grief – Page 2 – Sixth in Line

‘Forgive yourself for not knowing what you did not know until you learned it,’ Maya Angelou.

‘You’re too needy,’ he said at the door as he ushered us away. Too much of an encumbrance at a time when he was drowning in his own needs.

His sorrow. His wife had just delivered a still born child and their future as they envisaged it was all but wiped out.

The memories stick. The pain of their pain transferred to us at the door when this grieving woman took one look at us – I was pregnant with my first child – and screamed to send us away.

My friend’s explanation at the door, we were too needy. Too much in search of comfort, or so he implied. No resolution was ever reached.

Even as the years rolled on and we women each gave birth to healthy babies in the years to come, the pain of loss and rejection remain.

If I knew then what I know now, I might have stayed away, even as I recognised that people in grief need others to be around to whom they can tell their story. But it depends on those others and their timing.

On that day we were an added burden, persecution.

The hurt sticks like a layer of burned black on the bottom of a fry pan. It refuses to budge even after soaking for days and scrubbing with all my might. Next time I use this fry pan the eggs will not slide out easily even when well-greased because the rough bits refuse to act like Teflon on whatever comes next.

Whatever comes next.

There are other moments of cringe. Risks taken in the name of love, or of hatred, but mainly of love.

The phone call to this same friend’s house, well before his still born baby, late one evening in the hope he might answer, and I would declare my love for him. She answered and the moment passed.

Five decades ago. Forgive yourself Maya Angelou says, while another part of me sighs with relief. How would it be had he answered my call?

What mortification might follow? Shades of the character in Second Hand Rose who stayed with a so-called happily married couple when she was orphaned as a young woman of some sixteen or eighteen years.

One night she threw herself at the man of the couple. A kindly man. A thoughtful man. A sensible man. He gently prised her arms loose, or so the story goes in my memory, and tells her their relationship cannot be. The relationship she seeks will not happen and it does not. Then Rose goes off in search of love and falls pregnant, and this same man, along with his wife, arranges an abortion.

My memories of the film fade here. The only memory that stays: the rejection of her heartfelt overtures, a young woman in search of love, imagining here was a man who would reciprocate, only he did not.

Reciprocate my love, we cry. Like babies at birth look to their care givers for the stuff of care and love, and although we cannot ascribe thoughts to new born babies – they lack the capacity – we sense in their gestures, in their nuzzling to the nipple to be fed, their cries to be held, an expectation of welcome, of care and ultimately of a love so deep they will survive the torments of infancy when they are prisoners to the whims of a body they did not know existed while floating in the amniotic sac of their mother’s wombs. Where everything was taken care of. And the only thing to rock their nirvana were the surges of anxiety or grief that might cross the umbilical cord and into their bloodstream, unprocessed.

But all this is conjecture. How can we know this other than to sense it? And we sense it through the lens of our own adult and idiosyncratic lives.

Once I was a sixteen-year-old girl shipped off to boarding school so my parents could sort themselves out. Somehow my older brothers believed my mother could stop our father from drinking, and he could unbend her excess religiosity or zeal for goodness – neither happened – and I sang in the bath.

I sang on the top of my lungs like an opera singer. I sang in the middle of the day, when the other boarders were seated in the study working on their homework. I sang in the bath during my allotted thirty minutes bath time at four pm on a Wednesday.

Boarders shared a roster whereby two days each week we could enjoy a bath for a strictly limited period. It seemed alien this taking of a bath in the middle of the day after which I slipped back into my worn day clothes, too early for pyjamas, too late for a fresh dress, not that I had one.

The bathroom was one of several in a corridor attached to the nun’s quarters which were off limits and away from the boarder’s study, separated by a thin strip of garden where the nuns had planted ferns. Lush tropical ferns that did well despite the cold winter climates of Melbourne, closed into this space as if it was a hot house. As hot as the steam rising in the cubicle of my bathroom as I sang The Gypsy Rover and added a hymn or two for good measure.

I sang for my favourite nun. To attract her attention, to win her admiration. Even her derision, to be noticed by her. She a replacement lover, for my mother, or for whoever it was who might come to love me in this barren place of boarders and rules, of uniforms and stodgy foods. The endless mashed potatoes and stringy meats of dinner times; the khaki stodge of soups not quite heated through; endless plates of stale bread we ate with butter and jam; endless cups of tea and a daily mug of cocoa. How I disliked this food, but it was food and comfort in that place of loneliness far from the familiarity of home.

Here I was in the bath. Shamelessly singing. And the worst of it now in my memory, if they heard me at all, no one ever spoke to me about the volume. No one told me to turn it down. No one, including my beloved nun, told me I was out of line.

Angelou’s words resonate now as I seek forgiveness for my younger self, even as some part of me cringes at the brazenness of it all.

The folly to think that anyone, even a cloistered nun who was herself imprisoned in this place and life, might rejoice in the melodies that came from my tongue and throat. Might imagine mine was music to make a heart soar.

Unreciprocated love, Mrs Milanova once told me, is the most painful of all. To this day I wonder the purpose of those words.

To acknowledge the pain without reciprocating, but how could she, given she did not feel it? To pretend so would have been worse than any disappointment. For how else do we grow?

‘I measure every grief I meet’ Emily Dickinson

Dark days in the pits of winter. So much of war, and politics and griefs held at a distance to assail us. Assail me. Where to begin, my mother on the front step of the converted chook shed which was her first Australian home, sweeping out the dust of a day. She describes this in a short memoir which Elly Zierke included in an A-four-sized yellow book, Old Ties, New Beginnings: Dutch Women in Australia.

Somehow I lost my copy of this book and had to visit Abe books and spend big money to buy a copy back. I have it now. My mother’s story along with nineteen other Dutch women who migrated to Australia during the mid 1900s for a new life in Australia.

The standout feature of my mother’s story, sanitised to within an inch of its life, happens when she describes her sadness on seeing Father Ashe travel along the dusty streets of Greensborough on his way to give the elderly Hickling grandmother, a neighbour nearby, Holy Communion.

The good priest did not see my mother wave to him. He did not visit her, and in her writing here and elsewhere, she talks of how lonely she felt, how far away from her loved ones. How much she, who once held a significant place in her community on the Marnixplein in Haarlem, nestled in her Hooij family home, was a someone. Until she travelled to Australia and became a non-entity to all around her.

A mother with several babies. We her babies, bit players in her life, as children so often feature in the lives of their parents. While parents typically loom large in the lives of their children. Though not for my mother. She never wrote more than one or two lines about her parents. She talked often about her beloved father, but her mother remains a mystery.

Grief stalks us silently. The stab of sorrow through my mother’s heart, her longing for a place she once called her home, as she gazed across the yellow sands of the beach at Mentone to the far away horizon and her idea of home. Her home in Holland, the way it was before she left.

My mother when she was someone. A woman reading and enjoying her cigarette.

When I was seventeen years old, I travelled with my younger sister to Canberra. We drove with an older sibling – must have driven, for how else could get there? A bus perhaps. Surely not a plane. I took my first plane trip in my twenties when I went to Sydney for another brother’s wedding.

Surely we went by car, as we always went by car to Canberra. The long flat bitumen up the Hume. The endless paddocks, cows, sheep and horses, the sorrow of those barbed wire fences, the yellow/green tufts of grass, the rusted sheds along the way, the sad houses tucked behind scrabbly gum. The disappointment of the Australian bush until we reached the perfect man-made dimensions of the state capital Canberra and moved into my brother’s rented house at the foot of Mount Ainslie for a week during the school holidays. This brother who had once been in the seminary but changed his mind. No longer intending to become a priest. He chose marriage instead to a dark-haired beauty with the equally beautiful name of Sybilla.

How I admired her. Her pale skin, her warm smile. The beauty spot to one side of her lush mouth. High cheek bones that spoke to her European ancestors. And a mother who was big and warm and generous. She fed us cakes and egg filled sandwiches till I was fit to burst. This at that torturous age of seventeen when my body was filling out and I was getting tall. Taller than my mother and older sister. So tall, I feared my height might never stop and with it my width. I feared becoming a freak, an invisible freak to all, only illuminated through my vast size.

We drove home from Sybilla’s mother’s house that night, my brother at the wheel, my younger sister and I in the back of his car. I looked out the window onto the sparkling lights of the city. I have never been filled with such longing. Even now I cannot name the sensation beyond that word. A sense that maybe I carried some of my mother’s grief inside. Something of her sense of being a non-entity because it struck me at that moment, even as I knew I belonged within my family, sixth in line and held a place somewhere in my mother’s heart, I did not feel I was loved. As corny as that sounds to me now. As pathetic in its resonance as anything I can imagine, the pain of that moment spread like the drops of rain on the window, like tear filled eyes that blurred the street scape into a grey and black mess punctuated only by the flickering of lights above the street line.

It is my first measurable grief, attached to no one and nothing. A void of emotion, a well of pain and I cannot attach it to any specific event such that it holds meaning beyond the image of a young girl in adolescence struggling to fit into her body and mind as she stretched into new dimensions of experience.

Isn’t that the thing of adolescence, a roller coaster time where every experience is laced with ennui or inflamed rage, sensitivity to every slight, an intense dislike for anything that breeches the high-minded standards of the day and an intolerance for bigotry of any kind.

I feel this way now in the furore over plagiarism. I cannot join the throng of people decrying John Hughes for what he has done. Misguided as he might have been in not telling his readers ahead of time that he was working in the words of other writers before him.

If only he had done this, and he would be spared the torture of the moment through which he lives. I cannot join the shrill chorus of accusers who lambast him for his heinous ways.

I have always reserved an edge of something for the wrong doer, except for people like Donald Trump, who to my mind exceeds all excess in his arrogance.

John Hughes fucked up. Forgive him. Do not write off his every word because he has piggy-backed on the shoulders of those who came before him, as we all do. Only most of us manage to acknowledge most of our sources. And I say most, because I have no doubt I have used another’s words in my own writing and neglected to add their name again because words are like this. They slide into our minds as if our own. Even now Zadie Smith’s words for her character Samad run around in my mind.

‘Can’t say fairer than that,’ he says often enough, as does his beloved companion Archie.

‘Can’t say fairer than that.’ As means of exonerating themselves from wrongdoing. A means of entering a state of acquiescence to a life filled with complex contradictions.

My mother had sayings of the same kind. ‘And that was that!’, she ended her stories. An intake of breath, Ah Hah. Not quite as bad as the expression, ‘It’s God’s will’, but close enough. A type of resignation to fate. A way of bypassing the intensity of the pain of every grief people meet throughout their lives.

‘Can’t say fairer than that.’