The Grounding

The Pasha Bulker at Nobby’s Beach, 2007.

Sixteen years ago in June, the Pasha Bulker ran aground at Nobby’s Beach in Newcastle. The 76,000 tonne coal ship was blown to shore in a storm. There had been plenty of warning signs, but the captain chose to ignore them. He made some grave miscalculations and now he was in a whole lot of trouble and someone would have to pay.

I knew how he felt.

Three years before the Pasha Bulker grounded, Rob and I were renting in Copa when I received two big pieces of news. The first was that the draft of a novel I’d been working on had won a competition. I’d been awarded an editing mentorship — which meant an industry professional would give me advice on how to whip my messy manuscript into shape. Also, the woman who judged the competition was a big literary agent and she was willing to sign me on, once I’d completed the next draft. After years of committing to writing a book and working casual jobs to do so, I was on my way to becoming a novelist.

The second piece of news was that I was pregnant with twins.

Well, wasn’t I a fecund woman wallowing in the abundance of the universe! Tremendously excited, I prepared to receive this prodigious bounty. Rob and I found a bigger house to rent in Avoca with a granny flat underneath – grannies would be needed to help with our imminent baby explosion. I sent my manuscript to the editor and 6 weeks later she sent back a report. There’s a lot a good stuff here, she said, but also lots of tangents and inconsistencies and no real ending. Thankfully, she had some suggestions on how to make the story clearer and more plausible. I was grateful — now I knew what I had to do to make it better.

But first, I had a nest to build. In our new place on Endeavour Drive, Rob and I set up a nursery and began filling it with two of everything. I grew bigger and bigger and more uncomfortable, until I was the size of a small planet, swollen and dense, with my own climate and gravitational pull. For relief, I’d float in the rockpool at Copa at high tide. Gazing across at Tudibaring headland, with its oblong planes and blunt edge, I saw how it resembled the shape of my enormous belly: head, bum; bum, head. The babies would kick and squirm inside me while the ocean cradled us.

In April, I gave birth at Gosford hospital. Later, in the maternity ward, after delivering two boys and a giant fused double placenta that was bigger than both of them, I sat, dazed, with my babies wrapped like two burritos beside me. As my milk started to come in and I was struck by a thirst that would not be quenched for months, I reached for a cup of water from the bedside table and there, above the bunches of flowers and cards shouting their congratulations, was a sign taped to the cupboard, and it began, MOTHER…

Mother. That was me. The word hit me like a seismic wave and I let out a sob. My single identity shattered into three parts. I was now responsible for all of us.

For the first few months, Rob was home and together we learned how to be parents. We changed 14 nappies a day and soothed their crying, so much crying in stereo. The feeding was difficult and endless — I quickly learned to double breastfeed on a giant slab pillow to save time. We bathed their little jaundiced bodies and flaky scalps, and marvelled at their shining eyes and gummy smiles, besotted. We sang them songs, and tried to teach them to sleep at the proper times. We cleaned up vomit and tears and wee and poo and just as we were beginning to get the hang of it, Rob announced that he had to go back to work.

I was terrified. How would I juggle all this? What happened at bath time, or when I had to cook? What would I do when they both cried at once — how would I comfort them? ‘I don’t know if I can do this on my own,’ I confessed, to which he replied, sympathetically, ‘You’re going to have to.’ The next day he headed off to Sydney and I was left alone with the babies.

I wasn’t deluded to think I could finish my novel straight away. The writing would have to wait, and in the first year there was no time to focus on anything other than the challenge of caring for twins: feeding them, and cleaning them, and cleaning their clothes and my clothes and the house, when it got too grotty. And making meals, and shopping for the ingredients for those meals, with two babies in tow – I’d call ahead to Coles and ask them to locate the twin trolley and put it aside for me. As the boys grew, I pureed fruit and vegetables in bulk. They learned to crawl, tearing around the house together in their onesies and getting into everything below knee-level.

When I wasn’t needed, I was collapsed on the lounge with a drink, or puffing up and down the hills of Avoca, trying to strengthen my deflated body, or catching up with friends so I could remember who I used to be. If I was suddenly given an hour to myself, I’d spend it in a kind of paralysis, trying to decide on the best use of that hour, wondering whether to lie down or go for a run, or do some yoga for my sore back, or read a book, or try to write, or tidy up a bit so that everything wasn’t so chaotic. In the end I’d just sit there, staring into space, thinking about all the things I wasn’t doing as the minutes dribbled away.

Two babies make it hard to leave the house, but it was important to get out each day and go for a walk. Endeavour Drive runs along the top of the bluff and ends in a cul-de-sac with a tiny reserve and high views over the ocean. I’d push the pram to the reserve and let the view lift me. Look where I lived. Look at the angophoras, with their pink dimpled limbs and branches sculpted by the wind into mad bouffants. Sea eagles soared above me, high and free, and I envied them. In winter, I watched the whales on their watery stampede and I started to wonder about the ships. There were always two or three shimmering on the horizon, red rectangles scattered all the way up the coast to Newcastle in their queue for coal. One would arrive suddenly in the night and sit there for a week or so, then vanish. The ships were part of our seascape, their patterns mysterious, and I became fascinated by the lives of merchant seafarers. Now I had two novels to write.

The year the Pasha Bulker grounded, I felt a sense of foreboding building in me that was mirrored in the view on my daily walks. A dispute at the port in Newcastle meant that the coast was now crowded with bulkers in numbers I’d never seen: 30, 40, 50 vessels jostling for position, with more arriving each day, all waiting to be filled with coal. I thought about the mountains of energy that were being dug up and shipped away to be burnt on someone else’s fire and it made me worry about my own reserves. My boys were now three. They were so vibrant and powerful, it was as though they’d never come from me, rather sprung fully-formed from the mulch at the bottom of the garden. I felt my own potential being depleted and it filled me with fear. What happened when the pits were bare?

At home, things looked fine on the surface. Rob’s career had taken off — he was making his own TV show in Sydney. As producer, writer, director and lead actor, he was loving his job, making great money and supporting us well. By now I’d learnt how to wrangle the kids on my own: breakfast and morning tea and lunch and afternoon tea and dinner and bath time and jarmies and stories and bed — after which, I’d try to write, making headway on my novel amid toilet training and craft and puzzles and playgroup and painting and playdough and music. But progress was slow; it was hard to keep the whole story in my head, between illness and doctors’ appointments and specialists’ appointments and trips to the chemist, and trips to the vet with the cat, and calls to Dodo when the internet was down and calls to the glazier when a toy went through the window — I drew story maps and put them up on the wall, trying and find ways back in to my writing in the scraps of time I was allotted while teaching the boys to put on their own shoes, and pick up their own toys, and wash their own hands, and brush their own teeth, and wipe their own bottoms, and share.

I could do it. I was good at making a home and caring for others. The house ran like a well-oiled machine, but I was emptying. I was starting to corrode and my blood felt acidic.

At the end of the week, when Rob came home from Sydney, I was so relieved. We’d embrace, and his skin smelt of strange bath gel. He’d tell me about all the exciting things he’d been doing on the show, the friends he’d caught up with over dinners out, and I listened. I was desperate for adult conversation, but when he’d ask me about my week, I couldn’t think of anything to tell him. I knew I’d been busy, but I had no stories; I was at once drained and stuffed full of boring details. We had fallen into separate grooves from which it seemed impossible to deviate. Rob liked his groove, but I didn’t like mine, and I was starting to resent him. Everything he did irritated me. Why couldn’t he see how hollow I was? Why didn't he care?

I tried to feel grateful for everything I had, but I couldn’t. And yet I’d chosen this life — what was wrong with me? I’d been stupid and naïve. I wrestled with how much unhappiness I’d created for myself, and how much I could endure. I pushed down my despair so I could sleep at night, and get through the next day, and the next. I stayed the course, hoping I’d feel better, too exhausted to come up with another plan. Bitterness fuelled me when nothing else was left and then I turned mean.

In winter, a storm hit Avoca. Then another, and another — so many storms, and they stuck with increasing intensity. All around the suburb I saw exhausted mothers full of rage and bewildered fathers retreating into themselves. I saw parents of young children, women and men, who were overwhelmed, who felt unappreciated and confused and sad. I saw fights and separations and divorces, people self-medicating, or blowing up their lives in a desperate grasp at any kind of comfort. It was a time of life, and we were all caught in the middle of it.

One weekend, Rob was home, being his usual bubbly self. He was playing with the kids and making jokes, being funny. They were laughing and enjoying themselves. That night when Rob was making dinner, he asked me something kindly and I responded with my usual venom. He backed off, let it go.

That night, as I lay in bed, I thought about my boys as grown men. I thought that if they ended up with someone who treated them like I treated Rob, I’d tell them to get out.

In June 2007, NSW was pummelled by 5 East Coast lows. The Pasha Bulker, ballasted lightly, was next in line to load. Lashed by gale force winds and huge swells, it was advised to move to deeper water. But it was under pressure to get the job done and it hung in there. Until the engine revved out, power was lost and the ship was pushed to shore.

The storm raged on as 18 crewmen were winched, screaming, to safety. If the ship broke up, it would release 700 tonnes of fuel into the surf, but a rescue team stopped that from happening. The salvage operation cost $1.8 million, paid for by the owners of the Pasha Bulker.

Unlike the Captain, I chose not to ignore the warning signs. I spoke up. It felt like the hardest thing in the world to admit the truth of what I was feeling, to say that I was unhappy, that I wanted more. It was hard for Rob to listen, and for me to hear how he felt about the state of our relationship. It was hard to face my own role in all this.

Our first conversation left us both feeling sick. At least now we knew where we stood. A couple of days later, we had another conversation, then another. Eventually, we came up with a new way forward, one that involved us not hating each other. One with paid childcare, so I had time to write, even though there was no guarantee my book would succeed.

Watercolours was published four years later. My boys were eight years old, and at the book launch, they offered to sign copies for people. They were proud of their mum for having written a novel, yet even now they have no interest in reading it.

Rob and I are still together.

Avoca Beach is where I became a wife, a mother and an author.

A.F.