Free From the Past

Her childhood was marked by turbulence and tragedy. Yet Lanai Scarr determined her past would not define her future.

WHEN CANBERRA PRESS GALLERY JOURNALIST Lanai Scarr and her husband James settled in for an eight-week ultrasound to examine the contents of Lanai’s pregnant belly three years ago, they had no idea that the screen would include 30 little fingers and 30 little toes.

The parents of an already 16-month first-born Molly had just doubled the size of the family, and triplets were indeed on the way. Lanai’s path to motherhood hit the fast track. And while there were tears at first— tears of shock, disbelief, and concern for the risky pregnancy and birth that lay ahead—Lanai also felt a tremendous drive to take motherhood head-on. She wanted these babies with every ounce of her being.

Lanai has slowly, painstakingly, tried to piece together the puzzle of her childhood.

Nurturing four children under two is a remarkable and daunting feat in itself. Much less for a woman for whom motherhood was barely role-modelled and whose own childhood was one marked by tragedy, questions, pain and loss.

WHEN LANAI WAS BORN, her mother Belinda and father Stephen appeared, on the surface, to delight in their daughter. But within two short weeks, Belinda would be separated from her baby due to postpartum psychosis— signalling the start of the complete breakdown of her mental health, and also her relationship with Stephen.

Speaking from her favourite Canberra café, Maple and Clove, where she often comes to write away from the pressure-cooker environment of Parliament House, Lanai is calm as she recalls the deep dysfunction of her childhood. Like the time she was just three years old and woke to ask her mother for a glass of water. Her mother was drowsy and unfocussed and stumbled into the kitchen, slamming her head through the glass of the oven door. Lanai watched as she bled over the cold grey tiles before she ran to the neighbours to get help.

As an adult, she would have access to her case files showing her mother had taken a premeditated overdose that night in an attempt to end her life, and Lanai’s thirst had interrupted her plans.

Over the next two years, Belinda would be subjected to more than nine involuntary hospital admissions, and during those periods Lanai would be temporarily removed from her care. Things came to a head when she was aged five and her mother had a fight with a shopkeeper in Darwin, where they were living. Belinda was arrested and taken to hospital in a paddy wagon. Lanai went into crisis care and, shortly after, was declared a ward of the state. She was then moved into kinship care with her grandparents in Tamworth.

Aged just seven, Lanai would attend her mother’s funeral. Belinda had committed suicide in heavy scrub south of Bundaberg in Queensland. Her father, from whom she was estranged for most of her childhood and who did not seek parental rights, would die when Lanai was 16.

IN HER ADULT YEARS, employing the forensic skills she has fine-tuned in her journalistic career, Lanai has slowly, painstakingly, tried to piece together the puzzle of her childhood. Accessing her foster care case files, Lanai mapped out Belinda’s road of mental turmoil—her bipolar disorder and sustained periods of mania and depression.

When I ask her now what she remembers of her mum, Lanai is tender. “There are many memories I have of her when she was unwell, but also I have memories of feeling so safe and comforted in her presence. I know from documents that there were times that I didn’t want to see her and that as a child there were times I was scared of her, but my feelings and memories of her are not of those feelings.

“Remembering back I felt like there was no one else more I wanted to be with. And I also felt like no matter how unwell she was she always tried to meet my needs and put me first. I still don’t understand exactly why she chose to end her life and leave me behind, but I am sure it must have been because she felt she was doing the right thing for me. I know she loved me beyond compare.”

While Lanai would live with her grandparents until age 14, her teenaged years were marked by new frontiers of instability. As her relationship with her maternal grandparents broke down, Lanai moved to Sydney to live with her paternal grandmother who enrolled her in the Catholic Stella Maris College in Manly.

At around the same time, she was also assigned an incredible case worker, Anneliese, who worked for The Burdekin Organisation—a not-for-profit provider of youth housing on Sydney’s northern beaches.

Even as a small child—I made the choice to not be defined by my circumstances.

“Anneliese was my rock and my constant and stayed with me throughout my time in out-of-home care from age 14 to 18. Despite many different placements during that time she was there to pick me up from school and take me to appointments when I needed. She is still there for me and a close friend and has been present at many significant events in my life.”

When Lanai’s relationship with her new grandmother soured and she stopped paying the school fees, the school principal instead decided to waive its fees and keep her on. “I know now that this was one of the major things that turned my life around.”

Rather than be defined by her past, Lanai would receive “an incredible education at a school where I was with children who had normal families who had higher aspirations for their children than the ones my temporary foster carers—or even my biological family—had for me.

“The school, the students and the teachers never ever treated me any differently to others in my class. I was never made to feel I attended the school due to charity. I was never made to feel less because I was given a free education.”

In Year 12, as the school formal loomed, Lanai got called up to the front office and received a letter expressing pride in all she had achieved and including $500 so she could buy a formal dress and get her hair done. The letter was anonymous but she later found out it was her science teachers who had organised it.

Her education also allowed Lanai to get a foothold in the competitive world of journalism where she is a senior reporter for News Corp Australia, breaking stories that run across the national mastheads, and following up with a demanding array of television appearances.

I ask her what she attributes her resilience to. “I honestly haven’t figured that one out yet and it is a source of many discussions with those that are closest to me. I don’t know if I was born with it or if through my circumstances—even as a small child—I made the choice to not be defined by my circumstances, or if my mother played a role in my resilience.

“It often baffles me how people who have been through much less trauma and heartache than me can just give up and not want to carry on.

"What makes us different and how can I be OK when they might not be?”

LANAI WAS ALSO DETERMINED from a young age that she would one day build a family of her own. “I definitely always wanted to become a mother. I always loved and had a natural ability with kids, and I think because for much of my childhood I never felt unconditional love or truly as though I belonged, some part of me wanted to create my own family so I could always be loved.”

She met James at Knightsbridge Penthouse about two months after she moved to Canberra in 2010, when she was 22. He was kind, dependable, honest, and she didn’t look back. Lanai gave birth to Molly on her 26th birthday. She thought about her own mother going through contractions with her on that very same day, 26 years earlier.

She is also open that she had wondered whether her mother’s mental health issues may one day manifest in her. "I’ve never had any issues with mental ill-health but I was always fearful that giving birth would trigger post-natal depression or psychosis for me. Thankfully it didn’t, and thankfully I had a great support network around me and a wonderful husband who took six weeks off with our first daughter Molly and three months off when we had our triplets.”

The triplets—Jim, Nate and Edith—arrived in the world on 11 January, 2016, the day before Lanai and James’s third wedding anniversary. Jim and Nate are identical, while Edith was a lucky second egg. The pregnancy was helped along by a fertility drug Clomid, which the couple needed to use due to Lanai’s Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. There is never any guarantee for even a single pregnancy resulting with the drug, so triplets took them completely by surprise.

Lanai describes her mothering style as “besotted”.

“I love my children fiercely beyond any love I ever knew possible. I know that sometimes I overcompensate for my own childhood and that I want them to have a much more “normal” childhood than I did so that weighs on my mind a lot. I cuddle and kiss them 1000 times a day and I tell them I love them at every opportunity.

I want to...help others know their past does not have to define them.

“One of my greatest fears now is having them lose me or James. I want to be here for their lives. I want them to have a mum and dad they can always rely on and come to for advice. I never want to leave them.”

Such was her determination to be the best mother she felt she could be, Lanai committed to breastfeeding her triplets for 13 months. “I breastfed Molly and I researched ways on breastfeeding triplets and knew it had been done before and was not impossible so I was determined to try it. I worked out that I made 1200L of breastmilk in the first 13 months of their lives.”

Now she is back at work, Lanai follows the motto of “progress, not perfection”—bearing in mind that some days are “just going to turn to shit”.

“Every day I just try to do my best and aim to do everything with love and passion. Some days I am going to get it right and other days I am going to get it wrong and I just learn from the days that I fail and move on.

“I also demand equality from my husband, but equally married a man for whom that was never a question. We are 100 per cent equal partners in everything. We both work full-time, we both share pick-up and drop-offs at school, we just make it work. When I have to go away for work he takes up more of the slack and vice versa. We support each other to achieve our dreams and do what’s necessary to facilitate that.

“I also have absolutely incredible friends. We don’t have any family who live in Canberra but my friends here are very much my family.”

Increasingly Lanai is thinking about using her experience to lobby for reforms in the foster care realm—including a greater focus on seeking out top quality schools, be they public or private, to provide committed care for children and greater support for case workers so they are not so stretched.

“If I can show that it is possible to break out of the cycle that a foster child so often finds themselves entrenched in, and to make a positive life for myself and to create my own beautiful family, then sharing my story is something I want to do to help others know their past does not have to define them. They are worthy of their own aspirations and dreams.” •

WORDS Emma Macdonald

PHOTOGRAPHY Gary Ramage and Heartstory