I Knew You'd Have Brown Eyes (2 page)

2

‘Excuse me Mrs Walker, I’m going to be sick.’

I was writing my final Year 12 English examination paper.

‘Bathroom,’ she said, pointing to the door.

When I asked to be excused a second time, she looked concerned.

‘You look very ill,’ she remarked as I handed in my paper. ‘Go home and get some rest. Do you have any more exams?’

‘Yes Mrs Walker – Maths. In two days.’

But I didn’t go home and rest. I went to a chemist and bought a pregnancy test kit. When it showed a positive result I was incredulous. How could that be happening to me? I had a rudimentary understanding of contraception. Withdrawal worked, right? I didn’t recall my boyfriend suggesting we use a condom. Actually, I didn’t know what a condom was. I checked the test again and as the packet contained three tests, I checked it a final time. The result was the same. I wrapped all the evidence in a paper bag and hid it in the rubbish bin, lest anyone in my family discovered it. I couldn’t focus on my studies after that.

‘What am I going to do?’ I asked my boyfriend, Bryan. I had graduated from school and we were on the Gold Coast with some of my school friends, celebrating the end of school. I wasn’t in a celebratory mood. We had left them behind at their hotel to walk along the beach.

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I have no idea. Mum will kill me if she finds out.’

‘Does she have to find out?’

‘How can I hide it?’

‘What about abortion?’

‘It’s illegal in Queensland.’

Over the previous week I had considered my options, time and time again. There weren’t many.

‘I think you can go to New South Wales,’ I ventured, ‘but some girls die from it and I don’t know how we would find a good doctor, or any doctor who would do it, or even how much it costs …’

‘I’ll pay for it,’ he said.

‘You don’t even know how much it is! How much money have you got in the bank?’

He scratched his head.

‘We’d have to make up a reason to go away. Mum wouldn’t allow me to go with you. I’d have to go alone.’

‘How would you get there?’

‘I’d have to figure that out. I have some money saved, but I don’t know where to go and I don’t know who I can ask for help.’

The truth was I could not bring myself to abort this child. It was a mixture of responsibility and guilt but most of all, religious morality. I was Catholic and abortion was a mortal sin. It was killing an unborn child. I couldn’t do that. My mother was a ‘right to life’ campaigner. She had marched the streets of Brisbane protesting possible changes to the Queensland abortion law. This was something that was deeply ingrained.

All I could do was cry. I thought of my friends back in the hotel room having a party, drinking beer, and celebrating the end of school. My life was a mess.

‘Why don’t we get married?’ he said.

I couldn’t think of anything worse. I had spent the last couple of years at school working hard. I wanted to go to university and study to be a physiotherapist. I was top in my class in Biology and took Zoology, a prerequisite for physiotherapy, as an external subject because it wasn’t offered in my school. But I figured I had probably already blown the chance to enter university since I’d been so sick during the exams and my results depended on those final marks. It was 1974. The score we got in the final exams determined our university entrance. Now I was being faced with the prospect of marriage and a child. But there was more on my mind than my own career. Bryan couldn’t manage money. There was no way he could afford to keep three of us.

‘I’m not ready for marriage, I’m too young,’ I sobbed.

On the way home we were silent. I had to face the fact that my boyfriend couldn’t see the complexity of the situation. His solutions – abortion or marriage – were simple ones, but I could see that in the long run they would bring more difficulties. It was dawning on me that I was going to have to be the one to solve this dilemma. I was terrified. Facing my mother scared me more than anything.

At seventeen, I was looking at a major life-changing hurdle and I wanted to run away. Surely I would wake up tomorrow and it would disappear. I had been so stupid! How did I get myself into this situation? But importantly, in that moment, I needed to decide what to do. I was angry with my boyfriend. He was older than me. He should have had a mature solution, but at twenty-four he had no idea. Even though he had a full-time job as a carpenter, I had paid his previous year’s tax bill from my savings, working at Woolworths on the weekends and school holidays.

Could he change? Could I risk that? Was I ready to be a mother? While girls my age were drinking beer and sunbaking on Burleigh beach, I had to think about not only the child growing in my belly, but my future life, my boyfriend, my mother. Nothing in my life had prepared me for these decisions and I had a growing sense that I would have to make them for myself. I was frightened of the future.

‘Get that woman out of my house!’ raged my mother.

She and I were standing in the kitchen, and my brother had just walked in with his girlfriend. We had been planning for his arrival for some time.

He was white with shock. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I said I don’t want that woman in this house.’

My poor brother. He had made the momentous decision to leave the Christian Brothers some months earlier. Before leaving he’d seen out the year with the class he was teaching in Townsville. He had told us about the girl he had met, a librarian, at the same school. She had been married previously and had two children. We knew he was bringing her home to meet us, and that’s who we were waiting for as we stood in the kitchen. But Mum had given no indication that this outburst was coming.

None of us spoke. The look of agony and disbelief on Charlie’s face was torture. We all loved and looked up to our brother. In Mum’s eyes, he couldn’t do a bad thing – until that moment. His girlfriend, Jill, retreated to the car, which was parked outside our home. Charlie went after her.

‘Mum, what are you doing? You knew he was bringing her home! Why did you leave it till now to say that to him?’

‘I’m the mother, this is my house and I can say what I like.’

It was a tense Christmas that year.

My mother grew up Catholic, went to a Catholic school, met my father at a Catholic youth group and sent my four siblings and me to Catholic schools. We were as Catholic as they came. Having a son who was a Christian Brother was both a great honour and great sacrifice for her. When he left and became involved with a divorcée it was, in her eyes, a sin. Or maybe it was that she didn’t like him falling in love? While he was a Christian Brother, she would always be the most important woman in his life.

After that day Jill bought a house in Brisbane and settled there with her children. Charlie took a job driving taxis. He applied for teaching jobs but needed to earn money before the schools went back in January. He worked nights and, though technically he was living at home with us, he was gone for long periods. Mum thought he was working all those hours, but I knew he was seeing Jill.

I remained silent about my pregnancy, feigning overeating during the Christmas period when I suffered morning sickness. The child in me was still hoping the child in my belly would go away, or a solution would miraculously surface and all would be forgotten. When my final school results came out and my marks weren’t good enough to get into university, I had to fall back onto my second choice – nursing. Could that provide an answer to my problem? One of the stipulations for trainee nurses was that they had to live in the nurses’ quarters. Could I do that and hide my pregnancy from my mother? But what then? At some stage I would have to stop to give birth. And, anyhow, would they accept me in my pregnant state? By the time my course started, my pregnancy would be showing. All these questions raged over and over in my head. The only person I could talk to was Bryan, but there were no solutions coming from his end.

Charlie’s life was turned upside down by Mum’s reaction. He hadn’t expected this. My father was at work on that fateful day he had bought his girlfriend over to meet us. But even over the Christmas break Dad remained silent about Charlie’s relationship. Mum was the one to set the moral standard about these things in our household. Dad had learned over the years to take a back seat.

Charlie, wrestling with self-doubt, decided to take a trip to Shepparton, Victoria, to do some fruit picking and contemplate his future. He had a good friend, George, whom he’d met in the Christian Brothers, who had also recently left the order. George was at a loose end and thought a trip would be a good thing for him. And then there was me, looking to escape – anything to delay the decisions I had to make. No doubt Mum hoped the trip would lead to Charlie leaving Jill. So consumed was she with his dilemma that she didn’t even flinch when I told her I wanted to delay my nursing and accompany them.

I wrote to the Princess Alexandra Hospital where I had been accepted into nursing and delayed my course until September, three months after my baby was due to be born. I made my decision and there was no going back now.

We set out in Charlie’s newly purchased Renault. The drive to Shepparton took two full days. I sat quietly in the back of the car, hiding my rapidly expanding belly. When we arrived, Charlie found us a caravan on the property of a fruit farm. He set to work. I feigned illness and said I’d cook instead.

In the days that followed I formed a plan of finding a way to stay in Shepparton. I’d have my baby, give it up for adoption and come back to Brisbane without anyone knowing. If I could find us a place to live, Bryan could join me and hopefully find work. I was heavily in denial and prayed daily to the Virgin Mary, who, I reasoned, had been an unmarried mother and could therefore find a way for my pregnancy to either disappear or be kept a secret.

‘This isn’t working,’ Charlie said one afternoon after another hot day in the sun picking pears. We’d only been there a short time and I was enjoying being away from home and pretending my pregnancy didn’t exist. I was getting comfortable with the idea of staying in Shepparton.

‘It’s been a huge mistake. I’m going home.’ At first I thought he must have been annoyed with me being a hanger-on. I was formulating a way of getting into the township to see if I could apply for the dole and at least have some money to contribute to the rent of the van and our food. But my brother had decided he was going to make a life with Jill.

This came as a huge blow to me. I couldn’t stay alone. I had no money, no means of transport and no place to live.

‘Charlie, I’m pregnant.’

A look of shock.

Then George spoke: ‘I’m gay.’

My poor brother looked at us both, incredulous – he’d thought he had problems!

We were all lost in our own thoughts that night, no doubt forming plans of how we were going to return to our homes and ‘face the music’, as Mum would say. The next morning I approached Charlie.

‘I don’t know what to do. What will Mum say? I can’t tell her.’

‘You’re going to have to. Have you thought of a home for unmarried mothers? The nuns run them,’ he said.

I’d never heard of them. It had never occurred to me that there might be other girls in my situation who needed somewhere to hide. I knew about adoption because there had been children I’d met at school who were adopted, but I never considered why. This was good news.

On the journey home I hatched my plan. I prayed on the rosary all the way. Every Hail Mary was a plea to Our Lady to deliver me from my situation. Before I faced my mother I needed a plan. I couldn’t let her decide for me. I have since thought about this momentous stage in my young life and the surprisingly mature way in which I approached it. But, at the time, I just remember feeling terrified.

3

The moment we returned from Shepparton I went to see our local priest, the man who had baptised Bryan the month before. This had been something we had talked about long before I knew I was pregnant, because Bryan had wanted to become a Catholic. I told the priest I was pregnant and wanted to put my baby up for adoption. Did he know where I could hide till the baby was born? He arranged for me to go and live at the Holy Cross Magdalene Asylum in Wooloowin, on the north side of Brisbane. It was far enough away from home that I wouldn’t have to run into anyone I knew. It was operated by an order of Catholic nuns called the Mercy Sisters. I was very familiar with them, having spent twelve years of my schooling in Mercy schools.

Telling Bryan was difficult. By then he wanted me to keep our baby.

He cooked me dinner one evening at his parents’ home, where he was living. They had gone away for the weekend and it was the first time I had seen him since my return from Shepparton.

‘But we planned on getting married. I became a Catholic. That’s what you wanted!’ He offered me a glass of wine.

‘No thanks,’ I said. I was patting my belly, wondering if I had just felt the baby move. ‘I’m not ready to get married. And I’m too young to have a baby.’

He shook his head. I looked around the living room. He had built this home for his parents. The floors still had no covering and the kitchen wasn’t finished. Outside was a pool where his mother sat most days smoking and getting a tan; there was no garden surrounding the pool, just dirt. At the front of the house there were piles of rubbish, left over from the build. They had moved to Brisbane from Liverpool, England, where backyard swimming pools and sunshine were the dream of every working man. He lit a cigarette. I led the conversation.

‘Look, we’re young. We have plenty of time ahead of us. I need to finish my studies. We need to save money, and then we can marry and have children.’

‘I can build us a home.’

‘You have no money. Where would we live while you’re building?’

‘With my parents, here, till we get some money together.’

I shuddered, glancing at the full ashtrays on the dining table, the benchtop and the nearby coffee table. I couldn’t live with his parents. And it was becoming patently clear to me that it was not just a baby I would have to support and mother, but a husband as well.

‘No, it won’t work.’

I had made up my mind.

In my final school years, on hot humid Brisbane afternoons, I used to cycle up the huge hill that led to our home in Oxley. They were long rides.

I had started school with the Mercy Sisters. When I was about seven years old I told Mum I wanted to be a nun, and she kept me at school with them so that it would be an easy transition when the time came. The school was in Ipswich and although I had to leave home each day at 7 am to take the train and did not return until 5 pm, she thought it best. The Catholic high school that was closer to home was out of bounds since it was a different religious order.

My parents built their home when they were in their late thirties. At the time there were only a handful of houses under construction in our newly opened subdivision. The number of houses was restricted by the railway line to the west, the cement works to the south and the highway to the north. We children knew the layout of our neighbours’ homes as we’d played in them while they were being built, on the weekends when the builders had laid down their tools. Our house was a rectangular box with a double garage poking out on one side, displaying our ascension to the middle class – we could now afford two cars.

On the other side of the rectangle was the more recent addition – the rumpus room. Here we held family gatherings and my father kept his prized stereo and record collection. It had a second bathroom, which he used every morning before work, while blasting the neighbours with classical music, the volume high so he could hear it above the shower.

Between the rumpus room and the garage was the entrance to our family home. On passing through a courtyard, the stairs brought you directly to the lounge room. It was in this room that I was sitting, nervously waiting for my mother. The walls of the room were lined with family photos – my younger brother Ken wearing his altar boy vestment, standing outside the church that our family attended every Sunday. He no longer lived with us, having left home at fourteen after he was expelled from school. The next photo was my older sister, Teresa, and her boyfriend, Frank, at their engagement party. I despised him. In my opinion he was a bully. My sister had met him through Charlie, since Frank had also been a Christian Brother. And then there was the photo of Charlie, surrounded by us, his family, on the day he took his religious vows. Mum hadn’t the heart to take it down, even now that he was no longer a Brother and was going out with a divorcée. Finally there was a photo of our whole family. The day it was taken, we were all dressed in our Sunday best. Alexis, my younger sister, stood at the front staring into the camera, curly hair framing her innocent face and a cheeky grin.

I sat in Dad’s favourite chair in that lounge room, my hands nervously wrapped around my belly, knowing that my news would again shatter my mother’s dream of a brood of successful children.

‘Worse things have happened in this family.’

That was my mother’s favourite saying when something went wrong. I once asked her what was something ‘worse’.

‘You’ll know when it happens,’ she said.

When I was twelve, my aunt, who was nineteen at the time, became pregnant and disappeared from her home. She surfaced some months later in Western Australia. She kept her baby but didn’t marry his father. When my mother told me about it she said ‘That was the worst thing that’s happened in this family.’

I remember wondering why she’d been so wrapped up in the saga. My aunt lived in another state, and Mum had her own family now. Surely that was her parents’ concern, not hers. But it was made patently clear to me that my aunt had brought disgrace upon her family.

‘Approve’ was another word Mum used often, though it usually had ‘do not’ in front of it. She was driving us along a highway one day. I was thirteen and in the back seat. Another car suddenly appeared over the horizon, coming straight for us, in the same lane. Mum had thought it was a two-way road. She swerved out of its path into the dirt, just in time to avoid a head-on collision.

‘Fuck!’ I yelled.

She pulled over, killed the engine – and turned and glared at me.

‘I just heard a word I don’t approve of.’

She’d nearly killed us, but all she could focus on was my swearing.

My mother never taught me a thing about sex or menstruation. When I had my first period I was twelve and, for some months afterwards, I thought I was dying. I was certainly dying of shame. I used to wash my underwear and hide it so that no one would find it. One day she caught me hanging my knickers on the washing line. She called me inside, handed me a packet of menstrual pads and an elastic belt with clips on each end. ‘Here, use these,’ she said.

Back in the safety of my bedroom, I figured that, if you could buy such things, then bleeding must be normal. For girls and boys, I wondered. It took me some time to work out how to attach the huge pad to the belt that held it in place, and even longer to work out that the pad had a front and a back. I taught myself, through trial and error how often I needed to change it, and how to dispose of it. At that time I never equated periods with babies and contraception was not a word I had even heard of. When I did hear about it, it was in the context of not being for Catholics. Catholics accepted all babies that come along, or so I thought.

I learned this the year after I began menstruating, when we had a ‘Mother and Daughter’ night at school. We girls were taken to a classroom and showed pictures of our uterus and fallopian tubes and the educators explained that menstruation was normal for girls our age and that the ‘egg’ led to a baby, in the right circumstances. I was not privy to what the mothers learned that evening.

‘I’m pregnant,’ I blurted.

‘What!’ A contorted, angry, shocked look – one I knew only too well.

‘I’m going to live in a home for unmarried mothers. Father Donnelly told me about it.’

A bead of sweat fell down the side of my face. She stared at me, incredulous, and after a moment or two said:

‘How many weeks are you?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘Why have you waited this long to tell me?’

The old grandfather clock, which Dad had given her as a gift on the occasion of her twenty-first birthday, chimed. We were both silent for a few more moments. I didn’t answer.

‘What will you do with the baby?’

‘Adopt.’

‘When did this happen?’

‘Does it matter?’

More beads of sweat, this time behind the backs of my knees. I was trying desperately to hide my belly.

‘Of course it matters!’

I wanted someone to hold me and tell me that everything would be all right, let this moment pass. I wanted to disappear. But there was no-one here to rescue me.

‘Where did this happen?’

Now I felt shame.

‘Mum …’

‘I need to know, so that I can make sure it doesn’t happen to your sister!’

‘What?’

‘And, furthermore, how old were you? Because if you were sixteen, I could report Bryan to the police for carnal knowledge!’

My mother was extremely angry. I had anticipated that. But in this moment I felt I had created this mess. I deserved her anger. I was to blame. After all, I had bought this upon myself. Her anger was justified and I felt ashamed.

When my mother is angry, she goes quiet. As children we used to call this ‘Mum’s silent treatment’. And we saw it mostly when she was angry with Dad. Now it was my turn. She left the room and did not say another word to me till the next morning.

In later years, I realised that by resolving my own predicament, I owned the situation. If I had let Mum take control, it would have been so easy to lay the blame for my sadness on her. I had moments of regret, but in those times I thought back on the steps I had taken to give up my child for adoption. Because I had made the decision myself, I could more easily live with it. I could have investigated the abortion option and saved myself the heartache and not had to face my mother. But I resolved to take this route.

The next day Bryan picked me up from my family home and took me to the home for unmarried mothers. Mum made herself scarce that morning, but before I left she told me that she would arrange for our family health benefit to cover me for private health care. There were no fond farewells or words of encouragement, much less a thank you for being honest or an offer of support in making such a momentous, life-changing decision.