Occasionally he said something. Usually just when I was so fed up I was about to walk out, and it was often something that seemed so insightful and wise that I wondered how I could have ever doubted him. But doubt him I did. I spent hours trying to cross-examine him about what we were doing and how the process worked. His usual response was to smile enigmatically. Now and again he’d reply, always in a way that made me think I was in a movie that satirised psychotherapy.
‘I just don’t understand how this process is supposed to work.’
‘How do you think it works?’
‘I don’t know how it works. That’s why I’m asking.’
‘I see.’
‘So are you going to tell me how it works?’
‘Why do you need to know how “it”, as you call it, works?’
‘Because it costs $170 an hour.’
‘Is that the real reason?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes . . . I don’t know. Yes. I think so.’
Long pause.
‘See, if you were a chiropractor or a dentist or a mechanic, you’d tell me what you were going to do and why you were going to do it. You’d explain it to me if I asked. So why won’t you tell me?’
‘Because it’s not relevant.’
‘Of course it’s relevant. It’s why I’m here. To fix myself up. If there’s no methodology I might as well talk to the cat for two hours a week.’
Enigmatic smile. ‘Ah, the comedian is here today.’
‘Well, I just find it really frustrating not knowing anything. If you want me to talk about things, ask me questions and I’ll answer them.’
‘Why do you need questions to talk?’
‘Because that’s how people communicate. Questions and answers. It’s been going on for centuries.’
Enigmatic smile. ‘The comedian.’
‘If you tell me how it works, how can that be a minus? Surely it’s only going to help.’
‘If I were to explain to you how this process works it would take hours, and it would not help the process. I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I were to waste our time that way.’
‘Just give me the condensed version. In one minute.’
Enigmatic smile.
I tried to talk about things, to work out where the anxiety came from. I raked over anything vaguely disturbing in my past. There wasn’t much, really, I’d had a pretty easy trot. Sometimes I’d pick some incident that had been mildly unpleasant and try and talk it up into a character-shaping trauma in the vague hope that we could then identify it as a cause, but it was always a bit half-hearted.
‘You know once the car ran out of petrol, and I had to be at a meeting and I was late, and I remember feeling really guilty and anxious, and thinking how stupid I was not to have filled the car up the previous day, and ever since then I’ve always looked at the fuel gauge a lot and I wonder if that incident may mean that now . . .’
Okay, not quite that trivial, but not much more traumatic either.
There was no small talk, not even ‘How are you?’ I would knock, he would open the door, and silently gesture me into the chair. He would arrange himself, pick up his notebook and pen, then stare openly at me with an expression of caring concern, and wait. I found it quite intimidating to start talking unprompted about my life to someone who was so clearly focused on my every word. It made me feel whatever I said should be significant, which is probably why I often couldn’t think of anything to say.
When I did get going, the more he didn’t respond or interrupt or question, the more I got the shits with him and his smug clean carpet and his smug nice hair. One day I thought, Bugger you, mate, and sat there without saying a word for the whole 50 minutes. We had a staring contest at first. I lost. He was a good starer. Then I looked around, at the walls and my shoes, and counted down the minutes. I felt like a sulking child. Whenever I glanced back at him he would be looking at me in exactly that same caring, concerned way. But eventually, near the end of the session, I broke him. He talked.
‘I’m assuming that this display, the silent treatment, is meant to show me something. Perhaps you are trying to indicate how strong and independent you are, trying to prove to me how little you need the therapy . . .’ he raised one eyebrow fractionally, ‘. . . and yet you are still here.’
I tried to keep my cool and say something enigmatic, but only ended up with,‘Um, yes,well that could be it, I suppose, yes.’
He smiled.
‘Maybe I was trying to show you that,’ I gabbled on, ‘because I have been thinking that with all the things I have been saying that maybe I’m not actually . . .’
He put his hand up, stopping me. ‘Let’s talk about it next time, shall we. Our time is up.’
Prick.
I found out nothing about him. Which was the way it was supposed to be. The therapy was all about me. My fears, my hopes,my money.
It was like having a very interested, egoless friend, who was a bit reticent when it came to starting conversations.
The best moment was the day he was late. I never usually had to wait and our appointments would last exactly 50 minutes. He would then have ten minutes to compose himself before his next patient. But one day I knocked and there was no answer. A minute later my mobile rang.
‘I’m terribly sorry, I have been caught in traffic and I will be approximately ten minutes late.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘Would you like to reschedule? Or we can have a shorter session today. I will not bill you, of course, for more time than we have.’
‘We can just start when you get here.’
‘I am terribly sorry. I have been to a meeting and the traffic has been unusually heavy.’
‘I see. And how does that make you feel?’
I didn’t really say that. But I wish I had. It was the only time I felt as if I had some power over him. The rest of the time I felt like an immature schoolboy, unwilling to knuckle down and do the hard work needed to achieve something useful.
I went for almost a year before I worked up the guts to quit, and I still don’t know whether I lacked the necessary commitment to have made it worthwhile, or if it was all a waste of time.
‘The good thing is,’ I said in our last session, ‘that I can walk away thinking that the process—whatever it is—wasn’t one that worked for me, that the fact that it didn’t work for me was all psychotherapy’s fault, and you can walk away—or at least, continue to sit there—and think that I took the soft option and ducked out, and that the fact it didn’t work was all my fault. So we’re both protected. I’m protected from thinking I’ve failed, and you’re protected from thinking that your job might not be a very useful one.’
It was smart-arse, I know, but not cruel, because I’m sure it didn’t dent his confidence in his process—whatever it was— one bit. What I wanted to say, but lacked the courage to, was that the reason I had felt unable to go past a particular point, and really open up and make myself vulnerable, was that I never felt safe enough. He was so intent, it seemed, on not offering easy solutions or soft options, and of identifying self-pity whenever it was about, that he forgot about compassion. His analysis, on the rare occasions he shared it, was always logically impregnable, but never emotionally inspiring. Maybe I’m a wet blanket, but if he wasn’t going to give a bit, then neither was I. If you’re going to try and deconstruct yourself, if you’re going to try and pull yourself apart without really knowing what you’ll find or how it will all fit back together again, then every now and again you need at least a verbal hug, for someone to tell you that, yes it is hard, and you’re not doing that badly.
Despite my dissatisfaction, the psychotherapy may well have worked. (What may also have worked was talking to two lawyer friends, who listened and then calmly and logically told me how impossible it was that I had anything to worry about. ) Six months after I started psychotherapy my relapse began
to slowly ebb away, and by the start of 2003 I was therapy and anxiety free, and once again the idea that I could ever have been dosing up on any of them seemed ridiculous.
And I slowly came to a sort of realisation of where the anxiety came from. It came from a need to be in control, to feel secure. Once I had got the things I wanted—job, money, partner, baby—I became preoccupied with the fear of losing them. I felt compelled to look everywhere for threats and if I could find none that were real, I made them up, so that I could then show how diligent and prepared I was being by planning how to meet them.
The more you have, the more you can lose. If you are very happy today, the contrast you will experience when the things that bring you that happiness are gone will be far more marked than if you aren’t happy today. Therefore, stay miserable and if things go bad in the future you’ll know how to cope. That seemed to be what I was doing.
I always got anxiety surges when I was happy. Sometimes when I was playing with Bibi one would arrive like a messenger, and the message it brought was that this could all be gone tomorrow. So with my anxiety problem came a fear of enjoying myself, because to enjoy myself was to give myself more to lose.
Deep down, I believed I deserved a good, safe, comfortable, middle-class Aussie life of at least 75 years, and that not getting it would be hellishly unfair. And yet to believe I deserved a particular type of life was ridiculous. Billions of people have died before they reach the age of five. Billions more have lived their whole life without a fraction of the comfort or opportunity I have had. But if any misfortune, either imagined or not, befell me, what would I do? Would I think about how lucky I was to have had 38 years of healthy living, full of opportunity? No. I would whinge and moan and obsess about what I had lost. I wouldn’t spend one minute giving thanks for what I have had.
I had been like King Midas—although far less wealthy— crouched in a dungeon trying to encircle all my gold in my arms for fear of losing it. Whatever the treasure—gold, money, love, life, a baby—if you give in to the temptation to let the fear of losing it outweigh the joy it brings you, then you are a fool. And I had been a fool.
Which is easy to say but harder to do anything about. Habits of a lifetime are not easily changed. That’s why I thank Ivan and the builders. By the end of 2003, our month of Sundays had wrought a benefit on me far greater than any psychotherapist, drug or hypnotist had, or perhaps ever could. What had started as a desperate attempt to flee noise had become a series of precious mornings. They had involved me in the moment, they had shown me newness again, they had been full of experiences that demanded my attention now, in the present, and so had made me leave the past and the future alone. They had brought me into what was happening, into life, into my life, and ultimately that is all there is. The past is gone, the future is fantasy, and I had lost too may moments dwelling in both.
Bibi had been a continual teacher. If she was happy she was happy, if she was sad she was sad, but she was never thinking about why she had been happy yesterday or whether she would be sad tomorrow. She was right there, present all the time, turning the parent as teacher and child as student relationship on its head, and teaching me by example how to live.
But the real test wasn’t whether I could be fully involved in the present and able to find happiness at the aquarium or at La Perouse beach, it was whether I would be able to do it all day every day. The real test isn’t whether you can find happiness on a sunny day at the beach, it’s whether you can somehow find it on a shitty day on the bus.
Some will think it’s unrealistically optimistic to think you can enjoy each day. What about when the boss shouts at you, or you get sacked, or you’re sick, or your mum dies or your relationship ends, or you get hit in the eye by a stick because your dad forgot you were sitting in the backpack behind him. Maybe they’re right. Maybe it is unrealistically optimistic. But it’s not a bad thing to aim for.
How do you describe a day? Every morning we try. We say it’s sunny, or it’s windy, or it’s 21 degrees. We say it’s a good day or a bad day or it’s the 25th of June. Each is right, none tells the full story.
So what sort of day is today? In the end, maybe it’s whatever sort of day we think it is.
eighteen
empty balconies
Number eighteen was now built; at least the outside was. We could still hear workers bashing away inside, hammering and drilling and swearing and turning their radio up, but it was at least muffled now. They still had a bit to do out the front exchanging grass for concrete, and one morning a couple of them, Bobo and Nick, were digging the footings for the front wall that would separate Ivan from the world. Bibi and I sat on the front steps and she did some naming.
‘Dadda,’ she said, pointing a finger at me. Excellent. One of her first words. It made me feel I belonged.
‘Twee,’ she said, pointing at a tree. She was clearly a genius.
Then she pointed over at the builders. ‘Bobo,’ she said.
They had definitely been here long enough.
And so to Bundeena. Bundeena had been our Holy Grail. It had been on our list of places to visit from day one, but we had never quite got there. It’s in the south of Sydney, or even south of Sydney, depending on who you believe, and it had always seemed just too far away to get to and back from in a morning. There were two ways of getting there: one by car, driving south to Wollongong then turning left into the national park towards the ocean; the other, which was more direct and sounded far more pleasant, by ferry from Cronulla. For once the route the crow flies and the scenic route were the same.
We didn’t know anyone who lived in Bundeena, but we knew people who knew people who did, and had heard stories of them swapping cramped city living for life in a national park, surrounded by bush on one side, and golden beaches and water on the other. Yes, it was hard to get to, but that was its charm. It sounded like a rustic, arty community where everyone took care of each other’s children and lay around in the park writing poetry and wearing sarongs.
It was significant to us for another reason, too. The building was coming to an end, our lives were filling up with various types of work, and Bibi was growing past the stage where she was happy to sit in a backpack and be wandered about with. She had discovered what legs were for, and she wanted to use them, which meant that the sort of morning expeditions we could go on would need to change. Playgrounds were in, suburbs were out. All up, it seemed that our month of Sundays was coming to an end. And what a perfect way to finish, with a journey that required the commitment of a full day, and a destination that had seemed right from the start to be one that promised much. And fittingly, although it was a weekend, the builders were there, building Ivan’s front fence and blasting radio music through our bedroom window—which meant our original motivation to leave home, to escape them, was still valid.
It took about three-quarters of an hour to drive south to Cronulla. We drove along the shores of Botany Bay, crossed it as it narrowed into the Georges River, turned left and headed out along the next headland towards Cronulla. Cronulla has a beachy, healthy feel. There were joggers and surf shops everywhere. The ferry station is on the south side of the headland and faces across Port Hacking to Bundeena and the Royal National Park. We parked just a hundred metres away by the water. When I say water, I assume that was what the boats were floating on. From the shore they were all we could see. There were hundreds of them, tied up waiting for their owners like loyal dogs. And if the owners weren’t going to take them out today when it was summer, Saturday and sunny, then would they ever? It seemed cruel. I had a good mind to call the RSPCB.
Our arrival was, accidentally, perfectly timed. Ferries go once an hour, and we walked onto the 11.30 a.m. exactly 45 seconds before it took off. It was more like an old floating tram than a ferry. It was smaller than other Sydney ferries with wooden slatted seats crowded close together. There was even a conductor who wandered about selling tickets. I’d always wondered with conductors whether, if you started off sit
ting at the back, and when he was halfway along got up, walked past him and went and sat down the front, you’d get caught. We didn’t try it.
Our fellow travellers were like us, all decked out for the beach and looking eager. There were caps, daypacks and t-shirts everywhere. The ferry chugged south through Gunnamatta Bay. Near the ferry wharf—which was just next to the railway station—blocks of flats crowded the shore, all unrendered red brick except, of course, for the new ones. As we moved further down the bay, they were replaced by waterfront houses. I tried to keep an open mind, but I was amazed how often it was the case that the older houses looked tasteful, functional and excellent while the newer ones looked horrible, overbuilt and ugly. There should be a law. Or at least a council that would impose some aesthetic standards on houses that have to be seen by everyone.
Of all the hundreds of boats tied up in the bay there was only one leaving at the same time as us, a big cruising sailboat. When I say sailboat it had a mast and sails and cleats and all that stuff, it even had one small sail up for show, but unless someone had a lawnmower running below decks—and frankly, why would you—it was running on an engine.
We were moving parallel to it just a few feet away and I watched one of the ‘sailors’ (really machine operators) tie a piece of string around the back of his cap and feed it down inside his shirt to tie the other end onto his shorts. He wouldn’t be losing that cap.
The sea air was crisp and clean and salty, and as we came out from the little bay into the big bay, Port Hacking, there was some gentle rocking and rolling (or, as they say in the nautical game, pitching and yawing). I’d learnt my lesson on Broken Bay, though, and didn’t try to climb up the outside of the ferry just to prove I could hack it up on the roof.
The trip only takes twenty minutes and soon we got a big view of Bundeena. There are houses hiding in among the bush, and a beach stretching wide. Near the shore a flock of kayakers paddled and—thank goodness—some boats had been set free; a sailing race was going on just to our east. Trying to wreck the peace for everyone were a couple of men—of course—riding jetskis, the motorbikes of the sea, creating a high-pitched roar ten times louder than the gentle chug of the ferry.
A Month of Sundays Page 18
