For a Girl

  Centacare, the Catholic agency through which I gave my child away to strangers, still advertises adoption services for women. I can’t imagine a girl like me going down that path today, but if she did I would tell her to go back, spend some time with her baby, reconsider. If she then decided she wanted to relinquish her parenting rights, then of course she should be able to. But according to my friend Mary, very few do when given a chance to weigh up both options. At any rate, I would be unable to tell her what the pros of giving her baby to strangers are. Someone else would have to do that. I no longer know what the pros of giving a baby to strangers are.

  The energy that led to church and state adoptions, that led to a position where it was always better to give a baby to a married childless couple than let a single mother raise a child, is the I–thou attitude of righteous people everywhere. It is as healthy now as it was when I gave baby Ruth to strangers. It is particularly rampant when it meets up with women’s health and vulnerability around the birth of children, or when it finds itself responsible for any kind of care of vulnerable people. There are midwives and doctors and carers out there who still know best what women and children want and need.

  I have a friend who has just had her first baby. She is in the throes of wonder about this miracle that has come into her life. She is vulnerable, soft and needs encouragement, as we all do at that time. My friend visited a health clinic and was told by the child health nurse that her breastfed baby had failed to regain birth weight. ‘What are you doing with her?’ the nurse said. My friend tried to tell her and was interrupted mid-sentence. ‘Goodness me. Wake her every two hours and make her feed. Come back Friday and if she hasn’t improved, we’ll start some formula.’ She destroyed my friend’s confidence as a mother for a little while and she was wrong, wrong in heart and wrong in fact.

  At some stage during my work with Stace, I had a rebirthing session with a woman from Ocean Shores. It does not seem strange to be saying this, as if I have rebirthing sessions with women from Ocean Shores every other week; I do not, incidentally. She helped me immensely, the woman from Ocean Shores, partly because of how resistant I was to her and her beliefs, her assumptions.

  I spent two hours regressed on a couch. Beforehand I wondered how I’d fill the time, but it ended in seconds, before I had finished. My body shook. My teeth chattered. This is fear, I would have said to the woman if I could have got the words out, fear like you’ve never known.

  Afterwards, she said she was sure there was anaesthetic at my birth, or at baby Ruth’s birth, or even Otis’s. I was never sure who we were rebirthing. There was anaesthetic because she became drowsy. The anaesthetic was leaking out of me, she said.

  Her own birth was traumatic, she said, because she believed she had murdered her mother.

  ‘Did your mother die?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘But I thought she did.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said, not knowing what else to say.

  Over time, I have begun to place what happened to me in its context. But what I took away from my rebirthing session with the woman from Ocean Shores was nothing to do with birth, and nothing to do with baby Ruth, which surprised me. I took that picture of myself at ten, standing beside the pool. It came back to me that day at Ocean Shores and it has been with me since. I am fierce with life in that picture; that’s the point. I am here, she is saying. I am here.

  I’d rather be happy than normal

  ONE NIGHT, NOT LONG AFTER I told Louise the truth about my teacher and her husband, I was organising Otis for his bath and found sand all through his bed. It had leaked from the rolled-up cuffs of his pants when he was playing on the bed earlier. It had probably been collected at kindy that day and I hadn’t noticed.

  It shouldn’t have been a big deal but what happened on that beach at Redcliffe had come back as a memory around this time. It was a memory that came back whole, formed, while my body shook with the fear of it. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it yet, but everything felt too much, even the noise of a normal child, the light of a normal day.

  Feelings which would overwhelm me had been pressing down all day. When I discovered that poor little Otis had spilled sand in his bed accidentally, I was furious. I told him I was sick and tired of the mess he made. I said other things I’m not going to write here.

  Otis retaliated, started spreading sand on the bathroom floor. I picked him up and carried him back into his room and put him on his sandy bed to have some time out. I was still yelling. He was crying.

  It was me who needed the time out. When I’d calmed enough, I went back to him and said I was sorry. I said that when he put sand on the bathroom floor, maybe it was his way of saying my anger hadn’t been fair.

  He nodded hard through sobs.

  I told him he was right to do what he did, that when someone didn’t treat him fairly, he must speak up, must have it named. I told him that I was not really angry anyway, I was sad, that it was nothing to do with him, that I was sorry. I said I would not always be like this.

  After he went to bed I got in the shower and let the tears come.

  An afternoon not long after this, we were in the backyard, trying to talk our poor trees into growing. There were three of them. We’d picked them out at the nursery when we’d bought our house with its yard. Otis had a jacaranda, mine was a coolamon, and David’s was a dwarf macadamia. We’d planted flowers too, although they hadn’t bloomed, and herbs, but the rats had made short work of them.

  Otis was wearing his favourite pants, brown cords gone in both knees, with his starry night pyjamas under, his pink gumboots. He was digging a hole where the chook pens had been. I was always slightly worried he’d dig up more asbestos.

  Late in the afternoon, I sat down with him on the grass and said I wanted to tell him something important. I wanted to explain why I’d been sad and sometimes angry. He looked at me with his serious face, big eyes focused on mine.

  ‘I had a baby girl when I was very young,’ I said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ I said, ‘a long time before you were born.’

  He nodded slowly.

  ‘I was too young then to look after a baby,’ I said. ‘Otherwise, I would have looked after her because I love being a mummy.’

  He didn’t smile, continued to regard me solemnly.

  ‘The baby grew up with another mummy and daddy. They very much wanted children and couldn’t have their own,’ I said. ‘That sometimes happens.’

  I did not cry as I spoke.

  ‘Of course, this would never happen to you,’ I said, ‘because I am much older now, old enough to look after you.’

  Sometimes, I explained, there was sadness in my body where the baby was, and the sadness needed to come out. That’s all. But I wasn’t as good at feeling my feelings as he was, so I didn’t always know how to let it out. He’d taught me a lot about that, I said.

  When I didn’t let them out, the feelings would build up like a pot boiling on my head and sometimes the lid blew off the pot.

  ‘I yell at you, like I did last night,’ I said.

  He nodded in recognition.

  ‘But it’s not anything to do with you. It’s to do with me. And I’m sorry. What I really need is to go away for a little while and cry and then I feel better. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do now when I feel sad.’

  We sat for a while looking at our sad garden. I said if he had any questions, he could ask them any time he wanted.

  He looked at me. ‘When you cry, can you leave the door open?’

  ‘I shut the door because I don’t want to upset you,’ I said.

  ‘What would upset me?’ he said. ‘You’re the one who’s upset.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. I wondered how someone so young could teach so much.

  ‘The girl is now a grownup,’ I said.

  I told him your name.

  ‘She’s your sister,’ I said.

  ‘I know that,’ he said, an
d went back to his digging.

  The morning of that same day, before I’d told him about his sister, Otis and I had had another conversation, about a sandal he’d lost that he was really upset about. To put his feelings in context, I’d told him a story about a puppy I’d had once that had run away. I said I’d felt the same kind of sadness he was feeling about his sandal so I understood.

  The next day, getting ready for kindy, he said, ‘You know that baby, Mummy?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Was it a puppy?’

  Humour may not translate in such difficult circumstances, but to me, his simple understanding of the world is like taking a breath. I wish I could put it in a bottle and drink it every morning.

  After I wrote to my daughter’s other mother and sent her the essay I wrote on birth, she wrote back. She’d found birth hard to relate to, she said. It was something she’d never experienced and when women shared their stories, she didn’t feel she could really understand.

  When I read her letter, I realised how insensitive it was to send her an essay on birth. It hadn’t even occurred to me that she too had experienced loss; she had wanted to have children and had never given birth.

  I replied, You and I are on different corners of this fraught human triangle and it is too easy for me to focus on my own corner, to shore it up and make it sharp.

  In her next letter, she changed the shape. I see myself somewhere along a straight line between you and Miranda. Sooner or later (sooner I hope) my job will be to get out of the way so that you two can grow closer.

  A few weeks after I told him about his sister, Otis said, ‘You know, Mummy, I think it was good you gave away that other baby.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, because her other mummy and daddy, they couldn’t have a baby and then they had one.’

  We worked for two years at Thomas Street with our architect and builder. We developed over a dozen renovation plans and then a new house design for the site. Nothing worked. Nothing. And nothing ever grew there, not our trees, not even our son.

  We sold the house, finally, to a couple who did up old houses and made them look like old houses but work like new ones. I dug up our three trees and we put them in pots and took them with us.

  Before the new owners signed the contract, I said to the real estate agent: ‘Tell them that there is a presence in that house. I want you to make sure they know.’ I am no longer willing to keep secrets.

  Target

  I RESEARCHED SEXUAL MISCONDUCT WHEN I was writing my novel No Safe Place, which is about a young woman at university who says a student counsellor sexualised their counselling relationship. I went to a conference at the University of Sydney where I heard the accounts of women and men who had been sexually abused by teachers and priests and therapists who put their own sexual needs before their duty of care.

  The harm was terrible. I saw how those people at the conference, some who’d been abused as children, others as teenagers or adults, shook with emotion. Most had not been able to fulfil their potential, their years marked by addiction, self-harm, an inability to form lasting relationships. Some were gone already. They’d taken their own lives, and a family member was telling their story. It was shocking to me what these people had suffered. It frightened me, if I’m honest.

  I can remember thinking at the time that what happened to them was not the same as what happened in my life. I am not a victim of anything, I told myself. I will not call myself a victim. I will not call my teacher and her husband perpetrators. Words like that made me uncomfortable. Surely if there was fault here it belonged with me. I brought it upon myself. I’d been a troubled teen. They had helped me. Wasn’t that what happened?

  Later, I wanted desperately to believe I had agency, choice. My first therapist, Mick, was at pains to make me see the world this way. I gave them a special power to hurt me. I could take my power back. I spent a long time thinking this way.

  Wayne, the therapist I went to see after I accidentally hurt Otis with the stroller clip, became exasperated only once in the time we were meeting. I’d maintained my view that what had happened with my teacher and her husband was my responsibility, that I’d been the one who’d done wrong, or I’d given them my power, as Mick said, and I could take it back. Wayne and I had come up against this more than once.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said this particular day. ‘But I just don’t see that you gave them a special power to hurt you.’ He was quoting me quoting Mick. ‘I don’t see that you had any power at all. I really don’t.’ He was shaking his head in frustration.

  Wayne had asked me, when I’d first gone to see him and told him about the counselling I’d already done, why I hadn’t gone back to see Mick. I told him that David and I had become friends with Mick and Mick’s wife Suzi. We had even gone to their wedding.

  Mick became friends with many of his clients. When I started reading about sexual misconduct to research No Safe Place, I learned that counsellors are not supposed to make friends with their clients. It’s one of those relationships where power is unequal. At the time, it didn’t bother me, as Mick had never misused our relationship for his own gain.

  Although Wayne never said anything about this, over time, I began to realise that Mick’s way of seeing the world suited him, but he was wrong about me. He was wrong to believe that, at sixteen, I gave my teacher and her husband, a couple in their late twenties with much more life experience than me, my power. He was wrong that my teacher, who had a duty of care, was just like any other person in my life. And he was wrong to befriend me.

  When Suzi left Mick some years ago, she and I remained friends. I knew she and Mick had got together when she was twenty-one and he was forty. But he was also her work supervisor when they met, she told me. And, I learned, he had been counselling her on a personal level. He had mixed a work relationship, a counselling relationship and a sexual relationship with someone who had much less life experience.

  Suzi has been one of the few people in my life who understands, at a visceral level, some of what happened to me. It happened to her too.

  There’s not much nuance in the language we have to describe sexual misconduct and there’s probably not a lot of nuance in the reality either. There are victims and perpetrators and rape is always rape, as Stace once said to me. But while courts try to apportion blame based on age and maturity, coercion and consent, people like me who’ve actually experienced this kind of betrayal can no longer live the trusting lives we might have. I think this has been the hardest thing, learning to trust again that people won’t betray me.

  Still, I remained uncomfortable describing my relationship with my teacher and her husband as sexual abuse, and I was uncomfortable describing what happened to me on the beach at Redcliffe as rape. I was sixteen when the relationship started, the age of consent in Queensland. I’d consented to everything that happened, hadn’t I? And the memory of the beach came much later than the event itself, however clearly it came. And anyway, I had sex with my teacher’s husband after I came home from Melbourne. So does the rape count? As for my teacher, I loved my teacher, and I thought she loved me.

  The American novelist and essayist Mary Gaitskill wrote an essay in HQ about two experiences. In the first, she was overwhelmed by a man in the street who dragged her into a dark alley and raped her. In the second, she was on a date and said no to sex. The man raped her. When she told her friend, she said this second experience of rape felt worse than the first, that she wasn’t even sure she could call it rape. Her friend said, ‘You were raped, all right—you raped yourself.’ Mary Gaitskill said she didn’t like hearing her friend say this, but she also knew that it was true. I raped myself. I raped myself. There’s something in this that felt true to me, not in terms of rape but in terms of the entire relationship with my teacher and her husband. How did I let myself, a strong young woman on her way to the world, get waylaid by these people who were bound to cause me harm? How did I not see? How did I not protect myself? Why did
I go along with what they were doing for so long?

  It must be very difficult for courts to apportion blame in cases where young adults or adults have been in these relationships. I cannot now understand what I saw in my teacher and her husband. In those years of my late teens, it was something akin to a cult, where the people I saw and the actual people were a long way apart, but I didn’t know that, and I was so isolated that no one else was providing an alternative view. My teacher was my teacher and then a leader of religious curriculum development. Her husband was an officer in the army. Their status in the community legitimised them, legitimised what they did, so that even in my mind, it became me, the troubled teenager, who did wrong, not them. I believed this for years. And my family; we were not a ‘normal’ family, as I’ve said. I think shame fit me snugly. It wasn’t until I met someone like David, until Brian met my teacher’s husband, until I saw Wayne in therapy, that I started to see an alternative view.

  When I have told my story—and I have had to tell it to many people now, people who have known me for years and known none of it—some people say they believe me innocent and my teacher and her husband guilty. They shake their heads and say they can’t believe those people could have done what they did. I’m not sure if they say it to be kind, or if they really do think my teacher and her husband are evil people. But I can’t join with my friends, even knowing everything I know now.

  I have said this is my story. I am the point-of-view character, the unreliable narrator of my own life. I think if this story were told from another point of view, those friends who vilify my teacher and her husband might see things differently. For instance, as I read back over what I have written, I see I have made much of the fact that we agreed we would not tell anyone I was pregnant to protect my teacher’s husband’s commission. This is true from my point of view, and it looks cowardly of my teacher’s husband. But for him, I am sure it was galling to lie. He was generally a loyal and courageous person who owned his mistakes. He already had a wife. She was unwell, potentially unable to bear children, and vulnerable. He stuck by his wife, the first promise he’d made, and left me, to whom he’d made no promise, to cope alone.