Kintsugi

By Marie O'Rourke

All her life, Marie O'Rourke has been a Good Girl, a perfectionist, using words to apply golden seams to an imperfect life in an attempt to make something beautiful out of things that are flawed or broken. A volatile father, the death of a sister far too young, a faltering marriage, the ghosts of lovers past: these are just some of the fragments that Marie puts together again in these essays that explore her closest relationships as a daughter, sister, mother, wife and lover.

With exquisite prose, Marie reflects on the beauty of brokenness and the ways in which time can transform our understanding of truth, forgiveness, and healing. These essays are a poignant reminder that some things cannot be fixed but can still hold immense beauty and meaning. Whether you've experienced similar struggles, or are seeking a deeper understanding of the human experience, Marie's collection will leave you moved and inspired.

How many of us feel our family life is not picture perfect? This book will resonate with those who are interested in exploring the human condition through universal themes of love and loss, forgiveness and redemption.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Jan 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9781760992651

Book preview

Serrated words and memories leave a jagged, ugly wound. Yes, pressure (properly applied) coagulates the pain but long after, alone in your thoughts, you’re still drawn to pick at that scab. As fresh red beads of blood bloom once more, you will feel both reassurance and revulsion. Decades on, just a delicate contour remains: your fault line, faded to silver-white. Invisible to most (unnoticed, unseen), it will always pulse to the touch.

For remembrances of things past may preserve us, but they can paralyse too. And, when it comes to love, our memories sometimes (oftentimes) seem to do both at once. In the face of experience that threatens to obliterate, we can only work, slowly, through those rituals of piecing a self together. These repairs, Kate Zambreno says, can come through writing, as a way of ‘stitching back former selves, sentences’. She goes on to cite Louise Bourgeois’ mantra for making art—‘I DO / I UNDO / I REDO’—and in that suggestion of a constant cycle I sense a way to honour the transient beauty of all relationships. Tracing the seams in life, love and identity, we might manage to not merely contain but celebrate the damage which imperfect connection and premature endings can bring.

Our lives, our families, our memories, our selves: all are a patchwork of many pieces. When we stop thinking in terms of ‘either/or’ and allow ourselves to embrace the ‘also/and’ it might just be possible to appreciate both the inherent beauty of the ‘finished product’ and the process of its making.

Watch, read, listen now. See how.

THE WEIGHT OF WORDS

‘Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?’ And she turned her face up to his, and laughed, and answered, ‘Why cannot you always be a good man …?’

Emily Bronte

In the slide of fingertip over pressed glass, a lifetime pulses. Moments, memories are thrown into relief, as sure as the swirls of ribbon and flower which catch under my touch, standing out from the smooth solid of the everyday whole. I’m surprised, now, by the sharpness of these edges and seams, barely visible to the eye, yet alive to the touch. The mug’s shaped rim is rough, biting lip; handle digs into fingers, its indentations visible when I remove my hand. Pretty, and pleasing to the eye, this gift from my nan declaring me ‘A GOOD GIRL’ brings affirmation, true. But also expectation, warning and command, bundled and bound into something much harder to carry than this trinket’s two hundred grams would suggest. It sets me on a tiptoe trail through all my years to come.

An odd little website tells me pressed glass was ‘one of the glories of the industrial revolution’. Bringing the beauty of decorative glassware to Victorian England’s masses, it imitated the rarer cut glass of the rich, to which the working class aspired. My piece carries the added mystique of two aunts I never met, who lived far, far away and spoke a language I did not understand. For this old-world relic which still watches over me from my shelves was bought by Nan in a flea market, 1970s Amsterdam, while visiting two of her (not so good?) girls, daughters making a new life in the Netherlands. Both artists, aunties Veronica and Lois wore clothes of bold abstract print, held some alarmingly progressive ideas, and would soon claim the honour of being our family’s first divorcées.

Aged six, I don’t really know what a flea market is, but it sounds as mysterious as everything we know of Amsterdam life. My mug is for A GOOD GIRL; cousin Mathew’s, A GOOD BOY. A dynamic duo, Math and I: born a year apart, our mums are not just sisters but best friends, so we are constant playmates and sparring partners, though as different from each other as can possibly be. I cradle my mug—using both hands—anxiously aware of its fragility, yet proudly bearing this new responsibility of drinking blackcurrant juice, Milo, from something other than my pink, anodised aluminium tumbler. In the months after presentation, Mathew’s mug will bounce from table to tiles twice. Then, the third time, bounce no more, pieces swept up, wrapped in newspaper and ruefully binned. It seems, on reflection, an ironic gift for my cousin, whose name is regularly screeched through shopping centre, playground, car park—wherever we go—heavy with exhaustion and exasperation, those two syllables almost an accusation. He escapes, gets lost, nearly every time we go out; I rarely let Mum stray far from my grip, let alone my sight.

I remember, as a child, trailing my fingers across the quilt my Amsterdam aunts made and sent to Mum on my birth. In its stitches, folds and fancywork, I recognised a scaled-down version of Nan’s own quilt. An array of colourful cathedral windows set against squares of contrasting white. A plump, padded border, complete with corner tassels of darker hue. Both were good for a game of ‘spotting snippets of matching material’. Yet where Nan’s fabric scraps held memories of the people, places and past of our/my family life, I found no easy familiarity here.

I would peer at our few photos of aunts Veronica and Lois, searching for similarity within their strangeness of dress and surrounds. A large black-and-white print of them and my cousins making jam helps me decide that Veronica’s smile is like my mum’s; Lois’ eyes, a copy of Aunty Julie’s. My favourite photo shows both aunts closing in on Nan for a kiss at Schiphol’s arrivals gate. Grey curls wrapped in batik scarf, eyes closed, with face squashed and beaming between the force of their lips’ press, she is my nan, yes. But this picture is all about her being someone else’s beloved mother.

I’ve often mused that being born the third daughter was not the best beginning for any journey to my father’s heart. He and Mum both held hopes of a son, and as a ‘surprise’ arriving five years after daughter #2, I was their last chance. Leaving his wife at the hospital in the throes of delivering baby three, my dad’s parting instructions were to make sure this one comes out wearing football boots. I’m not entirely sure he was joking. Five hours later I arrive, no football boots or other necessary male markers, the fact of my girlness defying all dreams, intuitions, hunches and superstitious predictors, which had all seemed to be promising Jan and Frank that much-wanted Michael (or maybe John?) this time. However, a strange twist of genetics sees my two blonde-haired, blue-eyed sisters—neat copies of Mum—followed by a girl who will be told by all she is just like your father.

As I grow, Nonna’s friends, in particular, are excited by my striking resemblance to her beloved boy. To them, a man is a god to be waited upon, defining the focus of their days’ duties: no higher praise or purpose than to serve him, feed him well. To look like him? An honour. In clumps at Karrakatta Cemetery, they smile crooked teeth, their work-rough hands pinch my cheeks. Slav words flow around me, a swirl of excited, warm currents. I help these dutiful widows replace the flowers on graves, wipe over headstones; watch, as they crouch and fuss, wayward hems exposing beige knee-high stockings that bite red welts just below kneecap, yet always sag at the ankle. The force of their movements and voices seems at odds with their sombre uniform of black dress, black cardigan, black headscarf, for the loss of a husband demands they sacrifice all visible colour. In later years, I will adopt all black to play at sophistication, to embody my teenage angst and rebellion. But now, aged five, I am certain these other ladies must envy Nonna her bright Crimplene as much as her still-living husband. Listening carefully, I latch onto the occasional phrase—Nonna’s been teaching me a few when I stay with her on my kindy days. I recognise the fond form of my name intertwined with Dad’s.

Just like your father. Roman nose, dark eyes, dark hair, swarthy skin: my body seems determined to conspire in this trickery, Dad’s and my baby photos almost interchangeable. It makes me anxious when I’m little—I cry, telling Mum I don’t want to look like a man. And, in a few years’ time, to be ‘just like your father’ carries an extra burden, as I hear and sense and learn that the essence of the man I look like is cruelty and infidelity. An inability to show love to wife or children, no matter how ‘good’ they might strive to be. How can it ever feel good to be ‘just like’ a man who seems to be bad?

The Oxford English Dictionary offers roughly ninety subtle variants of meaning for the word ‘good’, which, in its adjectival form, is apparently ‘the most general and most frequently used … commendation in English’. What a load for those four little letters to carry.

My precious pressed-glass gift for A GOOD GIRL arrives at a time when I am beginning to realise just how being ‘good’ might bring the sort of attention I need and crave. Removed from the Year One classroom to work at Mrs Murrowood’s desk (neatly pressed school dress, sandals and white knee-high socks), I am offered advanced reading, spelling and maths, leaping ahead of my classmates. I bask in the glow of the teachers’ praise, working harder and harder to get ahead. Gold stars, stickers, stamps and smiles say that someone will notice when you do things right. And being noticed—for the right reasons—feels good.

I suspect this is also when I really decide that if I can just be better—or best—Dad might notice me too. I imagine him offering smiles rather than sarcasm, being proud of this girl he most often refers to (sneeringly) as one of the weights around his neck. In that tale of anger and discontent my father constantly builds on, wife and children lie at the base of all his problems, our whole being and existence nothing more than trouble, irritation and disappointment. My six-year-old self can’t see any flaw in this new formula for paternal validation: I love so much and so hard, I can’t understand how, why, my father might resist my encircling arms and all-encompassing need. When he dies, many fraught years later, thirty-six-year-old me will still be trying to make it all compute, while being about to (finally, completely) collapse under the pressure of all those years of trying to reach the unreachable. The constant battle to be not just good, but perfect.

For my role in the family is cast early in the piece. My eldest sister is already dubbed ‘delicate’, needs to be handled with extra care. Her anxiety keeps the house on a knife’s edge for fear she tip into hysteria. My middle sister is the ‘lively’ one; full of sass and charisma, she makes friends easily, laughs freely, challenges authority. I, though the youngest, become the most responsible and reliable; compliant and cautious, serious and sensitive. Yes, I am the ‘good’ one, the one who craves praise and acceptance, fears disapproval, and can be relied on to try to keep the peace and do the ‘right’ thing.

Yet trying so hard to be good for others can end up being bad for oneself. Only recently have I labelled my perfectionist tendencies and tics as such, realising that perfectionists don’t think they are perfect but rather, wholeheartedly live and breathe the opposite conviction. To live disappointed with anything less than perfection is to live in a state of constant disappointment. Reading on the issue now, I recognise myself in every one of the perfectionist’s trademark behaviours and traits—that you have these words in front of you now is a small miracle, because, Lord knows, I don’t give up my grip on things easily. There are a number of risk factors for developing perfectionism. And I meet every one. Frequent fear of disapproval from others? Feelings of insecurity and inadequacy? A parent who expresses disapproval when their children’s efforts do not result in perfection? Insecure early attachment? Tick, tick, tick, tick: thanks, Dad. Another personality precursor—anxiety—can be credited to both nature and nurture, though, for it ran like neon signage through both sides of my family tree long before our specific branch bore a parent who disapproved of anything and everything his children and wife did. So, with hardwired anxiety, anxiety brewing in the relationship dynamics at home and the added anxiety bred by a need for goodness, you see how perfectionism begets further anxiety, too—how the spiral keeps spiralling, until it is out of control. It pushes me to an obsession with creating not just a happy, but a perfect, family life. And this, perhaps ironically, creates one which is anything but.

My childhood home was not ‘good’ by any measures that might be applied to such things. We three girls suffered, and dealt with that, in different ways; our adult behaviours and relationship patterns were telling. I was, in my sister’s words, a marriage waiting to happen, becoming a Mrs at age twenty-one while sister two (twenty-six) still whirled in the nightclubbing vortex and sister one (twenty-eight) was entangled in an affair with a much older, married father of three. Though born in the heyday of second-wave feminism, my ideal of family life springs from a Little Golden Book written in 1947, by the intriguingly mononymous Nicole. A hand-me-down, my other two sisters took only a passing interest in this book, moving on to other, more exciting tales. But The Happy Family is what I latch onto, the childhood favourite I pester Mum to read over and over again. Ours is a tumbledown house of asbestos and tin in a suburb full of Italianate mansions; a house whose walls often reverberate with the sound of my father’s voice, or the impact of his fists. I am entranced by this book’s image of domestic order and harmony: mother, father and children all smiles as they work and play together.

In colourful illustrations, that happy family of Tony, Peggy, Mother and Father gather around the table to share a favourite dinner of mine: roast beef. This is the one thing I know and see in my own life, can recognise as familiar rather than foreign. For some of my most vivid childhood memories speak to the power of food to collectively comfort, and to cooking as a symbol of love and care. It is the unspoken in every meal which sees us gathered around Nonna’s dining table, her repetitive Mangia! Mangia! ringing through the room as she loops back and forward, kitchen to table, an endless stream of plates and bowls heavy with food. Under the peeling tortoiseshell frame and faded pastel of that print of The Last Supper, I learn a good girl eats and smiles then eats some more—Nonna gets sad if we say no. At home, Mum too offers food as a comfort: cooking, a reminder of her love and care in a home which is too often unpredictable. Unsafe.

So, perhaps naturally, I learn to see good meals as the axis on which each family and home spins. Food is where my early married energy is channelled, as I work to be a perfect cook, claim praise and admiration for my skill. Even though I’m the youngest in our extended family, I arrange and host most family dinners and occasions, resisting offers of help. The meticulously planned and coordinated menus, the intricate recipes chosen, can’t be left to chance. What if someone substitutes a key ingredient, or makes a variation that doesn’t match and complement everything else? I cannot let my grip loosen, and spend days in the lead-up to these occasions preparing and worrying how things will turn out. On the day itself, I barely sit or talk to anyone, spending my time in the kitchen: the knot in my stomach, the panic—can it be outweighed by food and praise? I trust so, and momentarily it is.

When children arrive, their birthday parties become the ideal outlet for my particular brand of mania. In the midst of some of my darkest mothering days, struggling to cope with a feisty toddler and a newborn who will not sleep or settle anywhere but my arms, I organise a fairy party, close to forty family and friends invited to mark our daughter’s second birthday. Recovering from chicken pox, she is irritable and uncooperative. Yes she likes the dress, and the wings, but the matching tiara of tulle rosettes annoys her; the ‘fairy feet’ I have stitched (felt sole with ribbons to wind up the leg) match perfectly, yet she squirms and grimaces, wants them off.

Birthday Cake Take Two sits on the kitchen bench, pale frosting studded with its last few pink and mauve Smarties around 2 a.m. that morning: Birthday Cake Take One ended up in the bin just before midnight, discarded for fear its texture was too heavy. In that room now, full of handpainted butterflies floating on pearlescent balloons, tangles of small children play peekaboo in a castle I’ve fashioned from three large refrigerator boxes, the doors swinging open and shut to a peal of giggles. All is a rainbow of pastels and pretty that has taken weeks of planning and decorating and making and baking. My husband thinks me mad and has been telling me so all the nights I have stayed up so late to prep and