by Jodie Moffat
I like to think these teachings are no longer me, that my father no longer lives inside my head and my heart. I like to imagine that I have somehow created myself ex nihilo. I am a Chassidic Jew. I live in Chicago. I have a cat, not a dog. I am terrified of taking something that isn’t mine. Toothbrushes make me shudder. My kids rule the roost. I don’t drink and I prefer women to men. The thing is, women’s breasts are pretty nice. The ocean is the most beautiful thing on earth, particularly the Indian Ocean. I drive a manual car and laugh at people who drive automatics. I clean my bathroom tiles with peroxide. I still have never eaten a piece of chewing gum or a marshmallow. I am suspicious of academia. I am ashamed to be a racist.
When I was in my late forties, I enrolled in a writing class at Northwestern University. Despite having won an international fiction prize at the age of sixteen, despite being a freelance writer for decades, I’d decided that I was parochial, untalented and desperately in need of some marketable skills. I was the mother of eight children and spent hours every day cleaning my house with a toothbrush. I drove a fifteen-passenger van and my point of greatest pride was that I could park this mammoth with barely two inches to spare at each end on the streets of my crowded inner-city neighbourhood.
Every summer, I ran a spiritual community and an Outward Bound–style camp in the Kettle Moraine area of Wisconsin, where I’d designed, built and decorated all of the buildings, as well as played nurse to large groups of adolescent boys who came to me with things like wood ticks embedded in their scrotal sacs. I was also responsible for the laundry, which meant that I was washing, drying and folding about fifty loads a week. When I told my then husband that I wanted to take a night class, he snorted and asked, ‘Who’s going to watch the kids?’
My father, however, had taught me that if I did something, I should do it well, so I signed up for a class with Fred Shafer, one of the real gems of the writing world. He is short and has snow-white hair like my father, but unlike my father, he speaks gently, with invitation, with compassion. His class lit me on fire. During that midwinter break, my family travelled to Florida and I wrote my first long literary story, ‘The Road to Katherine’. It was a thinly fictionalised story about a road trip my family had taken when I was six in the far north-west of Australia, during which I was accidentally left at a remote water tank. When I read it over the phone to my brother, he laughed. ‘It’s all bloody true,’ he said. ‘You can’t get credit for that at uni.’
For the first time since I was twelve, I’d begun – carefully, slowly, protectively – thinking about my father and his role in my life. I thought this analysis was going well but Fred very politely pointed out that the father in the story (no relation to mine of course. I was writing ‘fiction’) was a monster. ‘Real people,’ he said, ‘aren’t monsters.’ I wanted to argue with him. They are, I wanted to say. Real people do such terrible things that their evil is beyond words. ‘No-one believes in evil,’ Fred said. ‘It’s boring. It’s melodramatic. Try and find something likeable about this man.’
I almost quit the class because there was nothing I wanted to do less than find something likeable about my father. There was a reason I hadn’t spoken to him in close to four decades! The character wasn’t fiction and neither was the story. Dad wasn’t a melodramatic figure to me. He was real.
But in the back of my mind, my father’s voice saying that ‘I can’t’ really means ‘I don’t want to’. After years of avoiding any thoughts about him, I suddenly wanted to understand my father and his psychology so my story would be accurate, clean, the best I could do. Ironically, that perfectionism was another inheritance from my father. I ended up studying psychology so I could avoid writing my father (or any human being) as a monster.
Being told to find my father’s grace and then engaging in the slow process of revising the image I held of him set off a powerful transformation. At fifty, at last, I was no longer a child, terrified of bogeymen. I could call my father and imagine his pain rather than be ruled by my own. I was able to listen to his voice and let my children hear him too. Though I’d thought I was an adult when I got married, and when I had my first baby, and when I’d married off my son, and when I became a grandmother, it was only when I was able to imagine my father as a young and innocent boy that I truly became an adult.
Ignorance — Anne Aly
As the world was bidding farewell to the 70s, I was saying goodbye to my childhood. The year 1980 heralded a decade marked by extremes of unabated enthusiasm and apocalyptic dread.
It was the decade that saw the end of the Cold War, the assassinations of John Lennon and Anwar Sadat, Reaganism, Thatcherism, MTV, Madonna, the advent of the computer and electronic gaming, the end of the Berlin Wall, AIDS, Chernobyl, the Challenger disaster and bad fashion choices. Big hair, big shoulders, bold colours and bright lipstick weren’t just the fashion faux pas of the 80s: they were the icons of a decade of excesses and the ‘me first’ generation.
I was about to enter the 80s as a teenager. The year I turned thirteen was my second year at Moorebank High School in Sydney’s south-west. The school classified us into streams based on our academic ability. Academically, I had already proved myself as one of the better performers; I was in the ‘A’ stream, and could be assured that my classmates wouldn’t tease me for being too smart. If there were cliques at our school, I was too young, or too preoccupied, to notice them. I had a good group of friends – both female and male – and was fast getting a reputation for being witty in class, though my teachers would probably have described me more as a smartypants.
There were still the occasional remarks about my dark skin by some kids, but as American pop culture saturated our TV screens with shows that made being black and/or ethnic cool and almost normal, my skin became something that made me ‘exotic’ – like an iguana or a giant penis-shaped plant that trapped live bugs and dissolved them in digestive fluid.
Most of the time I thought of myself as a fairly typical Aussie teenager, though I was acutely aware that there were things about me and my family that marked us as different, as ‘new’ Australians. We never went to the movies because my parents preferred to watch Arabic films at home, and they bought a video recorder as soon as they came on the market so that we never had any excuse to go to the movies. We never ate at restaurants because, as my father would say, ‘Why should I pay someone to cook a meal for me when I can get your mother to do it for free?’ We never took family trips to the country during school holidays or had lazy long weekends. We were never allowed to stay the night at a friend’s house because, as my mother would say, ‘Why would I let you sleep in a stranger’s house? If your friends want to sleep, they can sleep here where we can keep an eye on you.’ There were lots of things that we never did and that I wished we would do, because if we did those things, maybe that would make us more Australian.
As I grew out of my obsession with the Brady Bunch, finally coming to terms with the fact that Bobby Brady was never going to visit Australia, find me and make his TV parents adopt me, I began to imagine the quintessential Aussie family by observing those around me.
My dearest friend in my early teens, the closest thing I had to a sister after my real sister, was a girl who lived in our suburb. Tracey’s family was one of the last to build in our street. She was a year younger than me and at first I was wary of her, thinking that we could not possibly have much in common. Physically, we had absolutely nothing in common. Tracey was petite, even for her age – like a child yet to catch up with her taller, broader, more physically developed peers. Her blonde hair framed her elfin face in what was a popular Princess Diana hairstyle of the day. I rarely noticed her slight awkwardness around other teens or the way she giggled shyly whenever she drew unwanted attention. She was, I thought, as beautiful as a delicate porcelain doll.
Some time during the summer of my thirteenth year, my body decided that it was time for me to grow up. I wasn’t ready for round hips and breasts so big they strained against the fabric
of my school uniform, causing the seams to split and the buttons to pop. They were just another feature that made me stand out as ‘different’: Anne Aly, the dark-skinned wog with the big boobs. I was so conscious of my gargantuan chest that I wore a school jumper over my uniform all through the year, even in the height of summer when the mercury would regularly reach forty degrees. While some teased her for her pre-pubescent, boy-like body, I envied Tracey her flat chest and slim hips. She glided effortlessly in her aeronautically engineered frame; I carried my burden of a body like the mythical Atlas.
Had I been left to judge a book by its cover, I probably would have thought of Tracey and her family as part of the ignorant and uneducated masses who believe Australia is in danger of being swamped by ‘insert group here’. But stereotypes cut both ways, and ignorance is not something any of us are immune to if we live our lives separated by assumptions of difference, never having the opportunity to glimpse in others that which makes us frail, vulnerable and just human.
Quite by chance, Tracey and I ended up walking to school together one morning, and soon enough the twenty minute walk to and from school in each other’s company became a ritual. We spent all our time after school, on weekends and on school holidays together. We tracked imaginary animal prints in the bushes, pretending that a giant feral cat was on the loose, and inventing wild new contraptions to capture it. We went jogging in the early mornings with our dogs and swimming in our backyard pools until late at night. When Tracey reached puberty, we shared the rites of passage into womanhood: make-up, our first concert (KISS), first heels and first Cosmopolitan centrefold (which didn’t impress us much but provided us hours of laughter).
Tracey’s dad was a big-bellied, beer-swilling, tattooed truck driver who looked an awful lot like Norm, the affable couch potato from the popular ‘Life. Be in it.’ television ads of the 70s. Her mum had regular perms, wore a bikini and laughed at her husband’s lame jokes. Her younger brother was in the same year as my brother and they too became inseparable, often passing the time by having farting competitions, which both disgusted and amused us in equal measure. Our parents never became what I would call friends, but they were as civil as neighbours could be, and developed a mutual respect and affection for each other cultivated by their children’s inseparability.
Every month, Tracey’s family ate dinner at a restaurant. Not a dodgy café at the mall that served crusty egg and mayonnaise sandwiches and cold cups of tea, but a real, fancy restaurant: The Black Stump. My very first meal at a restaurant was with Tracey’s family. I got to order real Australian food like steak and chips and salad, and garlic prawns and pasta. I joined her family at games nights where we all sat around the table playing cards or board games late into the night. I looked after their corgi when they went away to the country for long weekends.
Being around Tracey and her family made me feel … Australian. It was a feeling that had eluded me as long as I was constantly told that I wasn’t Australian because I didn’t, couldn’t possibly, look Australian. Even now, the question ‘Where are you from?’ still makes me uncomfortable. I’m never too sure what to say: Sydney? Albury–Wodonga? Perth? WA? Egypt? I’ve learnt to gauge the meaning behind the question: whether it is out of innocent curiosity or something more sinister, like a poorly disguised attempt to segue to a debate about religion or the status of Muslim women. Not that I would shy away from a debate, but it gets kind of exhausting when all you want to do is enjoy your double chocolate sundae, or wrap up a polite conversation about the price of free-range eggs. I’ve also learnt not to roll my eyes with conspicuous exasperation when middle-aged men in suits ask me this question in the boardroom after I’ve just spent ten minutes speaking about the challenges to substantive equality, and developing social, economic and political participation in a democratic political system. Most of all, I’ve learnt not to focus so much on being different but to develop relationships based on commonalities: Tracey taught me that.
Teenagers lead secret lives, and I was no exception. When I was fourteen, I found a copy of Nancy Friday’s book My Mother/My Self: The Daughter’s Search for Identity in the library and it was as if I had been handed a whole new looking glass. Friday’s assertion that ‘The older I get … the more of my mother I see in myself’ scared the bejesus out of me. No way! No way was I ever going to be like my mother. I much preferred the other things Friday had to say about being a woman and how the ideals of womanhood passed down from mothers shackled their daughters.
I knew even back then what kind of woman I wanted to be, but I was incapable of comprehending just what it would take to be her: an independent, free-thinking, autonomous woman who took no shit – a disruptor. Sometimes I felt like my belly would swell and burst with all the anticipation of womanhood that was growing impatiently inside me. Sometimes I despaired that she would never see the light, destined to live her life, my life, curled up in the fetal position, tethered to an existence defined and dictated by men and mothers to save her from her own vulnerability.
I started reading everything I could get my hands on about feminism. I read Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room and warmed to its utterly despairing vision of femininity and marriage. From there I graduated to The Feminine Mystique and a sequence of novels that featured strong female protagonists. But it wasn’t the Jane Eyres and the Jo Marches that I found appealing. As much as I discovered parts of myself in the writings of Western feminist authors of the 60s and 70s, I couldn’t relate to the nineteenth-century heroines and the complexities of nineteenth-century social norms. I preferred reading stories about women who jumped out of planes or fought off monsters to all that nineteenth-century politeness.
I never spoke of these things. Not with my family, and not even with Tracey. I kept my thoughts private, retreating to my bedroom to read the books I kept hidden underneath my mattress. This was something that belonged to me and only me. I lived my life straddling two worlds. I could sing all the words to Madonna’s ‘Like a Virgin’ (and know exactly what they meant) and convince my parents that I was their little angel who brought home good grades and didn’t know what a penis was. I needed to do that to survive, avoiding an inevitable clash of cultures that threatened to implode my world. Anyone who has never had to negotiate two identities – often with conflicting expectations – cannot possibly understand just how adroit young women can be at slipping in and out of identities: princess, queen, slayer, diva, damsel.
Beyond the seclusion of my bedroom – where I meandered through pages exploring dangerous, exciting ideas – I lived a life dictated by expectations. As a normal teenager, I did normal teenage things. Tracey and I went to concerts and weekend rollerskating sessions and movies. We talked about boys and read teen magazines. Despite my secret reading habit, I formed my ideas about beauty and attractiveness from the glossy pages of Dolly, where pink-skinned pre-teens with shiny blonde hair and flat chests modelled leg warmers, polka dots and flared skirts.
Tracey’s family moved away, and I lost touch with her before I finished high school. I thought about her often and wondered what happened to her and her brother, and the family that allowed me to do Australian things with them without judgement. I missed my childhood friend, my companion through the journey to womanhood who knew, more than anyone, how much I struggled to reconcile the me in my head with the me I saw in the mirror each morning: the me I knew others saw too.
