We don't do happy

 My life and that of various family members on both my Mum and Dad's side has been steeped in sadness. 

This creates a resilience and indifference that I would not wish on anyone. It is all well and good to have the ability to go into auto-pilot in a crisis but remaining stoic when others crumble is a sure sign that the person has seen a lot of pain.

When you are in the middle of a lot of things you are not aware of how unusual they are. When you are a child you don't understand that not every eight year old can wash and dress an ischemic ulcer. That the average 11 year old doesn't lift their Mother 10 to 12 times a day. That is not the usual conversation to have with your Father at 9 years old when he tells you that "no child will rule my life!"

These are all things that happened to me. 

I also watched my Mother go through tremendous pain but due to an allergy to codeine based medications was unable to get relief. Paracetamol was the only thing she could take safely and when you have an auto immune disorder that causes you to have flesh eating ulcers- that isn't much relief. Watching this and being an integral part to her survival made mental and physically strong but at a price. My childhood.

I often wondered about others in my family as we lived in Sydney and all of my parents relatives were in Victoria for the most part. This was a choice that my parents made before I was born. Both had issues with their families and they decided to leave. We didn't have big family celebrations and I missed it terribly. All I wanted when I was growing up was to have as many children as humanly possible so that I could create the family I yearned for.

But at 21 I had started having severe mood swings and had always had really painful long menstrual cycles. I felt like I was going insane. This turned out to be Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and my fertility was virtually non-existent. We will address this further at a later stage.

I have always wanted to know the family history, both of my parents had abandoned their family even though they were both from large families with lots of siblings. My Mother was one of nine and my Father one of five. Yet none of them were in any hurry for my brother and I to have access to these people. Goodness knows I could have done with the support.

So as a child of the 1970's we didn't have the internet or any more that 4 television channels, so a lot of our time as children was spent listening to stories that Mum would tell us. You see after Dad left we didn't have much money and Mum's health prevented us from her from doing much with us. So she would tell us stories about her life and different details were quite confronting and often questioned by my brother Tommy and myself.

One such story was about how my Mother was just 18 months old when her Father was murdered. Mum's version of events was that she was 18mths old and that he was stabbed in the neck by a woman named Bella Johansen and it was over him refusing to take a bet as he was working as an sp bookmaker. The facts according to her was he was stabbed with her on his hip, it was a stormy afternoon and he just made it home to place her over the front gate before dropping to the ground.

Only some of these facts are true.

In the last ten years or so I have done a lot of research into my family history. I have uncovered many surprising things about both of my parents, my grandparents and the rest of the extensive family. Social Media has allowed me to connect with relatives that I had never met in my childhood but knew existed. A lot of contact happened after my father passed in 2015. The reason for this quite frankly is that the whole family were terrified of him. Rightly so, he was not to be messed with.

So back to the story of Henry Richard King (Puddy). My mother's father had a disagreement with a local woman over a ladder that she thought had been stolen from her husband. She had taken it from Pud's backyard and he went to get it back. After asking her and her husband to have a beer and discuss it, Isabella Johansen stabbed him in the next with a broken bottle. He walked home and made to the front gate before collapsing. He died the next morning in Alfred hospital, March 21 1938. He left behind Emily and their 7 children ages 14 to 8 months and she was pregnant with the ninth. They had already lost a son the year before in an accident, he was only 5. 

6 years later my uncle Tommy the youngest born Clarence Ferris was killed in another tragic accident. My nanna Emily cornered the market on sorrow but being a single mother, she had to work. She worked and the older children looked after the younger ones in a tale as old as time. Around the same time the eldest child Henry William (Dick) had gone to fight in WW2. He was a prisoner of war and eventually did make it back but had lost so much weight in the concentration camps that he had to be fed baby food until he recovered. The next oldest Son Raymond had taken the role of the head of the home with gusto doling out corporal punishment whenever he saw fit, causing my mother to leave home and join the army at 16.

My Dad's side of the family was not any better. My grandfather was extremely abusive with my father often having physical fights with him over many different things involving his sisters. Both Schaffer brothers gained a reputation for being violent in their local area, a reputation that still exists today if you speak to the right crowd. Both my father and his brother Graham fought in Vietnam and saw many atrocities as you can imagine. Both were deeply affected. My father had gotten married before he left and when he returned he had two children and abandoned them. I am told that the relationship Dad had with his first wife Judy was volatile at best. There is only 3 months difference in age between me and my brother. We have different mothers obviously but it does give some insight into his lack of concern for consequences.

I have previously mentioned my mothers disease and some of the things that happened as part of that. I can't help but feel sorry for Mum. She was so embarrassed of her twisted body and transformation that was no fault of her own that she never returned to melbourne after she got really sick. It made her feel so isolated and alone. Other than myself and a few friends she didn't really have a support network.

The biggest revelation after my mothers death was her sexuality. Unbeknown to me, my mother was gay. She had told us stories of Pearly and her time with her. Pearly's daughter is my God Mother and she called my mum NannaMumma. I could never understand why but that's what her and her four kids called her. Mum was very close to her oldest child Kathy and was devastated when she was killed in a car accident. It was only after she died that I realised it was because as far as Mum was concerned, her grand-daughter had been killed. 

Mum had her fair share of loss too, she had a child at 18 which she gave up for private adoption. She was so traumatised by it she bought a house across the street so she could watch her grow up. Pearly died in Mums arms of a massive heart attack. Then after a few years when Mum met Dad she had me and then twins nearly two years later. It was a risky pregnancy, she had been diagnosed with Scleroderma and there was not much known about it. She went into labour in November 1973 at 27 weeks. She gave birth to Peter William Schaffer and Mary Schaffer. Mary was Stillborn.

Mum fell pregnant again just after this. She was advised to terminate and Dad took charge and agreed to not only a termination but also hysterectomy. The next few years saw Mum get more and more sick and crippled and the next big hit was her Mother passing in 1977. In 1978 my parents split after constant fighting. All of this affected me and my ability to sleep was non existent. In all of my school photos I look tired. I was tired. I constantly had bad dreams and saw skulls and death everytime I closed my eyes. I always had the sensation that someone was following me, a feeling a couldn't shake for a really long time.

Over time my mother's health worsened and my level of involvement in her daily care escalated. Slowly over the course of my first 24 years my mother lost more and more of her physical body as it was amputated piece by piece in an effort to avoid gangrene spreading and killing her. She was in constant chronic pain up until her death in November 1996. At this time, after being told I could not have children due to my diagnosis with PCOS I became pregnant and was 6 weeks pregnant with my son when my mother passed.

Little did I know that I had been taken off the lease of my mothers department of housing property which rendered me homeless. The staff at the department were cruel. They took the fuses from the property so that I had no power. It was something else. I asked my Dad if I could live with him and was told no. I was pregnant to my closest male friend. There was no future in the relationship, he didn't class it as anything more than friends with benefits. He also was using alcohol to deal with his various life traumas, so that was a challenge too.

The light of my life, my son Tristan was born on a rainy saturday afternoon. I was like a lot of first time mums, under the illusion that I would have a pain and drug free birth with no complication. The day before he was born I went to the hospital for my final checkup. The resident midwife felt my belly to see if the head was engaged. It was not. He was also large. 4.555kg to be exact. Now after spending most of my life visiting my mum in RPA hospital in Sydney, I had a huge phobia of hospitals and here I was alone, very pregnant and terrified being told that I had to have a c-section as my 10 pound baby was transverse breach. I would find out years later that he was also Autistic.

Of course there are quite a few more items on the list of events but let's pause on this fact.

On the 11th September 2004, my Sister Kylee went missing. As I am writing this, it is 17 years with no trace. But that is another story.

So do we have laughs? yes. Do we have happy times? yes. But as a general rule we don't do happy.

I quite frankly have a very difficult time dealing with the guilt of being happy.