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When the time to leave was nearing some of the usual panic set in. I scrabbled around trying to tidy up a little and trying to make sure I had everything I needed. Those voices just wouldn’t shut up; the ones that say everything needs to be perfect before I can do anything for myself, the ones that make me feel guilty for not crossing more things off the lists in my head. In the end I just left, Caspar’s bag well stocked and me without a jacket.

Ms. S, who I would be visiting on Friday, lives on the other side of the city, not far out but far enough to make it a daunting journey. My cousin lives in Elwood, not far from the suburbs I love living in and will hopefully be living in again soon.

Melbourne, in terms of size, is a massive city. The area it covers is roughly equivalent to urban New York but in comparison to New York’s 18.5 million inhabitants, Melbourne is home to only 3.5 million. Here, with so much distance between people, we rely heavily on our cars. And I don’t have one. Public transport is great if you live within the tram network but outside of that, you’re pretty much on your own.

By car it would have taken me 40 minutes at most to get to my cousin’s apartment. By bus, then train, then another train, it took me 2 ½ hours. That means a 5 hour round trip with a toddler in tow just to have a cup of coffee with my friends. It’s not feasible. This, along with my previous working life, goes some way to mitigating my sense of guilt about the way my friendships have dissipated over the years I have lived out here in this suburban wasteland. Now, with my limited energy and depressive exhaustion, at the very least I can be proud that I went anyway.

By the time I arrived, my cousin had gone out for the evening and I was too tired to go across the road and have some dinner at one of the many cafés. Caspar had fallen into a deep sleep anyway, not even waking when I took him from the pram and tucked him into bed, so I was left to my own devices with nothing to do but watch a television 4 times the size of my own and wait until my cousin came home or I felt the need to go to bed myself. Unsurprisingly, sleep wasn’t on the cards so I waited, studiously ignoring the voices which made me feel abandoned and alone and unloved.

My cousin arrived at about 11:30pm and I got Caspar up to see him and we had a long talk about where my life was at. It was then that my cousin told me to stay the weekend, to have a little bit of the life that I want for Caspar and me before travelling back to the suburb I feel so trapped in, both physically and mentally. And then I slept.

Well, I think.

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This is what is on my mind right now.

It is an article from Reuters which I won’t write the title of, and won’t go into the details of, because more coverage will simply exacerbate the situation and the longer this stays away from the Western press, the more easily the situation will be resolved.  Let’s just say that it is very close to home.

I’m used to this.  Getting a text message or a speedy IM or a one line email and then waiting to see what unfolds.  Bombs going off, riots, hiding out with security details. My mother in the thick of things.  She doesn’t live is safe places.  She’s had to evacuate more than once.  For her, that’s fine.  It is perhaps more frustrating on the other side of the world, waiting to get a clearer picture of what is going on.

I’ve learned to be phlegmatic, as my mother is.  She is not a daredevil, or a risktaker.  She is a practical, sensible woman.  However, I still can’t help that initial reaction, wanting to know more and wanting to do something even though I can’t.

I have a little more information though nothing helpful, so I will be waiting to see how the situation unfolds. But I won’t write that now, and I think I’ll turn the comments off on this post.  If anyone wants to discuss it, please use the contact form, or my email if you have it.  There will be no fuel from me: The media will start supplying that anytime now and it’s not helpful.  I only wish the media was as sensible as my mother.

Anyway, that’s all I have to say tonight.  There is nothing else on my mind.

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The October edition of the Blog Carnival Against Child Abuse has been posted over at Survivors Can Thrive and I read all of it today. One of the posts which particularly caught my interest was Weaknesses and Submission for Survival. The writer, Austin, talks about the barriers between her and her sister as they grew up in an abusive household, exacerbated by their different ways of coping.

I relate to this strongly. It may seem to those of you who have been reading this blog for a while now, that Big Sis and I have a wonderful relationship. And we do. But it is not always an easy one, and it is something that both of us have worked very hard to obtain. One of the many, many things that those who have not experienced an abusive family environment often do not understand is the way in which it damages all the family relationships. It is simple. The rule is this:

Divide and Conquer.

Often, I hear people who are shocked and disgusted by the lack of support individual victims receive from the other members of their family. It seems so unnatural to them. Mothers who remain with the partners who have abused their children, for example, are vilified. Unfortunately, more often than not it is unnatural, but not because these mothers lack maternal instincts, not because they are as heinous as the abuser themselves, but because they are victims as well. It is a vicious cycle. We should celebrate when someone, anyone!, breaks it, but we should ache as well for all those who can’t.

I would like everyone, next time they read a story in the newspaper or see a story on TV to wonder not at the inhumanity of these people, but at what they must have gone through themselves to be so incapable of defending their loved ones. I do not say this to give everyone a free pass – not everyone deserves one – but it is indeed possible that they deserve as much sympathy as the primary victim. (From strangers, anyway: A victim’s anger towards those in their life who were blind or who enabled their abuser is always justified. If they rediscover their relationships, that’s fine. If they don’t, well, they have no obligation for forgiveness. Their most important role is to find a way to heal themselves.)

So, divided and conquered they stand. Abusers are often subtle. Abuse is often subtle. Often, the things we perceive as stolen from children when they are raped and tortured have been taken long before, in painful increments which erode the child’s sense of self-worth along with their connection to the people around them. Their connection to the people they could tell. As they know less and less safety in their lives, the abuser becomes more and more secure. And so more is permitted.

And what is safety, to a child? Safety is home, it is family. It is that thing they are sure of; the haven which allows them to venture out into the world, knowing always that there is a place, and its people, to return to. If someone in the family wants to abuse a child, that place must be stripped bare of inhabitants.

…the mother made certain my sister and I stayed divided. With my sister’s cunning plans and my thinking ability to see it through we would have been unstoppable. The mother couldn’t have that now could she? Two kids who put their heads together to overthrow a tyrant, two kids completely different putting young resources together to survive that tyrant would have been something to contend with. There was no way in hell the mother could afford for us to be friends. _AUSTIN

There was no way in hell my adoptive father could afford for my sister and I to be friends. There is no way he could afford for us to trust each other, to see each other clearly. Together, we would have found the words to tell our mother, to make explicit that thing none of us alone could face.

Looking back, it is difficult to determine precisely the causes of the wedge between us. We are very different. Our minds work differently. Perhaps we would have disliked each other for those differences anyway. Perhaps we would have gone through a normal sibling rivalry. But what I remember most is this:

The way in which he ridiculed her, the way he made direct attacks upon her self-esteem. The way she never spoke back to him. The way she existed in the world outside our family, popular, talkative, confident and loving. The way all the good things about her became her mask instead of herself. The way she fulfilled every prophecy of failure he gave to her. The way he told her she was fat and ugly and stupid and the awful way she believed him.

The way he told me constantly how clever I was, how I was destined to be somebody. The way I argued passionately with him while my family, craving peace, left the room. The way I lived with fairies. The way the world inside my head was more real to me than daily things. The way he was proud of me, the way he bragged about me. And the awful way this separated me from my sister.

Picture this: In late primary school, I go to my mother crying. I ask her not why is he so mean to Big Sis, but why doesn’t he treat me the same way he treats her. I am crying because I am singled out. I cannot understand why. I do not want to be singled out. I do not want to be different, separate, from my sister. But how could I comprehend that then?

In many ways, abusers are smart. They are perceptive. They recognise the weaknesses they can exploit. My sister’s weaknesses and mine were different: I loved thinking, my sister loved people. For both of us, the other was the image we were battered with. Our mere presence was enough to hurt each other for a long, long time.

There is one thing that unites an abusive family, and that is silence. They show one face – one family face – to the world but within their own walls there are no real words between them. To speak would be to shatter the masks, and the masks are what holds the individuals together while holding the people apart. Our psyches can only take so much before our defence mechanisms kick in. That may sound like jargon but it is an accurate description. They are mechanisms, like breathing. They are not conscious and they override what would have been our normal functioning. My sister lost herself in a world of people, hiding from the fact that she felt worthy of none of them. I lost myself in the world of my imagination, hiding from the imperfection of my life.

When we grew to adulthood, I remained the image she was battered with. She remained, to my mind of pictures, less real than me. It took a lot of years, a lot of talking and a lot of arduous respect to learn each other’s language and find the things we shared. It took a lot of years to learn the other was not what we despised, and not the thing we should have been.

There are worse childhoods than mine. I come from a cycle which has been broken. By all of us: My mother, my Big Sis and me. I have the gift of an extraordinarily strong family which will never be taken for granted. Not all victims of abuse are so fortunate. Please feel for them. All of them.

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I admit I’m an addict.

I told myself and told myself that I was not going to post this weekend. I was not going to turn on my computer. And yet here I am.

I actually have a lot of posts in my head right now, but they require too much work with links and research to get them exactly right so this is my filler.

I’m going to write about my mother. And, yes, she is the best mother.

While succesfully avoiding my blog for the last couple of days, I haven’t avoided my computer. In my list of ten random things, I mentioned my mother’s blog. If you visited it, you would have seen that it isn’t very pretty and hasn’t been touched for a while. So I have been building her a new one. Adding many of her old Chronicles (her monthly newsletters to friends and family and even some strangers who just wanted to be added to her mailing list) necessitated a lot of reading so she has been at the forefront of my mind over the weekend.

She is 55. She lives a life that many envy and some do not understand. For the last 10 years she has worked as a teacher in many countries, some of them not likely to top anyone’s “dream holiday” list. She was in Pakistan when September 11 happened. She was in Qatar when the war on Iraq was launched from there. She was in Indonesia when the Australian Embassy was attacked only a few buildings away from where she sat in her office. She was in Afghanistan when, well, when it was as it is now: a military quagmire. She is currently teaching in Sudan.

To fill out her resume, add Nicaragua, Thailand, Mozambique, Estonia and Algeria to that list.

Are you one of those who envies her or asks yourself, Why? I know which one I am.

To paint a picture for you, I could tell you some anecdotes. How in Jakarta, when she heard the explosion and her building shook, the other teachers rushed to the windows asking, What the hell was that?, she said, It was a bomb, and kept typing. How in Kabul, when there were riots and her security detail had her and the other teachers confined to a safe house all day she said to me on the phone, Security won’t be able to keep me here if I run out of cigarettes.

She is a sanguine woman. With my disorderly passions, I am not like her at all.

Except I am.

She has the courage to live a life of her own choosing. She is generous with her love and her love is unconditional. She is staunchly independent, probably to a fault. She carries her own burdens and expects nothing from anyone. (As I said… to a fault.) She works hard and she quietly does what needs to be done.

She is always, and has ever been, just who she is.

In some ways, she has that very old-fashioned woman’s strength. A Portrait of a Lady type, who gracefully accepts the things she cannot change. In other ways, she is still the youthful, hopeful mother of my childhood. Age closes no doors for her. Life remains full of possibilities.

I always considered myself fortunate because my mother was young. (She had married, had two kids and divorced by the time she was 21.) I knew nothing else, so how could I compare, but watching the way my friends could not communicate with their parents, seeing some have to deal with heart attacks and death before they even finished high school, I thought her age was a wonderful thing. I now realise that it was her character more than her age I was fortunate in.

Many people who have young mothers talk about the ways in which their relationship was more like a friendship. I never had that. There was always a line and I think that line was a good thing. She was always a mother. But there was also no gap between us; no subject was taboo and there was nothing in my life I could not trust her with. She never cried in front of my sister and me when we were children. I never knew there might be things she could not handle.

I think that there is an obligation of dishonesty in parenthood in this respect. To a point only, but it is still an obligation. My mother was the rock of my childhood, and my childhood was not easy. I needed a mother like my mother.

Reading back over what I have written, and knowing that I have only described her goodness and not her greys, I still recognise her as my safe harbour. Even though I am grown and I know that she is human. Even though learning she was human was hard – a kind of disillusionment – I am grateful I did not have to face that fact before I was ready to.

And I am grateful that, despite our very different characters, I can see her strengths in me; not so well-formed, not so steadfast, and speaking in a different language, but there nonetheless.

It is passed midnight now and I have not even begun to do her justice. You cannot write about your mother as a filler. So I will end here, with the gratitude I cannot express fully and a song I wrote years ago, during that time when I was learning she was human, when I was learning to stand alone as she did.

Mother

somewhere
there’s someone
who means
something

maybe
she’s not all of you
maybe
she’s who you used to be
maybe
she’s not real at all
maybe
I’m just greedy, I just wanted…

woman woman
child me baby mine

last night
a roof fell
I saw
a shadow

wendy
sew her back on me
she said
that love is always free
it was
my own choice to leave
I know
I am stronger, I just wanted…

woman woman
child me baby mine

last night
a chain broke
I heard
a cock crow

this time
I have lost the game
it feels like
I have missed the last train
once more
life won’t stay the same
I know
you can’t help this, I just wanted…

woman woman
child me baby mine (x2)

somewhere
there’s some word
which means
something

maybe
she’s not all of you
maybe
she’s who you used to be
maybe
she’s not real at all

mother

sometimes I’m greedy, I just wanted…
sometimes I’m needy, I just wanted…
sometimes I’m greedy, I just want you all

Thank you, Mum, for being my rock, and for teaching me to be one.

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