‘The sinister pedantry of therapy. Its suggestion that somehow life was reparable. That here existed a societal norm and that the patient was being guided towards it.’ Hanya Yanagihara.
Elsewhere Yanagihara writes about ‘the still life of a dead family’. Grim thoughts with which to begin my day.
I disagree with the first notion. Therapy as repair. Therapy as conformity. My version runs more long the lines of Freud’s initial suggestion: Therapy might help a person move from overwhelming misery in life to more bearable misery.
It’s a modest claim, even as Freud, the man, seemed anything but modest, to me at least. He had his grandiosities.
Don’t we all. Our determinations. Our hopes and dreams.
As for the dead family in still life, I can picture such a family. The family that lives on the surface while underneath all manner of brutality occurs, particularly to the children. And their root system rots.
Wounds on trees
Where branches have been torn off in storms or fallen under the woodchopper’s axe. Wounds that leak sap as an antidote to bleeding. Some type of coagulation of the inner sap to help such amputations to heal. Into burls.
A wood turner’s delight. All those veined synapses in the wood. Tree branches as arms to support the leaves and stabilize the root system underground. A tree without branches has little chance of growth.
A memory slips in. During my twenty third year I rented a flat, one of two, within a rambling singe storey dwelling on Burke Road in Camberwell. At the top of the hill close by Canterbury Road and St Marks Anglican church. A solid brick residence stuccoed in battleship grey behind a broad front garden of grass and woody plants, including a spreading jacaranda which shielded the house from the street.
Inside was dark and needed lights on all year round. Two bedrooms to one side, in one of which we slept. The room closest to the back with a wide window and wardrobe space and the other smaller, closer to the front but with the tiniest windows. We used it mainly for storage.
The kitchen through which you entered by the back door was pokey with a small stove, room for a fridge and few cupboards almost no bench space to speak of more like a boat galley and around the corner a spacious loungeroom with the one wide window in the house.
Even so it too was gloomy given the overhanging trees lining the front garden. There was also a pond void of fish but replete with water weeds.
My memories of this place, even at the height of summer when the equinox blazed brightly were of inner darkness. There was a narrow gravel driveway to one side where I parked my white VW and my husband-to-be his blue Renault. And a garage that was locked.
Just as well it would have been a nuisance to open those clanking doors, where the once grey paint peeled to reveal the bare grey of aged boards. This garage was an aberration.
We lived in this flat over a year before the landlord sent us a letter, via the agent, to tell us they were about to sell and we needed to move out.
Memories are piling in now thick and fast.
The first when I was in the front garden one day in the weeks before our decision to marry when I thought of visiting my mother. Only I felt no desire to do so. My father was still alive. He had stopped drinking and he and my mother lived in quiet contentment, or seemingly so.
My father had started back at the church and shared in bible study with my mother.
The idea made me cringe. But it was better than drunken abuse. Still, there’s not much worse than a reformed alcoholic, one who has found God.
Not that my father espoused the virtues of God. He kept his religious views to himself. I’ll never know whether my mother put pressure on him to re-cement her faith or his. He had become a Catholic some forty years earlier to marry her. No mixed marriages allowed. And then, soon after his death when my mother chose to marry another man who came into her life, she urged him to renew his Catholic vows.
To be close to my mother, it seemed, you needed to believe.
I could not believe. Not as I once held fast to those ideas when a child. My faith was rotten. Eaten out by my late adolescent conviction it was all poppycock. It made little sense and kept us in thrall to a God – if he did indeed exist – who seemed capricious at best, cruel at worst. Life to me was more complex than religion suggested.
The thought my mother might be hurt if I did not visit that weekend as I had promised. But the thought of visiting hit me hard, and in the end I made some feeble excuse as to why we could not come.
It set in train a process of thought in my mind about a sensation I had experienced all my life. The sense I needed to look after my mother. That she relied on me to make her happy. That she was deeply unhappy despite her religion and only I could rectify her sorrow.
After I left home this thought softened as we were separate at last but every so often it rose and grabbed me by the neck. A choking sensation as if I had let her down and she would be devastated at the loss of my allegiance.
I understood she was upset at my abandonment of religion but as with most things we did not talk about it.
The thing I remember most clearly about my relationship with my mother throughout our shared adulthood, we rarely, if ever, talked. Only once, after I sent her a piece of my writing which I had called Night Terrors.
I sent it to her through snail mail. She rang me soon after and suggested we talk.
She was married by then to her second husband and seemingly happier than she had ever been when married to my father. So, we arranged I should visit one lunch time. We could talk after we ate, once my stepfather had gone off for his usual afternoon nap. My mother did not want him to join the conversation. She did not want him to know.
The lunch was cordial, and we talked of the usual nothings, only after Gordon closed the door behind him did I feel the relief of finally letting my mother know something of my childhood experience and she in her turn acknowledging,
‘The things your father did to me’. She did not elaborate and to this day, I’m still guessing.