Madness, Mayhem and Motherhood Read online

  I used to always think that the concept of falling in and out of love was a little bit too dismissive and trivialising, as if meeting someone you wanted to spend the rest of your life with would be like tripping into a sneaky sinkhole, and falling out would be like when you fell out of a taxi at the end of a boozy night. But when it happened to me, I discovered that falling in love is a lot like falling into a sneaky sinkhole, and falling out is almost exactly like falling out of a cab at the end of a boozy night – but in my case it also felt (the first time) like I had landed on the bitumen head-first and taken all the skin off my face, which would leave me scarred and disfigured for life. That was how it felt. At first.

  At first, I had thought it was just temporary. We’d have a mini-break, while Billy learned to be a completely different person, because at the ripe old age of twenty-five, with seven years of coupledom under my belt and two small boys to care for, I had become fed up with the one he was. I was naïve enough to think I could make him change, like a frog into a prince, just by demanding that he do so. So, with one little boy holding my hand, the other buckled up into a pram, and a couple of decades of Catholic guilt beating in my chest, I told Billy that I wanted a ‘separation’ and went for a walk to the park to let off steam and get away from him. If that sounds terribly civilised it’s because I am trying not to think about the crazy-woman ultimatums and deranged shouting I also engaged in as I left. I was hoping that a meltdown and a volley of threats would be enough to force the matter and get my way, to make my marriage more like the fairy-tale I wanted it to be because I was so, so, so unhappy that it hurt all the time, like a full-body migraine that started in the heart and radiated out into every pore and crevice of my being, and I didn’t think that was what love was supposed to feel like.

  It hadn’t always been like that. At first it had been a warm, comforting, albeit surprising, lovely sinkhole of romantic infatuation.

  I’d met Billy when I was seventeen, starry eyed and juiced up on Wuthering Heights and rock ’n’ roll. He was my punk-rocking Heathcliff and I had run away with him from home at the Gold Coast to Sydney to start a new life away from the great expectations of my parents, who wanted me to do sensible things like go to university and get a job, buy a house and so on and so forth. Billy and I were dreamers. Nearly four years older than me, he was going to be a rockstar and I was going to be an Academy Award–winning actor or a famous blockbuster writer like Jackie Collins. Unfortunately, in the end, we became each other’s nightmares. And there was no sign of fame or fortune on the horizon that day when I sat fuming in the park in Clovelly, while I waited for Billy to transform into a fairy-tale prince. What I didn’t/couldn’t realise at the time was that I was hardly princess material myself.

  Love was supposed to last forever, the nuns told me: eternal, impermeable and omnipresent, they told me. While my religious faith had long gone (God and Santa Claus went out with the gift-wrappings at about the same time in my life, like that pair of dead goldfish my mother flushed down the toilet), I didn’t think divorce would happen to me … so soon. Billy and I had lived together ‘in sin’ for a few years, and welcomed one son, and then we got married – me in a white fairy-floss dress, Billy with a broad smile and a flashy red cummerbund and spiked hair beside me, saying our I dos with as much understanding of what we were getting into as two tea-towels. I looked at those photos so often, wondering what we were thinking. I was smiling seductively at the camera like a doe-eyed luminescent meringue pie with a mullet and he was grinning mischievously as if he’d just farted (he also sported something of a mullet). Kids, dressing up in adult costumes. Billy and I had stepped up to the altar in a last-ditch attempt to salvage what seemed to be disintegrating between us, hoping that it might have been the catalyst for a second wind of romance, the bellows to fan the embers. It hadn’t been. We had a raging row in the motel after the reception and I threw the wedding ring at him. He walked out in a huff and I spent the evening by myself trying to find the ring in the shag-pile carpet. I guess the writing was on the wall. I slunk back to Mum and Dad’s the next day to pick up Ben and just made up some bullshit story about where Bill was – at the beach, or something – because I was too embarrassed to tell them the truth.

  Years later, my fairy-tale ultimatum didn’t work and so I decided to move out temporarily to make him miss me. ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ I’d suggested. ‘Maybe we need a little space. A little time to think.’

  So a week after the park challenge, I was standing with a bulging suitcase and two tiny boy-children on the doorstep of my best friend Sam’s cramped ground-floor apartment in Tamarama, with a forced smile, shouting, ‘Surprise! I’m coming for a holiday!’

  But my husband called my bluff and announced, in what felt like the blink of an eye but was probably a week or so later, that he was moving in with some ‘mates’. I had played my hand and lost.

  ‘We’re being evicted anyway,’ he’d said, waving the notice. ‘So we have to go somewhere else.’

  It hit me hard then that he was actually suggesting we move to different somewhere elses. I’d gone home after a week-long sulk and a string of ultimatums to find that there was nothing to return to. It was over and Bill was moving on.

  Reality hit like a sucker-punch. I had two little boys, one four and one two years old. I had no job. I had no money. I literally had two hundred dollars I’d taken from the under-stacked rent drawer and a pasta-sauce jar full of coins from the kitchen cupboard where I’d hidden it behind cleaning products. When Sam had said to me in the weeks leading up to Armageddon that if it got too bad I could come and stay on her couch for as long as I needed, I don’t think she’d really meant it. But there I was, the prodigal friend, and she was gracious enough not to turf me out.

  As I made up the sofa bed with the linen Sam had passed to me, I tried to explain to Ben, who at four was a pretty cluey little kid, what the hell was going on. He did the pillowcases.

  ‘So, Dad’s gone on tour again—’

  ‘With the band?’ he asked.

  ‘Yep.’ I nodded a little too enthusiastically.

  ‘Which band?’

  Oh, he was good.

  ‘Ummm. The Models.’

  Billy was a roadie, a stage-builder, and he was away a lot, which had been some of the reason we had grown apart. The rock ’n’ roll lifestyle and parenthood were hard to juggle at our young age. I think half of me hated to think of what he got up to on the road and the other half of me was jealous it wasn’t me out there still playing with rockstars, like back in my former groupie days.

  ‘So, anyway.’ I dug myself further into the lie. ‘While Dad’s on tour, we’re going to have a longer holiday at Sam’s place so we aren’t all by ourselves and lonely. It’ll be fun.’

  The ‘it’ll be fun’ line became a popular one in my regular repertoire of sales pitches to my kids over the years. All of us cramped into a tiny dark two-bedroom unit? It was a hard sell.

  ‘It will be like a slumber party,’ I told the kids, who at that stage probably had no idea what a slumber party was.

  Ben was wary. I could see in his intelligent green eyes that he thought the whole business was shady. Parents think they can hide the horrible bits of their relationship from the kids, but that’s rarely the case, even with very young children. I think we are all born highly intuitive and it gets worn away as we get older. Children might just be emotional geniuses. There is nothing more emotionally honest than a two-year-old’s full-blown tantrum.

  ‘For how long?’ he asked.

  I just shrugged and smiled off an answer. Billy and I had agreed to have a couple of weeks to adjust to the new, more-permanent arrangement, going from trial separation to actual separation, and then we’d organise visits for the kids. I didn’t want some frightful custody battle like I’d seen in Kramer vs. Kramer. These things always got ugly. Children needed both parents in their lives, if possible.
Perhaps we weren’t the best but we loved them, even if we didn’t like each other, and I for one had no intention or desire to sever that bond. But I was glad for the small break and distance between us, because there were moments when I thought back over the fights and the bitterness and I wanted to plough a rusty axe through Billy’s rib cage. I’m sure he felt the same way about me.

  ‘Not too long,’ I forced out through a slit of a smile. ‘Maybe a week or two.’

  I gave him that long before he got over the novelty of single life and came begging.

  Toby bounced on the sofa bed, clapping his hands. He had a bowl-cut of butter-blond hair and a smile that belonged in a baby-soap commercial. He, at least, thought it was all enormous fun. At his age playing on a foldout couch was almost as good as it got.

  ‘Dashy Dashy!’ he squealed at Sam’s little boy, who was in between my boys in age and looking out from behind his mother’s legs, confused by all the commotion.

  Toby was at that age where language was bubbling out of him at a rate of knots, but it took a game of charades and lots of pointing and hand gestures to actually guess the words he was saying.

  ‘It’s going to be such fun!’ I said again, trying to convince myself as much as anything, and grinned at Sam, who smiled back, although her smile was even less believable than mine, almost a grimace.

  Sam and I had gone to school together on the Gold Coast. We’d picked up matching boyfriends at clubs together, smoked pot for the first time together, got drunk and kissed each other at a party after a dare and basically been there for each other through thick and thin. Literally. As teenagers we were rake thin, but kids and bums and stuff had seen us thicken and for the previous few months we’d taken to meeting in her lounge room once a week for Jane Fonda videotaped workouts. We would try to outdo each other with fluorescent headbands and colourful leg warmers and end up doing more laughing than star jumps.

  ‘We can work out more often now.’ I laughed at her, trying to think of the positives. ‘Get fit and toned. Buff.’

  As schoolgirls we’d had the world at our feet, myriad life-choices and chances ahead of us. Sam at least had travelled to Europe before joining the mum brigade. There we were: two dirt-poor single parents. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. Only I was wet-mud-dirt poor. Sam was more of a dry-sand-on-higher-ground poor. She was juggling but keeping the balls in the air. She was the most sensible person I knew, so I hoped I’d be in good hands with her. She had a car. I’d never learned to drive. She worked as a nanny for some rich family. I had no job. Sam was a financial wizard who never ever fell behind on her bills. I had no money and probably already a bad tenancy record and credit history.

  I had managed to get a matriculation score from school that would have got me in to a law degree. How had I gone from being such an ambitious, spunky, school vice-captain and straight-A student to being a broke, homeless, penniless single mother and dropout? The answer to that was far too complicated for me to fathom as I unpacked my suitcase and a few toys for the boys. It would be a long time before I had enough pieces of the jigsaw to make up a picture. Back then, I was focused on how unfair it all seemed.

  Broke up with Bill. Am now a single mother, I wrote in my journal at the kitchen table that first night back at Chateau Tamarama, while Sam fed the kids instant noodles with chopped-up carrots and broccoli to lend the dish some credibility.

  ‘What are you writing in there?’ she asked.

  ‘The story of my sad life. It’s like an anti-fairy-tale. Instead of starting with the once upon a time, I’m starting with the happily never after. This is the beginning of the end,’ I told her in a voice that lacked all colour or expression. Reality was seeping in fast, like water into a leaking boat, and I was starting to fear I’d drown.

  Sam’s son played with my two little boys at the table. Toby was in the highchair flinging stuff down like he was King Kong on the Chrysler building. All the kids thought the noodles were like some kind of party game and sucked them up noisily, snorting them so that they came out of their little noses like long pasta snots. They thought it was hilarious, and in any other setting I might have laughed too. I shuddered as the worm-like strands went from nose to mouth seamlessly and then down their gullets.

  ‘I can’t tell my parents,’ I moaned. ‘They’ll just say we told you so on a never-ending loop. It will be humiliating.’

  ‘But did they warn you?’ she asked, looking up at me from the table and I stared at the cold noodle in her blonde hair. It looked like an enormous maggot.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I shrugged. ‘If they did, I wasn’t listening. Anyway, don’t all parents say that sort of thing? You’re too young and He’s not right for you and crap like that. Isn’t that their job? Sort of like being marital devil’s advocates to make sure you’re really sure?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ignoring Toby, who had progressed to shoving tiny squares of carrot up his nose and then shooting them out, while laughing with half a mouth of pearly white milk teeth bared. ‘But I guess in this case they were probably right, because it doesn’t sound like Bill is coming back.’

  I thought about all our furniture piled up on the street outside our old apartment building – we’d fallen behind in rent and now the eviction was final. I’d gone back in the late afternoon to salvage some photo albums and toys before the marauding neighbourhood scavengers picked over our worldly goods like seagulls at a leftover seafood feast. It was hard to see Bill’s decision to ‘side-walk’ all our stuff (only about three minutes after I walked away, finally, the two hilly kilometres to Sam’s from Clovelly, pushing Toby in a stroller with plastic bags full of stuff) as anything but an act of finality. Divorce, I guessed, would be the next step. I couldn’t afford a truck to pick up any furniture and as most of it had been found on the footpath in the first place it was no great loss.

  It felt like a death. It really did. I had been bluffing, trying to force Billy to be something he wasn’t. I’d rather immaturely hoped he would miss me but, clearly, he didn’t. There was grief. I knew my marriage was dead, a fire that had no redeeming embers left. But Billy had been such a pivotal, integral part of my life. It felt like someone had just chainsawed a limb off my body. And, head down, wanting to sob but not in front of the kids, I realised that I’d wielded the chainsaw myself. Talk about self-harming!

  I was more familiar with the concept of widowhood than divorce, because I’d been versed in it by years of The Brady Bunch. A mummy from one family dies, a daddy from another, and the leftover mummy, daddy and all their kids come together to make a Brady Bunch and it’s really, really great and everyone is happy, except that sulky bitch Jan. Society, with its unspoken mores, tells us there are ‘good’ fractured families and ‘bad’ ones. Good ones stem from death and everyone feels terribly sorry for the family left behind and people bake them casseroles and feed their dogs and budgies while they are given time to grieve.

  But just your garden-variety break-up and divorce is bad, because you promised, promised, promised to love each other until death, in front of a funnily dressed representative of God and all of your family, and neither of you is dead yet! You broke the promise! You are traitors to the fairy-tale. That is why the Pope says ‘No!’ And it’s not like you can claim it was an accident, or that you’d not known what you were doing. They had photos, videos and a signed contract as cold-hard evidence.

  King Henry VIII apparently was the first to break away from this iron-clad church law banning divorce and I can see the Pope’s point in being worried about that being a bit of a slippery slope, because Henry, it seemed, got kind of desensitised to discarding wives and became a serial divorcer and self-made widower. If they let you do it once, well, you’ll be out there marrying and divorcing just like Julia Roberts changing clothes in the Pretty Woman montage. I guess that’s what the Catholic bosses reckon. Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa Zsa Gabor really got addicted to divorce. (Ugh – with
the pain and the sound of the chainsaw still buzzing in my ears, I could think of nothing worse than falling in and out of love like that, over and over again.)

  For the kind of disengagement Billy and I were doing, well, there was very little sympathy. More a creepy atmosphere of schadenfreude, because I knew many people would like to believe we’d brought the misery upon ourselves, and they quite enjoyed watching it, all the while feeling smug because they always knew that:

  a)you’d married the wrong person

  b)you didn’t try to love hard enough because young people these days – if you’d only opened up your rib cage and ripped out your cold, dead heart and put spark plugs to it, it might have started working properly again, and

  c)you were too young to get married.

  Every time a celebrity couple broke up, like Madonna and Sean Penn, the women’s magazines salivated over the story and wallowed in the ‘we told you sos’. It was never going to work, said the columnists, tut tut tutting. The writing was on the wall, and to a certain extent, I knew that the writing had been on the walls for us too. Splattered in metre-high graffiti.

  It’s all very well and good to point the finger after the event and say you ‘saw it coming’, like a psychic who claims to have had a dream about some tragedy or other, but fails to mention it to anyone or record the premonition in any way until after the fact. Here’s some advice. If you ever, and I do mean ever, see a couple who should not get married because you can practically can see two trains on a collision course, break it up – seduce one of them and take photos, burn the church down, hold their elderly parents ransom. Then, and only then, can you do the ‘I told you sos’ with some level of credibility. If not, just shut up and get the bandaids and gin.