When I was twelve I read a book. It was
Faces in the Water, by
Janet Frame.
They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds.
I read those words and I understood them. I didn’t know how or why I understood them. I just knew that they were beautiful, and suddenly I was writing. I didn’t know I could write, I didn’t know I wanted to write, but I was writing a story.
I wasn’t always a happy child, but that story I wrote made me happy. From then on words became my sanctuary. I decided I was going to be a writer.
I have my mother to thank for this. She was the reason
Faces in the Water was on the bookshelf. She was studying and her neatly written notes and perfectly straight underlining gave those already beautiful words great importance. This was how I learnt to read as well as to write.
I’ve always said that I have no “golden era” of childhood, that for me, life has only gotten better, keeps on getting better. Yet when I think about reading
Faces in the Water for the first time, and writing that story, I think I would be happy to re-live that moment. When I read those words
They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety, that he is our Red Cross who will provide ointment and bandages for our wounds I get tingly inside. I remember how extraordinary they were to me as a twelve year old. How they presented me with a doorway into an entirely new, entirely fantastical world. How they were that world themselves. How I wanted to enter them. How if I could have slipped myself in between the pages, in the same way that I cut open a cavity in the middle of an old book to keep my secrets in, I would have. I would have curled into a ball and stayed there.
But I couldn’t. I had growing up to do. There was school, with subjects to love and subjects to fear. There were people, to love and to fear. There was my own reflection looking back at me in the mirror, to love, and equally to fear. Who was this woman-girl I was becoming? I was a troubled teenager, even more troubled than I had been as a child. I was sensitive, vulnerable, wanting, morose, self-absorbed, and trapped, as much by my family as by my own inability to interpret and engage with the world.
Oh I was normal enough. Maybe you knew me and you didn’t think I was so strange. Or maybe you knew someone like me. Or maybe you knew yourself. I worked hard at being normal enough. It was exhausting. But at least I could write. I could write.
Then suddenly I came out of those years as if I had been Alice falling down the rabbit hole all that time. Only for me it was the falling that was most confusing, and the landing that felt so good. I stood up and looked at myself in the mirror and realised that I liked what I saw. I looked around me and found that the world made sense. I got on with living.
In this business of living I found something else that felt almost as good as writing - making people happy. Making people happy was thrilling. I felt loved, accepted, understood, and most of all, important. All those things I’d felt the absence of so keenly in my tumble down the rabbit hole. I couldn’t believe I’d lived without them. They became my food, my gods, they were addictive. I served them with every last bit of me. From the outside it looked like my mantra was people, people, people. But I was in a whirlwind of need and I had cast words to the side. “Why would I ever want to sit alone in a room writing?” I clearly remember asking myself. I had abandoned my sanctuary.
You probably know how this is going to go. Making people happy was exhausting. It was just as exhausting as trying to be normal had been as a teenager. Actually, making people happy was just another rabbit hole. I thought I had landed and that finally I understood the world, but really I was still falling. I was a youth worker in my church, out every night and then more, driven by my insatiable need for approval. It wasn’t anybody’s fault but my own, yet it was unfortunate that the church, an institution that is called to walk people into freedom, so often allows its people to come under even more bondage, exchanging one burden for another.
The church I was in, to their credit, sent me to a psychologist. I was diagnosed with mild burn-out owing to a compliant personality. The day I stepped down from my role as a youth worker I inherited a computer. I was twenty-two and I realised, all over again, that I wanted to write.
I’ve spent the rest of my life since then trying to make up for the years I gave up on words. I’ve written it here, I’ve said it, I’ve cried it, I’ve yelled it and I’ve prayed it, but after loving my family, there is nothing else in the world I’d rather do than write. Yet it's been the thing I've found hardest to do.
At the beginning of the year I made some intentions. One of them was to spend one day a month alone. I didn't know if it would be possible, but I wanted it enough to try. Last Thursday I did it! Greer was at kindy, Mum took Isobella and Abigail, and I went to the Franciscan Friary in Hillsborough, a retreat centre. I drove up the driveway almost giddy, overwhelmed. It was my first day alone since Abigail was born.
The Friary is beautiful. It’s a simple two-storied brick building surrounded by gardens and tall, old trees. After finding my room I went for a walk. I walked slowly, taking everything in. I walked under the canopy of trees, felt shy in front of a shrine to the Virgin. I thought about how calm she looked, how peaceful and uncomplicated. I listened to the birds, the cicadas whirring, shouts of children in the school nearby. I thought about my husband and his sisters who went to that school, and my nephew who is there now. I thought about the land and the people who belonged to it, the people who had come together and built a community.
And then I saw a flower in the trees above me. It was a magnolia tree, and the flower was in full bloom, rich white and beautiful. I stared at it, trying to read its perfection. On tippy-toes I took a photograph. I took it for me as much as for you, I didn’t know this story was going to be written. I didn’t know what I know now. I couldn’t have foreseen the reunion that was about to occur.
You see I’d been to the Friary before. In that “other life” as a youth worker. I’d stayed there for a week, training to become a school chaplain. The me that was there all those years ago was the me at the height of my striving. Convinced I was capable of saving the world! So sure my life was with people and not with words. So I was thinking of all of that as I walked back up the stairs to my room. I walked in and stood in front of the window at the end of the room. I was on the second story. The window overlooked the path I'd just walked moments before, and the tree with that perfect flower.
That flower. A few days or weeks ago, it wasn’t there. It wasn’t there a lifetime ago when I was another person. It was open, flowering, perfect, right at the time I walked underneath it.
I lay on the floor and thought about the girl I was, the girl who rejected words. That striving desperate girl, so lost. I thought about myself through those years, and for every moment of lostness I prayed.
Jesus, son of David, have mercy on me. Have mercy.
I slept for a second, and when I woke I got up and sat at the desk. As I wrote I realised I was lighter, freer. I realised I didn't have to denounce my past, or heap scorn on the young lost thing that I was. I realised I didn't have to disassociate myself with her any more.
Because she had many redemptions, that girl. She loved God. She loved people. She loved life. She wanted to do her best. But most of all she was easily found. It only took a moment, that dreadful empty moment when I realised I was living the wrong life. In that moment I remembered what I had wanted all along; words.
And so I celebrate her, that so lost, yet so found girl. For does it really matter how lost we are, if we are easily found? I could have been less lost, yet less-easily found. More the tragedy that would have been. And in the eye of eternity I was already found. I was in that beautiful, hopeful darkness that comes just before dawn. That moment teeming with possibility. I stood in the darkness and saw the very first shimmering glimmers of dawn.
And in celebrating that girl I was, I pick up a part of myself I didn't even know was missing. I am put back together, whole.
Jesus, son of David, have mercy. I take that girl, in all her confusion and desperation, and I kiss her. Come back to me, I say, come home.
So I've brought her home with me. That girl in a red beret and blue nail polish who was going to save the world. I love that girl I was. She has many stories to tell me, and much grace to teach me. I have stories for her too. Stories for her broken heart, stories to untangle her confusion. And what better stories could I tell? When really she is all of us, in parts. We are all a little lost, all a little found. We are all dwellers of darkness, about to witness the first light of dawn. We are all that flower, perfect, whether seen or unseen, blooming or wanting or waiting to bloom.
And the woman-girl I am? Still in awe of words. Still wishing I could curl up inside them. Still longing, waiting, wanting to write the worlds of words I've seen inside me somewhere. When? Everyday, moment by moment, yesterday, today, tomorrow. Bit by bit, word by word, I'm writing. Whether you see me or not.
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