Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
When we built in Warrandyte, I had already given up architecture and segued into my new career in feminist health promotion. The three of us – Jem, Buzz and I – holed up cosily in the little mudbrick while Jem designed and oversaw the construction of the family home on the bush block. By the time the new house was done and the cottage renovated for use as Jem’s studio, I was pregnant again. Life for me was the office, and family.
In Jem’s design there was no dedicated space just for me. I should be fair to him; it was not as if he overlooked me completely. In the flowing open plan there was a nook with an inset desk and bookshelf, and a view to the garden. It was white and bright and beautiful. But there were no doors to close, and it flowed on to the kitchen. The boys used it as their playroom. I suppose Jem thought it would be ideal, allowing me to do a bit of my paid work at the desk while the boys entertained themselves and each other. I quickly cluttered the desk. As soon as Remy was six months and mobile, he would make a commando-crawl beeline to the bookshelf and dismantle all my beautiful books, pulling them off and ripping out pages. So my art and design books got packed away in boxes.
At the time I did not ask Jem to give me my own studio in the design. I didn’t think that I deserved one. What was I doing that needed a creative space? Nothing. If I was to use a creative space for something, would it make any money, like Jem’s? No. Did I have time anyway? I had a challenging senior position, and a long commute, and small children, and typically unfulfilled promises to self of daily exercise. And Mum. Lonely Bernie. There just didn’t seem to be anything much left over.
When Bernie announced that she was installing a shed in her backyard for use as her own creative space, within which she was not yet sure what would happen, something seethed in me. I was surprised and ashamed of my reaction. After all, wasn’t I the one who encouraged Mum in the gradual reclaiming of her life after Dad’s death? And finally, at seventy-five years of age, Bernie was telling us that she wanted something for herself, that she had wanted it for thirty years, and that she was finally in the position to make it happen. And I resented her for it. How dare she have this thing, this space and time for beauty and creation and play and stillness and fucking self and solitude? Was it not going to be spoiled on a woman of her age, and anyway, didn’t she knew how fucking lucky she was to be alone, in her own house, in command of her own time? Why did she need more?
This was the woman who was liberated from an abusive relationship by the early demise of her partner, and by the introduction of policies to support single mothers.
I told Ryvre about my ungenerous reaction and my continued sense of pain when I went for my next secret fortnightly session.
He looked at me in that unnerving way he had of holding my gaze well beyond my period of comfort. While not sexual, it always felt far more intimate than I was prepared for. He took a deep breath and then exhaled audibly to signal a release or a realisation: ‘haahhhh’.
‘Beautiful. Great.’
He jumped up and shook out his body, furry orange pants and a 70s khaki knitted jumper, bare feet.
‘I want you to stand up,’ he said. ‘Shake out your body; get loose. Close your eyes if you’d like.’
This was my least favourite part of any of this—the enactment through the body. Ryvre fucking loved that shit; I knew he regularly attended hippy dance meets and I had seen him completely lose himself in strange New Age rituals involving a lot of touching and sudden wild cries and ecstatic shaking. I thought it was weird and icky and I always had trouble taking Ryvre seriously in those moments. I would always think, what a loud of shit.
‘Now go into that feeling. Breeaaathe into it. Try to picture the creature who feels those things. How does it behave? What does it say?’
I stood there breathing through suppressed giggles of embarrassment and then frantic searching for something to feel the awkward silence. I stole a look at Ryvre; his eyes were closed and he seemed to be deep in reverie. He was committed, I gave him that much.
‘Where is that feeling of anger and resentment in the body?’
I kept breathing. And then I saw it; a little black and red cloud over a fuming girl. She was stamping her feet and then flinging herself around on the ground.
‘IWANTIWANTIWANTIWANT!!!’ I yelled. My eyes snapped open in surprise.
Ryvre was grinning. ‘And what is it that you want?’
‘Space for creativity,’ I whispered.
He whooped and then yodelled. I smiled sheepishly. And then I felt shit scared.
After the session was done, I sat with Molly by the river, at our special place. I loved it here; the Yarra was so dark in places that it was almost black, and it looked like a smooth, mosaicked quilt, flat and glossy and soft in patches. It was cut through with these neat ridged rectangles of rock that looked like worn-down blackened molars. Molly looked longing at the ducks. I thought about how our youngest son Remy had loved this place from a young age, how his first word at ten months was ‘duck’, or more precisely, ‘DU!’ A joyous, clipped syllable with no close at the end. He was now eight, and what did he or his eleven-year-old brother know of me? They could sit in the cottage with Jem, and watch his process, see something being imagined and created. They witnessed how Jem pulled the creative elements to him from life beyond. They could visit the construction sites, the finished buildings, hear others talk about them, even read what others had written.
What of me and my world? I went off to an office four days a week and spent the fifth working at the kitchen table, tapping away at a laptop. I was a commuting office worker, that mysterious yet dull adult world that sucked the life-force from us all. While beyond the house I did work that I thought was important, and tried to find ways to talk to the boys about it, I felt dulled and inhibited by my own bureaucratic speak, deterred by their lack of responsiveness. I was a drone and I was Mum.
I had spent so long resenting that Jem and the boys did not see more in me, and yet how could I expect them to see what I did not value in myself? Men do not feel the need to justify time and space for creativity, play and exploration, for their own projects; they feel entitled to it and just claim it. I had been waiting for validation, and it sickened me. I had a mother who was married far too young to a cruel man. I had a grandmother who wrote three novel manuscripts and stuck them in a drawer to be found after her death.
Molly nuzzled me. I played absentmindedly with some eucalypt leaves that had fallen on to the rocks around me, turning them over and over in my hands, feeling the oily exterior, smelling the fragrance released when I folded them. What did Ryvre say? Imagine putting your worries, your negative emotions on a leaf, one by one, and sending the leaves down the river.
I selected a leaf, one speckled with pink and distinctly heart-shaped. I leaned down and placed it in the water, imagined it carrying a whole weight of something slimy and alive and angry. It sailed away surprisingly fast and over a ridge and round the bend, quickly too small for me to follow its path any longer.
I stood up and led Molly away, turning my back on the river.
It was not until that night, lying beside a infuriatingly unconscious Jem, dreaming the blissed-out dreams of one living their fucking authentic successful creative life, that that little leaf speeding down the river toward the city came back to me.
I had my project. Tomorrow I would need some good paper, pencils and pens.