by Rosie Batty
Soon enough, a looming cash-flow crisis forced me to look for work again. With a toddler at home or in local daycare, my options were relatively limited. So I accepted a job doing telemarketing sales in nearby Mornington. On the plus side, it was nine to five, a ten-minute drive from home and required a bare minimum of brain power. On the down side, it was soul-destroying work and I hated it. With my self-esteem still under almost daily assault from Greg, this was just the professional diversion I didn’t need. My career – which had once informed so much of my sense of identity – had stalled completely. I was showing up to work each morning in a light industrial complex on the fringes of a sleepy seaside town in Victoria’s south – and it was killing me.
Into this mix, I still had to factor regular exposure to Greg, whose access visits to Luke continued. He would come to collect Luke and take him back to St Kilda where he was living. Sometimes he would bring Luke back to Tyabb the following day, sometimes he would not. If it had been a casual lack of organisation on his part, I wouldn’t have minded as much the two-hour return journey in the car to collect Luke from St Kilda. But it was always done with malice and intent.
On one occasion, when I was five minutes late to an agreed handover meeting at Chadstone Shopping Centre, Greg bundled Luke into his car and told me I had missed the window and would have to drive to St Kilda to collect Luke. On another occasion, during a handover at Frankston McDonald’s, he started to insist all pick-ups now needed to take place in St Kilda. I dissolved into tears on the spot, unable to take any more of Greg’s controlling behaviour.
As Greg trailed me with Luke in his arms, I ran towards my car in the car park and fell to my knees, sobbing uncontrollably. ‘Keep him! Just fucking keep him! I can’t do this anymore!’ I cried.
Greg tried to calm me down, but I got into my car and drove off.
‘You fucking bitch!’ he screamed after me. ‘You drive out of this car park and I swear you will never see your son again!’
Three kilometres down the road, Greg found me pulled onto the shoulder, slumped over the steering wheel, crying. He pulled over and wordlessly buckled Luke in the child safety seat in the back of my car before driving off.
Greg understood that by changing his plans or failing to honour an agreement we had reached about returning Luke to me at Tyabb, he would be able to cause maximum disturbance to my life. The more time he could tie me up in time-wasting effort to accommodate his whims, the less time I had to get on with a life of my own.
I can hardly bear to recall this incident now, but I was so desperate and emotionally frayed I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore. Of course, I would never have willingly given up Luke to Greg, but I was at the end of my tether.
Initially, I’d turned to friends to vent my frustration. And initially, they were very understanding and sympathetic. But, after a while, their patience for my predicament waned and, invariably, they would become frustrated – often with me. ‘Why don’t you call the police? Why don’t you get the courts involved? Why don’t you fight back? Why don’t you move home to England?’ But legally I had no options. The courts had made it quite clear that Greg had a right to see his son, and I felt that his harassment was just something I was going to have to manage.
Eventually, I’d run out of friends I felt I could burden with my troubles, and so I looked to see what services existed for women in my predicament. The act of taking the step to call a crisis line is a massive one. It’s an acknowledgement that things have spiralled out of your control. It’s putting your hand up and admitting yourself to a club you never wanted to belong to.
I dialled the number for the crisis line. Though the conversation was brief, it was revelatory. Not only was there someone who was willing to listen, they didn’t feel the need to try and offer a solution or, worse, pass judgement. They spoke with a calmness and an authority in which I found enormous comfort. Importantly, they seemed to know my story before I even had time to tell it to them. Not the specifics, because they were unique to me, but the signposts, the triggers, the hallmarks of the violence I had suffered – they were all hauntingly familiar to the crisis line counsellor. They told me of a ‘Women in Relationships’ course that was being run in Rosebud, down on the Mornington Peninsula. Emboldened by this first venture into the realm of domestic violence services, I resolved to go along.
The meeting was held in a stark room in a nondescript community centre. I sat and listened. With every minute that passed and every second of testimony I heard from the other women in the group, I felt a quickening of my heart. They were speaking my story, giving voice to my pain and my fear. They were strangers, but each one of them could have been me.
I specifically remember one woman who had been stalked by her ex-partner for the past thirteen years. For thirteen years he had called her, texted her, lain in wait outside her house, followed her home from work. She lived in constant fear of him. Her every waking moment was consumed with thoughts of him. He wasn’t technically in her life anymore, yet he controlled almost every aspect of it. And I was gripped by a dread that she was my future, that I was destined to forever be haunted by Greg and his increasingly irrational behaviour.
The course ran over several weeks, and it gave me the tools to properly quantify just how completely my own life was being affected by Greg. Surrounded by fellow victims of family violence, I felt empowered for the first time in years. I also took up riding lessons around this time, pouring my energy into my horse and focusing on something that gave me confidence rather than someone who undermined me. Little by little, I felt my self-confidence start to creep back.
At the end of the course I was so energised, I didn’t want it to end. It felt almost as if we had formed a little family who were all now expected to go our separate ways. I was going to miss them all, and I was going to miss the intellectual stimulation of examining family violence as a social and psychological ill. For the first time since I had left school, I felt inspired by a subject and desperate to learn more.
I asked the woman who was running the course how she had come into her line of work, and she told me she had studied a Diploma of Community Welfare. I was convinced I had just found my new calling. I went home immediately and researched the course. Reading the synopsis was like reading a road map for how I wanted the rest of my life to play out. For years I had worked in the corporate space – not out of any real design, but simply because I had fallen into a job and, like so many others, ricocheted from one role to another without ever really questioning if it was what I really wanted to do.
Here was a vocation that would bring together my interest in social justice, my passion for making a difference to the lives of those less fortunate and my firsthand experience as a victim of family violence. The only catch? I still had bills to pay and a child to raise. So the belt was tightened a little at home, a line of credit was sought and I visited Centrelink for the first time in my life to tide me over while I studied. I was going to go into debt to complete the diploma, and there was no guarantee of a job at the end even if I did complete it. But I was determined to do it – for the benefit of my own, severely dented self-esteem as much as anything else.
When finally I started the course, being back in a classroom environment just felt so stimulating. I was your classic mature-age student – so grateful for the opportunity to even be sitting in a classroom that I threw myself into the course with gusto. I was eager to make the most of every second of the learning experience, which was compounded by the fact that, as a single mum, I only had a certain number of hours every day in which to study.
We were a mixed bunch of students. Some had spent years working in the welfare sector or on the fringes of it, dealing with families in poverty, families facing long-term unemployment and homes racked by domestic violence. But I had lived it, and I was vocal when it came to expressing my opinions. Sometimes, unless you’ve lived through something, you don’t quite understand.
13
12 February 2014, 2.
30 pm
I’m in a classroom at Flinders Christian Community College with a group of other parents. Usually I’m too busy with work to collect Luke from school, but today the school has organised a talk for parents about the Life Education van that’s about to visit the school. One of the teachers earnestly outlines the sorts of things they’ll be discussing with the kids. Frankly, it all sounds a bit lame. I have to disguise a smirk, imagining Luke’s reaction when some well-meaning educator tries to lecture him and his classmates about smoking and drugs. They’re only eleven but they’re already so worldly. I don’t for a second think Luke or his friends are smoking drugs, but it’s a new, internet-enabled generation. There’s not much you can teach them that they haven’t already discovered for themselves online. And so I start texting on my phone.
As it gets closer to 3 pm, I get up and make for the door. I’m not usually rude like this, but I want to make sure I don’t miss Luke when he comes out of class. I want to surprise him with a lift home. He doesn’t much like having to walk home from school, which is crazy, because it’s just up the hill and he needs to become independent, not least because I’m always being told I’m too soft with him, that I indulge him too much.
But I figure he’s still only eleven. There’s plenty of time for him to find out how hard the world can be. And besides, I’m living on borrowed time. Before I know it, he’ll be a teenager and then a young man making his way in the world. Much better to suffocate him with affection now, while he’s still inclined to accept it.
Not that the pre-teen rot hasn’t set in already. Here he comes now, pretending he hasn’t seen me as he heads out of the school gates with his mate Jaxon. He’s part-joking, part-serious, because he’s reaching that age where it’s dead uncool to be seen with your mum. It’s even more uncool to show her any physical affection. So, as a joke, I run up behind the pair of them and go to give Luke an exaggerated hug.
‘And this,’ I cackle, ‘is what happens to little boys who ignore their mothers.’
Luke’s in a good mood and laughs as he pushes me away.
He and Jaxon talk about football and whether or not Luke will play up a year this year and join the under thirteens. Luke’s not sure.
I watch him with maternal pride. He and Jaxon say their farewells and Luke clambers into the car.
On the way home we joke about embarrassing mums. I think how nice it is for us to spend time like this together. It’s a good feeling. A good day.
14
Access
It’s a funny thing being the mother of a small child. You develop a love–hate relationship with the strangest things. Take, for example, the Wiggles. Luke became a Wiggles fan almost by accident. It all started when he’d fallen sick with one of those twenty-four-hour viruses, the sort of illness that hits little kids like a tonne of bricks and knocks the stuffing out of them but is gone the next day. Someone had given me a DVD of the Wiggles and, out of desperation, I put it on. Luke was enthralled. He watched it back to back for the rest of the day.
To my mind, the Wiggles were a bunch of grown men in skivvies singing mindless tunes, but to Luke, they were demigods. He knew every song and every dance, and would bug me to put on the DVD every time we walked in the door. The songs did my head in, but I came to develop a grudging respect for the Wiggles: anyone who can capture and hold the attention of a child is truly talented. And anyone who can afford a single mother thirty minutes respite in any given day similarly deserves a medal.
I took Luke to see the Wiggles in concert several times. He absolutely loved it. There’s something magical about taking a child to the theatre or a stage show for the first time: the look of wonder on their faces as they try to take in this fantastic world where relative strangers don brightly coloured costumes and dance and sing under lights for the amusement of a crowd. It was a dynamic that Luke adored, and a world that he really connected with. There was something of the natural showman in Luke. He was cheeky and funny. Even as a tiny boy he understood what it was to entertain and to make people laugh.
The last time we went to see the Wiggles together, the yellow Wiggle, Greg, had to bow out mid-tour because of illness. He had been diagnosed with orthostatic intolerance, a circulatory system disorder that affects blood flow. The announcement came over the PA before the show that Greg would not be performing. A video of Greg appeared on the big screen, explaining that he was not well and wouldn’t be able to be with all the boys and girls. And most kids stared at it, took it in and got on with their dancing and singing. My little boy, who up until that point had been standing excitedly in anticipation of the concert beginning, crawled onto my lap and sat there for the rest of the show. He was devastated.
In the car on the way home, he asked me if Greg Wiggle was going to die. He felt things deeply and was easily moved to tears.
Which is not to say that he was soft. When the occasion demanded, Luke could be the bravest little boy around. Like any kid, Luke suffered the usual ailments and injuries as a boy. There was the broken wrist following a fall off the monkey bars, an accident that required emergency surgery, which he took utterly in his stride. Me, not so much – but Luke was calm throughout.
There was the broken collarbone when at the age of three he fell out of his bed. Once again, he was stoic in the face of what must have been acute pain. He needed grommets put in to address what doctors were convinced was a partial hearing problem in his left ear (an operation to which Greg was vehemently opposed, convinced any stay in hospital was simply an opportunity for doctors to ply you with medicines that were part of some grand government conspiracy). And once again, Luke never raised a complaint.
Luke also underwent several lengthy and painful dental procedures after it was deemed the enamel hadn’t formed properly on his back teeth. The dentist remarked on how brave he was, and how most children his age would have required general anaesthetic.
So he was brave. But the soft centre was what defined him. One evening we sat down to watch the movie Marley & Me. Friends had recommended it, knowing how much Luke and I loved dogs. At one point I got up to go the kitchen, only to find Luke sobbing when I returned. The bloody dog had gone and died.
That was the kind of little boy he was – and it made me really proud. In a society in which men too often are raised to distance themselves from their emotions, my little boy was very much in touch with his. And while it meant he was occasionally prone to melodrama, and on more than one occasion would be in a flood of tears following some small occurrence, for the most part it was a sensitivity I wanted to nurture. It would stand him in good stead, I reasoned, when he grew up and was left to negotiate the world on his own.
*
It was 2006 and armed with a renewed sense of empowerment – and midway through my studies for my Diploma of Community Welfare – I decided it was time to put some legal parameters in place around Greg’s access to Luke. My previous strategy of preferring to keep the Family Court at bay, and instead work out a flexible arrangement, had been an abject failure. And so I looked to the Family Court to be my salvation, to consider the facts of my case and soberly inform Greg that his access to Luke would necessarily need to be more predictable.
I remember the day in court clearly. I had spent weeks beforehand working with my solicitor, preparing documents to present to the court, outlining Greg’s history of violence and unpredictability. At the time, I even felt bad for collating a dossier whose only objective was to put rules and restrictions around the one thing in Greg’s life that appeared to truly mean anything to him: time spent with his son.
And so we both fronted up to the Family Court in Dandenong for mediation before the court’s sitting registrar. I had instructed my solicitor to apply for Greg’s access to be restricted to alternate weekends only. I was, after all, the primary carer – and the sole provider. The constant to-ing and fro-ing from Tyabb to St Kilda was not only inconvenient but hugely disruptive to Luke’s life.
Greg acquitted himself with typical a
rrogance, intimidating my solicitor and the registrar to the point where the registrar had to reprimand him for being a bully and completely out of line. I sat there feeling quietly vindicated. At last, a third party – and someone of influence – was seeing Greg for the bully he was. Someone who could make a difference was being treated firsthand to a tiny sample of the extreme abuse I had gone to great lengths (with no small amount of trepidation) to document in my court submission.
But as the mediation went on, it became increasingly obvious that my request for alternate weekend access for Greg would be roundly ignored in favour of Greg’s preference to see Luke at least once a week. Agitated, I began to speak up, interrupting the registrar, making sure he was aware of my displeasure and frustration. Fearing I was about to be reprimanded, my solicitor quickly intervened and took me outside the room, telling me to calm down and advising me it was better to go along with the court decision rather than antagonise the registrar.
I felt cheated. I felt betrayed. I felt confused. Why had I spent weeks compiling a dossier with my solicitor if that dossier was not even referenced during the mediation? Why was I the one walking out of the court feeling like I had done wrong for daring to suggest Greg’s access to Luke be more predictable – alternate weekends would have been more sustainable due to the travelling distances?
As she shepherded me out, my solicitor made an attempt to explain why the arrangement was for the best. But none of it made sense. Not least the fact that I had forked out a considerable amount of money I really couldn’t afford on legal representation that I felt had acted more in Greg’s interest than my own or Luke’s.
How differently it could all have turned out if I had been referred to the help I so desperately needed, instead of being sent home with a court order I knew was going to play directly into Greg’s hands and an immediate future that made my stomach churn with anxiety. I now had orders in place from the Family Court permitting Greg have access to Luke every weekend. In the event he contravened those orders and kept Luke longer, or attempted to take him earlier than set out, there was no point my calling the local police, because only the Australian Federal Police could enforce Family Court orders – and only once the court had ordered them to do so.
