Mirror, Mirror in the Hall ... The Envious Moon

August 27 2013

Karen Hazler Nut  is … was a cousin of mine … my mother’s sisters daughter … who I have not seen or heard of … since about the year 1971 … when she came for a visit to our house at 15 Grey Street Deakin … I remember it was Easter Time … she took me to the Manuka shops to buy more Easter Eggs because I was so upset at having received only one very small egg …

Did I dam myself by wanting more Easter Eggs?

Anyhoos Normal Genie … I have been thinking about Karen Hazler Nut a lot lately … now why is that? She springs to mind every time I ponder on this question of ENVY … and how … in my humble opinion …ENVY… is the worst sin of all … and possibly the one sin that eventually leads to all others. And being an E with a V in it and a Y …it could have been the original sin.

I know that when my ‘mother’ 'Maureen' met my father, David, in Sydney and subsequently followed him to England and married him there … she had a different shaped face to the one she wore in Africa … she had a sweet, roundish face and there was an innocence about her … that is not evident in later photos … where she appears to have a different shaped jaw…square shaped and long … and slightly jowly.

There is a picture of my mother in a park in Kensington Gardens standing in front of a yellow pram … with a look of utter devastation on her face. In another photograph of her … on a ship … looking at something through a telescope there is a blurry image behind her … that looks like a shocked reptilian … I see it clearly when I stand back a bit and look at it without glasses.

Was my mother’s name really Maureen, or was it Mary or perhaps Louise … a name she shares with Lulubel …whose name is Louise Mary. Or was she Elwyn the woman who had a relationship with David before he hooked up with her ….the one who had the abortion.

Is it possible that Karen was envious of ‘Mary’…was Karen in love with David? ... or was she envious of ‘Lulu’ because Mary was pretty and she was not.

I don’t know if Karen ever visited ‘us’ in Kenya … at our house in Karen … name after Karen Blixen … the Danish woman who had a farm in Africa and who contracted syphilus from her boyfriend … ‘a big game hunter’.

If Maureen really was my mother as she claims to be … her catastrophic medical mistakes and her weird notions about what constitutes a healthy diet for a baby leave a lot to be desired.

For example …she told me that when/if she was pregnant with me… she took a drug for morning sickness called Dielstillbeasterol…I don’t know the exact spelling of it … only the phonetics. This particular medication was later found to cause cancer of the vagine in the daughters of women who had taken it during their pregnancies.

She said she stopped breast feeding me when I was only three weeks old … because that was the done thing in those days. Women of her generation accepted without question that formula was superior to breast milk. She gave me brains to eat when I was a baby because she thought they would be good for me. When ‘I’ was Four …a Doctor recommended that both my brother and I have our tonsils removed even though there was nothing wrong with them … and she agreed to it … without questioning the wisdom of such a procedure.

Both she and David had their appendixes removed before coming to Africa … for no apparent reason.

Who was she really…this ‘Maureen’ … Karen? What happened to the innocent, pretty woman who married David. Why did she look so devastated in Kensington Gardens that day? Why did her appearance change so dramatically in Africa after she came to live in Karen … in Kenya?

Curiously Kensington Gardens is famous as the place where lost boys fall out of their prams.

And the little blonde girl…Norma Genie…she looks so much like a little Marilyn to me. Who was she if I had never been born? Was she a ghost or little Mary or little Lulubelle?

About ENVY…when I look back on my life … I can now see that each and every time I’ve come undone…so to speak … and nearly always synchronous with those times when I’ve been at my prettiest and healthiest or when my intelligence has taken a leap forward … always … the arrival of a jealous rival or an unattractive female into my sphere of existence … has precipitated a downfall.

The last proper’ job I had for example …in 2006 …working for an organisation that processes applications from foreign doctors who want to come to Australia … and I can’t remember the name of it … a woman called Julie … who … come to think of it … reminds me of Karen … was from Day One ‘out to get me’. Her attitude towards me was like that of an old fashioned headmistress talking down to a child who she considers to be inept, stupid and incompetent. Needless to say she had me sacked and the employment agency who got me the job never contacted me again.