Naive Psychologist – Page 11 – we're all making our own sense of things

Christmas Eve

It’s lovely in Abu Dhabi at this time of the year. Every day for a month it’s like South Australia on the morning after a cool change has rolled in to break the heatwave. We have the windows open and don’t even mind the dust. I can smell the mangroves and hear the sea birds. Each sunset is perfect. The light is soft but full and it glows against the lounge room wall. Up in my room, the light is reflected in the wardrobe mirror. As a wardrobe it’s not up to much – it’s old so the rods run from front-to-back instead of side-to-side. I can’t see anything except what’s hanging in front and it’s hard to hang things in any useful order. But it’s one third of my mother’s bedroom suite along with the dressing table and washstand and I love it. The wood is glossy dark and the washstand has a marble top that still hasn’t been screwed in place since we moved it here. The mirrors have black cracks in the corners and the dressing table has two enormous scratches made by a big, stray cat that used to steal its way into our house through my mother’s bedroom window.

Sometimes when I’m waiting for the mister to come home, the lads to come back from the park, and the night-in to begin, I lie on my bed and watch the sunset in the mirror. I think that the weather and the light that we grew up with live inside us, as much a part of us as our blood and our soul. It seems strange that I live so far from the place that I grew up in, and yet, the smell of the mangroves, the breeze that blows at this time of year and the orange glow of the sunset doesn’t stir feelings and emotions so much as it settles me, grounds me. Makes me feel that this is the time and the place where I am meant to be.

Who knew that an industrial Australian town nestled between a mangrove swamp and the outback would have so much in common with an oil-filled Arabian city nestled between a mangrove swamp and a desert?

None of that is what I came in here to say. I came in here to talk about Christmas, it being Christmas Eve and all that. It’s the nostalgia I guess. It made me talk about the breeze and the sunset.

It’s up and down, isn’t it? Christmas and all that goes with it. There’s all of the deadlines which, on many days, have to be faced with half a hangover and not enough sleep. There’s braving the shops and then going back to the shops because you’ve forgotten the thing you went there for in the first place. There’s New Year looming which is just another day but still somehow forces a person to account for herself and all of the things she didn’t achieve. And then, waiting underneath it all, there’s all the people and all of the relationships and all of their complexities.

My dad loved Christmas. He had a full head of hair and a bushy beard all of which went from fiery red to snow white long before he got to middle age. He worked in high schools for most of his teaching life, but ended his career at a regional South Australian area school which meant that he was the principal for the full range of ages. On the day of his retirement one of the youngest children came and said to him, ‘You’re not really Father Christmas, are you?’

My mum, for reasons many and varied, didn’t love it at all. We left my father’s family Christmas with my dad driving at blood alcohol levels far in excess of .08, my brother and I passive smoking my parents’ Marlboro reds, and my mother singing her Christmas refrain, ‘Merry Bloody Christmas.’

Our last Christmas Day before we moved to Abu Dhabi was terrible. We all knew that it would be Dad’s last, and my grandfather – 90 at the time – slipped on the pavement and cracked his ribs, forcing me to admit that I had to take on the guardian duties he’d trusted me with and face the consequences of his age. It was a rough year.

But this one is good. The four of us – me, the mister, youngest lad and the floppy adolescent – are, individually and collectively, in a good place right now and we’ve embraced the season like never before. We somewhat spontaneously put the decorations up together one evening, youngest lad and I suspending tinsel from every door- and window-frame in the house and the Floppy Adolescent moving behind us, neatening and straightening and symmetrifying it all. In a genius flourish, the Floppy Adolescent finished it off with red baubles hung on the antler’s ears to remind us of my dad who spent every Christmas Day that I knew him with cherries hooked over his ears. The mister never got used to cherry earrings, but I still get a thrill every time I find cherries still in a pair.

I’m making Christmas desserts today and tomorrow we’re taking them around to a lovely friend who has invited us for Christmas. It’s pretty nice being invited places for Christmas and I love making desserts. The last couple of days I’ve been in my happy place, in the kitchen, testing new recipes to share with friends while I alternate my music between my Christmas playlist and Double J. Really, is there a better way to spend time?

The first time I was in charge of Christmas dessert was at the mister’s mother’s house. ‘Can I do anything to help?’ I asked, expecting to grate carrots and peel potatoes. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘Perhaps you could do this,’ and handed me a recipe for Bombe Alaska. Fark. It worked a treat, but I’m not doing it this year. I’ve probably got the ingredients for it – I think I’ve bought the ingredients for about twelve different things, plus extras because you never really know whether Spinneys is going to have cream so you have to buy extras when you see it. I’ve had a bit of trouble with my egg whites the last couple of days, and I thought I’d have masses of yolks leftover but I curdled the custard I was using as a base for the ice cream so that sorted that.

This is all a bit rambly, isn’t it? And you probably don’t have time to be reading blog posts. You’ve got ribbons to tangle, champagne to pop, tears to dry, memories to sift through. I don’t know, I started out trying to say something, but I haven’t got there. Some of my close friends are having a rough time of it at the moment, and I wanted to try and write something useful. Something that said, ‘Hang in there, it will be okay.’ But life is complex, isn’t it, and some years Christmas is fantastic and some years less so.

Well, since we’ve already popped the champagne up there in that last paragraph, let’s raise a glass and toast. To the people we love and the people who love us.

Happy Christmas, my friends.

PS Sorry for the typos, I’ve had to type in a rush and I don’t have time to go back because I have to make an uncurdled custard now. Also sorry for the quality of the photograph. I suggested getting my real camera and tripod out, but the Floppy Adolescent would only agree to a selfie taken on my phone.

Mind you, not looking forward to the geographical celibacy (if that’s a thing)

‘Would you really leave your husband here on his own?’

At the time she asked, we were sitting at the entrance of the school waiting for our children to come out, and I wasn’t even sure I knew her name. That’s how well I didn’t know her. I was wearing a denim skirt and a cotton shirt I’d pulled off the sewing machine earlier that day. I hadn’t finished it, not properly, and a loose thread was tickling the top of my arm. I was wearing the blue leather sandals I bought at Grundy’s on Rundle Street on a trip to Adelaide three, maybe four years, ago. I like those sandals. They are soft around my foot and easy to wear.

The polish on my toenails had started to disintegrate. I’ve never had an actual pedicure, I just slap a bit of colour on my nails from time to time, scratching whatever is left of the last coat off before I do. Standing in a crowd here I’m often embarrassed when I look down and see the state of my feet compared to everyone else’s. I think that will be different when I’ve moved back to Adelaide. I don’t remember ever being embarrassed by poorly polished toenails when I lived there.

Not that anyone has ever said anything. No one would be rude enough to comment on my ageing, drying feet, would they? But more than once, more than twice, people I barely even know have asked me about moving back to Australia and leaving my husband behind. I won’t say it isn’t something to worry about. I mean relationships do need nurturing if they are to flourish. But really? I wonder. Would you really ask an almost-stranger that?

It happened when we moved here too. People making comments about the dent we would put in our mortgage, about the cars we would drive, the early retirement we would take. I was astonished by it the first time that it happened. In my mind I had always seen myself leaving Adelaide. We had already moved a little bit and travelled a lot. Living overseas with my children was something I always wanted to do. But person after person after person made comment (passing or otherwise) about the financial motivations of our move. So weird.

Certainly, it’s not something I ever envisaged. That I would live in one country and the mister would live in another. But it’s just how things have panned out. Temporarily at least. The lads and I – for reasons various and multiple, individual and intertwined – are better off living in Australia, and the mister’s employment situation means he can’t leave here. Not yet. It will resolve itself. He will find a job. But all the same and nonetheless, we will live apart.

None of my friends, no one who knows me, seems to be concerned about the state of my marriage. Like I say, I’m not sure it’s the most fabulous way to nurture a relationship, live half a world apart. But it is what it is and we aren’t where we aren’t, and step by step it will work itself out. And in the meantime, I am off to have a pedicure. Find out what it is that I’ve been missing all these years.

On the Malcolms

Okay, look, I’ve got a bit too much time on my hands at the moment, but here’s the thing about the Prime Ministers, Malcolm.

Them, I do not trust.

It seems to me that we are all being seduced by Malcolm the Turnbull’s charms for reasons including, and pretty much limited to, the fact that he is not Tony Abbott.

Let me be clear: Tony Abbott is an odious man. Okay, I’ve never met him, I don’t know him personally. As a general principle-to-live-by I try to be generous of spirit and of kind and I try not to judge people and certainly not harshly. Maybe I should rephrase my clarity: Tony Abbott’s politics are odious to me. And I’m pretty sure that if I met him, he would be odious to me. The sense of elation I felt the night that he was defeated cannot be understated.

Let me be clear: Malcolm the Turnbull is a most attractive man. Handsome, elegant, smart and fun. He shows love and respect for his partner. His smile? Oh, my lord. Let us all be seduced by his charm. Where’s the harm? But let me be clear on this as well: Malcolm Turnbull’s politics are odious to me.

I have to remind myself to separate those things. The charming man. His odious politics. A vote for one is a vote for the other too.

I think perhaps there is something in the name. Malcolm. It’s an almost awkward name, the two syllables separated as they are by that click that’s not quite in your throat. Awkward, but perhaps it carries some enchantment, a bewitching. Casting a spell of which we are aware but happy to give in to.

I know I am increasingly alone in this, but Malcolm the Fraser I have not forgiven. I know that we all admire his recent (and not-so-recent, in fact, his altogether consistent) adherence to the principles of human rights. He talked the talk, but he walked the walk as well.

But here’s the thing: adherence to the principles of human rights is baseline. It’s the cake, it’s not the icing. It’s what our leaders should be doing. I mean good on him for standing firm and speaking out. But so he should have. He was just doing the right thing.

For me, what looms larger, his actual legacy, is the dismissal of Gough Whitlam. And this is not just some romantic nostalgia for Gough, though I’ll admit to some of that. I think we have to take seriously the disrespect that Malcolm the Fraser showed for our democracy. Such little respect for our democratic process. Such little respect for us. I have no scientific proof of course, but how can that Born to Rule mentality not be with us still?

I’m not saying that we should be hating on a man who isn’t here to defend himself. I’m not saying we should throw eggs at his headstone. He did a bad thing, but I don’t think he’s evil. Or even odious. I’m just saying that in our gratitude to people for not being Tony Abbott we should not kid ourselves that they are something greater than they are.

The Prime Ministers, Malcolm.

Our rage, it must be maintained.

On umbrellas (and other things)

I took the borrowed umbrellas out of the borrowed car and held them out to the Floppy Adolescent standing beside me. As he reached across his forehead and pulled his fringe into place, I drew my arm back.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll carry them.’

‘You don’t have to carry them all. We can carry our own.’

‘No thanks. That’s an argument waiting to happen.’

‘Mum, please. You can trust us. It’s just umbrellas.’

We have been together, the three of us, the two of them and me, for a week and they have been together longer, their extended Abu Dhabi summer break taken in a South Australian winter.

Brothers on holiday together.

Needle, bicker, hug, laugh.

Rinse, repeat.

Add umbrellas.

I handed the umbrellas to him (I know, right) then I locked the doors of borrowed car and the rented apartment and we began our walk towards the tram.

‘Oh God, look at you,’ I said to the lads. It is as if the outside light is somehow different and suddenly I could see them for what they were. Their jeans ripped at the knees, the sleeves of their jumpers too short, everything unwashed. How long has it been since anything saw the touch of an iron?

‘Mum, we look fine.’

‘Howcome you care so much about your fringe, but so little about your clothes?’

‘Mum. Please.’

‘At least tell me you thought to clean your teeth.’

The look! Teenage disdain perfected, but these days I am unaffected.

‘That’s the tree!’ The lads both pointed. They have been kicking the footy day after day for hours. At least once per session as far as I can tell the footy lands in the fork of one of the Norfolk Pines that line The Esplanade. This day, a police car had pulled up to watch them throwing rocks into the tree as they tried to dislodge the ball. ‘It’s all right,’ the lads reassured me when they recounted the story. ‘They were laughing. The had to watch us because there was nothing else for them to do. They’re bored. No one robs houses on Thursday morning.’

We arrived at the tram.

It used to be that when we came back on holidays I had an Australian SIM, an interwebby usb, a metrocard for the tram. Now too much time has passed and the SIM is too big for my phone, the telco has deactivated whatever it was that fired the usb, the metrocard is lost. I stood in front of the ticket machine and followed the steps, one by one, none of it in my memory now, everything being relearned. One dirham coins look like ten cent pieces to me, but not to the machine. We had gone two stops before I was holding our tickets. In the seats at the front of the tram umbrellas had turned into swords.

By the time the tram arrived at Victoria Square the darkness had started to fall. The lights were coming on, the street lights white, and a soft and buttery glow came from the office windows. When I am travelling, this is the time that I feel most alone, most not-at-home. My breaths grew shallow and caught in my throat. I swallowed to pop my ears.

Pirie Street. Rundle Mall. We got off the tram.

‘How far is it?’

‘Just down here.’

‘Yes, but how far? How long will it take us to get there?’

‘Not long.’

‘How long is not long?’

We crossed North Terrace, walked past Parliament House and the bleak, grey space of the Festival Plaza, stark and barren even in the soft light of the early night.

Inside the Festival Theatre it was how it had always been, but it was not what it used to be. Everyone used to be younger, the carpet used to be thicker, the stairs down to the bistro were steeper.

We looked at the bar snacks menu and I ordered. The cabernet sauvignon could have had more shades of marshmallow, the chicken wings could have had less sauce, the salt and pepper squid could not have been more like rubber. The chips were good, but there were not enough to go around. You never know with chips, do you? Sometimes too many, sometimes not enough, never just the right amount.

Bicker, needle, hug, laugh, bicker, needle, hug, laugh.

My boys looked shabby and they had umbrellas.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘Do we have to be the loudest wherever we go?’

‘Mum.’ They spoke in unison. ‘It’s only jokes.’ They wrapped their arms around each other’s necks and walked back up the stairs.

We watched The Book Of Loco a play about a mother’s death, migration and displacement, the edge of madness. I know, right?

I felt my Floppy Adolescent sitting with me and I remembered. My father and I sitting in the Keith Michell Theatre watching a Harvest production of Equus. Or maybe it wasn’t Harvest, but it was certainly Equus. And I felt so grown up sitting with my father. And when, at the end, my Floppy Adolescent stood and clapped and said, ‘That was amazing,’ I could not stop myself.

‘Oh God, you’re crying, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Mum. Really?’

On the walk back to the tram it rained and we were happy to discover that our umbrellas were fit for purpose. At the tram stop it was cold and it was windy and there was no romance in public transport. The rain died down as we got on and by the time we reached our stop there was no more rain, the wind had stilled.

A few steps away from the tram and we could hear the sea, the waves rolling in. All week I have been falling asleep, waking up to this sound. Sometimes it soothes and other times it stirs, whistling through my veins like they are empty alleys in my soul.

A man on a strange reclining bike rode past and out onto the jetty.

‘Do you think he’s going fishing?’ That’s my youngest boy.

‘He hasn’t got a rod. Are you stupid?’ And that’s my oldest.

Bicker, needle, hug then laugh. They looped their arms around each other’s necks and walked, loped two steps ahead, elbows digging into ribs, knuckles ground against skulls. Bicker, needle, hug then laugh.

From behind us I heard the rumble, loudly, of a plane.

‘That’s the plane to Dubai. That’s the one we catch.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because it’s nearly ten o’clock and this is Adelaide.’

I looked in the direction of the airport, but I could not see the plane. Too much cloud? Taken off in the other direction? I wanted to speak. I wanted my boys to know, I wanted them to understand that this is an Adelaide sound, that when I was their age and my parents brought me to Adelaide and we stayed in my grandfather’s house this was the noise that woke me. Planes just taking off or landing. This was the sound that reminded my body where I was, where I had woken. Somewhere safe that wasn’t home. I had no idea that those planes were flying to places I would one day see.

The lads ran on ahead. My heels clicked on the paving, the sea rolled in, the wind had started again.

There was no rain and the Norfolk Pines were silent.

Thank you Tuesday, you were perfect

Far less stressed than I used to be. Like so much less stressed I’m hardly stressed at all. Started the day at breakfast with my fabulous friend. Got quite a bit of work done on my thesis in the morning, took the lads to an excellent cafe for a late lunch, got more work done on my thesis, and then watched a cracker of a sunset while the lads kicked the footy in the background. It was a perfect Adelaide winter’s afternoon – deep blue sky, golden light in the eucalypts, turn your back to the sun and let it warm you through that kind of thing. To end the day I took advantage of this apartment’s uber-luxurious shower and then, to make a great day perfect, discovered that at least one of my children has learned how to replace an empty toilet roll on the holder. Okay, so he left the wrapper and the old roll on the floor, but let’s take our wins where we get them, eh?

Fortune cookies and the dentist

We had fortune cookies after dinner tonight. The Floppy Adolescent says they taste like styrofoam, but I’ve always been partial to a bit of fortune cookie action. I also like my bag of runes, but that’s a different thing, isn’t it? A different level of divining. Anyway I haven’t got my runes with me right now, so in the absence of better methods, these are my current fortunes.

In case you can’t read them they say
Adversity doesn’t build character, it reveals it.
Many a false step is made by standing still.

Probably you aren’t supposed to take two fortunes, but I did, because I like the biscuits.

The adversity seems a bit more 2009, but I guess the false step one is prescient. I can feel that paralysis creeping up, the one you get where you’ve got too much going on and so you do nothing not because that’s the best option but because it saves you from choosing the wrong thing to get started on.

I’ve been in Adelaide for a week, so that’s sort of one third through my time in Australia and halfway through my time in Adelaide or maybe slightly less than that so slightly more time remaining than I am thinking, but gah! Does time not fly?

This is the bit where I start getting stressed at all that I still want to do, knowing I won’t get it all done, but not quite at the place where I still pretend to myself like anything is possible. I know it’s stressing me because a few hours ago when the lads were wrestling on their bedroom floor and I said to them, ‘You need to stop, I’m feeling stressed right now,’ they did indeed stop. I guess I had my stress voice on.

There’s been quite a bit going on in the background the last month or so – you know the kinds of things that aren’t urgent or don’t affect you directly, but are big nonetheless so take a bit of (over)thinking. So there’s a bit more getting stuff sorted and arranging things and waiting for other things than I had planned for.

I much prefer the time later on (and this will be tomorrow or the next day) where a person can no longer pretend that everything will get done and starts to slash at the to-do as the priorities prioritise themselves. Actually, here’s something we can scrub off right now: dentist. I mean, am I really going to spend a precious day of my trip at the dentist when I could be having a coffee with a friend or another glass of sparkling burgundy with my cousin, or even just wandering from place to place and thinking, ‘this is winter, this is rain, how lovely does this feel’? And it’s not like there aren’t dentists in Abu Dhabi and after seven years of living there I should be able to not only make an appointment but get myself to it.

Scrub dentist from the list.

The stress, it has already lifted. That was easy.

Not drowning, waving

When I was a young adult, nervous about leaving my home (my house, my town, my friends) and moving to university, my mum said, ‘You can always come back.’ She spoke the words to me, but it wasn’t me she was really talking to. There was never any doubt that I would leave. I was heartbroken at leaving my boyfriend. But my parents wanted me to go. I wanted to go. It had never even been a conversation, it was a known. I would leave

(Quick aside: I would have stayed if I’d been able to get a hairdressing apprenticeship. I had a deep and secret wish to be a hairdresser, to join that glamorous world, to be introduced to the mysteries of face shapes and hair types. To stand behind someone, catch her eye in the mirror as I held her hair in the tips of my fingers and say, ‘And who did your hair last time?’ All of these things and more. I know it doesn’t fit with who I am, but I would deeply, dearly love to be a hairdresser.)

But no, it wasn’t me my mum was talking to. When my mum said, ‘You can always come back,’ she was talking about my friends, the ones who had decided not to leave. They made those decisions for many reasons. They didn’t get the grades for the courses they wanted, they didn’t have the money, they didn’t have their parents’ support. Of course for some of them, it wasn’t a decision. They didn’t want to go, didn’t think about it, it didn’t cross their minds. A woman who had found her place in the world but always wondered what else she might have been, what else she might have seen, I think she wanted everyone to leave and find the things she hadn’t found. Here’s a thing I think my mum had never considered: they were happy where they were.

That stayed with me all my life. You can always come back. I used it as a line in my first novel*. And on the night we decided that we would make the move to Abu Dhabi I said it with a conviction that, at the time, was real. If it doesn’t work, I said to the mister, We can always come back. When I said that, I didn’t think it wouldn’t work. I had always seen myself as adventurous. I had always wanted to live more places. I had always wanted to show my children the expanses of the world.

Two mistakes. I didn’t know it wouldn’t work. I didn’t know my mum was wrong.

My mum said lots of wonderful things, gave lots of great advice. But she was wrong about this. I mean, she was right, of course. You can pack up your stuff, get back in the car and go back. You can find out a place doesn’t work for you and you can turn around, go back to the place that works better for you (even if better is really only less worse). But Heraclitus said it better, You can’t jump in the same river twice.

I know you can’t compare my mother’s pragmatism with Heraclitus’ philosophy, but he’s more right than she is. My mother’s solution will help you to solve the immediate physical disharmony. When you go back, you will once again be able to find your place from A to B. The colour of the sky in that patch of afternoon between ‘anything is possible’ and ‘it’s too late’ will be the right shade of blue. The moisture in the air (or lack of) will prick your skin. The songs the birds sing will be the perfect pitch.

But all the things that you bring back will be changed.

When I left Adelaide I was a mother of young children who couldn’t tie their shoes. I had ambitions, and although I had not articulated them, they were, as we say, realistic and achievable. I took the strength of my marriage for granted. I lived a life that was true to myself and the things I believed in. I knew who I was, what I wanted, what I was doing next. I knew the kind of mother I wanted to be, the wife, the daughter, the friend. Then I moved to Abu Dhabi and none of those things were true. Or at least they changed, shifted, became less true.

I didn’t go back. I stayed. Bit by bit, piece by piece, put myself together again. And here I am. Mended. Happy. Here.

And now, it’s time to change again. There are many reasons, but mainly it’s because the Floppy Adolescent can tie his shoes and needs something beyond the world we live in. What opened up his younger world is now restricting. To help him get to where he needs to be, I need to go back. Perhaps not physically, but mentally.

That’s why I’m standing here on the bank. Looking in at the river. It is crystal clear, but even without dipping in my toes, I know that it is cold. The rocks on the bottom are smooth and round, but they will be hard beneath my feet. It looks calm, but I will need to swim hard only to stay still. My skin will prick.

The birdsong, when I hear it, will be pitch perfect.

Jumping in.

*Yes, I’m totally calling it my first novel now to distinguish it from second, but now I’ve decided that manuscript I’ve just finished is going to become a novel and sometime soon. I’m going to get that done. But I’m not sure where the full top should go there.

Anniversary

It’s seven years today since my dad died. On the seventh anniversary of my mother’s death, Dad rang me – he rang me on each one of her anniversaries and her birthdays. I remember saying, on her seventh anniversary, ‘It feels different this year.’ ‘Yes,’ he said. And it does feel different, because it is. The loss is deep instead of raw. Life has gone on. At seven years, it’s a new stage of things.

I’ve been tossing up whether or not to write about Dad today. I sometimes feel that I talk about my parents and their deaths too much. I worry that people think that I let those events define me. That people (that you) are thinking, Can’t you move on already? Goodness me, we get it.

Clare Bowditch sings it perfectly in The Thing About Grief, “It gets kind of boring for the people who don’t yet know.”

It’s true that when I talk about my parents I am talking about dead people. But I don’t talk about them because they’re dead. I talk about them because they are my parents and because they are a part of my life.

Part of my relationship with my dad is that I miss him.

Sometimes I miss him with a pang. Like when the Floppy Adolescent glides through the loungeroom on his skateboard balancing a cat on his shoulder and I think of my dad walking around our house with our stumpy-tailed cat on his shoulder. Or when Cricket Boy comes loudly to the defence of test cricket, ‘But it’s so exciting! The game can change with any ball!’

Sometimes I miss his steady hand. Like last year when we had An Incident with the Floppy Adolescent and the mister and I walked around the compound talking it through. ‘I wish we could talk to my dad,’ I said. ‘He would tell us it’s all okay. He would say, “You’re on the right track, you’ll see it through.”‘

Sometimes I miss him because what are we without the people who know us best? There is no one else who can say, ‘Bloody hell, you sound so much like Vivienne,’ with such meaning.

And sometimes I simply miss sitting at the table with him, the newspapers spread around, wine half-drunk, coffee gone cold, food, always more food and the conversation going in endless circles.

I miss his energy and I miss his love.

But there’s much more to our relationship than a simple wish that he were here. I don’t know exactly how to explain those things. There’s a lot of the same things that there would be if he were alive. Some months ago, I came far too close to making a spectacularly, enormously awful decision. But I knew I wouldn’t do it because I would have to answer Dad. He doesn’t let me get away with being dishonest to myself. I send him emails and texts in my mind, the details of my days that I would have shared. I look at his photograph and I tell him bits and pieces. But there’s more to it than that. Something deeper. He’s just here, living with me. Every single day. That’s the best explanation I can give.

Lucky us, we had a good and a solid and a straightforward relationship so there wasn’t much in the way of deathbed revelations, but there were two things he talked about that stay with me.

Don’t be angry. Don’t be angry with people who love you and don’t be angry with yourself. Forgive people if they hurt you and forgive yourself. I have managed to let go of most of my anger and my life is better for it. I still do an excellent line in churn and guilt, self-recrimination and flagellation though. I don’t think Dad would be surprised by that.

The other thing he said: Keep writing.

Do you know the stupidest I’ve ever done and no, I will never forgive myself for it? Not showing Dad the draft of my first novel before it was published. How dumb was that? I don’t even know why I didn’t let him read it. Scared I guess. By the time I had the courage Dad didn’t have the concentration. Really dumb.

But I almost did an even dumber thing. I almost stopped writing altogether. I have no idea of why it took me so much effort to write a second manuscript. I love writing. I feel good about myself when I’m writing and rubbish when I’m not. Whatever the reason it was really freaking hard getting it to the place that it’s in now. But I did it. I got it written. Even if it never gets published, even if you never read it, I wrote it and I feel good about that. I hadn’t realised until I started writing again how unbalanced my relationship with Dad had become. It wasn’t quite that I was letting him down but there’s definitely a sense now that I can look him in the eye again.

I don’t know where I’m going with this really. I don’t have some stunning insight to share or a life-changing observation.

I think I just wanted to talk about my dad.

Thank you for listening.

This is Denis with the Floppy Adolescent a few weeks before the Floppy Adolescent had his surgery.

This is Denis with Cricket Boy at the Adelaide Oval. Cricket Boy’s first test match.

Statistics

So I finished the undergraduate portion of my studies and then I took a bit of a break because the university I was studying with didn’t offer honours by distance, only on campus. I had thought they might offer it last year, but they didn’t so I sort of more or less moved on from the idea of doing much more study. I could have gone to another university but that involves getting your pieces of paper stamped by an official of some kind which involves first getting your pieces of paper and I don’t know, everything that’s already complicated gets a bit more complicated when you’re living overseas and although I’m mentally pretty strong these days there’s nothing like running around (in real life and virtually) trying to get the right pieces of paper signed by the right people to put that strength to the test (and find it lacking).

Then they shifted to online delivery this year and I thought I may as well enrol because I still had my original goals plus a few others in mind and because it seemed a bit of a waste to have come this far and not go any further.

What it was that made me think I could study full-time and work full-time I do not know, but there was a pretty miserable month there at the beginning of the year until I did the sensible thing and withdrew from a couple of units leaving myself with the thesis (because I’d done so much work on it by then it was silly to withdraw from that) and the statistics unit because hahahahahahahahahahahaha I may as well get it over with.

Holy moly. That unit pushed me to the brink of insanity like few other things have done. The world of numbers, it’s not my natural habitat, but I’d pushed my way through the earlier stats units to do not too badly and had, in a strange way, enjoyed pushing my brain to places it hadn’t previously been. But something had changed. First it was a few years since I’d done the first stats units so I had to go back and remember everything I’d forgotten (which wasn’t quite everything I’d learned, but close enough). Second because I was at work from 7.30 – 4.30 every day plus driving time I had to get up early and stay up late to do things like listening to lectures and working through tutorial questions. Now, I do like getting up in the morning and padding about in the silence, but it’s hard to set your alarm with enthusiasm for simple regression and the analysis of covariance. And not to mention trying to load SPSS and sorry you don’t have the right operating system and etcetera etcetera etcereraagghhhh.

With every spare moment spent working on statistics – something I don’t like and get neither enrichment nor enjoyment from – I felt like my life was completely off-track. And this at a time when I had thought I really had got my shit together. Instead of striding with efficient speed from one task to the next as I had imagined I would do, I was back to standing in the middle of the kitchen, sobbing. I felt so stupid – not just because I couldn’t do the statistics, but also for being a grown-up, middle-aged woman, sitting at her desk with a hangover (easily come by when you’re living on six hours’ sleep) and working on an overdue assignment. All of the decisions which had once seemed sensible and focused now seemed as unfocused and as scattered as ever. I’m supposed to be in control of my life by now! I would rage at the mister. Everyone else knows what they’re doing and where they’re going and look at me. I’ve still got no idea.

I logged in to the enrolment page every day telling myself to quit, just quit. But I was past the withdraw without penalty date and I can’t quit, because when I was in first year university I withdrew from French after the withdraw without penalty date. I told my parents I was withdrawing, but I didn’t mention ‘past the without penalty’ bit. My mother was a beautiful, elegant woman. She was whip-smart and wise. But my goodness she was fierce and this is the conversation that followed when she saw my results for that year:

‘What’s with that French result?’
‘I told you I was withdrawing.’
‘You didn’t tell me it meant that you would fail.’
Silence from me (because I could see the fierceness rising) until my mother said: ‘This family will fail, but we will fail with dignity and with pride.’
You see? There’s no way I could really withdraw. I mean, she’s been dead for more than twenty years but those words still live.

So I kept plugging away. In truth, I couldn’t really work out what was the problem. I’d studied before. I knew that it would come to an end. The mister reminded me that I had said it was going to be hard in May and June. I didn’t know why I was getting quite so worked up. But worked up I was and when I rang the exam venue to confirm the exam time my voice was shaking and I burst into tears when I got off the phone. It seemed to be something of an over-reaction even for my over-thinking mind.

It wasn’t until I got to the exam venue and the frigid air of its air-conditioner, and the cloying lemon scent of the open bathroom door hit me that I got it. The last time I was sitting in this room it had been only an hour since I’d discharged myself from hospital where I’d ended up after a straightforward miscarriage went a teensy bit pear-shaped so if you added everything up, multiplied it by a sandstorm and divided it by completely-exhausted-because-of-getting-up-at-four-am you’ve got…well, you’ve got tears in the exam room. But there’s the thing. Once you realise there’s a reason and it’s not random insanity, everything looks a bit less foggy and feels a bit less muddy.

So I went into the exam room and goodness knows how but I did extraordinarily well in the exam which, in combination with the okay result I got for my assignment gave me a not bad distinction in the end. Which isn’t the high distinction I’m aiming for, but it was much closer to a high distinction than it was to a credit so I’ll be able to make those couple of marks up with the other units. And now I’m back working on my thesis which is a qualitative methodology and words and that’s much more solid ground for me and I’m not sobbing in the kitchen anymore, and actually I feel like I’ve got my shit together and I know where I’m going and how to get there. Plus dignity and pride.

Resigned

I finished my job last week. Like, you know, not going back kind of finished. I’ve been working in libraries again, this time at a school. The end of the school year came and I decided that I would, well, ‘resign’ makes it sound much more dramatic than it really is, but I suppose that’s what I did. Anyway, the upshot is that I don’t have a job.

I think I might have retired from libraries. I’m not sure, but it feels that way at the moment. (future employers, please don’t read that last sentence, okay? Obviously when I tell you yours is the job of my dreams I mean it. Okay?).

There were all sorts of reasons that I decided to leave the job, but in the end they all boiled down to the same thing: my heart wasn’t in it. I mean, I liked it – much of it I loved – and I did a good job and I put myself into it and I was sad to be leaving it.

But at the same time there were other things I wanted to be doing that weren’t getting done. My novel for one thing. And other writing things I want to do. I can’t write them until I finish the novel manuscript. My study. I’ve got a thesis due at the end of October and I don’t see the point of going back to study at my stage if I’m not going to do it properly. There was all of the stuff about being the kind of parent I want to be. The Floppy Adolescent will be leaving home soon and I want to spend more time with him because it’s true that adolescents are unpredictable beasts, but they are also spontaneous and fun and make jokes that only adolescents make. Friends. I like to be a good friend. I like to spend time with my friends and I like them to be able to ask me for things if they need them. And then in this strange limbo-life that all expats lead to a greater or lesser extent the house as a whole was missing the flexibility of my freelancing life, and that’s going to become more and more of a thing as the Floppy Adolescent moves ever-closer to Young Adulthood.

It was odd, because for so long I’d been convinced that going back to work in a traditional work-way – with a desk and colleagues and a daily start and end time and a regular salary – was going to help me find my equilibrium. That being able to answer that question, ‘What do you do?’ with a definite answer rather than, ‘Oh, well, I don’t know, I don’t do anything much’ would help me to feel that I had a place in the world. Somewhere to go and someone to be when I got there.

For a while having a job did do that. It was good to be part of something bigger than myself and to spend less time in my own head. Plus, matching kids with books is a pretty nice way to spend a day. But I could tell that if I’d stayed it would start being counterproductive to my (constant) search for equilibrium. That I would start to hate getting up in the morning and would be consumed by all of the things that I couldn’t do while I was going to work. And I wouldn’t be doing a good job then. I wouldn’t do a bad job – I’m an earnest, eldest child and I’m nothing if not conscientious. But I’d always have half a mind on something else. It would be a churn.

I do know how fortunate I am to be able to make this decision. I’m fortunate that my partner earns enough for the four of us not only to live on, but also to be able to make choices like this. More fortunate still, I married a man who means it when he says he values me and that he believes writing a novel that may or may not be published is a good way for a person to spend her time. I know how lucky I am.

For a few days it seemed like maybe I’d made the right decision in that ‘this was meant to be’ kind of way because it looked like I might have one of my best freelancing clients back. One door closes another one opens. I don’t know why I still let myself believe that kind of stuff because that door closed almost as soon as it opened and for one reason and another it didn’t work out. So I’m freaking out a bit about no income in the immediate future. As much as I reconciled myself to the financial disparities in our incomes a long time ago, I’m bothered that I’m making no financial contribution at all, plus however much I tell myself not to be worried by it, the lack of financial autonomy plagues me.

But overall I know that I’m on the right path. Somehow or other the strands of everything will be woven together. Oh, look, a cheesy life’s big tapestry metaphor to end.