Tag: shame

You sweep ideas from the floor like so much left-over rubbish.

 

As part of training, we made weekend trips interstate and met with other candidates in Sydney and from Adelaide. We flew to Sydney on the Saturday morning and arrived home late Sunday. 

On one such return my husband met me at the airport bustling with weekend returnees, each shop bright and shining like the cosmetics counter at Myer. It’s a joke in my family. I do like travel, to go too far from home for too long but the smell and bustle of airports thrills me with an indescribable longing. It is enough for me to drive to the airport and hang about with people who are queuing up to leave or to wait in the arrivals lounge for international travellers and watch as weary people emerge through the sliding doors of customs loaded with cases and pushing heavy trolleys and scanning the crowd for a loved one or anyone they might recognise to ferry them home. 

It’s always home I imagine, though many people arrive here for holidays. The holidays makers are obvious and don’t attract my attention the way family reunions release tears from the back of my eyes. 

It must have to do with those early visits to Essendon airport when I was a child. The silver plane taxied onto the tarmac, and we watched from inside as travellers straggled along the tarmac. Among them my grandfather, my aunt and her new husband, her children. Another uncle who had spent years first in the Belgian Congo then in Indonesia on rubber plantations. They arrived in Australia for six weeks once every few years and created an atmosphere of such joy, especially for my mother.

 I associated their arrival with aeroplanes and airports. Equally the day they left and returned home and my mother’s abjection, especially when her father flew off that last time, and she knew she would never see him again. 

Airports are like this, replete with human triumphs of connection and despair. The despair that comes of loss and disconnection. 

We had been to Sydney for a weekend of seminars and while there my husband rang to tell me one of our colleagues told us her husband had reported her children had picked up lice at school. 

In the arrivals lounge people milled around. Her daughter ran to hug her, but she pushed her aside. How heartless to treat her daughter as though she had leprosy and could not be touched. 

A week later we discovered our daughters also had lice. A common enough occurrence in the transition between winter and summer and its reverse. The nit nurse arrived at school to check the heads of girls to make sure each child’s parents complied with the protocol of nit removal. 

Kp7, a foul-smelling petroleum-based lotion to fumigate the head, left on for ten minutes, a good rinse out then the arduous comb through with a fine-tooth metal nit comb. Under a bright light to avoid missing any. 

We hated the process, parents, and children alike, but it became routine. One I described to my analyst Mrs Milanova in a session the following week. It was a Monday after a weekend of nit removal which I told her about in detail. 

The next day I came and saw she had put an extra pillowcase on top of the pillow where I usually rested my head.

I was incensed. Didn’t she know I had treated my hair and my husband’s hair along with our children’s as we were advised? Didn’t she know my husband had checked my hair and I his to be sure neither had nits? Didn’t she know I was vigilant and continually assessing the state of my daughters’ hair to be sure they were free of nits? And here she was treating me as though I might have them.

‘It’s a precaution,’ she said, after I objected to the extra pillowcase. And I knew she was thinking of the others, the ones who came before and after me and I hated her for it. I hated them for it. I wanted to be the only one, or at least not to be reminded so blatantly that I was the infected one, the one she needed to protect others from. 

In retrospect I can see the overreaction of my feelings. But my sensitivity to anything coming my way from Mrs Milanova’s words or hands left me prone to fits of shame so vast, you could fill a room.  Nits were nothing. 

The sorrow of failing to give our first peoples a voice, and the art of Boxing

On this sad day on which many of the people with whom I live in this vast country Australia have decided against giving a voice in parliament to our indigenous people, my cheeks are flush with shame. 

Yesterday as I took my place in the queue outside our polling booth noticed a man whom I have often run across in the dog park. A friendly man with a Jack Russell with whom my daughter and I compare notes as we wander around Fritz Holzer Park together. A man around my age, maybe a few years younger, who looks to be retired as he walks during the day on weekdays and has plenty of time to chat with the locals. 

There he was unashamedly advocating for people to vote against the voice for indigenous people and shutters went down on him in my estimation. I will never look at him in the same way. I will never be fooled by his ostensible kindness. I will never look upon him as a friendly person. He has dropped in my esteem, and I can’t see him clawing his way back. 

Not that he would try. Not that I would expect him to. I will not speak to him of my disappointment. No point. But I’ll not spend many minutes chatting with him in the dog park, however civil I might be. 

And much as I’m appalled at my sudden dislike of this man for his conservative and to my mind narrow politics I am appalled at how quickly I can lose esteem for another person. This is the stuff of the polarising effect of politics. The way government decisions can estrange tribes of people and make us enemies of one another. 

I’m as bad as the next person.

It was easier when I was little before politics entered my mind, though I knew my parents were concerned about issues like getting government aid to Catholic schools. I did not understand when they joined the Democratic Labour Party, the DLP, a conservative group that broke off from the Labor Party in 1955 to form its own tribe, largely with the support of anti-communist Catholics. Mainly because of the demands of their religion to get help to fund their schools. And from fear. The DLP has little traction these days, but my parents once admired them. 

The DLP was led by the formidable Bob Santamaria, a conservative self-seeking autocrat if ever there was one. But how were my parents to know? I did not participate in politics until the 1970s when the It’s Time slogan hit our airwaves and Labor rose to ascendance at last after more than two decades of Liberal party rule. My first taste of the joy of your party succeeding with all those hopes for a better future. 

The cyclical push and pull of life. The way political parties, if they do not take over as dictatorships can swing from right to left, from progressive to conservative over a decade all based on how they’re perceived to perform by most people who pitch their own vested interests against one another. 

I wore fuchsia coloured gym pants, close fitting, a type I have not worn before to my first day in a gym. I chose them from a variety of gym clothes not only for their bright colour but also because the young woman at the Bonds store who was helping me suggested they’d be right for the occasion. 

The occasion being my first ever in a series of classes I will attend over the next eight weeks called Left Write Hook, where I will learn the art of boxing and also have an opportunity to share my story with a group of other women, all of us carrying around a sack full of trauma from our pasts, some sacks heavier than others, but all of us suffering a type of disconnect from our bodies, which we developed as a way of coping when we were small. 

Yesterday, after we first met one another and shared snippets of our stories in an initial warm up we had time to write to various prompts. Short moments of writing, for four minutes only, and then we shared our writing if we were comfortable after which Maryanne our boxing teacher took us through our paces. 

A remarkable process whereby the shift from head and mind to body was palpable. When you learn to box, when you learn to raise your fits, well-padded in readiness for the gloves into fight position to protect your face, and you enter a different zone. It took me a while to adjust to the various movements: jab, cross, hook and upper cuts. To me a new language for ancient movements from decades gone by enjoyed by men but now anyone can try. 

I had thought it might be good for me. I had no idea how good. The business of doing something together with a bunch of strangers, all of us relatively new to the activity, all of us rusty except for our teacher and facilitator, and all of us bonding in a way that went beyond my expectations. 

Although I felt I had no right to be there given I had topped the age limit they recommend, I chose to put myself out there in my fuchsia leggings so that I might grow stronger in my body and not simply in my mind.

On this sad day when the Australian people have failed our first nations people in the most contemptible of ways, by failing to give them a voice, I have begun to find another voice, not one that comes from my throat, tongue and mouth, but the unspoken voice of movement. The voice of my arms able at last to express some of the feelings inside packed tight and let them fly.

They clinched it with this one. This bringing together of people with shared experiences of disempowerment as children and as women and aligned their experiences with an opportunity to share our voices, written and spoken and then to take our place on the floor, two or three centred around the vast black bags which we punch, those bags, the opposition of our lives. 

For the first time we can give voice and fists to all the inner energy pent up inside, and we do so at own pace. Swear, curse, and breathe. All in one as we make our way out of stiff frozen bodies into a state of movement that allows for growth.