Introduction
Things rarely go to plan. Most of us know this but we go ahead and plan things and dream other things anyway. I imagined being a famous actress by the time I was thirty. Press buzzer now. I dreamed of being partnered, not married but with someone who got me, loved me and who I loved back. Buzzer again. I planned on being an excellent sister, an even better daughter, and a confident mother. There’s that buzzer.
But here I am in my forties with my grandmother’s warning ringing in my ears. ‘Don’t excite your baby so much, he’ll just grow up expecting too much from life’.
There’s that moment when it finally dawns on you that the gap between what you thought your life was going to be and what it actually is has opened up and you’ve just fallen right in there. ‘Mind the gap’, my grandmother might have also said, but I didn’t. ‘And when you fall don’t expect anyone to catch you’, I did, and no one did.
Life’s a mess. It’s incoherent and lacking structure. You can make all the plans you want. Plans are good. They provide shape. An illusion of coherence.
Once I made plans to get married in my grandmother’s garden. My husband hired a suit from the shop on the corner and I bought a linen outfit three days before the wedding. My auntie put little red paper flowers in my hair, my mother prepared everything just right and I camouflaged my future husband’s cold sore on his mouth with cover stick.
Our son was born one year later. Our marriage ended two years later. My grandmother died three years later and now five years later I am still making plans.
Today I am making plans for my son. I am making plans for my son and me.
Prologue
We had not been married long and I was shelling peas. This makes me sound more wifely, more of a domestic success than I was but I had decided on the peas because I thought that the sight of the peas and me would please him. Would please my husband who grew up in a village in East Germany and whose mother would have shelled peas at the kitchen table for sure. She would have picked those peas from the garden and gone about shelling and peeling, baking, and preparing them all in time for her husband when he came home from work and her younger son when he came home from school.
Her husband worked as a local schoolteacher but was never promoted. He should have been, but the Communists probably didn’t trust him. He and his wife were intellectual types. She wrote books in Low German; a language the Communists didn’t trust much either. Who knows what secret prohibitions were working against that family. My husband told me once that the Government had made sure he couldn’t go to university, but he was always a bit vague on the details. I had liked my husband’s parents, my new in-laws, but we didn’t speak a word of each other’s language so it’s hard to tell really. But the thought of getting some new family had really appealed at the time.
So, there I was that day in my nonna’s kitchen. She’d asked my new husband and me to live in her house because she couldn’t look after it anymore when she had to go to the Old People’s Home for Old Italians. That day in my nonna’s bright Venetian-blinded kitchen with its clean tiles and cream Laminex bench, I shelled peas and tried to look normal. I tried to look like a wife. I had no idea what I’d do with those peas once they were shelled but it didn’t matter because then my husband had come into the kitchen from his work room where he’d recently started playing computer games at all hours and in an uncharacteristically extravagant gesture had swept me off the chair and into his arms. He was trying to dance with me right there in my grandmother’s kitchen. He was trying to do with his wife something he’d probably seen in a movie. Maybe he’d been sitting at his computer planning it, choreographing this romantic and spontaneous moment in his mind. Rehearsing our faltering waltz in his mind’s eye. Or maybe he just saw the peas and me and was simply overwhelmed.
And then when he did it, we both kind of bumped into one another and he tried to kiss me but missed and I giggled but really wanted to cry and then his arms went limp, and his face dropped, and the peas were all over the floor by then.
‘Be happy be happy’, he said.
I am happy’, I replied.
‘No, you’re not’.
Then I was on the floor slowly on my knees picking up all the peas one by one and I didn’t get up until I heard the door to his workroom close. Quietly.
I loved my husband I think but it was never a crazy passionate love but then I thought I needed to break a pattern. I had loved him, but I just don’t remember that much about the love part now, just the part about shelling peas. Some days were good, it wasn’t all bad but it’s the illusion you fall in love with. And no matter how often it occurs, no matter how wise you are as to how it will end, one more illusion is welcome because it’s in that brief moment we catch a vision of our best selves. Who said that? Someone said that.
Q&A with Elly Varrenti about her book: This is Not My Beautiful Life
Jo Case The title of the book?
I guess I imagined feeling more grown up and wise somehow. I imagined being an excellent mother and a better daughter. I imagined having a career that made some kind of sense and I imagined being with a man whom I loved and who loved me back. I imagined being a good feminist. Nothing ever works out like we planned.
Jo Case You write very candidly about your family and your ex-husband (also your shared parenting partner). Was this difficult to do? Did you worry about their reactions?
The real worry about anyone’s reaction has come more recently. The actual writing process was blissfully free of such anxieties, although I am sure I was doing a certain amount of self – censorship along the way. It’s only now that the book is out that I am most concerned with people’s reactions. Mind you, my close mates and editor reckon that even though I am dead honest about everything that I have managed to remain non-judgmental, non-sanctimonious and even loving. Let’s hope they’re right.
Jo Case You’ve led a diverse and interesting life: an actress, arts administrator, broadcaster, teacher and now a writer. Which of those roles do you enjoy most?
As an actress, I was in a constant state of anxiety and the anxiety usually got in the way of the acting. I love radio broadcasting – the presenting, interviewing, writing. I feel very at home in that medium. I get a lot of satisfaction from teaching as well, always have. Writing, in more recent years, has been a real surprise, a wonderful and absorbing surprise of a life-time. I am not a good arts administrator.
Jo Case You write affectingly (and amusingly) about life with your young son. How has having a child changed the way you view life?
It’s a cliché and a divisive one at that, but having a child provides both the best and worst of everything. The early days after his father left when our son was five months old were very tough. I was depressed and disorientated a lot of the time. He is nearly six now, and his sense of humour, his brio and his over-energetic enthusiasm for everything – the good and the ill – can break and mend my heart in the same moment. He has made it all, all of it, worthwhile.
Jo Case It seems that you’ve gotten through many of the most difficult times in your life with the aid of a healthy sense of humour about it all. Is this true, or is this something you gained in retrospect, when looking back on those times in your life?
Our family have always been laughers. Overall, the tendency towards irreverence and amusing self – deprecation has got us all through most of the bad stuff. Most, but not all.
Jo Case Complete this sentence: ‘The thing in my life that makes me happiest right now is …’
… more than four hours of unbroken sleep.
Praise for This Is Not My Beautiful Life
A very funny book. I laughed out loud. Margaret Throsby ABC FM
A beguiling voice. The Age Newspaper
Intelligent and witty. Good Reads
Bloody terrific! Catherine Deveny ABC 774
Loved it! Richard Fidler ABC Brisbane
