Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Read online

  Advance praise

  ‘Nikki’s voice is one that’s not often heard. Raw, unfiltered, honest, this the story of a mother who, through sheer guts and determination, took up arms against poverty, mental illness and hopelessness in pursuit of a “Happy Ever After”. And that’s just the first bit …’ Wendy Harmer

  ‘If you’ve ever felt like you weren’t a good enough parent, partner or person, Nikki McWatters is the most important companion. She reminds us all – with rich insight, and without sentimentality – that to be flawed is to be richly and captivatingly human.’ Benjamin Law

  ‘Nikki McWatters recalls the hustle and the heartbreak of being single mum on a shoestring. She takes us on the epic highs and lows of becoming your kids’ best friend and your own worst enemy. Hot-blooded and quick-witted, this book whips the breath from your lungs.’ Jenny Valentish

  ‘An honest voice which brilliantly tells the story of a woman who gets knocked down but gets up again. Over and over again. Nikki McWatters proves that love can overcome even the most unbelievable tragedies. Compelling, beautifully written and a complete page turner.’ Mrs Woog

  Nikki McWatters was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award (2010) and has published a memoir, One Way or Another (2012), and two young adult novels: Sandy Feet (2014) and Hexenhaus (2016). She won the Irish Moth Award (2016) and has written for the Sydney Morning Herald, Huffington Post UK and The Big Issue. She is currently the spokesperson for the annual Vinnies CEO Sleepout. Nikki also has a law degree in her bottom drawer somewhere.

  https://nikkimcwatters.wordpress.com

  To Benjamin, Toby, Harrison, Mia and Thomas for teaching me how to be a mother (I’m still learning)

  Prologue

  Part One

  Reality Bites

  Stepping Up

  The Cockroach Palace

  One Adult/Two Children

  Les Miserable

  Merry Christmas

  First Day of School

  Sick Day

  Hot Chisel

  Birthday at Bondi

  The Sea Anemone

  Museum of Dreams

  The Wiggles

  How the Other Half Live

  Not the Brady Bunch

  Auld Lang Syne

  Scraps

  Part Two

  I Am Woman and I Roar

  Dreamboat

  Sinkhole

  Teetering

  Second Chance

  Against all Odds

  Heaven

  The Day it all Changed

  Emptiness

  Harry

  Melancholy

  Taming of the Shrew

  Not My Beautiful Life

  When the Tough Get Going

  Sweet Clarity

  All Hail to Lismore

  Bundanoon Magic

  Epilogue: Three Years Later

  Acknowledgements

  We open with a dream sequence.

  I am ten years old. And the mean girls are laughing at me. There are four of them.

  ‘Look at the little dolly.’

  ‘Aw, has she pooed herself?’

  ‘Or is it a boy? Let’s see if it’s got a dicky.’

  ‘Nikki Dicky and her little baby dolly.’

  ‘Do you breastfeed it with your tiny little nipples?’

  I am unable to move. Although the Queensland summer sun blisters down from the sky, I am frozen. If I did cry, the tears would become little stalactites or stalagmites (I can never figure out which is which, but I mean the ones that hang down) and freeze on my freckled face. My mind is racing for some kind of excuse: It’s my little sister’s doll or I have never seen that thing in my whole entire life. But neither would work, because my little sister is a tomboy and the hyenas know it, and the doll was in my schoolbag, wrapped protectively in the swaddling of my library bag. One of them had seen the bald head pop out when I went for my Tupperware container of carrot sticks and raw beans.

  The best I can come up with is, ‘But everyone plays with dolls, don’t they?’ I might just as well have said, ‘Hey guys, roll me in steaming dog turd and set me on fire.’

  ‘Hahaha. Not since we were about three years old!’ sneers Sharon.

  ‘Or maybe a bit older,’ Leanne, the nicest one says, with one of those smiles that tells me she will be a kindergarten teacher one day.

  ‘What’s its name, then?’ asks Kelly.

  Kelly Price is the ringleader of this double-digit Gestapo circus. She has actual boobs that require an actual bra that we can actually see poking out from the gap between her two top buttons. She is a good head taller than the others, which makes her pretty much two heads taller than me. I am frantically remembering the story that the nuns told us about David and Goliath and I am scatting my eyes about the sandpit, looking for a handy slingshot and a sharply pointed rock to take out her eyeball, but alas, cornered and confused, I simply answer her.

  ‘Mebe.’

  That buys me a moment of comical paralysis that lasts as long as a flashbulb explosion and then the laughter erupts and seeps over me, like an egg cracking over my head. It is, and always will be, a case of survival of the fittest in the school playground, and I have just slapped a sign on my own forehead saying kick me, pretty-please and so my evolutionary survival instinct advises me to think twice before going any further – say, for example, sharing the information that my baby, Mebe, is in fact only a plastic avatar, a vessel, for the invisible spirit baby to whom I gave birth in the school loo while my best and only friend, Kathy, gave birth to her imaginary baby called Oru in the next stall. You see, all of us – Kathy, me, Oru and Mebe – are in fact beamed-down spirits, entities, from the faraway planet of Basidium, which is, in this very summer of 1976, about to be sucked into a black vortex for all time, hence the need for us to be galactic refugees. Kathy and I know this because we have read about it in our favourite book, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet, and we know it in our souls to be true.

  In an inspired and grasping evolutionary snap decision though, l convince myself to let all that just stay silently under wraps, top secret, and I don’t mention a word of it to the mean girls. Mebe’s name is enough fuel for their bonfire. I just stand there getting singed by their cruel mirth until I think I might pee my pants.

  Kathy has gone home sick – her mum collected her after morning tea. Beaming babies down from outer space is sometimes gruelling work. So I have to contend with the mean girls all by myself. They eventually get bored with me, the flames die down and they drop the baby doll onto the sand and walk away to throw sticks at the boys they like best.

  I pick up Mebe and look at him. With a sick, thudding sense of grief I realise now that the mean girls have killed him. With the ringing of their caterwauling laughter, coming from over near the Grotto; yes, I see it now: Mebe sustained a head injury when they dropped him onto the sand. I am horrified and my heart breaks. He has travelled across time and through galaxies to be with me, crossing worlds and dimensions and time zones. But now he is gone. Just like that. And I feel like all the wind in my lungs has been sucked out and I fear that the Basidium bloodline will now end. All hope is lost. The mean girls have committed, quite possibly, with their casual laughter and taunts, not just murder, but genocide.

  Kathy and I are ‘the outsiders’ at school, ‘the weirdos’. We are also the youngest and the smallest and the smartest. And, as far as we can tell, we are also the only real-life aliens at St Vincent’s Catholic Primary School on the Gold Coast … unless you count Jesus, who has
been beamed down and then back up to Heaven, apparently. Father Shannon tells us that Heaven is a place far away from Earth, therefore it stands to reason, ipso facto, that Jesus is, just like me and Kathy, an alien. That thought often comforts me when I look up at Our Saviour, on the Cross, with blood oozing out of him. Occasionally he winks down at me when no one else is watching; kind of like one of those secret winks between friends, when they know something that no one else does. A kind of comradely alien nudge-nudge-wink-wink.

  I wipe the sand out of my baby’s eyes and feel like I have some in my own, but they are just scratchy. You know that feeling, when unshed tears feel like gravel under your eyelids.

  At home, Anne, my seven-year-old sister (a precocious girl with fashionably boy-short hair and a tan that predated the invention of sunblock) swings opposite me on the green and gold swing-set in the backyard. Behind us lies the pool, and behind that the chocolate canal that teems with stingrays and puffer fish.

  ‘Mebe died,’ I tell her.

  She looks at me like she either doesn’t know what I am saying, or doesn’t care.

  ‘My baby doll, from that other planet,’ I explain. ‘It was a rough journey for him and he didn’t make it.’

  She laughs. I want to cry but I don’t, not in front of her.

  ‘So I’m going to have a funeral and bury him this afternoon.’

  ‘Yippee,’ she yelps and scoots off the swing, wiping the summer sweat from her palms onto her sawn-off denim shorts. ‘I’ll grab my Barbie and we’ll kill her and bury her as well.’

  ‘I didn’t kill him,’ I bluster, not liking the inference. ‘It was just … his time.’

  I often hear the adults using that expression, whenever an old person dies, like Auntie Muriel or Uncle Jack. It is just their time.

  ‘Well, now, it’s Barbie’s time!’ Anne claps her hands.

  It’s a mostly moving and reverent sort of service. Anne and I stand beside the wide frangipani tree by the pool filter. I’ve managed to pilfer a tissue box out of the bin and it makes a good coffin. I bend down and dig a hole with one of Mum’s soup spoons and place the box inside, laying some frangipanis on it before filling in the small gaping grave with dirt.

  ‘Your journey was across the entire universe and you took it bravely, dear Mebe,’ I say, trying to sound like Father Shannon. ‘But Earth can be unkind. There are hostile forces at play.’ My mind drifts back to the enemy taunts in the playground. ‘Go well to Heaven and hopefully I will see you there someday. Hopefully a long time from now. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust …’

  ‘He’s plastic. Plastic doesn’t rot, I don’t think.’ Anne shrugs. ‘So you could always dig him back up later and wash him off in the pool … Hey … like a zombie …’

  ‘Shh.’ I frown and make a big sign of the cross in the air like I’ve seen the priest do.

  I shut my eyes and pretend to pray. I always only pretend to pray. I tried it when I was little, but it seemed to me like no one ever listened. I wonder if perhaps God might have once lived on a planet like Basidium, that was now in a black vortex and unreachable somewhere. He never answers prayers. Not anyone’s that I know of. Not mine. Not Kathy’s. No one’s. Otherwise we’d all have Malvern Star bikes and ponies clogging up our sheds.

  ‘Rest in peace, Mebe,’ I murmur.

  We stare at the freshly turned earth and I sigh a little deflated sigh and give a sad, pathetic smile at my sister.

  ‘Now it’s Barbie’s turn.’ Anne smirks.

  I look at her with her empty biscuit-box coffin dangling from one hand and a naked Barbie doll with bad hair and no bum crack in the other.

  ‘How did she die?’ I ask gently, expecting just a modicum of imagination to be sparked.

  ‘Her head came off,’ she says with a glorious grin and promptly, as if she is ripping off the ring-pull lid on a can of Fanta, she drops the biscuit box and pulls the little blonde head off the body with a festive pop.

  ‘See,’ and then she laughs like a little serial killer.

  I look up at the blazing orb of a sleepy sun drifting down over the hinterland to the west and figure that I just buried a little bit of my childhood. Reality trumped imagination and that, I suppose, is the first sad stage of growing up. I sent out another pretend prayer into the cooling muted pink of dusk, to my parents’ invisible, missing-in-action God. I prayed that one day I could have a real-life baby and that no mean girls would hassle me about it.

  End of dream sequence.

  It was a long dream and something of a skewed jumble of memories, truth and fiction blended like a cerebral fruit-smoothie. I don’t know why but I had it often, playing on a loop more than once some nights. My dreams were always strange, as if my daily thoughts and experiences were put through a de-briefing process while on acid. This one, being a regular re-run, must have signified something, and I often woke, staring at the ceiling, wondering what it all meant. There were no real bullies at primary school, although those girls were the cool kids at St Vincent’s and Kelly Price was a bit of a mean girl. I’d wanted so much to be a part of her gang but was, alas, never cool enough. Annie had never so casually murdered Barbie, although I did recall her doing some terrible things to toys over the years. But I had been a budding weirdo. Kathy and I had really been beamed down from Basidium. The doll births in the school loos had been real in an imaginary sense.

  And I had been a little girl who loved her dolls and wanted children of my own one day. In fact, I had doodled names for them in the backs of my schoolbooks. I wanted three boys and three girls like in the Brady Bunch (but not those exact kids because Greg was well creepy). I even remember the names I had picked as a little girl for my future babies:

  Clementine

  Matilda

  Tiffany

  Julian

  Matthew

  Andrew

  They sound like a group of super-sleuthing Enid Blyton characters. The Stealthy Six. I’m not sure if it was the praying or the shabby attention to contraception, but I ended up blessed, gifted or burdened with five children, four boys and a girl, none bearing any of the names above. And I still do believe I’m from out-of-space and all of my children agree.

  Motherhood is no easy calling. Babies don’t magically appear; you can’t put them up in the top drawer of the wardrobe or in a biscuit box when you are bored with them; and when something terrible happens to them, you get more than just a case of gravelly eyes. It is true that being a mother is a gift and a curse because, while I never felt such giddy love-highs as I did holding each one of my children for the first time, smelling them, breathing them in, I also never felt such despair, such terror and panic, as I did when I lost one in a shopping centre for those five minutes that felt like five days, or as I did that time I sat in a hospital, promising my version of god I would give my life over to good works and charity, or my own life itself if necessary, if my baby pulled through. My children have been my crosses and my clowns. They’ve given me stretch marks that look like I’ve been clawed by a bear and a belly that looks like puckered seersucker with all the seer sucked out of it. But they have also given me belly laughs that rumbled so hard I peed myself (another legacy of motherhood). Like the time one of them wondered aloud why his scrotum was so wrinkled and answered for himself it was probably just for decoration. Or the time another little monkey answered the door of my apartment wearing only my boots and black lacy knickers and said, ‘Mum’s in bed, farting.’

  For many years, I raised my boys on my own. I was a single mother, and back in the day that title still wore a sackcloth of stigma. There were hard times, funny times, bonding times and brutal times. Being a single mother, however that might come about, brings with it a gauntlet of challenges, but also moments of indulgently selfish, great giddy joy.

  This is not a how-to manual. If anything, it’s a how-not-to. I was largely a difficult mother. I was the special needs m
other. I struggled to raise my kids through times of poverty and times of crushing mental illness. I like to think it made our family kind of technicolored and interesting, but the truth, in retrospect, is that it is a miracle we all survived relatively unscathed. I suspect that wrestling crocodiles, fighting off a Great White Shark or outrunning a hungry wolf might have been easier than parenting was for me sometimes, battling against depressive lows and manic-panicked highs that seemed just as much like ferocious beasts out to get me. Of course, as is often the way, it took me many years to figure out it was me that was stark, raving mental, and not the whole rest of the world. Getting a diagnosis earlier might have been useful – it might have helped me make sense of my world and my place in it. Then again, perhaps not.

  I’m not going to gloss over my shortcomings as a mother. I was often very crap at it, or at least that’s how it felt when I was running about like a rat in a maze, but even when I was fighting hard not to go down the gurgler with the bath water I loved my children with a ferocity that sometimes was the only thing that kept my head above the surface. Mama bears will rip the head off anyone who dares threaten their children. But sometimes, I know this now, I was the greatest threat to my kids, with my uncontrolled mental health, my bad decisions and my lashings of immature irresponsibility. You know the old expression kids don’t come with an instruction manual? Even though there were many times I could have done with one, there’s no guarantee I would have read the small print! I did the best I could with who I was at the time, but sometimes I fear it wasn’t good enough. I suppose all mothers think that. Are any of us really ‘good enough’ at the job? We’re still evolving and peppering the planet with people, so I guess the model is working. Kids are tough and resilient. Sometimes they have to be.

  Growing up I was taught that when you got married it was forever, but I knew and understood the concept of divorce, despite being brought up in a Catholic community. I’d never seen it up close and personal, of course. No one in our family had ever been ‘divorced’ – a word that was always said in a hushed library voice with an umlaut of raised eyebrows above. It was a ‘get-out-of-jail-free card for lazy people who can’t be bothered to stick it out when they hit rocky ground’, my mother always told me as a child, through thinned lips as if she’d just sucked on a lemon, and definitely ‘not for Catholics’. It sounded like a one-way ticket to Hell.