Rebellious Daughters (20 page)

For ten years after that rushed departure, the peacock house of my childhood found its way into my unconscious, appearing as the background to my nightmares. I dreamt of wild bears breaking down the windows of my pretty bedroom with its cotton-candy drapery, and of the garden, though it appeared as an untamed savannah in which a lion was stalking me. Later, when I was pregnant with my first child, I dreamt that my dog was drowning in the peacock house's pool, the aloof agapanthus and beastly staghorns that grew at its edges framing the scene of horror.

I saw my stepfather again only once after the marriage ended. He happened to be at a party that I went to in my early twenties. I saw him across the room and felt I had seen a dead person. I had made myself consider him dead, I suppose, to alleviate the hurt of knowing that he had never tried to contact me, despite being in my life through most of my childhood. I dropped my champagne glass to the floor and ran to a bedroom, where I sat, shaking, feeling a mix of grief and rage, both at my mother and him. I hated my mother for having brought
him into my life at such a young age – an age when I was bound to grow attached to him. I thought of the intimacy he and I had once shared, his hand guiding me through the waltz at a school dance, his voice cheering me at my netball games. I remembered him beside me in the car, driving me to my first day of primary school, and in the audience at my high school graduation. Now this man, who had been so connected to me, seemed like a stranger. I grieved for our lost intimacy but also raged at the memory of his punitive control: the time he'd ordered me to write down and date my phone calls in a blue ledger he placed beside the antique scales that sat in our cavernous entrance hall, because he'd felt the phone bill was too high. The time he'd wanted us to learn defiance and forced my sister and me to march to the end of a rickety jetty in Western Australia, past the sign that said ‘Enter at your own risk' while I got dizzy and my sister, terrified of deep water, cried. The time he drove even faster down a highway because my mother had asked him to slow down.

Someone must have told my stepfather I was at that party, because he appeared in that bedroom where I sat, sobbing, my nose dripping onto the old floral sheets of my friend's parental bed. He looked the same. Short and portly in a way that disguised his power, bald in a way that made him seem comedic. He said ‘How are you?' in a kind, sickly voice that told me he pitied me but did
not love me. And I sobbed, and couldn't look at him, and eventually he left.

My real father was not gone in all of this. Though he was lost to the family paradigm, he was my loving father, living in another state on the other side of the country, with his partner, who was a gentle soul and a giant of man with a booming laugh and an artist's hands.

Having my father live away from me meant that I was spared the normal ups and downs of a father–daughter relationship. Our time together was idyllic and uninterrupted by the demands of real life. It was time spent in opulent peace, swimming at the beach and picnicking near the river and watching videos with my sister. I felt I could be a child on those holidays, able to finally let go of my otherwise ongoing anxiety about the state of my mother's marriage, luxuriate in long hours of quiet reading and shell collecting. I slept well at night, my body no longer tense and waiting for the timbre of fighting. And so my father got from me none of the angst he might otherwise have received for leaving my mother. I loved accompanying him and his partner to their wild New Year's Eve parties, where I displaced my preteen discomfort at the overt sexuality of their more camp friends. There I'd hide under curtains and only peep through to the lights of the garden where the champagne popped and the men wore dresses; it was
easier to self-censor than to find my father at fault for exposing me to something too adult for my years. I needed him to be the good father.

It was my mother who, I had decided, in light of the accumulating evidence of her choice in husbands, was at fault. It was as Oscar Wilde had put it – she'd chosen two fathers who would, in varying ways, be lost to me, and that was more than misfortune; that was carelessness.

I struggled to resolve the feeling that my mother was to blame for the losses I had suffered and for the burden I carried as her witness and her confidant. For years after the second divorce, I put as much emotional distance between us as I could. I felt desperate to be free of the vines of dysfunctionality that had clung to us as a family, and that meant I had to be free of her. She still talked frequently about my stepfather. Being married to him had been a wholly traumatic event for her. Before they met she, a woman of brilliant intellect, had had a successful career in her field in the health sciences. But my stepfather had wanted her to be available to accompany him on his frequent travels, and she had felt pressured to give it up. Now she was trying to re-estab-lish her former identity, regain confidence in her work and her mind. The conflict and the hurt of those marital years were lodged in her and she needed to replay them,
as if going over the details of the experience and forming a narrative out of it would resolve it for her. It seemed she herself couldn't believe how things had turned out, and she talked about her life with my stepfather almost reflexively over coffee with her friends at suburban cafes where I tagged along and when we met with old family friends who had chosen her side over my stepfather's; sometimes I was not sure she remembered I was there.

Within months of their separation, still only 17 years old, I moved into an apartment with my sister, which we kept shabby and under-furnished so as to ward off parents. Later I moved to a share house on the other side of the city. I kept the phone calls with my mother short. I made sure I did not stay too long at her house if I visited. I loved her intensely and there was still much closeness between us; we shared the same absurd humour and quick fuse. But when I did see her, we fought. I felt that everything she said was an attempt to lure me back to her, to show me that I was still a child. I had to put proper distance between us, because, when I was honest with myself, what I wanted more than anything was to crawl into her warm bed and be looked after again.

I took a year off my university course to travel overseas, and at the same time my mother went to work with a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory.
Despite the continents between us, I felt connected to her in a way that overpowered me. If I knew she was unhappy – and she
was
unhappy – I could not enjoy myself. If I did not hear from her, I worried she might be dead. I drank absinthe and smoked weed with my fellow backpackers in Holland, and was sick from vodka I consumed in vast quantities in Israel. I met men who I thought I might love but didn't, and did other reckless things like hitchhiking alone in Greece. But all through these supposedly exhilarating experiences – the rush of drugs or wine or sex, the cold night air on my face during a motorbike ride along a ragged black beach – I was not really there. Or not wholly. I felt my mother's sadness, her losses, her grief at every turn. In every encounter with a man I felt hollow desertion, even when they had not left me.

All the while, my mother sent me postcards from a fictional frog named Martin who declared his love for me and eventually proposed. I laughed at her imagination, but wondered about Martin's persistence and felt his appearance, and in particular his proposal, were signs that we still depended on each other too much.

When I came home from that trip I was tired, fatigued at the mammoth effort it had taken to enjoy my travels and ward off the constant low hum of anxiety that lurked in my mind. I slept in my mother's spare room, happy
to be cared for and fed. I was reaching the end of a law degree, with no desire to work as a lawyer; it was impossible to identify my own wishes with the hum getting louder. I was lonely, but seemed only able to meet men who loved me half-heartedly. And I was afraid, though the thought hadn't coagulated into words for me yet, that if I went too far from my mother, neither of us would survive.

I gave in to it, and decided to stay living with her. It seemed that, no matter where I went, a spider-woven thread pulled us back together. I dreamt often of a spider latching on to me as if I were a fly. And I knew that, though my mother was better-intentioned and only held me too close for fear that I would leave her forever, I needed to separate from her in order for us to be close again. So, after some months of planning, I moved cities.

In the fairy tale version of this story, my mother lies frozen in a canopied bed under a knotted tree waiting for her daughter's kiss of life. She sleeps for a hundred years while only I grow old, after which I am able to forgive her youthful sins. But my leaving her did not have that kind of transformative effect, no epiphany of narrative. In real life, for years we visited each other and fought. I told her she shared too much with me; she cried at my apparent coldness. I would become sullen and tense, and we would eventually say a teary goodbye
at an airport.

When I became a mother, the fairy tale was partly realised: I was able to look back on my mother's younger self with compassion. As I struggled to manage the sleepless nights and my altered existence, I thought a lot about what kind of person she must be to have survived being a single mother to two small children at such a young age.

I thought often of her as she had been then, only 26 years old, five years younger than I was as a new mother. I felt I needed to know her as a young mother, to see her. I pondered – as I took and shared around by email countless photos of my baby – why in my lifetime I hadn't seen more than a handful of photos from when I was a baby, and it began to dawn on me then that this was because there weren't many. The first year of my life was a painful time for my parents. Because I asked her, my mother gave me the few she did have, kept in a worn brown envelope. She was there in a few photos holding me, the same cupid upper lip and almond-shaped eyes that I have. My father was in other photos with me, too, bearded and with those big spectacles of the ‘70s. Sometimes my sister also featured, with her Orphan Annie freckles and glossy dark bob. But there were none with my mother and father together. This made me think what it might have felt like for her to face the loss of her hoped-for love with my father; to have navigated the
world of parenthood alone, the practicalities of sickness and night-waking and finances, and at the same time to have managed the grief of divorce. She must have been broken hearted at the realisation that the tall, handsome intellectual she had fallen in love with on a beach at the age of 17 had not been her ever-after after all.

Motherhood showed me, too, in the almost devastating love that I felt for my children, in the way that I was addicted to touching their skin and soothing their crying, that it had been easy to feel rage toward my mother because I knew how tenaciously she loved me. All those years I might have held back on being angry at my father because I suspected it could be easier for fathers to choose to leave their children, and I was afraid that my anger might drive him further away.

But in my new empathy for my mother, I still could not forgive her emotional reliance on my sister and me. I knew how hard it would have proven for her to lay the boundaries between the pain she felt and the love she gave, but I could not imagine burdening my own children with my sorrows.

My mother came to live near me recently, in Melbourne. She often phones and, in a fake French accent, says: ‘Bonjour, I heff your theengs,' and then she arrives on my doorstep with the children's washing.

Some months ago I called her at two in the morning
and asked her to come and be with my youngest child while my husband and I looked after our eldest, who was throwing up. She arrived at once, in her pyjamas, with a loaf of bread and Gastrolyte.

These days I often sit on her bed with my two sons between us watching TV, she smiling the slightly idiotic smile of a grandmother in love with her grandchildren. We are still trying to work out how to show each other love without going too far or holding back too much. I shut down now when she starts to talk about the past, or situations in which she has ended up hurt or slighted. It is a protective measure: I can't bear to know her pain anymore. It's as though my borders have closed up in self-preservation. She tells me I am cruel for being this way.

I still desperately want happiness for her, and find some solace in knowing that, despite never having the classic family unit she so hoped for all her life, she has dear friends in both my father and his partner, who also moved to Melbourne when my first child was born. We have all gravitated toward each other; my sister and her husband too. Every week, on a Friday, for the Jewish Sabbath, we eat together as a family. Something has shifted as time has passed, something that has allowed us to look at the past now with more honesty, without trying to censor the mistakes that we once made. While my parents' marriage had been an event absented to the realm of
best-not-talked-about
, it is now a part of our
story. My sister displays in her apartment a photo of my mother dressed as a bride when she married my father. My mother makes digs at my father about how drunk he got on his buck's night, saying that he was probably hoping to miss the wedding, and we laugh.

Last year, I went back to Sydney on holiday and took my eldest son to see the house I grew up in. I had passed the street many times on previous trips, but felt unable to even look at its ivy-green roof tiles in the distance. This time, I walked with my son all the way to the front gate, where we stood and looked up at the emerald and turquoise peacock above the front door. The house had lost its monstrosity. It seemed smaller, inanimate.