My elderly mother met a gang of bikies and got a tattoo. It taught me a great lesson

The Brisbane Lions won that day, in a famous victory that would never be forgotten in our family. After the game, I waited for the text from my mother so I could pick her up from the train station. I waited an hour. And then another hour. All of my calls went to message bank. By 8pm, I was frantic.

I’d spent my whole life worrying about my mother. As a child, I’d nagged her about her two-packs-a-day smoking habit, to no effect, and I’d lectured her on the importance of wearing clothes or at least a towel when watering the front garden.

At 12, I sat on the couch and pretended to be Jana Wendt as I quizzed her boyfriends as to their intentions.

“She looked like a 65-year-old dressed as a seven-year-old dressed as Wonder Woman, if Wonder Woman was the world’s biggest Brisbane Lions fan.”

At 14, I fashioned camouflage from banana leaves along the back fence so her garden bed of dope plants couldn’t be seen from the street.

As she aged, I worried about her more and more. At random times, she seemed flooded with a sudden, inexplicable rage. When she was diagnosed with diabetes, she was advised by a well-meaning but undoubtedly patronising specialist to make small, manageable lifestyle changes. You don’t need to stop eating roast chicken, he said, condescendingly, you simply need to remove the skin before you eat it.

Telling my mother what to do would never end well. She told him to get f—ed. Then she drove to the nearest Red Rooster, where she bought an entire roast chicken and, using her hands, ate nothing but the skin.

And now I’d lost her somewhere on the streets of Melbourne. Anything could have happened. She could have been caught keying a Mercedes parked in a disabled spot; she could have taken a wild swing at a random racist. Neither are hypothetical examples.

By 10 o’clock, I was ready to call the police when my phone rang. It was my mother. “Where are you?” I asked.

“I’m in Chapel Street with some very nice bikies,” she said, “getting a tattoo.”

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And in that instant, I changed my mind about my mother. I realised she was not defenceless. I didn’t have to worry about her. I felt all those decades of anxiety peel away. My mother did not need my patronising, condescending worry, because she was entirely capable of looking after herself. She had two specific defences: one, she did not care what other people thought; and two, she was not ashamed of her own fury. These were her shield and her weapon. Both of these things had given me so much stress when I was young, but were to become my later-life inspiration.

So when I turned 50, I did two things. Like my mother, I found myself becoming overwhelmed by anger as I aged, so, in search of a healthy outlet, I joined a boxing gym.

I was embarrassed when I first phoned. I was 50, I told the lovely, retired boxer who answered, and I’d never exercised before. “Lady,” he said to me, with a kind of weary patience, “if menopausal women stopped wanting to hit things, I’d be out of business.”

And I also got my own tattoo. It’s more subtle than the huge maroon Brisbane Lions sleeve my mother came home with that grand final day, dropped off by a stranger, giddy with victory, reeking of weed, with her upper arm swathed in glad wrap, but it’s in the same spot. It reminds me to be unselfconscious and it reminds me to be fierce, now that I’ve lost my mother for good, not just temporarily.