Author: ThirdCat

Youse should come and visit, the weather is truly glorious here right now

So I just now came backstage of Adelaide from Adelaide and see my latest google search (like only moments ago) is ‘what to do in Adelaide when its raining’.

You’re kidding, aren’t you? Five minutes after your heatwave ends and you’re bored. Go outside and run around in it, you goose.

And, look, while we’re on the topic of heatwaves, I’m seeing all your facebook updates and your tweets and your blog posts about this scorching weather, and it really is taking all my effort to not say, ‘Cry my a river, dudes’. When it’s forty five degrees and ninety percent humidity every day for three months, then I’ll listen*.

(*that isn’t to say that I’m not thinking about the fire risk, and how it is these days living with these constant catastrophic warnings – and it has certainly changed the carefree tone of our summers forever)

One year down, one to go

I took the lads back to Berri (the mister’s home turf) via Adelaide for Christmas while the mister stayed here Abu Dhabi.

Landing in Australia, putting credit back on my Australian SIM card, I felt the relief that you feel on arriving somewhere that takes no real effort. The relief that comes from knowing the language, the laws, and what to do if you lose your purse. We could get sick, robbed, lost, but it would be okay and, anyway, we wouldn’t get sick or robbed or lost, because we were home.

Except I was a little bit lost.

Well of course I was.

I’d just taken my lads to Paris for what must surely be, even if I am only half way through it, one of my life’s highlights. I’d dropped in at Abu Dhabi just long enough to remember how incomprehensible it is; to have a farewell coffee with a wonderful friend who won’t be here when I get back; and for the mister to wash my knickers and shove them back into my suitcase not-quite-dry. Then I pulled my clot-preventing socks back up and collected my boarding pass.

Back in Adelaide, I found, as people always do when they return, that everything was all at once different and the same. The light and the smells and the sound hit me with their forgotten familiarity. The air was dry, no crane in sight. But our house is rented out; we wouldn’t be spending the Christmas-New Year break on Kangaroo Island; the people who bought my Grandfather’s house have knocked it down and built a new one in its place; and a few days after I arrived in Adelaide the sale of my Dad’s – our family – house was settled. Dusted and done.

I was home, but not.

Mostly though, I was lost, because this was the second Christmas after Dad’s death. The second Christmas of being parent-less.

I think that in the grieving cycle, seconds are a bit more complex than firsts. Maybe not for everyone, but for me. In the second year, it all becomes real. In the second year, the shock has worn off and the protective numbness is receding. In the second year, that loss has been layered by births, illnesses, marriages, break-ups, break-downs, deaths, graduations, birthdays, bushfires, redundancies. Life has gone on as it does, layering our experiences minute by minute, days at a time. And so, at the second Christmas, you look around and you realise that this is how it is. He’s gone.

Intellectually, I know that I am a middle-aged woman without parents. I know this. But emotionally, I’ve lost my bearings, and I’m still not quite sure where I fit in this post-parent age. Even physically, I have to adjust, because my body still feels the absence of my parents as an emptiness above and around me. Somehow or other I have to work out how I can grow into that space.

As much as I try to keep Christmas low-key, it as at Christmas time that absences loom large. I do have places to be and people to be there with. Other families, of which I am a part, love me, welcome and care for me. Really, it’s quite something and even just thinking about how beautiful people were to me, I cry. But the absences are still there.

I’ve got welcoming places, but I haven’t got parents. I have safe harbours, but my anchors are lost.

Still, however lost I did feel, however overwhelmed, I was always glad that I’d made the trip. I watched the lads play with their cousins and have sleepovers and trade pokemon cards and go for swims in the river. I sat in backyards and in cafes and on the beach with my aunties, uncles, my step-family, my in-laws, my cousins, my friends.

I drank too much and stayed up way past my bedtime every single night (one time, almost til dawn, and it wasn’t even New Year’s Eve – brilliant times). One of the things I especially liked was sitting with my cousins and my friends, the ones who are around the same age, people I’ve known a long time or through tricky times, all of us who have looked, or are looking, around and thinking, ‘my goodness, look where we are, how did this happen and what are we supposed to do now?’

We cried and laughed over the years we’ve just had and the decisions we’ve made and the things that have turned out right and the things that have turned out wrong and the things we’re glad we’ve done and the things we should-oughtta have done. I wallowed, then get over myself, then wallowed, then get over myself again.

And it’s interesting, that even as each conversation acted like a little anchor, each one adding to the other, giving me more and more steadying weight, I felt myself able to leave them again, able to return to this incomprehensible place and say to the mister, ‘We should go and buy a bougainvillea to plant in the courtyard this weekend.’

Luckiness

From paris

…
So I took my boys to Paris for two weeks, and can I just say that if the mister had left me alone in the desert and sent me numerous texts along the lines of, ‘OMG, this is brilliant, this is really brilliant, this is fucking brilliant,’ then he would not have returned to a clean bathroom and a laundry basket cleared of its backlog. But there you go, some of us are born generous and some of us are not.

Because of reasons (not the least of which see above) it was an emotional couple of weeks. We followed our trip to The Louvre (Mona Lisa, check) with a walk through the rain (OMG, it’s raining, this rain is brilliant, you should see this rain) to The Orangerie where hang the waterlilies.

On walking into the first of Monet’s rooms, I cried, and not just eyes-watering with OMG-this-is-beautiful kind of crying. Proper tears streaming down my face crying. I suppose it’s a middle-class, middle-age cliché to stand in Paris crying at the beauty of it all, but rarely have I been so moved as I was when I was standing, sitting, standing, sitting, always crying in front of those paintings.

Eldest boy said, ‘This is because you can’t believe how lucky you are, isn’t it?’ which tells you something of the preceding days, because it wasn’t just the big things that made me cry, so many small things made me think and feel in ways that I think I had forgotten I used to think and feel.

As I, for example, looked away from the young man and his daughter on the metro; as I shared a smile with the woman who brought us our hot chocolates and asked the lads about their diaries; or as I watched the jeunes flirting on the footpath on Friday after school I felt…well, not one thing and not another. I just felt.

It felt good to feel.

At each of these (and at many more hundreds of) moments, I was thinking of the connections that we make with people we have never met and with whom we will share nothing more than a minute or two, and sometimes only a second.

For the longest time, that’s what my blog was about. Something, a seemingly simple something, would happen, and I would be struck by the depth of the simplicity in that something, and a feeling, a physical sensation would build, then a rhythm would start to form, and then words, and then voila. A blog post.

And that, I realised at some point in the last week or so (probably while I was on the metro, we spent a lot of time on the metro), is why I have been so alarmed at the loss of my blogging mojo over the last year or so. It is a sign or a symptom of my shallowness, of a superficiality of feeling. I didn’t blog, because I didn’t feel.

Not feeling is not good.

Or perhaps it is. Perhaps it’s sometimes what your body needs.

I don’t suppose you need to be all that smart to work out what’s at the bottom of this loss/lack of feeling. The grief, the move here…perhaps I will write more about that tomorrow. I did intend to write about it now, but I have to go and play mastermind or backgammon, because I’ve got a little lad who stayed home from school because he couldn’t wake up and now he is especially cuddleicious, so I am going to cuddle with him and play mastermind or backgammon. So for now, I will just say that I have missed feeling, and I have missed a sense of connection to the world around me.

Which I’m now fairly positive all sounds truly middle-class and middle-age cliché. I guess if it walks like a duck (which I sort of do on account of all that vin and fromage – OMG the cheese, you should taste this cheese) and so on and etcetera.

from youngest lad’s journal

From paris

It’s still hot

I’ve been writing a set of essays which I hope will one day be published either singularly or as the set that I am constructing them as.

Actually, I think they are more memoir than they are essays, but memoir sort of declares to the world that you are a fascinating person to whom fascinating things have happened, whereas I am a person who made a couple of extraordinarily stupid decisions, attempted to make up for them by making even more and increasingly stupid decisions, then thought that writing non-fiction would be a good (by which I mean, among other things, legitimate) way to further avoid the frightningness that is the second draft of my next piece of fiction and, lacking both the expertise and the gumption to investigate any other subject beyond myself in any depth, thought I may as well write about those stupid decisions.

I did wonder whether I would have anything to say that I haven’t already blogged about. I mean, goodness me, I’ve been rather revealing over these last couple of months. Perhaps, I thought to myself, blogging is a substitute for memoir. But the more I wrote offline, the more I realised that this was an issue barely worth a second thought. For one thing, there’s heaps I haven’t blogged about (for example, you don’t know what my grandmother said to the mister the day we told her we were getting married). But really, it’s not an issue, because as with all these questions, the answer is not an either/or. Blogging and memoir share some similarities, but they are different. Different processes, different results.

While the blog helps me to record things immediately and does provide an opportunity to think and reflect on the things that happen to me, it is altogether a different kind of thought and reflection than I have been doing while writing the essays.

Most of the differences come back to the same thing of course. The immediacy of blogging versus the ‘looking back’ of memoir. Because memoir demands a cohesive narrative beyond the simple chronological narrative of my blog, I feel that it is forcing me to explore situations and emotions more fully, to contextualise everything (for myself if not for the reader, at the moment, everything is done for myself because the reader is still a concept, a potential, rather than an actual).

My blog is a photo album, filled with snapshots where the essays, although potentially stand-alone, are a film.

And actually, that little analogy is bloody brilliant and has just helped me to fill in the gaps of one of the chapters essays I’ve been trying to write, so if you’ll excuse me I’m turning the interwebs off again and re-opening my increasingly large, but ever-more wieldy document.

PS One thing I’m surprised about is the amount of effort I have put into thinking about ego and narcissim and so forth. You’d think blogging would’ve moved me way past those worries. But no.
‘Do you think it’s too self-centred?’ I asked the mister of a piece I gave him to read the other night (this is unusual, I rarely let him read anything).
‘Well, didn’t you say it’s memoir?’ he asked in his engineering way.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Sometimes I really don’t understand you.’

We interrupt this metaphorical flow…

I will never forget the night of the last election, and by the time my dad got to our place, they were already saying Bennelong was too close to call and what a night it was, and my children will always remember that they were allowed to stay up until midnight playing computer games, only we kept making them come and stand in front of the television because this is history and the next day I felt like this great veil of mean-spirited conservatism had lifted from us all.

We drank too much sparkling red, but the hangover was worth it.

We knew, we always knew, that this wouldn’t be a revolutionary government, that things would carry on much as before but we believed that now we would be led by people who, even if they were conservative, would lead with more generous spirits. We believed that the lines in the sand would shift (oh, a metaphor, how did that sneak in?).

That’s why this whole asylum seeker and ringing the Indonesian government and expanding the Christmas Island detention centre is utterly and absolutely depressing. There’s some actions on the Amnesty International website and doing them will make me feel better about myself, but not about much else.

And what I’m also remembering is the day my dad and I had another of our heated discussions, back when Latham let Howard set the agenda on refugees and asylum seekers once again, and I could not believe that Dad could still be a member of the ALP. One of those times when Latham didn’t just say, as he should have done, ‘No, enough is enough’. (It might have been the Tampa, but who knows, I mean there have been so many moments where I’ve thought, ‘Well, it can’t get worse’, but then it has). Surely, I said to Dad this, this is the tipping point, and he gave his old, once-relevant, but to my mind no-longer-so, speech about change from within. He remained loyal to the ALP, and he probably still would.

I feel let down.
(updated to add: as would he)