Introduction
Things rarely go to plan. Most of us know this but we go ahead and plan things and dream other things anyway. I imagined being a famous actress by the time I was thirty. Press buzzer now. I dreamed of being partnered, not married but with someone who got me, loved me and who I loved back. Buzzer again. I planned on being an excellent sister, an even better daughter, and a confident mother. There’s that buzzer.
But here I am in my forties with my grandmother’s warning ringing in my ears. ‘Don’t excite your baby so much, he’ll just grow up expecting too much from life’.
There’s that moment when it finally dawns on you that the gap between what you thought your life was going to be and what it actually is has opened up and you’ve just fallen right in there. ‘Mind the gap’, my grandmother might have also said, but I didn’t. ‘And when you fall don’t expect anyone to catch you’, I did, and no one did.
Life’s a mess. It’s incoherent and lacking structure. You can make all the plans you want. Plans are good. They provide shape. An illusion of coherence.
Once I made plans to get married in my grandmother’s garden. My husband hired a suit from the shop on the corner and I bought a linen outfit three days before the wedding. My auntie put little red paper flowers in my hair, my mother prepared everything just right and I camouflaged my future husband’s cold sore on his mouth with cover stick.
Our son was born one year later. Our marriage ended two years later. My grandmother died three years later and now five years later I am still making plans.
Today I am making plans for my son. I am making plans for my son and me.
Prologue
We had not been married long and I was shelling peas. This makes me sound more wifely, more of a domestic success than I was but I had decided on the peas because I thought that the sight of the peas and me would please him. Would please my husband who grew up in a village in East Germany and whose mother would have shelled peas at the kitchen table for sure. She would have picked those peas from the garden and gone about shelling and peeling, baking, and preparing them all in time for her husband when he came home from work and her younger son when he came home from school.
Her husband worked as a local schoolteacher but was never promoted. He should have been, but the Communists probably didn’t trust him. He and his wife were intellectual types. She wrote books in Low German; a language the Communists didn’t trust much either. Who knows what secret prohibitions were working against that family. My husband told me once that the Government had made sure he couldn’t go to university, but he was always a bit vague on the details. I had liked my husband’s parents, my new in-laws, but we didn’t speak a word of each other’s language so it’s hard to tell really. But the thought of getting some new family had really appealed at the time.
So, there I was that day in my nonna’s kitchen. She’d asked my new husband and me to live in her house because she couldn’t look after it anymore when she had to go to the Old People’s Home for Old Italians. That day in my nonna’s bright Venetian-blinded kitchen with its clean tiles and cream Laminex bench, I shelled peas and tried to look normal. I tried to look like a wife. I had no idea what I’d do with those peas once they were shelled but it didn’t matter because then my husband had come into the kitchen from his work room where he’d recently started playing computer games at all hours and in an uncharacteristically extravagant gesture had swept me off the chair and into his arms. He was trying to dance with me right there in my grandmother’s kitchen. He was trying to do with his wife something he’d probably seen in a movie. Maybe he’d been sitting at his computer planning it, choreographing this romantic and spontaneous moment in his mind. Rehearsing our faltering waltz in his mind’s eye. Or maybe he just saw the peas and me and was simply overwhelmed.
And then when he did it, we both kind of bumped into one another and he tried to kiss me but missed and I giggled but really wanted to cry and then his arms went limp, and his face dropped, and the peas were all over the floor by then.
‘Be happy be happy’, he said.
I am happy’, I replied.
‘No, you’re not’.
Then I was on the floor slowly on my knees picking up all the peas one by one and I didn’t get up until I heard the door to his workroom close. Quietly.
I loved my husband I think but it was never a crazy passionate love but then I thought I needed to break a pattern. I had loved him, but I just don’t remember that much about the love part now, just the part about shelling peas. Some days were good, it wasn’t all bad but it’s the illusion you fall in love with. And no matter how often it occurs, no matter how wise you are as to how it will end, one more illusion is welcome because it’s in that brief moment we catch a vision of our best selves. Who said that? Someone said that.
There is a moment in all of our lives when we realise that things are not going as we’d planned…
… that there is a significant gap between what we thought our life was going to be and how it’s actually shaping up. Elly Varrenti knows this only too well. Childhood dreams give way to ill-fated careers, desperate loves and crazy Christmas lunches. But in between navigating the fierce bonds of family, endless co-parenting arrangements and complex relationships with the opposite sex, she finds there are unexpected moments of hilarity and joy.
Elly Varrenti’s memoir is about living life at full tilt, even if it means facing up to a life that’s not anything like the one you dreamt of.
Smart and wry, touching and dead honest.
Praise for This Is Not My Beautiful Life
A very funny book. I laughed out loud. Margaret Throsby ABC FM
A beguiling voice. The Age Newspaper
Intelligent and witty. Good Reads
Bloody terrific! Catherine Deveny ABC 774
Loved it! Richard Fidler ABC Brisbane
