Recentring Aboriginal Voices in our Search for a Home

Through the thin plaster wall I can hear her breathing in the adjacent bedroom. Most nights it’s a faint hum but occasionally her breath morphs into a gravelly snore that is slightly alleviated by earplugs. Living with my mother triggers intimacies I wasn’t expecting, but also deepens our relationship. Coffees before work and conversations in the courtyard pull us even closer. But there is a small feeling that I am doing something unacceptable. Returning home at 33 is often considered strange, like something went wrong. When the writer Maggie Nelson contemplated living with her mother she wrote, ‘I flashed momentarily upon the ghastly scene in the French film The Piano Teacher in which Isabelle Huppert sleeps nightly with her mother in the same bed’.¹³

Michael Haneke’s unsettling film is a worrying comparison to make. Huppert plays an introverted classical pianist whose obsessive creative temperament leaves her socially inept. Contained in a tiny apartment with her intrusive mother and a shoebox of peculiar instruments hidden under the bed for sexual relief, the spinster never looked so unhinged and the mother–daughter relationship is soured beyond recognition. But I wonder whether Maggie Nelson’s fears reflect a deeper distrust of relationships and living arrangements that transgress social perceptions of normal. Living with a parent can be immensely positive, yet we often gravitate towards nightmarish scenarios even when our parents don’t possess the qualities we’ve seen in horror films.