by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
Since her divorce, my mother had always had suitors, mostly conventional businessmen, some rich and married, who took her out to dinner but hardly rippled the surface of our life together. Scarred by my father’s departure, she had made me her vocation. Sometimes we went for a drive in her latest Mini, especially in the quiet melancholy of Sunday evenings. We chatted and drove down suburban streets, peeking through lit windows at family scenes that reminded me of my favourite children’s books about an English girl called Milly Molly Mandy and her extended family, cosy in their thatched cottages. We might sound like a lonely pair, but we were content in our twosome, watching other lives with anthropological curiosity rather than envy.
We were still friends and confidantes in my early teens and often went to movies, art galleries and the beach. Mum loved having my friends at home and they loved her warm, informal style, just as I enjoyed the novelty of their large houses, two parents and siblings. She was a rare divorcee in those days, an exotic and mistrusted species, but life was often simpler without a father: fewer rules, one less person to please, no one between Mum and me. I didn’t yearn for more of Dad or for a replacement. But as I tiptoed towards adulthood and Mum began to sniff the air for a possible mate, our tight partnership was threatened and it became clear that I needed a man of my own.
The next year I kept a diary was 1973. Between its psychedelic floral covers, in dense round handwriting that spills over the allotted lines, is the self-portrait of a 15-year-old who frets about being pimply, fat, ugly, stupid, overworked, lazy, exhausted, depressed, and is keen on boys who don’t want her, disdainful of those who do. How exasperating to see myself turn into a predictable teenager. Perhaps I was reading too many Dolly magazines.
I showed the world a more confident face: a straight-A student and, in my headmistress’s report, ‘a source of positive pleasure to me about the school with grace, poise of manner, and her eager interest in all manner of things’. Before the end of the year I decided to study Arts at university and become a journalist, exactly the path I would take. Again, as with my feelings for Paul, I showed astonishing clarity amid my teenage floundering.
At home, however, there was one consuming source of anxiety. In 1973 Mum started an exciting new job, helping to assess scripts with the government funding agency for the burgeoning film industry. Suddenly she was mixing in bohemian circles unfamiliar to a Liberal-voting, church-going, middle-class mother. When a floppy-haired film director with undisciplined libido walked into her office, she was ready for action. She must have thought – if she thought at all – that having steered us both safely through my childhood she deserved some distraction. Looking back now from my post-menopausal plateau, I can see also that she was shoved into sexual obsession by her body’s final lunge at fertility. No longer just mother and daughter, we were two women divided by the rocky peaks of female desire.
Mike was fun to have around at first. He was 14 years younger than Mum, which made him only 14 years older than me. I felt sophisticated in their company. We visited the sets of a film he was making and went to see Woody Allen’s Bananas. Over dinner he argued about politics in cynical ways Mum and I had never heard. There was nothing fatherly about him and I would have found any paternal moves presumptuous. But he disrupted our placid life: his loud laugh and heavy tread, his cigars and musty body odour filled our tiny house, and soon the air carried the sweet-and-sour reek of sex.
By the second half of the year I was writing in my diary: ‘I like him but hate him, and hate myself for feeling so.’ ‘Mum and Mike stayed home for dinner to keep me company and as they were going out for ‘coffee’ I burst into tears. I hate myself, as it is none of my business but I just hate the whole affair.’ ‘Felt really depressed, “dead inside”, especially about Mike and Mum. Cried and couldn’t stop. Mum kind but probably won’t change.’ ‘I like him but when I know they are jumping into bed the minute I leave, I feel sick.’ ‘Mike came – I stayed away.’
Our twosome had been bent out of shape and I didn’t know how to be one of three. I wanted Mum to be happy but she was acting like an adolescent who stayed out too late and broke the rules of our household. She was smoking for the first time, her humour was more salacious, her laugh wilder. She and Mike spent far too much time in her bedroom and the fleshy sounds from behind the door frightened me. Wasn’t I meant to be the unruly one? Somewhere in my hard teenage heart I worried, too, that she would be wounded again.
Mum had created a secure, happy home for us and built her career from necessity. She never thought of marrying again for less than love. And yet I saw the stress that weighed on a single mother. I knew about her nervous breakdown that had followed my birth. Then there were her weekend migraine headaches, the social anxiety that often kept her home, the inadequate pay and the exorbitant mortgages banks demanded from her. Much later she told me about the even darker side of her life as a divorced woman in the ‘60s: the driving instructor who had pushed my young mother down on his car seat during a lesson and raped her, the illegal abortion that followed, the married men who escorted her to her car after dinner parties and groped her. And now there was Mike, a sexual libertarian who flouted courtesies, a tom cat seeking comfort but never to be tamed.
Much as I adored her, I did not want to be my mother. I wanted the freedom that came from being both independent and loved, financially and emotionally secure; I wanted a career and a husband. All that was much more possible for those of us reaching adulthood in the ‘70s. The new prime minister, Gough Whitlam, uncle of a school friend, had made university education free. The generation of women between Mum and me was bashing down professional, social and sexual barriers. Thanks to them we stood astride the gap between old constraints and an almost-anything-goes freedom. We just had to work out how to jump.
In January 1973 I read ‘Girls Who Say No’, a magazine article about the rise of teenage sex, and worried that being a virgin made me odd, even at 15. I wrote: ‘I realise I am obsessed by sex, emotions, etc. I feel that I am gradually maturing but also become more confused. Does one ever grow up?’
I kissed plenty of boys that year, or they kissed me, a tongue down my throat so I couldn’t breathe, sloppy lips mashed against mine. Mostly the boys irritated me with their awkward conversation, their shyness or their unwanted persistence. And always, moving in and out of the foreground, there was Paul.
Beyond our family gatherings, he and I edged towards our own intimacy. Although Paul was caught in the continuing tension between his divorced parents, his mother welcomed me at their house. We hung out with his friends, listened to music, went to the beach, and talked for hours about our family and other dilemmas. He was easy company, bright rather than intellectual, handsome though not tall, with a fine Roman nose and capable tanned hands that raked through his thick hair. At 20, he was trying a series of courses and jobs, unsure what he wanted after his exam results thwarted his ambition to be a vet.
There was also the question of Paul’s sexual leaning. His father thought he was partying with some of the wrong types and showing qualities that were not entirely masculine. He was too domesticated, too sensitive, too inclined to giggle and wave his hands around. Paul was offended by a suggestion that he should see a psychologist. Scattered through the early pages of my diary are notes such as ‘Paul looks and acts more queer every day’. I was hearing the adult talk, but part of Paul’s appeal was his difference from the clumsy men and boys who pursued Mum and me. Among my early childhood models of male behaviour had been the interior decorators my mother had worked with as a secretary for years. Most were gentle, funny, young gay men, unthreatening to her and kind to me despite their snobbery and shadow lives. I had even added a couple of their names to the list of crushes inscribed on my pencil box. So if Paul had more style than machismo and preferred theatre to rugby, that was a plus.
Our first real date, in March, was to the musical Godspell. Perhaps Paul took me out of guilt because three years earlier he had persuaded my mother I
was too young for the raunchier Hair. Then, in April, we went to hear the flamenco guitarist Paco Pena at Sydney Town Hall. ‘Had great time, held hands! Terribly confused about my feelings.’ There are no more mentions of Paul’s possible ‘queerness’. By the end of the month he kissed me and I learnt not to choke him with my tongue. In May he said he loved me and I slid easily into thinking of us as a couple. ‘I want to see Paul all the time but I must, MUST remain independent! And not lose my other friends.’
We had accelerated into a relationship but the age gap between us still mattered. In some ways I was still a shy child while Paul was a man out in the world of adults. He retreated and began going out with a dark-haired girl of 17; after I first spotted them in the street together, I sat crying in Mum’s new red Mini outside the local library. She had never seen me upset about a boy before.
Part of the problem – and perhaps the reason my mother had not been alarmed by our closeness – was that I had no intention yet of having sex. Though my body was hungry, the rest of me was not ready. My first orgasm, at 14, had thrilled and terrified me as I lay alone in a fourposter bed, on a country holiday with my father’s family. Now there was no pressure from Paul, too polite and too sensible to tangle with an underage girl, but a young man in the easy 70’s must have had sex on his mind. Winter brought a cool silence between us, broken only by family occasions, as he seemed serious about his girlfriend and I tried to convince myself I didn’t care. At the same time, I had to endure my mother’s sexual heat so I felt doubly dumped. Trying to be stoical I wrote, ‘Sick of Mum and Mike, but I have no right or real reason to be. God, I need someone (Paul!?).’
September 19, my birthday: ‘Sweet 16. Age of Consent!’ I suspected a few of my classmates were having sex, with one boyfriend or more, but I was in no rush to lose my virginity for its own sake. That month I also wondered why I had wanted Paul so much, and then he won my heart again by convincing my aunt and uncle to take in a timid German shepherd that had been left at the vet’s surgery where he worked part-time. I wanted a dog, too.
As study leave for my School Certificate exams began in October, my panic about passing broke out in strange ways. Too little work and more outings than necessary. Hysterics over a flamboyant Indian dress I bought and then hated. A fierce cold that forced me to apply for a sickness appeal on my science paper. By Paul’s 21st birthday in November, he was seeing another, older girl, and I punished myself by lurking at his birthday party until 1am on the morning of my art history exam. Still I wrote, ‘God I want him’.
On a Sunday when the temperature hit 31 degrees, my fury at my mother boiled over. I wanted her to stay home in solidarity with me as I prepared for my final exam in Latin, but she announced she was going out to lunch with Mike. I never resented her absence when she was at work, but I collapsed in tears over this crucial test of her loyalty. ‘I feel so bloody selfish, but so confused. Mum upset too.’ My misery did not change her mind and on her way out she left me at my aunt and uncle’s place, where I wept over my Latin books all afternoon.
At the end of the school year, I was one of four girls who received a form prize for good work, and then I was free to go to the beach with friends, and photography classes with my aunt. There were concerts and parties and a boy who ‘I talked to for ages; he shows great intuition and is easy to talk to and I really like him’. But the disappointment was fleeting when I found out he had kissed my friend. I started my first holiday job at a shop that supplied handmade luxuries to society matrons, and within days a cocky young New Zealander called James came in selling scarves and asked me out to lunch. We went to a floating restaurant on the harbour and, to the amusement of the shop ladies, I returned to work with pink cheeks and a red rose. That summer I lay in a hammock kissing James and smoking cigarettes to a soundtrack of David Bowie and Elton John.
Paul was at our family Christmas lunch – ‘he drives me wild! Oh God!’ – but he was still dating another girl and I was on my own. New Year’s Eve was a joyful impromptu party at home with my friend Virginia and three boys we invited to join us for cheap bottles of Cold Duck and innocent banter. Mum had been out at a party too. As 1974 dawned, she tiptoed through the front gate carrying her shoes while Virginia and I slipped out to twirl blissfully through the honeysuckle-scented streets and imagine the future.
I remember my last two years at school in snapshots of unfurling maturity. At school, I continued my anxious but steady academic progress, became a prefect, head of my house, and editor of the school magazine, pronouncing on the need for education to adapt to girls’ expanding potential.
At home, Mike moved in and I spent more time away. His relationship with Mum had become a volatile blend of passion, arguments and jealousy, fuelled by his sexual wanderings and her insecurity. She did not tell me until many years later that she was jealous of me too. I had no sexual interest in Mike and he showed no interest in me but poor Mum, still vibrantly lovely in her forties, felt vulnerable against a temptress in a khaki school uniform.
Although I went out with other boys, none of them challenged my love for Paul, and gradually he returned to me. Our feelings steadied and deepened, and while I remained tentative about sex, Paul urged me forward. One afternoon, as he dropped me at home, he leaned out the window of his Volkswagen Beetle and teased me with his smile. ‘Go on,’ he coaxed and revved the rattling engine up the street. I knew I had to talk to Mum about contraception.
Time alone with her was scarce now that Mike was living with us. Watching television with them one night, I wrote a note on a square of paper and slid it into her hand: ‘Dear Mum, I would like to go on the Pill because 1) it would help my skin, 2) it would regulate my periods, 3) for contraception.’ The last point was in smaller writing than the others, but Mum got the message and laughed. Before long she took me to our family doctor, a pleasant, conservative man who explained that the additional hormones could harm my still-developing body. Mum was grateful, I suppose. But I pushed on and Paul’s sister-in-law gave me the name of a woman doctor who prescribed the Pill without questions.
We had sex for the first time in Paul’s double bed in his mother’s house. To my mortification, next morning we found she had whisked away the blood-stained sheets in gracious silence. I was 16 and nine months, and part of me wished I had waited another three months, because 17 sounded less impatient. Clearly, though, neither of us was a wild child and we were blessed with broad-minded mothers who preferred to have us sleeping together at home rather than who knows where.
Still, I began to have some secrets from Mum. I didn’t tell her about the Pill or the sex at first, and when she visited Paul’s house and asked to see where I slept on the nights I stayed there, I held my breath and showed her the spare room where the bed was unconvincingly piled with chairs. Nor did I tell her that when she drove me to a friend’s place to borrow a book on the way to a party I was really picking up a bag of marijuana for my first joint. (I felt so guilty about my lie that I confessed not long before she died, 40 years later, and the shock on her face made me feel worse.) I never told her that once or twice I borrowed the vibrator buried in her drawer as a release from the combined sexual tension and exam anxiety that now throbbed constantly through my body.
Mum was calm when eventually I admitted I was sleeping with Paul, and she grew used to having us stay in my attic bedroom above hers. ‘I’m happy he was your first,’ she said, as if she expected there would be others. To me, though, he was the only one. He certainly distracted me from whatever was happening downstairs, and I became more detached and tolerant of Mum’s waywardness. When Mike left after a year of turmoil, Paul and I were there to comfort Mum, who felt betrayed and abandoned again. I might have been relieved that Mike was gone but, seeing her pain, I didn’t say ‘I told you so’.
In my second year at university Paul and I moved into a rented house with our Irish setters. I was leaving Mum by increments: our cottage with a backyard bathroom was half a block from hers. Paul was working in adve
rtising, I had a student allowance and part-time jobs in cafes, shops and a gym, and at first Mum paid my half of the 40 dollars rent. We lived between the two houses, an extended family that only dissolved after my 21st birthday, when Paul and I left to travel in Europe and work in London for a year.
To cut a long love story short, in the six years after our return from England Paul and I shared four more Sydney homes and a changing cast of dogs and cats. While my friends lived with their parents or in group houses, we cooked dinners, renovated and prowled junk shops for furniture. We were natural best friends and lovers. I saw no need to marry but when Paul asked I nervously said yes, unable to picture life without him. At this news my mother admitted, after years of self-restraint, that she still worried Paul would one day realise he was gay and she did not want me to be left alone, especially if we had children. Sitting on my bed, she pleaded while I sobbed. Yet her resistance only made me more committed. I was 25 when we married and the world was shifting around us: it was another year before homosexuality was decriminalised in NSW, just as the AIDS tragedy was making headlines.
Even then, Paul and I were peeling away from each other: I was becoming a workaholic newspaper journalist among opinionated, rough-and-tumble types, not much interested in domesticity or children, while he was a homebody yearning to live in the country, surrounded by animals. We had been safe company for each other, stepping-stones to maturity. When we finally, sadly, tore apart two years into our marriage, I soon fell for another Paul, a very different man who remains my husband 30 years later. And Paul, my first Paul, eventually found love with another man, his own Paul, and their family of dogs, goats and horses.
My mother was right, after all, but she, too, never said ‘I told you so’. Like her, I had to cut my own path to adulthood, with all its detours and dead ends, even though in some way I imitated my parents’ too-early marriage and divorce. If I had children, I would advise them not to marry in their twenties, a time of rapid growth and change. But they probably wouldn’t listen. Mum often told me how frightened she had been that her warning against marrying Paul would rupture our bond. Indeed, after that we loved each other no less but we lost some of our old intimacy. From then on, I was one of a couple that did not always have room for her, and she was alone.
