A Mother's Story (11 page)

At the end of the course I was so energised, I didn't want it to end. It felt almost as if we had formed a little family who were all now expected to go our separate ways. I was going to miss them all, and I was going to miss the intellectual stimulation of examining family violence as a social and psychological ill. For the first time since I had left school, I felt inspired by a subject and desperate to learn more.

I asked the woman who was running the course how she had come into her line of work, and she told me she had studied a Diploma of Community Welfare. I was convinced I had just found my new calling. I went home immediately and researched the course. Reading the synopsis was like reading a road map for how I wanted the rest of my life to play out. For years I had worked in the corporate space – not out of any real design, but simply because I had fallen into a job and, like so many others, ricocheted from one role to another without ever really questioning if it was what I really wanted to do.

Here was a vocation that would bring together my interest in social justice, my passion for making a difference to the lives of those less fortunate and my firsthand experience as a victim of family violence. The only catch? I still had bills to pay and a child to raise. So the belt was tightened a little at home, a line of credit was sought and I visited Centrelink for the first time in my life to tide me over while I studied. I was going to go into debt to complete the diploma, and there was no guarantee of a job at the end even if I did complete it. But I was determined to do it – for the benefit of my own, severely dented self-esteem as much as anything else.

When finally I started the course, being back in a classroom environment just felt so stimulating. I was your classic mature-age student – so grateful for the opportunity to even be sitting in a classroom that I threw myself into the course with gusto. I was eager to make the most of every second of the learning experience, which was compounded by the fact that, as a single mum, I only had a certain number of hours every day in which to study.

We were a mixed bunch of students. Some had spent years working in the welfare sector or on the fringes of it, dealing with families in poverty, families facing long-term unemployment and homes racked by domestic violence. But I had
lived
it, and I was vocal when it came to expressing my opinions. Sometimes, unless you've lived through something, you don't quite understand.

I'm in a classroom at Flinders Christian Community College with a group of other parents. Usually I'm too busy with work to collect Luke from school, but today the school has organised a talk for parents about the Life Education van that's about to visit the school. One of the teachers earnestly outlines the sorts of things they'll be discussing with the kids. Frankly, it all sounds a bit lame. I have to disguise a smirk, imagining Luke's reaction when some well-meaning educator tries to lecture him and his classmates about smoking and drugs. They're only eleven but they're already so worldly. I don't for a second think Luke or his friends are smoking drugs, but it's a new, internet-enabled generation. There's not much you can teach them that they haven't already discovered for themselves online. And so I start texting on my phone.

As it gets closer to 3 pm, I get up and make for the door. I'm not usually rude like this, but I want to make sure I don't miss Luke when he comes out of class. I want to surprise him with a lift home. He doesn't much like having to walk home from school, which is crazy, because it's just up the hill and he needs to become independent, not
least because I'm always being told I'm too soft with him, that I indulge him too much.

But I figure he's still only eleven. There's plenty of time for him to find out how hard the world can be. And besides, I'm living on borrowed time. Before I know it, he'll be a teenager and then a young man making his way in the world. Much better to suffocate him with affection now, while he's still inclined to accept it.

Not that the pre-teen rot hasn't set in already. Here he comes now, pretending he hasn't seen me as he heads out of the school gates with his mate Jaxon. He's part-joking, part-serious, because he's reaching that age where it's dead uncool to be seen with your mum. It's even more uncool to show her any physical affection. So, as a joke, I run up behind the pair of them and go to give Luke an exaggerated hug.

‘And this,' I cackle, ‘is what happens to little boys who ignore their mothers.'

Luke's in a good mood and laughs as he pushes me away.

He and Jaxon talk about football and whether or not Luke will play up a year this year and join the under thirteens. Luke's not sure.

I watch him with maternal pride. He and Jaxon say their farewells and Luke clambers into the car.

On the way home we joke about embarrassing mums. I think how nice it is for us to spend time like this together. It's a good feeling. A good day.

It's a funny thing being the mother of a small child. You develop a love–hate relationship with the strangest things. Take, for example, the Wiggles. Luke became a Wiggles fan almost by accident. It all started when he'd fallen sick with one of those twenty-four-hour viruses, the sort of illness that hits little kids like a tonne of bricks and knocks the stuffing out of them but is gone the next day. Someone had given me a DVD of the Wiggles and, out of desperation, I put it on. Luke was enthralled. He watched it back to back for the rest of the day.

To my mind, the Wiggles were a bunch of grown men in skivvies singing mindless tunes, but to Luke, they were demigods. He knew every song and every dance, and would bug me to put on the DVD every time we walked in the door. The songs did my head in, but I came to develop a grudging respect for the Wiggles: anyone who can capture and hold the attention of a child is truly talented. And anyone who can afford a single mother thirty minutes respite in any given day similarly deserves a medal.

I took Luke to see the Wiggles in concert several times. He absolutely loved it. There's something magical about taking a child to the theatre or a stage show for the first time: the look of wonder on their faces as they try to take in this fantastic world where relative strangers don brightly coloured costumes and dance and sing under lights for the amusement of a crowd. It was a dynamic that Luke adored, and a world that he really connected with. There was something of the natural showman in Luke. He was cheeky and funny. Even as a tiny boy he understood what it was to entertain and to make people laugh.

The last time we went to see the Wiggles together, the yellow Wiggle, Greg, had to bow out mid-tour because of illness. He had been diagnosed with orthostatic intolerance, a circulatory system disorder that affects blood flow. The announcement came over the PA before the show that Greg would not be performing. A video of Greg appeared on the big screen, explaining that he was not well and wouldn't be able to be with all the boys and girls. And most kids stared at it, took it in and got on with their dancing and singing. My little boy, who up until that point had been standing excitedly in anticipation of the concert beginning, crawled onto my lap and sat there for the rest of the show. He was devastated.

In the car on the way home, he asked me if Greg Wiggle was going to die. He felt things deeply and was easily moved to tears.

Which is not to say that he was soft. When the occasion demanded, Luke could be the bravest little boy around. Like any kid, Luke suffered the usual ailments and injuries as a boy. There was the broken wrist following a fall off the monkey bars, an accident that required emergency surgery, which he took utterly in his stride. Me, not so much – but Luke was calm throughout.

There was the broken collarbone when at the age of three he fell out of his bed. Once again, he was stoic in the face of what must have been acute pain. He needed grommets put in to address what doctors were convinced was a partial hearing problem in his left ear (an operation to which Greg was vehemently opposed, convinced any stay in hospital was simply an opportunity for doctors to ply you with medicines that were part of some grand government conspiracy). And once again, Luke never raised a complaint.

Luke also underwent several lengthy and painful dental procedures after it was deemed the enamel hadn't formed properly on his back teeth. The dentist remarked on how brave he was, and how most children his age would have required general anaesthetic.

So he was brave. But the soft centre was what defined him. One evening we sat down to watch the movie
Marley & Me
. Friends had recommended it, knowing how much Luke and I loved dogs. At one point I got up to go the kitchen, only to find Luke sobbing when I returned. The bloody dog had gone and died.

That was the kind of little boy he was – and it made me really proud. In a society in which men too often are raised to distance themselves from their emotions, my little boy was very much in touch with his. And while it meant he was occasionally prone to melodrama, and on more than one occasion would be in a flood of tears following some small occurrence, for the most part it was a sensitivity I wanted to nurture. It would stand him in good stead, I reasoned, when he grew up and was left to negotiate the world on his own.

*

It was 2006 and armed with a renewed sense of empowerment – and midway through my studies for my Diploma of Community Welfare – I decided it was time to put some legal parameters in place around Greg's access to Luke. My previous strategy of preferring to keep the Family Court at bay, and instead work out a flexible arrangement, had been an abject failure. And so I looked to the Family Court to be my salvation, to consider the facts of my case and soberly inform Greg that his access to Luke would necessarily need to be more predictable.

I remember the day in court clearly. I had spent weeks beforehand working with my solicitor, preparing documents to present to the court, outlining Greg's history of violence and unpredictability. At the time, I even felt bad for collating a dossier whose only objective was to put rules and restrictions around the one thing in Greg's life that appeared to truly mean anything to him: time spent with his son.

And so we both fronted up to the Family Court in Dandenong for mediation before the court's sitting registrar. I had instructed my solicitor to apply for Greg's access to be restricted to alternate weekends only. I was, after all, the primary carer – and the sole provider. The constant to-ing and fro-ing from Tyabb to St Kilda was not only inconvenient but hugely disruptive to Luke's life.

Greg acquitted himself with typical arrogance, intimidating my solicitor and the registrar to the point where the registrar had to reprimand him for being a bully and completely out of line. I sat there feeling quietly vindicated. At last, a third party – and someone of influence – was seeing Greg for the bully he was. Someone who could make a difference was being treated firsthand to a tiny sample of the extreme abuse I had gone to great lengths (with no small amount of trepidation) to document in my court submission.

But as the mediation went on, it became increasingly obvious that my request for alternate weekend access for Greg would be roundly ignored in favour of Greg's preference to see Luke at least once a week. Agitated, I began to speak up, interrupting the registrar, making sure he was aware of my displeasure and frustration. Fearing I was about to be reprimanded, my solicitor quickly intervened and took me outside the room, telling me to calm down and advising me it was better to go along with the court decision rather than antagonise the registrar.

I felt cheated. I felt betrayed. I felt confused. Why had I spent weeks compiling a dossier with my solicitor if that dossier was not even referenced during the mediation? Why was I the one walking out of the court feeling like I had done wrong for daring to suggest Greg's access to Luke be more predictable – alternate weekends would have been more sustainable due to the travelling distances?

As she shepherded me out, my solicitor made an attempt to explain why the arrangement was for the best. But none of it made sense. Not least the fact that I had forked out a considerable amount of money I really couldn't afford on legal representation that I felt had acted more in Greg's interest than my own or Luke's.

How differently it could all have turned out if I had been referred to the help I so desperately needed, instead of being sent home with a court order I knew was going to play directly into Greg's hands and an immediate future that made my stomach churn with anxiety. I now had orders in place from the Family Court permitting Greg have access to Luke every weekend. In the event he contravened those orders and kept Luke longer, or attempted to take him earlier than set out, there was no point my calling the local police, because only the Australian Federal
Police could enforce Family Court orders – and only once the court had ordered them to do so.

And so I came to understand that, while magistrates in criminal courts could issue IVOs restricting Greg from coming anywhere near me, a Family Law court order granting him access to Luke would almost always override the IVO, except in exceptional circumstances when magistrates suspended family court orders for short periods of time. All of which meant I simply felt more vulnerable.

It was a vulnerability that Greg seemed to sense – and exploit. After several weeks of adhering to the new court orders and picking up and dropping off Luke at the times the Family Court had deemed suitable, Greg disappeared on one of his regular visits to the Russian monastery.

The timings are not clear – because I wasn't there and I've never had contact with the monks that live there – but it was later reported that on a visit to the monastery around this time, Greg was experiencing paranoid delusions.

During dinner one night in the monastery, he leaned across to Father Alexis, the spiritual father, and said, ‘Can you see them?'

Not understanding what Greg was talking about, Father Alexis replied, ‘See what?'

Greg responded: ‘There are worms coming out of the liver of the man sitting next to me and they are attacking me. I have to move away.' Father Alexis would later tell
Four Corners
investigative journalist Geoff Thompson that Greg had confided in him that he was a diagnosed and medicated schizophrenic – something I was unaware of at the time – who had smoked too much marijuana.

When Greg returned to Melbourne from the monastery, he was homeless. He arrived at Dandenong station one evening at
7 pm and called me, saying he had no bed for the night and asking if he could stay with me and Luke. It was a tactic he had used before: showing up as darkness fell and banking on my better nature to admit him into the house. And so I found myself once again in a familiar bind: did I turn him away and incur the wrath of my son, who was genuinely excited to see his father, and possibly trigger more violence from Greg? Or did I show him yet another kindness, in the vain hope it may mollify him? I didn't have the energy for another fight and, anyway, it felt like no matter what I did – whether I tried to accommodate Greg or tried to fight him at every turn – it made not a scrap of difference in the end. And so, reluctantly, I agreed to let him stay in the spare room for the weekend. His adherence to the court orders had been to the letter and he clearly had nowhere else to go. But the pattern was repeating again.

The following afternoon, we were all outside feeding the goats and putting the chickens into their coop for the night when Greg's mood suddenly darkened. It was terrifying how quickly it could happen – like a shadow passing over him. Apparently he had seen a new chicken egg incubator in the coop and suspected it had been put there by one of the fictional men he believed I was secretly dating. He flew into a rage, storming back into the house, ordering Luke to collect his things, declaring he was leaving and taking Luke with him. Luke, who had only just turned four, stood rooted to the spot in the living room.

I tried to calm Greg down, telling him to stop being ridiculous: reminding him he had no house, no car and nowhere to go. ‘You're not taking Luke anywhere,' I said, picking up the phone. ‘And if you don't calm down, I'm calling the police.'

Launching himself at me, he began to wrestle the phone off me, grunting loudly as Luke looked on in terror. Greg threw me
against the wall and held me there by my neck. Then he hurled me to the floor and kneeled over me, holding his fist to my face. ‘I'd like to knock you into next week,' he spat.

Terrified, I managed to squirm from his grip and run from the house. The cold air hit my face. Tears streaming down my face and my heart racing, I tore up the driveway and onto the street. I looked frantically over my shoulder to make sure he wasn't following me, then ran to my neighbours' house, banging loudly on their front door. Rhys and Penny took me in and attempted to calm me down, urging me to phone the police.

I made the call. ‘He's still in there. Luke's there too,' I said in a panic. The police told me to remain calm, to keep away from the house and to wait for the patrol car that had been dispatched.

Waiting for the police to arrive felt like an eternity – in reality it was probably more like a couple of minutes. I paced the living room at Rhys and Penny's house, desperate to rush back across the road and rescue my boy. But it was me Greg wanted to hurt, not Luke. I was the one in danger.

When the police turned up, they offered to escort me back to my house. As we walked in, I looked into the living room to see Luke sitting calmly in front of the television while Greg cooked his dinner in the kitchen as if nothing had happened.

He looked up to see the police, registered their presence, then turned back to his cooking, apparently unmoved.

I glanced nervously at the police, who were exchanging looks. Mortified that they thought I was making it all up – like some melodramatic woman with a talent for overreaction – I felt a wave of embarrassment.

‘Mr Anderson, you're going to have to leave with us,' one of the young constables finally said.

Greg looked up from what he was doing with an air of studied indifference. For a moment it appeared as though he was going to ignore them. Then, finally, he moved away from the stove top, coolly collected his things and walked out into the night, flanked by the police officers.

Two hours later, the phone rang. It was Greg, asking if I could come down to Frankston train station to collect him.

No charges had been laid. With no obvious signs of me having been physically attacked, it was my word against his. And the police, having defused the situation by removing Greg, had done what they could. It was, after all, just another domestic.

Greg's expectation that I would come down and pick him up as if nothing had happened completely threw me. How dare he? After everything he'd put me through! I put down the phone and this time I held firm. I didn't feel responsible for him and I would not pick him up. Where he slept that night was not my concern.