We hoped that his talking would continue normally, as Dr. Chez had suggested it might. But we soon realised his language had major deficits. He would need years of speech therapy and floortime, but he made a lot of progress with Stephanie and we decided not to start him on an ABA program. He was, and still is, a curious, sweet-natured child. He never developed the rages that Lily had gone through. He seemed very engaged with people he liked, and was learning new things every day. Floortime was a gentler approach and seemed the right therapy for Jack.
It was right for me too. I was falling apart and needed support—I just didn’t know it yet.
Lily, now eleven, was still doing her ABA therapy part-time, and going to Village Glen, but her violent rages and mood swings were getting worse. PJ begged me to look into places where she could live away from our home. How could we help Jack, he argued, when he has to live with a violent, out-of-control sister? We went to consult a psychiatrist, Dr Meland, about the possibility of putting her into a group home for disabled children. PJ thought it was the best solution, now that Jack needed extra attention and I was approaching burnout. Spike was also developing his own extreme anxieties. It could not have been easy living with two severely disabled siblings and two stressed-out parents. But I could not face the prospect of relinquishing Lily to strangers. I could feel my own glacier crumbling inside me.
‘I can’t bear to think of Lily living with strangers,’ I sobbed to Dr Meland. ‘I keep imagining strangers doing terrible things to her.’
Dr Meland looked at me. ‘I visit a lot of group homes, and they are friendly places, not what you are imagining,’ he said. ‘But before you think about putting Lily into a home, there is something else to consider.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Medication,’ he said.
I had always hated the thought of medicating Lily. It seemed like giving up. But maybe it could ease her emotional struggles.
‘Many young people with autism do very well with an anti-psychotic, like Risperdal. It will reduce her mood swings. The violence will decrease, and you can keep her at home.’
We took his advice and the change was extraordinary. Lily’s mood swings ceased and the violence disappeared. She was no longer in a rage or engulfed by panic. She was able to interact with her family.
If Lily was calmer and happier, I was a wreck. I felt constantly on the verge of tears. If friends expressed concern I would scoff. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I don’t need support. My child is the one who needs support.’
I was having terrible, gut-wrenching dreams that sent shudders through my body when I recalled them. In one dream, I remembered that I had killed someone, but not told anyone. The victim had not deserved to die. I was repressing a strong urge to confess, continuing to live with the hideous knowledge of my own evil and the dread of being discovered. In another dream, a child of mine had been stolen, or I had somehow lost the child by being an irresponsible mother. I had forgotten this child and gone on with my life, then in the dream I suddenly remembered and was engulfed by my heartbreaking loss.
One day, in November 2005, I woke up and the dream was still with me. I just knew it was all true. It wasn’t a dream. It was a repressed memory. I was convinced I had killed someone and had forgotten it until now. I was so certain of this truth, I lay in bed, paralysed, horrified to my core. I began weeping. PJ was sipping his morning coffee next to me, reading something on his computer.
‘PJ, tell me the truth,’ I whispered. ‘Did I do something really terrible, and you just can’t tell me?’
He was alarmed. When I told him that I was a murderer, and that he and other loved ones were keeping the truth from me to spare me the pain of knowing my own terrible sin, he gently advised me it was time to see a doctor.
I told Dr Meland about my dreams: I sat on his couch, sobbing. ‘I keep imagining what is going to happen to Lily and Jack after I am dead. What if people abuse them?’
Dr Meland asked me if I had been thinking a lot about death.
‘Yes. It’s hard not to. I have to make sure my children are okay after I am no longer here, no longer able to protect them.’
Dr Meland asked me if I ever thought about suicide.
I had recently read about the mother of an autistic boy: she had held his hand while they both jumped off a bridge. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. I had begun to think how easy it would be to walk onto the balcony outside my upstairs bedroom, to sit on the railing and let myself fall backwards. But I hadn’t seriously considered doing it.
‘But you have thoughts involving the concept of suicide?’ asked Dr Meland.
‘Well, I empathise with people who might choose suicide,’ I replied, ‘if the pain is too unbearable.’
‘That’s called suicidal ideation,’ he said. ‘Mothers of children with special needs, those mothers need help too,’ he said. ‘You know what they say on airplanes? In case of emergency, put your oxygen mask on first, then help your child.’
He told me it was time for me to put my oxygen mask on. He explained that my guilt dreams were a symptom of clinical depression. A key symptom, besides sadness, exhaustion and a loss of joy, is an inappropriate feeling of guilt. He explained that I had been through such prolonged stress and fear that my brain was in a state of permanent panic and grief. The double trauma of Eucalyptus collapsing and Jack’s autism diagnosis had tipped me into depression. I felt I had failed everyone.
Dr Meland persuaded me to try an anti-depressant for a month. After two weeks, the pain was gone. I didn’t feel super happy, or very different. I just felt like I was me again, without the cloud of doom sitting on my head. I could think clearly again, make rational decisions. Hope had returned.
I began to feel empowered again. Of course I could still help my kids! I read about ‘video modelling’, where therapists or teachers film themselves doing something simple, so that the child can watch the video and memorise the actions. I made videos for Lily and Jack, in which Spike and his friends performed, playing with Jack’s or Lily’s toys. Spike made silly faces and did funny voices (the ‘Big Affect’ recommended in floortime therapy). I showed the videos to Lily and Jack. Before long, Jack was imitating the play scenarios. Lily just enjoyed watching the videos and laughing. Spike was always her favourite person.
We added some ABA therapy to Jack’s program, to kick-start his self-help skills. Shaun Cochrane became his team leader, and was joined by Kirsten Agosto and Robin Ganeles, who became Jack’s new therapists and best friends.
I used to take a video camera along whenever we went on an outing to the zoo, or Lily’s favourite cafe, or the park. I focused on the things Jack and Lily found interesting, then added music and simple narration. Jack and Lily were learning more words, because they loved seeing themselves, and their favourite places, on the TV screen at home. I also made paper dolls and pasted on faces of familiar people. Then Lily and I would act out simple stories in front of the camera. Lily Doll and Rhonda Doll went on a rollercoaster. I screamed hammily for Lily and she giggled. Lily still loves to look at these crazy videos. It was a camera that helped me find a new way to connect with my children.
When I was forty-five, my periods stopped. I thought it was the start of menopause. Dr Crane did some tests, then laughed. As soon as he told me I was pregnant, the spectre of autism loomed in my mind, but so did the promise of another child to love. It felt right, as if this baby was meant to be. After the initial shock wore off, PJ and I were overjoyed. The prenatal tests revealed that all was fine and that we were having another daughter. The news that the baby was female was a relief, because girls develop autism at a lower rate than boys do. It didn’t matter, though. We had accepted autism as part of our lives.
Kathy and Geoff flew over to be with us for the birth. Our new baby, however, decided to surprise us, arriving while Kathy and Geoff were still in the air. Maddy was born by C-section on 27 August 2006. PJ stayed with me all night, holding newborn Maddy (whom we quickly nicknamed
‘Madelicious’) and helping to change her between feeds. By now he was an expert at burping babies and rocking them to sleep.
Maddy developed normally. Even as a tiny baby, she was extremely interactive and responsive, constantly seeking eye contact, goofing around with us. We greeted each milestone with joy, but beneath our happiness was the fear that Maddy’s neurotypical development would get snatched away from us overnight, as it had with Jack and Lily. We knew too much. But when, by age two, she began to use her few words in a communicative way, we realised she was going to be okay. By two and a half she was verbally precocious, just like Spike had been. She was using big words and making jokes. She was imitating us and playing imaginary games with her dolls. She began to skip. Without a team of therapists to show her how! I was astonished.
As Maddy grew older, she started wanting to dress up. She asked for a tutu and told me she wanted to join a dance class. Years earlier I had looked at little girls in their princess costumes and imagined their mothers had brainwashed them. Now I realised I had just been envious, wanting Lily to be a ‘normal’ girl.
Maddy included Jack in all her toddler games and wouldn’t take no for an answer. She followed him around constantly and went everywhere with him in a double stroller. He adored her from the moment he laid eyes on her. In a photo of them lying on our bed, Jack is holding newborn Maddy’s tiny hand and the look in his eyes as he gazes at her is pure love. I think Jack’s development was helped enormously by having a very interactive and irresistible little sister.
Both our autistic kids have benefited hugely from having siblings. There is a deep bond between them all, an unspoken camaraderie, a sense of belonging to each other. As Maddy got older, she would sit in on Jack’s therapy sessions, fascinated. After a while she insisted on ‘helping’. Soon she started doing her own ‘therapy’ with Jack. She was only playing, but he listened to her, watched her. Eventually, he started imitating her. If she was playing with her doll’s house, he would play there too. Soon her dolls were joined by elephants and zebras. Maddy used to stage ‘events’ with her dolls. It might be a swimming party, or a ball. She created scenes and provided the dialogue. Soon enough, Jack began creating his own scenes with his toy animals and dinosaurs. They were more rigid than Maddy’s arrangements. He did them in secret, in the backyard. He placed all his toy animals in order of height, or according to their geographical region (all the African animals together, or all the sea creatures together). The animals were always looking the same way, as if travelling in a mass migration. We would find them by accident in the garden, and then begin searching for the ‘tableaus’, as we called them.
Jack also decided the bathroom was his art studio. One night he used up all of PJ’s shaving cream to create a snowscape. He positioned his arctic animals—penguins, walruses and seals—around the bathtub and sink. It was an amazing sight, like a diorama you might find in a museum of natural history. It was also a huge mess. We were torn between wanting to nurture the artist, and maintaining a clean bathroom. The artist usually won.
24
A woman confronting men is a proper subject, it is inexhaustible.
CLAUDE CHABROL
In 2007, the producer Jerry Bruckheimer sent PJ Confessions of a Shopaholic. Based on the novels of Sophie Kinsella, it was a comedy about a wildly irresponsible shopping addict, Rebecca Bloomwood, and her best friend, Suze. PJ agreed to direct and it didn’t take long to decide on Isla Fisher for the main role. Isla is a petite, pretty powerhouse of comic brilliance. Shortly afterwards, she found out she was pregnant with her second child. The movie was delayed to give her enough time to have her baby and recover. By the time PJ moved to New York to shoot the film, it was early 2008. I decided to remain in Los Angeles, for the sake of the children, and to make a few week-long visits to New York with Maddy during pre-production and the shoot.
Around the same time, Emma Cooper contacted me again to see if I was interested in working with her on The Dressmaker. I told her that I still hadn’t read the novel and that I was too involved in my children’s therapy to be able to go back to filmmaking just yet. A year later, I ran into her at the opening night party for Confessions of a Shopaholic. Emma told me that the rights to The Dressmaker were now with another producer, Sue Maslin, who would probably contact me.
Sue had never forgotten Proof. She got in touch, determined that I should direct The Dressmaker. My response to her was the same as what I had told Emma. She suggested I at least think about writing an adaptation. I agreed to consider it, but didn’t make any promises. When Sue called back a couple of months later, I told her I had decided not to write the script. But her call did prompt me to read the book, finally. I fell in love with Tilly, Molly, Sergeant Farrat and Teddy McSwiney. Rosalie Ham had created characters who crawled under my skin and lodged themselves in my heart. I told Sue I loved the book, and was interested in directing an adaptation of it, but suggested she get someone else to write it. Sue thought about this for a while, but decided she wanted me to both write and direct this movie. She was very persistent and very patient.
The Dressmaker is the story of Tilly Dunnage, a beautiful and stylish woman in her mid-thirties, who returns to her dusty home town after living in Europe for twenty-five years. With her sewing machine, she wreaks revenge on the townspeople who persecuted her when she was a child. My mind was filled with images of the stark outback landscape, the Russell Drysdale earth tones of the town of Dungatar and its locals, in contrast to the gorgeous 1950s haute couture fashions. A print of Drysdale’s painting ‘Sofala’ had hung on our lounge-room wall when I was a child. Mum collected pictures of Sofala, a small town outside Bathurst, NSW, because it was where her mother, Mid, had been born.
When I told Mum I was thinking about going back to filmmaking, she borrowed a copy of The Dressmaker from her local library. She read it and told me I had to do the film. She was always sad for me that I’d had to put my career on hold. I told Sue I would, after all, write the script, but it would take a while.
‘I’ll wait,’ replied Sue.
I asked PJ to read the novel, as he would be my script editor to begin with, as he always is. PJ agreed it had great potential to be an entertaining movie. When we started talking about how to adapt it, we realised that we could not keep all the characters and events in the novel. We ended up combining some of the characters and eliminating others: Miss Dimm, the school teacher, was combined with Beulah Harridene, the town gossip. Muriel Pratt and Purl the barmaid become one character. Nancy’s brother and his dog were sadly cut, but we gave Teddy’s brother, Barney, a much bigger character arc. We also made him older than Teddy, so he could remember what happened the day Stewart Pettyman died.
Finally, we decided to give the story a slightly different twist. In the novel, Tilly already knew she didn’t kill Stewart, and the revelation that Evan Pettyman is her father isn’t really a big moment. PJ and I decided to keep the audience wondering. Is Tilly a murderer? Is she using her dressmaking skills as a way of eliciting information from people? And we shortened the timeline from around two years to three months. I was, however, determined to stay faithful to the essence of the book. Even though we changed a lot of the narrative elements, I wanted it to feel like the same story.
But finishing the screenplay had to wait for other things. In 2010, we returned to Australia. We missed home, and I wanted to be closer to my parents and siblings, especially since Greg, at the age of fifty, had become a father for the first time, to Freya, who was now three. Mum had also been calling me, worried about Dad. She thought he might have the beginnings of dementia. And he had been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and needed to have a pacemaker inserted. Mum sounded anxious and sad.
PJ and I bought a weatherboard cottage in Hunters Hill. It was the first home we had ever owned, and it even had a heated pool, so Lily could swim year-round. The autism school Giant Steps was just down the road in Gladesville. I was still eight hundred kilometres away from Mum and Dad, but it was
only a ninety-minute flight to Melbourne, then another ninety-minute drive to their home in Warragul. PJ refused to live in Melbourne because of the weather. But I was now closer to my parents than I had been for the previous fifteen years.
PJ has two siblings with mental illness and wanted to make a loosely autobiographical film, Mental, set on the Gold Coast, also the setting for Muriel’s Wedding. PJ’s sister had also told him: ‘You should put me in a movie. I want people to know what it’s like.’ His screenplay was about a dysfunctional but loving family whose members are not ‘normal’. While we were shooting Muriel’s Wedding, PJ and I used to entertain Toni Collette with stories about an odd, bohemian babysitter who looked after twelve-year-old PJ’s family for about a year when his mother had a mental breakdown. Toni had said to us: ‘You’ve got to make a film about this woman, and if you do, I’m playing her.’ Shaz, the babysitter, changes the lives of everyone in the Moochmore family. The other actors included Rebecca Gibney, Deborah Mailman, Anthony La Paglia and Kerry Fox. We shot the film in PJ’s childhood home in Banora Point, near Tweed Heads. The shoot went well, but there was not enough money to achieve everything PJ wanted. Along with the other producers, we donated our fees to the budget in order to finish the film. We came to regret that decision.
After the shoot, I went to stay for a week with Mum and Dad. Dad was now eighty-six. Mum, at eighty, was finally beginning to slow down. She had lost a lot of weight; when I hugged her she felt more like a sparrow than the cuddly bear I had known my whole life. She had chronic pain from osteoarthritis in her shoulder and spine. Every day, she sat in a chair and hooked herself up to a traction machine hanging from the bathroom door, designed to stretch her neck. It looked like torture but she said it gave her some relief from the pain.
Unconditional Love Page 21