Love In a Sunburnt Country (7 page)

Some of this was to do with Robina's past experience of what she now refers to as ‘limerence' in relationships.

Limerence is the nutty, yearning, frenzied, obsessive and unrealistic rush of early love; it's a separate state from either lust or love. Psychologists say that limerence has little to do with real love, and neurologists use another name for it entirely. They call it PEA Brain. The P, E and A refer to the phenylalanine that is the neurotransmitter responsible for the ‘high' of new love: PEA is surging, stewing, vaporising and condensing throughout our bodies.

Love of this kind is the ultimate mind-messing drug. You will think obsessively about the beloved, agonise over their feelings and pine in their absence. In their presence your heart races, soars, aches and somersaults. When they reciprocate, you are euphoric. When they don't, you're despondent. Frequently you swing between the two. Under its influence you will find it hard to focus on anything else, leading generally to poor judgment and impaired memory. Shortness of breath, sweating, stuttering and clumsiness and general anxiety can also be expected.

Writers often use love potions to show the absolute absurdity that limerence induces. Think of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
in which Puck mischievously uses a potion to have each young man reallocate his affections. There can be no clearer statement that this kind of love actually blinds us to the object of our affections.

As just about every authority is quick to tell you, a powerful experience of limerence is a very poor basis for marriage. In fact, some authorities believe that strong limerence is somewhat of a red flag in terms of the long-term health of a relationship. Limerence lasts from anywhere between nine months to two years—although times away from each other will prolong this. The best-case scenario for limerence is that the PEA Brain hormones gently decay, either setting the scene for a separation or for the next set of hormones to kick in to take the lovers into the next stage. This is the deep, quiet attachment of long-lasting love, and the hormone involved here is oxytocin—as it is between new parents and their baby. The worst-case scenario is for limerence to deepen existing wounds in your psyche, or to open up new ones in a previously healthy person.

Sometimes limerence is triggered less by your admiration or desire for the other person than by your own vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities may stem from difficult relationships in your family of origin or another psychological crisis in your life. Generally, at the times in our life that we don't really feel lovable in our heart of hearts we are at greater risk of limerence—it can be easier to fix on someone else as the cure for our hurts than to heal ourselves. If that person then goes on to hurt us in some way, that hurt compounds our earlier hurts. We desperately seek to re-engage with that person—or, if all hope is gone, we might look for someone else to love us. In this way the limerent person can become more and more emotionally dependent.

Not every couple experiences limerence. There are many reasons for this. For example, a young woman hurt by years in a messy, limerent relationship, such as Robina, might do everything she could to avoid that feeling again. Robina was determined to avoid limerent love, but she missed entirely the significance of the scaffold of fun, friendship and utter dependability that Aaron had constructed beneath her. Limerence is not the only pathway into deep love. Lust coupled with liking also works just fine.

‘He was my boss for twelve months and he taught me so many things, and I learnt so much more about him like that.'

She learned that Aaron could communicate clearly and deliberately without words by watching him work alongside Aboriginal stockmen who have another language of sign, expression and posture. It is a fast and fluent language that conveys volumes to the people who know it, but which the rest of us simply don't see. She saw that peer pressure didn't touch him. She came to admire his work ethic and his competence deeply. She learned that while Aaron isn't traditionally romantic he could make a corned-meat sandwich shared on the back of a Toyota feel romantic.

‘After nine months together he said: “Can we say you're my girlfriend now?”—he'd just waited for me to own it.' Robina hadn't seen love coming for her, but there was no doubt in her mind now that it was love that she was feeling.

And it was in this same year that Robina met for the first time what she refers to as a ‘shape-changing demon'.

Robina first experienced this demon as perfectionism. She was determined to be the ‘perfect station wife'. She wanted to be competent on the property and simultaneously totally in control on the home front.

‘It was as if I thought this would be appealing. I wanted to show him,' she says, mystified at herself all these years later. ‘I'd seen his nana do this, do the men's work and the other stuff as well, so I thought I could totally slip into this.'

She was up at dawn to leave the homestead, and when they returned from the day's work after dark, Robina cooked the evening meal, as well as the breakfast, smoko and lunch for the following day.

‘One day in the yard I was drafting. I was on a five-way gate, Aaron was yelling from the back of the race which way the gate needed to go. I was very new to this work, and there were heaps of blokes in the yard. And I let a cow that needed to go back out to pasture in with the cattle to go to market. And Aaron yelled at me, and he swore at me. He's normally very even-tempered, so I was a wreck by smoko. I'd packed things for smoko and things for lunch, and he asked me which I was going to get out, and I told him, but then I took out the other one. And Aaron said: “What are you doing?”—quite nicely, but that was it. I had to get away, I just cried and cried. And he had no idea how to deal with that with all the men around. And then when we got home I went into the shower.'

In the shower she cried some more. Aaron came and awkwardly apologised for yelling and swearing at her. Long days working with stock roughens tempers and tongues and forgiveness all round is the only way to be able to work together the following day. Robina and Aaron did forgive each other and kept on forgiving each other and learning about each other through what was mostly a beautiful year. At the end of it, Robina had not just learned a great many practical skills but had also completed her nursing degree. The next step for her was a graduate nursing program and Aaron suggested that she apply for the program run out of Alice Springs. She did this, and from there spent three years working around the Territory.

‘I used to work night shift, then I'd finish that, go back to my unit, shower, and drive out to the station. Once I was there I'd find Aaron wherever he was on the station and I'd go blow for blow with him, whatever he was doing—thinking I was such a hero. When we got home I'd get dinner ready and he'd just put his feet up. And I'd get cranky at him.'

Very slowly Robina realised that her own expectations—that she should, in addition to her own work, help Aaron on the station and also provide him with house-cleaning and cooking services—were not Aaron's expectations.

‘I was putting it on myself. It was a really screwed-up perception. When I dropped those expectations of myself—surprisingly and unsurprisingly—everything became easy between us.'

It was the first time, although it had been hiding in plain sight, that Robina had caught a glimpse of her demon. She didn't have a name for it yet but she knew that she would sometimes shut away who she truly was in the endeavour to be someone else, another Robina, who would be more acceptable to the critic within.

She hadn't realised yet that this one victory in loosening the grip of her own expectations around what a woman on a rural property does, of asking, ‘who says that?' and ‘is that even remotely reasonable?', was only the first battle she would need to fight. She didn't realise she was travelling through life with ‘should' sitting on one shoulder and ‘must' sitting on the other, each looking for an opportunity to whisper in her ear a message that would unleash anger and resentment within her, and then an inevitable self-hatred for harbouring these feelings. Why she was listening to the ‘shoulds' and ‘musts' was the real question, and one she would not think to ask for many years.

Aaron continued to manage Epenarra and Robina continued to work as a nurse, always returning to Aaron on the station as she could. She loved nursing.

‘The remote experience is so good because you have to make do with what you have. I imagined, when I became a nurse, that I could fly around solo delivering nursing care in an ultra-light to remote people.'

She was to realise that this was what the Royal Flying Doctor Service did—but that dream of taking journeys to remotely located clients would never quite leave her. She loved the physical aspects of nursing, the suturing and the bandaging, but most fascinating of all to her was care of mothers.

‘I had done a double shift at Tennant Creek and a young girl in labour came in. She was seventeen and this wasn't her first child. The ambulance had brought her from the post office, but she'd walked from the other side of the town to reach the post office. She was too far gone to get her to Alice and she was on her own. I played the role of father, I stood up at her head and she was reefing at me—pulling me in towards her with each contraction. I was just on a high. It was as if the oxytocin high of delivery overflowed into me as well, it was incredible. The girl delivered the baby safely and then we transferred her to Alice Springs.

‘I learnt a lot about mothering and breastfeeding from the Aboriginal people. The children I saw were “on” their people all the time. I remember on night shift seeing one lady in bed with three children—one sleeping on one breast, another who had just come off, and one more further down the bed. They were all just sound asleep, loving each other.'

However, Robina's contact with the Aboriginal people she was living alongside was mainly limited to her nursing role.

‘I missed out on those people—being on the station there was some divide. I never pursued those relationships and I regret that,' she says.

In their enforced long separations—Robina at some far-flung nursing post and Aaron managing the station—they kept talking. The great secret of long-distance romance is that sometimes it strengthens relationships as, with conversation as the only point of contact, you do really learn to communicate. It can be easy to rely on touch and action alone—particularly when you are by nature a doer, a fixer and maker, which is what both Robina and Aaron are. It was in these long conversations that the subject of marriage finally surfaced. Then Robina's much-loved grandfather became very ill. As was usual at that time, there were many kilometres between them—Aaron at Epenarra and Robina in Alice Springs. Robina rang Aaron to share the news and to say, ‘I really want Pop to know that I'm going to be married.'

‘So after I told Aaron he said, “Just hang on, I'll ring you back,”' says Robina. ‘And then he rang Dad straightaway. Dad was visiting Pop, he was at the bedside. Aaron said, “Can I marry her?”

‘Then Aaron rang me back and said, “Do you want to get married?”'

They were longing to see each other, but it was simply not possible. In the end, Robina was to see Aaron's parents before she saw him.

‘His parents were coming to visit us, and they were arriving in Alice Springs that day. I just hung out with his mum and dad for two days. Then he called up and we put the phone on speaker and he said, “Did Robina tell you yet?” and his mum said, “Tell us what?” She was tickled pink.'

In March 2009 Aaron and Robina were married. Aaron's face was clean-shaven, perhaps for the last time, and Robina's hair was long. The photographs show her looking delicate and at peace. Certainty had been slow to emerge for Robina but knowing Aaron is her man feels like an inspiration from God rather than simply a personal conviction, and that's what she's taken to church this day. Aaron looks handsome and happy. There's an elegant country-and-western look to them both. Robina is in embossed cowboy boots and lace. With his natty morning suit Aaron wears a leather belt made by Robina. The wedding rings are both made from gold found by a prospecting friend on and near Epenarra, and celebrate the land on which they met.

Their wedding day had been one of quiet commitment in a small church, wrapped in her family and his. But the months following were full of drama: by August, Robina was pregnant, and Aaron had been kicked by a bull and had to be flown out by the Royal Flying Doctor Service due to a number of broken ribs and the fear that he was bleeding internally.

Aaron healed, then went back to work, and Robina spent her days on a friend's neighbouring property. Much of the time she basked in the sun at a waterhole reminiscent of the one at which she'd met Aaron, her attention on the son growing inside her.

‘We did it,' she said to Darcy as she nursed him for the very first time. As she'd hoped and expected of herself, mothering her beautiful little son came easily to her. He was so very like his easy-going, steady-natured, certain-hearted Dad, not at all like Robina herself. Robina felt confident, she felt enough, and out of that her mothering flowed. But that flow seemed to dry up in the months after her second son Tully was born nearly two-and-a-half years later.

‘Something about becoming a mother to two children …' she says. Somehow, this once more opened the gateway to ‘must' and ‘should', of feeling not enough, not good enough, of needing to do a whole galaxy of things that she didn't believe in, but having to do them anyway and becoming angrier, more bitter, more resentful. Robina found herself raging at the children, frightening them with her sudden descents into hostility, then breaking her heart over the fact that she was hurting the ones she loved most of all.

‘I was teaching my babies terrible things,' she says. ‘I was a lovely mummy on the surface, but underneath was all this anger. There were words inside me, all this rot and chaos and I didn't know how to still it. I was really disconnected from my essence and eventually it was out of control. Aaron was walking on eggshells. He never knew what he'd be coming home to.'