Letter from my Father (23 page)

At the conclusion of the study, we decided to submit a paper for publication in one of the best international journals on child development. The day we heard that it had been accepted, Andrina and I went out and celebrated, lunching in a charming old Paddington bistro. Then we presented papers at conferences all over Australia, receiving considerable media attention in newspapers, and on television and radio. I went to Jerusalem and presented papers at conferences dealing with the psychology of stereotyping. In Italy I gave a talk at a conference at the University of Padua, one of the oldest in Europe. In the evenings I explored the city, noting the balance and harmony of its Renaissance buildings. I ate my meals alone but quite at peace, watching people at adjoining tables and enjoying the softness of the twilight.

Back home, apart from work, I continued to visit Simon and Ruth and my grandchildren, helping as they started school and celebrating with them and my mother Friday nights, birthdays and Jewish holidays. On a day-to-day basis, I focused on my lecturing and my research. Friends commented that I had become too single-minded, that I declined too many invitations, that I was neglecting my social life, that I was
not me
. I agreed that what they said was probably true. But I tried to make them understand that the raft of my post-Henry life was still rather flimsy and the waters beneath me still too turbulent for comfort. I had to strengthen my raft one slim reed at a time, slowly, doggedly, with all the courage I could muster.

Twenty months into my widowhood, I had an extraordinary experience. I was walking along the Opera House forecourt towards a couple of woman friends whom I had
arranged to meet to see a play. It was late afternoon on this glorious Sydney summer day. I was wearing a light summer dress and my body also felt light. Quite suddenly I was struck by an awareness of something new in me. For the first time since Henry had died, I was walking alone and whole without that ubiquitous sense that his phantom presence was beside me.

I met up with my friends and told them how I felt. I did not attempt to explain it.

Then Jonathan phoned me with the thrilling news that he and Paula were expecting their second baby. It was due in February 1994 and it was going to be a girl. It was the best news I could have received.

XIX

Seeking Adventure

T
he following years were full of adventure. They started off with the birth of my second granddaughter – a healthy, alert and beautiful baby named Anna by her joyful parents in America. It was a time when I was hungry for challenges, professional as well as physical and spiritual ones. My friends Liane, a travel writer and her husband Bernie, my GP and an excellent amateur photographer, casually mentioned that they were planning to trek in the Annapurna region of the Himalayas. In a flash I asked,
May I come with you?
They replied that I was more than welcome.

That gave my life a focus for the next few months: getting fit for this great adventure.

At the beginning of April 1995, we set off for Kathmandu in Nepal and then moved on to Pokhara, the starting point of our trek to the icy peaks of Dhaulagiri on the southern side of the Annapurna Range. We climbed to the top of Kopra Ridge, 4000 metres above sea-level and well above the tree line. The high altitude slowed down our movements. After a short excursion we were warned by our Sherpa leader to head back, since it was starting to snow. Our group crowded into a Nepalese hut with a roof so low you could only crouch, where we were offered a cup of tea and dinner. As we sat around the fire I confided softly to Liane that I was still in love with Henry and would never again have a serious relationship.

Before she could reply, our leader called us outside. As I stepped from the hut, my eyes opened wide as they beheld
the most magnificent sight I had ever seen. Against the glowing blue northern sky, the Dhaulagiri Himal and part of the Annapurna Himal were etched with breathtaking clarity. Every crevice and every fold in the mountains revealed themselves. The Western sky, by contrast, was so dark it was almost black. Was this majesty and grandeur real? Very soon the light changed and this vision disappeared.

Liane and Bernie stood close, holding hands, together in this awe-inspiring moment. I was aware that I stood alone. Sensitive Liane reached out and embraced me with her free arm. We stood silent, stunned.

This trip was an experience that was unforgettable for the sheer beauty of what we saw. It gave me a new understanding of how, in Eastern religions, human beings' lives are seen as tiny and transient against the immensity of these great Himalayan giants. Most of all, I learned appreciation that there was nowhere towards which you must rush. Just taking one step forward at a time in one's life is enough.

On the flight home, I reflected on these insights and wrote
: I still have many productive years ahead of me. No need to rush with work or anything else. I can pace myself. Slow and steady will get me there quicker and I'll be more relaxed. Enough of the hassle
.

The following year I helped organise a group of six women friends to take on the Cradle Mountain Wilderness Trek in Tasmania. It involved four days of challenging walking. We
Cradle Maydels
(
maydel
being the Jewish word for girl) were a terrific group of women. We were respectful of one another's strengths, vulnerabilities and idiosyncrasies and managed to laugh at and with each other. Bea was the one who screamed at each challenge:
Oh, my God. I can't do it
, as she proceeded to do it most competently. Judy refused to sit on logs and rocks at our picnic stops, remaining standing to keep the leeches away – not very successfully. Tanya observed and made us aware of the poetry of our surroundings. Rose, the purist, had brought her own coffee beans and proceeded to
grind and prepare fresh coffee every morning. Chris managed to look fresh and elegant at all times. I organised and made sure that we maintained our schedule.

We walked and talked along the way and during our overnight stays in comfortable lodges. It was wet, wet, wet. At the end of each day we emptied our boots and turned our packs upside down to let the water stream out. Rose and I decided to take an optional walk to a waterfall, amid the heaviest rain. Were we mad? Perhaps, but we bonded.

On our return home, each of the others had a husband or partner waiting at the airport. There was no one for me. Jonathan had said he would pick me up but had not managed to get there. The taxi driver who took me home was rude.

A couple of years after my Tasmanian adventure, we formed a new walking group to go on an eight-day trek in the Annapurnas. Back home, energised by and feeling more alive after this second encounter with the Himalayas, I quite happily resumed my teaching and research and my role as mother and grandmother to my brood. I also made plans for a sabbatical at Cambridge University. My application to become a visiting scholar in the Centre for Family Research at the University had been accepted.

I arrived in Cambridge two days before the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. As soon as I had unpacked, I was overcome by the realisation of my aloneness at a time of the year when Jewish families were all together. My friend Rose phoned from Sydney to wish me Happy New Year. Her timing was impeccable. Then Simon called with warm greetings from his darling family.

Friends had recommended that I contact a Cambridge couple for social support while I was there. They were the remarkable Felicia and Howard. They invited me to dinner and arranged for me to join them at their friends' home for the breaking of the fast for Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

It was an evening to remember. Helaine Blumenfeld and husband, our hosts, lived in Granchester, that quintessential English village near Cambridge. The older parts of their house dated back to the fourteenth century and the newer parts to the 1700s. The low ceilings, small rooms, antique furniture and low lighting created a sense of intimacy and permanence.

Helaine was a sculptor working in Carrara marble, creating large ambitious forms, several figures layered around a central space portraying the movement between strength and vulnerability, the feminine and the masculine, intimacy and distance. They were passionate statements about our human complexity to which I could really relate.

The Centre for Family Research was housed in rooms that had been occupied in the 1930s by Ernest Rutherford and his team as they worked on radium, and the staff was still nervous about possible after-effects. The Director took me on a tour of this great University. We strolled on the lawn in front of King's College, founded by Henry VI, past the library of Trinity College designed by Christopher Wren, and the college where Isaac Newton wrote his
Principia Mathematica.
It was intoxicating to feel the presence of these giants.

All was not historical grandeur, courtesy and scholarship. My lodgings were in a rundown B&B in a dilapidated old house, a tiny room up a flight of stairs smelling of musty carpets with a faint whiff of urine. The landlord was hairy, red-headed and rotund and always wore a singlet and baggy stained pants, no matter how cold it was. I survived the breakfasts in the dungeon-like dining room beneath the stairs by spending them with a charming Japanese lady scholar who was also visiting the University.

The evening meals were a challenge. My Australian dollar was worth half an English pound, but a simple pasta dish cost twenty pounds. I ate Indian and Italian food or went to the nearby pub and ordered whatever was on the board for
the day. Nutritionally this must have been the worst period I had been through since the War.

A few days before the end of my stay, a pipe burst and flooded my room. I could no longer take the smell and the discomfort and accepted a friend's offer to move into her tiny two-room digs at Emanuel College. What a relief! I enjoyed her youth and intellectual curiosity as well as the company at High Table at College dinners.

Back in Sydney I attended grandparents' day at three-year-old Anna's kindergarten, Jonathan and family having returned to Sydney after their American stint. It was a wonderful occasion. Then, for my birthday, my mother gave me a thoughtful gift. It was a certificate showing a many-branched tree heavy with leaves, a tree in full bloom. An inscription informed me that five trees had been planted in Israel in honour of my five young shoots: Zak, Nathan, Rachel, Adrian and Anna. This was one of those rare moments when I glimpsed my mother's deep concern and love for me.

Simon and Jonathan urged me to shift the focus of my life from research and writing at my computer to getting out and looking for a new partner. Often I wished they would just leave me alone. I felt I had created a reasonably good life for myself and did not need
a man
. This was certainly true most of the time – but not always.

One morning I was in my car outside the townhouse scraping the old registration label off the windscreen with a sharp little knife – and not doing it well. My neighbour Henrika passed by and I called out in frustration:
I need a man for this. I need a man in my life
.

She observed me coolly, and then replied:
You do not need a man. You need nail-polish remover
.

She was right. I was, however, starting to listen to my sons' and my friends' advice. It was nearly six years since Henry had died. Perhaps it was time to step out.

XX

The Psychologist learns and observes

Y
ou are always trying to explain yourself to yourself
observed my wise friend Audrey. I recognised the truth of her observation, though I would never have put it that way. I had certainly participated in workshops which had opened windows to the hidden workings of my mind and slowly allowed some healing.

I met Hal Stone at a lecture on his Voice Dialogue therapeutic model in a hall in North Sydney. He asked for volunteers to act as the client in his public demonstration of the way he and his wife Sidra applied their therapeutic method. Twenty people put up their hands but he chose me. I knew he would. There was immediate rapport between us as he asked me where I was born, and I replied:
Galicia, Poland
. He said:
Ah
,
so you are a Galicianer
(a Yiddish term for people from that province). I became a student of his method and, at the end of 1996, enrolled in a two-week workshop held at Thera, their home in Mendocino, California.

It was an expensive venture to travel to the States for such a short period, but I felt a strong urge to do so. The journey there, on my own to an isolated part of California a few hours north of San Francisco, was hazardous and hard to manage. However, when I arrived late in the afternoon at the prebooked Albion River Inn, a lovely place perched on top of rugged cliffs overlooking the wild and spectacular ocean shore, I was overcome with excitement. That evening, in a hire car driving on the wrong side of the road through a
redwood forest, I found my way to Hal and Sidra's sprawling old farmhouse, where I met the other workshop participants, mostly psychotherapists, from all over the world.

We came together as a group for several hours each day and lunched together on the veranda overlooking the garden. We listened to lectures and worked in supervised pairs. Most days were cold but sunny, and I relished my daily drive through the sun-dappled forest to the farmhouse with its low ceilings, bay windows and ambiance of a well-lived and loved place.

The Voice Dialogue model recognises that there are many aspects to our personality, many selves. Primary selves define us, control our behaviour and are generally the way others see us. The primary self is that aspect of our personality that developed most strongly because it has helped us survive by adapting to our life circumstances. But we also contain other selves which we do not recognise as being
us
. These we disown. They are often relics of our early childhood. For instance, vulnerability is one aspect of our personality that we often do not want to know about or reveal, even to ourselves. But when our primary self controls all our behaviour and we neglect other parts of our personality, we become unbalanced.