April 12th, 2010 §
For over a year I was away. What happened? What changed? What was I doing?
The answer, really, is very little.
After finding university study impossible with Caspar so small, childcare so problematic, the travel so exhausting, and time for the necessary research virtually non-existent, I enrolled for online classes. I thought I’d do literature again, as a kind of indulgence, as something easier. The late arrival of my materials and the problems of the university’s off-campus software, as well as disappointment in the course structure were enough to make me give up (again) after a week.
Much of the coursework for Lit was based on creative writing, on the basis that being able to write fiction is somehow a measure of your ability to understand it. Which is patently false and just… Flakey. The ability to write insightful and academically rigorous literary criticism has nothing to do with the craft of writing fiction at all. Obviously the two are complementary, but they are not the same discipline, and neither is dependent on the other. The fact that I have already done 2 years of study in professional writing and the fact that I have already done years of undergraduate study and all this is painful repetition anyway added to my frustration, but the premise is flawed regardless. It made me think of my friend’s sister, who, after studying music for a while, stopped the practical and continued solely with music theory, because that was what fascinated her. You don’t need to be able to play in order to listen well.
But I was already at low ebb anyway. Christmas had been stressful and, at breaking point, I had a huge argument with my mother. I’ve briefly mentioned my sister’s difficulties with dealing with my depression before. My mother’s are… different. But both result in what is experienced as rejection and worse, with my mother, what is perceived as dishonesty. Without allocating blame (because she must handle things in the way that works for her psychology), it seemed we were back to the old framework where the need for peace outweighed the need for speaking internal “truth”, back to that broken dynamic which holds families with abusive pasts together. On the surface anyway. Everything nice and and neat and tidy for public consumption, with no seething emotion or pain given space to leak out.
Any discussions of the ways this created obstacles for me, of the ways this was damaging, or the ways this piled pain on top of pain were greeted with increasing defensiveness. My mother would not use that word, would reject that word entirely, but the result is the same. Shut down. Rejection. Get over it.
I need to get things too large for containment out of my head. My mother likes silence and soldiering on. Our definitions of strength are not the same. And I could not cope with hers so I returned to the only thing I knew how to do in that crippling prison: Escape. As a teenager, I left home. As an adult, after screaming, I shut the door in her face.
The result of this was the same as it had been when I shattered the “happy” family in high school. Anger. Very ugly anger. Made all the worse by the ways in which it connected to old hurts. Made all the worse by her grandson, shut away from her by the door I put between us.
So… this was my Dark Night. The Orphan again. This time, there was no walking alone in the streets all night ~ that isn’t possible with a small child sleeping under dinosaur doona covers and waking in the morning needing to be fed ~ but there was some solitude and a path.
I planted vegetables. I watched them grow. And I am better.
Relationships are slowly mended, both resilient and fragile. Perhaps desirous of apologies neither will ever give, because the “truth” is different for each of us. But slowly mended.
I turned the computer on again. I’ll plant strange seeds here and see what they become.
I am better.
In November, when decisions of expulsion will be made, I will write to the university and explain… I am better.
So here I am. Older and new. Tentatively walking in life again.
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June 21st, 2008 §
Soooo… Mum changed her flight schedule and arrived Thursday morning, which entailed a 5am drive to the airport which, living out on the peninsular, is at the opposite end of the earth. But all my work with Caspar, trying to get him excited about Oma coming on an aeroplane, paid off because he went running toward her as she emerged from customs.
After a couple of days catching up, last night I went to bed early and slept late and then we spent the day out visiting friends and family and now I am gloriously tired and not planning on writing very much more than this.
Did I say I had more important, meaning-of-life stuff to talk about?
Er… Not today.
But I do think this constitutes a Smiley Saturday post. Because I’m smiling. 
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May 1st, 2008 §
[story continued from Amnesty, Part One]
It wasn’t until after the bottle of wine had been drunk and her packet of cigarettes finished that she spoke, but I was content just to be there with her in the darkness. She talked to me about her marriage and her childhood and the men in her life as though I were an adult. I listened, rapt. She told me she had gone to my father’s surgery at lunch time and found him in the back room with the nurse. She told me about other affairs he’d had. After the first few times, she had forced herself to stop being suspicious: She didn’t want to live like that. She couldn’t leave because she loved my father. She told me the story of how they met and, looking more often at the blue curtain outside the car than at me, she told me what he had been like. Then. I didn’t quite believe her. And then she rounded on me, hammered questions at me. I found it hard to answer most of them. Her eyes were very bright. Maybe she was a little crazy.
“…I like my room…I don’t really like living here…I like being by myself…I like writing…I would like to live in England or in a city at least…Because there would be other things to do apart from sport…I don’t like sport, I’m no good at it…The kids don’t like you if you don’t play sport…I wish that you had let me learn the flute…I wish that I lived just with you Mum, or all by myself…”
“…I wish that Dad didn’t drink…He makes me feel embarrassed…He makes me uncomfortable…Sometimes I’m afraid Mum…I don’t like the way he hangs over me when he talks to me…I don’t like the things he says…I like being by myself…That’s what I would like the most…Just to be by myself…To be by myself…”
My mother took the wine from my hands and swallowed it all. Without it, I felt naked and the air outside seemed to grow thicker. She said, “We’re leaving,” and I thought she meant that we were going home. I wanted to now because I didn’t have the cup in my hand and everything was dangerous. I wanted to be in my room. I put my seatbelt on. She wasn’t looking at me.
“We’re leaving. I’ve got the money. I’ve got enough money to go to Melbourne and find a flat and find a job and the schools are better there. I can’t go on forgiving him for the rest of my life. Besides, I’m afraid of him too sometimes and he won’t stop drinking. We’re leaving.”
I wanted to so much. I was shivering with the idea. I wanted to scream Are we really? Are we really? and to throw my arms around her neck. But I didn’t. I was scared she would change her mind. She started the car. I didn’t know what to do with all my energy while we drove home and it seeped out in little choking noises. My mother didn’t notice.
She didn’t say anything more, not while we drove and not when we arrived home. She walked slowly up the stairs to her bedroom. The light was on. It was the only light on in the house. I rushed to my room and rushed to my alcove, pulling a box clumsily through the sliding doors of my cupboard on the way. I filled it with books. I went out to the kitchen to find more boxes and I filled them with books too. I crawled beneath my bed and gathered up all the brown paper lunchbags I had hidden under there. I gathered them up and put them in the box my rollerskates had come in. I hugged the skatebox to me tightly. My eyes were glazed and my room had taken on the unreality that rooms always do at 3:00am. The rims of my eyes were burning, itchy and pleasant. I was tired without realising it. My mind was already searching for a flat in Melbourne. What would it be like? Wonderful. The city was an ocean. I would be a fish, and I wouldn’t flounder any more in all this fresh air. I looked at my boxes, wondering if I should take them out to the car. With my skatebox still hugged to my chest, I walked out to the hall, to the family room, to the bottom of the stairs. I stood staring at the blank wall where the stairs turned left and waited for my mother. Maybe she was packing too.
After a while, I sat down. It was cold because the fire had gone out and I shivered. The grey walls of our new house glared at me, reflecting the light which came out from under the door of my room and from my mother’s room upstairs. I didn’t care that the walls were mean. I didn’t have to live here any more. I shivered again and then the light upstairs went out. I sat for a little longer and then I went back to my room. I put my lunchbags back and I put my skates back in their box. I unpacked my books and got into bed. I was glad that I had turned my electric blanket on before my mother had come in to tell me that I was going with her.
The material in this post is protected by copyright. It cannot be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the author’s express permission. © www.cerebralmum.com
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May 1st, 2008 §
What follows is a short story written when I was, I think, 20 years old. I would probably consider it juvenilia partly because it isn’t an accomplished piece of writing but more particularly because at the time I did not possess the faculty of fictionalising biographical events or themes in the way I do now. I think it also lacks a certain subtlety, especially in the dialogue and the lack of nuance in the depiction of the adults in the story. When I next get a chance to write, there are some thoughts I want to discuss which this story in some ways relate to, but before I write that, I will also post an excerpt from my novel-in-progress which feeds into those ideas as well, though in a far more fictionalised way.
Amnesty (Part One)
It wasn’t late but it was dark. I wasn’t afraid. It was winter. The car was parked at the edge of Rotary Creek and we were hidden from the highway and the town’s light by trees and a children’s playground. For a long time now we had been sitting quite still in the front seat of the car. My mother was smoking and her window was open. I wasn’t afraid. I was thirteen. The air was mountain blue and the smoke from my mother’s cigarette floated out through the window and into it, disappearing slowly like a deep breath. The bottle was at my feet but empty now and my mother’s polystyrene cup lay beside it. The cup was empty too. My cup I still nursed in both my hands; the golden-yellow liquid in it had grown warm. My mother ashed her cigarette and turned to me. Relaxed now.
Not long before my father was due home I had gotten that suspicious, nervy feeling. I always did around that time. It made me sneaky. I acted like a spy. When he did get home, the door, instead of slamming against the door-frame and bouncing back an inch or two, glided slowly into place and startled me. I had been in my room underneath the stairs where my bookshelves were and writing and when I sprang the steady-tray that had been on my knees fell to the floor. I folded the paper I had been writing on and stuffed it into a brown paper lunchbag. I stuffed the lunchbag under my bed. Then I hurried to my door so I could close it, so I could sever my room from the brand-new Jennings house that we lived in and be by myself. I closed the door and stood waiting for the house to fade away. I heard my parents’ voices and I opened my door a crack to see what was going on. Spying. My parents were squared off in the kitchen and my father was flushed although he couldn’t have been drinking yet; he’d just got home from work. I opened the door a crack more and tried to hear.
My room and the kitchen were separated by a huge, grey family room with a slanting roof that stretched up to the second floor where my parents’ bedroom was and I couldn’t hear clearly. My father kept saying, “Nothing…” and my mother seemed to say nothing at all. Most of their words rose like heat to the ceiling or got lost in the crackle of the wood-stove which was burning furiously in the family room. Then I heard my mother clearly.
“Alex, you had no shirt on.” There was almost a laugh in her voice. Maybe they weren’t fighting after all. I couldn’t hear properly.
“You had no shirt on.” She said it again. They were fighting.
I opened the door and tried to look as if I was going to the toilet. Neither of them noticed me. I didn’t go to the toilet; I stopped where the hallway finished, where they couldn’t see me, and squatted down still trying to hear. None of it upset me though. I was just curious, fascinated by the argument the way some people are fascinated by Jack the Ripper. I still couldn’t hear anything so I went back to my room, this time closing the door behind me. I reached underneath the bed for the poem I had been writing and pulled out several brown lunchbags. I had to open five before I found the right one. I heard a few slamming noises so I turned my stereo on loud and went back to my alcove. I didn’t read my poem and I didn’t hear the music. I heard footsteps coming towards my room and then the door opened. It was my mother and I was glad.
“You’re coming with me.”
And I got up and followed her. We didn’t see my father as we walked through the kitchen where my mother grabbed the wine and the cups. I followed her through the front door.
It was only when we reached the highway that I asked my mother where we were going. She didn’t know. We were almost abreast with the entrance to Rotary Park when she decided to turn in and park the car beside the creek. I thought that we were going to drive straight into the water. She lit her first cigarette with shaking hands and there was something wonderful about it all.
[continued... Amnesty, Part 2]
The material in this post is protected by copyright. It cannot be reproduced, in whole or in part, without the author’s express permission. © www.cerebralmum.com
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March 11th, 2008 §
So, I’ve spent the last two days in bed unwell and miserable. Yesterday, (Shock! Horror!) I didn’t even turn my computer on. But I’m getting better and here I am again, thinking of all the things that I haven’t done. Is one ever able to catch up? Anyway…
On Saturday, Big Sis’ favourite cat (her baby) was hit by a car. Our neighbour came and knocked on the door. She’d seen him slam into the gutter and then dash off only to make it as far as the neighbour’s garden bed. So there he was, lying in the bark, Big Sis too upset to hear what the women were telling her about what had happened, while B and I organised blankets and a basket to take him to the vet. He spent the weekend in ‘emergency’ and was just transferred to the regular vet today but we’re still not sure how he is. It looks like one eye is gone and but the scans haven’t shown anything too frightening.
They are a little worried about brain damage but he seems to be responsive when Big Sis has visited so that’s promising. To be honest, I’m not sure what the vets can do at this point except wait and see how he improves so perhaps we’ll be able to bring him home tomorrow. He has peed, so his kidneys seem to be okay but he’s still being fed with a syringe. I just don’t know how Big Sis will be if he doesn’t make it.
But on to other, nicer news… I didn’t tell you about my first philosophy lecture last week.
I walked in to the “small” lecture hall which held only about 150 people and heard this booming “No way!” coming from the centre of the seating and looked up to see one of my ‘babies’ unfolding his 6′ frame from his chair and waving at me. I say ‘baby’ because when I was cocktail waitressing, I had my ‘baby boys’ (19-22 year old bartenders) whom I adored and who adored me in return.
This particular one was my favourite and when I changed jobs, I took him with me. But I’ve been out of the game for a while now and hadn’t seen him in ages. Even though I knew he’d attended the same university, I thought he graduated last year but apparently he had broken his wrist and then got a Staph infection so with his hospital stay and his inability to hold a camera (he’s a photography major) there he was…
Which means I have a friend at university!
Of course, he’s not entirely a baby any more, and I’m a little older and a little more faded and flabby, so his company isn’t the vanity-food it once was, but it’s nice to have someone to sit with in the sun between lectures and also to get a lift to the train station after class, removing 2 parts of my 4 part trip to home. (Tram, tram, train, bus. Grrr.)
And it’s even better to have someone to argue with about morality and and objectivism and relativism (the subject of today’s philosophy lecture) because that’s the kind of conversation philosophy and I are all about.
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February 21st, 2008 §
After my “Meh” post about my birthday, the evening turned out to be a lot of fun. Big Sis and her B made dinner for me and bought a cake. It was just a nice quiet “family” thing but I think you should always have a family thing even if you’re going to party hard. That’s always what we did with birthdays and Christmas when I was growing up but Big Sis and I have been having trouble working up much enthusiasm for these events after years of it being just the 2 of us, and now that we’re living together they are even less of an event because, well, we’re sisters.
However, adding that new, unofficial family member made a big difference because he has all the infectious enthusiasm while we alone are just too “familiar”. So it was a great night, with just some simple food, a birthday cake (which you’ve already seen all over Caspar’s face), good company and a bottle of wine. And at the end of our meal, and my snap-happiness (because I’d actually charged the batteries for my camera), I even conned Big Sis and B into putting Caspar to bed.
They said, Yes, before realising that they’d need to hose him off, change his nappy, put him in his jammies, brush his teeth and read him 3 books, but they did it anyway.
Now, before anyone thinks I’m a bad mother because bedtimes are sacred: I know! But I do it every single day. We have dinner and then I do my mummy work: bath, clothes, teeth, books, cuddles, bottle. I’m not complaining, because it is the best kind of work in the world, but I can’t remember the last time I was able to sit and actually digest my food. I hate doing things right after dinner. The dishes get done in the morning.
So on my birthday after dinner I sat in B’s garage (we’re on a dual occupancy block) with my glass of red and digested. And it was great.
Except, of course, it wasn’t. Or, at least, not entirely.
Because bedtimes are sacred.
I spent the rest of the evening at home wanting to wake him up so we could have our cuddles, so I could say goodnight “properly”. It’s all very well to have a little help now and then, but my instincts tell me that everything is my job all of the time. Of course, sometimes being a good mum means not letting those instincts take over, and leaving room for other people in your child’s life, but just because it’s okay doesn’t mean it’s comfortable.
Besides, sitting and digesting food is now… weird.
But now I’ve digressed and am a long way from what I was intending to write about. Why am I talking about my birthday? Because today I went with Big Sis to organise my present.
I am getting new glasses!
I got my new prescription and picked out the frames and ordered the lenses. And I’m sooooo excited. My poor old broken and lost ones were ancient and ugly. And my new ones are stylish and slick and flattering. I can’t wait to pick them up!
We had B’s card and he told me I could spend $300 but I really didn’t want to do that because I knew that money was coming out of the savings he Big Sis has been putting away for a new car. (B, obviously, is generous to a fault, so he lets Big Sis manage his budget, which he then breaks.)
Anyway, we went to the local shopping centre. The first shop didn’t have any appointments for a week. Er, uni is starting! Then we went to OPSM and they had an appointment that day but I would be lucky to get even the simplest glasses for less than $300 there. So no way. Then we found the next one. They’d had a cancellation and could fit me in at midday. And not only that, but all their frames under $200 were 80% off. 80%!
So I got the coolest (yes, I know that isn’t a cool word) $170 frames for $34. I not sure when they’ll be ready to pick up, but they put a rush on them for me and soon…
I WILL HAVE VISION!
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February 18th, 2008 §
