by Doris Brett
I am showing a friend the photo for my poetry book today. I have dug it out of the old cardboard box, brimming with photos, that acts as my photo-filing cabinet. As I stand up, my foot catches on the box corner, tipping it over. Photos pour everywhere.
‘Look at you!’ my friend exclaims. She is holding up an old sepia-coloured photo of myself and Lily, when young. There is nearly four years’ difference between us, but in addition to that, Lily is also tall and big for her age. I stand next to her, looking apprehensive. She towers above me, twice my size, and I remember again the experience of living with her—like living on the foothills of an active volcano.
Looking back, it seems easy to assume that my sister’s behaviour was motivated by jealousy—that she had never forgiven me for unseating her from her ‘only child’ status. As a child, however, I had no way of understanding this, nor the depth and intensity of her feelings toward me. It was always a mystery. I saw her as centre-stage in the family: a strong-willed, charismatic and forceful presence. She could be immensely charming, but her temper was explosive and frequently aroused.
We were a contrast in personalities. I was shy, introspective and eager to please. I was also a precocious child, reading and writing before I started kindergarten and effortlessly topping my classes; none of which can have endeared me to my sister.
For me, the hardest aspects of my relationship with my sister were not the fights; they were easy to understand. She was angry, she hit me; nothing to explain. It was the everyday behaviours that came out of nowhere, outside the context of an argument or fight, that were the most difficult to absorb.
The first time I remember consciously recognising the truth about our relationship is when I was very young.
It is 1956. I have been in a state of excitement and yearning for weeks. A huge toy fair is coming to town, near where we live. I desperately want to go, but my parents are unable to take me and I’m too young to go by myself. Sorrowfully, I resign myself to ‘maybe next year’.
It’s the weekend and Hannah, my little friend from next door, is over to play. I have to go off to the toilet. When I come back, Hannah is nowhere to be seen. I’m puzzled, but assume she got called back home. I notice Lily isn’t in the house either. It never occurs to me to connect the two disappearances. Lily and Hannah don’t have any particular relationship.
A few hours later, the mystery is solved. Hannah returns, looking rather sheepish, and tells me that Lily took her to the toy fair. For weeks, it turns out, Lily has been saving her money so that she can take one of my friends to the fair.
I still remember the feeling of finding out. My six-year-old self is struck dumb, literally. I have no words. Within the shock is a feeling I struggle to understand. It is not anger, not the frustration of a child who has had a treat taken away. It is something much more frightening. It is a recognition. A gaping, horrifying hole in my universe that has suddenly opened up. It is too frightening to look at for long. So I don’t.
I continue to idolise her. It was a strange pas de deux that we were executing back then. Every now and then, the pain would get too much and I would withdraw from her. And then she would woo me back with that alluring seductiveness that is so much a part of her. She would become Lily the enchantress. Her charm is mesmeric, drawing you in, inviting you to be part of the magic circle, part of her. And I would be won over, again and again.
Occasionally, my younger self is reminded that sibling relationships are not always like this. I see my friends’ brothers and sisters, families in the park, families in the streets. When I see younger siblings pestering older ones, I am aghast at their temerity. When I see older siblings taking care of younger ones, I am lost in wonder. I imagine what it would be like to have a sister who loved me, took care of me even. The possibility fills me with amazement. Could it ever happen? Maybe? Maybe? And I keep hoping.
And it is the hope that keeps me going and also the hope that nearly destroys me.
As a psychologist I have learned about the complexities of human relationships; the puzzle of the human heart, cleaving to that which is most dangerous to it. I see it in patients, paralysed by such relationships and the terrible toll they take.
A few years ago, a friend asked me, in view of what was happening, why I never felt upset at my parents for not intervening. The question stopped me in my tracks. It had never occurred to me. I reached back to my childhood experience to try to explain. Living with Lily felt to me like living with a force of Nature—as unstoppable as wind or tide; a force beyond anyone’s ability to contain.
So I don’t feel angry at my parents; instead, the situation reverses. I feel protective of them. I see my mother worrying and anguished about Lily and I want to make it better. And I become good. I take on what is traditionally the role of the eldest child. I am responsible, dependable, nurturing. And my voice gets quieter and quieter.
It took me many years, as an adult, to be curious about my parents’ lack of response to my sister’s behaviour. The only time I remember my mother reacting to this stands as a cameo in my mind.
It is evening and my mother is supervising Lily’s and my bedtime preparations. I am five and we are still living in our cottage in Carlton. As I wriggle into my pyjamas, my mother pauses. She points to my thigh. ‘It’s a bruise,’ I venture, in response to my mother’s astonished look. And when she asks how I got it, I indicate Lily.
My mother looks at her, but doesn’t admonish her. Instead, she examines the bruise again and then begins to tell us both, in an exaggerated fashion, how dangerous it is. I imagine, from the vantage point of years, that this is the only way she can find of saying to Lily, ‘You mustn’t do that, it’s wrong,’ but I don’t know that then.
As a method of discipline, it failed fairly predictably. It highlights for me, however, the difficulty my mother, who loved us both so deeply, had in setting limits on behaviour. It was only when I became a parent myself that I began to truly wonder about it.
In the research and clinical arena, the area of sibling relationships has traditionally played second fiddle to those between parent and child. It is only now beginning to be recognised by psychologists and psychiatrists that there has been a widespread blindness to the impact of sibling relationships. There is a kind of folk-wisdom that it’s ‘natural’ for siblings to fight and it will do them no harm.
From a professional perspective, it is clear, however, that ‘fighting’ covers a wide continuum. It may be the harmless, everyday squabbling so common among sisters and brothers, but it can also be more severe. In the wider arena, the latest research shows that emotional, physical or sexual sibling abuse does indeed do harm, in the same way that any other experience of abuse does.
It is a difficult area for parents to deal with because of a natural wish to believe that siblings truly love and care for each other. Many do, but the sad truth is that many don’t. The denial of this on the parents’ part may be understandable; but in failing to recognise the reality of their children’s relationship, they may also fail their children.
I wonder too, about the part that my parents’ Holocaust experiences played. My mother would have given her life for either of us, defended us like a lioness against any enemy or hurt. She was protective to a fault. Her passivity in the face of my sister’s behaviour is even more striking in this context.
I cannot even begin to imagine the horror of living through the Holocaust or how one keeps sane in its aftermath. I’ve always felt amazement and awe at the way in which my parents were able to come out of such a devastating experience as loving, trusting and generous human beings who were able to build a good and meaningful life in their new country.
One of the ways in which they coped was to build mental walls around their terrible experiences. They didn’t talk about the Holocaust; they wanted to put it behind them. I grew up knowing little of the Holocaust and almost nothing about my parents’ particular experiences. I can’t speak for the years before I was born, but in my memory—and I
was an alert, inquisitive child—the Holocaust was rarely even alluded to in the conversations within the family. I only came to know it in more detail as an adult.
In my youth, I naively saw this partitioning off of the past as ‘good coping’. And in many ways, it was, perhaps even the best way of coping with such unimaginable experience. My parents were truly remarkable in the extent to which they managed to reclaim life after the horror. What I failed to recognise then, though, was the hidden cost of such repressed, undigested experience.
I think of my mother who was plunged into this sadistic maelstrom of brutality, death and humiliation when merely a girl in her mid-teens. Her whole family died; she was the sole survivor. She went from the terrible deprivations and dangers of the ghetto to the nightmare of the concentration camps. I am aghast at the idea of having to cope with even one millionth of this experience—and yet she coped with it all.
She came through it in a way that was extraordinary and a tribute to her own reserves of courage, humanity and integrity. It is tempting to idealise her—she was so loving and nourishing to us in every other way—that it is difficult for me to admit that she failed me in this way, in not intervening between Lily and me. And that she failed my sister too, in not helping her set limits on her behaviour.
As a child, I had always assumed that it was the sheer force of Lily’s personality that silenced my mother, as it did me. As an adult though, I find myself wondering whether the hidden legacy of all those horrifying blocked-off war years of intimidation and violence played some part in her passivity in the face of my sister’s behaviour. As a psychologist, I know that what is denied or split off from the self is often in danger of being enacted or lived by someone else; that what is emotionally blocked off strives to find an expression, sometimes through the body, sometimes through families, partners or the social or work groups in which we find ourselves. That in this way we are often the inadvertent re-creators of the very situations we fear or seek to avoid.
The years go by. My relationship with my sister continues to be difficult. Sometimes Lily goes overseas, on holiday or work, for a few months. And something amazing happens at those times. She writes me wonderful, warm letters. I am entranced. I write back immediately. Our correspondence flows like the correspondence of my dreams. I am transported. My fantasy has come true—I have a sister!
When she comes home, however, it fades and the old patterns take over.
But I realise that she too has a fantasy sister. Sometimes I wonder who it is? I have very little idea. In her autobiographical essays, Lily rarely mentions sisters. Her last few works of fiction also contain no sisters, but she does write about two female relatives in her novel Just Like That. In this, she talks about Tosca, the four years younger cousin of Esther, the narrator. When Tosca comes to live with them, the young Esther grinds a bottle of aspirin tablets into a paste and tries to feed it to Tosca in an attempt to murder her. The adult Esther reflects on what a clever child she must have been to think of this solution and notes that she has no memory of being jealous of Tosca.
I try to imagine sometimes what it would have felt like to have been an only child. My daughter Amantha is very happily an only child. It was not a conscious decision on my part to have only one. Before having Amantha, I had a gut-urge that was like an aching, for a baby. This was new to me; a tomboy who had never played with dolls and never been clucky about babies.
I had been meandering along happily, immersed in my career, with children a ‘Yes of course, but no immediate plans’ issue, when suddenly I noticed that my eyes had taken on a life of their own. Every time a pregnant woman came within fifty metres, my eyes cleaved to her and refused to let her go. Puzzled by this ocular obsession, I tried to control them, staring determinedly straight ahead as I walked, or at the ground if straight ahead seemed littered with pregnant women. But soon it seemed that everywhere I went, pregnant women sprang from trees, emerged from phone booths, bumped into me in supermarket aisles.
Shortly after this, my brain caught up with my eyes and I realised that I wanted a baby. I really, really wanted a baby.
Writing about motherhood, Elizabeth Stone put it beautifully: ‘Making the decision to have a child—it’s momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.’
It’s an image that conveys exquisitely, not just the vulnerability of parenthood, but the intensity, the enormity of the love affair into which parenthood sweeps you.
Amantha has been the great joy of my life. I remember that moment after birth when I first met her. She was placed on my belly; I looked into her eyes and—this is the only word that fits—I recognised her. It was beyond rationality. I simply knew her. And it felt too—this also beyond rationality—as if she knew me.
I still look back on those years as some of the best in my life. There was the lost sleep, of course; the fatigue, the limitations—all those things people had warned me about. But what they hadn’t told me about was the love that flared, blazed through every cell in my body—the sheer amazement of it. I felt as if I was alight with love in a way that I had never imagined. Martin and I would tiptoe in at night just to watch Amantha sleeping. We would stand there with tears in our eyes just watching her breathing.
With an experience as positive as that, surely it would seem natural to want to repeat it, have a second baby? But the gut-urge didn’t come again. It wasn’t something I thought about much at the time. Most of my friends were having babies because of conscious decisions: ‘It’s time’ or ‘An x year gap would be best.’ Because my decision to become pregnant had been so insistently mediated by an intense and primal urge, it felt right to wait for that signal again. When it didn’t come, I simply accepted that one child was the right number for me.
I had never had any belief that I should have another child ‘for Amantha’s sake’. My own experience of siblinghood was not the kind that left me imagining siblings as gift-wrapped packages with a bow on them; companions for your present child. I had no sense that Amantha was missing out by being an only child. But it was only years later that I gave it conscious thought and suddenly realised that clearly it was my own experience of being a sibling that had turned off my gut-urge switch at one.
It makes me realise again the way in which unconscious forces shape and govern our lives. How ineluctably a part of ourselves our past is. That trying to separate ourselves from it is like trying to cut raw egg with a knife. I have been shaped by being a sister, just as I have been shaped by being the child of the parents I was born to. They are all part of my story.
It’s a story I have tried to separate myself from at times. As a writer, I’ve steered clear of alluding to my childhood family. In my novel Looking for Unicorns I was going to beat the widely held tenet that first novels are autobiographical. I took care to make the family as different from my own as I could. The mother was Anglo-Saxon and academic, the father was absent. Stephanie, the protagonist, was a twin. I wanted to explore the issues of loss, denial and identity, in someone who used humour as a defence against insight.
It is only after it is published and I am swimming with pleasure in the reviews, which are gratifyingly good, that I notice the word sibling appearing in them. ‘Sibling?’ I think to myself; I didn’t set out to write about siblings. And then the penny drops and I realise, to my horror, that twins are also siblings and that the core of the novel lies in Stephanie’s reclamation of her identity, submerged in a difficult, early relationship with her sister.
Score 1 for the tenet.
A few years ago, I am brought up short by a friend who tells me that until she got to know my family, she took what I was telling her with a bucket of salt. I am shocked by this. How could she not believe me, I think? And then I realise, of course, how easy it is; that I have been guilty of the same offence. I have had patients tell me stories of outrageous mistreatment by professional colleagues. ‘Histrionic dramatisation,’ I have thought to myself, ‘that sort of thing couldn�
�t possibly happen.’ And then, to my horror, I’ve discovered that it’s true. I’m aware of my own need to believe what is good and comfortable and familiar. How can I fault anyone else?
Another friend of mine, on reading a draft of this book, exclaims: ‘What a sad childhood you must have had!’ I am startled. I think of my childhood as a fortunate one. I was a child with a generally sunny nature, an odd cross between a bookworm and a tomboy. I was loved by my parents, had many friends and a vibrant, nourishing school that I adored—Lee Street State School. Carlton in the fifties was like a village and a child could roam its streets without fear or danger, with a freedom that the modern city child is denied. I had some wonderful times.
My relationship with my sister was certainly painful and difficult. It was a defining experience for me, but I don’t see myself as its victim. It ultimately gave me valuable and unexpected gifts. I had to find myself or drown. And in the end I found myself. I was forced into the discovery of my own strength, resilience and integrity and I am grateful for that. It has played its part in making me who I am, and I am glad to be that person.
As I think of my friends’ reactions, I’m aware once more of the multiplicity of lives that any one experience takes on; of how particular each person’s memory and perceptions are. How we pick a flower out of a garden to represent that garden. How one of us calls the flower mauve and another purple. How the scent is sweet to one and sickly to another. And how layers of experience, elaboration or insight reveal to us more and more ways in which the flower may be viewed.
It is an area that continues to intrigue me. I am fascinated by the differences between Lily’s descriptions of our childhood family and my own memories. Some aspects I can recognise easily—our cottage in Carlton; Mrs. Dent, our wonderful next door neighbour who was almost like a grandmother to us; Lily’s propensity for fabrication. She has said that she was continually fabricating stories about her life, and our family in particular, in order to gain attention and sympathy. She came to believe in these so much, she says, that she actually forgot they were not true.
