A broken leg and lots of blood

She: Glad you're back.

Me: I keep waking up full of stories. I keep not writing them down.

She: What's holding you back?

Me: I want them to be finished in my head before I start writing. I want to know where they are going.

She: You were enjoying just writing whatever came up, when it came up.

Me: I wasn't exactly enjoying it! Well, I was a bit I suppose. I was experimenting and it was strangely exhilarating, and very interesting what I was remembering, and realising about those memories. But it felt really out of control, dangerous.

She: And a little bit fun? It's good for you to write like that, without a plan or target to hit. You will get to enjoy it. I guarantee that.

Me: I read the whole thing yesterday for the first time.

She: I know. How was that?

Me: I thought it was good. I thought it was funny and sad and honest and meaningful.

She: It is. Keep writing. It's so good for your spirit. So good.

Me: And now I'm sitting here wondering what next? What stories? There are so so many. Stories about the Ward girls, the nanas (who could easily have a whole book each), the family outings, picnics, holidays. The food. The Christmasses, weddings, funerals. Pat and Jim O'Brien, aunty Win and uncle Jack Elder (Gin and Wack), Uncle grandad (our dead granddad's brother, Jim) and aunty Muriel and their son Neville (Devil). And more stories about mum and dad.
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So now it's taking a huge effort to stay here and write. I get this pressure in my chest. It's so solid and heavy. I just want to get up and do something busy, like clean the house or dig the garden, run the dog... if I was still drinking, I'd want a drink to bring me back down to a relaxed level. It's anxiety. It is so obvious now. It's really good to be able to see it, know what it is, and be curious about it.

A broken leg -- Polly

We were in Gore, visiting mum and dad's friends Tony and Jan Fosbender. Tony worked in the Gore branch of the same company as dad. He was small, wiry, with a squeaky voice. I think he had a moustache. He was small, and dapper in a grungy sort of way. Jan was large, loud, with died orange hair. They were not like any other friends mum and dad had. They weren't Catholics for starters. They weren't related to us either. And they didn't have children. They were an odd fit for family friends. I don't know why they were friends at all, but we drove the 40 miles to Gore to visit them occasionally, and dad and Tony would drink flagon beer, mum and Jan would have sherry, and Jan would make an uncomfortable fuss of us because she really wanted children but didn't have any.

Polly wasn't a baby, but wasn't walking yet. She could nearly sit up, so was probably 6 or 7 months old. I was 5. She was in the kitchen and I wanted to carry her into the lounge where the others were, because she was having trouble crawling on the lino floor. Jan's kitchen floor was legendary for its shine. I always asked before I did anything new, so I asked if I could pick her up and carry her out of the kitchen.

First I had to practice they said. It was agreed that a big bag of salt from the pantry would by a good Polly substitute for me to carry, to prove I could do it. I passed the salt test with flying colours, and went back into the kitchen with permission to carry Polly. I got her up into my arms, but as soon as I took a step towards the lounge I slipped and fell, and dropped her -- and  broke her leg.

Polly ended up with her lovely little leg in a heavy plaster. The up-side of that was that suddenly she could sit up good and proper, because she was weighed down by the ankle to thigh plaster. The down side was that for a while after the plaster was taken off, she would fall backwards and hit her head on the floor, because she'd come to rely in the weight of the plaster to hold her up.

This was told as a funny-haha family story, and I was grateful for that. I wasn't harassed or shamed over dropping Polly. I was never allowed to forget it, but it was a light-hearted thing, not a guilt thing. I do remember being shocked when my feet shot out from underneath me like they did. And I do remember one kind adult saying something like "that was Jan's fault for having such a shiny floor." It wasn't traumatic for me. It probably was for Polly.

If you were to take the family photos as a true record, I always had a baby under my arm, from age three to thirteen. Uncle Jim often said that he'd not seen me as a child without a baby latched on to me. I was very sure, from a very early age, that my job was to look out for my sisters. It was a job I took very seriously, and usually I did it well. But not always.

Lots of blood -- Julie

Obviously, it wasn't my fault that Julie got a cut on her head when she fell off the back of Mr Hunt's trailer. How could it be? But I was supposed to be "keeping an eye out" for the girls, and I had to bring her home with blood gushing out the side of her head, and deal with mum's hysterics, which were pretty dramatic.

Mr Hunt was the father next door, Mrs Hunt's husband, and the Hunt kids' dad. He was a builder. They weren't Catholics (so they didn't go to the same school as us), and they weren't related to us. We played with the kids anyway, but I don't remember the adults having that much more to do with each other than a hello over the back fence.

Mr Hunt drove a car with a trailor attached, for carrying his tools and wood to work. He would stop at the corner of Patterson and Harvey St, and the kids from the street would pile on the back of the trailor and get a ride the half block to the Hunt house. Then they'd all pile off before he went in the drive. That's when Julie's head got dinged. She jumped off the trailor, and someone else (probably Trevor Hunt, same age as Julie) jumped off just after her, knocked her over and scraped her head.

Julie got hauled off to hospital and came home with a cool big bandage around her head. It was only a small cut but such a lot of blood. Now I know head wounds bleed dramatically, even if there's just a little cut. This was dramatic. I felt terrible. That day I did a really bad job of keeping an eye out for the girls.

NEXT: Everything matters

Am I one of the girls?

I had my first epiphany when I was 11. That was when I found out I was a child, not a parent, and it was a Very Big Shock indeed. Here's how it happened.

The whole family was in the kitchen. Dad, mum, me, Julie, Polly, Maria, Angie. In that order. We were getting ready for our usual Sunday family picnic. It must have been winter because mum was filling the big green thermos with steaming Wattie’s tomato soup. Dad was leaning against the bench, finished buttering the white Sunday bread, probably thinking about the racehorse he’d put a bet on. I think he liked to spend his winnings in his head a few times before he actually won them.

Mum and dad were having a conversation, probably something ordinary like what time to leave, or which beach or bush to go to given the weather. I was standing by, as I did, watching and waiting for instructions. My four sisters were playing about in a girly tangle, as they did, giggling probably, and being told to behave themselves by mum. Or dad. Whoever got irritated with them first. Then mum said it to dad, or he said said it to her... I don't remember the details, but it was something about ‘the girls’ that clearly included me. First it puzzled me, then concerned me deeply, and then caused me to look at them both and ask “Am I one of the girls?”

If you knew my father, you’d know how deep and meaningful his laugh was when he heard something ridiculous. He laughed a particularly good one that time. Mum said something, but I wasn’t listening, because dad’s laugh said it all. And all I could think as my world view crashed around me was “What an idiot! I don’t even know who I am.”

I honestly didn’t know, until that day, that I was one of the girls. I am the oldest, and they started coming thick and fast from when I was three until I was ten. In practically every childhood photo after age three, I have a baby under my arm. The communication between my parents and me was mostly like this: “Are the girls ready?” “Where are the girls?” “Can you call the girls for dinner?” “Can you put the girls in the bath?” “Time to read the girls a story... get the girls in the car... put the girls’ coats on...” It never occurred to me that I was one of them. I was part of the mum+dad+me girl herding unit. Those four giggling tangled up creatures were the girls.

Anyway, dad eventually stopped laughing, mum finished filling the thermos, the girls got themselves untangled long enough to get into the car and tangled back up again, and we took off on the Sunday picnic. Life quickly got back to normal -- or so I thought.

I don’t tell this story for sympathy. Not at all. I loved that job. I loved those girls. I watched them grow from babies, to toddlers, take their first steps, speak their first words, suffer their childhood illnesses. I doubled them to school on my bike. I dressed them, and wiped their cute little noses, and sang to them in the car when they were wailing with boredom or car sickness. That was my job, I was really good at it, and I loved it.

I tell this story, because I've recently had another epiphany, equal and opposite to that one.

I've been listening to Tara Brach's teachings about self compassion; she's the reason I even thought about that situation when I was 11. During one of her meditations, I realised I've been still stuck in that "What an idiot, I don't even know who I am" story, all these years later. It's an intensely anxious feeling, and I've spent a lifetime numbing and zoning out and desperately trying to disprove it.

It's played out as hanging about on the fringes, shrinking, second-guessing, isolating and not trusting myself. I've quietly thought the good things in life apply to other people, not me -- things like the law of attraction and book deals,  for example!  I expect to be whacked from behind, when I least expect it, and I've spent a good deal of energy making sure I'm ready to counter-attack when this happens (which it never does, by the way.) I am very shy of strangers, terrified of mingling and networking events. I think other people will find me crashingly boring. I could go on, but you get the picture.

I've been living scared. I don't even know of what. Scared and anxious. Believing I'm not OK and not acceptable, not safe, and accepting the resulting low-level background anxiety as a normal part of life. This is crippling and limiting. And totally exhausting.

So. How cool is it to stare that one in the face and watch it back down? Very cool indeed.

Tara Brach explains the limbic brain, or reptilian brain, which humans share with other animals. It's in the back of the head, and it has very useful powers and lightning speed responses to keep us safe, alerting us to dangers and kicking in automatic reactions like fight, flight or freeze mode. It's responsible for basic survival. Useful stuff for sure.

We've also evolved another brain in the front of our heads which gives us other powers like compassion, empathy, discernment, kindness, creativity, love. Don't you just feel relaxed and gorgeous thinking about it?

The epiphany for me was: I get to choose which brain is running my show. And I choose the evolved one at the front.

(ps. I wrote this story quite a while ago, but it seems to fit in the sequence here.)

NEXT: A broken leg and lots of blood