Giving in to the Madness of Christmas

I didn’t want to wish anyone on Twitter Happy Christmas (or happy holidays) this year. I had to force myself.

It’ s not that I don’t want them to be cheery. It’s just not how I’m feeling, politically speaking any way.

Christmas is always a strange time for the sanest of us, let alone those with an anxiety disorder or other condition.

As my doppelganger FCM I’ve had a Twitter account for a few months now. It consists mainly of links to articles about the terrible things going on in the world, with some interesting literary snippets thrown in.

In the lead-up to Christmas this year I felt such a strong need to stop the political hectoring, the calling out of bad behaviour, the keeping up to date with it all. Such an overwhelming desire to withdraw and to give in to the madness of Christmas.

Yet the world didn’t stop being messy and tragic. New tragedies kept happening. Some were human made, others less obviously so.

The unpredictably bizarre injustices of the Abbott government have had an effect on so many Australians this year. No-one likes Tony Abbott much, not even Liberal voters, and these days his Treasurer, Joe Hockey, is just as reviled.

On 22 December, just days before Christmas, Abbott announced that Scott Morrison, who as immigration minister removed the obligation that Australia follow the refugee convention, and set off a scale of death, torture and misery in the gulags  detention camps that put Australia to shame, will now be our Minister for Social Services.

To paranoid lefties like me this seemed a cruel joke, both in its substance and its timing.

Tragedy continued internationally. In Missouri yet another black teenager was shot by police. Hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated from their homes, and at least 24 killed, following massive flooding in Malaysia. A plane carrying 162 passengers from Indonesia to Singapore went missing mid-flight, and the wreckage has since been found with all passengers presumed dead. The international community has continued to ignore the plight of the more than 1 million refugees fleeing the conflict in Syria.

Yet the need to withdraw from the fray, at least partially, has continued. My Christmas depression this year was partly just a response to the hullabaloo of Christmas itself, which seems to be a little more disconnected from reality, a little more surreal, every year.

There is such a yawning gulf between the hectoring cheerfulness of the relentless carols and the mad spending of the crowds on the one hand and my own state of mind on the other that it produces an odd lurch into alienation.

But like birthday depression, I suspect much of what passes for Christmas depression is unacknowledged grief, which is rampant in our society. In A Life at Work, Thomas Moore talks about the difference between the human soul and the human spirit. The soul seeks the past, the familiar, and is rooted in the earth. The spirit seeks out the new, the unknown, creativity and challenge.

Christmas is a time in which the soul demands to be heard above the din. At Christmas, even more so than at birthdays in my experience, the soul longs for the certainties of the past. Over the last few weeks I’ve found myself driving past my old place, which I moved out of in May, several times. I realised that it was the first Christmas I’d spent away from the place for ten years, and my first Christmas at my current flat. My soul was yearning for that connection with past Christmases.

But perhaps notions of unacknowledged grief are just scratching the surface when it comes to the kinds of funk people experience on holidays, birthdays and anniversaries. I’m reading Horse Boy, an inspiring book about how an autistic boy was healed of many of his worst behaviours by a combination of horse riding and a series of gruelling healing rituals by Mongolian shamans.

This book has made me wonder whether my understanding of spirituality and its repression in the West has been incredibly shallow. The spirituality of the Mongolian shamans seems to allow them to harness powerful forces for healing that put our Western alternative healers to shame. The scale of what we have lost in modern life suddenly seems so much larger, and is perhaps the reason for all the mental illness we are experiencing.

Yet there’s no need to ditch the scientific method that has created such leaps and bounds. If science had an open enough mind to explore what was going on when the shamans healed Rowan Isaacson, whole new areas of study could be established.

They might include an expansion of human psychology. Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs was an important milestone but perhaps it should also include the need to connect with the forces of the Earth and to balance them within ourselves. No wonder even the sanest of us goes a bit mad at Christmas. (In fact there have been studies of shamanism in relation to Western notions of mental illness. However, my sense is that interest in shamanism is still considered flaky within the mainstream psychiatric community.)

But as usual I’m getting ahead of myself. My challenge for Christmas this year was just to let go. Not try to change my rellies, or escape the boring bits, or get angry because our family never – I repeat never – gets around to eating lunch before 3 pm by which time my blood sugar is lower than Scott Morrison’s ethical standards. What else was there to do but play that daggy Christmas carols CD, break open the Christmas crackers, put on the tissue-paper hat that never fits properly and read out the dumb joke? I just let the whole circus roll.

Okay, so there was one conflict towards the end of the night but it arose from another family member’s angst, not mine. I’m not wearing it!

Happy new year to everyone out there in blog land.

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Farewell to Jordan

Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind

I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom

But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb,

That spot which no vicissitude can find?

Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind—

Jordan, my beloved friend, is dead. The lines from Wordsworth are perhaps a little hyperbolic, but seem to fit. The insult of death, especially when it’s sudden, has a melodramatic aspect to it.

Jordan (a pseudonym) was the ginger-coloured spaniel of my elder sister and her family. Only seven years old, he had a tumour on the liver. It wasn’t diagnosed until a few days before his death – he'd stopped eating and had no energy. My brother-in-law rang me on the Tuesday night at about six pm and told me that Jordan was going to be put to sleep the following day. Would I like to come over and say goodbye?

When I got there an open fire was burning in the lounge room and a lamp cast a soft light. Jordan lay on a rug in front of the fire, surrounded by his immediate family along with another of my sisters and her two daughters. At the sight of me he lifted his head and his bushy tail wagged for a second or two. I sobbed into his fur. But he was not the playful puppy I loved. He was a very sick dog who was focused on the business of dying, and who had to be stroked carefully for fear of hurting him.

For the first few years of his life I walked him twice a week, usually in mid-morning, at the nearby Ainslie Park. This was the source of the intimacy we shared, when we revelled in the wind and the trees and the feeling of freedom. I wrote a few blog entries on our fun times and travails, and the ongoing conflict with my sister and her husband over their treatment of Jordan.

I taught him to heel and to stay, and unsuccessfully tried to teach him to return the ball. Whether he would do the latter was conditional on whether you had a treat ready to give him – he’d have ‘a bob both ways’, throwing the ball down with his mouth and then quickly nosing at my hand for the treat, then picking the ball up again if the hand was empty. ‘Jordan, the point to giving the ball back is that I can throw it again!’ But all my efforts were in vain. Still, he heeled and stayed like a true champ.

On one of our typical walks, we stagger along the picturesque walkway with its crunchy white gravel, cross narrow Ainslie Road and we’re at the park entrance, Jordan pulling at the leash and frantically sniffing any dogs arriving and departing (his heeling skills would manifest in inverse proportion to our closeness to the park). Passing under the winding avenue of large elm trees, I tell him we are nearing the oval, knowing that dogs understand some English (the average number of words is apparently 165).

When we get there I lean down and unclip the leash from his collar, feeling the little torso quiver in anticipation. ‘Free!’ I yell like a demented army sergeant, wanting to make the distinction clear between the discipline of the paths and the liberty of the oval. He dashes off for a while as if I’m his sworn enemy and then slows down and seems to lose focus. He is caught by the rich cocktail of smells locked in the grass. From now on he will alternate between a complete absorption in these messages and a focus on me and the other dogs.

He is always a little lost, a little confused, a bit ADD. I don’t think he’s dumb though – I think it’s a case of overstimulation. There are too many messages pinging across to those extraordinary olfactory nerves. One of his favourite things to do in the park is to roll on the grass, bathing himself in the scents of manure and whatever else he can smell (apparently wolves do this in order to bring information back to the pack). He always has a far-off, blissed-out expression when he does this.

Under my uneven supervision, Jordan cheated death a couple of times, disappearing in the direction of busy Wattle Road on one occasion, and dashing across the quiet street at the back of the park on the other, when there luckily happened to be no cars on it. (The risk I took in regularly walking someone else’s dog – I shudder at it. There were other incidents too – dogs, people and sometimes kids and babies make for scary combinations and I was out of my depth sometimes.)

The saddest thing – which I don’t want to write about but must – is that I had abandoned Jordan before his death; put the relationships with my sister and her husband in the too-hard basket, and therefore my friendship with him. It was part of my growing ‘maturity’, to accept that I wasn’t close to the family and therefore couldn’t hope to be close to their dog. (Meanwhile my interactions with the neglected puppies in the semi-detached next door were childishly passive-aggressive towards their owner.)

But it was true, I didn’t feel welcome at his house. And his life was sad; he told me as much the last time I took him to the park. I think it was January, I don’t remember exactly, when I decided on a whim to ring up and ask to take him on a walk and the answer was yes, of course. He wasn’t getting enough exercise at this point and by the age of about six had become portly, as well as stiff from a disc injury. We had a lovely roam that day, but at one point he grew sad and we sat on the grass and he looked pensive, slowly blinking those impossibly long eyelashes.

That walk was the last time I saw him well, as the Jordan I knew and loved. I found his life hard to witness; easier to stay away and whinge about the way our society treats dogs and congratulate myself on not having one myself.

How much did my early support make his loneliness harder to bear? Did he wonder when I was coming next? How much did he suffer and how much of that suffering was related to me? There are no answers to these questions.

Yet it’s not guilt I feel exactly, just regret. What this has taught me is that you cannot simply sever a connection of longstanding with someone just because they aren’t human. The connection remains. I have no doubt that Jordan remembered me and regretted my absence from his life.

My initial grief was quite bitter and full of despair for the loneliness of his life. But now, less than a week later, I’m able to take a more balanced view. His life wasn’t all sadness. There were family holidays to the New South Wales coast, walks with my sister, and pats in the evenings in front of TV. He had wormed his way inside the house from being an outside dog, and for the last six months of his life slept in my sister and her husband’s bedroom. Also, various renovations of my sister’s house have been going on for years, and the builders often brought their dogs along with them (tradies often seem to have strong bonds with their dogs). And even though he was alone too much, he lived in the moment, and could rise to puppy excitement as soon as the prospect of interaction presented itself.

One impediment to the grieving process is that no memorial service is planned. In the absence of that, my perfect funeral for him is played in my head, a mixture of inspiring songs and stories about his escapades.

I sit at my computer and play those songs on YouTube. The following have provided much comfort: ‘Short note’ by Matt Finish, ‘I sing the body electric’ from the film Fame, and ‘The valley’, soulfully sung by the inimitable KD. Leo Sayer in his early emo period has been helpful. The soppiest Barbara Streisand standards have been inevitable.

The absence of a funeral also sent me on a return visit to the park last weekend, to see what it was like without him and to understand. I sat alone on a bench at the edge of the oval in my sunglasses, melodramatic as a movie star. The dead leaves from the elm tree above me tinkled down a few at a time. The sky couldn’t decide what it was doing – there were long brushes of cirrus as well as bits of cumulus cloud. The light felt wrong – overcast and glare-y at the same time. The few dog owners and their dogs seemed a long way away; the dogs looked like yearlings, just overgrown puppies. I didn’t know any of them. None of the people I had got to know at the park were there. The sense of time having passed was excruciating. I realised that the park and Jordan and I had long finished – and I was mourning that period of my life for the first time.

It’s the very physicality of dogs that makes it harrowing to mourn them. Our relationships with them have less cerebral content than those we share with humans, and are based on the shared experience of the moment. I find it hard to picture Jordan’s face, and although I hadn’t seen him for ages until the night before he died, part of the reason for the lack of a mental image is the sense that his essence was expressed in motion rather than speech. Jordan's essence - that of a sometimes daffy 'people person' with a stubborn streak, who knew his own mind, was loyal to a fault and endlessly optimistic - is still with me and I hope always will be.

Farewell, my darling. Thanks for the happy times. Your aunty misses you so much, but she knows that you're no longer suffering and is endlessly grateful for your loving friendship.

PS: The photo above isn't of Jordan, but is an uncanny likeness of him as a puppy from the Dogs Trust website.

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Stress City: A Melbourne Tenant Moves On

The unforeseeable, the impossible has happened. After almost ten years I am to be moved out of my unhappy little nest and forced to search for another.

The owner is selling – or at least her kids are. They are not turfing me out exactly but they may as well be. The new owners could be either home buyers or investors – if they’re the latter, they will probably turf me out anyway because the place is in dire need of much more than a spit and a polish to make it look decent, and they’ll get much more rent that way.

I have no idea how this is all going to work out. They want to sell in early May and I will be looking for somewhere to live and presumably packing while the sales manager holds open for inspections (or ‘opens’ as the lingo is). Life is about to become very interesting. Where will I hide the boxes and the washing when potential owners traipse through the house?

I got the phone call on Friday afternoon when I was looking at DVDs in an op shop. The only thing I felt for the rest of the day was numb disorientation. I wasn’t very well organised so only had time to look at two properties on the Saturday. It was a shock to discover that, if I want a two-bedder, there’s no way I’m going to be able to afford to settle on this side of town.

Private rental in Australia is almost uniquely unregulated. There are few restrictions on when you can turf tenants out (unless they’ve signed a lease, which is usually a maximum of 12 months) and you can put the rent up every 6 months, to whatever the market rate is. Tax breaks for investors encourage the cashed-up to buy properties for investment purposes. In a tight market due to high rates of immigration (a business lobby policy, nothing to do with asylum seekers) the cost of housing to buy and rent far outstrips inflation and wage rises.

Virtually all landlords these days are basically profiteers (except my father, who still charges a mere $140 a week for his tiny one-bedroom investment property, in effect subsidising someone he doesn’t know from Adam, whose rent comes out of a trust fund (!), to the tune of about $100 a week. It is confusing having a father who will drop everything to help you and who says things like ‘you can come and stay with us if you need to’ but who has absolutely no sense of putting family first when it comes to charity (especially when the family member has a psyche disability!).

It means that the question of responsibility – of how much power I have over my own situation, and the extent to which my difficulties stem from the immaturity that is an offshoot of my illness rather than the illness itself – constantly exercises me. But in a way my father’s own immaturity – he acts with similar blindness towards my mum – frees me. It doesn’t really matter whether the neoliberal state and my father have both let me down. The fact is I must bear the responsibility, like it or not, and make the best of things. This is actually freeing for me. It’s taken me far too long to realise that not only can I not rely on my family, but that they are also difficult people to actually help. Better late than never to understand the truth.

 Allied with this knowledge is another strange irony. I’d convinced myself that I was stuck on this side of the Yarra, dutifully close to my ageing parents. On this side there’s East Malvern, where I currently live and which is very white bread, and a range of suburbs that are increasingly less boring, culminating in St Kilda and East St Kilda which in the seventies and eighties were hubs of Eastern European Jewish people combined with penniless artists and musicians. It was a magic combination and one you couldn’t find in any other part of Melbourne. Its particular feel was completely different from the much more studious, serious dissent of the inner north, which basically houses those of my generation who went to Melbourne Uni – they couldn’t afford to buy houses in inner city Carlton or Fitzroy so they just kept going further north, and now the likes of Reservoir have inner-city style contingents.

But yesterday was a reality check so profound it has put me off this side for life. The maximum rent I can afford is pretty low for a two-bedroom and the place I saw in Elsternwick, next door to East St Kilda, depressed me so badly that I broke down in tears on the standard investment-flat carpet that you find in these places. But it wasn’t just the cost – I realised, traipsing to and from the real estate agent’s office to pick up and drop back the keys, that I don’t like Carlisle Street any more. There are few rebels left in St Kilda, they’re mostly young male backpackers here for a good time and a root. All the interesting shops are gone, and it’s mostly cafes, bars and two dollar shops. In fact, there’s nothing of street life that interests me on this side of town any more.

And this means that, after resigning myself to staying on this side, it may just be marginally more affordable to go back to my beloved inner city, the place I feel I truly belong. Moving all that way seemed too hard and self-indulgent until I realised it would be slightly cheaper to live in West Brunswick than in Elsternwick or even the slightly daggier Caulfield.

As I walked towards my car after seeing the Elsternwick flat, remembering that I’d put on mascara that morning, I thought ‘You’d better check your face’. At the same time another thought occurred, not so well articulated – that I might very well forget to check my face. I knew that there would be something deliberate about that. I felt extremely sorry for myself, and at times like this – the sense of crisis of having nowhere to place your head – part of me reverts back to the needy child who expects the entire world to look after her.

And guess what? Overwhelmed as I was, I did forget to check my face in the car mirror. It was only as I jostled my way along Carlisle street back to Wilsons that I remembered. I hoped it would be okay.

When I handed the key over, and told the receptionist the property wasn’t quite what I was after, she said ‘All the best for your search.’ Oh dear. I rushed back to the car and things were even worse than I’d imagined. I didn’t have just black under my eyes, but a grey mascara 'tear' down the lower part of my left cheek. Oh yes, the world was going to be made aware of Catherine’s dilemma, like it or not!

I despise this narcissistic part of my personality, but I also understand it. It has taken me so long to grow up, but the trouble with life in Melbourne these days (and I suspect most Western cities) is that simply being realistic and aware of how to get by isn’t enough anymore. The rental situation really is very challenging, however much I adjust myself to its realities. What makes me sad and angry and one of the reasons that I will try to fiercely guard that childish part (rather than parading her) is that if I had not been so immature I could have done okay. In the seventies and early eighties, if you were white and lower (or upper) middle class, it was very hard to stuff up getting on in life in Melbourne, but I managed. I am still suffering for silly decisions that I made decades ago, when I really didn’t know any better. Now that I do know better, and the inner odds aren’t stacked against me to the same degree, the outer odds are more stacked against me than ever.

Still, I know I’ll be okay. As my father assures me, I can always stay with my parents for a small interim period although I would rather die than do this. I have Grow meetings in which to air my problems. I have my intuition, which I have honed to a fine art in the last ten years and which I can use to help me sort out which flats to bother seeing, and to help me make my ultimate choice. I have a very open mind. I will continually test out ‘the universe’ – the energies, if you like – by trying things out and looking, and will keep adjusting to whatever realities I find. I truly believe and hope that life in the inner north will be better than here – not perfect of course, but better.

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’Tis the Season to Be Melancholy – Enduring a Bout of Christmas Depression

Pic: Mike McCune

I have been suffering Christmas depression since I first became an adult. It was a long time coming because if truth be told my parents were as reluctant as I and my four sisters to give up the old rituals – we still put out our Santa sacks even in our late teens, although by that stage they were thankfully left under the tree rather than at the end of our beds. Perhaps it was after the last year of the Santa sacks that the Christmas depression first showed itself?

Here, for the record, are the symptoms: weeping uncontrollably at one’s desk; regretting the entire life course one has taken; and a pall covering everything as if one is living in a fake, Truman-style world that can offer nothing that is authentic or remotely interesting.

And perhaps the most clichéd of all, wishing fervently that Christmas could take place every second year instead of annually. Wouldn’t that be more sensible?

These kinds of seasonal depressions follow their sufferers around like drones. They seem to find us. We do not choose them. Anyone who, like me, suffers anxiety and depression throughout the year is a prime candidate.

Each year the scale of the attack is completely unpredictable. One year, swept up in a pre-Christmas deadline frenzy, the whole shemozzle completely passes me by; another year there might be faint twinges a few days before Christmas, while the following year I will be swamped by dark ruminations as soon as December hits its stride.

More than anything, their weapon of choice is the past. Reels and reels of negatives (the word having two meanings here) of all that is irretrievably lost. By a certain age we have all sustained many losses and regrets, but at Christmas some regrets seem to be more equal than others.

Namely not having a family of one’s own. Reading stories about families is a big no-no for me at this time. In fact you would think Monica Dux’s Things I Didn’t Expect (When I Was Expecting) would be a fine book for a single, child-free woman to read around Christmas, with its tales of collapsing vaginas, stigmatic nipples and psychopathic mothers’ groups. You’d expect someone like me to be sighing with relief and thanking Fortune I’d somehow wiggled my way out of that. And on one level I am. As a feminist, I certainly don’t feel a woman’s worth and identity depend on her status as a mother. It is the whole family orientation of Christmas that sinks the (Santa) boot in. When I found myself envying Dux despite (or perhaps because of) what she’d been through, I knew it was going to be a bad bout this year.

You’d also think getting into the thick of the shopping scrum would help, and it can for short periods. But if you stay too long you’ll be hit by a percolation of hissing irritation that threatens to bubble over into a bad case of mall rage. All these people with lines of children attached to them like charm bracelets, throwing money around like they’ve just had a big win at the races, are not fun or edifying for a single person to witness for long periods.

And if you’ve made a decision not to buy a lot of presents at Christmas, as I have this year, that leaves you without an important compensation for the Christmas frenzy – spending money on other people. Research suggests that no matter how much or how little you spend, it actually feels better to buy for others than to buy for yourself. As someone with ten nephews and nieces I’ve given up trying to pick a present for each one of them at Christmas; and while that saves me time and effort and helps the planet a tiny bit, it also robs me of a chance to leaven my Christmas depression with a dose of therapeutic giving.

Just because other people go through similar torment doesn’t mean you get to join a fellowship of sufferers. This is because there is something deeply personal about how we celebrate (or don’t celebrate) Christmas, demonstrating how individualistic our society has become. At this time, whether or not we are Christian, we are forced to withdraw from the social world and into the bosom of our family networks. And whether those connections are firm, fragile or merely frazzled, we are stuck with them like never before. ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ we ask each other. We rarely say, for example, ‘Can I catch up with you on Christmas Day?’

This Christmas, I will play my usual role as black sheep in the Christmas nativity of my birth family. And I will be grateful to do so. I know a friend who is spending Christmas Day alone, and another friend who hosts a small gathering of fellow Christmas ‘orphans’ each year. I have decided not to extend an invitation to these friends, simply because I don’t want to impose the tricky-at-best family dynamics on them.

This reluctance to meddle with tradition also suggests that my own Christmas depression has become for me an inextricable part of the annual ritual, along with feeling left out because I can’t join my champagne-quaffing sisters on Christmas morning (dietary reasons), eating a kilo of roasted cashews before lunch to compensate, goading my father into political  arguments by making extreme left-wing comments while he tries to eat his Christmas pudding, and falling asleep in the spare bedroom at 5 pm precisely.

Despite the above, wishing all my blog readers a safe, peaceful and stress-free festive season.

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My Mother’s Memory: The Effects of Delaying an Alzheimers Diagnosis

Could the human capacity to remember be imagined as a shelf on which rest the things we know of the world? And if the shelf disintegrates, our memories have nowhere to rest?

That’s a poor analogy in some ways, because the shelf itself holds the kind of basic memories that tell us who we are and where we belong in the world. It seems to me that some of the less important understandings – the items on the shelf – dissolve or disappear before the shelf itself completely gives way.

My mother has cognitive impairment. Her short-term memory is terrible and continues to get worse. She is fast losing her understanding of how the more complex aspects of the world work. She probably has the beginnings of Alzheimers or some other form of dementia, but until she gets tested, nothing can be done. Yet she doesn’t care whether or not she gets tested, and my father is in a state of active denial. The more you try and bring him around to the need for testing, the more defensive he gets.

My mother knows who she is, that she has daughters and grandchildren. She drives to Chadstone alone and walks up and down the main walkways; she doesn’t buy much, but she says the walking is her form of exercise. She rings me and leaves messages saying ‘This is your mother here’. She complains about finding it hard to buy clothes because she’s so short; she recently found a new skirt that she likes, and showed it off to me with great delight. She is as obsessive as she ever was about keeping the house tidy.

But her short-term memory is terrible. She’ll remember some of what she did the night before, but specific details get wiped. Visiting my sister one night she commented on the large, efficient clothes airer that sat in front of the fire. A week or two later my sister found an identical one in a hardware store. She rang my mother to ask if she should buy it for her. My mother had no recall of admiring my sister’s clothes airer, and no interest in the one my sister had found. ‘We don’t really need clothes airers’, she said.

More serious than that, she’s losing her grasp on the world’s complexities. She could probably no longer explain distinctions such as the difference between state and federal, a premier and a prime minister. And while she is still aware of the things that affect her life – her grandchildren, her friends and so on – she finds it hard to follow the thread of conversations that go beyond the basic.

Her memory continues to get worse. A few months ago, in her own kitchen, she began cooking a birthday dinner for one of her nephews. Soon afterwards, she forgot that she’d already started the cooking process.

Memory also includes what goes where. Months before that, another of my sisters dropped over at dinner time one night. Mum was in the kitchen, having just put the electric kettle on the lit stove. When my sister’s horrified eye moved towards the stove and saw what had happened, Mum saw too, and understood right away what she’d done. But it was the fact of her doing it that was the problem.

Yet to my knowledge she’s never had one of those catastrophic existential moments that can confront sufferers with the reality of their illness – the ones where they suddenly become so disorientated they don’t know where they are or what they’re doing.

Such a moment is dramatised in the biopic Iris, about the life of the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, an Alzheimers sufferer. Murdoch is in the middle of a pre-recorded television interview when her magnificent brain fails her. She’s talking about education when she halts – what was she going to say? What’s going on? What is the meaning of the camera, the interviewer, and who is that person on the array of television screens? On the way home she gets hopelessly disorientated.

At the possibility of this happening to my mother, it is tempting to join my father in his denial. There are a couple of factors that encourage such a stance.

Factors that can cause poor memory

My mother is on a few different drugs for her ailments, which include high blood pressure and osteoporosis. Many drugs can cause forgetfulness. One researcher even developed a questionnaire to determine whether a drug regime was causing toxicity. This is something I would like a specialist to look at, but I realise it can’t, at this point, be the whole story.

The other factor is diet, but as I am the only one in the world who perceives this, there’s a fair chance that it is delusional thinking on my part. For Mothers Day this year my sisters pooled their money to buy my mother a coffee maker. I was horrified.

Ever since I was diagnosed with the little-known and incurable condition of low blood sugar, or functional hypoglycaemia, I’ve thought that this condition was implicated in my mother’s long-term fatigue, forgetfulness and low-level depression; caffeine and concentrated sugar, both dear to her heart, are the worst things for this condition. Her memory’s been poor for years, and she’s always useless in the afternoons, slightly better after her obligatory nap. I can’t count the number of times, even before her memory problems became serious, I’ve suggested she give up sugar and caffeine. Each time in her airy way she acts as if it’s the first time she’s heard of it. This is understandable now, but she’s always been completely uninterested when I broached the subject in investigating diet for her fatigue – she’s a long-time foodie.

However, I am fooling myself that Alzheimers or some form of dementia isn’t the culprit. Research shows that mild cognitive impairment can be a precursor of Alzheimers by many years. And Alzheimers is ‘by far the most common cause of cognitive impairment’.

An incomplete diagnosis

About two-and-a-half years ago my mother did get tested. The specialist told her she was on the borderline, could take anti-Alzheimers drugs if she wanted to, and should come back again for another test in two years time. I didn’t find out about this until almost a year later – my elder sister deliberately lied about the results to shield me. However, it wasn’t, in my understanding, a diagnosis of Alzheimers but of cognitive impairment. 

Even once mild cognitive impairment has set in, much can be done to halt and even reverse it and perhaps actually prevent it from sliding into Alzheimers. I curse the specialist and all my mother’s doctors for their slackness. Did the specialist tell her to do brain exercises? Watch her diet? Walk regularly? That she could arrest or at least slow some of the decline if she wanted to? Not by the sound of it, apart from offering the drug option. She was, it seems, just another bumbling 76-year-old woman. Next, please.

When my sister told me the truth about these tests – about a year ago now I suppose, I am vague myself – I wandered around in a daze of low dread, of loss and helplessness. It was as if I was feeling my mother’s loss of mental power in my own head. This laid bare, mercilessly, how bound up my identity is with my mother’s. It was as if my own brain, my own self, were under threat. In a way it was. I had never escaped the over-identification with the mother that is the trap of poorly mothered women.

Yet I don’t want this to sound as if I have come to terms with my mother’s illness. The move towards acceptance of Alzheimers in a parent seems to come in increments. I cannot properly grieve for my mother’s Alzheimers because there has been no proper diagnosis.

Of course, that dark dread, which returns periodically, is not just about over-identifying with my mother’s brain. There is a much more prosaic way in which it translates to my own experience. If she has Alzheimers this means it runs in the family, so I have a greater chance of getting it.

And this is ironic too, because mental debilitation of different sorts was an early symptom of what I now see as my OCD. I spent my twenties and to a much lesser extent early thirties dreading the onset of hallucinatory schizophrenia, and the future risk of Alzheimers. I had no idea that these lonely worries were part of a completely different disorder that was not in my future but very much in my present. I have always been a vague person, and worry about my vagueness came second only to concern about my social anxiety symptoms.

My identification problems with my mother make it difficult for me to witness with any objectivity her poor management of her debilitation. At the same time her shortcomings seem too conveniently related to her illness (a selfish stance I know, reflecting my own damage).

There have been so many ways she could have improved her memory, and even at this stage she could do more to preserve what she has. Frustratingly yet predictably, everything about my mother’s character that complicated my own development is writ large in her failure to take control of her cognitive impairment to the extent possible. This failure is all too consistent with her careless attitude to not only my illness as teenager, but her own physical health.

My mother’s identity has always been weak. Her lack of a strong sense of self, her utter emotional slipperiness, her reliance on others for affirmation – all these have been bound up with a chronic lack of attentiveness, resulting in an inability to shield her children from nutty relatives, poor teachers, the ravages of neurosis. Now these same weaknesses impact on her own ability to hold off some of the effects of her illness. And the illness accentuates those weaknesses to strengthen its hold on her, encouraging her not to care.

More than that, the cognitive impairment itself seems to be all of a piece with these weaknesses, a natural outcome of a lack of attentiveness to self and others. It seems as if my mother is making the ultimate escape. How dare she leave when she has never been fully present? And what does it say about me that I am incapable of viewing her dilemma except through the lens of my own needs?

The upside

I don’t want to be completely negative. My mother’s excessive acceptance has its good points. She is childlike and easygoing. She has lost some of the more bitter aspects of her personality. If she does descend to full-blown Alzheimers, I can’t imagine her being difficult to manage. If anything, she will be overly compliant.

My father is in good health and at seventy-eight has more energy and sprightliness than most men his age (‘sprightly’ seems the wrong word for him – he doesn’t really seem particularly elderly to me) and is a very giving person. He has taken over much of the domestic load, although his semi-incompetence in this area is becoming a problem – he burned my mother’s nylon undies recently when he put them in the dryer.

For a mother who was always so absent, so lacking in maternal instinct, my mother gave a good impression of presence. I always believed she was looking out for me even when there was evidence to the contrary. Now I know she never will be, never can be. I must look out for myself, be my own mother. It’s a heavy, difficult task. I cannot give to her at this point the care that a fully functioning daughter could. But I will give what I can when the time comes.

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The Lure of Hoarding: Keeping Our Appointments with Memory

I'm a mad thrifter and lover of op shops, but I also like the idea of decluttering. Indeed, thrifting and decluttering are both megatrends that have swept the consumer world in recent years, yet they have totally opposing aims. Does a love of thrifting inevitably lead to hoarding? Can a scourer of op shops like me actually lead a minimalist lifestyle?

My preoccupation with hoarding comes from the fact that my parents display totally opposing tendencies in this area.

My father is a hoarder of sorts. This trait took years to fully reveal itself, and remains limited to a few rooms in the house because my mother is a tidiness freak. 

While I was growing up my dad’s hoarding hardly impacted on me – except as an exemplar of untidiness – apart from the garage and garden shed, both almost unusable because stuffed with useless junk, including a canoe that to this day hangs upside down from the roof of the shed like some bizarre art installation, and is purported to have a hole in it. Oh, and my dad's huge glass-topped mahogany desk, whose surface was even then obscured by papers, that my mum had to suffer in their bedroom for many years. As she's gotten older, it's become harder for her to control my dad's messiness.

When we kids grew up and moved out of the house, Dad inherited a bedroom that became his 'office'. He used to complete his watercolour paintings in there, but it's so full of junk now, apart from a small space cleared for a computer and chair, that he’s abandoned it for this purpose. With its boxes of obsolete papers, discarded canvases, painting materials and plastic bags of electrical cables taking up most of the floor space, and the desk obscured by nests of manila folders stuffed with papers, it's a safety hazard.

Ominously my father has been 'given' another room for his painting, a tiny room at the back of the house that was formerly a spare-cum-sewing room. So far it's sufficiently free of junk that my dad can paint again but I predict that in a few months this room too will be unusable. He will occasionally create messy outposts in the rest of the house – for example, spreading his tax return documents around the dining room table, completing a painting project in the sunroom – but these are always temporary and are soon shooed back into the general chaos by my mother.

Dad is in some ways not a typical hoarder. Hoarding is often associated with compulsive shopping; Dad hardly ever shops for non-necessities unless he has to. Nor does he actively accumulate material objects in other ways (although he used to buy the odd broken-down car that he would tinker with on weekends). It's the past he hoards: religious pamphlets, old copies of journals, financial and administrative documents, and anything to do with his political battles with his teachers union, the local council and government bodies. He still has papers from at least fifty years ago.

While hoarding didn’t impact much on my childhood, its roots were present in subtle ways. For example, I knew one thing that would always garner my mother's approval (the usual things didn't really cut it with her): 'cleaning the kitchen' at night. What this meant was not just doing the dishes, but sorting, filing and taming the accumulations of junk that regularly spread themselves around the kitchen benches (this wasn’t just Dad of course – we are a family of seven). Organising this assortment of mail, torn pieces of envelope with phone numbers written on them, tiny miscellaneous toys, coins, sets of keys and so on, and creating sweet if temporary order, was something that my mother and I could both rejoice in.

Has Dad passed down his hoarding tendencies to me? Not at first glance. I'm a tidiness freak and I like to think I’m a great declutterer, but in that regard I’m fooling myself. I'm good at getting rid of some things but not others.

I hold onto clothes for longer than many, but I can get rid of the most treasured garment once I’ve made the decision; I actually enjoy the process of weeding out my wardrobe and dropping off a bag of goodies at my favourite op shop. Once it's time for a piece to go, I don't give it another thought.

But the fact is I do have my own hoarding weakness – books. I have five bookshelves if you don't count the one in my office that is stuffed with folders of edited educational materials.

I find it very hard to let books go. I have thrown the odd few out, but my decisions are extremely conservative. And I still have many books that I won't read again and that bear little relationship to how I live my life these days. Do I really need my secondhand copies of Emotional Intelligence and Steven Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? (These books were both written before the financial crisis – if they were so influential, why didn't their sage advice for corporate types stop the Goldman Sachs executives plundering the USA and destroying the world economy?) To me the knowledge these books hold represents security, and a link with past versions of me, and I can’t let them go, not yet anyway.

Another thing I hold onto is appointment diaries. Mine go as far back as 1994. I keep them in my bookshelves so it doesn’t feel as if I’m hoarding them. I tell myself they’re useful as primary sources for memoir writing and so on, but they’re really just another link with earlier versions of my life and myself. In the rare times I go through one, trying to discover when some long-ago incident occurred, I’m strangely comforted by the mundanity of the various lists I was so fond of making. Whatever my emotional and material struggles, I continued to go to the supermarket, have my hair cut, drop my books back to the library and pay my rent.

Flyers relating to arts and cultural events – exhibitions, readings, films, plays – are another weakness. It’s so easy to forget the details of these experiences, and while there’s enough room in my filing cabinet, I can’t bring myself to throw away anything that jogs my memory.

In fact, the things I hold onto suggest that I’m more like my father than is comfortable to contemplate. Like him, it’s reminders of the past that I cling to. In the absence of a photographic memory, these refugees from my past testify to my changing life and the things that continue to sustain it.

If you enjoyed this blog entry, you might like Furni-phobia: the fear of buying big-ticket consumer goods.

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Dog Despair

Neurotic and self-obsessed as I am, minor physical problems can throw me into a tizz. I metaphorically shake my fist at the sky and am haunted by dark imaginings of future health nightmares: rosacea will scar my face horribly; tinnitus will sound like a crazed pizza deliverer who keeps knocking at the front door, never realising he's come to the wrong place; I'll get permanent brain damage from the black mould on the kitchen ceiling. And then I pick myself up and gradually learn to manage and adjust to the latest issue that life and ageing have imposed.

When other people in my life show signs of ill-health it’s even more dire. These people are not supposed to get sick. They are there to support me, aren’t they? (Well actually no, but that’s what I believe deep down.) When family members acquire conditions much more serious than whatever I’ve had to put up with physically speaking, it feels as if the universe is making a direct attack on my fragile support systems. Forget the people themselves.

The people may not necessarily be human.

So far I’ve taken three paragraphs to get around to the point of this blog entry: Jordan, the 99-per-cent-cocker-spaniel-one-per-cent-cute dog that belongs to the family of one my sisters and that I used to walk in the park twice a week, has a slipped disc.

As soon as I write this, it starts to sound trivial. Anything to do with dogs ultimately does. Their status is infinitely limited compared with humans. The ones who are truly cosseted are derided by society with the label ‘pooch’.

As with all non-human animals, part of the reason we trivialise their suffering is because they can’t tell us how they’re feeling. So we take the easy way out and assume they put up with suffering more easily than we do. We tell ourselves that animals are hardy creatures who live and die in the wild without doctors, artificial heating, or guarantees of a regular food source, and that with us as their carers they have it made. I wish that as a society we could start to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Jordan has his own chair in the lounge room because the family don’t like him sitting on their large modular couch. His old chair – a black swivel leather chair – was fine. But they didn’t like the look of it so they got him a new one and that’s when the trouble started. The new chair was too high for him and he slipped a disc when trying to jump up onto it.

I went around to my sister’s place last Friday to say hello to Jordan and sit with him for a while. I kind of invited myself, something I normally don't do, but I was anxious to see that he was okay and give him some time. My sister agreed to me dropping over at 4.30 that day, and I promised her she wouldn't have to stop and entertain me. The self-invitation turned out to be a perfectly predictable mistake. 

I found him worse than I’d wanted to believe. He greeted me at the front door so excited he was shivering compulsively, but when placed back in his previous position he lay there listlessly. He can walk around slowly but should be resting. Watching his attempt to simply sit on his haunches was pitiful: tentatively moving his bum towards the floor, then giving up; obviously too painful. He is, to put it bluntly, temporarily disabled. Someone who didn’t know what was wrong might assume he was an elderly dog with a terrible case of arthritis.

My sister has taken him to the vet and he is now on painkillers and will go back for a further check-up next week, with x-rays a possibility if he makes no progress. He is obviously in some pain even when still, but it is not so extreme that he is yelping, as he was before the painkillers. ‘It could be months ...’ I said to my sister, who is a nurse and understands the travails of recovery. She nodded. ‘I know,’ she said in her irritable way. When she lets herself stop and focus on Jordan, she has a reservoir of affection for him, calling him puppy even though he's now five years old, and insisting that he uses his long ginger-coloured eyelashes to communicate: 'Look, see how he blinks to tell you how he's feeling!'

But the spigot of her empathy is easily turned off. Since the onset of the condition Jordan is allowed to sit on the couch with a towel underneath, but apparently only during the day when my sister is not at work. ‘We need the couch to ourselves,’ she explained as she relegated him to a corner next to the television at around 5.30 pm. In this alternative position he lies on a doubled-over rug where he can’t see the television screen; not that he seems much interested in it, but it means he’s cut off from what the rest of the family is doing when they’re all sitting down together to watch it. Jordan’s haunted, unhappy eyes shone darkly from this lowly (and probably colder) position; I imagine this alternative spot is because my sister’s husband doesn’t like him being on the couch, and was due home any minute.

There's no one to blame for this mishap, and it wasn't foreseeable. But I can't help seeing a kind of metaphoric correlation between the family's lack of care and Jordan's current state. They seem obscurely to blame for not watching over him more closely. And assuming Jordan’s new chair was higher than the couch, the family’s subtle distancing of him (not allowing him on the couch in the first place) has inadvertently contributed. My sister is cosseting him somewhat, but not enough.

My tenuous relationship with him has become even more fragile, because I can only see him within the confines of the house, where I am soon made to feel unwelcome – ‘of course you can stay, sorry, could you get off the couch? I have to tidy up, I’m always like this on a Friday afternoon’ – and I am shooed out along with the dirt my sister is sweeping up from the living room floor in preparation for her husband’s return from work.

If you enjoyed this post, you might also like Dog Days.

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Birthday Depression - Cured or Simply in Remission?

Three years ago I sat down to write a blog entry for Slightly Nutty. My recent birthday had been a day of dark thoughts, with a sense of underlying menace. Not because of anything that happened on the day but due to an undercurrent of feelings concerning what was then my forty-sixth birthday. I called the entry ‘Hit by pre-birthday depression’.

The response was strong. The entry became the most widely read of my entire blog, with 1,810 page views. It seems there’s a bit of a syndrome out there. A lot of people fall into a heap at this time, and then kick themselves in the guts because they feel guilty about not appreciating the efforts of friends and family to help them celebrate. Others simply feel sad because their loved ones don’t show their appreciation on the one day of the year that it matters most. Many of those who commented thanked me for sharing a common experience that doesn’t very often get an airing.

A year later I suffered a much milder bout of birthday depression and decided to record what I’d learned about the phenomenon to date. This second entry was also popular, with over 1,100 page views.

In that second entry I reluctantly gave some suggestions for dealing with birthday depression. I didn’t want to tell people what to do, or imply that they shouldn’t be feeling bad, when I knew many would already be feeling guilty. Much of the awfulness of birthday depression stems from the belief you have no right to be feeling so bad.

Well, I’ve just had another birthday. And like an eccentric doctor who operates on herself, I was curious to see how I’d go this year. It wasn’t what I expected at all.

A low-key celebration

First, I need to set the scene a bit. I have a rather fractious family. Given that we’re Irish Catholics, a group that tends to operate in closeknit clans, it’s taken me more than half my life to realise that this is an intractable situation and I don’t have to try and change it. So for the second year in a row, I chose not to spend the day with any of my four sisters. There was no acrimony. Three of them phoned me to deliver birthday greetings – I’m planning to catch up with one of them next weekend – and the other sister delivered greetings via Facebook.

So what did I do instead? I went out to lunch with a friend, to a cheap cafe in a vibrant, eclectic part of town that served the Middle Eastern food I crave (Balaclava Road East St Kilda for the Melburnites). Afterwards I had afternoon tea with my parents, who spoiled me with flowers and a very welcome monetary gift. Then I went home, answered my phone messages (which led to some cosy chats), and lounged in front of the television, alternating between watching it and reading a good book.

And guess what? I felt fine.

Why the change?

In reporting my experiences I want to make it clear that I’m not making any generalisations. The many comments I received suggested to me that the experience of birthday depression is different for each person who suffers it. ‘Depression’ is a catch-all term anyway that is often used to mean sadness or grief.

So while I would love what I say to be useful, I’m certainly not saying ‘I beat birthday depression – you can too.’ Quite the opposite: birthday depression is very common, and the only recommendations I would make is that people let themselves experience it, be nice to themselves, and take their needs into account when planning the birthday. But the mystery of why there was no birthday depression for me this year is still worth solving. Here are my theories:

Grieving in advance. Over the past few years as I’ve hit my late forties I’ve been grieving quite a bit for past mistakes and the direction my life has taken romance-wise. In the last year or so I’ve reached a much greater level of acceptance of where I’m at. Perhaps I am finally accepting ‘life on life’s terms’. (Not that I don’t get angry sometimes – I do – but for some reason the anger didn’t surface on my birthday.)

Planning the birthday to take into account my family’s shortcomings. From my years of celebrating birthdays with my siblings, I knew I’d end up feeling bitter and angry if I included them on the day. So for the second year in a row I spent the birthday without them. It was easier this year for everybody because it wasn’t a new thing. I felt not a shred of guilt. I freely admit that I’ve been lucky that my family have simply accepted this and yet were still able to wish me well on the day – not all families would be this forgiving.

Writing and sharing the experience. The experience of blogging about birthday depression and receiving so many positive responses to the entries has empowered me and given me the courage to explore the process more deeply in myself. I’m very grateful to all the people who have commented, and I sincerely hope you’ve been able to adjust your celebrations to minimise the pain.

Preparing for the feelings. I told myself it would be okay to feel sad on the day, and allowed any feelings to come up in advance.

Lowering my expectations. Just as I’ve let some of my most cherished dreams go (not completely of course – they are still there, but I accept my present) so over the past three years I’ve learned to adjust my expectations of the birthday. I plan ahead, choosing activities that are in line with where I’m at, and don’t expect the birthday to be super-fantastic. (I’ve had to learn to do this gradually – don’t feel guilty if you find this hard to do, or don’t want to.)

In fact I felt so light, cheerful and special on the day itself that the following day I found myself with a whole new phenomenon on my hands – post-birthday depression! No flowers,  birthday greetings, gifts or trips out for lunch. It was back to normality, and I didn’t like it one little bit.

Having said all that, my fiftieth is coming up next year, and if I don’t experience a new round of wailing and gnashing of teeth on the day and in the lead-up to it, I’ll be quite surprised. But at least I have a whole year in which to farewell my forties.

Please note: if you're suffering ongoing depression then you may need to speak to a professional. These words are no substitute for medical advice - please seek help if you need to.

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If Only the Kids Were All Right!

Happy new year to my blog readers! I hope that 2011 is full of joy and plain sailing. While I've been on my 'blog break' I've been thinking about the blog and struggling a bit with the fact that, although I find writing about my psyche issues incredibly therapeutic and don't want to stop doing it, it also increases my tendency to self-obsession. Living alone is part of the problem. I get sick of myself sometimes!

Meanwhile, as we move further into 2011, the world seems pottier than ever, with climate-related tragedies increasingly rife (not the least in my state - a quarter of Victoria at one point affected by floods), the GFC still spreading its slow-acting poison, and politicians dumber by the minute. Blogging about political and social issues, rather than getting them out of my system, just increases the amount of steam pouring out of my ears, and I don't want to sound like a rancorous grump (although I am). So I've had a bit of a break to get some perspective and try to make myself understand that I cannot control the world or change it singlehandedly.

I recently saw a movie that has galvanised me into returning to blogland - The Kids Are All Right, the first mainstream US feature film with lesbian mothers as the main characters. A few nights later the classic Brokeback Mountain was on the tele. The full moon was rising, and finally my blog drought was broken - it was time to make some notes about the differences between these two very different fil-ums. So here goes! Unfortunately I've had to include multiple spoilers to make my points.

Released in 2010, The Kids Are All Right is the story of Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening), a lesbian couple living in sunny California with their two children, Laser (Josh Hutcherson) and Joni (Mia Wasikowska), conceived by an anonymous donor. Nic wears the pants in the family; she's a busy obstetrician while the unconfident Jules plays homemaker and is hesitantly planning to start a garden landscaping business. The couple are worried about 14-year-old Laser's friendship with Clay, a troublemaker.

Laser and Joni secretly arrange to meet up with their donor dad, Paul (Mark Ruffalo); he turns out to be a hip free spirit who owns an organic food restaurant. Paul enters into the life of the family and sets everything topsy-turvy. When he takes on Jules for a garden landscaping project, they end up having an affair.

Reviewers have raved about the film with some exceptions, and it's been compared, not completely unfavourably, to a sit com. This response is not so surprising; on a surface level The Kids Are All Right is very watchable, the plot chugs along steadily, and there are some amusing moments. Audiences warmed to it; Wikipedia reports that the film was 'released to near universal acclaim' and that it had grossed $29 million by 20 December 2010, in its first five months of release - not bad for a film dealing with a topic that in the US at least is still controversial. The film won a Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy, and Annette Bening won a Golden Globe for Best Actress - Musical or Comedy. The opinion below is definitely a minority one, but there has been serious criticism about the way the film handles lesbian motherhood, particularly by lesbian bloggers.

Lesbian desire is something that mainstream films have struggled to represent. Perhaps this is because the structural relation of males and females in traditional misogynistic culture is that men desire, while women are the objects of desire. Where there is no male in a relationship, desire per se is problematic on a structural rather than a plot level.

In straining to represent lesbian desire, a desire that, initially at least, is unmediated by a man, The Kids Are All Right is conceptually confusing: to depict a progressive, twenty-first century relationship it turns to a retro concept of the family, in which one partner is masculine, desiring and active, and the other is feminine, passive and desired. The film deploys both an old-fashioned nuclear family model and a 1950s-style lesbian variant of the heterosexual structure whereby the femme and the butch played out traditional male and female roles. Thus Nic brings home the bacon and has a short, dykey haircut; Jules is conventionally beautiful, long-haired and lacking in confidence.

More disturbingly, Nic is a control freak; in one or two scenes her preternaturally calm dictatorialism borders on the emotionally abusive. It's this aspect of the film that is most disturbing and retrogressive, and that reveals its inability to imagine fully a lesbian desire that is not pathological. I'd go so far as to say that there's something monstrous about Bening's character that the breezy tone of the film cannot contain. She's possessive as well as being pathologically controlling and bordering on the alcoholic (her possessiveness encompasses her children as well as her partner). Only Moore's character is human and likeable, and in the film's schema she is the loved one, the desired woman.

In fact, with her heightened, melodramatic reactions, killer stare and chillingly careful diction, Bening's character brought to mind the eponymous film Monster, a biographical thriller about real-life lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos and her lover Tyria Moore. Starring the normally glamourous Charlize Theron as the ungainly Wuornos, the film strained to represent the lesbian relationship sympathetically but all too often ended up depicting a woman driven to murder purely by obsessive lesbian love (the theatrical release poster indicates the film's pathologisation of lesbian desire).

The breezy style of The Kids Are All Right sits extremely oddly with its own underlying pathology. When Nic discovers that Jules has been having an affair with Paul, at a family dinner at Paul's place, she returns to the table, stunned. The banter continues to swirl around her but so traumatised is she that she can't hear it. In seeming sympathy with her, the film momentarily mutes the sound as the camera zooms in on her silently horrified face. But in the one moment when we are supposed to identify and sympathise with her more than ever before, she has never appeared more dangerous and unstable, more extreme. It's as if she has no perception of herself outside her status as head of a family over whom she must maintain control, or perish. I wouldn't have been surprised had she rushed to the knife drawer, grabbed an ice pick and jammed it into Ruffalo's eye.

What's frustrating about this on a social level is that lesbian relationships, though of course hardly immune to dysfunction, are less likely to have one partner more dominant than are heterosexual relationships. Given the paucity of representations of these relationships, wouldn't it have been fairer to show one that was more typical? In fact, Nic's controlling behaviour embodies the worst of both male and female stereotypes, suggesting that having two mums must be psychoanalytically nightmarish; at one point she reminds Joni to send thank-you notes for presents she's received, advising her that it's better to send them before she will be forced to start her letters with an apology.

This inability to conceive of lesbian desire seeps into something as basic as the sex. At no point does the film show the two women properly 'getting it on' apart from kisses: twice when they start to get sexual there are interruptions, and their first attempt, aided by gay male porn, seems halfhearted and lacklustre (this wasn't the fault of the gay male porn; it actually created one of the funnier moments in the film, apart from smacking a bit of self-consciously enlightened social commentary).

In contrast, the sex scenes between Jules and Paul are full of energy, not to mention sexual subversion, as if the film were saying 'phew - now we can actually show how it's really done'. Confusingly, there are two conflicting lesbian stereotypes at play here: the 1970s myth that lesbians just need a good f--k; and the porn-related male fantasy of the sexually adventurous, dominant lesbian.

But of course the affair is possible and necessary because the Moore character is the woman in the lesbian relationship. That's why she can have sex with a man, and why she appears to be having a much better time with him than with her partner: real women, you see, need men. Jules actually exclaims something like 'oh baby' when she rips Ruffalo's underwear off and views his member, as if she's just been dying for a bit of 'real' action.

Part of the problem is the quality of the acting. It's mainly good, but Bening is just too good. For most of the film her character is so off the wall that what functionality and harmony there is in the family at the beginning of the film strains credibility. (Ruffalo should stop being typecast as a rebel; his performance was a bit predictable at times, as if he's a bit bored himself with the rebel persona.)

There's also a disturbing scene in which Jules summarily fires Luis, the Latino gardener she has hired for the gardening project, simply because he's happened to be around while she's been having it off with Paul. She's breathtakingly rude to him in a way that is supposed to be funny yet is merely offensive and appears to be racist.

There has been much discussion around whether this scene, including Luis's obsequious reaction to his firing, is racial stereotyping or a sophisticated attempt by director Lisa Cholodenko to show the supposedly progressive Jules's hypocrisy, and Luis's reaction as a calculated response to a racist environment in which he has little power. There is an attempt to satirise liberal hypocrisy going on here, but it's stifled by the sit com tone. Ultimately the film doesn't give a stuff about Luis's fate; after a rudimentary confession to Nic about her undeserved rudeness to Luis, the film appears to 'forgive' Jules as the necessary cost of milking a few extra laughs.

The other obvious point is that the film's take on the intervention of Paul makes some unpleasantly stereotypical assumptions about lesbian-headed families. It seems that Laser has no male role models in his life, and that's why he's acting out. After forming a friendship with his dad he's able to see what a tosser his friend Clay is, and give him up. Similarly, having Paul in her life gives Joni the confidence she needs to make a move on a male friend she's long been interested in. (That this is unsuccessful is unimportant - the point is she's been willing to try, and in so doing, dare to move into adulthood.) Yet, in the absence of a male co-parent or involved biological father, most lesbian parents, I imagine, would make efforts to include male role models in their children's lives.

In fact, the film's extreme conservatism is the basis for its hackneyed plot line: stranger intervenes in family, brings about important changes, then leaves. Paul is ultimately cast out; 'go and find your own family', Nic admonishes him at the end, and the audience is unequivocally supposed to be on her side at this point. No doubt Cholodenko was trying to be ironic here; the lesbian family as foundational, the heterosexual man as outsider. I don't know any lesbian mothers, but I imagine they would be more tolerant, more open to outsiders than this - does mainstream acceptance require that they fit a conservative template?

Let's contrast this film with the sublime Brokeback Mountain, starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as the star-crossed gay lovers Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist, whose affair while sheep herding in the Wyoming mountains becomes a lifelong love story that must be hidden from their families and is ultimately tragic.

This film just seems more perfect every time I watch it. When I first saw it I thought that, typical of director Ang Lee's style, the film was too clean. But I realise now that Lee's fastidiousness is born out of a huge well of respect and even love for his characters. Every last detail's been taken care of: Ennis's daughter looks like a combination of Ledger and Michelle Williams, his real and screen ex-wife; the actor who plays Ennis as a child in a brief flashback could be Heath Ledger's son; and even Jack Twist's parents are visually believable as his progenitors.

This isn't to say that the verisimilitude is anything but conventional. The film is a lush and tragic love story that from the word go has been marketed as classic Hollywood, the theatrical poster even modelling that of the mega-hit Titanic. The film unashamedly cossets the audience and blankets them in its loveliness, allowing viewers to project their own desires, dreams and losses onto the characters, regardless of sexual proclivity.

Instead of building pseudo-conflict by showing the characters being rude to each other - a trait not confined to The Kids Are All Right but increasingly evident in a particular style of US mainstream movie (Juno, Knocked Up) - Lee shows us, from the opening shots, the innate differences that will lead to conflict further on.

In the opening scene, Jack and Ennis, planning to commence a seasonal sheep herding job, wait outside a sheep owner's office in a dusty flybitten outpost in the American West. Ennis's hands are buried in his pockets, his shoulders hunched, his head bowed. Jack waits against his black ute in a casual stance; as he studies Ennis, confused by by his reticence, he unobtrusively slings out a hip then flings the opposite arm out and rests it on the tray of his ute.

Already we are being told subliminally that Jack 'knows' himself, and that, while he's hardly out, he has come to terms with his desires. His body language makes a stark contrast to the suit of armour that is Ennis's body. Jake Gyllenhaal is just stunning as Jack, and it's sad to see his talent now being squandered in mainstream rom coms; when the by-now secret lovers part after the seasonable job is over, the slightest raising of Gyllenhall's brow as he asks Ennis if they can meet again the following year is enough to convey a poignant mixture of emotional vulnerability and forlorn hope.

While there are emotional outbursts in the film, for much of the time the underlying emotions are conveyed by glances and body language; this both respects the audience's interpretative abilities and evokes the silence surrounding the issue of gayness in the period in which the film is set. And given its level of high melodrama and the sophistication of modern audiences, it's an achievement in itself that Brokeback Mountain never descends into bathos (perhaps the only thing I'd tone down is the force with which Jack and Ennis grapple with each other after their first reunion; the line 'I wish I knew how to quit you' has been fondly lampooned, but this merely indicates the film's ubiquity).

I don't want to go into a discussion about whether or not the characters are gay - clearly they are, and Brokeback Mountain is always a political film, pleading for acceptance and recognition of gay desire and gay relationships by relaying the central love story through an epic form. The fact that both Jack and Ennis have unhappy ends has caused consternation for some gays, who rightfully plead for an occasional happy ending for same-sex lovers. But I'd change hardly a frame of this lovingly crafted film.

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