Cousin Kaitlyn the Flight Attendant

Uncle Neil looked the part of a fundamentalist Christian pastor; straight-laced, conservative and with a look of pious indignation often upon his countenance. His non-descript light brown hair, his glasses and the beige sweaters, shirts, ties, trousers and shoes that attired his tall skinny body seemed to fill 90 percent of his wardrobe added to his conservative appearance. He spoke of God or Jesus frequently, at least in every third sentence, and anything he didn't like was the work of the Devil.

Aunty Mary, Uncle Neil's wife, was equally religious and like her husband wore glasses and ultra-conservative dresses, skirts, blouses and pant suits. She was dedicated to the church as to be expected as the Pastor's wife, and also seldom went more than three sentences without mentioning God or Jesus, and things she didn't like was somehow connected to the Devil. Both she and her husband made even the most devout Roman Catholics who attended Mass every day and twice a day on Sunday, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons or Southern Baptists look like pleasure-seeking hedonists headed straight for Hell.

Their daughter Kaitlyn was born in 1979. I of course did not remember Kaitlyn's birth, I was just two days old at the time. Kaitlyn and I being born so close together and our similar looks - both of us being tall and skinny with light brown hair and brown eyes - led to us being taken for boy/girl twins rather than cousins a number of times growing up. Certainly I looked more like Kaitlyn than my own siblings, Sheree's blonde hair and Trent's red hair contrasting sharply with my brown hair.

However, Kaitlyn did not have a twin brother, nor any brother or a sister, she was an only child and in fact Kaitlyn was the sole only child in the entire extended family in all the generations. I had sometimes wondered why Uncle Neil and Aunty Mary had had only one child, but it was obviously extremely impolite to ask as it may have been problems conceiving and they just happened to get lucky with Kaitlyn. All the rest of the families had three kids each. There was Sheree, myself and Trent in our immediate family, Mum's sister had two daughters and one son and Dad's sister and her husband had three daughters. Kaitlyn did have some maternal cousins too. Aunty Mary had a sister and she and her husband had three sons, but they lived out near Geelong and we didn't see them all that often. Like us, they weren't members of the church.

I really liked Kaitlyn and got on well with her growing up. She was pretty - well I thought her pretty - but her appearance as a Pastor's daughter was always very out of place. Her clothes were all hand-me-downs from a charity store, not through lack of money to buy her new ones, but because her parents wanted to keep her looking as demure as possible and to encourage conservatism and thrift in their daughter, attributes that were much admired by the Lord. Kaitlyn's only new clothes were her 'Sunday best' clothes she wore to church. These were a flowery dress in summer, and a blouse, jacket, knee-length skirt, pantyhose and sensible shoes in the winter, all beige in color. This made Kaitlyn look a bit like a miniature librarian, especially if she happened to wear her hair in a bun that day.

Kaitlyn's hairstyle remained the same throughout her childhood, her light brown hair cut into a long bob that went down past her shoulders. Sometimes she would wear her hair in plaits, a pony-tail, pigtails or a bun, but the length and general style of her hair never altered. With two parents who wore glasses, the same for Kaitlyn was inevitable, and she was wearing them from early childhood. As Kaitlyn got older an overbite became obvious, so between the ages of 11 and 15 Kaitlyn wore dental braces. The poor girl also had asthma. She didn't have really bad asthma, but she needed to carry an inhaler with her at all times for when she got wheezy or couldn't catch her breath.

A girl who dressed like she was from an earlier decade such as a frock from the early 1970s complete with knee length white socks and old-fashioned T-bar girls' shoes; or sported clothes more age appropriate for younger kids such as tee-shirts, jackets and jumpers with cartoon animals on them and patched jeans; had glasses, braces and carried around an asthma puffer might well have been a target of bullies at school, but for Kaitlyn this theory was not tested.

Aunty Mary had been a schoolteacher, but had stopped teaching when she had Kaitlyn. Now her role was a full-time mother to Kaitlyn and home-schooling her daughter, she and Kaitlyn's father not wanting their child to be exposed to sin and immorality at a regular school. There was also the danger of exposing Kaitlyn to books about dinosaurs, trilobites, wooly mammoths and Neanderthal men; geography texts about continental drift over many millions of years; and other dangerous books about the solar system, UFOs, ghosts and monsters, plus fictional fantasy series and young adult novels that might pollute Kaitlyn's way of thinking.

All of these factors - being an only child who was homeschooled and the daughter of a Pastor of a fundamentalist church - led to Kaitlyn being possibly the most naïve, socially awkward and unworldly girl one could ever meet. In her speech she would use expressions long out of date such as 'golly', 'neat', 'wow-wee' and perhaps most jarringly for a girl living in the 1980s and very early 1990s, 'swell'. She talked about God and Jesus a lot, still thought that the term gay meant happy, and became very upset by blasphemy.

Once this happened in the center of Melbourne when we were waiting for a tram in Swanston Street, a nearby husband and wife shamelessly airing their marital problems in the crowded area for everyone to hear. Their loud voices filled the busy street as they argued, setting something of a world record for using every form of profanity and blasphemy in the least number of sentences. Young Kaitlyn was most distressed. She couldn't understand why anybody would use such blasphemous and vulgar terms, and why they couldn't find relief in prayer.

At Reverend and Mrs. Miller's home, there was no television, no video cassette recorder or heaven forbid a games console. There was a radio which also had a tape deck, but it was always tuned to a religious station on the AM band, and sometimes as a reward for studying hard or doing a good job helping with chores, Kaitlyn would be allowed to put on a cassette of her favorite religious songs. Kaitlyn and her parents prayed before every meal - even snacks - and spent their evenings together doing bible study, or singing religious songs together on the piano. Then at 7.30 pm it was always bedtime for Kaitlyn, appropriate for when she was a young child but as a pre-teen and then a young teenager, not nearly so much.

I felt sorry for Kaitlyn having such an early bed-time, and thought it must be awful especially when we put the clocks forward for daylight saving every summer. True, Kaitlyn did not like daylight savings, but for a completely different reason than her early bed-time. She and her parents worried that God decided the time of the sun rising and setting, and men interfering with this process could incur the Lord's wrath. She wasn't bothered at all about having to go to bed at such an early hour, and in fact due to her sheltered life seemed to think all kids her age went to bed at that time. Her naïve and innocent nature would lead to her telling other kids about this and how she enjoyed her evening bible study and singing songs at the piano with her parents, oblivious to the fact that it made other children think she was weird.

Church was one source of socialization with other children for the home-schooled, only child Kaitlyn. They had something like a kids' club or Sunday school for children who went to the church. There would be activities connected with the Bible, and as a reward, the kids would be allowed to watch a video of a Christian kids show from Canada. Kaitlyn loved it, but then again she never watched television nor was she allowed to go the movies so this weekly thing was a special treat for her.

"Excuse me, Sir, would you like lunch?" My cousin's voice snapped me out of my reminiscing and back into the present, the flight from Brisbane to Melbourne. I had been so engrossed in my thoughts that I hadn't even noticed Kaitlyn, Melinda and the young male trainee push their food and beverage carts up the aisle, and now they stood opposite me wearing aprons to cover their uniforms during food service.

"Oh thanks Kaitlyn, I'll take the chicken pasta please," I said.

"One chicken pasta coming right up," said Kaitlyn, serving me while Melinda served the passengers next to me, and the trainee flight attendant concentrated on serving beverages.

"Thanks, I really appreciate it," I said taking the chicken pasta and an apple juice as a drink. As I peeled back the lid on my chicken pasta and picked up the plastic fork, I again thought back to Kaitlyn's childhood, and her eating habits.

Probably unconnected with religion, both Kaitlyn's mother and father were obsessed with their daughter having a healthy diet. "A healthy child is a happy child," my Aunty Mary commented to Mum and Grandma one time. Kaitlyn's mother would separate the different food groups on the plate, so that she knew her daughter was eating the correct proportion of each one. This even happened when eating out, which rarely happened for Kaitlyn. One time the whole family went to an all you can eat restaurant when Kaitlyn and I would have been aged about 11, and Aunty Mary made sure she selected the right proportions of the different food groups for her daughter to eat. Returning to the table, Kaitlyn, my aunt and uncle then bowed their heads and clasped their hands in prayer, attracting much attention from diners at other tables.

Then there was the matter of physical exercise. Kaitlyn was not permitted to participate in team sports, and had no opportunity for this anyway, being home-schooled. However, due to her asthma Kaitlyn required physical activity to build her lung capacity. She had a bike and seemed to like riding it, and she also liked jogging and swimming. But when Kaitlyn went cycling, jogging or swam laps at the pool she had to have one or both parents with her to supervise her. Never was she allowed to do this alone. Nor could Kaitlyn ever be left alone in the house. If her mother had to run errands during the day, such as going to the bank, shop or post office, Kaitlyn had to go with her. Again, appropriate for Kaitlyn as a child, but not so appropriate as she was turning into a teenager.

And Kaitlyn growing up presented some challenging things. We were at my Aunt and Uncle's house one day when we were 12, and I had just used the bathroom and was walking along the hallway near where Kaitlyn's room was. I could hear Kaitlyn crying, her mother trying to soothe her and then the sound of Kaitlyn vomiting. Sneaking a glance into my cousin's bedroom, I saw Kaitlyn sitting on the bed in tears, her mother sitting beside her, one arm around Kaitlyn and the other holding a bucket in place for her daughter to throw up into.

I assumed Kaitlyn had a stomach upset or food poisoning, but soon found out that the problems with Kaitlyn were due to her reproductive system rather than her digestive system, when after being sick again she pulled her head out of the bucket and lamented, "Mum, why does my period hurt so bad? My cramps are so painful that they make me vomit, and this is only my third one. And I have to have this once a month until I'm about 55?"

Fortunately, Aunty Mary had all the right knowledge to impart to her upset daughter as she gave Kaitlyn some tissues to wipe the tears from her eyes. Women's problems were something that God used to test every female's faith after Eve picked the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden of Eden thousands of years ago. So long as Kaitlyn maintained her faith and prayed especially hard during her ladies' time, it would all be okay, God would see to that. This was provided Kaitlyn continued to wear sanitary pads from menarche to menopause and never tried tampons, which apparently made women who used them impure and therefore angered the Lord.

Not wanting to be caught eavesdropping and to respect my cousin's privacy during her time of the month, I went on my way, hearing Kaitlyn vomiting into her sick bucket again as I did so. I was obviously no expert on menstruation - I was a boy, aged 12, and my only experience of it was a very awkward and chaotic health class at school and learning the hard way to give my older sister a wide berth every four weeks and avoid her wrath - but I thought to myself this was all wrong. If I was grown up and had a daughter who vomited in pain when she was on her period, I wouldn't be telling her to pray, I would be taking her to her doctor for referral to a gynecologist. I felt so sorry for my cousin, but unfortunately there was nothing I could do to help her. Kaitlyn's absence at dinner that evening was explained away by her having problems with her asthma, and she had therefore gone to bed early to rest.

While I really liked Kaitlyn and enjoyed spending time with her, my other cousins and my siblings had feelings about her that were mixed at best. Our reactions to the Cloud Cuckoolander things she did and said were frequently very different. There were many examples of this, but one that stood out in my mind was when Trent asked Kaitlyn why she often went barefoot around the house, even during winter when it was cold. I found Kaitlyn's response that people in biblical times mostly had no shoes such as the Israelites who spent 40 years in the desert under the stewardship of Moses and Aaron, and therefore when she had bare feet she could feel more like them to be cute and endearing. The others found it embarrassing and weird.

"It's like she's from the 50s and has travelled forward in time," Sheree said one day after a large family picnic near the Yarra River Falls when Kaitlyn and her parents had departed.

"I think you mean the 1850s rather than the 1950s," cut in another female cousin.

"Sometimes it's like Kaitlyn's not from Earth at all, she's like from Mercury, Venus or Mars, she's such a freak," said our male cousin Paul.

"I think you mean Uranus!" exclaimed Trent, getting overly excited and exchanging high fives with our cousins.

"Kaitlyn's alright, she's a really nice girl and you should be nicer to her," I said to my siblings and cousins. "And it's not fair to talk about her like that behind her back, she's not here to defend herself."

"Oh my God, Darren, do you like Kaitlyn or something?" asked our cousin Lucy. "Have you got a crush on her?"

"He does," said Sheree. "Darren spends his days dreaming about when he and Kaitlyn are grown up, get married and have lots of babies."

"Ooh, that's sick, you need to move to Tasmania," said Cousin Stacy, all of them laughing.

"I don't love Kaitlyn, I just like her as a person and I wish you wouldn't pick on her so much." I had stormed away, listening to the chants of 'Darren loves Kaitlyn', 'Kaitlyn, Kaitlyn, where for art thou Kaitlyn?' and the song, 'Darren and Kaitlyn, sitting in a tree, K I S S I N G.'

While obviously not right for my cousins and siblings to say nasty things about Kaitlyn behind her back, it was worse when they were directly nasty to her. Sheree was a prime example, she could be a mean girl at times. Innocent little Kaitlyn thought that every word in the bible was literally true and the Earth about 6000 years old, and on one occasion when we were 10 she was telling me how Noah's Ark was her favorite story.

Sheree had cut in saying how ridiculous it was that anyone other than a retard could believe that all the animals currently on Earth were descended from two of their species, that the story was nothing more than a fairytale and a crap fairytale at that. Kaitlyn attempted to assert that the stories were true, and even though I tried telling Sheree to back off, she didn't listen and kept right on at Kaitlyn about how dinosaurs, trilobites and ice age mammals were real and the bible was nonsense. The inevitable result given Sheree's stronger personality and greater age was that Kaitlyn burst into tears and the poor girl ran away crying into the back garden. I grabbed a box of tissues and went after her, sitting with Kaitlyn holding her hand as she cried and trying to make her feel better.

Bad as Sheree and the others could be with Kaitlyn, even worse were her cousins down in Geelong. While we rarely saw them, I was not impressed at all with the three boys, they were complete and absolute assholes, who treated their sensitive and sheltered female cousin like dogs would treat a chew toy. They would physically bully her, and take and play keep-off with her glasses or more dangerously her asthma inhaler. One time when we were 11 I got into a fight with the middle son Brendan and gave him a black eye, when he kept harassing Kaitlyn by snapping the strap of her training bra when nobody was watching. Kaitlyn said that these cousins needed to pray more and embrace the love of the Lord and then they would be nicer people. I thought they needed to see a belt more and that might make them nicer people.

Watching the confident, self-assured Kaitlyn who along with her colleagues was now pushing the trolley up the aisle with her colleagues to collect the packaging from the passengers' lunches, I thought about how little confidence she had as a child, and no wonder with parents like my aunt and uncle. When she was 12 she had stayed with our family for a week when her parents had to go to Sydney for a church conference for pastors and their wives that happened to fall during the winter school holidays, and taking Kaitlyn with them would have been inconvenient.

I was looking forward to my cousin staying with us, my brother and my sister not so much especially Sheree as she had to share her bedroom with Kaitlyn. Kaitlyn arrived with her parents, a travel bag and a lengthy list for my parents of what Kaitlyn could and could not do. Before her parents left to go to the airport, I was witness to a very strange thing, when Aunty Mary was talking to Mum and Uncle Neil decided to sit down with Kaitlyn and go through everything his daughter had packed for the week to ensure she had everything. As usual, he spoke to Kaitlyn in a patronizing way like she was a small child, not the young woman she was turning into by now.

Some were understandable for a parent to want to check, like her asthma medication, spare glasses and her orthodontic needs. But things got weird when he went through his daughter's toiletries with her, and then her clothes. Finally they reached her underwear, and Uncle Neil said, 'Now let's make sure you've got enough bras and panties for the week Kaitlyn,' before performing an inventory on the aforementioned items.

Never once did I think there was anything sinister about that, even at that age I could see that my uncle's actions were those of a misguided and out-of-touch man who controlled and micromanaged his daughter at levels not appropriate with her age, but it didn't make it any less creepy. And it wasn't the first time that year I had seen something weird like that happen with my uncle and cousin.

One of the strangest things about Kaitlyn's upbringing was that in public she was not allowed to go to the toilet on her own. Her mother always walked her to the ladies room, standing outside the stall while Kaitlyn was in there, then escorting her back when she was done. Like with so many things, this was reasonable when Kaitlyn was a little girl, not so reasonable when her age reached double figures. One might also have thought that Kaitlyn when getting older would have wanted more privacy, but probably as she didn't know any better she didn't request to be allowed to go to the ladies on her own.