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AUTHOR’S
BIO. Margaret Weise lives in retirement with her husband, Brian and her dog Pixie in south Queensland. Her mother is in the final stages of Alzheimer's Disease. Margaret and Brian each have three children from former marriages. Between them they have twelve grandchildren, a considerable family of which to be a part. She enjoys writing and has several other manuscripts awaiting publication. At the present time she is working on Volume Two of ‘One Link in the Chain’. As well, she loves to spend time with her family, read widely, watch movies and current affairs’ programs, play cards with her friends, travel, play a little lawn bowls, do handicrafts and keep in touch with people who have made her life whole. Chapter
One
THE
PEBBLE IN MY SHOE
This
is a personal account of my family’s relationships. At its heart is my
mother’s struggle for independence, beginning in the first half of last
century. It was a time of
entrenched attitudes toward women. I grew up closely analysing the issues, while
extricating some sense of my own individuality. Having
thought for many years about my part in the scheme of things, I found
inspiration at the genesis, the atmosphere of my childhood. Being cossetted by
much love when small, I struggled to comprehend the degree of barbarity and
injustice we had to deal with from other quarters. A sense of grievance bothered
me like a pebble in a shoe, aggravating, chaffing, rubbing raw, refusing to be
ousted. I
have pondered at length the machinations prior to my birth. The loving way my
grandmother manipulated my mother assuming she had some God-given right to
possess her; the monster who was my father, his dealings with my mother and,
through him, her experiences with religious and legal fraternities, the nursing
community and society in general. These issues appalled me as much as they
focused my life-long attention. How
I resented being the target of schoolyard bullies and bigoted teachers because I
existed beyond their definition of normalcy.
Children are so readily victimised by matters beyond their comprehension. In
dealing with sensitive issues, names have been changed to protect the innocent
and the not so innocent. Some characters are composites of various people, a
couple are entirely fictitious. Occasionally I’ve used fictional techniques to
explain the inexplicable and for the sake of continuity in instances where
family members weren’t privy to conversations.
I have quoted my mother’s account of events verbatim. You
will never find the towns of Kersbrook, Boolgoolie and Murwullanda on a map of
this area in Australia. They exist only beyond the shadowland in a realm called
Yesteryear. In
my mother’s day men decided whether women would be educated, how much freedom
they would be allowed, their ability to divorce an unsuitable or violent
partner, their monetary situation and the right to the children’s custody or
upbringing. Fathers and husbands were supremely powerful. Church
and state operated like large men’s clubs, generating and wielding absolute
control. Little or no appeal against the rectitude of their authority was
granted. In some cases, women had also become indoctrinated with prejudicial and
intolerant attitudes of the kind that had been handed down for generations. My
mother was conditioned to accept her destiny, not so much by confrontation as by
painstaking training in how things should be. Giving birth to me bound her ever
more tightly in a web of duty to her parents, held her as firmly as padlocks and
chains of steel. By repeating their unquestioning ownership to her, they assumed
unequivocal mastery over our future. A illusory sense of shame caused by my
birth dogged my mother all her days. Sixty-four
years after her violation, as the century turned the millennium wheel, I
continued to question how much attitudes have changed among people of her
generation and mine. All
her life, well into her twilight years, my mother shed scalding tears over the
injustices done to her, reiterating them as though desperate to purge the pain
of cruelty. She couldn’t have appreciated how burdened I became on hearing
such stories. I suffered from a nebulous feeling of guilt which I finally
identified as concern for having been instrumental in her undoing. The
crucible in which our lives were distilled also fired my ability to remember
without fear or favour or I might have left those decades so fraught with
hostility tightly closed. It’s impossible to shelve childhood impressions. The
chimera they create continually haunts us. Thus I was forced to analyse this
mercurial menace in order to exorcise it. The
image of my father always fills me with mixed emotions, destabilising my innate
need to achieve a sense of balance. I only met him for half an hour and speak
mainly from my family’s memories. Mostly
I have written about unremarkable people in commonplace lives. This story will
be familiar to thousands of women in and around my generation. Contemporary
attitudes empower us to take control of our lives, enabling us to share our
experiences and empathise with others’. Dredging up the past can bring out
unexpected emotions, perhaps useful to those who are also seeking some sense of
resolution to the their lives. We
are a link in a chain of generations, the connection between ancestors and
descendants. Writing this book has enabled me to review the many I have loved
and lost. And to speculate on those inborn and conditioned traits which caused
them to behave the way they did. I
am feeling as though I’m still waiting at the station for the magical mystery
tour of life to begin, when the truth is, the tour is nearly over. One day I was
a girl poised on the brink of a future, but poising on the brink took up many
years. Now there’s not many left. How swiftly a lifetime passes and how
quickly the opportunity to tell that singular tale is lost. This is my story,
once lovingly hoarded. Now I let it burst forth. Click on the cart below to purchase this book:
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