Aftershock

Mum told me she “loathes” my brother for what he’s been saying about her. She’s so angry with him, and she said their relationship is irreparable.

In some ways, I feel bad—like I shouldn’t have told her what he said—but the truth is, if I hadn’t, I would have felt like I was betraying her by engaging in those conversations behind her back.

If I want to be a responsible person moving forward, I need to really assess whether it’s the right thing to do to relay those conversations to her.

There are two things I’ve noticed about Mum that make me wonder if something might be wrong. One is that she often stays in bed until 3:00pm. In the past, she used to get up at 7:00am, tune in to 5AA radio, and get her day started. But now she’ll spend long stretches in bed during the day. Not every day—but enough for me to stop and think, that’s not like her.

The other thing is that she’ll watch the same movie over and over. Last night, for example, she watched The Bodyguard, even though she’d only seen it a couple of days earlier. I know she doesn’t mind watching things again, but last night I really thought to myself—did you not remember watching this just a few days ago?

But you know what? I hate it when people gaslight or mock older people by making them out to be demented or incompetent.

When Joe Biden was still President of the United States, I hated the way Sky News and other ridiculous outlets called him things like “Sleepy Joe.” They’d say things like, “Time to take the car keys off Grandpa,” and I found it so deeply disrespectful.

And in some small way, my brother is doing the same thing to Mum—diluting her dignity by making her sound like a blithering idiot.

Mum has told me she’s worried my brother wants to put her in a home or have her detained. I promised her I would never allow that to happen.

I understand what it’s like to have someone question your sanity—what it feels like to have your mind and credibility undermined. It’s degrading. It’s dehumanising.

And I will never let that happen to Mum.

Now I want to tell you about an incident that happened when I returned home from Sydney in 2011. There’s no way I would have ever worked at any of the courts again—nor would they likely have had me. But the experience did spark a very keen interest in the Table of Precedence, and when I eventually came home, my new career goal became to work as a Protocol Officer at the Department of the Premier and Cabinet. You should have seen the résumé I started putting together for them.

Positions in the Protocol Office don’t come up very often, so I figured I’d just temp until I saw one advertised in the Notice of Vacancies.

To say I didn’t feel capable of physically looking a man in the eye—if he was of the same vintage, marital status, or station in life as the judge—is an understatement. And the very first temp job I was offered? It was on the reception desk within the Office of the Chief Executive Officer in a state government department. I almost didn’t accept it for a number of reasons.

But I did. And once I settled in, I was okay.

At the time, they were also trying to manage someone out of the office. Eventually, they placed her on the reception desk with me. She was nice enough—and I’m sure there are plenty of jobs she’d be well suited to—but they were managing her out of the department for a very good reason.

The department had just extended my contract, which I accepted. Then they offered to create a position for me—which they often do for temps once you’re trained up and there's an ongoing need. But this offer felt especially positive, given the previous six months I’d had.

Then, one day, a former Mayor walked into the office for a meeting with the Chief.

I actually only knew he was a former Mayor because I used to go to school with his daughter—and I now hope to God he didn’t remember me. Just as he walked in, the other girl on reception was at the tail end of yelling out, “Fuck.”

I had previously—rather prudishly—outlined to her that she really shouldn’t be swearing at the front desk of the Office of the Chief Executive Officer. But on this day, after the former Mayor was hopefully far, far away in a meeting room with the Chief, in light of what she’d just done, I snapped.

And I absolutely ripped into her. Verbally.

I went off about how she was dragging down the integrity of the Office of the Chief Executive Officer with her behaviour and language. I was so loud—so full-on—that people came running out to the reception desk to try to calm me down.

I was so passionate about it that I ended up in tears. I was loudly — and quite inappropriately — trying to make the point that my coworker had violated the principles of etiquette associated with those who hold a seat at the Table of Precedence.

Someone ran upstairs and brought down two high-level managers, both of whom I had, up until that point, very friendly professional relationships with.

At first, they were incredibly compassionate. They took me into a private meeting room, trying to work out what had just happened—what had gotten into me.

But you would not believe how shocked they were when, instead of calming down, I launched into a damning review of management’s incompetence—based on what I had just witnessed at the reception desk of the Chief Executive Officer, in front of a former Mayor. Both of whom, at one point or another, held seats at the Table.

I was absolutely relentless.

I systematically outlined faults within the department—touching on public perception, the conduct of the Chief—who was only temporarily in the role—and eventually even the Minister, who was also the Attorney-General at the time.

And that—that—unleashed the wrath of Satan’s Child.

I started yelling at them—high-level managers—in utter disbelief that they personally didn’t understand how serious this was. That they didn’t grasp the weight of representing the Attorney-General in such an unprofessional, undignified way.

Even after that, to their credit, they were nice enough to tell me to calm down, take the rest of the day off, and come back tomorrow to work it out.

But then I launched into the most venomous oration you could possibly imagine—detailing their own very personal failings in relation to the whole thing. It was so full-on that one of them eventually snapped herself. She started yelling back at me, but honestly? I didn’t care. I matched her tone. I fought her on it—anger for anger.

I quit on the spot.

I started storming out of the building. A couple of the girls I was friendly with tried to stop me, but I just turned to them and echoed my disgust—telling them plainly that I would never be part of a department that would allow something like that to happen.

You know, I don’t find a thing about that funny because as ridiculous as it sounds, there were real consequences. But still—you could not have witnessed a more dramatic scene in a more mundane government office, over quite possibly the weirdest thing in the world.

To this day, I’m still surprised I wasn’t actually detained—purely based on the ridiculousness of what I was saying. But I had clearly, genuinely, taken what had happened to heart.

And yes—I know the above story makes it sound like I completely snapped and took it out on this poor woman working next to me at the Chief Executive’s reception desk. But the truth is, the real moment I snapped was after I was let go from the courts.

I’ve never experienced anything like the rollercoaster of emotions I felt when I started working at the courts and then when I was so devastatingly let go. 

This incident?

It was an aftershock.