Today is Saturday

One of the things about working full time outside my house for the first time in many, many years is the renewed sense of pleasure I now take in the weekend. My, but I treasure it. In these parts, Friday is the Holy Day, so we have Friday and Saturday as the weekend and go back to work on Sunday. Which takes care of the whole Monday blues things quite nicely.

Yesterday, I wasted far too much time faffing about on the internet. But last night was good as we went to Al Ain to the birthday party of some friends we made when we went to Fujeirah. I should show you those photos of Fujeirah, shouldn’t I? I think you’d like them.

I’m determined not to waste today. Not only because this is the last day of the weekend, but because the weather is most definitely heating up, and it won’t be long before we’re all inside again.

The mister has gone off to Dubai to take part in an Important Meeting (I guess it will involve powerpoint and spreadsheets), but I intend to:
– waste time on the internet (done)
– decide which Mall is most likely to have an Ominitrix, visit said Mall, catch breath at hideous price of Omnitrix, consider saying, ‘no, you can’t have it’, then rememeber that it was totally promised and I have to;
– have trip to the Mall delayed by ten minutes while youngest lad gels his hair;
– fit in a bit of work on either my second novel or essay collection;
– go to the gym for step class (fitness level decreasing and weight increasing as a direct result of returning to work, because going to work not only involves sitting at a desk all day but also accepting the many offers of chocolate and cookies which come my way during the day – it would be rude to say no);
– stumble on step (I am not at all coordinated)
– intervene in soccer disputes;
– intervene in disputes over lego ownership;
– intervene in arguments over who is looking at who;
– mess around in the kitchen with youngest lad, making muffins and so on for the week’s lunchboxes;
– decide what to have for tea, realise that there’s no food in the fridge, make scrambled eggs, lacing my own with smoked salmon to make me feel like I’ve served up something approximating a real meal;
– check the strawberry plants;
– hopefully get in a few more rows on the right front of the cotton top I started a year ago and now just really want to see the back of (though I’ve finished the back, so could see that, but you know what I mean).

Best be off then.

PS Do you know what I really hate? Australian politicians who weasle their way into the death penalty ‘debate’ all-the-while proclaiming they’ve ‘always been against the death penalty’. I think I preferred it when Tony Abbott was talking about his sex life. (And, Mike Rann, even though I can’t vote in the upcoming election, I remember when you did it too, appalling behaviour).

We really must catch up sometime.

Did I tell you that I’ve got a full time job? A most marvellous job in a most marvellous organisation stumbled upon most unexpectedly.

No? Goodness. I should have told you that.

Did I tell you that I am learning Arabic? Which pleases the lads no end, especially when they’re helping me with my homework.

No? Well, I am. I can’t believe I didn’t mention it.

Did I tell you that I’ve got a piece in the soon-to-be-launched, and I think it’s almost in your bookstore Kill Your Darlings journal?

I didn’t tell you that either? Oh. It really has been a while, hasn’t it?

I know it’s just google, but sometimes it really is spooky

Questioning google searches intrigue me. They used to annoy me, librarian-trained as I was when databases were the Next Big Thing, the internet was but a twinkle in Tim Berners-Lee’s eye, and boolean logic was most certainly in the exam. ‘Keywords people,’ I would think. ‘Use the quotation symbols,’ I would snarl from behind my screen.

These days, I’m much less personally affronted by the ‘what time is it in adelaide’, ‘what time is it in adelaide right now’ or ‘what can I do in adelaide’ searches I see in my wordpress dashboard. Life is too short, has moved on, and boolean is just a word.

Besides, I like the poetry of the google questions that come my way. Like today:

can i run away for my 40th birthday

it asked.

Well, dear 39-year-old whoever you are, wherever you currently live, I don’t know what other answers you found, but here’s mine:

yes.

Yes, you can run away for your 40th birthday. You can buy a plane ticket, get a stamp in your passport, bury your head in the sand.

But whatever it is you’re running from will, no matter how tightly you pack your suitcase, slide its way into the space between your knickers and your socks. And it won’t come out in the wash.

But that’s okay, because one day, you’ll wake up and you’ll realise that just next week you’re turning 41.

…
PS And ‘green liquid from back of fridge’ person? If you’re still there…this time of year, my bet’s on basil, bought in a fit of ‘let’s have pesto’ exuberance.

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.’