I want it now

My Dutch grandmother, a woman of scruples, a woman who held fast to her religious beliefs even under pressure, kept camphor balls in her apron pockets during her pregnancies. 

An uncle told me this recently, when I visited him in his retirement home, this uncle, my mother’s younger brother, and one of the only two left now of my mother’s large sib ship of seven. 

I had read a short memoir of his childhood, and somewhere the words: 

‘The unusual habits of mother during her pregnancy, especially in her choice of food, made her vitamin deficient and could have given her children a form of rickets as our dentist pointed out.’ 

I was curious, and asked my uncle about his mother’s strange eating habits and he talked about the lack of vitamin D from the harsh long winters in Holland and how his mother fed her family cod liver oil.  

He did not mention her eating habits, only this peculiarity. 

My uncle described how from time to time, as his mother went about her housework duties, she dipped her hand into her pockets and pulled out a camphor ball.  Then she put it to her nose and breathed in deeply, as if from a snuff box, but only when she was pregnant, my uncle told me, and only when she had those strange cravings that pregnant women can have, not otherwise. 

It seemed an odd habit for a woman of scruples, a woman whose religious observances bordered on the extreme.  Mass every day even in the snow and cold and the rosary every night.  

She was an expert at self-denial.

Self-denial takes practice.  

I remember when I first decided to get a grip on my television watching as a thirteen year old.  I sat in the classroom and the Latin teacher, Mother Eleanor, was going on about the importance of learning our verbs.  About the importance of putting aside time every night to practise them. 

I pitched myself in my mind to the end of the day.  I saw myself come home.  I saw myself go into the kitchen and spread at least four slices of bread with margarine and jam, then I went to the lounge room where my brothers were already stuck in front of the television and I joined them. 

I put my sandwiches on the arm of my chair and eat sandwich after sandwich as first Bugs Bunny, followed by the likes of Daniel Boone or Robin Hood flashed across the screen.  Then my father came home and I bolted, along with everyone else, no longer hungry for dinner, no longer keen on sitting together as a family, but having to go through the dinner ritual regardless. 

During the Latin lesson that day I decided I would stop watching television.  I would give myself time from the moment I came home to do my homework and then I would get good at Latin. 

I would deny myself for a greater good.

They’ve done experiments with small children where they sit each child in front of a lolly and tell them that if they can resist taking that lolly for five minutes – not sure exactly how long, but about five minutes – then they can have two. 

The researchers do this test to demonstrate the development of impulse control and of will power.    

Some kids can do it.  They can hold out for the greater reward but others cannot.  They want it now. 

When I shop with my husband for some item that is of significant value, a new chest of drawers for instance, or a computer upgrade or some such thing, he likes to look, to compare, to consider and then to go home empty handed, with the intention of returning the next day or the day after that once he’s satisfied this is the best thing to buy. 

Me.  I see it.  I examine it and think about it.  I reckon it’s okay.  Enough value for money, a good quality product, it will do the job.  I want it now.  Why wait till tomorrow or the next day to buy it when we agree we need it and can have it now?

In this way we are different.  But over the years I have noticed some of my husband’s caution has crept into me and some of my impulsiveness erupts from him.  Just some. 

My husband is still a great one for window-shopping.  It’s nothing for him to go off to a farmer’s market and come home with some small token, a bunch of radishes for instance, whereas if I were to go to said farmer’s market I’d feel almost compelled to buy stuff we might not need, stuff that interests me perhaps, expensive butter from nearby farms, venison from a local supplier.  We might eat it eventually but we do not need it. 

I will want to buy something for our children, too, but my husband is happy to feast his eyes on the displays and come home empty handed. 

And then I get to another part of my uncle’s memoir where he talks about his mother’s response to the fact that five of her seven children left home as young adults to live far away in Australia, in New Guinea and in Brazil.

‘Every time somebody leaves, it takes away a piece of my heart,’ my Dutch grandmother said.  And no amount of scruples, impulse control or camphor ball sniffing can stop her heart from breaking.   

Letters as 'fossils of feeling'.

‘Letters are the great fixative of experience,’ writes Janet Malcolm. ‘Time erodes feeling. Time creates indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared. They are the fossils of feeling. This is why biographers prize them so: they are biography’s only conduit to unmediated experience.’

Last week I went to a class about letter writing.  Although we talked briefly about the sorts of letters that people write in the privacy of their rooms, we focussed on those letters written for the purpose of performance.

 Letters a person might write to some imaginary friend, or even to a state of mind.  For instance, one of our exercises involved writing a letter to ‘my wake up call’.  Another to myself in three hours when the class would be over.

Michaela Maguire, who took the class was clear and focussed.  We read letters; we wrote our own, with plenty of discussion in between, a group of about ten woman – always women – it was to do with women writing letters after all, and there was a sprit of thoughtfulness throughout the room.  All in three short hours. 

But I worried that I spoke up too much in the class; that I was a show off.  That I wanted too often to share too much, especially as there was one or two women who were quiet. 

I have often wondered what it might be like to be one of those quiet participants in a group.  What it might be like to be shy or reserved, to keep my thoughts to myself. 

I often keep my thoughts to myself but I have this instinctive urge when I enter the space of a workshop where a few of us have gathered to start the conversation rolling, if it hasn’t already started. 

I’ll introduce myself and some people will introduce themselves back and we might talk about the space, or the weather or the fact that so far it looks as though we’ll only be women attending, as happened yesterday. 

I do this to measure the temperature of the room, the nature of the people present.  

Who’s here and what they’re like. 

Will I enjoy myself? 

Will I get something out of our time together?

I divide my experience into two, the audience and the teacher.  In this case, the teacher was fine, friendly, though with a reasonable degree of reserve.  Teachers need this I reckon if they are to hold the group.  The other women were also friendly. 

If we could go on meeting for week after week after week or even month after month we would no doubt become better friends.  We would come to like one another as a group. 

We would form bonds, but a once only meeting is never easy.  There is the quality of what-does-it-matter-I’m-only-here-once-to-get-as-much-as-I-can-out-of-this time but there is also the sense, for me at least, of wanting to make the most of it. 

And the business of reading our writing out to the class is fraught. People hesitate at first and then towards the end there’s an avalanche. 

I was among the first to read, and then kicked myself for my solipsistic reading.  But isn’t that the way of it?  And the final worry I have in such groups is the fear that I will be judged harshly for my age. 

Oh her, she’s just an old fogey.  

Why would they think that?  

Why do I think this?  

Is this how I judged folks older than me when I was younger? 

I fear it might have been so, until of course I came to know those older people.  Even writing about this makes me feel slightly queasy.  Too self referential, too much of what goes on in my mind.  No story line.  

But that’s the way it goes sometimes.  You get the inside story, or at least some of it and the rest I leave to your imagination.  

And then I found a copy of the 2013 edition of Women of Letters in my daughter's bookshelf and read Amanda Palmer’s letter to someone called Anthony.  I imagine he was a friend.  Someone who was dying of cancer and in it Palmer talks about her almost adolescent need to offer people the truth about themselves, however brutal, and about the time she had surgery on her throat and couldn’t speak for two weeks.  How she came to relish silence.

In a much clearer way than I write here, she seems to confirm something I’ve been wondering about above. 

Why not try being quiet for a while? Write letters instead. 

To fly on broken wings

How do you fly on broken wings?  Wings so broken there are times when it’s impossible to get off the ground. 

Flying on Broken Wings is Carrie Bailee’s extraordinary story of survival in the face of horrendous and unspeakable childhood abuse.  Unspeakable because it takes readers places where no one wants to go. 

We enter a world of horror so great we’re left gasping.  And for anyone who has been touched by the trauma of childhood abuse it becomes a shared journey with someone who’s seen and experienced the worst of it. 

Bailee was not only abused by her drunken father who took delight in tormenting the nine year old girl, but she was also sold to the highest bidder in a paedophile ring where a group of men took delight in photographing children in sexual poses and of doing all manner of perverse things onto their innocent bodies. 

These children are most likely dead by now, the degree of depravity visited upon them can only suggest as much.  But Bailee managed to escape from her adoptive maternal home and from then on she no longer needed to visit her father on the dreaded access visits, although she thereafter encountered other horrific experiences, including a rape shortly after her arrival in Australia as a twenty year old. 

Later in Australia with the help of a group of brave and determined women, counsellors, friends, psychiatrists, and refugee advocates Bailee managed to begin to heal from these unspeakable traumas, but not before going through long periods of intense re-traumatisation when the flashbacks of her childhood brought her back through dissociation into being that little girl again, a girl who could not protect herself from her father’s extreme cruelty.

The book is well paced.  These flashbacks come to us in spurts, sometimes long spurts, but they are always interspersed with parts of the journey wherein Bailee is able to see something of the life she had led and to reach out for help. 

It is her capacity to reach out for help, despite her occasional attempts to run away that is most striking. 

Bailee has a website and on it you can see her performance of her slam poem, ‘Sold’, and there you see a most attractive and passionate young woman, today the mother of two small girls, who has managed to survive to tell her story, especially since both her adoptive parents have died.

I mentioned I was reading this book to a number of people while I followed Bailee’s journey and several said they did not want to read about that level of horror.  I can understand this. 

‘To tell of the trauma is to be re-traumatised’. 

 Bailee’s book is not an easy read, not for its inaccessibility but for the extent to which unlike watching the six o’clock news on the television or online where horrific images of torture and brutality play out often, this book takes us into the heart and mind of one of the tortured and she is 'one of us', a white western woman with pale skin and Caucasian features. 

I worried when reading of her good fortune under Phillip Ruddoch’s reign that Bailee is one of the lucky ones.  Senator Brian Harradine had spoken up on her behalf.  But it seems to me it would have been  harder and continues to be harder today to evoke compassion for all refugees who seek asylum in this country, in part because they are not regarded as one of us. 

Coming from Canada, Bailee is only half-foreign, with her different accent but that’s about the end of it.

The book also alerts us to the need for greater intervention in situations of domestic violence and childhood abuse, and the degree to which traumatised and tormented victims become voiceless. 

As Bailee writes: ‘Children are made to feel responsible for what is being done to them.  This is the abuser’s most powerful weapon.  It prevents them from telling.’

Baillee’s experience is not isolated.  For this reason, I urge people to read Flying on Broken Wings. There are paedophile rings throughout the world and proliferating.  They consist of men who are hell bent on the exploitation of small children, for complicated reasons often including there own experiences of abuse.  

 Paedophiles breed in societies where brutality is sometimes condoned, and where disenfranchised men grow up hating those who are most vulnerable, including their own vulnerable selves. 

To read Bailee’s book is to want to stomp this out – now. 

Politics and a short history of telephones.

Rooster one day, feather duster the next, or so my husband reckons in relation to the fate of a certain politician and his conservative party following their defeat in yesterdays election in Queensland. 

Triumph to abjection.  I know the slide well.  The ways in which I might see-saw between omnipotence and impotence.  One day on top of the world, the next day in the gutter. 

1972 

My boyfriend rang from Edithvale.  It wasn’t often I spoke on the telephone.  I had an aversion to the disembodied voice at the other end.  The fact that I could not see the other person’s face rendered me voiceless, as if I could not find words enough in my mind to fill the silence that grew between us. 

And so I had trained myself to use the telephone only for calls of an intentional nature.  The calls you make to arrange an appointment, or to meet someone.  Nothing that required any other effort than to relay a brief message. 

The call on the telephone to my boyfriend to make arrangements for when we would meet on the weekend was even shorter than I had expected when my father came along with his scissors and snipped the cord. 

The idea that I should engage with someone in the outside world, or perhaps the fact that this someone was a boyfriend, had enraged my father. 

There was no reasoning with him, and I fled.

2002 

Forty years later when my then fifteen-year-old daughter was on the phone for about the fourth time that night clogging up the line, my husband took my father’s place. 

In those days we had only one line and my husband sometimes needed it for work.  He, too, destroyed the connection that night, but not in the same way.  Not quite.

He snatched the telephone from our daughter’s hand after she had refused to finish up the call and cracked the receiver open on his knee.  It must have hurt him, but his rage shielded him from too much pain. 

Not so our daughter.  She was devastated and she too fled, but not after remonstrating with her father for doing this, and with me for not stopping him.

Years later my daughter showed me she had kept the broken telephone in her possession as a souvenir of that dreadful time. 

It’s not something my husband is proud of, nor am I.

It puzzles me this antipathy we can have to others who connect elsewhere with someone else in our presence.  The jealousy that stirs. 

1960

It was not the first time my father had disconnected the telephone.  He did it years before when I was still very small, but this time he simply refused to pay the bill and the telephone company instead cut us off. 

For years we were without a telephone and it seemed to me even as a seven year old that there was something shameful about not having a telephone number to offer people in case they might want to make contact with us, other than face to face, on foot or by letter. 

I never once talked to my father about his decision to sever my phone connection with my boyfriend but to give him credit, my husband talked to my daughter and in a calmer moment he apologised.  He was good at apologising. 

As was my daughter, both apologised for their part in the fracas, but in my mind now I hang the responsibility on my husband’s shoulders and on mine.

We should have found a better way to deal with an adolescent daughter who spent too many hours on the telephone, even though at the time it seemed as though words were not enough.

In the end we ordered an extra phone line and there was no longer any need to police the time spent on calls except when mobiles came in and for a time our daughter could run up huge bills from talking too long to her friends on this then more expensive form. 

2015

Today the mobile phone is such a lifeline for most of us.  And I, too, am in the habit of checking mine several times a day just to be sure no one is trying to reach me. 

Another daughter in Scotland communicates by Skype and we, too, talk on the phone but now face to face on the screen. 

It helps to see her face.  It helps to hear her voice.  The distance between us washes away for a moment and she could be in the next room.

1957

When my mother and father travelled from Holland to Australia in the early 1950s, before my father had the telephone cut off, my grandparents sometimes made a call.  We children were never allowed to speak, but I heard the tension in my mother’s voice as she tried to connect across the distance with her own father and how every word which cost so much money seemed precious and therefore too hard to find.  The conversations were stilted and short.

Words are like that, unless they flow freely, they fall flat.  From rooster to feather duster in one fell swoop.