On wholeness

‘Happiness hides in the humdrum.’ Paul Lynch

Or as Hugh McKay argues, let’s not seek happiness so much as wholeness, by which he means a person who can carry all emotions, hold them together, comfortably.  

Moments of joy and transcendence, a rare treat, while everyday contentment lies in the humdrum, and all the sorrows filter through the everyday and extraordinary.

Rushall Crescent floats through my mind. A road winding through Northcote that I often travel between places, between my home in Hawthorn and the spaces occupied by daughters further away in the north.

It’s now a prestigious street though wasn’t always so. Once the home of migrants, particularly Italians, now the home of the rich.

In my community-based placement as a student social worker, I travelled daily by train to Northcote. Two trains and a bus or tram. It wasn’t an easy place to reach and in the late 1960s was under resourced. 

The Northcote City Council asked the University of Melbourne to provide two students who could visit local charities and draw up a booklet of welfare resources within the community.

Ron Tiffen, red haired and tall, married to Karma, and with one small son, a mature age student of sorts and me were given the task.

In those days I lived in Caulfield with my immediately younger sister, her friend from school, Kris Honey whom we called Honey.

The three of us comfortable in a second storey flat perched over Dandenong Road not far from what was then Chisholm Institute of Technology. 

On cold winters and to spare heating bills I sometimes took my frozen body over to the student library and studied there. Or should I say tried to study. In those days me and academic books were not a comfortable partnership.

I read words on pages but could not take many in, not as they were intended. Instead, my mind wandered to things I’d prefer to be doing. Mostly time spent with my then boyfriend who was initially ambivalent – or so it seemed to me – to share a lifetime with me though I had fallen for him hook line and sinker.

It’s painful to slip into love when you’re in your early twenties and follow all the tropes you’ve seen on the television and read in books, only to find they make no difference.

A person cannot be made to love another. They will not be coerced. And Paul was like this though he was willing to bed me down as often as the impulse hit him and to accompany me to student parties or share restaurant meals, especially after he won at the races.

He and I went in the evenings to Ron and Karma’s to play cards, gin rummy and canasta. We played for hours while their small child slept. Ate potato chips and drank. Beer for the men, Pimms and lemonade for us women. 

While by day during the long three month break over Christmas from the university during my third year, Ron and I traipsed to Northcote. The council offered us two chairs and a long desk at the far end of a concert hall. No actual office as such. It felt as though we were excess to requirements but otherwise they were kind. 

As in all matters then, I did not have a clue as to what we were doing but followed Ron’s lead. He was mature age after all, somewhere in his thirties, a decade ahead of me. He seemed to know. Sometimes we visited local agencies together and at other times we went alone. 

To Co As It, the Italian support community, well-resourced given the glut of Italian families in the area, to maternal welfare centres and even to then social welfare departments. 

At one of these I met Duré Dara, who came to fame as apprentice cook to the famed restauranteur, Stephanie Alexander. Duré then she was a social worker in the grip of Primal therapy.

She gave a talk at one time to her department and Ron and I were invited to join. All about the idea that people took time off work, went on some type of sickness benefits, care of the endorsement of a few local and agreeable doctors, then found a room somewhere. 

A dark room whose walls and floors they could pad with cushions, and people sat around. Somehow some inspiration whether from therapists they visited or from within, they were then thrust into the trauma of their birth. Where they could relive the ordeal.

 I read Arthur Janov’s book The Primal Scream and stuffed down my scepticism behind a wave of awe that someone should be so bold as to take time off work at the government’s expense to advance their mental health.

After all Ron and I were tasked to locate all the resources for people in the community of Darebin, Northcote Thornbury, and surrounds, and our focus was on people’s well-being.

Not that anyone talked of well-being in those days. In those days, the focus was welfare. For the sick and needy. Those lesser mortals who fell on hard times.

In my first year at university all the students in the social work department made a trip to the housing commission towers in Flemington, the ones that overlooked the city to the south, racecourse to the north. 

My boyfriend’s grandmother lived in one of the small flats in this monstrous high rise and I wondered that anyone could bear such a life, stuck up there high in clouds, freezing in winter and roasting in summer with lifts from floor to floor that reeked of urine from the night-time drunks who couldn’t wait. More often than not the lifts mal functioned.

In those days, the days of Ron Tiffen, of studying to become the best social worker I could, book talk bothered me, because it was often too academic, though I remember reading Durkheim on anomie and something there resonated.

Along with all the voices from case work.

Only in my final year did we get to experiment with actual counselling and interviewing. In a new laboratory set up on Royal Parade. Where a man from Britain, newly arrived, taught us the gentle art of interviewing. We role played and taped ourselves in action.

The tilt of my head as I listened intently to my fellow student who concocted a role for my benefit. And the place of my hands when my turn came to raise a respectable issue for her to tackle in front of the video camera.

The days when I first considered the impact I might have on other people. My small diminutive me. Not so much on happiness, but hell bent on avoiding pain.

The nourishment of sleep

Somewhere in my dreams last night there was a baby, the tiniest baby I’ve ever seen who was intermittently crying for a feed then sleeping. I went to pick up this baby to reconnect it with the mother.

Its mother reached the baby before I could get my fingers around its frame, which looked as fragile as an insect’s. Premature, I thought, but did not say. 

Elsewhere in my dream a yellow green snake coiled around my fingers and would not release its grip. I was seated at a wedding reception and a woman to one side told me to let the snake slither to the ground after which it would leave. It was not venomous, just determined, she said. Once grounded it slithered away. 

My dreams are great companions. They feed the nourishment of my sleep, but I rarely hold onto them for more than a few minutes over the course of a day. I’m untrained at getting a firmer grip on them as I once managed during my analysis. 

In those days I wrote dreams down, even in the middle of the night when I woke. To explore the next day with my analyst. Like me, Mrs Milanova took dreams seriously. They were like friends, she told me. They helped you understand your states of mind. The way they rollick along from one day to the next. 

The stuff of a human mind fascinates me. And what better subject than me, though I could hardly be called objective. And the blinkers go up the minute my fingers hit the keyboard, even as I reach for authenticity. 

Even so, that pull away from certain subjects is always there: You can’t write that. You can’t say this. You can’t alert people to this or that, or the other secret business buried in the back of your mind. 

It’s as much an enemy of art as Cyril Connolly’s ‘Pram in the hallway’ suggests, the ways in which the presence of children get blamed for taking parents, especially mothers, from their creative lives. 

Sleep for me is also a great distractor. If I did not need my sleep and dreams, I’d get up every day to write at 5.00 am. But I do not have it in me to rise earlier than 6.30 am on weekdays. And on weekends I love my mornings without an alarm. When I can lose myself in the unconsciousness of my dream world unencumbered by responsibility.

The pram in the hallway. The responsibility of motherhood. The life of a therapist. It’s a constant. And as much as I welcome it and seek it out, I sometimes wonder how it might be to live without appointments. 

I have been working ever since I was 17 years old and only once in my life beyond my university days have I been without work. This happened when I was between jobs after returning from six months in Canberra as a 24 year old where I worked part time in two separate jobs.

I remember the sensation. My husband-to-be was still working. His job with the Commonwealth’s Department of Administrative Services, conveying and selling land for the government, took us to Canberra. While I gave up my social work job at a community care centre to follow him. 

Typical. A woman following her man into a job and leaving herself without one. But as soon as we hit Canberra, I began the search. My eldest brother worked in the ACT as a senior public servant in immigration and he put me onto the head social worker at the Woden Valley Hospital. She took me on part time in the rehabilitation unit. 

I did not warm to her authoritarian style or the job, apart from one or two of the other social workers there. Mostly I wanted to go home. For the second half of my Canberra days, I snaffled a job as sole social worker at the Queanbeyan Hospital on the outskirts of the capital city. 

A weird job and place. The buildings were wooden as if built in war time. The place had an impoverished feel. And my office, tucked away in the back corridors, was isolated. 

My predecessor had been there for decades, lived in Queanbeyan, and everyone knew and loved her. The worst was at morning tea when I entered the tearoom and tried small talk with people I did not know. I was shyer then than today. 

Today I’d go out boldly and introduce myself. Today I’d have something to say. Today I’d be unashamed, but as a twenty-four-year-old who lacked confidence in her capacity at anything in a position of seniority – I was meant to run an entire department of one – I floundered.

By the time I crossed through the flat back roads of Canberra to the Woden Valley Hospital after lunch I was ready for rehabilitation and there was plenty to come. I hated the lack of autonomy. The responsibility I had to show up even as I had little idea of what I was meant to do beyond being a social worker who helped people sort out their affairs. It was not where I wanted to be. 

Come Christmas and our return to Melbourne for a week, I railed against my boss at the Woden Valley who would not let me extend my time away for more than two days because, as she put it, ‘It’s your job and responsibility’. 

She had no idea how much my heart ached for home. For the familiarity of the streets of Melbourne. The way the people I knew there conducted themselves. My friends, even my family. We did not stand on ceremony the way folks in Canberra did. In Canberra you needed an invitation to someone’s home before you could visit. You could not simply drop in as we did in Melbourne. 

I was blessed that my husband-to-be did not plug for a continuation of his time in Canberra and instead returned to his more mundane tasks at home. When I was finally free to find my own course in the place where I felt safest.