Because

Because I lost the green notebook in which I kept the thoughts of my adolescent self, I do not have a record of my early written words. Only a memory of sitting in the back of the chapel at the convent school where I spent six years from the time I was twelve until I turned eighteen.

On those pages I journaled my interiority. 

The passions of a fifteen-year-old who fell in love with her teacher. One who wore a habit of black after taking her vows to become a Faithful Companion of Jesus, when she was still a young woman, not much older than her student. 

I did not long to touch her or be touched by her. I longed only to be near her, to be in her presence, to hear her voice, to receive her words written on slips of paper which she passed onto me after I had sent my first messages to her during the holidays when I could not see her at school.

This then was my first foray into letter writing. My first attempt to put my hand into that of another and share my innermost thoughts in the hope of a warm response. 

The nun wrote back letters and over time they held greater weight.

These letters came to feel as if she had me in her mind but when my younger sister a year behind me at school began to fall in love with my favourite teacher, too, something began to sour.

By the time I left the school with its green garden beds and high fences to keep out the sooty factories of Richmond and hide the smells from the brewery further up the Yarra River and close to the city, I had eased my way out of this love.

It is best to ease your way out of love. Best to let the glowing warmth in your heart, the hope and desire to be with another, fade away into a trickle of affection that barely lights your sky at night, rather than hold fast to the deep pain of lost love. 

Or so it was for me with this teacher, this nun, this young woman who first taught me desire beyond the passions I once felt for my mother.

I am wary of the word love, of the depth of its charge. I use it freely to mark an affection for others whom I hold close, but the passions I once felt as a child and adolescent, as a young woman are harder to reach.

As when I fell for a young moon-faced man who tended towards heaviness and walked with an easy restlessness, as if those two opposites could co-exist.

Those loves have bypassed me. Filtered down to something gentler, more centred on the ground of the familial and of friendship. 

Loretta Smith was three years older than me but, despite the disparity in our ages, she became my friend. She lived with her huge family in a ramshackle house at the end of our street and held the distinction of being in the girl guides. 

Loretta urged me to join her and after much pleading my mother relented. My mother did not object to her daughter joining such a movement, given various of my brothers had taken to the boy scouts over the years, but she baulked at the cost of the uniform. 

There were no hand-me-downs available from my older sister. who took no interest in the guides. No one among my mother’s extended family who could hand over the clothes their daughters had outgrown. I was the first girl in my family to join the guides.

Once a week after dinner I walked with Loretta, who collected me from my front door. Down the hill on Canterbury Road and through Shierlaw Avenue to the scout hall, a rectangular weatherboard box with large double front doors on top of which the words: Canterbury Scouts and a Fleur de Lys. 

My skirt and blouse were crisp with their newness, something I had not known before.

In my family new clothes belonged only to firstborns. And the pleasure I felt was soon offset by a chafing sense of guilt when I remembered my mother’s unease in the Girl Guide shop in the city when she looked at the price tags she needed in order to be properly fitted out. 

A year later when my younger sister wanted to join me and Loretta, the thought of buying another such uniform again for me (my younger sister could take over my, by then, too small uniform) was too much for my mother. And too much for me. 

What is it with younger siblings admiring us so much they want to do exactly as we do and then we’re left with a sense that our achievements are taken from us?

Or so it was for me. My favourite nun, my girl guides and later still a boyfriend. 

But I did not factor in the way my sister paved the way for me with some of her friends.

That because we were only one year apart at school, because we were thrown in together in our family as the little girls, we spent hours of time together and formed the closest bond imaginable.

Why do these bonds fray? Why do these loves go cold? Why not endure the test of time? 

What we do not see

In the moments of waking up, when I slipped between dreaming and wakefulness, I opened my eyes into a rush of shame, or its equivalent.

In this dream, my husband on the bed beside me looked into my face.  Blood pulsed through my veins, with a sudden acceleration of heartbeat. I crawled into a foetal ball characteristic of one who wants to escape, then jammed my eyes shut again. 

 ‘Bessel Van der Kolk reckons this happens when we’re caught off guard,’ my husband said in the dream, as if he was an expert in such things. In waking life he has not read Bessel Van der Kolk, but I gave these words to him in my dream where he went onto say, ‘When a traumatised person finds themselves unexpectedly in the spotlight, they go into a shock reaction of panic and withdrawal.’ 

In between the agitation in my bones and trying to self soothe I found comfort in these words, as if a theoretical understanding of what had just happened could bring me back to the world of the living.

And all of this in less than two minutes.

Dreams are like this. They can stretch time or condense it. They can leave you with a sense you’ve been gone for hours, or with a sense that the entire night has passed in a heartbeat.

I prefer the latter, the entire night gone fast. It suggests I must have slept well and all night long, which these days is rare. I prefer the longer journey. The stretching of time that offers more opportunity for travel and exploration.

The point is not what we see but what we do not see. 

In my younger days I travelled in the slip stream of others. I imagined anything I did or said was only good if it could be reinforced by another’s approval. I would not send out a single letter to another person without my husband vetting every word, and even as I disliked the way he changed my words into a formal and legalistic structure, I hid behind his words, as if his edits guaranteed correctness, whereas my clumsy efforts could only get me into trouble.

The irony is that his excess efforts and legal language, which were okay in the world of his career as a lawyer, were not so helpful in the world of psychotherapy.

Not that it brought me down too far. 

When did I slide out of that slip stream and take my place in my own space without hovering behind another?

The body keeps the score. I sensed it in my dreams this morning in the tensing of my tendons and the racing of my heart. But now my mind is awash with clutter. I cannot get beyond the torment of a soul lost in life’s irritations. And a wish to get back into a story. Any story. The story of shame that got me to this point. 

The story of the day I first felt shame, bent over my father’s knee as he belted my backside because I had stolen lollies from the shop. I was a child of five or six. A child who knew the difference between right and wrong, a child who, even so, could not resist the allure of the shop that ran parallel to my bedroom in a place called Sunspot where we lived for one full year while my parents ventured into a business that began and failed in another heartbeat. 

My mother tended the shop alongside the care of her eight children, most of whom were away at school by day while my father travelled the hour plus into the city for his day job as an accountant.

They were migrants trying to make good, the two families, my parents and my auntie Barbara and uncle Gerard back from Indonesia and before then the Belgian Congo those once-colonial outposts of the Dutch.

My uncle had managed rubber plantations in both places where he met and married his 18-year-old bride, my aunt who must then have been in her mid-twenties with three small children in her care.

She and my mother surrounded by children tried to run a shop that few visited. By then, the late 1950s, the tourist trade to the outskirts of country Victoria and places like Healesville had dried up. My uncle took care of the residential cottages on top of a nearby hill where again few, if any, visitors came. They made no money and the business failed.

During this time two little girls stole into the milk bar while the family were at Mass on a Sunday morning and filled their pockets with lollies. When they heard the crunch of car tyre on the gravel outside the girls threw the leftovers they had not managed to eat out the window where one of the brothers later found them. He dobbed his sisters in. 

The shame of my father’s anger in front of my brothers and sisters, and of our eviction to the bedroom for hours until our mother released us at dinner time, stays with me.

A precursor to any other wrongs I have committed, a residue of what happens when those in charge decide to redden your backside and crush you with the indignity of the subhuman.

It’s not what we see, it’s what we don’t see. The rage that percolates below the surface of shame that causes us to hide. The rage that surfaces again and again whenever anyone is humiliated. And all for the sake of a few stolen lollies.