by Liz Byrski
‘I knew something was up when she said the sand was black,’ he told me.
The birth was traumatic. In the middle of the night, she’d tapped him on the shoulder and told him it was time to go to hospital.
‘ “Yeah, yeah,” I told her, “just like last time and seventeen hours later you had the baby. Wake me in the morning.” ’
She’d pointed to the baby’s leg dangling from between her thighs.
‘She screamed the bloody hospital down. They couldn’t do a caesarean coz the baby was stuck in the birth canal, so they broke her pelvis to get him out.’
In the end, the doc unscrewed the forceps and used them like salad servers to dislodge the baby’s head. They dislocated his shoulder to get him out and when he reached the outside world, he was purple. The doctor put the baby on his lap and tried giving it oxygen but, in all the confusion, the hose had been dislodged and oxygen was hissing unchecked from the bottle.
‘I hooked it up, watched Mick turn pink and thought, finally, everything would be okay. A few months after, she said the sand was black and, you know what? Her mother fucking agreed. She patted her bloody hand and said, “Yes, darling, it is,” and things were never right after that.’
He dropped me off at my driveway. With the car door open and the engine running, we talked some more.
‘She left me with the kids and ran off with another bloke,’ he said.
I asked him what helped soothe the bruising that comes with being left and unloved.
‘Fishing,’ he told me, without thinking. He shook my hand before driving away. ‘Good luck,’ he said.
It was like I was going into battle.
I tried sleeping again, without any luck, so I decided I’d tackle the mound of dirty washing. The place I was staying didn’t have a machine. I’d made arrangements with a woman across the road that ran a B&B to wash my clothes. It took three visits.
When I arrived with the first load, Cathy asked me how I was going. I burst into tears and told her, ‘Jim doesn’t love me anymore.’
This prompted an eco cycle–long conversation.
‘You know what, Jacq?’ she finally asked as I piled the wet load into my basket.
‘No,’ I said, ‘what’s that?’
‘At times like this I try and embrace the Buddhist concept of love. Do you know what that is?’ She waited for me to stop and listen. ‘Embrace the enemy. Wish them all the love that you would wish onto yourself.’
Through my mind flashed an image – me standing, feet planted, forearms crossed in front of my face, fists clenched.
‘No deal!’ I muttered out aloud, pegging up my first load. ‘No deal!’ All I could think of was how I wanted to bruise Jim back. Hurt him as much as he’d hurt me.
During my second visit to Cathy’s washing machine, she asked again how I was going.
‘Not great,’ I told her. ‘I’ve spent the last two hours crying.’
She looked at me. ‘You know what, Jacq?’
‘No,’ I sniffed. ‘What?’
‘There are some people in the world that need to learn to cry more and there’s others that need to cry less.’
On my last visit, Cathy caught me in the driveway trying to make a quick getaway with my coloureds.
‘How you going, Jacq?’ she asked.
‘I only cried once!’ I announced proudly.
‘That won’t last,’ she shook her head. ‘You’ll go up and down and this will go on for years and years.’
I don’t know why people talk about hearts breaking. The heart is a muscle, for Christ’s sake, and muscles don’t shatter. People can hurt us by retracting their love, or leaving us for others or just plain leaving us. But this is more of a bruising thing. Domestic violence, sexual and physical abuse, now that’s a different thing. These actions have huge potential to inflict long-term psychological damage. They can break us and tear us apart. And the death of people you love. That’s not bruising, either. Neither is grief a long-term illness. Like cancer, it ebbs and flows. Goes into remission. It comes back to bite us, often when we least expect it.
People like to give you advice when you split up. It ranges from quick fixes to long-term game plans. Over the next few months, I found most of it annoying, amusing and, on the whole, unsatisfying. The only advice I would pass on to The Bruised is: fish, stop listening to Leonard Cohen, and buy haemorrhoid cream. Listening to Leonard Cohen is like pushing down hard on your bruise. ‘Wallowing’ my mum would call it. Whatever you call it, it’s not helpful. Fishing puts things in perspective: watching the tide go out dragged my angst into the open sea where it bobbed around small and insignificant. Haemorrhoid cream was more practical – it reduced the puffy eyes that came with constant crying. The advice I would give to Friends of The Bruised is to listen. That’s all.
Other advice during that year was the Getting Over It school of thought. Like hurt was a hurdle. But I didn’t believe that leaping over it and never looking back was going to work. There was also the school of Toughen Up, Princess. It’s the sister school of Tell Someone Who Gives a Shit. It’s a tough place, where I live, the North-West, but it’s come a long way since I moved up here. We take our mental health a lot more seriously these days because of the high suicide rates. Everyone, particularly in Indigenous communities, is chalking up a suicide, or two or three, in their own family. Many of them are young men. Boys bruise too; it seems … not just on the footy field.
I became My Own Worst Enemy. Apart from going the knuckle on my bruise with Leonard Cohen, I kept a Bruise Inventory. Here are some of the items I listed:
Bob Hawke discarding his long-suffering wife, Hazel, for his biographer, Blanche D’Alpuget.
My friend’s wife leaving him when she found out he had prostate cancer.
Woody Allen falling in love with his adoptive daughter.
Being texted by your long-term partner saying, ‘It’s over’ and never seeing them again.
The purpose of the Bruise Inventory was to put my bruising in perspective. I tried to tell myself that what happened to me wasn’t really up there with Bob taking off with Blanche.
As a result of falling into Cathy’s crybaby category or administering too much haemorrhoid cream, I ended up with a persistent bloodshot eye, so I carted myself off to the doctor. He took my blood pressure. It was off the scale and he asked me if my life was any more stressful than usual. I burst in to tears and told him I was separating from my long-term partner. A child was involved. I left the surgery with scripts for conjunctivitis cream, antidepressants and anti-anxiety tablets. I was also clutching a mental health care plan. He wouldn’t give me a script for sleeping tablets. Yet sleep was the thing I most needed. The psych I’d been seeing was furious.
‘Of course you’re depressed and anxious. I’d be more alarmed if you didn’t feel that way.’
She told me to only consider filling the prescriptions if I stopped eating, sleeping and being able to work.
‘But call me before you go down that path.’
I didn’t travel that path but I got pretty close. I stood at the beginning of the end of it, time and time again, unpacking my feelings in an attempt to understand things better. And it wasn’t one path, I soon discovered, but many; the bitter and twisted one, the one that flogs you remorselessly, the trail of breadcrumbs leading to nowhere.
‘Surely, surely,’ I said to one of my Listening Friends, ‘there’s another way through this.’
‘Maybe you’re just not at a point in your life that you can imagine a happy ending,’ he said. ‘I’m the same.’ He was a playwright and his strong point was satire … plunge-the-knife-and-twist-it stuff. We both laughed unhappy laughs.
‘He’s right,’ another Listening Friend said. I’d offered to help with the purging of her house. We’d got to the point of emptying out her built-in wardrobes and putting her junk into themed piles. We were just about to embark on the process of throwing away and delegation.
‘Don’t tell me there’s no
happy-ever-after,’ I moaned, picking up a pile of stained linen, sandpaper bath towels, tea towels and placemats. I moved towards the op-shop box.
‘No,’ she said, plucking the pig of happiness tea towel from the top. ‘He’s right about the “imagining” bit.’
‘You have a whole kitchen drawer stuffed full of tea towels,’ I said, plucking it back.
‘And you have chosen to see what happened in your life in one way, making up a story based on that one imagining.’
I threw the pile into the box and moved towards a stack of books and magazines.
‘Being a writer, you should know that there are many ways to imagine or interpret an event,’ she continued. ‘You’ve just chosen this story to see things through a particular lens.’
‘It’s not about lenses. It’s about bottom lines. You either love someone or you don’t.’
‘Wait,’ she said rifling through the books I was about to cull. She plucked one with a cover straight out of the 70s, all swirling psychedelic pink and green. It was Alice Morgan’s What is Narrative Therapy? An Easy-to-read Introduction. It was thin, the cover flimsy and the only thing that got me opening it was the fact that Alice was Australian, not American.
I frowned as I leafed through the book, stopping at one page to read out aloud, ‘The stories we make about our lives are created through linking certain events together in a particular sequence across a time period and finding a way of explaining or making sense of them … we have stories about ourselves, our abilities, our struggles, our competencies, our actions, our desires, our relationships, our work, our interests, our conquests, our achievements, our failures.’
‘That’s it.’ My friend tossed a few old magazines into the op-shop box and put aside the National Geographics.
I pushed the mountain of clean washing to one side of the sofa.
‘Keep it,’ my friend said.
‘I’ll just read the first chapter,’ I said, already absorbed, curling up. ‘And don’t think I didn’t notice,’ I muttered.
‘Notice what?’ she asked.
‘That the pig tea towel made it back into the kitchen drawer.’
She returned the majority of piles back into the walk-in wardrobes while I read Alice Morgan cover to psychedelic cover.
After reading the book, I realised that I’d got so caught up in the story about my failure to make my relationship with Jim work that I’d shelved any stories I had about my achievements. How had my story as a gymnast in high school come to be an achievement story rather than a struggle story? Because I’d privileged medal-winning and praise when I’d mastered flips and dismounts. I’d overcome fear when I fell and kept on going. That’s how.
During our lives, we live many stories at once. Sometimes they run parallel to each other but most of the time they layer-up and are multi-storied. Plot lines and themes shoot themselves into each other. They intertwine and are coloured by social and cultural values. At certain times in our lives, particular stories gain precedence. Sometimes these stories may also become problem stories.
My son would give his right arm to be invisible but for me, my invisibility is an outstanding problem. I can be in a group of people and feel as if I am not being seen or heard by anyone. It has me thinking that I’m not important. My invisibility is magnetic, it attracts filings of lunch cancellations, unreturned telephone calls and not being invited to parties and camping trips. It renders me speechless or makes me say stupid things, it calls me ‘dickhead’, churns my guts, snorts at the way I deal with disagreements and, at times, has been known to relentlessly chant, ‘B-o-r-ing! B-o-r-ing! B-o-r-ing!’ Only recently have I named this ‘invisibility’. Before that it was me being painfully shy and self-conscious. Naming it was powerful. It created a gap between ‘me’ and the ‘problem’. Now I can see the problem for what it is.
Perspective is a wonderful thing. It creates a nice little lookout where I can stand and watch the problem’s tricks and tactics, its rules, game plans, desires and, importantly, what forces are in league with it and the people in my life that cheer it on. I’ve learned a lot sitting at my lookout and watching. Not just about me, but about the huge part cultural and socio-political stories play in people’s lives. Instead of seeing someone as ‘lazy’, for example, I can see how much credence Western society values hard workers and shuns idleness. Australia has a word for lazy people – ‘bludgers’. At my lookout I can better identify these norms and this helps me to embrace and celebrate difference instead of categorising people in terms of how different they are from the accepted story. But it’s a challenge, right? It’s much easier to say someone is lazy and move on, rather than think about why we think they are lazy. When we call someone ‘lazy’, the person is the problem and the role social values play in this magically disappears. If I had ten bucks for every time I’ve heard a non-Aboriginal person call an Aboriginal person ‘lazy’, I’d be a rich woman. Yet Aboriginal people in the North-West put family above work and, instead of burning out, they tend to pace themselves, take time out to enjoy life and laugh.
Here is a story that begins in a Victorian primary school ground. A dog cocks its leg and pisses over the new girl’s skirt. I take the new girl home where my mum sponges her skirt down with soap and warm water. They were hard days, I remember. Days of asphalt, grazed knees, taunts, teasing, corporal punishment and playground equipment that burned skin and broke bones. My friendship with Sarah Taylor and the pine forest surrounding the school were the only soft things available to me. Lying on a bed of brown, scented needles, we talked, laughed and shared secrets; but that all changed at high school. New friends found Sarah and her new friends didn’t like me very much. That’s when my problem story took over.
My Invisibility story consisted of one lonely lunch after another on the back step of a side entrance, far away from the netball courts, school oval and smokers’ alley. Then, one lunchtime, my phys. ed. teacher, Carmel Morello, stopped to chat. Carmel Morello wore Adidas runners, skorts and those ankle socks with bobbles on the back. Her legs were smooth, muscular and tanned. She had a shiny, honey-brown bob, a cute up-turned top lip and dimples. Her cheeks were coloured and covered with that soft, peach-like fuzz. Lunchtimes together, when she was on duty, soon became a regular gig. We spoke mainly about gymnastics. She’d been a gymnast herself. We both loved Nadia Comaneci. Remember that sassy, young Romanian gymnast in the white leotard with the ponytail who made the double-tucked back salto executed from a handstand on the upper bar look like a walk in the park? After a month or so, Carmel Morello opened up the gym for me. I had it all to myself and tumbled around to my heart’s desire. My story of Invisibility stopped being my main story. You know the rest.
But my Invisibility narrative is always lurking around on the sidelines. It recognises vulnerable moments and infiltrates its way into my life in insidious ways. I have learnt to be vigilant but also to tease it too. Problems possess us. They love seriousness. They get worried when you don’t treat them with gravity. I can highly recommend laughing at problems.
When I first met Jim, I’d got sick of my former partner’s fraternising and was living as a single mother with our preschool-aged son. I was amazed when the handsome, eligible bachelor on campus sat on my desk and asked me to take him camping at Easter. When he proposed to me, one year later, I didn’t think to ask myself: Is this man right for me? Does he have the personality and the characteristics that I can grow old with? Are the things I like about him going to get us through those tough patches?
Instead, I turned to my Invisibility, gave it the forks and told it, ‘See, you’re wrong, I must be special and interesting.’
My giddy excitement at being valued blinded me to what was obvious to others, my mother especially. I’d overlooked the fact that the man I’d married did not put a high value on communication. We moved at a different pace to each other, rarely were we in time. And although we had a shared sense of humour and love for the underdog, our life priorities couldn’t be more differ
ent. Sometimes this can work but in our case it didn’t. His resentment and withdrawal added fuel to my problem story. I broke plates and hit out. And then it all ended up at Cable Beach with me swinging my leg and him telling me he didn’t love me anymore.
I am thrilled when people take themselves out of the pigeonhole I’ve put them in and plonk themselves somewhere else. Ecstatic when they divvy themselves up and put themselves into multiple pigeonholes. Better still, kick apart those pigeonholes altogether. It’s these kinds of experiences that have built great characters in my writing. I have a character in my novel Red Dirt Talking whom I’m particularly fond of; his name is Maggot and he is a garbo. Maggot has tatts and dreadies. He philosophises. He speaks eloquently, quotes poetry and is widely read. Some readers say to me that Maggot is an ‘unbelievable’ character. My response? ‘Truth is stranger than fiction.’ I’ve filled notebooks as testimony to that saying.
The other day, I had coffee with my friend who finds it hard to chuck stuff out.
‘You look happier,’ she observed. ‘Lighter.’
I told her I had became less wrapped up in why Jim didn’t love me and was focusing more on who did love me and why. ‘I feel like I’ve moved the goalposts and changed the relationship I have with that particular problem.’
She knew what I meant. She’d been going through a bit of shit herself and we often talk about how hard it is to change the way you look at things and stop thinking of yourself as a certain type of person.
Bruises fade with time. Nowadays I’ve ditched the Bruise Inventory and become a love-story bowerbird. Not love between people because that’s been done to death, but stories about things that sustain people when the people in their lives let them down or don’t meet their expectations. Here’s the beginning of mine:
This love story happens in the steamy tropics. It involves fruit and a certain degree of flexibility but it’s not what you think …
That’s as far as I got, but basically it’s set during the months before I left the family home to begin the tumultuous decision-making process of leaving or staying with Jim. I was doing a weekly yoga class held on the deck of the local café. Every week I placed my mat in the same spot under a peach-mango tree. When I was supposed to be practising shavasana, I looked up into the leaves of that tree. I watched it flower, I observed a small, green dot form from the flower. The dot grew from a kidney shaped bean into a fully-fledged mango, bright tangerine with a rosy flush. At the end of my last class, the teacher picked the mango and gave it to me. I ate it for breakfast, threw the seed into the garden, packed the car and drove away.