March 10th, 1998, The Globe Is Wearing Us Down
I felt disturbed that Teresa had not worked as hard as I had expected her too, but that
had to do with my own expectations of myself and not with her as a person. If she
suddenly wants to drop out of the race by going to Darwin, and living in a caravan
collecting sea shells in order to photograph them with no marketplace, then it is good so
long as she is happy. Teresa was healthy but when we spoke a year later, she had gone
completely deaf in one ear. She said, "I'm holding the receiver to my good ear." When my
grandmother sat next to me in the movies I always had to sit the same side as her 'good'
ear, otherwise she wouldn't hear me. It happened to both of them young. I wanted them
to have perfect hearing and to be happy, but what could I do? For a start I wasn't born
when it happened to my grandmother. She had a flu in her twenties and told me that her
eardrum burst when she blew her nose too hard. It was as though a cyclone had suddenly
swept up on her left side and jumped into that ear and battered down the doors. With
Teresa it was more subtle, like aching swampy water had flooded the place, taking her
hair into her ear to create a wetlands ringing with mosquitoes. Now she went to sleep
with her ceiling fan on just in order to hear something different. Her ear remained a
bright red and her face swelled up. By giving itself more surface area, her worried facial
skin was trying to accommodate that flood of pain. "It feels like something warm and
gluggy in there, but the specialist assured me it's nothing. I'm completely deaf in one ear.
I have to hold on to a railing when I walk up the stairs." I said, "surely there must be
something someone can do?" But I was talking to a universe, not expecting an answer.
The damaged nerve ending of Teresa's deaf ear was slowly writhing like eels in swampy
brown water. There was no peace in the absence of sound. I tried to console myself with a
stupid analogy. A lot worse happens to those poor farmed animals who are brutalised all
their short lives before they dragged to their murders, yet I resented all of it. I get angry
when Mathew says, "I'm sick," spitting his fillings out into his hands. He says, "It's the
haemorrhoids. I've been bleeding from the arse again," then suddenly I get really angry at
him. I get angry at him for getting old and going bald, and for his bad breath and rotting
teeth. Sometimes I get angry because I think this is his way of saying, "I have nothing to
give to you, no love to give to you." Other times I get angry because this has happened to
him, and no matter how hard we take care of ourselves, it could happen to us and it will
happen to us. I thought of the hen rescue that was coming up on Friday night and the
barbed wire fences I had to crawl under and climb through very quickly. How close had
those barbs been to snagging an eyeball out of its socket or ripping my face? One night I
tried to barge my way through an 8ft wall of lantanas and thistles, in order to get to some
suffering birds. I failed and was pricked all over. Yet I kept doing it, attempting the title
of stupid-stubborn-super-human. I am angry that Mathew deteriorates, in the same way
that I am angry that I couldn't penetrate the lantana. What I guess I am saying here, is
that I am angry at my own vulnerability and that others are vulnerable. I was angry when
my own mother and father entrenched in their self destructive patterns of alcoholism,
prescription drugs and overwork were saying, "we're doing it for you," because I didn't
want them to do that for me. I just wanted them to be good parents and not fall to
pieces. I was angry that I couldn't save them, that they couldn't save themselves and that
they couldn't save me. I have been taught that I'm responsible. Kids will adopt complete
responsibility for a world they cannot control. An adult throws them over that world like a
big beachball, that they can't get their arms around. "Here, catch this! You are solely
responsible for it." I walked around with this big inflatable ball for years. Often the wind
would blow it away across the lawns, then it was a giant snowball gaining its deadly pack
ice and momentum down the side of a mountain. The giant globe was propelling out of
control and I was becoming part of its structure, glued beneath it like a frozen twig. As a
child I simply had to hold on and suffer as though that globe was my only mother and
father. But as I grew bigger it began to look smaller and I said, "you know, perhaps I can
save this world. It's beginning to look pretty manageable." It was when I was walking
beside it, with my hand on its curve feeling confident, that my troubled inadequacy really
began. I should just do what a lot of people do, which is once they are big enough they
give the globe the boot. They kick it sky high to the hills. But I would feel like I was
kicking it into someone else's backyard. Now the inflatable globe and myself are engaged
in an intermittent relationship. I let it lie in the front lawn grass gaining sun. Often I sit
beside it dumbfounded, like a child who has found the ball of her best friend. |
