Three bears, cults and extraversion

I made up a bowl of porridge for my daughter this morning, the easy stuff out of a sachet, with two minutes in the microwave instead of one and a half, given I had put in too much milk.  My daughter was in a rush for work and I was trying to help her get out the door in time. 

The porridge at first was too sloppy and therefore needed more time in the microwave and then when she did not eat it immediately it became too lumpy.

 

I think of those three bears, and Goldilocks’s desire that things – chair, porridge, bed – be just right.

I did another Myers Briggs test this week and came out with a slightly different score from the first time I’d tried it. 

I’m sure this is not the official test but it’s one that’s free to try on line. 

My daughter reckons I should take the results of the first test seriously, at least more seriously than later results because by the second and third times I was likely to answer less honestly given I could anticipate the questions.  

Funny questions like: after you have been socializing heavily do you prefer to spend time alone.

 

Well, yes and no.  I can manage more company after a I’ve been with a crowd but equally there are times when I’d like some quiet time. 

This is why I dislike these tests so much.  They tend to demand 'yes' or 'no' answers and therefore become reductive. 

I know the test managers ask the same questions in reverse order to try to trick the truth out of you but I suspect people can become test-savvy and answer in whatever way they feel might best suit their purposes. 

These tests to me are like horoscopes.  You go along with whatever suits you – namely the positive interpretations, and ignore the rest.

I came out as Extravert 78%, Intuitive 38%, Feeling 62 % and Judging 22%.

At a glance, I’m not much of a judge.  The other results don’t surprise me so much.

I have my third Christmas party this afternoon, and my last bar Christmas day on Monday evening.  I haven’t done too badly.  I do not yet feel overwhelmed by the sense of excess this time of year brings. 

Shades of the question I quoted above from the Myers Briggs test.  That one is to root out the introverts,  I'm sure.  

 

My husband and at least one of our daughters are so-called introverts.  My older sister reckons a person on the introversion scale a la Myers Briggs, is simply one who derives energy from their own company, from quiet times.  While an extravert is a person who derives energy from time spent with others. 

I’d like to think I derive energy from both sources and to an extent I suspect we all do.  But it’s true, I prefer the company of others to total and prolonged solitude.

When I was a school girl we went on retreats once a year.  A week or maybe three to five days during the school day dedicated to prayer.  I pretended to enjoy those days.  The imposed silence. 

During retreats there were times when we sat in chapel together and a nun read to us or the priest held  Mass or benediction, something that involved noise, voices, or better still singing, but then later we were meant to make our own entertainment, namely in the form of more prayers and contemplation.

 

I can see us now, thirty or so fifteen-year-old girls, our missals in hand wandering around the gardens of Vaucluse Convent ostensibly in deep contemplation.

 

The more outgoing girls caught one another’s gaze and burst into fits of giggling.  The nun in charge who stalked around behind the rose bushes offered an unspoken reproach and silence prevailed again.

I longed for the hours to pass.  It felt as though I had been tied in a strait jacket and could not move my arms.  I should have known from this experience that I would never make a nun. 

Nuns take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.  All three would have been impossible for me, and yet there was a time in my life when I contemplated taking on such a life, out of love for my favourite teacher, whom I once decided I had wanted to emulate.  Even if it meant hours of imposed silence and a pretense – for me at least – of prayer.  

This nun has since left the convent but not before I gave up on that particular vocation. 

The other day I listened to Phillip Adams during his radio program Late Night Live on the topic of cults.  Apparently there is a group of people in London who were arrested.  Three women had been held in enforced captivity for thirty years, one of whom must have been born into slavery.  Apparently they are part of a cult. 

Their story fascinates me but the discussion of cults fascinates me even more.  One speaker made the point that if you get a group of people together and keep them separate from outside influences for long enough they can begin to develop kooky ideas. 

Madness breeds out of too much introversion, though equally there is the opposite madness, that of the mob. 

It all comes down to balance I suppose, a bit like my daughter’s porridge this morning: not too runny, not too firm.  

The truth is a slippery fish

Saint Patrick’s Day and my mind goes to two things.  First the soup we will have for dinner tonight, leak and potato with toasted bread and butter.  It’s a tradition we built up over the years mostly because most of us in this family enjoy the soup, one of my husband's specialities. 

He found the recipe in one of those newsagent’s cook books that came out years ago, one that specialises in Italian cooking.  This Women’s Weekly cook book, or is it from New Idea, a magazine my husband likes to re-name No Idea as a joke in honour of his perception of the magazine's mindlessness?  Except for its recipes, the Italian cook book offers simple tasty delights, including the soup, which we eat on Saint Patrick’s day, in spite of the fact it's called Saint Joseph’s Day soup in Italy.

My mind then pitches back to the Saint Patrick’s Day march of years gone by, in the days when I felt proud to be a Catholic.  One day a year as close to Saint Patrick’s Day as possible, we school children marched along Collins street, which the police had cordoned off and every school sent a cohort of boys and girls to represent them. 

We marched in order of schools, presumably based on the age of the school.  Saint Patrick’s College, my older brothers’ school, a Jesuit school then located in East Melbourne near the cathedral, now no more, came in first, and my school, Vaucluse Convent, run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus, once in Darlington Parade Richmond and also now no more, came in second. 

The school captains held the banners high in front of every group and Archbishop Simonds, who took over from the famous Daniel Mannix, led the procession in his black cathedral car.

It’s timely I should be writing this now on Saint Patrick's Day and after they have just elected another Pope.  I no longer feel proud of my catholic inheritance.  I disowned it long ago in a manner of speaking, not that you can ever disown your past.  It’s there with you forever whether you like it or not.  However, it is possible to learn from the past and not hold yourself responsible for things that you were born into, things not of your own making.  

At least that’s how I see it now and that’s why I’m troubled by this idea I’ve seen on Face Book and in other parts of social media that go on about un-baptising yourself or excommunicating yourself to be freed from responsibility for the wrongdoings of certain members of the church .

I see no need, largely because I imagine the whole thing of baptism and belief is a construction, a thing that is human made and therefore able to be reconstructed in any way we see fit, simply through an internal decision to stay or to leave. 

Of course any belief system can be dangerous if its endowed with supernatural powers and when the powers-that-be encourage the young, naïve and innocent to take beliefs on board as gospel truths.  Hopefully, most of us learn to modify our views on such dogma soon enough,  though when I was young, very young, right up until my adolescence I took my religion on board as the ‘truth’. 

Now I think of  the truth as a slippery fish.  You can only grasp it momentarily before it slips off into the ocean and you have to spend long hours fishing for another truth in the form of an equally wriggly fish that might also slide into your hands if you’re lucky enough but again only momentarily before it too slips back into the ocean. 

We can remember the sensation of the truth.  We can play around with how it feels, how important it might be, and we can modify our views; but the idea of holding firm to the truth leaves us only with a dead lifeless fish in our hands, no longer fluid, no longer free to swim the oceans and grow stronger and bigger. 

Maybe that’s too simple a metaphor but strangely when my husband just now went to look for the recipe for Saint Joseph’s day soup we could not find it in the Italian cook book after all.  

My memory, my truth has failed me.  We found a version of Saint Joseph's day soup through Google but where I wonder is the original?  I had hoped to photograph a bowl of soup for you and post it here so you too might enjoy the image and the tastes it evoked. 

See what happens to the truth?   It slips away in the shadows of memory.

Listening for ghosts

There was not much traffic as I stepped out into the middle of the road. I could not be bothered walking all the way to the traffic lights, which I saw some way in the distance and well out of my way.

I wove through this traffic easily but when I reached halfway, the cars that had moved through slowly like Brown’s cows, were now replaced by a convoy of fast paced motorbikes. The roar of the engines echoed from the underside of the metal roof tracks on the rooftop that formed a bridge for the trains above.

I managed to dodge them and laughed to myself when I saw one old bike driver spit out his phlegm into the gutter. The wind blew it back up at him and it landed on his coat. He almost veered off the road in an effort to wipe it off.

Serves him right, I thought. Disgusting habit. No sooner had I savoured this thought than a collection of bicycles streaked through, followed by a number of mounted horses.

The road was an obstacle course and I wondered would I ever get through, or would I inevitably be knocked over.

Such is the nature of my dreaming at the moment. I prepare to be knocked over by life. It seems too hard. Too much stuff creeping in at the seams, and too many memories invade my space.

Last week I went with two of my sisters on a tour of our old school with about twenty other women. My sisters and I were by far the oldest. None of our contemporaries from the sixties and seventies were there, only one from the eighties and the rest from the nineties, including one girl who went to Vaucluse the year the nuns decided to close down the school.

Vaucluse was a convent for ladies run by the Faithful Companions of Jesus and steeped in the traditions of this teaching order, a brave strong academic tradition, the female equivalent of the Jesuits. The school began in the early 1880s and for a time was the oldest girls school in the southern hemisphere, but they closed it down for want of students.

The school had always been the poor cousin of its sister school, Genezzano, in Kew. And we, my sisters and I, felt this deeply.

The sporty girls played in competition matches against Gen, and our younger but richer sister school invariably won. Our school attracted the poorer Catholic families of Melbourne, those who wanted a convent education for their daughters but could not afford the higher fees of the prestigious Genezzano.

I was struck by the disparity of our memories, not only those of my sisters and I, but also, the younger women.
‘This was where the Sacred Heart dormitory stood,’ I said when we passed upstairs and gathered on what was once a balcony but has since been closed in to form a few small classrooms.

I could tell the dormitory by its ceiling and its position near the stairs, just as I could tell the year twelve classroom, the room we then called Matriculation. The younger women remembered what I thought was the Sacred Heart dormitory as the secretarial room, the room which my generation once called Commercial. For me Commercial stood where the library and computer room still stands.

I tried to listen out for ghosts as we traipsed through the corridors that had once been off limits, the house in which the nuns’ small rooms stood, row after row, neat tiny cubicles and I shuddered at the thought of a life lived in so small a space, a single bed in a room the size of an en suite.

Yet I did not feel the shiver of fear I had thought I might have felt travelling over what to me was once almost sacred ground.

The nuns have long gone and now the Christian Brothers have taken over the school. They bought it from the nuns and use it as a year nine campus for the boys from Saint Kevin’s and as a central office for their order.

In place of the few pictures that once adorned the walls of our old school, throughout the main hall there are rows of images of boys who triumph in sporting events.

It was like going back to visit your childhood home now taken over by another family who have moved things to their tastes and wiped away most traces of you and yours.

And yesterday we went to the wedding of a friend’s daughter, a friend whom my husband has known for some forty years, well before the birth of the bride.

There is something in the wedding vows that stir up intense feelings. The ones whose marriages have survived the test of time, can feel triumph, confident in the success of their efforts, however strained. They have managed to get through for better and for worse, while those who have not survived their vows and whose marriages have not held fast must cringe internally.

A friend suggested they should remodel the legal and compulsory words of the marital vows into something like: We promise we will try to stick together, but if we wind up divorcing, we will do so with respect towards one another, despite our differences’.

I consider events at this friend’s house, which is where they held the reception to be a measure of the passage of time. I have been going to birthday parties, to wedding anniversaries and celebrations of all kinds for a number of years here, for over thirty years now.

My husband and I started as newly weds and then as parents of very young children. Our children once came to these functions, too but as they reached adolescence they chose to stay away.

The years roll by and we now attend these events alone, not yet quite elderly but almost.

Many among our generation have retired or are considering retirement. Their children are grown and married, in many cases with children of their own. There was a rush of new little ones at this wedding, the grandchildren of the bride’s relatives. She is the first to marry in her sibship of two.

And now today
‘Go back to your hovel,’ my daughter says when I offer to go out to buy the eggs that we have run out of. 'And don't be such a martyr.'

My husband is busy eating the last two eggs and I am trying to write, wracked by the requirement that I attend to my family despite my thoughts to the contrary and their knowledge that they are old enough to attend to themselves.

At this precise moment I hate being me. I hate the pressure I feel I am under to restore everything to order including, the state of my writing room. To make it look like the study I see on certain blogsites of famous writers who work to order, when I am a slob.

My room becomes a storage room for empty shoeboxes, which I stack to one side and the multiple overfilled filing cabinets, necessary for holding my collections.

‘A hovel my daughter calls it, not simply because of the mess I fear but more because she resents my preoccupation with taking myself off to write as I do.

There are not enough hours in the day to lead a writer's life, but I can always dream.