THIS MORNING, as I lay in bed, contemplating life and love, I thought it might be a worthwhile exercise to reflect on what love has looked like in my life.

My most shocking realisation is that I don't think I've ever had a loving relationship with my parents.   When people say, "Oh, we're a really close family", I just can't identity with that.   Close?   My family?   Mmmmm ...   I don't think that's possible when the main focus of the family is just one person - my father. 

I've been fond of my parents.   Every financial advantage I've had in life has come from them, but I can't think of a loving legacy that I would have wanted to pass on to any children of mine.   Maybe that's why my brother, sister and I have not had children.

My mother was a lovely woman - kind, patient, loving and caring.   My sister and I came to the conclusion some time ago that she never really got to love her children the way she would have wanted to, because my father demanded that all attention in the family was on him.   No one else mattered.   Only him.

I know I'm being harsh, because of course there must have been, times when I did feel their love; it's just that nothing stands out as, "I remember the day my father loved me so much he ..."   Maybe my mother sacrificed what might have been an otherwise happy life, to give her children a good provider.   I don't know. 

I hope I'm not the sort of person who doesn't feel they are loved unless the other person gives them a kidney.   Maybe I am - maybe I'm the sort of person who doesn't know what love is.   All I know is that the love I experienced with others, later, is much stronger and meaningful to me.

I know when I hear people say, "My father gave me a deep love of the outdoors",  or "My mother shared her love of literature with me" that I feel a pang.   A pang of what, I'm not sure.   Just a pang of, "Oh, I never had that." 

My legacy has been one of self-doubt and an inability to see my value.   We were all decimated because of my father's over-arching ego.   How to get past that kind of damage?   I'm embarrassed to be 56 years old and still wondering how I get over it.

I just didn't have anything in common with my parents.   I came home one night to find my mother and brother watching, "The Slim Dusty Story" and I still remember thinking, "Oh my god, can I be related to these people?!"

My interests were make believe, literature, writing, being an archeologist.   I lived in a Hollywood fantasy world of glamorous movie stars and gorgeous satin gowns.

I'm sure love was there in our family home, in some form, but there is still no particular occasion which I can warmly look back on and think with satisfaction, "Oh, they loved me so much."   There was just no joyous celebration of love or connection or 'family'.

I've always said, "I had a good technical upbringing - I was fed, housed, clothed and educated - but I can't remember a single circumstance where I felt LOVED and valued.

Having decided to give birth to myself at my last birthday in April, I want to put 'all that' (my childhood and their influence on me), behind me, never to be mentioned again.   Not because it was so particularly devastating, but because I'm sick of weeping and wailing at the wall of, "I'm like this because my parents did that."

I like the idea of giving birth to myself and creating the kind of nurturing I would have liked to have had.   My companions on this journey are my beloved David, Paul, and trusted members of our Second Life community.

It was easy to put my 'old' childhood behind me recently when I asked my father to think back and tell me what memories he had of me as a child.   "I don't know!" he answered testily.   "You were a kid!   You went to school.   You played with the other kids.   There were three of you."   I just burst out laughing.   That's the sum total of your memories of me as a child?   That I went to school and played with other kids and had a brother and a sister!   What an absolute lack of involvement or interest from the man who gave me life. 

So it's not surprising that when I think of love, I don't automatically think 'family'.

Several months ago, at a family function, when my father was boasting about how much money he had, my uncle (who has never had much, lived in a housing commission house and brought up five daughters on a chauffeur's wage), pointed to the wall of family photographs and said, "There's my treasure over there Jack.   That's all that's ever been important to me."

Again, the pang of, "I've never had that."

First Love:

Oh my beautiful first love - Tim.   We met at a local fete dance when I was about 15 or 16 and were both immediately smitten.   I was such an innocent!   As we snuggled up to one another dancing, I remember saying to him, "Ooooh, can you please take your cigarettes out of your pocket, they're poking into me."   I had no idea boys got erections!   I didn't even know what an erection was!   A product of a Catholic school education, I was absolutely terrified of getting pregnant and there was just no way I was going to tempt the fires of hell by exploring sexuality.

We were both so lovelorn though.   Those loooooooooooong telephone calls where you stay on the phone line, content just to hear the other person breathe on the other end of the line.   And the reluctance of either one to hang up first.   "You hang up", "No, you hang up", "No, you."   The sweet desire of youth.   The laying together in parks, in friend's cars, when no one else was home - but still, no sex!   The lusty kisses, the lovebites, the hands down pants and up tops.   "Everything but".   

When he got a job away from where we lived, I thought I would die of heartache.   He wrote of course and those love letters were my most cherished possessions.   Under my pillow.   Kissed each night.   We wanted to run away together and get married, but we were so young.   I don't remember why we broke up, but most likely it had something to do with him wanting sex and me being terrified of getting pregnant.   In those days, 16 year old girls didn't go to the doctor and get the pill (even if it existed then).  

I was broken-hearted and cried for months.   Losing love is the most devastating experience of a young life.   All is lost.   I would stand at the window where I worked in the city and look yearningly outwards, searching for just a glimpse of him if he walked by.   In my desperation, I thought that if I relented and did have sex with him, he would come back to me (vain hope of course), so we arranged to meet at my place when my parents were out and I was quite determined to 'give him' my virginity.

We went to bed and fumbled and tried - two totally inexperienced and clueless virgins - and then when his mates pulled up the front and beeped the horn for him, he gave up in frustration and drove off with them.   I felt completely destroyed.   I had failed to 'seduce' him and felt 'thrown away' because he would rather be with his friends than in my hot little loving embrace.   As he left, I fell down, wailing, at the door.   I honestly thought I would die of heartbreak.

Marriage:

When Graham came into my life, I'd had crushes and boyfriends and frustrated relationships of various shades.   It was obvious that Graham was head over heels in love with me and I felt safe with him.   Eventually I came to the conclusion that he was someone I felt safe enough to lose my virginity to.   A friend of his shared a grand old mansion with several others in Kew, a leafy suburb of Melbourne and so it was, that on a mattress on the floor of a beautiful old mansion, I 'gave' my virginity to the man I would eventually marry.

It's funny because of all the relationships I've had, the one with Graham is perhaps the fuzziest - the least memorable.   My first experience of sex, left me with the memory of me responding with, "What?   Is that it?"   No fireworks.   No violins.   Just a grunting and heaving and a very satisfied Graham at the end, and a less than impressed me.

It's terrible to say, but life with Graham hasn't left me with any memories of love.   Domestic frustrations, yes.   I was 21 and my interpretation of love was that when I served him dinner, I gave him the biggest sausage or best looking potato.

I had no idea of what love was all about.   And I certainly didn't know about married life, so I just copied what my parents did.   Graham was 'head of the household', even though I was the one who did all the work in it.  

We were married for all of 11 months and frustratingly so for me.   We both had office jobs, with his being closer to home than mine, so he would get home sooner.   Yet, he would sit and read the newspaper or watch television and wait for me to get home to cook the dinner, clean, wash, iron, make the bed - every single domestic duty fell to me.   His only responsibility was putting the rubbish out each week, and even that I had to remind him endlessly.

So I definitely don't equate the 'marriage' chapter of my life with love.   Graham and I shouldn't have married.   I now know that I used getting married as an excuse - a 'legitimate' way of leaving home.   I didn't love Graham.   In fact, I told him that I'd changed my mind and didn't want to get married, but he cried and 'begged' and so I thought, "Well, how can I hurt his feelings?" and so I went through with it.

In the end, he met a 16 year old at a party and ran off with her and I travelled overseas.   We returned wedding gifts to those who'd given them and there was no harm done.

Miscellaneous:

When my marriage ended, I travelled overseas for a year or two and then settled in Noosa Heads as a hippy, living on the beach.   It was the days of "make love, not war" and I was an enthusiastic peacenik.   Men and boys came and went - plenty of sex, but not much love.   It's so true, that adage - "Men give love to get sex and women give sex to get love."   I gave a lot of sex!   Didn't find much love though.

At one stage I was quite promiscuous.   Don't know why, because I've never really been satisifed by sex.   It has always been my desire to experience love which has motivated me to be physical with a man.   A 'need' to be close and intimate.   Eventually though you realise, you could lie down on the footpath at a city's main train station and have sex with every man who walked past and never find love.

There is one man who stood out though in all these years - Bern.   Bern is one of two men I've ever wanted to have a child with.   He had long blonde hair and gorgeous blue eyes and a lovely heart.   I think we were all in love with Bern.   All us hippy chicks, with our long, flowing hair and bouncing breasts (hippies didn't wear a bra).   For a glorious few months, Bern and I were an item and I was in seventh heaven.   

I don't know how much love was expressed in those days ... perhaps more a lovingness, than actual love.   Nothing was too serious.   It was easy to get stoned and just snuggle up to a convenient body.   We experimented and explored and had open hearts.   With someone one day, and someone else, the next.   No hard feelings.   Just a desire to spread 'love', when really I think it was more a case of wandering attention.

Friends became lovers and lovers became friends.

The Love Of My Life:

I met Mark at an "Alice In Wonderland" party.   I'd never even read the story and went dressed as a wood nymph.   I'd gone there specifically to meet someone else, but they hadn't arrived.   Mark and I had chatted for awhile and I drifted off to get a drink.   But I kept finding him in front of me, obviously keen on more conversation.   "I wish this guy would get out of the way, so I could see if Andrew has arrived," I remember thinking.   Ironically, it was Mark who was 'the one'.

I was in a relationship at the time, with Rod, a very steady and safe partner.   He was reliable and faithful, but ultimately, I was bored.   I'd convinced Rod that I just needed 'a fling' to blow away the cobwebs on our relationship.   Instead, what I found was Mark, who turned out to be 'the love of my life'.

... Next post ... What is was all about and other expressions of that great desiring ... love.

THE NIGHT I MET MARK, I was on a 'one night only' pass from my relationship with Rod, the gentle gardener I'd been living with for several years.   I don't know why I thought a one-night fling would remedy a relationship that had grown stale, but there it is, I'm good at rationalising!   In any case, Rod had agreed to go away for the weekend so I could have my fling.  

Not long before, I'd met this guy named Andrew on my way home from work at a local community house.   I was heading home on my bicycle when I came across Andrew hitchhiking.   I rode past, and then thought, "Hey, there's no reason I can't give this guy a lift on my handle bars."   So I turned back around and offered him a 'lift'.   Having someone bigger than me on the handlebars didn't really work, so Andrew decided that instead of giving up the lift, he would run alongside me!   I still laugh now at the incongruity of it ... a hitchhiker being picked up by a cyclist and then ending up running alongside to keep up.

So when the Alice In Wonderland party came up, I was hoping that because it was in the same town where Andrew lived, he might be there.   As I said in my previous post, I was most put out that this guy Mark kept engaging me in conversation, especially since it was Andrew I was hoping to get to know better (if he came that is).

The party was held at this quirky little house in the hills with one of those rambling, overgrown gardens.   One of its more unusual features were floors that undulated like an ocean.

Eventually I came to accept that Andrew was not going to come and that since this guy Mark, seemed rather keen, I would take him home instead.   It probably seems a bit cold-blooded to take a strange man to the bed you share with someone else, but I wasn't being deceptive - Rod knew of my plans and had acquiesed, so again, I guess I rationalised.   'Our' bed (the one I shared with Rod), would be the scene of 'my' need that night.

The sheets were crisp and white; the candles pink and warm.   The ambience of freshness and cleanliness - a new beginning.   I had a hunger to really 'feel' - to feel alive.   I truly thought it would be a one night thing and that would be it.   

The next morning Mark and I decided that it would be fun to go down to the beach with his dog and mine.   At one point, we were exploring along a narrow path on a steep slope and I slipped, but before I could slide too far down the embankment, Mark's hand reached out and grabbed me.   "My hero", I thought and the beginnings of my romantic attachment sprang to life.   Here was a man to be rescued by.

The beach expedition (and me feeling so safe with him), led to an afternoon in his bed, again with me still thinking this was a one-off thing.   Rod would be home later on, and our life together would just resume I thought.   

So ... a couple of days later on a wild and wintry day, when I unexpectedly bumped into Mark again up the street in the town where we both lived, it seemed a natural thing to invite him back home so he could meet Rod.   How very avante-garde of me huh?

I never learnt what Rod thought of meeting my new 'friend' - he stuck his nose in the newspaper and didn't really participate much in the conversation at all.   It only served to show me how much more I had in common with Mark, than I did with Rod.   I enjoyed Mark's company and he enjoyed mine.   

We started spending time together and when Rod made a request that I not see him anymore, I knew that that wasn't an option for me.   So I moved out of the home I shared with Rod, and in with friends, and before long (after an expedition in the snow on acid), Mark asked me to move in with him.

So began the most important relationship of my life.   I felt loved and secure.   He understood me and accepted me, warts and all.   It was a meeting of minds and a pairing of equals.   We spent a very happy hot summer, wrapped in one another's arms in a cosy little bungalow.

He had won my heart when he said, "I know you will want to make a nest, so please do whatever you want to turn my place into somewhere you want to be."   I felt important to him and that has always been something that I've always looked for in a relationship.

Mark could do anything he turned his mind to ... carpentry, art, music, jewellery-making, friendships.   He had a very strong sense of self-worth and would indignantly dismiss someone from his life if they proved to be a less than honourable friend.

It's hard to describe the intracies and depth of a good relationship - you are just living a life that makes you both happy.   We were on the same wavelength and regarded one another as each other's best friend.   We complemented one another's personality. He was so into his music and I tried hard to at least have a rudimentary understanding of what it all meant.   I really strained to listen when he would say, "Listen to this riff here ...", but I wasn't very good at it, and in the early days, I would worry so much that he'd ask questions and then he'd know I was a complete nincompoop when it came to music!

I'm not sure what kind of partner I was though.   He once said that I kept wanting him to jump through hoops to PROVE I was worth loving, and he's probably right.   If we are lucky in life, we find just the right person for what we need at that time.

There were so many lessons he taught me.   Like my propensity for what he called, "looking over other people's back fences and telling them to clean up their mess, when I had the mother of all messes in my own!"

Mark pointed out that I was like some dirty old pervert, who liked to open his raincoat and show off his genitalia - in that when I met anyone, I had a propensity for revealing all my deepest, darkest secrets.   (Which I saw as just part of the, "This is who I am, I'm telling you everything now so that there won't be any nasty surprises down the track.")

Mark KNEW me and he still loved me - that was the greatest thing anyone can have.

One thing I do know - our sexual appetites were not evenly matched.   I've never been highly sexed and the continual desire for sexual intimacy, was a constant thorn in my side.   Spurning Mark's advances was not a good experience for either of us - and in the end, he felt like a dirty old man himself, always having to 'ask' for favours.   My withdrawal from him sexually, usually resulted in him wanting the attention of others and while I was happy for him to do that, I also had a fear that he might find a better relationship in one of these 'dalliances'.   My words ring in my ears, "For god's sake, leave me alone, go and find someone else!"   But then, when he did, I'd worry that he might prefer their company to mine.   I just wanted to leave me alone for a particular time, not always!

There was Anne, a good friend who admitted to me one night that after she and Mark had been to a concert together, (while I was away at school camp), that she "almost didn't want to go home" and I remarked, "It sounds as though you didn't", to which she replied, "Well, we did lay down on the bed together, but you might as well have been lying there between us, your presence was so strong."

Next was Jan, another friend ... beautiful and outgoing and flamboyant ...   I came home from work one day and she followed Mark, in her underwear, out of our bedroom, saying with so much gaeity, "Oh, I've just been trying on some of your clothes, I hope you don't mind!"    Mmmmmmmm ......

And then there was Robyn, a friend of ours whose husband had drowned.   Mark started visiting her to see if she was right for firewood, but we all knew a stronger desire was at play here.   One of my darkest experiences was the night Mark invited Robyn for dinner with the sole purpose of reassuring her that I was okay about their developing relationship.

I resented him using me to pacify her.   How dare he do that to me?   But then, who hasn't temporarily lost an otherwise good sense of judgement to get what they want?

Ironically, I learned about trust from Mark.   There was a time I expressed concern about the importance of our relationship to him and he said to me, "You just have to trust that I won't ever start a relationship that will be a threat to the one I have with you."   I weighed up his words and thought, "Well, I can believe him and be taken for a ride, or I can believe him and be vindicated in my trust.

So I took that leap of faith and I'm glad I did because I firmly believe that it taught me how to love with an open heart.   

There were other 'relationships' which fulfilled his need to be desired and wanted and which threatened my sense of security, but it wasn't another woman which ended our relationship it was just that it ran it course, and that was that.

We had set off on our grand "Around Australia" trip.   Car packed up.   Trailer on behind with his motorbike, the dogs, a homemade kitchen set up and a purse, not overflowing with money. 

Consequently there were petty squabbles about how the money was being spent - trivial annoyances, not quite constant bickering but life on the road really tested us and our desire to be together.   Eventually we reached Cairns and for a time we settled there.   We both got jobs on a local newspaper - me as a reporter and Mark as a photographer.

I can't remember what the straw was that broke the camel's back, but we reached a point where we both acknowledged that we had come to the end of the road together and we decided to part.   For me, I think it was just a case of me having taught Mark all that it was that I had to teach him, and he had done the same for me.

Mark found a job on a newly set up magazine and was commissioned to do the inaugural front cover portrait of Diane Cilento (who had at one time, been married to Sean Connery).   (Just as an amusing little aside, apparently Diane accused Sean of beating her, a charge Connery vehemently denied; although in an interview with Barbara Walters, he stated that it would be acceptable for a man to hit a woman with an open hand, if she continues to provoke him after he concedes an argument to her).   

Nothing having Mark in my life anymore was a traumatic time for me.   I was bereft.   

At this time I was still working for the newspaper and I'd gone to interview a prostitute and left behind my briefcase (containing my wallet with $5,000 in it that I'd just withdrawn from the bank to buy a car with).   Mark had been with me as photographer, and when we went back to her house, she was gone and so was the money.   I later learnt that she had quite a heroin habit, so no prizes for guessing where my $5,000 went!

In the course of trying to bring some pressure on her to return the briefcase at least, I'd been in touch with a couple of her family members.   I was chilled to the bone, when the prostitute phoned and threatened me with, "You keep my family out of this!   You bring them into it, and I can bring some pretty nasty people into it for you!"   By this time, Mark had moved out and I was all alone.   I was, quite frankly, terrified.   The thought that I had brought the underworld into my life, really scared me.

Not long after this, I decided to head back to Melbourne.   Back to the life I had put into storage when Mark and I left on our big adventure.   Reviewing your life after it has been in storage is another unique experience.   Seeing stuff that you now regard as 'crap' and wondering, "Why the hell did I want to keep this for?" or seeing little gems that years later are STILL gems to you.

It was very cathartic, separating my stuff from Mark's stuff and sharing 'our' stuff between us.   

I have never experienced the deep sense of sadness and grief I felt at the ending of our relationship.   I think I cried for a full year.   I certainly didn't have any joy of life.   It was almost eighteen months I think, before I had any enthusiasm for anything.

Every morning when I woke up, my first thought was, "He doesn't love me anymore" or, "He's really gone from my life".   

Mark had gone on to fall madly in love with a woman I didn't like at all.   I couldn't even take any joy in him being happy as I didn't feel the relationship was any good for him.

(Years later when he did fall in love again with someone else, I at least had a sense of it being right and that they did belong together).

One particularly bad night I thought, "I might as well be floating out in outer space, I feel so alone.   No one can reach me in my depths of despair."   Perhaps I had idealised what we had together, but it didn't last ten years because we pretended that everything was okay.   It was a good relationship because we had always been honest with one another and expressed what we needed from the other.

I'm not sure what the point of this "What Love Has Looked Like To Me" retrospective is, other than I have been looking at the relationship I have with David and been doing some soul-searching.

Next time ... Dick, The Mad Adventurer.

(Photo:   There was a very exotic European/Middle Eastern restaurant we loved going to in Cairns - this is one of the nights we decided to dress up for it).