Sunday, November 20, 2022

The Last Hurrah

TRIGGER WARNING - this post is not a cry for help. It is not about suicide. 

In 2006 when the news of Diane Brimble’s awful death aboard a cruise ship hit the newspapers, I was so disgusted with the coverage that I wrote an email about it and sent it out to all the people on my email contact list. Someone suggested I start a blog to disseminate my views. I figured out how to start one shortly thereafter: Mersigns.blogspot.com. 

I haven’t used my blog to generate advertising revenue. I don’t regularly update my photo and profile. My blog does not function as a curated reflection of my life. I’ve never worried about an audience. I am an individual whose issues, problems, insights count for very little in a world where some are suffering, others do all they can to help, and most are too busy to do anything but live their lives as best we can. 

My most recent post drew a response from people who interpreted it correctly as a cry for help. But this has not been the driving purpose behind my posts. My blog has been an outlet for me when I have had something to express to the world, and nobody to talk to. 

As a blogger, I have been neither journalist, nor academic. My writing style upsets some people. There are reams written to support different kinds of journalism, but I choose to align with a Whorfian viewpoint. As writer, I am part of the world I write about. My experience of the world is formed by how I write about it. I’ve never claimed objectivity. 

I have not posted everything that I’ve written. I’ve started, completed, and set aside numerous fictional works over the years, beginning well before the advent of my blog. Before the graphic novel was a thing, I started developing the plot, dialogue, and panels for a comic about someone trying to get pregnant outside a heterosexual relationship. I’ve composed the better part of more than one novel in verse. During 2020, I wrote a series of imagined conversations between me and the Queereye crew, as though they were helping me to transform my life. I documented my family’s fortnight of hotel quarantine with a daily blogpost shared via Facebook. 

My lawyer has asked me to consider what it is about posting on my blog, that I can’t get out of journalling or communicating with friends privately. It’s a valid question. Blogging has been my way of documenting and processing my experiences. I rarely have opportunity to speak unmasked with others about the impact of my experiences upon my inner world. I have assumed that if someone did want to talk with me about something I had posted, they would. For the most part, nobody has. 

I’ve referenced before, Anne McCaffrey’s story Dull Drums, (published 1977, by Del Rey Books, Get Off the Unicorn). In McCaffrey’s imagined future, the breaching of citizens’ private digital storage is of major concern, not because of identity theft or some other nefarious commercial, criminal intent, but because it opens citizens up to ridicule and social humiliation. My observations about the casual, creative ways that many people interact online, is that our digital lives tend to be quite public. While it is horrifying that cyber-bullying, trolling and other forms of abuse have increased in prevalence, I have always asked myself before posting about me and my life, “what could I lose by posting about this, and what would I gain by hiding it?” 

I have been defiantly open about my life. Now, as I am challenged about this, I feel conflicted. Am I justified for considering myself worthy of a voice when I do so in direct opposition to others, who want me to sit down and shut up? Is there any difference between yelling into a sealed echo chamber, and being ignored, silenced, and censored? Who is harmed by my posting my point of view, particularly when the things I post usually go unnoticed? 

The spite with which I am being forced to shut down my blog is evident to me, no matter how my lawyer calmly reassures me that her job is to look out for my interests and take the sting of emotion out of the injunctions. 

In 2022 I find myself immersed in grief for the loss of so many aspects of my life. It is hardly surprising that the impact of losing my blog feels like another death blow. But if I continue to blog, I risk losing my parenting rights.

Friday, November 04, 2022

extrapolations of existential irrelevance


Extrapolations of existential irrelevance

It starts small, like remembering when I did something badly, or when I didn’t do something I maybe should have. Sometimes it’s envy, when someone I do everything for shows love and appreciation to someone else when I feel I deserved it more. When I’m physically unwell it makes sense to reject my unwieldy, clumsy body as faulty, inept, incapable of functioning. It’s always an emotional shame-based trigger into the rabbit hole where rationality warps and tears and I fall further and further from light. The thoughts just wrap round and round my brain and my body, imprisoning me in a web of deceit until it’s all I can do to push on past it, relegate the whole sorry mess of me into a crawl-space under the bed or behind the door while I get on with what I need to be doing. Because there’s always something I need to be doing for someone – a child, an employer, a landlord, an animal, a friend, a neighbour, a plant … those are what keep me from fading irrevocably into the oblivion that yawns in my wake if ever I slip and cast a sideways glance. The ribbons of self-hatred unravel any inkling of self-worth I have managed not to reject. And this runs deep, so deep, until all that makes sense is to make a plan to end the torment. Two days ago, this was my plan: see out my lease, do right by my landlord, get my affairs in order, rehome the animals, quietly divest myself of all my worldly possessions, by donating what is of use to those who might use it, and making use of the waste collection and recycling services to gradually empty my house, organize for the equal distribution of my pathetic financial accretions to my four children after paying off all my debts, walk away quietly and sink, Virginia Woolf-like under the waves someplace, allowing my bones to be tumbled until they are opalescent like those of the plesiosaur in the museum. Obviously, one takes nothing when one goes. Obviously, I am nothing to write home about. Obviously, there is no hope of redemption. It’s not about the imputed impact on anybody else. It’s about taking myself away and out of the picture because I add nothing to the composition and removing myself from it will have little impact, if any at all. I feel as though I’m not really in the picture anyway. The small ripples my departure might cause are trifling. I will not be remembered for anything I would want to be remembered for. Better to be altogether forgotten. Existentially irrelevant.


Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Accommodations #2

Accommodations #2 (12/10/2022) 

I can write this safely, secure in the knowledge that 
My mother will never read it. 
Much as I yearn for her sympathy and understanding 
She lacks capacity to relate, help, or understand me. 
I am more fearful of having to deal with
The repercussions of her misinterpretation. 

My mother prefers to deal in the lies and distortions of hearsay 
Manipulated by the speaker, further twisted by the hearer. 
She accuses me of using written words as weapons of cleverness 
Of playing them to my advantage against those who can but speak 
And feel reduced and vulnerable therefore, when faced with 
The onslaught of my written words. 

Accommodations have never been made for me. 
I have always been selectively mute. 
Another convenient fact about my life 
That nobody noticed. 

Nevertheless 
My poetry is not something you can twist into the shape of a gun. 
I reject this notion out of hand! 
My written words do not represent pieces of shrapnel 
Directed at those who try endlessly to erase me. 

My written words 
Are simply my voice 
Of self-expression. 

I am allowed to use my voice to express my life 
Even if it makes you uncomfortable. 
My written words hold power, yes 
But they cannot kill you 
Like the bullets in a gun 

My written words don’t even have 
The volition to silence you or shut you down. 

When you stop feeling threatened by my written words 
The distortion becomes obvious 
The lies unravel
Truth is exposed. 

I only wish to exert my rights 
For my voice to be acknowledged 
To be cherished loved blessed alive. 

Friday, September 16, 2022

Accommodations #1

 Accommodations #1

(16 September 2022)

2022       The classic situation, an aisle seat next to an overflowing man, on a sardine tin flight from Sydney to Adelaide after 36 hours in transit, finally exhausts my reserves. I sit tense, irritated, beyond tired, waiting to disembark. Does my discomfort show itself to anyone at all? I doubt it. I remain polite.

The days afterwards are a struggle. I walk into a tidy house, but for no apparent reason, every towel I own is in the washing basket. All I want is a hot shower and bed. I have brought home a suitcase of unwashed clothing and get out of bed intermittently throughout that first, long night to unload, reload and, on occasion, rebalance the washing machine. The next day one of my kids glomms himself onto me ahead of schedule and refuses to leave my side. The other rejoins our household, along with the dog, the following day. It is a full week before I have any time to myself. Two days of appointments, two days of work, then I opt to host a family meal at my place, rather than deal with the possibility of conflict arising so soon after my reappearance, should one of the children refuse to go elsewhere to be fed. Every night I fall desperately asleep whilst attempting to read to my children, resurfacing groggily to haul myself into my own bed, only to be repeatedly disturbed shortly thereafter by the child who is so happy that I came back, that he just can’t leave me alone, even to sleep. At 02:00 every morning my body wakes up with a zing! Sleep eludes me for hours. But I slip back into my role without fuss. Older mother, marriage wrecker, home maker, relief teacher, good daughter … This fatigue, mental, physical, emotional, spiritual, is my normal state of being.

My arrival home coincides with the jasmine blooming. That heady fragrance heralds dangerous memories of myself, a very young woman, cautiously navigating my first serious friendship as I tip-toe into adulthood. I’ve been accessing those memories lately, trying to figure out how I slipped up, way back then. I have been baffled by how I so spectacularly stepped out of my role as the good daughter (albeit lost child) with the world at her feet and into another.

1987        I was determined this friendship would never be a romantic liaison. I did not want a boyfriend. I did not want a lover. I told everyone I was never going to marry, never going to have children. I planned to go back to Europe, explore my roots. All I wanted was a little flat filled with books, houseplants and my two cats where I could write and create and study and meet the world entirely as I saw fit, finally on my terms, and no one else’s.

My experience until then had been to try and appear normal. I knew very well I wasn’t normal, but I did my damndest to pass. This is called masking. It made me vulnerable precisely because instead of self-discovery, I always aimed to replicate and perform whatever others seemed to expect of me.

2022        When I meet my uncle in Texas, 37 years after spending time in his home in 1985 aged 15, he remembers me as a teenager who never said a word. He tells me he likes me much better now that I talk. His claim not to have known that I was in Texas with my folks in 1979, for six months, demonstrates how invisible I made myself. Invisibility is a shield almost as effective as shapeshifting, when you know you just can’t fit in.

For years we had a Peanuts cartoon on our fridge at home, depicting Peppermint Patty just standing there inside the frame, while Marcie declares “You’re weird, Sir.” That was me. I owned that notoriety and enjoyed the feeling of belonging I got whenever my parents said affectionately to me, “You’re weird, Sir!” So long as I stayed with the bounds they set for me, they accepted me as the person I presented to them.

1988        I see myself now, earnestly digging myself into a shallow trench. Yes, a tight fit. No, it doesn’t hurt, not much, anyway. I can cope. Always reaching blindly, accommodating myself to the demands of others. Does it hurt? I would ask myself. Really? Is it that important? Do I stick out? Is it that difficult? Am I not strong enough, kind enough, big enough, understanding enough, to manage, despite my distaste and misgivings? I was raised to not be selfish, to put others before myself. Is he really asking too much of me?

This is never a process of negotiated consent. Consent is never sought. Conquest is assumed. I see my role as choosing how to respond to what morphs from an unwanted, unsought, unimagined idea, into inevitability. Somehow, choosing how to respond becomes my only power. Do I stand helpless in the headlight glare? His demands creep up on me all unawares. I am so naiive. There are many moments of acute, mortifying embarrassment. I could list them all now. The feeling of humiliation resonates still within me. It hurts. These days, when my performance falls short and I am exposed as less than normal, less than perfect, my whole body is thrown into acute physical pain.

As usual, other people seem to know me better than I know myself. I grapple with who I am being made to be and transform myself into that person. In this process I lose focus on my authentic, true self. She lies discarded, bleeding out quietly in that shallow trench.

What tenuous boundaries I had formed by that stage, were malleable and permeable. I allowed others to shift my boundaries incrementally to suit themselves. I struggled to accommodate, never gaining enough traction or perspective to realise what was happening to me, never quite making it back up to the surface to gasp untainted air.

1989        Before I know it, my circumstances change drastically. Within a few months my life as good daughter, university student, peace activist, writer, sister, friend, traveller, is torn out from under me. I shapeshift to survive, transition rapidly into girlfriend, wife and mother, so estranged from my previous life and people that I no longer trust which way is up. I am pulled out by the roots. I sever ties willy-nilly, trying to avoid dragging others down with me. It takes years for my people to find me again. Rejected, discarded, worthless, defeated, yet I have to somehow measure up to my responsibilities.

My father tells me – I made my bed, and now must lie upon it. My mother tells me – actions speak louder than words. Take a reality check. It doesn’t matter whether I have chosen my path or just gone along with what had happened to me. I don’t count. Did I ever? Only my actions matter, especially now that the survival of others depends entirely on those actions. And no, I am not to expect any help with babysitting.   

Access to resources is entirely dependent on my erstwhile “Friend”, who rapidly devolves into a selfish, self-serving bully, intent on blaming me for the inconvenience of having a wife and children, and at the same time, intent on crushing me, using me in any way he could, to achieve what he thinks he deserves.  

This is an old story. Its interest to me now lies in recognizing the steps I took to adapt, learn my new roles, acquire the working knowledge I needed to raise my children and eventually release us from that sticky situation. I don’t know that I ever came back to myself – I just keep treading water until I can’t any longer.

If I weep now, it’s not so much regret for what might have been, but rather a retriggering of pain and confusion that I have never dealt with. It seems that this accretion of pain and confusion forms my only means of defense today; a sorry excuse for boundaries. The ongoing effects of my lack of boundaries continues to profoundly impact every relationship I have.

There is so much work to be done. I think I glimpse the shape of myself now, buried in that shallow trench under so many layers of accumulated filth. When I finally dig her up, clutch her to my bosom, will I know me anymore? Will she accept me for who I have become, the terrible mistakes I’ve made, the paths I’ve forged?  

2022       I fly out of Adelaide in a window seat. I feel empty, bereft, uncertain about leaving my children, even less certain about meeting my adult children on their terms. Will I fit? Is there a place for me? Do they really want me to play a role in their lives? I feel like such a fraud, such a failure. How can I expect them to understand? All I have to go on is my hard-won self-knowledge that I play a set of roles. I mask my true self. Do they know me at all? Am I a failure to them? If they do not know me for who I have become, how can they love me? How can I pretend to play mother of the bride? This role is new to me. Mother-in-law? It’s ludicrous. It feels so risky. I feel so flimsy, unreal.

I watch the world recede and shrink before my very eyes as we ascend. Who am I, away from my allotted roles? I foresee the need to similarly shrink myself to size, to not get in the way, to be accommodating. And with that, I feel the familiar inward-pulling tug of the precious kernel of self, gird my locked ribs tightly around the hollow of my heart, breathe deeply and intuit how to participate on this journey, as a lone white overweight middle-aged woman on an intercontinental flight.

Anonymity grates, but invisibility continues to surprise me. When the flight attendants interrupt me three times with special gluten free meals I feel obliged to eat them, even as the young man with the window seat across from me (I am in the aisle again) politely refuses anything but water. Here’s the thing – I’m not really hungry, I don’t want to use the airplane toilets, but the fact that the airline has prepared these meals for me means I feel I need to eat them and appreciate them. Besides which my residual childhood memory associates airplane food with good times.

During my eight flights there and back, no one inquires or shows any interest in me. I sit back, or lean forward, playing uncomfortable elbow-tag with the armrests, doze, watch movies, and engage with no one. It’s not to say I don’t use my acquired life-skills to try and connect. I do. I initiate conversation on the flight from LAX to Philadelphia with the young man beside me and the woman next to him, with a cat in a carrier. It’s a fizzer. (You’re weird, Sir.”) When the flight from LAX to Sydney finally departs close to midnight, and it becomes clear that the seat between me and the young Filipino man will remain empty, I initiate a high five with him. It’s embarrassing. (You’re weird, Sir.)

Maybe people these pandemic days invest less in connecting with strangers. Or maybe it’s the way I present that puts them off. Yes, I suspect it has to do with my inadvertently stepping beyond the bounds of my role as overweight middle-aged white woman.

My heart literally hurts when I leave Philadelphia. Tears course down my cheeks. No matter how I try, I cannot stem the flow. But I have to go. I’m expected elsewhere, and after that I have to return to my life, to the bed I must lie upon. My one consolation is the knowledge, the truth that I did meet my adult children unmasked, raw, joyous and bereft all at once, and was embraced.

Tuesday, April 19, 2022

Four months of life

*spoiler alerts* Maid (Warner Brothers) 

18 April 2022 

I started watching MAID yesterday and it hasn’t made me cry yet. I watch Alex as she hurtles from crisis to crisis, leaping over puddles that inconvenience her relentless pursuit of survival. She can’t even think about thriving in a world that fails to acknowledge her worth as a human being. 

When Danielle tries to push Alex into tapping into anger, the dull rage that swirls endlessly inside Alex barely ripples. I resonate with that. Anger takes such a lot of energy that is better put towards knocking down another obstacle she never sees looming on the horizon. 

Other people’s houses, other people’s children – totally I get how in the maelstrom of mother’s hand to child’s mouth, one’s sense of efficacy and connection becomes warped. Alex writes that it is hard not to want other people’s things. Yes, and it is hard not to want other people’s lives. 

* * * 

When I worked as a checkout operator in Coles, I was still living with my parents and still studying. But my memory clearly conjures up the precise distance I perceived, between the products whose purchase I facilitated for other people, and my own lack of access to these products for my personal benefit. Stock-take took place regularly in those days, always after the store had closed at midday on Saturday. It had been impressed upon me so firmly, during my orientation to my job, that if I were caught even involuntarily eating from a packet of something that someone else had left open but unpurchased on a shelf, I would be summarily charged with theft and lose my job. This warning was given to every new employee, but I became so frightened at this prospect, that I couldn’t even see myself making a legal purchase of nuts or sweets or chips or yoghurt, lest I inadvertently jeopardize my reputation and employment. 

I mean, this hurts. I might have buried my anger too deep to let it burn me on the surface, but I have access to several layers of pain. There’s the dull and constant pain of blood pumping through my veins, marking in time, my dissociation from the reality of my connection with the children I bore and the children I raise. There’s the sharp and acute pain that strikes whenever I am confronted by someone else’s reality, which, after piercing through my armour and wounding me in the gut, subsequently deprives me of something I had thought was certain and real. There’s the irritation that buzzes my consciousness, drawing a cross-hatched pattern across my senses in these days when matter shifts about almost at random, unbalancing my centre, rendering everything in disorienting shades of perpetual uncertainty. There’s the pain that throbs down deep, threading through my very marrow with reminders that I am responsible, I am culpable, never innocent of blame, especially when it is unfairly projected upon my person. Intention is irrelevant in indeterminate circumstances that shape my actions and impel me towards repair, covering the breach, mending relations, smoothing the way for others. I picture myself grovelling, lying face down in a mud puddle, trying in vain to flatten my big behind, cease my fidgeting, to make the passage less perilous for the stream of entitled mendicants lined up along the path awaiting their chance to tread upon me in their pursuit of whatever it is they believe they have a right. 

* * * 

No one ever bothers to ask Alex what Alex needs or wants. Alex has no time to think about what Alex needs or wants. Alex runs fast. Alex is snared so securely in survival mode that Alex only responds to two things: whatever shadows her and whatever shoves itself into her face. 

It’s a story so banal, so familiar, so mundane as to parallel documentaries of natural history, focusing rather than on some animal species, on a young female human’s life journey of inter- and intragenerational trauma. 

Alex is abused, just as her mother is abused, and quite possibly her mother before. Alex is aware of the damage her own daughter incurs. Alex chose not to have an abortion. Alex chose to bear this child despite the stated wishes of her child’s father. Trapped, Alex comprehends the horrible truth that although she herself has no value in the world, and although her own daughter will likely turn out despite her bestest efforts, to grow up in a world of abuse and struggle, Alex is nonetheless responsible for her daughter’s life. 

Alex is now held accountable by everyone, for each of her daughter’s failures and successes. This is drummed into her not only by the government agencies which insist that by fleeing an abusive partner, Alex is to blame for destabilizing her daughter’s world, but by her experience in which she is blamed, held responsible and made to jump through arbitrary hoops for absolutely everything she needs to survive. 

Her survival is begrudged by government regulation. Her survival is begrudged by her mother and father, who see Alex only for what they and their grandchild require of her. They take what she is unwilling to give. 

No one ever says thank you, or sorry to Alex. 

Alex’s existence is begrudged by Sean, the young man who took control of her, by his family and community, who all abuse Alex in turn. Alex is a nuisance. She is an eyesore. Alex and her selfishness spoiled Sean’s chances of making it in this world. She has saddled him with their child. Sean’s addictions, selfishness and violence are thrown inconveniently into lurid technicolour view, but only Alex notices. It is unbelievable that no one else can acknowledge what is going on. 

The trajectory is clear. When full-time parenting, which is what Alex wants and needs to go on doing, becomes inconvenient to Sean’s lifestyle, he graciously allows Alex to claw her way back into active mothering of their daughter. Alex has no choice then, but to be grateful to him, because she has no other purpose in life than to protect her precious daughter. 

* * * 

Resisting the urge to place a permanent end to the cycle of abuse takes an inner strength that musters itself only incrementally. A few steps forward and a few steps back, in a slow dance to somewhere. The strength might always lie there there somewhere inside, sluggishly lumpy, dormant, and stubbornly ignored, even as it forces one to go ahead and take another breath, despite one’s every intention to not. 

Watching MAID doesn’t make me cry. It puts me back in touch with the rage that smoulders endlessly, consuming in brightly-coloured, frantic flames, my bruised, misshapen fifty-two-year-old heart. I am angry about the choices I have had to take. I have never been privileged with a smorgasbord of options to suit my tastes. Until I was diagnosed with coeliac disease, rendering my food choices public, I was never invited to consider my tastes in anything. My choices have always been binary – life or death? him or her? this or that? now or then? here or there? yes or no? I am governed too, by the toxic silence of a family bound together by secrets and lies, as well as social conditioning that tells me I must consider the comfort of every other person before my own. 

When faced most recently with the choice of whether to go on living, I weighed up carefully the cost to others, of killing myself versus ending my relationship. I concluded that by inconveniencing, yes even hurting Brown Owl and disrupting her serene and fruitful life, I could allow myself to go on living, for the benefit of my adult children, my young children, my ageing parents, my siblings, niblings, pets, and friends. 

And so I gathered up my possessions and I left, to start living again. 

I could not project myself into the future she has forced upon me. Like the pain of childbirth which recedes behind a smokescreen of responding to a baby’s immediate needs, my mind forgot to remember the consequences I would bear, for choosing life. I have forged an unavoidable, deeply furrowed path, fraught with potholes and ditches that ambush almost every step I am forced to take. I must face up to the consequences of my actions without the comfort of knowing that my choice was false, made not on my behalf so much as in an attempt not to hurt and disrupt too many of the lives of all those others who are connected to me. I know I have caused disturbances in the accepted narratives of many people in my life. I know that my wishes don’t matter nearly as much as my actions. 

Which brings me back to Alex, who cleans other people’s houses, just as I cleaned other people’s houses, and just as I cared for other people’s children. I am conscientious, hardworking, intuitive, and bold, when it comes to other people’s houses, and other people’s children. 

I struggle to maintain the boundaries necessary for personal safety, between myself and other people’s children. This is the curious thing. Are Wizard and Jack my children? No one says they are not, and most people seem to think I am mostly responsible for keeping them safe and healthy. Their daddies stopped talking to me for two months because I chose to go on living. I keep encountering Organisations and Institutions that require proof of my relationship to them, because of course I have no legal legs to stand on in this Brave New World of non-biological parenting, where the accountability reaches only in one direction, from my spirit to theirs. 

The impediment that repeatedly breaks my heart is this armour I have built around me; my attempt to go on surviving without being impacted by the incessant assaults upon my invisible integrity. My survival depends upon my self-protection which stops me from soul connection. 

There are years of my life in which I don’t even know who I am anymore. Who is this “I” that survives? Who is this “I” in connection with anybody else? If I don’t know who I am, how can I possibly know what my children need from me? How could I ever do less than my best for them? 

The paradox of continuing to live without purpose or recognition of what I have endured pushes my every button, impelling me towards self-extinction. I focus instead on the external, knowing full well that one day I will have to face the discordant music that permeates and punctuates my inner turmoil. It will be waiting if ever I find myself at liberty to take it apart at last and reassemble all the layers of my world to suit me. 

* * * 

19 April 2022 

The second part of MAID made me cry, nearly all the way through. I had been warned of this possibility by a friend, also a survivor of emotional abuse. 

When Alex returns to Sean, having exhausted her options – neither of her parents can help her; the man who offered to help won’t stop making sexual advances towards her; everything that hinged upon her accommodation, such as daycare for her little girl, and employment on the island, is torn away because of Sean’s inappropriate and addicted behaviour at a birthday party – it’s not long before the cycle of abuse turns once more from sweet honeymoon to poisonous exertion of control. 

Alex watches and experiences all this from a distance, still holding on to her self-belief, and reaching out wistfully towards the future she desires, while clearly and consistently signalling to Sean that she has returned to him on her own terms, terms which he refuses to heed, or even hear. 

Sean has literally imprisoned her. He steals her car, won’t pay for her phone credit, makes it impossible for her to work, threatens her physically, speaks to her with cruelty, buys alcohol instead of food, and the list goes on. 

And then, after another violent attack upon her, Alex walks away from Sean’s trailer, carrying their daughter and nothing else. Fortunately for Alex, the DV shelter readmits her, and supports her to regain a sense of self and purpose. 

When Alex, after multiple struggles, ultimately triumphs, my tears fall once again. This time self-pity has set in. I remind myself that it’s really only been four months, since I chose life. I have done quite a lot in those four months. 

When Brown Owl ensnared me, thirteen years ago, I had been fifteen years single. I had raised my children up, brought them and myself through education, gained a qualification and a decent, steady wage, and had even scored secure public housing that I intended to stay in, for life. I had, at that time, enough self-respect to have placed boundaries between myself and my parents. I was devoting energy and time to creative pursuits that had for so long been reduced to dabbling on the edges whenever the need to create bled too much through the fabric of the things I needed to do to survive. My activism remained a core value and a driver for frequent activity. 

Today, I sit shame-bound and crippled by the lingering doubts about how I traded my freedom for a sequestered life of middle-class middle-aged privilege, I wallow and writhe and wonder how much time I really have left. I calculate the cost to myself and my four children. The knowledge that I abandoned Guitar Hero and LabCat on the cusps of their adulthood is something I live with, and I cannot undo. 

Emotional abuse is so slippery and elusive to define. It happens all the time, that I switch from myself to herself. It’s so easy to take the blame, to be the fall guy, the one with the issues. Because I am the one with the issues. I am the one at the top of the seesaw, scared to fall on my head, wishing and hoping with all my might that she will let me down gently, while knowing full well I am in for punishment. I deserve all she dishes out, due to my temerity in calling out her behaviour and attitude. 

I choose life. She feels humiliated. 
I feel used. She feels accused. 
I feel abused. She feels gracious. 
I feel ashamed. She feels self-righteous. 
I feel worthless. 

The only reason I feel at all is because I choose life over death. 

My covid quarantine output, though not prodigious, is still quite high: a clean house, repaired bed clothes, weighted animals, numerous items of mended clothing, half a jumper knitted, 15 job applications, long and frank conversations with three friends, one hand- painted piece of furniture an online inteand 3000 words. My boys will return to me tomorrow, and I am looking forward to spending a few days with them. The last four months have brought me to this place. I have housing, I have an income, I have resources, I have friends who actively love and care for me. 

year, my Jerusalem.

Wednesday, May 05, 2021

The Stories I Have In My Head (6 May, 2021)

A few years ago I wrote a piece called “Holding My House in My Head”. I never published this agonizer, but it has stuck with me because at the time of writing it, I spoke about it with a friend whose response surprised me at the time. I recall she said something like “I wouldn’t want to hold my house in my head; it sounds really terrible”. 

 At the time I was a Stay At Home Mother of two primary-school-aged children at the same time as being a Business Owner working 30+ hours/week from home caring for preschoolers for $10/hour each. If I had had four in care, that would have been $40/hour, but my hours stretched from 6am to 11pm and I almost never had more than two in care at a time. Oh, I was also a Wife, a Daughter, a Sister, with In-Laws, and a Friend. 

My friend’s response surprised me was because although I was under immense pressure, I was feeling very strong. I was feeling good about keeping all the balls in the air. I was feeling competent and adequate. 

I wrote:      My house – I know pretty much where everyone is and what they’re doing most of the time; Get to spend the day with some of the most funny, interesting human beings; I’m not scared. I do my work well. The children I care for are well looked after and educated
. . . . . . 
 I hold my house in my head. I am intimate with every spider web, streak of grime across the kickboard of the kitchen cupboards, dirty windows, from when Wizard threw mud on them that never got washed off, despite the hours and hours of playing firefighters and squirting water on said muddy windows. I know when the toilet paper is about to run out and it’s time to place an order with Who Gives a Crap. I keep track of light bulbs, refillable bottles of shampoo, the need for socks without holes to wear to school, and clean uniform items. 

The pressures exerted on me by the Family Day Care Scheme were massive and, in the end, insurmountable, especially combined with the pressures of family life and a partnership in which I felt my paid work was of far less value and not recognized as a contribution to our family. 

I wrote:      When I’ve been up since 5am working, and the last child leaves at 6pm and 
my wife has just got home from work and I need to feed my family, 
 when am I supposed to vacuum and mop, and scrub the cupboard doors? 
 When do I reflect on what I offer the children the next day? 
 When do I write up my reflections and my programming? 
 And why? So I can keep working for $10 an hour? 

Also:      The twinge of guilt and exasperation that pinches me at the words 
“There’s no bread?” at 7:25am on Wednesday morning 
 when Brown Owl needs to make her lunch and leave for work in the next 
five minutes because there are not enough leftovers from the night before, 
 is soon buried beneath the multiple other strands of need that 
I juggle and weave and manage so deftly all of the bloody time. 

(Except when I don’t. And there are so many times I make mistakes, times I am just unable to add one more complexity to the list of responsibilities, times when I cannot be in more than one place at one time, times when the guilt, resentment, envy and exhaustion turn me into a robotic martyr.) 

The story I carry in my head from such years is of me as an unloved drudge, invisible so long as I perform to standard, and unworthy of attention or affection. Each time one of my children hurts me or feels hurt, feels like it is a punishment I earned and deserve because of my imperfection. 

Each time I am deprived of something I’ve been longing for, miss out on an opportunity to give some time to myself, let go of another connection with someone feels like if I don’t further compress my being, the cracks will start to show and the whole thing might fall apart, and where will that leave my children, my partner, my business, my garden, my home, my animals? 

I was busy, yes – too busy to give anything much for myself, and too busy to gain any perspective on the aspects of my life that I had orchestrated and created, those I had taken on because there didn’t seem to be anyone else to fill the void, and those that were placed on my shoulders because I accepted them without question. 

I remember vividly, the dread I have carried in my heart for years, knowing it would be years before my children are no longer at home full-time and I can finally give voice to the yearning to create. The stories I created in my head at these dread-filled times were joyous, colourful, light-filled and wonderful. I couldn’t wait to express what was being compressed and repressed inside my being. 

These were not stories I could talk about freely with anyone in my life. These were not stories co-constructed with the viewpoints and experiences of anyone else. They were vicious open secrets; wounds that repeatedly tore jagged holes in the doggedly darned and meticulous weaving that represents my life. 

These stories are mediated by my inability and unwillingness, because of the shame I bear, to place responsibility on anyone else. At least this way, only I can be at fault. It wouldn’t be fair to blame somebody else. 

Of course, some people know me better than that. Some people do not remain oblivious to my pain. 

Some people say – you choose to see your life in such a negative light. Actually, your life is great! Just look at the good bits instead of focusing on the bad bits. 

Some people say – let me help you refocus your ideas about your life. There may be ways to change things so that you are not so overburdened. 

Some people attribute my behaviour to the circumstances I construct around myself. 

Some people tell me that I am making choices to write my story the way I am writing it. Some people said – hey Melina, this is not your fault; give yourself a break – let in some freedom chinks. It’s not all up to you. 

See, I am not an idiot. I have been trained in Deep and Active Listening. I have had therapy, worked on myself. I am not ignorant or incognizant of my tendencies to render myself so alone, so special and so Rock Rose Water Violet remote as to be unreachable.# 

I quote the out-of-favour J.K.Rowling: 
Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? 
Or has this been happening inside my head?” 
. . . . . 
“Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, 
but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?

My life is not a fiction. I do not dwell between the pages of a novel. When I summoned the courage to speak my truth in the hope that such a radical gesture might initiate a cataclysmic change in the paradigm of my life, and my truth was relegated to “stories inside my head”, the shock and shame of this judgment silenced me instantaneously. The somatic effect was shakiness, queasiness, shortness of breath. And I wanted to die. Of course. Or at least disappear, permanently. 

Perhaps I was foolish to harbour the hope that the truth of my lived experience holds any value if not for myself, than for those I share my life with? Trouble was, I naively mistook my opponent for my ally. I understand that, now. 

#Bach Flower Therapy: Theory and Practice, Mechtild Scheffer (1988) 
 *Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K.Rowling (2007)