When I was twenty-two years old, one of my eldest brothers took me to the CBA bank in Prahran where he approached the manager on my behalf so that I might take out my first ever loan.
My brother was then a successful businessman selling carpet and he knew all there was to know about money. Including the fact the bank needed someone to act as guarantor.
Why not? I was only borrowing $2000.00, which in those days seemed like a million.
I needed this money to buy my first car. Not that I had a licence to drive yet. I was still in the agonising throes of learning.
I say agonising because I could not muster the confidence and coordination skills necessary to get my instructor’s car out of stationary and move through the four gears to allow for smooth sailing through the streets.
Worst of all I had trouble stopping. Brakes preferred to be approached through the gears. An abrupt stop wore out your engine.
I had no idea about cars and even once I had my licence in hand, which took me over two years at a time when it was far easier to square it with the licensing authority.
I failed my licence three times. The first for failing to stop as we exited the depot. A man was pushing a wheelbarrow across our path. My instructor slammed on the brakes for me. Instant failure.
The second and third times, I could not master parallel parking. On that third time though the instructor took pity on me and granted me my ticket even after I performed an abysmal effort at reverse parking.
For several months with licence in hand, I was still too afraid to drive my car and instead loaned it to a boyfriend who’d crashed his own, until this boyfriend and I broke up.
He was not the most psychologically minded of men and seemed unable to express a single emotion except irritation when I insisted he return my car.
I had no excuse then not to drive, but drive I did with great hesitation, until one day I ran into a Cocoa Cola truck going under a bridge in Caulfield.
No damage to the truck but I lost my front headlight and for a time could not drive my car after dark.
Until another boyfriend, this time an electrician who was handy with cars, managed to putty in place a second-hand light. Although it had a pink putty bruise that was never properly panel beaten, the light worked again.
This same boyfriend alerted me to the fact that cars needed to be serviced. Their oil changed periodically and various other bits and bobs checked.
I had no idea.
And again, this boyfriend rescued me by servicing the car himself but once we, too, broke up and my car puttered along for several months, I figured with no boyfriend in tow, I needed to do the responsible thing and book my car in for a service.
The mechanic at Brandon Park shopping centre, where they also offered petrol to patrons, took my car under his wing and for a sum of money, which shocked me at the time as I measured everything by the value of my car, was able to service my car and get it ready to go on a few years longer.
It was a white VW Volkswagen. Now bruised after my accident. Over time I came to love its lawn mower chug.
When I met the man whom I would marry, after our first dinner at a mutual friend’s house, when he urged me to follow him to his home, all the way from Glen Waverly to Camberwell where he lived, I followed in second gear.
I thought he, in his flash blue Renault hatch back, might not have the courage to go faster. Instead, he told me later he went slow because he feared my losing track of him.
I was the one going slow.
We did not go slow after this. Moved in with one another instantly and the rest, as they say, is history.
My ignorance of car servicing sets me thinking about my then ignorance of the human body. And earlier when I was a child and did not know the names of body parts, the salacious bits that caused a stir in my veins.
Words like penis and vagina were never used in our household and the notion that women and girls had this bit called a clitoris shocked me when I first heard of its existence in adulthood.
Why were such words forbidden?
Obvious in many ways within the repressed Catholic household of my child. My mother’s sexual anxiety against my father’s tendency to sexualise almost everything and most especially his daughters.
Maybe it was a way of protecting us from danger. As if not to say such words would make them less potent. When we know now it’s best to teach children accurate terminology for gender parts in order not to euphemise their bodies.
This is also a helpful way of teaching then about the sanctity of their bodies and the ways in which they might protect themselves from others who might seek to use their bodies for their own sexual pleasure against the needs of the children.
Rather like having knowledge of the need to service your car regularly, small people need to learn the names of their body parts so they can enlist grown-ups in their support if something goes wrong rather than hide behind cute euphemisms that leave them confused as to whether they’re being abused or not.
Which puts me in mind of the business of parenting. A different type of servicing required. The servicing entailed in the changing of nappies, the feeding and holding, the cleaning up.
But alongside this practical service, babies and small children need parents who are interested in them. Curious about their little ones.
The problem with obfuscating meaning by offering cute words for body parts, it can undermine curiosity. And without curiosity we cannot learn how to get on better in the world. How to understand ourselves better and how to understand others.
