Or, Write a two thousand word essay on how my thinking got so screwed up.
Here goes.
Many years ago there was a young man called Stan. He grew up an only child on a small family farm at Fish Creek. The farm was run by his parents and two of his dad's brothers. When Stan was growing up, his world was a narrow one. It revolved around his parents, his uncles, and various other relatives, mostly on his dad's side, who would visit from time to time. Those visits were always very exciting for Stan. Of course he also had childhood friends, but they don't enter into this story.
The two uncles never married. Hence, Stan was the only child not just of his parents but also of the entire farming operation. So the world of the farm, it seemed to Stan, revolved around him. And perhaps it did. It was more than just a home to him. It was his life. Even when he wasn't actually working on the farm, it formed the background to his playing, his study, and anything else that was going on. When he wasn't at school, he was at the farm. To him, that was just the way things were.
He grew to understand that the farm would one day be his. In his small world, he had no reason to think otherwise, anyway, and he thought no more about it.
Eventually young Stan finished high school and moved to Melbourne to go to university. Even then, though, he continued to go back to the farm on holidays and many weekends, and when he had finished university he found a job at a law firm 20 miles from the farm. He began forming plans, with his father, for what they might do together on the farm as his parents started to get older.
Around this time a number of things happened. His mother fell into poor health. He met a girl called Adrienne. And his father, after a very short illness, died of leukemia. Into his truncated and sheltered world entered a number of forces that were beyond his understanding and outside of his control. The result of this combination of outside forces was that the farm was lost. And a fundamental part of the young Stan was lost with it.
Looking back now, after many years, Stan finds himself applying his more mature and sophisticated brain to the exercise of dwelling on what happened, what could have been done differently, and, specifically, whether the farm could have been kept going and if, in fact, it was because of his actions that it was not. The problem with an exercise like that is that Stan now is not the same person as young Stan, and applying his current standards and abilities to the Stan that existed 20 years ago is an exercise in futility. But it is not just an exercise in futility; it is also stopping him from being able to luxuriate in his limitless store of fond memories of life on the farm, and life with his parents, because those memories are constantly being intruded upon by the equally limitless re-living of all that he went through.
And he went through quite a lot, for a young and inexperienced man. Even as he was coming to terms with the idea that his father was going to die, and with the burden of having to break that news to his mother, who was too unwell to be in Melbourne with her husband, he had to also try to make sense of what was happening around him: namely, that his dad's two brothers, and other members of the family, whom he had nothing but fondness for, appeared to be keeping him and his mother at some distance from their dying husband and father.
His mother would always, he had thought, be welcome to stay with the Melbourne branch of the family, as they often had as a family. But for some reason, that was going to be too much trouble for them. She was going to have to find accommodation elsewhere. Which was impossible. So Stan had to ferry his mother to the hospital on the second-last day of his father's life, and sit in at what was a terrible, terrible reunion. And then, the following day, having driven his mother back to the country and then driven, without her, back to Melbourne, in the knowledge that his father would die that day, he found himself waiting in line with other grieving relatives for a chance to be alone with his dad. At least he was able to be there, with Adrienne by his side, when his father died.
To re-tell that story now is difficult enough. But it is hard to imagine how this young man called Stan could have navigated his way through it. What skills did he have? The dynamic between him and the other members of the family was always, in essence, that he stood one step behind and to the side of his father. And that all of them, his parents and his two uncles, essentially stood together. Could he have confronted his Melbourne relatives and insisted that they give his mother a bed for a few nights? Of course not. Did they deny her this so as to keep Stan and his mother at one remove from his father, knowing that Stan would have to divide his time between the hospital and where his mother was staying, two hours away, and that she was too unwell to be able to spend any length of time at the hospital? The thought would never have entered his head. He was not an active participant in whatever was going on, but a young man trying to deal with events that he could not understand. Were they trying to send a message to him, and his mother, that his mother was not "real" family? Well, he would have had no idea about anything like that.
He also didn't understand what was happening when, in the days after his father died and before the funeral, he watched another older brother of his father's, visiting the farmhouse to pay his respects, and wandering around looking at things as if taking an inventory, and making no secret of it.
What young Stan gradually figured out for himself was that, unbeknownst to him, the older of his two uncles had never accepted his mother, and that uncle called the shots throughout the family. So Stan never stood a chance, really, because from a very young age he had worshipped that uncle. There was nobody there to explain to Stan that he would have to choose between the family and his mother. But choose is what he was forced to do, and what he did, and of course his loyalty was to his mother. In making that choice, though, the fate of the farm was sealed. His uncle ruled out the idea of any kind of partnership in the absence of his father, and his mother was not prepared to put her own financial security in the hands of his uncle, so the relationship had to end.
His role, really, was to watch the relationship, and the farm, fall apart, and in a practical sense to facilitate that happening. He had the skills, and the legal knowledge, to know the mechanics of what had to be done and to be able to make that happen. What he didn't have was the ability, or the worldliness or maturity, perhaps, to intervene, or to try and wrest control of things from his uncle and the extended family.
One particular task that fell to him, because his uncle had sent them to see him rather than doing it himself, was to tell the sharefarmers that the farm wouldn't be continuing on beyond the end of the season and that they had better look for work elsewhere. He didn't understand why it came to him to do that, because the business of the farm was nothing to do with him. But he did it anyway.
Is it any wonder, then, that as time has passed he has come to place himself at the centre of the story, as an active player, rather than as the inexperienced, well, not victim exactly, but participant in the collapse of everything that had been most important to him? And, of course, all of these things were compounded on top of his own grieving, and coming to terms with his own changed world, and the family history he hadn't known, and hadn't been prepared for, and taking the necessary steps to ensure that his mother was able to be looked after and cared for (itself an unexpected role reversal for which he was ill prepared). And, let us not forget, young Stan had no brothers or sisters to turn to for advice, and his mother was in no condition to take any of the pressure off him. In fact, at the same time as Stan was at the centre of this cyclone, hanging on just enough to make sure that her interests were looked after, his mother was dealing with her own grief and poor health, and taking out her own frustrations on him. So he had, really, nowhere to turn, no one making sure he was alright. Well, he had Adrienne, but she wasn't part of this particular history. It wasn't her approbation he was looking for.
In the wash-up, his mother kept a small part of the farm. As for the family, he walked away. He couldn't really do otherwise. He didn't burn bridges, he just left them behind. There was too much hurt, too much doubt and confusion, for him to be able to just turn back into the arms of the people who had done this to him. For a few years, his mother's part of the farm was leased out to neighbours as a turn-out paddock. But it wasn't viable on its own, wasn't as well looked after as if it had been owner-operated, and, especially after he moved to Canberra with his own family, was too far away to be enjoyed for recreational purposes. So, long after his mother herself had died, he made the final decision to sell what was left of it. But that decision, which was his own, was really only the full stop at the end of the chapter that had written itself when he was only 25 years old.
So, if the Stan of 2009 wants to ask the questions, What did he do wrong? and What could he have done differently?, which, anyway, are questions that are unfair to the Stan of 1989, the least you can say is, he did what he had to do. You should, though, go on to say that in the circumstances he also did the "right" thing, when those whom he understood to be his elders and betters were putting pressure on him to do otherwise, pressure he was in no position to resist, and at a time when, on so many levels, he was trying to get his bearings in a world that had so quickly and so unexpectedly become so different from the one he thought he knew. So the fact that he did resist that pressure, that he supported his mother, when he could see what he thought would always belong to him slipping away from him as a direct result of those decisions, says something, and perhaps it says rather a lot, about how well he performed, at the age that he was, and with the skills that he had, and with the maturity that he didn't yet have. And perhaps it also says that he went through things that very few young adults would ever be asked to navigate, essentially on his own.
When he is able to think back to those times, and what he had to do, and what he did, and in particular when he is able to remind himself that he was not then the person that he is now, well, then he will have untied the knot that has been snarling his thoughts for a long, long time, and he will be as free as a bird, free to soar over the childhood that still exists, in brilliant technicolour inside of his head, and the view will no longer be obscured by clouds.
