Performance Art

Performance Art
(c) Melina Magdalena September 2006

My children will probably still be dutifully trotting off to their father’s house for alternate weekends when they’re in their thirties.

Synchronicity is a strange thing. It’s true that once sensitised to something, one suddenly sees it all over the place. For me, synchronicity occurs precisely when it’s needed.

Lately, I’ve had adults spontaneously tell me their stories of growing up in divorced households; people I didn’t know had come from ‘broken homes’, who I would never have guess had experienced the torrid times of feeling they were freaks. Without exception they have each volunteered the following:

“Oh, by the time I was that age, I wanted to do my own thing.
I wasn’t going to my father’s house every other weekend.”

I want my children to grow up and become independent human beings! I want to say to them – you are here to become yourselves, not to pay homage to someone who would make you in his own image!

It’s ironic that I’ve finally found someone who wants to be my partner. Finding time to be alone together could only become more difficult with a détente in the contact arrangements between my children and their father.

The enforced rigidity of contact and the payback games in which their father and I have engaged over the last 13 years have been sources of immense frustration and deep emotional pain. He has instilled in the children a belief that I always intended to keep him from them, and that it was only his wiliness and perseverance, even in the Family Court, that won them the precious right to see their father. I do not want to sever my children’s contact with their father. I do not want them all to myself.

In the interests of nurturing my children’s growing independence, I have noted several things about their communication with their father and me. They avoid informing their father of anything that is not routine. This includes getting in trouble at school, losing calculators, needing to pay for extra activities and receiving invitations to social events. Parties are a problem – particularly when they fall on the weekends when my children are with their father. The children make an assumption that they will therefore not be able to go to them. Why? Don’t ask me, I can’t tell, and as far as I know, they’ve never asked him either! Needing to be able to pay for things is a problem – they do not ask their father, as a rule. Why bother? His attitude has always been to take his right of contact by force if necessary, while refusing his responsibility of contribution to their material well being and neglecting to make sure communication about his activities goes both ways.

Building my children’s confidence, assertion skills and autonomy is a task I consider paramount as part of my mothering. It’s never pleasant when we disagree, but it’s a chance for them to practice these skills. When they need a note for school, or lose something, it’s risky for them to bring these troubles to me. They are willing to take these risks with me not because I am a pushover, but because I treat them with respect and try to keep their best interests uppermost in my mind and behaviour.

I suggested to them that perhaps given their changing interests and busy schedules, it might be appropriate for us to rethink the way their travelling back and forth between their father’s home and ours is conducted. I suggested to them that they are old enough to have some say in how they want to live, and that if they want to make changes or be more flexible, it would be a good idea for the four of us – me, the children and their father - to talk about this and come up with some ideas and plans. I reminded them that each of us has rights, ideas and feelings that are ok and probably different from one another’s.

When they asked me what I wanted, I stressed the fact that I didn’t want to impose my ideas, because I wanted to be able to discuss it all so that everyone was heard. I said that it is quite convenient for me to have blocks of child-free time, but that it is also frustrating when I want to be able to plan to do family things with them, but they fill up their weekends with me with other commitments and are rarely available to change their plans with their father in order to accommodate my wishes. They told me they are teenagers and don’t want to do family things with their parents (meaning me – their father drags them off wherever he wants to go and they never say a word).

My son told his father I wanted to talk to him about changing access. I tried to ring their father, and got his answering machine. It’s no big deal – I’m often not around to answer the phone either. So I left him a message. I don’t remember it word for word, but it went something like this:

Hello X, it’s M.
I think Y told you I wanted to talk to you about arrangements?
I just think it would be a good idea for us all to sit down
and work things out together
so we’re all happy with arrangements.
I’m at work today, so I can’t talk now,
but if you’ve got time tonight when you drop off Y,
we could talk then and you could maybe eat with us?
You can leave me a message and let me know if that’s all right,
or I’ll see you then.

When he pulled up in his car I went out and asked whether he had received my message. He had. I asked whether he had time now. He did. He came inside. I directed my son to offer him a drink.

I finished preparing the meal, and dished up four plates. I directed my daughter to make sure there were four chairs at the table and the children sat down to eat. Their father had already seated himself. There was one place left for me in the corner, squeezed in beside him. I assessed the situation, set my plate at the end of the table and said “Excuse me, if you move over, I’ll just sit at the end here,” extricated the chair from its entrenched, powerless position and seated myself at the head of the table.

Their father began to eat, but within one minute, he began to show signs of distress. He put his elbows on the table; his head in his hands, turned red-faced and began to cry. The children did not know what to do. They didn’t say anything. I just reached for the tissue box and put it on the table. It didn’t take long before he had gathered himself for the verbal onslaught I am still primed to anticipate. First, he yanked a tissue furiously out of the box, smudged it across his nose and threw it on the floor behind him.

“You can’t do this to me, M after all these years!
The last time we sat down together was with a fucking lawyer between us!
This is just totally bizarre.
Why didn’t you give me some notice or something?
I didn’t know you were going to give me dinner.
And I’m not even legally allowed to be here.
You’ve got a fucking restraining order on me.
You just can’t do this!”

He did not look my way. He delivered this verdict violently and loudly, punctuated by sighs, sobs and fists on the table. The children were terribly uncomfortable and scared.

I was also scared. I thought – yes, that restraining order is there for good reason and I don’t want to be in the same room with you ever and I don’t know why I invited you here and I don’t know why I concocted this stupid plan when it’s obvious I’m still as weak as piss when it comes to advocating for my children with you and you won’t listen anyway and you don’t care about what I want and think and need or your children you selfish prick you haven’t changed and you’re just a big fake and I don’t like being scared of you and where can I run to if you explode in the next five seconds and will you hurt the children you always want things your own way and why did I bother you stupid bully and how can you sit there pretending to be in such pain and how can I get you out of my house now instantly immediately like five minutes ago and forget this whole uncomfortable episode?

“Yes, I wanted to talk to you about the restraining order – ”

“Well talk to me then!”

“R and L –”

“I’m not R. I’m not L! I don’t want to hear it!”

I shut up. I continued to eat. He gathered himself up again. I thought Oh God. Let me die right here on this spot I cannot bear another second of this existence. I don’t want to witness my children’s torment any longer.

Imagine what I did next? It’s not hard to guess. It follows the prescribed pattern down to the letter. I had to somehow save the situation, defuse the bomb, stall proceedings.

So, I … apologized!

Yes, that’s right. I apologized for putting him on the spot, explained it had never been my intention to make him feel uncomfortable, that I had only wanted to open up a conversation because I thought it was time after all these years, even though we’ve had a longstanding arrangement that has been working pretty well on the whole. I said the children are old enough now to have some say and I thought it was a good idea to give them a chance to talk about what they want, too.

Fat chance.

After that performance the children were well and truly cowed into submission. When their father pushed his plate away and picked up his calendar, obviously ready to do business, they still hadn’t said a word, but had sat there silently eating their meal, then took their plates into the kitchen one by one and scraped what they could not stomach into the compost bin, returning to the table and refusing to meet my pleading gaze.

After he left, my son treated me to a lecture on my behaviour and expectations and exactly where I had gone wrong in expecting their father to behave like a mature adult. My son even used the word ‘baby’ in reference to his father’s behaviour, and claimed that he would have told his father to stop acting like one, if I had not had the restraining order against him and had not put him on the spot by serving him a meal at my table after all these years of never speaking with him without having a lawyer to mediate.

I reminded my son that the claim about the lawyer is untrue, and that in fact we have been able to negotiate many things over the years both over the phone and face to face. I told him that it is true I have a restraining order against his father and that I wouldn’t have received it from the court if there hadn’t been reasons for it. I also told him that his father has always spoken to me in that way, which is why I so rarely go out of my way to speak with him.

Even so, my son went to pains to justify his own silence and his own position in not wanting to change anything. My heart went out to him, as he told me how angry I was, and how wrong I had been in attempting to bring the four of us to the table to talk about our arrangements. I understood quite well that my son was unable to express his own anger and instead foisted the emotion onto someone whose anger was not so scary and confronting as his father’s.

My daughter was calm and matter of fact. She said little, but her attitude was clear. That had been a pointless exercise. What was there to say?

I gleaned some useful information. I now know when he is going away; three times during the next three months. He probably left quite pleased with himself for managing to get his weekends swapped over to a pattern that suits his fancy-free lifestyle. It just so happens that his trips all coincided with the weekends when he was supposed to have the children. If we hadn’t swapped weekends, it would have meant I had them every weekend for nearly three months. So now he gets to have the children when it suits him, and as usual, he won’t be available to help out if I get busy with my life.

Still, what’s new? Our lives continue to revolve around his needs. He always has been, always will be a performance artist.

My son said to me that this was the worst it will ever get. Next time won’t be so uncomfortable, especially if I lift the restraining order. I’m wondering whether X will have won, if I refuse to initiate a next time. Perhaps I would do better to stay on the sidelines, and encourage my children to speak for themselves, rather than set myself up to be further abused by the man who calls himself their father.

Down the Gurgler

Down the Gurgler
(c) Melina Magdalena, 2006

Anyone see Lily Tomlin and Helen Caldicott on Enough Rope last night? I stayed up especially, and am glad I did. Earlier in the day I had a conversation with my sister about the world. As a new mother I know she must be especially sensitive to what’s going on around us.

On Saturday night I had a series of hilarious dreams, one of which is pertinent to this discussion. I dreamed I was watching television. There was a lead-in before the ad break, to the next segment in the program, in which we were going to be introduced to “Australia’s Most Famous S-Bend Family”. In my dream I saw how this family (perhaps something like The Borrowers, by Mary Norton) had set up home in the S-Bend of a toilet!

It seems to me that if we don’t want to end up drinking toilet water via new and improved water filtration technology that no one trusts any more than they trust microwaves, than we really oughtn’t be putting our sewage in the water in the first place.

It seems to me that there is no inevitability about water desalination , nuclear power or recycling sewage into potable water. Besides the fact that recycling water makes perfect sense, as it mirrors the organic water cycle, perhaps people wouldn’t be so up in arms about using filtered grey water from washing dishes and clothes, as they are about using filtered poo and wee water?

If we continue to take no action, we will descend, like Jonah into the whale, and who knows when and in what condition we will eventually emerge into the filthy waters of our own creation? Humans are the dirtiest creatures on this planet.

So here’s an agenda for a political party that wants to win votes and save the world. Please add your ideas to this agenda and present to your likely candidates. (ever the eternal optimist, I presume there are some strong and sensible political candidates somewhere in Australia.)

1) Invest every cent that is needed in building Australia a solar power grid, so that we are completely solar powered and are selling our excess energy overseas by 2015.

2) As a lead in to the above, offer one-off grants to all public housing tenants in Australia to convert their homes to solar power by 2010.

3) Retrain some of the miners at Roxby Downs to manufacture, repair, maintain and install solar panels and the necessary apparatus.

4) Close all uranium mines in Australia.

5) Do not begin to enrich uranium in Australia.

6) Refuse to store nuclear waste anywhere in Australia.

7) Invest every cent that is needed in converting Australia’s sewage system so that toilet waste no longer enters our waters. This means investing in the research that will make it possible even for city-dwellers and office blocks to be able to convert to composting toilets . Every Australian household and office should be converted to using composting toilets by 2020.

8) Retrain miners and other willing workers to be able to manufacture, install, maintain and repair compostable toilets and in the plumbing skills necessary to change our sewage systems so that toilet waste is kept separate from grey water.

9) Make the installation of rainwater harvesting tanks mandatory for every Australian dwelling, and in educating Australians about how to keep this precious resource clean and usable.

Let’s not send ourselves down the proverbial gurgler.