There was something curious about Kristina Olsson's mum.
Growing up, she and her siblings knew it — it was unmissable — but they never spoke about it.
"There was always, for all of us, this edge of sadness around our mum that we could never dislodge," Olsson tells ABC RN's Life Matters.
"Despite everything we tried, every joke we told, every cake we made, every family gathering we had, it was still there. It was just the sense in the house, this feeling we couldn't come to grips with."
Years later, as an adult, Olsson finally learnt the source of the feeling: a great loss in her mother's past.
It explained much about not only her mother, but herself.
"Grief and guilt and shame cascades down the generations," she says.
"It's coursing in your blood even as you're born."
'He pulled the baby from her arms'
Olsson's mum, Yvonne, was just 19 years old when she boarded a train from Cairns in 1950 to flee from her violently abusive husband, Michael.
She carried their one-year-old baby, Peter, in her arms.
The train was headed to Brisbane, and the safety of Yvonne's parents, but before it departed Michael appeared at the carriage.
"He pulled the baby from her arms and told her that she would be dead if she tried to stop him and to stay on the train or he would kill them both," Olsson says.
"She knew from her experience with him that he meant it."
Helpless, Yvonne was forced to take the train journey alone. In Brisbane she tried to get Peter back, but the legal advice she received was that it was hopeless.
Michael had a job and a home, whereas she had fled with nothing. She was instructed that it would be better to leave her first-born child be.
She would have to wait three decades to see her son again.
By then, Yvonne had a new husband, and Olsson and three siblings had been born.
They knew none of their mother's story. But even as children they could feel the loss.
"It insinuated itself as secrets often do in families. We were never told about Peter, we had no real idea. But I think these things are in our bodies," Olsson says.
"We didn't see that until Peter knocked on the door … completely out of the blue."
Separated and helpless
Peter's upbringing in Cairns was miserable, Olsson says. His father continued to be violent and a new stepmother was "terribly cruel to him".
"He would just keep running away, trying to find his real mother," Olsson says.
"He would get on trains … and go looking blindly for this woman. [He] had no idea where she was … But it was in him very early that he would find her.
"And one day he did."
Peter was in his 30s when, passing through Brisbane with his wife and small child, he decided to approach the Births, Deaths and Marriages registry.
He was able to get the address of Yvonne's mother and father, who, when he met them at their home, directed him to Yvonne's house.
"He knocked on the door and she opened it," Olsson says.
An 'awful heft of grief'
Yvonne's and Peter's reunion wasn't a simple one. It couldn't be.
"They'd both suffered so much," Olsson says.
"They had both been told such different things about the other. They'd both had such different lives up until then.
"They tried incredibly hard to make it feel as if nothing had ever intervened. But of course, the whole world had intervened by then."
Peter's father had told him "terrible lies" about his mother, Olsson says; for example, that she'd voluntarily left Peter after running off with another man.
And Yvonne had "hardened her heart against ever seeing this boy again".
"So they had a lot of work to do. I think the thing between them that they shared most was shame; the sense of terrible shame, of losing a child and of being a lost child.
"It was incredibly difficult for [Yvonne] to come to grips with the guilt of losing a child … She didn't know how to articulate it … and so she retreated a little into that sadness," Olsson says.
The guilt trickled down through the generations, and today Olsson lives with it, too.
Though there were challenges growing up with Yvonne, Olsson says, at least "we got her".
"[Peter] should have had her. We should have had him."
"And we can only imagine what kind of mother ours would have been if Peter hadn't been taken … without that awful heft of grief she carried.
"We'd have all been running around the yard, all five of us."
'Any family is an ongoing effort'
It was only after Yvonne died in 2000 that Olsson decided to write Boy, Lost: A Family Memoir.
"I've always known my mother wouldn't have wanted me to write it. But I knew, too, that it had to be written.
"Once I started to understand its parameters, I realised that we're all tied tightly to something that wasn't letting us go.
"[Yvonne] couldn't speak about it. She just absolutely couldn't. And we knew not to ask. So I guess the book was another way of really attacking that silence."
Writing the book, over a period of five years, also helped strengthen Ollson's relationship with Peter. She'd stay with him in Sydney so often, delving into his life and their family history, that a room at his apartment was even designated hers.
But writing about her family was also a way for Olsson to better understand how she has raised her own family. She says she inherited a very particular style of parenting.
"We were tucked up into that family by our parents, because they were terrified … they didn't want one more lost child," she says.
"I found myself, and do even now, holding on to my own children too tightly, holding onto my grandchildren too tightly. I worry if I haven't heard from them for 24 hours. I've seen that in all my siblings."
"We've all commented to each other about how hard it is to let a child leave home … we could hardly bear it, I could hardly bear it. When my son moved to New Zealand, with his little family, I was grief-stricken.
"It took me a while to work this out. And finally, I did of course, trace it back to that original separation. Whatever's in my family, and what's in our blood, must go back to that original tragedy, that original loss.
"Grief lives in the body and doesn't really go away."
Delving into her family's story has made Olsson consider "the shapes of families and how they come together". She's realised that even "splintered", they are precious.
"Peter and I are very close. He's close to all of us.
"But it's difficult. We didn't share some of those common things in childhood: falling out of trees and being rushed to hospitals, the school fetes, the family meals.
"So it's taken a lot of kind of emotional embroidery, if you like. I mean, any family is an ongoing effort. I think that especially when it's one like this, you've got to keep remembering to pick up the pieces."
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