A Reason to Exist

Chapter 10

Tate was only six when mum and dad split up. It was a shock for him. He was living in the safely constructed world of instruction booklet Lego. I was twelve and suspected something was up. Mum's thyroid was overactive again, she'd lost a lot of weight, she couldn't sleep at night, she stormed through the day making homemade crackers and banana bread, cleaning out the linen closet and bursting into sudden rages and fits of tears. Her hair was falling out in puddles on the floor and when she drank a glass of water her hand shook.

One evening I was doing my homework at the kitchen table, when I heard dad approach mum who was washing dishes in the kitchen sink. He said, 'Calm down Vivien.'

'Calm down? Calm down? That's the support I get?'

I'd seen my dad's hand reach out to touch her, but it paused mid-air, like there was an invisible shield around my mother's body. I remember seeing that hand paused there, so useless, so unsure.

'It's not cancer,' dad whispered.

'It's a chronic life-long disease. They want to remove my thyroid. It's a vital body organ.'

'You'll be all right. There's worse things. You need perspective.'

'Perspective? You promised to love me in sickness or in health.'

'I do.'

'I don't feel your love. If I'm alone with an illness, I may as well be alone.' She'd pushed his body away from her, taken off her rubber gloves and inspected her fingers for shaking.

Two weeks later, they sat Tate and I down on the living room floor to have the separation talk. It shattered our childhoods into twelve million pieces.

Before long, my father had moved out and my nana had moved in. Her husband had left when her two girls were six and eight, so she was already convinced that all men were bastards. She fanned the flames of my mother's contempt. The new narrative about my parents' separation was made clear to everyone. I'd seen a man trying his best to reassure his wife. The new narrative was that she was 'abandoned when she needed him the most' and that he thought she was 'neurotic'.

He was soon accused of lacking empathy and therefore unfit to be a father. They'd battled over custody arrangements for us for two years. It nearly sent dad bankrupt, but my nana bankrolled mum's legal team fees.

During that period we were only allowed to see dad on a Saturday from 9am until 3pm. Mum would drive us to the local Woolworths car park to hand us over to dad, as she didn't want him at the house. I felt like Tate and I were an illicit drug deal being exchanged in a supermarket car park like that.

Dad was always upbeat. He never questioned or tried to influence us, even when we had to see a child psychologist and she had to testify about our relationship with him. He couldn't afford to pay a lawyer anymore, so he'd had to rely on Legal Aid. Somehow, he managed to get a ruling for us to stay with him two weekends a month from Friday night until Monday morning. Mum was livid.

Unlike dad, mum spoke about all these things unashamedly in front of Tate and I. We heard her on the phone to her friend Lucy, we heard her at the kitchen table talking to nana, we heard her at the garden centre checkout telling the lady how the children's father had returned us on Monday with severe sunburn. We were a little rosy on the nose, but it had turned into another catastrophe. We attended reiki sessions where mum would sob into the daybed while all her pain was released. Day after day we were reminded of how our father had let us all down.

So this was the narrative Tate grew up with and these stories became more vivid for him than the memories of our father pre-divorce. I made sure I held on to other memories of dad. I believed that mum and him had been happy before she got sick. I remembered when she'd been pregnant with Tate and he'd massaged her feet on the couch. Or how he used to take her car to get petrol on a Tuesday night. He had cared for her. She was wrong.

Things had become calmer after the first two years, we'd gotten along as best we could in our divided households. But then dad met Sandra and then Sandra moved in to dad's apartment. Mum practically did a police check on Sandra every time we came home. We were questioned about what we had done, what we had eaten, how many hours of sunlight we'd had and what time we'd gone to bed. Sandra didn't have any children herself so mum was very suspicious that she even knew how to keep two children alive. And mum is very particular about what we eat because of our 'high susceptibility to getting an autoimmune disorder', so according to her, there's a risk in even eating a piece of grain-fed steak. Over the years she'd managed to train dad about autoimmune triggers, but Sandra 'didn't know anything' and was therefore a code red danger to all of us.