‘You make peace by talking to your enemies’, or so the saying goes. To overcome your conflict, you must address them with those who hold the differences. It links to what Sebastian Smee reflects as ‘the morally troubled relationship between the stories we tell and the lives we lead, or are led by.’
These words in an essay exploring the divide between Alice Munro and her daughter Andrea, who was sexually abused as an eight-year-old by the man Alice brought into their lives. A man who treated both badly, while the child copped the greatest fall out and the mother wrote award winning stories about relationships, between troubled children, women and men.
If parents are our moral compass at least in childhood before we’re old enough to grasp the significance of our own set of rules for how to love, then they too can lead us astray. The hypocrisy we endure daily within ourselves and beyond.
I miss my correspondence with Gerald Murnane who sacked me two years ago. The way I could write to him when all else failed. And another friend now to whom I sometimes write. But both these once beloved people have shifted in my esteem and I in theirs. For years we wrote to one another but over time those differences sprang up like weeds choking our otherwise lively correspondence. Both finding me too different from them, as I have found them. In our politics, our sensibilities, our world views.
Gerald Murnane sacked me after he wrote me his last letter. We belong to different tribes, he wrote. And my other friend has suggested instead of our reliable and consistent Sunday stories, consistent at least from my end, hers were peripatetic, we write when the urge hits us.
And this is what has happened it seems for her. For me the urge to write hits often and I have sent several missives her way, but she takes so long to reply, if at all, that I’m left wondering whether I’m writing to a ghost.
I have written about letter writing in the past. The way my mother wrote letters to those who lived on the other side of the world, her beloved father, siblings and cousins whom she left behind when she migrated to Australia. And then when her children reached adulthood and left home, even as we could visit one another in person, she took to writing letters to us.
My mother wrote to me whenever there was conflict between us and whenever she was avoiding it. She did not like my moral compass after I left her care and her church. She did not like my attraction to psychoanalysis. A heathen practice she considered dangerous following on from her limited understanding of Freud and his take on sexuality. Or her version thereof.
She did not relish my promiscuous ways in my early twenties before I met the man I married. She did not like me ‘living in sin; with my first ever boyfriend. She did not like my attitude to all things modern and contemporary in the world, my profligate tastes in music and clothes and people.
She wished she could have the same impact on me as a young adult as she held over me as a child. And how I wish in some ways I could have gone on loving her in that same unadulterated way as when I was a child. When my mother was my sun and moon and stars and basically she could do no wrong. She was my best ally. The person whose attitudes and ideas stood for me as representative of the best person in the world, until she was not.
It crept up gradually reinforced when I fell in love with my favourite teacher in secondary school. A nun and as repressed I imagine as my inhibited mother, but a woman of the world in my convent. At least she had a deeper understanding than the other nuns who taught us and I came to see her as the one person in the world for whom my heart beat fast until I fell foul of her.
Two reasons: one she befriended my younger sister who turned to her even more than me, and two, I went to university where I encountered my first taste of the opposite sex. No longer for me any desires to enter a convent and spend my life chaste and without desire. I began to recognise something of the carnal pleasures of closeness to boys and men and I could not go back to my convent ways.
Then my desires flipped in the direction of my first serious boyfriend, his seeming unattainability that morphed into a steady relationship for four years. With him I lived in sin much to my mother’s horror but my love for him paled over time after I began to work as a social worker in Prince Henry’s hospital and he began to pursue a proper career beyond gambling. I had planned to support his education after he had supported mine, but by the time I entered the world of work and met other people from other walks of life I shifted my allegiances.
I can see a pattern here.
Every time I moved places in my life, I met other people and my original connections faded. No wonder I prefer to stay put. It’s safer. Though over the decades as much as I have lived in this same house since 1980 and stayed married to the same man I married three years earlier, I have strayed and others in my world have strayed. Friends who were once close have drifted away or I drifted from them. Friends I met through my work come and go. Though there are a few who last the test of time though none since my childhood in adulthood except my husband who entered my life when I was 23. And my children. Family my siblings. These are the people who stay in my life however much distance might come between us. We never entirely drop out of ne another’s lives. We never entirely fade from one another.
For such is the nature of life and love and friendship. At least in my life. I’m always in search of deeper connections. But I’ve yet to learn how to negotiate my way through the morass of these gnarly differences that invariably creep into all our relationships over time. How to talk to my enemies, rather than take them on.
