My heart was in the right place

When I was young in my early twenties and first began to work in my then chosen career as a social worker, I resented my youthful appearance. I wanted to look older so that people might take me seriously.

‘I would never go to see someone as young as you,’ my mother said repeatedly. She was then not far from the age I am now, and I can understand her point of view better now than I did then.

Then I thought that my youth should not matter at all. Straight out of university and full of good ideas about what might be helpful for other people, I was determined to make my mark on the world.

From where I stand now, I can look back on this young woman and snigger, but I refuse to do so. My heart was in the right place. It still is for the most part, at least I like to think it is, but I have grown wiser, as most of us do with age, and now I know there’s more to a person than their age, despite an almost universal tendency to judge ourselves on the basis of age, among other obvious things, like beauty, race and gender.

Whenever I meet a person I size them up for age almost instantly. I size them up for age almost as soon as I size them up for aspects, such as kindness or cruelty. Is it the look in the eyes, that comes first perhaps, the curve of the mouth, the set of the jaw, subtle hints of how that person might be feeling towards me, and no accounting for how I might be feeling towards them?

I’m often less clear of the vibes I send out. I tend to think they are invisible and that only I know about my internal world, but I know I am wrong in this. At least to some extent.

We all give off vibes to one anther and they travel in both directions. ‘Projections’ is the technical term and of course it all goes back to Freud and his followers, as most of these terms do, though people often want to discount Freud’s work these days.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a strict Freudian, and there are many things Freud said that have long troubled me, like the suppression of the seduction theory, and his patronising attitudes towards women. But he was a man of his times, Sigmund Freud, and we must not judge the past by present standards, though I often wonder, how else are we to judge them?

My mother: an anemone buried in the sand.

St Columbs church near the corner of Launder Street and Burwood Road looks like something from a BBC period drama. Dark grey flat rendered walls with an elaborate edging. A protestant church to be sure. It sits in the shade of Swinburne university, a lego block set of buildings put together as if by a three year old.

Is that why I felt uneasy going inside? I had been there once before many years earlier in my twenties for the funeral of the mother of a friend. I felt then as though I was sitting inside what I imagined to be a Quaker church, bare benches, no kneelers, stark white walls faded with age and minimal mosaic work on the high barred windows. The shape of a church but none of the trimmings of the Catholic churches of my youth.

It held nothing of the sanctity of a church to my mind, and seemed better suited as a meeting place.

I had decided to go alone. I had decided to arrive unannounced. I had decided to make myself enter this church where I would know no one.

I could be anonymous I thought then and see myself through the eyes of others: a middle aged woman, slight build, average height, broad Australian accent, educated perhaps, diffident perhaps, but someone without a visible past, without a history, someone whom people might puzzle about.

I knew that I too would be faced with the mystery of these people.

The woman who sat to my right did not turn to introduce herself to me as I had imagined she might. I had imagined from my childhood memories that people might greet one another like this, like the handshake or kiss of peace in Catholic churches, but then I remembered the anonymous bit.

Privacy is important. We were there on business. We were there to deal with the alcoholism of a parent, a friend or a relative. We were there to develop detachment.

‘Detachment’, that accursed word, my mother’s favourite and with it she once learned to leave the rest of us out of the equation.

She had needed to do so for her sanity. She had needed to remove herself from the life she then lead, to put herself, if only in her mind and imagination, into some other safe place, some place where my father could not reach her, some safe place where my father could not hurt or impact on her in way way. And in so doing she excluded the rest of us, her children.

My mother had needed to develop detachment in order to become more like her husband. Just like him, she could cut off her pain, he with alcohol, she with detachment, a cut off manner, an inward seeking, like an anemone buried in the sand.

You could not know the anemone was there until it raised its tendrils. Just the slightest touch to those tendrils and the anemone disappeared again. My mother’s eyes glazed over, like a shut down anemone.

As I looked around at the women in this strange protestant church I could see my mother’s eyes in them.

No wonder the woman who sat beside me, clutching her black handbag on her lap, tugging at the skirt she wore to better cover her knees, no wonder this woman did not turn to introduce herself to me. She had developed detachment, or so I imagined. But then it was possible that this might be her first visit to this place too.

She, like me, might have been a new person in this dank church.

I felt my feet flat on the floor and curled my toes inside my shoes to better connect with myself. The muscle on my right shoulder above my breast plate, the muscle that
I would imagine was my heart were it on the other side of my body, tore its painful way across my chest and, once again I thought, if I can get through this, I shall go to Pilates.