"Oh!" I suddenly thought to myself last night, "This is those stuffed birds all over again, isn't it?" and I burst into inconsolate weeping.
I would have been perhaps eleven or twelve years old; not quite old enough to routinely travel into the city myself by train. I was desperate to get out of the noisy, cruel, and violent outer suburb where we lived for at least a little while, and also desperate to spend some time alone with my father, being eleven or twelve years old, the eldest of four children and therefore not getting an awful lot of parental attention in the normal course of events, and thinking the world of him, as I did.
The Sunday paper had just landed on the front lawn, so I tiptoed across the cold dew in my pyjamas to fetch it. I unrolled it, rolled it tightly in the opposite direction to flatten it out, and turned to the what's on section of the classifieds.
Not a lot was on. The natural history museum was promoting some bird exhibition, which didn't sound all that exciting, but it would do. Dad's mood always seemed to lift when he was in town, and I was confident that, whatever the pretext, once there he would think of some little thing he needed to do, or he would just be seized by an urge to take a little walk in some direction or other.
He grumbled about the proposal, as I expected, but as it is the sworn duty of the car-dependent suburban household patriarch to give children lifts to places, he acquiesced. But rather than drive to the station and from there take the train, as I'd assumed, he opted to drive the whole way in.
He grumbled through the traffic all the way. The exhibit turned out to be just the standard gallery of stuffed birds a century or two old, arrayed in timber-framed glass cases about the walls. Most cases had a button or three which would trigger a tape loop of birdsong corresponding to one of that case's sad postmortem inhabitants. I made my way clockwise round the intimidatingly large room, feigning as much interest as I could while my father stood dutifully a few feet behind me, his grumbling at a low simmer.
My heart sank lower and lower until we finally completed the circuit.
"We're done?" he asked/declared.
I nodded, and he marched us straight back to the car. Somewhere in my not-very-deep pre-teen depths, my heart broke as I climbed back into the passenger seat.
My father, his heart no doubt set on a cup of instant coffee and a slice of iced tea cake with a thick layer of margarine, was now considerably more sanguine, He occasionally tut-tutted and pronounced upon the behaviour of his fellow motorists ("Like Brown's bloody cows!", etc.) in a genially irritable sort of way. I was silent, and he didn't appear to think anything of it.
How could he not understand what I was asking for?
About thirty-five years later, I'd arranged to come down to Sydney from my regional exile to spend a few days with my parents, before meeting up with a friend who was seeing his mother off at the airport (before the looming pandemic made her a long-term resident rather than a tourist). We'd have a day wandering about the city before taking his car back up North. But I was very particular about having at least a couple of days clear to spend with my parents.
I had been working hard at my local supermarket, as many hours I could get, scrimping and saving in the way that one does, getting my ducks in a row, in preparation for moving to a big city (yet to be determined, but as there are only two of these in Australia, a coin toss would settle it in a pinch), so that I could transition without being lynched. (Nobody but myself and some Internet chums knew of this plan, of course.)
I really needed some time with my parents, not imposing on their regular routine, but just gently establishing a baseline version of myself that was more settled, mature, and composed than the directionless waster they had known when I was young. What was coming was coming, regardless of how anybody might react. However I didn't want to lose them if I could help it; at least not until they'd actually met me.
When I got there, their first question was about where I wanted to go, and what I wanted to do. And it was the second question, and the third. I couldn't get them to understand that I was there to visit them; not to do anything else.
By mid-morning on my first full day, their bewilderment — not to mention my father's desperation to drive me somewhere and then come back to pick me up when I was done — was so distressing to witness that I announced I was going out for a walk. So I now have loads of photographs of places from my traumatic childhood that I never want to see again.
I showed them to my parents when I returned in the afternoon as proof that I did something. Then we had dinner, watched some telly, and were finally in the comfortable realm of remembering the names of actors, the shows they were in, the other actors that were in the same shows, the other shows they were in and so on.
The next morning, I went straight out. I tried telling myself that I was doing the useful work of conquering demons from the past. I was revisiting sites of cruelties and humiliations and proving to myself that I was strong enough to bear the memories.
In fact, the memories were less painful than the realisation that my parents couldn't understand that I wanted to spend time with them; couldn't even see that as a possible motivation for me being there. They certainly didn't have any reason to want me there, except to fulfil their vestigial parental duties of providing a temporary bed, and of course transit from place to place in car dependent suburbia.
They were just utterly baffled by my presence.
So here in 2026, the night before last, my mother phoned with the provisional itinerary for her next "visit". She's not confident travelling alone, so she managed to cajole her best friend into coming down with her. The problem, she said to me, was in organising the tours.
They would be arriving on Monday afternoon and going home on the Thursday morning. The whole of the intervening two days would be consumed by gruelling day-long coach tours out into the countryside. This was not the difficulty.
The difficulty, as she saw it, was that she and I had already done the second of these tours (and it was awful), but her friend hadn't and was really keen on it. While my mother had a completely different and no doubt equally punishing coach tour in a different compass direction in mind.
I had two reactions to this. The first, which I expressed to her, was that it seemed silly to travel all the way into Mascot Airport (from a distant suburb that isn't in any meaningful sense part of Sydney, except by administrative fiat), and then to Melbourne, only to spend the time one has in Melbourne getting as far away from Melbourne as possible.
The second reaction, unstated and not fully recognised by me at the time, was to draw the conclusion that I am and have always been unloved and unlovable, and that any effort to alter that situation would be hopeless.
Attending to the first, I said that I would try to come up with an itinerary for a less taxing day in and around the Melbourne CBD. The next morning I asked the Fediverse for suggestions, and by the end of the day I had the most brilliant walking and/or tram route: downhill all the way, and never more than a few minutes from an opportunity for coffee and cake, taking in greenery, grand buildings, and historic sites, from Brunswick/Princes Hill/Carlton North down to Flinders St, with many optional side quests.
In the evening I looked upon my work and saw it was Good.
And then I thought "Oh! This is those stuffed birds all over again, isn't it?" and burst into inconsolate weeping.
This is me trying to lure somebody into spending time with me when they aren't interested in me, or the places where I live (no matter how beautiful they are), and are simply concerned with fulfilling their duty.
If I were to ask for money, I'm sure money would be found. Ask to be seen, recognised, acknowledged, and appreciated (never mind loved) for who I am, and I'm met with incomprehension.
And, hand to heart, I don't know that the fault isn't mine. Perhaps I don't have the sense to realise that I'm deficient in a way that means treating me as a human being is an obvious absurdity. Am I so worthless that I can't see that I'm worthless?
Either way, there is no point in being angry. Angry at whom? Over what? So all I am is despairing and hopeless.