Struggle

 I struggle with this …

flat line of words. It is such a frail, thin thing, too slight to capture the fullness of the experience. Reading back over my recent posts, I can see that, try as I might, they do not capture the essence of what I lived through.

My children are safe. They have been fed and nurtured, cared for, clothed, given gifts, received the best education I can afford for them. They have received medical care when they needed it. But more than that, they have been granted some autonomy in how they live their lives, who they choose as friends, what beliefs and spiritual practices they embrace. They have been encouraged to take up different interests, to explore what it is to be a social being by having friendships outside of school. I have tried to affirm in each of them their qualities and strengths, and supported them to follow the paths they choose for themselves in life. Simple things. Although my parenting has been imperfect, although I have been challenged by my traumatic past, I have raised both of my children to know they are safe and loved.  

This was not my experience as a child. I was not always fed, and when I was that food was sometimes withheld, either in its freshness and quality, but sometimes altogether. La Narcisse mythologised the practice of bread and water meals as a method of discipline, although, of course, in France the bread would have been the day’s fresh bread, with cheese or sausage. In Australia it was several days old, usually hard and unappealing, often served alone. And that was often what I ate: bread and butter, for breakfast, lunch, after school. (There was usually an evening meal, but sometimes it was displaced by another gruelling round of interrogation and beration, which could go on for hours especially at night). La Narcisse had a rule about never throwing bread out. For a while I was the only person who ate it, and nothing fresh would be forthcoming until the two loaves bought at the start of the week were gone. A friend reminded me recently that there was a period of time when I only ate rice. Boiled rice and nothing else, and while I remember this it is fragmented and I don’t know why or for how long that was the case. What I do remember was the constancy of hunger. And even now when I am distressed I stuff slice after slice, great lumps of bread into my mouth, no matter how old or hard or stale, and I chew mechanically until the hollow in the pit of my stomach is filled. 

The clothing was tough, too. When we were young, before we lived with la Narcisse, we didn’t have a lot but we were always clothed. Between my grandmothers’ sewing, and the huge bags of handmedowns that turned up every year at the change of seasons, we were clothed. I don’t know why this slipped as we got older. Perhaps it was because we moved out of sight of our extended family. It wasn’t an issue until we went to live with la Narcisse. For a while we wore bathers all the time at home. One pair, which we rinsed in the shower and hung up for the next day. Some of those were handmedowns too, but I wore them until they were faded, and lost their stretch and became too small. I was acutely aware, when other people came to our place at how inappropriately under-clothed we were. I have some old photos from that time, and there we are in badly fitting bathers in nearly every photo. I remember being sent to stay with my grandmother with very little in the way of clothes, so that she always had to take us shopping at the beginning of our stay. And those few items of clothing became the mainstay of our wardrobes even after they’d become too small. As a teenager, I had secondhand school uniforms, a pair of shorts to leave the house, a (hideous) dress for church and the rest of the time I wore a tshirt and sports briefs (ie, underwear) and nothing more. Occasionally there was hideously inappropriate op-shop purchase, like the time I had to wear cut-down polyester slacks for sports at school because we were meant to have shorts instead of skirts for that activity. There was never the slightest bit of concern or compunction shown by la Narcisse whenever we were exposed to the serial humiliations and social embarrassment of not having clothes we needed for whatever occasion it was, whether an everyday interaction or a special event. And there was a really disturbing disconnect between the kind of modesty we were constantly exhorted to display in our behaviour, and the reality of the scantness of our clothing and how it disempowered us every day.

I don’t know whether they did this out of deliberate efforts to control us by restricting our necessities, or whether it was more a case of disinterest, lack of care or neglect, but it had an ongoing effect on my confidence, my sense of social identity and my self-worth. Because, along with the disempowering lack of clothes came constant belittling, fat-shaming, bodily criticism. And la Narcisse heaped it on constantly, irrespective of my actual weight. We were summarily sent, at one point, to live with my grandmother, where we were fed a normal diet of normal, abundantly supplied food, which I consumed heartily after the dietary deprivations we were already experiencing with la Narcisse. I went home at the end of that year somewhat chubbier than I had been, which triggered the start of a campaign of control where fat and food were concerned. And even after I lost all that weight and more, that criticism and control persisted.

(This bit gets bad. I feel exhausted just holding my arms up to type it). What had already been an inadequate diet now became a forcefully restricted one. La Narcisse had some peculiar ideas about nutrition, which she applied with willful discipline. And I mean discipline. I’m not sure when she made the whip, but it was there after we’d spent the year with my grandmother. And I was whipped more than once after I admitted to eating something that was on the list of forbidden foods. And it didn’t have to be much food, either. Half a toffee from the school canteen? Whipped. A handful of chips when we went to a friend’s house to play? Whipped. And it became really problematic when I was older and went out and they served something that might veer into the “junk food” zone, like fried snacks. I never knew what to do. I visited some nuns once, and one of them cooked up some fried vegetable samosas. And I had no idea whether I could eat them (it was lunch) or if I had to politely decline, even though I was a guest and I had no other food. But they were nuns, so how could their food be so wrong? And so it became a situation of stress and indecision and embarrassment, when it was just a normal lunch for them. I was 16 or 17 at the time, and even at that age the level of pressure and control exerted on me over things like when and what I was allowed to eat, even when I was away from home, had not abated. And the same fear and hunger and confusion about eating and especially eating in front of other people followed me for years afterwards. And it was a really long time before I could eat with enjoyment, instead of guilt and shame and fear. And I was hungry, really hungry, for a long, long time.

It would be one thing, I suppose, if I’d been a very overweight child who needed some healthy dietary modelling. But I wasn’t, and the food restrictions forced on me weren’t healthy either. Some of my old photos show a young girl who is gaunt, and more tellingly, who already holds her body in postures that guard the vulnerable organs of the torso. There is an unhappy rigidity instead of the relaxed, carefree flexibilty of youth. And there’s a wariness in my eyes that doesn’t match the happy occasion the photos portray. Not that the occasions were ever completely happy. There was always a heavy tension associated with them. Sometimes they went very wrong with shouting and punishments. Sometimes they were cancelled. The festive meal was prepared, and then we didn’t have any. We were given a sandwich (if we were lucky) and sent to bed. And on my 18th birthday, I was given a pile of presents and a plate of food, and I sat alone in a darkened room because la Narcisse decided I didn’t deserve to have my birthday celebrated. I don’t even remember what terrible transgression they said I had committed. I was getting high distinctions and distinctions at uni, volunteering my spare time at church and doing charity work, and costing them nothing while I spent my birthday savings to get to and from uni. And yet, la Narcisse declared me disgraced, such that I was ostracised as completely as they could without putting me out on the street. On my 18th birthday. 

And even typing all of this, these words are not enough to tell you all of it. How we slept as far as possible away from where my mother and la Narcisse lived, how our accommodation was not maintained so it let in the insects, the mosquitoes and wasps, the spiders, the frogs, centipedes, a huge teeming ant nest in the bottom of my wardrobe. How the rain whipped in and the tropical storms caused it to rock about and the stifling heat when the power went out and the thunder was crashing and we were left alone out there in the storm by ourselves, and later when my siblings left, all by myself. How we had to piss on the ground outside, even though that spot wasn’t totally shielded from view from the road, because there was a rule about not going to the actual house at certain times, not even to use the toilet or bathroom. How we were made to clean the mouldy bathroom and toilet walls even though there was some kind of live electrical fault up there that zapped us every now and then. How we were made to read our letters to family members out loud before we posted them, and the letters we received in return. How they told us repeatedly we would be made wards of the state if we went to live with our father, when the truth was that he had spent years and thousands of dollars trying to win custody of us. How we were put on the end of the phone and told what to say to our family members and how to say it. How they let me keep a journal for a while because I would read entries to them from it. (Until I wised up and found a really good hiding spot for it, and then later took it with me every single time I left the house, and you’d better believe that drove la Narcisse wild, knowing I was keeping actual secrets from her, after years when she constantly accused me of keeping secrets while I had none). How they were so unabashed by their use of a whip, which by design would be best described as a “heavy flogger”, that they kept it on the outside work table, in full view of anyone who came to the place. It was a rudimentary looking thing, and I don’t suppose its purpose would have been readily apparent to a casual visitor, but there was a calculated brazenness to keeping it there, all the same. 

And it’s a similar kind of brazenness, now, from la Narcisse. I don’t understand how anyone could be OK about not telling someone their mother had died. I can’t imagine that anyone who heard about that wouldn’t be shocked. But for la Narcisse, this is an acceptable level of behaviour. Perhaps she has never really contemplated what other people would think or say about anything she has done. Perhaps she has never imagined saying the words, ‘Oh we cancelled Spirited’s 18th birthday because she didn’t write her uni essay quickly enough.’ Perhaps she has never visualised the reaction she might get if she told a friend, ‘Oh we flogged our children with a whip when they ate lollies, that’s why they look so thin in their photos!’  Maybe she didn’t quite go there, mentally, to think about what people would say if she announced, ‘Hey my best friend died, and her children weren’t in contact with her much anymore because of how we abused them physically and psychologically for a decade and again pretty much everytime they tried to repair the relationship since then, so I’m just not going to tell them their mum’s dead, so I’ve got time to monetise their grandmother’s stuff and throw out everything that was theirs that their mum hung onto, because she did really love them, even though I did my best to convince her otherwise. That’s cool, right?’ She has gotten away with an entire lifetime of transgressions against the people who were her nearest and dearest, and she appears to have no qualms at all at carrying out an action (the deliberate suppression of news of my mother’s death) which, due to the finality of death will ultimately become apparent to everyone who ever knew my mother. Did she think nobody would notice, the same way nobody noticed when I was hiding the whip marks under the hem of my school uniform? Or perhaps she just underestimated the power of words, even a frail thin line of words such as the ones that I am writing now?

These words will go where they need to. The energy of my testimony about her crimes and her lies and her wrongful self-approbation will go where it needs to go and it will do what it needs to do, either now by my telling of it, or at such time that I choose a more formal vehicle for it. I don’t know where or when or how this will end. What I do know is that my silence is over, and that without my silence, there is no place la Narcisse can hide from the truth.