The Evolution of the Mamma Beast

Bathroom walls know so much. A bathroom is a place where, generally speaking, people won’t disturb you, or are least likely to disturb you. Kids and pets excepted. Public and private bathrooms alike are privy to a plethora of nefarious goings-ons, secret rendezvous, self-flagellation, self-pleasure and possibly more so than all these things, bathroom walls are witness to people’s grief.

I bet most people have a bathroom story. I have many. There was that time when, regardless of the fact that I was really high, I still managed to feel disgusted when my friend snorted a long line of speed off the toilet seat at our favourite St Kilda nightclub. My overactive imagination pictured all the smelly, sweaty, shitty arses that had sat there over the course of the evening. All the dried-up pee dribbles. I still to this day marvel at how a woman manages to dribble on the seat. My friend even swiped the dregs off of the seat with her finger and licked it. I was much classier with my drug consumption. I used the lid of the cistern to snort off. Neither of us died of any nasty nasal E Coli infections and we both achieved our goal, so I guess it was a win regardless.

Years before this I was also in a bathroom in a Melbourne nightclub. My best mate Rik and I were under age. We had a membership badge we had found/stolen (its a grey area) so no one questioned our obvious youthfulness and besides, it was that bloody long ago, in an era where no one really cared and no one lost their liquor licences for serving booze to teen angels in city night clubs. We were hot nubile things and that trumped the legalities. Rik wanted to wear my bra so we snuck into the girl’s bathroom and I deftly snapped his skinny teenage boy chest into my then petite B cups. We stuffed them with toilet paper, about 2 and a half sheets per boob I think. I’d need the whole roll these days. I also stuffed a wad of it in my knickers in an attempt to simulate a very misshapen penis and we spent a large part of the night gyrating in our, not at all convincing transgender disguises on the dance floor, Rik fondling his paper tits and myself hunched forward dancing like a skinny Quasimodo girl trying to pretend I didn’t have tits, and lewdly stroking my munted paper cock through my jeans. The night ended with me pashing a very short and very gay George Michael lookalike and sleeping under a garbage bin at Flinders St station (the type that is mounted on a pole appearing like a dystopian faerie toadstool with me curled around the stem). The bin was situated outside the Flinders St public amenities which were, apparently, a beat. I spent much of the wee hours shivering from the cold Melbourne predawn frost and peeping out from under my cardboard box blanket watching guys in suits and ties sending out some sort of (unseen by straight people and country bred kids) signal to each other and covertly slipping into those bathrooms together to do with strangers what they couldn’t do at home with their wives.

One morning when my son was about 7, well anywhere between 5 and 10 actually, I seem to apply most of my memories to my son's 7th year. If I were right every time he would have had to have been 7 for around a decade. Anyway, whenever it was, I found myself on the cool grotty tiles in the small safe seclusion of our bathroom. We were still poor then and this was the first actual house we had lived in for around 4 or 5 years so it wasn’t much. At the time I think it was actually condemned but regardless we lived there as did a few of our friends in the following years. The block is now for sale for around $1.5 million. It was morning and Jaia was at school. I got down on my knees and put my forehead on the tiles and I lost my shit. I have never lost my shit like that before or since (not counting overdramatic teenage dramas and lost loves, usually also involving bathrooms and the kicking and punching of the doors within). I knelt there with the tile spaces impressing lines on my knees and head and I wailed. I wailed with pain, frustration, guilt and raw unchecked grief and when I was empty, I curled up on my side like a foetus and sobbed until I stopped. At this time I had already been many years unwell and undiagnosed. At this time I was so unwell I had to be supported when I walked. I was suffering anxiety attacks that were causing me to lie rigid and unable to move on my bed for hours. I was getting migraine with aura, dysphasia and hemiplegia several times a week. I was hallucinating on the medications the doctors had given me to try and make me better and when it didn’t work being told to ‘fuck off out of my office and deal with your own women’s problems. My whole body was in excruciating pain all day, every day. I couldn’t feed my child, drive him to school or attend to any of his needs. I was frightened. He was terrified. It was at that moment on the bathroom floor that the original mamma beast was born in my mind and a few years later that I created her likeness in oil on canvas.

She was huge. So filled with fear and guilt that her body could barely contain it. All these dark things inside her made her so heavy. She had wings but they had shrunk. They were so disproportionately small that they were useless. She would be better off without this burden of wings, a symbol of unreachable potential and partly the cause of the mental anguish she felt. She had huge feet to try and stay stable but every time she tried to move forward she would stand on her own hanging head, making any progression impossible.

This version of the mamma beast represented me for many years. I was infected at age 16. I became chronically ill at age 30. I wasn’t diagnosed until 13 years later.

I’m a new kind of mamma beast now. While sometimes my hands feel huge and useless because they can’t achieve what’s in my mind, I am, at least upright. I have more stability with the help of my tail and I’ve shed the burden of wings. My wings are now huge and detachable. I can access my creativity when I need or want to, I am for the most part inspired. My shoulders are wider to more easily bear my burden and I’m pushing against the tide instead of being swept away. Having a diagnosis helped to empower me and allowed me to purge myself of some guilt and anguish, making me less heavy. My son needs me less so I don’t feel inadequate quite so often. He’s 21 now. Whilst I still have significant pain every single day, my head no longer droops to the ground. Even though I’m still bent, I can move forward. It took a long time for the evolution of the mamma beast to get to this point and a lot changed while I was gone (I felt so gone and I wished to be gone). I’ve moved forward in my health and life journey. Sadly my body moved in a different direction, down. My butt sags and my boobs sway in the breeze like pregnant cucumbers. I have jowls!

These days my bathroom walls are privy to me avoiding the mirror and doing what is supposed to be done in bathrooms. This is usually with the audience of at least a couple of cats and sometimes Sunshine, my little haystack on stilts.