Memory's thump

After she died, my mother left each of her children $8154.94 as their inheritance.  She had wanted to leave $10,000.00 each out of the proceeds of her rooms at the retirement village where she had spent her last decade, but the way these things go, costs and disbursements whittled some away. 

Throughout her life my mother was determined to give each of her children something of significance, and each must have an equal share. 

Ironically, what she leaves can never be equal

For some of us, $8000.00 plus is a significant sum, for others it’s a trifle.  For some it can go into unpaid debts, for others it becomes part of their inheritance to their own children, administered early.

They will give it away.

After my husband’s father died and left a small but more significant inheritance size-wise, he wanted to buy something of substance as a reminder of his father: a timeless piece of furniture that might stand up against time. 

I have not been able to think of anything to honour the memory of my mother other than through words on the page.

One of my brothers has been writing his ‘chronicles’ about his life, which he had wanted to include in the family archive, but has since withdrawn because some family members objected to certain of his statements. 

The response to his writing, which he initially spread far and wide among our extended family, was a bit like my mother’s inheritance.  Some responded loudly – it meant a great deal to them.  Others did not react at all, or at least not in company.

Last night, I read the second section of my brother’s chronicles in which he addresses some of the contentious areas where people have challenged his view of what really happened in our family and I wonder yet again about the nature of fact and of fiction. 

The ways in which one person’s story can seem so very different from that of a sibling, when both occupied the same space in childhood, when both shared the same parents. 

But in many ways, my brother’s parents were not my parents.  All nine of us have different parents, given that our parents – despite our mother’s best intentions to treat us all equally – behaved differently with each one of us. 

My father prized the boys above the girls; at least as far as academic achievement was concerned.  Girls were good for housework and sexual favours. 

My mother, on the other hand, preferred her sons.  Especially, the first and last-born, though the first might say that our mother preferred the second born son. 

These distinctions put differential pressures on each of us as girls and as boys. 

Years ago, Helen Garner wrote a story about her sisters for an anthology on sisters in which she gave her sisters names based on chronology, second sister, third sister etc.  I have a similar impulse in relation to writing about my brothers, given there are five of them, and each is unique. 

Here, too, I try to protect their identities in order to make a point about family experience, but this emphasis on family chronology can make for dull storytelling, so the critic in my head pulls me up and says ‘fictionsalise’.

Does it matter that my brother writes in blunt words, that my father penetrated my sister and raped her on a number of occasions, both for its factual nature and that the statement seems to take it further than my understanding of events. 

Did my father actually penetrate my sister? 

Does degree matter?  My father penetrated my sister’s mind.  He penetrated mine.  He penetrated all our minds but in different ways. 

See these words on the page.  See how they disturb, even as I put them down. 

See how much the reader wants to say,

‘No, don’t write that’. 

Don’t say that.  Don’t speak of these events, they are too awful to consider.

Embellish them in a story.  Give the reader some space in which to imagine.  Don’t leave it too open-ended. 

My brother writes about his own memory of seeing my father go into my sister’s bedroom late at night.  Sometimes my father was naked.

This one hits me with a thump.

My brother as witness and given that he himself did not go into my sister’s bedroom, given he did not watch my father with my sister, but could only imagine it, he may have taken his memories to this extreme.

When we witness events, we take in certain aspects of that event and our memory and imagination then kicks in and rearranges the images over time. 

When I read about my brother’s memory it puzzles me.  Only in so far as I do not remember my father walking naked through the house until I was in my teens, by which time this brother had left home. 

But when this brother still lived at home, it is possible that he saw my father in ways I did not.

Does it matter, the truthfulness of all this, of who saw what, of who did what to whom? 

I suspect it does.  But when it comes to sexual abuse, the facts become murky, simply through the overload of sensations that accompany our understanding.

When I read about the three year old boy who went missingfrom his home on the mid-north coast of NSW several months ago and of how police later recruited the aid of Interpol to look out for a paedophile ring, I cannot get it out of my mind: the sight of this little boy in the grip of a group of paedophiles. 

In my imagination, they are a blurry group of dark clothed men standing in a ring around this small boy, preying on his body as if they are dogs fighting over a bone.

This is as much as my imagination can bear before I want to snap it shut.  Stop the images.  They are too unimaginable.

My mother was a person who could not bear to see what was going on around her, under her own roof. 

She could not contemplate what was happening to her daughters, most particularly her oldest, even though she tells the story of finding my father at my sister’s bedside and of telling him if she ever saw him doing this again she would kill him. 

She thought that was enough to stop him.

It was not enough.

My father continued to visit my sister in the night and my mother continued not to see, until it was too late. 

Even now in my family, and in the community at large, it is hard to want to see these things. 

Perhaps this is one of the reasons I write about them.  I pick at them like an old sore, and there are some who say, stop it, get over it.  It’s done now.  Get on with your life. 

There are some who might put our mother’s inheritance into the bank – just a few extra dollars and nothing of any substance – and there are others who might like to make the most of our mother’s inheritance, some who might want to use some of the talent she passed onto her children, both for observation and her ability to write, but also to fight against this tendency of hers to turn a blind eye.  

The stuff of grief

The weather’s on the turn.  I’ve seen the first of the pink blossoms out in the neighbouring streets.  My mother’s body is decomposing in the ground near to where we had buried my father but my life goes on. 

On the day of my mother’s funeral I looked into the deep hole in the ground where her body was soon to rest to look for signs of my father. As if the gravediggers would allow for that, but some part of me hoped to see signs, bones perhaps, some testament to my father’s existence where we last put him over thirty years ago.   I saw none.  

These two, my parents, united in marriage in 1942, their bodies together again in the earth, despite all their trials while living.  

This morning I needed to use a long stick to dislodge the newspaper from out underneath our car.  The indignity of it all, me in my dressing gown on all fours poking underneath the car as far as my arm could reach to roll out the newspaper that the deliverers insist on chucking in over the fence.  But that’s small indignity compared to illness and death.

Still my mother is not far away and images of her during her last few weeks pop into my mind unbidden.  When I find myself clearing sleep from the corner of my eye I see my mother’s pointy finger nail on her index finger as she tried to brush aside the conjunctivitis gunk that had built up in her eyes as she lay dying. 

Is this the stuff of grief? 

Somehow I do not imagine myself grieving for my mother anymore.  One of my brothers sent an email and called it something along the lines of ‘Closing the file on our mother’. 

Closing the file.  As if it were so easy.  But grief is at the other end.  When we grieve we cannot let go. 

I sense a too-easy ability to let go.  My mother comes in and out of my thoughts, but she is not there at the surface most of the time. 

I run into a friend for the first time since my mother’s death and she asks me meaningfully with a special tone in her voice, ‘How are you?’ and for a minute I go to say ‘I’m fine,’ but then I recognise the intent of her question and I have to modify my tone.  I go back to the week of my mother’s death and talk about how hard it was then, but for now it seems I’ve entered a protective bubble that tells me I have too much to go on with to grieve for too long. 

It was different when my mother was around and I sensed my deep obligation to her, especially in her last few years, unlike it had been from my early twenties through to more recently.  Now I am free of her, and yet it jars. 

For the past two Sundays, the day on which I visited my mother regularly during these past few years I factor in a visit to her, only to remember I will not go to her any more. 

I will make one last trip next week to my mother’s old room in the retirement village to help my sister and whichever other of our siblings might show up, to move out the last of our mother’s belongings. 

And thereafter, my sister, one of the executors, will distribute my mother’s few possessions to which ever of the siblings most expresses a need or desire.  

We will divide up my mother’s belongings as best we can, much as we did when I was little, when on Sunday nights we shared a rectangular block of Neapolitan ice-cream for dessert.  Strawberry, chocolate and vanilla in three tight layers.  My older sister took a knife and divided the block into ten, if we were all at home. My father, a diabetic in those days, missed out. 

I’ve ordered Helen Garner’s latest book, This House of Grief, about the Farquarson murder.  This is the story of a father who has been found guilty of murdering his three sons by driving them in his car into a dam.  According to court and news reports, Farquharson claimed he had suffered a coughing fit and had lost consciousness at the wheel. He managed to get himself free from the car, but his sons were trapped inside and drowned.  The event took place on Father’s Day during a custody visit.  There is evidence from witnesses that Farquarson had said he wanted to pay back his wife, and that he knew she would remember every Father’s Day for the rest of her life.  This is yet another story that ranks among the particularly spectacular examples of revenge enacted.  After two trials, including an appeal, the jury held that Farquharson was responsible for the death of his three sons. 

Helen Garner’s a brilliant writer I reckon but she turns people into characters   Should there be a ‘but’.  Isn’t this what writers do?  Isn’t this what I do when I write about my mother as though she is now only so much decomposing matter in the ground and for the rest she is a memory, a fiction, a fantasy, a person who once lived but is now no more.

My mother, and those three little boys drowned in the dam, like ghosts they hover over us.  The skies are filled with their invisible spectres. 

I cannot figure out the maths but I imagine there are many more ghosts in the sky above than living people on the ground. 

As for me, still alive, I have a day to meet; a daughter who complains jut now that some unknown person – not me – has bought ‘caged’ eggs.  We do not eat caged eggs here.  We abhor the cruelty shown to hens kept in cages. 

‘The cat food stinks, too’, my daughter says.  The food I serve the cats first thing in the morning a mixture of dry and wet from a can - pilchards and something else - offends her sensibilities.  How can she eat breakfast with that smell up her nose?    

And I skulk off to write.

Life is back to normal 

To be wolf whistled is not about you.

On the radio this morning I heard the news that two young girls in New Delhi, one fourteen years old and the other fifteen, were found in their village hanged from a tree after they had been gang raped. 

It’s hard to understand the minds of men who could do such a thing to two young girls.  

I refuse simply to dismiss it as a function of the culture of New Delhi with its high incidence of sexual assault on women, in a place where women are considered inferior, and of no intrinsic value in the eyes of men, except as commodities. 

It puts me in mind of an article I read recently where a young woman in America, Estelle Tang describes her experience of being wolf whistled and worse still of having her bottom slapped as she ran through a park during one of her exercise routines.  

Her first impulse was to run back home and hide herself away. 

Here in Australia, one of my daughters reports a similar experience.  She was jogging along a shared cyclist/pedestrian path when a man came up behind her on his bicycle.  Before she could register what was happening, as he overtook her, he leaned down from his bike and slapped her hard on the bum.  He then looked back at her with a leer as he rode away.  She was left mortified, ashamed and enraged all rolled into one.  

Her impulse, too, was to hide.  She stopped jogging and took herself home.

What is it then with these men, that they see fit to invade another’s personal space with such careless disregard.

Before I heard the news of the two girls in New Delhi, I had a conversation with my youngest daughter.  We had talked about these things before, about how strange it is that when I was young, some forty years ago, I considered a man’s wolf whistle to be a compliment, however uncomfortable it made me feel.

‘How can that be a compliment,’ my daughter said.  'To be wolf whistled is not about you.  It’s not even about your body.  It’s about the fact that you’re a woman.  A woman walks down the street and certain men believe it’s fine to pass judgment on her without so much as an invitation.’

I’ve begun to re-think my reading of The First Stone, Helen Garner's book about two young women at Ormond College at the University of Melbourne who went to the police after one of the masters at the college had fondled the breasts of one of the girls.  

In the book, Helen Garner in her usual brilliant writing style, ponders her own reaction to these two women’s response to what had happened. 

After I readit, I was left with a sense that Garner believed the two young women had over reacted.  And I was then inclined to agree with her.  They should have taken it less seriously, brushed it aside perhaps.  

I cannot do justice to the book here, but I recognise my own re-think.  

We must not brush these things aside.  They are the tip of the iceberg, the thin edge of the edge.  I wonder whether Helen Garner is re-thinking it, too. 

These events, the brutal murder of two school age girls in New Delhi – though whether they were at school, able to get an education, I do not know –  and the assaults on young women in Melbourne, Australia, in America and elsewhere, are on a continuum. 

And then I worry for the men who live in a world in which such behavior is almost expected.  How are they to rise against it?

Once again I find myself wishing I were a man.  I’d start up a campaign to get the men thinking. 

I recognize there are many men who respect and love women and who are appalled at all this domestic violence and sexual assault.  What can they do to stop this? 

Watch out for the undertow

This morning someone used the towel which hangs in the bathroom, the one I claim for myself.  I’m not so much critical of the fact that someone else used my towel – these things happen – but more the fact that when I went to dry myself, the cold wet of an already damp towel jarred and left me in ill spirits on an otherwise perfectly fine morning. 

Or is it a perfectly fine morning? 

Today I have promised one of daughters that I will help her with an essay on the topic of fear and anxiety.  

We all know fear : that cliff you’re about to drive over, that near miss on the road, that accidental slip of the knife.  Fear, actual and intense that sets off your adrenaline big time and leaves your underarms prickling with sweat and a racing heart. 

But anxiety is worse.  Anxiety is insidious.  Something out there, sometimes you know not what, sets your heart racing, your pulse soaring and all you know is that you feel a deep sense of dread.  The old fight/flight response to fear kicks in but it doesn't budge.  It hangs around.  

When I feel anxious there’s nothing clear cut to fight.  There’s nothing obvious to flee and so I'm stuck, bathed in these hormones with a vague sense of what might be troubling me but an inability to shift it because it is not what might be called real. 

Even now I can feel it.  I try to attach it to something: that talk I’m to give to a group of post grad students at the end of the week, rehearsal anxiety, free-floating fear of the unknown, but is that enough? 

I’ve prepared for the talk.  It should be okay.  Is that enough? 

For me sometimes even thinking about anxiety can make me anxious.  And anxiety is contagious.  I pick it up from other people, quick smart, especially from those who are near and dear to me. 

It’s also the stuff of terrorism, the ways in which certain people play on our fears to divide and conquer. 

In Thomas Keneally’s novel, Flying Hero Class, the narrator anticipates the hijacking of a plane and makes a plea for solidarity among the passengers.

What they will do these hijackers, he says, is to select a few of us for special treatment – cruel treatment.  Those selected will be chosen for some fault of their history, culture or some such thing.  They will be isolated and punished.  Basically they will be punished in order to split up the rest of the group. 

It’s an old technique.  Those not selected will gradually find themselves withdrawing from these victims.  Gradually those not selected will feel a sense of blame towards these others, a sense of their badness.  And all of this will emerge out of a sense of not having been chosen. 

We must avoid the process at all cost, the narrator argues.  Solidarity will help us.  Black and white, Jew and gentile must come together to avoid the divisiveness of the hijackers. 

On the other side there are Helen Garner’s thoughts from The First Stone.

‘I’ve seen hesitant people bludgeoned by an appeal to solidarity,’ she writes.  ‘Solidarity can be used to mock genuine doubt, to blur a fatal skid in reasoning.  Run the flag up the pole and see who salutes.  Whenever I feel in myself the warm emotional rush of righteousness of belonging, that accompanies the word solidarity, I try to remember to stop and wait till the rush subsides so I can have a harder look at what has provoked it.’

I too can feel the clash of anxiety, alongside my wish to belong when I press the send button to make a comment on that controversial blog, No Place for Sheep, where people can be very generous and thoughtful and yet a other times they might brawl on line about important topics and some actually abuse one another. 

But I am drawn to this anxiety, too, like a toddler to an open socket.  I’m drawn to the excitement of it, the kick-in of hormones that can leave me feeling more alive.  

Without anxiety life might become too drab and ordinary.   But watch out for the underto, or the 'under toad' as the young Walt, a character in John Irving's novel, The world According to Garp, calls it.  

Anxiety needs to be optimal to inspire and fire you up.  But too much anxiety and you wind up paralysed.  

Not for me cold tea. I much prefer it hot.

I'm out of whack.  This morning when I started to make my usual cup of tea I found myself making coffee instead - the whole coffee shebang, complete with frothy milk.  I usually drink coffee later in the day and start off my waking hours with Earl Grey tea. 

Before I realised I was making coffee instead of tea, I had been lost in my thoughts, which is easy to do on a Sunday morning early before any one else is up, including my husband who likes to leave his tea until it gets cold.  Not for me, cold tea, I much prefer it hot. 

Life is feeling too hot at the moment and my head is full.  I wondered as I fiddled with water from the kettle and milk from the fridge, why I did not know the reason behind one of my daughters being up early this morning well before me.  Unheard of on a Sunday morning.  Perhaps she had told me.  And that’s the thing, I can’t remember. 

I can’t remember either what was the question that Helen Garner asked at a conference yesterday, not a writing conference, mind you, but the famous Freud conference, one in which psychoanalytic ideas get thrown around. 

I have gone every year for the last several years to the Freud conference and each time it is a thrilling event, for me at least, not only the topics discussed, but the audience interaction.  The audience interaction is the most amazing of all.  It is one of those conferences where half at least of the audience of around two hundred people know one another, a small conference by some people’s standards but by the standards of the psychoanalytic community in Melbourne it is huge. 

I expect Helen Garner was there for ideas that might filter into her book on the Farquharson case.  The Farquharson affair is the sad story of a man who killed his three sons on Fathers day ostensibly as an act of revenge against his estranged wife. He pleaded innocent, saying that he had lost control of his car through a coughing fit as he approached the water into which he drove with his sons.  He managed to free himself, but not the sons.  The jury would not buy his defense.  Farquharson, as I understand it, after an unsuccessful appeal, is now in prison. 

I write about it all here dispassionately, but it has rattled me, all this talk of homicide and madness.  I could write about it with my academic hat on, but my point here is more related to the behind the scenes experience of being at such a conference, the shiver of anxiety I felt in a room filled with people many of whom I know, some of whom I'm fond of, some with whom I have deeply personal connections, mostly via my work, and others with whom I have no connection at all, and the odd person – I stress odd – towards whom I feel downright hostile.

I’m writing this in short hand and leave you to read between the lines.  It is one of those situations where I cannot be more specific, though I can be specific about this amazing section of the conference where the writer, lawyer and psychoanalytically trained professor, Elyn Saks, who also happens to be schizophrenic, spoke about her life and her wonderful book, The Centre Cannot Hold – also the title of the conference. 

The topic was unsettling but more so the fact that it was delivered via satellite link-up.  Elyn Saks sat facing the screen and what to her must have looked like an audience of bobbing heads and clapping hands.  She sat at a dark desk which was centred in what looked like a conference room or large office.  We, the audience, could see only her and the chair in which she sat, the table/desk in front of her, all in dark office colours, against a huge white board on a white wall. 

It must have been evening time for Elyn Saks at eleven am Melbourne time but she did not seem so much tired as surreal.  That was until she spoke, at which time she came alive, especially during question time. 

Hers was a plea to recognise that people with schizophrenia and other sharply defined mental illness can and do lead successful lives.  One difficulty among many, seems to be that people with severe mental illness are often told to lower their expectations: Go get a job in Safeway or something, once you get over the hurdle of a psychotic episode.  Don’t try to do too much.

When I asked a question of Elyn Saks during discussion time, I felt this weird collision of worlds.  I held the microphone in my hands and faced the screen where she sat.  It was like one gigantic skype session, only with a audience of two hundred people and Elyn Saks alone at the other end. 

My question, more a comment dealt with the issue of separation, which she describes in her book.  How unbearable she had found it when her first therapist in London left her, because she and her husband were moving elsewhere as I recall.  They had to pry Elyn loose.  I know this feeling well and she spoke to it well.

A family gathering from my mother's day, when she was one of the little girls in the front row.  For some weird and surreal reason this photo reminds me of the Freud conference, another gathering of sorts, where the ghosts from the past settle on our shoulders and our futures are as yet unimaginable.   

And here’s a quote from Samuel Beckett, to help you on your way: 

‘You must go on.

            I can't go on.

            You must go on.

            I'll go on. You must say words, as long as there are any - until they find me, until they say me. (Strange pain, strange sin!) You must go on. Perhaps it's done already. Perhaps they have said me already. Perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story. (That would surprise me, if it opens.)

            It will be I? It will be the silence, where I am? I don't know, I'll never know: in the silence you don't know.

            You must go on.

            I can't go on.

            I'll go on.’ 

Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable

Before I stop I must acknowledge my good blog friend, Kath Lockett from the Blurb from the burbs blog, and Goofing off in Geneva, who graced me with a Liebster award.  With many thanks, Kath.