by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
She shook her head.
I told her about being called into the Principal’s office: ‘You have to cover for me. You have to tell them that you signed all the notes.’
Mum’s face had tightened as I spoke. I didn’t have to explain to her what was at stake. If the school knew that I’d been wagging, we were both in strife. She would be the mentally ill mother who couldn’t control her wayward daughter and the school might involve the Department of Human Services. I had been taken away already a few times in my childhood when she was ill and placed with foster carers. Either way, it was in both of our interests to keep scrutiny off us.
Sure enough, Mum backed me up when the Principal called, but as a result the school recommended that I begin seeing the school counselor. I didn’t mind. I got to meet Miss Beattie who actually listened to what I had to say and took me seriously. More importantly, I missed a period of schoolwork a week. I tried to time it so that I missed Maths, a subject that I struggled in. I usually spent those classes reading, or would transform myself into the class clown, disrupting the lesson.
‘What illness does your mum have?’ Miss Beattie asked.
This was the first time that we’d gone into this territory. Usually I spent all my time bitching about my friends.
‘Mum has nervous breakdowns.’
‘But what is the actual name of the illness?’
‘What do you mean? That’s the name.’ That’s what Mum and everyone I knew called it, and that’s what I’d grown up telling people.
Miss Beattie asked me what happened when Mum got sick. I explained how she got insomnia and couldn’t sleep, her glowing eyes and thick tongue, and the way she would share her every thought and feeling. Miss Beattie nodded as I spoke. I also told her about Mum’s bizarre behavior in those times. I said that there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to Mum getting sick. Sometimes she got sick when she was taking her medication, sometimes she got sick when she didn’t. She got sick when there was lots of stress, and she got sick when there wasn’t. But the one thing that was a constant was the complete shock that I felt every time. It seemed like her nervous breakdowns came out of nowhere and would only become obvious when she was too far gone and all we could do was take her to hospital and wait for the doctors to smack it out of her.
Miss Beattie’s questions made me think about Mum differently and I went home that night and asked her what her illness was called.
‘Nervous breakdown.’
‘Yes, but what causes it?’
‘The doctors told me that there’s a chemical imbalance in my brain.’
When I returned the next time to talk to Miss Beattie, she had a surprise for me.
‘I was thinking about your mum and decided to do some research.’ She handed me sheets of paper that were photocopied pages from a book. ‘Does this sound like your Mum’s illness?’
I began reading. The information was about manic depression. This illness was characterised by emotional highs and lows. When the person was suffering from mania, they would engage in impetuous and reckless behaviour, which I recognised in my mother. When they suffered from depression, they would struggle to get out of bed and become suicidal. This, too, was what happened with my mother.
As I read, I felt a shock thrumming through my system. I didn’t know it at the time, but this moment would change my life. For the first time I realised that there was actually a pattern to my mother’s illness. That there were early signs I could recognise if I paid attention and I could get her help before she ended up in hospital. For once I felt a sense of hope, that I could have some control over my life.
I brought the information sheet home. ‘Mum, do you think you have manic depression?’ I asked.
Mum looked at me with curiosity. ‘Some doctors said I have schizophrenia, some said manic depression.’
‘But if you read this, then it’s all about you.’ She took the photocopied pages from me and read. ‘This is what you have, isn’t it?’ I asked.
Mum nodded.
‘But why didn’t you say? Why did you call it nervous breakdown?’
‘That’s what we called it at home.’
I had spent so long blaming Mum for her illness and all the horrible things that happened because of it. I had judged her and found her wanting as a mother, a wife, a human being. But now I realised that she was as much a victim of her ‘nervous breakdowns’ as I was.
That weekend Zehra called me to sleep over. ‘Sorry, I can’t make it,’ I told her. We had made plans earlier in the week and I knew she’d be mad at me for breaking them. In the past, I’d have done anything Zehra wanted me to, but now I had other priorities. ‘Mum and I are watching a Doris Day marathon together,’ I said.
ESTRANGED
CAROLINE BAUM
In my mid-forties I did something that might have been more appropriate in my teens: I became estranged from my parents. I walked out the door of their London home after another turbulent visit and simply did not see them for three years. It was a long overdue act of assertion and self-preservation.
I had never done anything so extreme. As a child, I was as obedient as a bonsai. Shaped and trained, I complied with my parents’ strict discipline unquestioningly. Eager to please, aware of their pride in me when I did well at school, I played the part of the good girl with ease and conviction. Neatly dressed, curtsying to visitors, speaking only when spoken to, diligent with homework, adept with cutlery. At the end of play-dates, I said my ‘thank you for having me’ unprompted. In my school report, the teachers at my French school made the same comment year in, year out: ‘Caroline est sage comme une image’.
As a teenager, there had been no hormone-fuelled rebellion. I did not lose myself in drugs, sleep around, do badly at school, hang out with a wrong crowd, although I did become moody and insolent.
Even before adolescence turbo-charged my selfawareness, I had a sense of being precious cargo as an only child. I realised my mother and father had one shot at parenthood and that I could not afford to disappoint them. As my father reminded me regularly, in a vaguely threatening tone, they had no spare.
Also, the price of disobedience was high. When I told a lie or answered back, my father resorted to the tactics of his Austro-Hungarian upbringing and administered carefully calibrated punishment: I was deprived of meals, pocket money or access to the phone. In really grievous cases (faking my mother’s signature on a maths test when I was 12 or 13) he beat me with a finely stitched calf ’s leather slipper. I had to present myself to my parents’ bedroom as if for a formal appointment and lie face down, bare-bottomed, to receive ten or more blows. The pillows barely muffled my bellows of indignation. Perhaps because of a troubled childhood in which she had seen domestic violence at close quarters with tragic results, my mother never intervened. Instead she closed the door of the sitting room so as not to hear me while she sat knitting elaborately patterned sweaters in front of the television. Worst of all, when it was over, my father asked me to kiss him on the cheek, as a sign all was forgiven and forgotten. It was not.
It never occurred to me that all children were not treated this way.
Gradually I became aware that I was bound more tightly by constraints than my friends. I provoked heated and often tearful arguments at dinner, mostly battles about being allowed to go to parties. I pleaded for weeks, hoping to wear down my father’s fortress mentality in a campaign of relentless attrition. I slammed doors and indulged in epic sulks, often sustained over days. But his rules were unassailable ramparts: if a parent was not in attendance, I could not go to friends’ homes. And when I did go, I had to be delivered to the door and fetched at a predetermined time (and there was no question of taking public transport after dark, even with others), whereas I ached for spontaneity, a quality unknown in our household where everything was carefully planned. Sleepovers were a rare treat, following a discreet vetting process by my mother as to suitability. What exactly was she supposed to check? Ashamed of being treated like a baby, I pr
eferred to turn down invitations than accept terms and conditions.
Protected to a stifling degree from any opportunity to engage with the outside world unsupervised, I ached for a longer leash, like the extendable ones that allow dogs to run ahead, wishing I could be less special to my parents than other children were to theirs. A little less loved, a little more free.
But I did not break away. I looked on as girlfriends trashed themselves, stumbling through hangovers in class, failed exams, wept over abortions, pierced themselves in the first wave of punk, and my nerve failed me. I was too conventional for revolution; the jagged anthems of the 70’s sounded jarring to my classically trained ear.
Precocious in my studies, emotionally I was a late developer. Everyone else was calming down, finding forgiveness and understanding for their parents’ failings as they navigated the turbulence of parenting themselves. Perhaps because I was childless, I experienced no such charity or serenity. Instead, I rebelled out of synch. Therapy only fuelled my sense of injustice without leading to acceptance.
When I moved to Australia at the age of 24, I did not recognise it as an act of rebellion though friends interpreted my migration, prompted by marriage, as a defiant gesture. My parents grieved at the separation and tried to lure me home but I resisted. And each time I returned on an obligatory annual visit, our encounters became more and more fractious, charged with expectations. Besides, as my parents got older, their mutual disappointment became increasingly painful to witness, leaving me roiling with fury and frustration. Eventually I turned my back on them and cut all communication.
The last time I visited before our rift, it was with the best of intentions. But a fraught side trip to Paris for my mother’s 75th unravelled after a couple of days. The mask of civility between us fell swiftly. The atmosphere became suffocating. One day I had a panic attack in the car, leapt out in traffic in a sweat and walked to our hotel, my guts churning. I was too sick to join my parents for dinner; my mother was furious at having no one to dilute my father’s morose company or to distract them from their mutual boredom. At breakfast the next morning, thin lipped and severe, she returned the birthday presents I had chosen so carefully, including an album I had compiled of favourite photos of us together around the world, often dressed in matching outfits. The spitefulness of that gesture cut deep. We drove back to London from France in silence leaden with hostility.
All the way I mulled over the dynamics of the couple sitting in front of me; he the bullying tyrant, she alternating between the personae of needling opponent and compliantly passive victim. As we crossed the Channel I worked myself into a bitter stew of contempt, my lingering nausea exacerbated by the aroma of market bought cheeses ripening in the car’s warm leathery fug. While the Vacherin and Reblochon released their sulphurous vapours, I stifled mine.
Once we reached my parents’ apartment, the already overheated air from the permanently cranked up central heating became even more stale with tension and resentment. My eyeballs felt dry and I was thirsty all the time. My skin flaked. My hair crackled with static. For the next few days, we ate together without exchanging a word. No one asked what I was doing or where I was going. No one said good morning or goodnight. My parents’ faces hardened into blank masks.
In bed at night, the mattress beneath me felt like a burning hot plate. I had never felt such intense radiant heat spread under my body for hour after hour and kept throwing off bedclothes and surreptitiously opening windows and turning off radiators. But the inferno must’ve been inside me, because it never cooled down, no matter what I did. I was incandescent.
Lying there smouldering, I reviewed the toxic way my parents spoke to each other, the nagging and wheedling, the sarcasm as corrosive as battery acid in their tired exchanges, a bitter banter of mutual disappointment. This time at least, they had a new, shared, focus for their regret, uniting them in the complicity of disapproval against their bad daughter. One evening, when a news item on television announced legislation allowing children to prosecute their parents, even retrospectively, for physical abuse, they sneered jointly: ‘So, are you going to report us?’ That dare hit harder than any real blow.
I moved out for a few days, pretending a friend had asked me to housesit, thinking that might provide a welcome breather and an opportunity for a truce. But I was met with stony faces when I got back. I booked myself an earlier flight home. No-one kissed me goodbye when I left. It was the first time I had ever left home for the airport without my parents.
Within weeks of being back in Australia, the decision to break off all contact felt surprisingly good. I really did feel released, perhaps even a little elated. I had severed damaging ties with less guilt than I anticipated. The only time I felt regret was when walking on my local beach on especially glorious days, thinking that my mother might never see the beautiful place where I lived. The sorrow of that realisation pierced me like a shard of glass.
But I had also escaped the constant carping, negativity and incessant criticism, implicit and explicit, and above all, the endless triangulating, in which my parents played me off against each other as a way of exercising their own frustration at getting old together. I felt detoxed, as if I had come out of rehab. I thought of myself less as a daughter. Unmoored from the rotten jetty of my parents, I drifted towards less freighted identities: wife, friend, godmother, colleague – the buoyancy of these relationships was a source of renewed pride and pleasure.
It had taken me well into adulthood to answer any questions about myself without describing myself firstly as a daughter, always putting my parents’ troubled pasts in the foreground by way of introduction as a warning sign that there was complexity, drama and emotional baggage ahead. Like my mother, my father was an orphan. Sent to England at the age of ten by his Jewish parents to escape the Nazis, he was fostered into a family of strangers. Although they treated him with unconditional kindness and love, and he was eventually able to secure a safe passage for his mother, he never recovered from the loss of a father he idolised. How could I abandon two parents who had suffered such tragedy, in their different ways?
According to my mother, after my departure, my father said: ‘We are just going to have to forget her.’ Except he didn’t. He persisted in writing me injured, aggrieved and bitingly accusatory letters that made me feel like a combination of Goneril and Regan. Always sentimental, he liked to quote from King Lear, often comparing me to Cordelia, hoping perhaps that like her, I would prove myself steadfast, loyal and loving in the end, despite the misunderstandings that caused a rift between father and daughter.
My fiercely proud French mother, on the other hand, accepted the rupture as total. Betrayed as a child every time she placed her trust in relatives or foster families, who either denied her affection or paid her unwelcome sexual attention, she had long come to expect that she would always be abandoned. I was just the latest in a long string of bitter disappointments. When I first left England to come and live in Australia, she was so distraught that for two years she hardly spoke to me on the phone, finding those long echoey, stilted conversations too painful. This new separation, a second abandonment, was a confirmation of her worst fears. She did not buckle.
Until I walked out, I had always been a harsh judge of those who cut off communication with their parents. I thought them uncaring and selfish. But in those three years when we did not talk, I changed my mind. Some relationships are just too poisoned to be fixed unless both sides are prepared to take responsibility, compromise or seek professional help. I knew I had failed to be a good daughter in the eyes of my parents. They had invested all their hopes in their only child and I had let them down. It was a failure I chose to accept, consoling myself that I was succeeding in other ways.
I did not know how long our separation would last. I did not rule out reconciliation. But I knew there was a risk that I might have to live with my decision for the rest of my life and I was prepared to take that chance.
Slowly I felt myself taking shape. My b
lurred edges became sharper, as I made decisions free of the soundtrack that had colonised my consciousness for years: an endless imaginary judgemental chatter, a parasitical presence that gnawed away at my confidence. It was a sad state of affairs, but with such a porous sense of my own borders I felt I had no choice but to make a complete break.
At the same time, I jettisoned tastes, values and behaviours that I had inherited from my parents unquestioningly. There was something heady in no longer pretending to enjoy classical music concerts. My husband nearly fainted when I suggested that on our next holiday, we make our way without the usual schedule and advance reservations. In conversation, I let go of absolutism and embraced ambivalence. I cared a little less about material proof of success, and rejected suspicion and anxiety as my default settings. No longer comparing myself with others as a yardstick of achievement released me from the bitter taste of envy. The patina of things worn and used became more appealing than the new. It was like discovering extra lung capacity. I breathed deep.
Some shared enthusiasms remained: my parents and I had always eaten well together, especially in good restaurants where we appreciated the sense of occasion, the stiffness of starched napkins matching my father’s formality, my beautifully dressed mother aware of admiring glances from other diners while I played the role of little princess wedged between them, urged on to try pressed duck and turbot in cream sauce, earning praise for my adventurous palate. That pleasure remained intact, though no longer subsidised by my father’s generosity. We had always travelled in comfort and stayed in the best hotels because of my father’s position as the head of a travel company; I never lost my love of room service or a fine thread count.
Some shared attitudes were merely diluted to a weaker potency. Often I was surprised to recognise in my behaviour a quality that was hardwired into me: my father’s sense of social concern and indignation, my mother’s eye for colour and pattern, their stamina for reading and affection for animals. I had no desire to reject every dish my parents had served me. But I chose to flavour and consume them with milder seasonings.