I Knew You'd Have Brown Eyes (13 page)

15

‘This isn’t my first baby,’ I told my obstetrician at my initial antenatal visit. If he was surprised he didn’t show it. I was worried about complications – what would I do if I lost this baby? Now that I was a trained midwife I knew what could go wrong in pregnancy. But as each month progressed and my baby kept growing and moving, I became more confident.

When our daughter Samantha arrived, she had large eyes and a beautiful plum face. Trevor sat with me through the whole labour and when I was too tired to lift my head off the bed he held her. It had been a long night, but after I was wheeled to my ward I couldn’t sleep. The nurses wheeled her into the nursery so that I could rest but I followed them.

‘I knew you wouldn’t be able to sleep,’ one of the nurses said to me. I guess I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. I was overjoyed. I reflected that my youth was over. My adult life may have had a shaky start but at last things were working out. Now with a baby to care for, I felt that I was a real grown-up. It comforted me to know that this child would grow up with stability and security.

During my pregnancy I worked at Fremantle Hospital but I resigned before Samantha’s birth. The course I took at the University of Western Australia’s Education Department enabled me to get into the Master of Education program there. I was planning to pursue a career in nursing education. Samantha was born in the Easter holiday week and, after I was discharged from hospital, I went straight back to university and took her to lectures and tutorials in her baby carrier. She rested on my lap as I pored over my statistics homework at home and slept as I typed out assignments.

When she wasn’t asleep I would push her pram around the streets of Scarborough. We visited friends, read books together, and sat and gazed at each other. On weekends with Trevor we went to the beach or for bike rides to Cottesloe or Bicton to watch Trevor and his son windsurfing.

Trevor’s mother lived in Bayswater. She was in her late eighties and, when I took a part-time job as a tutor in the School of Nursing at Edith Cowan University, she babysat Samantha. My job was six hours a week split over two days, and on one of those days we’d have lunch together – she always cooked a curry – before I left for my three hours of work. It was a great arrangement because Samantha was small enough for her to manage, and I got to know my mother-in-law over our weekly lunches.

She asked me to call her Grandma. She was a genteel, intelligent woman who had lived in Sri Lanka all of her married life. She met Trevor’s father at an inter-university event. She was studying languages at Birmingham University and he engineering at Glasgow University. When they were to be married, she sailed from England to her new country, where Trevor’s grandfather had a tea plantation. She arrived the night before her wedding, and stayed in the pastor’s house, since she had no family or friends there. She told me childhood stories about Trevor and his brothers and sister, and how difficult it had been to send them one by one, as they reached twelve years old, to boarding school in Perth. They had had to travel by boat from Sri Lanka. It was too far for them to go home for term holidays, so she only saw them once a year.

‘Trevor sent me a letter once, telling me that he had lost his jumper. I didn’t know what I could do, being so far away and I worried about him being in the cold without a jumper,’ she said wiping a tear away.

I felt her sorrow at losing her young children, even though it had been over thirty years earlier. It had been a huge sacrifice for her.

When Trevor’s father died, Grandma moved to Perth. She loved sport and referred to herself as a Bolton Wanderer, since that was her home town football team. She knew all the tennis players of the times and followed the cricket too. Trevor visited her once a week and he told me that they either talked about sport or cooking. It was a running joke that whenever he cooked dahl he would pick up the phone and without any pleasantries ask, ‘Mum, how do I make dahl?’

After she died, Trevor found a box with some of her writings, scribbled on bits of paper. On one she had written: ‘Once we were two, and now I am one.’

Grandma died when she was ninety-two. Her burial service was on the 11th of September 2001, the same day as the attack on the twin towers in New York. I was pleased she wasn’t alive to see that. It would have distressed her. At the same time I was sad that she had not lived longer to know our daughter as she was growing up. She was a wonderful person. Her warmth and generosity were in strong contrast to my own mother’s treatment. I never had the heart to tell my mother about my relationship with her.

Alexis too had a great relationship with her mother-in-law. I once asked her why they got on so well.

‘I don’t know Mare,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s because my mother-in-law doesn’t expect anything of me.’

‘Trevor’s mother could just wipe me off as the second wife if she wanted to.’

After a pause, Alexis said, ‘Mum had a tough childhood, Mary.’

‘Yeah I know, getting ripped out of school when she was sixteen and sent to work to help support her family.’

‘Don’t forget, being the second eldest of nine children, her parents probably didn’t have time to give her the love and support kids get today.’

The unit in Scarborough was too small for the three of us so we bought a house. It had a large family room where we put our dining table, and a fireplace. It reminded me of the warm home in England where I had looked after the old lady who died. Soon we were having family dinners around the table with Trevor’s children and our baby.

I received a letter from the department, informing me about a change to the
Adoption of Children Act
, effective from March 1991. All I could determine was that the department no longer kept an adoption register and they no longer offered assistance with reunions. It was up to me to reapply when my son turned eighteen. Since the department had never offered me any assistance in the past, I wasn’t too perturbed by this. I was old enough and strong enough by now to handle my own affairs. The less interference from any government department, the better, as far as I was concerned.

Our second daughter, Alexandra, was born the day after Christopher turned seventeen. I vividly remember looking out of the hospital window the day after she was born and seeing Trevor and Sam walking towards the hospital entrance. Sam was holding Trevor’s hand and in her other hand she held a single red rose from our garden.

Developing relationships with Trevor’s children was not always easy. Understandably, they were not happy with the breakup of their parent’s marriage. Trevor had strong bonds with them and was often sad that they were struggling with the change. His younger son, who was sixteen, often stayed with us. He was wonderful with Sam and Alex, taking them on small walks, and playing in the pool with them. He and Trevor were keen windsurfers and we often took a picnic to the river. I walked with the girls while they windsurfed. It was by observing Trevor’s son that I had an idea of what a boy Christopher’s age might be interested in. I rejoiced in my little blended family but it wasn’t enough, I wanted to meet my son.

I speculated about Christopher’s nature, his life, and wondered if there would ever be a time when he could meet his half-sisters. I especially thought of him during his teen years because of Ken’s depression, drug addiction and suicide. Could there be a genetic predisposition? I hoped he was weathering his teenage years unharmed, because I knew that, especially for boys, it was a time when mental illness could become apparent. I could only hope he was in good hands.

Abandonment was a word I thought about a good deal:
to leave completely, desert, utterly forsake, withdraw from, to give up control of
. So many people I knew had experienced this at some time in their lives. Christopher. Ken. Trevor and his siblings in boarding school. Me. My mother. Does abandonment mean to be scarred forever? For some it builds resilience and yet for others, like my younger brother, it had spelled disaster.

At least once every two years, I travelled to Brisbane to visit my family. Trevor rarely came as he was tied up with work and his family. My relationship with my mother was cool after our wedding, but I loved seeing my siblings and their growing families. Teresa had separated from Frank. She had no money and was using prescription drugs. Mum bought her a unit where she lived alone. She also took Teresa’s three children on two overseas holidays during their teenage years. I didn’t always see Teresa when I was in Brisbane. I was angry with her for using and lying about drugs and I was angry with the doctors who prescribed them for her – surely they could see she was an addict.

Alexis and I speculated about Mum’s behaviour.

‘You know, Alexis,’ I said on one of these visits, ‘I think Mum has forgotten about how she treated me on my wedding day.’

‘She does that a lot,’ she replied. ‘It’s as if she really has forgotten. One day I reminded her about our trip to Ulladulla when I was pregnant with Leanne and she wanted me to hide my belly – you know what she said? “I never did that!”’

‘It’s as though she tries to rewrite history,’ I replied. ‘The problem is, if you bring it up and try to discuss it with her she gets angry, as if you are accusing her of something she never said or did.’

‘I’ve found the best thing to do is steer the conversation towards politics and the Labor Party,’ Alexis said. ‘She gets so distracted she forgets everything else.’

‘The bloody Labor Party is like a god to Mum and the Libs are the devil.’

‘Yeah, so just let her rip on the Libs and she’ll leave you alone!’

On another occasion Alexis told me she was taking singing lessons. She has a beautiful voice and I was really happy for her. When she was younger, she and a group of friends sang in pubs and clubs, and I knew it was a passion of hers to get back into singing again.

‘I rang Mum,’ she said, ‘and told her I was taking lessons. ‘Would you like to hear a song?’ I asked her. And you know what she said when I finished? “I hope you’ve got a day job, Alexis.”’

‘I guess she got no praise from her parents. They weren’t into doling that out freely in the forties.’

‘Maybe the best strategy is to just tough it out when she comes up with these acerbic comments, and change the subject.’

And that was how I learned to cope with Mum. If our conversations veered towards conflict, I guided her in another direction. None of us are perfect. All we can do is to attempt to see another person’s point of view and, most of all, respect them.

My nieces and nephews each had a visit to Perth during one of their school holidays, except Matthew, who Frank thought was too much trouble. When Matthew was an adult he told me that he had been very jealous of his brother and sister. I felt terrible about that. It was one more occasion when I had been unable to stand up to Frank. And for Matthew, it was an abandonment of a sort. The others came on the plane as unaccompanied minors, two at a time. We showed them around and took them to Rottnest. I got to know them, and they got to know Samantha and Alexandra.

Trevor’s work was becoming more demanding and he needed to put in longer and longer hours. His job was for a Perth-based mining company but he was often away on business trips. On one occasion I said to him, ‘I didn’t have children so that I could be a single mum.’

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘It’s time for our adventure. Let’s try this – you get a job and I’ll look after the children, but it has to be on an island where we can have a boat.’

This solution, which came right out of nowhere, took me by surprise. Trevor and I had often discussed doing things that were not conventional. I relished the opportunity to change direction and began looking around for jobs that suited Trevor’s criteria. But first, I knew from my experience as a remote area nurse that I needed my third certificate, Community and Child Health. It was the perfect time to undertake these studies since I had two little models to observe the stages of child development in my own home. In addition to this certificate, I took a short course with the Family Planning Association. The name has since changed to Sexual and Reproductive Health, which more suitably reflects the nature of my study. I wanted to be up-to-date on sexual health, contraception and women’s health before I went bush again.

Part of the course required me to spend a week in a clinic doing supervised work experience, and I needed childcare for my girls. Since Alexis had occasionally asked Mum to help her out with her children, I thought I would offer to pay for her airfare to Perth for the week. No sooner had I asked her over the phone when her response bolted back at me, taking me unawares as it had so often done in the past: ‘Haven’t you heard of daycare?’

In Child Health studies I learned that the best support a mother could have when her children are young is from her own mother. Clearly that was not going to happen for me. I felt sad and yes, abandoned yet again. She could have got to know her granddaughters who lived far from her. In the end I decided she was the one who was missing out. I told Sam and Alex, ‘When you grow up and have children, I’ll be there for you. Wherever you are living in the world, I will come and help you.’

When Christopher turned eighteen I applied for information on his whereabouts. I was nervous about sending the letter but reasoned that I’d always believed we would meet and it wasn’t going to happen without me making it happen. The response I got was not what I’d expected. He objected to contact. I was told that under section 39D, it was an offence for me to make any contact and, should I do so, ‘the penalty for breach of this section is a fine of up to $6000 or up to two years in jail’.

Whew, that was heavy! In any case, how could I contact him? I didn’t know the name his adopted parents had given him, his parents’ surname or where they lived. Not for the first time in those years I wondered if there was another way of finding this information. But I quickly dismissed that thought. What would be worse? Finding him and then being rejected or finding him and then not being able to contact him? I wasn’t into breaking the law and respected a person’s privacy enough not to think about where to go digging.