For a Girl

  My daughter’s other mother rang me, out of the blue. I heard her voice for the first time on my answering machine, this woman I’d been corresponding with on and off for over twenty years, this woman who is my daughter’s mother. She’d read my story, she said, and she wanted to talk to me. She didn’t leave a number, just a time she’d call again.

  When she called again, she said she had decided to read the story before she told Miranda about it, and now that she’d read it she did not want to tell her of its existence at all. ‘Some things are private,’ she said. ‘A person’s sex life is private.’

  ‘This is not my sex life,’ I told her. ‘This is nothing to do with my sex life.’ I felt alone.

  She wanted to throw my words in the bin, she said. She had hoped for a fairy tale ending, but this is no fairy tale, she said. This is devastating. She was frightened of what my words might do.

  I was upset to hear her say these things. I was a child too, I found myself wanting to say, and then felt guilty for those feelings. Oh, the cost of all this. It’s just so hard, too hard for anyone to comprehend.

  Later though, I admired a mother so fiercely protective of her daughter.

  ‘Think before you decide on her behalf,’ I said finally. ‘Maybe tell her you have the story and give her the choice. She can always say no.’

  Some time later, I got an email from her saying that she had passed the story on to Miranda, that she wasn’t sure how Miranda had responded but that Miranda was glad her other mother hadn’t kept it from her.

  Months later I heard from Miranda. Actually, I didn’t exactly hear from her. She wrote to her other mother and told her she didn’t know how to respond to me. Her mother was pressuring her to respond and she didn’t know how to. She was so glad her mother was her mother. Although I said several times in the story that I made the wrong decision, she was sure I made the right decision. She didn’t have room for me in her life. She wasn’t sure how she felt after reading the story. She couldn’t see how she could possibly go forward. Maybe her mother should just copy the email to me, she said. And this is what her other mother did.

  Some time later, she wrote to me and said other things; how difficult this was, how confusing. We emailed one another from then on. I don’t recall much about the content of the emails. I sent her the names of songs. I don’t know if she ever listened to them. ‘I Dream a Highway’ by Gillian Welch. At least one song by Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. ‘Make You Feel My Love’ by Bob Dylan. She told me about her life, her real life.

  PART IV

  Arriving

  Byron swim

  TODAY I SWAM THE BAY and didn’t feel afraid. I went out through The Pass and the sea was easy, if mildly resistant. Near the rocks, I bumped into a skindiver in a dark grey wetsuit. I took him for a shark. He took me for his diving buddy. When we realised we were neither of us who we thought, we laughed and wished each other well. I said hello to everyone I met, kayakers, swimmers, fish, a turtle.

  The thing I love about swimming in the sea is the freedom it gives. The water and I are not so different, our bodies going where they will. The sea and I are one just for a little while. I have heard that drowning is a painful and terrifying death. I imagine it to be so, having known even in small measure what failure of breath feels like. I do not wish to drown, would feel the sea had betrayed me, for its beneficence is so pervasive when I swim that I have learned to take it for granted, for mine.

  Near the end of the swim I rolled over onto my back and floated a while, as if I am the kind of person who floats a while. Soon a thousand will follow me in the swim I have just done. It is the day of the Ocean Beach Classic, and already the water is dotted with the orange buoys that will show the swimmers their route. I am glad to avoid the throng. I am a good enough swimmer. I do not wish to improve.

  I walked back along the beach after my swim and tears came. They have changed just lately. No teeth chattering, no yelling, but sobbing, heart-sobbing, for all that has been lost. Me, who lost some of her youth; baby Ruth, who was torn from the mother she had a right to; and David and Otis, who lost the life they might have lived.

  David who is still here beside me, Otis who has no choice about the mother he has, who continues to love me when I am not the mother I want to be. They are there now, building a castle from the stones we found on the beach on the other side of The Pass. They will be there when I arrive, and they will wave and their wave will say, We are here, we love you. And I will wave back.

  Rosemary

  MY MOTHER TOOK A HANDBAG everywhere she went. Her final one was a supermarket freezer bag. I don’t know what was in her handbag—everything you might need to survive the last days, I suspect. She hardly ever let me carry it for her, even when she was old and sick. It was very heavy.

  Her name was Rosemary, which is my name in reverse, or I suppose mine is hers in reverse, but she didn’t mention this and I didn’t notice until I was in my teens and someone commented. When I asked her, she said that no, she hadn’t called me Mary-Rose because she was Rosemary. It had never occurred to her. She just liked the name. And also, she thought Mary-Rose MacColl might be a name for a writer.

  She was a writer too, of course. She was a journalist and later in life she wrote poetry and romance novels. I’ve often wondered what she might have written if she’d had the opportunities I’ve had in life to write about my own experiences. But she didn’t have the opportunities I’ve had. She just did what she could to make sure I had them.

  When I was a child, she was vast. I remember seeing her body in the bath. These days she would be termed morbidly obese, but I didn’t think of her as that. It was part of who she was. She was solid, reassuring, soft. As she got sicker in her last year—cancer that started on her beautiful face—she stopped being able to eat as easily and so her bulk dwindled. She clarified, in a way, into the girl she’d been.

  It was Mum who had us all taught to swim. I was that girl of ten standing by the pool because of her. The night I won the only swimming race I ever won, against the faster, larger Mary McCluskey who hadn’t perfected, as I had, the speed-enhancing tumble-turn, it was Mum who was there to tell me how marvellous I was.

  Mum herself had never learned to swim but one day she jumped into the pool and found that watching swimming instructors all those years had taught her too. She swam effortlessly.

  In her very last days, cancer caught her up like the hound it is and the cells burned every last skerrick of fat from her body. On the day she died, her face was just like Nana’s; the same fine bones had shown themselves.

  She’d moved to Perth when Andrew my brother went there for work. She went to visit and found the new place suited her. She liked the climate and the blue sandy river. She liked being a long way away from Nana, and she liked being a long way away from me; in my thirties I was bossy, thought I knew what was best for her. I think she might have liked, too, the notion she might be someone else. She might start again.

  I flew to Perth to tell her the truth about my teacher and her husband. We were in McDonald’s in Fremantle where, she told me, she could get a burger and coffee with an ice-cream for a dollar on her pension card. Otis and David were down on the beach.

  ‘The father of my baby girl,’ I said. ‘It was my teacher’s husband.’

  She knew already, she said. ‘I’ve always known.’

  I told her all the truth then, what he had done.

  My mother had clear light green eyes, reminiscent of those lakes in Canada when the snow first melts. She looked up at me and put her hand on mine and said, ‘Oh, Rose, I’m so sorry I didn’t do more. I should have.’

  It was a healing gesture at a time when I was feeling treacherous about what I’d done to her, lying about my baby’s father. I was feeling treacherous about what I’d done to my child. I was feeling as if I’d betrayed my blood, the strong women I came from.

  I told her she couldn’t have done more; she was the perfect mother for me. And it is the deepest truth I
know.

  ‘Have you had any contact with her?’ she said after a while.

  ‘She doesn’t want to meet,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘She might one day.’

  This is what mothers are for.

  The day I took her to the hospice for her first and last visit, she didn’t take her handbag. She had metastatic bone cancer by then. The nurses who’d been visiting her at home said it would be respite only, that Mum was managing well. She’d be out in a week, they thought. She still had months.

  She’d wanted to die at home. Having seen my bossiness for what it was by this time—an attempt to control a world that will not be controlled—I wanted her to have whatever she wanted.

  I told her if they tried to keep her at the hospice, I might not be able to get her out again. I knew about powerful institutions.

  She nodded.

  She didn’t take her handbag.

  ‘Your bag, Mum,’ I said. She just shook her head. She knew.

  Or almost knew. Because when we arrived at the hospice and the doctor came to see her, she told the doctor she hadn’t eaten for nineteen months because her mouth was sore and I think some part of her thought they might fix her now. She might enjoy life again.

  When I wrote In Falling Snow, I thought she might not live long enough to read it. It was the first novel I’d written since the long journey I’d been on.

  In Falling Snow is historical fiction, and to my own surprise I loved researching the history most of all. It tells the story of extraordinary women who created a hospital in an old abbey in France in World War I. There is a child lost; of course there is. But writing about strong women who overcome difficulties became my thing with In Falling Snow: the lost heart, in Louise Bogan’s words, that I give back to the world. I followed it with Swimming Home, about women swimmers. It is a very small lost heart, the one I give back to the world, but it’s the lost heart that’s got my name on it.

  I got my publisher to send Mum the proofs for In Falling Snow so that she could read the novel before she died.

  She was so sick by then, and drugged. She kept losing her place, she said, falling asleep reading.

  But she’d read it all once, she said, and now she was reading it again.

  ‘It’s very good,’ she said. ‘I’m so proud of you.’

  Byron goodbye

  OUR TIME HERE AT THE farm is over. Otis will wake soon and we’ll pack the car and say goodbye cows, goodbye farm, goodbye beach, goodbye sea.

  Goodbye, baby Ruth.

  I do not much imagine what our life together would have been like. I do not think of you at two and four and seventeen living with me. It is a baby named Ruth I have been grieving, a potential life that never was.

  My body knows Otis at every stage of his life, in my belly, on my breast, in my arms, wrapped around my neck and hips, hand in hand. My body was cut from you at birth, became confused, so all I have is a knowing that once I carried your life, your tiny life, and then it was gone.

  I’d have made a mess of mothering you at nineteen. We’d have been poor and friendless. I doubt my teacher and her husband would have given much support, although you never know people, as Nana used to say. I’d probably have made new friends. I’m a good maker of friends, I’ve discovered. My mother would have helped. I’m sure she would have. But it would have been a hard life for you. I’d have had no job, no money and no ongoing support.

  I’d have made a mess of mothering you, which is why when my friend Mary tells me that in all the years she spent working with teenage mothers, she only cared for one family in which the baby might have been better off with someone else, it resonates somewhere deep within me. For while I would have been the worst mother to you in so many ways, I was your mother, your best mother, and should have claimed you.

  I am sure I did you harm, although I didn’t know it at the time, and you have said you do not agree with me that harm was done. We will have to agree to disagree about that. I am responsible for the months we shared my body in which I didn’t acknowledge you. I am responsible for leaving you in a hospital nursery for twelve days, cared for by those lunatic midwives with their gripe water and beliefs, leaving you in foster care with some woman who said a newborn baby was unhappy and waved a Bible over her, leaving you those thirty days until your other mother could come and take you in her arms and try to make it better.

  I am responsible for giving you away to strangers.

  In our big souls, as Stace calls them, did we know what we were doing, Miranda? Did we each come into this life with something to learn? Perhaps we did. I think I am learning to be happy rather than normal. Is that my lesson?

  Whatever else will happen, whatever else has happened, you are on the Earth. What happened to us seared that dark and violent beach with fire. You clung to my unwelcoming womb like a limpet on a rock. You emerged from me in a wave of grief that’s taken all these years to find its shore. But you are alive. You are this vibrant woman your other mother describes and loves so well, this marvellous woman who makes her way through the world.

  I wish you a life as filled with meaning as mine.

  April 2016

  LATE LAST YEAR, I WENT TO see a young woman named Bonnie Bliss (possibly not her real name) at Stace’s suggestion. Stace had a friend with a story like mine who’d gone to see Bonnie Bliss and it had been helpful.

  I’ve learned that sometimes you have to take a breath and dive in. I decided to make an appointment without thinking too much about it.

  Bonnie Bliss offers a three-hour one-on-one yoni-mapping session for women. Yoni is another word for vagina and the mapping is what you might imagine it is. The aim of her work is healing, helping women who’ve experienced trauma in this part of their bodies back to themselves.

  Bonnie Bliss lives and works from a cottage on a farm outside Mullumbimby. When I arrived at the session, she explained that she was pursuing a Tantric spiritual path, which seems to me, from what she then said about it, a lot like Buddhism.

  I don’t know if Bonnie Bliss helps other people, those who haven’t experienced what I have, but she helped me.

  Last month, the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse was in Brisbane, bringing its light to dark places where people who have done great harm have hidden for a very long time. Although it does me no good, I read the testimonies of children, now grown, who were betrayed by those who had a duty to care for them. I read the responses of the schools and institutions, those who run them even worse in their way than the offenders, for they have more resources. They know about harm. They are able to tell the difference between right and wrong.

  After I watch the Royal Commission for a week, I do something I haven’t done for years. I look up my teacher and her husband by name on the internet. I find a funeral notice. My teacher’s husband has died peacefully in his sleep, it says. I am supposed to feel something, I know, but for weeks nothing is there. Nothing at all. I think of going to the cemetery, finding those bricks, burying them, but I realise they are already buried, already gone.

  And then I write to the Royal Commission, offer my name, my teacher’s name, her husband’s, offer to tell my story if it will help anyone else. I get a call from a commission officer, whose job it is to check whether my situation fits the commission’s terms of reference.

  I was older than many of those who’ve given evidence, I tell him.

  Yes, he says.

  The school was not to blame here.

  All right, he says.

  He wants to know did I ever lodge a formal complaint about what happened.

  I did not, I say, wondering if he thinks me daft, writing after all this time.

  ‘Your story is as set out in your letter?’ he asks.

  Yes.

  ‘The next step is for you to meet with a commissioner,’ he says.

  It may take up to a year to arrange. They have so many of us to meet with, there’s a backlog.

  I’ll wait, I say.


  Home

  WE AGREED ON A CAFE in the middle of the Fitzroy Gardens. It was spring or summer, I don’t remember, but the day was perfect. I was late—the plane, the bus, a long walk.

  We were texting one another like two friends.

  Sorry, longer walk than I thought.

  The reply: Don’t fret, see you soon.

  So normal.

  So normal. But in the approaching days, my body had set out on its own journey. I had passed through menopause in the intervening years, but now I had all the signs of ovulation: an ache on that right side, the coveted egg white, and then that heaviness in my pelvis, as if preparing for new life.

  My body remembers. It remembers everything.

  Finally, I got through the gardens, the leaves on those lovely elms, the green grass. I saw her standing at the cafe doors and knew her, although I didn’t have a recent photograph and hadn’t asked for one. When we embraced, when we crossed that enormous space, I felt her slight shoulders and they were shaking. I realised she was nervous.

  Oh God, she was nervous. I had done wrong to her, my child, and she was nervous. The cost. But more than that, I realised, here was a person, with a sense of humour and a preference for honesty and a winning smile, her own. I realised here was a person and it was enough.

  I had read so many stories of mothers reconnecting with their children. I expected it would be of the nature of epiphany. It was not. There was a long rough road ahead, given where we’d started, and no guarantee of anything at all. It was not of the nature of epiphany. But it was of the nature of something good and right in the world. And it was enough for the rest of life.