by Rebellious Daughters- True stories from Australia's finest female writers (retail) (epub)
Is this why I rejected the colour pink? Mum loved it passionately – all shades of it, but especially that most feminine and delicate rose hue in which baby girls are typically dressed. I decided I liked red and blue, and preferred my clothes without bows and ribbons. Mum loved dolls and sewing and craft, and the words ‘pretty’ and ‘demure’. I liked books and climbing trees and the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘brave’. She loved to quote Jesus, who said, ‘Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth’ and though I wanted to be good – I really did, and prayed to Jesus every night to make me so – there was also part of me that found this injunction galling.
Later, when I discovered television and movies, I reveled in Bill Collins’ Golden Years of Hollywood because the glamour and the glory of cinematic femme fatales finally made sense of my distaste for the pale and watery virtues possessed by good girls. Vixens and sirens played by Vivien Leigh, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis and cool, sexy Grace Kelly, they did what they wanted, even if sometimes it destroyed them. But good girls held their tongues, obeyed their elders and waited for marriage to determine their destiny. Good girls always put the needs of others ahead of their own. Good girls became good mothers.
‘Why not become a school teacher?’ my father said to me, when I was filling in my university preferences and considering Law or Journalism. ‘That way you’ll get the school holidays off when your kids do.’ I looked at him, speechless for a moment, as I realised he had no ambitions for me. That he didn’t, after all, think I was free and fearless like him. He thought I was like my mother, a girl who would be defined by motherhood and marriage. I felt betrayed and angry. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted, but I craved a bigger, wilder world than the one he pictured for me.
And yet, I married at the age of 20, and though I was angry at my mother for questioning my right to wear white (because I’d ‘given in’ before the wedding), and though I was angry at my father for ordering me to take my husband’s name, I didn’t question the need to be married in order to have sex. In my prayers I asked for forgiveness for losing my virginity too soon. I knew it was wrong to ‘live in sin’ and I knew that if a penis entered my vagina it had eternal significance. I was bound for life (‘made one flesh’) to any man I slept with. I wanted to follow the rules and I wanted to go to Heaven. But I couldn’t be like my father – he’d made that clear. And I didn’t want to be my mother.
The single best way for me to avoid becoming my mother was of course to never become A mother. My young husband (who was also raised a Seventh-day Adventist, with his own rebellious longings) was in agreement. No babies. Not ever. The world was too full of people and, anyway, we wanted to be eternal playmates, companionate lovers without domestic drudgery and traditional gender roles.
In Carl Jung’s seminal work Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, he writes about mother complexes in daughters, the most extreme of which involves ‘an overwhelming resistance to maternal supremacy, often to the exclusion of all else… The motto of this type is: Anything, so long as it is not like Mother!’ I don’t agree with everything Jung has to say on the subject, but I prick with recognition when I read the following description of his, of a woman obsessed with resisting her mother:
‘This kind of daughter knows what she does not want, but is usually completely at sea as to what she would choose as her own fate. All her instincts are concentrated on the mother in the negative form of resistance and are therefore of no use to her in building her own life. Should she get as far as marrying, either the marriage will be used for the sole purpose of escaping from her mother, or else a diabolical fate will present her with a husband who shares all the essential traits of her mother’s character. All instinctive processes meet with unexpected difficulties; either sexuality does not function properly, or the children are unwanted, or maternal duties seem unbearable, or the demands of marital life are responded to with impatience and irritation. This is quite natural, since none of it has anything to do with the realities of life when stubborn resistance to the power of the mother in every form has come to be life’s dominating aim.’
In so many ways this is my story. I’ve defined myself against my mother. My young marriage was some kind of escape from her, while also an attempt to live by the rules of my upbringing. It’s also true that sexual difficulties came to dominate that relationship. My husband’s lack of desire for me led us to pursue an open marriage (along with all kinds of other rebellions aimed at escaping our strict religious upbringing, but that’s another story entirely). After five years, the relationship failed for many reasons – youth, inexperience and the complications of ‘adultery’– but I remember quite distinctly choosing to leave it because, for all its radical un-Christian qualities (and I had declared myself an atheist by that time), my marriage had begun echoing my parents’ difficult union with our daily struggles to reconcile our incompatible answers to the questions: ‘What is a good life?’ and ‘How shall we live?’. To stay and keep struggling, to endure and swallow down my dissatisfaction, that would have made me into my mother. So I had to leave.
Jung predicts that the daughter with the mother complex will have difficulties if she becomes a mother herself. And so it has been with me. At the age of 30 I decided that I would, after all, have a baby with my new partner, David. (My parents insist on calling him my ‘husband’ even though we’ve never married.) David was already a parent to a sweet little girl when I met him at a university Christmas party – I was doing a PhD on Australian cinema, while he was a neuroscience lecturer with a cross-disciplinary interest in philosophy. I fell in love with him as I watched him with his daughter, her head on his shoulder as she fell asleep on him in an echo of my mother’s fantasy. He was obviously a natural father. A brilliant academic, he’d told me that work wasn’t ultimately that important to him; he didn’t believe in working long hours because he loved reading and watching movies, and being with his daughter. He wanted another child.
I saw in him the opposite of my workaholic father, and glimpsed the possibility of a family life where I wouldn’t have to become a self-sacrificing mother. I loved him wholeheartedly and imagined, indulgently, that the mixing of our genes would be a magical gift to the world. So I became pregnant on schedule: three months after completing my thesis, and one month after going off the pill. I felt smugly successful. My body knew what to do, and I was fully in control.
Hyperemesis Gravidarum (HG) is the condition of extreme and intractable nausea and vomiting during pregnancy. It’s morning sickness that persists through night and day, for months on end, and this was the curse of my pregnancy. Without medication, I couldn’t keep a glass of water in my stomach. Some days I wished I was dead as I lay in the dark listening to Radio National, too sick even to read a book. Sometimes I thought, guiltily, that I might even welcome a miscarriage. But mostly I worried about my baby. Was he starving in there? The doctor, a kindly mother of four, looked at me with pity: ‘Don’t worry too much at this stage. They’re parasites and they’ll take every bit of nutrition from you before they suffer.’
There have long been some theories, now discounted, that the causes of HG are psychological – for example, an unconscious wish to expel the fetus and avoid motherhood. As I vomited my guts up day after day, I began to wonder if my body was rebelling against motherhood after all.
There is another, also unsupported, theory that morning sickness is a sign of a healthy and strongly embedded pregnancy, one less likely to end in miscarriage. In my more hopeful moments, I chose to believe this, picturing my precious little parasite, strong and selfish, holding onto my womb for dear life, and sucking all the goodness out of me. I imagined him building strong bones while my own pre-osteoporotic ones (sadly, I am like my crumbling mother that way) were leached of calcium. I didn’t resent my baby for this. I cheered him on. But my feelings for him were dark and complex, selfishness mixed with love and animal protectiveness.
At six months pregnant, I finally started to feel alive aga
in. I drank champagne and ate blue cheese, fetal alcohol syndrome and listeria risks be damned. I felt defiant, particularly as I knew my mother, the anxious prospective grandmother, would be appalled. She hated me drinking a glass of wine with dinner even before I got pregnant. But I didn’t care. I was going to be a different kind of mother to the one she’d been. I wasn’t going to be a worrier. I wasn’t going to fool myself that I could engineer the perfect conditions to create a perfect human being. Above all, I wasn’t going to be defined by motherhood.
Perhaps this was why I spent so much of the first year of my son’s life feeling angry and distressed. The reality was that my life was defined by motherhood. There was no way around the fact that I was getting just four hours of shallow sleep every night; that my meals were eaten with one hand and my cups of tea were always half-finished, mugs of cooling, milky brew mushrooming around the house as I attended to the baby’s endless needs. Each craved-for hour of solitude had to be bought or bartered with my partner, whose own life seemed to sail on quite unruffled: he left for work each morning in his crisp, ironed shirts, and had civilized coffees with colleagues at Mario’s Cafe before heading up to his office to read and think and prepare lectures. I was so jealous of him, so resentful. His body had not been ripped apart and remade into some child-feeding machine. As supportive and involved as he was (and he was – my first impressions of him as a wonderful father were correct), the plain facts were that I was at home in a small blonde-brick flat with our screaming child, while he was the breadwinner, out in the world and living the life of the mind. How had I fallen into the banalities of traditional motherhood so willingly, so blindly? I was a writhing ball of complaints and anger, and it was ugly.
‘Did you even want a baby?’ my friends (none of whom had children of their own yet) asked when I candidly explained the realities of new motherhood. Some of them no doubt remembered my long-ago pledge to remain childless. And then I felt guilty, a non-maternal freak. My younger self had known better. Maybe I had made a big mistake. An irreversible one.
The complicated truth was that I loved my baby passionately, even as I hated the relentless drudgery of keeping him alive. I wanted to eat up his chubby, golden gorgeousness. I’d bite gently into his thighs and arms while I was drying and powdering him after his bath, tasting and smelling his delicious flesh, unable to believe this creature was mine. I couldn’t stop looking into his serious sea-green eyes whenever he was awake. This love was true and primal, but blistered with such severe exhaustion and self-doubt that I wanted to run away and let somebody else raise him.
It was around this time that I used to fantasise my own mother might step in and take my child home with her. She’d do a better job, because she was a ‘natural’ mother, unlike me, and then I could give in and go to sleep for a million years, which was my other vertiginous fantasy. But then, every four hours, my baby would be hungry for me, and he’d glug greedily on my leaky breast, and I’d feel euphoric again that I could satisfy him completely in a way nobody else could. I’d succeeded at breastfeeding where my own mother had failed – and she generously congratulated me on this achievement, deriving pure pleasure from seeing him feed. ‘He’s in heaven,’ she’d sigh as she sat at my elbow and stroked his head, and for a brief moment I knew what it felt like to make both my child and my mother completely happy.
Maybe every new mother feels she’s ‘not like the other mothers’ – a distinction that brings both pride and shame. To me, normal motherhood seemed self-sacri-ficing, self-effacing, all libido and ego invested in the obsessive quest to produce the perfect child who would represent some kind of social success for the woman who had erased herself in the process of producing it. Middle class motherhood looked like a competitive sport in which each gram of food, each hour of sleep and every educational opportunity was measured and analysed to maximise results. It was boring, demeaning (to both parent and child) and, quite frankly, unsexy. I wasn’t going to submit to it.
So of course I was applying makeup just hours after leaving the delivery suite and wearing my skinny jeans two weeks after giving birth. My vanity was a kind of armour, put on in the fight against the disappearing act women seemed to perform when they became mothers. I was fighting to remain in sight that whole first year of my baby’s life. And the battle wasn’t just about appearance. Half-dead with sleep deprivation, I kept reading serious books and going to the movies (refusing the indignity of ‘crybaby screenings’) and I kept writing for The Big Issue, where I was the film editor at the time. I had coffee with my ex-boyfriend, a performing arts critic, every Wednesday, and we’d talk about theatre and dance and sex – anything but the baby. My partner and I continued to throw the odd drunken party when we could send our son off to his grandparents for the night. There was something manic about the way I held onto these activities, as if stopping any one of them might cut off my air supply.
But in between these brief gasps of air, there were the long afternoons in the cold park, pushing a swing and picking tan-bark out of my baby’s hair. There was the weekly mothers’ group gathering, where our babies were compared and contrasted, and there’d be fevered talk about private schools, home renovations and muffin recipes. In the loneliness of new motherhood, I needed the company. Beneath their competitive crackle, the other women seemed kind and helpful and I wanted to belong. Yet I didn’t. ‘They’re growing up so fast,’ the other mothers would moan as the babies got bigger and smarter by the week. Was I the only one thinking that it couldn’t happen fast enough, counting down the years to when I’d have the house back to myself again? I felt I was a bad mother, and this both pleased and scared me.
‘You don’t seem like a mother,’ new acquaintances would sometimes remark when I mentioned my son, and I took this as the ultimate compliment. Whereas when my own mum would tell me, ‘You’re a wonderful mother – it’s your greatest achievement,’ I’d cringe, unable to accept the compliment because it felt like a devaluation of everything I’d done to separate myself from her; like she was absorbing me back into her own achievement of raising me.
The truth was I needed my mother so badly at that time, while my own baby was small. She saved me from madness. She looked after him one day a week, an oasis when I would write and see my friends. Mum was on the telephone daily, with a sympathetic ear, as fascinated and concerned as I was with my son’s every milestone or minor illness. When at ten months old he finally weaned, I’d leave him with Mum overnight, or for the occasional weekend, so I could recover from that first year of parenthood. I loved her so much for this. The relief was euphoric. With her help, I felt more confident I could do this motherhood thing and perhaps even enjoy it.
But just before my baby’s first birthday, Mum and Dad announced they were moving to Brisbane. Dad had been ‘called’ yet again by God to accept a promotion, and they didn’t really enjoy living in Melbourne. It was too cold for them, and anyway they’d never stayed anywhere longer than five years. It was time to move.
I cried and cried, and felt confused. How could they leave me? How could they leave their first grandchild? Wouldn’t it break Mum’s heart to be away from this beautiful baby I’d given her?
‘To be completely honest, darling, it will be a bit of a relief to escape all the child-minding,’ said Mum.
I was stunned.
‘But how will I cope?’ I wailed. ‘I need you!’
‘You’re an adult in your thirties now,’ she said calmly. ‘And I raised two children on my own, without my parents’ help, so you can do it. We’ll visit you regularly.’
And then I saw it: the painful, complicated truth that my own mother possessed unfilled longings of her own, and they didn’t involve me. She had the contrary desires to nurture and love on the one hand, and also to be free and selfish on the other. She wasn’t quite sure what she wanted, but she knew what she didn’t want, and that was to be an always-available, self-sacrificing Nanna. In this we were so ultimately alike.
Will I ever escape the
push to rebel against my mother, and the equal and opposite pull to please her? I wonder at my compulsion still, to tell her everything, the whole truth, so that she might understand me, forgive me, accept me, difficult daughter that I am. As I’m writing these words, I wonder what she might think if she reads them. I want to send my essay to her, like a cat that’s killed a rat and rushes to lay it at the feet of its owner. Would she see this as a gift of love, my struggling with truth and memory? Or as a mangled dead thing, disgracing her doorstep? Would she see that by writing it all down like this, I’m arguing with myself and trying to become more than just a rebellious daughter? I want to live for something, and not just against it. I want to accept the fact that I’m finally safe in my separateness; able to own my desires without needing to kick against the past. That’s the dream, anyway.
I’m kneeling on my son’s bed, pouring oil into my palm to warm it before I give him a massage. It helps him sleep. He says he knows he’s spoilt. He’s 12 now, on the verge of becoming something other than this soft, suntanned child laid out on the sheets before me. How long before he balks at my touch?
‘You’re getting hands like Nanna’s,’ he says looking at them. I, too, can see my sunspots and veins, my short fingernails ruined by years of gardening and cooking just like hers.
‘Sorry Mum, no offence!’ he says, seeing my look of sorrow.
‘It’s alright,’ I say, kneading his smooth shoulders now, and bending to sneak a kiss on the nape of his neck. ‘It’s true.’
WHERE MOTHERS STOP AND DAUGHTERS START
JANE CARO
‘I hate you! I HATE YOU!’
SLAM! My eldest closes her bedroom door so hard, I look nervously up at the ceiling to see if she has knocked any plaster down. No, it is still in place but my heart is hammering inside my chest and a red mist has descended in front of my eyes. I have just enough control left to mutter a riposte at her closed door, low enough so she can’t hear it. I want to scream it full into her face and hurt her feelings as much as she has hurt mine. But I don’t. I am her mother and whatever I may feel, the instinct to protect my child – even from the full force of my own anger – remains.