You'll Be Sorry When I'm Dead (27 page)

When younger, I fancied myself as one day becoming one of those effortlessly cool mothers who spoke to their children as ‘real people' and attempted to ‘level' with them in times of high anxiety. ‘Talk to me,' I imagined myself saying from an understanding crouching position as my offspring hit the deck wailing for a Bubble O' Bill. ‘Let's workshop this out, one on one.' Of course this sort of logic flies out the window the first time a full-scale meltdown occurs and you find yourself singing ‘INCY WINCY SPIDER' with the sort of brittle, shrill mania usually seen in Joan Crawford directly before she snaps a few coat hangers in half. Children will not suffer hypocrites or blowhards, a fact that strikes fear into the hearts of most of us who are, by nature, hypocrites or blowhards. A child's steady gaze is like X-Ray Specs into the black corners of your soul. There is nowhere to hide.

And that's when I inadvertently stumbled upon the same formula my folks had all those years before: draw on your theatre background. I put on a show. I threw myself into parenting like it was opening night for the Kew Amateur Players. I introduced costumes and wigs and changed the lyrics to well-known songs to include the names of our family. By the time Sime came home Edie and I were both in full pancake make-up and I was dressed as Little Orphan Annie.

‘She likes me!' I said brightly. ‘Look! She really likes me!'

After steering me gently from the room and removing the swimming cap from his daughter's head (‘I think Daddy Warbucks might need a little rest, hon'), Sime had time to reflect upon my unique style of mothering. It may have been odd, it may have been rooted in that strange world of unhealthy, competitive mother-daughter showbusiness partnerships like Liza Minnelli and Judy Garland, or Matthew and Patti Newton, but it was my way of coming at what was a fairly challenging emotional situation and, given my upbringing, the only point of reference I had. Being raised by two actors
only affected me slightly and besides which Sime would be on hand to veto any of my more elaborate showpieces.

Awash with love, we decided to marry and make our strange little family unit official in the eyes of the baby Jesus, or at the very least create an excuse for excessive drinking in a rural environment. We joined together in a pine forest, me in a red nightgown and Sime in jeans and a trucker's cap. Our beloved Bubble of friends stood shivering in the cold, arms slung around each other, smiling indulgently at this grand, conventional gesture symbolising our mutual adoration. We felt young and handsome and impenetrable. Edie, nearly two years old, sat in a stroller during the ceremony, avocado smeared all over her perfect face, which is the best you can hope for with certain wedding guests. I carried her out of the forest, full of love and promise in my heart, and she pointed at me with a dirty finger. ‘Mik,' she said with no small amount of pride. Sime and I looked at each other.

‘She said your name.'

‘Well, it wasn't
exactly
my name. She called me “Mik”.'

The question had finally arisen about what Edie was going to call me when she was able to talk conversationally. I was now technically her stepmother, a title that sat on the scale of fairytale evil somewhere between a poisoned apple and Jeffrey Dahmer. I didn't want to be plain old ‘Marieke'. There was no romanticism in that, no sense of family. I wanted to be someone special.

When as a teenager I had started calling my own mother by her Christian name—Galia—she became visibly upset.

‘Anybody can call me
Galia
,' she said. ‘You're the only person in the entire world who can call me Mum.'

I kept calling her Galia regardless because it seemed like the cooler thing to do and I was an insensitive adolescent out to hurt her feelings.

I was the only person in the world who Edie could call her stepmother. I wanted to make sure that what she called me was
right
. A friend's mother had insisted on being called ‘Molly' by her new granddaughter and had spent months of babysitting coaching the infant.

‘Who am I? I'm Molly. I'm
Molly
.'

When the girl was old enough to form the words, my friend's mother realised with a start that she'd essentially handed the opportunity to be called ‘Grandma' over to someone else in the family. It had been a tactical error. Furiously, she tried to backpedal, creating a fusion of names the child could work with.

‘Who am I? I'm GrandMol.
GrandMol
.'

It was to no avail. She was—and remains to this day, I believe—Molly. Grandma is on the other side of the family, no doubt immeasurably smug.

In the end we settled on ‘Missus', which is what Sime called me when he wasn't cursing my very existence to the gods ho ho, and hearing Edie say it for the first time, with that clumsy, all-encompassing lisp almost every child struggles with at some point, was one of the most beautiful and life-affirming moments of my existence.

‘Mithuth?'

She grew and she grew. It is what children do. Sime accepted my shortcomings as a parent and encouraged the blossoming petals of maternal instinct that were forcing their way through despite my best efforts to remain inept. I learned how to change a nappy while still holding a conversation, like Steve Martin in the final scene of
Parenthood
. I taught Edie the alphabet. I found that little nook 'twixt hip and shoulder where she balanced perfectly when I had other things to do, like get in and out of a car without causing a crowd of concerned citizens to gather around angrily, threatening to call DOCS.

Sime and I spent a happy week turning her room into an Arabian tent and presented it to her in song and dance. She learned all the words to ‘Tomorrow' and
Pippin
's ‘Magic to Do'. Soon I would start her in on
Godspell
and
42nd Street
and the circle of life would be complete. We shared custody, so spent half our time repeating the story of Maisy the Mouse in a dimly lit bedroom at one in the afternoon, and the other simply being young and hedonistic and madly in love. It was a delicate balance, and we got it right most of the time. Our friends knew which nights to call us out into wickedness, and which evenings we locked the doors and flourished as an unconventional family unit. We parented with and without hangovers. We parented with sweeping gestures and insignificant stumbles.

People thought Edie was mine and I didn't discourage them. It helped that she was so little and had those huge black eyes. When I ran into friends I hadn't seen in a while and I was holding an infant in my arms, I could see them do the
my god, I had no idea
face. I played a dangerous game, not confirming or denying either way. Enjoying the show-offy bit of motherhood, where your child is good-looking and everybody likes them.

‘This is Edie. Say hello, Edie.'

‘Hello.'

I would whisk her away before she could rumble the ruse by saying anything about me not being her real mother.

Our family was mismatched and extended. Edie would stay with my parents, Sime's parents, her mother's parents, her mother's sister. She adapted beautifully to this baffling rotisserie of houses and was a happy, well-adjusted child. I would take her to the park and lie in the grass with her and sing. Looking up at the clouds, our heads would touch.

In that moment, just the two of us and the sky, she was mine and I was hers.

We took baths together, the pair of us crammed into some ungodly garish tub while Sime made dinner, and happily wandered around naked in the bedroom afterwards. My family, too, had been a naked one. I would climb into bed with my parents of a morn and we'd all be naked as the day was long. When my dad levered himself from the mattress once, I heard myself gasp.

‘Dad,' I said scandalously. ‘You've got a stiffy.'

He sighed, and looked to my mother. She shrugged, one of those ‘you're the one with the penis, you get this' moments.

My father sat down—carefully—on the bed.

‘This, Marieke,' he said in a teacherly fashion, ‘is what's rather crudely referred to as a “piss horn''.' I nodded and took this in. Given their predilection for theatrics I suppose I'm lucky he didn't put on a puppet show with it.

In a naked moment I once bent down to get some clean underwear and noticed Edie had fallen silent. I turned to see her staring at me with an expression not far from awe.

‘Gee,' she said quietly. ‘You've got a really big bottom.'

I frowned.

‘It's not
that
big.' Why was I arguing with a three-year-old?

She shook her head, refusing to accept my explanation.

‘It's the
biggest bottom I've ever seen
,' she insisted, which was the point that I picked her up and threw her from the window.

When Edie was three-and-a-half her mother took her on a two-week holiday to Brisbane and decided to stay. She wrote us a letter, explaining her case. ‘I need to be near my family,' she said. ‘This is too hard.'

We were both filled with an unbridled confusion. We were good parents, we put on shows and fed her vegetables and made her go to bed at a reasonable hour. And just like that, a cold war between two sad ex-lovers resulted in the loss of Edie from our little family unit.

There are, they say, hundreds of Inuit words for ‘snow', and
x
amount of Latin words for ‘love', but as far as I understand there is not one word in the known language that describes what it feels like for a once-reluctant stepmother to lose access to a child she has learned to raise.

It destroyed our relationship. Unable to fathom how such a gross miscarriage of justice could occur without some sensible authority figure stepping in to make things right, Sime and I fell apart. We kept Edie's room set up, as though she would return through the front door at any moment. We were like the parents of the dead. He had no bundle to cling to, nobody to sing to sleep. He tried to parent me and I railed against him. We should have gone to counselling. We didn't. We buried each other, and our relationship, into the ground.

I felt the loss of Edie keenly; mourned the child who had never been mine. It was a tangled grief. I did not know if I had the right to these feelings.

‘It's not as though she was
your
kid,' somebody said to me. ‘I mean, imagine how
Sime
must be feeling.'

A few years ago I was told by a doctor that I might never have children of my own, at least not without the aid of drugs with complicated names or a vocal campaign by Deborra-Lee Furness. I accepted the news with an odd sort of calm. It felt like being told I would never fly. I wondered if my sole stab at mothering would involve those all-too-brief years with Sime and Edie. I regretted wrestling for so long with the concept itself. I regretted too few days at the park, looking up at the clouds, touching heads.

Edie's eleven now, and prefers to be called ‘Bel', something I have trouble getting used to. I want to breathe into her hair and do zerberts on her bare belly but she doesn't like that anymore. Some years ago, she and her mother returned to Melbourne. I met her on a street, Sime holding her hand tightly, and for a moment we looked at each other. All the baths and musical theatre and bad op-shop clothing and hot chips on the bonnet of station wagons existed in the air between us in that split second. And then she broke free of Sime's grasp and belted forward to embrace me tightly around the waist.

‘Missus!' she exclaimed. ‘I've
missed
you!'

She still calls me Missus and still runs to hug me when we meet, all teeth and long hair and sticky-out arms. That she remains a part of my existence, in however an unorthodox fashion, is something I can never be grateful enough for. There may be other children in my life at some later stage; softly spoken products of a broken relationship whose refugee I am temporarily sheltering, but I understand now that I will never know that true ownership, the unspoken ritual of life-giving and innate selflessness. I was not born to be a mother but I have mothered, for a few blessed moments, a few precious hours, on a swing, in a bath, on a private stage made for two.

Parts of this story first appeared in
Frankie
magazine.

Man bites dog

Bob Ellis: a writer of no small reputation. A penner of political speeches, a Labor Party devotee, man of the theatre, filmmaker, author. Kim Beazley, the former leader of the ALP, once referred to Ellis, not entirely mean spiritedly, as ‘Labor's pet cat'. The implication was that he held no real loyalty to the party, or to anybody really, was quite able to pen a speech singing the praises of Bob Carr whilst simultaneously shredding Julia Gillard on an ABC blog. Politicians from both sides would chuckle nervously on his approach, spotting from afar the lumbering, snarling man-camel shuffling his way down the corridors, taking long-suffering plods up the steps of Parliament House.

‘Bob Ellis,' wrote columnist Frank Devine in
The Australian
, ‘is more poisonous than a funnel web spider.'