Free Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles by Margaret Humphreys Page A

severe depression.
    ‘My wife, Barbara, was my first and only serious girlfriend. We lived in a flat for a while, and when we were expecting our first baby we bought a three-bedroom weatherboard house in a new housing estate about fifteen miles out of Melbourne. In those days this was akin almost to living in the bush. Trevor was born in 1961 and I was very proud and happy to have started my own family. Fiona, our first daughter, was born in 1965, and Cathie two years later.
    ‘I don’t think I was madly in love when I got married. I didn’t understand what that word meant, and still have trouble with it now. It’s as though this word, this feeling, belongs to other people, but not me. I’m not entitled to feel love.’
    Harold started searching for his mother when he was about eighteen. He saw an advertisement in the newspaper – probably a detective agency – that said it could find people. The agency took his money but produced no positive results.
    Then, in 1963, Marie found him through the Salvation Army.
    ‘That visit wasn’t very successful but it brought feelings and emotions to the surface that I had buried deeply, feelings about my parents, particularly my mother. These feelings had arisen when Trevor was born but I had kept them hidden. While I continued to control them when Fiona and Cathie were born, they kept bubbling away inside.
    ‘I got very depressed and felt alone and empty.’
    By 1968, Harold had three lovely children and a happy marriage. He was buying a house and working as a signwriter. To outsiders he may have looked a happy and contented man. Instead, he tried to kill himself. It was a cry for help.
    ‘I thought about my mother a lot, but never talked about her. How can you talk about someone you have been told doesn’t exist? It didn’t make any sense to me.
    ‘A psychiatrist put me on anti-depressant tablets. I took these and saw him for a while, and slowly they took away my depressions, and so I stopped, and stored up the tablets that he gave me.
    ‘I was all right for a while, and then I started to get depressed again. I kept trying to fight it, thinking it would go away, but it just got worse. I was drinking a lot, trying to obliterate my feelings, but it just made me feel worse.
    ‘The first time I tried to commit suicide I had done it away from home, this time I did it at home. I didn’t want to be found in a motel somewhere. I had a few drinks and when Barbara went to bed, I started to drink more rapidly, and then I took the tablets I had stored up. I woke up, or became conscious, a few days later in hospital.’
    Harold’s marriage broke up in 1970, through no fault of his wife, and they were divorced the following year. He felt guilty about leaving Barbara and the children. He’d always vowed he would never do such a thing.
    ‘I had no idea how to be a father, a dad, I felt so bad about this that I even stopped calling myself Dad when I talked to them. I didn’t deserve to be known by that name,’ Harold said.
    ‘The only woman I have wanted to find, desperately wanted to find, the one I have always wanted to hold me, and hug me, is my mother. That emptiness has been with me all my life.
    ‘I can’t stand Mother’s Day. Every year it’s a constant reminder, like someone twisting a knife inside me. I always stay inside that day, with my blinds down, and never answer the phone. I’ve spent years looking at families from a distance, trying to understand what it would be like to be a part of one, my own. To have my own mum and dad.’
    In all, Harold attempted suicide three times and became locked in a seemingly endless round of psychotherapy and medication.
    He stumbled aimlessly from one crisis to another, with the only constants in his life being alcohol and a yearning to find his mother. The only way he could express himself emotionally was through his art but his paintings were full of disturbing, abstract images of pain and anguish.
    Because of his past