It was the result of an ongoing train-wreck that started when I was still in high school.

There was a fellow in my class that I was seriously keen on. Every time I was around him, I had butterflies in my stomach and was speechless. That was the unfortunate part – I could never bring myself to speak to him at all.

My friend was going out with his friend, so the four of us would go to different places together. We went to the park to watch the boys flying their model air planes. We also went to soccer matches. Soccer, or any team sport, didn’t interest me at all, but I was organised into going, and assigned a “favourite player”.

Then we decided to all go to the Brisbane Exhibition together – the Ekka. The chap I fancied came to my home to ask permission to ask me out (not sure why really, as we had already been going to other places as a group). My mother sat in the lounge and spoke to him for half an hour. I was quite jealous, as I had never had such a long conversation with him myself, but my mother didn’t know that.

If only I had not been so damnably shy! I was a VERY “late bloomer”.

For some time, I had been thinking that the best way to meet a guy would be in a mixed group of friends who hung out together. That would give us an opportunity to get to know each other, without the pressure of “dating”. Why did I not recognise that I had exactly what I wanted right there? Only God knows. I suppose it was because the combined pressure of problems at home and not fitting in at school had become so great that I couldn’t seem to think at all, let alone think straight.

The night before we went to Exhibition, I hardly slept a wink, out of anxiety that he would probably want to hold my hand, and I had not yet got to know him. It makes me cringe now to think how pathetically naive I was; all I needed was someone I could confide in, and they would quickly have noticed the craziness of not seeing that I actually had exactly the situation I’d been wanting, so why was I not embracing it?

So … I blush to admit it, but I wouldn’t let him hold my hand until some time later in the day. We all went to a movie afterwards. And the next day he wouldn’t speak to me – at all – from that time onwards. I was wracking my brains to think why he was behaving like that. I asked my friend, and she said I should ask him. Considering how chronically shy I was at the best of times, I was even less likely to approach him now, so the question never got answered.

My mind, which was constantly turning over some problem or another, now set itself the task of pondering this situation. My friend had often teased me about being “pure, sweet, naive, backward, and far too logical for a girl” – it was almost like a mantra. I finally decided that the reason he had dumped me was because I was naive and backward, and decided that from then on I would prove myself to be quite willing. ::Sigh:: From one extreme to the other.

At university I had a short relationship with a very strange person who stole from me, took keen delight in crashing the department computer (singular – there was only one in the early 70s), especially just before an assignment was due in, and brought cereal packets to uni, eating directly out of them. I don’t count him as a boyfriend, as I consider myself to have been literally a little crazy at the time. Once I recovered my senses, I cast him off.

Then, in the middle of my second year, I was at a meeting of the computer club. Attendance was compulsory if you wanted to continue as a member. They were having an election of board members. Some clown nominated me for treasurer or secretary. I looked around to see who it was, and since I didn’t recognise him I asked my friends if they knew him. Oh, they said, that’s Peter Kuskopf; he’s really smart. Well, I just thought he was an irritating fool, nominating me when he had never met me. So I ignored him, and declined the position.

Some time later, I had arrived at  lecture and was sitting with my friends. My friends were at the end of a row, and I was the last person on the inner end, with several empty seats between me and the next person along. Peter Kuskopf turns up, and walks along our row; I cringed inside. Discretion says he should have sat in the middle of the group of empty seats, as we had never met, but no, the arrogant fellow sat beside me. I studiously ignored him throughout the lecture.

At the end, my friends stood up to leave. I had missed a previous lecture, so was still copying a friend’s notes, and did not leave with them – wish I had, although it may have made no difference. Everyone else left, and still Peter sat there; I was getting really annoyed. Finally I finished and stood up – so did he – God! what an irritating man he was!

As we walked out, he finally started to speak – his opening gambit? something about cricket!! He finally starts talking to a girl he’s apparently interested in, and he chooses cricket. I hate team sports of any kind, but cricket was invented because they didn’t yet have sleeping tablets. Poor polite fool that I was, I did my best to answer him. Wish I’d told him to shove off!

So he started to ask me to join his group for card games. Our group played card games quite often at lunch time, and I suppose he must have come to those sessions sometimes, but as I recall, he often asked me to be the fourth hand for 500 with his friends. I didn’t want to, as I liked to study throughout the semester, and keep up to date with homework, assignments, reading through my notes, etc. He insisted, and I was hopeless at protecting my boundaries and asserting myself.

Finally, he asked if he could take me to a party many of us were going to at the end of the year. I kept saying no, as I already had a lift with some friends, but he kept asking, so I finally agreed to let him take me home (stupid, STUPID idea!). When we got home that night, I kissed him, as properly as I knew how (remember, I had decided to be willing – somehow I forgot that should also like the guy).

So one thing led to another and within two months I was pregnant – so began the nightmare slide into marrying a man I seriously wanted nothing to do with, and who clearly hated me, because within six months of marriage, when I listed all the things he had criticised about me, I realised there was not one single thing he actually liked about me.

So whose fault was it that all this happened? Mine, because I was so unbearably naive and incapable of being assertive?  My friend’s for teasing me so much, and not helping me sort out the original problem? The boy I was keen on, because he dumped me with no explanation?

I blame my mother – she was so constantly critical and forever reminding me of my long history (in her eyes) of being a hateful child, so that any kind of rejection sent me into a panic, and then I massively over-corrected. If there’d been just one sensible person I could talk to. I don’t blame my friend.

In my first year of high school, I had told a girl in my class about my father bullying my brother and hitting him. One day a teacher or staff member had called me out of class, to say that my younger brother (still at primary school) had had an accident, so could I come up to the office to give them my parents’ contact information.

Afterwards, other girls in my class had said I’d gone white a a sheet when I was told my brother had been injured. Perhaps that was why I also mentioned the bullying – I can’t remember. The point is, that the next day, this girl, Judy, approached me and taunted me (!?) asking whether my father was still hitting my brother, biff! biff! biff! I just looked at her in shock, that anyone would disbelieve me, or find it amusing.

So I don’t blame my friend that I had no-one to confide in, because after that girl spoke like that, I did not trust anyone else for several years.

As for the fellow who dumped me, I was in my 50s when it finally dawned on me that perhaps he just though I wasn’t interested, because I’d been reluctant to hold hands – again a stunningly obvious explanation, but I’ve had a very stressful life, and understanding interactions is something I’ve been woefully poor at.

For my mother’s part, I was 24 before I discovered that she didn’t just hate me; she had a very poor opinion of many other people as well – so at least I stopped looking for ways to please her. I was in my 30′s when it finally dawned on me that I am the child of a man she hates and wishes she had never met.

I realise that she did not set out to hate me as well, but it happened anyway. If someone hits you with their car, it really doesn’t matter whether it was an accident or they did it deliberately – the injuries are just as real.

My parents were both angry people. It was quite easy to get into trouble for nothing more than happening to be in the room when one of them was in a bad mood.

My father had a hot temper that would flare up in 2 seconds flat over nothing whatsoever. He would then rant and rave for a while, then stalk off. When he was angry I took care to keep a room’s width between us, and an escape route behind me. It didn’t dare let him get close enough to grab me – he was a fit man, and very strong. There were times that I needed to use that escape route, and would end up on the footpath trembling with anger, and fear, and humiliation.

My mother’s anger was cold, and poisonous. When my mother went crook at me, she didn’t stop with whatever imagined wrong I had committed, but listed all the dreadful things I had done for the last 10 years. In other words, in her eyes, I was just a nasty, wicked child, who could never do anything right.

I was 30 years old before she finally found one nice thing to say about me (she said I was good with colours – yay!). Some time later she managed to come out with a second compliment, but I forget what it was. Shortly before we left Brisbane (I was 41 by then), she actually apologised for something! She said I was right to have managed my garden the way that I had, and she was sorry for having made disparaging remarks many years ago. Really! as if the garden was an issue – compared with everything else.

I have not spoken to her for several years by now. For some time I had been thinking that if she had been any other person (other than my mother), people would have been asking me why I continued to associate with her. They would have been pointing out that every time I was around her, I became tense and anxious. Yet, just because she gave birth to me, people have generally said “but she’s your mother – she loves you really”.

It finally occurred to me that not all mothers have given birth (adoptive mothers, foster mothers), and not all women who give birth are mothers. A mother is someone who loves their children, and wants their lives to be happy and fulfilling. My mother has never been at all interested in my well-being, and has generally poured cold water on anything I was happy about or interested in. She was forever putting me down for one thing or another.

What with her constant criticism, the angry diatribes, and her general refusal to help me with anything while I was growing up, along with the fact that I couldn’t derive any comfort from my father either, essentially, I ended up feeling that I was utterly worthless and unwanted. So I married a man who treated me the same way, then joined a religion that also proceeded to treat me in similar manner (with occasional exceptions).

There was some other matter that happened soon afterwards that gave us a reasonable pretext for asking them to split up, without giving away the fact that we’d been reading the diary. It soon became apparent that they were not going to listen to us, so we further told our daughter that she was not allowed to go any function that he was at, unless either her father or I was present. This cut down on her social life, of course.

Soon after that, we were giving a lift to a girl who had become friendly with my daughters. She was saying that she wanted to have a party, and told the girls who she wanted to invite. The list included this young fellow. I said nothing.

One of my daughters explained that if he came, then Rowena would not be allowed to go. The girl immediately said that she would far rather have Rowena there than this boy. She said she didn’t like him anyway, and was only inviting him because she wanted to ask his sister. I had said not a word throughout this conversation.

A couple of days later, the boy’s mother turned up on my doorstep, then proceeded to stand in my lounge room shouting at me for the next two hours for “deliberately causing people to leave her son out of activities”. Of course, all I had actually done was quite reasonably keep my own daughter at home.

I found out later that the woman had also been to the girl’s house while her mother was out, and torn strips off her as well. Shameful conduct towards a girl of 15 or 16.

These days, I’d turf the mother out fairly promptly, I hope; it makes me feel quite foolish to have allowed such grossly unreasonable behaviour to continue. For most of my adult life, I have gone quite jelly-at-the-knees whenever someone has been angry with me, no matter how unreasonable – mainly due to how I was raised.

What a contrast between her behaviour, all because her dear boy was not invited to one party, whereas when we found that he been interfering with our underage daughter, I had been on the one hand very clear that he was to stay away from her, but very calm in the way that I spoke.

In the end, because it was all becoming problematic, we simply organised to move 2 states away, so that he would have no likelihood of following us. Our daughter has thanked us for doing that, and agrees that she was caught up in one of those teenage crushes at the time. Of course, she then turned around and started going out with Daniel, eventually marrying him – from one devil to another.

However, my relationship with my father was extremely problematic.  I was born on the other side of the Great Divide, in a small town called Gulgong, where Henry Lawson lived for a while.  My father was a lay preacher at the time.

When I was one year old, my parents moved to Dunbible, a small community a few miles south of Murwillumbah, on the northern coast of New South Wales.  We lived on a banana plantation.  My mother says she had no idea what to do with small children, so she left me to run around on my own for most of the day, with just the chickens for company.

But sometimes my dad would let me tag along with him in the plantation, and sometimes his mates from neighbouring plantations would come over to help out; I have always preferred the company of men – after all, my earliest friendly companions were men.

When I was 4 years old, my mother suddenly left my father, taking us kids with her.  My father had gone into town for supplies, and my mother spent some time watching out the window; perhaps she was waiting to see if he was coming back for anything he had forgotten.  Then she suddenly started rushing around packing a suitcase.

I can’t remember how much I said out loud, or whether it was just thoughts in my head, but I do clearly remember wondering why my Dad wasn’t coming with us. Why weren’t we packing his clothes? he was wearing his everyday clothes; he wasn’t dressed for plane travel. I could imagine how he would feel when he got home and found us gone; he’d be devastated.

I had not been able to sleep with my other daughters, although I had wanted to, but because Rowena was born in the middle of winter (southern hemisphere), my husband said it was OK to have the baby in bed with me.

The elders never did anything about it. Just shrugged and said, that because he was now in a different congregation, they couldn’t do anything about it.  I didn’t know any of the elders in the other congregation, and was did not feel up to approaching strangers about this matter, so it never got dealt with.

I would sometimes drop in to my daughter’s place, and if Daniel wasn’t home, she would let me in, but if Daniel was home, she would tell me I couldn’t come in.

My daughter now tells me that Daniel “had concerns about my spirituality” at the time. What?!?!?! I was going to all the meetings, and was still quite satisfied with my religion (as opposed to the people in it).  At no time did Daniel express to me any such concern.

It is pointless for him to say “oh, but I was young and didn’t know any better”.  He was a ministerial servant, and soon afterwards, the elders made him an elder; if he was mature enough to be an elder, he was certainly mature enough to approach me and say that he had concerns.