The Long Hot Summer (29 page)

Over the next six weeks, leading up to Christmas, we both have a series of events and conferences to attend in various
country towns between Bathurst and southern Queensland. We use the opportunity to catch up with some old friends and there is also talking time, lots of talking time, in the car as we drive over the thousands of kilometres of our journey. It's as though we are recovering from a major illness. We have good days and bad days. He is still emotionally bruised and battered and I am not much better. I yearn for him to be a bit lighter, to be a bit more positive. But he remains subdued and distant. It's going to be a long, slow road to recovery.

We stop making love as frantically as we did during the period when we were, theoretically, ‘estranged'. The feeling between us during that phase was so electric that it often resolved itself sexually. Now that a decision has been made, we have slipped back into that ‘old married couple' syndrome. Or perhaps it's the numbness David is feeling. Whatever, I hope it will pass and the spark will return.

We are best when we are with other people, especially with good friends who have known us over many years. We don't necessarily discuss everything we have been through with them, but just being together as a couple in the company of those who care about us is reaffirming. We have made the right choice. It will be for the best in the long run.

My preparations leading up to Christmas, however, don't feel as carefree and joyful as usual. Everything seems to be more of an effort, more of a struggle. Christmas has always been a major event in our family life. My brother Jon comes down from the small country town where he has lived for many years and the entire family gathers for two or three days of non-stop present-giving and partying. I don't even have the heart or energy for killing and plucking geese for the table and buy turkey and ham
instead. Our mood is more solemn than usual. We still haven't bounced back.

Christmas day, however, is as blissful as ever. The weather is hot, but not unbearably hot, and we eat in the cool of the formal dining room rather than out in the hall as we have done before. After lunch we scatter, with the boys, both large and small, playing cricket on the wide side lawn. I join them as a spectator and Miriam's little Jack Russell terrier, Ulysses, comes and snuggles up to me. Like all terriers, he's bad news around poultry, so we have muzzled him for the day to protect our flocks of geese and ducks. But I feel sorry for him in the heat and remove the muzzle so he can rub his itchy nose on the grass.

I decide to have a late afternoon nap and sleep off the effects of excessive food and wine but am woken to shrieking and general pandemonium. Ulysses has been into the dam after the ducks and has managed to slaughter two of David's favourites. David is running around the garden holding aloft the bleeding birds, shouting in fury and distress. While we are all upset at what has happened, I realise his overreaction is symptomatic of his state of mind. Still very fragile.

People in long-term marriages or partnerships react differently when those relationships come to an end, whether by death or divorce. There is always a period of adjustment and then, for some, a new beginning as life moves on.

When my father died, my mother was initially numb and grief-stricken. She could have seen his death as a way free from the chains of their co-dependent relationship and then made a whole new life for herself. She was only fifty-two at the time, bright and attractive, and could easily have carved out a new career for herself or become involved in a exciting new relationship. She chose not to. She more or less gave up on a life of her own and merged into our family unit instead. Not that there is anything wrong with taking up the role of grandmother, it's just that she stopped having dreams or ambitions of her own and hung her future on her only daughter – me – and her grandchildren instead. She also created a fantasy around the image of her late husband. She somehow forgot all the negative aspects of
his personality and reminisced only about the good times they had enjoyed together. It's understandable in many ways that she would want to suppress the painful memories of his infidelities and the subsequent drunken brawling, but sometimes I became very frustrated at the rosy picture she painted of her life with Theo.

I had an aunt who spent her life totally at the beck and call of her husband, who was quite a forceful and dominating character. She was meek and bird-like, but their marriage was happy because they obviously met each other's needs. My uncle didn't like flying in aeroplanes and he had but one favourite holiday destination, to which they returned year after year. They were very set in the pattern of their lives together. When he died, my aunt was initially devastated. But when the shock and grief subsided she decided, despite being well into her eighties, to do a little travelling. It was an amazing thing for her family to behold. Suddenly she was airborne, zipping from Sydney to Broome to Adelaide to Tasmania. Exploring Australia for the first time on her own because during her married life it hadn't been an option. She was a late-life adventurer and for years it was almost impossible to catch her at home.

In France, my friend Margaret Barwick was similarly grief-stricken when her husband David died after a long battle with cancer. Margaret, usually a lively personality, became quiet and almost withdrawn. She slowed down, gained weight and even developed late-onset diabetes. Her friends and family were worried about her. Then something amazing happened. She just took charge of her life again. Picked herself up and went onwards and upwards. She started exercising, kept to a rigid diet and lost weight rapidly. She had always been a keen hands-on
gardener and she took to it again with a vengeance, disappearing down the back with barrowloads of plants from early morning until dusk. For several years she had been working on the manuscript for an encyclopaedia of tropical trees, her particular passion. She and David had spent their married life in tropical regions of the world, where he had been a colonial governor. During this phase of their life she had developed her passion for plants and had helped establish botanic gardens and parks in several of their postings. With her renewed energy and fitness she finished the manuscript, found an English publisher and worked day and night to prepare the large volume for publication. She was a dynamo.

So there is life after a long-term marriage ends. There can be a new beginning. My problem is I just can't imagine what my life would be like without David. It would be like a death, I guess. Even though we have had major ups and downs and at times I have felt a desperate need to escape from the confines of our relationship, in truth I can't visualise myself as a single woman. I feel as though our lives are bound together through more than just love. Through myriad connections and shared experiences. Some people say that choosing divorce is the ‘easy way out' of a troubled marriage. To me it feels as though it's the most difficult way out. Surely staying together and trying to work things out is an easier solution. For me, anyway.

Having moved from Leura to the farm at Yetholme to be closer to Miriam and her growing family in Bathurst, it was inevitable that they would move away. It somehow never works, the notion of trailing after your adult children in the hope of being involved and useful grandparents. Some young families move back to be near their parents for mutual support as the grandchildren grow up and the grandparents age. Certainly that's why Miriam and Rick moved from Canberra to the Blue Mountains nine years ago. But when their dreams and careers take them further afield there is little point in following in their wake, because there is no assurance that they won't keep moving on.

It took Miriam a few weeks to pluck up the courage to tell me about the family's proposed move to Adelaide. She had completed her communications degree in Canberra the same year Eamonn (now ten) was born, and also part of a law degree. She and we always assumed that at some stage she'd go back and finish the law component of the degree. The year she became pregnant with Gus, her youngest son, she'd been accepted into
law as an external student. She knew it would be difficult, juggling several years of university with three small children, but she was excited at the prospect of getting her brain into gear again. Then she discovered she was expecting a fourth child and the prospect of studying even part-time became an impossibility.

When Gus was two years old, Miriam started looking again for possible post-graduate courses to undertake as an external student. One day by chance she stumbled across a fairly radical course that fired her imagination and completely changed the direction of her future career. The Bachelor of Midwifery is a relatively new course offered by Flinders University in Adelaide and is one of only a few available in Australia. Instead of midwifery being an additional qualification to general nursing, this degree stands alone. The few students accepted each year are trained to be an elite group of highly qualified practitioners capable of providing care in birth centres, hospitals or at home. One aim is to fill the gap in remote and rural areas, where obstetricians don't choose to practice, by providing specialist midwives, which will enable women to have their babies close to home rather than travelling to hospitals in larger towns or cities.

Miriam had given birth to three of her four sons at home with midwives, one in Canberra and two in Katoomba. During her first pregnancy she read extensively on the subject of birth and as a result of her research decided that homebirth was, from her perspective, safer and preferable. The only reason Gus, the last born, emerged in a hospital delivery suite was because there were no independent midwives practising in Bathurst at the time and because the family was too broke at that stage to afford the costs involved. Homebirth midwives currently have no access to insurance and their charges cannot be recouped through
Medicare, so people wanting to have a baby at home need to set aside several thousand dollars to cover these expenses.

I had also had a homebirth – my last child, Ethan – and Miriam had been reared in a family that considered birth a normal part of life rather than a medical condition. Over the decade in which she produced her children, regular contact with homebirth midwives had politicised Miriam about the government's attitude to birth alternatives. This course would not only allow Miriam to gain a high level of expertise in an area she felt passionately about, but would also put her into a position of being able to lobby for a better deal both for midwives and for expecting parents. She was ecstatic at the possibility of doing the course and applied immediately, hoping that her previous degree and her experiences of natural birth would stand her in good stead for being accepted.

Although I was thrilled that Miriam had stumbled across a career path for which she seemed destined, I was also devastated at the prospect of losing her and her family to Adelaide. While they were living in Bathurst I saw them regularly, usually several times during the week when I would pick the boys up after school or meet Miriam during the day, and certainly every weekend for a big day at the farm and Sunday lunch. It had become a tradition. Now I would be lucky to see them once or twice a year, and the close bond I had developed with the four small boys would be severed, temporarily at least. I was also concerned that this situation would add pressure to my relationship with David. When all the family is around it somehow diffuses the one-on-one relationship that couples face when children have grown up and left home. Our son Aaron and his family live at Mudgee, just an hour and a half away, but he is
often on call in his job and can't get over to the farm at the weekends. We just don't have as much regular contact with these grandchildren as we do with Miriam's boys.

The move to Adelaide was not without its problems. Miriam applied for the course but wouldn't find out if she had been accepted until after Christmas, giving her just a few short weeks to sell the house, pack up and move. Not to mention the problem of Rick finding a new job or getting a transfer from his office in Bathurst.

It's very difficult to prepare a house for selling when there are four small boys around. As fast as Miriam tidies up or renovates an area of the house or garden, the boys blunder along and make a mess of it. I bring them out to the farm for days at a time to try to give her a clear run at getting the place looking as good as possible. At exactly the moment they choose to put their house on the market, the bottom falls out of real estate. One week their neighbours sell their property for an excellent price and two weeks later Miriam and Rick's estate agents can't even get a prospective buyer through the door for an inspection. By mid-January Miriam is beside herself with anxiety. They realise they will have to rent out the Bathurst house and rent a place in Adelaide, at least for the first six months. Rick has been applying for transfers but without success.

Finally word comes through that she has been accepted into the course. One of only twenty-five students out of several hundred applicants. While delighted with the news, she knows it's crunch time. Deferment is not an option.

‘Go,' I say to her. ‘Throw the boys in the car and we'll pay for a motel until you find a place to live. Just get yourselves down there and we'll look after the rest. Rick can stay until you find a
place, then he and I will pack everything up and send it across to you. He can follow.'

So that's exactly what happened. Miriam bravely drove with the four boys across the Hay Plains, car packed to the gunnels. They had been to Adelaide briefly the previous year to check it out, so she had already found a good caravan park near the beach with comfortable air-conditioned cabins. It was a two-day drive and they were all totally exhausted when they finally limped into the caravan park. The boys were in holiday mood, being so near the beach, but for Miriam it was anything but a relaxing period. She spent weeks dashing from one real estate agent to another looking for a house to rent. It was almost impossible to find a suitable house within their limited budget that was also big enough for a family of six. Then there were the animals – two cats and two dogs. The agents all shook their heads.