After reflecting on it for many weeks, I've decided to post the following abridged excerpt from my memoirs. Some readers of this blog might derive lessons from our early experience of married life.
Looking
back after our 54-year marriage (55 years as lovers) ended only with the
death of my beloved Wendy, I marvel that we managed to stay together
in our first two shaky years. We had to struggle through festering
difficulties to achieve the confident stability and mutual love that
came when we were convinced that we were meant for
each other. Our first two emotionally stormy years were followed by ten
years during which we moved several times across the world from one side to the
other until we came to rest, permanently as it turned out, in Ottawa (we came to Ottawa naively seeing this as a stepping stone on the pathway back to Australia or New Zealand). Those
years of wandering and wondering what would become of us are a story that
occupies much space in these memoirs.
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Our first home: 11 Chapman Street, Torrensville
(With my car and Helen, our dachshund bitch) |
Superficially
our problem was simple. We were both over 30, becoming set
in our ways when we began seriously courting and had got used to living
independently; we each had to adjust to living at close quarters with
another person whose needs, desires, hopes and fears were different from our own. Below the surface there were layers of complexity that
sometimes upset the emotional equilibrium of one or both of us, often for reasons we could not understand, let alone try to
prevent. Each of us kept secret from the other some personal, private worries
and fears, in my case because I felt that bringing this into the open would
strain our marriage. Despite living in a different country, Wendy always
remained emotionally very close to her mother and sister. There were
many times when she would have loved to be able to pop in and talk intimately with either of them, and innumerable letters went back and forth
across the Tasman Sea between them. I almost never saw or read Wendy’s letters to
her mother and sister and infer from excerpts of theirs to her, which she
showed or read to me, that she revealed her sadness to them and they encouraged
her to stick with me, that our lives would get better. I had a possessive,
clinging mother who, I believe, did not really want our marriage to happen, let
alone succeed. Several times during our first two years of
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| Wendy 6 months pregnant, beside a camp fire in Flinders Ranges |
married life, I had
to engage in shuttle diplomacy to patch up emotional lacerations my mother
inflicted on Wendy. Years later Wendy occasionally revealed other ways my
mother tried to drive wedges between us. I sensed enough of my mother’s unspoken
hostility to motivate me to leave Adelaide, and to lift Wendy’s spirits when my
career aspirations took us further away. I had no incentive to return again to
Adelaide to settle there permanently.
Early
in our lives together Wendy was often tearful, insecure, and unhappy. She was uncertain about
our marriage. When we had been married for more than 10 years and were
happily and comfortably settled in Edinburgh, she told me that she had kept a
small secret stash of money for several years, enough for her fare back to New
Zealand if she found it impossible to stay married. Belatedly I recognized that
she was depressed but in those days I knew so little psychiatry that I was unable to help her. I asked one of my
partners who dabbled in psychiatry to see her and he prescribed mild sedatives including the currently popular drug
thalidomide, which happily for our offspring, she did not take during either of
her first two pregnancies. By the time
she began her third pregnancy late in 1962 the danger of thalidomide was known
and it had been withdrawn from the market. A few years later when I learned a little
about how the mind works I realized that in those early months of our lives
together, Wendy was suffering from depression that began during our
engagement to marry if not earlier and continued intermittently during the
first eighteen months or so of our married life. For a few years after this she
had occasional periods of sadness that could be described as mild
depression but these became rare, increasingly brief and ceased altogether in
the last 25-30 years of our lives together.
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| Wendy with Rebecca aged 3 months |
Wendy
had another emotional problem that she confessed to me when we’d been married for
almost 30 years: She had not wanted to have children and was almost distraught
when she realized that she was pregnant for the first time. Throughout her
first pregnancy she was worried and unhappy, fearing that our baby would be
born malformed or suffering from Down’s syndrome. Even when her fears proved
groundless she remained unhappy and worried that she would not be a competent
mother. There was no basis for her fears, apart from her mother’s critical
remarks. Her mother stayed with us when we lived in Sydney, and again when we
lived in Edinburgh. I found it hard to tolerate her constant criticism and her
interference in our approach to bringing up our children. Her way was rigid,
authoritarian, and relied on physical punishment, whereas we adopted a more
relaxed, permissive method that relied on rewards for good behavior rather than
punishment for bad. I’m sure her mother’s constant criticism and interference during her
prolonged visits upset Wendy and I didn’t help matters much when I tried to
contradict or over-rule her.
My
psychological and emotional problems were more complex. The scars on my soul
from damage caused by memories of the war my parents waged against each other
probably never completely healed. I was emotionally damaged, so bonding with anybody, even with Wendy, was
difficult and tentative. I have always found it hard to express
my feelings in spoken words, although I could and did write my thoughts down,
for example on greeting cards, and later in dedications of my MD
thesis and some of my books. But the problem of expressing my feelings in
conversation remained with me throughout life. Often during Wendy’s final
illness we sat side by side holding hands in silence. Her voice was failing by
then because ALS was killing off the nerve endings of her speech
muscles. But my ability to speak was unimpaired and my mind was flooded with
loving thoughts and innumerable things I wanted to say to her. She was deaf too, so I had to speak loudly, even shout, which further inhibited me
when I tried to utter the words of comfort and intimate loving thoughts that
were overwhelming me.
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| Wendy and Rebecca, West Beach |
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| John and Rebecca, National Park |
We
both revealed our bodies to each other freely and often when we were newly wed.
Wendy told me years later how she felt that revealing her body would make it
easier to reveal her thoughts, and this worked for her: she was able
to say things and to express ideas when we were naked that she could not when
fully clothed. Without consciously applying similar reasoning, I tried to do
this too but I was less successful and if anything sometimes I became more
reticent and inarticulate without clothes to cover me. Eventually I discovered
that to communicate complex abstract ideas it was essential for me first to
write them down, examine and sort them out, arrange them in logical sequence,
then speak them. Early in our lives together I had not learnt this. We never had any serious arguments, nor even quarrels, in those early days, but there was often an underlying
atmosphere of tension in which at times I was uneasy about what the
consequences might be if I spoke my mind or criticized any of Wendy’s words or
actions, and I know she felt the same, because a few years later we talked
about this. Each of us felt we were walking on eggshells. It’s as well we each
had this feeling – we treated each other delicately and with respect rather
than insensitively or crudely.
When
it came to supporting her at her most fragile, however, I was the opposite of
helpful. I was aggressive, impatient, lacking insight or understanding of how
she felt, inadequate in communicating with her on an emotional wavelength that
would help her, would enable or assist her to recover from unhappiness. She
healed slowly without help from me. Paradoxically we had very satisfying sex
lives during this fraught period. Each of us took care to satisfy the other, so
neither of us was left unsatisfied. We both enjoyed oral sex as much as
conventional intercourse and found this a sure way to satisfy each other. Probably
we both felt that union of our bodies would facilitate union of our minds, our
souls, and I’m sure eventually it did, although now she is dead my sorrow and
sadness is aggravated by regret over all that I could and should have said and
done to bring my soul into greater harmony with hers in those early months of
our marriage – and no doubt later in our married lives too, when we were
communicating better though still imperfectly. That will always be my greatest regret about
our lives together: I was unable to communicate adequately my thoughts, my
hopes, my feelings.
Now
that she is dead I am invading her privacy and reading her diaries, where
repeatedly I come across remarks about my moods that she often misunderstood,
mistaking silence for disapproval, and mild misgivings for anger. Our lesson, my lesson for others from our
experience, is that communication between partners is an essential component in
a successful and happy marriage. We discussed this vital ingredient with happily married
Hindu friends in an arranged marriage about 25 years ago. They were strangers to each other when they married. The mother of one of them – the husband – urged
both to learn how to communicate with each other if they wanted their marriage
to be a happy one. They did, and were as
happy as Wendy and I. What wise advice this is!
As
for me, several things were going on in that early period of our marriage. I
was painfully aware of the abject failure of my parents’ unhappy marriage,
blamed my father for its failure, desperately wanted to avoid at all costs a
similar failure of my own marriage but suffered from inability to articulate my
anxiety about this cause for concern. I’d never had a male role model whose
behavior I could emulate (or avoid) in my role as husband and father.
At
the same time I was going through a professional crisis brought about by my
growing conviction that general practice, much as I loved it, lacked
intellectual challenge, the time to reflect and think, that I wanted and needed
to fulfill myself professionally, and moreover, general practice was an
inadequate setting for many of the ideas I was developing for research. I loved the work and felt confident that I was
increasingly competent and capable of doing most if not all that a good family
doctor needs to do - except deal effectively with mental and emotional disorders. Also, I was becoming a family man with growing
responsibility for a wife and child, then a wife and two children. General practice provided financial security,
stability, a comfortable home, a well defined future of increasing prosperity
that would enable me to offer the children a top quality education at private
schools and certainty that they would get the best possible start in life. But I was moving left ideologically, to a political perspective that meshed perfectly with Wendy's, and my sense of social justice made me uncomfortable at the thought of getting rich because my patients
had the misfortune to fall ill. Also, I had an ideological bias against private
fee-paying schools and the social inequality and divisiveness these fostered. I
felt a different kind of anxiety and guilt when I realized that the academic
and research career to which I aspired would rule out for many years if not
forever any possibility of being able to offer all or even any of the wealth of
a successful family doctor, to my family. There were no role models in
Australia to show me what I might become. In Britain there were the beginnings
of general practice as an academic discipline, in Edinburgh and in Manchester.
The College of General Practitioners had been born and I became active in its
South Australian branch. I had several
long discussions with Adelaide’s first professor of medicine. He explained to me that I would need academic
credibility, would need to demonstrate that I had original ideas and thoughts,
could provide inspiration and intellectual leadership to others with
aspirations to follow where I had led. This was very challenging when I so
lacked confidence in myself that I doubted whether I would even survive in
academia, let alone become a leader and an inspiration to others!
These
ideas and inchoate aspirations preoccupied me increasingly during our first two
years of married life, distracted me when I should have been focusing most of
my time and energy on Wendy. Towards the end of 1959 when I had resolved to
leave general practice and strike out in this new direction, I talked at length
and in detail with Wendy about my ideas and aspirations and she encouraged and
supported me whole-heartedly. Without her backing and total support, I would
never have left general practice, and none of the events and accomplishments
that followed would have happened. Wendy was not entirely happy in the role of
family doctor’s wife. She was fully occupied with first one then
two children, but she wanted to fulfill herself in a more active caring role in
the community than reassuring patients who came to the door when I wasn’t there
or called for help on the phone. Her spirits lifted when I confided in her my
aspirations for a more scholarly career. She took her place beside me,
supported and encouraged me wholeheartedly. Without that support and
encouragement none of my accomplishments would have been possible. Moreover,
Wendy was at one with me ideologically, was in complete agreement with me about
the inequities of our way of practicing medicine and the divisive social
consequences of private fee-paying schools that prosperous Australians
preferred. Ideologically we were always
perfectly matched, almost from our first conversation on that magical spring
day when I picked up two hitch hikers one of whom was Wendy, and my life
changed forever.
Looking
back on it after well over half a century, I’m sure that our successful and
happy marriage owes a great deal to our transcendent love for each other, and
to the patience and tolerance we both possessed, that made us able to overlook
each other’s shortcomings as well as to demonstrate our deep and sincere love
and affection. We always followed the
advice handed down from mother to daughter through successive generations of my
mother’s family: “Never let the sun go down on a quarrel!” Whenever we had a disagreement, which
inevitably happened from time to time (less often as the years went by) both of
us always made sure to make peace with each other before we went to bed. That snippet of traditional advice may have
been the wisest, most helpful thing anyone ever said to us.
