Dear Tony Abbott
Shut up. Please.
Or, at least speak more quietly. I shouldn’t be able to hear you from here.
Yours &c
TC
we're all making our own sense of things
Dear Tony Abbott
Shut up. Please.
Or, at least speak more quietly. I shouldn’t be able to hear you from here.
Yours &c
TC
Howcome learning stuff just makes you realise how much more you’ve got to learn?
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?
Sometimes, not often, but on occasion and every now and then, I find myself saying, ‘I was not right about that.’
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.
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)
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.’
The letter began:
Forgive me for every time I said ‘I don’t believe’.
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 |