The Bexley years were marked, for me, with memories of being sick. As well, Elizabeth was sick for two of those years, with what looked like the same problem.
When we first moved to Bexley near the park, I was in my early twenties, with two pre-school children. My health was “okay”, but I was having periods of acute illness –swollen glands, low-grade fever, aches and pains in the joints, excessive and debilitating fatigue, diarrhoea and stomach cramps, and nausea. In the early years my complaints were mostly ignored by the doctors I saw. At one point one doctor diagnosed me with “soft-tissue arthritis” which is a peculiar definition to give for my symptoms. My only solution to the problem was to spend my time laying on the sofa and taking aspirin – I did not have access to any other drugs, and aspirin relieved the symptoms for the 3-4 hours at a time. The illness came in episodes, lasting up to three months at a time, and during this time I would be mostly unable to do anything apart from the most necessary of duties. I would do the housework and set the cooking up for the day, and spend the rest of the day on the sofa, dozing and napping. I would close the house up, if it was the winter, or lock the back gate if in the summer, and let the children play. In the winter, I would allow the children to move the furniture and play houses – I would give them sheets to make tents etc. I would keep one ear on the children’s noise, and as long as the noise was the usual children’s noise, I would stay on the sofa. In the afternoon I would put the children down for a nap and sleep myself. At around 4pm I would jump up, tidy the house and the children, giving them a milkshake to tide them over until tea-time, bathe them and generally make the place look as if I had not spent all day on the sofa. My son has a memory of me in one of these episodes, combing my hair for me.
The intermittent diarrhoea I suffered from for years meant that I had a weight problem – I never weighed more than about 57 kgs in the whole time I was married to Michel.
I had surgery to correct the retroverted uterus just before we moved to Bexley and unfortunately for me I had continuing pain from the surgery. The GP I was seeing in Rockdale, a Dr Kolos, diagnosed stretched tendons –the tendons had been pulled too tight during the surgery and were painful. She performed corrective surgery to loosen the tendons and gave me a course of injections to deal with the pain. She also referred me to a physio therapist where I was to undergo a course of ultrasound treatment to aid healing. Getting the children dressed, getting down to Rockdale, worrying about what the children were doing while I was undergoing treatment was counterproductive to the any benefit the treatment may have given me. Eventually it was the effluxion of time that cured the problem. It was several years before I was free of pain, but it eventually disappeared.
When Elizabeth was three, the occasional intermittent fevers that marked her early life became much more frequent, and I was referred to a paediatrician. He was unable to come to a definite diagnosis. He admitted her to hospital each time she ran a fever in an effort to get to the bottom of the issue, but came up with nothing other than he suspected a virus infection, as her blood tests showed elevated white blood cell activity. It appeared that the fevers were not life threatening, so eventually I relaxed about them, and they disappeared once she went to school. Later we found that they were caused by the Epstein-Barr virus that we had caught in Lebanon.
Dr Kolos was, as a GP, very good for me. One occasion I was seeing her about my own problems, and Pierre shat in his pants. I had been able to toilet train him for wees, but not for bowel movements. At this point he was just two years old. The ka-ka was foul smelling and loose, and Dr Kolos, on smelling it – it was unavoidable – declared that the smell was “off “ and promptly swooped on Pierre and took a sample to be tested. The results surprised me. He had a fungi infection – monilia albicans – and milk intolerance. No wonder I had not been able to toilet train him! Once I took him off milk and he had a course of medication, he stopped shitting his pants and became a happier boy as a result.
During this period I spoke to Dr Kolos and her partner several times about my own problems. One time, the other doctor in the practice prescribed medication – Serepax and a diazepam, to be taken together. I was a little dubious but at that stage still doing what my doctors told me to do without question. This episode changed that view. I took the medication once I had got back home, after lunch, and promptly became very drowsy, dizzy and disorientated. I could barely keep my eyes open. I struggled through the afternoon, becoming more and more angry that the doctor had prescribed powerful sedatives to a mother with young children. How I was supposed to function, I don’t know. As well, the implications of the prescription – treating it as a nervous complaint – meant that the doctor did not see my complaints as having any basis in fact. I threw the rest of the medication out and changed doctors.
I had a bit of a crush on my next doctor. He was a handsome young man and I was a lonely very frustrated housewife and I must admit to visiting him more than was absolutely necessary. I would see him whenever the children were sick etc. Perhaps 4 to 5 of my visits were spurious however it never went further than these few extra visits.
I was experiencing a lot of lower back pain of unknown origin and this pain over time was driving me made with frustration. There did not appear to be a problem with the back – my back was fine, and examination of my back yielded nothing. The pains got worse over time, and eventually I realised a nexus between the pain and eating. One evening the pain was very bad and I was writhing on the bed, enable to find a comfortable position, and I asked Michel to call the doctor (the one I had a crush on) as I was in terrible pain. He came, and when I told him I thought there was a connection between this pain in the side back on the right hand side, he performed what he called a “Murphy’s test”: he asked me to breathe in deeply and he pushed his hand into the space under the ribs on the right hand side. Silly man, he did not warn me it might hurt – it hurt like crazy and I instinctively lashed out, hitting him in the face (a nice backhander) in pain and surprise. Well, he said, that’s a positive Murphy’s test, if ever there was. It appeared I had cholecystitis, inflammation of the gall bladder, probably due to gall stones. He gave me an antispasmodic to take, which worked, and told me not to eat fatty food and to arrange for a test.
Unfortunately the test did not show gall stones. The bile duct was inflamed, that was all. The pain continued and I was put on the list for surgery as a public patient for a gall bladder removal. I continued to get the pain and over time ceased to eat any fat whatsoever in an effort to reduce the pain. I started to lose weight and became quite sick. But at least I knew what the problem was. This explained the back ache I had all the way through the second pregnancy – gall bladder problems are common with pregnancy and the cholecystectomy is common in women who have had children.
During the years we lived at Bexley Michel worked sometimes 7 days a week, 16 -18 hours a day. The reason was to send money to Lebanon and to save for a house for us. If it were only to save for a house for use, I would have been sanguine about it, however a lot of what he earned he sent to Lebanon to continue the building project. At least twice he borrowed on personal loans to send the whole money to Lebanon. These remittances also supported Farouk and his family – most of the time I was married Farouk did not work and Michel supported him and his family.
Michel also took a job as an office cleaner, working at night after his other job. This meant he arrived home, tired, at about 9 pm during the week. Was he a workaholic? Yes and no. Yes he seemed to driven to keep working, but he did not work just for the sake of it, his goal being to make as much money as he could. Unfortunately his children did not know him very well, as they only saw him on Saturday and Sunday evenings. They were asleep when he arrive d home during the week. Eventually I put my foot down: I told Michel that for the children’s sake he needed to stop working such long hours, as they had begun to show a lack of interest in him. He acquiesced, reluctantly, however this move did result in a better relationship with his children.
These long hours working did not improve our relationship which had begun to sour visibly during this period. We started fighting, which is something that I hated as I am not good at fighting. I get physically sick from nerves and cannot think of anything to say, often bursting into tears before I can say anything. A few times I started the fight, and one time I threw things at him in an effort to get him to give me an answer to a question (I can’t remember what the question was). It was in this period that I found out why he married me – I had asked him why had he married me if he found me so imperfect and unsuitable – why did he criticise me continuously? He answered that he thought that marrying a young good looking girl of 18 would be a good way of getting the wife he wanted – he could change me to what he wanted me to be. You’ve changed, he said. No, I said, I’ve just grown up more. You can’t change people, I said. He reluctantly agreed with this statement. At this point our marriage was at a nadir of disappointment on both sides as we were starting to say what we really thought of each other.
During one of these arguments he threatened to take the children from me and take them to Lebanon. I took this threat very seriously and immediately instituted proceeding in court to give me sole custody of the children, to prevent him form taking them out of the country. It was surprisingly easy, given I was still living with him, and was funded by Legal Aid, and I had my mother serve the papers on him when it was finalised. He was very taken aback and I think it gave him pause to consider the situation because he became a little more attentive and the situation improved somewhat once he got over the shock of it.
Another time, I cut my hand leaving a nasty little scar because I knew I would not get help from him. I had locked myself out of the house when the backdoor blew closed on me. It had happened once previously and I had rung from a neighbours and made Michel come home to unlock the door for me. He was not happy to do so, however as he lived only 5 minutes from his workplace I thought it reasonable to ask him, especially as I had several children with me. The second time, I broke a pane of glass to open the door, cutting myself. I have the scar to this day to remind me of his mealy-mindedness.
I was beginning to discuss and complain to people regarding my unhappy marriage. I considered it unhappy; apparently Michel did not (as he said when I later left him). I was upset at his lack of consideration for me and the children, the time he spent working and the balance of the time he spent mostly with his Lebanese friends. Despite the fact I didn’t like his company I resented the fact that I was alone most of the time and I had not support from him whatsoever. I had to do everything myself and he just worked and visited. I had gone the extra mile in Lebanon by living the Lebanese life as much as possible but he would not accommodate in any way any element of the Australian way of life or even its attitudes.
At one point I even caused him to lose face in front of the Lebanese. Up to this point his marriage problems had not been broadcast to anyone and the only people who knew were my family. An incident illustrates this: the olives. Somewhere Michel had got hold of a box of olives straight off the tree. These need to be scored and soaked in brine before they can be eaten, and this is a laborious job. I had no desire to do it and as I did not eat olives (I hated the taste of them) I flatly refused to sit and score the olives for him. I told him to do it himself. Instead he brought up the Lebanese grandmother of the family with whom we had lodged when we first came back from Lebanon. She sat in the hallway and scored the olives for Michel, leaving me fuming at his insolence at bringing someone into the house to do the job for him. He got his olives – which would have been cheaper and easier to buy prepared – but he lost face, as the Lebanese community knew his wife would not do this for him. I drew the line in the sand.
Our sex life faltered and ground to a halt. I asked for and got a bed of my own. I could not stand to be in the same bed as he. We reached a state of neutral animosity – carefully polite to each other, not really communicating on any other than a superficial level but only when it concerned the children or a family matter. My unhappiness over my marriage only added to my woes and my health deteriorated.
All during this period – these three odd years - I managed to pick up work as a day-care mother and making clothes for the children of my friends. Most of any money I managed to keep went on buying material for clothes for the children, some on dental and physiotherapy bills for myself. Most of the time any money I earned was carefully docked from the housekeeping money by Michel and I was not better off. However it always made me feel good to know I could earn money for myself if I needed it.
I continued to visit my parents and my mother continued to visit me. I was not able to keep girlfriends as Michel’s behaviour when it came to meeting them scared them off – he made it obvious he did not trust any of them. A few of them were very nice women, and I would have liked to have a girlfriend, but I could never keep one. Also I think in retrospect I came across as needy – I was desperately lonely living on the hill in Bexley, with no transport, no money to speak of and a not so nice husband and I believe that scared women off becoming friendly with me.
I had started to consider how I could leave him.
When we first moved to Bexley near the park, I was in my early twenties, with two pre-school children. My health was “okay”, but I was having periods of acute illness –swollen glands, low-grade fever, aches and pains in the joints, excessive and debilitating fatigue, diarrhoea and stomach cramps, and nausea. In the early years my complaints were mostly ignored by the doctors I saw. At one point one doctor diagnosed me with “soft-tissue arthritis” which is a peculiar definition to give for my symptoms. My only solution to the problem was to spend my time laying on the sofa and taking aspirin – I did not have access to any other drugs, and aspirin relieved the symptoms for the 3-4 hours at a time. The illness came in episodes, lasting up to three months at a time, and during this time I would be mostly unable to do anything apart from the most necessary of duties. I would do the housework and set the cooking up for the day, and spend the rest of the day on the sofa, dozing and napping. I would close the house up, if it was the winter, or lock the back gate if in the summer, and let the children play. In the winter, I would allow the children to move the furniture and play houses – I would give them sheets to make tents etc. I would keep one ear on the children’s noise, and as long as the noise was the usual children’s noise, I would stay on the sofa. In the afternoon I would put the children down for a nap and sleep myself. At around 4pm I would jump up, tidy the house and the children, giving them a milkshake to tide them over until tea-time, bathe them and generally make the place look as if I had not spent all day on the sofa. My son has a memory of me in one of these episodes, combing my hair for me.
The intermittent diarrhoea I suffered from for years meant that I had a weight problem – I never weighed more than about 57 kgs in the whole time I was married to Michel.
I had surgery to correct the retroverted uterus just before we moved to Bexley and unfortunately for me I had continuing pain from the surgery. The GP I was seeing in Rockdale, a Dr Kolos, diagnosed stretched tendons –the tendons had been pulled too tight during the surgery and were painful. She performed corrective surgery to loosen the tendons and gave me a course of injections to deal with the pain. She also referred me to a physio therapist where I was to undergo a course of ultrasound treatment to aid healing. Getting the children dressed, getting down to Rockdale, worrying about what the children were doing while I was undergoing treatment was counterproductive to the any benefit the treatment may have given me. Eventually it was the effluxion of time that cured the problem. It was several years before I was free of pain, but it eventually disappeared.
When Elizabeth was three, the occasional intermittent fevers that marked her early life became much more frequent, and I was referred to a paediatrician. He was unable to come to a definite diagnosis. He admitted her to hospital each time she ran a fever in an effort to get to the bottom of the issue, but came up with nothing other than he suspected a virus infection, as her blood tests showed elevated white blood cell activity. It appeared that the fevers were not life threatening, so eventually I relaxed about them, and they disappeared once she went to school. Later we found that they were caused by the Epstein-Barr virus that we had caught in Lebanon.
Dr Kolos was, as a GP, very good for me. One occasion I was seeing her about my own problems, and Pierre shat in his pants. I had been able to toilet train him for wees, but not for bowel movements. At this point he was just two years old. The ka-ka was foul smelling and loose, and Dr Kolos, on smelling it – it was unavoidable – declared that the smell was “off “ and promptly swooped on Pierre and took a sample to be tested. The results surprised me. He had a fungi infection – monilia albicans – and milk intolerance. No wonder I had not been able to toilet train him! Once I took him off milk and he had a course of medication, he stopped shitting his pants and became a happier boy as a result.
During this period I spoke to Dr Kolos and her partner several times about my own problems. One time, the other doctor in the practice prescribed medication – Serepax and a diazepam, to be taken together. I was a little dubious but at that stage still doing what my doctors told me to do without question. This episode changed that view. I took the medication once I had got back home, after lunch, and promptly became very drowsy, dizzy and disorientated. I could barely keep my eyes open. I struggled through the afternoon, becoming more and more angry that the doctor had prescribed powerful sedatives to a mother with young children. How I was supposed to function, I don’t know. As well, the implications of the prescription – treating it as a nervous complaint – meant that the doctor did not see my complaints as having any basis in fact. I threw the rest of the medication out and changed doctors.
I had a bit of a crush on my next doctor. He was a handsome young man and I was a lonely very frustrated housewife and I must admit to visiting him more than was absolutely necessary. I would see him whenever the children were sick etc. Perhaps 4 to 5 of my visits were spurious however it never went further than these few extra visits.
I was experiencing a lot of lower back pain of unknown origin and this pain over time was driving me made with frustration. There did not appear to be a problem with the back – my back was fine, and examination of my back yielded nothing. The pains got worse over time, and eventually I realised a nexus between the pain and eating. One evening the pain was very bad and I was writhing on the bed, enable to find a comfortable position, and I asked Michel to call the doctor (the one I had a crush on) as I was in terrible pain. He came, and when I told him I thought there was a connection between this pain in the side back on the right hand side, he performed what he called a “Murphy’s test”: he asked me to breathe in deeply and he pushed his hand into the space under the ribs on the right hand side. Silly man, he did not warn me it might hurt – it hurt like crazy and I instinctively lashed out, hitting him in the face (a nice backhander) in pain and surprise. Well, he said, that’s a positive Murphy’s test, if ever there was. It appeared I had cholecystitis, inflammation of the gall bladder, probably due to gall stones. He gave me an antispasmodic to take, which worked, and told me not to eat fatty food and to arrange for a test.
Unfortunately the test did not show gall stones. The bile duct was inflamed, that was all. The pain continued and I was put on the list for surgery as a public patient for a gall bladder removal. I continued to get the pain and over time ceased to eat any fat whatsoever in an effort to reduce the pain. I started to lose weight and became quite sick. But at least I knew what the problem was. This explained the back ache I had all the way through the second pregnancy – gall bladder problems are common with pregnancy and the cholecystectomy is common in women who have had children.
During the years we lived at Bexley Michel worked sometimes 7 days a week, 16 -18 hours a day. The reason was to send money to Lebanon and to save for a house for us. If it were only to save for a house for use, I would have been sanguine about it, however a lot of what he earned he sent to Lebanon to continue the building project. At least twice he borrowed on personal loans to send the whole money to Lebanon. These remittances also supported Farouk and his family – most of the time I was married Farouk did not work and Michel supported him and his family.
Michel also took a job as an office cleaner, working at night after his other job. This meant he arrived home, tired, at about 9 pm during the week. Was he a workaholic? Yes and no. Yes he seemed to driven to keep working, but he did not work just for the sake of it, his goal being to make as much money as he could. Unfortunately his children did not know him very well, as they only saw him on Saturday and Sunday evenings. They were asleep when he arrive d home during the week. Eventually I put my foot down: I told Michel that for the children’s sake he needed to stop working such long hours, as they had begun to show a lack of interest in him. He acquiesced, reluctantly, however this move did result in a better relationship with his children.
These long hours working did not improve our relationship which had begun to sour visibly during this period. We started fighting, which is something that I hated as I am not good at fighting. I get physically sick from nerves and cannot think of anything to say, often bursting into tears before I can say anything. A few times I started the fight, and one time I threw things at him in an effort to get him to give me an answer to a question (I can’t remember what the question was). It was in this period that I found out why he married me – I had asked him why had he married me if he found me so imperfect and unsuitable – why did he criticise me continuously? He answered that he thought that marrying a young good looking girl of 18 would be a good way of getting the wife he wanted – he could change me to what he wanted me to be. You’ve changed, he said. No, I said, I’ve just grown up more. You can’t change people, I said. He reluctantly agreed with this statement. At this point our marriage was at a nadir of disappointment on both sides as we were starting to say what we really thought of each other.
During one of these arguments he threatened to take the children from me and take them to Lebanon. I took this threat very seriously and immediately instituted proceeding in court to give me sole custody of the children, to prevent him form taking them out of the country. It was surprisingly easy, given I was still living with him, and was funded by Legal Aid, and I had my mother serve the papers on him when it was finalised. He was very taken aback and I think it gave him pause to consider the situation because he became a little more attentive and the situation improved somewhat once he got over the shock of it.
Another time, I cut my hand leaving a nasty little scar because I knew I would not get help from him. I had locked myself out of the house when the backdoor blew closed on me. It had happened once previously and I had rung from a neighbours and made Michel come home to unlock the door for me. He was not happy to do so, however as he lived only 5 minutes from his workplace I thought it reasonable to ask him, especially as I had several children with me. The second time, I broke a pane of glass to open the door, cutting myself. I have the scar to this day to remind me of his mealy-mindedness.
I was beginning to discuss and complain to people regarding my unhappy marriage. I considered it unhappy; apparently Michel did not (as he said when I later left him). I was upset at his lack of consideration for me and the children, the time he spent working and the balance of the time he spent mostly with his Lebanese friends. Despite the fact I didn’t like his company I resented the fact that I was alone most of the time and I had not support from him whatsoever. I had to do everything myself and he just worked and visited. I had gone the extra mile in Lebanon by living the Lebanese life as much as possible but he would not accommodate in any way any element of the Australian way of life or even its attitudes.
At one point I even caused him to lose face in front of the Lebanese. Up to this point his marriage problems had not been broadcast to anyone and the only people who knew were my family. An incident illustrates this: the olives. Somewhere Michel had got hold of a box of olives straight off the tree. These need to be scored and soaked in brine before they can be eaten, and this is a laborious job. I had no desire to do it and as I did not eat olives (I hated the taste of them) I flatly refused to sit and score the olives for him. I told him to do it himself. Instead he brought up the Lebanese grandmother of the family with whom we had lodged when we first came back from Lebanon. She sat in the hallway and scored the olives for Michel, leaving me fuming at his insolence at bringing someone into the house to do the job for him. He got his olives – which would have been cheaper and easier to buy prepared – but he lost face, as the Lebanese community knew his wife would not do this for him. I drew the line in the sand.
Our sex life faltered and ground to a halt. I asked for and got a bed of my own. I could not stand to be in the same bed as he. We reached a state of neutral animosity – carefully polite to each other, not really communicating on any other than a superficial level but only when it concerned the children or a family matter. My unhappiness over my marriage only added to my woes and my health deteriorated.
All during this period – these three odd years - I managed to pick up work as a day-care mother and making clothes for the children of my friends. Most of any money I managed to keep went on buying material for clothes for the children, some on dental and physiotherapy bills for myself. Most of the time any money I earned was carefully docked from the housekeeping money by Michel and I was not better off. However it always made me feel good to know I could earn money for myself if I needed it.
I continued to visit my parents and my mother continued to visit me. I was not able to keep girlfriends as Michel’s behaviour when it came to meeting them scared them off – he made it obvious he did not trust any of them. A few of them were very nice women, and I would have liked to have a girlfriend, but I could never keep one. Also I think in retrospect I came across as needy – I was desperately lonely living on the hill in Bexley, with no transport, no money to speak of and a not so nice husband and I believe that scared women off becoming friendly with me.
I had started to consider how I could leave him.
The first photo is a rare photo of Michel at work, making the fittings for fire engines at Alexander Perry & Sons. The second photo is of Elizabeth and Pierre, Christmas 1978, in matching sailors outfits, just before setting out for my parents place for Christmas celebrations. Soon after this photo was taken Elizabeth was stung by a bee and her hand swelled up badly.
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