Enter Mother

Mother is a bit like me.

She doesn't realise it yet. But I know. I've repeated some of her histories and learned from my choices. Her story is remarkable and when I ask her for it she tells me little save for the words: My Story Is Very Sad

I believe her. I'm 21 now and for years I've made assumptions and been caught up in my own world. Oblivious to hers. Perhaps I just wasn't as perceptive. When I ask her to tell me about her life in Cambodia, when she was a young girl, she speaks quietly and methodically, trying to recall what she can from her past. I want to start off with good memories, so I ask her

Tell me about your happiest time.

She doesn't understand. But she does tell me her parents sent her to french school and she recites flawlessly for me:

Parlez-Vous Français?

Little escapes from her, I try to penetrate her round eyes, they are glassy and red. She tells me some more. About being alone and very young. About how she escaped from bad people. About using rice to barter and bargain. She has been seperated from her family. Seeking charity from other families, trying to find her way back to Battambang. She tells me the man in the family, looks at her funny, She doesn't tell me any more and I am left to exercise my own horrors.

My mother and her brother are both orphaned in Cambodia. Their Aunty (her father's sister) adopts them both and in 1983, they all migrate to Australia. The family consists of my mother and her brother Sam, The Aunty's own three children, plus her sister's son and another adopted boy.

I don't know much about my mother from before I was born. I do know, she was incredibly beautiful and that she worked hard and saved money. She tells me that her Aunty (The matriarch) was very controlling and took her money. She tells me that she couldn't stand living with the family and that she chose to marry, only to leave the house as soon as she possibly could.

I favoured my father over my mother whilst growing up. This of course has completely reversed. She wasn't a very good mother to be honest. My brother and I were often, always hungry, especially at school. Sometimes we would have no lunch. She got into gambling and would usually leave my brother and I to fend for ourselves. Sometimes she would lock us in the house overnight or the weekend and have the neighbour keep an eye out. We lived on noodles. I didn't like the company she kept, the people she hung out with. My mother's thirst for easy money was insatiable and it inevitably was her down fall.

My mother did devote herself to religion. Her shrines held statue upon statue, idol upon idol, offering upon offering. In retrospect I found it somewhat ironic that what she offered to her idols were always much more lavish then what we got offered. But, in any case, we always got to eat the fruit after the gods were done, "spiritually munching". Though with mother being neglectful mother, flowers wilted, fruits bruised and browned and fruit-flies buzzed and swarmed. Our family co-existed symbiotically with a colony of cockroaches. The kitchen was their breeding ground. But we lived with it.

Three kids later, and I may have single handedly been the one to seperate her from them. Although perhaps her incarceration is possibly a large playing factor. Years of neglect hurtled out of my mouth when the kind people from DoCs interviewed me. I got in big trouble by my uncle for ratting out my mother. Big argument. The turbulent episode resulted in me smearing FUCK YOU in red oil paint (and that stuff doesn't wash off easy) all over my bedroom door ( I was living with the Matriarch at this point). Uncle kicked a hole through my door and as the door swung open, it punctured out a hole in one of my paintings. The painting was due the next day for assessment and was the one I considered the best.( Until the hole of course).

to be cont...

the daily misadventures of toad

Today after showering, Toad decided it would be an adequate time to exercise.

Mind you, It doesn't sound half as gross as it does, since he hardly exerts any physical activity whatsoever. 10 swings on the Abswing and he's a " healthy toad". As strong as the next toad! More sweat is probably secreted through his walks back and forth to the kitchen whenever I am in cooking concentrate mode. He always bugs me when I'm in a 'concentration' mode.

On the weekend after working through Toad's income and expenditure. I worked out he totalled over $600 worth of monthly bills. Colossal when considered next to his measly earnings and crapola spending sprees.

"I like buying new t-shirts. I don't know why? I see a cheap shirt and I buy it. "

Grey

Today I feel grey.

There were some moments of brevity were I managed to battle the grey.
Just managing to lift my head above the surface of a sloshing sea.

There is something stuck between my teeth.

It has been bugging me all day. I can feel a prescence stuck there. I feel it with my tongue. My tongue moves to feel all my teeth. I know my wisdom teeth are growing sideways. I can feel an ulcer in my mouth. A slight sting in my bottom lip foreshadows a coldsore. I have never been to the dentist in my life. My family never took me. If I am scorched to death, I will not be identified by my dental records.
I can't afford to go to the dentist. It doesn't matter anyway.

There are holes in my boots. So, my feet and socks got soaked in the rain.

I watched a leave fall off a tree today , while sitting on a bus. The bus was waiting in traffic. The yellow leaf fell onto black bitumen. Another leaf fell. Then I watched the leaves spin and dance in the heat of vehicle exhaust. It was a poetic image. Yellow, dancing leaves caught in vehicle exhaust against black bitumen.

My head is only throbbing gently today. I shouldn't read on the bus.
I feel empty, because I am hungry.

Toad is talking at me again. I bought a loaf of bread yesterday, and he used my good bread. Even though he had a half-finished no-name, brand loaf.

Toad left his keys in the door again. But this time the screen door was not locked and the wooden door was wide open. I hate him even more today.

I sit here, typing and my shoulders feel tense and heavy. I would like a shower. This morning I imagined the bathroom was tiled in aqua tiling with porcelain white accesories.

I want to feel less grey tomorrow.

some previous work

current work in progress - paper silhouettes

family portraits 2007 (detail view)
C type print
15x20cm

Untitled 2008 ( detail view)
C type print
21 x 29 cm

isntalled view

From Berkshire to Lesotho, 2007
Inkjet Print on Mounted Card
21 x 29 cm, series of 12 pieces

Evidence against the Toad

My resentment for him increases exponentially. I can see that graph in my head, with no beginning and no end, no sense of bearing. I am reminded of the time I wrote down that I loathed someone, in a personal diary, because of their jealousy, vindictiveness and selfishness (perfectly viable reasons). Said person, ifiltrated private written space then had trouble dechipering the word loath without the aid of a dictionary. The odd sense of irony added just another reason as to why I could not like someone. But times, have changed and I do not loath that girl.

But I loathe him. I resent him.
Every morning I wake to more mental check boxes in which I cross in angry, heavy strokes.
His blubbering voice filters into my head, oozes through the filmsy cracks of my bedroom door. It croaks, it croaks, it croaks. The man is a toad.

"try to turn off the lights, when you are not using them", says the man who left his bedroom light on this morning.

"lock your windows and doors, or someone will come in and steal everything", says the man who leaves his keys dangling from the front door all night, With the key still in its correspoinding lock.

"I have so many bills to pay, I have gas, water, electricty,internet", says the man who brazenly flicks through catalogues in front of me and suggests more crap to buy. Says the man who brought this on himself, with his mobile contract, interenet plan, x-box live service and foxtel bills. Says the man with no job, who complains about having to go to job search meetings. Says the man who can afford to show me his new "expensive" sneakers, his t-shirts. Who buys boxes of hair dye.

"What's the date today, Is it Friday?When is Thursday?" Says the man who made personalised calendars, stuck on the fridge, with his blob of a face, in stupid self-portraits taken with his mobile camera.

"I guess I have to clean up your mess again", Says the man who takes the only bottle of dish-washing liquid in the house to do his window-washing job, then comes home to find I've left a pan and a plate in the sink. When his mess from breakfast sits there too.


The blubbering, balding toad. Who wears his pants too low. Who always forgets to do up his fly once he leaves the rest-room. Who drenches the bath mats and tea-towels which I have supplied to the house, Who massacres my food, and never stores things properly.

My bedroom has evolved to become a pantry, to store morsels of food, so that he cannot touch them. I hide laundry powder so I have something to wash my clothes with, I have pegs, I have shampoo and conditioner, I have toilet paper, I have tooth paste, I have body wash, I have a room full of things that shouldn't be kept in a room.

Because I don't want to share with someone who has no respect.

Imbecile

My friends are all beautiful people.

When they invite me into their homes, I know why. Their families are so nurturing, so loving and caring. Even if it isn't shown quite coventionally, their care and committment is always echoed through hard-work...In providing them with stable homes.

Other people's Mums and Dads care for me when I am in their homes. Temporarily I become a daughter.

My father is hopeless.

Today when I got home, he had not bought any dinner or food .

"Dinah! w-w-w what should I get for dinner? I didn't get to the shops yet because I didn't know what to get," he blubbers.

(Although it was his suggestion of Taco's, which I agreed to when he asked me yesterday)

" I thought you were going to get stuff to make taco's with!" I exasparated.

"Oh, Yeah, I didn't know what to get because you didn't write me a list, I was going to get meat but I didn't know what else goes in a taco..."

(even though I had made them on previous occassion and he could have read the back of the box)

He is a walking joke.

An imbecile of a man.

If you'll excuse me I have to make his dinner now...

disillusionment

The balding 49 year old man sits in front of the television.
In this manner, he emphasises his round globular form and I liken him to a toad.
I see the back of his head. His white scalp contrasted with his thin and thinning hair- dyed black in a desperate attempt to reaffirm the appearance of youth.

But a man like this is disillusioned.
Childish.
Selfish
Alone...

remarkably disillusioned.

His twenty year old daughter darts back and forth through the hall, catching glimpses of the old, fat child. She is making his dinner in the kitchen. On this particular evening, she doesn't bring him his food. On this particular evening, she does not wish to bring him a meal as he sits in front of a box, x-box controller in hand, headset strapped to his head- reaffirmations of youth.

How demeaning it feels, for this twenty year old daughter and writer, with a balding, 49 year old father, to bring him his dinner. To kneel down as he sits cross legged on the carpet. As he sits so close to the television...

he is not a father, he is child

and this twenty year old daughter feels like a mother...