For better and for worse, till infidelity do us part - Part Two
My mother was a hairdresser before she met my father, but by 1984 she was a full time mother of a 12 year old girl, Melissa, an 8 year old girl, me, and an 8 month old baby, Jane. Rhys was 18, and while no longer legally dependent, he drifted in and out of home. My parents had been married 14 years, the last eight of which had been spent living in a 1940s weatherboard home in Campbells Bay, in the East Coast Bays of Auckland’s North Shore.
In the early 1980s, the East Coast Bays was not buzzing with diversity and excitement. In the preceding years, the area had attracted a lot of young, white families, presumably drawn in by attainable real estate and the beach lifestyle. There were few Maori or Polynesian children at any of my schools, but that tiny few still outnumbered any ethnicity other than Pakeha.
We lived in a suburb of commuters. During the working day, mums would busy themselves with childcare, housework, shopping, the school and kindy run, or the occasional coffee group. There wasn’t a thriving restaurant or café culture, and there were few pubs. For teenagers there was not much to do other than linger at the beach, or throw out of control parties when Mum and Dad were not home.
In the early days of her marriage, my mother seemed to make a go of living the life of a suburban housewife. We were dressed nicely, the house was relatively clean and tidy, breakfasts were usually cooked rather than cold, and dinners were always tasty. She assisted with Melissa’s school outings, and was the fun mum who shouted the children an ice block at the end of the trip. Wednesday was shopping day, and as a special treat we would visit the market gardens in Albany for our produce. My mother would sometimes take us down to the rock pools at the beach, take photos of us playing with our many pets, or bake biscuits for our school lunches.
My mother was also creative, a competent painter and sketcher who collected shells, and made intricate dioramas for Melissa’s school assignments. She still socialised with her more eccentric and artistic friends from her former life, and our house was filled with the paintings, sculpture, and pottery she bought over time from local artists.
If this all sounds like a recipe for an ideal childhood, I am probably leading you astray. I don’t think the life of the suburban housewife suited my mother’s temperament, and the cracks showed from the start, going by my father’s realisation eight weeks into the marriage that marrying her was a mistake. My mother was host to a wild beast that she let out for air periodically. She had a temper that could set damp wood on fire, and would fly into a jealous rage quicker than you could say, “Watch out Dad, the crockery’s airborne”.
There was a night when it got a bit dangerous for my father. I was only three, so my account is based on his recollections, and those of Melissa. On one of the car-less days, my father’s ride in the carpool lingered after work and returned dad home late. That evening, my mother had fueled up on wine, and worked herself into a lather over his tardiness. By the time Dad’s ride pulled up, she was in the lounge chanting “I am going to stick him with this knife” while slipping a Wiltshire knife in and out of its sharpening sleeve. A sharpening sleeve isn’t quite so dramatic or intimidating as a sharpening steel, but you make do with what you have to hand. And it terrified us sufficiently.
Melissa and I scuttled out of the house and up the drive. “She’s got a knife, and she said she’s going to kill you!” Melissa screamed. We begged him not to go inside, but Dad told us not to worry for he hadn’t done anything wrong. He boldly made his way into the house and into the kitchen. Before he could get out an explanation my mother hurled a bottle of wine at him. He dodged it, and it made a hole in the wall. Immediately, she lunged at him with a metal meat tenderiser that she had held in her other hand. She raised it above her head, and brought it down towards his, with force. He grabbed her wrist and twisted it out of her hand, leaving a bruise. The following day she went to the doctor to get the “abuse” on record.
Alcohol was my mother’s drug of choice, and was usually involved in her more erratic and abusive behaviour. She also smoked marijuana and even, she once told my brother-in-law, tried LSD when she was pregnant with me. She never shared this with me, but she did confess, like a teenage boy tallying his can tabs, that she drank a bottle of beer a day throughout that pregnancy. It didn’t sound like much until I realised she was talking in quarts, not stubbies. My father also recalls her falling down drunk at a pub in Albany while six months pregnant with Melissa. The advice regarding alcohol and pregnancy was not so stringent then as it is now, but even so, I suspect drinking to the point of passing out while pregnant was not within the recommended guidelines.
Despite all the drama, my parents had their special moments. Rae once told me that early in their marriage she was opening the fridge when Dad came up behind her and held her tenderly. At that instant, a potent wind threatened to escape her. She desperately told him to move away, before he felt its power. But he refused to move. “I love you so much”, he said, “that I will get down on my knees and smell your fart”. So he did, and ended up on the floor dry retching and exclaiming that he had never smelt anything quite so vile in his life.
There were also the numerous occasions when, in the middle of the day, my parents would barricade the bedroom door with an ottoman. Rhys would knowingly chuckle and tell me to get away from the door as I stood on the other ottoman, straining to find out what was going on through the keyhole.
Passion aside, what maintained that marriage for a long 14 years largely remained a mystery to me. My father is an accountant. For me that summed up why a union with a creative eccentric was a Bad Idea, but I will add that he adored weekend sport, and was prisoner to the weekend paper. In those days he was also particularly preoccupied by home maintenance. He can’t have been great adult company after a week of looking after children. As for my mother, I know from first hand experience that she is high on the list of ‘Difficult and Unstable People To Live With’.
But if I think on it harder, there are some clues as to what kept this marriage going so long - a strong sexual connection; my mother’s need to be provided for; a desire to hold things together for the children; and the moral weight of my father’s catholic upbringing. My father is also obstinate, yet conflict averse, and this may go some way to explaining why he flogged that dead horse. Maybe he didn’t want to admit to his family that he had made a mistake. Maybe he was afraid of creating even more drama. But if Dad was looking for a catalyst for divorce, he found it one day, late in 1984.
