Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer
I fell into the perfect family the year I spent in Denmark. They were straight from the pages of Hans Christian Andersen: Far was the local lighthouse keeper; Mor was the local post mistress; the son was a royal guard at the Queen’s palace, complete with bearskin and sabre; and there were three blonde daughters to round it all out. There was a cat (indoors), a dog (outdoors) and a family of hedgehogs who shared the dog’s water bowl. Home in Melbourne, my stepmother liked to call me a cunt; my dad was either stoned or drunk on cask red; and I would go months at a time without seeing my mum. My stepmother’s four cats (indoors) regularly pissed in the house and no-one ever thought to clean it up.
The perfect family lived in a centuries-old farmhouse attached to a barn that a generation ago was a piggery. An orchard on the farm produced apples and a fresh Christmas tree every December, when the ground was covered in snow and the lake was frozen solid. The perfect family gave me a room of my own and 11-year-old Joan (pronounced Yo-ann) put yellow post-it notes all over house for me, each one written with the Danish word for whatever piece of furniture the note was stuck to. When I was Joan’s age, police had kicked our back door down and shone flashlights around my bedroom while I lay shaking under the covers, because dad was threatening suicide again.
20 years has passed since I saw my perfect family. Today I was asked what I would do if I only had six months to live, and why I hadn’t done that thing already. As well as publishing the memoir I am currently editing, the thing I would do is visit my perfect family. When I lived with them as an eager 15-year-old exchange student, Mor taught me how to make frikadeller; passing on the necessity of burning one’s hands with melted butter to ensure the meatballs formed the right shape, molded between the palm and a spoon. At home in Melbourne my stepmother, a cook for a living, gave my dad and I food poisoning on more than one occasion.
The reasons why I hadn’t been back to Denmark, to visit the perfect family who shared so much with me, are all the reasons I’m writing a memoir in the first place. How do I explain my dad’s three marriages to Mor and Far, who celebrated their silver wedding anniversary when I lived with them? Will Jesper, who bought the farmhouse for his own family when Mor and Far downsized, understand that until the age of 30 I’d never lived in one house for longer than 12 months at a time?
The things the perfect family gave me – togetherness, tradition, simplicity – both delighted and destroyed me. I hadn’t known families like that existed outside fairytales. It’s not surprising, really, that, despite being a lesbian, when I met the family of a boy who liked me, I jumped straight in and married him. His family offered me the same thing the perfect family had. They gave me my innocence back.
When I came home from Denmark I lost all control. This time it was substance abuse, mental illness and abusive relationships I fell into. It took many years and a failed marriage I was convinced was going to save me, to regain some of that control. But I just couldn’t make it stick, and when I left my husband, his family and all that they represented, I went spinning once again. I wasn’t built for perfect family life. Innocence wasn’t mine to hold onto.
If I only had six months to live I might call the perfect family; but I won’t be visiting them any time soon. My family now is me, my girlfriend and our two dogs, and I am proud to call them my own.
Kelly’s memoir The Art of Corpulence and Forgetting is about losing innocence, and is currently in the ‘up draft’ phase. You can find her at @kayeebeee.