Sunny Day

Today is a sunny day in Perth. The grass in my front yard is drying out. It is a sparse array of long and spindly grass heads. The place looks neglected. Out the back weeds are growing between the paving stones. A breeze is buffeting one leafy tree. My clothesline is beginning to be engulfed by the new growth of this tree. I don't have the mental energy to tackle the task of pruning or cutting, sorting, or any household clearing. I'm worn out. Just being here for my children is all I can muster the energy for. Inside I'm parched of love. I need of a kind word, a pat on the back, some loving understanding, a friend. That particular luxury is not going to come my way I don't think. I must keep trudging forward though. Each step is a test of endurance.
I'm at home again by myself and like it that way, sheltered from the unintentional blows of indifference, unkindness and malicious gossip. My car is in for a service.
I'm wounded, hurting. My boyfriend rings up with a whole new mouthful of lies about who he has recently been overseas with and who he is now with interstate, and expects me to believe him. He knows that I know what he says are lies. Yet I'm supposed to accept lies.
Is this a good thing? If I could feel less bound to my mothering role, I'd do something about it by actively going out and finding another lover. As it is I don't want to desert the home. His dissatisfaction at the amount of time I can give him makes him moody, yet he declines to discuss how we can make more time to be together. He wants me in his home, control over my home and my money, and no kids. This seems very unfair from my personal point of view.
So he's making do with my girlfriend, though I don't think he loves her. But if he works under the assumption that I will accept anything given time, he is wrong. I'm not going to get used to the idea that he has two women. Nor will I be one of the women. It's only because I'm in my self-inflicted trap and he is my only chance of affection from someone I know, right now when he gets back, that I'm giving him head space at all. Once I'm freer on the weekends again I'll be able to go out and meet someone else.
I don't accept that he can have two women. I will not live with that. When he rings next week I'll tell him so. He'll deny that he has had anything to do with my girlfriend, and say that it is all in my head and I should get counselling. That is when I'll have to break it off with him. I am convinced I feel love for him though. I understand and like the way he is. Though he seems very influenced by his close family who don't love me. Some of his nasty strategies regarding bullying and intimidation, getting me to abandon mothering in favour of him, come from his family I feel. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe he really is that selfishly monstrous spoilt child, destructively driving to have what he wants at the expense of others.
My 'ex' friends all know. I sense my exclusion, but because I'm used to that, put it down to being 'their problem'. Now I realise that some of those friends had been getting together socially with my ex-girlfriend and ex-boyfriend even though I was not aware that we had 'broken up', and certainly we weren't 'broken up' in the bedroom three or so times a week.

I'm attractive, intelligent, kind, responsible, aware, selfless in the face of duty to my offspring. Many people don't value or understand these traits. No friends understand me. New friends who seek to, I back away from. "Come along to tennis open day." says one girl who I admire. She is married with kids, active in clubs and around school. I'm flattered and honoured and say I'll try. Don't think I can do it, too sick at heart, too used to being at home in case someone needs something. I'm too afraid to get out there and be a part of a club, be normal. Not only that, I love tennis but the self-discipline I need to make me go, is lacking.
Deep inside I'm still that neglected little girl who never knew guidelines, boundaries, encouragement or approval. Inside if a could just be the person I have outwardly become, I wouldn't be the enigma and disappointment to so many who would befriend me. Perhaps people view me with suspicion when I don't open up and join in with things.
Actually, all that is not quite true. I have been active in canteen at school and committees to organise events for children. I was once in a book club, a karaoke singing group. I'm not an outcast. I swim and walk. Tennis, I'd always have to stop to wipe my running nose. I'd get puffed too easily. I've only had a few lessons and then played with the children. So in actual fact, tennis is not really for me.
What is true is that I'm worn out emotionally. I can't find the energy to get out and try any more. The betrayals of friends, the nasty social dishonesty and jealousy of people or of their childrens achievements, have slain me. I give up due to lack of strength.
My major pride and joy is seeing and hearing the achievements of my children. One said to me that he feels happy when he is striving for something, and that always takes hard work, which caused him a moments unhappiness at the thought of all the hard work he puts in to get happy. That means he is always working hard, but not fanatically at either sport or his studies. He regulates himself under the watchful yet non-judgemental eye of me who is mostly always upbeat, silly and irrelevant. No wonder they seldom feel the need to be demonstrative. I know they love me. Sometimes I even get thanked for a meal, or the chocolate I bought for a treat.

Mopping

While mopping the kitchen floor today I thought of a friend I'd made when we lived in the Pilbara. We had babies not far apart, like about six months, her one came before mine, but before the babies arrived we would often spend time together.
She came from central Europe where she had run a ski chalet. Cleaning and cooking were her fortes, but she once ran over a flock of birds outide the flats because she didn't think she should slow down for them. You don't slow down for things, they must get out of a drivers way, she explained. Another thing, was that she used a great amount of salt in her cooking. Sometimes her rigidity bothered me, especially when she couldn't help but point out the flaws in my cleaning techniques. "Your home is dirty" she would tell me and grab a scourer from the sink to scrub a mark off the floor then put it back. She would catch a look of contempt on my face sometimes. I regret allowing her to see that. But one thing that I found unacceptable about her was putting floor germs onto the sink. She wasn't the sort of person I could argue with though. But if I only washed the floors every few weeks then it was my business, and I certainly didn't use the dishes scourers for the job.
Then in the bathroom today, I pictured her pointing to the toilet brush and saying "You haven't cleaned that, its obvious." We drifted apart over time. Rigid, proud yet free of arrogance and likable is how I fondly remember her. Pity I didn't learn more while I had the chance.

I like to keep my hands clean and I like to shower frequently. I can't bear stickiness on me or on surfaces. I really dislike that 'animal' smell people get when they haven't washed. My house sometimes smells when the kitty litter needs changing. All the ceiling fans need cleaning. I hardly ever wipe the walls or doors, or clean the windows. Papers build up on the table surfaces. I'm a slob maybe, and don't welcomc visitors because I don't like being judged on it.

My Story - Between months of hitchiking and working in out-of -the-way places I would be at home with Mum and Stephen in Newcastle. During those times I tried to be good to Stephen but ended up always screaming at him in frustration. Then I'd hate myself and remember that I was behaving just like the way Dad had always behaved towards us. He always acted like he hated us while Mum always acted like she felt sorry for us. In passing that is, because they were busy with their own lives. One thing we learnt from them was that you look after 'number one'.

My uterus was pointing backward. Perhaps I had never fallen pregnant because of that, apart from my periods only coming every few months. I had a funny discharge and was given four tablets to take and another four to give to the boyfriend who was fast drifting out of my life without me understanding why.
I had a drinking problem. Once a week I'd have to get drunk.
I met a guy. He asked my to marry him. I'd only known him a week. He'd stay at my mothers house sometimes, sleeping with me, but could never please me. The more he tried to the more I hated him. Mum liked him and would ask me why I treated him so badly. I didn't have an answer. He stopped coming by. I tried to hound him but he avoided me.

During that time with him I heard a voice in the night in my head that asked me if I wanted to get pregnant and have the baby adopted out. I said yes, if it would help. The guy had already gone when I discovered that I was pregnant. I so wanted to 'get him' that I went to a legal-aide lawyer, but nothing could be done.
Via outpatients, I was given the oportunity to visit with a psychaitrist. Every few weeks I flooded her office with tears. I'd go away broken, but I lived for those visits.
"There is something wrong with me" I told her. "I don't know what it is or even how to begin to fix it." The aching hurt, the shame at admitting that, brought out a lot of sobbing from me and she put the tissue box within reach.
"Maybe if the baby was a girl I'd consider keeping it, but I don't want to keep it."
"You have a lot of tears." She said, then continued.
"What will you do once the baby has been born and adopted out?"
"I might move back to Melbourne." I paused, "I might commit suicide." I said. It wasn't the first time I'd thought of it. I'd stood next to a seventh storey window wondering if I could make myself jump out. Only the memory of my love of sunday school in the Dandenong Ranges caused pause to think what a sin I'd be committing.
Going forward was beginning to look increasingly difficult though, I told the psychaitrist. I was afraid of reaching that place where I could no longer find a way to keep going. I'd been reading self-help books, travelling, trying to be different, to evolve, to learn the truth about myself and the world. But me was with me the whole time. I couldn't run away from me. I couldn't change because I didn't know how to.
I couldn't bring up a baby, I told her. I wouldn't know how. Nor could I take a pristine, beautiful baby into my mother's filthy environment.
She listens to me. I talk. I cry. She listens.
Then she says that after the baby is born maybe I'd like to engage in a course of psychotherapy. She has a student in need of a client.
This is my lifeline I realise. I can live and not die. She is saving me. So I say yes I would like that very much.
I keep seeing that wonderful woman right up until the baby is born. She even visits me in hospital. She asks me if it made a difference to me whether I had a boy or a girl once the baby was born. I told her no. I hadn't changed my mind.
I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. An ex-boyfirned and the current boyfriend I started going out with at six months pregnant both brought flowers. I re-assured the ex-boyfriend that he wasn't the father. My mother visited and tried to convince me to keep the baby, that she would look after the baby for two years then I could have her back. I couldn't send this poor baby away. Mum was feeling sorry for the baby. I lay down on the bed and turned my back on her.

I breastfed that baby in hospital for ten days because I wanted to give her anti-bodies and make sure she had the best start with mother's milk. I had her at feeding times and not before or in between. The thought of the baby screaming in the nursery for its mum didn't cross my mind.

I have to say that my next three babies were never allowed by me to cry. They cried and I picked them up and fed them or otherwise made them comfortable.

But back then, with that baby, I had no concept of the baby being a human being that I should give everything I can to to make her happy.

After ten days I left the hospital without the baby. My milk was in, and my boyfriend asked if I was alright when I suddenly broke down into tears because my breasts were sore, full and leaking and the baby wasn't getting the milk. My boyfriend always was quite aloof. He didn't expect much from my body. He left me alone unless a pushed myself onto him for sex. Then it was just that, no foreplay. I recovered quietly from the ordeal by myself.
I saw the baby again six weeks later and my mother nursed the baby through most of the interview until at the very end I took the baby from her for a short hug before giving her back. I believe she went to a good home and I'm so glad about that.

Holidays

Its school holidays in Perth. I'm going to a party tonight. yesterday a bought flowers and wine. some of the flowers are for me, and the wine too; My birthday and my friends birthday. I packaged up some soap and some cards, both made by me. I'm looking forward to tonight.

If my ex-boyfriend rings I should say " You and her are a match made in heaven. Here is my blessing."

I should say this and not be taunted by them being together and him denying it.
Anyway, I'll always be involved with my kids. I care about them and would run to them if they need me when they are grown-up. I like being with them, making sure they are ok.

Maybe I should consider life without a partner.



I have been cleaning. I picked up tips on how to clean from womens chat and books, since it wasn't done very much at home when I was growing up. I drizzle bleach around the rim of the toilet and onto the tiles in the bath/shower. The toilet is old and some brown stains never go away. I use bleach to clean the white lino of the kitchen floor. Then I mop it with water.

From one ex-boyfriend, of Greek descent, I learnt a really good way of doing the dishes. I put washing-up liquid onto a sponge, and using it I soap up all the plates and glasses and cutlery. Then I rinse them under hot water and fill the sink at the same time. Then I soak more dishes in there, rinse them under running water over the adjoining, smaller sink. Then I get sick of that job and leave the rest to soak until I make a cup of tea later, then I do a few more while the kettle is boiling.

The sink is always full of water gone cold with scum on the top and the smaller sink has dishes piled in that too, the plug hole is slimy with old food and the stainless steel is dull with grime.

I wash some dishes at least once a day, more times usually, but can never get to the end of it. If we have a party though, I clean up the place. The vents high up in a long wall facing the kitchen and lounge are very dark with dust. I must clean them if we ever have a party again.


We have an intantaneous , small gas heater outside the bathroom. I don't turn the kitchen taps on when someone is in the shower, or allow the washing machine to run. The cold or the hot water pressure can't cope with two outlets at once going.





My story - Back in my twenties, while working, I suffered from huge, chronic anxiety and never ending feelings of inadequacy. Going to work at any job I'd bluff out some confidence though. I would either verbally attack fellow workers, especially if they tried to 'boss' me, or I would keep very quiet and not relate with anyone. I would try to work to the best of my ability, even if my hands were shaking as I served people in a restaurant, and I'd quickly re-wash the sheets if I dropped them in the red sand of the outback. But I always took pride in the fact that I had a job. After a few months each time I'd move on. I'd always find another job in another town then plan my next move.

Holidays

Good

My story is good. I'm perfectly entitled to tell my story. If I'm arguing with myself well then that's ok. I need to write it. That is the truth.
My life is filled with good fortune. I have healthy kids who take me for granted but don't overstep. They know what I expect from them - to reach their full potential - if they keep striving they know I am here for them. I don't take my eyes off them. Childrearing being like tending a garden. You have to keep at it. Turn your head and the weeds are growing and the sappling trees without a stake for support bend, maybe even break. The potential for beautiful flowers gets choked away by nutrient sucking creepers.
I have a home and kids to nurture. I am blessed. I tell them I'm going to live to be one hundred and three. That is what I want to do because I would like to be around for them forever. The last thing I want to see is them being hurt by my passing.
I pray and pray all the time to be allowed to do that.
My periods have stopped. They do that when I'm underweight. When I get happy, like if I have a boyfriend and I have someone to dream about, I put weight back on and the periods come back. This time its different because I only have my ex-boyfriend to think about, and those thoughts are linked to the pain of his duplicity. Yet I understand. Only, what if it carries on once he gets back. What if he keeps seeing her while expecting to see me at the same time, when I'm free. That's going to cause me alot of anguish. Perhaps the whole thing will come to its natural conclusion, and I'll be able to move on, eventually.
I'm not eating much. I'm yearning and hiding my tears when we watch any movie that tugs on any of my emotions. Its school holidays so we've been watching movies on tv late into the night. My insides ache with a longing that I can't see what to do about.
My periods have stopped. But at my age, maybe they won't come back this time. Not that I have any other symptoms. Not alot of sex-drive, that could be a sign, or it could be that I've buried the drive for love. I really think it has waned though.
My story :- From age sixteen to age twenty-six I slept with many men. At first it just happened. Then I started saying no. I was a teaser sometimes, easy the next. With some men, I couldn't sleep with them. Something inside warned me that I had no understanding of their expectations of me. Others just knew how to take and then abandon me. Relationships never lasted more than about three months. I never cared for the person. They could never please me no matter what they did. On one occasion when I was taken out to dinner I hardly touched the food. On another I made myself puke in the bathroom after eating. My main aim was to save money and that miserly attitude overrode any considerations of the individual I was relating with at the time. I spent alot of time hitch-hiking, staying in youth hostels, getting hotel work or hospital work in remote places. A person threatened me with a knife but I didn't give in to him then the next night I all but gave in to a guy because I happened to be stuck in a hotel room with him. He let me stay with him after giving me a lift. I couldn't give in totally on account of having my period. He didn't ask for anything else. I never did anything else anyway, unless I was forced. Sometimes boyfriends insisted on other things. Sometimes they were smelly and I'd dry-retch. I drove all my boyfriends away with nastiness. The normal guys who were prepared to like me, I drove away. Not that I knew it at the time. At the time I'd feel the heartbreak and put it down to him being just another bastard. I travelled overseas and survived on my own, scrimping and hitchhiking. My goal was to go to every county. I knew how to save, how to be poor.
I came home to Newcastle for respite. Mum and Dad had split up. Dad stayed in the Dandenong Ranges house. They sold the Williamstown house and Mum bought a house in Newcastle. Stephen moved with her. Later Sebastion, my older brother moved from Melbourne too, to be closer to Mum. He was married with kids.
I moved home, and fought with Stephen for the best available bedroom in the house. I won. He had to sleep on the closed in verandah. The dog always barked. I don't think we kept its water bowl filled. It harassed the postman who reported the dog. I blamed Stephen for not keeping its bowl filled. Stephen didn't wash or change his clothes. Sometimes he soiled his pants and didn't care. His piano thumping grew less. Once he scared some chilren when they discovered him curled up under a bush during a local festival we went to.
He was diagnosed schizophrenic. As outpatient at Watt Street he was supposed to take medication. He was quiet and docile but Mum told me that when I was away once he threw a sugar basin at her that smashed against a wall.
I took him on a drive once, before one of his appointments. We drove along fire tracks in the mountains. The track wouldn't come to an end and eventually I had to turn around and drive back. I dropped him for his appointment half an hour late. He didn't complain or react.
My children are getting up so I can't keep writing. Time to cut up some fresh apple and banana and put out the bowls for cereal. I'll nibble on some leftover chips from last night and have a cup of tea. Maybe I should make some toast. Farewell for now.

Sunny

Sunny today. I've been into town. I'm tired and low on energy; tired of this blocked nose and the coughing. It's surprising how many steps one can walk up and down taking public transport; so many steps in railway stations. I visited two shops. They kindly take my cards on consignment. I swapped a few of the items over for fresh ones but came away without any money. That's because the right contacts weren't there. Yesterday I drove to two outlets and came home with seventy-five dollars. Three hours yesterday by car and three hours today by car, train and bus.

My ex-boyfriend has sent a message of love from Europe by sms, plus the international numbers prefixing his telephone number, saying his phone will collect the charge. I'm not going to ring him.
My Date from a few weeks back has disappeared into history. Nobody else is pursuing me. I have thoughts only for my ex-boyfriend.
What to do though. He'll eventually be back and maybe he'll never give up my girlfriend. Maybe he'll want to see her and see me too. That is not something I'll tolerate. I've told him so. If he dumps her I'm bound to hear about it. Surely she wouldn't give him up without a public fight. I just can't see how he could give her up and expect the details of his duplicity to stay hidden. That is why I think he can't give her up. If he can't give her up then I'll have to give him up.
Two years more in my mothering role. I can't hope to keep him. I understand his impatience. He wants to 'live'. My kids are not his kids. Maybe I shouldn't even bother trying to have a boyfriend or look forward to a future with someone.
All there is is sickness anyway. I'll just have reached a position when I have plenty of time on my hands, when the partner who has settled with me will start getting sick and I'll have to nurse him. When my time eventually comes to be free, I'll be stuck looking after someone and won't be able to travel.
I don't understand the love I feel for him. Nor do I trust it. Maybe its not love at all. He is not good for me. He drinks every day. I only drink when I'm with someone, out of nerves possibly. We talk alot and just sit around enjoying each others company. We go out to pubs and dance. He buys me dinner sometimes. I cook alot at his place. That was months ago now.
Of all the boyfriends I've had since the marriage broke up, he has lasted the longest.

Many boyfriends. But I've always gone into a relationship with the best of intentions. If I can sleep with a guy, I reason, then I'll sleep with him for the rest of my life. If I can't even start something then I let them know I'm not ready for a relationship. My mantra is 'kindness'. I shrivel at the thought of hurting anybody. There were many boyfriends before psychotherapy, there have been alot after my marriage broke up too. Not that I wanted it that way. My situation; three young children and me boasting about how I'm so proud to be able to devote my life to them. No man wants to hear it. Then, the army of married men looking for regular mistresses or regular 'one night stands', knowing just how to take advantage of lonely, deserted mothers. They say soothing words, lies, anything to start something up that doesn't go beyond the next day.
The constant rejection, the pain of being dumped and deceived, that I thought had been left behind in my youth, is a constant companion. I'm getting dumped, deceived, used, for reasons other than being a 'sitting duck'. Atleast I don't do it back. I take it, stick to my ideals. I know what is important; doing my duty to my kids, and being kind. I don't find life easy though, that constant rejection. I get knocked over and I get up and try again, to get rejected after a few months or a night. I never give up hope though, just get a bit sad sometimes.

Boring Story

It all seems so boring now, my story. Thank you for reading whatever I'm writing, whoever reads. Does it really matter that this forum is public? What can anybody do to me? Should I be afraid of anything? I am anonymous aren't I? The worst I see happening is me boring any would-be readers away to a more interesting blog.
I have millipedes curled up on my walls. When they fall to the floor and I accidentally stand on them they crunch. One cat is curled up on the washing in the backroom. The garden is a jungle. Washing needs hanging out. It is a drizzly day in Perth.

OK. back to my story. I bare my all to a computer screen, confident in the hope that nobody knows who I am.
I was with my brother Stephen in the back of a postal collection van and had wet my pants. That spoiled our trip around with our father on his shift.
Dad collected me from a musical at school in that van, and he must have had the job for years because he gave me a lift home from a nursing job many years later in it as well.
He wasn't a member of the communist party in Melbourne, as far as I know. That didn't stop him from maintaining his strong views on subjects like 'the moneyless society' and black holes. Every waking hour was spent arguing his point. He was always right and seemed to pick on us constantly for our views so he could argue us down. The newspapers were treated to a constant supply of letters to the editor. Once he was invited to defend his stance on communism on a radio show. He declined, telling us that he was probably being 'set-up'.
Dad retired at around sixty. He and Mum lived in the Williamstown house. They sold the Box Hill house to pay out the Williamstown house loan. Dad kept the Dandenong Ranges house because it was his War Service home. Which meant that the loan repayments were at a very low interest rate.
For a while his Mum, my Grandma lived with them until Mum couldn't take Grandma waiting for her at the front gate, watching her walk up the street from the train station after work.
Grandma moved on to another relatives home.
Mum and Dad towed a caravan to Western Australia. they visited my half-brother Jason in the north-west town of Dampier, and were gone a couple of months.
Stephen and I smoked a lot of dope while they were away.
Jason had married a Singaporean woman. They lived in a flat. She wanted Jason to help her daughter get citizenship in Australia. Jason insisted that the daughter should just 'disappear' when she come over, and that they don't need him to help her. The marriage broke up eventually and his wife went back to live in Singapore.
Mum and Dad came back to Melbourne and hosted three hitch-hikers they had collected along the way. Stephen and I felt even more neglected when these two men and a woman came into the house and all we wanted was some parenting, even at our late ages of about seventeen and nineteen. Poor Stephen. I was always mad at him. I would work and he wouldn't. I cook a meal and he wouldn't eat it. "What is this anyway?" He'd say, pointing at the food.
I'd fly into a fury and seek out passages of the bible that he should read so to understand the error of his ways.
Our dog was always staring at me and I thought that even the dog wanted to have sex with me. Everyone else did, so why not the dog. Not Stephen of course. The dog probably just wanted a drink of water and some food. Stephen, also had normal urges I'm sure, because a number of years later he was reported and the police came to the house. Apparently he had been exposing himself to female passersby, inside the front screen door. But they could see what he was doing.

While Mum and Dad were away, every day Stephen would pound furiously on the piano for hours on end, tuneless raging notes, slamming the keys. I could hardly bare it. then the hictch-hikers were in the house and then living in the caravan now returned to the side driveway. One of the guys made a move on me which I rebuffed because they were in our home and I didn't like it. Mum had to find them somewhere to live to get them off our property. She paid the bond money and helped them move into their own flat. We didn't see them again after that.

Stephen left school early for an apprenticeship in the painting trade. We were living at the Box Hill house. He would try to wash his overalls in the copper in our rickety, weatherboard laundry shed. He also bleached some new Lee jeans there and ended up burning holes in them. I think that he stopped turning up for work which is why he lost that apprenticship. Nobody helped him or looked after him. He didn't have the capacity for doing his own washing, getting himself up and there on time.
After Mum and Dad came back from Western Australia, Stephen went to Tasmania. He lived for months in Youth hostels and came back with a wide-eyed girlfriend who stayed at our house for a week or so. She maintained that Stephen was just a 'friend'. When she moved on we never saw her again.
I would drag Stephen along to my favourite pubs on my times off even if he didn't want to go. He could hardly withstand my vicious onslaughts and so would give in to me. He was known and accepted by my nursing friends.
My sexual encounters happened and weren't repeated with the same person most of the time. I didn't want to be used so wouldn't let the same person use me again. I also thought that maybe I was using myself, that maybe I could salvage some pride by telling myslef that I was notching up a tally that I could be proud of.
One evening coming home from work I met a decent young man and invited him home to my bedroom. It was late and my parents were in the room across the hall.
We had sex and when it was over I told him to get out. "Get out" I said in my nastiest style.
He pleaded with me "Give me another chance!"
Cold and icelike I repeated "Get out." I followed him to the front door and slammed it on his back.
Soon after that I came into my room during the day and Dad was lounging on my bed, hands behind his head, ankles crossed. I remained standing in the doorway, hand on the door knob.
What to do; nowhere to sit on that side of the bed. I'd have to walk to the other side. I had a double bed. He just wanted to talk to me. I'm sure he left eventually, without anything bad happening.
I have screamed and brow-beaten Stephen to get my way. I have had sex with people and thrown them out. I have found myself thrown out on the street after sex. I've been taken advantage of in cars, forced into having sex then put out. Too many examples to remember. All I know is that I escaped. Ten years of selfish, abusive behaviour returned with abuse enforced on me ended when I fell pregnant and decided to have the baby adopted.

Ex-boyfriend

My ex-boyfriend and I first met about three years ago. We've been on trips together to Melbourne, south-western Australia, Newcastle, NSW. We camped at Philip Island, not far from Melbourne, Victoria for the motorcycle grandprix weekend. He is going there this year with my girlfriend, straight from Italy.

The three years have been stormy and we've been broken up a lot of that time. I see the problem as his desire to conquer me. I haven't been able to give in and he has become impatient and brought in dirty tactics like 'I need counselling' because of my severe problems with 'lack of trust'. He is worst when I catch him out in a lie. He will go all out to discredit and destroy my credibility in my own as well as other peoples eyes.

On our trip to Newcastle, we attended a wedding. We arrived at my Mother's house; her deceased boyfriend's house that she would have to give up to his daughter when she moved into a home, and that has actually happened now; and she wobbled up to him with her eyes intent on giving him a great big open kiss on the mouth. She had to reach up to do it, all wrinkles and floralled, shiney materialled shift and no bra to keep those long boobs up from her waist.

He met my brother, a bearded bushman with a gift for music and other relatives who prefer to make music than talk or be inquisitive about others. We arrived and immediately became an audience for all of them. I had hoped my ex-boyfriend might be able to understand me if he saw where I came from, after all I had told him about my journey through psychotherapy. He really didn't know what to make of the whole experience.

Now that he is with my girlfriend, he has heard the story I told her to explain myself. This is the story about attending a good private school in Melbourne, my father being part owner in a family factory, maintaining and fixing the machinery in it because he was trained as a mechanical engineer. We were rich, in other words. We lived in a big house in the Dandenong Ranges; a house that he gave away rather than leave for his children. That much is true.

I created a poster years back and a girlfriend saw it and said it was very sad. The poster depicted a young girl and a mother. The mother had been hit by a car. She spent years in a hospital bed, we can tell this by the height of the girl at the hospital bed and that she has grown a lot as she leans over her Mothers' coffin with a flower. The words on the poster are - mother died slowly - drop 5 save lives. The poster was for a road safety competition. It wasn't chosen. It didn't win anything. But the idea was planted in my girlfriend's mind that this was my mother I had depicted in the poster.

Now I do believe that my ex-boyfriend knows of this and is waiting for me to explain my history. His last strategy when he wanted to attack me was that because of my upbringing I really need to get some counselling. I had the feeling it was the Melbourne story and the poster story he was referring to. He attacks me because he feels there is nothing wrong with him, it all has to do with me.

The thing is, I believe that he is convinced of the new story he has heard. The mother that he met in Newcastle just can't be my mother. It just doesn't fit. Not only that, but in Newcastle other friends of mine and my brothers were there like they were part of the family too, like Mum was a 'carer' of many. Also, at the wedding, when I was next up to make a speech, my brother objected, as if I wasn't part of the family, therefore not really entitled. Yet one of our friends made a speech. I'm used to not being understood and regarded with suspicion by my family since the psychotherapy.

Now, it all has just fuelled by ex-boyfriends suspicions that something bad happened in my childhood and its too painful to talk about. When we were away on Saturday afternoon until Sunday early afternoon, I tried to tell him something that would make him happy, like I'm confiding in him. So I went over the story that I guessed he already knew. Melbourne, the poster, explaining that someone took that poster wrongly. I didn't elaborate. He walked away, silently, impatiently. He wants to understand me.

I don't want to lose him, stupid as that sounds. I need to tell him what he wants to hear.

Perhaps I can explain that my mother was run over. I was six or seven. We visited her in hospital, a hospice, then she died. This was our ritual, every Sunday, visit Mummy. But where? I don't have a name of the hostel in Melbourne offhand.

In the meantime Daddy gets a housekeeper. The house is big. She takes the downstairs flat. She has two sons. One of them I became close to - Stephen. She is still in close contact with the children of another family she used to look after. She also has an older son who lives with his father. Infact maybe these two sons also live with their father a lot of the time. She becomes my 'Mum'.

I spend most of my time with them when Im not travelling to and from school. Daddy works long hours and he's met someone else. He doesn't bring her to the house. She has children of her own; maybe she's married, even. I grow up, move into the nurses quarters and seldom go home to stay in the downstairs flat because 'Mum' has moved on, and Dad's new family now live upstairs. They get his house. I' m left nothing when he dies much, much later.

Does that sound convincing? I'm not sure.

The thing is, I could stick to my story. Yes. That is my real mother in Newcastle. That is my real family. I broke free and became a different person after psychotherapy.

He will look at me and he won't believe it. He'll think I don't trust him with my most agonising, heart-breaking secrets.

Another thing, if I'm not believed when I say that I grew up with poverty and abuse, but I am believed when I say I'm a poor little rich girl struck down by tragedy, I may as well go with the rich story.

The person I am now and that girl I was, are so different I can hardly understand myself, so how can I expect anyone else to understand?

Lonely, isolated and happy to be that way most of the time....

Still Low

I have been given a fiftieth birthday invitation. I'm thrilled that somebody still thinks of me. Usually no girlfriends get in touch unless they want something like, to store things in my shed, or to 'fish' for information to gauge if I'm still seeing my ex-boyfriend. I like to be alone.
Today I'm angry with my ex-boyfriend. He tramples on people in a quest to satisfy his own needs for pleasure. I just can't quite ditch him. He has kind of promised that when he gets back he will be using his money to support a charity. I once described myself as a charity because if anyone wants to go out with me I can't be expected to pay my own way because I am not working. As it is I keep dipping into my meagre savings just to give us quality of life. I'm saving for a holiday for my kids and myself. I could put hope in my ex-boyfriend, that he means to employ me somehow so that we can see each other during the day and then on the weekends again when my ex-husband gets back, or I could not trust his statements, knowing how he lies, and surmise it is a tactic to keep me from straying while he is away, having sex and a holiday with my 'girlfriend'.
I told him before he left, that if she stays in his life I won't be in it. The problem will be knowing whether she is still in it when he says she isn't. He is just so good at manipulating people, with his malicious tongue, so to keep them from talking to others.
As I said, I like to be alone. What I don't like is being misunderstood and I don't like not being appreciated.
I'm a good mother. It's my full time job and my focus. My children will be successful because of my support. I take care of their needs. I focus on that so they might devote their efforts to school work, then university so that eventually they will earn big money and be able to give themselves whatever they need to be happy. Money helps. Good mothering underpins a childs ability to earn good money. They would hardly focus on their studies if someone didn't lovingly support them through it, because they don't understand why it is important to work so hard and stay single minded. It's only later when regrets or gratefulness come into a child's head, that a good upbringing or otherwise, is recognised.

Today I vacuumed my middle child's car while he is away. I ironed handkerchiefs, pillow cases and tea towels. I don't have any shirts to iron currently. No point when the shirt is hidden under a school jumper and blazer. Middle son only wears t-shirts and I don't bother ironing them. I will empty the vacuum cleaner, maybe mop the kitchen floor. Later I will collect youngest from school. When it's time for his swimming training I'll drop him early so as to get to the airport on time to collect middle son.
He has been away to a juggling convention in Melbourne and has visited eldest son who is studying there.
My children's father and his wife have gone to Europe for two months. Ex-boyfriend has gone to Europe for one month. Our holiday will be to Newcastle in NSW in December to visit my old Mum and attend a family reunion, for one week.

I need to cut up card today and make some cards from my artwork so the supply is ready once the winter season is over and tourists start coming to Perth again. It's hard getting the motivation. I'm weary of trying to be recognised. I go into competitions, make cards, package prints, make fridge magnets, all homemade, but good enough to be stocked by half a dozen shops. I had catalogues made of my main, large works and popular smaller prints. I spend, spend, spend, my efforts are not bringing money in, and centrlink are always badgering me to get a job.
They don't recognise my mothering, or my art. In their eyes, I need to do something they recognise as being legitimate so they don't have to pay me anything.
Good mothering and good art; both not recognised by society as being legitimate pursuits. This is a crying shame for all the neglected children in the world, and all the sensitive, yearning souls of artists clawing and crawling from one day to the next due to pouring their agony out and making it into something; a piece of art. Children and artists are disdainfully ignored in our society.

Low

I feel deeply low right now. I spent a weekend away with my ex-boyfriend 10 days ago. I have strong feelings for him. I want to be with him. He doesn't want to give me up either. He says he loves me.
Now he has gone to Italy with my girlfriend. He will never admitted this, but 'I know'. I mentioned he was going to Italy to another girlfriend, word got around and then I get a call from another girlfriend close to the 'betrayer' girlfriend. This 'other' girlfriend is fishing. She wants to know where I heard that he is going to Italy. I figure she is checking for the Betrayer.
But I can't hurt my ex-boyfriend so instead of making his life difficult, as it may become, although he is such a good liar, he would just tell her that it was wishful thinking on my part, and a malicious desire to destroy them by telling lies, I don't tell the truth. I couldn't. I said that I had heard he was going to Italy from an aquaintance that I bumped into coincidentally at the shops.
The girlfriend refuses to confirm my ex and the Betrayer are going together. Instead she leads me to say that he's not worth my worrying about and that they deserve each other. When I say I had the boys on the weekend she seems re-assured that 'it wasn't me' he disappeared with all weekend because I never leave my boys.
I did that weekend though because at 16 and 19 I can, but don't very often. They understood that I would only be away overnight. One thing they can't understand is why I go with someone like him. They are bemused, but let me run my own life, and knowing they will always come first.
I can't stop thinking about my ex-boyfriend. When we are together we are happy. We like the same leisure activities. We indulge. I have two more years of child rearing esponsibilities before I can give him my undivided attention. He can't wait. He wants to travel. I'm sure he loves me as I love him.

I was suspended from my course. I explained that I would be late for class on Thursday and the head dude says. No. My son can take a taxi to the airport. I repeat that I will be driving him and will therefore be late. He repeats that if I don't turn up by 9.30am I will be suspended. This argument is heated.
I go away and complain to my job provider then send a detailed e-mail describing this dudes mal-practices to a body who can do something about him. Mal-practices such as over-seeing use of the hoist when he is trained as a primary school teacher, not an aged care worker, telling a 'Tamil descent' lady that because she is short she has to lift in a particular way, not holding the handles on the back of the sling which is supporting a fellow student we had hoisted off the floor, the way we had been taught to do by the real instructor who was taking another class that day.

Thursday I take my son to the airport. Due to hold-ups on the freeway then roadworks all around the airport, I drop him with just half an hour to spare. He checks himself in at the automatic machine then queues to deliver his luggage. I join him in the queue after parking the car. We get to the check-in counter, the girl takes his boarding pass, labels his luggage and puts it on the conveyor belt. She is about to give the boarding pass back when on the screen something comes up. She reaches over and gets my son's luggage back.
"Flight's closed. You've missed it." She suggests we go to another counter and book on a later flight. I couldn't believe it. We had 20-25 minutes to go before the plane took off. My son wasn't allowed to board. Another lady was in the same situation as us. No matter who we argued with the situation remained the same.
I brought my son back to the airport later in the day and saw him off on another flight. I came home and composed a letter of complaint and sent it off.
All I've been doing lately is complaining to people. I have been spending a bit of money too getting my art printed and then framed so I can submit my pictures into competitions.

My Date

My date was fabulous yesterday. We met at a cafe not far from my place. He had coffee I had tea. He bought me two cups. He followed me home, we left my car and drove to the beach in his car. We walked down a path and onto the sand. I carried my sandles and bathed my feet just before the water rushed back into the ocean again after gushing up to us. He kept his shoes on and stayed well up on the dry sand. We could still talk but not hold hands. Maybe I looked too old for him to want to hold hands with me. We ate lunch in a pub. He ordered a club sandwich and chips and I ordered a caesar salad without the bacon and anchovies. It came with bacon but I avoided eating it, being a vegetarian. I had three glasses of red wine. He drank soft drink. He didn't ask me to pay for anything which I thought was very noble. We came back at my place for coffee. My head was swimming from the alcohol but I repelled his advances in a pleasant way. We kissed. That's all. Then he had to leave. He was a bit younger than me. Don't know if he'll get in touch again. T'was a pleasant encounter and I'm happy to let it go at that. Today I'm having lunch with a girlfriend then I'll come home and will finish my activity sheet.
I really enjoy lunching and drinking alcohol during the day, then getting physical with a lover. It is a most pleasant way to spend a day. The problem is the hangover later and still having to deal with responsibilities like getting dinner ready when I just want to sleep it off.
I felt like that last night only without all the memories of physical pleasure or the promise of another get together in the future. Oh well. Probably just as well for now.

My Course

I'm having a hard time doing this course. Our first assignment day saw thirty people arrive to use eight computers. Half the class went home again to use their own computers. Then on the next lecture day, there were not enough hard copies printed out of our activity sheets. I missed out and was told by the lecturer to go and ask for one at the desk. The woman at the desk told me they normally charge for extra for lost copies. I apologised but maintained that I hadn't sighted my copy at all.
At that stage I hadn't understood what had happened to my copy as there had been confusion as the copies were handed out. Later in the day when another handout went around, I realised this print run was also one short.
I pointed this out to the desk woman at break time during a brief passing discussion with a number of us. I said that someone wasn't doing their job properly by not copying enough handouts for all the students, and I shouldn't be asked to pay for something that wasn't my fault. I felt affronted She laughed it off.

It would seem that the rules are not hard and fast here. When activity sheets and test papers need to be handed in seems fluid.
What is definitely clear is they both need to be ready for the lecturer when she comes in twice a week. I surmised that I could do alot of the work at home providing I turn up on lecture days and have my work in on time that morning.
Incorrect. Yesterday I was made to stay back or I would be suspended from the course. I must finish my activity sheet by yesterday afternoon if I'm not coming in today to do it.
I had been pulled into the prinicpals office and asked to explain why I hadn't attended activity day last Friday. I told him I had family issues and also wouldn't be in tomorrow (now today). I handed my work in on time so I didn't see the problem.
Not acceptable. If I was allowed, then everyone would be allowed to not come in on activity days. He told me to stay back or be suspended.
The prinicpal is soft-eyed, over six foot with grey hair and a huge, drinkers stomach.
After the lecture I sat in the common room at the table. All the other students had left. Others from different courses streamed past then I was the only one besides the principal and his secretary who were sitting in the lecture room. He came out, walked past me and asked how I was going.
"Getting through it." I said, trying to sound pleasant. I held a side of the stapled sheath towards him in a gesture of co-operation. He said " Which one are you doing?"
"The activity sheet." Obviously, I was thinking.
"Oh no. Don't do that one. You have to do the test paper."
"That wasn't my understanding." I spread out my sheaths of papers as he leaned over the table. Now I didn't know what he wanted. I pointed to the yellow highlighter on a test paper with 'See me' in the margin. The lecturer had asked me to re-write some answers after discussing aspects of the topic with me. No it wasn't that one.
The principal said I must do the test paper. I pointed out that it wasn't due until Thursday and he had told me to do the activity paper as I wouldn't be coming in tomorrow.
No. I was wrong. I must do the test paper. He walked away.
My mind was fluttering everywhere as I thought what to do. I gathered my concentration, put the activity paper aside and started on the test paper. I did need some of the charts for reference from the activity sheets, but I'd already thought of keeping them to take home anyway and just handing in the written sections.
I worked through the test paper, calling on my memory of the lecture and overhead presentation and regretting not having time to study the notes more thoroughly. I completed the paper.
"I've finished." I said at the door of the lecture room, which is small with three tables down the centre and chairs, two corkboards on one wall covered in pamplets and handouts, and vertical blinds opposite closing off a view of the walkway and frosted glass dome over the food hall.
The desk woman stood up and followed me to the front desk. "Where is your activity sheet?" she asked me as I handed over the test paper.
"I started to do it but Mr----" I couldn't remember his name, "Mr Philip told me to do the test paper."
"His name is not Mr Philip. It's James."
James somebody or other, not James as a surname. James came out of the lecture room.
"I was of the understanding," I repeated calmly, "that I needed to hand in my test paper on Thursday morning."
"No. It has to be in today." He said.
"I've already handed one in today. This morning, the one that was supposed to be handed in."
"Make sure you hand in the activity sheet Thursday."
I decided not to argue. I signed out, exchanged goodbyes and got out of there.

Today I am going to have coffee with a man. We have spoken once by phone. He got in touch with me on a dating site. Then I will do some food shopping then come home and complete my work.

Dad and Stephen

Dad came from country Victoria. His family moved to Melbourne during the Great Depression, I think, but not sure when that was. It was after World War 11, where he served as a soldier in the Pacific, that he was stationed at Adamstown Barracks in Newcastle and met Mum. He was still in uniform when he met Mum at a dance. He left the army because the was was over. He worked in the fish markets in Newcastle, then the steel works as a shift worker. when we moved to Melbourne he worked in the Monbulk Jam factory. For three months during that job he stayed off work because he had put a steam hose used for cleaning, down his boot and burnt his foot. I remember him being at home and a nurse coming to the house. It was not a happy time due to his loud intolerance of pain. We were still living in the Dandenong Ranges at that time. He was also prone to leg cramps and would cry and groan constantly, limping and hopping up and down the dark corridor between the bedroom s and bathroom. I cried privately in sympathy at his terrible, loud moaning when his leg was cramped.

He worked in a clothing factory, then found a job driving a red van and collecting the mail from post boxes and taking it to the sorting depot. Everything was difficult for him and the stress of work put him in a bad mood always.

We went with him on his round once, Stephen and me. We sat on cushions in the back of the van and laughed ourselves silly, skidding around on the shiny floor. Then I wet myself so the cushions didn't slide wo well

Failures

Today I'm tormented by my many failures. In the past, in every area of my life I have failed. Not an hour goes by when, no matter what I am doing, something reminds me of an experience from way back, where I had let myself, and others down.
These days, sometimes I wonder if I imagine my inadequacies due to echoes from the past, especially when I say to a friend 'I hope I didn't say a wrong thing last night.', or 'Was I bad last night drinking three glasses of wine?' The friend always looks at me and says 'You were fine.' Then one of them might even suggest, 'You have low self esteem and no confidence.'
I try to be perfect. I am always kind, friendly, calm and mostly quiet when required, or vivacious when required. I always fall short in my eyes, then severely tell myself to be kind to me.
My anguish rubs raw when I try to understand how I am perceived by others. I'm probably falling short in areas I'm not even aware of. All I really want is to be treated with respect and accepted for what I am. I think I am treated with respect as a successful, self-sufficient, well-adjusted mother, who doesn't need friends, so nobody rings me. I could be imagining that too.

I put my anguish down to 'Post Traumatic Stress Disorder'. Two symptoms are, by some accounts, cold extremities and nervous fidgeting. I learnt that yesterday in my course. I have those symptoms.
Aah, my course!
I have been parking my eldest son's old car that I bought for him, even though he is away, down at a shopping centre a kilometre from my home. I walk across a flat, cleared block of land big enough to build a factory on, up a steep embankment to a road. The sandy, damp soil of the embankment has been compacted smooth between the exposed rocks from the many people other than myself who trek that way because the rail station's car park is always full. I cross a busy intersection at the lights, walk up the slightly inclined footpath next to the parked buses and the people getting on and off, including school kids, at eight-forty in the morning. I place my card briefly on the scanner and the red, plastic-looking gates let me through. I go down the escalator and wait in the open on Platform One for my train. I stand, swaying on the crowded train which dips underground just before the city. I alight, queue for the first escalator, queue for the second escalator, tag out with my card, then walk briskly to keep pace with the crowd stepping out into Murray St Mall. I walk to the road and stand at the 'Cat' bus stop; a free service. The bus is crowded. I stand, getting jolted by the stop start movements of the bus, for twelve blocks until I can get off at the front of my building. The course in conducted on the first floor. I cross the road from the bus stop, walk along through a short shopping mall to the Food Court, ascend a curved staircase. I can look down on the tables and food counters from the mezzanine floor, and up to a domed, frosted skylight. My door is on the right, at the corner of a corridor leading into the lifts, toilets and others offices. I push open a glass door covered in signage, go up to a counter, voice a greeting to the lady there and sign in. When I leave I sign out. This week I have been to classes three times.

I believe that the reason for my stress and anguish, due to trauma, is that, from the age of sixteen until I married at twenty-six, I had sex without really wanting to with more than a hundred men. A handful of those incidences were while I was unconscious due to drink or I was forced against my will. The majority were due to my inability to understand normal human interactions. I didn't know how to say no, whether I should say no, when to stop foreplay, whether I should get into foreplay in the first place. My mind had no idea; all it wanted was to find acceptance.
Sixteen was when my periods started. I at last became a woman. My Mum took us up to Newcastle on the train from Melbourne, an overnight journey sitting up in a box of four people facing four people and the luggage high on racks with a corridor running along the side. From Sydney another train took us through the beautiful scenery to Newcastle where we stayed with relatives. One friend of that family took me for a sightseeing tour in his panel van. We stopped by Newcastle beach, climbed over onto his mattress in the back and drank cans of bourbon and coke. We 'did it' and I didn't feel anything. Nothing. Looking back with what I know now, maybe he didn't actually penetrate, or did slightly then orgasm-ed.
Not many weeks after we returned to Melbourne I found myself in the floor-mattress bed of a man ten years older than me. I told him I wasn't sure whether I had been deflowered or not. I explained my experience in Newcastle and he stated "Well you are not a virgin then are you."
He played with me until I orgasm-ed. I tried to keep still and not say anything or move. He became frustrated with me and pressed so hard down on my nipples that I felt some little clicks, like tears. Many years later a lump was removed from that area where he pressed, and years after that another lump was removed. Both benign thankfully. I couldn't help but twitch when I orgasm-ed. Then his rubbing became painful so I asked him to stop. He stopped doing that, raised and parted my legs and penetrated me. He pounded, moving me as he willed, for a long time until his orgasm. I found the whole incident painful, unpleasant, uncomfortable.
That incident happened during a festival and the next day I saw him in the audience at a hall and embarrassed him by going and giving him back the small amount of money he had given me to get home. I remember feeling his semen still on my legs where it had run down under my calf-length dress with the shirred bodice.
Many similar experiences happened with his peers and those men in that set, over the next period of time. One of them had just taken off my pants and turned his head away saying 'whoo' in disgust at the smell. He still had sex with me though.
One time while I was still at school, I was standing on Ringwood railway station in a pair of homemade hot pants of the 'Austrian yodelers' style; braces over the shoulders that crossed over at the back; in olive corduroy. I had made them and felt ashamed to be seen in something that I had made. One of the popular tough boys from school saw me. I really wanted the earth to swallow me up. I looked down at my hot pants, flushed bright red, looked at him then away repeatedly. He continued to stare at me, also red in the face, with a tragic 'I feel sorry for you' look on it. Now I see that my hot pants were OK. I could have worn them with panache if I was me now.
Another time while still at school we were grudgingly allowed, at Mum's urging, to go along with Sebastion on an overnight 'Uni' camp in a house away in the Blackwood Mountains. Sebastion had uni friends. Stephen and I lay down in the lounge-room to fall asleep with the rest of the crowd. One couple sitting up on the floor behind my head were looking at me as I looked up at them . The guy said to his girl 'Poor Kid.' I looked up at them again but they ignored me. I had imaginings of being a 'peace, love, flower child'.
Another beautiful, blonde uni student took me to the beach, had sex with me in his car and then his house. As he dropped me at a tram stop I said, 'I really hate it when nobody rings me.' I gave him my number, telling him not to ring at a certain time because I wouldn't be home then. That young man rang at the time when I was out; I received the message; and he never rang back again. We were still living at the Box Hill house. I must have been seventeen then eighteen. Another man going out with someone I knew had sex with me in his car and whenever else he encountered me at gatherings or at peoples houses.

Another Sunday

Today is Sunday. I'm on my own. My boyfriend hasn't come back to me. From next weekend two of my children will be with me on the weekends for two months while my 'ex' and his wife spend time in Europe. I'm glad, even though children can't replace that feeling of closeness that being with a partner brings. I've been going out with girlfriends but haven't really met anybody to explore 'possibilities' with. My confidence is down too. What do I have to offer ? Realistically, not a lot. If I could meet a man who would marry me and support me but had his own house and was prepared to see me during the day and on the weekends at his place then a relationship could work for me. I'm dreaming.
I guess I need to count my blessings. I am very fortunate. I have health, a roof over my head, just lonely that's all. Perhaps it's a normal human condition.
Tomorrow I start a course in aged Care. That will last about two months then I need to do four weeks work experience in an old people's facility, then I need to do paid work. The 'work facilitator' who is helping me to go in this direction said that if I don't earn enough to get off my benefit then the dental treatments will not be taken from me. Two or three night duty shifts on the weekends may tip me over the cut-off limit.

Back to my story.
Trainee nurse I was no longer. I rode my dilapidated old pushbike over to Mum and Dad's house in Williamstown. From there I explored my options. I needed to work so, with difficulty, I swallowed my pride and registered as an Enrolled Nurse. Because I had completed eighteen months training, I was allowed to do that. I worked for a couple of months at a hospital in the city, commuting by train. While I was there the enrolled nurses went on strike for a day. It was a state-wide strike and I had only heard of it by rumour. Nobody spoke to me directly, so I showed up for work. The Sisters sent me to some obscure place on the ward and I spent most of the day alone while they did the work which they had planned in advance to cover.
I left after a few months and then worked at a local hospital near Williamstown, and one of the Sisters there, a kindly older lady said that my name meant 'living in a forest' and that the description suited me somehow. I cycled to work; took regular sick leave and felt the stress of trying to fit in. Williamstown is an old port suburb twenty minutes train ride from Southern Cross station, which used to be called Spencer Street Station in Melbourne. The lapping water at Williamstown Beach never lathers up into a huge surf, but because Port Philip Bay is a vast expanse, and Melbourne being a fair way south on the globe, Winter time brings gales and rough weather; choppy water and unpleasant swimming conditions. Our dog drowned on North Williamstown Beach. I was away at the time, but Mum had taken him for a walk and swim and he got into difficulties. A man waded in to rescue the dog but it was too late. That dog was probably buried in the back yard, unless it was put out in the garbage, wrapped up. He wasn't a huge dog.
After a few months I decided to move to Collingwood, an inner suburb of Melbourne. I found a job and rented a flat not far away. I worked shift work. During the day we would have to feed the patients. One lady I fed regularly would never open her mouth. I would try to force the metal spoon between her gritted teeth but she would never give in. I would walk away annoyed and frustrated that she hadn't allowed me to do my job. That lady, along time ago, curled herself up into a fetal position and stayed there; became fused, rigid.
We flipped her gently from side to side every two hours. We treated the bedsores on her bony hips. Her rubber sheet was often covered with a fluffy or kylie; a padded draw sheet, to help absorb the urine from her incontinency but these were usually in short supply so she would be lying on a rough, cloth draw sheet most of the time. Sometimes we would place a rubber ring beneath her hip.
The ward had about sixteen beds, eight on each side on the ground floor. Windows ran down one wall, a double door opened out onto a cement and brick, partially enclosed verandah with a thin view of trees and grass within the courtyard.
At one end of this room were the utility rooms and bathrooms and at the other, the kitchen where the meals were brought to for distribution and where we blended up excess lunch food for the evening meal, several offices and storage rooms.
One evening shift, a big lady in a bed on the opposite wall to the fused up lady did a huge bowel action in bed. The Sister on duty had been a nurse during the Second World War. She wanted to help me clean up the mess. We changed the bed and washed the lady. As we were cleaning up in the room set aside for that sort of thing the Sister started to dry retch. I offered to take over but she said no. I started to giggle then laugh out loud. She smiled at me between her retching. I couldn't control my laughing and doubled over in hysterics. Then urine started to run down my legs.
I completed my shift wearing those urine soaked, grey thick pantyhose as if nothing had happened. That was not the first time I'd had to complete a shift wearing smelly wet tights with dampness inside my shoes due to hysterically laughing too much.
Quite a few of the older nursing sisters working at that rest home had been sisters during the second world war. On night duty I refused to sit in the same office as the sister even if she asked me to. I just wanted to sit by myself. Between rounds I would sit in another office to her and practice writing excerpts from books using my right hand. I figured that if I practised enough I could become ambidextrous.
In truth I didn't feel worthy to sit with a Sister and pass the time. I felt inferior to her but superior to others. The other staff, during the day and evening with the same or less training than I, I felt were inferior to me so I did not entertain the thought of making friends with any of them.
Instead I clung doggedly to the strained friendships of the past. I organised a night out to see a musical. Four people came along. I may have even not asked them for the ticket money. I invited a group over for dinner and the guys outnumbered the girls eight to two. My girlfriend had started burning her own flesh with lighted cigarette butts. He boyfriend asked where the food was and I pointed to a saucepan on the stove. I had become so paralyzed with not knowing how to serve the food that I had just left it on the stove. He stared at the stove for a few seconds then went over to it and served himself. I thought less of him after that.
My girlfriend fell pregnant and had an abortion. She was always angry with her boyfriend and didn't want to have his baby. Privately I didn't agree with abortions so ignored her needs if I saw them at all when she came to my flat after the event. Her boyfriend picked her up from there. They were living together. A year or so later they broke up. She moved into her own place. She would say to me; 'Three.' What does that mean to you Sylv?' I had no answer. 'One and one and one.' She would say grouping three cigarettes together. 'What does that mean to you?' My friend. She completed her three years nursing. She worked as a qualified sister, had a drivers license and a car. She kept herself clean and bought nice clothes, all things that made me jealous of her.
When I went to Tasmania she visited me, but when she moved back home to Gippsland we lost contact. I heard later that she died an accidental death from a prescription injection, one side effect being sudden death. My friend. RIP.

I left my job, moved out of the flat. Mum helped me do battle over getting the bond money back on account of a big red wine stain on the living room carpet.
I moved into a room in a flat above a shop. the other room was taken by a guy in the pub circle I frequented. A new acquaintance I met at one of the pubs helped me to move in. We drank a lot and smoked cigarettes. He got me to have sex with him. The lease holder of the flat was out. A cigarette butt dropped though a hole in the mattress cover and was lost amongst the kapok. It was an old mattress from home. We forgot about it. The guy wanted me to have sex again with him. I didn't want to. I became hysterical as he chased me around the flat not taking 'no' for an answer. I ran into the other bedroom and tried to close him out but he had his foot in the door. He eventually he led me back to my room for sex. I didn't enjoy sex. It hurt. Sometimes they couldn't even get inside me because my muscles were so rigid.
He dropped me back at my parents place. The guy with the lease on the flat contacted me in a fury. The place was filled with smoke when he came home. Was I trying to burn it down? The lost cigarette butt I'm thinking. 'Get out', He says. The mattress now filled two drums downstairs. My stuff was downstairs. Take it away now. He never wants to see me again. I hired a minivan to collect my possessions and moved back home.

The first day....

This is the first day of the rest of my life.
I've been a single Mum for thirteen years. Two of my kids are now at university studying law/science and the other, engineering. Last child is in year eleven. All I want from my life is to be able to support him so that he maintains the effort to get into the course that he wants to do. It is probably going to be law/arts. He likes learning japanese and ancient history over the science subjects although he is pretty good with physics, chemistry and maths.
The 'system' is pressuring me to get a job. I am poor. I'm not afraid of work, but I don't like getting so tired from cleaning houses that I'm grumpy and don't feel like getting dinner. I do art and try to sell my cards and fridge magnets. I pick up and drop off from school. I'm around during the holidays and on teacher development days. These things are important because my kids know that they are not alone in their quest to reach their full potential.
I am considering doing a course for looking after the aged. After all, I did do an amount of nursing in my younger days. If I did that course then registered with an agency then I could choose to work night shift on the weekends. I have been moderately enthusiastic about that plan and will suggest it to my Job Network interviewer today. The only problem with that is if I go off my benefit then I won't be entitled to subsidised dental treatment. My son is midway through having the braces on his teeth replaced with a double set. He has a strong bottom jaw and has been enduring orthodontic treatment since primary school. He suggested that when his top braces come off he doesn't bother with the double set. I'm not sure myself whether he needs them to stop the teeth of the bottom jaw creeping in front of the top teeth. I also need four crowns and the preliminaries have been done for those. The fillings will last a few weeks, but if they crack or break then they will need to be re-done and that costs hundreds of dollars. Students will do the crowns if I can be fitted into their busy study schedule. I may not get them on until next year. If I need to go out to work I will no longer be eligible, I'm guessing, to have my treatment completed. My estimate is sixteen thousand dollars by today's prices at a dentist, to get our work completed. I'd be lucky to make that in a year.

So, back to my story....As a child we had to do things persectly first time, without any practise. We had to be perfect or get shouted at. We had to just do things and know how to do things.
A child must get on a bike and ride it. Just do it or risk a belting.
A child is given a jigsaw puzzle and Mum stands over her, shouting the girls name in fury as the girl tries to put a piece in. Mum snatches it. Shakely she reaches for another piece. She tries a spot, again it is wrong. Mum screams at her. She moves the piece over the puzzle, tries a spot; she has chosen in the wrong spot. The little girl is shaking and tears are beginning to well up and she didn't want to pick up another piece. Mum was calling her stupid and building herself up into a froth of hatred towards the girl.
A small child is called to his Dad who is seated and the Dad calmly asks the boy if he knows what he did wrong and why his is going to get a beating, and the obedient little boy nods 'yes' fearfully.
The Dad stands up; towering over the boy he holds the boy by the shoulder, Dad raises his arm then slams his open hand into the boys buttocks and upper legs and the boy is bending backwards under the onslaught. Other family members are witness but say nothing. The boy is crying. He is let go and runs off.
A little girl is sitting in a high chair, tears streaming down her face, choking and sobbing and her Dad screaming in her ear and holding her jaw closed with both hands yelling "Eat it. Eat it!" Food dribbles from the corner or her mouth as she tries to swallow something she finds gross.
A ten year old girl is standing in the bathroom without her pants, holding up her top so that her brothers, aunts, uncles, who are invited, can look and comment on the premature arrival of one pre-pubescent pubic hair.
This was our upbringing.

At School

One evening while still at school I had my first vomiting experience due to alcohol. We had a party in the Dandenong Ranges house under the house, in a bottom flat where Sebastion slept, as a kind of farewell to the house. I drank scotch and coke and still remember that smell in my throat and the total feeling helplessness in the face of pure physical annihilation. The bottom flat of that house was free for us to use after we moved to Box Hill, and I spent some weekends there on my own or with Stephen, before it was rented out. The flat consisted of two living rooms, a tiny kitchenette, and a bath and washbasin between both rooms with a third door going under the main body of the upper house opening into the base of a dark stairwell with a locked door at the top. A shower, toilet and laundry were in this area under the house, next to a garage area with closed double wooden doors where the light seeped under, and where Jason had slept on his visits.
For a short time, Sebastion and I would come down those stairs after breakfast to use that shower on a daily basis when we were living there. But Dad told us not to because the tank water would run out. We had two large tanks at the side of the house. We had to buy water, which the fire brigade delivered, two years in a row.
While still living there, once when we were catching the bus to school, one of the popular girls with high blonde pigtails and a short, neatly creased summer uniform sat down next to me on my bus seat just to hold her dress next to mine for comparison. The white squares between her blue checks were white and smooth. My white squares were brown mottled and wrinkled. She stood up and walked away down the bus, leaving me none the wiser as to why she looked so good and why I didn't.
After we moved to Box Hill Mum worked in the city in a railway cafe serving and cleaning tables. Stephen and I would visit her sometimes if we had a reason to go into the city.
After school I would catch the train to Box Hill and walk home. In the evening Mum would arrive with a cooked chicken in a bag, and some coleslaw.
Later she changed to an office job and loved it. She bought some very smart pants suits and took alot of time over taking care of them.
I discovered an antique shop on the walk home from Box Hill railway station. I bought a brass vase there then took to calling in every day after school. At first I'd look around then leave, then I started going in there and sitting down, waiting for the young man who ran the shop to engage me in conversation. Then he started to avoid me by retreating into the back of his shop when he saw me coming, through the front, plate-glass window. So I stopped calling in.
Our rickety, weatherboard house backed onto the railway line. I could look into our backyard going to and from school. Trains thundering by on their embankment and the rattle of kitchen windows soon became a part of our lives as we grew used to the place. I had my own room; second door on the left off the hallway which led into the lounge and the beyond that, the kitchen. A linen closet and beyond that, a bathroom opened to the left off the lounge. The boys had rooms as did mum and dad. Sebastion was still living at home but would soon be travelling and then getting married.
The house had two fire places backing onto each other. The one in mum and dad's room wasn't used. Their window opened onto an open front verandah which was hung with fancy wrought iron lacework. We fed the lounge room fire with brown coal briquettes from Gippsland. A pianola stood in the lounge. We would take it in turns to pump the pedals, holding on to the wooden frame beneath the keys as they moved by themselves. It was a strenuous exercise. We would all sing along, reading words printed next to the wind holes on the old rolls of paper. Sebastion's friends loved coming to our house to sing along to the pianola and pump its pedals. They also played alot of card games with us in that lounge room. One of his friends enjoyed kissing me but it never went any further than that. Then another friend enjoyed kissing me. The third friend went further than kissing, but I was seventeen by then.
Standing in front of the narrow strip of mirror above the mantlepiece I cut my hair off once. Stephen hovered behind me anxious to help, but not knowing how. It didn't matter. I just wanted a new, more individual style.
Around that time I discovered the teen magazine Dolly at the newsagents. I read that magazine from cover to cover and felt I had a friend, then lived and longed for next months edition.
Most weekends I would go back to the Dandenong Ranges to stay at a friend of a friend's house. I never classified her as a friend because she was younger, and we just fell together. We would walk the cold, forested, winding roads late into the night singing loudly 'It's one for the money, two for the show, three to get ready....blue swede shoes.'
Everyone called my friend's friend by her nickname, Lizard. Lizard had boyfriends. Sometimes we would walk five kilometres or more to meet up with them. I wasn't interested in having a boyfriend.
One older boy decided he liked me. We were in a group at Olinda and some of us were going to get a taxi. An older women with us pointed out his obvoius liking of me. I ignored it. Then the boy took off his heavy coat and insisted, despite my objections, that I put it on over my light jumper and jeans. I didn't want to wear it, but reluctantly luxuriated in its warmth for a time. The taxi hadn't arrived yet and the boy was starting to shiver uncontrollably, rubbing his bare arms and bending forward making hissing noises from his mouth. I took the coat off and handed it back to him. The taxi arrived and even inside the taxi he couldn't stop shivering. Cold, black, windy, wet and about minus two degrees celsius is how I remember the Dandenong ranges during Autumn, Winter and Spring.
During Summer though, when we lived there, we would swim at the Olinda pool. I owned a beautiful yellow bikini swimsuit and loved meeting kids at that pool wearing it. One local boy kept holding me down under the water until I fought him to get to the surface and catch my breath. Another time he grabbed me forcefully from behind and insisted on us doing rude things together. I fought him off again, but felt soiled and unhappy.

My schooling ended after semi-satisfactorily completing year eleven. Later in the next year I would start nursing training. To fill in the next ten months I found work in a clothing factory in Box Hill. I left that job to work for the railways. Then I left that job to pack meat in a supermarket.
I visited Lizard on the weekends. Her family moved down from the mountains into a rented house in Upper Ferntree Gully. We would buy alcoholic apple cider and take it to a vacant block to drink it. Later in the night her motorcycle riding friends would turn up. We'd go back to her place, taking over the lounge area. If any one of the guys talked to me I would get cross and go to bed. I slept on a top buck in the set of two in her room. I woke up one night, looked over and down and saw her boyfriend lying on top of her under the covers of the bottom bunk opposite . They both froze, looking up at me. I turned over and went back to sleep. The next day she said that I had caught her at it. But I didn't actually feel that I had because I didn't actually see anything happening.
Lizard lived with two older brothers and a Mum and Dad. I asked Lizard once about the bruises she always had on her thighs. She told me that her Mum said that she bruised easily. So I thought that maybe she had a blood complaint of some sort. Once Lizard told me that she was the one who burnt down the gymnasium of the Tech school along her street. There had been a huge fire and thousands of dollars damage. I refused to believe her. She ranted at me that it was true but I just wouldn't believe her.
We wore dark mascara, eyeshadow and lipstick and disdainfully scorned the boys who took us into a local pub and bought us a drink.
We walked out on another boy who had invited us into his home when his parents had gone out because his music collection wasn't up to our standards.
We hooned around in a car with some boys chasing a terrified cat through bushland, refusing to say one word to the boys in the car.
Lizard and I were drifting apart by the time I started nursing training. After orientation I was no longer guaranteed of weekends free.
Mum decided to move again. They bought a home in Williamstown. By then I preferred to stay in the nurses residence and when I moved in with three other nurses into a rented terrace house I hardly saw my family.
The orientation for nurses took place away from the hospital. I was bunking in with a religious girl. She lead a group of us for a run around a nearby oval. This exersion had me nearly collapsing, out of breath and totally flushed on all fours on the ground. I took a liking to a girl in one of the other rooms. She was a bit older and had the appearance of experience. I tried to hang out with her and tolerantly, she didn't turn me away. Orientation finished. We moved into the nurses quarters at the hospital. Six months later I moved into a house with her and two other nurses. By then I drank as much and whenever I could, smoked cigarettes and pot and experienced several trips on Lsd.
I passed exams without studying; completed ward shifts; shirked the responsibility of getting experience by doing procedures that had to be ticked off on my record.
My woeful slowness at making beds drew comments from patients. I broke thermometres when shaking them by accidently hitting them on the end of the bed. I would hide in staff bathrooms to have a cigarette, return to the patient and expect her to still want her back washed with the bowl of water, now gone cold, I had left there twenty minutes previous.
Before night shifts I would drink two large bottles of beer which really annoyed my house mates. "Go and drink it in your bedroom, one would say, not out here." I would often end up with the lounge room all to myself and my housemates hiding away from me. At work, with a hangover, I'd disappear into the ward kitchen for ice cubes to suck on for my thirst.
On one social occasion a group of us decided to go out to a restaurant. I wasn't going to go because I didn't want to spend money. One very friendly girl called Ruth encouraged me to go along. She offered to pay for my meal. We all sat around a big table. I didn't know what to order, and in spite of many suggestions I ordered a lobster meal. Seafood was always raved about by my mother especially lobster, prawns and oysters. Mother was the only person that mattered in the universe of my home. So I ordered something that she would like. The girls looked at each other and one mumbled to Ruth "I'll help you pay for it."
Another time I joined a breakfast with a group of friends and was very hungover. We were all seated on the floor in the living room of a terrace house. Effort had been made to serve cut grapefruit with glace cherries, among other things, like toast and eggs. I was very thirsty and tried to get hold of more grapefruit. Ruth very kindly gave up her grapefruit for me.
After eighteen months of training I failed an exam. The Nursing of Children exam. I just couldn't see why I would have an interest in the care of children and refused to take the topic seriously. I was given two weeks notice. One tolerant tutor whom I had taken for granted completely as being a pushover, came up to me on the ward with the instruction to take down the hem of my dress and apron. It was disgusting. It occurred to me that she had never liked me all along.
I had taken up the hems myself so that they were very short. I didn't turn up for work again, but was only rostered on as an extra anyway. My nursing career came to an end. I also moved out of my room in the terrace house. My housemates were glad to see me move out judging by the way they avoided me especially in my last days. I moved back home to the house in Williamstown and a room of my own.

Saturdays

On Saturday mornings I would watch Rage, an 'Australian Broadcasting Commission' music video show on tv. I really wanted to learn piano. Back in Newcastle I had been given piano lessons for 2 years. I was supposed to practice every day for an hour but didn't. Instead I got Mum to sign my book saying that I had done my practice.
I asked to take up lessons again. Stephen was taking singing lessons and Sebastion was learning to play trumpet. Mum wouldn't let me do piano. She thought I should try another instrument. The closest I could think of to piano was piano accordian. I was booked into a studio for lessons on a saturday in melbourne.
I would catch a bus at the end of our street, a train from Ferntree gully Station then a walk up Swanston Street to the studio above a shop. The lesson lasted half an hour. I sometimes wandered around shops, browsed record stores. The whole round trip took about four hours. Once, a boy who liked me at school and had taken me to the pictures once already, came with me into town. He tagged along with me, surprised and not that happy at my rigid routine that I wasn't budging from. He wanted to look at better music, not just pick up the latest top 40 list. He wanted me to share his broad experience of music, and for me to open myself to appreciating what he liked. My rigidity put him off. After that trip, to my dismay, he avoided me at school ever after.
The accordian lessons lasted about a year. I had my own accordian and carried the heavy thing with me each trip. It came in a beautiful blue case with pink crushed velvet on the inside. The instrument itself was pitched slightly off key so that it couldn't be played with other instuments. It didn't matter to me, and I participated in the end of year concert in a big group rendition of Dr Chivago's 'Somewhere My Love', even though I had hardly practiced.
During those school years I joined a 'one off' out of school orchestra organised by one of Sebastion's friends mothers. I played the triangle. It seemed like the best experience to be part of an orchestra. I also joined the chorus of two musicals at school and made two new friends Gay and Angela. One of the new friends Angela victimised the other new friend Gay whose place I had been to once and we rubbed each others breasts until we were both excited. But she said we couldn't do anything else or go any further, which I couldn't undrstand but had to accept. Not that I knew what else we would do, but I couldn't see any reason for frustrating that feeling of excitment. I had been staying over at her house for the night so we just went to sleep after that. At the same time I had fallen totally in love with the other friend Angela. The incident between me Gay was not mentioned by me to anybody. Angela had a mean streak and tried to send Gay away from us by being cuttingly nasty to her. Gay would sit meditating during rehearsal breaks, in a Swarmi position with her hands praying and eyes unblinking. We would try to make her blink but she never would then we would go off laughing. Angela said I could hang around with her at school after that musical was over. I could think of no-one and nothing but her. When school started again and I did try to hang out with her I discovered that she already had a long-term friend who she was hanging out with. I tried for a while to be with them but in the end I stopped loving her and hung out on my own again. Gay was victimised by Angela at school too until she went back to her own long-term friend to hang out with.
Another friend I had at school's name was Sonya. I had been to her house once, but by the end of year nine, our friendship had become strained. When school started the next year and I saw her in high ponytails and perky breasts, my anger bubbled over. I marched up to her, interrupted the bright conversation she was having with some other girls, grabbed her arm and spun her around. "Have you got a bra on?!" I said, accusing her.
She looked at me scaldingly, "yeah!".
She shook me off and turned back to the girls she was talking to. That friendship ended right then.
I was never given a bra, nor did I get a proper fitting one until I bought one for myself. One of Mum's friends passed on some huge, wrinkled second hand bra's to me once, but they looked ridiculous on.

By years ten and eleven I would sit by myself behind the sports pavillion and try to eat my sandwiches which were huge salad sandwiches. The other girls would always swap a peanut butter or vegemite sandwich with mine then walk away. So that every day I never ended up eating any of my sandwiches.
Once I was given the remnants of some potato crisps in a bag and a girl from my street pursued me all over the playground to get me to share with her. I wouldn't share. She was rarely given treats and neither was I. But sharing was an alien concept to me. I didn't know how or why I should.
I was a slight, pretty girl with a good body. Some boys like me. I fell madly in love with one boy, but pretended to like his mate instead. On school camp though we exchanged chewy's mouth to mouth going to Wilson's Prommentory by bus. I did not have my period but thought I was probably going to get it, all the other girls had theirs. So I took a big pack of pads with me on camp, but didn't use any of them. At sixteen my period arrived. It came every three months for years after that. On one excursion, I had an encounter with a boy who felt me at the beach with gritty, sandy fingers, I thought, but maybe I had sand in private places from doing a wee in the dunes.

Another boy allowed me to borrow his flippers on an excursion to the beach and I lost one of them in the surf. He was good about it, even though it didn't wash up before we had to get back on the bus.
I had a party and some of the tough boys came, staged a mock fight then left early. One of the tough guys even came to my house before the party. Mum and Dad weren't home. I showed him around, even taking him into my room which I called a storeroom, curtained off in the loungeroom. He said 'I thought you said this was a storeroom."
"It is." I said.
I thought this boy may have had a soft spot in his heart somewhere. This caused me to not respect him. Cold, hard, flint is what I was becoming and what I respected.

Mum worked in a factory in Ferntree Gully. I also worked there over one school holidays. By Year eleven, Mum decided we had to move. We moved to Box Hill. From then on we caught the train to school. Sebastion had to leave school and get a job to help make ends meet because they weren't going to sell the other house which meant two mortgages. Sebastion studied maths at night school but gave up because it was too hard.
I caught the train to school. Some of the girls wagged some of the classes. I decided to drop maths, so if they were free I'd go with them back to one of their homes that was closest. We'd raid the biscuit barrel and sit around in the pleasant loungeroom and kitchen. I soon became not welcome there. Perhaps by eating and drinking too much always.
During the evening at one girl's house we sampled the liquor cabinet. I became quite drunk on straight gin.
I failed year eleven and would have had to repeat if I was going on to year twelve. But my marks were good enough to get accepted into nursing training.

Melbourne

Plans were being made for us to move to Melbourne. I moved back into my bedroom but by the end of primary school we were on a train and going to Melbourne. We left our house and most belongings behind for the relatives to pack up for us. I was almost glad to be leaving because I could sense that the transition to high school for me was going to be friendless and challenging beyond my capacity to cope.
The relatives in Newcastle pointed out to Mum later, in a letter, and she passed this onto me, that my room had been swarming with fleas and this had caused alot of discomfort for those packing up the house ready for sale. These comments re-inforced my already entrenched feelings of shame and inadequacy.
In Melbourne, we were at first taken to Grandma's house in East Brunswick; a little, old, corner house with shop front, dark and heavily draped windows, heavy tablecloths, stuffed furniture and red carpet, but clean inside. My mind's image is of an aloof, smiling, big bosomed, long skirted old lady in a long, white apron; her thin, grey hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, and not very tall.
We stayed there then moved in with the Aunt and Uncle who had visited us in Newcastle. They ran a guest house in the Dandenong Ranges. We had visited them once before on one family road holiday, when they ran a guest house in Healesville.
We were put in dark, cold, clean rooms, separated from Mum and Dad who had their own bungalow. We helped with chores like drying up the dishes and were made to eat stewed apple and rhubarb which caused me to dry-retch. I liked to stay inside in my bedroom, possibly due to fear and anxiety about not knowing what to do, but the Aunt often chased me outside.
I joined the primary school, repeating my last year because of the different systems between the states of NSW and Victoria. We walked to school with our male cousins; one of them I fell in love with. The feelings I had for him were petrifying. He must have felt something for me too because he asked me to go off with him to the bushes when we were hanging out at the Recreation Reserve, but I couldn't. Trembling inside, I pulled my hand sharply out of his when he tried to drag me away. I stayed with the others. He kind of deflated and gave up on me. Much later he was killed in a traffic accident.
I tried to be good and I tried to please. But my unfortunate personality caused me to be either ignored or treated with disapproval and disdain. I loved Sunday school.
Mum took us to church every Sunday, and this continued when we moved into a house of our own, even though it was further for us to walk. School was further away as well. Stephen and I walked the couple of kilometres every day. Then I started high school and caught the bus with Sebastion.
My bed was in my parents room at first. Then a space was partitioned off for me in the lounge room. The boys each had their own room, and when Jason came to stay, he had a bed in the garage area under the house.
I played netball for a time, but it didn't work out. I was the least skilled on the team and usually a reserve; I didn't practice. My red spotted uniform was not regularly cleaned or ironed, I didn't bring cut up oranges for half-time when I was supposed to. But probably I 'knocked' all the other girls if they tried to excel. In the end the fat coach stood up for the other girls and sent me away. I recall a vague, unpleasant feeling of walking away into the recreation reserve, away from the hostility, in my polka-dot uniform.
In our house excelling was taboo so I tried to stop others from excelling as well.
I joined the girl guides. As a leader for a short time I tried to encourage other girls to bring money so we could buy cigarettes for our walk through the bush.
We became friends with other children in our street. My brother Stephen had a crush on my girlfriends sister. We all used to hang out at the Recreation ground, the 'Rec'. She asked me to tell Stephen that she only liked him as a friend.
I told him that she hated him and why would anyone like him anyway, that nobody would. I laid into him, trying to destroy and crush any feelings of self-worth he may have contemplated having. Later, the girl asked me what I had said. I told her and she became shaken and tearful, understanding why Stephen was now seriously avoiding her. He was not the type to challenge anyone. He just tried to be acceptable by being quiet and not attracting attention to himself.
We caught the bus to high school, or walked if we missed the bus, but we weren't each others allies. Once, for my birthday, Stephen gave a friend of his some money for a record for me. The friend took the money but didn't give over the record. I yelled and screamed at the friend to hand over the record but he didn't give it to Stephen until months later.
I was vomiting one afternoon before getting on the school bus, I couldn't stop vomiting so the bus driver stopped every hundred metres so that I could get out to vomit or dry retch.

After school and on the weekends we would go chestnut hunting. We'd open the spikey pods using the heels of our shoes, spend hours walking and collecting big bags of them then weigh, bag and sell them at our roadside stall on the weekends. Mum always said, put a little more in than less. I always put alot more in and our price was very reasonable. I secretly thought that nobody would really want to buy our chestnuts. As with daffodils. A girlfriend and I had a daffodil stall and she couldn't understand why I wanted to give two bunches for the price of one, but she let me do it and I felt exraordinarily low in her eyes, also depressed and unworthy to be asking anyone to buy our daffodils. She didn't feel the same way and didn't like me for it, but she was younger so didn't challenge me.
I was walking along the main road with a huge bag of chestnuts I had spent a long time collecting when a car pulled over and asked to buy the bag for one dollar. I didn't really want to hand it over because it hadn't been weighed and I suspected it was worth alot more. But the man, an Italian I guessed, was very persuasive so I handed him my bag and took the dollar. That day I felt real rage.
All my hard work for a dollar, then deprived of the slim pleasure of weighing up the chestnuts and seeing how much they were really worth. I pictured them weighing in at about three dollars. I seethed, walking home with empty hands and nothing to do when I got home. I fantasised about having a wonderful father; one who came along just when I needed him and told the Italian guy to F-off and leave me alone.
While we lived in the Dandenong Ranges we experienced snow two winters running, and then bushfires two Summers running. One year we were evacuated from high school because of the fires. The sky had turned black. I really wanted my parents to collect me from the evacuation centre, but instead a neighbor took me home when the emergency had passed.