The Best of Times, the Worst of Times

by Penelope Rowe

  Chapter 3

  We were very young, we were very merry—

  We went back and forth all night on the ferry.

  —Edna St Vincent Millay

  Penelope: I was deemed too young, at sixteen, to leave school after my final exams and was sent back unhappily to repeat the year. My dreams of going to the National Institute of Dramatic Art were totally quashed. It was out of the question. I would be mixing with unsuitable types whose morality was suspect and I ‘would have nothing to fall back on’ in lean years. I was desolate about this decision but it was probably for the best—the right thing for the wrong reasons. I think now that the fantasy world of the theatre is a dangerous place for anyone with bipolar disorder. I believe that eventually I would have completely fragmented.

  It is inevitable that if you spend those formative years of adolescence away from your family, a bond is lost. You experience those important years in the company of your peers. They become your confidantes, and if anyone can understand you, it is probably your friends. So when my father agreed that I could go to university college in 1964, the disappointment over NIDA receded. He had thoroughly enjoyed his college years and was enthusiastic for me to share the experience.

  College seemed like the Promised Land, free of the restrictions of school and the tensions of home. Sadly, my mother was deeply distressed and said she would not forgive me if I left home. This is hard to understand even now. She had spent a happy year at this same college, during which time she had met my father. Perhaps she had hoped that after all the years at boarding school, I would come home and be a companion to her in our male-oriented household. Perhaps, like most parents, she worried about what might happen to me out in the wicked world. (The worst thing, in the 1960s— the greatest shame—would be getting pregnant, followed by the only slightly less shameful sin of marrying a non-Catholic.) Whatever it was, it changed our relationship irrevocably. Up until that point, I think she had found me a helpful and amenable child. Now my father seemed to call off the hounds and she became my most ruthless critic.

  For, despite my mother’s threats, I left home for college. I wanted to start again, and make a new life. Prior to university, the only boys I knew were my brother’s friends. He had left home to study for the priesthood and the word was out that I was a prude and destined for the nunnery. Now was my chance to meet a whole new crowd who had nothing to do with my ‘back story’—and I wasn’t going to tell them. I planned to forget the past. Ah, so easily said, yet how impossible to do just by willing it!

  I think this was the most blissfully carefree year of my life. For other young women, it may not have been so exceptional. They may never have felt the guilt and pressure of expectations that I had felt, but for me the freedom was exhilarating. I’ve re-read my diaries of that year and they are as banal, childish and, in retrospect, embarrassing as any seventeen-year-old’s, but one thing is certain. There is no hint of depression during that year. If anything, it was a year of joyous hypomania. I performed in both college and Sydney University Dramatic Society productions. I went on marches and demonstrations, not out of any real conviction but because of the excitement they generated and the fun of cocking a snoot at the establishment. I made myself long dresses, ringed my eyes with kohl and walked barefoot on campus. My fair, curly hair was my only enemy. I wanted it long and straight and black like Joan Baez. I spent many nights in crowded, dingy, smoke-filled rooms listening to folk singers and drinking cheap port. If this was life, bring it on. In between times there were lectures in packed theatres and tutorials in tiny rooms with mullioned windows that overlooked the beautiful university quadrangle. I remember one rainy day when someone dared me to emulate Dylan Thomas’s vision of naked women in wet macintoshes and wear nothing but my shiny black schoolboy’s mac to a tutorial. The tutor was very irritated when I refused to take the dripping thing off and leave it outside the door. He told me to leave. Oh, yes, those were the days.

  At the end of the year, just before the exams, the Senate of the University announced that Arts students would no longer be able to carry a subject if they failed to pass all three. I wasn’t worried. I’d attended lectures, taken my notes and studied. I’d never failed academically in my life. But pride comes . . . When the results came out the following January, I was one of the top ten English students out of 2000, had an Order of Merit in History but I had failed one of the two Anthropology papers. I saw the professor. He told me he didn’t ‘give a fuck’ about my failure. He would not re-mark my paper. Both the English and the History faculties went in to bat for me but the Senate was adamant. I had failed and would be required to repeat everything. (It only made the situation more unbelievable when they repealed the by-law after we had re-sat our exams at the end of the following year.) But this sudden thump that brought me rudely and crassly down to earth precipitated a depression that was to last for the next three years at university. I had experienced one of life’s great lessons—I had foolishly believed until then that life was meant to be fair.

  I felt I had nothing to live for. I did not have the maturity to accept that decisions can be taken that are profoundly unjust and can affect a person’s whole life, and you cannot do anything about it. There is no guarantee that after bad luck will come good luck. There is just luck. As it is now succinctly put, ‘shit happens’. I lost that wonderful, first-year confidence. I also lost my scholarship and had to go home. My mother would not speak to me except to state that, as she had foretold, leaving home, going to college and mixing with university types were the reasons for my failure. My father was more understanding, telling me how he had once failed an important exam, but my mother’s attitude spread throughout the house, poisoning the atmosphere, so the whole family gradually became angry with me. Any time I was at home was like a nightmare. If I passed someone on the stairs, I was not acknowledged either by word or gesture. I had become a non-person to them and to myself. I hid if I heard footsteps so that I would not have to face such blatant rejection.

  I found it increasingly hard to rise in the mornings. I would be awake but burdened by such profound inertia that I felt paralysed. This infuriated my father. Had I not learned my lesson about laziness and selfishness? On one occasion he strode into my room and poured a jug of water over me. It was a personal invasion. I can still remember the breathtaking shock of it. After that I would roll off the bed early every morning and hide in the cupboard so that if he looked in my room he would think I was up.

  The only safe place I found in which I could try to work myself out was a series of new notebooks that I started to keep from then on, quite different from the girlish recounting of dates, movies, best friends and small disappointments that I had recorded before. Re-reading them now, I come across the sinister sentences and phrases that send me back to the awful places my mind went to in those years.

  Saturday, 21st. A week of horror and bleak despair ends and I pray that tomorrow things will look up. I am too disheartened to write.

  Monday, 3rd. After midnight and I am writing in the dark. I never thought it would come to this—complete and utter desolation of heart and mind and body and spirit. Who am I?

  Friday, 11th. So weary. No spontaneity, no freedom. The bars are as close about me as ever. I’m in prison. If only I could scream and scream until someone hears and comes to release me.

  Sunday, 15th. Why this tension, depression and tears all the time?

  I don’t know what’s going on with me but I’m lonely, lost, afraid. How do I find equanimity inside myself? I only have to hope that some time—near or distant—everything will become clear. I sometimes think I’m cracking up.

  ‘Somewhere among the great rocks on the scarce grass

  Birds cry, they cry their loneliness.

  Even the sunlight can be lonely here,

  Even hot noon is lonely.’(Yeats. The Dreaming of the Bones.)

  With my scholarship restored after I had passed my repeat exams, I returned to college but nothing was the same. I
had a room on the top floor in the old part of the building, overlooking the gravel drive, and I went into hibernation. The room matched my mood because it was dark and gloomy and isolated. I did not seek out or want interaction with others. In my corner eerie I could hide. The morning inertia became worse. I now know that, clinically, it can signify deep depression. I could not get up until the early afternoon. I just lay in bed, awake but helpless, as if a heavy, unseen weight— perhaps like an invisible car airbag—was pinning me remorselessly down, until slowly, slowly the weight would lift a fraction and I could finally get up, shower and go to afternoon lectures. This pattern meant that I missed breakfast and lunch but I never felt hungry.

  This vulnerability and loneliness led me on to a path that was to alter my life dramatically, but if I had not taken it I would not have my three wonderful daughters. I met the person who, I thought, met all my needs. My husband-to-be was lithe and confident and carefree, and he said he loved me. He wanted to care for me. At last I had found a person who seemed to find me exceptional and I clung to him for grim death. I fell in love with his large family, too. Their home was full of life, exchanges of views, arguments that blew up and were over in a flash; there was a constant stream of callers and everyone was welcome around the dinner table. I sensed warmth and love and wanted to be included in it. It was a seductive, perfect environment.

  It was an intensely emotional relationship on my part, and I was not able to find a balance in how I handled it. It was either floods of tears or laughter and high spirits. As time went by, the high spirits became less and less frequent. I needed him to be my mainstay and anchor because I had lost any sense that I could provide myself with confidence and security. It did not help that, for the four years we were going out before we married, he was not permitted to come into my family home. Don’t ask why. There is simply no answer. I suspect that his own self-esteem and confidence must have taken a huge battering but he never allowed this to show. It amazes me now that he stuck around—a carefree, hopeful young man saddled with a needy, depressed girl, and denigrated and refused entry to her home for no good reason. If he had kept a diary over these years, it would indeed make interesting reading!

  But re-reading my notebooks of those years is tedious and disheartening enough. The very words—hardly paeans of praise and contentment—should have been warning that the danger signals were clanging loud and clear, but I could not afford to face up to them and lose the modicum of security I had found. I needed to be ‘in love’ because I felt I had nothing else, and here was someone who didn’t see me as a worthless person. The mistake was—and so many of us make it—in thinking that in time the perfect side, the real side, of the partner will emerge. I did not know then that what you see is what you get. I just grabbed and hung to my lifeline as tight as I could.

  Wednesday, 18th. What a night. Lost on the ice. Confusion, loneliness.despair. Why go on? Am I really a total failure? Have I really wrecked my life and any potential I had? They say so. I don’t know anything anymore. Is there anyone to turn to? How do I find them? Can’t someone help? I’m so scared.

  Monday, 23rd. Wonder if I am being dishonest not saying how confused, distorted, distressed I so often feel. Suicidal even. And the elusive desire to give in—that’s the worst part. To just let go.

  It is so easy in retrospect to see how we set ourselves up for disaster, but at the time we thought we could live on love—that although we were penniless we would get by, that we were unique in our love. A year after I graduated, we decided to marry. It was not the happy occasion it should have been although I put a good face on it. My mother told me I was throwing away my life. Perhaps it was her way of trying to alert me to the fact that hers had been very hard and demanding and she didn’t want me tied down and saddled with a gaggle of children so early in my life (I was 23). I don’t know. My decision and the ensuing atmosphere caused terrible outbursts within my family. One of my young brothers even assaulted me, crying out that I was destroying the family, making everyone miserable. My mother, once more and, with even more feeling, told me she would never forgive me, and sadly she never did. It made my escape from this environment all the more urgent. I still could not (and still don’t) understand what I had ever done that was so wrong to deserve such opprobrium. I wondered how I would survive if I didn’t get away. Marriage had to be my salvation.

  When I became pregnant six months or so later, I was overjoyed. I revelled in the whole process and had never felt better, either physically or emotionally. There was an evenness of emotions that I had not experienced before—no highs, no lows, just calm and peace. I prepared like an Olympic athlete for the birth and, after the experience of five brothers, I longed for a daughter. Through the Women’s Electoral Lobby we found the name of a doctor who would allow my husband to be with me during labour (because the husband’s presence was quite a new phenomenon then) and all the preparation paid off. It was a long labour and a drug-free natural childbirth. My overwhelming memory was how primitive, intense and earthy it all was—civilisation stripped away, nature exposed in all its violence and immutability. It seemed impossible that my body could produce such power. With absolute clarity, I remember the few minutes of the actual birth. ‘First hair-cut,’ said the doctor as the baby’s dark hair streamed down and out of the birth canal. A long, hard push and the head was delivered, a pause as the cord was disentangled from around the neck, then the rest of the little body slipped free. If I were a tennis player or sportsperson I would have punched the air and screamed ‘YES!’. Instead, I bent down and lifted my baby up towards me. ‘Welcome to the world, little one. I promise I’ll look after you always,’ I said. Jessica was born.

  A short time after the birth, we were offered the rent-free loan of a house high on a hill above one of the most beautiful northern beaches. Under different circumstances, this would have been like having a prolonged beach holiday. But there were things I had no idea of then. I did not know that having a baby and moving house are high on the list of the most stressful events in anyone’s life, along with death and divorce. At the time, the prospect of saving on rent was uppermost in our minds. Besides, it would have seemed churlish to refuse the generous, well-intentioned offer. Unfortunately, it meant my husband had long hours of driving to his workplace on the other side of Sydney, leaving early and coming home late. He was tired, I was tired and Jessica behaved like any baby— demanding, voraciously hungry, wakeful when I longed for sleep. The lure of the famous beach held no joy as the house was several kilometres from it, up a very steep, winding road, and there was no public transport. Further along the plateau was a tiny cluster of shops to which a nursing sister came once a week. She weighed Jessica, measured her, checked her progress, filled in my card and that was that. I knew almost at once we had made a dreadful mistake moving there. I’d never heard of post-natal depression then. I knew I could expect to be tired to the point of exhaustion. Sleep would become the new sex—and, not surprisingly, new mothers tell me it still is! But something more sinister was happening to me as well. Once again I began to feel depersonalised.

  Day and night became interchangeable. I existed in a dreamy, timeless world, passionately in love with the totally dependent little passenger who had joined me on my journey through life, but nonetheless terrified and insecure about the responsibilities this huge change entailed. I wanted and needed encouragement—someone to say how well I was managing as a new mother. I wanted to be with other young mothers, to share a coffee, exchange hints—even have, if necessary, a mutual whinge—but there were no mothers’ clubs to join.

  My husband, after his long day and the hours of travelling it involved, just wanted to eat and crash into bed when he arrived home. My frailty was hardly an enticement to want to stay up anyway. But often, in the middle of the night when I heard the little mewing sounds coming from the bassinet that presaged a wakeful, hungry baby, I behaved like a crazy thing. I wanted help and I was going to get it. I pushed and pummelled him, shouted at him
to at least bring the baby to me. He refused to respond.

  As time went by, I started to walk all day, pushing the pram around the plateau, although the grey and dull green of the everlasting gum trees seemed to leach out my last vestiges of energy. I talked aloud to the sleeping baby, promising her all sorts of good things, telling her I would be a better mother soon, telling her of my love for her. A shadow of a smile wafted across her mouth as she burped silently in her sleep. I talked and talked in an attempt to banish a deep fear. I feared I was losing the ability to feel. Perhaps by talking I could imprint what I said on her and my own consciousness so that we could relive it in more tranquil times. I repeatedly told myself—and it was true—that I did not resent her. But why the constant sadness, the idea that fate had pulled a swift trick on me? I was meant to be joyful, proud, capable, strong— wasn’t I? I was none of these. Instead, I was depressed and growing more so, but didn’t know it. Even if I had, would I have done anything about it, back then in 1970? Probably not. Even if I had known about post-natal depression, I would still have felt stigmatised and ashamed of myself.

  Eventually even our long walks ceased. I could not find the physical or mental energy to leave the house. I sat for hours, motionless, unmotivated, staring out the window. The future seemed unremittingly bleak and remorseless. Eventually I just fed the little one when she needed it then went straight back to bed as soon as she was settled. I pulled the blankets over my head and blocked out the world. That was the limit of my capabilities.

  I stopped giving her baths because of the obsessional thoughts that had started to take over my thinking: What if I let go of her head when I am bathing her and she slips under the water? I don’t want to let go, but what if I do? What if I do? I could not push this idea away—this idea that somehow I was going to do it. Finally, I would simply freshen her up with a damp cloth to avoid the situation, but the more I told myself not to think these hideous thoughts, the more they obsessed me.