Maria Katsonis & Lee Kofman (ed)

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

  I felt stifled, trapped, but I also understood her. She’d been a single, full-time mother for most of her adult life, and my leaving meant a huge life change for her too. Soon, she’d be jobless, and having to find friends after decades of having no time for a social life. Not to mention the cultural barriers that came with being a migrant living in a predominantly white town where the Australian women didn’t understand her, and the few Chinese women around gossiped about her divorce behind her back. We both knew that inevitably Mum would have to let me go. Already she was panicking about my departure. I understood this and yet I couldn’t stop myself from muttering ‘I hate you’ under my breath, and branding post-it notes with passive aggressive messages, like ‘Fuck off, Mum!’ and then placing them strategically on my desk for her to see, because I could never say something so awful to her face.

  On my way to Liam, as I pumped up my bike tyres, the guilt bore down on me like a lead weight. In Chinese culture, you must always respect your elders and never talk back, even if you know you’re right. And you can never lie to them. So far I’d been a painfully obedient child. I wouldn’t even jay-walk or return a library book late. I didn’t like causing a stir and I didn’t like drawing attention to myself for the wrong reasons. I hardly ever questioned rules. Up until now. Now I needed to know that I could be my own person, make my own life and keep my own secrets. I needed to know that I was more than just Mum’s daughter.

  I knocked on the fly screen a second time and a very tanned, topless man with a beer belly appeared at the door. He seemed confused as to why this Asian girl with a rusty bike was standing before him.

  ‘Hi, I’m Michelle,’ I said, nervously.

  ‘Oh!’ said the topless man, with some recognition. ‘I’m Liam’s Dad. I’ve heard all about you.’ My heart leapt. I was important enough for Liam to mention me to his parents. ‘Give me a sec. Liam’s in his room – I’ll go get him.’

  After a minute or so, Liam emerged from some place behind the house, frazzled and also topless. When he first saw me, his face fell. I figured it had something to do with the fact I was sweating like crazy and had helmet hair plastered to my head. But then, perhaps Liam was responding to my actual presence. He hadn’t known that I was coming, because I wanted it to be a surprise. And he was certainly surprised. And annoyed.

  ‘Does your mum know you’re here?’ he asked. He knew how overprotective Mum was, having met her several times during our chaperoned meetings at JB Hi Fi. If I met anyone in public, especially a boy, Mum’s presence was non-negotiable, and having learnt that no amount of tears or bargaining would sway her to leave me alone, I’d always acquiesced to her conditions out of sheer desperation. Liam and I would normally browse for half an hour in the anime section – him trying to engage me in a conversation about Japanese culture and Chinese language, and me pretending to be just as interested – before our designated meeting time with Mum in the food court. To his credit, Liam was never bothered by Mum being there. He’d even become used to Mum waiting in the wings, which is why he seemed disturbed now to find me unaccompanied, as if it were some kind of trap. ‘I’ll show you around,’ he said, reluctantly.

  Liam lightened up only when showing me his room, which was a renovated shed connected to his family’s garage. I took it all in: the empty aquarium filled with gravel and driftwood (‘I want to fill it with marine fish!’); his keyboard on a stand; the small bookcase and an open copy of Dune and the single bed in the corner.

  ‘Did you tell your mum you were coming?’ he asked, still edgy.

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you lied?’

  I shrugged, annoyed at being lectured when we were supposed to be in cahoots with each other. Didn’t he want to be alone with me as much as I wanted to be alone with him? I stared at his abs.

  ‘I’ll just put a shirt on,’ he said, embarrassed.

  Disappointed, I diverted my eyes to a half empty bottle of beer on his desk. I was scandalised. Here he was, underage, brazenly drinking a beer without a care in the world. Besides the handful of times I’d sipped Vodka Cruisers at friends’ house parties, the only times I’d ever drank were at home, when Mum handed me the rest of her Guinness because ‘a woman should know how to drink beer’. Besides those occasional sips, alcohol was strictly prohibited at home, lest I become what Mum referred to as a ‘crazy Australian teenager’ like all of my friends. I couldn’t tear my eyes from Liam’s beer. It was just a stupid drink, but I couldn’t make up my mind about whether it was right or wrong and whether I was afraid or excited by it. Or both.

  Liam turned on his computer and pulled up a chair for me. We were now sitting so close together I could feel the heat emanating from his body. We watched some clips on YouTube, listened to his band’s latest demos, which I’d already listened to on MySpace a thousand times before, late at night, as I waited for him to come online. We quickly ran out of things to talk about and then sat there for half an hour or so, idly browsing the internet, as I silently wondered if at some point he’d lean over and kiss me. And then a thought struck me: what would I do if he wanted to have sex?

  But I was slowly realising that he was never going to make a move, and he was doing everything in his power to make me understand this: sitting further and further away from me, whining about his ex-girlfriend, telling me how I should be excited about leaving town. I had misread the situation and now felt like an idiot. I thought about my bike resting against the side of his shed and desperately wanted to leave.

  ‘Did you want something to drink?’ he asked. I didn’t, but followed him into the house anyway, where we laughed at the school photos of him and his brother stuck to the fridge, then sipped our glasses of Coke in silence. His dad walked in, poured himself some water, and joined us at the kitchen bench.

  ‘Have you told her about my tattoo?’ he asked Liam.

  ‘Dad, she doesn’t care,’ said Liam.

  ‘It’s a Japanese koi,’ Liam’s dad said, smiling hugely, twisting his forearm around to show me the full pattern. I smiled back, internally rolling my eyes, wondering whether he knew I was another type of Asian. After we finished our Cokes, Liam led me outside, where I told him I better go.

  ‘You’re leaving already?’ he said. I could see that he was relieved.

  My bike was a hand-me-down from my older sister, Tammy, who loved bike riding and whose dream was to own a motorcycle. When I’d asked her about her obsession with bikes, she told me that riding fast on one was the closest she’d ever felt to flying.

  On the ride back home that afternoon, I raved to myself like a madwoman as I pedaled alongside peak hour traffic. I’d been rejected! Humiliated! Scorned! I felt like I’d been deceived – by Liam, by Jessie, and even by myself. Of course nothing was going to happen between Liam and I. Of course I hadn’t found someone who liked me as much as I liked them.

  I ignored the part of me that felt a distinct and overwhelming sense of relief. Yes, I’d wanted a kiss. Making out also would have been nice. But I didn’t want anything more than that. I didn’t want to have sex, and I definitely didn’t want to be in a relationship. At least not with Liam. I realised that while Liam may have liked me, much of that was probably tied to my foreignness, and what I represented more than who I actually was. And I couldn’t be angry, because those were the exact same things I liked about him too. To me, he represented escape, change from my current situation. Sure, it helped that he was beautiful, but beyond that there was no real connection between us. I couldn’t imagine us being together in any meaningful way, or at least any way that didn’t involve me simply drooling over his abs.

  I didn’t want Liam. What I’d actually wanted was freedom. And something as simple, as unremarkable, and perhaps laughable, as a solo bike ride.

  As I rounded the corner back onto our street, the sun close to setting, I wondered what would happen if Mum ever found out how I’d betrayed her. I’d been gone for a long time, more than an hour. Still, for the first time, I’d done something for my
self and I didn’t feel guilty. Not to mention, nothing bad had happened. So just because Mum was afraid of something didn’t mean that I needed to fear it too. I could make decisions for myself.

  ‘I’m back!’ I called, as I pushed my bike through the creaky back gate, eyes watering from the wind, chest burning from the exertion, my body feeling lighter than air. ‘Mum?’ There was no answer. On my way to the garage, I glimpsed her in the kitchen, watching television, preoccupied and seemingly uninterested in my whereabouts.

  RESISTING THE NIPPLE

  ROCHELLE SIEMIENOWICZ

  I wasn’t the kind of baby my mother wanted. Or so my story goes. I can already hear her arguing with an injured voice, ‘Darling, I loved you completely the moment you were born. You were perfect in every way!’ But I wasn’t. We both know that.

  From the time she was a small girl, my mother knew that having babies was her life’s work, her true mission. She acted out maternal fantasies with dolls and kittens, and, later, with the placid baby brothers who came along when she was well into her teens, while her own exhausted menopausal mother took to bed. So, when Mum thought of her own longed-for offspring, she imagined soft, cuddly, compliant children with hungry mouths that only she could satisfy. She’s a great storyteller, my mother, good at doing funny voices and vivid descriptions, and an expert at mocking herself too. This is how I know all about the feather-downed baby-heads that were supposed to droop and fall asleep in the crook of her swan-like neck as she sat in church on Sabbath mornings, listening to sermons preached by my father, the handsome young minister. Singing hymns and reciting Bible verses, she imagined how she’d shape the small souls in her care using the loving kindness and firm discipline recommended by the Seventh-day Adventist child-rearing manuals. Mum had studied these books as her belly grew larger and rounder, planning to carefully nurture her firstborn as he or she ‘grew in wisdom and stature’, in the image of Jesus Christ himself.

  But instead Mum got me. Not exactly the Devil’s spawn, but a vomity, fidgety, skinny girl. A squinty-eyed baby who’d pull away from the nipple in a fashion I’ve heard about so many times: ‘It looked like you were rejecting the breast, even when you were starving, and you’d pull away like this,’ and here Mum mimes a screwed up face and arched back. ‘Maybe you had colic, or maybe you were just a contrary little creature.’ Either way, after several months of conscientious breastfeeding (‘conscientious’ being one of my mother’s favourite self-descriptors), she reluctantly surrendered her nursing Madonna fantasy and put me on the bottle. So too, the dreams of a sleeping angel were cruelly dashed by a baby who resisted unconsciousness. ‘You had this strong little neck and a head that would pop up in church, your eyes wide open, always looking round as if you were afraid you’d miss something.’

  We all have our origin myths and this is mine, crafted from the affectionate but barbed stories told about my babyhood. These are the stories I tell myself now when I think about how I became, and continue to be, a difficult daughter and a somewhat ambivalent mother.

  Did this disconnect between my mother’s expectations and my own irrepressible desire for selfhood really begin when I was so young? Or have I only selected for my story those elements that distinguish me, and separate me from her peaty embrace and her fierce control? The fact that I need to shape my narrative this way is perhaps more important than the literal truth.

  There’s a memory I have of my mother, holding the large, disdainful black cat we had when I was ten or 11. A spoilt, fussy eater and reluctant cuddler, this cat was not much good as a pet. Yet Mum would pick him up, hold him close to her in an iron grip and growl an order into his ear as he struggled to escape: ‘Nestle!’

  Was she joking? Not quite, and I knew exactly how the cat felt: trapped and restless, as far away from complying with the order to ‘nestle’ as a tree snake or crocodile would have been.

  I feel so guilty as I write this, unable to shake the feeling that my mother is reading over my shoulder, contradicting me, defending herself. ‘Tell them the full story,’ I can hear her admonishment. ‘Say that I was so proud of how alert you were as a baby – the way you walked and talked so early. And then later, you were obedient, a good toddler. You never threw a single tantrum when we’d go out – too proud and self-controlled, like me.’

  ‘But I was naughty sometimes too, Mum,’ I argue, thinking of the glass I broke on my brother’s head when we were fighting over the dishes and the shameful episodes of Doctors and Nurses games that put an end to sleepovers at my cousin’s house and gave my mum nightmares of my becoming a nymphomaniac lesbian.

  ‘You weren’t really naughty,’ says Mum. And this is something she’s said to me often: ‘Before you became that horrible teenager, you were quite good. Affectionate and kind. And always so honest. I knew you’d tell me things, even if it meant you’d be punished.’

  I was honest, too. But mainly because I believed Mum could read my mind, so there was no point hiding anything. I imagined she was a bit like Jesus, who knew the inner workings of our hearts. Hypersensitive and highly intuitive, Mum could smell my sins, almost before I’d committed them. She inhabited my brain, like my conscience – that ‘small, still voice’ that helped me distinguish Right from Wrong. As I grew up, I knew I had to get her out of my head if I was going to become a separate person. Looking back, I can see it was always going to be a messy extraction.

  Reading through my 14-year-old diaries, I find a page written on the first day of 1986. Along with some banal resolutions I see this declaration: ‘I need to learn how to lie artfully to my mum. I need to learn how to get what I want.’ Reading it now, I’m appalled and impressed. (Artfully?) What did I want to do that was so bad I needed to lie about it?

  My desires appear humble now, a cliché of late ‘80s teenage life. I wanted to listen to the Top 40 on the radio, watch Countdown and The Young Ones. I wanted to go to the movies, even though I’d been told that my guardian angel would stay outside if I did so. I wanted to pierce my ears, swim on the Sabbath, wag prayer meetings and taste forbidden wine from the cask at my best friend Esther’s house. I wished to read books that didn’t have pages ripped out of them where the sex scenes appeared, and I wanted time with boys, un-chap-eroned. It seemed essential to develop an identity that transcended the one I had at my church school, that of ‘the pastor’s kid’ with the strictest parents. I pulled on my leash so hard it snapped, and left poor Mum stinging with the shock.

  Perhaps it would have helped Mum if she had read some Freud or the later psychoanalysts, for most would agree that a girl must in some way overthrow or break away from her mother in order to become herself. This makes perfect sense to me, but Mum, having always identified as a Good Girl (conscientious), and never having rebelled against her own gentle, sickly mother, found my adolescence deeply traumatic, a personal rejection.

  Everyone said I looked like Mum, that I was her spitting image, but I couldn’t see it. Even when I was that obedient little girl she remembers so fondly, I prized the qualities that set me apart from her. She had thick dark hair, so stiff that if I curled it round my finger, it held the shape like wire. My own hair was fairy-flossy blonde – so straight and fine I seemed almost bald until I was three years old. Convinced that curls ‘suit us girls better,’ Mum gave me my first home perm at the age of seven. I sat for hours, sweltering in the Fiji heat (we lived there as missionaries for a couple of years, to convert the natives) while the stinking chemicals and tight little perming rods forced a kink into my corn-silk tufts. ‘We must suffer to be beautiful,’ said Mum, laughing as she said it, knowing how monstrous it sounded. We continued this bi-annual perming torture, until at the age of 16 I craved a straight, shiny bob like the ones I’d seen in Vogue magazine, and finally refused her hairdressing services. To my surprise, without the regular applications of ammonium and peroxide, my hair turned quite suddenly dark brown, proving after all that I was the daughter of my swarthy parents and not some fair imposter.

  My mother
’s body was always threatening to claim me back to it in her likeness, so I scrutinized each difference and celebrated it quietly as a victory for my independence. Mum had small hands and feet, with toes so cute and stubby that my father used to laugh at them, not always kindly, sometimes employing the word ‘deformed’. My own fingers and toes were long, elegant and bony like his. I admired them as I painted my nails with clear varnish (coloured polish being forbidden because we didn’t want to be like Jezebel, that painted heathen princess from the Old Testament who ended up eaten by stray dogs for her sins). I’d marvel at my toes too, seeing them as further proof that I was as much my father’s child as hers.

  When I was little, Dad seemed so strong and fearless, with power in the world, and pride, even as he preached humility from the pulpit. He was a celebrity within the congregation and he never lost his cool. His glorious days as a teen cycling champion ended once he was ‘called’ to serve God, but as an adult he’d jog religiously every morning before the sun came up and sometimes run marathons. Dad’s passion for health food was extreme, even by the standards of our predominantly vegetarian health-obsessed religion, and I thought he might live forever. A pastor with a zeal to save souls and spread the Word of God, Dad always seemed to do exactly what he wanted to, including moving our family around the world at his whim. Dad knew how to get his way.

  Beside him, Mum seemed complicated and shy, neurotic and moody, veering unpredictably between light-hearted sweetness and sharp resentment. Where Dad seemed cool, Mum was always anxious, her vivid imagination predicting disaster at every turn. ‘Take a cardigan, it might get cold,’ and ‘Don’t’ go out so deep!’ were her refrains. But Dad would beckon my brother and me out into the surf, or up onto the high dive board at the swimming pool. He taught us to ride our bikes and catch a ball. I liked it, and I enjoyed the quaver in Mum’s voice when she feared for me, because it meant I wasn’t like her.