Home Truth
Page 4
Because of my experiences of boarding school at a very young age, my feelings about home were conflicted and passionate. Compared to the regimented, coolly hostile boarding school environment, where toughness and bravado were required for survival, the relief of home lay in its freedom. I could get up from my comfy bed when I wanted to, not when the bell clanged and the light suddenly blazed on at 6.15 am and nuns flapped round hauling sleepy children from horsehair mattresses. At home, I could dawdle down to breakfast and choose whatever I wanted to eat rather than be forced to go to Mass and then move in silent ranks into the refectory for cornflakes in summer and porridge in winter. I could wear what I wanted to, laze around reading, or play with my younger brothers and sisters. I could draw or wander up to the library for yet another book and generally please myself. Home was a place of comfort and warmth where my cat could sleep on my feet at the end of the bed, where we could make messes, drag furniture into the wide front hall and drape it with blankets to make strange, sagging cubbies to crouch in and imagine games about pirates or housekeepers. Calling out in the night ‘Mu-um, I want a drink of water’ and waiting confidently while she brought it in was a very different proposition from sitting up in the moonlit dormitory, not knowing what to do about the congealing vomit all over my eiderdown, waiting anxiously for the certain trouble and possible punishment this might bring in the morning. The contrast between home and school was intense. Home meant freedom. We were left alone to pursue our childhood activities. At home under the camphor laurel and jacaranda trees, we could build dams down the backyard with the hose or we could make stories in the sandpit, or organise snail races, making leafy nests as rewards for the place-getters, while the also-rans faced death, crushed in the vise on the workbench down the back. All very different from the rigid timetables of boarding school where everyone did the same thing at the same time, under close scrutiny, where a balloon, playfully attached to a tap until the water burst it, merited a beating. Home meant freedom where playfulness reigned, school was a prison where playfulness was suppressed and strappings were frequent. Play in children is practise for a creative life. We built rambling cities out of timber blocks, inhabited by a variety of figures—peg dolls, lead soldiers, paper cut-outs from magazines—even the bones from the forbidden box in the surgery featured. Long narratives with witches and horses, princes and mysterious imprisonments played out endlessly on the floor of the ‘play room’.
Packing up at the end of the holidays was a grim business, pretending to be cheerful for my mother’s sake: ‘Gabrielle’s mouth turns up at the corners.’ Freedom was coming to an end. The prison loomed ahead. I was jealous of the cat, sitting smug under the hall table, and used to wish we could change places. Leaving home in the late afternoon for the drive back to school with my father in the old black Riley was a sad and silent affair, the long school term stretching ahead into the future, an endless piano keyboard, ivory keys diminishing toward the vanishing point. It would be an age before I was home again. As we left the coast and drove towards Wahroonga, the vegetation and the birdlife markedly changed. Unlike now, there were no currawongs on the coast, and the melancholy calling of these unfamiliar birds in the gloomy twilight heralded the prisoner’s return. There were no eucalypt trees at Coogee.
These thin, alien trees, with their leaves in tiered clumps silhouetted against the darkening skyline like an Art Nouveau etching, seemed in my childish imagination to be blocks of flats for birds, each clump housing a mother nesting with her fledglings, warm and safe for the night. First sight of the ‘clump trees’ and the imagined safe havens for fledglings caused my heart to ache as I was driven further from my home. Even now, walking in the evening on a Sunday night, and hearing a late currawong calling on its way to roost, a wave of sadness can ambush me half a century later.
Back at boarding school, unable to sleep on the hard horsehair mattress on the iron bedstead for the first night or so, I’d think of all the animals who had no homes, who were scared and cold and wet, and I’d weep for them. I couldn’t approach the real source of my grief.
In my case, to the aching sense of homesickness and alienation was the added shame of being the only suburban boarder among two dozen country girls for whom boarding was necessary. ‘Why are you boarding?’ they’d demand to know at my Sydney boarding schools. ‘You live in Sydney!’ Nor is homesickness confined to early childhood. In Paris where I lived for four months twelve years ago, the sight of a discarded packing case stamped ‘Packham Pears Australia’, among cabbage leaves and other vegetable debris at a street market, brought me almost to sudden tears.
At the other end of term came the rising joy as the holidays drew closer, day by day, and I counted the days until home. I’d promise myself that this time, things would be different. There wouldn’t be the constant fights. I’d be a good (compliant) daughter. I’d go home full of high resolve. But by the end of the first day, the conflict was back and, bewildered, I’d wonder how it was that I could never seem to be ‘good’.
Gradually, the acute stage of homesickness wore off and over the years I ceased to feel these powerful emotions. Hurt, anger and grief were replaced by carelessness—of every sort. If you don’t care, nothing can hurt you.
Home and the return home after a long absence provide one of the most powerful archetypes for stories. Whether it’s Ulysses or Lassie, the deep satisfaction such homecoming stories create in us is a clue to their universal nature. My mother-in-law used to tell the story of how her father, a small farmer, in a fit of either emotional stupidity or financial desperation—it was during the Depression—sold the two pet whippets belonging to his daughters to someone described in her account as ‘a tinker man’. My mother-in-law and her sisters were heartbroken and grieved for the lost dogs. She would lie awake worrying about them. Were they being cared for? Ill-treated? Properly fed? She and her sisters cried themselves to sleep mourning for their lost animal companions. Many months later, she reported, she was looking out over the dried-out soil of the barren paddocks, when two balls of dust appeared on the horizon. Closer and closer they came. It was the two whippets, escaped and coming home!
There is a deep satisfaction in stories such as this, a deep redemption that hits ‘home’ somewhere in the psyche. The newspapers love tales of animals overcoming huge odds and coming back to their homes. Readers love them, too. A dog that finds its way back to Sydney from Adelaide makes a better story than a dog returning from a nearby suburb.2 Writers of drama know that the greater the distance between the goal and its accomplishment, or the size of the fall from grace (or its opposite, the rise of the lowly) the greater the impact of the story.
One of the most powerful expressions of the homecoming story, and one which for me expresses the full, rich nature of the idea of home, is ‘The Prodigal Son’. Here, the returning son limps back to the place where ‘they have to let him in’ after wasting his inheritance in lowlife misadventuring. Not only do they ‘let him in’ but a great feast is also made in his honour. His father lavishes his riches, including the ring from his own finger, on his chastened, humbled and repentant offspring. This parable implicitly points to something powerful underlying notions of home—that of complete acceptance by the father figure (representing society). Even more than acceptance, my notion of home needs to contain forgiveness—even redemption.
There comes a time when ‘home’ starts to chafe—it’s too small, too limited for the growing person. The habits and culture of the home belong to the older generation and young ones growing up hear and see things differently. They want to experience more, live more. Their world is not our world. In the last two years of high school at the convent, the 1960s were erupting around me! We’d be sitting in the Senior Study Room on Saturday nights, darning our dreadful lisle stockings over wooden eggs and, in the houses that surrounded the convent, the parties were audible. Rock’n’roll in the distance promised excitement, boys and girls jiving together, and sex. I couldn’t wait to get into it! Rebellion an
d curiosity fuelled me.
I had nothing in the way of life skills by then, but I didn’t know that and wouldn’t have cared anyway if I’d realised. I felt like I was on the brink of some huge, endless party of fun and boys and doing all the things that the nuns and my parents frowned on or forbade. Institutionalised as I was, by the time I left school, I wasn’t part of the family, I’d been a holiday visitor only since I was six. I didn’t feel any real connection with the people I lived with yet neither did I have any idea of how to move out. This entails saving money for a bond, for at least a month’s rent in advance, not to mention the maturity to either live alone in rented premises or to live with others, sharing the domestic duties. I hadn’t had any experience of this, either. My only domestic skills being that I could make good gravy and a classic white sauce.
Finding somewhere to make love was extremely difficult. There were hotels—but for those you needed four pounds (fifty dollars now?) and the ability to sneak past prudish receptionists and desk clerks. There were cars, always a difficult proposition. Making love requires space. There was the beach—unfriendly in winter, and subject to nosey police patrols. There was the odd phone booth—quite a challenge. I wonder how many people of my generation left home simply in order to find a place where they could make love? Hell, I got married to do that! In the meantime, a place had to be found.
Down the backyard, past the camphor laurel and jacaranda trees, on top of the garage that gave onto the lane at the other end of the long property, was a small bedsit flat. This was occasionally let to gardeners: single men usually, with colourful life stories; more rarely to a younger gardener and his wife and baby. But more usually it was vacant, and certainly when I was looking for places other than the backseats of cars, the flat down the back provided a very occasional (and never completely relaxed) haven for me and my boyfriend, though only when the parents were away. Many years later, when the six of us siblings were all together at a family function, and talking about our family and the past as we are inclined to do, I mentioned how I used the flat as a love nest. My brother, eighteen months younger than I, looked up smiling. ‘I used to do that, too,’ he said. We both noticed the next brother laughing. ‘Me too,’ he said. Someone else piped up, and our laughter became even louder. It turned out that just about all of us had used the gardeners’ flat like this over the years, each one thinking how clever we were to think of it.
Just as it all depends on what you mean by home, there are also many different ways of coming home. Many years ago, when I stopped drinking and was enduring those days of what is termed ‘early sobriety’—a prim phrase that does nothing to indicate the maelstrom of confusion, unintegrated emotions, rawness, fear and helplessness and the awful realisation that I had never really learned the necessary, quite ordinary skills for successfully living as a human being—my newly sober and fragile mind kept repeating this phrase to itself: Take me home. Even then, confused and disoriented as I was, I wondered at the words. To whom were they addressed? What home was meant? Where did this pleading come from? Was it some sort of disguised suicidal wish? Was it coming from a deeply regressed state of mind, one that was seeking some sort of inner parent figure? A pathetic, childish plea for rescue from existential pain?
Now, with the advantage of twenty-five years’ worth of hindsight, these questions have been largely answered. But it took quite some time. Years of costly bioenergetic therapy and daily, sometimes hourly or even minute by minute practice of a twelve-step program had to be worked before the fog of confusion lifted and answers slowly unfolded. I discovered that the ‘home’ that I was seeking was an inner state of mind and body—a state of relative psychological stability, largely free of inner conflicts and self-contradictory attitudes, of resentful grievances, and largely free too of the undischarged backlog of the lifetime’s collected grief I’d been carrying around, and a body that with years of work eventually became relatively free of habitual, muscular contractions and restrictions. A mind that could relax and just be, released to a large degree from the neurotic patterns that previously bound it.
The neuroses that restrict life can be subtle or gross. The strange ‘Beep!’ shouted intermittently in the street below the Habira Hotel turned out to be a man’s compulsive tic. The afflicted hairdresser, working in a small shop across the road, was compelled to shriek this sound. It would just burst out of his mouth at random intervals as he worked and he seemed to pay no attention to it. He, his clientele and the other shopkeepers clearly accepted this harmless, if somewhat surprising, personal quirk.
Over the years I developed more ease with living, found more intuitive solutions to problems rather than my old way of dealing: charging at them with the full force of my will. I had dreams about finding a door in my home that I’d never noticed before and opening it to discover, much to my astonishment, that my property extended much further than I’d previously thought. Sometimes I’d find a whole new suite of rooms, richly furnished, and I’d walk through them, wondering how I could have overlooked them until this moment. In other dreams, I’d open my window and look out on a Venetian-style waterway, delighted that I’d somehow gained a perfect waterfront! And in Venice!
My hunched, asthmatic body opened out and straightened up noticeably. I gained a little height. I learned to breathe without chemical puffers. I took up yoga, committed to doing everything possible to support a healthy, rather than self-destructive, lifestyle. I came to see that the home I had been seeking in that strange compulsive phrase ‘take me home’ was my self, restored to more of my birthright, the great potential that every human baby is born with, before the defences start building, the responses to life become guarded and narrow, and the iron enters the soul.3
However, I’m not sure that’s the complete answer. There is a very strange sensation that occurs—many would dismiss it as some form of synapse-jumping déjà vu and it only happens when I’m in a garden looking quite closely at a very particular arrangement of tall, dark green hedges and lush undergrowth. An intense feeling of tender familiarity arises, and I’m suddenly transported to this place, a place I knew once, a place of perfection. This memory—a sense of recognition of a familiar place—is always accompanied by a deep sense of love and longing. It feels to be a place I have known and lost. In a second, it vanishes and, once again, it’s back to old me again, standing looking at a nice green hedge and some lush undergrowth.
Again, on rare occasions, during certain forms of body work, extraordinary, altered states of body–mind occur. An intoxicating and exhilarating sense of huge expansion begins, as if one is an expanding supernova, spreading right out into space. This creates not only intense and all-encompassing pleasure, but a paradigm shift of consciousness, a shocking yet delightful revelation of a hitherto unknown capacity. Who is this and what is here? This experience crumbles existing ideas of limits and boundaries. But each time this has happened it has been too quickly curtailed. Old consciousness ‘doesn’t know what to do’ and as it seeks to regain equilibrium the huge experience is instantly pinched back into ordinary ‘normality’. All that is left is the memory. And with the memory, questions. What is this capability? This body that I’d thought of as my physical ‘home’ has proved insubstantial in the face of the expanding universe experience. How can this expansion be accessed more fully? What would happen if the fear didn’t kick in? Would one expand indefinitely into some other dimension? Where is home then?
The psychological home
Leaving aside for a moment the fact that ‘psyche’ actually translates as ‘soul’ rather than ‘mind’, the psychological inner state, the familiar, habitual waking mental state, is another sort of home. The body–mind perplex has kept philosophers entertained for centuries. Within our minds, familiar understandings and prejudices, attitudes and emotions, ways of thinking, irritations, bodies of knowledge, aptitudes and talents, negativities and character strengths or defects seem to envelop us psychologically, informing everything we do and say and determinin
g how we interact with other people. This psychological home is so habitual, so familiar, feels so ‘right’, that it’s hard to stay aware of the fact that probably nobody else in the world experiences life in quite the same way. Don’t we all really believe deep down, if we’re honest with ourselves, that we’ve got it ‘right’ and that if everyone else was of the same mind, thought the same way, acted in the same way, the world would be a much better place? With the collapse of boundaries called ‘falling in love’ human beings experience real euphoria. At last, we think, someone feels and thinks and speaks ‘just like me’. Someone ‘understands’. For a while, there is the sense of a shared mind—a shared psychological home.
Even without the ‘in love’ experience, there will always be certain individuals with whom I feel much more ‘at home’. A shared ethnicity implies certain similar race memories and a language bond. A certain type of education, a shared childhood religion, similar life experiences and certainly a shared sense of humour all increase the amount of ease and familiarity.4 Being raised (or as I like to joke, ‘razed’) Catholic in Australia, especially a pre-Vatican-Two type, creates familiarity at least at the tribal level with other people of similar experience. But these are relatively superficial levels of connection. At a deeper level, shared ideals and similar standards of integrity and honour can create a psychological home in which individuals can more truly meet. But I’ve come to understand that other people’s minds are not set up like mine and I imagine that there are an infinite number of ways to ‘see’ things psychologically. It’s helpful to remember this when discussing things because although we all use the same vocabulary, each word might come with completely different associations. Lots of arguments could be avoided by remembering this at all times. ‘It all depends what you mean by home’ should remind me that ‘It all depends what you (and I) mean by each word we say’ but we rarely delve into this. Defining terms might help a little, but even that would not inhibit the associations that arise, unbidden and uninvited, from each individual’s consciousness—or unconsciousness. Dr David R Hawkins, psychoanalyst and kinesiologist, has likened individual human consciousnesses/minds to corks in water in the great ocean of consciousness, each one suspended according to its level of buoyancy—some floating high, other low, others in between—in a nonhierarchical system. For a mind like mine, which used to see words and numbers in colour, and still views the days and weeks stretched out ahead of me as a series of long cream-coloured horizontals, not unlike the ivory keys of a piano, such a simile as this is very helpful and it’s always comforting and a nice surprise to find another cork bobbing alongside in the great sea of consciousness.