After

by Nikki Gemmell

  *

  Elayn was always waiting when it came to a daughter. For me to bloom into prettiness. For me to become famous, which meant a specific type of adulation to do with television and television alone; the pinnacle was to have her daughter on the small screen in some revered journalistic capacity. She was waiting for gratitude. For her daughter to declare to the world that Elayn Gemmell was the person who made her, above all, and who she loved more than anyone, particularly her lowlife father. It didn’t happen. This book could be it. Well, the gratitude bit.

  *

  All Elayn’s frustration would spill out in her combing of my hair during the primary school years, tugging and yanking and pulling at my knots. It hurt, physically and emotionally, it bewildered me. All that anger in a brush stroke. As a consequence, I do not touch my daughter’s hair. Sometimes, wilfully, you live your adult life in opposition to how you were parented. You evolve. Most determinedly, you evolve.

  *

  Some friends have mothers capable of immense cruelty. Friends who weep all the way home in their car after a visit. Who’ve sought divorce counselling from their mother because it’s just too hard to be with them. Who’ve had to move to a new state to remove themselves from the destructive, narcissistic press of the woman who gave birth to them. Who haven’t spoken to their mother for years, even as grandchildren have arrived. Just to survive.

  My friends and I wonder about these perplexing women of the fifties, snagged by frustration and taking it out on daughters who live so differently to them. They came of age pre-feminism and we came of age post-feminism and sometimes the gulf feels too far to bridge. We have opportunities they never had. Yet it doesn’t seem to make them celebratory, it makes them bitter.

  *

  ‘Hi Mum.’ A light, breezy ‘Hi Nik’ in return on the phone was rare. The cool ‘Hello Nikki’ more common. Sometimes, a long pause, then a weary ‘Hello.’ Just that. The tormenting of silence. Most times there was a knot in my stomach when calling her. Because I never knew what mother I’d get.

  But I was always the one to apologise. Even when I wasn’t sure what for. Sorry wasn’t in Elayn’s vocabulary when it came to her daughter.

  *

  ‘The knowledge that she would never be loved in return acted upon her ideas as a tide acts upon cliffs,’ wrote Thornton Wilder in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Always, always, the little girl, desperate for scraps of affirmation. Even into middle age. And when it came, the euphoria, leaving me craving more.

  ‘He who loves the most is the inferior and must suffer,’ Thomas Mann wrote. In my case, I loved the most because I was the child. Always the child, with Elayn, needing affirmation.

  *

  Sometimes family is not a gift but an endurance. And sometimes, to endure, you have to distance yourself from it. That’s why so many of my adult years were spent living away from family. A lot of the time I couldn’t endure my mother. Yet in her last five years I came home. To find a suturing. To make it work. To prove it could be done. I’d have gone mad, now, if I hadn’t done that.

  *

  Freed from: Elayn’s game, year after year, when my birthday was held hostage to whether I was in her good books or not, demonstrated by whether I’d be rung or not. If I was in favour she’d lavish me with love; a beautifully worded card and an exquisitely wrapped present. Gift wrapping, for Elayn, fell under her remit of perfection; every paper selection and ribbon had to be just so. On the last birthday I spent with her it was all this, fulsomely. We had a lunch in the Members Dining Room of State Parliament. She worked there as a casual receptionist to the politicians of New South Wales and loved their imposing, clubby environs of privilege and poshness. I was issued a security pass and met her colleagues; it was a tsunami of care and attention. I remain stunned. Perhaps we were both changing.

  At the end of the lunch, Elayn broke the news that she was going into hospital for a foot operation in the next few weeks, and might need some help.

  *

  Most often, during my adult birthdays, there was only vicious silence. No call, no acknowledgment. This would stain whatever festivities I was having on the day with a fuming at the game of withholding. Elayn’s birthday was four months after mine. Each year, after yet another great silence, I’d think no, I’m not going to contact her, she needs a taste of her own medicine. And each year as Elayn’s birthday came around I’d soften, call, give a gift. Couldn’t bear to sink to her level. Couldn’t bear the admission of my own littleness, alongside her, in the depths.

  *

  ‘What to do with her, with the hostility, undying, which I feel for her? I want, as ever, to grab my life from out under her hot, itchy hands. My life, my writing, my husband, my unconceived baby. She’s a killer, watch out . . .’ Sylvia Plath on her mother. My mother propelled me into writing. Into a different kind of life. Far removed from her world, from everything she stood for. I knew it at fifteen as a judging teenager and I know it now, deep in motherhood.

  Elayn did not fully grasp the consequences of what she was doing. Does any parent? She underestimated my anger at being pushed in directions I did not want to go in; at being forced to be someone I wasn’t comfortable being. And by pushing me, actually, into another life, so different to Elayn’s, I would always, somehow, be beyond her. Did she hate and admire this at the same time? There is the riddle of painstakingly curated clippings, yet the attempts to my face to constantly reduce me for my choices; put me in my place.

  What I’ve learnt: that as a parent, we cannot rigidly shape our children’s lives no matter how much we would like to. We have to step back and watch them bloom into who they are meant to be, whether we like it or not. We have to step back with understanding, and love.

  *

  Once Elayn walked suddenly into my teenage room (just as she used to when I was child, just as she always would) and came upon a canvas flung across the floor. All my anger and frustration and torment was spilled out in the vicious colour, the furious strokes. She said – bewildered, serious, weary – ‘Sometimes I wonder what I’ve raised.’ As if I was not quite human. Not part of her known world. And she really didn’t want to have to deal with it.

  *

  And yet, and yet . . . I miss her wisdom. The talks about men. On N, the fiancé who jilted me: ‘Look at his girlfriends, his past. Why is he still so friendly with all of them? If you love someone that deeply, and it falls apart, you cannot bear to look at them.’ She said that maybe all it needed was six months, and perhaps he would come back the better man: ‘If it’s true love it will still be there. And it’ll be mature love then.’

  Of an early boss, summed up from one handshake: ‘He lacks confidence. He lives under the shadow of his parents. He’d be clingy and needy if you were in a relationship with him. He’d chip away at you to reduce you, bring you down to his level.’

  Of an ex-boyfriend: ‘He’s quite charming in his unsophistication.’ And that was on a good day.

  ‘Beware the controlling man. Don’t ever get caught up with one. They’ll destroy you.’ This one on my wedding eve, yet I was able to soothe Elayn that she had no fear on that score. She didn’t know Andrew beyond his beautiful voice; didn’t know how comfortable he was in his own skin. Didn’t know I’d learnt from her.

  *

  ‘Don’t sell your flat.’ Mum never wanted me to get rid of my old, single woman’s flat, in Sydney’s Kings Cross, to have it subsumed by marital finances. To her it represented financial freedom. An escape if ever it was needed. She’d worked hard after her divorce to pay off the mortgage on her newly acquired flat and wanted her daughter to have that surety too. Independence, especially within a marriage. A way out, just in case. On my wedding day she walked me down the aisle as the proud single woman who’d raised me, while my father stood beside us in the pew. My grandmother, Lexi, was so appalled she refused to go to the wedding. Bob was fine with it. He knew the truth of the situation.

  *

  I moved briefly home when I was
eighteen, between house shares. Elayn let the boy who took my virginity stay in my tiny childhood bedroom with its high, narrow bed; happy for him to invade my little-girl world. When I lost my virginity she was celebratory and brisk. Ordered me to see a doctor, to get the pill quickly. That feeling of horror, as a teenager, that now I would be like her. All . . . appetite.

  *

  I didn’t tell Elayn when I got my first period. Denying her this seminal, mother–daughter moment. I had to work out how to insert the tampon myself, and wondered if I’d found the right hole. Distance, and removal.

  *

  When I became engaged to N I was living in Alice Springs, Elayn in Sydney. I told her over the phone we were getting married. It was fine, she was happy. But then a night of reflection. The next day, the tone in her voice, the judgment. I said that L, a journalist, had managed to get him and I tickets to the Sydney Film Festival’s opening night. This did not change her stance. The sing-song, accusatory, ‘What are you wearing? We dress smartly in Sydney you know. You don’t want to look like an Alice Springs waif.’ I loved my mother. I did not like her.

  *

  Yet I wanted the children to have her in their lives; to know the solace of a Nonna because I’d had two guiding grandmotherly lights. Andrew and I had made the decision to return home from London to reconnect with our blood and land and hearts. For our children to connect too. To know their Nonna in ways far richer than made possible by her trips to England every couple of years, or our crammed visits back home when there were always too many people in too few days.

  *

  As the days lurch on, the weeping. That Elayn did not love my children so much that she wanted to see them grow up, was not fuelled by curiosity. Did the kids sense it at all? She would sit in the car rather than walk inside with me to collect Jages from his preschool, choosing not to revel in seeing him in his happy school environment; she would bow out of invitations to the older kids’ presentation days with a dismissive ‘I’m busy.’ Her incuriosity was striking. Did she love any of us, enough? We could not hold her in this world, not a single one of us.

  *

  I wish for Elayn now a different life. We – her children – held her back, exhausted her. I wish for her now a university education, a continuation of her modelling career, a flowering into the world of business. My father didn’t want a wider world for her, with other men, and Elayn surrendered. Shortly after they divorced Bob married a woman nineteen years younger than him. She was everything Elayn wasn’t. Fervent with domesticity, proud to be a traditional homemaker. Swiftly they had four children. It was a much more solid match. I’ve grown to love my stepmother. To appreciate all she’s done for my father in making him settled and happy. But for a while there, during my teen years, I was bewildered by the vast loneliness she made me feel within the family she had created with my dad. The obscenity of that. Yet did I ever consider that I made Elayn lonely within her family?

  *

  In the seventies, when my parents divorced, a fractured family wasn’t called a single parent family, with all the strength that that entails. It was a broken home. That’s what I came from. And it felt broken, our family unit, all five of us. It still does. Yet to me the words single mum and feminist always seem to go together. You can’t have one without the strength of the other.

  Elayn always acted with audacity. Unlike my stepmother, who made the better wife.

  *

  Elayn could not bring herself to say Bob’s name without her voice souring with hate. ‘Your father.’ The ugly spit of it never changed. We’d spoken of Bob briefly before Ticky’s birthday dinner, driving to the restaurant; he was coming down soon from his country home to look after the kids because Andrew and I had an interstate wedding. ‘Your father.’ The hrumph of contempt. No-good lump of a thing, her voice conveyed, just as it had when I was ten.

  *

  ‘Tell your father your maintenance is due.’ ‘Get the towels, bitch.’ ‘No one likes you.’ ‘I wish I had __________ as my daughter, not you.’ Elayn made me feel grubby, grubby I couldn’t get rid of. She was hard as a door banging on your fingers at times. Her death was not a happy, light one. Her lonely choice reflected the sadness in her life.

  *

  Elayn had never, once, offered to look after my children in the five years I’d been home. I’d asked a few times but it was always ‘I’m busy’ in response so I soon learnt to stop. We were living down the road but it was not in her DNA to provide assistance. It took me years to understand this. That she had done her dash with her own children, that she wanted to live her own life now, that young children were depleting. Bob is the opposite – regularly helps, despite living a day’s travel away. He’ll bound into Jages’ preschool to help me pick him up, delighting in gazing at his grandson in his world. As a parent, I couldn’t help but veer to that. Elayn was unable to cut through our father–daughter bond, and she hated it. For four decades I endured her hatred of it.

  *

  Working side by side with my father, securing a new hammock between palm trees. ‘You know,’ Bob commented, ‘in all my years of marriage to your mother she never once lifted a hand to help me.’ I tell him it was the same for me, and with Win, her mother. Building up the walls around herself until at last, in her final act, she was alone. Her choice.

  *

  Elayn resented my love for my father after they divorced. I was ten. I was not meant to love him after they had split up; I was expected to hate him as much as she did. No idea why. In my late teens I wrote a piece about my father’s and grandfather’s coalmining lives, which was published in the literary magazine Quadrant. The commissioning editor and poet, Les Murray, wrote in his letter of offer, ‘If you made this up, you’re a genius.’ I didn’t.

  Elayn was so angry after she read the essay. I was confused because this was one of my first pieces of published writing; the catapult into the dream. I’d finally cracked it. Yet this was Elayn’s response: How dare I express a love of my father in print. How dare I commit that love to permanence. How dare I mention his coalmining background; the world she escaped from and never mentioned socially. How dare I let the cat out of the bag, in her new, severed life that was removed from all of that.

  *

  Elayn’s powerful, blunt hands. They could open any jar with a fiercely effective, almost superhuman twist. City hands, of course, with their red nails and elaborate rings, but hands that shouted a robust bush past. I envied them.

  *

  Elayn was a woman made strong by her own suffering. Like Kintsugi, she was shaped by the dents and the cracks. Throughout all the twists and turns of life, the setbacks and the humiliations, she wanted me to be that woman too.

  *

  I left Elayn, emotionally, at thirteen, when she forced me to buy my own school shoes to teach my father a lesson because his maintenance payment was late. Flinty rage, as I caught the bus to the shopping centre with a purse full of birthday money. Flinty rage, at being used as a pawn in someone else’s war. Flinty rage, poured into my teenage journal. Yet her lessons grew me up.

  *

  My Snoopy diary, aged fourteen, records Elayn saying that no one would care if I died, that I was a slut, a slob. As a shy convent girl I didn’t know boys throughout my entire high school years; not until first year university, aged eighteen. Her rage came from a dark, deep place I had no access to. It felt immoral. Still does.

  *

  The sense of responsibility changed. For Elayn, for us. As she aged I was now looking after her. It was draining and exhausting but right. She was in her mid-sixties, it was time for me to step up. Give back. While she was in London and staying with us I was checking bus timetables, cooking for her, opening cans for her, putting on her music. She was to be waited upon. It was like she had completely given up; or decided that her time was due. That she had spent her whole adult life giving and giving, as a wife and mother, and now it was time to get something back. I did it because I knew it to be so.

>   *

  When I visited Sydney with my eldest, baby Ticky, Elayn didn’t want us to stay. She said it would be ‘too stressful’. She didn’t touch him on that first visit. Eventually, over time, she held him, but was always quick to hand him back if he was squally or restless. At the time, this felt not only a rejection of me but my baby, my first child.

  Theories from various people:

  Elayn was just not a baby person.

  She had lived by herself for so long she had locked herself within selfishness.

  She was having difficulty coming to terms with being a grandmother; it aged her; the former model whose dazzling youthfulness had carried her through life.

  She didn’t want any more hurt from me.

  She was afraid. ‘It’s been thirty-five years since I’ve done this,’ she had said to an old friend, the mother of A, my best friend, as they were changing Ticky’s nappy together.

  She had no idea how I’d cope with being a mother and thought perhaps I wouldn’t; that I’d lean on her too much for support.

  My theory: all of the above. And that she was afraid of being shown up.

  *

  Elayn would have been a fabulous, childless, career woman. She had always been a sexy woman because she looked like she revelled in life; looked like a woman who loved laughing in bed. There was a succession of boyfriends during my teenage years. Sunday outings on the harbour in their boats, trips to bush weekenders. I always felt I failed her; the studious, shy teen with the greasy hair and spots, blushing with my awkwardness. The teen with the glamorous mother who’d swim with her boyfriend in the bush in just her underpants, who’d honk the car horn at the black sailors when the American warships were in town. Who was so exasperated when I put on my first pair of reading glasses; that I’d slithered into this strange, nerdy world; that I’d become so other.