Free Love In a Sunburnt Country by Jo Jackson King

bitter, more resentful. Robina found herself raging at the children, frightening them with her sudden descents into hostility, then breaking her heart over the fact that she was hurting the ones she loved most of all.
    â€˜I was teaching my babies terrible things,’ she says. ‘I was a lovely mummy on the surface, but underneath was all this anger. There were words inside me, all this rot and chaos and I didn’t know how to still it. I was really disconnected from my essence and eventually it was out of control. Aaron was walking on eggshells. He never knew what he’d be coming home to.’
    She has insights and solutions now, but at the time, and for quite a long while, she simply felt guilty and isolated. The shame and the ugliness of it all made it too difficult for her to share until the day she realised that preserving her secret would only continue to hurt her sons. She needed help. It was at this point she saw a course on the Gold Coast that seemed to have been written just for her. This course aimed to help women start their relationship with themselves and their history afresh, and in being at peace with themselves, from there create truly loving relationships.
    Aaron’s family had welcomed her with open arms years before, even in the days when she and Aaron were ‘just friends’. Now Aaron’s mother took a week off from her work to look after the little boys on the Gold Coast so Robina could attend every day, secure in the knowledge that her boys were in loving hands, and could still breastfeed Tully at night.
    The course was directed at healing all that might lie beneath Robina’s unhappiness. And it worked. It reconnected Robina with the easiness she had felt in mothering in Darcy’s early years. She came to understand that she had shut down that loving flow and joyful engagement with the world, that welling-up of soul from deep within the landscape of her being, all by herself. The demon she’d glimpsed, the one who had placed on her the heavy burdens of ‘must’ and ‘should’ and ‘prove’ under which she’d faltered and raged, was simply an aspect of Robina herself.
    â€˜For years I dismissed and minimised myself, until I didn’t know what was okay about me and what wasn’t. And, of course, it is all okay.’
    For the first time Robina confronted the fact that in believing that she was not ‘okay, enough, sufficient’ as she was, she’d dethroned her true self. She’d placed in charge another aspect, an ignorant and misguided self, who saw threats where there were none—in the unwitting defiance of a small child, for example—and missed the real threat to family wellbeing: Robina’s disconnection from herself.
    Robina had arrived at the course almost silent under the weight of her sorrow, hidden beneath her long hair.
    â€˜I knew Aaron liked girls with long hair, so I grew it and I grew a big fringe,’ she says. Robina herself liked her own hair short but she had felt that a good wife should suppress such preferences to make her husband happy. She emerged from the five days of intensive therapy totally made over: a change Aaron seems to have taken in his stride.
    â€˜The course took away the rage and the sadness and the anger. The only thing that was left was my hair, and three women there cut my hair. I realised, even if he does like long hair, he still loves me, long hair or not,’ she says.
    Her hair was cut to within millimetres of her scalp but the real makeover occurred deep within, and this Aaron welcomed even more. There’s that old saying, ‘if Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy’, and Robina’s rediscovered joy in life was a gift not just to herself but to Aaron and the two boys.
    Robina had been taught as a child: ‘There’s right and wrong, you only do right. It doesn’t matter how you feel, you do it; first with your head and then