I wanted to have the circle of life flowing through.” But then there’s John and I in this story too, and also Manny. As Brierley tells me: “In the media, it’s all about Saroo finding his first family. Lionness ends on a prayer: that Mantosh, too, finds his birth mother, who abandoned him as a child, and that she knows he is now well and happy. “We made our peace and I gave her my gratitude and it’s important that she live her life.” “I feared that it would end up being my father all over again.”īrierley, who had her own tearful meeting with Fatima in India, prefers to stay out of the way, leaving Saroo to develop his newfound, and sometimes tricky, relationship with his other mother unhindered. “It destroyed my confidence in my parenting skills,” she admits. Following abuse in an Indian institution, he arrived in Australia aged nine in distress, and often lashed out at Brierley, sometimes physically. I really see myself as a recovered Catholic.”Īnd yet Brierley’s own belief in herself as a mother was challenged by difficulties she faced with her second adopted son, Mantosh. I saw that kind of manipulation and pressure in my own life, in my Catholic faith, in my mother’s Catholic faith, in her mother’s. “It creates a glorified image of being the best and only way. “There’s this sense of failure – you’re less than,” she says. But there’s a huge variety in the way women mother.”īrierley says that adulation of birth mothers – born from the worship of the Virgin Mary as the ideal mother figure – has proved destructive for women, particularly those who can’t conceive. In particular, our enduring infatuation with the “mother myth”: “We have got an obsession about birth mothers being the only true mothers. Society, too, fails parents, Brierley believes. Her childhood left Brierley certain of two things: that she wanted to marry a loving, gentle man (a goal she fulfilled thanks to her husband John) and that she wanted to adopt children, both to give them a new chance in life and because she regards parenting as a privilege, not a right.īrierley and her family meet the actors who play them in the feature film, Lion. “And I do think to be called Mum and Dad should be an honour: it should be earned and it should be deserved.” That term ‘Dad’ just wasn’t true,” she tells Guardian Australia. “I never really thought about why I was doing that. It also informed her views about parenting: in Lioness, while she refers to her mother as “Mum”, her father is called “Joe”. The trauma left Brierley a meek, withdrawn child. At home, she often bore witness to her father’s brutal beatings of her mother. She was put to labour from a young age, “cranking a stiff handle to separate the cream from the milk and then winding the heavy handle of the churn to make butter … a thankless and repetitive task”. Struggling to make ends meet following her father’s often mad dash plans to make cash, they lived off produce from their vegetable garden, eggs from their chickens, and milk and butter from their two Jersey cows.Ĭhildren were, as Brierley writes, “incidental – they just happened along and their purpose was to work hard and support the family”. Written in straightforward, unembellished prose, which mirrors the way that Brierley – a sensible, kind, no-nonsense type – speaks, I could not put it down.īrierley, 66, grew up in 1950s and 60s Australia with a downtrodden Catholic mother and a violent, unpredictable father. That big picture – a deep dive into families, domestic abuse, adoption, the “mother myth” and much more – is, in many ways, more fascinating than the oft-covered glitz and glamour of Hollywood. Brierley’s parents were European refugees, who struggled to establish their life in Australia with Sue (baby, right) and her two sisters.
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