Perilous Adventures
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Pandora

 
 

Bone Mother {an extract}

by Pamela Douglas
 

Douglas - Bone Mother

bones on the balonne

Every morning that year, thousands of farmers out west left their boots by the back door, washed their hands in a plastic tub in the laundry, and sat down to breakfast tuned in to ABC radio, waiting for the long range weather forecast.  No relief in sight.  Water was trucked to outback towns month after month.  Paddocks were bare.  Cattle and sheep died.  Even the stock routes were devoid of feed.  Thirsty skies, hot dirt, cracked mud, flies and rotting corpses.  

Not long after their wedding, Erica and her husband raised a loan and purchased a multi-million dollar cotton and wheat property half an hour’s drive outside St George, on the banks of the Balonne River.  Since then, they’d had only a few short runs of the river.  The hungry cattle they brought over from her father-in-law’s quickly stripped away the last tufts of sunburnt yellow grass.  Empty dams gaped by the ugly dulan trees; the fields were a mess of spiky brown stubble.  Soon they owned two thousand hectares of burning red dirt.

Upstream from the Beardmore Dam, the river is untidy even at its best, scoured into the dirt beyond its natural banks by the reservois. Thousands of bleached eucalypt skeletons rise up out of the water.  Downstream from the reservoir, the beautiful watercourse of the Balonne–flanked by melaleucas, gums and clean white sand–was reduced that year to a string of mudholes in a mosaic of deeply cracked mud.  Cyprus pines in the sandy soil of the surrounding paddocks were dying.  Erica’s husband drove by the stagnant puddles each day in a ute, lassoing the horns of cattle who were bogged and too weak to free themselves.  Sometimes, he came too late, to find carcasses rotting in the unremitting sun.  Starving red kangaroos, without the strength to flee, watched him in silence. 

“Do you bury them?” I asked Erica naively the day they came to visit.

She shook her head.  Drought lays out skeletons upon the parched creek bed.  Though the stink of death rises up to the empty skies, the sun blazes on without a blink.  Her gaze bores into the suffering land.  Bones on the Balonne do not move her. 

“I saved a whole ten thousand dollars in the years before I married,” Erica said to me.  “Pretty good, I thought.  Then the first thing we did when we arrived on the property was to purchase a load of fuel.  It cost fifteen thousand dollars.  The second thing we did was to put power on to the house.  That cost ten thousand dollars.”

Around the time she fell pregnant, a dust-storm blew in over the horizon.  Broiling red clouds blotted out the sun.  They had just had their three-bedroom weatherboard house raised up on slim steel posts so that vehicles could park underneath.  “I was fascinated,” she said, “because I was new.  And frightened that the house would blow off the posts.”  She ran up the stairs, closed all the windows and put on the lights as swirling red winds buffeted the house.  Soon, despite the closed windows, a coat of crimson dust settled over the furniture, carpets and bedspreads.  Out in the paddock, her husband couldn’t see two metres in front of him.  He pulled his shirt over his face and sheltered in the cab of a combine-harvester.  

The next week, the water they pumped from the river turned to mud in the pipes.  Erica wouldn’t shower.  Her husband showered in red mud.  They drove into town to fill up a water-truck from the town’s bore-water tanks, and arranged to sink their own bore.  Another ten thousand dollars.  Already their overdraft was blowing out.

“I’m a newcomer,” Erica said to me that year.  “But no-one talks about how the drought is affecting them.  Dozens of families are leaving town as they’re put off work.  Shops are closing.  I know at least three families torn apart by divorce since I’ve been here.  Everyone talks constantly about the weather.  I hope it rains, they say. We really need rain.”  Even she, the newcomer, watched the skies constantly, noticing an occasional wisp, then checking every few minutes to see if a bigger cloud followed over the horizon.  But no-one talked about the swollen overdrafts, or the lack of money for household expenses, or for the kid’s education.  “You don’t know who’s coping, and who’s going under, until you hear that their property is up for sale.”

Her mother-in-law had lived in the district for thirty years.  For her, the worst was watching the men.  Up before dawn each day, working in the fields until after the children were in bed, keeping the farm running as the overdraft swelled.  They prepared the paddocks, during weeks of painstaking work, ready for sowing the minute it rained.  But it didn’t rain.  The men in her husband’s family are an even-tempered stock, Erica said.  They don’t lose their tempers.  They don’t take it out on the wife and kids.  But their spirits fall flat, working day after day after day through the drought.  Suddenly, late at night, just when you think your husband is asleep, he frightens you by thumping the mattress, by crying out into the darkness:  Why the hell am I doing this?

“They are god-fearing men,” she said, “and you’ve got to be, because you couldn’t do it if you didn’t have faith.” 

“The poor blighters call it suicide weather,” my father observed.  “A lot of them are out with the cattle on the long paddock now.”  If they lived near town, the wife went back nursing or teaching or working behind a counter, and the men took paid jobs where they could find them, trying to keep the property going at the same time.  It was worse if they were too far from town to find work.  They couldn’t borrow any more from the banks.  They couldn’t sell–who would buy?  It was suicide weather.

On the news, the spokesman for the Grain Growers Association sat stiffly in his suit, blinking at the studio lights.  “The primary producer has a right to a living,” he declared stiffly.  He sounded stubborn.  He was not articulate, like the well-groomed, educated woman from the Australian Conservation Foundation. 

“You’ve got to understand history,” he insisted in a dogged outback drawl.  “Since the 1800s the government built headwater storage in marginal land, encouraged people to buy, sold water rights for twenty dollars …” 

I noticed that the woman from the ACF packed her message in clean sound-grabs.  The drought is caused by unsustainable water allocations.  By overgrazing of marginal lands.  By farmers ruining the land. 

The man from the Grain Growers didn’t come over well.  And we in the city are much too eager to apportion blame.  My father thinks the environmentalists are hotheads, city-slickers.  They wear cotton garments and eat vegetarian foods without thinking about the complex issues that confront the ordinary primary producer, out there sweating in the paddocks to provide them with these basics.  It makes my dad mad.  “They just don’t know,” he mutters darkly.  This is why he votes for the National Party. 

My father has said that farmers just need good, workable advice; they all want to do the right thing by their own piece of country.  I’ve only appreciated in recent years that my father and his mates in the extension programmes of the Department of Primary Industries were the original greenies.  From the 1960s to the 1980s, the old-fashioned extension officer was an arbiter of a cultural clash between the imported, colonial methods of pastoralism and cultivation, and the modern imperative to manage the land sustainably.  He stood between the scientist and the primary producer, translating research into practices within the farmer’s reach.  My father was among the first advocates of soil conservation on the Darling Downs.  He advised that instead of burning the residue after the harvest, farmers plant new crops into the stubble so the land was never bare.  On slopes, he advocated contour banks and grassed waterways. Within a single generation, he and his fellow DPI extension officers facilitated a massive cultural shift towards sustainability in agricultural practices. 

The woman from the ACF had an important point to make, of course.  Out St George way, two thirds of the river flow, when it comes, is lost to irrigation.  The wetlands that take out sediment are disappearing, the silver perch are almost gone, algal blooms choke the rivers.  But blaming farmers for the drought ignores the issues that face the ordinary grower, who has been up dirtying his hands in the paddock for hours before the city-dwellers wake.  It ignores our history.

Because this landmass is old, and worn down by erosion, it has few of the soaring mountain ranges that pull wet seasons down from the skies.  We are the driest continent on earth, and living things here have adapted.  The hardy, silver-grey leaves of eucalypts, wattles and banksias don’t have much moisture; inland frogs bury themselves in the dirt for years until the next wet; kangaroos carry three offspring during good seasons and abort foetuses during the dry.  Aborigines used their intimate knowledge of local resources to manage the variable climate:  some individuals specialised in the weather, and advised on the necessary migrations.  They had no use for the concept of drought, since dry times were expected.  But we latecomers still view drought from a colonial mindset, as a cruel and unexpected climatic quirk.  We rely too much on the good times.  We consider abundance our birth-right, our heritage.  When drought passes through our lives, we panic, we’re unprepared, we can’t imagine an end to it.  We cast about frantically for a quick fix.

But my father has been listening to the land.  “Expect it,” he says.  He means to say this:  that it’s only drought, the inevitable lady of the long hot dry.  She too will pass. 

 

the guard

The family of one of Amy’s preschool friends were Catholic Workers, who lived a philosophy of voluntary poverty, non-violence and hospitality for the homeless out of their rambling, run-down West End house.  In the kitchen, chain-smoking schizophrenics and alcoholics baked bread; out the back, chickens pecked in the dirt and squawked and fluttered through the weeds and the rusted wreck of a car.  In a spare room off the front entrance a larger-than-life sponge carving of Jesus leant precariously against the wall.  Rivulets of black blood criss-crossed the defeated yellow body, pouring down from the crown of thorns jammed on its head.  I let Amy play there one morning, having been assured that Phoebe’s mother would be in constant attendance.  When I returned to collect her, I heard Amy questioning Phoebe about the sculpture, over a lunch of baked bean sandwiches. 

“Is he a bad man?”

“No, he is everybody's guard,” explained Phoebe. 

“Not mine,” said Amy, affronted. 

“Yes, he is,” Phoebe replied firmly.  “He guards everybody.”

Later that day, when she and Johnny were in the bath, Amy raised the subject with me.  “This man died, but he is alive, too.  Mummy, can people come back alive after they die?  He looks as if he has been in a car crash, doesn't he, Mummy?  He has been in a car crash.  That's how people look if they are run over by a car, all covered in blood.  Poor people killed him because no-one had any money.  But,” she said, “he is alive, with all that blood, and he is Phoebe’s guard.  Is it true, Mummy?”

My daughter, who did not look at the world through the prism of Christian fundamentalism, knew the guard was macabre.  Phoebe’s guard exposed my Christian wound, the blood of my veins and arteries, draining away.  The guard compelled me to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, to haemorrhage without mercy for myself.  Phoebe’s guard was, quite frankly, my nightmare.  I suppose after hundreds of generations of ritual and worship, human longing for inspiration and comfort penetrate the crucifixion like moss on old wood:  rotting it, softening it, reducing it to elemental particles that are ordinary and nutritious, despite its fundamental brutality.  But I want my daughter to celebrate a female spirituality, to know that her body’s lunar cycles will be mirrored in her life, that the full moon always waxes out of the dark, that the seasons can be trusted to turn.  There will be drought, when the land is barren, and then there will come the rain. 

I spoke to my daughter haltingly, wringing out the washer, turning on the taps to add more warm water.  I concurred:  the sponge carving of Jesus looked awful.  “Phoebe’s family have their own beliefs, which we need to respect, but which are different to ours,” I explained.  I prevaricated over whether people who are dead can come alive again, and settled for no.  I talked about the female god:  her bountiful, birthing nature. 

Amy had more questions, and I answered them as best I could, washing Johnny’s face.  Frances knocked on the door, with a sprig of peppermint in her shirt pocket and a breath of cool evening air clinging to her.  I called her in delightedly.  Her moonstone earrings glittered and danced.  She perched on the edge of the bath.

“Do you think the soul has gender?” she asked, after a while.  “I’m trying to finish off this assignment.  It’s overdue.”  In the years immediately after her divorce, Frances worked as a psychologist.  When she moved down to Brisbane, she purchased a highset weatherboard home in a Tarragindi gully, nestled amid rampant permaculture gardens and eucalypts, just a ten minute walk from my newly rented place.  Now she was studying theology.

“Yep,” I said, soaping up the washer for Johnny’s feet.  “The soul’s a blossom of the body, that’s how I think of it, so of course it’s gendered.”

“I love your ducky,” Frances said to Amy, who was squirting water out of a hole in the squeaky toy’s beak. 

I dreamt that night that Jeffrey demanded one of my three long-stemmed pink roses.  I   gave it to him by rubbing it over his bristly cheeks and destroying it.  Then I refused to bring beautiful things into my life anymore.  My mother drew me aside and asked me to show her my bedroom.  I took her into a naked little room with ugly timber-veneer walls. That’s when she understood how deeply I’d been hurt.

At dawn I found myself trying to sleep with a boy in flannelette pyjamas curled around my head.  When he woke, with that toothy grin and those dancing eyes, I buried my face in his blonde curls and showered him with kisses until he giggled. 

Later, as I made the bed, I heard Johnny say,  “Amy, guess what, when I got into Mummy’s bed in the night I saw a shadow of an elephant running.  I really did, I’m not tricking.”

“Can I have my cuddle now?  I didn’t get mine yesterday,” Amy replied, tying a bib on her doll.

“Alright.”  They cuddled. Then he continued.  “I saw a shadow of an elephant running.  I looked over there and saw it twice.”

“It can’t have been running, it must have been walking,” said Amy sensibly.  “If it was running the earth would have been shaking.”

 

a chemical imbalance

My first patient at work that day was a new mother.  She was an intelligent, competent professional.  She placed her two-month-old baby on the examination couch in front of us. 

“So, what do I do when she grizzles like this?” the woman asked.  The infant was healthy, and gaining weight nicely, but frequently cried inconsolably. 

“I just don’t know what to do when she gets like this,” the woman admitted, tears falling.  “I can barely get through the days.” 

This new mother was, as we all have been, afraid of the dark.  She was accustomed to the daylight, to knowing–planning–her path.  But when the arrival of a baby throws us down through the seven gates, there are no stars to guide us, and the silence of the earth is terrifying.  “This is not,” my patient said, wiping away tears, looking at the plump infant in a pink jumpsuit that wriggled and grizzled on the couch, “this is not the life I planned for myself.” 

I picked up the baby; by the time the consultation was over, I’d kept my next patient waiting forty minutes.

She was a twenty-two year old bulimic, who vomited five times a night.  I took her blood pressure, listened to her heart, drew blood from her veins.  Then she rocked forward in the chair, clutching her hand-bag ready to flee.  “Give me a pill, please,” the girl said. “Please, can’t you give me a pill to take it away.”

By the time I called in a Filipino woman of about my own age, with glossy red lipstick and high-heeled sandals, I was running an hour late. 

“I would like a pap smear,” she said in heavily-accented English.  She lay back on the couch with a tight smile.  When I opened the speculum, carefully, she flinched with a quick intake of breath and her thighs trembled.  “Yuk,” she said, “I hate pap smears.” 

I had been more concerned the time I inserted a speculum into the vagina of another patient of mine, who was depressed.  That woman insisted she didn’t mind pap smears, and when I opened the blades to find the cervix, I noticed with a chill that her pelvis, vagina and thighs were completely lifeless, flaccid and unresponsive.  It was easy to do the smear, but as I wiped both sides of the plastic brush over the grass slide and gave it a little spray of fixative, I reflected that she was frighteningly shut down. 

Pap smears are important; I have done many thousands over the years.  I worry, though, about the absence of other rich and celebratory images.  To think about the cervix is to open our quivering thighs to the steel blades, to allow a scraping and poking in the innermost recess of our body.  A responsible woman imagines her cervix, when she thinks of it at all, as an internal protuberance of cancerous possibility:  a hidden part of herself most notable for its capacity to turn foul and eat her up.  It’s important to have routine pap smears, but women also need a cultural imaginary that contests the medicalised, that offers us celebratory images of our jouissant female flesh.

“She gets like this,” the next patient said of her six-week-old baby, strapped into a car capsule.  “She’s tired, and she will grizzle until she falls asleep.”  Initially, the woman had had nipple pain and mastitis, common problems in the first few weeks, and caused by difficulties with attachment, positioning, and inadequate drainage of the breast. I wasn’t surprised to hear that it had taken the baby three weeks to regain her birth weight.  The obstetrician announced that the mother’s supply was failing, and prescribed domperidone.  The paediatrician advised the mother to feed no more than six times a day.  Despite this mismanagement, the baby had gained 500 grams in the last three weeks.  But the paediatrician wasn’t happy, because he averaged the weight gain from the day of birth, and told the mother she must give the baby an evening bottle of formula.  I gazed at this woman for a moment, perplexed.  Babies grizzle and nuzzle and cry for the breast, but the breast is withheld, according to the advice of the experts.  Because the milk isn’t flowing freely, the breast blocks up and becomes inflamed.  Because the baby isn’t feeding enough, it doesn’t fatten.  Because the breast isn’t suckled often enough, the supply drops off.  These circular problems, caused by our strange conviction that mothers and babies must be regulated, result in the failure of lactation. 

A mother came in with a whimpering toddler, who’d fallen headfirst out of a shopping trolley.  The child did not lose consciousness, and stopped crying shortly afterwards.  There was nothing to find, other than a two-centimetre lump on the right forehead, with no palpable deformity.  I sent the mother home with instructions for head injury observations and review if anything unusual happened.  Afterwards, I happened to mention it to the practice principal, as I paused for a glass of water in the kitchen.

"Always X-ray," he declared.  "Then you're covered.  Even if you know it’s OK."  Then I imagined the child convulsing:  intra-cranial haemorrhage, cerebellar coning, death–headlines, court cases, fingers pointing at me: the incompetent doctor.  I would call the mother at the end of the session.

My next patient was a thirty-eight year old woman.  She had closely cropped hair and drawn features.  She requested a script for Zoloft and a referral to a psychiatrist.  I took a history.  She’d been depressed on and off for the last seven years and had tried a variety of medications.

“I want a psychiatrist because psychologists don’t have a scientific background,” she announced, weary of my questions.  “Psychiatrists are trained in both therapy and drugs, aren’t they?”

“Well, yes,” I replied, carefully placing my pen on the Norvasc ad at the bottom of the desk blotter, “although psychiatrists can tend to focus on diagnostics and medications–” 

“Anyway, it’s all a matter of chemistry,” she interrupted, flatly.  “I’ve tried counsellors and they were no use.  I just need the script and a shrink.”

I sighed inwardly, pulled the script pad towards me, and began writing.  “OK,” I said, “let’s run through possible side-effects.”

A month later, this woman with the closely-cropped, bleached hair returned.  There was a brisk I’m-in-control air about her.

“I’m seventy-five percent back to myself,” she said.  “Not one hundred percent, but better.  I feel more like getting up in the morning, I’ve stopped thinking so much about wanting a baby; I’m not so sensitive to things that people say.”

“Wonderful!”  I asked if she had made an appointment with the psychiatrist.  She said she’d changed her mind; she didn’t think it would make a difference. 

I inquired once more into the history of her depression, and this time she told me that before she began taking Prozac, a number of years ago, she’d been watching her friends marry and have children.  Everyone she cared about was marrying and having children.  She longed desperately for children but had no partner and wanted to die because she was lonely, and life was empty.  Once she started Prozac, she was happy for the first time.  She became the person she was meant to be.  She finally understood what she had been missing out on.  At last she wanted to get out of bed and she had lots of energy; it didn’t matter that she didn’t have a family.  Previously, she had been very sensitive to others’ opinions about her and brooded over imagined slights, but on Prozac she understood what people meant when they said, “Just brush it off.”  Suddenly, she could.  At least at first.

A while back she took herself off it.  Prozac stopped working after two years, she told me, even at the maximum dose.  Being on it was initially an upward spiral, but then became a downward spiral, she explained.  Finally, she came in last month because she was feeling worse than ever.  A friend told her that Zoloft worked wonders, and that was why she had asked for it.  And the Zoloft was, she insisted, doing the job.

“We need to try to sort out what is happening for you psychologically,” I proffered.  “Cognitive behavioural therapy can make a big difference. Have you heard of it?”

She said she understood what had been happening. In fact, half the problem was thinking too much.  She didn’t want to keep going over and over things. 

“Ah,” I said, “but that’s what CBT helps you do:  manage your thoughts.”

She looked at me doubtfully.  “My previous doctor said I would need to be on anti-depressants for the rest of my life because I was born with a chemical imbalance in the brain.” 

My heart sank.  The old ‘chemical imbalance in the brain’!   The pharmaceutical fix!  I felt a familiar internal tension.  I could see that for some people, temperament and genetics, lack of opportunity and painful life circumstance may congeal into a certain biochemical paralysis.  There is, without doubt, a vital role for anti-depressants in clinical practice.  For a start, lives are saved.  But from my first years as a GP, I’ve resented having to collude with the simplistic idea that depression results from an immutable organic state, that chemicals go mysteriously awry–as if the way we use our brain has nothing to do with it, as if life experience and social circumstance have nothing to do with it, as if we are hapless victims to the tyranny of biochemistry, incapable of affecting our own neurohormonal state.  According to this unsophisticated medical model, depression is corrected by anti-depressants, if necessary for the remainder of a patient’s life.  Doctors write 12 million scripts for them every year in Australia.  If depression is imagined as a static state–a chemical imbalance in the brain–patients feel powerless and I’ve watched many, at any eruption of sadness, become paralysed by a fear that the ‘black dog’ will return.  This fear itself breeds anxiety and depression.  I have, since my earliest clinical experiences, resented having to kneel before the altar of biological determinism in order to be seen as competent.  I have never been a believer.

Lately, there is an emerging awareness of the human being’s remarkable and innate neuroplasticity, biological language for an old spiritual concept, that of hope.  Neuroplasticity explains the way habits of thought, arising out of certain experiences and predispositions, effect the neurotransmitters and reinforce unhelpful neuronal pathways.  But when we help someone alter, if not their life circumstances, then the way they think about their life circumstances, we create new circuitry in the brain.  This may involve CBT; it may involve forms of therapy more complex, more nuanced, than CBT; it may involve spiritual practices, such as mindfulness.  The science of neuroplasticity teaches us the possibility–or, if we believe, the inevitability–of the sweet full moon, the resurrection, the rain.  At last, there is hope, and healing.

“OK.  Well, I should organise blood tests at least, to exclude any physical causes of depressed mood, but I really think these longings for a partner and kids that you’ve had are important.  Can I refer you on to someone who will explore them with you?” 

She shook her head.  “No point,” she said. 

I studied her for a moment with a rueful smile.  “You promise if you ever want to talk it over, you’ll let me know?” 

“Promise,” she said

You can see that I’ve been much too concerned with context to be happy as a clinician.  There is, of course, the fragility and the magnificence of the human body.  You’d think that would have fascinated me, and it did.  Like any living thing a human body may sicken or die, without logic and despite everything.  We inhabit a vulnerable flesh.  Sometimes fate writes into us a mysterious flaw; many of us live with an inexplicable wound.  This is the terror, this is the gift, of our humanity.  How could I translate my passion for context into general practice?  I couldn’t. I didn’t want to practice medicine. But I needed to provide for my children, so I turned up anyway, and did my best.

***

THE JUDGES SAID ...

Bone Mother is a fictionalised memoir of a Brisbane doctor who recounts her strict Methodist upbringing, her university life, early years as a doctor and her troubled marriage and often difficult early years of motherhood. It examines the mythology and reality of motherhood through the narrator’s relationship with her mother and through the birth and childhood of her own children. It also offers interesting ideas around the perception of birth and motherhood in Western society, supported by personal stories of the central character’s work as a GP in women’s health.


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