Learning how to Breathe

by Neil, Linda;

  One of the consequences of her being admitted to psych wards or psychiatric hospitals, even though we are regularly told it is ‘just to work out the medication’, is that Mum now thinks she might be going crazy. Or, perhaps worse, that other people might think she is. These doubts about the state of her mental health begin to worry her as much as her as-yet unnamed illness. After the first few days of her stay at Woodlands, Mum begins to question her own sanity.

  Do you think I’m going mad? she asks me one day in the middle of one of our walks around the hospital corridors. It is shocking to think that she could feel so upended when, barely a year before, she had been adjudicating eisteddfods and travelling the world. I wonder at the circumstance that puts a tired woman into a mental hospital where she begins to doubt the stability of her own mind.

  If it’s the word itself you’re afraid of, I say gently, feeling her uncertainty, we could always pick another one.

  To amuse her, I bring Dad’s old thesaurus with me next time I visit. We’ll find you an alternative word for mad, I announce that day as we munch on vanilla slices in the visitors’ room.

  I suggest ‘unsound’ might be a better choice, although when I investigate further I decide that for my musical mother a word that suggests the negation or absence of sound might not be appropriate. Nor would its other meanings: ‘unhealthy, diseased, or suffering from wounds or injuries’. I try ‘senseless’, but we both feel that a word which implies a state of unconsciousness or of being destitute, deprived of sensation, or physically insentient is also best avoided.

  She admits to often feeling a little foolish, as I do too, but decide against ‘foolish’ as a substitute for the word ‘mad’. ‘Rabid’ is another word which we reject. I am not a mad dog yet, she observes wryly. Nor is she, outwardly anyway, ‘furious, raging, or violent in behaviour’.

  You are prone to infatuation though, I scold her playfully as I wipe off some leftover crumbs of vanilla slice from around her mouth, especially with the good-looking doctors who flirt with you when they want you to take your antidepressant medication.

  I didn’t know infatuated meant mad, she whispers, disappointed that what she had always considered a harmless and fleeting pleasure could be taken as a sign of mental imbalance.

  There it is, in Roget’s Thesaurus, I show her, in plain print.

  Then who isn’t, or hasn’t been mad at sometime or other, she says, and if so, shouldn’t everyone be thrown into the madhouse?

  Sensing her melancholy, I move on quickly to the next word.

  How about wild then? Do you think perhaps it is better to be known as a wild woman than a madwoman? I ask her.

  Linda, I’m tired, she whimpers as her shoulders slump, a sign of a sudden mood change.

  Come on, Mum, I say, trying to rouse her out of what I sense is an oncoming depression. Just a couple more.

  Ok. A couple. Not more. She sighs again. It reminds me of her sighs when I was a child. I always wanted to go that extra little bit further while she would have preferred to stop. I understand now that the effort she makes to rouse herself is for my sake, not hers.

  Now, where are we up to again? Do you think perhaps it is better to be known as a wild woman than a madwoman? I repeat meekly.

  Not where I come from, she answers solemnly. She puts on her glasses and takes the book and reads aloud the words beneath my fingers. ‘Animal-like; living in a state of nature; not tame, undomesticated; uncultivated or uninhabited, desolate.’ No, definitely not wild. Absolutely not.

  What about ‘alternative’, Mum? I ask, surprised to find this word as a substitute for mad. Would you rather be known as alternative or mad?

  She looks exasperated as she peers up at me. She sees I am on a roll.

  I don’t quite understand what that word has to do with mad, although I know that you have often preferred alternative music to the music of your own mother, she says. Do you think I could go back to my room now?

  What about ‘divine madness’, I ask her as I link my arm through hers and steer her back in the direction of her room. Her new room-mate, Flo, short for Flower, is walking towards us from the other end of the corridor, accompanied by a nurse. Flo has just had electric shock treatment. I keep talking in the hope that Mum will be distracted from noticing Flo’s blank face and slow shuffle.

  ‘Divine madness’. As in ‘fervent with poetic or divine inspiration’? Or would you prefer to be ‘stupefied with astonishment, fear or suffering’ rather than mad?

  I walk slower so that Flo can get settled into her bed before Mum reaches her room. Last time Flo got the treatment she didn’t remember Mum for days. Or perhaps you could just be carried away by or filled with enthusiasm or desire, or just wildly excited?

  When Mum doesn’t reply, I laugh, trying to distract her. I know. How about ‘discombobulated’? It was one of Dad’s favourite words. Remember?

  Discom – what? Mum whispers as she suddenly notices Flo’s progress down the corridor. She stops, hanging back on my arm until the procession takes a left-hand turn into Flo’s room. Up close I can see that I have only imagined the changes in Flo. What I thought was her blank stare is her usual expression and because of longstanding arthritis she always walks slowly. There are only subtle signs that there is anything different, but incrementally after each treatment we have noticed Flo becoming more of a stranger in this strange place. As has, by association, my mother.

  Discombobulated. I remember the word. I remember how it made me laugh when I first heard Dad use it, how it had sounded like a word that wore striped socks and funny shoes. Maybe Dad would have chosen this word for us now. For Mum. He always knew exactly the right word to use. The appropriate word that might lift us out of pessimism and gloom. Meaning ‘confused or disconcerted’, I tell Mum.

  Mum stares silently down the now empty corridor and then back at me.

  Discombobulated it is then, she tells me, uncertain whether I am joking or not. You can tell that to the doctor next time he asks. You can tell him I am not mad, but that I am, quite definitely, discombobulated.

  DIVINE DISCOMBOBULATION

  According to Dad, there were a lot of discombobulated people in the soap operas Mum liked to watch in the afternoon. Not just discombobulated, he would whisper to me in a theatrical aside, downright mad. He could do a pretty passable imitation of Victor, the aging hero of The Bold and the Beautiful, who went through the gamut of every dramatic emotion just by moving his right eyebrow, as well as the long-suffering Marlena from Days of Our Lives, who mysteriously looked younger as she got older, as if, Dad whispered to me, she had been given an elixir of youth by the gods. Dad never differentiated much between popular or highbrow entertainment. Despite his religious and scholarly past he always seemed, where culture was concerned, to be an egalitarian man who saw just as much soap opera and discombobulation in Shakespeare as he did in Mum’s afternoon serials.

  I never really understood why Dad used to call me ‘ding-dong’ when I was a little girl. I don’t know whether he meant to insult me or liberate me. Or whether he thought I was slightly discombobulated. I was always laughing then and perhaps I made him laugh too. He had funny nicknames for his other kids as well – Pill, Stets, Cat and Pa – so I like to think now that he was encouraging me with my particularly embarrassing pet name to freely traverse those areas that were normally demarcated – by snobbery or genuine preference – and to enjoy Mum’s soap operas the same way he might have liked me to appreciate a Shakespearean comedy or a Greek tragedy. Unlike the rest of the world, which seemed to easily divide things up between highbrow and lowbrow, our family, apparently, had no brows at all.

  Around the time I first began to learn the violin, Dad gave me a book called The Myths of Greece and Rome in which I read about Madness, Furies, Herculean tasks, Retribution, Patience, and the fickle nature of Gods and Goddesses. I read about a daughter cracking open her father’s f
orehead – and giving him a terrible headache – in order to be born, a man rolling giant stones up a hill, and a cripple working in the bowels of the earth who was loved and healed by a beautiful woman. I read about a muscular, rapacious god overwhelming a young woman before carrying her off into the underworld, and how this girl’s mother weeps and harries the earth until the ground opens back up to offer her a deal with the Lord of Darkness so her daughter could be returned – albeit only periodically – to spend the flowering days of spring above ground.

  I became obsessed with these myths in my little room, which was always the messiest in the house. But even though the chaos of my room was a long way away from these other messier, more cataclysmic struggles between human beings and their darker natures, the stories still nourished me. I gobbled them up as hungrily as I ate the toast with honey and drank the tea that Dad made for me every day after coming home famished from school. Consuming words and fables of mythological history was sometimes more pleasurable than the physical act of eating itself, even though once, as a joke at the expense of my self-professed starvation at the end of a long day at school, Dad stacked onto my plate at least fifteen pieces of toast and honey and challenged me to eat them all up. I gave up after the tenth piece, proving Dad’s point that my eyes – and words – were indeed bigger than my stomach and that the word ‘starvation’ did not – and could not – apply to me when there were children all over the world with nothing to eat at all. Slumped over on the table, bloated with toast and honey, I thus learned from my father the crucial lesson that I should use my words more carefully and meaningfully or one day I might really get myself into trouble. He may have been creating our own mythologies right there in our kitchen but at the time I couldn’t see it. I only knew that reading connected me to worlds, times and spaces other than those immediately apparent in my bedroom with its walls so thin I could easily hear the television which Mum watched every afternoon in the next room.

  Our preferred forms of entertainment were not that different. In both, there were life, death, love, calamity, retribution, trials, fury, and madness of varying kinds.

  Mum knew the stories of Marlena from Days of Our Lives and Victor and his women from The Bold and the Beautiful, she knew about the trials of Susan and David from Days of Our Lives, and the fury of Stacy and Roman in The Young and the Restless. But I don’t think she had any idea about the story of Persephone and Demeter. She lived through it with me, though, every time I fell in love and, like Persephone, descended into a sometimes calamitous underworld while she, stable, home-bound, eternal like the earth – and just as immoveable – remained above ground and waited for my return. I never sensed, however, that she searched or grieved for me, like Demeter, every time I disappeared. I am glad now that she didn’t. She had too many other children to worry about. Or perhaps she was just too busy singing to notice. It was not in her nature to voluntarily make the descent, not like her second daughter who descended into the underworld – hopefully yet hopelessly – every time she fell in love.

  Mum was engaged three times before she married Dad. Three broken engagements were unusual in Mum’s time, but she was a beautiful young woman with a talent for singing, so she waited, worked, studied and sang, displaying the diligence and persistence that stayed with her all her life. The first two engagements, in her early twenties, seemed to have been explained away by the admission that she was ‘young and didn’t know any better’ and was just marking time until she met the boy I always suspected figured in her dreams as the ‘lost love of her life’ – a country boy called Damien. With his lean, lanky, movie star looks, Damien was the perfect physical match for Mum’s ingénue beauty. They went dancing together and held hands on moonlit walks. In photos from around that time she looks like a teenager, as virginal as she was in reality and still with stars in her eyes.

  There was, though, a major problem with Damien: his possessive mother, who threatened to withdraw his inheritance if he married ‘that showgirl harlot’. The first time I heard that phrase in relation to Mum, I laughed out loud. Mum looked the very opposite of a harlot with her cherubic face and pink lips. I even searched for evidence of ill-repute in Mum’s old photos, but all I found was the glow of energy and life in her eyes and her wide open face as she threw her head back and sang.

  Grandma’s steady wisdom eventually prevailed. On an extended rail trip she and Mum took together down south, Mum’s ardour cooled. Returning to Brisbane, she ran into my newly secular father at a concert in the Brisbane City Hall. Dad was handsome, older, educated, stable, and that most desirable catch for a good Catholic woman: a ‘retired’ religious man who had been trained from an early age to be obedient and self-sacrificing. Best of all, he was not a drinker and therefore perfect husband material. Neither Mum nor Grandma looked much further than these obvious virtues when Mum arrived home with him that night. A handsome, God-fearing man who loved Mum was the answer to their prayers.

  My father wooed my mother with poetry and books, and she thrilled him with her songs and her loveliness. And while he was older in years than Mum, in experience with love he was far less schooled than she was. In photos they are a radiant, handsome couple: he, dark and wavy, she, fair and curly; he with the inward-looking curves and lines of a contemplator, she with the round, shining face of a performer. This image of the dark and light is deeply imprinted in my memory and my psyche; born from their duality, my life has sometimes been a search for the balance between these two polarities.

  They were married at St Thomas Aquinas church in St Lucia just a short walk up from Grandma’s house in Warren Street. Dad’s mother did not attend the wedding; she was too old and ill to travel up from Sydney, but Mum’s mother, who later recalled that the groom was ‘so happy he was literally shaking’, wept tears of joy, relief and gratitude, while Mum sang, especially for her new husband, one of his favourite songs: ‘One Day When We Were Young’.

  I never sang a song for my husband. I have not yet married. But I did sing one for Michael Franklin.

  Michael Franklin. I can whisper his name now and I can still hear a song. My grandmother took one look at Michael Franklin and knew he would carry me down into an underworld from where I could only return with a broken heart. As a good Catholic she knew about the red burn of hell. But though I knew, thanks to my father’s notes on Milton’s Paradise Lost, that I might be ‘overwhelmed/with Floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire’, I didn’t care. Not at all.

  Michael was not the safe, nice boy Gran might have hoped for me, but he was other things that she understood through music: a barefoot angel who could make his violin sing. We first met as teenagers in a Youth Orchestra where we sat next to each other in the second violins. He was considered wild but so talented that he moved quickly up into the first violins and would eventually lead the orchestra while I was still scraping away in the second violins or at the back of the first violins. He was both fascinating and troubling to the status quo of the classical music scene and seemingly destined for a future overseas.

  I resisted my attraction to Michael until I was, in my grandmother’s words, old enough to know better. Nothing I did made any chronological sense anyway. Despite my inward rebellion I spent my teenage years being a serious, brainy girl and only in my early twenties did I go mad for love the way adolescents are supposed to – like Juliet for her Romeo or Cathy for her Heathcliff.

  Before Michael Franklin, there were other boys who would never turn my world upside down the way Michael eventually would: a gentle cellist, a sensitive painter – all ‘nice, intelligent young men’ according to Mum. But I came from a house where love and music were inextricably connected: where each night as he washed the dishes after dinner Dad might have been contemplating whether music was indeed the food of love while Mum swept the kitchen floor and put away the plates as she sang another one of her favourite Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes.

  Even then I was more interested in words and music I h
adn’t heard yet than those my parents sang but I still tried to be brave and follow my star. And I clung very close to my destiny when I thought it had arrived in the wiry, kinetic form of Michael Franklin and his red and golden violin. Although I was upended by passion, we both gave up things to be together: he abandoned his classical music future and while I did not have the brilliant future he did, I abandoned mine too. He began to compose and perform original music and I began to write my own words and songs. We played and moved around the country together, south and then north again; we even formed a band together. We survived a few mad chaotic years during which I used to dream I could hear my grandmother’s voice calling down to me from the safe, serene, unchanging world above: Mark my words, my dear girl, it will all end in tears. Which it did.

  I haven’t cried over Michael Franklin for a long time, but I’m still shaken when I encounter him one morning on the footpath in West End outside a pub where we used to play in a band. I’m in West End to track down a treadmill for Mum from the Trading Post. Because she can’t walk easily now she’s had to give up her morning walk and really misses her daily exercise. The treadmill is to help her keep fit and this excursion in search of second-hand bargains is not my first on her behalf.

  I haven’t visited the area since Michael and I parted. I left town to start all over in Sydney while he ended up back in West End, married with a child. West End suits Michael. It used to be a working class area, where artists and druggies and other desperados hung out. But during the last decade, West End has developed like a lot of suburbs close to the heart of the city. Now the old pub where we once played, which used to smell of piss and vomit, is a bistro with an ‘entertainment area’, a menu artfully drawn in coloured chalk on a decorated blackboard, and outdoor seating under tasteful awnings.