The Price of Love

WORDS: Big Issue Australia vendor Anita G

SOURCE AND IMAGE:The Big Issue Australia / International Network Of Street Papers

If things don’t improve, I’m going to end up like Beryl next door. The old dear is watering her plastic tulips and won’t let her white cat outside “in case he gets dirty”.

It’s 1990 and Mother is at it again. “No, Natalie,” she says to my three-year-old daughter, “you will wear the red dress and not the other one because I say so.” Her house, her rules. We’ve just moved in with her – Natalie and I – to make ends meet. I’m late for work, no time to intervene. Natalie glares at me, her tiny hands clenched into fists.

Things didn’t work out at the creche. It broke my heart. Natalie was often left unsupervised. The baby boy in the next bed chewed the corner of his dirty bunny rug and cried all day. Toddlers and older children roamed around, and Natalie often came home with a different virus, or bite marks.

I am tethered to poverty. It’s a life sentence. We’re in the depths of a recession, and I must keep working. The only alternative to creche is to let my mother look after Natalie, which she is eager to do. I have misgivings.

She is going to steal my baby. I come home knackered and feel like an interloper. Mother cut Natalie’s hair without telling me, and it sticks out in tufts. Things are getting worse.

One night, I am trying to give Natalie a drink of water during dinner.

“Don’t do that,” Mum yells at me. “No drinking during meals.”

“But she is thirsty!”

“You don’t know anything!”

Before putting her into bed I start taking her jumper off.

“It’s too cold, leave it on!”

“But Mum, it’s only cold outside. We have the heater going.”

“Leave it on.”

Natalie is becoming distressed and uncontrollable; I take her to a psychologist. “A child can’t have two mothers at odds with each other,” the therapist warns. “Stop this tug-of-war. Move out or keep the peace.” I try to imagine what moving into a share house would be like for Natalie. Strangers traipsing in and out all day. Not safe. I must keep my mouth shut and act in Natalie’s best interests.

The child has cabin fever. She hasn’t been outside for days. Mum is protesting: she says it’s too cold and windy. I scoop Natalie up without a word and we go rollerblading and kite-flying.

Maybe being dysfunctional is in my DNA. When I want to check if I really exist, I look at a photo of my paternal grandparents. They sit at far ends of a park bench; their coats piled high in the middle to protect them from each other. When we return, I read Natalie a story and rock her in my arms.

“You are keeping that girl chained to you,” Mother protests. “You need to work and if you’re not careful, she won’t let go.”

The woman is looking at Natalie with hungry eyes. In the early days she never got to mother me. With her entire family murdered in the Holocaust in 1944, including my father, she was destitute, so she left me at an orphanage until she could afford to claim me. I picture her lingering outside, desolate, her arms empty. Mother is not trying to take Natalie from me. She is clinging to my infant doppelganger, the one she never got to mother. I decide to back off, no matter how much she provokes me. Peace at any price.

Okay, I can do this. Except I can’t. The white fury returns every now and then, but I can keep it under control. How long can one do this until one disappears?

It’s important to keep Natalie grounded, to be terra firma in her life. Without earthquakes.

Sometimes I go for a walk by myself to keep some perspective. I pass the coin laundry where people wash their miserable, meagre lives out of their clothes, sprinkling soap powder over them. A snow job. You can’t wash away poverty.

I drop into the Chapel Street Mission, where you can get a hot meal and see paintings on the wall by people who suffer from mental illness. Lurid colours, jagged lines, images of anguish for sale, some for only $25.

I feel guilty over having unkind thoughts about my mother. To her I owe my love of literature and music, not to mention my very life. I can’t cook a good meal, even from the finest ingredients, while she makes a delicious soup from scraps. Maybe I deserve her criticism.

My daughter no longer loves me and feels abandoned. I read books about child rearing; it’s like learning a foreign language. “I” for “Inept”. Are those experts really experts? Where have I gone wrong? I see cold mothers being worshipped by their children.

It’s hard to reward Natalie. She hates chocolate and brushes me off when I approach her. I walk on eggshells; you practically hear them crackling. What’s maddening is that my mother can reach her in ways I can’t. It must be magic.

As Natalie develops, I feel myself atrophy. I can’t remember what it’s like to be a child. My mother is playful while I’m a boring killjoy. Must stop trying to impress Natalie. She will prefer my mother every time, no matter how hard I try. Perhaps I should stop trying.

I tell Natalie to keep experimenting, to take risks. She is getting the message and instructs the cat to take more risks. The cat appears to be listening and disappears for three days, returning ragged and ravenous. “I’m so proud of you, Kitty,” Natalie says. “You dared to run away.”

I visit the toy library, remembering that these items must be returned. More things Natalie can’t keep, along with the aborted music and ballet lessons that I can’t afford.

Today it’s Natalie’s fourth birthday. My mother baked her a cake with pink icing. Mother is laughing and crying at the same time because she finally got to mother “her” baby. Natalie is looking content.

My peace plan seems to be working.