Around this time every year, my mother sits at her computer for a day and types up her annual Family Newsletter. This usually opens with a witty anecdote about how domestically inept she is, describes something stupid my dad has done, bitches about the fact that my brother still lives at home, and then reveals everything embarrassing I’ve done during the year. Mum then prints out 400 copies and mails it to all her friends, family, neighbours, co-workers, bible study group, TAFE classmates, hairdressers, therapists and accountants. It’s up to me to avoid all those people for the following 12 months.

Past newsletters have included the following:

• Annik has stopped going to church in order to pursue a life of sin (2001)
• Annik lost her virginity (2002)
• Annik went drinking instead of studying for any of her HSC exams (2004)
• Annik got alcohol poisoning (2004)
• Annik has been dumped by the same boy three times (2005)
• Annik has begun experimenting with drugs (2006)
• Annik failed her uni degree (2006)
• Annik has gained a stack of weight (2006)

…and so on.

I wonder what little gems Ma will choose to include this year? She has quite a selection to choose from:

• Annik has quit no less than five jobs throughout 2008
• Annik got her nose pierced and refused to remove the ring despite various infections
• Annik lied to an entire South African community in order to exempt herself from completing a volunteer work assignment and gain compassionate priority for an international flight
• Annik had a seizure and wet her pants in front of a thousand odd people at the Hordern Pavillion
• Annik can’t remember her own birthday because she was so intoxicated she spent 3+ hours straight sitting on the same couch in front of a fan

My extended family has always been split into two categories: Dad’s side, and the exciting side. Seven people came out of my maternal grandmother, twenty-two people came out of those seven people, nineteen people came out of those twenty-two people, and another person has come out of those nineteen people. Mixed in have been twenty-six spouses, two adoptions, and three dead babies. Trying to remember everybody’s birthdays is a total bitch.

When I was still young enough to be forced into family holidays, my parents would cram my brother and I into the Commodore and drive us up to Bundaberg. There we ran amok and slept at whatever aunt or uncle’s house we happened to end up at after sunset, until my mother could no longer stand the heat, crammed us back into the car and drove back to Sydney.

I spent most of my time in Bundaberg at my Aunty Dee’s house. Apart from the lure of a sprawling mulberry tree and the privilege of helping my Uncle Sam make home brew, I chose this particular house because I was fascinated by my older cousin Alice. She had inherited her mother’s fierce temper, lack of patience and volatility, and their arguments could reach spectacular heights in mere seconds.

“Did you pick up some bacon?” Alice would ask, standing in front of the open fridge.
“Oh.. Sorry, I forgot.” Aunty Dee would reply.
“Well I’m not making dinner then. You can all fucking starve!”
“Don’t talk to me like that, you bloody prima donna bitch. Get the hell out of my house!”

Then Alice would slam the front door, climb into a boy’s car and speed off down the road. It was better than fireworks.

My relationship with my own mother was based on rare and polite exchanges, but I was willing to try and liven things up.

The week before Easter, my kindergarten class was a frenzy of activity. We drew bunnies, made cards, and fantasised about eating chocolate until we vomited. Meanwhile, our mothers competed fiercely to create the best Easter Hat for the annual Easter Hat Parade. Well, most mothers… As usual, my Mum forgot about this until the night before. “Aww crap,” she said, staring at the calendar, “How the hell am I meant to make you a hat before tomorrow?” Then, exhibiting about as much enthusiasm as she showed for housework, she glued some glitter and bunny ears onto one of my brother’s baseball caps.

“I can’t wear this,” I protested, “It’s stupid!”
“Don’t worry,” she promised, “I’ll be there to deck anybody who makes fun of you.”

But on the day, as I stood in line waiting for the Easter Hat Parade music to begin and cringing with embarrassment at all the other kids’ cool hats, Mum was nowhere to be seen. Finally, halfway through the ceremony, she appeared at the back of the crowd with a cup of coffee in hand. I decided this was a good time to try out my newly learned conflict-resolution skills.

“WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN, YOU BLOODY WITCH?” I shouted across the quadrangle.

Short of hearing, and thinking I had called her a “bitch”, my mother marched through the lines of children, dragged me out of the Easter Hat Parade, and belted me in front of the entire student body of my primary school and their parents.

I did not win the Easter Hat Parade that year.

The only memory I have of my grandfather is from the late eighties. I sat at the kitchen table of the small Bundaberg flat he and my grandmother lived in while my mother sat outside with Nanna smoking cigarettes. Grandad hummed and poured iced water into a tall glass, then dropped in a tablet of Berocca. To my enchantment, it fizzed and spat and turned the water a spectacular shade of orange. I assumed this was some forbidden adult-substance, like coffee or alcohol, but Grandad suddenly pushed the glass towards me. “You can have the first sip,” he offered with a wink. I immediately adored him.

My grandparents met in Algeria in 1942. My grandfather, Bert, was stationed with British forces there while my grandmother, Annik, worked as a clerk with the French Intendance Supply Corps. Despite his many attempts to talk to her, Annik pretended not to speak English and ignored him until he one day asked her to go to the cinema. All five cinemas were requisitioned for the use of the military and only soliders were allowed to buy tickets – it was a tempting offer. “Alright,” Annik said, “But only with my mother, my grandfather and my brother.” Bert agreed and from that day on became a friend of the family. He and Annik fell in love, then he knocked her up and went to war. The only news my grandmother received of him during the next two years was a telegram saying, “Bert missing in action. Presumed dead.” which one of his sisters had sent in an attempt to stop him from marrying “the French girl.” Another year passed before Nanna received a letter from him saying that he was actually alive, and could she come to England to marry him? She did, and the rest, as they say, is history.

When I was five years old, I was racing through the house one day when I knocked over my mother’s favourite vase. I carefully stacked the pieces so that, from a distance, it looked as normal, and left it on the shelf. Later that night, I heard my mother crying in her bedroom. I went in, head hanging, and told her that I was sorry I broke the vase.
“It was an accident!” I swore, “I’ll get you a new one! Please don’t cry, Mum…”
“No, darling,” she said, “I’m upset because your grandfather died today.”
“Oh!” I said, “That’s good.”
And I went to play with my brother’s transformers.

When I was thirteen, my family lived in then-rural Kellyville. One morning my mother was driving me to school when a bird ran out onto the road and went under our car.

“Oh fuck,” Mum said, slowing the car and peering into the rearview mirror. “I think I hit it.”

I swiveled in my seat. Sure enough, a pigeon lay mangled on the road behind us. As I watched, it raised a bloody crushed wing and waved it in the air as if to say, heeeelp….

“Shit,” Mum groaned, “It’s still alive. I can’t just leave him there like that!”

“That bird looks like it’s in a lot of pain,” I observed. “It would be inhumane to simply drive away.”

Mum sighed. “You’re right. I have to do something.”

She reversed until we were behind the bird and squinted at it through the windscreen.

“Poor little fella,” Mum said, shaking her head, “I hate thinking of him hurting like that.”

She pushed the accelerator and we ran over it again.

“All fixed, darling!” Mum smiled, patting my knee reassuringly.

My earliest memory is of lying naked next to my brother on the burnt orange carpet of our hallway in Candowie Crescent. I sucked on black jelly beans and cried silently while my parents rubbed a foul-smelling ointment into my skin. Holding my nose, I tried to ignore the revolting cream that was applied to my entire body from the neck down, but these things are hard for a three-year-old. This entire process was repeated for four consecutive nights, and then I was allowed to bathe as normal.

Years later, I realised my parents had been treating us with sulfur. Dad brought lots of things home from work, but scabies was the best – microscopic bugs that burrow under the skin, lay eggs, and create a red rash that resembles an allergic reaction in appearance. As the eggs hatch and the mites crawl around underneath the skin surface, the infected person develops a terrible itch, scratches the shit out of hisself, and often develops a secondary infection. My father had been working as a GP in a local nursing home in 1989 when they experienced an outbreak among the old folks. They treated the residents and doctors but didn’t think about the doctors’ families, even though scabies is extremely contagious and transmitted readily through skin-to-skin contact. For the remainder of my childhood, I would have an intense fear of insects. When I found out about bed bugs, I slept in the bathtub for a week.

My second earliest memory is of my father forcing me to solemnly swear to never practise medicine. When asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, for years I replied, “Not a doctor.” Teachers and creche workers were fascinated by my inclination to define myself by what I was not, or would not do, rather than the opposite, but that ended up being the professional direction I would take as an adult. It’s as if I have a giant list of every career possible and am slowly crossing them off one by one after each failed attempt to make a living. (Eventually, I assume I will be left with my dream job and a string of bad references.)

Dad only worked one job, but he had a hard life. He spent years building his practice and getting patients, and then the rest of his life trying to get rid of them. Admittedly, our number was never listed in the phone book, but do all other forms of advertising go completely unnoticed? An entire generation of Australian adults simply lived without medical care until they met my father at a dinner party in the eighties. Whenever I was dragged along with my parents, I would watch the other guests’ faces light up as they chatted to Dad. “Oh! You’re a DOCTOR? That’s so interesting, because I have this pain juuust heeere…” and they would reveal the body part that grieved them. Even as a child, I was always amazed at the rudeness of these people. If you met a hairdresser at a party, would you hand them a pair of scissors and request a trim? If you met an accountant, would you ask them to do your tax before dessert? If you met a cleaner, would you ask them to pop into the kitchen and tidy things up a bit? Fuck no. But people thought nothing of pulling my father aside at tupperware parties, trivia nights and bible study groups and making him inspect their genitals. Over the years, almost every family friend, relative and member of my parents’ church has adopted my father as their GP. Dad has dirt on everyone in the Hills.

My next earliest memories are of late-night trips to nursing homes to certify bodies. Mum was out a few evenings during the week and Dad couldn’t leave me at home by myself when one of his patients died, so he took me with him. The first time, I waited patiently in the home’s common area. I sat quietly and pulled leaves off a pot plant, but within minutes I was surrounded by gnarled geriatrics with glossy eyes. They shoved pieces of fruit into my pockets and tugged at my hair. One woman proudly introduced me as her granddaughter, then smacked away the hands of anybody else who tried to touch me. They drooled and moaned and hacked and couldn’t hear a damn word I said, which was probably a good thing as I was pretty feisty for a five-year-old. After that night, I chose to wait for Dad in the same room as the corpse.

Not only North-West Sydney’s preferred medical health professional, my father was also the go-to guy for household injuries and neighbourhood emergencies. I probably set the precedent when, one night in the early nineties, I jumped out of the bathtub and ran naked through the house. Still wet, I slipped and cracked my forehead open on the cement step in our kitchen. Instructing my brother to clean the pools of blood off the floor, Dad made me lie on a beach towel in the back room and calmly stitched my face back together. Years later, getting up to pee during the night, I would see the exact same scene happening in the kitchen after one of my brother’s friends fell off his motorbike. People regularly arrived at our door with sprains, burns, grazes, cuts, dog bites, stuffed backs and split lips. Friends seemed to bring to Dad what they were embarrassed to take to the medical centre. He once dug a small bug out of a girl’s eye with a Q-tip, flushed a bead out of a boy’s nostril after he intentionally inhaled it, and sedated a friend’s son after he had tried to scrape their mashed kitten off the road outside their house. Dad was brilliant during emergencies and could treat his own children without batting an eyelid, but when it came to general illness or ailment, my brother and I always went to our mother. Mum had cool hands and stroked your hair; she made you honey tea and prepared hot packs or cold packs or steamy rooms; she rubbed Vicks on your chest and dabbed calamine lotion on your mossie bites. My father, on the other hand, only ever had one piece of medicinal advice for us: “Take two panadol and lie down for half an hour.” Nevermind the fact that I couldn’t swallow tablets until I was ten – lying down for half an hour is practically impossible when you’re a kid. No matter what symptoms we had, Dad’s advice was always the same. It was as if he couldn’t take us seriously unless we were bleeding or bruised or broken. I spent seven years complaining of headaches before Dad sent me to a specialist. Mum received even more useless advice than me – whenever she complained about an ache or pain, Dad simply said, “Aww that’s no good.” One day, Mum snapped. “Eight years of medical school and that’s what they teach you? THAT’S NO FUCKING GOOD?” After that, Mum started seeing a female GP at one of the surgeries Dad owned.

Through eavesdropping on my father’s phone conversations over the past twenty-two years, I like to think I’ve gleaned quite a bit of medical expertise. (Although I once overheard him tell a patient to “take two panadol and get a divorce.”) Dad was always stupidly giving patients his home number, and they’d ring every night the minute we sat down to dinner. I listened attentively as Dad rattled off medications, dosages, statistics and warnings. I also disgusted myself thoroughly by reading his medical journals and learning far more than a child should about the body. At school, I showed off my drug-company pens and notepads (Zoloft was way cooler than Mambo!) and surveyed the playground carefully at lunch time. Whenever a student fell or injured themselves on the monkey bars, I dashed over. “Don’t worry,” I would reassure the growing crowd of spectators, “My father is a doctor.” And they would make room for me accordingly. Then I would inspect my classmate, poke them in various places and ask if each one hurt, nod gravely, and escort them up to sick bay. There I briefed the school nurse on the incident and offered my diagnosis before she rolled her eyes and kicked me out.

The problem with my Dad is that he’s too nice. He treats all our friends and family for free, even though he would never dream of using their accounting, consulting, plumbing or basket-weaving services without paying them. Even when he does things through the books, Dad accepts “alternative forms of payment.” One of his patients, a greengrocer, gives us boxes of fruit after each appointment. An elderly Philippine lady with no medical insurance pays Dad in bizarre desserts (green things with jelly and spaghetti and mousse.) Most of the time, he just bulk bills everybody, even the “struggling” retired couples who request vaccinations before their overseas holidays and then drive away in their sports cars. Dad genuinely cares about his patients though, and he always puts their safety and wellbeing before his own. One day his most annoying patient, a recovering alcoholic, showed up to an appointment blind drunk and twirling his car keys. Rather than letting him put other road-users in danger, my father drove the patient home, stopping on the way to buy him KFC because the lush hadn’t eaten in days. After dropping him home, locking up his car and tucking him into bed, my father then walked the 6 kilometers back to the surgery. In January.

As a side project to general practitioning, my father regularly taught sexual education at a local highschool. This meant that while he usually sidestepped awkward father-daughter chats by cutting a relevant article out of the newspaper and leaving it on my desk, he thought nothing of sitting me at the kitchen table and placing a condom and a carrot in front of me. “Practice makes perfect!” he declared, while I looked up at my mother pleadingly. I was thirteen.

Despite the scabies, career limitations, dead bodies, phallic objects and constant interruptions to daily life, having a father who is a GP has its perks. I can get scripts for anything, we have enough medication in the house to kill a rhino, there’s some great gear on hand whenever I have an emergency fancy-dress occasion, and people assume I’m rich. Unfortunately, I also have an unusually high tolerance to panadol…

While I was growing up, my family did not put up the Christmas tree for five consecutive years. I’d like to say that we were progressive non-traditionalists who scoffed at commercialised pagan rituals, but in truth we were simply lazy. My mother, especially, believed that if something would only require undoing in the near future, there was no real point in doing it in the first place. (I suspect that this, along with being overweight, is the reason all her pants had elasticised waistbands.) I’m now wenty-two years old and I still have no idea how to make a bed. When I was a child, my mother furnished my bedroom with a mattress, a pillow and a doona. During summer, she would simply remove the doona and leave me with its cover. It never presented an issue until I began sleeping over at friends’ houses. Then I would secretly pack a sleeping bag and lie inside it on top of the bed, terrified of wrinkling the sheets. “Oh sweetheart,” my friend’s mother would say as she poured me an orange juice the next morning, “You didn’t have to make the bed!” Unbeknownst to her, I never unmade the damn thing.

My family has never really been into festivities. Last week I had a birthday, which was largely ignored apart from the household making the effort to eat a meal together. As a present, my parents agreed not to force me to pay for my own car insurance and registration for another twelve months. Two days later, I came home from work to find a book sitting on my bedside table. My brother had stuck a post-it note on the front reading: “Dear Annik. Happy thingy. Chris.”

As far as Christmas is concerned, over the years we all gradually began copying Chris’s method of purchasing gifts, tying the top of the plastic bags in which they were packed by frazzled sales assistants, and writing the intended recipient’s name on the front using a permanent marker. Then we stacked them in a messy pile underneath the coffee table and prayed that the cat would not urinate on top of it.

A month before my 18th Christmas, my father came home one day with a fibre-optic tree. “There!” he said, propping it up in the corner of the lounge room and plugging it into a power point, “Now is anybody feeling enthusiastic enough to flick a goddamn switch?”

The sad thing is we weren’t.

Religious people really hack me off sometimes. I live with a bunch of Jesus-praising, bible-studying, grace-saying, hymn-singing, sexless-til-married, loving, caring, forgiving Christians. I look like a pretty shit person in comparison.

Don’t get me wrong. My family are very tolerant of my “heathen lifestyle”, as they affectionately call it. My mum sometimes even spins cute little phrases around it: “If that plumber comes on time, then Annik’s a virgin.”

The thing that gets my beef going is that every opinion I have is immediately tainted in the household’s eyes on account of the fact that I have “fallen away.” When really, my views should be worth twice my family’s because I have lived both as a Woman of God, and as somebody capable of thinking for herself. I gave God a shot and he didn’t come through – as soon as I developed my higher reasoning abilities (about the same time I started smoking pot) the whole thing ceased to make sense.

Even Gilbert Grape could tell you that Christianity doesn’t reconcile with free will. Allegedly, God has graced us with mental autonomy, yet he has total control over every pre-destined whisper of the universe, and then he punishes us severely for exercising our “free will”. Where’s the fucking sense in that? On a similar note, concepts such as infinity and immortality are about as plausible as City Rail arriving on time. Any time I raised these concerns as a teenager, I was told that “mere humans cannot understand that.” Excuse me? Baking powder? That’s the biggest cop-out I’ve heard since Warnie’s mum gave him the tablet. If you undermine the entire capacity of human logic like that, then isn’t anything possible? Pigs might fly, Britney Spears could make a come-back, and Telstra might actually employ real live people to answer their customer care line instead of having a recorded voice that takes you from lengthy menu to lengthy menu before cutting you off in mechanical triumph.

I’ve been surrounded by Christianity my whole life. My entire family are devout Anglicans. 80% of the student body at my highschool and 100% of the faculty were Christians. I was one too for fifteen years. I understand that some people spend their whole lives studying the bible and are still putting the pieces together but shit, if something doesn’t grab me in less time than it takes to reach puberty, I’m not interested.