She thought of her late mother’s professional life. What about that norm, the parental norm? Leaving home every day to work on a locked ward where an obsessive-compulsive man stuffed his pyjama pants with toilet paper every half hour, was chased out of the ward bathrooms, only to duck back in behind a stall when the nurses were occupied so he could refill his pyjamas again. Where a man hanged himself in the shower on an evening shift. Where a female patient in a manic state threw a brass sculpture at the wall of her room, creating a dent the size of her head. Where one of the permanent night nurses, as disturbed as the patients she cared for, gave up all pretense of practising her profession and slept behind a glass cage at the nurses’ desk through most of her shift. She neglected everyone and everything but her need for sleep, chin propped on a stack of phone directories, reference texts and a thick vademecum, the total of which held her head upright so that the night supervisor, passing by at the end of the corridor, would see, through a narrow barred window in the door at the end of the hall, the nurse’s profile and believe she was hard at work over her charts. The supervisor did have a key to the locked psych ward, but she refused to enter because several months earlier she’d been threatened by a patient with a gun. And though the gun turned out to be a plastic toy, the supervisor would no longer do her night rounds directly inside the ward. She’d had quite enough.

Those were some of the stories Addie had been told. Her mother took the work conditions in stride and carried on. She was used to dealing with danger, with the bizarre and unexpected. Addie recalled how her mother had always been positive, searching for ways to help. An optimist, because she could make things happen. She was trusted by people around her, and she was tough.

But her mother had also puzzled over ordinary moments, over normality. Addie remembered how she had talked about her basic nursing education, about living in residence for three years.

“Just before Christmas,” her mom told her during one of their drives home at the end of the day, “the head nurse on the ward I was assigned to for three months happened to mention that she’d be spending her holidays with a group of yodellers. She was unmarried, about fifty. I was eighteen years old and couldn’t reconcile what I saw as her two lives. All that starch and poise on the job. She was strict, demanding. And there we were, in a structured, dignified setting governed by rules and decorum, always with people’s lives on the line, and she was going off somewhere at Christmas to yodel and bellow and holler, or whatever yodellers do. I never saw her in quite the same way after that. My eighteen-year-old and obviously limited imagination couldn’t grant her a separate private life. I thought the image of her yodelling was preposterous.”