BELOW is a video reading by me, of this chapter. So you can read the chapter, or allow me to read it to you… 
Thank you for coming by.
Daniel had never experienced a barbecue before, so it was with a lot of delight that I met my now married school friend, Kathy, for just exactly that Aussie tradition of a meal. In her back yard, with a dog running circles around Daniel’s stroller, to his delight, we enjoyed a feast of sausages, steak, salad and drinks. Like my sisters but in a different way, I never felt intimately close to Kathy as we waded through our school years. But we had sufficient connection to hang out together, and considering my otherwise troubled state, that was good enough for me.
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Throughout my teens, living with dad, I felt genuinely ‘not of this Earth’. I felt alien: literally, not figuratively. I didn’t know where I was from, but I knew for certain I was not connected to my family. Lana was gone off into the world, unreachable and unrelatable; Deana developed schizophrenia, which gave her to ‘see’ Angels, and ‘hear’ them singing in the clouds grey, overhead our back yard.
“See?” she had once exclaimed to me, about 15, as we stood on the back steps of dad’s house. Our faces were upturned to the rumbling threat of more darkness in our lives – thunder clouds – but I could not see. I wanted to. I believed it possible Angels could come to remind Deana and me both that if we just held on, coped as best we could, life would become good for us.
“Where?”, I begged her, as splinters of rain broke from Nature’s hold and spat in our faces. “There”, she strained to have me see – “There! Oh…their voices…” And for moments long, and unfair, Deana saw Angels in the skies above us. I looked, and I looked, but all I could see was grey and black rumbling clouds. Why I wasn’t special enough to be given hope, too, I cried inside to understand. I so, so wanted to see.
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When a crack of lightening flared before us and the spittle became thick splats of rain, we opened the wire door and returned inside our cold concrete house. Dad had an oil heater in his room with a timer, so that when he woke on cold Melbourne mornings, he rose to like a comforting womb. It was the only heater in the house but we were not allowed to use it, hence dared not. So with fingers numb, I worked the axe on our front porch to chop kindling, thicker chunks and blocks of wood. I made a fire for Deana and me and when we sat on the thin ember-pocked carpet before its hearty roar, mesmerized by the flames, I wanted to ask her again about the Angels – had she really seen them? how many? did they notice me at all? But she was then quietened, and lost somehow. So we sat in silence. Who knew what time dad would be back that night, whether he would bring food, would be drunk, would bring back ogling, salivating bleary-eyed mates.
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One thing I do now know, though, is that I am glad I did not see or hear Angels that day, no matter how desperately I had wished to, standing on our back steps. I am glad that all I have had to suffer is depression, bulimia, self-sabotage, self-abuse, suicidal wills extreme – for none is delusion, all too real. Me, I have only had to wrestle with what beasts roamed within my oxen being, escaped the zoo of my mind and charged the potential for happiness in my soul. Like rhinocerouses stamping out fires inside my heart, the beasts of my troubled psyche have run rampant and unchecked for decades. But no matter how many times they darkened the rooms and passages of my existence, I have always managed to strike the flint of my greater will against my perseverance bolstered by undying hope – in a life worthy, spiritually achieved, and spent in service of one I loved; that I might discover, at my dying breath, one I loved included me. That would be an enormous turnaround of events, this lifetime: to love me.
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Daniel babbled delightfully at the barbecue, with me interpreting his intonations for Kathy and her husband. His mind flow through verbal tinkled with a promising eloquence, and I loved the sound of him, nuances of expression, the thinking clearly wiring through his mind. Matt the dog sat patiently nearby Daniel, knowing that he would lose focus at some point and the sauce splattered sausage would loosen in his hold by tiny fingers. Alternatively, if he looked pitiful enough, his big eyes engaging Daniel’s, his eyebrows quirking that way dogs do, Daniel may even volunteer his meal to Matt, and he would chomp the Aussie icon with all the illustrious spirit of a family pet loved and kept.
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I contemplated: only when Daniel was born did I realize Love. It was amazing. And frightening. That I loved Daniel, meant he had the power to hurt me – by rejection. Would Daniel reject me when he grew old enough to see me not as his Mother provider, giver of food and fun, guide, but when he saw me with all my human flaws? My greatest flaw, I determined, was my depressions – my incapability of maintaining the social façade; the one which smiled at work on Monday mornings and told coworkers all was fine and I had had a great weekend, when really, I had been abused by Man again, at my invitation, and I drank again, and I felt irrepairably separated from my sisters, estranged from my father.
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Kathy began clearing the table. “That was a quick shot of you,” her husband Kevin said. She brushed past the camera. “Noel, could you just grab the door?” she asked me and I left the table to assist her. Daniel watched us. Matt watched Daniel.
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It was time later, when we were having coffee indoors, that I realized within myself how reassured I was that I loved Daniel. I had felt before he was born that I could not love anybody. I had felt numb for decades. It wasn’t just my sisters I did not love, or favourite cousin, or self, or my husband though he accepted that (believing I did love him but just wouldn’t admit it). And dad: as I did not love my father, he could no longer hurt me. Dad’s rejection and assault of me in profession of love of me were actions seasoned by the same tears he had wept at Mum’s grave, claiming he loved her too.
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“I don’t want you to declare love on me,” I had once told a man of interest during my three years of single life post-marriage pre Daniel. His name was Russel – with one ‘L’, I can never forget. He had looked at me so quizzically, I hoped he would not ask me to explain. And he did not. He simply, quietly, slowly advanced me, then embraced me so that I was held within his secured, manly arms and in our moment suspended in warmth, peace and connection, a sob broke from deep within, which I reactively swallowed and pretended had never surfaced. I left Russel soon after.
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I ‘should’ love my sisters, I knew, even if just for their very fact of birth in the same stream of Time along which I was being swept. But when Time cascaded over the rocks and through the troughs of our childhood, while we ought have held hands and huddled together as one carriage, we rather each went tumbling through the years independently, spluttering, hands reaching out to nowhere, no-one. Our scrapes and scars from the turbulence of the years were various, and the bruises we each suffered in our abuses were bleeds internal that when we looked into each others’ eyes we knew existed, but where exactly within, each, we did not know.
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Matt leapt in and devoured a sausage Daniel had let slip from his grip, watching Kathy and I carry plates from the table to indoors. I looked at him, 11 months infant, and decided I would one day write about his Mum all the things I couldn’t speak to other humans, and I would dedicate the book to him, which would read:
Dedicated
to my son
DANIEL,
who taught me love.
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What Daniel had given to me in his brief time on this Earth thus far, was momentous in the heart of Me. I owed him greatly, God knows.
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Copyright Noeleen&Daniel 50/50
