In 2008 I was approached by John Cash and Joy Damousi from the University of Melbourne to contribute to a book they were writing about the personal worlds of Australian Rules football supporters. Joy conducted a number of written interviews with me and ended up publishing my responses verbatim in Chapter 7 of their book, 'Living Through Loss.' Joy requested the use of pseudonym; I called myself Madeleine.
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Footy Passions, John Cash and Joy Damousi
UNSW Press, Sydney, 2009
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Chapter 7: Living Through Loss
My passion for footy does not fill
a lack in my life. It enhances and helps sort the fullness that is already
there. Footy dialogues with my life.
Madeleine – Sydney Swans
Unlike
most people who we talked with, Madeleine did not inherit her love of footy. The
daughter of a French father passionate about soccer and
rugby and a mother and sister who were wholly uninterested in anything sports
related, Australian Rules football was nowhere on the horizon. In any case, Madeleine grew up in Sydney where Australian Rules was typically regarded as a
perverse expression of Melbourne’s insularity. However, Madeleine was the ‘sporty’
girl in the family, hence her father would religiously attend her gymnastics
competitions when she was a school-girl and would take her to watch Test
matches at the SCG. She did attend a Sydney Swans match, the team she would
eventually come to love, when she was thirteen, but that game had no lasting
influence on her eventual devotion to the Swans.
I went with my
mother’s then secretary who followed the Swans and loved Warwick Capper ‘for
his cute little bum’. I did not understand the game, nor did I want to. There
was absolutely no family history. Going to the Swans was a 13 year old’s chance
to ‘hang out’ with adults who were not relatives, a chance to indulge in
something completely atypical for my family.
In 1999 her
partner, Joseph, started going to games and tried to convince Madeleine to come
along by telling her that ‘it’s a game I think you’d really like.'
I cannot truly
remember when I went with him, how often and what occurred that year. It must
have been one of those life-changing transitions about which the mind goes
protectively blank thereafter – a little like childbirth. It’s better to forget
how you got where you find yourself. All I know is that in 2000 I signed up as
a full-club member and have paid my membership every year since. It was not a
slow growing thing that accumulated gradually. I fell head over heals. But, at
least, it has lasted.
Madeleine was totally
hooked. She and Joseph would go to all the Sydney matches and would travel interstate for finals. In
Sydney they would always go with a group of male friends, something that Madeleine has come to value greatly as she finds herself included as one of the boys.
Such bonding opens up new types of communication with her male friends.
As the lone
female of the group, I find that the game solicits a level of involvement and
communication from the men which allows them to be far more emotionally
revealing than perhaps straight conversation may. The season and its flux has
an inherent up and down quality that we can all use as a support structure for
our own ups and downs, or even a way to reveal them to each other. They all
have partners and children. Relationships and parenting and careers … anything
can be covered between the play, over four quarters. From a feminine perspective,
that sort of enforced structure can be particularly helpful for ‘blokes’. You
can be talking footy with them, but also be talking about ‘other things’. I
certainly feel close – on a feeling/vulnerability level - to the ‘blokes’ I go
with.
As full-club
members Madeleine and Joseph have reserved seats and have become well-acquainted with the other
supporters who sit near them at all Swans home games.
That cameraderie
extends to the rows in front and the rows behind our reserved seats too - June in row T who bakes for everyone; the
family in row S who bring in photos of the new grand daughter; the chorus from
rows Q, R, S, T and U who grizzle a collective ‘Chewy on your boot’ before an
opposition shot on goal.
As we have seen
in earlier chapters, children are typically recruited to support for a team by following
one of both of their parents. We have also noticed that late-converts, like
Christine in chapter 4, can have a transformative effect on their parents. One
way of staying close to a daughter or son is to adopt their passionate
attachment to a footy team. It becomes a shared ‘security blanket’, as we
suggested in chapter 1. Once again, the parent can enter the now grown-up
child’s fantasy world and share it with them. Listen to Madeleine's story of how
this has played out in her family, a story very similar to Christine’s with her
mother.
Despite the poor
start in my immediate family, I have now enacted, on them, a kind of reverse
conversion to footy. My parents follow my passion from afar, but not too far.
My sports illiterate mother now puts in a weekly phone call of congratulations
or commiserations. She knows a handful of names: Barry Hall, Adam Goodes, Roosy
… She will even occasionally watch a match with me when I am staying at their
place in the country. She became so entangled with the drama of 2008’s Round 11
come-from-behind-win over the Eagles that she gradually decked herself from
head-to-toe, with me, in talismanic red scarves, shoes, African beads, bakelite
bracelets – anything red! - just to will a red and white win. We succeeded and,
although my mother and I are anyway close, it was a moment of great unity and
intimacy between us, because she was willing to engage in extraordinarily
strange behaviour (for her), just to enter ‘my world’, with me, for me,
completely.
For Madeleine losses
hurt, but in quite complex ways that intersect with the rest of her life.
Moreover, the way she feels about a loss has changed, indeed matured, as her
commitment to the Swans has consolidated.
A Saturday night loss has a
different effect on me than a Sunday afternoon loss. A Saturday loss often
means some degree of nocturnal tossing and turning followed by Sunday, a
naturally contemplative day. I am susceptible to bouts of pensiveness or
melancholy on the Sundays after Saturday night losses. I find it hard to
respond to my four year old’s cheeriness. I am susceptible to bouts of cleaning
on the Sundays after Saturday night losses – an effort to restore some kind of
order. After a loss, I find it helpful to saturate myself in post match press
conferences and newspaper sports sections, trying to extract some sense, to
pick out the crux of the matter so that I might somehow solve it by proxy for
next week’s match. I need to digest a certain amount of material before my
wondering can be sated. And let’s face it, Sunday’s journalism is never as
comprehensive as Monday’s. A Saturday night loss means I have to wait longer
for counseling. A Sunday afternoon loss can be more quickly swept up in the
‘getting ready for Monday’ energy that often builds on Sunday evening. There’s
a sense of being closer to the next round than the one that is just being
completed - not so much time to wallow.
Madeleine provides a
fine description of what a win feels like.
The wins have the
effect of weightlessness on me. They are like small, happy reference points that can be mentally snuck back to throughout the week. The sense of
elation at the actual game is palpable: the mandatory, releasing rise to our
feet on the final siren, singing the song, clapping the players as they
approach the stands in gratitude. In direct contrast to the losses, the wins
provide the happy completion to the equation of effort and outcome. They are
the full circle.
Madeleine also
described how she reacted to losses.
The sense of
missed opportunity. The lack of resolution to all the effort, the emotional
investment. The loop of satisfaction for effort is not completed. There’s no
happy ending. A loss cannot provide the buoyancy of a win. Although, just
occasionally, they do bring into focus the kind of vitality you can feel when
you’re up against it but still surviving. Another important element for me is
empathy and respect for the players. Few of us, in our daily lives, have the
opportunity to push our physical vessels to their extremes, to tone them and
tune them as professional sports people do. I have great admiration for the
discipline and commitment this requires. I have great respect for the mental
capacity which allows these players to handle and often surpass their physical
capabilities during a match. And I often experience real gratitude towards my
team’s players for allowing me to touch those places, by proxy, in watching
them. So it is always unsettling to see their disappointment when this is not
rewarded. Contrary to the children’s carnival slogan, every child does not win
a prize.
We
have quoted Madeleine at such length because she is so eloquent, but also because
there is a part of her story which it is best to tell in her own words. When
telling us about how a loss affects her state of mind Madeleine said, in passing,
that a loss can occasionally ‘bring into focus the kind of vitality you
can feel when you’re up against it but still surviving’. Tragically, Madeleine has
had such an ‘up against it’ experience in her own life, when her new-born
daughter, Bessie, her first-born, died at birth. Deep into the pregnancy and
at the start of the 2003 season, Marie waddled out to Olympic Park for the
first match against Carlton. Her footy friends and acquaintances greeted her
with encouragement and admiration.
I was due in 16
days and I made good point of milking it for all it was worth and using the
stadium gold club member lifts all night. I made it to the Round 3 match
against Adelaide at the SCG on the 13th April. I was due in 3 days
but knowing I’d miss plenty of games while looking after a newborn I was
determined to make the most of the ones I COULD get to … just. The ‘gang’ in
front, particularly the women, Michelle and June, were very warm and
encouraging as we said goodbye each time. We never knew when I was going to
have to disappear from the scene for a while.
Bessie was born
six days later:
She had been
absolutely fine through my whole pregnancy
and a long labour
until the moment she was born with her cord wrapped tightly around her neck
twice. She could not be revived.
Madeleine went on to explain how, after
such a life-changing loss, the football slowly drew her back into society,
first at home and then back amongst her friends at the home games.
A week after her
death Sydney played the Anzac Round game against the Demons. We did not go. But
some time during the evening, we remembered that there was a game on and we
huddled together on the couch and switched on the radio. It was nearly three
quarter time and the Swans were three goals behind. ‘Oh come on Bessie, first
you die and leave us without you … the least you can do is give the Swans a win
for us!’ I cried out from the couch. We may have made some tea and we sat in
miserable silence to listen to the last quarter together. And we could not
believe what began to unfold. The Swans kicked 10 goals in the final quarter to
beat the Demons by 4 straight. It was truly magical. From that moment, we
decided that Bessie must have heard us, that she must be their guardian
angel.
In that very raw
stage of grief, it gave me unspeakable comfort to bring her to life again in
Swans victories, to have the chance at least to story-tell her connection to
something which was meaningful to us, to insert her into our world in imaginary
ways even if she would never be part of it in the flesh. In my experience, it
was important to do that because the death of a child is very much the loss of
a future, and when you are expecting a child, especially a first child, the
future is a place of great imaginings, of intentions and dreams and hopes and
‘we’ll do this and that with the baby’. Because Bessie's death was so
completely unexpected, the grief process took on two quite distinct strands for
me: one, to grieve my child herself, her presence, her life; but also, to
grieve the future we had built for us in our minds, amongst our friends, in our
conversations.
At first Madeleine and Joseph huddled
at home locked in grief, but soon they began to step back into the society of
their friends and acquaintances. They ventured back to the SCG where they were
met with the distress and concern of their friends. Tragic events such as the
loss of a child are so unthinkable and unspeakable that the grieving parents
can often meet with silence and embarrassment from family and, especially, from
friends and acquaintances. There seems no way to offer friends and
acquaintances a way into their grief. No way for it to be expressed and
acknowledged. Miraculously, as it were, the footy helped overcome this for Madeleine.
One of the
hardest things about the public face of our daughter’s death was facing the people
who had not seen you since ‘it’ had happened, explaining the story, seeing the
expectations on their faces and then having to tell them what had happened and
watching those expectations crumble into discomfort and sorrow and pity,
mirroring and reminding you of your own all over again. It always felt like a
desperately unsafe thing to do, for myself and for them. So, integrating back
into the habits and locations of our former life, or what felt like our former
life after such a monumental change of direction, was a very precarious process
for me. We did not return to our home footy crowd for a few months, even though
we followed the season closely.
A part of the
future would have been taking her to the footy, having her footy family adopt
her, seeing her in red and white, growing her up into a love and appreciation
of the game. The wonderful, mythical happenings of Round 5 and the rest of that
2003 season, with all of Bessie's impact as ‘guardian angel’, became a
wonderful make-believe story book where her ‘might have been’ was explored, not
only by us, but it was a story we could tell with our whole footy community.
When we did eventually return to the stands that year, these ‘guardian angel’
tales gave our footy friends, who had obviously heard the story of her birth
and death through our close friends at the game, a kind of permission to
acknowledge her, to say her name to us and to chat to us about how we were
going. To figure her in our community’s real, ongoing experiences, to colour in
a little of that future picture, which was now impossible, helped in the
process of merging the long held fantasies and the new reality we faced.
Grieving takes
time. Grief has to be worked through and our contemporary society offers very
few public rituals to assist with this work. Madeleine used her identification with
the fate and fortunes, and even the tactics, of the Swans to invent a public
ritual of her own, one that allowed her to express and share her grief and have
it acknowledged.
From week to
week, I felt very carried and supported by the reliability and distraction of a
weekly game of footy. People always tell you that time is the only thing that
makes grief better so I spent a lot of time, that year, just waiting for time
to pass. And games of footy became little signposts that made the distances
smaller. With each round, I knew I had made it through another week. The game
performed the same function when I was again very nervously pregnant with our
son. The rhythm, the repetitiveness, the non-negotiability of the fixture were
indeed a great support structure. There is never any question, from the clubs’
end, of ‘We don’t feel like doing this game of footy.’ ‘We can’t get up for
this game of footy’. ‘We don’t have the courage to play today.’
I took courage
from the weekly strength, the will and intention of the players too.
Interestingly enough, I developed my passion for the half back line that year.
I don’t think that was a coincidence either. It happened at the exact time I
found myself standing deep in defence looking for clues about the psychic
manoeuvres that would help me turn grief around. I became fascinated by the
responsibility and craft of rebounding, of creating a new, offensive play from
a position of defence. I watched the half backs intently that year: finding the
opportune moments, assessing when to toy with a forward movement and when to
drive it, when to dash and carry themselves and when to find support. It’s a
position that is all about the subtleties of changing direction. That position
became my model for working with grief.
In reflecting on
what her family and friends really make of her identification with the Swans
and her fascination with footy, Madeleine comments:
I’m aware that some family and friends wonder at
me during the winter months, as I design my social commitments around the footy
fixture, spend cold Sunday nights tallying tips, read and read and read and
listen. You can almost hear them whisper: ‘she’s obsessed, doesn’t she have
anything better to do?’ I would reply that my passion for footy does not fill a
lack in my life. It enhances and helps sort the
fullness that is already there. Footy dialogues with my life.
Four years ago Madeleine gave birth to a healthy, thriving boy, Oliver. All
those hopes for the future have been mobilised again, as they first were for
Bessie. Of course, this includes the anticpation of his devotion to the
Swans. However, Oliver has plans of his own.
Our son, Oliver,
turned one the day before the 2005 grand final and we had scheduled his birthday party
for the Saturday morning, long before the Swans even made the Grand Final. We
thought we’d make his party a kind of laid-back grand final breakfast, no
matter who was playing. So when the Swans were actually IN the grand final, it
was decided that we would make the event a red and white Grand Final
experience. We asked all our friends to sport red and white, which they
graciously did – most of them complete AFL ignoramuses! I mean this in the
nicest possible way. It was voluntary on all their part. My sister and I
decorated the cakes in red and white -
she painted the Swans logo, in icing, atop one of them - and we had a huge and
festive grand final bbq in a park in Sydney’s inner west.
After such an initiation, Oliver's fate would seem sealed. But loss is hard to take when you are only two, especially if the winning team wears very bright colours!
We secured tickets to the 2006 grand final and jumped on a jumbo jet on grand final day with two-year-old Oliver. It was an amazing day. Despite the agonising one point loss, I will always be grateful we got to experience the atmosphere of a grand final, especially in the context of our most normal daily activity - looking after our child. However, we feel the result may have done long-term damage to Oliver.
It seems that Oliver has a long memory. Perhaps because of a desire to distinguish himself from his parents, at the start of the next season he filled them with consternation mixed with pride after watching the opening rematch between the prior year's grand finalists.
On the Monday
morning after the 2007 Round 1 rematch between the Eagles and Swans, Oliver stood on his stool at the dining table. ‘Who are the blue and yellow ones?’ he
asked, quite casually, looking at a photo of Daniel Kerr and Brett Kirk.
‘They’re the Eagles,’ I replied. Pause. ‘But we don’t go for the Eagles in this
house. We go for the Swannies,’ I added with all the confidence of collusion.
‘I don’t,’ said Omar. ‘I go for the Eagles’. It came out of nowhere! This is a
child who did an entire Swans season in utero, a child who was knitted red and
white bootees and dressed almost exclusively in red and white for his first
winter, a child who celebrated his first birthday the day the Swans won a
Premiership!! But … he has stayed true to his claim. There have been
promises of red and white merchandise, attempts to prey on his four year old
need to belong, more hand knitted garments … Nothing works - he will not be a Swan.
Joseph sees it as a
delightful expression of his individuality and is secretly proud of his
defiance. On a recent work trip to Perth, Joseph procured some West Coast
socks for him. I was faced with the humiliation of hanging Eagles socks on the
washing line!! Perhaps I too am secretly proud of his individuality. But there
is a large part of me that hopes one day, he will come to the footy with his
old mum and cheer the Bloods. When I confessed this particular failure as a
mother to June, who sits in front of us at the SCG, she told me the story of
her two sons. She took them to a Grand Final when they were young – Hawthorn v
Geelong. One supported Geelong on the day and one took Hawthorn. And they never
looked back. Now in their 20s, they remain committed Hawks and Cats fans. It
doesn’t bode well.
