Author: Elisabeth

Nothing is for free

When she was not yet twenty, my mother walked the streets of Haarlem with her new young man. In a bevelled shop window, one that displayed fabric and other haberdashery, she saw an embroidery kit. In those days all the rage. A kit that once set up, enabled the craftsperson to embroider great swathes of fabric and then, following a pattern, turn the sheet of fabric into an elegant, fitted blouse. 

My mother hinted to the man on her arm that she would love to possess this kit.  My mother, master manipulator, as were most women of her generation. The only way to get things was to hint at your desire. Women were not meant to have desires then. 

She did not say, ‘Could you please buy this for me?’ Instead, she said, ‘I’d love that blouse.’ And then later, on the return trip, she looked longingly into the window again and admired its perfection. ‘I’d love to be able to embroider that,’ she said. And finally, as if her young man had not yet heard, ‘What I would do for such a blouse.’ 

And my father – for the man on her arm became my father in less than two years – took the bait as ceremoniously as he could manage. In later years he came to hate my mother’s desire for things. He came to resent her wishes and her needs for possessions and for babies. These became things that weighed him down. Especially his children. But on that day, my mother’s every wish was his desire. 

‘Why don’t I buy it for you?’ he asked, as if the thought had never entered her mind. 

‘Would you?’ she said, seemingly incredulous at such generosity. 

‘My pleasure.’ And my mother beamed her delight. A no reason present. Something just for her. Something that came into her possession purely through the power of her allure. 

‘You can’t keep it,’ my oma said when she saw her daughter’s gift. ‘He’s not your fiancé. You’re not serious about him. You have to give it back.’ But my mother who by then had learned enough to disregard her mother’s commands, skittered off to her father and pleaded with him to make her mother see reason. 

My mother was the first-born daughter of two daughters among a host of sons. She was her father’s darling. He could not resist her wishes and the blouse became my mother’s pride and joy. She stitched the elaborate swirls night after night and wore the blouse on the first day of spring in the April when she and my father had finally approached the idea of marriage.

It was war time. There was no time, but my father needed to create his own metaphorical blouse of religious conversion. He needed to visit the priests for weeks on end to convince them that he had learned the doctrines of the Catholic Church well enough that he could be baptised in this new religion. Otherwise, my mother’s parents, even her beloved father, would not condone such a partnership. 

In the August of her twenty first year my mother became a married woman and the rest, as they say, is history.

All those years between then and now the blouse travelled over the sea from Holland to Australia and for years my mother wore it when the weather was kind, and her body was not too stretched. For her body swelled every year with each new baby and by the time her eleventh child came into the world, still born, with nine living children in her care, the blouse had lost its allure. 

It was worn at the seams so much that my sister who took possession that day cleaning out our mother’s cupboards was dismayed. She had planned to restitch the blouse, but this garment was too far gone to get back its original shape.

So, my sister formed a plan to find a way of commemorating our mother through her blouse. She cut out sections of the material, large pieces that held together without stains or gashes, and these she framed into a series of pictures, each gold rimmed, each carrying the imprint of the years.  Today they hang in our various houses. 

I thought of my mother this morning as I went out to collect the newspaper. I thought of how cruel I had been to her in my later years, in the years after I had babies of my own. I thought of the way I was civil to her and invited her to my children’s birthdays, but I did not embrace her, nor encourage them to embrace her as their grandmother. The way they were not free to love her in a way I hope my grandchildren are free, and encouraged by their mothers, to love me. 

When I was a young mother I felt a certain honour in my decision to exclude my mother in this way. Subtly, insidiously, not loudly so others might notice, but loud enough so that she could feel the sting of my disappointment in her. 

My mother whom I had admired in childhood and even into my adolescence. My mother whom I loved above all others, even into my early twenties when something snapped inside of me and turned me away from her.

And now, like my mother’s blouse, our relationship can be cut into individual pieces to show off the beauty of the embroidery, to hide the stains and gashes in the fabric, and to hang the pieces framed on a wall somewhere as a reminder of what once was. 

Limbs like melting butter

The nuns rostered bath times three times each week at intervals before and after school. Nothing to do with the actual state of your body at any time. You could be rostered on at 4.00 pm any weeknight or at midday on a Saturday. A thirty-minute limit on the time needed to fill the bath, to soak, then dry yourself and re-dress.

The baths were located a narrow strip of garden away between the boarders’ study and the nuns’ quarters. So positioned, I imagined, because sometimes the nuns themselves might need to use these baths for their own washing. Late at night when the boarders slept.

To take a bath at boarding school was to become aware of my body, hidden under the mushroom pink uniform of a linen dress, with detachable white Peter Pan collar and cuffs in summer, or navy tunic, white blouse and striped tie in winter. 

To take a bath was to find myself connected once more to my flesh and blood beneath.

One of the older nuns told stories of her time in the novitiate when the nuns took their baths dressed in a night gown so as not to be tempted by the sight of their naked bodies. 

She did not include the stuff of temptation. She talked only of her need to cover up for God. I could not understand that need other than to protect myself from the eyes of other people, especially my father.

I did not consider my body as a source of temptation, merely of shame. It had ballooned. Since I began at boarding school, my breasts, my hips, my pubic hair, all an embarrassment of riches I preferred to hide.

As much as I hated to undress even in the privacy of the tiny cubicle that stood in a row of four, each with its claw footed bath in the centre. Once in the water, I returned to my mother’s womb, the warmth soothed and held me. And I drifted off into song. 

I was in love with one of the nuns, the youngest in the order and by far the most hip and attractive, however cold she might sometimes appear.

Among her fellow nuns on a rare event, and eating in public, at a picnic.

She was tiny against my growing bulk, a small wispy insect-like creature behind wire spectacles that matched her elfin face. And she was whip smart, as far as I could tell. Had travelled around the world and knew things the other nuns did not know.

I wanted to impress her with my singing at full throttle in the bath, knowing she was in the boarders’ study at that moment, overseeing the boarders at their homework. 

She sat at the head of the classroom, black woollen fingerless gloves to protect her from the chilblains that assaulted her every winter. She sat at the head of the classroom and read her book. She too was studying; she had told us.

Further mathematics at Monash University. A degree aimed to improve her teaching. I was impressed with the idea of any nun at the university. That heathen place filled with young people in hippie dresses and sixties long hair. 

To be submerged under water, the warmth enveloping my limbs as though they were melting butter. Shameless I sang as loudly as I could, my voice echoing off the ceiling. And although I sensed they could hear me in the boarders’ study, I feared  other girls might not look up and laugh at this idiot at bath time, I did not stop. 

I also imagined my favourite nun was impressed. Sure, she might raise her eyebrows in disapproval to suggest this behaviour was not to be tolerated in front of the others, but most of all she enjoyed my foibles, or so I hoped, while I soaked for my allotted fifteen minutes in the bath before the water turned cold and I was left to face my body again as I dried it. Before I returned to my uniform and back to the study with all the other students who might look at me with smiles when I returned, or sneer in contempt at this hapless person who could not bathe in silence.

My clean body back in my dirty clothes. I did not have enough extra pairs of underpants to change them when the bath roster dictated. I sensed the clash of cleanliness and the sordid nature of my thoughts which tinkered on the edges of desire, not for bodies but for minds that might meet across the void of classrooms, water, and air, across the small corridor of garden between the boarders’ study and my bathroom and into the head of my favourite nun whom I hoped against all hope, she held me in mind, with loving feelings and good will. She saw me as more than just an ungainly adolescent but as a person who mattered more than the other ill-dressed schoolgirls who marched into her classrooms year after year.

I looked for proof. I courted her attention. I kept the slips of paper she left for me when she wanted me to tell the five other girls who also studied Latin under her charge that she might be late that day. I treasured the curve of her letters in her handwritten note as though they were precious jewels embedded in gold, the one evidence I had when she wrote my name, 

Dear Elisabeth, I shall be five minutes late to the Latin class, could you please tell the others and get to work translating the first section of the Aeneid. And then Catullus, Oh Mea Lesbia. 

My older sister came to visit the school one day to bring pads for our periods. Something the nuns did not provide, and I told her about this nun who took us for Latin.

My sister who was four years older than me and had left the school the year before my favourite nun began. ‘She’s a lesbian,’ my sister said, and her words rankled. I did not understand my sister’s conviction such a person was dangerous.

Such a person might get me into trouble. Such a person had sex on her mind and sex between women was something I could encompass any more than the idea of sex between a man and a woman. 

I shrugged it off. 

My love for my favourite nun was platonic. I knew only this. Bodies did not come into it. Bodies were only the external trappings of our minds. It was our minds that did the loving. Our bodies only got in the way.

And so, my love grew and widened into proper letters between me and my favourite nun. Until university beckoned and I met boys and men and a different sense of bodies, mine and theirs, and my love for my favourite nun cooled like the bath water, and I no longer longed to be with her. 

The memory of that love still sparkles in my mind, the most radiant of loves and one that will never fade.