July 2025 – Sixth in Line

Corporal works of mercy

The man I married tells a story. When he turned eighteen he drove one day from Monash University campus to the Ringwood police station to undertake his driving licence test.

Even then it was illegal to drive without a licence but everyone he knew did just that, he told me.

He had driven to the university regularly from his home in Croydon from the time he first went to university after leaving school and needed to legalise his driving.

He had learned to drive through watching others, especially his father. And on the farm of his childhood home, he had plenty of opportunities to practice in paddocks.

To secure his licence he took a few paid lessons with an instructor who showed him the ins and outs of the licensing procedure and then took himself off to be tested.

Unlike me.

In my early twenties I was a bundle of nerves who failed her licence almost three times. Only on my third failed attempt to parallel park, the instructor took pity and gave me my licence against the rules.

Rules were not so strict in those days.

Whereas my husband to be blitzed his test.

As they returned to the licensing depot the tester issued a final instruction.

‘Now back into the yard.’ My husband to be took this literally and went into reverse.

‘What are you doing?’ the examiner asked

‘As you instructed.’

‘I meant, drive back into the yard,’ the examiner said, without deducting any points.

In fact, the man I was to marry believes this was the icing on the cake, clear evidence of his readiness to drive, and so his licence was granted.

I was twenty-two when finally I received my licence after a year of lessons with an instructor who told me once as we pulled off in his turquoise Datsun 180 Y, ‘You’re phobic about driving.’

Was I phobic or just plain terrified? The need to coordinate this and that, when in those days even more so than now, I lacked coordination. The practical skills needed to get the clutch into gear, my left foot from brake onto accelerator and then apply pressure enough to take off.

There’s something confronting about the blank page, paralysing even, writes Magda Szubanski in her memoir Reckoning.

I’m two thirds through this book and love it for its lyricism and the story with which I resonate. Her European father, an arrogant one at that. Magda was born in the UK to a Scottish mother and Polish father and came here with two older siblings age five.

Such a colourful person and her book so compelling. And now I feel the distress of many that she’s in stage four of a rare form of cancer, and although she’s upbeat about recovery online, it’s a worry.

She who is so clever and funny.

Magda went to Sienna alongside other dignitaries . A friend of mine as well, to that school on the road not so far from where I live now and over the way from the blue stone of St Dominic’s Church. She’s younger than me by what looks like almost a decade. And too young to die.

How often we think of someone being too young to die?

When her sentence on the blank page began I had imagined she’d write something about its power. The idea that you the writer will soon fill this space with words you had not anticipated, but for Magda initially the blank page led to a paralysis until her brother told her one day,

Don’t think too much about what you’re writing. Just write. Just keep going. It will be crap at first but soon it will improve.

He was right. As the Canadian writer Barbara Turner Vesselago tells us, write without editing. Just get words onto the page. Irrespective of what you think and feel. Do not check over what you write as you write. Just let your words stand. Spelling mistakes and all. Editing is for later, once you finish your first draft.

But I have friends, including the lovely Carrie Tiffany, who tells me she does not write like this. Nor Gerald Murnane. Both have told me they write sentence by sentence, perfecting each sentence before moving onto the next.

Now this would cripple me.

But while the process may be painstaking, it works best for them. Whereas for me the other process of just getting words down works best.

I love the thought, even as I write and imagine as I often do, this stuff is drivel, that when I read back over it I will find more than drivel. I might even find gems.

You never know when you read back over words written a long time ago what you might find.

This is the way in which I tell my story day after day. Mainly on weekends when I have time. My practice of recording a life lived now for three score and ten.

An older brother who told my older sister recently after he had turned eighty-two. “Who’d have thought I’d reach over a decade more than my allocated three score and ten.’

Three score as in three twenties plus a decade.

Who says that’s our allocated time?

Perhaps the bible, or the catechism we were forced to rote learn as children.

The catechism loaded with instructions, or corporal works of mercy.

My husband wrote these out for a friend the other day, both the corporal and the spiritual works of mercy. The Catholic’s guidebook to behaviour when we were children. I include them here.

The corporal works of mercy are a set of seven actions that address the physical needs of others.
They are rooted in Christian teachings and emphasise caring for the vulnerable and marginalized.

The seven corporal works of mercy are:

to feed the hungry
to give drink to the thirsty
to clothe the naked

to shelter the homeless

to visit the sick

to visit the imprisoned
to bury the dead.

Just as the corporal works of mercy are directed towards relieving corporeal suffering, the aim of the spiritual works of mercy is to relieve spiritual suffering. They were codified in or before the Catechism of the Council of Trent of 1566.

The seven spiritual works of mercy are:

to instruct the ignorant
to counsel the doubtful
to admonish the sinners
to bear patiently those who wrong oneself
to forgive offences
to comfort the afflicted
to pray for the living and the dead

See what you think. Most are reasonable injunctions to be kind and thoughtful of others. To care for the vulnerable but the spiritual ones require more. To pray for the souls in purgatory requires a type faith.

You must believe those souls are waiting there, desperate to get to heaven.

You must believe in heaven and hell, places I abandoned long ago along with the idea of fairies and Father Christmas. Places of the imagination that might help some to imagine a better future if they lead a good life, while for others the promise of the worst retribution for living a destructive life.

I sit in the camp of people who, like Phillip Adams, reckon death is a place of mystery and no more. Once our bodies are gone, our spirit travels with them into nothingness and we are left only in the memories of those who might hold fast to us.

There may be photographs, black and white or coloured images, of us as we age, and our words recorded, or even our voices, but that’s it. Traces of who we once were.

It was hard to bear this knowledge as a child with my wonderful belief of going on forever. Like Magda Szubanski I, too, was full of the idealistic belief the world would improve on my watch.

But life isn’t like that. It goes on for good and ill. Somethings seemingly improve while others deteriorate, but none of us go on forever.

The tyranny of the past

It’s a long time since I endured the blood trickle of a period. That event we learn about before we enter womanhood, usually from experience even as we are warned ahead: one day it will happen to you.

I was late to the party, fifteen years old. It had bothered me for twelve months earlier because my elder sister alerted me to its existence after an aunt with whom we stayed one weekend suggested we go to the beach for a swim. My sister declined, and my aunt asked, ‘Do you have your period?’

The word ‘period’ baffled me. It shuddered in my ears. I’d heard of periods from my sister’s attendance at secondary school where she talked of blocks of time in which different subjects were taught, but this was different. So, back home, I asked her its meaning. Her explanation left me little but my imaginary wonderings.

Soon after I woke one night, went to the toilet and there in the dark I imagined a great dark stain at my pyjama’s crotch. It was a false alarm and when it finally happened, again another night, I went to my sister for support. These were not things I could discuss with my mother. My sister handed me a tampon box and urged me to read the directions. I did not know then I had a vagina, nor where it was located. In my family we did not use such words for genitals. Nor did we hear the word penis bandied about. Certainly not vulva or labia. These parts of our bodies were secrets.

My vagina, this foreign hole, somewhere between my legs I knew, and somewhere close to my anus. But where? Even as I write these things a chill sets in, a yuk. How can you write about such things? They are unseemly.

Recently at a seminar on misogyny, Michaela Chamberlain talked about gendered blood and the way women’s bodies get policed. All aspects of misogyny and how to fight a perspective that dominates our lives and seeps into our bones from earliest days.

I doubt men are much better at talking about their bodies and the changes to them as they enter adolescence and old age: the wet dreams, nocturnal emissions – if that’s the word. In later years, an inability to get an erection, or other aspects as when a young boy’s voice breaks and an Adam’s apple appears at his throat.

But I suspect if they don’t, it’s because adolescent changes and the ravages of age, bespeak a certain vulnerability which men meet with coming-of-age events: the tough training run; a few nights out camping alone. Whatever rituals they can devise, to harden their bodies on the way to manhood, and later onto death. Or else into denial

Whereas we girls endured no such experience. Still, we also needed to be hardened for life. So many things on the road ahead and no one ever talked about it. The way period cramps can be torture. Not that they ever hurt me, nor my mother or sisters, from what I understand. Looking back, I wonder whether this is also about a disavowal of our bodies.

In my childhood household, besides the unseemly arrival of our periods, which in later years my sisters and I called Charlie, like the perfume, we did not speak about it.

The night of that first encounter with a tampon, I misjudged and shoved it up my anus. The discomfort in my spine as I lay in bed later thinking something had to be wrong was overwhelming. I reported back to my sister who was trying to sleep. She sighed. ‘You’ll have to learn one day and I’m not about to show you.’ The thought of my sister fiddling with my bits below put me off. ‘Try these,’ she said handing me a pad and suspender belt.

The belt was easy and the pad self-evident. But it took many years before I located my vagina and dared to use tampons, well after someone else, a man, found my vagina and penetrated it. After which I entered the realms of womanhood.

All this a secret to everyone, even to myself.

How do we escape from the tyranny of the past that says we cannot speak of these things? These bodily excrescences that hint at our vulnerability.

Even when I was a child in love with television series like The Brady Bunch and The Swiss Family Robinson, I could not understand why no one left to visit a toilet on screen. They might use the bathroom or on their deserted island take a dip in the sea to clean their face and hands, put on makeup, but they never spoke of a need to relieve themselves.

Michaela Chamberlain talked about Freud’s case of Dora. A young woman whose father brought her to see the great doctor for help with hysterical symptoms. Her loss of voice, choking, migraines, difficulties breathing.

Freud writes her story as the case of a failed analysis and ascribes the problems to her resistance, and his failure to deal with the transference. Her refusal to use the couch. Her decision to leave abruptly after 18 sessions.

No wonder she left. She had told Freud her story. When she was fourteen, a family friend, Herr K sexually propositioned her. And then repeatedly at sixteen and again, she believed with her father’s knowledge. Freud ascribed her struggles to jealousy of her father’s lover Frau K and Dora’s desire for her father. Freud twisted the narrative.

The good old Oedipal Conflict, which I imbibed in my early years of psychotherapy training as if drinking mother’s milk. But there’s something in the business of jealousy, I know from experience. My aching jealousy of others whose achievements within the writing world are greater than my own, and when I was young, my jealousy towards a younger sister who was more beautiful than me alongside my brother, seventeen months older, who was so clever. The family genius.

Sandwiched between both, with neither brains nor beauty, the past assaulted me like a sledgehammer of self-loathing. But when one of my early therapists suggested I wanted my father for myself, as if I was in love with him, I refused to oblige. Like Dora. He had it wrong.

https://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000007026836/hysterical-girl.ht

I did not want my father any more than Dora wanted hers. These fathers who betrayed us. Who used our bodies and minds for their own comfort, and sexual desire. Who could not find what they wanted in their wives, sexual satisfaction that was built on a misogynistic and patriarchal view of the world that urges women to stay in their places as receptacles for men’s desires, for the penis and whatever else they might want to put inside.

In another book on misogyny, Kate Manne’s Down Girl, I read about the 2014 Isla Vista killings. A young man, Elliot Rodger, enraged that no women took an interest in him, murdered as many men and women he could locate on a university campus and beyond as a way of assuaging his rage. He aimed his weapons from his BMW. He would show them how wrong they were before he crashed his car and shot himself in the head.

He is a hero for the craziness of Incels who see themselves as victims of rejection because no woman wants to gratify their desires. The fault of women, of all women. This then is the essence of misogyny, and we learn it early. It’s in our blood. Even women fall victim to its thrall. We pander to our men like they’re small boys in need of love, instead of demanding they pull their weight. Insist they take a greater share in parenting.

I recognise it. My tendency to care, especially for men. When I was in my first significant relationship with a man I adored, I took to ironing his shirts as a way of winning his love. I cleaned his flat every Saturday from floor to ceiling. I scraped out his toilet and vacuumed his floors simply to satisfy my belief this was a way to his love. This was my job. This he’d find irresistible and love me for it.

The pleasure of his pleasure overruled my own and I did not consider the boredom of housework or the loneliness of those Saturdays at home alone cleaning his flat while he was away at the races. And when he came home, whether he won or lost, we would take to his bed for peremptory sex. It satisfied something in him while for me it was not so different from the housework, only I could doze if there was time later.

Across the map of time this was what a good relationship looked like to me then. And as much as I see it differently now, I’m still bogged down by the urge to do the lion’s share of housework. My duty to clean and wash; my job to tackle the dust as it piles on every surface. Only these days I let it settle.

Life has a way of needing more than just submission to another’s wishes. It’s time to make room for all of us as humans. Not bogged down by gender divides that are as false as they are constructed.