‘We played happy family’…
Sandy Jeffs has lived with schizophrenia and all its moods for over thirty years. In the poetry below, she writes about her experiences of violence in her family.
Sandy is a community educator who speaks to school, university and community groups about what it’s like to live with a mental illness. She has been published widely and is a prize-winning poet whose writing has been concerned with madness, domestic violence and the humorous antics of women who play midweek ladies’ tennis. Sandy is the author of the bestselling Poems from the Madhouse (1993, 2000, 2001), Loose Kangaroos (co-author, 1998), Blood Relations (2000), Confessions of a Midweek Lady: Tall Tennis Tales (2001), and The Wings of Angels: A memoir of madness (2004).
Facade
We played happy family
presented ourselves as normal
sanitised our image
deluded ourselves with lies.
Something was rotting in our family.
Playing happy family
was a full time job.
Going to school
with the screams and punches
playing themselves over in my mind
while pretending to be happy
was a killer.
Something was rotting in our family.
Mum stayed indoors for days
powdered her bruised face
nursed her battered body
sent me on messages
made up excuses.
He brought her cups of coffee
pretended nothing had happened.
Something was rotting in our family.
Yet still I pretended to be happy.
In the end my heart watched
in dazed disbelief
while my family rotted
knowing no one could smell the stench.
Crazy Woman
Crazy woman looks back
on her crazy life
in that crazy home
with her crazy parents
doing crazy things
yet no one thought them crazy.
Crazy woman sits huddled
with her crazy thoughts
and crazy voices
talks crazy words
to the crazy people
and everyone knows she’s crazy.
Crazy woman wasn’t always crazy
and wonders in her crazy mind
why she went crazy
and sees crazy shrinks
while her crazy family
drove everyone crazy.
From Blood Relations, Spinifex Press, 2000