Expectations

"I have been bent and broken, but - I hope - into a better shape." - Charles Dickens Great Expectations

In our house, success was the only currency that counted. Out of the four of us, one boy, one girl, ran hard for it, like it was oxygen. The other two, including me, drifted to the edge. We didn’t fight for the prize. We faded. It looked like apathy to anyone watching, but it wasn’t that. Not really.

My older siblings were nearly grown when I came into the family. Fifteen to twenty, already shaped, already carrying their bruises and trauma in silence. I was still small, still becoming someone. I watched them sharpen themselves on expectation. They chased degrees like deliverance. Worked like the world was closing in.

Mum clapped loud in public. Big noted herself to anybody who’d listen, about her brilliant children. In private, she lit matches between us, tiny, constant fires. If we ever felt less than, she made sure we knew it. For scapegoat Gudrun, her trials were just beginning.

Felix and Gudrun did everything right. And yet the more they achieved, the more they seemed to vanish inside themselves. No joy, just strain. They didn’t glow with accomplishment; they cracked beneath it. I saw it before I understood it. I was a quiet child, but I noticed everything.

Maybe that’s why Alby turned to drugs, trying to find some relief from that weight he carried as the golden child. Or even to dull the noises that may have existed in his head. Nobody said it out loud, but I could feel the absence where happiness should’ve lived.

Gudrun took the first plane out of town to the Northern Territory to get away from Mum. When she came back, she was married and had her first child. She moved into the granny flat out back—and boy, was she cruel to me. Sharp, cold, and suspicious. Years passed before forgiveness found its way between us.

She’d say later she was suffering too, and I believe her. But back then, she was jealous. Thought I was Mum’s favourite. Her “minion.”If she’d ever stopped to know me, she might have seen I wasn’t anyone’s soldier. I was just a child, looking for peace and love. On my own.

I watched and I listened. That was my survival. And somewhere deep inside, I made a decision:If success makes you into what Alby, Felix and Gudrun had, then I didn’t want it. Gudrun attained her master’s and still it wasn’t good enough Mum.

I couldn’t join that economy. I wouldn’t.

I became the underachiever. Not because I didn’t care, but because I did. Because I knew exactly what that kind of “success” did to people.This was my resistance. My refusal. A soft rebellion.

So, she called me “her dumbest child.” The least. The quiet failure.But what was I failing, really? A rigged system?

I put effort into the things I loved. That should’ve counted. But Mum didn’t care what lit me up inside.In high school, she chose my electives. No discussion.Art was out, even though I loved it, even though I’d won competitions in primary school. Even though every time a birthday or Christmas came around. Who was the chief developer and decorator of cards for the woman.  Didn’t matter.

She allowed cooking, briefly, until year nine. Then came Commerce. Business Studies.Her dream, not mine.Gudrun had “let her down” by choosing teaching over accounting, so now I was Plan B.Another chance to make Mum proud.

Too bad I didn’t want to be an accountant.

Too bad I was terrible at maths.

Still, she said I was lazy. But I wasn’t. I was awake.I saw the game for what it was.In our house, performance was mistaken for worth.Love had strings attached. Attention had to be earned, and even then, you might not get it.Mum rationed affection like water during a drought.

You could die of thirst in that house and still be told to work harder, but the irony was floating there the whole time, Mum never really believed in my talents, I was the kid they adopted from someone they didn’t know.

Without proof of intelligence, Mum didn’t hold out much hope. I felt that to my bones as a child and when I was old enough to know better.

At school, I stayed on the edge of every circle. Not outcast, just peripheral. I didn’t want to mould myself into something I wasn’t just to be liked. But still, I wanted to be liked. But I wasn’t pretty enough, cool enough or just the right amount of quirky to get away with it.  That conflict of wanting to be liked stirred inside me early. Still lives in me now. Just not in the same desperate way it did when I was a kid.

I remember my first day of high school like a bruise.A too-long skirt, wrong bag, socks sagging at the knees. A crowded bus full of loud teenagers going to the other High School, the cool co-ed one.  I tried to disappear into a metal pole. Twelve years old and already tired of being seen the wrong way. And yet, I wanted to be seen. Truly seen. That was the ache I carried.

I learned the violin at eleven. That was Mum’s triumph. Alby had been a prodigy once, or so the story went. I never heard him play. She even hired his old teacher, hoping the magic might pass through willpower. She was elated and it got me high for a fleeting moment.

I liked playing the violin, but not for praise. Not for glory. And yet, one day in fifth grade, something bold rose up in me. I asked to play for the class. I still don’t know why. Was it bravery?

Or the deep hunger to be noticed, just once, just, right?My teacher was so impressed, she had a great plan for the next school assembly. She paired me with Marcy, the girl who played piano and glowed with effortless popularity.

Everyone liked her. I liked her. She was kind in that quiet, natural way that didn’t need an audience. Marcy was even more popular than the prettiest girl in school – Sharla.

I planned our duet like it mattered, because to me, it did. But Marcy never showed up to practice. Her heart wasn’t in it. We got together at her place, once. Piano as it turns out was Marcy’s chore, not her choice. She had softball, netball, weekends, laughter. A whole childhood to live through.I came from the most serious family in Sydney.

If I was eleven on paper, I was thirty-five in spirit.

The assembly came. No rehearsal. No harmony. We clashed on stage like two songs playing in separate rooms. The teacher stepped in. Split us up. Let us each play alone.

Marcy played. The crowd clapped. She shone.

I played.

They forgot me.

But I didn’t hate her. I couldn’t. She was perfect and untouchable.I was invisible.

That’s what lingers in me still, the ache of a child who lived in shadows. Not loud enough to be praised. Not pliable enough to be loved easily. I was the watcher. The feeler. The one who saw the cracks in smiles and heard the silence behind the noise.

The only contradiction in that world, was Dad. He smiled every time I played the violin; he squired me to every lesson and sat quietly in the corner. He was the one I felt cared.

Nobody taught me emotional intelligence. I learned it the hard way, by paying attention to what went unsaid.

For years I believed I had failed. That underachieving made me weak. But now I see, I was surviving. I wasn’t collecting trophies. I was collecting truths.

And maybe that’s a kind of strength, too.

Fifteen years ago, something began to shift. Quiet at first, like morning light on a locked room. It wasn’t a miracle. It was love. The steady kind. The kind that doesn’t raise its voice to be heard.

A man saw me. All of me. Even the quiet, hidden parts. He loved me without asking for a single performance. That love dissolved the armour I didn’t know I was still wearing. And when it fell away, I saw myself again, not as the failure, not as the invisible one, but as a woman who endured. Who learned. Who felt.

I make art now. Every day. Not to impress. Not to prove. Not even to give away. (Well sometimes…. Said with a cheeky grin, you can’t change in the blink of an eye) ----I make it for me.

I still carry the contradiction, I want to hide, and I want to be seen.

But now, when I’m seen, I don’t flinch.

Now, I stay.