Tuesday, January 15, 2013

'There are thousands of hungry children all over the world who would give anything to eat your dinner,' my mother said to my eight-year old self, watching as I pushed cold and untouched mashed potato around my plate. Her words had little effect, with interchangeable threats of no dessert, a smack and early bedtime being met with surly muttered responses along the lines of 'why don't you put it in an envelope and send it to them then.' A fussy eater and a brat,  her attempts to strike a chord of empathy in me did nothing to evoke a reaction.

'I hate Christmas', I said. 'It makes everything bad seem worse.' I was fourteen, the child of newly divorced parents and only just beginning the teenage years that were to be filled with determined and steely angst and indignation. I had heard that line in a movie, or read it in a book, believing it to be aptly suited to the way I felt about my current state of affairs. A lady I worked with, in her fifties, someone who knew a little something about the heartache life can bring, reprimanded me while her Christmas earrings jangled and flashed. 'Oh come on, tell me what's bad?'

'One day you will write a book,' my history teacher told me in Year 12, as I sobbed wearily and wiped snot from my nose with my sleeve, all because my final essay remained incomplete. 'On the pain and struggle of your life.'

By the time I finished high school I had a new mantra. 'I hate this fucking town', I spat, as I spent a summer sweating out 60 hour work weeks, all in a bid to leave as quickly as I could. I had tried pessimism on for size and loved the way it fit me. These days I love corny quotes, get a kick from cliches, write overly sentimental messages in birthday cards, gush at love stories, hold on too long during goodbye hugs and get teary at community events, but I'll still call myself a cynic.

The hospitality industry broadcasts the worst and the ugliest qualities in people, while human services shows you just how unravelled their lives can become. Am I doomed to see disaster every day, railing along the spectrum of no manners to no opportunity? I find solace in the sparks of children, who plough through minefields and manage to smile at the other end.  The first time I saw a child in what I considered to be broken pieces of a life, shards that left innocence cut and bleeding, I refused to fathom its functionality. Families cannot be this way and still go on, my mind shuddered that night, as I drank red wine like water so I could stop feeling and desperately searched for someone to explain to me why it was. It seemed like months that I felt my way blindly through each shift, holding onto intuition with white knuckles and emerging a carb-craving mess at the other end every time.

Months on, nothing has changed too much, except now I have begun to be able to distance myself at arm's length. I don't dream of the little faces, have stopped seeing every problem of every person who passes me in the street. Maybe empathy has a limit, before it freezes you where you stand, arms outstretched in a bid to make it better. You are paralysed by comprehension of another's pain, such is so to the point where you don't recognise your own and cannot do anything to stop or change any of it. Last year I was at a friend's birthday, and his mother spoke of how he saw and felt the world's pain but was not overcome by it. I was immediately envious without knowing why.

Apathy panics me, so does idealism. Can't we just be realistic? I plead with my textbooks that reference long-winded theories and how they will help us achieve a world where social services do what they are supposed to, all of the time. They don't say anything about how you are supposed to feel when you watch a child's face remain blank as their parent approaches them for a court-ordered hour every week, of a grandmother's pleas, of tears and tantrums echoing in a carpark and trying to navigate the backstreets of a suburb so far away you wonder if you're still in the same city. I went to a seminar where a child protection worker spoke of 'Positive Fridays', and I thought it was a crock. Now I understand why you have to grab onto the little things every Friday after lunch, so you aren't swallowed up by a system that sometimes seems to hinder more than help.

How can I put Band-Aids where you are bleeding, when my own knees are still mottled purple with reminders of my mother laying her cool hands while I howled in pain? Those scars still aren't quite healed, remaniscent of cold asphalt netball courts, of creaking brakes on a bike, running down slopes, ramps and stairs with no fear, a childhood where blooming innocence was mostly left unpruned, happiness grew like the centimetres marking our height in lead pencil on our grandparents' wall, where strong hands held me, the bath water was warm and at night we dreamt of mostly good things while luminescent star stickers glowed on the ceilings. So blessed was I, that I simply cannot bear to comprehend your world where things have gone so wrong. I want to fix it all, put colour back in your sky as the grey clouds leech borders and the rain never stops. If I could I would, wrap you up tight and hold you close, make you okay. But you are not mine to have, not mine to hold. The broken pieces of the puzzle I desperately want to see, never fit together the way I imagine. Your sun is bright, until they go away, and I have vowed to stop, the day I go home unaffected, where I am no longer angry at the injustice of it all.