Author: ThirdCat

And only one of them laughed

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’.

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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.

If you need me, I’m on the couch nodding off, because I stayed up too late last night

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..

If you need me, just wait at the kitchen table I’ve gone for a quick walk round the block

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!’

If you need me, I’m on the bus, looking out the window and laughing

‘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.

If you need me, I’m in the backyard with a cup of tea and my back to the sun

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.

If you need me, I’m wandering around the house, exhausted but not at all tired

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.