{Extract} The Sunday Story Club: Real life tales of love, loss, trauma and resilience

My favourite part of this book is that every chapter in The Sunday Story Club brought new insights into people's experiences - reminiscing on past mistakes and struggles, and looking into the deeper questions of who we really are and what's brought us to the present moment. Today I'm sharing an excerpt from one of my favourite chapters in the book called "Being known", starting off as a woman reflects on a chance encounter in Paris which prompts a reflection on her upbringing and how we come to be able to truly express ourselves without judgement.

The Sunday Story Club by Doris Brett & Kerry Cue

Released: 25th June 2019

Published by: Pan Macmillan

Genre: Non fiction/memoirs

Source: Publisher

Pages: 272
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

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'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cry. But the salons have given me the opportunity to look back and think about my life . . . I don't talk to anyone about these feelings outside of the salon.'

A book club without books. A key to the stories we all carry within us - wrenching, redemptive, extraordinary, laced with unexpected and hard-won wisdom. These are the stories that women tell each other when they gather for a deep and structured conversation - once a month in a suburban living room - about the things that really matter. They discover that life can be a heartbeat away from chaos; that bad things happen to good people; that good people do outrageous things; that the desire for transformation is enduringly human - painful and yet possible. A mother tells of the heartbreaking loss of control when her daughter develops anorexia. A sister reveals the high psychological cost of being hated by a sibling over the course of her life.

Husbands leave wives; wives take lovers; friendships shatter; finances collapse; children defy parents; wrong choices turn out to be right ones; agency is lost and re-claimed.

Profound, layered and clear-sighted, this collection of real-life stories reveals the emotional untidiness that lies below the shiny surface of modern life and reminds us of the power of real conversation to enlighten, heal and transform.

As a child and teenager, I had been quiet and rule abiding at home. I was never offered emotional or spiritual guidance by my parents. They never asked about my emotional life. I felt loved, but to them parenting meant providing the basics: food, shelter, clothing, schooling. I don’t think they knew how to do anything else. All my parents saw at home was the quiet girl who kept to herself and didn’t cause trouble. Outside the home, however, was a different matter.

I brought myself up, and my primers were Enid Blyton books – The Famous Five, The Secret Seven, The Five Find-Outers and Dog. I devoured her books and her fictional protagonists became my role models. They were brave and adventurous. They went where they weren’t supposed to go. They took risks. They got grubby and tore their clothes. They defied authority. And they weren’t afraid. These were my real role models. I became a rule breaker and a risk taker. I wasn’t quiet. And I didn’t conform. My friends were always in the fringe groups; I could never understand people who kowtowed to the in-group in order to be accepted.

My Paris experience, then, was for the adventurer in me – the part that had responded to the derring-do antics of my childhood literary models. I didn’t tell anyone about what I had done. Not because I was ashamed or embarrassed – I was neither of those – but simply because in my family we didn’t share our experiences, not even with each other. I grew up in a house of secrets.

My mother sailed on the last ship from Poland before the war. She was sixteen years old. The rest of her family had remained in Poland, and all of them were murdered. My father was sent by his family to England to escape the Nazis. The British interned him and sent him to Australia on a ship called the HMT Dunera, which would later become notorious for the mistreatment of the detainees, including the young Jewish refugees who were sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Hay, New South Wales. Like my mother, my father was the only one of his family to escape Europe. He too was the sole survivor of his family. Neither of my parents talked about their war and pre-war experiences in any detail, but my older siblings and I grew up knowing that they both had suffered intense pain and loss and had witnessed almost unbearable cruelty.

I was much younger than my older siblings; I almost felt like an only child. At the dinner table, my brothers and sisters talked. They were older and louder than I was. If I chimed in, I was either ignored or told to be quiet. I became used to being the listener, the observer. Perhaps because of this, I also became the keeper of secrets. When my mother was 42, she unexpectedly fell pregnant. In those days, women of that age didn’t have children – they were considered too old. My mother was deeply embarrassed by her pregnancy. She refused to tell anyone and disguised her condition in loose clothing. She didn’t drive and would walk to her doctor’s appointments in the evening. She wanted someone to walk with her and I filled that role, which was how I came to learn of her condition. I was ten years old and, for nearly seven months, I kept that secret from everyone, including my family and my closest friends. About three weeks before the expected birth date, my mother called the family into the living room and announced that she was pregnant. That was the first they knew of it. Despite their remoteness, my parents had clear favourites among their children. My father loved the firstborn, a girl, because he had lost a sister in the Dachau concentration camp. The next child was a boy – the only son – and he and my mother were close. Then came a sister who was also close to Mum. And finally there was me, and I was a daddy’s girl.

And yet despite these connections, I’m not sure that my parents really knew any of their children. They knew what they looked like, of course, and what they achieved in school and so on, but they didn’t know who they were inside. 

They didn’t know what they thought, felt, feared, loved or hoped for. Emotional issues were never mentioned, let alone discussed. There was a matter-of-factness to everything and no curiosity as to why someone might feel or think one thing or another. We were brought up to adopt that same matter-of-factness, a kind of businesslike approach to life: ‘It happened, it’s over, move on.’ Everything was external and nothing was internal.

I never thought about my life – my inner life, that is – until I was in my sixties and I went to my first salon. My family’s attitude is, of course, the opposite of the salon approach, where we think about our inner lives, explore them, unearth our stories. When I went to my first salon, I was startled by the idea of meditating on the patterns and discoveries of one’s own life. It was as strange to me as if the sun had turned purple. And I loved it. The salon gave me permission to explore myself for the first time in a safe environment. When I told various stories about my life, I got feedback and a different perspective. I was quite stunned by some of the reactions.

There are things I’ve done that seemed very ordinary to me, but to some people they were amazing, brave and even, some said, inspiring. I was astonished when they said that. Hearing those responses helped me to grow and see different parts of myself and recognise the strengths I have. Listening to other people’s stories has also helped me grow. Hearing how they have responded to their own life experiences has helped me to sort out my own issues, given me a different appreciation of how my mind works. 

And it has been fascinating to see how people with different backgrounds, belief systems and philosophies approach the same topic. Sometimes, when you’re listening to other people’s stories about how they have dealt with various obstacles and difficulties in their lives, you think: Wow, that was impressive. And then you realise that you’ve also managed to deal with something like that. You can recognise parts of yourself in other people’s experiences and it allows you to see yourself from a different perspective. It’s a process that brings your strengths to the foreground – it frees you up. And everyone is open about their mistakes. There’s a recognition within the group that we’re all human; we don’t judge each other. I learned more about myself – who I was and who I had been – in the first three salons than I had learned in my whole life.

When I got engaged, my mother said to me, ‘You’re getting married and I don’t even know you.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She wasn’t wistful. She didn’t say it regretfully. It was just a statement of fact. And I responded equally matter-of-factly – she was right; she didn’t know me.

I look back on that moment now and it strikes me that at least she was aware that she didn’t know me. That must mean something. And yet she wasn’t saying it with any emotion or sense of enquiry. It wasn’t intended as an invitation for me to open myself up to her. I think she was simply recognising the fact.

I was telling a friend of mine about this and she said to me: ‘If you had been like that stranger in Paris and handed your mother a photo of yourself, what would it have looked like?’ The question stopped me in my tracks. What would my photo have looked like? And then, as I thought about it, it occurred to me that maybe we’re really all going around like the man in Paris – handing out photos of ourselves that don’t reflect what we look like on the outside, saying, ‘Look, this is me, this is the real me,’ and hoping someone will finally recognise us.

This is an excerpt from The Sunday Story Club by Doris Brett and Kerry Cue, published by Macmillan Australia, RRP $32.99 and is available from all good bookstores. Any 'quoted' sections represent emphasis added by me.