Bloodline Burdens: A Memoir
Coco Thompson
‘This will determine if you move or stay. If she sees how you play, and that you play well with me, she will see that you can’t move to Brisbane with your mother’.
Although not a direct quote from my father, I know he expressed something similar to me in the June of 2011, whilst awaiting a court mandated family consult meeting. I did not know that this was what it was and had a rather convoluted idea of the situation that I was about to enter into.
The weight of that sentence, it settled onto my chest, and later instilled itself into my heart. The heaviness it left would have had me sunk to the bottom of a lake like a witch on trial, my pockets though need not bear any rocks, my heart, my soul, my conscience was hefty enough. I was eight, and within a single moment felt as though I had become so burdensome no one would ever be able to carry me, in that wonderful childish purgatory where you’re neither awake nor asleep but somewhere in between, from the couch to my bed again.
And as for myself, I knew that I would not be able to support my own new weight across the monkey bars, that I would never make it to the other side. I would spend eternity stuck perpetually swinging from the first monkey bar back to the platform that I was always stranded on, never moving forward. Only a taste of ‘What if?’ in the mild swing of my legs, just to return to where I always was, always had been, and where I felt I always would be.
My father lived in a defence house, the one my family moved into when I was three. This was before the divorce happened, and I began to spend my time split between my parents and their places. His house though, it had orange terracotta tiles, and a long hallway, the backyard had a planted herb garden and the most inexplicable batch of wild rosemary. Which I would eat in the backyard, rolling it between my hands and fingers, letting the fragrance infuse my skin. My father was in the Army, he currently still is, and I think it is rather beautiful in a tragic way that a rosemary bush blessed our backyard, a defence house, a house that homed an army man, and partially his child. Rosemary, the herb that represents fidelity and remembrance. Rosemary, the herb that grows on the Gallipoli peninsula. Rosemary, the herb that is pinned to my shirt on Anzac Day as we mourn those who have died across wars, and from wars. Anzac Day, a day that I also mourn my lost childhood to the army, the sacrificial lamb that my father chose for the slaughter.
I do not mourn that house though, that was all it was in the end, a house that sufficiently lacked homeliness, like my father lacks empathy. The only thing that house had was Rosemary.
My mother, however, she built her own house, and when they laid the concrete slab down for the driveway, we wrote our initials into the drying cement, an act that felt awfully close to immortality. This was felt, even though someone might repave that driveway, or one day that whole development could get knocked down and rebuilt again. It was felt, even though those letters might not stand the test of time, but in that moment with the grey cement at my mercy, I think I felt a semblance to what the Denisovan’s felt when they drew their first pictures on cave walls.
I also think, maybe, being a part of that house, writing my name in its bones, is what made it a home.
In that home my mother had a tall bed, when I was younger it seemed to expand upwards in a grand way that made it look like it belonged in a fairy-tale. I could always see Rapunzel sleeping in it, her long hair yellow as corn draping over the tall edges down to the floor, other times it was Mama Bear’s bed, and I was Baby Bear sleeping in it after a nightmare. I used to love clambering into it at night, and cuddling close to my mother, at that height, with her near, I knew that I was safe, that there was nothing that could hurt me, nothing to fear.
I cried when I found out my mother was selling that home, despite it being years since I had lived in it, or even lived in the same city as it. But its walls held so much of me, that sometimes I grieve the knowledge that I won’t be able to press my hand to its plaster and suddenly like a whisper remember all the moments in it that I have forgotten, that have laid waste to time.
The family court room was wooden panelled, a deep stained brown, it was carpeted too, a well-worn blue. There was a dollhouse in the corner, with those wooden dolls that had painted faces, wire twine limbs, and cotton provincial clothing. The lady was there, she wore business dress, with a notepad, and worst of all, she seemed nice. It made it all very hard to visualise her as the enemy that I had been warned about, she was no scaly fire breathing dragon, or horribly wicked witch, she was just a woman.
Yet, I knew that she had power. My father had told me.
The lady sat with me, at a small children’s wooden table and chairs, she asked me questions about my home, about whether I liked living with my father, followed by whether I liked living with my mother.
Then she asked me, ‘Do you want to move to Brisbane?’
I can remember sitting with the question in that room, rolling it around on my tongue. It was the most uncomfortable of previous acquaintances to meet again because I had been asked it before, I had tasted its answer in my mouth, it was who I sat with it at night, never Mr. Sandman only the shadow cloaked Boogeyman, and the guilt of knowing that the answer was ‘no’ ate away at me like butterflies to a carcass.
Nevertheless, I cannot lie. Deceit makes me sick, if I do not announce it immediately it becomes violent in my body, leaving me coiled over and curled. I could almost feel it rising in my body, and with wet eyes threatening, I told the lady ‘no’.
But the remorse I felt after answering truthfully flooded my lungs, bit back nails to bloodied thumbs, the word a burn on my tongue. I was a betrayer to my mother, a backstabber, a silent traitor at supper.
I mentioned this moment recently to my mother, in our kitchen, in a new home, in Brisbane as I dried up dishes with gnawed nailbed fingertips, ones that she has painted nail polish on so many times to try and stop my teeth and their intentions, without knowing why they insist on destruction. She would be there, holding them delicately, whilst my hands shake, and brushing smoothly, carefully, over their uneven rims.
My mother, with her soft, kind, giving, gentle soul, so divinely created that anything she makes must be blessed, said ‘I know. I didn’t expect you to say yes, to want to leave your father, your friends, the only life you had ever known’.
With those words she had wiped clear my mind, like a priest she had abolished my sin. Thanks be to God, that because she had created me, I was blessed with her. Plate in my hand, no longer shaking, but finally a comfortable stable.
My mother continued on to denounce my father’s wrongdoings, brought to light his sins, ones that he would never renounce for the sake of anything other than himself. She told me, in her voice (that I sound so much like) that it was never in my hands, that the lady was there to make sure I was okay, that I was safe and sound. She was there to ensure that throughout the tumultuous sea crossing of the Federal Circuit I was not becoming another capsized ship, another soul lost to an icy death grip.
In the end, I was raised by an army man, and I wish that I had met him before he was one. I wonder if he was kinder, nicer, in the ‘before’. I wonder if prior to that uniform, that rank, that arrogance, if he had a gentleness that absconded him with every round he shot from the battle guns, if the resonance of the cannons booming is what stopped his ears from hearing of hurt, if the callouses that he bore on his hands travelled deeper, if the sergeants yelling is what left his heart scorned, scorched, so well-worn it had no room for my mother, or for me.
My father, the army man, he who believes he taught me how to be a fighter. A fallacy that he created, for his fighting has done nothing but lead me to an unwavering ache. My father, his unrest left me on my back, eyes looking skyward, making me his martyr, his daughter, a doomed solider with her fate sealed, dying from a blooming wound like a poppy picked from Flanders Field.
I was loved by my mother though. She is who grew me from nothing to now, her green thumb not received well by plants but like water to people instead, and I am her home kept sunshine, nurtured from seedling to now, I seemed to of created her solar system. She always told me I did, in bed, long filed nails stroking my hair, as she sung ‘you are my sunshine’, and the final line of ‘please don’t take my sunshine away’ must have choked in her throat sometimes, with the knowledge that there were people that she would seemingly spend eternity fighting tooth and nail with to keep from stealing me. She is strong my mother, she is strong with kindness, with how she swaddles me in blankets, holding me close to her when unwell, with how she tenderly washes my childhood bear in a tub of warm water and soap, and with how she would braid my hair for picture day, adorned with white ribbons, a vision of purity, whilst her shoulder, and neck ached from pain.
My mother is who makes me strong, she is who I fight with, raised voices, that go hoarse from the screaming, words that shoot like knives, from our whip-like tongues, she is who can hurt me most. She is also who has helped me grow the most; if I can fight with her, I am comfortable with her, safely knowing that I can be mean, and cruel, and harsh, and she can be it back, but at the end of the day, when I am angry at her, when I am hurt by her, I still want to exist in her space. With her near. I want to force our anger to clash together like tectonic plates, making the Earth our home stands on rumble, I would rather argue with my mother, than place any space between me and her.
My mother, she is who made me a fighter, not him. Her.
I am aware that I may not be overly wise, I would not dare pretend to be, but one thing I know, is that there will be a day when the sun sets on our era together, like the circles drawn on palms at bedtime by fingertips, ‘round and round the garden’ and round and round the world, it all comes back to her. My mirror reflection, she who is in the curl of my hair, the person who is most like myself, my mother.
And I love her.
Author: Coco Thompson
Coco Thompson is an emerging Brisbane based author, currently studying a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at QUT. Her writing is influenced by her relationship with the LGBTQIA+ community, and her lived experiences overseas. As a creative, she predominantly specialises in the exploration of queerness in literature, and contemporary prose works.
Artist: James Shang
Edited by: Charley Anderson, Max Jenner, and Nyah Marsden
Editors: Tia Shang