I DISCHARGED MYSELF FROM THE hospital in Melbourne as soon as I could stand up and spent two days in the home before packing and leaving. Sister Mary told me to wait until I was stronger but I didn’t want to be there one minute more than I had to.
I had no clothes that fit my post-pregnancy body so I went into the city to buy a dress. I remember it was maroon with a black leather belt, a size twelve. Afterwards, I wore it to interviews until it became too big. I bought presents for everyone. I flew in my first plane.
Mum and Dad picked me up at the airport. It was so humid I felt like I was covered in honey. I was still bleeding heavily. My breasts had been bound in the hospital and I’d taken drugs to dry up the milk I was making. They were less sore but still engorged. I didn’t say anything about what had happened. No one mentioned it.
My body was no longer me.
A few weeks after I arrived home, I saw a baby on the television. I felt as if I was going to be sick and ran out of the kitchen.
Mum followed me into my bedroom and found me on my bed crying. ‘It will be like this,’ she said.
‘Like what?’ I said angrily.
She didn’t answer.
‘Like what?’
She looked at me then and there was such sadness in her eyes, and such fear, I turned away from her, afraid myself.
I went to see Miss Parker. There was nothing she could do for me, she said. She had no authority. She suggested I go to see the editor. I did but he wouldn’t give me a job.
‘You threw us away,’ he said. ‘Forget it, kid.’
I applied for Melbourne papers but my applications were unsuccessful. I was interviewed twice, but they wanted to know why I’d left a good job and I couldn’t tell them.
I applied for advertised jobs: writing copy, driving delivery vehicles, working in cafes. Australia was in an economic recession. I had no experience and no skills. I didn’t get many interviews and if I did get an interview, I didn’t get the job.
I started doing volunteer work with the Brown Sisters who nursed the sick poor in New Farm. I met their boss, Sister Katie Flannery, who taught me a lot about being among the unchosen. Katie was an alcoholic who hadn’t had a drink for years when I met her. It was brandy, she said. Someone gave her brandy when she fainted and that was that.
I visited a family with Katie and she took a child in her arms and said, ‘I was here giving food parcels to your grandmother and now I’m giving them to your mother. Will I be giving them to you too, or will something change?’ She said to me afterwards that she thought nothing would ever change.
She was sick that day, from chemotherapy. We had to stop every few blocks so she could throw up in the gutter. She knew I’d had a baby, I think. Either I’d told her, or her friend Father Brian from St Vincent de Paul had told her. I got the volunteer work through Father Brian, and I’m pretty sure I told him about the pregnancy. It wasn’t something Katie and I discussed, though, as far as I can remember. I know I didn’t tell any of them who the father was.
The next morning the Archbishop came to the convent for breakfast—he lived just down the street and had a soft spot for the Browns—and Katie put his sultanas in an episcopal cross on his Weet-Bix. She nudged me under the table to point it out. It was hard not to giggle.
Except for my volunteer work I had no job that first year home. I had no friends, either, except my teacher and her husband, who I still believed were good to me, and one friend from school, Jessica, who was also volunteering for the Brown Sisters.
Jessica had been a good student, liked by everyone, the girl in the class you’d describe as a good old stick, even at seventeen. Her father was the bank manager who approved the loan for my first car. I hadn’t told Jessica the real reason I left my cadetship in journalism. I’d said I felt like travelling. I wrote her from Melbourne, telling her I was working as a waitress, having a great time. While I was away, Jessica became friends with my teacher and her husband.
One Saturday, Jessica came to see me. She told me I needed to sort out what I wanted to do with my life. At the time, I was sure she thought me erratic, going to Melbourne for no good reason, coming home jobless. She said she’d be in touch. But I didn’t hear from her. She didn’t return my calls.
Later Jessica joined the Brown Sisters and studied medicine. Just before Jessica joined them, the other Brown sisters, the ones I’d known quite well who shared the New Farm house with Katie, cut me off. Katie was very ill by then, not working anymore, but I’d become close to some of the others too. They all cut me off, which was strange.
I never understood this. It was as if something had happened that Jessica didn’t tell me about. For a time, I wondered if my teacher’s husband said or did something to drive a wedge between us. Perhaps he did. But for me, it meant I had no friends. All I had was my teacher and her husband. And although I didn’t know it at the time, I had staked my life on them.
My memories of my relationship with my teacher and her husband in the months after I came home from Melbourne are incomplete. I didn’t sleep in their bed with them. That was something that stopped when I told them I was pregnant. We didn’t speak of what had happened in the past. We didn’t speak of stopping, although I do remember a conversation vaguely, when I went to talk to the editor of The Telegraph. We were laughing about his name. They were making fun of him and I was laughing along. It’s very vague but it was a sense of making fun of him because he hadn’t given me my job back, seeing it as his fault. It was that same feeling of superiority, that we knew something the rest of the world didn’t, that we were special.
A few months after I arrived home, my teacher had to have an operation for endometriosis. She was in the hospital overnight. Her husband and I had been to visit her and then I went back to their house with him.
I have no memory of detail about this but I know we had sex that night on their bed. I know I was not forced. I know I went to the bed with him and had sex.
I was conscious of a body, but it was not mine. I remember he was on top and I was not in my body.
I was not using any form of birth control. This was despite the fact that a doctor in Melbourne had given me a packet of pills before I left the hospital. I threw it out when I was packing to come home. I remember how angry I felt when he gave me the pills. I didn’t need birth control. I was not having sex.
And yet, I went to the bed with my teacher’s husband and I had sex. I can’t tell you why I did this; I don’t know why I did it.
By this time, you could buy pregnancy tests that you did yourself at home. When I felt the familiar symptoms—sore swollen breasts, a missed period—I bought one, then a second, then a third pregnancy test. I remember the phials in my bedroom cupboard on a little stand. You collected urine in a dropper and put it in the phial with a chemical and waited two hours to see if a brown ring formed. A brown ring formed three times.
Without telling another soul, I went to see Children by Choice in Union Street, Taringa, so I could have an abortion. I used a false name. Abortions were illegal in Queensland in those days. The woman from Children by Choice arranged for me to drive over the border into New South Wales to a clinic at Tweed Heads. I stayed in the clinic while the sedative wore off, drove to a motel on the Pacific Highway at Burleigh Heads, took the pills they gave me to help me sleep and drank beer and ate ham sandwiches. I bled for three weeks and told no one what I’d done.
When I tell people I had a child long ago I gave to strangers, they sometimes say I did the right thing. And then then say, At least you didn’t have an abortion. It reminds me what I did the second time I became pregnant.
I am not even that person, you see, the person some might admire, the person who didn’t have an abortion. I am this other one, the person who did have an abortion.
Jill, my friend from the home, came to the Gold Coast in that year after we both left Melbourne. She and her boyfriend had split up, she told me. I drove down to see her. I said something along the lines of, ‘Are you different now?’ I wanted to tell her I was different. She was the only person I could tell. I understood it in my body but not my mind. In my mind nothing had changed. But my body was unmistakably different, like a beacon, the red stretchmarks on my belly and breasts, the scar where they cut me. Jill was on holiday with her nurse friends. She looked at me directly—she had lovely green eyes and a soft warm voice—and said, ‘I’m getting on with life. That’s what you have to do, get on with life.’ I drove home and wanted to die.
I reached the bottom of my life that year. The second pregnancy gave me the energy to sever my relationship with my teacher and her husband, at least temporarily. Not because I thought they were bad, not then, but because I thought I was bad. I couldn’t bear what I’d done to my teacher, and I couldn’t bear the thought of being anywhere near my teacher’s husband. I didn’t tell my teacher and her husband why I wanted a break. I just told them I didn’t want to see them anymore. At first, they left me alone.
Late in that first year home, I went on a reunion camp with the two priests who ran our senior religious camp at school. After the reunion camp, I went to the monastery at Oxley where the priests were staying and I told one of them what had happened between my teacher and her husband and me. I used the veil of confession, but I was telling him without their permission and this was the first time I’d breached our agreement of keeping the secret. I told the priest everything, about the pregnancies, the abortion, all the things I’d done. I was deeply ashamed, blamed myself entirely.
The priest did not vilify me. He listened. He offered me God’s forgiveness. It was not solemn, his God’s forgiveness, or ritualised. ‘God forgives you, of course he does,’ he said to me. ‘But do you forgive yourself?’ He agreed with me that it was probably best not to have too much to do with my teacher and her husband in future. He also said I shouldn’t tell anyone else in the Church that I’d had an abortion. ‘Not that what you did bothers God,’ he said, ‘but not everyone knows that God forgives.’
Coincidentally, the two priests who ran our reunion camp had also run camps at All Hallows’, my old school, and at the camp I’d caught up with my old classmates from Saint Catherine’s. I’d also met up with two girls who were a year below me at All Hallows’, Louise and Lib. Lib and I had gone to the same primary school. They became my friends, my first new young friends since I became involved with my teacher and her husband.
Louise and I had six degrees of separation in our childhoods. We were both from biggish Catholic families, but hers had remained conventional whereas mine was out of kilter. Both her parents were accountants. Her father had a practice in the city. Nana knew their family, knew an aunt quite well. Perhaps they sang together. Louise’s family had cousins out west who might have known Sing and Stacia, Nana’s maiden aunts who ran the pub at Stanthorpe.
Louise and Lib were so normal. They were training to be nurses, saving up for cars, drinking rum and Coke and going to the beach every time they had four days off. They were interested in boys. They planned holidays. I didn’t feel like them. I felt different, marked, but they continued to welcome me into their lives. The marks were on my body—I knew I couldn’t let them see me naked—but also on my soul. These were harder to understand, to identify. I was so ashamed of what I’d done.
I managed to get a job in a nursing home as a nurse assistant. It was a difficult job, cleaning up old people, washing them, dressing them, feeding them, changing their beds. I loved Mrs Tilby, who would go from room to room stealing everybody’s clothes and putting them on in layers, and her roommate, Mrs Bird, who was very grumpy with Mrs Tilby for not being able to behave herself. They were so wonderfully honest, these women at the end of their lives. I could listen to them for ages, as I helped Mrs Tilby remove layer after layer of clothing, which I’d then return to the owners.
Every now and then I went into a dark place inside myself. I drank myself into a stupor. I cut off from whoever I was with. I used to go to the pub with a couple of the nurse aides from work. I wanted to disappear. One night I found myself alone in the pub with no way of getting home. Everyone else had left and I’d said I was fine and wanted to stay on. Another night, I drove so drunk I could hardly see, didn’t remember the next day how I got home, had to check my car was in the driveway to know for sure. On yet another, I slept in the gutter outside my house. I had no idea why or where these dark periods came from. All I could do was wait them out and go on with life.
In the first year after I came home, Jenny Fish and I wrote each other. She sent the signed Form of Consent to Adoption Order. With it, she sent a blank Form of Revocation of Consent to Adoption Order. This second one was the form through which I could change my mind, I knew, and withdraw consent to adoption within thirty days. I still have it.
In that year, I received reports on the baby’s health and wellbeing. The reports told me many things: that the baby’s posseting after feeds was settling down, that she was putting on weight now, that whenever her adoptive mother couldn’t find her adoptive father, he was invariably in the nursery playing.
I would read these reports and they would mean nothing to me.
After a year, Jenny wrote and said she could continue to give me detailed information if I wanted, but some girls found it easier to move on if they didn’t know anything. ‘Do let me know your preference.’
I didn’t reply. I didn’t want detailed information. I didn’t want to move on. I didn’t want to know anything about any of it.