Perfectly Mistakable

On Duty

When I came back home to Australia after my brain injury in Canada I was confused and lost. I don't really remember the first six months and the six after that were spent trying to change myself to please my family. I got home to my Granddad being really sick, my little brother finishing highschool, my older brothers running their restaurant into the ground and my parents could feel their holds on us all slipping. I felt like my duty to my family needed to be fulfilled, that I had travelled for almost two years and now needed to get my career started so I could get a job and a husband and have a house and a family.

It is strange to think on my relationship with money and my family. We certainly had enough money, more than the average person, to be very comfortably taken care of growing up. When I was about eleven I went to a psychologist for the first time for the bullying I was going through transitioning from primary to high school. Like a lot of my childhood, I do not remember much about it. I can't even remember the name of the psychologist I saw but I do remember my Dad not knowing about it and not believing in therapy. I remember sitting in the waiting room one day and Mum telling me that we were spending a lot of money for me to see this woman and I had to make progress, so it wasn't wasted.

Now I am a big believer in therapy (obviously), but I don't remember if I connected with my psychologist or engaged in our sessions. I think the fact I cannot remember testifies to the dissociation I had become accustomed to living in. I do remember it was my duty to not be a problem, to not have issues that took the attention from others. To be a quite lady who was agreeable and polite, not being crass and tomboyish. I remember my stomach dropping in my chair, feeling like I was going to send my family destitute by going to therapy, that I was going to send us to the poor house because I needed help. So what did I do? I crawled into bed with my mum, crying, telling her I didn't want therapy anymore, that I thought it was a waste of money. I don't know if I ever went to another session after that.

This strange perspective I had about our families financial situation was confusing and resulted in so many of my frugal habits. My father is a very practical man, wouldn't buy anything new and likes to keep to the bare minimum. He paid full school-fees for all of us to go to private school and foe his children he is very generous with his money as I can see now. But I grew up with brothers, my Mum the only female relation I had to learn from close by and it created a strange double-standard inside of me. As a full-time mum, dad gave mum a card and an allowance each week to do the shopping, buy us kids things, pay for fuel and whatever else we all needed. Now I do not know the particulars of their arrangement, only what I saw and was told and that was all I knew, thus it shaped my view on money, marriage and women.

Mum wasn't allowed anymore money than what she was given each week and from what I understood that amount of money only increased by a couple hundred dollars in the eighteen years of living with them I experienced. I remember being in the shoe shop with mum and she would need new shoes but said she couldn't afford them because she had to use the money to buy us things for school or sport. I don't know about my older brothers but when I – and eventually my younger brother - started working she would ask us for money to pay for the phone bills or groceries. I remember Dad saying he didn't understand where all the money went (even though he had access to all her records) and tell her that she would spend money on 'stupid shit' we didn't need. Hear him tell me that she didn't know how to spend money properly and he gave her enough and he'd have to keep working forever to support her.

It hurts me to think of anyone being treated like that by their loved one. I cannot imagine being a stay-at-home Mum without any money of my own, being told by my husband who has never done a full month of housework for six people that I was stupid with money. To imagine that your duty is to take care of children in a house that was bought with your husbands money, to buy the groceries with his money to create meals that were only frowned on and not appreciated. To hear from your mother-in-law that you're a bad mother beacsue you don't force your children to finish the food on their plate, because your children are energetic and want to play instead of sit and be quiet you need to beat them into submission. All this while dealing with major depression, post-natal depression, anxiety and domestic violence. How did these expectations of duty help? Simple, they did not.

Even to this very second I feel like I have forsaken my family by separating from them but I also know this sense of ease would never have come if I had let that relationship continue. My Dad still sends me jokes and calls me. It makes it harder for me to move on and deal with these emotions and traumas when I can't even have the space I asked for. It hasn't even been one month and he keeps calling and messaging me like nothing has happened. It makes me angry and frustrated, angry that he doesn't respect me and my boundaries, frustrated that I feel like I should go back to them and try another way even though I have done that time and time again.

So I grew up to understand that if I was uneducated like my mum then I would be reliant on a man for financial support and be indebted to him, and if I wanted men to respect me I needed to be educated, pretty, and agreeable. So this dichotomous relationship was built inside me while I was still too young to realise that I can, in-fact, decide who and what my 'duty' is to. I have landed on my duty being firstly to myself, and secondly to sustainability. In school we learned that sustainability was the goal with development, to create the solutions to our current problems while leaving the world in a better condition than we found it for our future generations. That the aim of development was to make things better for future generations with what we have now. I take that on in my personal development, knowing that if I want to have a happy and healthy future I need to take care of myself in the present in a way that leaves me better off in the future.

For me, my family was not helping me build a more sustainable future for myself or my chosen family. If I stuck to the closeminded superficial prejudices of my family I would never have become friends with my wife or partner, and those are very sad thoughts indeed. But changing is harder than I thought it would be.

At almost every turn I am thrown back into regressive behaviours, becoming arrogant, close-minded and cynical very easily when I am anxious or feel threatened. And while I am getting better at recognising when this side of me has taken over it is a chaloenge to rationalise my actions with myself because I am then threatened by my own reductionistic attitudes. Thinking that I am special for all these fucked-up qualities I have and also belittling my own experience because I am not important or clever.

What determines if someone is special, important, or clever? Culture, family, friends, work, society all these factors influence how we decide to value ourselves, whether we are aware of it or not.