For a Girl

  This may just be the novelist in me who can always see at least two sides of a situation, or the last remnants of the cult-like brainwashing I suffered, but if we could go down to the beach at Redcliffe that night from my teacher’s husband’s point of view, I know we would see an entirely different scene. I suspect he wouldn’t even recognise himself the way I have written him. He would think I was writing about another experience, another him, another me. She was there, he would say, a willing partner in consummating our relationship. She had a great time. In his story, we both lost control because we were really living. My teacher’s husband used to say that some people remain on the sidelines their whole lives, never take risks, watch, criticise. ‘If you really live,’ he said, ‘and I mean really live, you make mistakes, but you also do some good.’ I think he believed this.

  So what were these two relationships then, from their point of view? A teacher unsure of her own sexuality becoming involved with a young student? A woman whose husband’s needs are overwhelming? A woman wanting to help a student and things go wrong? And my teacher’s husband. A rapist? A man losing control? A well-meaning but deeply damaged man doing damage to someone else?

  I read a paper put out by the US Congress, gathering the research that’s been done into educator sexual misconduct. That’s what they call it when teachers have sex with students. They spent a good deal of time on the terminology, considered ‘sexual abuse’ rather than ‘misconduct’, but decided this put too much emphasis on the victim and whether they suffered harm, rather than on the teacher and his or her conduct. The matter of what to name students was considered too. ‘Targets’, they decided. ‘Complainant’ made it sound legal and alleged, ‘victim’ took away a student’s power. Target, because they were targeted.

  In a way, it doesn’t much matter what terminology I use, or what the motivations of my teacher or her husband were. They did harm, great harm, and to more than one person. There are children born from the relationships here, children who don’t have a choice where they’ve come from, children who one way or another have to live with the consequences of other people’s actions. My daughter, my son. Their daughter.

  At the conference in Sydney, I listened to Dr Carolyn Quadrio, a psychiatrist who still works with victims of sexual abuse. Dr Quadrio spoke angrily of the harm that had been done, the perpetrators who offended again and again, the lack of safeguards, the sense of betrayal. ‘If you could understand what such a betrayal of trust means to someone, you would make sure it never happened again,’ she said. Her drive and energy made the world feel safer.

  In much of the research I did in order to write No Safe Place and to understand what happened to me, I found the disturbing fact that adults who have sex with children and young people offend more than once. When I read this, I thought back on my teacher, her husband, wondered if there were other young people like me they harmed, people who didn’t know what they didn’t know. I wished I’d understood the harm earlier, realised how young I was. It might have meant I made a complaint to someone, perhaps even helped someone else.

  Last year, I read a self-help book that suggested I sit around a campfire in my mind with my teacher and her husband and try to understand them. I did this, mentally sat around that imaginary campfire with my imaginary teacher and her husband. In my head, my teacher’s husband told me he’d been sexually abused as a boy by a family friend. My imaginary teacher told me she’d been abused by her alcoholic father. They were just plain damaged, same as all of us. They were not bad people. They were deeply flawed. They didn’t set out to make me responsible for what we did. They just didn’t have the courage to live, despite what they thought about themselves.

  My teacher and her husband asked me to keep secrets that have done harm. They took my voice as a young woman, took it for all these years. They contributed fundamentally to a situation where I was faced, as a young woman, with a decision, a Sophie’s choice, to give my child to strangers.

  I spent my twenties and thirties living a short distance from my body, like Joyce’s Mr Duffy. I was in my forties and the mother of another child before I began to close that distance.

  I have to let my teacher and her husband go, or be consumed by them. I have to let them go, dive in with that ten-year-old girl, put one arm up and over, the other arm up and over, and breathe. In this way, I go forward in the water, I swim.

  Unresolved grief

  THERE WAS A STORY IN the newspaper a while back about a mother who was out jogging with her baby in a stroller. She stopped along a riverside track because her phone rang.

  When the woman finished her call and turned, the baby was gone. She searched the track, the roadway and then called the police. ‘My baby has been taken!’ she screamed into the phone. The police found the child, the stroller, in the river twenty minutes later. The child was dead.

  My friends were critical of the woman. ‘She didn’t put on the brake, you know,’ one said, with anger in her eyes. ‘How could you walk away from a stroller?’ another said. Still another friend said: ‘Oh, please. The first thing you’d do would be to check the stroller hadn’t slipped; you wouldn’t think someone had stolen your baby.’ (The woman was well known. It was not out of the question that someone would take her baby.)

  I am floored by their hatred, their damnation of the woman. I understand it too. We all wish we had a foot on that stroller brake, a hand on the strap, an arm around the child. We see him slip away into the river and think, No, no, this must not be. I understand these women want to save a child.

  But I am not with them. I think of the mother with sadness, for whatever she says on national television afterwards, I know her life will not be the life it would have been. It will not resemble that other life in any way. She is already someone new. She has grown a different skin.

  I look at the photograph of Otis and me on the beach, the one David took at Byron. On that weekend, for the first time since Otis was small, I started to believe I might be all right. We would walk along the beach in the evening and the sea and wind would take my tears and make them less important, part of the afternoon rather than something to be revered or feared. Otis would run and look for shells and jellyfish. David was taking photographs again.

  I can look at that photo of Otis and me and place us in a context, understand that I might have been the woman who gave her baby to strangers, but that I was also this other woman who had a child she could love and care for.

  I spent a long wasted time wishing this hadn’t happened, wishing I’d been more self-preserving, self-respecting or whatever other girls were. I never quite knew how other girls managed their lives so well. I have never been able to manage my life well. I did wish I could have done something differently to stop what happened to me from happening.

  My right leg used to give me messages. It took a long time for me to hear them. I listen to my body now, the pain behind my heart that tells me to let go, the ache in my jaw that tells me I am angry.

  I have learned, too, to say sorry to Otis, to tell him I was wrong, unfair. I have had to say sorry a lot these past few years. I am getting quite good at it.

  I would say to him as often as I’d think to, When I am sad, it is nothing to do with you. It is not your fault.

  One day, when David found me crying, Otis came up behind him and said, ‘Don’t worry, Daddy, it’s nothing to do with you. It is not your fault.’

  David has put meaning to the phrases we never included in our marriage vows: ‘in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad’. He has taken the weight of our family onto his slight shoulders and continued walking down the road, with me, with Otis. He has been with me over twenty years and says he doesn’t look like going anywhere else. At times I have told him to leave. I have said to get out of the house. I have told him that he doesn’t understand me, for he doesn’t, and how could he? How could anyone who wasn’t there? He stays with me and waits out the storm, tells me I’m right, he doesn’t understand, but he’ll do anything
he can to help.

  Sometimes still it is too much to have him near me. My teeth chatter. My body shudders with fear. I cannot abide another being beside me. But eventually, mostly, I can bear him nearby and then his hand on my back, him holding me in his arms. I take comfort in his touch. It is another kind of surrender, this finding my lover again.

  I have nothing to offer women whose children are gone, not even that loss passes. This has not been my experience. It has not passed. I wrote in a letter to my daughter that while facing great pain has brought many more tears, it also brings the beauty of the world more sharply into focus. And while this might be true, some days it is not enough.

  I have been on the internet to google women like me. They are crazy, most of them, crazy like me. They list the crimes against themselves, take governments and churches to court, write theses, invent terms like ‘unresolved grief’. They cycle on the bikeway listening to ‘The Long Road’ and yell and cry along.

  I have learned less than I would have liked given how long I have been here in the past with baby Ruth. I have learned this: at those times when I can look at my life without guilt or blame or anger, when I can even be kind, I have found a measure of my power. The hardest thing for me has been to face that at some level this was a choice, a choice I made. Perhaps it wasn’t for others, who were coerced, threatened, frightened into complying. They are welcome to the high moral ground. I am not among them there.

  After we moved out of Thomas Street, we rented a brick townhouse that looked towards the city. At that time, we were still planning to build a new house on the Thomas Street site. Once we moved into the rental and I saw how much happier it was, we put Thomas Street on the market. When it sold, I started looking for a new house.

  I hadn’t planned even to look at the house we eventually bought because it faced west at the back—hot in Brisbane—and was on the southern side of a hill, so wouldn’t get the predominant north-easterly breezes. I was only in the street because I was looking at the house opposite. The house we bought was open at the time so I went to look.

  I spent five minutes in the house, drove home so that David could look while it was still open, called the agent that night, met him at the house on Monday morning with Otis so Otis could give his vote and then made an offer.

  The agent hadn’t known David was my husband when David had gone through the house, so when I said that since my five-year-old son wanted to buy the house, I wanted the agent to take my offer to the owners, he asked me, casually, did my husband know I was offering on a house? I think he wondered about my sanity.

  We love our little house. It is a house you can come home to.

  Byron moon

  LAST NIGHT WE SAW THE moon rising at the end of the main street of the little town of Bangalow, an enormous red ball coming out of the land like a hot-air balloon. We ate at a restaurant and Otis saw a candle burning for a boy who’d worked in the restaurant; the boy had been killed on his motorcycle and the candle would burn for forty days, as is the Greek tradition. Otis wanted to know how you could die on a motorcycle and I did my best to tell him.

  You don’t realise until you are a parent that you will have to lie. I have promised I will tell the truth. I have tried to be honest with Otis. I am afraid of dishonesty. I know it can harm much more than it helps. I know now what secrets do to people, how they cauterise from within. But I lie to Otis. I mediate the world because I know it may be too much for him.

  A dog followed us almost all the way home through the dark streets of the town. It was broad-chested and stocky and it had no road sense but wouldn’t let me lead it. I walked as close as I dared—I have a fear of dogs, having been bitten half a dozen times as a child—and hailed cars to slow down as they approached. It would have been run over three or four times had I not remained near.

  David and Otis kept asking me why I was letting the dog come with us.

  ‘What will we do with a dog?’ David said.

  ‘Is it really friendly?’ from Otis.

  I knew the cottage wasn’t equipped for animals. I didn’t exactly have a plan but felt sure one would present itself.

  As we turned into the street where we’d parked, a car I was hailing to slow pulled up. It was the dog’s owner, who had been searching frantically. The dog had escaped through an unlatched gate and had walked all the way to town. ‘I have a little boy too,’ she said after she’d snuggled the dog into its front seat bed. ‘That’s why he followed you. He thought your little boy was like my little boy and might know the way home. He’d have been killed if he hadn’t followed you, sweetie,’ she said to Otis.

  Afterwards, Otis told the story of how we’d saved the dog’s life. ‘He thought I was his little boy,’ Otis would tell people. ‘That’s why he stayed with us.’

  This morning when I swam, I went out through The Pass and around the rocks. The water was a dense green so I couldn’t see more than a few inches in front or below me. It made me afraid, this new blindness. The sea was calm, like a rocking crib, and still I was afraid. My fingers and ankles found bits of seaweed that startled me because I had no idea what they were.

  I wanted to see, to know what was around me. I wanted to know.

  Just before we came away on this trip, I was walking with my friend Cass. We walk once maybe twice a week up a hill near where I live. We call the hill a mountain because it makes us feel better. After we walk up our mountain, we have coffee.

  After I hurt Otis with the stroller clip, Cass rang me every week, kept ringing if I didn’t call back. She told me it was not normal to get in the shower every morning and cry. Her niece, a physician, said it was not normal. She knew a psychiatrist, she said, the eighty-six-year-old father of a friend. At eighty-six, he’d have seen it all, she said. Maybe he could help.

  ‘Before you do anything drastic,’ she said once, although I hadn’t mentioned anything drastic, ‘will you call me?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Good,’ she said.

  While walking on our mountain on the morning before we came away, I was telling Cass about my conversation with Mary, how much it had meant to me, how it had helped to have someone acknowledge that I’d made the wrong decision.

  By this time, I was travelling much better. Cass and I would walk up our mountain and watch the sun and hear the mad cockatoos. We’d even spied an eagle’s nest that year, the baby eagles well protected by their fierce mother.

  Cass stopped on the track. ‘I don’t think I agree with that, Mary-Rose,’ she said. ‘No, I don’t at all. How could anyone know that? How could anyone be sure? You don’t know what your daughter’s life would have been like. You can’t have any idea.’ She was shaking her head.

  It occurred to me suddenly that Cass was right, just as Mary had been right. I made a wrong decision. Yes, I did. There is no way of knowing if I made a wrong decision. Yes again. Whatever baby Ruth’s life had become, it wasn’t the life she would have had with me. That was all I could really know for sure.

  Not everyone in my life has agreed I should write this story. After I hurt Otis in the stroller clip, I had stopped writing anything at all and when I started again, I found myself writing the truth about what happened to me as a young woman.

  During this time, I had been meeting with my friend Kris Olsson to workshop what we were each writing. We used to meet after my cold-water swimming at South Bank for breakfast, but for a long time I hadn’t had anything to workshop.

  After I started writing again, I read out loud to Kris what I’d written. We sat there in the winter sun crying together.

  Some time later, Fiona Stager from Avid Reader Bookstore in Brisbane hosted an event where I read from an essay I’d written for Griffith Review, published by Julianne Schultz, telling some of the secrets I’d kept. It was terrifying, and I was glad I did it.

  If these women hadn’t been willing, I would never have kept writing.

  Some of my friends said I should not under any circumstances share the story of what happened to me, to us, with my daught
er. It is too much for a child to bear, even in adulthood, they said. Others said some secrets are better kept. Past is past. Leave it there.

  I do not agree with them. I agree with my friend Cass.

  ‘Of course she has a right to know,’ Cass said. ‘We all have the right to information. People make me sick the way they hide things, as if information can harm a person.’

  It’s secrets that harm a person. I know this much now.

  I had resumed contact with my daughter’s other mother. I had written a version of this story. I wanted to explain to my daughter how I arrived on a dark beach on the night of her conception, and how I came to leave her with strangers.

  I would rather have sat down and told her in person, but that was not an option. I knew it was entirely possible that it might never be an option—many children adopted at birth decide not to meet those who gave them away. My daughter had not expressed interest in any contact with me. I wanted to tell her the truth.

  I sent the story through my daughter’s other mother, which was still the only way to contact my daughter. I asked her other mother to pass the story on. I told her I wanted my daughter to have the information, that I didn’t want anything from my daughter but I wanted her to have the information.

  This is not your story, and perhaps there will be some comfort in that. It is not even half of the story of where you come from and it is none of the story of where you are going. You came through me on your own journey. This is mine. You can take what is useful from it and move on. I read Women Who Run with the Wolves: ‘The wild woman carries with her the bundles for healing; she carries everything a woman needs to be and know. She carries the medicine for all things.’