I laugh to think that I have my father to thank for my devotion to self-improvement, because my father was a steadfast non-improver and hater of change in general. He was fixed in his ways ever since I knew him and allowed himself to become ever more fixed, incurious and unquestioning as time went on.
But it just so happens that I first met the literature of self-improvement on our family bookshelves. I am not at all sure that Dad actually read a single volume. Or even a chapter. He did have a hypnosis relaxation record he used to lie on the lounge room floor and listen to, though. The LP had a black and white cover with a giant scary spiral (Hitchcock's Vertigo no doubt helped with that) and the record label's grainy logo of the Sphinx added an extra gloomy mysteriousness to it.
But over on the bookshelf was Dale Carnegie's classic 'How to Win Friends etc' and a book by a man who was an exponent on multi-tasking one's way to achievement and success. He had his family learn foreign languages as they brushed their teeth, and such like. I have pieced for myself a story of why and how these books got there. My Dad worked as a Singer Sewing machine sales repairman. He saw his job as an excuse to drive around the vast dusty suburban roads of Brisbane and the flat Redland Bay Area between brief visits to women needing their machines repairing. I think his boss must have tried to get a more pro-active attitude out of his employee - and possibly a few more working hours to boot. It wasn't a position he held down for long. Dad wasn't really cut out for sustained regular employment.
My father had nervous problems. Official diagnosis: 'nerves'. This was said dismissively to my poor young country-girl mother (so she told me) when she had followed Dad's panicked demands for a doctor to be sent out in the middle of the night (yes those were the days when you could call a doctor out to your home and they would actually come). I think she also once used the phrase 'anxiety neurosis' or some thing like that.
It was an interesting environment to grow up in. Dad ran our family, well his moods did, managed by my mother. And my mother told me stuff about my father. My early life was curtailed by my father. 'Play quietly in your room and don't disturb your father'. Mum told me she had schooled me with this. Told me when I was about 30. I was surprised, I thought I had chosen to tinker in my room with tiny dolls and packs of cards (as I couldn't play card games due to lack of playing partners and as no one had even taught me solitaire, I used the face cards instead as characters in my story scenarios). Mum had another story that I used to stand in front of the mirror for hours talking to myself. I was always a bit embarrassed by this - did it mean I was vain? I realized eventually that I must have been profoundly lonely. But it's like the fish looking for the ocean 'you're in it!' it doesn't need identifying, it's invisible and impalpable, it's just ...existence.
When I was 7 about to become 8. The family took a 4 day car journey to teh Queensland outback. The last three of those days I experienced travel sickness to the point of nausea and remember standing by the roadside, voiding my foodless stomach of the very last of its stock of bile and then my very recently swallowed saliva, while my father loomed over me bellowing 'it's all in the mind!' Which is ironic and un-compassionate of him as that's exactly where all his problems were.
When I was 17, I once had to cancel a driving lesson at my father's request so I could hold his hand as he lay on the floor and moaned. 'If only a man had a broken arm, he could understand!' He couldn't understand and it's probably fair to say he refused to understand. The fact that he mentioned understanding was startling to me as I was required not to understand, required not even to be aware of Dad's 'nerves'. I had been briefed by mum never to mention it. And yet, regrettably, here I was on this day, having to be sudden witness to non-existent thing. He wanted to hold my hand. I felt trapped. Before you think me heartless, a little back story - once when I was three he had made me sit on his stomach (while the morbid baritone drone of the Hypnosis record relentlessly intoned) because he had a stomach upset. (Yes, I have been through this with my therapist.) You see, Dad's ideal child was an inanimate one. 'Children should be seen and not heard' was declaimed often. Clearly 'children are also a handy alternative to a hot water bottle' was another of his deeply cherished beliefs.
On this exquisitely uncomfortable occasion (hand, not hot water bottle) the sound track was provided by the radio which rode the airwaves always. It was interminably tuned to his favoured jabbering, MOR station. (Actually more lowest common denominator, than MOR, but let's not dwell). The radio was playing a merry American tune 'There's such a lot of living to do!' I sat there, desolate that my lesson had been cancelled, afraid at what this state of my father's meant or would lead to and feeling - how can I put this? - in a dull panic of claustrophobia and aversion, combined with a prayerfulness that Dad be deaf to the song that was playing so that he not notice the hideous irony of it all.
There's music to play
Places to go, people to see!
Everything for you and me!
Life's a ball
If only you know it
And it's all just waiting for you
You're alive,
So come on and show it
There's such a lot of livin' to do
My father wasn't the most aware of men, or so I felt, so I was hopeful.
And that was when he said, with a sentimental-to-melodramatic cadence: 'Ah, Peta, It doesn't feel like there's a lot of livin' to do.' which capped it all off nicely. I was left me to wrestle down yet a billowing cloud of sickly absurdity while I simultaneously entertained the somehow horrific concept that I might be expected to comfort him in some way.
But over on the bookshelf was Dale Carnegie's classic 'How to Win Friends etc' and a book by a man who was an exponent on multi-tasking one's way to achievement and success. He had his family learn foreign languages as they brushed their teeth, and such like. I have pieced for myself a story of why and how these books got there. My Dad worked as a Singer Sewing machine sales repairman. He saw his job as an excuse to drive around the vast dusty suburban roads of Brisbane and the flat Redland Bay Area between brief visits to women needing their machines repairing. I think his boss must have tried to get a more pro-active attitude out of his employee - and possibly a few more working hours to boot. It wasn't a position he held down for long. Dad wasn't really cut out for sustained regular employment.
My father had nervous problems. Official diagnosis: 'nerves'. This was said dismissively to my poor young country-girl mother (so she told me) when she had followed Dad's panicked demands for a doctor to be sent out in the middle of the night (yes those were the days when you could call a doctor out to your home and they would actually come). I think she also once used the phrase 'anxiety neurosis' or some thing like that.
It was an interesting environment to grow up in. Dad ran our family, well his moods did, managed by my mother. And my mother told me stuff about my father. My early life was curtailed by my father. 'Play quietly in your room and don't disturb your father'. Mum told me she had schooled me with this. Told me when I was about 30. I was surprised, I thought I had chosen to tinker in my room with tiny dolls and packs of cards (as I couldn't play card games due to lack of playing partners and as no one had even taught me solitaire, I used the face cards instead as characters in my story scenarios). Mum had another story that I used to stand in front of the mirror for hours talking to myself. I was always a bit embarrassed by this - did it mean I was vain? I realized eventually that I must have been profoundly lonely. But it's like the fish looking for the ocean 'you're in it!' it doesn't need identifying, it's invisible and impalpable, it's just ...existence.
When I was 7 about to become 8. The family took a 4 day car journey to teh Queensland outback. The last three of those days I experienced travel sickness to the point of nausea and remember standing by the roadside, voiding my foodless stomach of the very last of its stock of bile and then my very recently swallowed saliva, while my father loomed over me bellowing 'it's all in the mind!' Which is ironic and un-compassionate of him as that's exactly where all his problems were.
When I was 17, I once had to cancel a driving lesson at my father's request so I could hold his hand as he lay on the floor and moaned. 'If only a man had a broken arm, he could understand!' He couldn't understand and it's probably fair to say he refused to understand. The fact that he mentioned understanding was startling to me as I was required not to understand, required not even to be aware of Dad's 'nerves'. I had been briefed by mum never to mention it. And yet, regrettably, here I was on this day, having to be sudden witness to non-existent thing. He wanted to hold my hand. I felt trapped. Before you think me heartless, a little back story - once when I was three he had made me sit on his stomach (while the morbid baritone drone of the Hypnosis record relentlessly intoned) because he had a stomach upset. (Yes, I have been through this with my therapist.) You see, Dad's ideal child was an inanimate one. 'Children should be seen and not heard' was declaimed often. Clearly 'children are also a handy alternative to a hot water bottle' was another of his deeply cherished beliefs.
On this exquisitely uncomfortable occasion (hand, not hot water bottle) the sound track was provided by the radio which rode the airwaves always. It was interminably tuned to his favoured jabbering, MOR station. (Actually more lowest common denominator, than MOR, but let's not dwell). The radio was playing a merry American tune 'There's such a lot of living to do!' I sat there, desolate that my lesson had been cancelled, afraid at what this state of my father's meant or would lead to and feeling - how can I put this? - in a dull panic of claustrophobia and aversion, combined with a prayerfulness that Dad be deaf to the song that was playing so that he not notice the hideous irony of it all.
There's music to play
Places to go, people to see!
Everything for you and me!
Life's a ball
If only you know it
And it's all just waiting for you
You're alive,
So come on and show it
There's such a lot of livin' to do
My father wasn't the most aware of men, or so I felt, so I was hopeful.
And that was when he said, with a sentimental-to-melodramatic cadence: 'Ah, Peta, It doesn't feel like there's a lot of livin' to do.' which capped it all off nicely. I was left me to wrestle down yet a billowing cloud of sickly absurdity while I simultaneously entertained the somehow horrific concept that I might be expected to comfort him in some way.
And people wonder where my sense of absurd dark humour comes from.
