‘Parents, despite their strongest resolutions, end up sounding like their own when they talk to their children.’ Gwyneth Lewis. Nightshade Mother: A disentangling.

Not the words. The vitriol in tone. The poison.

The other day in the kitchen and grating parmesan cheese for dinner, Gertie, the dog ran underfoot. She loves to lick parmesan flakes from the floor as they fall. 

‘Ga weg,’ I said to her. ‘Go away.’

Then I qualified my tone, ‘Schat,’ which means sweetheart.

Childhood earworms from my Dutch mother tongue.

I often say them. Schiet op. Hurry up.

Vlug. Be quick. 

Doe Niet zo dom. Don’t be so stupid. 

Vies. Dirty, followed by a sound that might not be a word, so much as a grunt of frustration. 

Veis bah. The bah pronounced like a sheep’s low bleat, but angry in tone. 

Of all the Dutch words racing into my mind, there are only two whose tone is endearing:

Schat. Sweetheart, and its diminutive, schatje, alongside heerlijk which means delicious.

Mooi meisje, a pretty girl

Verschrikkelijk, something terrible,

Slechterik. A baddie. My mother points them out on the television screen. 

Terms of derision or anger.

Not surprising when you consider the ease with which our parents admonish us with such words.

Most of these words emerge in my mother’s voice, even as she was the one renowned for her kindness. My father for his cruelty.

For some reason, I imagined all parents balanced out like this. Loving mothers, awful fathers. It seemed to play out in other families from my school, except for in one of my cousins’ families where both parents, my mother’s youngest brother and his Australian born wife, where both seemed kind. And another uncle who married a woman from Indonesia, Dutch born. She seemed ferocious towards her children, in a firm and disciplined way that left me in awe.  

This family lived in Ivanhoe in the most amazing house. It teetered on a hill as if the house grew uphill. The top half was single storey and as the house ran downhill it formed into a second storey with a long veranda that spanned the upstairs section.

The veranda jutted over the sprawling downward slope of the garden while underneath covered a closed over section where the laundry lived. Where all their bikes, tools, and outdoor equipment sheltered. 

This dark place was made even darker with hanging grape vines running across the veranda balustrades and down through a curtain of magnificence, green in summer, red in autumn, and in winter like the gnarled fingers of an old man all the way down. Lace work to peek through when we played outside in cold weather and a curtain of cool at the height of summer. 

Inside the house, separating the kitchen from its living room to one side and dining room and lounge on the other, was a long fish tank. My uncle’s pride and joy. It housed tropical fish of all shapes and colours. Temperature controlled, there was a light shining on this tank day and night. It highlighted the iridescent blues of the angel fish with their black stripes and upper wispy angel wings to either side, and the blue and red of the Cardinal tetras darting back and forth.

I loved to watch the fish whenever a tiny streak of black appeared at their rear end. A fish mid poop. Their poop appeared in long thin strips or full stops of black that fell slowly to the base of the tank and were lost among the grains of sand and pebbles lining the base. 

I could watch those fish for hours. The way they spooled from one end of their watery home to the other. My uncle had installed a miniature mock shipwreck at the base of the tank in one corner. In another, he erected a ramshackle concrete cave into which the fish swam and momentarily disappeared. 

He alone was allowed to feed his fish, weekly as I recall, for fear of overfeeding. If you fed the fish too much, they did not remember they had eaten. Fish did not have brains or memories like us. They were likely to eat and eat and eat if they saw food. And if they kept on eating they would explode. Just like that. A balloon popping. Only fish had insides that would smatter all over the clean glass of the tank. It would not be a pretty sight. 

I feared an over-fed fish as much as I disliked feeling over fed myself, which was rare except when I went to the few children’s parties to which I was invited.

There was one in grade six. Libby Howard’s birthday. She lived in a double storey 1950s cream brick house on Burke Road in Deepdene. To me the house was a palace. All these separate rooms, and downstairs a vast family room, which her parents had cleared of furniture and set up with a long table filled with food. All the traditional fare: party pies and sausage roles, fairy bread and angel wing cup-cakes, loaded with whipped cream and tumbling with bright red strawberry jam that spilled down the sides. Chocolate frogs in clear plastic beakers set, as if in a pond of green jelly, and Cheese Twisties, orange and crunchy, in a bowl alongside the golden yellow of crisp potato chips. And there were lollies. 

I had never seen so many lollies in one place and marvelled the other kids did not fill their pockets with them but took only one or two snakes, or a handful of jelly beans, raspberry creams or smarties, while I longed to scoop handfuls into the deep pockets of my party dress for later.

I was lucky with this dress. One week earlier, Mother Mary John had told me during lunch time she had a parcel for me to take home at the end of the day. She gave me the brown paper wrapped object, squishy to touch, and told me to stash it in my bag. I was not to open it or examine its contents. Or show it to anyone. It was a secret and it was for my mother.  

I did as I was told. But the parcel was not for my mother. The two party dresses inside would never fit her. One was my size, almost exactly, and the other, in pink, was two sizes smaller and fitted my younger sister. 

I was lucky therefore to receive a birthday invitation to Libby Howard’s party. She invited the entire class. A chance to give my new dress a trial run. People, except for Rosemary Russo, whose father ran the green grocers in Ivanhoe, did not invite me to their parties. I figured because I was too shabby.

But here I was at Libby Howard’s in a party dress complete with layers of blue lace over a silk petticoat, fitted with pockets, one on either side and tucked away under a white sash. The pockets were deep enough to hold at least two full bags of lollies if I’d had the courage to snaffle them. I did not. 

Instead, when no one was looking I ate them. And like the fish in my uncle’s tank, I could not stop. When it came time after all the party games: pass the parcel, pin a tail on the donkey, and musical chairs, for which Libby’s dad, not her mother, to my amazement, stopped and started the record on its turnstile, we sat in front of clean white plates with clown patterned napkins to eat our fill.

We were allowed to put anything we liked in our plates as long as we began with at least one savoury piece. A sausage roll would do, or a pie or piece of the fruit. Libby’s mother had cut the fruit into triangles and decorated the into a heart shape on a plate. Hulled strawberries, pineapple pieces, apples, and pear. With green grapes a plenty. 

I chose little from this section. I wanted to fill myself with the stuff I rarely saw in such quantities, except in shop windows. The cakes and biscuits, the row upon row of chocolate eclairs. Chocolate icing over pastry that melted in my mouth. And the mountainous meringues, best of all for their sweet crispness, smattered with crushed mint chocolate freckles, and tinned passionfruit as sweet and tingling as the fruit tingle lollies Mrs Howard had opened from their life savers wrappers and added to the lolly bowls.

The ache in my gut in the evening when I returned home ruined it all. I felt like the fish before they exploded, only I never exploded and that night. In my memory at least, one of the nights of the long hard howling when my father took in too much drink and scared my mother. She holed us up in the bedroom I shared with my big sister. All seven of us and my mother on my bed against the wall.

The two biggest boys had left home by then. If only they were still at home, they would keep us safe. They were now nearly as tall as my father. They would not let him hurt us. 

My mother in the dark corner of my bed tucked in as far away from the door as she could, huddled under one of the grey army blankets to ward against the night air that grew colder by the minute. And the window was too far away from the bed to leap across and escape into the night. 

My father at the door, salivating like a wolf. He was angry at my mother, and the rest of us, her snivelling kids. He shouldn’t have had us. Too many brats and all because of our mother. 

And she tried to ignore his presence at the door. We kids holding our breath in case our father should move beyond the door and come too close. 

For reasons I never understood, it was enough for him to stand at the door and growl. As if he was planning to eat us all one by one, like the fish who could not stop eating. Only the fish were tiny and my father was huge and we were smaller than him but not so small that he could not slice us up one piece at time, beginning with my mother who seemed to disappear by the minute. 

She clutched onto her rosary beads and when my father slammed the door shut behind him after one of his several visits she prayed the rosary out loud. 

All the mysteries. Hail Mary full of grace…. 

And this was the night concertinaed in my mind alongside many other such nights when my big little brother Frankie jumped out of a window and walked around the streets alone until a police patrol car found him and took him home. 

When the police rang on our bell and they brought Frankie inside, frowning at the idea of this small boy roaming the streets, my father changed his mood, and spoke to them politely. My mother came out too and told the police her husband had been drinking and he was violent.

The police went into the loungeroom and spoke sternly to our father. They told him to behave himself. They told our mother there was nothing they could do.

‘It’s a domestic,’ they said. ‘If he hurts you. If you have bruises to show. If there is blood, then we can take him to the station, but for now, it’s up to you.’

The night ended here in my memory.

With the fish still swimming in their warm bath through plastic tendrils of fake sea weed rippling to the top of the tank and my uncle tipping just the tiniest amount of dried fish food onto the surface of water. 

Finally, we slept. My mother returned to her room, where he was snoring.

And although there were a few more muffles of discontent in this night of unsettled sleepers, the worst was over. 

Till the next time. 

The moving parts of a body

I come as a multitude. My identity is not fixed. I contain many moving parts. And those parts can sometimes pull in opposing directions.

‘Cast your eyes towards the horizon,’ Mother Anthony told us in year eight. ‘Use your right hand. Separate your thumb and fingers like this.’ She raised her arthritic knuckles, jointed stones under her skin.

‘Hold up your fingers and thumb at right angles, then hold your hand along the line of the horizon to calculate the angle as it reaches towards the Azimuth.’

I knew the word horizon, but there was not one to be seen below the roof tops of houses fast erected in the back blocks behind my home in Cheltenham. Roof tops reaching skywards. 

There I stood on the concrete veranda that took you down some five steps to reach a bare back garden in a house newly built with all the trimmings of modernity.

It stays in my memory as one of those experiences where the moving parts of my body cooperated, while my mind joggled in uncertainty.

I had no idea what I was doing. Night after night on the back veranda measuring the azimuth.

I made a few guesses each time and wrote a figure somewhere between 90 and 360 degrees, as I understood the range of angles possible. Then wrote down the figure in my notebook.

After a week we were to add up all figures and divide them by the number of days to find our average.

One of those exercises you complete as a child without any idea of what you’re doing or why. The why of it was the most potent for me. So many things the moving parts of my body directed me towards, and I did not have a clue as to why. 

Even at university I found myself guessing at the why of things. It was not until I was in mid to late adulthood that pennies began to drop. A second stint at university when I began to read the theorists of the day, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva, Cixous.

When I began to read on the significance of the post-modern, the meaning of the modern and the idea of grand narratives as constructions. Then I realised there was more to the many things we did and understood in the past. 

Although I had abandoned religion long before, even its dictates began to make sense to me, and with that the possibility of seeing why people might adhere, and why many, including me, might not.

And not just out of laziness or a reluctance to believe, because belief is central to any religious doctrine, belief and faith as the nuns taught. And if your faith failed you and you lost it, somehow then you could never understand the significance of faith.

One of those weird things. You needed to have it to understand. And if you did not hold it tight then you could not understand.

The same it seems with our understanding of things in the world that change over time. Attitudes and views rooted in belief systems held across generations. The firm black and white beliefs of masculine and feminine as two distinct polarities.

Gender binaries that are in the minds of some people as fixed as the sun and the moon. As clear cut as the seasons. And over time I began to challenge this notion of a fixed self. 

I have begun to move away from any form and fixed belief in the certainty of boundaries in binaries.

We all come as multitudes, only some of us prefer to hold a more fixed sense of identity, one that feels immutable.

It can be challenging when you encounter someone who travels under a different frame of identity one that shifts over time from the masculine to the feminine or vice versa and in between. 

Born with a sexual apparatus and determined at birth, to be a he or a she, yet choosing otherwise over time. And often from early days, though not necessarily to embrace another, the opposite seemingly, or something more mixed, gender-neutral determinants of the they.

I come as multitudes, not just one but many.

We can sense it more in our dreams where we might find ourselves as a female sporting a penis, or as a male carrying a baby in utero. Our mind’s defiance of the fixed rhetoric on how we must be. 

There are some who would say it’s only a dream. It belongs in the land of the mystical, the extra-terrestrial, not the real. Think Freud’s reality principle.

And then we might argue what is real. What’s fixed. Even time as much as in the chronological appears to be fixed, while elsewhere in our unconscious it is not.

But how do we know what’s unconscious when it is by its very nature unknowable, only we might catch glimpses.

And why are so many people fearful of the nature of transitioning or morphing from one gender identity to another, especially in children.

It begins in children, for any number of complex reasons. Some might say it’s born of a troubled identity. Or problems in the family. Or the intergenerational transmission of trauma. 

We don’t know why it is that one person born into a particularly identified body at birth and thereby assigned their gender and treated accordingly with all the hormones that accompany the female form or the male form choose to abandon their ascribed identity at birth and then identify with other characteristics to which as a woman for instance they’re not entitled. Or as a man. 

And the trans person who seems almost more than the single entity of female or male to which they have been ascribed can become a ‘they’.

We binarians might cringe because we do not understand the complexity of identities and how they are not fixed. Just because you’re born one way does not mean you must stay that way forever. 

And some might argue the only thing allowed is the course of ageing.

Ageing is a given even as many people rail against it. Some argue death is inevitable. Lives are finite while others with money and perhaps delusions of grandeur or dreams of coming back to live in corporeal form once dead might have their deceased bodies cryo-vacced and frozen over time until such day when scientific advancements allow them to be thawed and revivified.

From here it seems fanciful. And most people I imagine will not or cannot afford to travel this route.

Not something I desire.

The many multitudes of me are not yet ready to die. As if I will ever be ready. Though perhaps one day I might. Be ready, that is.

And in the meantime, I recognise the inevitability of death, and find comfort in the idea there will come a time when I might not need to strive in the way I strive to settle the multitude of forces in the me, the many moving parts and voices that can create a cacophony of ideas and movement like a tornado to interrupt my sleep as if thought grenades are dropping on my need to retreat from consciousness for a time.

A time after death when I will cease to exist except as a memory and some of my name continues apace anywhere it will become a figment of the imaginations of the few who come ahead of me who can know something of the fact I was once here.

Me and my many multitudes. 

As much as I’m reconciled to death, I’m reconciled to being forgotten. In some way it’s a comfort, the thought of blending with rocks, earth, and sky. A blimp on the horizon a small measure of the azimuth and my many multitudes wanting to rest. 

As I send this piece to my computer I remember today is the anniversary of the day on which my mother was born.

She has been dead now for almost a decade. I remember her well. But she fades from the memories of my children. And when we are gone i will fade into a similar blip. One of the multitudes who have passed by here. All of us specs in the universe.