What I Couldn't Tell My Mother

By Kari O'Gorman

Confessions of long-kept secrets by more than 20 award-winning authors of all ages from around the world. Journey from the streets of Sydney to the temples of Casablanca and ride the unforgettable journey between love, laughter, lunacy, lust, learning and lament.

Uncensored and unabated, "What I couldn't tell my mother" will be hidden under bed-covers by audacious readers for many years.

These life stories are a result of the inaugural Melaleuca Blue Life Writing Award and are dedicated to Jo Peirce, Bridie O'Gorman and all mothers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kari O'Gorman
• Release date: Jun 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9780992400217

Book preview

WARNING:

The contents of this book are uncensored. As a result, they may cause: moments of fury, delight, or disturbance, elements of confusion, excessive tears, progressive laughter, deeper understanding, broader acceptance, the stirring of forgotten memories, an over-coming of self-doubt, a sharing of guilt, a connection to your fellow human beings, and stories sticking in your heart and mind forever.

The writers and editors take no responsibility for any side effects. Read at your own risk.

Melaleuca Blue Publishing 2013

Edited by Kari O’Gorman

with Tamara Protassow Adams

This edition has been published as part of the

Melaleuca Blue Life Writing Award 2013

by Melaleuca Blue Publishing and Kari O’Gorman.

www.lifewriting.info

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted.

All authors have given written permission for their work to be published by Kari O’Gorman and Melaleuca Blue Publishing. For the protection of third parties, identifying details such as names of characters and exact locations have been changed. For the protection of the authors, many have chosen not to be identified by their original names.

First published December 2013.

Electronic-book version published June 2015.

Smashwords Edition

Reproduction and communication

Except as permitted under the Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act), no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, communicated or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. All inquiries should be made to the publisher.

This book is under copyright of © Kari O’Gorman, 2013

Cover image: © Kari O’Gorman

Photography © Xavier Da Costa

Additional photography © Aldo Schumann

A catalogue record for this book is available from the

National Library of Australia.

Title: What I Couldn't Tell My Mother: An Anthology / edited by

Kari O'Gorman; assistant editing by Tamara Protassow

Adams; photography by Xavier Da Costa; additional

photography by Aldo Schumann.

ISBN: 978-0-9924002-0-0 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-0-9924002-1-7 (e-book)

Dewey Number: 809.89287

But some secrets are too delicious not to share.

— Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay

I never lie, I said offhand. At least not to those I don't love.

— Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

These stories are the winners and short-listed entries from the inaugural

Melaleuca Blue Life Writing Competition in 2013 held in honour of

Jo Peirce and Bridie O’Gorman.

The competition categories and list of results are available at

www.lifewriting.info.

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

To all of the entrants in the 2013 Melaleuca Blue Life Writing Competition: thank you for sharing your secrets, telling us your stories, letting us be a part of your journey, helping us to see our own follies, and helping us to accept that we are all imperfect beings.

And in loving memory of E.Rice

8th September 1988- 31st January 2015

'In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years.'

Abraham Lincoln

For Bridie O’Gorman (1919- 2008), who planted the seeds of my desire to share stories: I hope I have stories this good to tell my grandkids one day.

CONTENTS

A DEDICATION TO JO PEIRCE

THE LAST DANCE

BY JOHN MCINNES

FOR MY MOTHER

BY A. CHAMBERS

SUSAN

BY MITCHELL KELLY

JIM’S LEGACY

BY KELSEY KNIGHT

13 CONFESSIONS TO MY MOTHER

BY CHRISTINE HOUSER

NEXT TIME

BY GAYLENE CARBIS

MY OWN PRIVATE CASABLANCA

BY RHONDDA WATERWORTH

FOREVER BABY

BY CHARLY

SAY NO MORE

BY DANNY MELIA

TIME DOT COM

BY LISA MIREMBE

YOUR FACE

BY E.RICE

JESUS IS MY DENTIST

BY DANICA KLEWCHUK

THE WOOD STOVE

BY ANDEE JONES

TO BE LIKE HER

BY JUNI DESIREé HOEL

SHOE SHOPPING

BY JANE CAFARELLA

NOBODY RIDES FOR FREE

BY CASEY MILLIKIN

VENTOLIN

BY M.J. REIDY

BUN IN THE OVEN

BY ALISON CASSIDY

TAPS, TOILETS, TEAPOTS & TRUTHS

BY MARIAN PENMAN

FOR MUM AND MICHAEL

BY ROSY O’GORMAN

FIFTY-TWO

BY KARI O’GORMAN

ABOUT LIFE WRITING AND MELALEUCA BLUE

PHOTOGRAPHY

THANK YOU

Nothing weighs on us so heavily as a secret.

— Jean de La Fontaine

A Dedication to Jo Peirce

1959-2011

Editor’s Foreword

It is July 2011. I am in the car with you travelling from Gin Gin to Brisbane, our birthplace. I have stopped on the side of the road to pinch some sugar cane from a farm so that my children who have grown up far away from where sugar cane can grow might know the texture of the raw cane in their mouths. I recall when you stole some sugar cane for me from a farm in Maroochydore when I was a child—to know that both roughness and sweetness can reside together in nature is something I would need to know.

Whilst your grandchildren are gnawing away in the backseat, you are still eating macadamia nut ice cream from a local farm like a small child, getting it all over yourself and laughing. These nuts boast the hardest and toughest shells in the world. But actually they are soft and rich with flavour. A complete surprise. If our family are full of nuts, I know many of us are the macadamia.

Often I have dreaded long drives with you. Being trapped in a confined space where you can repeat stories from your life— over and over and over again—has felt suffocating and paralysing. It is not the stories themselves that I dread, but the heavy ones; the ones that seem to always have the same dreaded enemies, their actions and words dug up as corpses and forced to dance over and over in your mind. Those rotten stories, foul with the stench of the years in which they have eaten away at you, are buried in the creases of your skin and still cause your tears to sting like acid. I can’t help but think that this is a precious waste of your energy and the time we have together when you have so little. Whilst I drive I can do nothing but watch you wipe away hot tears in the reflection of the cold, smeared glass, and try to change the subject. You never wanted to be like your mother, yet this ritual is distinctly hers, and you seem to carry it as a familiar crutch, like you now carry her walking stick.

So I suggest to you that we play a game to try to keep us present.

Confined to the car for three hours, we ask each other all kinds of silly questions like:

If you found a treasure buried in the beach sand, what would you hope it was?

Have you ever stolen something?

If you could be a man for a day, what would you do?

But then, you ask me one I cannot answer.

Is there anything you have never been able to tell me? You know, a secret that you thought about telling me, but never could?

I scan my mind quickly for an answer that will satisfy you enough to avoid answering truthfully. I once stole a red watch off my teacher’s desk when I was eight. It was a digital watch. I really wanted it. But I was afraid I’d go to hell, so I put it back a few days later.

Is that it? You look disappointed. You always wanted a completely open relationship with your only daughter. It was your greatest wish. You had so many secrets from your own mother and never wanted to have secrets with me. So this meant you told me everything about you. I knew all of your secrets. Some I didn’t want to know. But yet I couldn’t tell you mine.

Even though I knew you were dying, and I knew this would probably be the last time we ever spoke face-to-face like this, I still couldn’t tell you. Besides, my children were in the back seat and as every parent knows, children have extraordinary ‘selective’ hearing.

I think that part of us really wants our mothers to know us, but at the same time, there is a part that wants to be, or sometimes needs to be, kept hidden. I have never understood exactly why. Is it self-protection? Is it fear of disappointing the person who tried their best to raise the best person they could? Is it just wanting to keep a little part of ourselves to ourselves?

For me, it wasn’t that I thought you would be disappointed, it was perhaps not wanting to burden you with things you could do nothing about. And I didn’t want you to think you had failed as a mother. You often saw your parenting as a reason for all of our weaknesses, yet rarely took credit for your parenting resulting in many of our strengths.

But then the idea for this book was born. Right there, on that car trip from Gin Gin to Brisbane. Our conversation and my reaction made me wonder: how many of us cannot tell our mothers something? Why is it that we hold a guard up when it comes to our very own mothers? And do they just know our secrets anyway, deep down?

"I’m going to collect stories, mum. For a book called What I Couldn’t Tell My Mother," I managed to tell you a few days before you passed. You were not really paying attention, so I didn’t tell you it would be dedicated to you, or the reason the book came about. It would be my last secret from you.

It is July 2012. All of us are standing under the full moon, your ashes in a giant urn. Your sister, joking as she hands them over to your children and grandchildren, Careful, she’s heavier than you might think. Your mother was a fatty. I am surprised to be laughing with her because you