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The following text is from “Real Life” published in THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN,
MARCH 27-28, 1999; Review Pages 30, 31
When the other woman arrives by e-mail, Mary* is caught in a world wide web of deceit
The sex is exhibitory. I find a graphic fantasy about a copulating couple at a crowded party in several computer printouts, hidden among documents for our new house. Is my husband involved?
A stranger thanks her "darling" for his "story"; she says she is wearing a thin-strapped negligee, and seems to know him so very well.
A window to another world will shatter mine when he finds another partner on the Net.
The intrusion on my privacy -- after the deaths of a son a year before and a stillborn daughter only months ago -strips me bare. Suddenly, sad and sick after my losses, I have no control over who comes into my sanctuary; no protection from a persistent presence destroying intimacy in our home, reducing me to a nonentity in my own space. It happens quickly.
He says he is not the man on the printouts, which disappear after I confront him. He says he "spied" on a chat-line when I was consumed by grief.
At first, the intrusion is deceptive. He uses the computer at all hours for work. He surfs it. It mimics orgasm, laughs, meows, moos, toots, impersonates Darth Vadar.
I become an involuntary voyeur of some erotic web literature and pictures of scantily clad cyber-sirens, for which I coin the label "interslut". But I convince myself these are only games into which he retreats.
We plan a new baby and are about to move when I read his on-screen tribute to a raven-haired beauty. He says he was thinking of me. Being blonde, I burst into tears. I type "My name is ... I am [his name] wife". I say I love him very much, have had two stillborn babies to him, ask who is on the Internet with him. I don't think she gets the message.
"Thank you darling," the computer replies, "... it must be getting late for you over there." A shadow, a kind of stalker, is in my home.
An image of lingerie, skin and slightly splayed thighs snakes online. He tries to delete it. It is no one he knows, he insists. She grins from what appears to be a home office. To a wife, and mother who has lost a child, this vision is as frightening as a gun or knife.
A decade ago, I could be disempowered by lipstick stains, late nights, different perfume. Now, early-morning "Intercourse", an inaccessible password, an address abroad, pictures of him smiling from inside his briefcase and a letterbox lock are ominous signs of e-mail infidelity.
I discover more crumpled print-outs while unpacking in our new house. A copious liaison unfolds. "My darling [derivative of his name]," says the computer woman. "From what you tell me about [your wife] ... in her position ..." Sobbing, I think I read" darling ... ours is a diamond ..."
Her familiarity sickens me. He snatches the copy away from me. She is English and single, he confesses. They met on a chat-line. Apparently she loves him. He wanted to tell me but didn't know how. He tried to end it, he says, but she resisted. We have not made each other happy recently. She makes him feel good.
We go to counselling but it's too late. The computer is a third person in our house. Lying next to him, I hear it download in the night. I try to compete. But a sick woman is no match for these platitudes.
This stranger, with no right to be part of my sorrow, consumes the only space where I can cry. What did I do? Why did she pick me, my house, my marriage? Why did he let her? Exhausted, I collapse. While I'm in hospital, the computer has carte blanche.
He leaves with an incumbent contained in the computer. I try frantically to reason with him but eventually he stops contact, ignores most of my calls.
Without ready capital and too sick to work, I rely on food vouchers, charity and social workers to help me find a new home. He is absent for weeks while ours is on the market. I hear he is overseas. He is traced to her apartment. When he comes back, he says he wants a divorce.
It will be at least two years before I begin to physically recover.
I didn't want to write this. Yet, when a stranger gained unauthorised access to my life, and home, it was virtually told. Where is the safety net for those on the periphery?
In Net-induced isolation, I lost dignity. I had to share my grief with more strangers. Now how many self-help groups, crisis lines, hospitals and other public services have my computerised details?
All I have of my children are memories; now interposed between lascivious portraits of cyber-seduction I fear I will remember for the rest of my life.
The last time I see my ex-husband he says he has "never met" his Web woman. Later, I hear he has left Australia again.
I check an international directory for a listed number.
"This is the voice mail for [him] and [her]," it says.
The interloper has won. My ordeal is over. Perhaps hers has just begun.
* The author's real name is not used for legal reasons.
No doubt this story is substantially true – at least from the viewpoint of the writer. It is interesting and a little instructive to contemplate other viewpoints. As it is told the man is deceitful and possibly untrustworthy, but the author is not blameless.
Note how she protests that she is "sad and sick after my losses", not our losses but mine. In the same paragraph "my privacy" is invaded and the sanctuary lost also is mine. The intimacy is ours but singular possessive here is probably a bit conspicuous – one doesn't do it alone.
Consider whether this person regarded her husband as an equal part of their relationship, and whether his needs were as important to her as her own.
In the long run it is arguable that his needs are more important to her than her own as, to a large extent, her needs are met by the meeting of his. It is a fascinating paradox that we are best served by ensuring those on whom we depend are best served.
Her problems don't stop there. "I become an involuntary voyeur ... But I convince myself these are only games into which he retreats." Denial is the demon we most easily fall victim to and never see. She does not wish to see the truth of her own situation so she denies the substance of it. It is undoubtably difficult to face up to unpleasant realities, but the longer we put off dealing with them the more unpleasant they become and the harder when we are finally forced to face them.
Denial helps nobody. In a case such as this denial may have prevented his talking with her about their problems – ‘we don't have any problems do we honey.’ If there is no recognition of a problem it is unlikely this party will be putting much effort into its resolution. Unfortunately that doesn't make it go away.
Counselling will not help in this situation. She is so engrossed in self-love and self-pity that she cannot see that the destruction of herself is her own work.
She tries to compete. Why should she compete? This is not a competition, there is no judge and no finish line. She tries whatever, but her objective is not an expression of her love and devotion to her man. She wishes to compete, to beat some other woman, to have him for herself. ‘Me first’ is the goal of her competition.
She is a sick woman. She seeks our sympathy on the presumption that her difficulties are physical illness – a random deal in the lottery of life. This is only partly true. Our physical problems are too often a reflection of spiritual illness, of greed, envy, jealousy, conceit, anxiety and fear. These sins which we allow to consume our physical resources weaken our immune system and limit our capacity to be healed and recover from the vagaries of fate.
'Why me?’ she cries. Why not? Has she presented her husband with a gift of love to treasure. Has she sought to forge an ‘us’ which was stronger than either of them alone? I don't think so. She protests the loss of the only space where she can cry – she carries this burden alone, it is not shared. She does not come to him and say ‘please help me – I need your help’. She pretends to be strong enough to be able to get along without him, and that is exactly what she finishes up with.
In the end it is his fault. "Why did he let her?" None of the blame for this baby. Oh no. She never made any mistake. Denial again provides her with her only solace, it is like cheap wine to the alcoholic.
In conclusion she bemoans what she has lost: her dignity. She feels humiliated to be like countless others, but even in her humiliation she remains conceited. She was not of the class who use charity, she should never be so low, but her name and details are now on the records of all those help providors, as though they could care who she was except someone in a time of need.
He was lucky.
This story is characterised not only by the woman's presumptions about her own part in this tragedy, but also by an important presumption she expresses regarding her own personal space. Personal space is something which we defend vigorously but little understand.
The point at which people feel invaded varies widely, between individuals and with the circumstances. This woman considered her home to be her own personal space and seems to feel that some influence by an uninvited person is an invasion. I think that many people would feel the same, but it behoves us to consider whether this is reasonable.
The sense of invasion when one is burgled is strong, I daresay other experiences give a much stronger sense of invasion. To feel that when her husband talks with another woman that "a stranger gained unauthorised access to my life" doesn't leave much scope for things to get worse.
In the same week the Serbian expulsion of the Kosovo Albanians got under way. I could not help but compare the vulnerability of a woman whose husband and sons are murdered, her daughters raped and her home torched. Such women were abundant.
Another story which came to my attention in the same weekend was of a radio journalist; he was live on air broadcasting details of a bushfire in the area where he lived. He continued to describe the destruction of his own family home as it burned before his eyes, on air, in real time (he was crying).
A right to some private space is something we might claim, but many have it taken away. When we make ourselves dependent on the sanctity of that space we become more vulnerable than those who do not.
Personal space can be serious baggage. We need to think carefully about what is worth defending and why we would defend it.
The very different, and most beautiful, story below stands in stark contrast to that above.
Peter Hoban
The following text is from “Real Life” published in THE WEEKEND AUSTRALIAN,
AUGUST 14-15, 1999; Review Pages 28, 29
A mother's mental illness doesn't make her less of a mother, writes Carmel Williams, a daughter who knows
My daughter is expecting a daughter. We sit facing each other over the kitchen table. Her cuppa sits undrunk and I can tell by her body language that she needs to talk.
"The doctor asked me the family medical history. I told him about the ... mental problems."
Her fingers whiten around her cup and she looks like she did as a small child when something got broken or lost.
So there it is, sitting between us. The subject hasn't been avoided; it just hasn't come up, or perhaps that's just how I wanted it to be.
Like all families we have our share of eccentrics and weirdos but it is my mother, her grandmother, who she wants me to talk about. She wants to know about a lifetime lived mostly in institutions and a madness that spanned six decades of my mother's existence and, until her death, all of mine. I doubt that my daughter realises how hard it is to tell her grandmother's story but she needs to know how it was, how it is.
When I was eight I knew two things for certain. The first was that it took two trains and a bus to get from where we lived to Mont Park Psychiatric Hospital. The second was that I would have to take my mother on that journey at least three times every year. My mother was cyclical, most psychiatric patients are. Christmas, Easter and my birthday were sure times for episodes but sometimes she tricked me and had them for no reason, or else they just ran into each other and went on and on.
In my child's mind I always thought of it as a game. My mother's fingers would clench and unclench, her eyes would cross slightly and she would begin to talk softly to herself. I would climb on to a chair and haul her hospital bag down from on top of the wardrobe. Then I would take her hand and tuck Rosa between the handles of the bag and we would walk the track to the railway station.
If my timing was right, I would arrive before my mother had descended into the nightmare of full-blown psychosis. A game, like avoiding the cracks in the pavement.
Rosa was a jointed walking doll. In one of my mother's good times, we had picked her out in the toy shop and I had watched her through the window every day after school until my mother had enough money saved to have her lifted over the trucks and train sets and into my arms. On the way home we tried names out on her. Clara, Isobel, Annie.
My mother picked Rosa and made up a song: Rosa Rosa pretty as a pearl/Rosa Rosa walks just like a girl.
We sang the song all the way down the dirt track to our house. My mother's eyes calm and smiling, her fingers soft in mine.
Rosa had a special place in my mother's troubled mind. Outside the psychiatric ward where she stayed was a pool of water from a broken pipe. It was a ritual that every time I visited mum we took off Rosa's pink dress and bathed her in the pool. No matter what state my mother was in, the rhythmic motion of the water running through her hands and over Rosa's china body somehow gave her flashes of clarity. Rosa turned into me.
"Rosa needs a haircut," she'd whisper to the doll. "Rosa can get money out of the post office account."
As I got older, I hid Rosa away in the bottom of mum's bag so no one would think I still played with dolls.
Like most children who have different lives to their peers, I had a "normal" imaginary life. I had a mummy with an apron who baked things and worked in the tuck-shop on Fridays. I had a daddy who wore a felt hat and carried a gladstone bag to the city every day and I had an ever-changing number of brothers and sisters who were all older than I was and spoiled me.
I remember one day at school I was telling the kids about something one of my "sisters" had done when a girl from a higher grade grabbed the sleeve of my jumper and hurled me into the tin fence. "You're a little liar!" she hissed. "You're an only child and your mother's mad, everyone knows that. My mum says you've got bad blood in you."
I ran home from school hating that girl and for the first time hating my mother. I sawed the top off my finger with a bread knife and watched the blood run down the draining board and into the sink. It wasn't bad, it was bright and red the same as everyone else's.
Years later I told my mother the story and we laughed about it. What doesn't break you makes you strong, she'd said and she was right.
When I grew up and married, mum was always part of the deal. When my husband had the option to move with his job, we looked for a place that had a psychiatric service, a golf club and schools.
As mum aged, all the drugs and the electric shock therapy caught up with her and she suffered dementia as well as psychosis, so I often stood at hospital admission desks with a baby on one arm and mum on the other, doing what I'd done all my life.
My mother died in a psychiatric hospital when I was 30. Many people would have seen her death as a release for me but they couldn't be more wrong. Even today I miss her terribly. I see her with her head thrown back and her glasses twinkling as she reads the comics in the paper or bent over for hours, stroking the head of a grandchild with croup. The bad times are blurred, forgotten, the good times are remembered, savoured, because she struggled so hard against her illness to have them.
My daughter's body has relaxed while I have been talking, her fingers are resting on the table and she is looking at me through tears. I lean over and wipe them away. I need her to know that no matter what lies ahead, her daughter will be loved as fiercely as I was and as she was. I need her to remember that the women of this family are tough and enduring. We get it from her grandmother.
Original: April ‘99
This page is part of “Living in the Light”
found at: http://www.geocities.com/phoban2000/
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