the age of 77.

In the small Wilston house that my mum called home her bedroom was the front porch which was only partially enclosed. She’d get a ride to work each day on the back of her brother John’s motorcycle, many a time he was intoxicated. He had an accident once which left him almost unrecognisable, with burns to most of his face. Luckily my mother wasn’t with him that day. My mother was the girl that your parents didn’t want you to hang around - her family had a reputation.

My mothers’ whole family were alcoholics, she’d left school with a grade seven education to go out & work to help support them. One night when her brothers straggled in they went looking for the liquor which my mum would hide, her brother John pulled out the gun he kept under his bed & put it to her head screaming at her to give it to him. That same brother would in later years be asked to give my mother away at the altar, he didn’t turn up. Her other brother Noel did the job instead, after he’d turned up late & drunk again. Not that long after my parents married, John would be found dead in a public toilet at Shorncliffe – empty bottles of methylated spirits were found beside him. Noel soon followed, after being picked up by the Salvation Army he had been taken to hospital, he died a few days later as a result of malnutrition & cirrhosis of the liver.

From an early age my mother wanted to be a nun, she had gone to a catholic school & the nuns had always been good to her. This didn’t happen though & at 19 she met my father, she saw her opportunity & she took it. They were married & the rest is history. Not long after they were married my mum & dad took nana in to live with them, she had begun to show signs of Korsakoff’s (alcoholic dementia). My Nana often took a cocktail of sleeping pills with alcohol & my mother found her unconscious on three separate occasions, setting the bed alight with a cigarette during one of them. So you see, my mother is far from simple, she saw more heartache as a child than anyone I know. I often think of her as that little girl home all alone, her parents & brothers down at the pub. She’s sitting out on the front porch, her arms lovingly draped around Trixie her dog. She's just sitting there patiently, talking to her God.