My Two Husbands had its genesis during a painting trip with a few women in the outback. We painted by day, and when evening fell like a blanket, blacking out the grey and silver of stunted trees against rich desert ochre and deepening the rose mauve gold of red sun shimmering along pearly saltpans, we gratefully put away our brushes, exhausted with the effort of trying to trap some of this fleeting miracle of light and changing colour onto paper, and retreated to stools around the campfire where we ate steaming stew, sipped wine and swapped yarns in the cold night desert air.
We were new friends, bringing stories from different lives. What we had in common was our desire to respond artistically to this ancient landscape, more impossibly beautiful than any of us had imagined. There were among us three painters, a filmmaker, an architect and a photographer. Everybody was excited to be there, and at night, everyone had stories. Hannah Kay had fought as a girl in the 1973 Six Day War, and Sandra had been there too. Jenny Sages had been brought up in Shanghai in the Russian sector, Tamara had lost her husband when her two sons were babies. Sandra and Hannah were accustomed to desert, having come from Israel. I was the only Dinki Di and it was my first trip to the real desert. In this company that made me an exotic.
So it was my stories about my first marriage into a Polish Jewish family which they all wanted to hear. I made my camping mates laugh till they rocked on their stools, relating some of the capricious antics of my mother-in-law Mamushka. We sat there until the last embers of the fire had died, and my voice had gone hoarse. And then we left the cosy ambience of the campfire to retreat into the freezing night to where our swags lay, cold to touch, but inside warm as toast.
And it was then, lying in my warm swag, covering my eyes from the white glare of the galaxy, that I realised I had a story, and it could sparkle like a small star, and I was going to make it happen.
So I came home to the city, sorted out my paintings, my little mantras from the desert reminding me again of the bold beauty of the interior, of evening story-time and my attentive listeners, and I started to write. I wrote furiously, in between the frenetic comings and goings in my busy household, in between visits from small grandchildren, problems of older kids, the rising angst of my second husband forcibly retired from academia, demands from debt-collectors and the need to keep exhibiting my paintings. I just kept writing. I wrote as I painted, just putting bits and pieces together with care, and with daring, creating a shape, a mood, a feeling. But unlike with painting, where the emotions of the painter and the response of the viewer can remain separate, one from the other, with words on a page there is no hiding place. The reader and the writer are locked in there together, in the same place, experiencing the same emotions, suffering together, laughing together. That’s what words do. They keep you there.
I wrote about Olek, my first husband’s childhood as a partisan in the forests of Eastern Europe, about the gypsy who predicted his early death. I wrote about his children, and about his mother Mamushka and her on-going capricious pranks against me. I wrote about the difficulties and the joys of my life. And then I showed the manuscript to a friend, a professional editor. In return for a painting she gave me her opinion.
“Kathy!” she said.
“First of all, you write so beautifully! I enjoyed these bits and pieces you’ve put together. I found them very engaging…But a book? Oh no, not yet, there is something missing….”
I listened, notebook in hand.
“What happened”, she asked, to your first husband? You talk about his childhood, its riveting stuff!”
“But”, she continued, tentatively, cautious of my sensitivity
“Where did he go?”
“You seem to glide from husband to husband seamlessly, with your children, and it is not clear why you even had a second husband. A reader has to know more, in order to engage. Do you know that you have a clear duty to the reader, to reveal the important things, the agony, as well as the comedy. That is, if you want to write this as a book, and not just as a set of anecdotes…?”
Well after that I put the whole thing away, and returned to my painting, which feeds on suggestion rather than total exposure, and my busy family life which could be relied upon to gum up any spare moment. More and more grandchildren kept getting born, and appearing for me to mind. I minded them naturally and willingly, returning to activities which I had thought were blissfully behind me. Nappies, mess, eternal vigilance, sorting fights. My daughter and her ever demanding singing career and my second husband continued to compete grumpily for my attention with invading infants and toddlers.
And then something triggered me to write again.
I got out of bed early, hours before my household was due to wake. And brutally I started to unpick the caskets which guarded residual sorrows of my soul. I struggled with memories which must have still hurt and confused me. And as I wrote, and read over what I had written, I cried fresh tears, and then more unravelled, some sad and sweet memories. The whole story started to emerge, and the current and ever-present household dramas wove their way into my tale.
And I saw that my life did indeed have a shape and a form, and a reason, that it was not a just a set of random incidents, that there were riches to be extracted from the caskets, and these riches could be shared. I became more bold, experiencing shock as looking in at myself. I became brutally aware of my own responses to family situations, responses which at the time must have seemed natural to me.
I never showed the manuscript to my editor friend again, because I knew that I had achieved the missing core, and that this was now a proper book.
The proper book found its way to Penguin, and the great publisher made an offer.
I was jubilant, I shouted the whole family presents and champagne in advance of my publishing advance.
My publisher, a glamorous woman, told me firmly that the book should be called “My Two Husbands.”
I was shocked. I gasped, and then I spilt my coffee right over the new designer skirt of the publisher, and she left in a taxi to rescue her outfit, leaving me clutching my book cover with its confronting and suggestive title: My Two Husbands.
What did it imply? I quizzed myself, squirming with embarrassment. That in the pages to follow I was going to boast about those two men? Or bitch about them? Or was I about to embark on getting a third to add to my portfolio?
So what, people then asked me, is My Two Husbands about? And I worried about the question, unsure what to answer.
You can write a book, it flows through you like a river, clearing out corners of treasure, excavating layers of life. It is a sort of emotional cleanse. And despite having lived in its pages for so long, reading and re-writing, editing it, re-shaping it, searching for its errors, I found that when asked I could scarcely remember what I had written, or why, and this alarmed me, because I knew I would have to deal with these questions when promoting my book.
I knew that it was about my first husband’s war-time childhood, my one and only Jewish mother-in-law, my family life, my second husband, struggles with growing children, cross cultural misunderstandings, food, rites of passage and the brawls of marriage and motherhood, all of which are part of a greater story.
It was also, as I was reminded later in interviews, about loss, grievous loss, about the brutal amputation by accident of a beloved person from the body and soul of a vibrant family. And it was about going forward into life because life is to be enjoyed and fully celebrated and one can love again.
So here is the story.
When I married an intriguing Polish medical intern named Olek, soon after a brief meeting on a bus stop, my life changed forever. I was thrust without knowledge or warning into the chaos and passion of Polish Jewish culture, right on past the fascinating whiff of it, and then into motherhood with its joys and its eternal mess. I engaged energetically with my new reality, never abandoning my fledgling career as an artist, continuing part-time studies wherever we were living, and with whatever number of children we had, trying and usually failing to come to grips with my mother-in-law, an intrepid firebrand of a woman, who never stood down to make way for me. We competed cantankerously and ceaselessly for the attentions of her beloved only son who was also my husband.
And then tragedy struck. With my three small children, I was left to face a future without Olek, our inspiration for that future. And we were left with his mother.
This was the part that was so hard to write but, if I wrote anything else, then it had to be written, because his death had become the watershed of my life. There was life before his death, and there was life afterwards. The life afterwards is shaped by my second marriage with Voy, another Pole, who, appearing mysteriously in our lives around the time of Olek’s death, had, I thought, been sent to me and the children by Olek.
A second marriage with growing children can be a mine field. It was. And we had another son pushing his way into the scrum. But the spirit of Olek appeared to remain as a wise force, guiding us in his certain way through territory when it became perilous.
So I instinctively started to address my story to him. He became the hiding place for my story, which felt like a long letter, telling him what had been going on with us his family, how we had felt when he left, and how his strange childhood and ideals were seeming to shape the lives of his growing children and how I could fall in love again.
But now I think I will quote from a recent review, by Thuy On, in the Melbourne Age.
………This is a book of and about families…….
It may well be sub-titled: My Two Husbands plus My Children and My Grandchildren as Golski documents her maternal anxiety when her adolescent children take off on their first international trips as well as marking the stressful joys of babysitting her tumble of grandchildren. ……
The bi-cultural backgrounds of Golski and her husbands are also explored, these “two
very different men from behind the same Iron Curtain.” Golski’s safe and privileged childhood in Sydney’s North Shore is held up in relief against Olek’s desperate trials in escaping the occupying German army during the war. Time in Papua New Guinea with anthropologist Voy was the closest Golski came to understanding what it was like to survive in underground bunkers in the forest’s depths. This is a warm and passionate book, narrated to Olek, whose protective spirit hovers over the pages.
Well I quote this review, as it seems to me when I see my name penned by somebody else, referring to me as “Golski”, that the words may carry more weight than my own musings about my book.
But, I can say, meanwhile, back in my present real life, demanding singer daughter has just produced a tiny girl baby with a loud voice. It’s my seventh grandchild, and she’s called after my mother-in-law, and I just got a phone call…
“Mum! What does it mean when she cries until 5am and doesn’t seem to be able to get to sleep again? Do you know what that means, Mum? Is it…..normal?”
And I hear a break in the voice....
Well, I do know what that means. It means daughter is losing it, her husband is copping it, baby is surviving loudly at the expense of their sleep, perhaps their sanity, hopefully not their relationship, and that Mum, that’s me, will have to think about downing tools of trade to help out again, lending the calm expertise of years of practice. And my second husband will say “Why do you have to keep doing this? What about your work? What about me? What about us?”
So perhaps that’s also what the book’s about, this book called “My two Husbands”.
