Dead objects the once kept us warm

The poncho spread over the manikin’s shoulders and called to me like dolls and teddy bears call to small people in children’s toy stores throughout the world. It was expensive by my standards, a class two social worker in a community care centre, but I knew my husband would not object. 

When I went inside the store and pulled it over my head, its warmth and weight, like a gigantic hug, convinced me I must have it. Mohair and three colours, fawn brown, cream and a dull charcoal, each colour blending into the other reminiscent of tie dying and Appalachian Indians from somewhere far away. 

We were on the cusp of the Easter holidays with plans to go camping with a group of my husband’s friends and although I imagined the poncho would be perfect against the cold nights I worried it might absorb the smoke from the campfire, so I left it in the car. 

I wore wet weather gear instead but longed for a time when I could wear my poncho without threatening its integrity.

I wore it over the next few winters but by the time I reached my mid-thirties and had passed the hippiedom of the seventies, I could not justify its languishing in my cupboard where there was scarcely room for other clothes. I put it into a garbage bag which I filled with items no longer worn and dropped it at the Salvos for someone else’s pleasure.

The poncho stays in my memory as one of those pieces of clothing I can never forget. One I regret saying goodbye to, though I doubt I would ever wear it again and even my children who have gone through their own hippie periods would not want to wear such an item. It has lost its allure. 

To wear the poncho was like wearing a blanket with arms free to move below the fabric hidden from view. And it was shapeless in the way of a tent hanging from my shoulders. My body was hidden. My legs only visible from the thighs down, like two ten pins, and I could slip my hands out to pick things up and do whatever might need attention, like a snail sliding inside and out of its shell. 

It could also get in the way if I needed to move my hands and arms in a hurry. It was good for walking in. 

We must mourn these dead objects, but we cannot let them overtake us in the present. Like regrets we must tuck them away, otherwise we can be paralysed. 

I crawled into bed the other night and worried I might slip into another sleepless night such as I endured the week before, the first time in my life I can remember when beyond waking up around midnight after an hour’s sleep I could not get back to sleep for the rest of the night. 

My thoughts ticked over and over in that cruel restless way when you find yourself thinking about something that’s not too loaded, say about the movie I had watched that evening or plans for the next day, and in the next breath, I should be asleep but find I’m still thinking.

Stop thinking, I told myself. Don’t entertain such thoughts, even the non-stressful ones. You should be slipping into sleep. Why are you caught up in thoughts? 

In time, it was not just the thoughts but my thoughts about the thoughts that kept assailing me, as if I was driving a car and shifting gears too often. The ride became uncomfortable and the more often I jerked myself awake, abandoning one thought for another, I became even more awake, even as my eyes felt like beads of pain. Then still another thought took over. 

I tried breathing techniques, the inbreath for four seconds, holding for seven and then the long slow outbreath for eight seconds, again and again. As I breathed I had no thoughts and I hoped after a series of such calculated breaths I might slip away, but again and again I reverted to consciousness and things grew worse. 

Not only was I now thinking relentlessly about the next day when I would tell people about my restless night, the next day when I would write down the experience, the next day when I would be able to get beyond this endless night, I found myself moving my fingers in conjunction with each thought, as if I was transcribing my thoughts onto the computer and my fingers moved in rhythm with my mind. I tried to still them. To stop thinking thoughts and then writing them down in my head. I sprayed the room with lavender. The stuff I use to settle my nerves when it’s time for sleep. 

Twice with the lavender, and endless times those breathing exercises and all to no avail. When I heard the first tram at five am, I imagined if I could get to sleep then I would at least manage a few hours and survive the day ahead. I wondered whether I was being punished for two days earlier when I was unwell and stayed in bed all day, reading my book. I thought of the book, Maggie about the priests who abused this young woman and my rage towards them. I thought about the priests in my life, my admiration of them when they were more god-like than God.

When I heard that George Pell had died I felt nothing. Even as here was a man whom I consider the core of the problem. His conservatism and hypocrisy. 

I have heard through backchannels from people who knew him, despite his staunch religiosity, he could be exploitative of young men and boys. He typified the priesthood. The things that kept me awake that night have not gone away. The things of life.

When I die, will we leave such a mess for our children that they too will split and divide in much the way my own siblings have done? My own siblings whom I once loved as a mother loves her children. Only now such distance has crept in I feel towards them as towards George Pell, a cold distance, especially towards my brothers.

Our connections lie in the past. They do not exist in the now. When we get together my sisters want to talk about the now. But we have little in common now. Only in the past can I find a connection to them and then when we do, I want to spend time together.

Back in the past as it was with my poncho. Only when we give such things away, like my poncho, like memories of how it was, we lose connections that are hard to revive in the moment that is now. 

I cannot bring my affection back any more than I will ever find my poncho and from now I can only hold to the memories until they too slip away. 

Love like an axe

‘My love for my mother is like an axe. It cuts very deep.’ Deborah Levy. Hot Milk.

As generations go, we in my family do coldness well. Not the ice of distance but the cold of the unspoken and when words come they can add to the freeze. 

My mother’s body was too wide to embrace, encased in tight girdles, I could not get a handhold on her flesh or hips or sense the bones underneath. 

‘Good things come in small packages’ one of the nuns at my school said when people remarked on her stature. My mother might have said likewise, though something in her lack of height added to her distance as though, despite her bulk and firm form, she was fragile and could easily get broken. 

My mother came packaged with rules. About how to be. Not that these rules were ever put into words beyond the doctrinal, which she quoted in her own words 

‘Don’t make a show of yourself.’ 

‘Do as if nothing is wrong.’ 

‘Don’t let your unhappiness show.’

‘Think of the starving Biaffrans.’

‘Don’t hate anyone. Ever.’

‘Never get angry,’ or if you can’t stop yourself from the heat rising in your cheeks, then hold your tongue and move into action. 

Wash the dishes. Sweep the floor. Tidy bookshelves. Dust underbeds. Anything, but do not let your feelings show beyond pleasure and delight at the presence of others.

Most of all, hide your fear. Even as this feeling vibrates in every hand gesture, even as the racing of your heart is almost visible through the cover of your clothes, do not let people know you are fearful. 

Dry mouthed and trembling of hand, hide your hands. Go drink water. But do not let it show. This way you will not provoke a response from the other. 

These ways of being my mother passed onto me as they were passed onto her through her mother and father, mostly her mother.

The story goes, when she went off to her first confession, my mother told the priest her sins, the usual list of safe sins a child might rattle off to a priest: telling white lies, taking the biggest piece of pie, hitting her brother. 

When she had finished, half hidden behind the grill that divided priest and supplicant, the priest stopped her from bowing her head ready for absolution,. 

‘Isn’t there something more to tell me?’ 

‘What do you mean, Father? 

‘Your mother told me you would not share with your brother.’ The priest cleared his throat.

My mother fudged her way through the rest of her confession burned by betrayal. 

Perhaps because of this, my mother valued the celibacy of priests. Priests should not marry, she once told me, otherwise they might be tempted to talk to their wives about secrets they heard in the confessional. 

This knowledge made it even harder for my mother to bear my sister’s slide into a sexual relationship with a priest, one whom to my mother’s mind, my sister stole from God. 

The priests belonged to God. They were his representatives on earth and my mother loved her connection to them. In every parish in which we lived my mother sought out the parish priests and befriended them, always at a distance. Though you could sense her tremble with delight whenever she spoke to one, as if she had developed a secret relationship in fantasy. One in which she and her beloved priest connected at deeper levels.

My mother loved nothing more than a visit from the priest even as it irked her to hide the signs of my father’s drunken rampages on weekends, or the fact he did not go to Mass, or the mess of our house. 

When the priest came for a visit she’d send one of us out to buy biscuits however skint she might be. We needed to have something to offer with the cup of tea even if the priest declined. 

I despised my mother’s love of God transferred onto the priests. The way her eyes glowed when she saw the dog collar around his neck and a frisson came over her as if she was in the company of stardom.

She worshipped authority: the pope, Melbourne’s Archbishop Daniel Mannix, John F Kennedy, the president of America, because he was Catholic, and Queen Wilhelmina from Holland. All the Dutch royals as though they too were gods or saints. Anyone my mother could put onto a pedestal and keep there, despite her own mother’s early betrayal. 

My mother rarely spoke of her mother to me, but I came to understand my Oma had been strict and often unwell. She married late by the today’s standards and was in her early thirties when she began her run of seven children, two of whom were twins. 

She needed a housekeeper or nurse maid to help her manage her large brood and spent much of her time resting and reading. She had been a schoolteacher when my Opa, a physical education teacher, met and married her. From respectable middle class Haarlem families. And both families devoted Catholics in a country that saw Catholicism as a problem. Catholics encouraged large families, given their take on contraception, and Holland was a small country without room for excess population. 

I disliked my Oma though only knew her in person as a two-year-old, the year my grandparents came to stay with us in Australia around the time my younger sister was born. Whether my sense of this Oma is affected by my younger sister’s arrival and losing my position as baby, or whether it arose from a sense my mother did not enjoy the warmth of her mother’s company as she might have wanted, I cannot say. 

‘You have your Oma’s eyes,’ my mother said to me. And it scared me. I studied the black and white photos of my Oma and examined her eyes, including her photo from later years when her eyes are sunken. They have an inscrutable look, as if underneath there are secrets never able to be plumbed.

As I have written elsewhere, my Oma suffered from scruples. No amount of absolution from a priest could ever relieve her of her sins.

To be the first-born daughter of such a woman must have overloaded my mother with her own scruples, though my mother coped by a level of optimism and denial that surpasses my own.

My mother tried to look on the bright side. She tried to see good in most things even as she was hypercritical of deviations from what she considered acceptable behaviour. Despite my father’s obvious failures. She forgave him fast because he had suffered as a child and children who suffer can grow into troubled souls demanding our empathy. 

A weird mixture of one who tolerates the intolerable and at the same time is hypercritical of small misdemeanours especially those of thought, her own especially.

For instance, she could not bear that she disliked my Aunt. You could tell simply by the way she spoke about her. The way she believed my aunt was too strict with her children and cared too much about keeping a tidy house. But mostly by the way my aunt gave up her religion and was critical of her husband’s ongoing Catholicism. 

Our aunt suffered in Indonesia; my mother told us. She once watched a Japanese soldier hack one of her brothers to death, but she was a hard woman, or so my mother believed. Her brother was too good for her. Never once could my mother admit to disliking her sister-in-law.

It’s wrong to hate. It’s wrong to hold anyone in disdain. We must love people as much as is humanly possible and for the rest bury those feelings. Refuse to let them show. 

No wonder my feelings for my mother, like most women’s feelings for their mothers, run deep like an axe. They cut.