by Unknown
Lily Brett’s writing is full of life. A life that was and a life that is. Beauty, in all its forms, has been a big part of both of our upbringings. I identify with everything she writes and can proudly say I have read everything she has published with great, great joy. –MW
I was thrilled to give a birth to a boy. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t believe my luck. I thought our family didn’t have boys. I thought they lost boys. My mother lost a son, in the Lodz ghetto. She lost four brothers, in Auschwitz, and she aborted a small boy, in shame, after the war, in Melbourne.
In Guys Hospital, in London, I couldn’t sleep. I stayed up for two days and two nights looking, with amazement, at my beautiful boy. Several days later, I was even more amazed. I realized I had to take him home with me.
I hadn’t thought further than giving birth to the baby I wanted. I certainly hadn’t thought of taking him home. What was I thinking? I think I wasn’t thinking.
I wasn’t thinking about my mother. Now, I think part of the reason I had my son was my mother. I wanted to give her the sons she’d lost. I wanted to give her some of her family back. I wanted to give her the grandchildren she never dreamt she’d live to see, when she was lying, near-naked, ablaze with typhoid on the frozen ground at Stutthof, where she was sent after Auschwitz.
My baby boy made a big difference to my mother. She fell in love with him. And he fell in love with her. When she introduced him to people, she said, “My son.” Sometimes, when I was there, she corrected herself, “My grandson,” she would say.
Nine years ago, when she lay dying of cancer at sixty-four, she wanted him at her side. And he wanted to be there. Did I know about the fierce love that would grow between my mother and my son? The love that would fill gaps and dreams. I don’t know.
I didn’t know much, then. I didn’t know why I got married the first time around. I married someone I’d met when I was nineteen. He was tall and blond. He was as Aryan as you could get. Later, when his blond hair darkened, I bleached it right back.
The second time I married, I was thirty-four. And I knew why I was getting married. I was crazy about him. I was crazy about a man who was a stranger. I fell in love with him minutes after I met him. What did I know? I knew something. I’m still crazy about him.
Recently, my younger daughter asked me how I could have fallen in love with someone I hardly knew. It was a hard question. I stumbled around, talking about what we unconsciously perceive and understand about each other. But she wasn’t satisfied. And she was right. I didn’t have an answer.
I don’t have an answer to many things. I thought I would. I thought age brought answers. I think it does. But not all the answers.
I have some answers. And so I should. I’ve spent half my adult life in analysis. Anyone who’s read my books will know the head count. Three analysts. Many years.
It has been a crucial part of my life. One that both separated me from others and gave me a greater insight into other lives, as well as my own. For most of those years, I knew no one in analysis. When I began, my mother wept and said I was casting shame over the whole family. My father said he’d heard shocking things about my analyst.
Analysis saved me. It saved me from being the least I could be. It wasn’t easy. I’ve traveled to analysis sessions, early in the morning, four times a week, in different parts of the world. In hot weather, in below-freezing temperatures, in snowstorms, and in pouring rain. I’ve walked, driven, and bussed. I’ve cried gallons of tears. I’ve wept everywhere it’s possible to weep. On the bus, in the car, on the streets.
But I made it. The better part of me emerged. The part of me that feels entitled to have a life. To live without paying a price. And I’m grateful. So grateful.
I’m surprised at how much gratitude I feel. I feel grateful for things I didn’t notice or understand, in the past. A new sense of perspective came with the gratitude.
When I won the 1995 New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for Fiction, I said, in my acceptance speech, that my novel, Just Like That, was a celebration of love.
A celebration of the lives of my mother and father who survived Auschwitz. And a celebration of the fact that my mother and my father, who lost everyone they loved, in Auschwitz, did not lose the ability to love.
My mother and father survived five years in the Lodz ghetto before being transported to Auschwitz, where they were separated from each other, but not separated from their love for each other. It took them six months after the war to find each other, and they are a rare statistic—two Jewish people who were married to each other before the war, each surviving. I was very lucky to grow up in the middle of that love.
I wrote this speech very soon after being told I had won the award. I knew, and quite surprised myself by how sure I was, that it was my parents’ ability to love that saved not only them after the war, but me. It took me years to see how lucky I was to experience and be the recipient of that love. I spent decades dwelling on what was missing. I spent decades wishing we weren’t surrounded by the dead, by past and future Nazis, by anguish and absence.
I’m also surprised at how lucky I am able to feel. Feeling lucky has always felt dangerous. So, I’ve preoccupied myself with what’s wrong. Once I start thinking about what’s wrong, I can shuck off the discomfort that feeling lucky brings.
But, I do feel lucky. Lucky to be married to the man I’m married to. Lucky to have my children. Lucky to have lived long enough to see my children grown-up. When they were younger, I dreaded dying before they’d done enough growing. I kept detailed diaries of their childhoods, and of my feelings for them, in case I wasn’t around to remind them of the past. It wasn’t that I was ill. I never even caught colds, but I did catch the notion of death accompanying love. And for my parents, that was true. Everyone they were related to died, everyone they loved died.
I allowed myself to feel lucky so rarely that the moments stand out. When my son was small, he said to his best friend, within earshot of his best friend’s mother, “My mother is much nicer than your mother.” I was told this by the mother. When I stopped laughing, I felt very lucky to have a kid who thought that.
I feel lucky to have written the books I’ve written. I didn’t finish high school. I threw my education away. It was only one of the valuable things I discarded. I was in the A-form, at University High School, a school for bright kids, when, seemingly out of the blue, I couldn’t understand anything any teacher said. I was sixteen.
I spent the next three years trying to pass the final year of high school. I couldn’t read any of the textbooks. Nothing I read made sense. Words and paragraphs swam around the page. One year I would pass French, economics, and English, the next year I would fail all three and pass something else. Another year, I gave up and went to the movies when some of the exams were held. I never managed to pass the requisite number of the right subjects in one year.
In retrospect, I realize I was having a nervous breakdown of sorts. Nobody was troubled by it at the time. My parents were bothered, and I think very puzzled, but they had greater concerns about me. I was too fat. I had to lose weight. So, this failing and flailing of a bright, young girl went largely unnoticed. No teacher commented on it.
In school photographs, I look bright and cheerful. Over the years, when I’ve met people I went to University High School with, they tell me they remember me, always cheerful, always laughing. What was I laughing about? Why was I looking so cheerful when I was so clearly in trouble?
I stopped trying to study, and I got a job as a journalist. Boy, was I lucky to land that job! At the job interview, no one asked me if I could write. They wanted to know if I had a car. I said, yes, a pink Valiant. I got the job. Soon, I was writing page after page of the newspaper, every week. And I hardly saw my car again.
Feeling lucky still has an edge to it. I don’t want to push my luck. So, I filter and dilute my days with odd complaints and aches, and let the heady giddiness of feeling lucky seep in bits and pieces.
I�
�m forty-nine, now, and I can feel lucky. Physically, I’ve changed, too. I’m older and I’m lighter. I weigh less than I did when I was twelve, but I was a bit of a hefty twelve-year-old. I’ve been regaining my body, which was lost to me for years.
Feeling free is not easy for me. Still. “Freedom was never something you let yourself get away with for very long,” my first analyst wrote in a letter to me fifteen years ago.
“You’re much freer now,” my younger daughter, who is home from college for the weekend, says to me, looking over my shoulder as I type. “You can dance, too,” she says. “You never used to dance.” She’s right. I can dance.
“You can get out on the dance floor and have a wonderful time,” she says. I smile at her.
“You’re much calmer, too,” she says. “It’s easier to tell you when I don’t like something. I don’t think the world will fall apart, or anything.”
I understand exactly what she’s saying. She’s always been a good kid. Too good. I used to worry that she felt she had to be good. That she felt I had too many demons to deal with without her adding to the distress. Last year, I bought her a T-shirt. It read, “NO MORE MS. NICE PERSON.”
The former Ms. Nice Person looks at the title of this piece. “I think you’ve gotten older and younger,” she says. “I think you take more risks than you used to. You’re more curious, more confident.”
This is my baby who’s talking. The child, who despite the fact that she’s 5’8” and in her final year of college, I can’t stop feeling is still my little girl.
That was a few years ago. Now, I’m well and truly menopausal. Verified by blood tests. Jewish women, I read, statistically experience the worst menopausal symptoms. At least here, in America. And I was gearing myself up to fit right in with those statistics.
But something happened. I think it was a combination of all those years of analysis—menopause, the change of life, wasn’t going to bring me any new revelations, regrets, or disturbances, not after examining every detail of every revelation and disturbance—and the walking, the weight lifting, and the eating well.
A symptomatic menopause, weight loss, dancing, biceps, and triceps. Happy endings in my own life make me nervous. I feel the need to say that this is not the perfect life. I feel the need to dredge up difficulties. I’m as imperfect as I ever was, in many ways.
And, not all the damage can be fixed up. I can’t get rid of the scars of self-mutilation of my early childhood. One of them runs vertically and wildly down my stomach, the result of an unnecessary emergency appendectomy. I was only ten and wanted to cut all the excitement out of me.
I carry traces of the welts that dotted my teenage legs, red and inflamed, when I was too young to understand how distressed I was. The welts used to itch and itch. And I would scratch and scratch. I’ve made myself sad thinking about this. Sadness is always a good antidote for too much happiness, for me.
Some things don’t change. No matter how much you think you’ve changed. No matter how much clarity, wisdom, maturity you may feel you’ve achieved. I can feel the same hurt I felt as a teenager, at a friendship not turning out to be what I imagined it was.
Friendship, deep friendship, a subject that has preoccupied me for most of my life, has, in a strange way, eluded me. I still have the occasional fantasy of the best friend. The friend who shares everything with me. The friend with whom I’m completely connected. Connected to each other, to each other’s partners, to each other’s children, to each other’s pasts. I still long for that sometimes.
Maybe what I’m longing for is the passionate, unbridled friendship of more youthful years. Those years when you don’t wait until you feel good, or look good, or it’s an opportune and not inconvenient moment to call and see each other. Maybe I long for the unguarded, more truthful, less competitive friendship of the young.
A new friend, who lives in Washington, said she liked me instantly, because, as she put it to her husband, “She suffers.” I can understand criteria like that.
LILY BRETT was the recipient of Australia’s 1992 National Steele Rudd Award for her book, What God Wants. She also received the Victorian Premier’s Award for poetry and is the only writer to have won Australia’s highest awards for fiction and poetry. Ms. Brett was born in Germany, but moved to Melbourne with her parents in 1948. She is married to David Rankin, a prominent Australian painter, and lives in New York City.
About Dream of Things
Dream of Things publishes memoirs, anthologies of creative nonfiction, and other books that fulfill our mission to publish distinctive voices and meaningful books. For more information, visit dreamofthings.com.
Other Books From Dream of Things
Saying Goodbye
To the people, places and things in our lives, an anthology edited by Julie Rember and Mike O’Mary
Be There Now
Travel stories from around the world, an anthology edited by Julie Rand and Mike O’Mary
Leaving the Hall Light On
A Mother’s Memoir of Living with Her Son’s Bipolar Disorder and Surviving His Suicide by Madeline Sharples
Everything I Never Wanted to Be
A memoir of alcoholism and addiction, faith and family, hope and humor by Dina Kucera
Betty’s Child
A memoir by Donald Dempsey
Swimming With Maya
A Mother’s Story by Eleanor Vincent
Wise Men and Other Stories
A collection of holiday-related essays by Mike O’Mary
The Note
A book about the power of appreciation by Mike O’Mary
MFA in a Box
A Why to Write Book by John Rember