Maria Katsonis & Lee Kofman (ed)

by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)

  On this night, after I locked the door and blocked it and she hit me and screamed in my face, she reached for my hand and stared at me. My grandmother’s eyes always grew slick when she saw someone upset.

  Having a memory means, at least hypothetically, having a power over those who don’t. As always, I had two choices. To force a smile, shake my head. ‘Nothing, Gran. I’m fine.’ Squeeze her hand. ‘Let’s go watch some tellie.’ My other choice, the one that I usually made, was to shake her off and stalk past her. ‘You just called me a bitch! See my face? It’s red because you just hit me! Go away!’ I did the same that night.

  My mother expected me to be compassionate. And yet this happened less and less. I was cruel. I became rigid. I took aim at my grandmother ferociously. I paced the house, as she paced the house, my disinfectant spray clenched hard. My mother watched us. She watched me. Sometimes she would take me aside. Just be kind. She made it sound so simple.

  One day, when I was 15 or 16, I slammed the car door on my grandmother’s fingers in our driveway. I always tried to get out of the car before her. To be standing next to the car and have my door closed before Mum had unbuckled my grandmother’s seatbelt. Then I had the chance to be impatient, frustrated at how slow they were. This time my grandmother had her hand braced in the gap between the two open car doors. I wasn’t looking when I slammed mine shut.

  She cried – it was the cry of a little girl – and that made my mum cry too. Mum fumbled with her bag, trembling too hard to clench her fingers around the car keys. Once she managed to open the door, my grandmother cupped herself around her swelling hand.

  Mum looked at me. ‘Aren’t you sorry?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m sorry.’ I stared at my crying grandmother.

  But I didn’t feel anything. She wasn’t my grandmother anymore. Not really. And, in the shocked moments after, I couldn’t quite comprehend that she still had feelings. I watched her sob. I watched my mother soothe her. I watched my mother watching me and eventually I went inside.

  It was not until two years ago that I encountered the term disenfranchised grief when studying a counseling course. It was a relief to have a name for what I had experienced, for what my mother had experienced, too. Grieving in a way that society does not accept, does not acknowledge. Disenfranchised grief is the grief people aren’t really meant to feel. In my case, it was grieving ‘too early’, before my grandmother had gone. I grieved over those disappearing pieces of her; I grieved all the ways she had shifted into someone we didn’t know.

  Throughout it all, I refused to be kind.

  During the 12 years my mother and I lived with my grandmother’s worsening Alzheimer’s, there was an element of rivalry between me and my grandmother. I would start arguments with her and demand my mother judge. I would pick topics I knew my mother would side with me on. Silly things. Like estimating how tall I was. Or arguing that Mum was not my grandmother’s mum. Or recounting what we had had for breakfast.

  I stuck hard to things factual and truthful. Things in the here and now, which I knew my grandmother could not understand. I refused to bend anything – I refused to give her the illusion that she still had some grasp on reality.

  My grandmother disappeared slowly and in pieces. The part of her that stayed intact the longest was her compassion, her urge to nurture. To be kind. When I cried because she’d pooed in my favourite teapot, she would rub my shoulders and tell me it would all be okay. These were the moments, scattered and few, when I would sometimes choose kindness over truth. When I would stop waging my rebellion against my mother’s expectations (Just be kind…). When I would squeeze my grandmother’s hand, tell her that her mother had just popped out, that she is indeed taller than me.

  But as the years went on and her illness progressed, my grandmother was no longer kind to me in the way that grandmothers are meant to be. She would narrow her eyes at me distrustfully, tell Mum on me for things I hadn’t done, such as hiding her belongings or running away. Or, as I’d read in the room I refused to sleep in, my grandmother was prone to opening the door, glaring at me, and quickly shutting it again, as though I was an unwelcome visitor in a house she still considered solely her own.

  My mother ended up mothering two children, one aggressive and demanding, the other ill and slowly declining. I fought against the Alzheimer’s more than she or even my grandmother. I fought Alzheimer’s by fighting with my mother over everything she did for my grandmother. I would take her to task for helping my grandmother do up her shoes or preparing her food. My mother did everything for my grandmother, from her make-up to making her blow her nose to feeding her (during her worst times when she would try and eat with her fingers or not eat anything at all) and everything in between. Mum always cuddled her, held her hand, laughed with her. I became convinced that her kindness did my grandmother no good, that it hastened her decline. ‘She’ll stop doing it herself if you do it for her!’ I’d yell, as though Alzheimer’s was as simple as that: that people just needed the opportunity to do things for themselves. ‘Stop it!’ I’d scream, if I caught my mother doing up my grandmother’s blouse, or trying to convince her to spit out her false teeth to be cleaned. ‘You’re making her worse!’

  I was still not kind, but more and more I felt I was helping my grandmother. I was stopping the disease.

  Because, surely we still had some control over Alzheimer’s.

  Fathers

  By the time I was 18, I used the disinfectant spray so regularly, so intensely, that I dreamt of its sharp, chemical smell. I slept in my own room now, but still kept my knife close – in the top drawer of my bedside table. And I still believed in ghosts, but they had lost their terror. The idea that my grandpa’s ghost might be around had become what I loved most about my bedroom. But I didn’t want a living person there. I put a hook on the top of my door to keep it closed, so my grandmother couldn’t wander in during the day and move my things around.

  I had always been a daddy’s girl. More and more, as I reached my later teens and my grandmother declined, I put distance between my mother and I. She wanted me close and I pulled away. So much of what my mother wanted from me I refused to yield to. Going out together. The three of us. To friends or for a coffee.

  My parents had separated when I was four. I started staying with my father a night a week when I was nine. My father is an intelligent, creative and intensely troubled man. He has always obsessed over things like renovating and gardening. Breeding birds and owning dogs. He hand mosaicked a fountain in his garden. He turned his garage into a glasshouse with a pond and moss and the call of damp frogs. He dug a fishpond so long and deep, I could have kicked laps in it until I was ten. He built an aviary, exquisitely painted, which he filled with expensive flocks of birds he would occasionally bring inside to hand raise.

  When I was younger, my father was always oscillating between extremes. Between going to bed early with his pills and scotch while I read by myself in the living room, or else staying up late and playing endless board games with me. We played poker by his fountain using blue glass pebbles. We climbed onto the roof of his garage one New Year’s Eve, disturbing a spider nest so that my legs swelled with the shock of hundreds of spider bites. When I was younger, my father was always bewildering and unpredictable. So often, it was hard to keep up.

  When I was 18, my father’s behavior, just like my grandmother’s, slipped from functional to catastrophic. I watched him with a sort of weariness. I had spent years preparing myself for my mother getting Alzheimer’s. She is 11 years older than my father and her mother had the disease. So it seemed a logical thing that it could happen to her sooner than later. I had braced for other things from my father: his drinking, his moments of extreme intensity, his periods of lethargy and depression. But I had not expected forgetting. At least not yet.

  My father was diagnosed with dementia in his early forties, just after moving with his wife from Melbourne to Ballarat. Or maybe it was with something similar: he had a pattern of symptoms that
didn’t quite fit. He was diagnosed when I was 18, after I’d already lived ten years with my forgetful grandmother. My adolescence was, largely, spent watching my loved ones changing, and for the worse.

  Forgetting, apparently, runs along both sides of my family.

  ‘I’ve never hit you,’ my father would say. ‘I’d never hit you.’

  When he just had, the week before. Again I was confronted with that choice. With my father, I am more likely to agree that nothing happened, that he didn’t hurt me. With my father, I do not fight against things the way I did with my grandmother. Perhaps I’m growing up. Or perhaps I’m too tired, utterly spent from so many years of rebelling, of fighting my mother and grandmother. Of refusing to just be kind.

  One of the scariest moments of my life was following my father’s car late at night from the middle of Ballarat to where he lived, 15 minutes out in the bush. I lived an hour and a half away, on the far side of Melbourne. I didn’t know the local roads, the curves, the junctions.

  On this night, my father drove at 120 kilometres an hour, veering all over the narrow, heavily treed country road. I’d had my license for a year. I had no idea where I was and tried to keep up, all the while certain that he was going to die. Or that I might die, 18 and trying to keep pace with my father in the dark. It was summer, two days after Black Saturday. Even in the west of Victoria the air had a tinge of smoke to it. I remember that. The smoke. How I drove with the windows down.

  Trembling, by the time we reached his house. ‘You were speeding!’

  My father’s face. I couldn’t see his expression, but I painted it with confusion.

  Defiance. ‘But I wasn’t.’

  Soon after our race through the smoky dark of Ballarat, I sat my father down with a notebook and a pen. He was self-medicating with scotch and codeine, exacerbating whatever was going on with his brain – the disappearance of short term memory, the mood swings and lethargy.

  I’d been reading about drug addiction, how it alters a person’s behaviour. My first toe dipped into the water – I would later study addiction and eventually work for half a decade in the alcohol and drug sector. But that day, I was freshly 19. I still smelt of disinfectant spray and yelled at my mother for helping my grandmother with things I felt she should be managing herself.

  Once again, I wanted to believe we had influence over things we did not.

  ‘What stuff do you want to improve about your life?’ I’d asked my father, all bubbly and bright. It’s embarrassing, to think of myself that day. So optimistic. Naïve, despite seeing the decline of my grandmother, which progressed no matter what, whether she was left to manage things for herself or not.

  My father indulged me and slowly listed things. He wished for some basic stuff. Like having more energy and sleeping better. I pulled together dot points on how he could address each one. I even noted down how many pills he should cut back on a day. What hour he should get up. How he could slow down on his drinking. He had already tried to give up drinking a few times, but without success.

  I had faith in my list. The dot points, the straightforward changes. Enough faith to be bitterly disappointed when my father didn’t stick to any of it. Wasn’t able to.

  I called him up. Persistent, demanding.

  I said he should buy a pair of comfortable shoes and go for walks. I suggested he drink a chamomile tea before bed, to help him get to sleep.

  Later that same year, I drank so much that I passed out in a public toilet and was taken to hospital. That night is a blur of wine, scotch, champagne, vodka, gin and vomit. And the boy that I would later marry, pulling a blanket over my feet.

  Until that point, my drinking had been about control. I drank a lot and had become very good at recognising my limits. I could outdrink all of my friends without the alcohol making me ill. After my trip to the hospital, I felt profoundly disappointed. Drinking had always soothed me – it alleviated my social anxiety and made me feel in control, and that control had given me comfort. I knew precisely how much to drink to feel good, to feel relief.

  But the year I turned 19 everything had tripped. My grandmother was hardly speaking. She had forgotten how to use utensils. My mother and I fought each other on everything. And my brilliant father had disappeared into the dry bush outside Ballarat and would now ask me a question, then two minutes later ask me the same thing again.

  Then even my drinking had changed, becoming something else that was, quite suddenly, sharp edged and out of my control.

  Three years later, my father threw a remote at my head. He called me a fucking bitch and, once his wife sedated him, he wandered haphazardly around the house flicking a lighter in the pocket of his track pants. Later, he tried to comfort me, confused at my distress, but it just made me cry more.

  By this time, my grandmother was dead. And I was in the throes of a grief-stricken guilt. For being so hard with her. So impatient. By this time, I had also started working in the alcohol and drug sector. And the day after my father threw the remote at me, my partner and I left to drive around Australia for three months. We had been planning it for half a year. For me, it was a chance to step away from my family, and see if they could still hold themselves together without me.

  My mother said that not long after I left she cried at the supermarket, shopping for one for the first time in her adult life. My father, 150 kilometres from my mother’s house, didn’t even realise I was gone.

  Nowadays, my father lives just under 200 kilometres from the house I share with my husband, on the other side of the city. We don’t talk as much, anymore. Partly due to distance, partly due to me having nothing left to give. But when we do speak, I am kind.

  I am patient.

  Sometimes this kindness, this patience, is a sad thing. It means I don’t have the energy to fight or to rebel. My father’s forgetting, the ways he’s changed, are too many and much to fight over. On the other hand, I often catch myself getting angry with my mother when she forgets things. Her keys or a date or time we’d agreed on. Her forgetfulness is nothing out of the ordinary. But my reactions are steeped with paranoia and out of proportion, shadowing the ferocious way I used to respond to my grandmother’s Alzheimer’s. But then, you can’t protect anyone from forgetting. All you can do is hold their stories and try, when you can, to be kind.

  A SPOONFUL OF SUGAR (OR NOT)

  MARIA KATSONIS

  There’s a photo of my Baba (father) that sits on the mantelpiece above the fireplace in the lounge room of my house. It’s actually not the room I lounge in – that takes place in the sunny family room at the rear. There I sink into the upholstered folds of a houndstooth couch next to French doors which swing open onto a paved blue stone courtyard. From my vantage point, I can see the glorious orange spikes of the birds of paradise I planted in Baba’s memory. Under a lemon tree stands a Weber barbecue where I cook his famous chargrilled lamb (the secret is in the marinade).

  When the doors are open, the garlicky smell of lamb wafts throughout the house, transporting me to my childhood days when I helped Baba fill his homemade broiler with charcoal. Baba would have looked at my Weber with disdain. He honed his barbecuing skills in the ‘60s over a tin drum that perched on rickety legs. These were the days before lighting a barbie was as simple as turning on the gas or lighting heat beads. Baba carefully constructed a pyre of crumpled newspaper and kindling in the drum and set it alight, fanning the flickering flames with a sheet of cardboard and adding more and more wood until he had a bed of glowing coals. Placing a mesh grill over the embers, he laid out rows of fat chops, spicy loukanika (sausages) and of course lamb souvlakia.

  The room where my father’s photo is displayed is more of a formal sitting room, a saloni as the Greeks would call it. Good Greek girl that I am, I too have a formal room for receiving visitors just like my parents did, although mine is devoid of the obligatory lace doilies, heavy faux antique furniture and replicas of ancient Greek vases. Instead, tangerine and magenta landscapes of the Nevada desert ad
orn my walls and a sleek black leather couch faces the fireplace.

  The photo of my father is the first in a series of black and white familial pictures I laid out neatly in a row like solders standing at attention. He is in his 30s and cuts a dashing figure in a dapper tuxedo complete with a jaunty bow tie. There’s an air of Cary Grant about him as he leans against a massive timber panelled television almost the size of a small armchair. If you squint at the photo, you can just make out the brand name centred between two enormous dials – His Masters Voice. On top of the television is a photo of my father and mother on their wedding day. They are stiffly posed in a photographic studio and again Baba is in formal attire, although this time it is white tie, a pair of ivory gloves in his hands.

  Alongside this photo is a picture of me, Baba and Mama on my sixth birthday. I am on Baba’s knee. Mama nuzzles next to us, her arm draped around Baba’s shoulder, the other resting lightly on my knee. I am staring at an ornately decorated birthday cake, looking peeved as if to say, ‘Hurry up already and take the photo, I wanna eat the cake!’ Further along, I am balancing on an outdoor swing, rugged up in dungarees and a corduroy jacket, the trees behind me bare of leaves. Mama and Baba are on either side, gripping the swing’s ropes, faces beaming.

  When I think of my parents, these are the images that first spring to mind as well as recollections of an idyllic childhood: Sunday drives to the Dandenongs for an indulgent afternoon tea of black forest cake at a Bavarian inspired café; Baba teaching me to tumble, one hand on my back, the other vigorously turning a whole lamb on the spit over glowing coals; Sunday night scratch teas of egg and feta cheese toasties which Baba made in the Sunbeam electric frying pan as we gathered in front of the television to watch Disneyland.

  This is what I choose to remember and not Mama and Baba’s faces distorted with anger as they hurled slurs of resili (disgrace) and poutana (prostitute) at me during the height of my rebellion when I was in my early 20s.