Longing to belong

The money collectors are out on street corners in honour of the Good Friday Children’s Hospital appeal.  I try not to resent the rattling of tins at every intersection I pass through on my way home from the airport.  One of my daughters is off to China with her boyfriend and we were up at 4.45 am in order to make their flight to Sydney and from there onto Shanghai. 

Most years I relish the quiet of Good Friday but this Good Friday has already been anything but quiet.  It’s the middle of the day before I have a chance to sit down and write. 

Yesterday a free-standing brick wall on a construction site fell over in Carlton killing two young people and critically injuring a third.  An hour or so later a couple of suburbs away in Richmond a truck clipped a car at a busy intersection, mounted the curb and then struck a fourteen year old schoolgirl on her way from home.  She died at the scene. 

Two freak accidents which have left me waiting for a third and so frightening on Holy Thursday, the Thursday before Easter,  or so it has been named in my family on my mother’s side for generations.  Holy Thursday and the last supper. 

I can only think of the families of those young people who died, through no fault of their own.  A freak accident.  In the wrong place at the wrong time and try as I might everything else pales into insignificance. 

The people rattling their tins offer broad and coaxing smiles –  give give give.  Most are dressed in uniform, from the fire brigade, to the SES, even school kids.  Collectors with arm bands and bright coloured tins.  All collect for charity. 

On the way home from the airport another daughter and I stopped in Carlton at Baker’s Delight to buy some bread and encountered a family of fire brigade collecting folk, father, mother and a few children.  They were all dressed in fireman’s overalls and rattling their tins in the faces of diners at one of the open air cafes where patrons enjoy their meals on the street footpath. 

I tried hard not to judge.  All in a good cause and people were polite and agreeable but inside my head I thought the collectors were intrusive.

It’s not a bad thing I know but still the part of me that resiles from too much generosity cringes.  Maybe such ‘begging’ has the hall mark of my overly Catholic childhood where excess generosity hid all sorts of atrocities. 

It’s sometimes hard to put the good deeds of the church up against the things that go on behind closed doors – the abuses, not just of children, but of others who are powerless to protect themselves. 

I went to an Anglican service on Wednesday night where one of my daughters sang in the choir.  I went to listen to her singing but the religious elements were to the fore,  not that they convinced me. 

I enjoyed the spectacle, the back and forth chanting across the church hall, the slow extinguishing of six of the seven candles in the centre of the church until a church helper in black robes took the last one from the church –  to symbolise Christ’s death or so it said in the accompanying pamphlet – and we were left in darkness. 

As I looked around at some of the people in the church, those whom I imagined had arrived out of conviction rather than from a wish to hear their children sing, I felt a twinge of jealousy. 

Oh, to believe.  To have such conviction, and a certain view the world and our place in it.  I have no such certainty.  As much as a part of me admires them their confidence, another part of me shudders. 

And there’s a shut out quality for those who don’t believe. 

I felt this as a child growing up within the Catholic church.  There was ‘us’ and there was ‘them’.  And belonging to the ‘us’ part of the equation offered security.  We were on the right path, the one true faith. The rest, the poor misguided souls were headed elsewhere. 

We could pity them.  We could have some level of respect for their mistaken ways but we were on the side of right and might and all was well. 

My mother's church from whence some of my sense of certainty first sprang. 

I lost that certainty a long time ago but these days when  I see signs of it elsewhere, and not just within religious institutions – it exists in football clubs, political parties, professional groups – I can feel the same cringe of exclusion, but this time from the other side, from that of the outsider. 

The same fear of and longing to belong.  

I am a scatter brain

I have been at my thesis part time for nearly six years now. I have two more years in which to complete it. These are the difficult years. This is when I will need to stick to the basics of my academic housework, to set up indexes, footnotes, paragraphing etc. But before I do this, I need to get the body of the thesis held together. I need a skeleton, one on which I can pile flesh, jam in organs and stick on limbs.

This is my task today – to construct a thesis skeleton. But I am a Jill of all trades, and a mistress of none. I hobble from one thought to the next and cannot settle on a single idea, a single image, a single notion to follow.

Another person might move to someone else’s writing for direction, but I do not want to read yet, not another person’s writing, not yet, not anymore. Another person’s writing will become for me yet another distraction and I am already awash with them.

This thesis matters to me. It matters to me as one way of overcoming the wretched sense of failure, which I endured some nineteen years ago when certain powers-that-were decided that I should no longer continue in my training.

I had invested so much in this training to be a psychoanalyst that at the point where my mentor told me I was no longer wanted, my world seemed to collapse, and for a time it did. I survived then by putting one foot in front of the other, one step at a time.

One day I took myself off to the Immaculate Conception Church in Hawthorn in search of comfort. I no longer believed in the healing power of God and his angels but I still held faith in my memory of those times when I could find comfort in the quiet, musty corridors of an empty church. I tried to breathe in the feel of the past, myself as a child, a child who could be comforted by the belief that someone out there was looking out for me and that all would be well in the end.

In March 1993 the playwright, Dennis Potter spoke about his life.
‘You start defining your dignity by your ability to work,’ he said, and then he paraphrased the words of an unnamed American theologian.

‘There is a child crying in a room and the mother comes in and picks it up and says, “There, there. Everything’s all right.”

Outside there might be bombs and starvation. Is she lying? The answer, in my opinion, is that she is not. No matter how corrupt, wicked, cruel, disastrous the world is, some little tributary of feeling says, “It’s all right.” That is where writing comes from.’

Blogging has become one way of practising my writing but it is also a distraction, as if I am cleaning my house and move from one room to the next, never quite settling on a task before I move onto the next.

Today I must brainstorm my thesis. I must stick with the task.

It is Good Friday. The one day of the year when most things stop. I allocated this day in my mind the last time I sat with my supervisor.

‘You are going to need to sit down with these ideas and work out a structure,’ my supervisor said. ‘You are going to need to pull it together’.

Pull it together. Who me? Not me, I am a scatter brain. I am fearful of structure, the way it ties you into a forced form , like a straitjacket, the way it narrows the roads along which you might travel.

This is not true, another inside voice says. Structure will allow you to follow multiple roads. It will create a sense that each road is clear and separate, each leading somewhere different.

The way it is now your roads begin but they end in cul de sacs. They end in incomplete bits of pavement. They end nowhere.

I fear I have already imposed too much structure on my thesis but it is not a creative text per se.

The creative text can form one road, my now internal supervisor says to me, but it needs a description of what you are on about, otherwise your examiners will fail you - again.

Again you will fail. As you failed mental arithmetic in grade six and Mother Mary John handed back your report card and said
‘I knew you were bad, but I did not realise how bad.’’

Strange how some words stick. How some words come to colour your entire life.

I have slipped into the second person. Forgive me. I am trying to include the rest of you in this, my fellow bloggers. I imagine you too know what it is to feel damned to failure for the rest of your life.

It is a damnable position from which you never quite recover.