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The Mother Wound

Posted on by under chronic pain, feminism, history, life, memoir, Uncategorized

In my parents’ bedroom in my childhood home was a brown, metal filing cabinet. It screeched terribly when its stiff drawers were pulled open and heaved with the many documents Mum thought it necessary to keep (she had a very high threshold for throwing anything out, if the overstuffed nature of this filing cabinet was any guide). In this filing cabinet was the paper trail of our family: bills, receipts, passports, certificates. Sometimes, when I was of an age old enough to be left home alone for short periods, I would ransack this filing cabinet, scouring for evidence that I was adopted. I imagine most children at least entertain the notion. The evidence for, in my case, was my dark hair and green eyes in a family of blue‑eyed blondes, parents old enough to be my grandparents, and a sense of alienation from the people whose pictures huddled on shelves and hung from walls and who I was told were my family.

This alienation was simply a sad product of time; I joined the party too late. My maternal grandparents died before I was born. My paternal grandparents passed when I was young. My mother had only one brother and my father was an only child, and the few cousins and second cousins I could cobble together into an extended family were far removed from me in age and geography. I would stare at the pictures of people whose names I knew but whose stories I didn’t searching for any likeness that would form a tether between us. I didn’t find any. But neither did I find any adoption papers.

*

I am often asked about my family history. There are two reasons for this. The first is my unusual surname, which, when enquired about, unlocks the dramatic story of a family who escaped persecution by fleeing across empires and continents for antipodean safety. The second is because I talk to doctors a lot.

At 22, I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease, a form of degenerative, inflammatory arthritis. Family history is one of the diagnostic indicators of this disease, and suddenly, what I had in common with my ancestors became very clear: autoimmune arthritis. What’s my family history? A matrilineal line of pain. A great-grandmother, grandmother and cousin, all with Rheumatoid Arthritis. A connective tissue disease, forming the connective tissue between me and women who are names, and faded photos, and, in many ways, define my life today.

I didn’t want this to be my family inheritance. With each doctor, with each temptation of a new treatment that might help, I would be asked, “and what is your family history?”. And my answers would be intersected with uncertainties and hesitation because I didn’t know the people whose experiences were now so relevant to my own, and I didn’t think to ask, because I didn’t want to engage with my pain – with my difference – any longer than I had to. I just wanted to get on with life.

My cousin, the one surviving relative with lived experience of my reality, reached out with kindness, sympathy and suggestions. But, in these early days, when I was wrestling against rather than living with my disease, I couldn’t accept this connection, the way I might have if it was the outline of a familiar jawline I could trace in a photograph. And, perhaps, I couldn’t yet confront that her present – multiple surgeries, organ transplants, replaced joints, a body wracked by decades of heavy medications – might be my future.

*

There is an idea in psychology that suggests that women inherit the pain of their mothers; a burden passed through the generations, born of surviving in a society created by and for men, of being denied matrilineal knowledge and support. It describes the struggle that exists between mothers and daughters as the former tries to keep the latter safe, as the latter tries to find expression in a world that wants to keep her small. It is called the Mother Wound.

I bear this Mother Wound. But I also bear another wound passed from mothers to daughters in my family for at least three generations. My Mother Wound is what connects me to my family, and anchors me to the women I don’t know, for their stories of pain, of resistance and resignation, are also mine. And, as my resistance has shifted into acceptance, I have begun to search for the women who I know understand what I’m going through.

*

My great grandmother’s name is Martha. When my mother talks of her life there is nothing tangible for me to grasp. I smell dust and see sepia. It’s too remote, a life that began in 1870 and ended the year King George VI died. But – when my mother talks of a woman whose life gradually closed in on itself – I see her. I understand.

Martha didn’t leave the house in five years. Towards the end of her life, Martha’s Rheumatoid Arthritis prevented her using stairs, so she retreated to a life lived on the top floor of the family home. There was no life for elderly, infirm widows. She just withdrew. Her life was just isolation. Martha didn’t leave the house in five years.

There are days and weeks where my pain keeps me on a leash that allows me to shuffle only from my bed to the bathroom. I become anxious and desperately lonely, and home becomes both respite and prison. My social media usage spikes during these periods as I send cyber flares seeking company, seeking that I not be forgotten. Outside seems a very long way away, on these days. Martha didn’t even have a telephone.

My grandmother’s name is Ormey, but in the family storytelling she’s always been called Mada. She fought against her condition, Mum says. It overwhelmed her. She was subjected to every new treatment: injections of cortisone, injections of gold, being encased in hot wax, powerful drugs with terrible side effects. She refused a wheelchair, saying she’d drive it down the stairs with her in it, so my grandfather would instead throw her over his shoulder and carry her, if he had to.

Mada loved reading, Mum says. It was her only joy, really. Mada would sit on the front veranda in a cane lounge with her romance novels and the dog that loved no one but her. But then the drugs made her eyes dry and clouded but she didn’t want to make a fuss and by the time she did make a fuss her cornea had ulcerated and she lost vision in one eye.

Mada absolutely loved shoes, but the arthritis warped and twisted her feet until she was unable to fit into normal shoes and it broke her heart to buy ugly, open-toed shoes. She worried that people would stare at her feet so she didn’t like going out.

Her last years were a blur of surgeries, pain, isolation and doctors who wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t empathise, who would just write scripts and send her out the door. Except Dr Morgan. Dr Morgan had a thick Scottish burr and a way of making Mada laugh. At the end, when she weighed only 25 kg and was on so much morphine that she saw brass bands marching up her hospital walls, Dr Morgan let her choose how her last days would be spent. She chose lucidity – and with it, pain – so she could talk with her family until the end.

The woman in the photo with the sad eyes and thin smile is alive to me, now. I too have tried everything because, without cure, management is the only option. But I too have gulped the pills only to compound my problems with complications and side effects. I too have writhed against the realities of my condition, clinging to a memories of a life without boundaries until my body collapses; wearing pretty shoes that make me taller and match my outfit because that act of resistance, that shred of my old identity, is worth more than the pain I will endure in payment.

My cousin’s name is Helen. She is radiant and smart and cheeky and irresponsibly adventurous. And she doesn’t want to talk about the past, she just wants to live. It is her story, and I wonder if one day we might find a way to exchange our fragile truths to one another. But I do know that to think for too long about the darkness – the life that was or could have been – risks being swallowed by it. So, in not talking about the past, my cousin shows me how to live. I have realised that if her future is indeed my future, it promises joy and survival and success by every measure.

My mother feels guilty because it is through her that I have inherited the family arthritis. She doesn’t articulate this, but I can feel it. What she does say, often, is that she wishes she could bear the pain for me, or take the fatigue away. I don’t have much capacity to indulge alternate futures, and I don’t see that blame or regret would bring me any relief. But my heart hurts for her: she nursed her own mother in those final, tortured years and now she fears for me. I know she feels helpless. Strangely, this has softened me towards her. I indulge the soup that appears unannounced in my fridge, the daily texts, the frenetic attempts to find better treatments because I know she is doing all of this because she can’t bear the Mother Wound for me. Her burden is watching those she loves most suffer, and that, to me, would be the most unbearable pain.

*

A family’s history is not just names and dates, connected by thin, black lines. It is the colour and shadow that these charts can’t capture. It’s that my grandfather would hoist my grandmother over his shoulder and carry her, her petticoats flying and legs kicking. It’s that my great grandmother lived in a world with no space and no time for an elderly widow who dragged her leg as she walked. It’s that I couldn’t see where I fit into the familial gallery until I knew Mada loved shoes, and dogs, and reading, and had an inflammatory autoimmune arthritic disease. And it’s that my family history includes a Mother Wound that connects strong, resilient women. These are the visceral stories that link me to a family I never knew. And they can’t be found in a heavy, brown filing cabinet.

 

This essay was Highly Commended in the E. M. Fletcher Writing Award (for writing on a theme of family history) and was originally published in The Ancestral Searcher, Vol. 42 No. 4, 4 December 2019. 

I Hate Yoga: A Diary.

Posted on by under chronic pain, culture, life, Uncategorized

A version of this essay was originally published in Womankind Magazine (Issue 20, May 2019). The full essay is published here. Writers were invited by Womankind to complete five days of daily yoga practice and record a diary of their experience.

Day 1: I hate yoga.

Yoga conjures in me such a visceral reaction that Womankind’s challenge intrigued me: could I find out what lay behind this anger?

After some gnashing of teeth, petulance and prevarication, I haul myself onto the floor and follow a yoga flow practice sourced from the internet. My Labrador’s fur, until now seemingly irrevocably embedded in the carpet, suddenly coats every inch of me and is distracting my inner calm as it travels into my nose, eyes and mouth. I’m frustrated, annoyed, uncomfortable and bored. Every joint is crying. I hate yoga.

 

Day 2: “You should be doing yoga.”

In this phrase lies the probable cause for my yoga rage. For over ten years I have been managing an aggressive, incurable form of auto-immune arthritis. I have tried yoga a few times over the years (and yes, tried properly by practicing a few times per week for months at a time). I have tried everything you could possibly suggest to me. And I have found what management techniques work best for me – medication, reduced work hours, diet adjustments and running. But still, yoga is the ‘silver bullet’ most frequently, didactically and condescendingly pressed upon me as something I “should” be doing. And, because I’m stubborn and contrarian, this guarantees I won’t do yoga.

Except today, because I said I’d do this challenge. I roll around, begrudgingly. And I notice, begrudgingly, that my tight muscles and painful joints breathe a little easier afterwards.

 

Day 3: My arthritis pain is bad today and I’m nursing interior emotions that are jangled, broken and delicate. The last thing I want to do is be present in my body and risk feeling this pain more. I also can’t control my brain’s wanderings. Today’s yoga session leaves me disjointed and anxious, so much so that I go for a run to recalibrate myself.

The only time I find stillness is when I can drown my thoughts in music accompanied by the rhythm of my footfalls, when I exhaust my body so much that I can only focus on forward movement. Emotional and physical pain wait for me when I am invited to be present in my body so existing in a state of distraction and abstraction is my solution. I am scared by what yoga might ask me to find.

 

Day 4: Today, yoga continues to ask me to do things that I find almost impossible. Not physically, but intellectually. When my teacher gives an option for a stronger pose, I take it. I shouldn’t. I have to fight my own competitiveness, my own desire to be top of the class, and acknowledge that the softer, gentler option is what I need today (and maybe far more often than I allow).

I’m observing the women – for they are all women – who are apparently finding bliss here, while I can’t. We are all white. I am troubled by the appropriation of yoga into something very white and very privileged and very bound up in consumerism and exclusion. I am repelled by how some people portray yoga in social media: faux-spiritual, indulgent, costumed, performed. As a disabled person, I notice how inaccessible the spaces and practices of yoga can be. I see this yoga as very disconnected from its history, culture and intent and I want to see more white Western practitioners engage thoughtfully with this and differentiate themselves from a type of yoga that has become branded and exclusionary.

But I also know, truthfully, that my ego is bruised. I feel as though I’ve tried to part of a clique and I’ve been rejected. When people give themselves over to yoga, when it becomes such a core part of them, I find myself wondering what it is that they’re craving. Why do they get it and I don’t? Is it me that’s missing something? Or them? Or yoga?

 

Day 5: I don’t like to admit this, but today I find myself creating moments of yoga-esque movement and groundedness. I’m moving into my joints: slowly, gently, waking them up with tenderness. I’m noticing when my heart races and my chest is filled with fluttering birds and I drink in deep breaths and feel safety and lightness return. I clamber down onto the floor and end up lying still, able – for once – to hear my body’s call to move only as much as it takes for my steady breath to gently touch each swollen joint.

It is not for me to determine the nomenclature with which this should be labelled. It doesn’t need to be. It’s just intuitive rolling around; a time to find stillness and listen to – rather than escape from – myself. For me, there will be no #dailypractice, but I will try to keep treating my body and mind with the gentleness I’ve found in these past few days. Maybe then I can

In My Home I Don’t Belong

Posted on by under feminism, life, memoir, politics, travel, Uncategorized

I’ve been gone nearly as long as I lived there. Like the cliché, I left as soon as I could, at 17, heading south for university. I only applied for degrees that would put at least a day’s drive between me and the place I grew up. Fifteen years on, it’s only curiosity or the odd wedding that can lure me. It’s been two years between drinks, this time.

I was feeling dislocated from life. I wanted to run. God knows it would have been cheaper to fly to Singapore or Indonesia or New Zealand but I wanted to go somewhere that felt small and familiar.

On Wednesday, I rang the only friend who still lives there that I am in regular contact with.

“Can I come and stay?”

I was on a plane Friday morning, travelling back. Back north. Back there.

***

It wasn’t a bad place to grow up. It was just … small. Isolated. Brisbane is an eight hour drive south. Townsville is ten hours north. Nothing bigger or more exciting interrupts the drive, except the odd place to stop for a pie with mushy peas.

In the small plane, in the cloudless, electric blue Queensland sky, I fly along the coastline. Civilisation thins at the Sunshine Coast and then it’s just cobalt sea and brown land. Even though it’s only 9am, I’m getting sunburned through the aeroplane window. I press my nose to the glass as we approach. Central Queensland was in drought for all of my remembered childhood. To see it cast in tones of green makes this view completely unrecognisable. Long brown rivers that were dry twenty years ago now snake through expanses of green. This isn’t the patchwork of neat paddocks of different crops and livestock of the south. This is grazing land, all of it. It is so utterly flat but for an enormous mountain range that rears suddenly from the landscape, with a town of straight, wide streets built at its feet. This is Rockhampton.

***

Rockhampton is like the Truman Show, insulated from the outside world not just by incredible distance but by its own shell. This shell is a shimmering mirage of heat that traps the population. Upon landing, I immediately become a source of water, sweat springing and trickling from every pore. I stay coated in this glistening dampness for my entire visit. The airport suggests I might like to spend my time here visiting a crocodile farm or the bullring.

All my teenage insecurities come flooding back when I come here. In this way, I travel back in time. I wasn’t good at sport, I tried really hard at school, and did band and choir and musicals and debating. I was terribly uncool. Unaccepted. At least I didn’t panic and get a fake tan before this visit. Ahead of my last visit I did, and my sweat carved white rivulets through my orange topcoat.

***

Rockhampton is a regional centre for industries that thrive on remoteness: cattle and mining mainly. There’s huge support for the Adani coal mine here: locals are desperate to find a way back to the excesses of the resource boom, desperate to stop the good times disappearing, clinging to the sweet nothings promised by what would be one of the world’s largest coal mines. If you try to bring up the environmental impact on the nearby Great Barrier Reef, or that the Chinese economy is no longer a rapacious consumer of our raw materials, or even that investment in renewables is a more sustainable project, you’ll be told you don’t understand what it’s like in the real world.

Anti-abortion and One Nation billboards line the roads. The locally-produced, Murdoch-owned newspaper skews popularist and the only other paper available around here is the Murdoch state publication, which adopts a fiercely anti-intellectual tone. Nothing progressive permeates the Truman heat dome, resulting in a parochial and suspicious mindset. You can’t go into a newsagent and buy any paper that would use the words ‘feminism’, ‘indigenous affairs’, or ‘climate change’ without massive doses of scepticism, derision and condescension. They think Rockhampton is the real world. Whenever I visit, I am stunned by how completely different it is. My views find few allies here.

***

The friend I’m staying with has a heart of gold and a nonchalance about everything, which I find incredibly comforting. He’s one of those characters that could exist in any small town drama who, without fuss, can quietly see the truth about any situation. He’s been a meatworker since we left school and has been saying that he’ll move to Brisbane next year for just as long.

Everybody likes him, which means while I’m with him I can be assured of running into an excellent representative sample of the local population, resulting in conversations that have my friend shooting me tense glances and me clenching my teeth and taking deep breaths.

Here is a list of things that I try to carefully, but unsuccessfully, persuade my conversational partners of:

  • That gender and sex are different and why genitals are not relevant to gender (the Courier Mail’s front page that day was having a “political correctness gone mad” implosion over Queensland removing gender from licenses).
  • That Australia Day is a fraught and traumatic concept (mainly, the divide was over whether or not to boycott Triple J’s Hottest 100 due to their capitulation to lefty pressure).
  • That Indigenous Australian culture is far from primitive.
  • That the commodification and exploitation of women’s bodies in Southeast Asia is a really serious issue, therefore calling out “how much?” to your Asian neighbour is not funny.
  • That referring to anyone that isn’t white as “they” reveals subconscious – if not overt – racism and discrimination.
  • That a circulating Snapchat video of a disabled person is exploitative and dehumanising.

What the hell is this place? How can a group of white men sitting around a table defend their constant incidental use of sexist and racist language?

I ask how people voted in the postal survey on same sex marriage. And everyone, bar one guy who had never enrolled to vote so didn’t receive forms, shrugs and says it doesn’t bother them. They wanted people to have the same rights (this electorate had voted for changes to the Marriage Act by a small margin). I proffer that it was great they could recognise legal barriers to equality, but what about social barriers evidenced by the fact that most gay people I knew from Rocky had only come out after moving far, far away.

“But paying people out is a sign of acceptance,” is the reply.

***

I plan short trips to Rockhampton, partly because I cannot endure the heat for more than a few days but mostly because I always feel great sadness here, amongst those who stayed. The future seems to stretch out as flatly as the landscape. Staying in a town like this you’ll always see the same faces in the same bars. The passing of years are marked by the same sporting events amongst the same teams, by weekends spent piggin’, huntin’ and fishin’. Everyone says how boring it is. But to leave? That would be rejecting comfort and certainty. Many have left, of course. And I can’t work out a common privilege or characteristic amongst this diaspora. Perhaps a desire to be a part of a bigger world? A comfort with being a small fish in a less predictable pond?

I don’t fit in here. The insecurity of my teenage years was born from trying to contort myself into a mundane ideal, reacting to omnipresent social pressure. Now when I come back, having lived away from that pressure to be less intellectual, less argumentative, less independent, my time in my home town is teeth-grindingly, eye-rollingly, tongue-bitingly dislocating. It’s like playing a video game as a different player: the physical space is so familiar but my new certainty of self makes me being here in this place feel radically different.

I don’t know where the real world is: if it sits beneath that hood of heat that surrounds Rockhampton, or in the messier cities I feel more at home in. But when politicians utter their inane soundbites, or distance themselves from progressive politics, I know who they’re thinking of. I hope places like this are the last bastions of patriarchal certainty and white confidence: surely truth and cosmopolitanism and human rights can permeate even the most remote locations? But much of Australia’s politics seem to be made for this audience. Maybe to know the future is to know Rockhampton’s version of reality.

***

On Saturday night we go to Rockhampton’s second-nicest bar. One of the guys exposes his penis to me. Everyone laughs. “Hashtag me too,” I mumble, darkly. No one gets it. It’s time for me to go home.

 

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program.

An Interview with my Mother

Posted on by under feminism, memoir, Uncategorized

On Christmas Day, my mother and I had a brief spat. The point of friction was that I was enjoying a re-run of Mean Girls and, as the time approached 7.20pm, I hadn’t turned over to the ABC yet.

“Can’t I just get it up on YouTube for you later, Mum?”

“But it’s the QUEEN! We’re missing THE QUEEN’S CHRISTMAS MESSAGE!”

This illustrates the clash of cultures between a mother and daughter separated by 45 years of age. My Mum seriously still cares about the Queen.

***

I was an accident. At 45, my Mum had two sons (aged 20 and 23) who were somewhat on the cusp of leaving home. Then, the surprise of her lifetime happened. At her age, she was discouraged from continuing the pregnancy: the risk of my being disabled was 1 in 5 and Mum found herself negotiating for my life based on hypothetical scenarios. But with the fierce determination she is often underestimated as having, she signed up for the commitment of bringing up another human.

Her own mother had passed away a few years earlier, and had apparently mused that she always thought my mother would have a little girl. A demure, sweet and shy little girl.

I asked my Mum yesterday how she would describe me. Impetuous. Headstrong. Driven. Bossy.

It’s ironic that my name’s Hebrew meaning is the pleasant one.

***

I feel like we both love each other very much but there’s some invisible elephant between us, preventing the truth and honesty that comes from vulnerability. I feel that this might revolve around the question of “what it is to be a good girl”. Can I explore this with you?

– Email to Mum, January 2018

I decided to sit down with Mum and talk about the gap between us – not only of generations but of social norms.

We talked for hours. Primly, with pen and paper readied and having messaged me at least five times in advance of our ‘casual chat’ asking how she could prepare, Mum sat with excellent posture warily bracing for the inquisition. We talked about growing up in a big country town in the fifties, marrying in the early sixties and raising children for the next forty years.

***

Did Mada (my family’s name for my maternal grandmother) enjoy being a housewife?

Oh no, she hated it. Absolutely hated it.

How did you decide upon your career?

I was told to do Commercial (a course of useful secretarial skills, like shorthand, typing and accounting) and I cried myself to sleep.

But there was no resistance?

No, we just accepted it. 

***

Her posh girls’ school seems to have emphasised ladylike behaviour as much as it did education. Demureness and deference is how Mum describes it. She still tuts disapprovingly at female presenters sitting crossed-legged – a 1950s reflex she can’t shake. She still pathologically puts herself second to her husband and her children.

I can think of at least a dozen opportunities I have missed in life because I didn’t want to offend . A job at the school, teaching music… I guess I didn’t want to make a fuss.

Mum mentioned being terribly aware of the toll the Depression and World War II had taken on her family – a father fighting in PNG, a mother raising children alone terrified of invasion, of having to share an egg, a luxury, with her brother – I wonder if the vividness and immediacy of that parental sacrifice made it harder to challenge the set course of social expectation.

So many stories Mum told were laden with heaviness of duty, of lost opportunity, of barely concealed sadness. Of female teachers, ‘spinsters’, who had never married when so many men didn’t return after the Great War. Of insecurity from illness – deadly influenzas, the commonness of death in childhood. Of accepting, and getting on with it.

***

How did second wave feminism and the sexual revolution affect your life?

I wasn’t terribly aware of it. If it wasn’t in the Women’s Weekly I didn’t hear about it.

Have you read Simone de Beauvoir’s the Second Sex?

No. I don’t think that came to Rockhampton.

***

When we turned to talking about me, Mum’s internal conflict became clearer. She yearned to give me the education, freedom and confidence that she was denied, yet the impact of these things scared her. She was a product of her time, and had found safety and comfort in the roles she was given.

What worries Mum most is my anger.

In her life, if someone caused her offence, if someone did something to her that she didn’t like, she felt she had little recourse but to sit and fume. In an era where women teachers were only offered temporary contracts after marriage, in an era before No Fault Divorce, many women held very precarious positions. She wouldn’t want to be unladylike (that would lower her social worth), she wouldn’t want to make things difficult for my father. So whenever I challenge ideas, engage with controversy, speak up about disenfranchisement and inequality, demand respect for myself and my body, Mum worries. She worries I’ll be punched. She worries what people will think. She worries that I’ll make things difficult for my husband. These worries tell me everything about life in country Queensland in the 1960s.

***

After our talk, I pulled out my copy of The Second Sex. I underlined phrases that mirrored my Mum’s matter of fact description of the expectations of womanhood during her life. That marriage was to be a woman’s fundamental project. That, unlike men, women were unable to choose personal liberty (or, not without significant personal cost). That society chose for her (and she felt she had no recourse but to accept) her place as a deferential woman.

For as long as I can remember, my Mother has been the person who has given me most love, who I perhaps care about the most, and yet from whom I feel a profound separation; as though we were two animals of different species staring blankly at each other, marvelling at each other’s oddities. I have come to realise that it is not merely our 45 year age gap that causes this curious distance, but the inevitable generational conflict between competing ideas of womanhood. What Mum made it her life’s mission to be, is precisely what I rail against.

***

Mum, I feel as though your lifetime has been weighed by the mantle of a very different expectation of womanhood, and that I challenge that. And you worry for me, and try to reign me in.

I guess I should also say: As you caution me, you trigger the societal judgement that I try so hard to writhe free from, and make me doubt myself. I know I try to drag you forward, and that terrifies you. For who are you without being Dad’s second? Who could you have been had you not been forced to do Commercial when you were a musician in your heart? My impatience is born from seeing your potential, and the potential of all women, when that cloak can be shed. But equally, what you have achieved has been incredible and inspirational. You – like many women of your era – carry the emotional burden for entire families, for a generation of men who can’t express themselves. You have nursed and carried and cared. You are resilient and inexhaustible.

***

How are we similar?

Well, we’ve always had the music in common.

Mum started teaching me to play the piano as soon as I could hold myself upright. She has the discipline and patience to still practice carefully every day, to have spent 18 years collecting the music I had flung across the room in a frustrated tantrum.

At Christmas I gave my mother a book about the forgotten women of music. She would appear intermittently to give impassioned summaries of the chapter she had just read, still stewing over the injustices and losses to music of erasing women performers and composers.

I smile. I love that she shares this with me. That when we catch up she’ll always have a story that starts with “did you see/read about … [something to do with feminism]”.

She’s reaching across the chasm to me, and in sitting down to interview my Mother, I am reaching out too.

 

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program.

Witches, old wives’ tales and our history of not listening to women

Posted on by under culture, feminism, history, Uncategorized

She haunts our fairytales, our tales of warning and our paperback mysteries. She lives at the edge of society, on the margins of civilisation and the foreboding forest, at the meeting point of the wild and untamed. She knows the difference between the mushrooms that are delicious and the mushrooms that are deadly. She is turned to in secrecy and at great risk by desperate women seeking to harness their bodily power, aiding or hindering fertility. Her knowledge renders her an outcast and there hangs about her a sense of danger – for why else is she always single (a spinster!), childless (barren!), uninterested in male attraction (hideously ugly!). A knowledgeable woman – woman who knows things – is a frightening thing indeed.

***

Garlic for colds. Peppermint for indigestion. Ginger for nausea. Unless I turned to the medically qualified internet, I could not be sure whether these actually work or if they’re an old wives’ tale, and yet I still add these natural remedies to my pharmaceutical panoply. Part of my scepticism comes from herbal preparations being the domain of the charlatan. Once, feeling very vulnerable, I had a very expensive trip to a naturopath where I emerged laden with all sorts of evil-smelling potions to assist weight loss. It was expensive and it worked, but I still felt as though I’d been sold a version of the emperor’s new clothes. Mostly, I think my agnosticism about anything herbal comes from the idea that it’s somehow not scientific. Not tested. Not respected. Don’t medicines come in packets and cost money? And when I scrape back some of these assumptions, what remains are duelling images of a woman in a sagging house between the village and the forest offering ginger tea, and the clinical environment of the lab coat and the degrees and the stringent research and the globally‑monestised system of pharmaceuticals. And I realise that I don’t think the woman of my imagination has real health knowledge.

This utterly hypothetical deductive analysis caused me to wonder how much knowledge we have lost – or at least, undervalued – through ignoring women’s wisdom, through assuming the advice is inherently unsound and untested, through confining old wives’ tales to whispers between generations in the corners of domestic worlds rather than something accorded a spotlight, funding, publication and circulation. What have we lost by not giving the realm of women’s learned knowledge a real chance? To be scrutinised and debated and improved? For women healers to have space and primacy to learn and teach and be believed? The 21st century specialist medical field of surgery, after all, evolved from butchery. We scoff at what has been believed, tried and tested; recommended as “medicine”; developed and matured as a field (medicinal cocaine and cigarettes, anyone?), but understanding these ridiculous beliefs is important in the historical development of medical knowledge. Yet it seems we’ve never allowed the feminine domains of knowledge to advance beyond the derisively-termed ‘alternative’ field. After all, wouldn’t the decades of qualitative case studies obtained by the women of the herbs, the centuries of stories of women as primary caretakers of the ill and injured, be an interesting starting point for more institutionalised research?

In European history, women traditionally served as the healers – their expanded social role compared with contemporary gender norms always causing some concern. But as the feudal era dissolved, the large-scale institutionalisation, protection and control of knowledge began. Churches and the nascent university system worked to own and define sources of knowledge. And, as these were the institutions of men, women healers were cast out of this structure, and derided as heretical, as witches. Centuries later, I’m still falling for this propaganda campaign.

I pause here to make myself utterly clear. Medicine is awesome. It’s keeping me alive! I use a lot of medicine! In the context of this piece I’m terribly uninterested – really – in the efficacy of these herbs. The point I’m trying to make, the story I’m trying to uncover, is how historically we have undervalued and largely sidelined women’s wisdom – not only in this field but in many others. I wonder, what could we know, in this case about herbs and witches’ warnings, if we’d given women’s ideas the same opportunity for development and maturity as a dude’s ideas? And what have we lost by belittling women’s knowledge as too simplistic, too unscientific?

Historians have found strong connections between gossip and accusations of witchcraft: women who developed and shared knowledge – social and medicinal – were slandered as gossips and burned as witches (gossip being seen as the linguistic equivalent to witchcraft), such was the masculine fear of this feminine knowledge. This epistemological dismissal of women’s knowledge continues today. Communication amongst women is often derided as idle chatter, speculation and gossip. Untrustworthy. Unreliable. But what is feminine prattle to the outer‑world is our encyclopaedia. Glenn Close, recently speaking about Hollywood’s reckoning with systemic sexual assault, said, “…Gossip is what women do to keep themselves out of danger.” It is also what women do to learn and to teach.

***

There’s another side to this story. There’s that evergreen Punch cartoon, tagged with the caption ‘That’s an excellent suggestion, Miss Triggs. Perhaps one of the men here would like to make it.’​ Throughout history, bits of women’s wisdom have found themselves a male patron to carry them into the mainstream, shedding any doubt that it was ever found wanting.

Paracelsus, a Swiss physician considered one of the pioneers of the Renaissance’s medical revolution, wrote in the early 16th century, “The universities do not teach all things so a doctor must seek out old wives, gipsies, sorcerers, wandering tribes, old robbers, and such outlaws and take lessons from them.” These lessons from the margins of society, carried into the fold by a more respectable source, could be included in the lexicon of scientific research and development. And this knowledge, from old wives and witches, ensured Paracelsus his place as one of the most influential medical thinkers of the early modern era. Now imagine if the women whose ideas have been appropriated were themselves given further space for experimentation and exploration? In this age of encouraging women’s participation in STEM, it’s ironic that we’ve really held a place in this academic chronicle for millennia.

***

I can find one silver lining; one really awesome social element to this. The wisdom of witches and old wives might not have had access to the means of widespread distribution or been enshrined in learned tomes next to their names. It might not be famed or respected. Yet, this knowledge endures. Women’s knowledge endures. From herbal remedies to how to survive in a man’s world, women’s whispers have survived through a resilient oral history of the domestic world, passed from woman to woman down generations – a surprisingly strong intellectual chain. Recipes, remedies, warnings. Just like we quietly pass on to one another which men to avoid, or how to be safe, or how to cope with the complexities of our bodies. Lessons borne from survival and experience. So while I urge for a re-examination of feminine traditions of intellectual discovery, at the very, very least, we women can comfort ourselves with our secret oral history: while they’ve not been listening, we’ve been learning.

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program.

Diary of a Traveling Ghost

Posted on by under life, memoir, travel, Uncategorized

Transylvania, Romania, May 2017

Something must happen to me in the plane. I cannot emerge from long-haul travel unchanged. I disappear into myself, in that darkness, through those lost days and nights and emerge quieter, simpler and more watchful. My normal instinct for inserting myself into every scene and every conversation as a lead actor evaporates, and I become a quiet audience. A voyeur. A ghost who likes to watch. Quietly slinking through the lives and homes and habits, feeling, touching, learning, leaving no impact.

I have been told I look like I’m from this part of the world. I search for myself in the faces, expecting to find home or heritage. What I find in the faces is signs of great wear. Skin looks tired, more creased, more worn far earlier than I am used to. I realise I haven’t seen anyone I would bundle as middle-aged: the path from young to old doesn’t seem to have any rest stops. It is no romantic stretch (but one backed up by economic and social data) to think that life must be a bit harder here. And if it’s harder here now, what must it have been like twenty years ago, pre-EU membership, thirty years ago under one of history’s great insane dictators, seventy years ago under a largely forgotten Fascist leader who rivalled any for brutality.

I notice young people doing unskilled jobs, jobs usually done by migrants in the West. Young people with tertiary educations don’t drive cabs where I come from. I am struck by how ethnically homogenous the work force is – there don’t appear to be many migrants here. Then I realise, Romanians are the migrants for everyone else in Europe.

Our small local bus is driving through a faded story book. The snow-capped mountains form an enormous backdrop to the utterly flat countryside. Pitched rooves sag comfortably onto houses that could have been built centuries ago, the sharp spires of Romanian Orthodox churches the only disruption to the uniform height. Despite being the connection between two major regional towns, our bus will happily stop regularly, sometimes giving people a lift of a few hundred metres. This gives me ample time to stare out the window at a lifestyle confined to the past in my world: a horse-drawn plough in a slightly dilapidated field; a person working alone with a hoe; the complete absence of large-scaled mechanised agriculture. Then we pass a drive-through Subway. They don’t have those in Australia.

Bucharest, Romania May 2017

I love hardcopy maps. They make me feel like an omnipresent spirit circling a city from above, wondering where to swoop. I task my husband with asking our small pension for one and, after a lengthy search on their part, he returns with a map carefully marked with brothels and strip clubs. This either says everything about Bucharest’s tourism industry or everything about my husband.

After the architectural, cultural and human destruction wrought by Romania’s Communist regime, I expected Bucharest to be a grim, concrete, wasteland. Instead, it is one of the most beautiful cities to become lost in: quiet, clean, happily shabby here and there, and filled with surprising parks which are cool and well-used by youth and elders alike.

I could live here.

We discard the brothel map.

Comrat, Gagauzia, Moldova, May 2017

Regardless of age, all women in Romania and Moldova wear thick, flesh-coloured pantyhose. It is boiling hot. Is this a comfort thing? To avoid chaffing and rubbing of shoes and thighs? Is it modesty – the hose providing a fig-leaf for the short skirts and high heels beloved by the local teens?

With their open-toed sandals and thick hose, older ladies wear bright headscarves. Older gentlemen wear brimmed hats that seem too small as they sit perched high on the head.

My husband, as quintessentially Anglo-Saxon Australian as a kelpie, tall and brawn and bearded and snappily dressed in colour and tailoring (though toned down at my suggestion), is as out of place as a flamingo at a pigeon party. For a start, only Orthodox priests seem to wear beards. His beard worn with colourful shorts has garnered some odd looks from passing priests. And, as at 5’2” I am comfortably tall amongst the locals, his 6’2” seems unnecessary. Even in the height of summer, shorts are rare here. Triple denim is ubiquitous.

I saw a Zara in Transylvania. I wonder how long it will be until what looks weird to me will look weird to them. How long till they discard the scarves and the hose and the small jaunty hats for whatever Zara is selling?

Is capitalism the new colonialism as it sweeps in and displaces time and heritage with the new and the cheap? 

Chisinau, Moldova May 2017

We are staying in a grand Soviet-era hotel. Hotel Chisinau. There are two lifts but only one works at a time and then it can only travel in one direction. Well, this is what my charades with the dedicated lift operator tells me. This is ok, because I tried the lift once and it stopped at random intervals for random periods and it was small and terrifying.

Each wing has a dedicated well-coiffed lady in blue. She pops out to show you to your door.  I visited other floors and no matter how silently I entered the long, expansive hallways, out one would pop. The lady in blue proudly shows you to your bed and pulls back the duvet to reveal your top sheet neatly folded underneath. I cannot explain this opportunity for self-action.

Finally, breakfast is a complicated dance of pre-ordering the night before from a choice of three dishes. In the morning, one visits reception to obtain a ticket where you confirm your choice from the night before (but if you haven’t made such a choice the night before you will be banished, without breakfast), and take your ticket to the restaurant in a dungeon (possibly a former wine cellar) where you exchange it for your meal. It is a pleasant and communal method of food delivery. To accompany breakfast is a large television displaying writhing, lingerie-clad women. Rationing, scrupulous fairness, and utilitarianism still reign in Hotel Chisinau and I couldn’t be happier.

Tiraspol, Transnistria, May 2017

As one who loves to travel, and as one who tempers their addiction between hits with quick fixes of travel writing or documentaries, I’m really bothered by the apparent profundity of everyday experiences when cast through a white gaze.

In short, how can I visit places and not be a dick?

Today, I’ve heard people complain about the quality of coffee. Only instant is provided by the hotel in this unrecognised, breakaway region which lauds Lenin and Soviet-style Communism. Not sneering at what others have, and appreciating what they do have, is a good start to not being a dick.

I also momentarily removed my ghost guise to chastise a tourist in a church who was sneakily taking photos of both the church and its attendees despite warnings not to. I don’t care, he said. You’re a dick, I said.

Odessa, Ukraine, May 2017

I’ve just realised I haven’t seen a single gym, or yoga studio since leaving Vienna three weeks ago. I haven’t seen anyone running either. I guess there are other things to do with your time here.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 2017

There’s a natural process that occurs when the traveller knows they are nearing their time of departure. The energy for adventure quietens. The mind seeks reflection and quiet: to absorb all that it has seen and learnt. I’m sitting drinking coffee not even ten minutes from my door. Sam is getting a haircut. We are transitioning from invisible ghosts who roam a city trying to know all its secrets back to normalcy. It doesn’t matter whether I’m gone for months or weeks: as the airport lounge nears, so too does this transition.

The anonymity of the wanderer is waning. For weeks I have worn no makeup, dressed in the same clothes. I have two pairs of shoes and no perfume. A cheap pair of earrings and three items of makeup for the one or two ‘special events’ I have attended. I become a person I barely recognise when I travel. As she begins to enter her hibernation, I think, ‘I must wax my eyebrows when I get home’ and start questioning my certainty that these sneakers go with every outfit.

I walk everywhere here. At home I’ll hop in the car to drive 200m to the shops if it’s cold or hot or nearly dark or maybe looks like rain. Here I won’t countenance public transport for less than 3km. There’s no reason to rush after all. My chronic illness doesn’t vanish – of course – it just doesn’t matter if I stop a million times to sit and watch. Or if I need to rest and spend a day within 20 metres of my bed. I am in suspended time where the world is just for me, the voyeur. The city will keep on performing its part and it will be there for me to watch when I am ready.

But all too soon this ghost-like suspension will evaporate. As desperately as I try cling to its cobwebs, it will disappear as the texts resume and the chores resume. Connectivity to reality will puncture my invisibility and I will be seen again.

 

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program.

A Non-Compliant Woman

Posted on by under feminism, memoir, Uncategorized

Our lives are full of shoulds. For women, these shoulds act as the hands that form and shape a lump of clay. Like clay being formed into something suddenly respected as art, we are pressed into behaviours that see us recognised as ladies. This pressing begins so young, and is so omnipresent, that it becomes an intuitive and unthinking framework for every interaction. Like how we’re so used to stepping out of others’ ways, deferring space. Like when we’re told to smile, deferring our faces.

When we start challenging these shoulds, it’s uncomfortable, it’s shocking and it’s scary – for us, and for others. These shoulds are in fact, compliance. Compliance with a world that wants to bind and conscribe our behaviours, voices, bodies and ambitions, veil them beneath manners, politeness and contentedness with the progress we have made from being the chattel of fathers and husbands.

‘You should write happier things,’ says my mother, worried about the emotional and societal implications of my ‘complaining’ all the time.

I have started watching for acts of everyday compliance – instances where I subsume my preferences or comfort for another’s. They’re everywhere. But this has become much more than proving that if I don’t move from the path of oncoming pedestrian traffic I’ll get shoulder-checked five times a day.

I understand now the myriad ways I have complied my entire life. I understand why a barely known middle-aged man rested his hand high on my seven year old thigh. Why a guy refused to wear a condom when he had sex with a friend of a friend. Why so many of us yield to accepting what is done to us even though it makes our blood chill. I understand that we have been moulded and pressed and shaped so that we are compliant and cannot resist. I need to push against the hands that want to form us into something prettier and nicer and quieter. I am trying harder and more consciously to be a non-compliant woman.

Since I started my micro-movement of non-compliance, I have been terrified of the consequences of pushing back. ‘You’re going to get punched in the face one day,’ my mother has oft said following a small act of perceived surliness or, as I like to call it, standing up for myself. I’ve been screamed at. Ridiculed. Glared at. But what I take these reactions to show is the genuine and deep-seated fear that men have when we challenge the expectation that we’ll comply.

Some examples:

1.

I hadn’t seen him for a decade, yet every few years he’d crop up on messenger and just check in and say hi. Somehow, I would fold into myself and become 16 year old Naomi, on the cusp of her first heartbreak. Anxious to do everything right lest I made something go wrong. I was so eager for his approval. I was so eager to keep him happy and not upset him.

As each conversation ended and I morphed back into 30 year old Naomi, I’d feel sick afterwards. So unaccustomed to this role of subservience, of ego-stroking. Is this what it feels like, really, underneath all the superficial male-awarded affirmation, to be a cool girl? To comply?

So it went until he caught me on a day when I was grumpy, busy and NOT in the mood to listen to white boys playing four chords on the guitar and expecting me to swoon.

‘You’re still into music aren’t you,’ he asked. ‘Wanna listen to a song I recorded?’

‘No thank you,’ I said. ‘I would find it awkward. You know I’ve taken music seriously my entire life. I’ve performed professionally. For a brief moment it was going to be my career. I tend to want to offer constructive criticism. If you enjoy playing that’s great. You don’t need to know what I think to enjoy music and I’m worried that what I think won’t be what you want to hear.’

This honest response unleashed a flood of comments that I was a stuck up bitch with massive tickets on myself and that I was incredibly rude and by the way I was really unattractive.

I just really didn’t want to listen to him play the guitar.

 

2.

‘You should get a job here!’ A smartly-dressed older man beamed at me.

I broke from the conversation I had been maintaining in my head while I waited in the queue to return his comments with an expression that said, ‘Huh?’

‘Here, at Priceline! You’d look gorgeous in their pink uniform.’

I looked down at my orange, undoubtedly food-splattered shirt and to the woman behind the counter wearing a pink blouse and a humiliated expression.

‘Pretty in pink! You should get a job here because you’d be pretty in pink!’

‘I have three degrees and an important government job. But I’ll throw all that away for the chance to be pretty in the uniform of your choosing.’

‘It was just a compliment! You don’t need to be sarcastic.’

I’m guessing the correct reaction was to laugh merrily and accept his gaze.

 

3.

I was at a wedding, a handful of friends and I taking a break in the fresh air from the furious dancing.

‘Do you guys have a lighter?’ An unknown wedding guest approached our group.

‘Sorry, none of us smoke,’ I said. ‘But those guys over there were just smoking so perhaps they can help out?’

‘Are you trying to get me to fuck off?’ My new acquaintance demanded aggressively.

‘No, I was trying to be helpful. But now you’ve spoken to me like that you can certainly fuck off.’

The atmosphere suddenly shifted. His body language morphed into something larger, squarer, and stronger. His eyes narrowed on me. I saw his hand tighten around the beer bottle he was holding. Women are very, very finely tuned into these atmospheric changes.

Just as it seemed he would explode, my partner calmly said, ‘Mate, she was trying to help and you blew up at her.’

Suddenly, our friend was on more familiar footing: how two white guys sort out a little problem.

‘Oh yeah no worries mate.’ He shook my partner’s hand.

‘No hard feelings love,’ he said to me, ‘give me a hug.’

‘No thank you,’ I said, offering my hand instead.

‘I just want a fucking hug what the fuck is wrong with you.’

It was a friend’s wedding, I was already weakened by one small round of resistance. I listened to the damn guitar and gave him a hug so he would go away, so I didn’t get hit and so I wasn’t rude. It was easier.

Why not just be nice to people instead of assuming the worst? Is what I want not valid? Especially when my niceness is exploited by intentions that are clearly not the best? Why is it so much more horrible to be truthful and honest, to be a non-compliant woman, than to allow myself to be formed into something quieter, meeker, smaller and unhappier? So what if the guy told you to smile where you were in your head about a serious issue? Well, raising a defiant eyebrow might be the first step to having a framework for saying what you really want, what you really feel, when it really matters. I send a question back: why is the scrutiny not directed at those who uphold the shoulds, who react angrily to non-compliance, who exploit the expectation that someone will acquiesce to their wants, who assume we won’t ask for more than we were given. Are not they the ones who should be doing things differently?

For many women, facing the condemnation of non-compliance is too terrifying because our social worth is bound in the approval our every action is given (or not) from men. Not complying will get you yelled at or dumped or hit or raped. So they just listen to the damn guitar. It’s easier. It makes them go away. But it hurts our souls and binds the fabric of compliance even tighter. I imagine that non-compliance allows us to stretch fully, to be radiant and brilliant and powerful without limit. And to imagine the true possibility of a womanhood without shoulds is terrifying in the most beautiful way.

To look into the eyes of someone who has asked me to submit to their expectations of my femininity, and refuse, is the most powerful act of womanhood. I feel adrenaline and power and strength race through my blood. Then afterwards, the shaking, rage filled tears of doing what I know is right despite criticism to calm down and not overreact; despite snarling, warm, drunk breath spewing insults at me; despite the fear of being hit – or worse. Non-compliance is more anguishing the more intimate the hands that press my compliance are, because it is shattering a relationship that was built upon my compliance, and I see that, to some people, I am not loveable when I say no.

 

This article was originally published by Feminartsy as part of the writer’s residency program.

Massage Nightmares: Why I can’t be naked and silent

Posted on by under life, memoir, Uncategorized

Massages are meant to be a wonderfully relaxing experience, but not if you’re me. Unfortunately, the promise of luxury causes me to forget my regular propensity to forget how to human. At first, a massage sounds like a fabulous idea. I trot eagerly into the spa at the appointed hour and am shown to a room. But suddenly, the imminence of nudity and proneness and silence renders me completely incapable of remaining in control of my mind and body and my usual high risk of awkwardness suddenly sky rockets, creating certainty that I will do something unusual, unexpected and uncomfortable.

The trigger is the instruction to disrobe and lie face down on the bed. The resultant capitulation into complete clown can be broken down into three distinct dilemmas (that in reality are whirling and colliding in my head as I panic, exacerbating the difficulty in any attempt to ‘act normal’). Let us observe these dilemmas in turn.

Internal Narrative of Dilemma 1: Shit, I’m being asked to disrobe. How ‘nakey’ do I get? Do they want bra off or do they want to do the modest unclip of bra so when I roll over there’s less ‘flashage’? I could ask but that might sound like I’m anxious and/or can’t undress myself and now they’ve left the room anyway. OH GOD THERE’S A PAIR OF DISPOSABLE KNICKERS. These never fit. It’s so dark in here I can’t get them out of the tiny packet. Surely it’s a fire hazard to attempt to disrobe and apply unfamiliar undergarments by candle light? “Are you done in there?” “Not quite!” Shit shit shit I’ve been in here too long, they’ll be wondering if I’m stuck (this has happened before). Ok, knickers are out of tiny packet and a rough assessment indicates they’ll possibly cover the good bits. Not like that time that I nearly had them in a respectable position and then tore them. Like, literally ripped them a new one. I had no idea what to do with a torn pair of disposable panties so I panicked and put my jocks back on and the torn pair over the top. I can’t explain this decision. And all I could then think about for the entire massage was how the therapist would be spending the entire massage wondering what the hell was wrong with me. Ok. Ridiculous pants on. Now to mount this table….

Internal Narrative of Dilemma 2: Now I’m naked in ridiculous pants and I’m looking at a very neatly towel-wrapped massage table. I can never work out exactly what they want me to do. I have ruled out just getting on up sans modesty throw: my naked self, shining like a moon through the candle-lit darkness would be far too alarming for the already perplexed therapist. So I have to do something with the towel. Early on, I tried to loosely wrap it around my body before climbing onto the table but, no matter how loosely I wrapped myself, by the time the therapist tried to access flesh it had turned into a tightly wrapped kebab and their attempt to remove my wrap would necessitate my raising and lowering my shoulders, torso and legs so that it looked like I was performing a particularly disjointed attempt at a nude worm. And then there was that time that this failed and I just had to get up, unwrap, and clamber back up under the disappointed and confused gaze of the therapist. Either way, soon will cometh the half-time roll, where I am expected to somehow demurely and modestly rotate my nude (again let me remind you that nudity sets me to auto-awkward) heft in the manner of an animal – perhaps a walrus? – on a spit, without undue flashing, without falling off a narrow bench and whilst covered in a slippery slick of massage oil. For now, I do the superhero – swirling the towel around my shoulders like a cape so that it covers only my back. One does have to hold this at the neck so that makes clambering up that touch harder…

Internal Narrative of Dilemma 3: Why oh why is the bed always too high! I acknowledge I am somewhat shorter than the average bear (in fact, I am close to the average height of the shortest bear) but the table always seems to be set to (my) chest height. It is so hard to clamber when nude (I feel the knowledge of being naked limits me physically) and towels have such little purchase. I should have checked the brakes were on first. One time they weren’t and the thrust of my mount caused me to sail – elegantly and spectacularly ­– across the room on my table, and crash into a counter of beauty accoutrements, the inertia of my impact causing crashing, rattling, flying hot wax and the great distress, alarm and – once again – disappointment of my therapist.

Ok I’m up. Head in hole. Now I wait in the darkness, and the relaxation can begin… while I worry about everything I can do to embarrass myself while lying here doing nothing.