Dee Madigan grew up in what looked like a normal home. But things weren't as they seemed.

They say loss makes you stronger. Undoubtedly it changes you, but I’m not sure it’s always for the better. Of course, we’d like to think that somehow something good comes from it. But I wonder if that is simply a fairy story we tell ourselves.

Loss makes you scared. It’s only once you have lost that you truly understand that you can lose again. Until that happens, the concept of loss is hypothetical and therefore the fear cannot be as intense. For me, loss made me overly fearful to the point where I developed a series of debilitating phobias. I always thought the worst would happen because, for me, it actually had.

In your rewired post-loss brain you are always on hyper-alert for things to go wrong. As if somehow by seeing them earlier you can stop them, either by fighting back sooner or by running away more quickly. An overdeveloped fight-or-flight reflex.

What I eventually learnt, through the help of psychologists and my own experience, was that living in constant fear has no impact on whether or not the worst will happen. It just means you live scared and tired a lot of the time. And it is so very tiring to be always on the lookout for something to go wrong. For the plane to crash, for the spot to be cancerous, for the man next to you on the train to have a bomb.

Ironically, people would often say how I was strong and brave and outspoken but inside I felt none of that. I felt I was leading a double life.

I grew up in what from the outside looked like a normal home. It was large and beautiful and very, very clean (my mother had a ‘thing’ about mess. I unfortunately did not inherit this ‘thing’). We were polite, well dressed, well spoken and well educated. We were comfortable, not rich; we lived in Hampton, which back then was Brighton’s poorer cousin.

Even with all this normality, a lot of my friends envied my life – ‘your parents are so funny’, ‘their parties are amazing’, ‘your life seems so free’. And there was truth in all that. We didn’t have things like curfews and could wander the streets at any hour as long as we had the dog – my mother placed an inordinate amount of trust in that dog.

My parents had big parties that ran so late we would often miss school the next day, and they never checked that we had done our homework. But what to the outside might have looked like freedom felt very, very unstable to a child. Physical freedom is important, but only when there is emotional stability at home. And as any child of an alcoholic will tell you, there is never safe ground underfoot. Even in the good times, you know the bad times are just one drink away.

My mother was beautiful; my father was charming. Having left the priesthood, he was a man who desperately needed a vocation and without one turned to whiskey. He loved politics and journalism, but began selling antiques to make a living. When he was young he could sell anything to anyone. Like many Irishmen, he had the gift of the gab.

But then, in ‘the recession we had to have’, they lost a lot of money, mostly through incredibly poor investments made by my father, I suspect, when drunk. Like the time he bought a racehorse, and a hairdressing salon. With absolutely no knowledge about either.

As our finances became more precarious, my mother went into business herself – to make sure the mortgage and school fees could be paid. The balance of the marriage changed and my father did not cope well. I think he liked being the educated, successful one, with my mother as his pretty, young, uneducated bride. The priesthood is an appalling training ground for marriage and fatherhood.

As the brilliant youngest son of a family and then a parish priest, my father had spent his first thirty-three years being adored and literally worshipped. He struggled to deal with the realities of four young children, and a wife who gradually became more bitter. My parents’ romantic love story – of a priest falling in love with one of his parishioners – had ended in a marriage between two people who were utterly unsuited to each other in every possible way. Each a disappointment to the other.

Eventually my parents bought into a theatre restaurant, and my mother had an affair with one of the other owners. She didn’t even try to hide it. Her reasoning was that my father had his own affair with the whiskey bottle. My parents were gone four nights out of seven from five pm till well after midnight. We’d get five dollars each to go and get dinner (which was plenty in those days) and we’d all wander off up the shops, sometimes together, sometimes separately. We were aged from eight to twelve.

One weekend we went to stay at a country pub about six hours’ drive from Melbourne (we were travelling with family friends who had relatives in the area). It was in a tiny town with the pub, a shop and a primary school with nine kids. On a drunken whim, and in a misguided attempt to rescue his marriage, my father bought the pub that same weekend. I think my father had visions of himself as a country publican, leaning on the bar talking politics and literature with the locals, while sipping on a fine single malt.

As it turned out, the locals weren’t interested in talking politics or literature. They preferred to discuss ‘crutching’, where you shear the sheep’s arse to remove the maggots. After only a few months, Dad left us all up there to go back to Melbourne, leaving Mum to run the pub on her own. The hours were hell. The money was too low to afford staff except on a busy Saturday night, so it was up to her.

Selling it wasn’t an option as Dad had forged her signature and mortgaged the pub to the hilt to finance his new business ventures in Melbourne, none of which made money. He opened another antique shop but it was only opened ‘by appointment’. Needless to say, he didn’t make any money.

LISTEN: Bec Sparrow and Robin Bailey on when life pulls the rug out from underneath you (post continues after audio...)

We were at the nearby high school for a year, but when the maths teacher admitted to me that we’d only got through half the syllabus, I – unbeknown to my parents – applied for a scholarship to Methodist Ladies’ College. I had literally spotted the newspaper ad for the scholarship over the shoulder of a fellow passenger on a Melbourne tram while in town for a visit. I won the scholarship but my father decided instead that all three girls should go back to Loreto, our previous school. It didn’t have boarding facilities, though, so we would board with families we didn’t know. Whether it was because Loreto was Catholic or because he wanted us all together, I don’t know.

This decision – when I could have been in a boarding school with all fees paid, and in a safe environment – made no sense to me. It still doesn’t. And we were never given the option of staying with our father, even though he was living in Melbourne at the time. I don’t think he wanted the hassle of teenage daughters with him. And as he could be a violent drunk, I didn’t push the issue either.

After boarding with three different families, none of which really worked out, we ended up renting rooms above a pub. My older sister had graduated, so it was just my younger sister and me, each of us at opposite ends of a corridor, with a series of drunk men wandering up and down. I don’t think I slept soundly in my entire HSC year.

When I was eighteen my mum was diagnosed with lung cancer. The pub was sold. Its value had dropped significantly and there was no money made from the sale once the mortgage was repaid. My parents, in another attempt to re-establish a family, rented a house in Melbourne and we all moved in together. It fell apart quickly. We hadn’t lived together as a family for a number of years and it felt forced and uncomfortable.

My brother successfully lobbied to go to a country boarding school – wisely staying as far away as possible. Mum decided that the last thing she could cope with when dealing with cancer was my father, and we also needed an income. So she rented a shop in Sandringham with tiny living quarters behind it, which she moved into with my younger sister. My older sister was at college and I rented a room above another shop, three doors away from Mum.

Mum died aged forty-six.

Nine months later, my dad died of chronic asthma, which had exacerbated his emphysema, at fifty-three. There was no money. Dad hadn’t filed a tax return in ten years.

So there we were, with my two younger siblings – aged fifteen and sixteen – still at school, and no money to pay fees. Luckily we weren’t on the radar of community services. And we took a punt that Catholic boarding schools wouldn’t throw out orphans.

I took off for Sydney and, in a desperate attempt at stability, married a perfectly lovely guy at the ridiculous age of twenty-one. I walked out a few years later. Apparently the need for stability is not actually a great basis for a marriage.

My younger sister was diagnosed with trauma-induced schizophrenia at nineteen and has been unwell ever since. My brother, ever the wise one, hotfooted it to Europe, where he has lived ever since. My older sister is an artist who lives in Melbourne.

And me? I have lived a charmed life for the past twenty years. And here’s the thing. Despite the bad things, I wouldn’t be who I am without my past. My father, when sober, taught me to love literature, and that social justice matters, and politics matters. My mother taught me how to love unconditionally. I travel, I write, raise a family, I do the teevs, I own and run a company, and I do work I am passionate about.

Sometimes I think it’s a karma thing and I got all the bad shit out early, in the first part of my life. And though there’s still a part of me that is still waiting for it all to go wrong, each year this fear abates slightly. Oddly enough, getting older and knowing that death is closer helps somewhat. A lot of the fear is based around life being cut short, of dreams being unfulfilled. But I have achieved so many of my dreams.

As long as I live long enough to see my children into adulthood, I will be happy. And when I do die, as we all will, I can honestly say I truly lived.

This is an extract from UNBREAKABLE, Women Share Stories of Resilience and Hope, edited by Jane Caro, published by UQP, RRP $29.95.