Where did I come from?

Nowadays, whenever I visit my parents at the family home, mum will show me the progress they’ve made in “decluttering”, which is the term she uses for getting the house ready to sell. A few months ago she gave me a box of books from my childhood collection. I simply added it to the pile of boxes at my place that I hadn’t sorted through yet after a particularly rushed move. When I came back to it, sure enough, there was that 80’s classic in soft cover: “Where did I come from?” This book was how we all learnt about “the facts of life”, and it boasted that this was achieved “without any nonsense and with illustrations”.

No nonsense sex education from the 80s

As we each play our part in the process of determining which items from 45 years of a household should be kept and which ones should be passed on, there have been a couple of trips down memory lane. One particular day Dad asked me, over a well-earned tea break, whether I’d ever lived in this house. “Yes, I grew up here, actually," I replied, as matter-of-fact as I could manage, reflecting briefly on the two or so decades that had shaped my current life; the many arguments about his loud television blaring while I tried to get to sleep and the moments lying in that bed, looking out that window contemplating my place in this life. “In fact, the room that you sleep in was once my room” I offered. Dad was somewhat intrigued by this new information, and what followed was a casual discussion about where I used to have the bed, and how he was now utilising the space. 

Although I’d occupied all 3 “kids” bedrooms at different times, it is now generally understood that the upstairs room was mine, the one closest to the bathroom was my brother’s and the front room, which had a window onto the front porch, was my sister’s. When they were babies, the twins had their matching cots in the front room, and I can remember them talking to one another across the room in their unique dialect of baby babble. They ended up chewing the white paint off their cot rails to reveal a pale, mid century green below. At that time, I was in the room nearest the bathroom, and the busy floral carpet that my brother later pulled up in favour of floorboards offered an opportunity to skip and dance from one hideous flower to the next on the short trip to the toilet.

The other day mum handed me several copies of the ultrasound images from when she was pregnant, dated May 1976. Scientific proof, finally, that I wasn’t adopted. The facts of life, without any nonsense and with illustrations. Mum’s sister, who had also harboured a belief that she’d been adopted, recently did a DNA test, and had to confront the reality that, like me, any feelings of being misunderstood or on the edges of belonging could not be put down to genetics. 

Proof of life

Another time, mum pulled out her journal from when I was 18 months old and began reading from it. According to her notes, it was a worrying time because “A” (as in, me) had been aggressive with other children, pulling the neighbour’s hair and hitting children at playgroup. This behaviour was UNPROVOKED, mind you, which made it all the more alarming. Together with a spate of possibly related nappy changing antics, mum was clearly at her wits end. 

I’m still not sure why the 18 month old me was pulling other children’s hair, but as a rage well known to women in the Autumn of their lives begins to take hold, I have empathy for that little girl. Rage or aggression can appear unprovoked, but really it rises up in response to a thousand tiny cuts, the multitude of micro-aggressions experienced on a daily basis. Almost fifty years later, societal views about the roles and expectations of girls, women and eldest daughters still exist. There is still a disapproval of "strong emotions", and an expectation that we can't have needs of our own. But rage isn't necessarily a bad thing. When channelled with care and purpose, it is the mother of powerful social change. I recently learnt that my grandmother, having realised that she couldn't stay silent any longer, had a quiet (but firm) word with Fred Nile about his stance on abortion. 

On another visit, while making space for a few of my clothes in my brother's wardrobe, I found a photo of my siblings and me in a 3-way embrace. They say that the sibling relationship is the most important and longstanding, because they have known us throughout all our phases of life. When mum’s uncle died a few years ago, his sister, the last remaining sibling, grieved particularly because he’d “left her all alone”. 

Siblings

On yet another occasion, mum presented me with a written exchange with the tooth fairy, from some 40 years ago. They say “Give me the child at 7 and I'll show you the adult”. In a suitably miniature font, the human protagonist has a couple of questions for her winged correspondents. She was concerned that the tooth fairies hadn't taken the tooth, which was their rightful reward in exchange for a gold coin. Furthermore, she wanted to get to know where these little creatures lived and what their names were. Integrity in business affairs and building meaningful relationships were as important back then as they are now. 

Miniature correspondence

As the trip down memory lane inevitably comes to a close, and the house mum and dad called home for almost half a century is gradually emptied of its “clutter”, the place feels more and more spacious. And with spaciousness, it's possible to  see things more clearly. I can embrace the aggressive toddler, the inquisitive child, and the loving sister as all true parts of a whole person. So, where did I come from? I believe we all come from ourselves, are shaped by our environment, and eventually return home to who we really are.

The filing cabinets

Sometimes when I visit mum and dad, there’s not much happening. Other times they’re in the middle of a “project” of some kind. Yesterday was a project sort of day. I was chatting to mum as she heated lunch on the stove when Dad’s voice called out from the verandah “Where’s that sewing machine oil?” Mum headed off to get said oil. “Your father is trying to get the bike pump working again” she explained upon return, as if that provided clarification. With imaginings of Dad taking up sewing now adjusted to the prospect of him dragging a disused bicycle that nobody remembers owning out of the garage and incorporating cycling into his daily exercise routine, I suspected I still didn’t have the full picture. 

“It’s the trolley” offered Dad, “the tyres have gone flat”. A trip downstairs further enlightened me. There, in the middle of the table tennis room, was one of Dad’s old filing cabinets with the base of a removalist-quality trolley under it. The trolley tyres were indeed quite flat. “It doesn’t work with the tyres all flat. There’s no momentum”. Dad was disappointed, but undeterred. Dad had always been able to solve practical problems like this, even if his solutions were sometimes a little “unconventional” and definitely always low cost. Inevitably the end result was highly embarrassing to us as teenagers because Dad valued function over form. Dad’s ability to find workarounds for problems that arise has been an asset along his journey with dementia. 

Now that I understood the end-of-project outcome and the intended theory of change, we returned to Step 1 (resurrecting the bike pump) with renewed enthusiasm. Mum and I were given the task of testing the freshly oiled pump. Sadly, regardless of whether the little plastic lever was up or down, no air was flowing and the dial on the little glass face wasn’t moving either. But this was not an insurmountable problem, as Dad soon emerged from the garage with two more bike pumps to try. “That one’s ancient” mum scoffed, looking at the rustier of the two “it’ll never work”. “It’ll probably be the one that does work” was Dad’s indignant reply, and sure enough the most rusty and spider-web-covered pump was the one that sprang into action with a satisfying burst of air and the dial jumping about with vigour. 

Once I’d pumped up both trolley tyres (Step 2) we were ready for Step 3, which was to wheel the now-empty filing cabinets out to the front of the house ready for council cleanup. Assessing the combined physical capacity amongst the 3 of us, I decided that it would be better to open the glass doors at the back of the table tennis room and guide our consignment up a few very gradual and manageable outdoor steps and along the driveway beside the house rather than trying to get them up a flight of internal stairs and through the house. The glass doors hadn’t been opened in possibly a couple of decades, so there was a bit of a process of finding the keys, wiggling the bolts back to life again, and moving a few pot plants out of the way. 

We just needed to fashion a ramp at the step from the room to the patio, and mum solved that problem with a piece of wood that happened to be hiding behind one of the filing cabinets in wait for such a moment as this. We then settled into a rhythm of me wheeling each filing cabinet past the table tennis table to the ramp, and guiding it down the ramp with Dad stationed outside ready to “catch” it. Then Dad manoeuvred it carefully up the garden steps while mum or I held on to the bottom of the filing cabinet and the other carried Dad’s walking stick in case he needed it for the walk back. My phone was within reach, poised ready to capture this momentous achievement on film. 

Once the task was completed, and the glass doors pulled shut again, it was time for a cuppa and a sit down. Even mum decided to have a cup of tea, given the significance of the moment, and we exchanged stories of one another’s efforts amid moments of challenge and uncertainty. Buoyed by our recent achievements, mum thought we could also deal with a letter from council about a new way to pay rates. And so it was that by the time we embarked on our afternoon walk, we’d solved two significant household problems and had zero injuries to report (notwithstanding Dad’s near miss when getting a bit too confident with the final filing cabinet). It felt like there was nothing we couldn’t do.