Some Other Destiny?
Gabrielle Carey, Waiting Room: A Memoir. Melbourne: Scribe,
2009.
Caught between caring for her
ailing mother and attending to her demanding children, Gabrielle Carey wonders
in the middle of Waiting Room when she will be able to ‘squeeze in a bit
of life’ between these duties. Then she is struck by a terrible thought:
…Maybe this is life. Waiting rooms, traffic lights, family squabbles. What else did I expect? Something bigger, greater, more meaningful, perhaps? Why was I convinced that I was missing out on something? That there was some other destiny for me out there that was far more structured, far more directional, more ambitious than this dull, day-to-day management of appointments, housework, and student assignments? (p. 124)
Waiting Room is an account of the period in Carey’s life when her mother was diagnosed with a massive brain tumour. As she observes this fiercely independent woman struggle in the face of devastating memory loss and increasing dependence, Carey is struck by how little she really knows of her mother’s life and family history and how little time may now remain to correct this. But Waiting Room is more than the story of her mother’s illness; Carey's urgent desire to know her mother’s life experiences more intimately is woven into a meditation on mortality, on family legacies, on the nature of creativity and on the unfolding meaning of life. This is Carey in mid-life looking around and assessing what it is that makes life, families and writing meaningful when on a day-to-day basis they all can seem to lack, if not purpose exactly, then the satisfying order or shape one often imagined they would assume.
Waiting Room is the latest in a series of works in which Carey turns a critical lens on aspects of her personal life. Her teenage rebellion was famously chronicled in Puberty Blues (1979) which she co-authored with Kathy Lette. This was followed by Just Us (1984) which traced her relationship with long-term prison inmate, Terry Haley, and In My Father’s House (1992), the painful account of her relationship with her father who suicided the day before Carey returned from years of living overseas. In some respects, Waiting Room can be read as a sequel to In My Father’s House and, if it is a slighter work, it remains a striking one. In My Father’s House expressed anger and incomprehension at the loss of her father in such an untimely fashion and Waiting Room similarly captures Carey’s anxiety that she may suddenly be deprived of the time she needs to examine – and perhaps even celebrate − the never straight-forward bonds of familial intimacy.
The bonds she traces here are those between mothers and daughters and she brings to this touchy and often awkward terrain a quality of scrutiny that successfully skirts the sentimental. It is the thought that she may soon lose her mother altogether or, at the very least, access to her familiar personality and memories, that troubles Carey as she accompanies a now forgetful and fretful woman on her rounds of increasingly distressing medical appointments. At the same time, Carey’s concerns for her mother’s failing health and the stories she has never told her daughter about her past are intertwined with her own anxieties about what kind of mother she may be for her own teenage daughter. What are the legacies, she wonders, that are shared by generations of mothers and daughters? She has a lingering sense that her mother’s family deprived her of a rightful share in family property which prompts an extended meditation on the complex nature of inheritance, one of the more significant themes explored in Waiting Room. Thinking of her growing daughter, Carey reflects:
I knew Brigie wouldn’t inherit much from me financially, but I hoped that she might inherit something else. Because inheritance is not just about the final will and testament: what we inherit materially, from our parents and grandparents, is really only a small part of all that we receive, willingly or unwillingly, from our forebears. Inheritance is also about temperament, character, intelligence, habits, dispositions, genetics, artistic inclinations, religious impulses, philosophical leanings, and cultural traditions. (p.158)
While she has enjoyed and even preferred to think of herself as nothing like her own mother, as events unfold Carey is forced to recognize that they might instead be just ‘two of a kind…peas in a pod’. The same secrecy and refusal of intimate confession that she knows frustrates her own daughter about her is no different from her mother’s refusal to supply even such mundane details as where she had met Carey’s father. They are, she realizes
both mute and constantly in fear of being psychologically exposed, of being caught out, of being seen not as we wanted to be seen – as responsible and in control – but for what we really were: naked and needy, like everyone else. (p. 187)
Carey is by turns tormented by the idea that her own daughter may not have inherited very much from her (‘I had to admit, I was a little disappointed that I could see nothing of myself in my daughter’, p. 159), and relieved to discover − in light of her own adolescence − that Brigie is ‘so completely and utterly normal’: even if it is a mystery to her that some much could have ‘been completely erased in the period of a single generation’ (p.158). Interestingly, beyond her passion for clothes and all manner of similarly superficial things, one marker of Brigie’s apparent ‘normality’ is that she shows none of the qualities of contemplation and reflection that Carey associates with the writing life. ‘I didn’t want my children to experience the driven, internal, intellectual, literary, solitary, individualistic existence that I had led’ (p. 160). And this is another important strand to Carey’s reflections in Waiting Room: the challenges and disappointments of the writing life. Alongside the doctor’s appointments and children’s meals Carey keeps returning to a ‘To Do’ list that contains the note: Send draft novel to publishers. She admits that this item, like so many others, is a permanent fixture on an unchanging list of major enterprises that are routinely displaced by infinitely smaller and more pressing daily demands. Her life, as represented here, is reminiscent of Tillie Olsen’s famous formulation of the woman writer’s existence as ‘part-time, part-self’ where moments for creative endeavour are sandwiched between children, paid employment and the domestic round. When in the midst of her mother’s illness, she receives a pointed request from the publisher to return the advance on her now overdue novel, there ensues a further crisis in her already faultering confidence in her ability to ‘produce’:
Would I ever be able to finish a book again? I wondered if I really knew anything at all about writing, whether I was just having myself on, whether my few friends and (fewer) fans were just humouring me. Maybe I needed to go out and buy one of those books I’d seen in the self-development section of the local library. How to Write a Novel in Weekends, for example, or Unleash the Novelist Within. Or perhaps I should have been a nurse, like my mother. (p.106)
Clearly Waiting Room represents the resolution to this crisis for it is the work that ultimately emerges from that period rather than the stalled novel. And it is in many ways a worthy resolution: Carey has created a simple and moving tribute to the complexity of family relationships, to the frustrations and mystery surrounding small family secrets and to the always tortured realms of mother-daughter love. If, in the end, the revelations about her mother’s past are somewhat anti-climactic, the journey towards them is not.
Maryanne Dever is an Associate Professor in the Centre for Women’s Studies & Gender Research at Monash University and a co-author of The Intimate Archive: Journeys Through Private Papers (2009).