firstperson thirdcat

I’ve moved my blog. Which is much simpler than moving furniture and clothes and deciding whether or not to take my rhyming dictionary.

You can find me over at adelaidefromadelaide which I think you’ll agree is a particularly clever use of the word from. Or not. Titles are my worst thing.

This whole thing of having my own domain name hasn’t worked out for me. Actually, it’s got whiskers on it trying to manage the software behind the scenes and so forth, and it means I can’t do anything that I want to do without being frightened that the whole thing will break. Also, there have been some credit card iss-ewes and anyway, it was just time to move on.

Having it hosted at wordpress just means there’s less to think about. Not that thinking is wrong. Just that there’s only so much thinking one mind can do.

See you over there sometime, though not sure when, my weekend is filled with champagne dates. Life rocks, no?

Whereas:
Christmas has become an over-commercialised construct which places undue economic and social pressures on people who could really do without it;

And fully recognising that:
Father Christmas has been totally appropriated for aforesaid commercialisation;

And not withstanding:
That children get way too many lollies at this time of the year;

And also acknowledging:
that our primary schools should not be culturally isolating by introducing potentially inappropriate cultural symbols;

I nonetheless need to tell you that watching an entire school (admittedly a small school) of children run (arms and legs akimbo, hats flying to the ground) from one end of Marshmallow Park to the other in order to greet aforesaid commercial construct carrying sugar bounties is worth it’s weight. In myrrh.

Tonight at tea, I told my children that I was in the final of the ‘Most Fantastic Mother in Adelaide’ competition and if I won I would get two million dollars.

They said, not quite but almost in unison, ‘Can we have one thousand dollars to buy a Wii?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’ And then they said, pretty much in unison this time, ‘And can we have one thousand dollars to buy an x-box?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’

And then I said that to win the competition, I just had to get each of my children to say ‘my Mum is fantastic’ ten times.

So they said, ten times each, ‘My Mum is fantastic’.

And then they yelled, at the tops of their voices, just to be sure, ‘And she rocks’.

I’ve been up at Port Pirie, starting the sorting out what remains of my father’s house. The house where I lived during my formative years. The house where my mother was living when she died, the house where my father wasn’t exactly living when he died. (long story).

Because of reasons (mostly to do with redback spiders, dust and loneliness), I stayed in a hotel. In fact, I stayed in the same room we stayed in when we first moved to Port Pirie and the removalist van broke down just past the ‘thank you for visiting Clare, we hope you enjoyed your stay come back soon’.

I spent a few wonderful days wandering around Port Pirie, putting the finishing touches on my novel (though not quite as many touches as I envisaged I would finish - things will be a bit quiet around here this week too),  sifting through crockery and pieces of paper, and visiting old haunts and new.

I know not every one would get it, but to me, that town is a beautiful place to be.

The mister and our boys came up on the weekend to help me with boxes and things. And just to make sure I was all right. Which I thought I was. When we got home last night I said to the mister ‘I’m ready to say goodbye to it now’ I think I even said ‘I feel good’. But this morning, I feel absolutely shattered. Do you know that feeling after you’ve been at WOMAD for the whole day and the whole night and you know you’re exhausted, but you’re not sure what kind of exhausted you are? That’s how I feel. Hollow would be the best one-word description I could come up with right now.

Much of how I feel at the moment is how you might expect I would feel and how I would have guessed I would feel. Sad and lonely and very, very grown-up. But something unexpected has come upon me too, something I have been wondering why I hadn’t seen.

For some time now, I’ve kept an eye on the seven stages of grief. Partly out of curiousity, partly because I think it is helpful to know what other people have experienced and discovered. But the one stage I’ve never really got to is the anger stage. I have noticed it playing itself out in different ways (the classic transference etc etc) but I’ve never had what I could identify as your actual rage or anger. Not about my mother’s or my father’s death.

But over the last little while, I’ve noticed what I would call anger, and this is particularly in relation to my mum’s death. And not that I’m angry on my own behalf, so it’s not a kind of anger about why did she die. But I’m mad about the fact that she missed out on so much.

Over-thinking this, as I am, I think that this feeling is emerging as I become increasingly aware of the depth of what my mum missed out on in her life. A sudden death, and one without any warning at all (she died in a car accident) really does make a difference to your life. Yes, I know how obvious that sounds, but I don’t only mean what you miss out on, but I also mean the way we build our lives in layers and stages, and how each of those layers does have a retrospective impact. (I’m struggling a bit with how to explain this to myself, but I’ll give it an awkward try now and refine it another day.)

A sudden death means that you not only miss out on the things you might ordinarily have planned (taking your long service leave, for example), but it also means that all the intangibles, like relationships, get suspended too.  And that matters more than I realised. Not just in that ‘if only we hadn’t argued that morning’, but in a much more wholistic and layered sense.

I guess I can keep playing around with the words all I like, but it all gets down to the same thing. She died when she was 46 which means she got ripped off, and I feel mad.

Anyway, all of this is nothing new. It’s not an emotion I’ve invented or an insight that hasn’t been sighted before. It’s just something I wanted to write down, because if I want to understand all this, I’ll need to come back to today later on.  And finding, as I did yesterday, my Alphabet Soup game from when I was six years old, it reminded me that we really do forget things easily. I loved that game, but I’d forgotten all about it.

And in case you’re wondering, no, we didn’t get the shed done.

PS Earlier this year, I also had to sort out my grandfather’s house (along with an aunty and cousins, we were all there sorting). Can I just say - and this is the singularly best piece of advice I will ever give you - go to wherever it is that you store your pieces of paper and remove eighty five percent of those pieces of paper. Leave enough that treasures may be unearthed, but honestly, see all that paper - that is a hard job you’re leaving someone to do. And it’s a privilege to do the job, it really is, but yeah, do chuck some of your paper out.

Quiet around here, isn’t it?

Today, I heard a woman say:

I can’t run

because I’m wearing a long dress

because I haven’t shaved my legs.

IMG_1506

Originally uploaded by adelaide writer

Because it is more likely than not that we will be moving, we had to find a new home for our dog.

The woman we chose did not think I was mad for crying.

Eldest boy is at a friend’s house for the afternoon which he (and we) thought was the best approach.

I was in bed last night, thinking about this and that and the other. And in between these thoughts I was turning my light on and off and on and off, and reading Everything I Knew by Peter Goldsworthy.

And all of this led me to the thought, the realisation:

I don’t know what I dreamed of becoming.

I thought of myself on the school oval at lunchtime, or on the benchseat leaning against the wall, or walking from class to class. I thought of talking with my one very best friend, of gossiping with the bigger group, of laughing on the year eleven camp. I tried to reimagine the conversations that we shared.

And I can’t pinpoint a particular aspiration. Not of mine and not of anyone’s.

I remember in year eleven, in our economics class, the girl who said to me she wasn’t worried about her job because ‘I believe that married women shouldn’t work’. I guess she said ladies not women. I was gobsmacked (I have tried to think of the word we might have used in 1984, but I don’t think there’s a gobsmacked equivalent) which makes me think it was an unusual conversation. I remember one friend did a modelling course one school holidays. I remember another came to Adelaide to do a secretarial course and one of our teachers said it was the worst decision any of us could make, but to me it seemed neither good nor bad, just something else I hadn’t known you could do. Girls left school to do hairdressing, but they were girls who were good at art and wore interesting clothes. It never seemed like something I could do.

I know that I have always carried an affinity with words, a knowledge that words are what I get. The same way some girls got hairdressing or some girls got netball or my best friend got maths. I got words. My ‘mock interview’ was at the local newspaper, but still and all the same, it never really occured to me that I could be a journalist. I didn’t know that journalist was something to become.

Perhaps I thought I would live my parents’ lives. Civic-minded teachers, surrounded by other passionate teachers and political activists. I remember telling the mister he should be a science teacher, so I guess on some level I was trying to recreate their life.

But my mum didn’t want me to have her life. Or more precisely, she didn’t want me to have the limits of her life. And the only thing she knew to say was ‘don’t become a teacher’.

And now, I’m back to where I was at two o’clock this morning. I don’t know what I dreamed of becoming. Which doesn’t matter. It’s not something to fret about or to add to the lists of things that keep me awake at night.

It’s just - as they say in yoga - an observation.

One of those rare thoughts that has remained as interesting in the light of day as it was at two a.m..

In the mornings, he perches himself on the toilet (its lid is down), and he watches me.

‘I won’t ask you questions while you clean your teeth.’ It’s a lesson he has learned.

I rinse my mouth then turn quickly and flick water at him.

‘Mum!’ He gives the smile which knows much more than it used to know. ‘You can see I’ve already got my school clothes on.’

I pump facecream onto my fingertips, rub it lightly into my nose, my chin, my neck and across my collarbone.

‘Can I have some?’

He closes his eyes and tilts his chin towards me. The skin at the top of his cheeks is not as smooth as it used to be, but still it is smoother than mine.  I brush my finger against his cheek more times than it takes to rub the face cream in.

I go back to the sink and the mirror and brush powder on my cheeks.

‘Why do you wrap your towel around your head?’

‘To help my hair dry.’

‘Oh.’

He stands on the scales I brought home from my grandfather’s house.

‘Hey! I’m more than I used to be.’

‘That’s good. That must mean you’ve grown.’

‘Do you want to be less?’

‘Less what?’

‘Less than you used to be.’

I begin to unwrap the towel and rub lightly at my hair.

‘Sort of. But that’s not really it…I just wanted to start going to to the gym and doing more exercise because I wanted to make sure I didn’t get too sad…if you don’t do enough exercise it can be hard to stay happy.’

‘But Mum!’ He looks up at me now. His eyes are brown. Why does that still surprise me? ‘You’re already heaps happy!’

‘You should see a life coach,’ someone said to me.

I had been talking about turning forty: and my lack of focus now that the boys are both at school; and my aimless wandering from one unfinished project to another; and the general blah blah blahs I get when I look at my To Do list, the same list that used to make me feel excited and motivated; and how my mum was 46 when she died and didn’t get to use her long service leave and I’m not going to let that happen to me, but look here I am on the couch doing nothing to make sure that doesn’t happen; and my growing financial dependence on my partner which is, right now, freaking me absolutely out; etcetera etcetera etcetera (I know, being around me is a bundle of laughs right now - but trust me, no one is more bored by me and my woes than I myself am).

I wasn’t really sold on this life coach idea. Thought it might be a bit of wank. But then I did a bit of looking around, and I thought, ‘It can’t hurt’. It’s kind of just career counselling, but with a bit of other stuff thrown in. And geez I pay a tarot card reader, an acupuncurist and hairdresser to fix my life, why wouldn’t I pay life coach?

So, I sent off an enquiry email or two. You know, as they suggested. Gave a brief outline and where I am and what I’d want out of life coaching.

Then I started looking forward to it. This is just what I need, I thought. Bit of a talk about what’s good, what’s realistic, what’s dreams. Yeah. This’ll be great. Bit of life coaching and I’ll be on track. Set to blast into my forties with a sense of purpose. There’s still time to change the world.

And

Guess

What

NO ONE HAS GOT BACK TO ME.

I’ve been writing a short essay on how, after signing the registration book as Housewife, I found myself to be in the Abu Dhabi library reading “A Room of One’s Own” (they have two copies).

And then, thanks to Genevieve, I read Susan Johnson’s blog and she said, amongst other excellent things, this: “I do know my life is enriched by my children, but I am not entirely sure my art is….it is very, very hard for me to combine writing with running a household, having children, and a marriage. Most of the world’s greatest women writers did not have children. This is not an accidental fact.”

So it seemed that although I was very much enjoying putting words into sentences and sentences into paragraphs that there was no longer any need to write the essay.

But if I keep not saying things because they’ve already been said, then what will I write about?

So I put the kettle on.

In the end of course, the other pelicans grew suspicious of the new creatures and the pelican parents asked that their pelican children be removed from the classes where the new creatures sat.

For their part, the human children had grown tired of unscaled fish and a bed which smelled of dried seagrass. They had begun to think fondly of their mother’s rock cakes and rich spaghetti bolognese and although grateful to the pair of pelicans who had rescued them from the paddock of dried grass they began to dream of their own beds and the smell of unwashed sheets.

The pair of pelicans, for whom this had been one final chance to fulfill their dreams of parenting, did everything they could to improve their children’s lives. They searched for cod instead of carp, they desalinated the water, and they shared nightshifts snapping at the mosquitoes which dined on the flesh of the youngest human child.

But late at night, when even mosquitoes slept, the pelicans lay awake and heard the sob-filled dreams and knew that it was time.

And so it was, the children were returned, dropped gently from a height into the self-seeded tomato bush which, in a week had grown rather rapidly to the point that it was bearing recognisable, if unripened, fruit. Their shirts were no more or less filthy than they ever had been, although their mother was sure that the stains were no ingrained.

The mother held the children close and they held her, and when they pulled away, they smiled such smiles of happiness at her that it made her heart beat fast. Absence had made her heart grow fond and so she mentioned neither the shirts, nor the matted hair, nor the freckles which, in the absence of sunblock, had multiplied like the winter spots of bathroom mould. Instead, she handed them the gifts she had bought from the Malls of the Middle East.

She had bought them shoes with wheels and flashing lights, and the children oohed and aahed like she had known they would.  She helped them put them on and tie the laces up (confirming with them, that no, they did not have velcro shoes with wheels, and yes, of course, if she’d seen wheeled shoes with velcro she would have bought the velcro home and not the ones with lace) and then the children tried to walk which they could not, and as the children scratched their way along the passage, and scraped their way across the kitchen’s floating floor, and as the night wore on and they stamped their feet at her, and as their voices rang inside her head, she looked outside the window and teased herself about learning how to make a pelican call.

Apparently not all of you recognised the photo below as one from Abu Dhabi. More specifically it is taken in Kalifha City (A or B, I’m not sure) a satellite or suburb of Abu Dhabi which is growing out of the sand.

I love to travel. The mister and I used to live and earn money purely to travel. Twice, we’ve sold everything we own and ridden off into the sunset. Okay, we didn’t sell our stuff, mostly we gave it away because it wasn’t the kind of stuff you could sell. Okay, lots of it we neither sold nor gave away, because mostly our stuff was rusty and broken because we never bought anything new. Except the Trinitron which, I think I mentioned, died the other week. But twice we’ve disposed of our stuff in a variety of means (sold, chucked, stored in parents’ sheds) and ridden off into the sunset.

I have extensive travel lists. Lists of places I want to visit. Lists of places I want to live. Lists of places I want to catch the train through.

Abu Dhabi is on none of these lists.

I’ve been in Abu Dhabi for a week because we were going to move there, but now we might not, although we probably are. So we need to act both as if we are (in case we do) and as if we aren’t (in case we don’t). This is just a fantastic way to be living, because after a year in which I have moved my grandfather into a nursing home, sold his house, then watched my father die, I could really use a bit more uncertainty. Especially in December which is just the most best month to start out stressed.

All of this indecision is, obviously, because of reasons. I wrote all those reasons down (in a rather well-written paragraph if I do say so myself) then realised it was probably a little inappropriate given that this is the internet and all. So I can’t tell you. I also know the meaning of life and I can’t tell you that either.

I could tell you about Abu Dhabi, but I hardly know what to say. It is flat and dry and hot. But that’s how I’d describe Adelaide and most of South Australia.

I left the camera with the mister who is still there. He had a dragonboating appointment amongst other things. When he gets back I will show you some of the photos. Or I will get him to load them onto flickr - interestingly, between his last visit (August) and now, flickr has gone from being blocked due to inappropriate content, to being not blocked.

Abu Dhabi. The hommous is brilliant, the coffee is shit, the sound of construction is constant.

so see that building down the road a bit…

no, no, not that one, the one a bit further on…

yeah, that one, that’s it…

well, turns out that’s not actually where we wanted to go

which would be because the building where we wanted to go is in totally the opposite direction

(insert appropriate told you so music here, though I must say moral victories are inglorious things when celebrated in thirty five degree heat)

(captured on the mister’s blackberry - it all looks waaaay weirder in real life let me tell you)

Fuck all happened and then I made a pot of herbal tea.

Who me? No, I haven’t gone anywhere, just madly writing an essay on the ethics of comedy. I know, take something that’s perfectly fun and theorise it to death, why don’t you. Funny thing is, I’ve also got a gig tonight, which is probably, for reasons I will explain when I’ve got more time, my last until Fringe next year. Don’t think I’ll worry about telling tonight’s punters (see how groovy I am, I call them punters) that I can, with reference to Kant, justify the use of my husband, my children and my dead parents to make said punters laugh.  And further, if said punters don’t laugh, maybe my use of family members it isn’t so justified.

Anyhooo, and still with the overthinking…

I am quite troubled by my chidren’s participation - via school - in the Premier’s Reading Challenge and the Healthy Lunchbox Challenge (can’t find any info about the South Australian one on the web, but google it and you’ll get the idea).

I totally get that schools need to encourage reading, healthy food and so on. I applaud creative efforts to encourage such activities and do not want to be pain in the arse PC parent who gets all uptight about everything. But you know what - reading and eating well should not be described as a challenge. Nor should they be turned into fucking competitions.

That is all.

The facts:

The mister and I might be taking a short trip (one week).

We probably won’t be taking our boys. Possibly. But probably not.

The plane trip will be about twelve hours long and involves flying over long stretches of water.

Plane incidents are on the increase (okay, I don’t have any studies or concrete evidence, but this is how it seems to me).

The question:

Is the mister wrong for looking at me with resignation in his eyes as he agrees to my demand request that he and I travel on seperate planes?

…>>>…

PS This might all be academic, because I have just watched the woman at the Post Office CUT MY PASSPORT UP, because - so she says - they can’t issue me a new one while I’ve still got the old one.

Buoyed by the joy of after-school baking,

and of the sight of youngest boy lifting his chin over the top of the bench so that he could better catch a view of the cooling cakes (rock),

I said,

as I watched them wolf down their third,

‘There’s nothing like rock cakes hot from the oven, is there’

to which eldest boy replied,

‘Well, yes, except you know when you’re really busting for a wee, and you finally get to the toilet…that feels great’.

When the rubbish truck goes past, its loud stop, start, stop, start, makes me think of the days - increasingly distant as they are - when youngest boy had not yet started school, and he ran to the door, or the window if the door was closed, and watched the rubbish truck moving down the road, and I wish I had more often stood in the hall and stared at the curls on the back of my growing boy’s head.