Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER
I was always gunna write.
But didn’t make enough time.
I was always gunna write but the house needed cleaning.
I was always gunna write but I needed a real job – something I could write in, but not about.
I ran from poverty, violence, neglect and alcoholism in childhood into a world of stories and make believe. Short poems, little rhymes, made up characters that I could see in my head in a way that the adults in my life didn’t see me. Or turned away.
I wrote as a child.
I grew up with my father and siblings, from the age of 3 and saw my mother every other weekend. Not typical of the mid 1970s in this country but it was simply my life. My father was a drunk. A high functioning drunk but a drunk nonetheless. We rarely had money for anything, including school bags or new shoes. Once I inherited a battered tan briefcase to take to school. I made do. A classmate’s mother was paid to look after me after preschool and when I went to kindergarten my brothers and I walked home. A housekeeper made us dinner every night. We mainly ate eggs, potato and peas, sometimes fishfingers. She left every evening before my father came home on the bus. The first thing he did was pour a glass of wine, sculling it down like a blood transfusion. And then he’d pour another and lean back against the bench top and scull it down while he clawed at his tie and turned on the radio. The last thing I saw before taking myself off to bed, was him pouring another glass.
I climbed into bed each night and I wrote.
Both my parents re-partnered – my mother had a few relationships with violent, hard-living men before marrying another alcoholic. Just a different kind. Not the wine and classical music and thick cigars alcoholism that hung in the air of middle-class dissatisfaction permeating the air I breathed in my father’s house. The beer drinking, punch ups at the pubs, cigarette-smoking, hunting, fishing, fairly benign, trying to survive alcoholism. Laughter and jolliness turned sour after a few hours on the grog but at least the laughter was there to begin with.
My father re-married, this time to an insecure, controlling woman – also morbidly obese like my mother, prone to unpredictable if infrequent violence best left unacknowledged if I didn’t want to suffer further reprisals. I began to fear vacuum cleaner poles, small spaces (the car, the hallway) from which there was no easy escape from her quick slap with hands bigger and wider than my face (she was over 6 foot tall and with a wing span longer than she was tall. In another life, minus the weight she could have rowed for Australia). By the time I made it to year 7 I was only 4 ft four inches (132cm). Small for my age. Tiny in contrast to her. I shrank even smaller in any proximity to her and began to find ways to stay out of the house to minimise the chances of experiencing her wraith.
Eventually my brothers and I were kicked out of home one by one like a drip feed in reverse, as my step-mother and father had three new children together. My mother didn’t want me to live with her, but eventually I did after being kicked out of home in the school holidays between year 8 and year 9, just 6 months after my brother, leaving behind 3 younger siblings who I loved and cared for and who were the only sources of joy in what was ever shrinking to be a dark, scary and lonely place.
And christ did I write. I couldn’t stop. No therapy for me. I couldn’t afford it.
So I wrote.
I was able to live in a caravan in the back yard of my mother’s father in-law’s house, which was frequented by many different friends of my step-father’s every night, as they gathered in the backyard to drink to excess, eyes wandering over me in a way that disturbed me if I had to leave the caravan to go to use the bathroom in the house. I was frequently stopped by one sleazy drunk or another babbling in Finnish, either to tell me what a good girl I was or to tell me what a lovely looking woman I was becoming and what wonderful babies I could make one day, you know, as they squeezed my arse or tried to cop a feel of my emerging breasts. My mother was often locked in her room, drinking herself in those days, or out. My step-father dismissed my complaints with a wave of his hand, clamped around his 12th or so long-neck. I rarely slept and rarely felt safe. I missed my younger siblings terribly but was prevented from seeing them. I developed insomnia and began to sleep with a knife under my pillow, shaking with fear when one drunk or another inevitably rattled the caravan door. Seeing what they could get away with.
I went from winning the diligence award in year 7 to barely surviving year 9. I started working in year 9 as a check out chick, not because I had a great desire to scan canned goods, but because I needed to pay my own way. I had to pay my mother a third of her rent, and a third of the bills including food and the electricity for the caravan. I struggled in the space as I had developed claustrophobia as a 10 year old when my step-mother locked me in a metal garbage bin for knowing something she did not, telling me that’s where I belonged and sat on the lid. I kicked and screamed and cried and no-one came to rescue me. She kept me in there for 15 minutes but it felt much longer. I bashed and screamed and when she pulled me out I was a hyperventilating mess. I couldn’t calm down or stop shaking so she dragged me through the back yard and turned the hose on me until I stopped crying. To this day I cannot stand small spaces or a lack of air.
I struggled to write about it.
Once we moved into a new public housing place, my mother began a job working night shift and all weekend, every second weekend. I had a room finally but often my brothers would eat everything they could – food was something to fight over and I lost, every time, so I lived off popcorn and 2 minute noodles. I began year 11 closer to this house, away from all my friends and the connection to my previous life and also transferred jobs to a supermarket closer to school. I began to work every Thursday afternoon, Friday night, Saturday lunch times and all day Sunday so that I could afford to stay in school and pay a third of everything at ‘home’. I owned one pair of jeans, one pair of sneakers with holes, one pair of black work shoes, two work uniforms which I washed, rinsed and hung out every night (first an awful pale blue dress uniform and then black pants and white shirts). No make up – I couldn’t afford to get into it. No coat. One jumper. I often walked to both school and work because I couldn’t afford the bus fare. It was almost an hour each way. Late at night I would sometimes catch a cab because walking home inevitably meant harassment from losers, but to do so equalled less money for the week. More often than not I walked trying to stick to paths where they existed and wishing desperately for more street lighting.
I continued to struggle to write or sleep.
I recall my science teacher in year 11 yelling at me for yawning in class one day. I explained that I had had to work until late the night before, that in fact I had worked all weekend. She told me I should think about my choices and that if I was smart I would choose school over work. I looked at her like she was an alien. Who has those choices? If I couldn’t work and pay my way, as I had since I was 14 then I would have nowhere to live. At that stage I was aiming to survive and make it through year 12 and then escape the life I was living. University, further education, any sort of future based on my ability to think or the skills I didn’t know I had, seemed as about as likely as not being harassed in some form or another every other day. It began to dawn on me that most of the kids I met did not work. Some got casual jobs at Christmas and some worked casually to save for luxuries like a car, or to go out on the weekend, to have fun. Every weekend. Movies, bowling, dancing, drinking. I could rarely afford to go. I could barely afford to pay for food, let alone fun.
I stopped writing.
Years later, when I had made it to university I recall a similar experience of social dissonance. I was tired from working all night in the computer lab to write an essay. A young woman asked me why I didn’t just write it on my computer at home. I said I didn’t have one. She looked at me aghast and asked me why I didn’t get my father to get me one? I said I hadn’t had a father for more than a decade and she looked at me in horror. My life was unfathomable to her. In her world you just got what you wanted because that was how life worked, or a parent would get it for you, so you could study wherever you wanted and as for working to support that study? That would be bonkers.
By then I had worked as a cleaner in a hotel, pulled beers, cared for children, worked in shops, delis, bakeries. Stood on my feet for 12 hour shifts, missed breaks when people were sick, worked double shifts for the same reason and to pay the rent. All the while going without things most people took for granted. Sometimes I had a black and white telly. Most times I didn’t. what little clothing I had, I stored in a make-shift milk crate stacks with an old broom handle serving as a rod to hang the various uniforms I had. I felt lucky to have somewhere to live. For a while I was on the dole when I quit a job because a manager would not stop sexually harassing me. No one cared it was just what happened. I lived in cramped accommodation, roomed with friends, slept on couches and for awhile lived in a hostel in kings cross surrounded by noise and car loads of drunken men.
Writing for myself became a distant memory. Something I used to do when I was younger.
I was always gunna get back to writing for myself but I got really good at writing for other people instead. I willingly chose the corporate career. It was about as far from home as it was possible to get.
My partner and I considered ourselves fortunate. Both smart women who were able to overcome shit, survive and gain an education. And find a way to create our family and thrive.
And for years I swam in the sea with other folk who all seemed to have very similar cultural, social and educational experiences to each other. I walked among them but I still wasn’t seen.
And then I found my way back to myself mid-life. My relationship of 18 years ended. My job ended. My life seemed to end on one level. So I looked for new ways to begin.
And I started with writing. Stopped reading so much and just started.
I was always gunna write.
And now I am.
Learning to breathe.
Making time.
Writing.
I was always gunna but what is better is this: having written.