Thirty-Two
MY EMANCIPATION DIDN’T happen like I expected it to.
I thought maybe I’d wake up one morning and see the light. Feel liberated from everything. Or maybe one particular incident would see me through it. But it happened while I was hysterically crying—again.
It was after receiving a birthday card from Jacob that I threw in the bin. I just sat there thinking back on the year and I realized that I was emancipated long ago. It wasn’t at one particular point either, it was at several. The hang-ups I once had were superseded, but not with other hang- ups as much as with a few sorrows.
I remembered feeling socially out of it at St. Martha’s, yet when the fiasco of the walkathon happened, I realized I wasn’t. I thought my birth circumstances were a cross I’d bear for the rest of my life, but what had happened between Nonna and Marcus Sandford made me realize that it had never been my cross. I had only made it mine.
And the different cultures thing?
Well, I’m not sure whether everyone in this country will ever understand multiculturalism and that saddens me, because it’s as much part of Australian life as rugby and meat pies. But the important thing is that I know where my place in life is. It’s not where the Seras or the Carlys of the world have slotted me.
If someone comes up and asks me what nationality I am, I’ll look at them and say that I’m an Australian with Italian blood flowing rapidly through my veins. I’ll say that with pride, because it’s pride that I feel.
A lot has changed at home. I’m not sure why. Maybe because I’ve changed. Michael has moved into his home at Balmain and I stay with him a lot. The funny thing about it is that Mama will sometimes come over for
dinner and the both of them amaze me. They just seem so tuned in to each other.
They talk for hours without embarrassment or awkwardness and I wonder what is stopping them from getting closer. Maybe they’re both terrified of how strong their feelings really are.
I fight with Michael a lot. Expecially now that I see him so much. He can sometimes be such a male chauvinist and he doesn’t think twice about criticism. Though he expects of me not what he wants, but what he feels that I want. If I cheat myself, he says, it makes him furious. We clash because there is a generation gap.
He watches current affairs programs and considers them entertainment and he goes absolutely berserk when he catches me watching American sitcoms. He detests them.
But I love Michael Andretti more and more every day. I love him double to what I did maybe a month ago, yet I see his faults now too.
And Jacob?
Well, I don’t think it is my Italian background and his Australian one that is keeping us apart. I think, at the moment, we’re too different. We haven’t figured out what we really want from ourselves, let alone from each other.
I think that during the year Jacob got a bit more ambitious than he used to be and I became a bit less. Sometimes I’m not even sure that I want to be a barrister. But I’m not going to make that a problem or a hang-up. When my results come out, I’ll make my decision then. But I’m optimistic. I do believe in my heart that one day I will be with Jacob Coote again. So I took the card out of the garbage and put it on my mantelpiece.
It’s my birthday today. I’m not seventeen anymore. The seventeen Janis Ian sang about where one learns the truth. But what she failed to mention is that you keep on learning truths after seventeen, and I want to keep on learning truths till the day I die.
Just like I’ll know who I am till the day I die. I’ll believe in God and I won’t let any church rules take that away from me. I’ll believe in my world.
A world where an Irishman told us to feed the poor and we fed the poor.
Where musicians asked us not to “Sing Sun City” and we supported them against the segregation between blacks and whites.
A world where Sting asked if the Russians loved their children too and we knew the answer was yes.
I know there is a lot that is bad with the world, but too many people are ready to give up on it. But I’m not. Because I honestly believe in the goodness of the individual person and especially the youth.
So I’m sitting here listening to U2, to the words written by, perhaps, a modern-day poet. And tonight I’ll be with friends and family, which is what life is all about. I will sit between two women. The two most influential women in my life, whose relationship was almost destroyed by one man who has been dead for fifteen years.
I will sit between them and be a link and I’ll fight with all my might to see that nothing tears my family unit apart. I’m not saying my life will be easier now because I finally feel free. I’m not saying that people will stop whispering about me behind my back. Because I think that if I lived life like a saint and walked with two feet in one shoe; if I wore the clothes of St.
Francis of Assisi and suffered like a martyr; if I lived by the rules and never committed a sin, people would still talk. Because human nature is like that.
They’ll always, like me, find someone to talk about.
I’ve figured out that it doesn’t matter whether I’m Josephine Andretti who was never an Alibrandi, who should have been a Sandford and who may never be a Coote. It matters who I feel like I am—and I feel like Michael and Christina’s daughter and Katia’s granddaughter; Sera, Anna and Lee’s friend; and Robert’s cousin.
You know, a wonderful thing happened to me when I reflected back on my year.
“One day” came.
Because finally I understood.
