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Book Review
My Mother's Child
Helen Gardner
2001 208 pages Makor Jewish Community Library
Jennifer McIntosh
Senior Consultant and Director, Family Transitions; Director, Children-in-Focus Program, Australian Institute for Primary Care, La Trobe University; Adjunct Associate Professor, School of Public Health, La Trobe University, VIC
In My Mother's Child, Dr Helen Gardner brings her formidable powers of description, presence of mind and unerring honesty together with her scholarship in attachment theory to produce a lucid, generous, and transporting novel for all, as well as an important text for mental health professionals.
Helen Gardner sketches her own journey through a childhood labyrinth of absent and broken attachments to her mother and to her beloved ‘Nursie', within a dense sociocultural tapestry. Gardner was born to Jewish immigrant parents. Her father's mental illness (though never named that at the time) meant that her mother returned to work immediately after Helen's birth. She discharged herself from the Mercy Hospital, but not her newborn daughter, who remained there for 10 months. From this well meaning but institutional nest, the transitions begin across every plain. Gardner is returned home to her hard working mother, and cared for by Nursie, a second-generation Australian, of Scottish descent, and a strict fundamentalist Christian. At three years of age, in the height of the war, Gardner is transported to country Victoria, with Nursie, where they remain together for 6 years. In all ways, Nursie is Gardner's secure base, her psychological mother. Until the age of 9, Gardner describes a happy, blissfully unassuming life growing up under Nursie's watchful eye in a small, Christian community in Traralgon, until this:
It takes three hours to travel by train from Traralgon to Melbourne. I cried all the way. Nursie was embarrassed, feeling silent accusations of maltreatment in the curious eyes of the other passengers. But she was adamant. I had to go. ‘But why?' I wanted to know, holding tight to her in a bear hug. ‘Why can't I stay here with you?' ‘You are your mother's child. You belong with her,' Nursie replied. ‘For a long time she couldn't look after you herself, so she asked me to look after you for her. But now she wants you back, and that's the way things should be. Now you be a good girl and love your mother and do whatever she tells you, and everything will be all right.You'll see.' (p.56)
One is struck by the sheer discipline of the self-reflection that follows. Never distant, and never indulgent, Gardner carefully unpacks the story of her journey back into the care of her mother, who could not provide what was so sorely needed. We see her budding identity fragment into persecuting pieces, in a struggle through an emotional waste-land of detachment. On top of this already unmanageable load is the conversion from Christian fundamentalism to orthodox Judaism. The shape of Gardner's inner world continues to contort, held fast by new cultural structures and associations in her adolescent life, but not by meaningful care. In her adult life, the tensions can no longer be held. Gardner's descriptions of her mental health crises, and of her experience of therapy resonate with the clarity and honesty of hard won hindsight. They provide a unique window into a life sorely compromised by disordered attachments, by psychological burdens too great for the child beneath them.
This work provides the professional with a unique lessons about the internal contours of attachments, and their developmental ramifications through the life cycle. Gardner's self-portrait is a fine illustration of Bowlby's ever unfolding theory.
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