Ideas of home
I've been thinking lately about ideas of home and family. In particular, I've been thinking about the differences between institutional ideas of home and family, and the real act of family, the act of making a home.
As I've been writing the story of Heather and me, it's become clear to me that I need to think further about my own past. In order to understand where I am now, I need to better understand my past. I especially need to understand my mother's background. She and I have had a troubled relationship at times, and I have not been as sympathetic or understanding of her as I could have been. By writing about her now, I hope to reclaim some of what has been lost to anger and misunderstanding.
When my mother was eight years old, her father went to work one day and never came home. Many years later, my grandmother, Thelma, told me that her husband had a gambling problem, and large debts. His disappearance had an immediate and catastrophic effect on the family. There simply was not enough money to support my grandmother and her seven children. The three eldest girls, who were in their early to middle teens, quit school and began to work. The four youngest—two boys and two girls—were placed in State-run Homes—orphanages, effectively. My mother and her two-year-old sister, S., were placed in a girls’ institution, and their brothers in a boys’ institution.
Within a couple of years, S. was adopted, which was probably for the best. At the Home, the children were beaten, slapped, and fed rotten food on a regular basis. They endured all sorts of horrendous punishments, often for no reason. Like many of the institutions of the time, it was a hellish; 40 years later it would be just one of scores of institutions to be investigated in a State Government’s Forde Inquiry. The Inquiry found that abuse and neglect were commonplace in these institutions, institutions which purported to care for these homeless children of the poor.
Mum was in the Home until she was fifteen, when she was permitted to leave to find work. She returned to live with her mother and one of her sisters. The family never saw Sunny again. When they managed to locate her years later, she didn’t want any contact with her biological family.
Mum was only two years out of the Home when she married my father at seventeen. She had her first child a year later. I think she wanted to have a perfect little family, a perfect marriage, but she had nothing on which to model her ideas of perfection. She and Dad didn’t do too badly, but there have been some bumpy patches. As she’s grown older, many things have come to haunt her, and I think her childhood has a large part to play in this. Never terribly comfortable in social situations, she’s grown increasingly reclusive over the past ten or fifteen years. She avoids leaving the house because she sometimes has panic attacks when she goes to do the shopping. She’ll find herself standing by the laundry powder or the baked beans with the world crumbling around her, her heart pounding, and an absolute certainty that she’s going to die.
She doesn’t travel any more. She came to Brisbane a few years back to see a specialist when her health started to fail. It’s the only trip she’s made in the twelve years since I left home. I thought she would make an exception for the wedding party, but she didn’t. She talked about it a little, said she’d like to, but “who would look after the pets?” I told her she could arrange for someone to feed them, surely; or she could leave enough food for a day, fly down just for the party and return the next day. But she couldn’t.
It’s a pointless task to speculate on how Mum might have been different if my grandfather never left, or if the Home provided a nurturing environment. But I do speculate, sometimes. I wonder how our family might have been different. Some people say that you shouldn’t wish things were different, because otherwise you wouldn’t be the person you are. I do wish things had been different, though. How could I not? If things were different, my mother might have had a chance to be happy. I don’t write those words lightly. I don’t mean she might have thrown dinner parties and gone out dancing. I mean that she might have had a chance to be happy.
A Senate report from 2004 estimates that 500 000 or more Australians were in some form of "care" in the past century. The report contains submissions from hundreds of care-leavers and details the abuse they suffered and the ongoing effects of their time in the institution. The report states: "Submissions refer frequently to a range of legacies including low self-esteem, lack of confidence, depression, fear and distrust, anger, shame, guilt, obsessiveness, social anxieties, phobias, recurring nightmares, tension, migraines, and speech difficulties" (145-46). Apart from the last two, I would say my mother has suffered all of these symptoms at some point, and most of them quite regularly, for all of my life.
In ways that I don't fully understand yet, my mother's experience influences me as well. I want to understand it better. I write; it's what I do to try to understand. And so I will write about my mother.
As I've been writing the story of Heather and me, it's become clear to me that I need to think further about my own past. In order to understand where I am now, I need to better understand my past. I especially need to understand my mother's background. She and I have had a troubled relationship at times, and I have not been as sympathetic or understanding of her as I could have been. By writing about her now, I hope to reclaim some of what has been lost to anger and misunderstanding.
When my mother was eight years old, her father went to work one day and never came home. Many years later, my grandmother, Thelma, told me that her husband had a gambling problem, and large debts. His disappearance had an immediate and catastrophic effect on the family. There simply was not enough money to support my grandmother and her seven children. The three eldest girls, who were in their early to middle teens, quit school and began to work. The four youngest—two boys and two girls—were placed in State-run Homes—orphanages, effectively. My mother and her two-year-old sister, S., were placed in a girls’ institution, and their brothers in a boys’ institution.
Within a couple of years, S. was adopted, which was probably for the best. At the Home, the children were beaten, slapped, and fed rotten food on a regular basis. They endured all sorts of horrendous punishments, often for no reason. Like many of the institutions of the time, it was a hellish; 40 years later it would be just one of scores of institutions to be investigated in a State Government’s Forde Inquiry. The Inquiry found that abuse and neglect were commonplace in these institutions, institutions which purported to care for these homeless children of the poor.
Mum was in the Home until she was fifteen, when she was permitted to leave to find work. She returned to live with her mother and one of her sisters. The family never saw Sunny again. When they managed to locate her years later, she didn’t want any contact with her biological family.
Mum was only two years out of the Home when she married my father at seventeen. She had her first child a year later. I think she wanted to have a perfect little family, a perfect marriage, but she had nothing on which to model her ideas of perfection. She and Dad didn’t do too badly, but there have been some bumpy patches. As she’s grown older, many things have come to haunt her, and I think her childhood has a large part to play in this. Never terribly comfortable in social situations, she’s grown increasingly reclusive over the past ten or fifteen years. She avoids leaving the house because she sometimes has panic attacks when she goes to do the shopping. She’ll find herself standing by the laundry powder or the baked beans with the world crumbling around her, her heart pounding, and an absolute certainty that she’s going to die.
She doesn’t travel any more. She came to Brisbane a few years back to see a specialist when her health started to fail. It’s the only trip she’s made in the twelve years since I left home. I thought she would make an exception for the wedding party, but she didn’t. She talked about it a little, said she’d like to, but “who would look after the pets?” I told her she could arrange for someone to feed them, surely; or she could leave enough food for a day, fly down just for the party and return the next day. But she couldn’t.
It’s a pointless task to speculate on how Mum might have been different if my grandfather never left, or if the Home provided a nurturing environment. But I do speculate, sometimes. I wonder how our family might have been different. Some people say that you shouldn’t wish things were different, because otherwise you wouldn’t be the person you are. I do wish things had been different, though. How could I not? If things were different, my mother might have had a chance to be happy. I don’t write those words lightly. I don’t mean she might have thrown dinner parties and gone out dancing. I mean that she might have had a chance to be happy.
A Senate report from 2004 estimates that 500 000 or more Australians were in some form of "care" in the past century. The report contains submissions from hundreds of care-leavers and details the abuse they suffered and the ongoing effects of their time in the institution. The report states: "Submissions refer frequently to a range of legacies including low self-esteem, lack of confidence, depression, fear and distrust, anger, shame, guilt, obsessiveness, social anxieties, phobias, recurring nightmares, tension, migraines, and speech difficulties" (145-46). Apart from the last two, I would say my mother has suffered all of these symptoms at some point, and most of them quite regularly, for all of my life.
In ways that I don't fully understand yet, my mother's experience influences me as well. I want to understand it better. I write; it's what I do to try to understand. And so I will write about my mother.
posted by Michelle | 6:35 pm
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