by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
Someone must have told my stepfather I was at that party, because he appeared in that bedroom where I sat, sobbing, my nose dripping onto the old floral sheets of my friend’s parental bed. He looked the same. Short and portly in a way that disguised his power, bald in a way that made him seem comedic. He said ‘How are you?’ in a kind, sickly voice that told me he pitied me but did not love me. And I sobbed, and couldn’t look at him, and eventually he left.
My real father was not gone in all of this. Though he was lost to the family paradigm, he was my loving father, living in another state on the other side of the country, with his partner, who was a gentle soul and a giant of man with a booming laugh and an artist’s hands.
Having my father live away from me meant that I was spared the normal ups and downs of a father–daughter relationship. Our time together was idyllic and uninterrupted by the demands of real life. It was time spent in opulent peace, swimming at the beach and picnicking near the river and watching videos with my sister. I felt I could be a child on those holidays, able to finally let go of my otherwise ongoing anxiety about the state of my mother’s marriage, luxuriate in long hours of quiet reading and shell collecting. I slept well at night, my body no longer tense and waiting for the timbre of fighting. And so my father got from me none of the angst he might otherwise have received for leaving my mother. I loved accompanying him and his partner to their wild New Year’s Eve parties, where I displaced my preteen discomfort at the overt sexuality of their more camp friends. There I’d hide under curtains and only peep through to the lights of the garden where the champagne popped and the men wore dresses; it was easier to self-censor than to find my father at fault for exposing me to something too adult for my years. I needed him to be the good father.
It was my mother who, I had decided, in light of the accumulating evidence of her choice in husbands, was at fault. It was as Oscar Wilde had put it – she’d chosen two fathers who would, in varying ways, be lost to me, and that was more than misfortune; that was carelessness.
I struggled to resolve the feeling that my mother was to blame for the losses I had suffered and for the burden I carried as her witness and her confidant. For years after the second divorce, I put as much emotional distance between us as I could. I felt desperate to be free of the vines of dysfunctionality that had clung to us as a family, and that meant I had to be free of her. She still talked frequently about my stepfather. Being married to him had been a wholly traumatic event for her. Before they met she, a woman of brilliant intellect, had had a successful career in her field in the health sciences. But my stepfather had wanted her to be available to accompany him on his frequent travels, and she had felt pressured to give it up. Now she was trying to re-estab-lish her former identity, regain confidence in her work and her mind. The conflict and the hurt of those marital years were lodged in her and she needed to replay them, as if going over the details of the experience and forming a narrative out of it would resolve it for her. It seemed she herself couldn’t believe how things had turned out, and she talked about her life with my stepfather almost reflexively over coffee with her friends at suburban cafes where I tagged along and when we met with old family friends who had chosen her side over my stepfather’s; sometimes I was not sure she remembered I was there.
Within months of their separation, still only 17 years old, I moved into an apartment with my sister, which we kept shabby and under-furnished so as to ward off parents. Later I moved to a share house on the other side of the city. I kept the phone calls with my mother short. I made sure I did not stay too long at her house if I visited. I loved her intensely and there was still much closeness between us; we shared the same absurd humour and quick fuse. But when I did see her, we fought. I felt that everything she said was an attempt to lure me back to her, to show me that I was still a child. I had to put proper distance between us, because, when I was honest with myself, what I wanted more than anything was to crawl into her warm bed and be looked after again.
I took a year off my university course to travel overseas, and at the same time my mother went to work with a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory. Despite the continents between us, I felt connected to her in a way that overpowered me. If I knew she was unhappy – and she was unhappy – I could not enjoy myself. If I did not hear from her, I worried she might be dead. I drank absinthe and smoked weed with my fellow backpackers in Holland, and was sick from vodka I consumed in vast quantities in Israel. I met men who I thought I might love but didn’t, and did other reckless things like hitchhiking alone in Greece. But all through these supposedly exhilarating experiences – the rush of drugs or wine or sex, the cold night air on my face during a motorbike ride along a ragged black beach – I was not really there. Or not wholly. I felt my mother’s sadness, her losses, her grief at every turn. In every encounter with a man I felt hollow desertion, even when they had not left me.
All the while, my mother sent me postcards from a fictional frog named Martin who declared his love for me and eventually proposed. I laughed at her imagination, but wondered about Martin’s persistence and felt his appearance, and in particular his proposal, were signs that we still depended on each other too much.
When I came home from that trip I was tired, fatigued at the mammoth effort it had taken to enjoy my travels and ward off the constant low hum of anxiety that lurked in my mind. I slept in my mother’s spare room, happy to be cared for and fed. I was reaching the end of a law degree, with no desire to work as a lawyer; it was impossible to identify my own wishes with the hum getting louder. I was lonely, but seemed only able to meet men who loved me half-heartedly. And I was afraid, though the thought hadn’t coagulated into words for me yet, that if I went too far from my mother, neither of us would survive.
I gave in to it, and decided to stay living with her. It seemed that, no matter where I went, a spider-woven thread pulled us back together. I dreamt often of a spider latching on to me as if I were a fly. And I knew that, though my mother was better-intentioned and only held me too close for fear that I would leave her forever, I needed to separate from her in order for us to be close again. So, after some months of planning, I moved cities.
In the fairy tale version of this story, my mother lies frozen in a canopied bed under a knotted tree waiting for her daughter’s kiss of life. She sleeps for a hundred years while only I grow old, after which I am able to forgive her youthful sins. But my leaving her did not have that kind of transformative effect, no epiphany of narrative. In real life, for years we visited each other and fought. I told her she shared too much with me; she cried at my apparent coldness. I would become sullen and tense, and we would eventually say a teary goodbye at an airport.
When I became a mother, the fairy tale was partly realised: I was able to look back on my mother’s younger self with compassion. As I struggled to manage the sleepless nights and my altered existence, I thought a lot about what kind of person she must be to have survived being a single mother to two small children at such a young age.
I thought often of her as she had been then, only 26 years old, five years younger than I was as a new mother. I felt I needed to know her as a young mother, to see her. I pondered – as I took and shared around by email countless photos of my baby – why in my lifetime I hadn’t seen more than a handful of photos from when I was a baby, and it began to dawn on me then that this was because there weren’t many. The first year of my life was a painful time for my parents. Because I asked her, my mother gave me the few she did have, kept in a worn brown envelope. She was there in a few photos holding me, the same cupid upper lip and almond-shaped eyes that I have. My father was in other photos with me, too, bearded and with those big spectacles of the ‘70s. Sometimes my sister also featured, with her Orphan Annie freckles and glossy dark bob. But there were none with my mother and father together. This made me think what it might have felt like for her to face the loss of her hoped-for love with my father; to have navigated the world of parenthood a
lone, the practicalities of sickness and night-waking and finances, and at the same time to have managed the grief of divorce. She must have been broken hearted at the realisation that the tall, handsome intellectual she had fallen in love with on a beach at the age of 17 had not been her ever-after after all.
Motherhood showed me, too, in the almost devastating love that I felt for my children, in the way that I was addicted to touching their skin and soothing their crying, that it had been easy to feel rage toward my mother because I knew how tenaciously she loved me. All those years I might have held back on being angry at my father because I suspected it could be easier for fathers to choose to leave their children, and I was afraid that my anger might drive him further away.
But in my new empathy for my mother, I still could not forgive her emotional reliance on my sister and me. I knew how hard it would have proven for her to lay the boundaries between the pain she felt and the love she gave, but I could not imagine burdening my own children with my sorrows.
My mother came to live near me recently, in Melbourne. She often phones and, in a fake French accent, says: ‘Bonjour, I heff your theengs,’ and then she arrives on my doorstep with the children’s washing.
Some months ago I called her at two in the morning and asked her to come and be with my youngest child while my husband and I looked after our eldest, who was throwing up. She arrived at once, in her pyjamas, with a loaf of bread and Gastrolyte.
These days I often sit on her bed with my two sons between us watching TV, she smiling the slightly idiotic smile of a grandmother in love with her grandchildren. We are still trying to work out how to show each other love without going too far or holding back too much. I shut down now when she starts to talk about the past, or situations in which she has ended up hurt or slighted. It is a protective measure: I can’t bear to know her pain anymore. It’s as though my borders have closed up in self-preservation. She tells me I am cruel for being this way.
I still desperately want happiness for her, and find some solace in knowing that, despite never having the classic family unit she so hoped for all her life, she has dear friends in both my father and his partner, who also moved to Melbourne when my first child was born. We have all gravitated toward each other; my sister and her husband too. Every week, on a Friday, for the Jewish Sabbath, we eat together as a family. Something has shifted as time has passed, something that has allowed us to look at the past now with more honesty, without trying to censor the mistakes that we once made. While my parents’ marriage had been an event absented to the realm of best-not-talked-about, it is now a part of our story. My sister displays in her apartment a photo of my mother dressed as a bride when she married my father. My mother makes digs at my father about how drunk he got on his buck’s night, saying that he was probably hoping to miss the wedding, and we laugh.
Last year, I went back to Sydney on holiday and took my eldest son to see the house I grew up in. I had passed the street many times on previous trips, but felt unable to even look at its ivy-green roof tiles in the distance. This time, I walked with my son all the way to the front gate, where we stood and looked up at the emerald and turquoise peacock above the front door. The house had lost its monstrosity. It seemed smaller, inanimate.
NERVOUS BREAKDOWNS
AMRA PAJALIC
I entered the bedroom where my mum was still lying in bed. I had poured myself cereal, then found there was no milk.
‘Oh,’ Mum said when I told her. She sat up with her hair tousled, blinking sleep out of her green eyes. Izet, my new stepfather, had left to run errands an hour ago and we were alone. ‘Take some money from my purse and go buy it.’
I bit back words of frustration. I missed Nana. During the four years that I had lived with my grandparents in Bosnia, in the mornings she would wake me and I’d find breakfast waiting for me on the table: hot tea, sliced homemade bread, jar of also homemade jam and a stick of butter. In the two weeks I’d been living with Mum again I’d learnt that I had to fend for myself. Mum suffered from what she called Slom Živaca, which translated to ‘nervous breakdowns’ in English, and all my childhood she had been in and out of hospital. Living with my grandparents had been a welcome reprieve from the chaos of Mum’s illness, even though at the same time I’d been racked with a feeling of homesickness and grief at being separated from her.
As I rode my bicycle to the milk bar, I enjoyed the sensation of flying. My mood lightened. I looked with curiosity at the yellow and brown brick houses I passed. These were the same streets I’d walked as a young child, but now as a 12-year-old it was as if I was seeing them with the eyes of a stranger. This landscape was so different from Bosanska Gradiška, the town where my grandparents lived. By comparison Melbourne’s western suburbs were monochrome and cold. There was concrete everywhere: in grey footpaths and asphalt roads, and most of the yards were lost to concrete driveways.
On my way back home, the plastic bag with the milk bottle hanging on my handlebar kept swinging back and forth, until its handle tore. The bottle hit the asphalt with a bang, the milk seeping into the black bitumen. I braked abruptly and stared at the mess on the road. I didn’t know what to do. I had no money to buy another bottle, as I’d taken only a two-dollar coin from my mother’s purse. I began pedaling forward home.
Fear gripped me the closer I got. I didn’t know what Mum would do. If this had happened while I was living in Bosnia, my grandfather would have used a stick to correct my clumsiness. His favourite method of punishment was beating my fingertips while I held them together. As for my grandmother, she would have chased me away from home, throwing rocks at my retreating form. Even though I thought she purposely missed with her rock throwing, no one could be that bad, but I’d never stuck around to test my theory.
When I arrived home, I knocked on the door, as I wanted the option of a quick get away if Mum got agro. I had never before feared my mother, but I had become infected with fear after living in a Communist regime where people who were different from the so-called ‘norm’ were viewed as dangerous and often locked in institutions. While we lived in Bosnia Mum, too, was incarcerated in hospital whenever she demonstrated the tiniest indication of her illness.
‘Why are you knocking?’ Mum asked when she opened the door.
‘The milk bottle smashed and it went everywhere on the road,’ I was almost in tears.
Mum gave a deep sigh, her lips narrowing in displeasure. ‘Here,’ she said, handing me a coin.
‘Thanks,’ I said.
I walked back to my bike, worrying my lip. Maybe living with Mum was going to be better than living with my grandparents.
Six months later I was hanging out on the corner of my street with other neighbourhood kids. Even though it was seven o’clock at night, it was summer, the sun was still out and it was broad daylight. I was with Zehra, the daughter of Mum’s best friend. Zehra had recently moved into a shared house not far from where we lived.
The squeal of a burnout rent the air, the thick vapour produced by the friction of tyres on asphalt surrounding the car like a blanket of smoke. Zehra stood on the curb wearing denim cut-offs and a stretchy spaghetti top that was poured onto her hourglass figure, her nipples beaded from the cold.
The red Holden Commodore passed by and Zehra stared dead ahead at the driver who was speeding past us. I saw the moment when she caught his eye, how his head whipped toward her and their stares locked, then he drove past. Another squeal of the tyres and he did a U-turn, before pulling to a stop by us.
The driver was speaking to one of the guys who we were hanging with while staring at Zehra. She kept looking down at the ground, then quickly back up at him. With each drop of her eyes she did a move, drawing attention to yet another asset of hers: a dip of her shoe in the street curb to show off her naked leg, a scratch of her shoulder which squeezed her unfettered boobs up. By lowering her eyes. she gave the guy a chance to check her out, then met his gaze again.
I was both fascinated and appalled. At 13, I�
��d just begun developing and my breasts were the size of apricots.
‘I’d better go get ready,’ Zehra said and broke away from the group. It was Friday night and she was about to go clubbing. She was five years older than me and her world was full of freedom: she didn’t have to deal with parental dramas and decided herself where she lived and with whom, while my life was always dictated by Mum’s illness.
Having no interest in hanging around with hoodlums once Zehra was out of the picture, I went back home. Mum was in hospital again and without her my stepfather and I had settled into a loose routine. We lived off frozen pizzas, baked beans and hot dogs. Before Mum married my stepfather, whenever she went to hospital, life as I knew it would stop. I would be taken in by friends of family or foster families, would have to change schools and leave my friends behind, and I would be in limbo because there was no time limit as to how long Mum’s hospital stay would last. At least now I got to go to the same school, hang out with my friends, stay in the same house. Still, I avoided home as much as possible, staying out late on school nights. I found spending time with Izet draining.
Izet was caught up in homesickness. While living in Bosnia he had worked as a baker and had lived with his elderly parents and brother. Now that he had left, the memories of his previous life were coloured by nostalgia, which rendered it as perfect. By contrast Australia was found wanting. According to Izet, there was no proper sense of community here, and he felt an all pervasive sense of violence outside his front door. Indeed, the Western suburbs of Melbourne where we then lived were often described as the crime capital and our suburb, St Albans, had the highest murder rates in Victoria. In his unhappiness, Izet became consumed with talking about leaving this ‘shit country’, though he never did anything about it. But even though being in Izet’s company made me feel anxious and unsettled, I couldn’t ignore the fact that without him in the picture I would once again be at the mercy of strangers to take care of me while Mum was in hospital. Mum’s previous beaus had been offhand in accepting her offspring, while Izet cared for me as if I was his biological daughter, even though I kept him at a distance because I never trusted that he would stick around.
