Thoughts before Father’s Day

I was three years old when my mother left.

Dad picked me up from the babysitter’s on his way home from work and we pulled up to a darkening house. I still remember following him into their bedroom. A missing suitcase, make-up gone from the dresser, wardrobe doors open. My brother’s room cold and quiet, his toothbrush gone. Dad panicked and started making phonecalls, afraid and angry. Then he said to me, ‘Mummy’s just gone on a holiday, it’s okay.’ 

I cried a lot.

Afterwards, I stayed with family down south. Dad had to remain in Cairns for legal arrangements, and there were things to bring from the house. This meant driving the thousands of kilometres to Victoria in a big old truck. When he neared our farm that first night back, he kept driving the extra forty minutes to where I was staying, even though it had been arranged that he would come for me in the morning. I had been put to bed already – my uncle carried me outside in my pyjamas when the truck came up the drive.

I still remember what he was wearing when he climbed out of the cabin – a red-checked wool coat with a lambskin collar. I remember the feel of his chest as he hugged me to it, too. The solidity.

~

Almost twenty years later I sent him a red polar-fleece vest for his birthday. It was February but the chemo gave him chills and I thought he’d like the softness – his old woolen jumpers were too scratchy. When I saw him at Easter he’d put the vest on for my visit.  I don’t think he wore it often though; I had underestimated how much the cancer had shrunk him down and it hung loosely across his torso.

Suddenly, I was bigger than him.

~

After he died I looked for that red-checked coat to hang in my wardrobe, but it had been packed off to the Salvos long ago.

A friend in need

Today I met a man with no worldly possessions except his singed car and the clothes and shoes he is still wearing.

We were collecting my new glasses from the optometrist and he saw that my husband was wearing a CFA t-shirt and  came over to offer gratitude, and perhaps also to connect with a person he knew would have seen some of the things he had seen.

This man had a slightly weathered face and kind eyes and he could have been a friend of my father. He spoke calmly of terror and quietly of raging death. To him, the fires weren’t natural, they were Napalm. He kept saying that no one should be, can be, blamed. He smiled. I don’t know how.

He was at the optometrist because when the heat hit his home in Kinglake the metal in his glasses expanded and the lenses fell out. He still managed to drive safely through the chaos. Lucky, or blessed. He and my husband talked together of cars that crashed into trees as their drivers panicked and then perished and I stood there listening but not understanding. Their minds share images that I can only see if I watch the television news but the mediating screen makes it unreal, for me and most of us. Another thing to be grateful for.

As I paid for my glasses the man commented that he wasn’t sure how he’d organise things, since he doesn’t have a medicare card. Or anything.

The person who was serving me simply explained that they would be giving free glasses to all bushfire victims and that they would be prioritised ahead of everyone. I found myself welling up with tears for the umpteenth time. She turned to me and said ‘we have to do something and this is the only thing we can do.’

I am yet to speak to someone who isn’t similarly determined to help. And as horrific as it is that we have come to this state of loving and giving through such trauma, I still want to celebrate it. Because it proves to me that I’m not wrong to believe that we are basically all better off connected. Better off kind.

Victoria is shrouded in smoke and unfathomable sadness. But it’s a shroud that forces us to huddle together for comfort and out of that we can salvage something.

Dead letters

Every few weeks or so, I write an email to my brother. Now I know you’re probably sitting there chewing on a jam fancy and sipping a cup of tea hoping against hope that something interesting will give you an excuse to stay away from the real world a bit longer and are now sarcastically saying to yourself well whoopdedoo… how mundane. But before you take another bite of your jam fancy and go looking for some interesting boob shots (my advice: avoid Facebook), let me tell assure you that me writing an email to my brother is actually news. Well, to me.

You see, he doesn’t read them.

At least, I don’t think he does.

I imagine them flickering into his inbox and being deleted with a thud. Dead letters.

It’s a long story, but no longer or uglier than your average family dysfunction saga. Suffice to say, he doesn’t talk to me. And it’s not my fault. It’s our mother’s.

No, really.

Anyway, I find it intensely difficult to write those emails. I have to ask myself if I’m doing it out of some perversity but if that were it, I’m sure there’s more rewarding way to be a masochist. It’s not about pain. It’s about honouring what I say and what I feel, even if it makes me or others uncomfortable. A lesson I’m trying to learn.

I’ve only been able to do this for a relatively short time because it was only last year that I finally got hold of an email address for him, after ten years of silence. I was more or less a child when we last spoke. Now, I’m finding that there is another difficulty in this one-sided correspondence and it has nothing to do with trauma or baggage.

Carrying on a conversation when you’re not sure if the other person is listening actually requires courage and not a little skill. I have new found respect for people who talk to themselves. And I don’t mean just muttering in the supermarket about what was left off the list or what will happen to Little Johnny when you get home – I mean the ones who vocalise all day long. What stamina they must have! How fascinating they must believe themselves to be!

The thing is, I have nothing to talk about. The only people who are up to the task of feigning interest in my days filled with dribble and failing dismally at ‘keeping house’ and breastfeeding highs are lows are other people with children. My brother was always pretty unimpressed by babies and as a gay man it seems the odds are against him having any. Although in truth I hold a secret hope that one day he’ll reply to say that he and the talented and beautiful lover I have imagined for him are adopting a child and could I possibly share with them my vast knowledge of modern cloth nappies. Or something like that. And I suppose that’s what all this comes down to, isn’t it? Hope.

Writing a blog is hopeful. It says I have something to say and it says I think what I have to say is worth someone else’s time to read. Or maybe it just says something about our net-obsessed world and our insatiable desire for making the private public, in a fashion. Whatever it is, I enjoy it. It doesn’t feel in the least masochistic. (At least, not for me. I can’t speak for you, dear reader…)

If only all writing was so easy.