Free Purple Prose by Liz Byrski

others is usually lower in social status. There is a subtle or not so subtle downgrading of anyone in the Slow Lane. Time is also deeply gendered in a way that is quite simple, with a profound, long-lasting impact on women. Women’s time is still meant to be available to others, for care, with what’s left over devoted to paid work. Men’s time is meant to be made available for paid work, with what’s left over available for family. The assumption is they are a care commander who has a female care foot soldier doingall the care work. ‘Good’ women are marked by their willingness to give time. Women have traditionally acted as time sentries and time wardens, preventing intrusions into men’s time as wives, secretaries and assistants, and as conservers of the family time bank, able to be drawn on as needed. ‘Don’t Disturb Daddy’ is the name Susie Orbach and Luise Eichenbaum gave the phenomenon of tiptoeing around men’s time. 2 Women’s time in contrast, seems porous, a door that is always open. Care of the aged still carries an assumption that a woman, this time a daughter, is not at work, has all the time in the world to attend to her old parents.
    Even the oft-used word, ‘spent’, to describe time passing, is not innocent of its impact on how we see care. It shows not only the irrevocability of time which has gone, but of new, exploitative attitudes to time; that it
ought
to be about
productivity
, and
efficiency,
all the opposite values of any ethic of care of the frail aged, especially someone who is losing any sense of the straightness of Time’s Arrow. ‘Spend’ also carries inflections of the domineering relation of the business world, of ‘time is money’, of males at the top of the hierarchy whose attitudes to care go unchallenged. ‘I am too busy and too important to “waste” time on care.’

    And yet … my last word on my analyst’s couch connected to purple would be
courage
. ‘Old age is not for sissies,’ says one of Mum’s friends, quoting Bette Davis. I am often silenced by my mother’s courage. I don’t want to sentimentalise this period in her life, but her matter-of-fact braveness is one reason why none of this is simply burdensome. As Baraitser says, an ‘encumbered experience is in an odd way generative’. How did an unencumbered life, so remote from most people’s experience, with such vasty unequal consequences, ever become an ideal? All this time spent with my mother is deeply valuable to both of us. Certain ghosts in the mother knot have been laid to rest. Sometimes I have struggled to get here, but our time together can be quite lovely. My motheris more expressive of affection than at any other time in her life. I find new sources of respect for her, or perhaps rediscover them. I am moved by my mother’s gritty stoicism, her adaptability, her uncomplaining resilience. Especially I admire, how in spite of everything, she goes, full of joy, into the Whipstick.

Velvet – Rachel Robertson
1
    It is rich, deep purple velvet. Even now, it pulls you to touch it, to feel the silken allure. Cut into a rectangle with pinking shears and stuck onto a piece of buff card, it can fit into a woman’s palm. On the back, the words: ‘a bit of coronation robe.’
    We found this, my sister and I, upstairs at my mother’s house in a box file that contained things from her childhood – old photos, a menu from her parents’ wedding, and her birth notice. The words on the back of the card with the purple velvet are in my mother’s handwriting. My sister’s grey eyes darken as she holds it.
    We are captured, both of us, by these mementos from our mother’s past, most of all by the sample of purple velvet, symbol of another place and time.
    â€˜Yes, my father gave me this,’ says my mother, though she doesn’t remember when.
    Because she is