Tag: friendship

The guilty child

‘Oh what can ail thee knight at arms

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake 

And no birds sing.’ John Keats

Not exactly how I’m feeling this morning, but it’s strangely soothing to rattle these lines from Keats’s poem to my husband when he looks forlorn.

Against other joyous times when he and I belt out the words from a childhood hymn: 

Hail Queen of Heaven, the ocean star

Guide of the wanderer here below

Thrown on life’s surge, we crave they care

Save us from peril and from woe

Mother of Christ, Star of the Sea

Pray for the wanderer pray for me.

Elsewhere the invocation is to pray for the sinner.

No wonder we were raised on unhealthy doses, or perhaps to some a healthy dose, of guilt.

The guilt of a child who learns too early the nature of sin.

Galit Atlas writes about the guilty child as the ‘part of us that believes every bad and painful thing that happened was our fault.’

Even your thoughts, in my case, any thoughts pertaining to my naked body. The strange sensation I felt poring over the pictures of naked women in my father’s art books.

When you’re raised on a diet of the unspeakable, without even knowing why such sensations are so, not only unspeakable, but also unsayable, you learn to censor yourself. 

Atlas again, ‘As guilty children we live with a particular type of magical thinking, the illusion that our feelings, wishes or thoughts are wrong…’

Not only did I struggle against those impure thoughts, which were so diabolical I could not even bring myself to tell the priest for fear he might ask me to spell them out. 

‘What thoughts, my child?  He might ask from the shadows of his seat in the tall confessional and I’d be obliged to tug out words from my limited vocabulary for things I knew were forbidden because they involved the naked women’s bodies in my father’s art books, not to say anything about the thing I imagined sat nestled behind fig leaves painted in those same books.

If I saw a banana peel shed by some careless person on the pavement, I went into overdrive. Even as I cast the peel into the gutter out of harm’s way, I still imagined a hapless passer by treading on the peel and slipping their way into the orthopaedic wing of a hospital with broken legs, arms and spine. And it was all my fault.

Thoughts like this plagued me as a child, especially when I learned the facts of original sin, the one we’re born with from the get-go. 

Years later, when I first read Melanie Klein’s ideas following on from Freud writing about an innate sense of envy, I railed against the idea. As if a baby can be born with anything other than their small body, immature brain and need for love and care to survive. Why saddle babies with the heavy burden of our adult projections?

All this speculation on the intricacies of our internal worlds, allegedly based on long spells of adult observations during long hours talking to small children and even non-verbal children, and trying to figure out their ways of viewing the world.

When you’re little, you tend to take it all seriously in each moment, even when those moments slip away fast. 

The conceit of time can seem evasive, as if every single moment is a moment forever.

This morning preparing my breakfast, chopped up pear, kiwi fruit and blue berries in yoghurt with multiple cups of tea, I reflected on old friends, one in particular, a well-known Australian writer who prefers not to be referenced in my writing, which to my mind defeats the purpose of writing, as it deletes a salient detail that makes a difference to the reader. Anyhow out of deference, only to say she is an award-winning Australian writer a decade at least younger than me and an all-round lovely person. Everyone loves her. 

When I first encountered this friend mid PhD at La Trobe, she and I spent time together talking over all things literary and family, life and the rest. She, too, was interested in the psychoanalytic world and so we found we had things in common.

I was excited to be among the audience at one of the Melbourne writers’ festivals many years ago when she was presenting ideas on her first brilliantly received novel. I sat in the front as I’m inclined to do for better hearing and because if I’m going to go to the trouble of attending a talk, I prefer to be close to the speakers to maximise my engagement. 

Not for me hovering and hiding in the back rows. Though I did this often when studying my undergrad at university in my late teens, early twenties. When I lacked all confidence in my capacity to have a brain. 

Anyhow my friend introduced me to her husband and not for the first time. Was it she who later told me, or did I overhear him describing me as one of her groupies? I thought of the comment as more a reflection of him. His jealously perhaps that his small and quiet wife was starring on stage still his comment hit a nerve, one that has stung ever since.

It marred my sense of connection to my friend. As though I was a hanger on, a mere acolyte, one who was not worthy of her company. And over the years as her fame within the literary world has risen, and mine has staggered along hidden in the shadows I have tried less often to keep up contact. Though from time to time, we still might meet.

Much water under the bridge as the saying goes. Our worlds no longer collide as fiercely though I wish they did. I miss those early days of friendship.

What is it with friendship? Why does it fade? For me at least. So many once close friends slipping from my life, unable to withstand the rigours of intense connection.

And of course, true to that guilty child within, I imagine it to be my fault. 

I must have done something to push them away, even as oftentimes my friendships have faded because of conflict, sometimes instigated by me, other times by them. And conflict needs to be survivable if our connections are to continue, not as sycophantic small children constantly trying to make up for our guilt at all that wrongdoing, but recognising each one of us as unique individuals, connected by our common shared humanity. 

And with some special folks, at least special to us, we might include the added bond of close connection.

To me it’s the stuff of life.  

The frailty of friendship

When she sent me the email, I thought I could die. Her words so simple on the page were full of poison.

‘You were mistaken,’ she wrote, ‘to think I had not received your email. You were mistaken. I have simply chosen to ignore it.’

I sat at the keyboard frozen. I had tried to reach out across the gulf of oceans, across the gulf of skies, to make contact yet again, after two years of silence and all she wanted to say to me was ‘Go away’.

You’re not wanted in my life. You’re not welcome.

I had found the eggshell by the side of the road on the small strip of grass called the nature strip. Someone must have mowed it recently but they had not done a good enough job. Bits of grass sprouted at the edge by the gutter, like a badly cut hairdo. Long weeds stuck out from under the sprawling ti-tree in the middle. The ti-tree had grown in that straggly ungainly way of trees when they are close to the sea.

I found the shell on the grass between the ti-tree and the gutter. It was pale blue and speckled in green. Its edge was crusted with the egg yolk yellow of the embryo that once must have been tucked inside.

I do not know what made me pick it up. Some sense of its fragility, its beauty, its connection to the earth. Instinctively I took it to my nose. It smelt the way a stone smells when you breathe on it. It carried the smell of wind and rain, the grassy smell of a hot day after a heavy soak.

I stroked its smoothness. A tiny bit crumbled from the edge and fell to the ground. I would keep the shell, I decided then, as a souvenir of her.

A souvenir of the day I last saw her, the last time she held my hand.

‘You can’t just leave like that,’ I had said. ‘You can’t just go.’

‘I must,’ she said. ‘My mother is dying. But I’ll be back.’

That’s what she said then. She said it, I heard her words loud and clear. I heard her make the promise.

‘I’ll be back. Soon,’ she said. ‘I swear. Besides I have to be back for the next exhibition. I have too much at stake.’

At first she wrote me long loving letters, on purple notepaper in her fine spidery scrawl.

My mother is up and down, she wrote. She’s frail. Not long now.

I was understanding then.

What daughter could leave her mother to die alone? I was understanding then that I must be patient. I had cradled my eggshell in a piece of tissue paper in an old soapbox in the bottom of my study drawer.

From time to time I looked at it, as I look at it now. It was fading fast. The hard shell around the thin milky inner skin had come away. My half shell had become a quarter. Soon it would be fragments.

A year ago she sent a note and inside enclosed a card containing all the details of her mother’s life and death.

Her letters came fewer and further between, their content thinned to a list of her activities, those she had seen, what she had done.

No longer did she share with me the inner workings of her mind.

I thought of her often. Every time a new exhibition opened at the gallery, I wondered why she had not comeback to exhibit her work, why she had decided that Germany could offer so much more to her than here with me.

I looked up her name on the Internet, nestled in among the names of other print makers. I found her alongside the famous, Monique Gilbre, Antonia Boudin, and knew then I had lost her.

There was an email address at the foot of the page alongside her name and a copy of the details of her latest exhibition.

It would be easy to reach her.

Letters are slow, I thought.

Letters lose their passion, letters cannot convey the urgency of my need for her, but an email. A message now shot from the heart. A call that could cross the ether, that would bring her back to me, would bring a message back to me.

I waited a month, a month maybe two. But I did not hear.

What could this mean? It must be a wrong address, a changed address. The university where she worked had a website and again I found her name with a new address. I sent her another email, a last arrow into the darkness, my last call.

And then her reply.

I was mistaken to think she still cared.

Here now, I peel the eggshell from its tissue.

I crush it inside the hollow of my hand. I rub the powdered grit into the small of my hand, one hand on the other, rubbing and rubbing until all trace of the shell has gone, pulverised, like the image of my friend, then I press the delete button.