Book: Redemption - Part XII - Chapter 10

CHAPTER TEN

Awakening

1978 - 1981

The birth of my son ensured I could no longer ignore what had been happening to me, and for the first time, I seriously considered the concept of reincarnation. By age ten, in seeking to answer the riddle of the haunting man at the end of the vortex, I read books about British convicts and European Jews thinking there may be a connection. I never thought the man in the room could be an earlier incarnation of myself, I simply wanted to find an explanation so it would stop. Before my thirteenth birthday I stopped looking because a far more horrendous thought occurred to me. What if that place was Hell?

Prior to 1978, I never entertained a thought as to who my daughters were before they were born, not even Tamara with her unnatural fear of being held. They were just my girls. After 1978, I found myself thinking about it a lot. Sometimes, when looking at Che asleep in his cot, I wondered if he could remember who he was before. At other times, I would look up from whatever I was doing to catch him staring at me with an intensity I found unsettling. Something very profound was going on inside that big beautiful head of his. The thought that he might be my father, though, was still months away.

Just a week after bringing him home from hospital I took him to the Maternal and Child Welfare clinic to be weighed and measured. This was against my better judgement because I had not had good experiences with Maternal and Child Welfare nurses. When Kristen was a baby and doing well on the formula I was using, I was instructed to replace it immediately with boiled cow’s milk and vitamin drops. I did as instructed but in the first week her weight plummeted. The nurse was not concerned. She said that was a normal reaction and that in another week I would find her thriving. I didn’t, so when she kept losing weight I took matters into my own hands and refused to take her back. The woman reminded me of the old Sister in the Mater Mother’s Hospital who tried to force to me breastfeed despite not being able to because of severely inverted nipples. Pragmatism prevailed when she lost too much weight.

After bringing Tamara home I tracked her progress on pharmacy scales until she came down with a severe case of gastroenteritis at six months and was hospitalised. Feeling a little guilty, I took her to the clinic after her discharge and was lucky to find a younger nurse with modern ideas I was happy to implement. However, when she left I found myself at the mercy of yet another cog in the draconian Maternal and Child Welfare system. By the time it was Che’s turn I was older and wiser. If something didn’t seem right there was no way I was doing it. After giving my boy an initial inspection and noting his measurements in a little booklet, the nurse suggested I take him back to the hospital for X-rays. Not only was his head bigger than average, she said, but his fontanels were closed and that could be a problem. In an attempt to allay my fears she added that this was typical of forceps deliveries and I was not to be unduly concerned.

X-rays cleared him of any problems in that regard, but a new worry presented itself at four weeks when he came down with measles. Kristen and Tamara were in bed with them but I was ill-prepared for a child as young as Che getting infected. I had always believed babies had a natural immunity to such diseases until they were six months old. Our doctor gave him a shot of gamma globulin and referred him to a specialist at the Royal Children’s Hospital. That doctor was more concerned about the size of Che’s head than anything else. At his second appointment the paediatrician ordered a CT scan.

It was while I was on my way home from the hospital after the scan that the possibility Che might be my father first presented itself. He didn’t have “water on the brain” as feared. He just had a big head. Regardless, the paediatrician insisted on seeing him every three months for the next year and a half.  It started with a single, seemingly unconnected thought. The scan was fine. The X-rays were fine, too. Our own doctor wasn’t concerned. That kind of thinking that led me to doctors in general, which in turn led me to the doctor of my childhood. What an old fuddy-duddy he was. Then it hit me, like the proverbial ton of bricks. My father died because he trusted that man. A vigilant doctor could have saved him. Is that what the X-Rays and CT scans were all about? Does he need to ensure there is nothing wrong inside his head this time? When I told Steve he said I was clutching at straws. He didn’t believe in reincarnation.


During his first year, Che was plagued with all-too-frequent high temperatures, eczema, sniffles and colds. His temperatures were my biggest concern because they would happen spontaneously. Once, in the Emergency Department of the Royal Children’s Hospital, his temperature was deemed so high he was immediately plunged into an icy bath. That went down well, I must say.  Croup was a problem, as it had been with my girls. On a particularly bad night I sat up with him until after midnight, worrying and praying he would be alright. I learned a terrible lesson the night Kristen stopped breathing. Only when I was satisfied he was alright did I tip-toe off to bed and close the door. Some hours later I woke suddenly to find him standing beside me. As he was only a few months old my first thought was Oh my God! He’s dead and he’s come to say goodbye! I flew out of bed expecting to find my baby cold and blue in his cot but he was sleeping peacefully. It took me some time to recover from that because I knew astral travel was the only possible explanation.

The first year of Che’s life was difficult for another reason. When he was four months old my dearest Aunt Marie passed away. The dreaded 'Big C' had struck again. During her last days all three of my children came down with chicken pox. They were still recuperating on the day of her funeral. That night I cried myself to sleep thinking how unfair it was that the mother figures in my life had been snatched from me all too soon.

I lost Edyth from a combination of prescription drugs and alcohol shortly after Tamara’s first birthday. “Death by misadventure” was the coroner’s verdict. No one believed she had deliberately taken her own life. She had too much to live for and she was getting married in six weeks time. Her beautiful dress was still hanging on the door when we went to sort through her personal effects.

Edyth was my rock. She was the person I turned to when I needed to vent about her ex-husband. She never interrupted, and it didn’t seem to matter if she had something else to do or somewhere else to be. She just listened. Her death had a big impact on my relationship with Kathleen. The ice-breaking incident of Christmas 1974 made a difference of sorts, but it was not until Tamara came along that I felt I could talk to her without feeling angry. By the time Che was born she was so much a part of my life it didn’t seem it could ever have been any other way.

On Che’s next trip to the hospital a different paediatrician was waiting to see him. Dr Nasser was quite a character and, unlike his colleague, he was funny and self-effacing. After familiarising himself with Che’s history he peered at him over the rim of his glasses and said: “Ummmm. What’s inside that head of yours, young man? Let’s say we monitor you for a year or two and if that old noggin doesn’t grow too much bigger, we’ll call it a day. Deal?”

I thought it was a great deal. The trouble was I had to monitor my son in ways I never had to worry about with my girls. Before his sixth month he was manipulating his cot by shaking it in such a way it became a vehicle capable of being steered to any part of his room. His bath-time needs, stored on top of a cupboard on the other side of his room, were too tempting. Once he had reached the cupboard, he’d stand on the top rail of his cot, claim his bounty and return his cot to where it belonged before examining his prize. The first time I found him covered in talcum powder I was at a loss to explain how he could have got it, but it wasn’t long before I was taking steps to prevent him for accessing anything potentially dangerous. In protest, he’d shake his cot so violently we were afraid the side would break so we put him on a mattress on the floor. This created yet more problems for I not only had to baby-proof my house; I had to ‘Che-proof’ it. With Steve’s ingenuity and determination not to be out-witted by a baby, we finally succeeded.

For a child whose first name was supposed to be “on his birth certificate only” our son was never known as anything other than Che – except for the all-too-frequent times he was “Che Adam!” I truly believe that, just as we choose our parents and siblings, we choose our names. Kristen had to be Kristen with an ‘e’ and Tamara had to be Tamara, not Tammy-Lee, Tara-Lee or Mara-Lee, just as Che had to be Che, not Adam or Paul. I can’t help but smile when I recall the time my sister, Frances, came over with a gift for him. On seeing me scold him for yet another misdemeanour she dryly remarked: “Well, you did name him after a revolutionary.”

In May 1979, due to the impending demolition of houses at Cribb Island, we accepted a Queensland Housing Commission house at Geebung, a quiet north Brisbane suburb. The house had been on the open market before being purchased by the State Government from funds allocated by the Federal Government. Because we were relative new comers to Cribb Island we were not emotionally connected to the suburb as others were. By holding out, hoping against hope the government would change its mind, many of our former neighbours were forced to take what was left of the allocations, often in outlying suburbs such as Lawnton, Bray Park and Petrie. With the exception of rail, public transport in these areas was virtually non-existent in the late ‘70s. At Geebung, we were spoilt for choice and Chermside Shopping Centre was within walking distance.

Shortly after Che’s first birthday, Kristen had her troublesome tonsils removed and we went to the farm for a little rest and recuperation. After sliding a door rail into place to prevent Che from falling down the steep steps, Glady took me to a far part of the house. She wanted to show me a box of fabric she had been accumulating for years. My adventurous boy was hardly impressed by the fact that his sisters could come and go as they pleased while he was stuck upstairs. I warned her we couldn’t just wander off and do something like sort through a box of fabric because he would get into mischief. She said I was overly imaginative. He’s thirteen months old, she said. What possible mischief could he get into? she asked. We had been gone no more than a few minutes when an alarming silence brought us running to the steps. He had silently removed the rail and was successfully negotiating the steps by the time we found him. I’ll never forget the looks on both their faces – his rage and her disbelief. I think that was the only time the formidable Gladys Walsh had ever been rendered speechless.

L-R: Kristen, Jack Walsh, Che, Gladys Walsh, Tamara 1979

Two months later Che was so ill we had to rush him to hospital in the early hours of the morning. A lumber puncture test cleared him of meningitis, but X-rays confirmed pneumonia. Thinking we might lose him, the first two days were dreadful, but as he recovered, something unexpected and worrying occurred. He got bored. On the third day I was greeted by a harried nurse. “Oh, Mrs Bird, thank God you’re here! Please take him to the park. Anywhere! Just get him out of here!”

On our return, the now-composed nurse informed me he had been shaking his cot until he was able to manipulate it out into the corridor where he caused all manner of mayhem. That heavy steel cot was just another vehicle to him and the corridor was infinitely more interesting than the ward. After these activities were denied him toys heavier than teddy bears were also banned. Blocks, trucks and books became missiles accurately directed at children who refused to play with him. Mealtimes, too, were a nightmare unless I was there to feed him and I was there every day, arriving at 7am and staying until 4pm. But it was never enough. Boredom had given way to anger and no one could explain why.

After he was discharged he settled down into his normal routine, but within days he was again hospitalised. The antibiotics he was taking proved useless in treating a new strain of infection in his lungs. When we took our son home the second time, he was a very different child. Where he once chatted for hours, he was strangely silent and for a child who terrorised staff and patients alike, this was abnormal. I will never forget the time three months later when I took Tamara to hospital with a rare bout of tonsillitis. The young doctor immediately recognised Che and instinctively yelled: “Oh, no!” while jumping behind his desk for protection.

Weeks became months but still Che refused to talk and, not wanting to miss out on anything, he developed his own version of sign language. We tried to deal with this by refusing to give him what he wanted until he made a real attempt to ask for it but his will was too strong. He would have happily starved before asking for a sandwich. This, and the violent tantrums he threw whenever he went to the hospital, didn’t faze Dr Nasser in the least. The man simply waited for Che to realise his behaviour was counter-productive before getting down to business. Eighteen months later, with no improvement, Dr Nasser referred Che to speech therapy at my request. He, himself, was not at all concerned because he felt Che would talk when he was ready. Albert Einstein, he said, never spoke until he was four. He even nicknamed Che his “little Marcel” after the famous French mime artist, Marcel Marceau.

At Che’s first speech therapy session I learned that life may take us down some scary roads, but never leaves us stranded in unfamiliar territory without a light keeper, or at least someone who can direct us to a light keeper. In a conversation with another mother, I told of the look Che gave me shortly after his birth and unlike others, she didn’t dismiss it as mere fancy. She even took it further by asking if I had ever considered reincarnation. To hear someone else say that excited me to the point where I told her, a complete stranger, my theory that my son was my father. She said she thought it possible and advised me to learn as much as I could about my father’s early life to see if there were any correlations. John was the only one I could talk to about this and what he said shocked me, but then, as it was John I wasn’t sure he was telling the truth. Dad was a lonely child, he said, whose mother had little time for him. When she dropped him at the gates of Mount Carmel College in Charters Towers she just walked away, unmoved by the terror he faced at being abandoned in a strange city. John never laid blame for this at Granny’s feet for he said it was accepted practice for the pragmatic folk of the west. Their lives were too harsh to worry about mollycoddling children. Could I believe him? It certainly fitted in with Che’s inexplicable fear of abandonment.

After Che’s second session, however, I had a lot more to worry about than reincarnation. The speech therapist told me he bothered her, even frightened her. She said he deliberately isolated himself from the other children by sitting in the middle of the room staring menacingly at her, almost as if he was defying her to make him talk. She said he needed a psychiatrist, not a speech therapist, and agreed to accompany me to see Dr Nasser. She fought valiantly against his refusal to “refer a toddler to a shrink”, as he put it, and won.

After weeks of probing, the psychiatrist’s verdict was Elective Mutism. Che, she said, had a problem with authority. He was locked in a power struggle he was determined to win. With that, Dr Nasser had a go at me for allowing my son to be named after a revolutionary, as if that was an explanation. He simply couldn’t understand how the time Che spent in hospital could have had such a negative impact on so young a child and he wasn’t about to listen to my thoughts on the matter.

Che was eventually placed in Play Therapy where the therapist, assuming a totally non-threatening demeanour, sat in one corner of a large room crammed with toys of every description. Whilst suspicious at first, he came to trust the lady who sat in the corner and made no demands upon him. Within a few months he became less obstinate and even looked forward to his days with the toys. He still refused to talk and his behaviour at hospital did not change. If anything, it intensified.

Every time it was the same story. Two brave nurses took his weight and height while other parents and staff looked on with a combination of terror and compassion. A few times he’d set off some of the other children, but mostly, they’d just stop what they were doing to see what all the fuss was about. Whilst writhing in seeming agony, he allowed no one to approach him and if they dared his ear-splitting screams put a stop to it. When his name was called I literally had to drag him into Dr Nassar’s room. Five minutes later, his screams were replaced by a wonderfully blessed silence. An unappreciative audience can be so draining.

On one particular day, during the construction of the new hospital complex, we were forced to walk down a covered walkway which seemed to go on forever. I was shocked when Che said: “This is ridiculous”, but decided to keep it to myself in the interests of all concerned. Not that it mattered because at his very next appointment, when Dr Nassar rose to take a phone call in a cluttered office, Che whispered: “If that stupid doctor thinks he’s going to make me talk he’s got another think coming.” We looked up to see Dr Nassar peering down at us. But nothing changed. We both knew he could talk and when he chose to he would. Another two years were to elapse before he trusted the world enough to verbally communicate with it.

During all this stress and turmoil I still had Steve’s father to deal with. I honestly believe that period of time was the closest I ever came to having a nervous breakdown. The only way I found any peace was to bundle the kids up and take the train to Wilston to stand outside the house I grew up in. Somehow, this gave me the strength to continue. During this period I was also plagued by recurring dreams. Doctors, in a hospital emergency room, were fighting desperately to save Che’s life because he had been shot, stabbed, bitten by venomous snakes or spiders, or had suffered some other life-threatening injury. Each dream may have had a different reason for him being there, but they were the same otherwise. There were just two people in the waiting room, my mother and I, and in every dream, she would say: “Don’t worry. He’ll be alright for both of them.” 

Over the two-month period I had these dreams I must have heard those words fifty times. From my perspective, they were all the proof I needed that my father had indeed returned to this world in the body of my son.

Che 1981