I watched them try. My parents. I watched them fight, and save, and carve out the things we needed as a family, as if from thin air. We were never as poor as some of my classmates at school, with their torn uniforms and home-cut hair. But there were four children in my house, and every one of us needed things. Every minute, of every day. Food, clothing, shelter, art supplies, packed lunches, school excursions, books, shoes, love. Children are deep pits of need and when there are four of them, an otherwise good household income might start to look quite poor indeed.
I watched them. I peered around corners when I was supposed to be asleep, I listened at doors, I peeked at my mother before bed, when she sat at her vanity table and combed her hair. I would watch as the hand combing her hair slowed, her distracted face turned slightly away from the mirror, as the worries nestled onto her shoulders, her neck, her head. I spied as she sat, motionless, lost in the yawning vortex of wondering how they would all make it work from days to weeks to months to years. As the distance between our parents grew, their stubborn feet standing on opposite sides of an echoing chasm, I was peering quietly from the shadowy corners of our house.
And I saw. I saw how my mother's face rarely smiled, I saw my father in his oblivious ways. I saw them decide it was easier to just settle in like that. But most of all, every time a child yelled out for attention, I saw the indifference in my mother's face morph slowly into a simmering hatred. Her smiles, already uncommon, began to feel like snarls. Teeth bared, lips pulled back, a resentful fire smouldering in her face. If I think about it, as I do on quiet mornings staring down at the creek, I feel like I can picture the moment she let go of that last piece of love, and nursed her hatred to her chest.
Maybe she felt Kane was the final straw. That fourth child. The one no one saw coming. A baby that landed, screaming, in the world, to snatch up the last of everything she had. All of my mother's babies were breech births. In 1962, when I was born, that was no small thing. I was a footling, as she reminded me incessantly on every birthday. One foot in the world, body in the womb. Every year my siblings and I would stare at our birthday cake and sit, grimacing, through the stories of our births. Somehow, they were never stories told with much happiness.
It's a strange thing, to grow up in a home where your parents scrape to give you everything, but toss it at your feet as though you didn't deserve it. A counselor told me once that my mother's attitude had prevented me from connecting with my own children. She told me that I was so afraid of letting them see or feel my own negative emotions, even ones totally unconnected to them, that I perpetuated a false happiness. It was damaging, she said. To pretend like everything is roses, all the time.
Sometimes I think the question is not whether you can avoid causing damage, but just to carefully select which damage you will accept.
My parents are thin people. They barely cast a shadow at high noon, despite living mostly on thick slices of bread, and meat with three vegetables, their entire lives. Gravy on everything. Biscuits after dinner. Maybe the more rounded genes skip a generation, because unless I keep a vice grip on my food intake I balloon into chubbiness quickly, and Samantha has been all soft edges and ample bosom since the moment puberty set its claws upon her. I've always thought Samantha is so beautiful, though I suspect that had more to do with the kindness in her character. My sister is warm and patient. Our mother is an emotional vulture. She had no idea what to do with our brothers, the noise and mess they wrought upon the world. Our parents are quiet, orderly people, who grew up in England, their youths smudged over by World War II. They are reticent, and they frowned disapprovingly at their raucous Australian children and our inability to understand hardship. I suppose when they aimed to create a better life for us, it didn't occur to them that to us it wouldn't be better than anything. It would just be life. We failed to inherit a genetic ability for gratitude, and this more than anything, I think, set my father's teeth on edge.
They watched our youth with an uncanny ability to forget that it was exactly what they had set out to give us. And like children everywhere, we thought everyone had what we had, and assumed we suffered the same as everyone else. I watched my mother's thinness over the years, with a mixture of envy and hatred. In the mornings I would peer at her clothes for the day, a dress draped over the back of a chair, or a pair of jeans and a blouse. As steam billowed from the bathroom while she showered, I would wonder how she fit into those tiny garments. I wasn't a big child, but in my mind I was round as a blueberry, all thighs and belly. It's remarkable how the picture in your mind can defy the visceral reality staring back at you from the mirror. As I neared teenage years I watched my mother's pride in her unearned thinness and I thought how strange it was to be proud of the amount of physical space you inhabit. Then my half-formed mind would feel angry that my body didn't behave like hers. It didn't just burn everything off effortlessly. She fed us the way she had always been fed, but on Samantha and I it settled into chubby cheeks and soft elbows. Samantha didn't seem to mind much, but I wanted to be like mum. I didn't understand what she did that I didn't do, and in the dead of night in some bizarre form of invisible revenge upon my own misunderstood failures, I would get out of bed and eat as much sugary food as I could find in the cupboard. Angrily, I would shove biscuits and chocolate into my mouth, knowing that it would certainly not lead to a sudden conversion to effortless thinness. Part of me hated her, and being fat would drive a wedge between us. She would view me as a disappointment, and she wouldn't keep me under her wing anymore as her favourite child. I didn't understand why being her favourite made me so angry as a child. I know now that it was because it made Samantha, as the other daughter, a scapegoat. I was treated better, I was confided in, I was treated like an adult. I was her friend, not her child, in ways that only now am I beginning to understand the damage from. It felt strange, to know I was her favourite when I didn't even feel as thought she liked me very much.
When I became a teenager, I felt the shame and fury felt by every teenage girl in the world - shame that I wasn't thin, fury that some girls were just born that way. At birthday parties and other gatherings I would watch classmates like Amy Reston eat whatever they wanted, occasionally giggling delicately and flipping back sheets of perfect hair to further reveal their perfect skin and I would wonder, quietly, whether the police would really be able to tell what happened if I pushed her in front of a bus.
So as puberty descended upon my life, I came to a grudging understanding that I could not eat like other people. And I stopped. It was then that my mother's gaze turned once more approvingly upon me, and I made a decision to learn to live with the feeling that I was betraying myself, rather than accept the rounded edges that life saw fit to give me.
