Australian Dream

Dreaming.

And if all this what but a dream ?
Marty once said I should be a very romantic one.
To elude my everyday worries, I put my imagination to work and fancy a totallly different life for me from the one I am actually living. Both Pierre and Marty say I am acting like a child and I know it is so true.
Infantilized that's what I 've been made.It is a way for others to put a thumb on you and keep total control over one person. I am perfectly aware of the process suffering from it since childhood.
My parents, especially my mother, were very strict and in order to keep their children in control , relied on means of another age.
Beating was one thing, not only smacking one's buttom nor slapping one's face.
Seeing my father undo his belt brought so many fears into me.The faults were minor ones usually, and very often out of my mother's imagination in order to have me punished, sometimes in my brother's place.The latter made the best he could of his privileged status.
My childhood universe was a very restricted one. We were living in a flat in a building occupied by retired people without children. The motto was silence.
We had to keep quiet, not move about the flat: we were stuck in the hall with toys ,to play with in silence.
We were not allowed to speak if not required.
I have been taught never to ask anything. One day, I was spending the afternoon at my godfather's, one storey below. There was that candy-box on a table and I asked very politely:
"Please, may I have a candy ?"
This was immediately reported to my mother who slapped me in the face for having dare ask.
Not being able to express loud my feelings or inner sufferings, and having to keep silent most of the time, I created a world for myself in which I was loved and granted all the affection I was craving for.
We did not have friends either, having to come back home straight from school and confined there for the rest of the day.
Things changed a lot when we moved to the West Indies. My brother gained total freedom allowed to wander about with his new friend, two years older. I was allowed toplay Monopoly on Thursday afternoons at my parents' new friends'.
Being a teenager and looking older than actually was, my parents started to become anxious about boys getting next to me. My mother started fancying fake things about my going to bed with some of them, and more than once, I was confined into my bedroom after severe beating;
Deeply hurt inside, (as outside at times), overwhelmed by injustice, I would dream of a better world, lying on my bed for long hours.
Another way of keeping children under parents' contol is to deprive them of any form of economical freedom, by refusing them pocket money and on one occasion to take a summer job.
I was left asking, though someething I dared not do as I said before after that experience I had to go through when a child.
This lasted almost till I got married, for after having had a bit of freedom, I lost my university grant and could not find a steady job.Financially, I had to rely on my parents again. When they came back from the West Indies to join me in Europe, my mother said she would tame me, as if I was but an animal. Funny, being nearly twenty-five. She cut all the relationships I could have set up when on my own. When I started to go out with my future husband, he had to ask the permission from my parents I was supposed to be back home before midnight.
One day, I played Cinderella. It was not my fault at all: Pierre did not want to drive me home before he had found out where his friend had disappeared into the night-club.
I was saved from severe beating by the presence at home of two of my father's sisters. They pleaded my cause. But the only way for my parents to keep their honour preserved was for me to get married as soon as possible. That happened within the six following months. The engagement was hopefully skipped. Not for me though. I had dreamed of having an engagement party and the ring attached to such an event. Well, I was deprived of both.
My mother refused to buy me a wedding-dress and Pierre had to provide it She said she had spent too much money on my brother's wedding six months before. That did not prevent her from buying a mink fur coat for herself. I got married in winter time!
Unfortunately for me Pierre stepped into my parents' shoes with great facility.
He kept his earnings secret to me. I could not even get to know where was the flat we were going to live in and in which he was undertaking works. He had me signed a wedding contract by which he was keeping all his belongings to himself.
I was still a student at that time without resources and he would not give me money. I had to fight hard to have a checkbook for myself. By the way, I still have to ask over and over again before he would give me a single banknote to put into my wallet.
He said to me that the money was all his and if I wanted to have some of my own I would have to find a job.
That I did under hard conditions. My first teaching job was two hundred kilometers from home.
I had to sleep in a bad hotel.
Teaching led me have to drive quite often far from home, and my last job was one hundred kilometers away. By that time my daughter was two. She was partly brought up by my parents and I hated it. My husband was on his own at home and quite satisfied with the situation. I had to share a flat with another teacher five days a week.
When I was appointed for three years further from my home town, aware that after these three years I could be appointed in the up North of France, me living in the South, my husband advised me to stop teaching and bring up Laure the best a mother could.
He had big problems of his own, and had to start a new business. I decided it was wiser indeed to stay by my family and help Pierre a much as I could in his new work life.
He promised me a salary he never gave, to compensate for the loss of my job.
Laure is a big girl now. She has completed her university studies in a very brilliant way and has now a job in Paris as a civil servant. I am so proud of her!!!
Having lost the freedom that earning one's own money can bring, I was like a child.
I had to comply to my husband's wills, beg for a banknote and put all my inner desires aside.
Pierre does feel the need to fufill them, emotionally or sexually. He just does what he wants when he feels like it. What I feel is of no consequence to him.
Being left more than once on my own, confined into a room and I have carried on with my dreaming. I still know where reality stands, well I used to before meeting you , Marty, on that web.
It is hard for me now to tell myself fancy stories to go to sleep. In a sense you are too real.
I fancied so many stories in the past to alleviate the burden of the present. In the world of my imagination I met so many Prince Charmings....These fancied ones would bring me all the love and affection I was craving for. You told me once I should treat with love and affection that old computer which was undergoing one of its ordinary bugs. I replied it was me who needed love and affection. I hoped you did not miss the point.
Being far from Australia two years ago, I dreamed so many times of how things would on my coming back there. I even fancied how I would meet you for the first time at Bo's.
But you took all my dreams away when you let me know that we would not meet your being in Sydney for the length of my stay in Alice Springs. So no use dreaming anymore.
I can't hardly dream by now, for you are too real.
At the same time, you said I was reading too much into things. Did you mean by that that I was drawing false conclusions from the things you said or the way you could act?
When you played that song "Addicted" just for me in the new quiet of the place when the crowd had left, what was it meant for then? When you wanted to know what I meant when speaking of impossible love, were you thinking of our improbable relationship?
The border between dream and reality is so thin. I don't know where it stands at present, especially when you are recoiling from going any further in that direction. There is one of the songs you play quite often about one step forward and two steps back.Is it what you are doing at the moment?
I have to interprete every single gesture you make or word you say. And then my imagination is at work again. Left on my own in front of that computer brings all sorts of thoughts to my mind, the sweetest and very sour ones as well.
I have had a dream. May be...