ONE NIGHT AFTER DINNER, WE decided to go for a walk. Otis had an enduring interest in underground drainage systems. The year before we’d carried a small chisel-like tool and a torch with us on walks to lever the lids off water drains so we could have a good look at them. In the evenings at Thomas Street, we sometimes walked to an enormous water pipe in Hope Street and debated what kind of drainage system it was part of.
But this night, Otis had been slow putting his shoes on, slow getting ready, and it was like a weight bearing down on me, a weight that had been pressing me down all day. We had finally set out when Otis remembered he needed his builder’s helmet. We must go back, he said. David said he would go back.
I yelled at Otis that I would not wait any longer, yelled at David, walked off flooded with feelings I could hardly contain.
I found a place to hide up the street, an open garage attached to a house whose residents I was sure were away. I crouched in a corner and made myself as small as I could. I was shaking as if cold and crying. Fear, I knew this to be fear now, although I didn’t know what I was afraid of.
Some time later, David and Otis passed me, David chatting to Otis, trying to give the impression that we were a normal family.
I was still crying, holding on to a concrete wall. It was holding on to me. I watched David and Otis pass, a happy boy and his dad, and for the first time the thought occurred to me that they would be better off without me. They would be better off without me, and I would be able to end these tears.
I did not let this thought take hold, not then. I made myself walk after Otis and David. I found them where I knew I would find them, in Hope Street at the water drain. Is it a water drain? Or a sewer? I think it’s a sewer. Yes, certainly a sewer. They were sitting up there and they saw me coming from the bottom of the hill and when I reached them David said my timing was perfect. Otis had just started to worry—had just started crying, in fact, I could see, because his mother had walked off in a blind fury for no reason he understood.
I let David hold me and I held Otis and the three of us sat there and in this way we survived.
As well as Stace, during our years at Thomas Street I was seeing a counsellor who practised solution-focused brief therapy. I’d gone to see Wayne when my first novel was published and I was getting ready to leave my salaried job and become a writer. Once I left work and was happily writing, I stopped seeing him. After I hurt Otis with the stroller clip, I went back.
Wayne was different from Mick, whose approach mixed family therapy with transactional analysis. If Mick was too complicated, Wayne was so simple I sometimes wondered if he understood anything. He certainly didn’t look to my childhood to explain what was wrong. As far as I know, solution-focused brief therapy points us towards what we do right rather than what we do wrong and encourages us to do more of that.
Over two walls of his office, Wayne had put up drawings done by children he’d helped, and he had a climbing plant that he stuck to the wall so that it ran around the drawings. I went to see him fortnightly then weekly, and in the time we met, he covered a third wall. We talked for an hour at a time. At some stage, I told him that his therapy put a whole new meaning on the notion of brief. He smiled and said it was as brief as it could be.
He said things like: You need to see this in a context of what you are moving through. This is the hardest thing you have ever faced. You did the only thing you could in the circumstances. Sometimes you focus on what’s wrong and not what’s right. Here is your ego; here is your spirit. Breathe. He had very light blue eyes, or grey, that were among the kindest I’ve ever encountered.
I read Anne Manne on being a mother. She says you hand in your ticket to suicide at the door to motherhood. I reassured myself with this notion, that I had handed in my ticket at the door. But of course, once you have seen that place where pain might cease, you will go back, you will go back there and some will stay.
At the times I thought like this, I made myself look at a photograph of Otis and me. It’s one David took on a trip to Byron the year after I had pinched Otis in the stroller clip. It’s late afternoon. The sun has set and the sky behind us is extraordinary colours. Otis and I are in silhouette so you can only see our outline. We stand the same way and we’re hand in hand against this beautiful backdrop. Even though you can’t see our faces, you know we are close, at one in whatever we are doing, absorbed by what we are seeing, in the moment together.
The worst times were when I failed Otis, sometimes as a result of what I was coming to terms with, sometimes just because I fail as a mother, as mothers do. For me these failures became much larger. They confirmed that I was a bad mother, the worst mother you could be. I was the mother who gave her child to strangers. That was who I was.
I became stuck in a cycle of self-hatred: feelings in my body that I didn’t recognise or respond to, Otis being a young child, losing my temper, deciding I was a bad mother, he would be better off without me. It was a cycle that could end nowhere but my death.
Wayne said two things that will remain with me my whole life. He said he believed many people had something to answer for in what happened to me but I was not among them.
And when—after I told him I was not getting better, I had thought of dying lately, I had planned it and worked up my plan—I asked him, ‘Are you the person who can help me?’, he gave me two names, one a psychiatrist who could medicate me, the other a psychologist who worked with adoptees.
He asked how I felt when he suggested those names.
I told him I was too tired to start with someone new.
He said, ‘In that case, you are stuck with me. You are stuck with me until you are not so tired, and when you are not so tired you can go to see someone else if you think it will help, I will find someone, but for now, you are stuck with me.’
And what I will remember about this is that he did not give me the other option, the light-filled room, and I left him knowing I would be back.