The House My Father Built

 

This post is the prologue to my memoir, The House My Father Built, which is a story about the psychological damage of growing up in a house dominated by hatred and violence that goes beyond a bitter divorce to entrap my life on a merry-go-round of violence and broken relationships until I finally find the courage to jump off and uncover the truth about my past so I can heal my life. The story originally grew from a need to show why children are not as resilient as we may think. What finally emerged was more than I bargained for.

From a very early age my father taught me well how to fear and hate men. It has been the deepest darkest secret I have kept all my life – even from myself.

Looking back over my life from the vantage point of my seventh decade, I can see how hatred has spread out from its source like a huge oil spill at sea, snaking its way around and over waves…contaminating, suffocating and disabling with a black stickiness from which even seabirds cannot escape into flight. With oil coated wings, they are doomed to a slow-creeping death – as was I.

Misandrist is the term for women like me. It is the female equivalent of misogynist. Like the unconscious hatred I felt toward my father, the existence of such a word remained hidden from my awareness – the long succession of misogynists I attracted into my life the only clue that all was not as it seemed, for like attracts like.

Yet instilled within me from an early age was that the work of children was to love their parents, to be obedient and good, and to strive to achieve at school. Every Monday morning at assembly, with our right hands across our hearts, we recited, “I love God and my country; I will honour the flag, serve the Queen, and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers, and the law.” On the rare occasions I went to church, I sat wide-eyed with fear while a minister waved a fist in the air and loudly proclaimed that sinners would burn in hell forever.

And so I learned that ‘sinners’ were bad people. And since only ‘bad’ children were smacked, or had their bare bottoms strapped, or spent time alone in their rooms to make them ‘good’, it became my obsession to be the ‘perfect’ child – not only so I could escape the fires of hell, but win my parents’ love.

I took to heart that little girls should be “sugar and spice and everything nice,” and therefore needed to hide their anger – even the righteous anger that wants to erupt at the unwarranted violence of parents who have not only lost control of their temper, but their grip on what is moral and right. However it seemed that no matter what I did, or how hard I tried, there was nothing I could do to arrest my inevitable fall from grace into the muddying experiences of life.

Eventually the shame of being so flawed compelled me to hide my badness behind a ‘smiley’ mask, and my childhood fragmented into a collection of jigsaw puzzle pieces that did not fit. Disconnected scenes replayed in my mind as I searched for clues that would link them together.

I see my father’s hand reaching into the loaf of bread left over from dinner to pull out its soft white heart. His fingers roll and then coil the bread into a snake that sits up to stare at me with beady eyes before he bakes it in the wood burning stove’s still hot oven.

Blue linoleum with crimson flowers covers the bedroom floor. My sister bangs her head on the pillow in her cot. The cot rolls over the flowers to the other end of the room and hits the wall. Voices of strange men fill the house and I call out in vain, “Mum, I want to get up.” The afternoon is starting to fade and the crimson flowers look like splotches of blood. “Come,” says my mother when she opens the door at last, “Let’s bake some cupcakes.” I stir the mixture and lick the spoons and the crimson flowers fade into darkness.

My mother sits at the dinner table staring absently at the wood burning stove. I look into her face and dozens of butterflies begin to flutter their wings inside my stomach. My father has gone. Will he come back after all the arguing and yelling through the night? I rock back and forth. My mother coldly commands me to sit still. I stare at the cake on the table we cannot eat because my mother sprinkled it with salt instead of icing sugar. “Don’t tell your father,” she says. It waits for when my father comes home.

My father drives up in his black car that looks like a T-Model Ford. A boy, about a year older than me, gets out of the front passenger side. My father tells us the boy is from an orphanage and looks pleased that he is going to live with us. I know for certain then that I am not ‘good enough’ as a girl and my tomboy ways have failed to win my father’s lasting affection.

The boy is nervous on his first day at his new school and I hold his hand like an older sister. I lead him on a tour of the playground. Over to the monkey bar and swings we go first, where I love to swing upside down on the little trapeze bar with rings, not caring who can see my knickers when my dress drops down to cover my face. Under the pine trees where magpies swoop during nesting time, I show the boy where I sweep pine needles into low hedge-like walls to play ‘houses’ with Shirley Kruger.

On the asphalted ball courts a group of older girls follow us like a shadow, giggling and pointing at us holding hands. “Kiss him,” they tease. I kiss him on the cheek. “Again,” they clamour in unison. I kiss him again and smile at their chorus of giggles with the heady delight of being the centre of attention.

In class the teacher commands me to stand. My heart pounds at the abrupt gruffness of her voice, wondering what I have done wrong. While she ticks me off that it is wrong for little girls to kiss boys, I wish a hole would open up I could climb down to escape the unwanted limelight of standing centre stage in shame.

The teacher doesn’t like the boy. He can never do his work right and crumples his paper and breaks his pencils. She makes him stand next to his seat while she tells him he is naughty…and she does not like naughty boys. His face goes red. His feet fidget on the bare floorboards and I feel his hurt inside me.

The bell goes and we burst through the doors as children do and run out into the sunshine, gasping in lungfuls of fresh air. I take the boy to the grassy playing field where the daisies grow and teach him to make daisy chains. When the bell rings I place the one I made around his neck.

The boy and I are like best friends lost in each other’s being as if no other world exists. We climb trees, run wildly across the lawn squealing in the delight of chasing each other before tumbling to the ground in a giggling heap, or we sit in a neighbour’s market garden and pull up carrots, brush off the dirt and eat them raw. With him I am wild and free from the fetters of being born a girl. The only cloud that hangs over our happy days it seems to me is that the boy comes from an orphanage and has no parents, or a place where he really belongs. I feel better when I decide he belongs with me and I will keep him safe forever.

Our happiness and fantasies shut out the voices in the walls of our house that whisper secrets of violent acts. The feelings of love I have for my parents quietly creep up to sit by my side while I play, as if waiting for me to invite them to join in.

Then I am older and playing games of hopscotch with friends at a different school. The earth is hard-baked from the long hot summer, and the wind through the pines sounds like surf on Melbourne’s wild back beaches.

“Children are so resilient they always bounce back,” I hear mothers cluck-cluck over cups of tea after calming a screaming and tearful boy caught in the rough and tumble of play outside. There is something haunting about his big brown eyes peering at me over the top of the cup of tea the mothers gave him to soothe his tears.

“Children are not resilient,” I declare to Dorothy, my first mother-in-law, who is washing the dishes after our Sunday roast chicken. With the tiniest hint of anger I added, “And I’m going to write a book about divorce to show why they are not resilient.”

Dorothy swished the dishcloth over a plate in a sink full of frothing detergent. “Now why would you want to do that?”

I picked up a plate still dripping with foaming bubbles that quickly soaked the tea towel. The answer rolled off my tongue like I had carefully rehearsed it for years. “Because I haven’t bounced back like the adults in my life believed children do after they get hurt. It’s been nine years since my parents’ divorce, and all the fighting and hurt and bitterness is still locked up inside.”

“People wouldn’t be interested in reading something like that,” Dorothy said, handing me another plate. “There’s no story to it. They like reading mysteries, or thrillers, or romances…”

Her reply took me by surprise. The thought never entered my head that no one would want to read such a book, for what I loved most were the disquieting tragedies in English literature that helped normalize my life. I recalled how I’d paced the floor reading aloud Shakespeare’s King Lear, tears streaming down my face at Lear’s blindness to his youngest daughter’s love, the rash way he banished her from his life when she struggled to find the words to express that love, and how he spent the remainder of his days wandering blind and lost. Unconsciously it mirrored the way my father had effectively banished me from his life through the silence of his internal war. It had turned him into an ‘invisible’ man – so invisible in fact, that an image repeatedly came to me of reaching out to give him a hug, only to have my arms pass right through him.

I put the plate I had dried on the bench. “The truth needs to be told about what happens to people in real life…”

“You’re still hurting over your mother.” There was genuine sympathy in Dorothy’s voice and she added kindly, “Put the past behind you… Leave the skeletons in the closet where they belong and get on with your life.”

But marriage had unexpectedly brought up memories of my parents’ divorce and no matter how much I tried to shut them out, they began eating holes in my fantasy of ‘living happily ever after,’ like the holes snails ate on the cover of the Cinderella book I left outside in the rain.

In the same way that trauma leaves indelible imprints on the amygdala in the brain, the memory of the first day I ever heard the word “divorce,” etched itself there in deep grooves as well, for the psychological wounds it caused have still much healing to do.

I am playing hopscotch within the muted sounds of autumn rain. The shrill ringing of the school bell summons us to assemble in the school courtyard in front of the flag. There is frantic whispering-like-wind that Cheryl will not be returning to our school. “Divorce.” It is all because of a divorce. A ripple of fear sweeps through us like a chilling wind that makes us shiver. Divorce is like some sort of disease that can strike anyone at random, suddenly and unpredictably wrenching us from those we love and the life we once knew.

It was only a month or so later, under an Indian-summer-blue-sky, that the whispering walls within my home finally collapsed within the earthquake-like destruction of my parents’ marriage, entombing me within a labyrinth of family secrets, illusions and fantasies, terror and fear, lies and guilt-laden, angry silences.

Staring at me from the rubble is a bold canvas with a surreal-like image of a little girl sitting on her father’s knee. He is helping her read the very first book she brought home from school: a story of Mickey and Minnie Mouse going on a picnic. It has a picture of a blanket covered with slices of chocolate cake, sandwiches, and pies. On the opposite page, huge ants are carrying away all the food.

Then the ants march off the pages and into my life to carry away all the people and things I dearly love. They steal my memories and create a big, blue hole of nothing. The hole swallows my father after the boy with no name disappears. It sucks in the boy’s laughter and leaves behind a deathly silence as if the whole world has gone to sleep and won’t wake up. My teacher is in there too, telling me to take home the things in the boy’s locker. All I find are some crumpled pieces of paper with messy writing, and a small box of broken pencils. “Don’t cry,” my father says when I take them home. “The boy ran away because he didn’t want to live here anymore.” What I saw never happened, he insists.

I see my mother peeping out of the window from behind the curtains before the ants come to carry her into the big blue hole, where she disappears forever.

Your mother’s a whore,” my father’s voice echoes from the hole as if it is stuck in a track on an old vinyl record. My heart goes numb and freezes solid to protect it from shattering like brittle glass from all the pain. In dreams the boy leaves footprints on perfectly made beds while running through a secret apartment inside our house I can no longer find. In nightmares I hide in chimney pots while monsters lumber over rooftops trying to catch me, taunting, “You have no mother…”

A creeping death called ‘bitterness’ consumed the rest of my childhood following my mother’s sudden illness a doctor was called to attend, the holiday she needed, my father’s disappearance into the night, a kidnapping…and divorce.

He found her at Nagambie, he said, naked in bed with another man. It was where, years ago, he and my uncle threw my mother into the river during a camping holiday and she packed her things into a small suitcase and left with my little sister. I watched the road swallow them up while I screamed in panic, snot and tears dripping off my chin.

“Whore” he called her. I knew it was something bad. The shame of that word contaminates my life still like the key that would not stop bleeding in the Bluebeard tale, where a young wife disobeyed her husband and unlocked a little chamber which hid the gruesome remains of his previous wives.

And then I am centre stage in a play after the leading lady quits and unexpectedly, the role is mine – even though I do not want it. My father directs me to wear my mother’s costume of shame and I wobble in her high-heeled shoes and trip over the too-long dress that winds itself around my legs, like her dresses did when I was five. Then, like a thief in the night, my father forces his way into the private gallery inside my mind and slashes my mother’s canvas images with a knife. “Bitch Face” becomes my mother’s new name. My father says she has a split personality.

I take my mother’s place in her husband’s bed when my grandmother comes to stay. It is where my mother finds me the night she returns to collect her things. I stare at her wide-eyed when she bends down to look into my face to ask if she can take the little ballerina picture I gave her on her birthday, hanging on the wall near the bed. After she leaves the room I sob into the pillow with an agonizing pain in my heart I had never before experienced. Then angry voices shouting at each other pierce through the walls from the lounge like daggers to completely sever me from the only life I know.

My father is drunk when he climbs into bed to clutch me tightly like a teddy bear. But then the anger comes. In place of his wife is a little girl. Ten… He initiates her into womanhood with the vicious and angry thrusts of his hatred towards his wife…his mother…all women, as if he is stabbing them all to death. Within her.

My mother died inside me that night. It was my father’s misogyny that killed her. And its rapaciousness obliterated my childhood like jasmine which smothers a garden after it grows wild and untamed, twisting and spiralling to weave a thick mat of leaves and vines through and over shrubs and bushes, climbing the heights of trees to create smothering and oppressive canopies which block out the sun and stunt the flowers that struggle to grow beneath it.

While my father angrily pulled bloodied sheets off the bed, I heaved my mother’s corpse over my left shoulder and carried her as a soldier carries a fallen comrade out of enemy territory to mourn her death with dignity and respect back at base camp. But I never found base camp, or a place of safety, and wandered lost down the years with my burden.

Until now…

You see, there was one thing my father could not destroy: the memories of the stories about the Greek Heroes my mother read to me, along with the usual fairytales of living ‘happily ever after’. Within the story of Jason and the Argonauts, an adventurer within me was born which finally gave me the courage and inspiration to set off on a journey to discover my own golden fleece, slaying the dragons of fear along the way so I could make peace with my past.

If Dorothy was alive today she would welcome me back as the long lost daughter she never had, but always wanted. She would invite me for a Sunday roast and afterwards I would dry the dishes while she washed them, suds dripping in globs upon the tea towel. I would tell her that it took twenty years before I finished my book, only to have an astute editor say after selecting it from Doubleday’s slush pile, “You haven’t told the whole story.”

I would tell her that it took me another twenty years before I found the elusive “whole” story…and that as I began rewrite after rewrite, one by one I found the long lost jigsaw puzzle pieces of my childhood memories. Putting them together I could finally see what my unresolved grief had been trying to tell me all along about the ravaged war zone in which I grew up; the reckoning of the casualties and the cost scarcely begun.

“My book is now about more than divorce,” I would say. “It is also about a journey into a war zone to rescue a child still lost within a misogynist’s battlefield.”

“What’s a misogynist?” she would ask.

“A man who hates women.”

“I don’t know any men who hate women,” she’d say, choosing to forget about the husband who beat her. Then she would say, “Who would want to read such a book?”

“The child inside each adult who grew up with violence and abuse and never learned to love themselves.”

“What an imagination you’ve got,” she’d retort, “There’s no child within people. Anyway, it’s wrong to love yourself. You should love God and your neighbours – not yourself.”

“Why do you think there is so much violence within our homes, so much greed in the world, addictions of every kind, wars and a plundering of our planet’s resources that will impoverish us all for generations to

This post is the prologue to my memoir, The House My Father Built, which is a story about the psychological damage of growing up in a house dominated by hatred and violence that goes beyond a bitter divorce to entrap my life on a merry-go-round of violence and broken relationships until I finally find the courage to jump off and uncover the truth about my past so I can heal my life. The story originally grew from a need to show why children are not as resilient as we may think. What finally emerged was more than I bargained for.

From a very early age my father taught me well how to fear and hate men. It has been the deepest darkest secret I have kept all my life – even from myself.

Looking back over my life from the vantage point of my seventh decade, I can see how hatred has spread out from its source like a huge oil spill at sea, snaking its way around and over waves…contaminating, suffocating and disabling with a black stickiness from which even seabirds cannot escape into flight. With oil coated wings, they are doomed to a slow-creeping death – as was I.

Misandrist is the term for women like me. It is the female equivalent of misogynist. Like the unconscious hatred I felt toward my father, the existence of such a word remained hidden from my awareness – the long succession of misogynists I attracted into my life the only clue that all was not as it seemed, for like attracts like.

Yet instilled within me from an early age was that the work of children was to love their parents, to be obedient and good, and to strive to achieve at school. Every Monday morning at assembly, with our right hands across our hearts, we recited, “I love God and my country; I will honour the flag, serve the Queen, and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers, and the law.” On the rare occasions I went to church, I sat wide-eyed with fear while a minister waved a fist in the air and loudly proclaimed that sinners would burn in hell forever.

And so I learned that ‘sinners’ were bad people. And since only ‘bad’ children were smacked, or had their bare bottoms strapped, or spent time alone in their rooms to make them ‘good’, it became my obsession to be the ‘perfect’ child – not only so I could escape the fires of hell, but win my parents’ love.

I took to heart that little girls should be “sugar and spice and everything nice,” and therefore needed to hide their anger – even the righteous anger that wants to erupt at the unwarranted violence of parents who have not only lost control of their temper, but their grip on what is moral and right. However it seemed that no matter what I did, or how hard I tried, there was nothing I could do to arrest my inevitable fall from grace into the muddying experiences of life.

Eventually the shame of being so flawed compelled me to hide my badness behind a ‘smiley’ mask, and my childhood fragmented into a collection of jigsaw puzzle pieces that did not fit. Disconnected scenes replayed in my mind as I searched for clues that would link them together.

I see my father’s hand reaching into the loaf of bread left over from dinner to pull out its soft white heart. His fingers roll and then coil the bread into a snake that sits up to stare at me with beady eyes before he bakes it in the wood burning stove’s still hot oven.

Blue linoleum with crimson flowers covers the bedroom floor. My sister bangs her head on the pillow in her cot. The cot rolls over the flowers to the other end of the room and hits the wall. Voices of strange men fill the house and I call out in vain, “Mum, I want to get up.” The afternoon is starting to fade and the crimson flowers look like splotches of blood. “Come,” says my mother when she opens the door at last, “Let’s bake some cupcakes.” I stir the mixture and lick the spoons and the crimson flowers fade into darkness.

My mother sits at the dinner table staring absently at the wood burning stove. I look into her face and dozens of butterflies begin to flutter their wings inside my stomach. My father has gone. Will he come back after all the arguing and yelling through the night? I rock back and forth. My mother coldly commands me to sit still. I stare at the cake on the table we cannot eat because my mother sprinkled it with salt instead of icing sugar. “Don’t tell your father,” she says. It waits for when my father comes home.

My father drives up in his black car that looks like a T-Model Ford. A boy, about a year older than me, gets out of the front passenger side. My father tells us the boy is from an orphanage and looks pleased that he is going to live with us. I know for certain then that I am not ‘good enough’ as a girl and my tomboy ways have failed to win my father’s lasting affection.

The boy is nervous on his first day at his new school and I hold his hand like an older sister. I lead him on a tour of the playground. Over to the monkey bar and swings we go first, where I love to swing upside down on the little trapeze bar with rings, not caring who can see my knickers when my dress drops down to cover my face. Under the pine trees where magpies swoop during nesting time, I show the boy where I sweep pine needles into low hedge-like walls to play ‘houses’ with Shirley Kruger.

On the asphalted ball courts a group of older girls follow us like a shadow, giggling and pointing at us holding hands. “Kiss him,” they tease. I kiss him on the cheek. “Again,” they clamour in unison. I kiss him again and smile at their chorus of giggles with the heady delight of being the centre of attention.

In class the teacher commands me to stand. My heart pounds at the abrupt gruffness of her voice, wondering what I have done wrong. While she ticks me off that it is wrong for little girls to kiss boys, I wish a hole would open up I could climb down to escape the unwanted limelight of standing centre stage in shame.

The teacher doesn’t like the boy. He can never do his work right and crumples his paper and breaks his pencils. She makes him stand next to his seat while she tells him he is naughty…and she does not like naughty boys. His face goes red. His feet fidget on the bare floorboards and I feel his hurt inside me.

The bell goes and we burst through the doors as children do and run out into the sunshine, gasping in lungfuls of fresh air. I take the boy to the grassy playing field where the daisies grow and teach him to make daisy chains. When the bell rings I place the one I made around his neck.

The boy and I are like best friends lost in each other’s being as if no other world exists. We climb trees, run wildly across the lawn squealing in the delight of chasing each other before tumbling to the ground in a giggling heap, or we sit in a neighbour’s market garden and pull up carrots, brush off the dirt and eat them raw. With him I am wild and free from the fetters of being born a girl. The only cloud that hangs over our happy days it seems to me is that the boy comes from an orphanage and has no parents, or a place where he really belongs. I feel better when I decide he belongs with me and I will keep him safe forever.

Our happiness and fantasies shut out the voices in the walls of our house that whisper secrets of violent acts. The feelings of love I have for my parents quietly creep up to sit by my side while I play, as if waiting for me to invite them to join in.

Then I am older and playing games of hopscotch with friends at a different school. The earth is hard-baked from the long hot summer, and the wind through the pines sounds like surf on Melbourne’s wild back beaches.

“Children are so resilient they always bounce back,” I hear mothers cluck-cluck over cups of tea after calming a screaming and tearful boy caught in the rough and tumble of play outside. There is something haunting about his big brown eyes peering at me over the top of the cup of tea the mothers gave him to soothe his tears.

“Children are not resilient,” I declare to Dorothy, my first mother-in-law, who is washing the dishes after our Sunday roast chicken. With the tiniest hint of anger I added, “And I’m going to write a book about divorce to show why they are not resilient.”

Dorothy swished the dishcloth over a plate in a sink full of frothing detergent. “Now why would you want to do that?”

I picked up a plate still dripping with foaming bubbles that quickly soaked the tea towel. The answer rolled off my tongue like I had carefully rehearsed it for years. “Because I haven’t bounced back like the adults in my life believed children do after they get hurt. It’s been nine years since my parents’ divorce, and all the fighting and hurt and bitterness is still locked up inside.”

“People wouldn’t be interested in reading something like that,” Dorothy said, handing me another plate. “There’s no story to it. They like reading mysteries, or thrillers, or romances…”

Her reply took me by surprise. The thought never entered my head that no one would want to read such a book, for what I loved most were the disquieting tragedies in English literature that helped normalize my life. I recalled how I’d paced the floor reading aloud Shakespeare’s King Lear, tears streaming down my face at Lear’s blindness to his youngest daughter’s love, the rash way he banished her from his life when she struggled to find the words to express that love, and how he spent the remainder of his days wandering blind and lost. Unconsciously it mirrored the way my father had effectively banished me from his life through the silence of his internal war. It had turned him into an ‘invisible’ man – so invisible in fact, that an image repeatedly came to me of reaching out to give him a hug, only to have my arms pass right through him.

I put the plate I had dried on the bench. “The truth needs to be told about what happens to people in real life…”

“You’re still hurting over your mother.” There was genuine sympathy in Dorothy’s voice and she added kindly, “Put the past behind you… Leave the skeletons in the closet where they belong and get on with your life.”

But marriage had unexpectedly brought up memories of my parents’ divorce and no matter how much I tried to shut them out, they began eating holes in my fantasy of ‘living happily ever after,’ like the holes snails ate on the cover of the Cinderella book I left outside in the rain.

In the same way that trauma leaves indelible imprints on the amygdala in the brain, the memory of the first day I ever heard the word “divorce,” etched itself there in deep grooves as well, for the psychological wounds it caused have still much healing to do.

I am playing hopscotch within the muted sounds of autumn rain. The shrill ringing of the school bell summons us to assemble in the school courtyard in front of the flag. There is frantic whispering-like-wind that Cheryl will not be returning to our school. “Divorce.” It is all because of a divorce. A ripple of fear sweeps through us like a chilling wind that makes us shiver. Divorce is like some sort of disease that can strike anyone at random, suddenly and unpredictably wrenching us from those we love and the life we once knew.

It was only a month or so later, under an Indian-summer-blue-sky, that the whispering walls within my home finally collapsed within the earthquake-like destruction of my parents’ marriage, entombing me within a labyrinth of family secrets, illusions and fantasies, terror and fear, lies and guilt-laden, angry silences.

Staring at me from the rubble is a bold canvas with a surreal-like image of a little girl sitting on her father’s knee. He is helping her read the very first book she brought home from school: a story of Mickey and Minnie Mouse going on a picnic. It has a picture of a blanket covered with slices of chocolate cake, sandwiches, and pies. On the opposite page, huge ants are carrying away all the food.

Then the ants march off the pages and into my life to carry away all the people and things I dearly love. They steal my memories and create a big, blue hole of nothing. The hole swallows my father after the boy with no name disappears. It sucks in the boy’s laughter and leaves behind a deathly silence as if the whole world has gone to sleep and won’t wake up. My teacher is in there too, telling me to take home the things in the boy’s locker. All I find are some crumpled pieces of paper with messy writing, and a small box of broken pencils. “Don’t cry,” my father says when I take them home. “The boy ran away because he didn’t want to live here anymore.” What I saw never happened, he insists.

I see my mother peeping out of the window from behind the curtains before the ants come to carry her into the big blue hole, where she disappears forever.

Your mother’s a whore,” my father’s voice echoes from the hole as if it is stuck in a track on an old vinyl record. My heart goes numb and freezes solid to protect it from shattering like brittle glass from all the pain. In dreams the boy leaves footprints on perfectly made beds while running through a secret apartment inside our house I can no longer find. In nightmares I hide in chimney pots while monsters lumber over rooftops trying to catch me, taunting, “You have no mother…”

A creeping death called ‘bitterness’ consumed the rest of my childhood following my mother’s sudden illness a doctor was called to attend, the holiday she needed, my father’s disappearance into the night, a kidnapping…and divorce.

He found her at Nagambie, he said, naked in bed with another man. It was where, years ago, he and my uncle threw my mother into the river during a camping holiday and she packed her things into a small suitcase and left with my little sister. I watched the road swallow them up while I screamed in panic, snot and tears dripping off my chin.

“Whore” he called her. I knew it was something bad. The shame of that word contaminates my life still like the key that would not stop bleeding in the Bluebeard tale, where a young wife disobeyed her husband and unlocked a little chamber which hid the gruesome remains of his previous wives.

And then I am centre stage in a play after the leading lady quits and unexpectedly, the role is mine – even though I do not want it. My father directs me to wear my mother’s costume of shame and I wobble in her high-heeled shoes and trip over the too-long dress that winds itself around my legs, like her dresses did when I was five. Then, like a thief in the night, my father forces his way into the private gallery inside my mind and slashes my mother’s canvas images with a knife. “Bitch Face” becomes my mother’s new name. My father says she has a split personality.

I take my mother’s place in her husband’s bed when my grandmother comes to stay. It is where my mother finds me the night she returns to collect her things. I stare at her wide-eyed when she bends down to look into my face to ask if she can take the little ballerina picture I gave her on her birthday, hanging on the wall near the bed. After she leaves the room I sob into the pillow with an agonizing pain in my heart I had never before experienced. Then angry voices shouting at each other pierce through the walls from the lounge like daggers to completely sever me from the only life I know.

My father is drunk when he climbs into bed to clutch me tightly like a teddy bear. But then the anger comes. In place of his wife is a little girl. Ten… He initiates her into womanhood with the vicious and angry thrusts of his hatred towards his wife…his mother…all women, as if he is stabbing them all to death. Within her.

My mother died inside me that night. It was my father’s misogyny that killed her. And its rapaciousness obliterated my childhood like jasmine which smothers a garden after it grows wild and untamed, twisting and spiralling to weave a thick mat of leaves and vines through and over shrubs and bushes, climbing the heights of trees to create smothering and oppressive canopies which block out the sun and stunt the flowers that struggle to grow beneath it.

While my father angrily pulled bloodied sheets off the bed, I heaved my mother’s corpse over my left shoulder and carried her as a soldier carries a fallen comrade out of enemy territory to mourn her death with dignity and respect back at base camp. But I never found base camp, or a place of safety, and wandered lost down the years with my burden.

Until now…

You see, there was one thing my father could not destroy: the memories of the stories about the Greek Heroes my mother read to me, along with the usual fairytales of living ‘happily ever after’. Within the story of Jason and the Argonauts, an adventurer within me was born which finally gave me the courage and inspiration to set off on a journey to discover my own golden fleece, slaying the dragons of fear along the way so I could make peace with my past.

If Dorothy was alive today she would welcome me back as the long lost daughter she never had, but always wanted. She would invite me for a Sunday roast and afterwards I would dry the dishes while she washed them, suds dripping in globs upon the tea towel. I would tell her that it took twenty years before I finished my book, only to have an astute editor say after selecting it from Doubleday’s slush pile, “You haven’t told the whole story.”

I would tell her that it took me another twenty years before I found the elusive “whole” story…and that as I began rewrite after rewrite, one by one I found the long lost jigsaw puzzle pieces of my childhood memories. Putting them together I could finally see what my unresolved grief had been trying to tell me all along about the ravaged war zone in which I grew up; the reckoning of the casualties and the cost scarcely begun.

“My book is now about more than divorce,” I would say. “It is also about a journey into a war zone to rescue a child still lost within a misogynist’s battlefield.”

“What’s a misogynist?” she would ask.

“A man who hates women.”

“I don’t know any men who hate women,” she’d say, choosing to forget about the husband who beat her. Then she would say, “Who would want to read such a book?”

“The child inside each adult who grew up with violence and abuse and never learned to love themselves.”

“What an imagination you’ve got,” she’d retort, “There’s no child within people. Anyway, it’s wrong to love yourself. You should love God and your neighbours – not yourself.”

“Why do you think there is so much violence within our homes, so much greed in the world, addictions of every kind, wars and a plundering of our planet’s resources that will impoverish us all for generations to come?”

After a long pause, and with a faraway look in her eyes, Dorothy would sigh before half-heartedly asking, “Why?”

“Because when we can’t love ourselves it creates a huge hole of emptiness we obsessively try to fill. Within emptiness and loneliness, fears are hatched that can lead to war – even war against ourselves.”

Dorothy would then hand me a sudsy plate to dry and look at me as if I was talking a foreign language. “Tell me about your travels,” she would say.

come?”

After a long pause, and with a faraway look in her eyes, Dorothy would sigh before half-heartedly asking, “Why?”

“Because when we can’t love ourselves it creates a huge hole of emptiness we obsessively try to fill. Within emptiness and loneliness, fears are hatched that can lead to war – even war against ourselves.”

Dorothy would then hand me a sudsy plate to dry and look at me as if I was talking a foreign language. “Tell me about your travels,” she would say.