The Girls

by Chloe Higgins

  There were things I could not say.

  (My editor asks: ‘Was he right, that silly boy? The truth is coming out now.’

  And I think: Yes, and at what cost?)

  15

  As the sun is setting, I walk the hundred metres from my apartment to Wollongong’s South Beach. I am barefoot and watch out for small stones as I cross the road that is empty at this liminal time, the day melting into evening. The Illawarra Brewery is open with a few people drinking beers out front but even that is quiet. It is March 2019. I am thirty-one years old.

  As my feet hit the sand, I take in the groups of people dotted along the two kilometre stretch of beach, some with small children, others with dogs in the off-leash section down the way. A couple of stragglers are still swimming in those huge waves we sometimes get.

  I plug my headphones in, hit play and continue walking. This evening’s podcast is Tim Ferriss interviewing Maria Popova—of Brain Pickings fame—about her writing, workflow and routines. It makes me cringe to think of myself returning to the self-help interests of my late teens and early twenties, and yet here I am, smiling at Popova’s thoughts on workflow software, exercise routines for travel, Stoic philosophers, presence versus productivity. I too take great joy in these things. For a long time, I assumed people’s routines for building a good life were innate, not something they worked at. It is a pleasure to discover otherwise.

  I look up and find myself at the end of the beach; I must have been walking for at least half an hour and it’s now dark. There’s something about an interesting podcast that takes away my awareness of time. My walking pace slows, and in turn, so does my mind. The muscles in my neck and shoulders begin to relax.

  I stare up at the night sky. Three stars stand out brighter than the rest, and the moon is giving off enough light to make out the white crests breaking towards the shore. I have the beach to myself now. I kick around in the shallows, waiting for the podcast to finish, in no hurry to return home.

  Perhaps this is what a good life looks like: slowing down.

  I recently began meditating. It had been coming up for me for a while: in conversations about deep acceptance with a close friend who’s been bed-bound for six years since having a stroke; on Friday mornings when I meet my friends at the beach at 6.30 am to stretch, swim, and talk about mental health; in my online reading about anxiety; in my growing awareness of how quickly time passes and that the only thing to slow it is being still. I have been thinking a lot about reducing new shames in my life, how most of those tend to be related to alcohol, unhealthy sex or cigarettes, and that the antidote to these behaviours seems to be patience, requiring me to sit in my emotions without trying to change them. How the answer to all of these things seems to be stillness. Which is to say, meditation.

  But as I have said before: sitting still is the hardest thing to do.

  I recall a time twelve months earlier when I called my mother, feeling nervous as I waited for her to answer. It’s always an anxious state, those few moments before I first hear the tone of her voice. If it’s pricked and curt as we exchange pleasantries, I know I’m going to feel guilty when we hang up. This is how she speaks to me when she is hurting, or feeling alone, or believes I haven’t made enough of an effort to talk to her. If her tone is chirpy and talkative I know she’s feeling loved and I won’t spend the rest of the day feeling guilty.

  She answered in a relaxed-sounding tone, and I felt great relief.

  And then, a little later into our conversation: ‘Why don’t you call Dad?’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ I replied, unsure where this was leading. ‘How is he?’ I had just returned from another stint overseas but was staying with a lover in regional Victoria for a couple of weeks.

  ‘Why don’t you call him and ask? He keeps asking me where you are, what you’re up to, if you’re back in Australia, and I feel like saying why don’t you call and ask her.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he call me?’

  ‘I don’t know. He says if you want to talk you’ll call him.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll call him.’

  ‘He’s still down.’

  ‘That’s not good.’

  ‘Not a single person called him when it was Lisa’s birthday the other day. He was upset. Thinks everyone has forgotten them.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, trying not to let on that I also forgot it was Lisa’s birthday. This is not a normal thing, with Facebook usually being so flooded with photos and Thinking of you messages that it’s impossible to forget. Normally, I make sure I am working so I don’t have to fill the day myself, and then I go to the cemetery with Mum, Dad and a handful of others at four in the afternoon. This year, the anniversary date arrived and passed without me realising: I had deactivated Facebook for a social media break, was alone on this property with my lover. I was so removed from any reminders that it slipped my mind.

  I waited for the onslaught, for the passive-aggressive comments suggesting that my not calling further aggravated him. But it didn’t come. Instead, she said: ‘I’m getting fed up.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, my shoulders tensing as I waited to feel the guilt come on.

  ‘It was the anniversary of Kerrie Andrews-Sorensen’s father’s death a couple of months ago. And Keryn Dixon’s mother’s on Lisa’s actual birthday. I asked if he called them but he wouldn’t answer me. He won’t talk about it. I tried to tell him that people have lives. It doesn’t mean they have forgotten the girls. They wake up and think, Oh, it would have been Lisa’s birthday today, they don’t always think to call or message Dad. He doesn’t call everyone who has an anniversary. He just refuses to listen.’

  A couple of days later, I called my father. There is rarely guilt and never passive-aggression when we speak. Instead, there is confusion or forgetfulness or quiet sadness. I can tell how my father is doing by the tone of voice in the first word that comes through the line. If he is sad, or busy, he answers with, ‘Yep?’

  If he wants to talk, is feeling good, or both, he answers with a drawn out ‘Hello’.

  It takes a full sentence for me to gauge my mother’s mood, but with Dad, he gives it away with one word. It was a good day. We bantered, and he made jokes about how forgetful he was, probably had Alzheimer’s, he laughed.

  ‘Don’t say that, Dad.’

  He asked about where I was staying and I told him about the veggie garden my lover was building, and how he built the house himself. Dad asked questions, in a cheery, interested voice.

  I waited for the sadness, but it didn’t come. I didn’t mention Lisa’s birthday.

  ‘Did you get me a present from your trip?’ he said.

  ‘Since when do you care about presents?’ My mind flickered to the bags of Turkish delight I’d bought for Dad and Nan, from a small deli not far from where I was staying one morning on my way home from a run. I saw the bags sitting there on the counter and thought it was exactly what both Dad and Nan would like.

  ‘I don’t know. I just wondered if you got me anything.’

  ‘I did, actually.’

  ‘When are you coming back?’

  ‘Next Friday. For the weekend away with our family friends, for Father’s Day.’

  ‘Oh, yes, that’s right. I’d forgotten.’

  Later that week, while in Melbourne for a writers’ festival, I bought Robert Dessaix’s The Pleasures of Leisure for my father. I give him books regularly, but never on birthdays or Christmas or other commercial-con dates. But this is the first time Dad had ever asked about a present and so I thought that perhaps the book and the Turkish delight would help remind him that after all, we do remember.

  What does a good life look like?

  There are unexpected things: my friends in Wollongong.

  There are the things I work hard at: my parents, my physical health.

  There are the things that sound too simple to be t
rue, but make all the difference:

  Writing that feeds my soul.

  Contributing to society with Wollongong Writers Festival.

  A balance of deep connection and ample solitude.

  Freedom to travel for three months of the year.

  Freedom to go to the beach at two in the afternoon.

  Financial sustainability.

  Nature—I need mountains and ocean at all times.

  Which is to say: a good life is good mental health. In the past, I did not realise how much this could be supported by routine, how much constant work mental health takes to maintain.

  These are the things that help:

  Rising at six in the morning to meditate.

  Doing six minutes of French.

  Writing first thing each morning.

  Having my phone on ‘Do not disturb’ until midday.

  The rest of the day is looser: I will exercise; I will try—and frequently fail—to eat meals that are both healthy and humane; I will do a couple of hours of other work, perhaps for the festival, perhaps for a university class I am teaching.

  My weekly writer’s group at the cafe where the river meets the ocean; phone calls with Desney; conversations with Izzy about anxiety and learning to find joy.

  I will try to refrain from too much social media and will often find myself in bed for an hour or two with a film, or TV series, or multiple TED talks. This brings my heart rate down.

  I will read in bed with my legs in a yin stretch to loosen my pelvic joints. According to traditional Chinese medicine, we store our sadness in our hips.

  Afterwards, I sleep by nine or ten at night.

  I do these things partly for joy, partly for health, and partly for sanity. Since I have found them, I am more grounded. I drink less, I feel calmer, I find myself smiling for no reason throughout the day. But equally, when my routines are thrown off—someone who needs to meet before midday, an evening event that I enjoy and so stay past my bedtime—I feel myself tilt off kilter.

  I struggle to hold space for my mother in these bubbles, and this pains me. Slowly, I am talking her into getting relationship counselling with me so we might discover how to support each other without sacrificing our own mental health. We move through the world so differently.

  My mother has never had an office job. It is not until she is sixty that she learns to email, slowly and with trepidation, after I push her into it. During the day, she sends me text messages asking me to do administrative tasks—lodge her tax return, check her super, and so on.

  Send me an email, I text back, not wanting to forget, nor give up my precious morning writing time when her messages arrive.

  She does this, becoming excited when she learns each small task—first, hitting reply, and later, learning to create a new email on her own. My responses or questions to her come with my automated email signature signing off Warm regards, Chloe, and she begins to mimic this beneath her own emails, with her own brand of punctuation and capitalisation:

  wArm regards., Rhonda, she writes, and this makes me laugh. The older I get, the more I enjoy her humour.

  The first time I change my sign offs from I love you to I love ya face or, I love ya toes, I smile in anticipation of her mimicked but slightly varied responses. I imagine it becoming an in-joke, moving from faces and toes to calves and other body parts. She’s good like that.

  I watched a TED talk about loneliness the other day. The woman spoke about ritualised connection being the key. That is, picking an activity you like doing with your friendship group, establishing an agreed day/time/regularity to do it and sticking to it.

  Over the past twelve months, my Friday writers group has grounded me again and again. I knew it was because of the people, but I had a feeling there was something else going on too. Through life’s ups and downs, we return to the same cafe by the water, at the same time of morning and on the same day of the week. When I watched this talk, I realised: ritualisation is key.

  Yesterday afternoon, my mother sent a message to the group chat we share with my father. In it, she writes: omg omg best day ever. Above the text, two pictures: one, a close-up of a single piece of paper. On it, the words: CERTIFICATE OF DISCHARGE FROM BANKRUPTCY. In the second photo my father is holding that same piece of paper in one hand, his newly acquired passport—his first in close to a decade—in the other. His expression is one I recognise well: he is holding back tears. I can tell by the narrowness of his eyes, the way he is looking slightly downwards, the soft pull of his eyebrows into the centre so that the lines on his forehead and around his eyes become more visible than usual. But in this picture, his mouth is different. It is subtle, but it is there. His lips are so thin they are a dash of pencil across a page. But here, finally, their edges are a little upturned. In this way, instead of the lines on his chin being drawn out, it is the lines separating his nasal area from his cheeks that are made more prominent. And I can see: he’s holding back tears of joy, instead of his familiar sadness. It is this—more so than the paper he holds—that moistens my eyes.

  I call him.

  ‘Where will you go first?’ I ask.

  ‘I was thinking I might go with Mum to see Amber in Italy. And then to Switzerland to see Jasmin. And then to Chile to see Ro.’

  My parents have accumulated makeshift children over the decade since they lost two of their own. Each year or two, one will visit from afar and my parents will pick them up—not just crying, but actively sobbing—from the airport, as if they were their own long-lost children returning. They do this also with me, rarely letting me catch the train out of the city to meet them closer to home after landing at Sydney airport.

  I send my mother a text: #SriLankaFamilyTrip. I have been talking about travelling there for some months now and think that perhaps they would like to come too.

  It is a happy time.

  I went to visit a mentor a week or two after his colleague had died in her sleep one night. She’d been healthy before that, no warning signs to prepare. I brought him chocolates and gave him a socially appropriate hug and he cried a little but mostly tried to stem the tears. I wanted to say, but didn’t: ‘Why don’t you lie on the carpet, push your face into the floor, kick and scream and throw a tantrum? Wouldn’t that be easier than pushing the emotions down and hiding the snot and tears in tissues and blue cotton handkerchiefs?’

  ‘It helps,’ I would explain, thinking of my breakdown in the psych ward.

  I am also trying to find my way through grief intellectually. The podcasts, books and conversations. The writing helping me, one piece at a time. Lately, I have been focused on time passing, and trying to sit with my emotions. Once, not long after we’d started seeing each other, a lover said he wasn’t sure if he could continue with me after I told him I’d slept with someone else. I felt like I was at the top of an elevator shaft, in pitch black, and the floor had fallen out from beneath my feet. Several seconds is not a long time, unless those several seconds are spent falling down an empty elevator shaft with nothing to catch your body besides concrete. The anticipation is what hurts the most.

  I am unwilling to risk commitment; am constantly afraid of who I’ll lose next.

  I’ve been trying to develop patience. Trying to teach myself that when I feel bad, it is not a permanent state. I have not yet learned this. I have not figured out how to cope with negative emotions in healthy ways. Whatever healthy means in this context.

  I ask people questions about how they manage their mental health. They tell me:

  ‘Get out of the house and go for a walk.’

  ‘Cultivate hobbies.’

  ‘Find a routine, and repeat it, until you come out of the fog.’ This one in particular strikes me as a sensible strategy: to commit to the knowledge that this too will pass, if you just have the patience to sit with it.

  ‘You need to go through each season of the y
ear without the person who died,’ someone says on a Griefcast episode.

  I send my father an email:

  I found a podcast you might like. A woman in London interviews comedians about their experiences with death. I like to listen while I walk.

  But these responses all take certain things for granted. Walking sounds so simple. But I’ve seen Dad, night after night, on that pink couch my mother made him bring home in a trailer when she saw it sitting outside someone’s house. And I think that maybe getting out for a walk isn’t such a simple thing after all.

  ‘If you can get up and get dressed each morning, you’re doing a good job,’ the lady on the podcast says.

  A comment my therapist made keeps playing in my head:

  ‘Children need to differentiate from their parents.’

  Each time I hurt my mother by not replying to her too-frequent texts, or declining her requests to hang out, I think of this comment and try to console myself.

  Later, after months of throwing this word—differentiation—around in conversations I have with various friends about the complexities of mother-daughter relationships, I finally google it.

  ‘Hey Siri,’ I say into my phone. ‘What is mother-daughter differentiation?’

  Google returns 7,560,000 results in 0.58 seconds.

  So, I think, I am not the only one who struggles with this.

  The first few links are psychology-based websites and organisations, each listing dot-point-style advice mostly around the same ideas. I open a blog by family estrangement counsellor Tina Gilbertson. In it, she writes:

  Usually there’s some physical separation from family that occurs naturally, such as when young people go off to college or to travel when they come of age. It’s psychological and emotional separation, however, that helps with the process of adult identity formation . . . He needs psychological and emotional room to find out who he is, independently of his family. The space young people take often ends up being physical, because that’s the easiest way to set boundaries . . . It may be harder for him to say to his parents, ‘I don’t want to see you every week’ than it is for him to move to Cincinnati.