Six years ago a handy man came to our house and stayed for 4 weeks. Well he didn’t actually stay with my son and me, but he did visit regularly to do work around the place and have lunch with us sometimes. And one day just as we were about to start eating, he asked if he could say grace.

My 8-year-old son had found the handholding and head bowing odd but did it anyway. The handyman’s giving thanks to the spaghetti bolognaise had surprised me too at first but I got used to it during the following weeks and even came to like it.

In his book An Elegant Argument for Spirituality Without God, Andre Comte-Sponville asks if ‘Atheists have as much spirit as everyone else; why would they be less interested in spiritual life?’ 

Why indeed? Although I never really know what people mean when they say the’re not religious but that they are spiritual.

I don’t believe in God. I never have and most likely never will.  After all I come from a family of atheists and communists, muckrakers and skeptics.

I was 10 years-old and my best friend was preparing for her Confirmation, twirling about showing off the new white flowy dress her mother had made for the big event. I asked her what a confirmation was and she said that ‘It’s when you promise yourself to God.’

Really? How come she got to give herself to God and dress up like a bride and I didn’t. I asked Mum.  ‘Because she’s Catholic’, she said ‘and just because we’re Italians doesn’t mean we all believe in God.’

God or no god I still wanted to wear a dress like that, and surely my nonna could make it for me?

But when I asked my grandmother if she could rustle me up a dress like my friend’s, with its lace Peter Pan collar, she led me outside and declared authoritatively that ‘God was right here in our garden and not in any church.’ I couldn’t see anything except tomatoes and a chook shed but she seemed so confident that her version has always stayed with me.

Later in my 20s I visited a Tibetan monk. I was lost, depressed and flailing about for meaning and a Buddhist friend suggested it. Why not?

Once in the monk’s modest suburban home, he looked up at me from his armchair in front of the telly, ushered for me to sit down and poured me a cup of tea, offered me a Tic Toc biscuit. Then he went back to watching the cricket. Eventually he looked at me again, smiled and suggested I go away and meditate. That was it. Maybe I’m just not wired for religion.

In my 30s I discovered the theatre and it seemed that the ‘God-shaped hole’ within me, as Salmon Rushdie puts it, was filled finally with art. I had found my spiritual home and my tribe at last, and so spent the next 20 years working and living in the arts community.

Today I am in my 50s and the young handyman is looking into my eyes and saying that he will pray for my family and particularly for my ill sister. The he suggests I get down on my knees. I feel silly, but when my knees settle upon the cold tiles of our kitchen floor, I feel something shift inside me. It’s as if the mere act of surrender, of supplication has somehow jogged my body memory. I am calmer, stiller, focussed. 

I really wanted to believe that the handyman’s prayer would make my sister well. But it didn’t.

I never heard from him again after that until I received an invite to his wedding. There was a picture of him and his bride-to-be on a small white card that said they were getting married in a private ceremony at the Registry Office but to join them later in their garden and to please bring a plate.

My now 14-year-old son tells me that in his Comparative Religion class they teach about ‘miracles and stuff. I mean, as if.’ I tell him that people are entitled to believe what they wish as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. Parenting 101, I know, but unlike my own fundamentalist atheist parents I’m trying not to influence him too overtly in areas of faith at least.

This week my mother and I picked vegetables from a friend’s garden. My mother tugged and snipped at the carrots and parsley, eggplants and silver beet as we filled a large basket with it all, silently.

Later that evening she phoned me. ‘I just want to say that when I got home I burst into tears. I don’t really know why, but something about picking those vegetables moved me and, I was so overwhelmed that I cried. Anyway…’

I thought of my nonna and I standing in our vegetable garden over 40 years ago and felt the tender tug of three generations of female skeptics who had found god amongst the parsley and eggplants.

 

 

 

 

My son and I were reading in bed together. He had Standing Tall, a book about the history of Lego and I was half-heartedly flicking through Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. I hadn’t been able to read or write a thing for weeks. But I determined now, to at least make a show of normality for my child’s sake. And non fiction was easier than fiction, less of an escape, not as disloyal or frivolous, somehow. And there it was – a whole chapter on writing about someone you love who has died. Lamott describes it as ‘writing a present’. A friend of mine describes it as a kind of ‘controlled keening’.

***

My sister’s story reads like an over the top pitch for a television series, except that it’s true and she did actually fight with the Sandinistas, take a bullet for the revolution (literally) and she has lead a crazy-brave life. In her diary when she was thirteen she wrote in red pen, ‘I want to marry Nicaragua’ and she did. Sort of. She’s always been as sharp as a whip; beautiful, smart and funny – the trifecta. But she can be pretty crazy too. Suffers badly. The black dog and all that.

I’d like to say that we have always been close, but there have been too many partial disclosures for us to be easily close, too much difference in pitch. I have kept her confidences, betrayed others. She’s been ferociously loyal and disloyal too. I’ve kept quiet about a lot of stuff over the years and so has she and ‘Don’t tell Mum’ has become ‘a thing’ between the two of us.
‘I nicked off from work and went and visited that guy in Woomera. Don’t tell Mum.’
‘I gave the dog lady 2,000 bucks for her family in Chile. Don’t tell Mum.’
‘I got this dress. It’s designer but not real fur. Don’t tell Mum.’
‘I’m going back to Latin America. Australia’s only half-made. Don’t tell Mum.’
‘I got pissed and told that smart ars celebrity lawyer bastard he was a morals-murderer. Don’t tell Mum.’

Mum always knows though. She either senses stuff or my sister and I end up telling her anyway. We always end up telling Mum most things about our lives – all the dirty realism – and most of the time Mum probably wishes she didn’t know so much. She’ll be disapproving, disappointed, supportive and occasionally appalled but she’s always been there. My sister says, ‘she’s my rock, Mum. I hate that I keep putting her through this stuff but it shits me she’s so strong too.’ Don’t tell Mum. Don’t tell Mum I said that.’

My sister has a fat ASIO file and she’s proud of it. ‘It’s bigger than Mum’s or Dad’s is.’ I’m not so much impressed as confused as to how I am meant to react; what she wants from me. She has always wanted something from me that I don’t completely understand and I have always felt bad for not having giving her more of the right thing at the right time. Giving more of me to her at the right time.

Even though she’s 7 years younger than I am my sister had already packed more into her life by the time she was 30 than anyone else I know. She lives life on high flame and any time spent on the back burner is like a death sentence. By the time she was 15 she had read more than the average politics honours graduate. She surrounded herself with the music of and images and language of Latin America, wore a Che Guevara T-shirt before he’d become fashionable again, and spoke fluent Spanish by the time she was 20.
By the time she was 25, she was a doctor and by 30 she had met Castro, fought with the Sandinistas, married a fighter pilot, supped with Gusmal and lived with diplomats and body guards. An activist, a passion addict, a brain the size of a planet and a temper even bigger, she converted to Catholicism and worked with the Liberation Catholics for a bit but reckoned that if women could not become priests then Catholicism wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.

Extrovert, clever and sexy people like my sister make friends fast but can lose them just as fast because they often feel betrayed or misunderstood. Often they are. She’s no walk in the park, but if you want to be with someone who when she is on, has more contagious energy than anyone else you know and who’s funnier than Joan Rivers on a bad day, then she’s your girl.

By the time she was 40, her flame was faltering, her life getting smaller, her world had become her enemy and her sense of self so fractured. Spent. Her disappointment and self-hate were eating her up. She was in exile from herself.

I have spent less time with her than I should have during her really dark and bad times but some of our conversations during these periods are seared into my memory like electrocutions. She usually doesn’t remember most of what she says or accuses or declares during these times. I do. Mum does. But when she is flying high, when she is on a journey, my sister, you just wish you had the same damned travel agent.

When she was in East Timor during the war, Mum and I thought we had finally lost her. She had been missing for 2 days and the last time anyone had seen her she was carrying a rifle and heading for the mountains. Mum and I sat at the bottom of the stairs in our nighties and waited for the call. My mother has spent the last 10 years waiting for the call. She has always been sitting on a step somewhere waiting for the call or climbing into a car or a plane to go rescue her from somewhere. In recent months she has been caring for her daughter’s, my sister’s baby boy. My mother is straight from the animal kingdom.

My sister did come back from East Timor that time a little more scarred and scared and with a few more stories that could blow your mind and make you envious for the intensity and meaningfulness of her life but she was changed after that though. She saw things, bad things, did things that changed her some more, deepened the wounds some more, allowed the black dog to bark more loudly.

When Communism fell, like so many on the Left she felt betrayed and confused. They knew the Soviet Union had stuffed up big time but still, people like my sister, my father too, took it real bad when the dream was exposed as a nightmare.

She was never at home in Australia, my sister. Born into the wrong country, at the wrong time, she has spent her life searching for the right fit. She can drive me crazy; make me so mad and sad that I want get away from her for good sometimes. But she can still make me laugh. We still laugh together. Her rendition of our mother is award-worthy.

She is, she was, my baby sister, and when they write a book about her I can tell them all about how she used to insist on wearing lace tutus to primary school over her school uniform, how she read my diary and scrawled in the marginalia comments too smart for a 9 year old, how she fell in love with my boyfriends, how she could sing all of Verdi’s operas by heart and how she was devoted to Freddie Mercury – ‘the bloody brilliant gay Persian’ – and how she, how she…

***

When I return to my house in the country it’s the blossom and nature’s arrogance that hits me. Stop it! Stop! How dare anything be beautiful and new when my sister is dead? How can spring slap my grief in the face like this? Enough with the new light and the fucking daffodils! Bring back the dark closing-in of winter. Stop!

‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come’.

But they have come. And they have gone. The cards have stopped. And the flowers have wilted in their vases.

But in my garden, the freesias are at their best. It’s overgrown with weeds (weeks since I did anything) but the bluebells and the blossoms, the Daphne, the small blue noisy bird, the creek, it all goes on, flows on because yes, life will. Shall. Go. On.

I am ‘writing a present’. This is my present to my little sister who took her own life some weeks ago and who I love and who, for whom mental illness, had become unmanageable, unrelenting, unforgiving.

For whom the pain has stopped and for whom the freesias in my overgrown and neglected garden are at their best.

 

Everyone’s got a telecommunications horror story. Launch into your latest Telco trauma and there’ll always be someone to top it at the water cooler.

Forget the Vagina Monologues. I hereby initiate The Trouble with Telcos – a series of insightful, lament-style anecdotes about your own uniquely appalling relationship with the telecommunications company of your choosing.

Stand-up comedy routines about how so discombobulated you were by the customer service operator’s endless obfuscating prose that you signed away your house just to stop their unpunctuated spruiking.

Entertaining and occasionally harrowing vignettes about how this or that telco had sucked you into yet another 2-year contract that’ll cost you a bomb to break.

Micro-memoirs about the latest Extras Plan you’d agreed to because the prospect of wasting another 3 ½ hours of your life with recorded options or reciting your full name and date of birth for the 20th time in 12 hours, was just too horrible to contemplate.

I was on leave from work. I teach a writing course at TAFE whose future is looking pretty shaky since the recent $300m cuts to funding. I needed to recover my mojo, spend more time with my ten-year-old – who’d just got back from 6 weeks overseas with his father and step-mother, but that’s another story – and to weed the garden.

But instead, I did what everyone advises against when mourning a relationship breakdown or the death of an ideology – even if it is with an educational institution – and went straight into another one: with a telecommunications company.

Seduction-by-Smart Phone has got to be the 8th deadly sin by now, doesn’t it?

It started out well. My new telco answered all my calls and even called me first sometimes just to see how I was travelling; which was thoughtful.

But gradually things begun to falter and the relationship started to need more and more attention. I’d begun to feel panicky and insecure, like I always do a little way into any new relationship. And I was tormented by a nagging suspicion that my telco was not being completely straight with me; that all nice those long chats were just a cover for the real business of hard sell and harder to pay off.

I started to neglect my real life and to spend it on hold.

Increasingly distracted by Megabytes and Extras, Plans and Caps, my garden had become so overgrown the letterbox was invisible and my son had put an ad online for a bedtime story-teller because his had gone mad.

And, yet, I kept on throwing my life away on people who were suspiciously polite, weasel word–robotic and totally incomprehensible. I cried, I shouted and I rued the day my first sexy- shiny Smart Phone had arrived in the post.

But the more I tried the less I understood. The more I sought to decode the latest nine-page account, the more bemused I became by a version of the English language that didn’t make sense.

Telco-promiscuous, a psycho-mess of repetition fatigue and unable to pay the bills, my 10-year-old advised me to seek professional help.

I called The Telecommunications Ombudsman.

At last there was someone who understood what I was going through. Finally there was a person at the other end of the line who did not flounder for her script when I wept or who called me Ma’am or who kept thanking me for my patience. I was actually in a conversation with someone!

And, I realised that it was the system that was crazy, not me.

Today, I am a Recovering Telco Consumer. When I am not ticking boxes and explaining to students why fees have nearly tripled and the staff is comatose with death-by-administration-syndrome, I am back teaching at TAFE.

Oh, and, I can start telling my son bedtime stories again. Ones that begin with:
Once upon a time, there was a big bully called Telco …

I don’t like this time of year much.

With every bit of tinsel I’m reminded of what isn’t. With every pretend-wrapped-present under a city square Xmas tree, I feel abject. Lacking. Bereft of all appropriate and happy festive thoughts. Furious that they can make me feel like this. Those shops and choristers, holidays and turkeys. Xmas is a turkey.

We are compelled to buy things we don’t need or want, but because we feel so caught up in the gifts for your friends and loved ones contagion we do, or feel really bad because we can’t.

Xmas felt simple once but that’s because I was young and adults took care of all the confusing emotional and practical stuff and I was free to lie awake for Santa, to luxuriate in all the bounty.

I adored Xmas once. I can remember the feelings – intense, joyous and expectant. My family gave good Xmas then. And it did feel like we were all full and happy in that moment.

But I am an adult now and Xmas frightens the hell out of me.

I want my son to have a memorable time and have even started talking the talk – the Father Christmas and Good Boy talk. I told him the Jesus story and he asked if Jesus was a good boy too. He wants a tree with lights and stars and I know I should do it (and probably will) but I am secretly glad his Father is going all the way at his end so that maybe he wont notice the lack of it at mine?

Maybe if he gets enough good cheer and presents and carols and tinsel at his dad’s he’ll just be too full to want anything more and we can just go on as if nothing’s happened?

My family wants the Xmas lunch of course but I’m planning to scarper – a couple of pillows, a blanket and a basket in the boot of the car and off we’ll go.

I fantasize about fish and chips on the beach with a juice and a beer, just my son and me. But the family wants the Xmas lunch.

My mother is just doing her best like she’s always done to maintain what little ritual our family has progressively unindulged in over the years.

Some of our Xmas lunches have been interesting though. Like when there was a Catholic, a Buddhist (it’s sounding like one of those jokes), a Sandinista Fighter Pilot, a Right Wing Apologist and a Post-Modernist Academic all there at the same table. That was great. Awkward. Loud. Adversarial (except for the Buddhist) and a bit embarrassing for my mother who had gone to so much trouble to make it nice. But fun.

At least there weren’t any of those strange silences you get when it’s the same old same old. My grandmother isn’t around anymore and when she died so did those lovingly recycled threepences in the pudding.

And I miss not worrying about what I can eat. Some years my sister and I have a boyfriend or a husband between us. One year someone’s boyfriend, or husband, ostentatiously read a book for the entire day only putting it down in order to bot another cigarette from my mother.

Another time someone’s major panic attack practically up-ended the lunch table.

A lot of us do tend to reserve our worst and most infantile behavior for these enforced family get togethers. This year my father and his other family are coming. A magnanimous gesture on my mother’s part really. I like my half brother. He’s charming and handsome and has more self-esteem than both my sister and I put together. We both envy him for that but understand that it’s not his fault my father did a better job as a parent the second time round.

My stepmother never had much time for the two young girls she inherited when she married my father at 22. I understand that now too but at the time it just felt like dad had chosen her over us.

I think everyone is getting older and more sentimental about family. And of course I’d love for my son to have the big extended, rambling, happy and non-judgmental family but it’s a fantasy. I guess some people do have those kinds of families.

Good luck to them I say.

This year we are having a few more outsiders at Xmas lunch too and that’s good. Outsiders diffuse tension, relieve boredom and hopefully encourage better behavior.

Opening up the house to those without family or whose family doesn’t want them makes more sense to me.

One year I avoided Xmas all together and worked at the Brotherhood of St Lawrence. That made sense too. But next year I want to have Xmas lunch at my place although it will be a bit cramped.

I want to have a go at reinventing the genre, ‘subverting the dominant paradigm.’ If only I had the courage. It requires a lot of confidence to take over that responsibility because I remain an adolescent in my family.

The fact that I have a child and a job (sort of) and a mortgage still don’t give me the requisite you-can-now-have-Xmas-lunch-at-your-house-points.

Of course I’d like it to be easier and different but it isn’t great for a lot of other people either. This time of year can be hell for a lot of people, who see the images on TV and in the shop windows, hear people making plans and see the couples and the kids.

It can be a painful, lonely and confounding time for a lot of people who by some simple throw of a dice exist outside the square.

Yes, I am definitely going to need a really, really big house. Next year when I commandeer the Xmas day lunch.

 

I feel incommensurately proud when my not yet six-year-old son wins pupil of the year. (And do not have the heart to tell him that every student in the class eventually wins it too. They have to, because it is unofficial school policy)

I enquire of the tuck shop woman, somewhat patronisingly, as to why my son has not received the requisite amount of sizzle in his sausage at the school’s most recent fundraiser. (There is a fund raiser every second week)

I feel abject and isolated on my son’s behalf when I realise that he hasn’t been invited to one of his class mate’s 6^th Birthday party, even though I knew that parents, the sensible ones,  invite only a handful of the class to any one birthday and not the full malarkey of twenty-one. (I do not tell him this either).

I hover and wipe when he is eating. I hover and swipe if he is not sharing.

I tell him that it is dangerous to walk about without a grown-up because a bad grown-up might snatch him.

I compare his behaviour in Monday morning assembly to all the 439 other students and fret that he maybe more restless, less focussed than all the rest of them.

I thank Jesus Chris, Allah and what, who ever else, that it is someone else’s child who has been asked in for special meeting with the junior school coordinator, and not my special son.

I worry he will not be interested enough in learning for learning sake. Not physically active enough. Too physically active.

Not affectionate. Too affectionate.

Too slow. Too fast.

Too loud. Too quiet.

Not imaginative enough or overly imaginative and out of touch with reality.

I panic, a little, when I see other children in his class learning violin doing swimming lessons (and actually learning to swim) and decide ruefully, to surrender my next pay cheque to every single extra curricula activity I can lay my eyes on.

I secretly covet a four-wheel drive and to spend more time ferrying about my over stimulated and increasingly under whelmed child in it.

I am grateful – thru gritted gratefulness – that he spends most weekends at his father’s in the country so that he can make up for the lack of good clean air and fun and out-doorness, he doesn’t get enough of with me in the city.

He has a cough. A sore throat. A fever.

His feet point the wrong way. Don’t they?

His ear is pointy. Mine was pointy too! Jesus, will he inherit my propensity for self-doubt and over-eating as well as the pointy ear?

He does not look at people. He stares at people.

 

Am I a hyper-parent?

Answer, yes. Is it hard, really hard, not to be, especially when you are a sole parent and you only have the one child and you waited until you were 42 to have him? Answer, yes.

 

On this program recently, author and psychologist, Carl Honore, warned all of us over-anxious, eager to please and over compensating hyper parents to stop and smell the flowers. And well, just to stop, or to slow down at least. Well he didn’t say that exactly, but he did urge us to get back in touch with the good old days – but without the rose tinted, knee jerk, conservative nostalgia I suspect – and to wrench back the good – the out door playing time mercifully uninterrupted every  20 by hyper parents concerned for dehydration, starvation, snakes and paedophiles – and to combine the good old days of laissez faire parenting with the best of early 21^st century paradigms which have, for one thing, made fathers as present as  mothers in the rearing or children. Have technology as a site for exploration and adventure and experimentation. Although, he concedes, that our children are over –wired too. Like most of their parents.

 

 

In our heart felt and over anxious desire to be good parents, better parents than our own were, perhaps, we are over scheduling, over parenting, over estimating. ‘Parenting advice seems to presume that everything in childhood can, and should, be controlled. Unproductive time is wasted. Luck and chance are discounted.’  We are overlooking that good parenting is more about good role modelling, sharing a laugh and cultural exchange programs. Not international school exchange enrichment programs to Canada but cultural exchanges between you, the grown up parent, and the child, your offspring’s ‘child culture’. It is often about what social researcher, Hugh Mackay calls active listening. Not just listening, but active listening. Stop and listen and look and learn and smell and respond and do not pre-empt or pre determine or pre package your child’s every utterance or activity.

 

Just give our children some space and for God’s sake, for everyone’s sakes, slow down! Ok. I have slowed down. Shit, it’s 3.15! School pick up! Soccer practice after school. Chess club after that and high level Israeli diplomacy class to prepare for. Homework at 5.O0. Dinner at 6.00. Self directed play/ amusement time between 6.00 and 7. Shower at…

In the last twelve months my son has changed. A year ago he would grab my hand faux-casual-like and tell me stuff unbidden. Fifty-two weeks ago he answered my questions with a complete sentence. Today on the brink of thirteen he regards me as an embarrassment and tells me to stop talking so loudly in the street. Currently carousing with Oedipus my son is trying to kill me off.
Occasionally he will look directly at me like when I ask if he has lost his PE uniform again or if he has the change from the two pairs of psychedelic skate socks he just bought.
Other times we play this little game where he chases me around the house and when he catches me – and he always does –maneuvers me to the ground and looks into my eyes and says,
‘Gotcha Mum!’
What does he see I wonder?
His nose is like a man’s nose now and the expression in his green eyes is new- amused, flirtatious, defiant.
He slumps past me in the hallway examining the lines in the floorboards. He trudges towards the train station, his heavy school bag slung across his almost-manly shoulders. His head is in a book. His focus is on a screen. He stares at his body side on in a mirror. He is chatting online to friends. When he sleeps he is longer than the bed now and when he mumbles goodnight from under the covers, he presses his body up against the wall like he is trying to merge with its stony coolness.
These days I am an embarrassment. My top is too low and my hair is too frizzy. My lips are too red and what’s for dinner. He is becoming a man, that’s for sure.
I am going to do some teaching at his school next term and he tells me: ‘Mum, don’t be too strict or too friendly. Just be normal, okay.’
If he hears me singing along with Bob Dylan he asks me not to, so I lower my voice and whisper-sing: she aches just like a woman but she breaks just like a little girl.
‘I wish I had a brother,’ he laments, when I drag him home from his best friend’s house after an entire weekend living in someone else’s bigger, noisier and ‘funner’ family.
‘I wish I could live there,’ he says, staring out of the passenger seat window.
‘Well you can’t, I say. ‘You already have a home. And by the way, the only way you will ever have a brother is if I get involved with some man who’s got kids.’
‘So why can’t you then?’ he says, making faces in the side mirror now. ‘How come Dad’s got someone and you don’t?’
My almost 13-year-old son wants me to do online dating but I tell him that I tried it once and hated it.
‘It’s horrible. It’s not real.’
‘Nothing’s real’, he says. He is not being philosophical or clever; he is just of that generation who experience the world virtually, so it’s no big deal.
My son is right of course. I mean he is right in wanting his mother to find another man apart from him. He is right in trying, however ambivalently, to kill me off, figuratively speaking, because lately my maternal presence is just too big for him. I am needy and he knows it. He loves me but he hates me too. He wants me available but invisible. He needs me reliable, loving but shtum. He likes me to keep my distance but to acknowledge his every want.
Maybe these days what he needs is different to what I think he needs. The best times are when he is doing his thing and I am doing mine but we are under the same roof and only calling distance apart.
‘You want a smoothie?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What are you doing? You need some help? You know I used to teach Year 7 English.’
‘No, I’m fine Mum.’
‘What are you reading this term?
‘I don’t know.’
Last try. ‘I hope you’re not playing computer games?’
‘I’m doing English revision.’
Revision? I didn’t know how to revise until I was twenty-eight and in my third go at university. The grammar of my son’s and my relationship has changed. I use questions and imperatives while he employs monosyllables and closed statements.
I am trying to teach him to ask other people about what they do and how their day’s been because it’s polite and empathetic.
‘I’m marking stories.’ I call.
Nothing.
‘You want to read one a first year student has written about zombies?’
‘Yeah, okay.’ He comes out of his room and I meet him halfway at the entrance to our kitchen. I have been working at the kitchen table. I have a study and a desk but it’s friendlier in the kitchen.
I am standing in front of him now. He is almost a head taller than I am and for a flicker of a moment I see him at forty.
‘So where’s the story?’ he asks. ‘Are they vampires or zombies, you get them mixed up remember?’
‘Vampires. I think.’
He reads the first page, grins and then hands it back to me.
‘It’s not that bad. You just don’t get it,’ he says. ‘We got any of that good bread, not the one with all the seeds?’
He recently got dual Australian-German citizenship so now he’s got another identity I can’t know. He scares me a bit. He is so other. He has become an exotic blonde with whom I cannot speak and for whom I can never do or be enough.
‘Hey Mum!’ he calls from his room.
‘Yes.’
‘Come here.’
‘What is it?’ I am at his door. He’s got his iPad in one hand and a sheet of questions in the other. He’s still on the English revision.
‘What’s character development?’ he asks.
I sit down next to him. Now this is something I can help him with.

I’ve been re-watching Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing.

It’s Christmas Eve and The White House is elegantly stuffed with giant baubles, tinsel and carol singers, and President Bartlett is preparing to give a speech about forgiveness, tolerance and generosity at this time of year. But true to this series’ interest in the painful personal stuff as well as the idealised intricacies of good governance, Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman is diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress after having been shot by a loon gunmen a couple of episodes back.

I cannot stop watching this series. I am more interested in this series with its fast and brilliant walk-and-talk than anything else in the world. But this ep. gets me thinking about Christmas, about celebration in the face of trauma and how we grapple with grief at this time of year.

My friend told me this week that she doesn’t ‘do’ Christmas. What does that mean? I just don’t do it, she said. I haven’t done it in years. It’s just too hard you know, with the family stuff, the money, all the bullshit.

My friend does not ‘do’ Christmas anymore because it’s too painful. So what do you do on the day? I asked her. She laughed and said, what do you mean what do I do? I don’t have to do anything, that’s the point.

I get it.

I reckon I’d prefer to sit in front of the next 4 seasons of The West Wing until Christmas was done and dusted for the year. I’d eat and drink nice things while doing it, make some calls maybe, and I’m sure the odd family member or friend would join me at some stage during this, my day of the slaughter of the sacred cow of Christmas.

But I will do Christmas lunch at my place again this year for the sake of the kids and Mum and because it’s going to be a more open door affair this year. The more the merrier and diverse, the less the lonely and curmudgeon I say. As long as I promise not to get drunk and cry before 11am, like last year.

Plenty of people dread this time of year because it shines a light on the hard stuff and puts a high flame under what’s absent.

This Christmas we will again light a candle for my sister and set an empty chair at the table for the miserable, persecuted, neglected, absent or sick. You know, kind of like how they do at writers festivals when there is always that empty chair on the stage symbolizing the universal incarcerated writer in some repressive regime.

If you have a job you are real busy trying to get everything done at this time of year. If you have a job that goes on paying you during the Christmas holiday you are probably looking forward to taking some time out, having a well-earned break, winding down, doing nothing except sprout idiomatic chill-out clichés whilst lying prostate on a lilo in a pool somewhere.

You will probably get bored after a week.

Plenty of us don’t have a permanent income though, and plenty others no income at all. Plenty don’t have family they want to be with or who’ll have them.
This time of year can really suck when you are caught up in the orgy of expectation and hype.

For the last few weeks I have been teaching Homer’s ‘The Iliad’ to my Classics class and Phillip K. Dick’s ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep’ in Literature. I asked my students what they thought of Christmas: did they look forward to it, what did it mean to them etc. The Classicists said that this time of year was cool because there were so many ancient myths all colliding with their contemporary incarnations it’s fun to try and make sense of it all.

The Dystopians said that Christmas is a desperate clinging to an anachronistic convention and that that no amount of cranberry jelly or gift giving can wrap up this increasingly warm and messed up planet of ours and make it look pretty.
Sorrow, personal or global, is particularly hard at Christmas.

Every Christmas since my sister’s death has felt kind of wrong. It is the fifth one without her this year. We will light a candle for her; we will lay a plate for her. We will pay extra attention to her little boy.

And after the day, and after the friends and the family all leave, I will watch Season 5 of The West Wing and eat all the leftovers. It doesn’t feel right to keep the party going for too long.
When a terrorist bomb wipes out a number of lives, in The West Wing, Martin Sheen, who plays the American President gives another one of his brilliantly written speeches and he says that ‘The streets of heaven are too full of angels tonight’.

It’s a nice line. Comforting. Even if you don’t really believe in angels.

I have written a memoir, a book about my life, the people in it and out of it and the everything else in between it. I have written a dead honest book inspired by that moment – that moment when we finally realize that there is a significant gap between what we thought our life would be and how it’s actually shaping up.
I have always loved reading the memoir genre and will always return to the comfort or otherwise of wrestling with or wallowing in someone’s account of their own life. With biography, the knowledge that it is true, or as true as the author thinks it is, makes it more, not less, exciting and enticing for me. A reader then, can sympathize, eroticize, fantasize, intellectualize and – identify. It’s still escapism, but only just.
My book, my memoir, is about ill-chosen careers, sex and romance, complex family relationships, indispensable friendships and the madness and sometimes debilitating sadness, of co parenting with the ex husband who doesn’t like me much and the ex’s wife who thinks she is my son’s mother as well. And it’s about ageing disgracefully
My book is out this week and I’m scared stiff.

First of all, who cares? I mean who cares about the ramblings of a forty –something dysthymic curmudgeon who appears, for all intents and purposes to be doing OK these days. On the surface of it anyway. Doing OK. She’s got a job, she’s got a child, she’s got her health, she’s paying off her flat. Who cares about a non-famous person that much to pay money to read about her tilt, her take, on life?

I comfort myself in the knowledge that a memoir is not as presumptuous, as pretentious as an autobiography because a memoir implies bits of a life, the best and the worst bits of a life, a refracted and refined multiple take on a very fractured fairytale of a life. It is less the beginning, middle and end of a life and more just a few parts, some scenes of a life as seen by the author, the person who has lived through them. Parts of a life, as observed through a prism of some experience, some wry humor and some therapy.

Forget that part about the therapy because now I am making my book sound bloody awful. So awful as to be indulgent garbage of the ‘I have been through the mill and am now going to tell you all about it whether you like it or not kind’. Sounds like a bit of OpraWinfryisation culture, my book. So forget all of the above. All except maybe the bit about the very fractured fairytale, that sounded like some curious fun.

I have been writing and monloguing on air and on stage in confessional/memoir/personal column mode for a few years now and given I am still doing it and was asked to write this book, I guess someone, some people, have been listening. But now it’s a book. A big fat wad of paper with binding and proper font and a cover with an emboss title. But now this feels different. More exposing, less ephemeral than radio and the stage. Less temporary. More permanent. More like a testament. More scary.

Lots of people enjoy other people to take to the confessional publicly. Look at all the shadenfruede, the frenzy of interest, about Wayne Carey getting close up and personal on Denton recently. But then Carey is a national anti-hero, a celebrity, a sportsman. That’s different. Most people love a fall from a great height. It’s just so excruciatingly gorgeous to watch, to read, to listen to, while you are chomping on a muesli bar, slugging a Glendficich or smugly cozying up on the couch with a Lite N Easy meal. Carey’s ordinary epiphany, his evident contrition, was uncomfortable, but compelling television. Better him than me, we all think.

The world is divided into two parts – those people who can talk openly and candidly and without shame about themselves and their stuff ups. And those who can’t. Those of us who make some of a living from their own particular style of first person shtick and those who find the idea of doing so, terrifying, embarrassing and positively indecent.

‘Remember that I want to be able to give it to my friends to read,’ my mother said to me as I was writing my book.

My not so cozy book of candor is about life, love and other great expectations. My family probably wished there was less sex in it, but my publishers probably wish there was more.

So why are we interested in your life? I hear you ask. Well, the responses so far tell me that these are things that people can relate to … work, love, career, a child … And I don’t name anyone but call them by titles (The Married Man, The Playwright, The Sister, The Ex Husband, The Actor etc) so no-one need be afraid.

What other disclaimers can I venture that will make it sound saucy, controversial and a little bit outré?

I am scared, not because I regret writing about such things and baring my bum and my soul, symbolically speaking of course, but because most of us, let’s face it, finally, fear being disliked, thought of as up yourself, disapproved of and, worst of all, ignored all together. That’s the fear, that’s why I am scared, if I am honest. And I am. And that’s the book.

And if one more person focuses on its content over the writing again and tells me in how ‘brave’ I am, I will include them in my next book. And not in nice way either. And not no name, no pack drill either.

Writing a book about one’s life is at first really exciting, then hard and emotional, later exhilarating and then finally, terrifying. It took nine months to write my book. Sound familiar?

Come on sweetie, faster! If you can’t keep up, we’ll all have to do it again. Come on, come on, you can do it. You fight yourself, no one ever wins. Come on just one more hill –

I hate you! I hate this! This is not a bloody episode of Australia’s Biggest Loser! I came here to turn off the noise in my head, not to change the station from ABC Radio National to New Age 101. Leave me alone. I can’t do this anymore. I’m tired, my legs are shaking, and –

Oooh, you’re so funny when you get angry. Come on sweetie, you love it, it’s brilliant isn’t it? Look at that rainbow. That’s just for us, you know, that rainbow. Come on –

How long till we get to the beach? I just want to sit on the beach and look at the ocean for a bit –

Oh, you are going to love the beach, sweetie. You’re going to launch. I know you are. I can really feel this. Yes, you are going to launch. Come on girls. Now, we’re going to burn and bury the Mandela you all drew last night and the other one, the future you, we burn too and then you throw into the ocean. It’s beautiful. It’s so powerful. Come on, just 2 more kilometres and you can rest. Come on Eleonora, you’re going to be back on television.

I don’t want to be a television actress anymore! I haven’t been one for a hundred years. That’s you, not me. I went into radio because I didn’t have to keep myself thin and now – What! No! I can’t! I can’t do another hill-

Yes you can, you’re launching! Now I want you all to sprint the rest. Amazing sweetie. Amazing. You’re sprinting is amazing.
Look at that. Look how perfect it is. That water, the sand, those caves. You are on your journey and you are launching and – come on Jo, Sal, catch up, come on. Come on sweeties. Oh poor Jo, come on Jo.

A few days ago on a Wednesday night I decided that if I did not do something, something radical and decisive (and probably expensive) to short circuit the bad thinking, the bad living, the bad me, I was going to implode and all that would be left of me would be a little puddle, no, a small pile of beige dust, 2 hair slides and my favourite earrings. Because, I was, ladies and gentlemen boys and girls, out of control.

So, I did some fast research and found a health retreat that was not the price of a return ticket to cape Town (or as far), made a few calls to the father of my son (did he mind having him for a few extra days over the holidays?) and to the ebullient and obviously extremely ‘cleansed fellow’; (he sounded very young) who run, no reigned over my chosen health retreat. And by Friday I was off.

Where are you going? Asked a close friend.
To a detox boot camp for a few days.
Why? What are you detoxing from?
Well, everything, I guess. You know, life –
Crap, El. Are you coming off an addictive substance? Have you been living on cardboard and cola for the last 12 months? It’s a take, El, can’t you just –
No. No I can’t. I can’t just. I need the support and the structure to get me going, to start me off an a more healthy and less stressful way of –
OK, OK, sorry. Good luck. Call me when you get back. That’s if you are still permitted to see me after your ‘detox’.

I was nervous. I would be sharing a house at the beach with 2 women whom I did not know -– a mother and daughter, even worse! – and with this guru cum new age Chinese doctor and part-time television actor. What the hell was I doing? And why didn’t I just keep my money and spend it on something less self indulgent like, like, the telephone bill or something?

On and on it went, the pessimistic self-talk (that’s what they call it, isn’t it?) for the duration of the 2 hour journey there, at an even higher and more insistent pitch during the extra half hour because I got lost. Of course I did. So pulled over at a dodgy looking take away and got a souvlaki. I know, I know…

Hi sweetie, lovely to meet you. Sit down, get comfortable, let’s check you in. Yes, you are definitely meant to be here. My God, you’re a wreck sweetie. Why are you such a wreck?

Then he took my hand and looked into my eyes.
Mmm… I thought so. (His eyes were big and brown and he was compact, open -faced and boyish.)

I hate it when they do that, alternative practitioners, when they think they can read your life in your eyes or from massaging your back or from or testing your reflexes, or whatever.
Your liver is really struggling, you need more zinc and your last boyfriend was very nasty. (Tell me something I don’t know). Well, there was something else he said too that I will not share with you but let’s just say it was a revelation to me and I was with that last boyfriend!

In minutes, I had unloaded my luggage – thermal underwear, old trackies, sports bra, oversized Ramones t-shirt, bathers, and the latest Rachel Tusk. Not much. No computers or mobile phones allowed and the house had no television or radio and even the fridge was quiet. I met the 2 other ‘inmates’ briefly and instantly thought, wrong! I shouldn’t be here! I am not like them, they are not like me. What will we talk about? It’s going to be so boring. I paid a thousand bucks to be bored out of my brain! Excellent. Why am I always making such wrong choices!

Next, I was half naked lying on a massage table, head scrunched and straining through the little hole for your face. Candles, ‘relaxing music’, bamboo screens and with only the sound of the nearby waves and my new guru doctor to keep me from screaming – Getmeouttahere!

And then it all started to change. Then the gears started to shift and I finally started to calm down and the good doctor massaged me and stuck needles into me and put suction cups on my back (they are so weird!) and spoke to me and, yes, it all started to change. I started to feel an extraordinary sense of relief. I exhaled for the first time in 13 months and tried not to cry.

It’s OK sweetie. It’s OK.

And then the good doctor said something that knocked my socks off – not that I was wearing any. He said some things about me and my life and my family, things that had been contributing to my near-implosion that he just couldn’t have known. Even if he had downloaded the last 5 years of these columns he couldn’t have known them. It was strange, it was spooky it was plain clairvoyant. Not that I believe in all that stuff.

From that moment on, along with his compassion and insight and unnerving ‘rightness’, I decided I was prepared to give it all a go. You know, to ‘surrender’, to ‘feel the energy’, ‘to trust’, to commit to ‘the journey’ I am meant to be on, and to get off the one that’s making me body and soul sick.

Four days later and after getting to know the thoroughly lovely and reassuringly vulnerable mother and daughter couple, and after accepting that my new guru was a most unusual and compelling combination of new age nonsense and razor sharp intuition – and funny too- I was glad, glad and relieved I had made this leap into faith that such a ‘journey’ requires from such an experienced sceptic like myself.

The worst and most corny-clichéd and silly-symbolic moment was the afternoon we had to commando crawl along the beach. The sand was wet, I couldn’t figure out how to lug my dead weight of a carcass the required remaining 80 metres and I just sobbed. I sobbed loudly into the sad-sand, my head bent in abjectness, my body exhausted with effort it did not remember. This is my life. This is what it is like to be me and I sobbed some more.

Come on sweetie! You can do it. Ooh, you’re so funny when you get cross with me. Are you crying? Oh sweetie, come on, it’s OK. You’re not bad. The beach isn’t bad. What I am asking you to do isn’t bad. Nothing is bad. And then the other two women, who had already got to the finish line because they seemed to know what to do and I didn’t, started urging me along too. I was not alone. I hated this dumb commando-style exercise but I was not alone. I hated the taste of the sand and the feel of it in my underwear but I was not alone.

On the last day it was just me and my good doctor and when he finally sent me on my way, I didn’t want to leave. It wasn’t just the early nights or the fat free, salt free, caffeine free, carb free all organic diet, (Really? But all the fruit looked too perfect surely. Not all marked and earnest, like organic fruit usually does!) It wasn’t just the daily Pilates (but it looks so easy!) or the treatments and spas, or the 6am beach runs, it was that I knew that during those few days something in me had shifted and, for the better. I was scared that once I got home again…well, you know the story.

Oh, and during one of my treatments, the good doctor also said that he could see my soul mate very clearly’ and that ‘his name begins with…what is it… an ‘A’. Yes, an ‘A” and he has been admiring you for r a very long time and is very unhappy and –
Is he married? I ask.
Yes, he is married, but very unhappy and his name starts with ‘A’ and –
Forget it. I can see the rest of that story for myself, thanks. And I’m no psychic.

***

It’s been 3 weeks of living in the ‘real world’ again and so far, I am doing pretty well, thank you very much. But I will check in with you all again in about 3 months and see just how much of that good doctor medicine is still working or even credible.

But still can’t bring myself to read more than a page of Louise Hay and I hate relaxation music and why do clairvoyants often have such a daggy domestic aesthetic going on, I wonder

Stop it. I’ve stopped.

OK. I am on my journey and this is my train and I want you, you and you off it, please. You are not good for me, you are not meant to be on my journey. I am sending you on your way. With love of course, with lots of love, sweeties.

She’s got everything she needs/she’s an artist/she don’t look back. (Bob Dylan)

My ex husband escaped his country before The Wall came down and didn’t look back. He told me this once, and only once and meant for me to take it literally. But I have always been curious about its more figurative implications.

What he meant was, that just before he hid in the boot of the car that whisked him to Hungary – East Germans were permitted to go for holidays there – and then onto The West, he did not turn around to say goodbye to his place of birth, his parents or his friends. Nothing. Because to look back, he told me, would just make him feel bad and anyway, “What was the point when (he’d) already made the decision to get out.” And besides, he had only told one person of his plans and so to make a big deal of goodbyes and the like would have only aroused suspicion and the East practically invented suspicion. The East German government was very keen on forgetting the past and reinventing the present, so maybe my ex husband had been brought up not to look back.

Thirteen years after he escaped and three years after he met me, I watched him leave his most recent life, and was reminded of that story. As I watched him get into a car that whisked him away once again to some new unchartered territory, I watched him as I held our five-month-old son in my arms and I willed him to look back.
Go on turn around. Smile sadly, knowingly, just before you get behind the wheel. Gesture in our general direction. Look like you already regret it. Just fucking wave for Christ’s sake! Nothing. Well nothing visible to the naked eye anyway. I can only assume that plenty was happening on the inside. He was also brought up to hide his feelings.

My ex husband is not the looking back type. But I must be because, amongst other things, I write memoir and memoir, by definition requires you to look back: to reflect on and to analyse the past; to regret and reason with the past and to try and construct your own personal narrative.
My ex husband will probably never write memoir but he will have more lives then me, because he holds on to the past less and moves on to the future fast. He is a person who is used to starting from scratch. So the memories remain, but they don’t rattle his cage for attention like they do with those of us who spend so much time leaning, slouching towards our pasts.

* * *

Received and accepted wisdoms abound when it comes to the whole notion of looking back: it’s important or unhealthy to; it’s essential in order to heal; or it’s a waste of time because it’s what you do now that matters, not what you did.
You got to stop living in the past. It’ll just make you miserable and you’ll get neck cramp.

Certain therapeutic models demand we look back while others dissuade us from mining or acheologising our history as a prerequisite to understanding our present.

While the more psychoanalytic approaches rummage about in our past and unconscious and are predicated on the belief that to unlock the past is to fully open up the future, practices like Cognitive Behavioral approaches are more about the here and now: less about “They fuck you up your mum and dad,” (Phillip Larkin) type thinking and more rooted in “You can’t change the past, Mamma,” (My six-year-old) ways of looking at the world.

There is then, healthy and good looking back and destructive and bad looking back. Sometime memories, miss-remembered or otherwise – what’s the difference in the end – can wreck a person and make it impossible to live in the so-called here and now. We can be just so caught up with all the perceived injustices of our past, all the missed opportunities and wrong choices, all the fuck ups. Looking back can be hazardous to one’s health.

Then there’s the kind of looking back that is luxurious, a kind of escape, a foray into a time when life was less complicated, happier, more innocent somehow. Wasn’t it? This is the kind of looking back as musing and self reflection and can take on almost romantic overtones while providing opportunity for solitary introspection. The kind of introspection that requires we look back with real curiosity and some wonder.
“For oft, when on my couch I lie/In vacant or in pensive mood/They flash upon that inward eye/which is the bliss of solitude’. (William Wordsworth)

This kind of looking back is more a form of reflective nostalgia than any more concerted or willful effort to get hold of the past or to call it to account.

But not all nostalgia is nice is it. Sometimes nostalgia may be disguising itself as the simple truth when it is, in fact, more like dangerous conservatism – a call for a time when all was natural and right in the world and before all things progressive or new came along and destroyed the good past and left us with the moral ruins of the bad present.
Sometimes looking back can be fuelled by the desire to kill off the present. Literally. In his film, ‘Ninety Miles Down a One Way Street’, Michael Gurr suggests that: “Murder is essentially a nostalgic act – because it seeks to recreate the world (imagined or real) as it was before the person you want to kill fucked it all up”. Gurr does not mean this figuratively because the central protagonist in his film does, in fact, commit a murder. But then Freud urged us to symbolically kill off our parents, didn’t he, to make way for a future, free of parental blame.
“They fuck you up you mum and dad/they may not mean to but they do.”

* * *

One of the few things I recall from my very brief fling, flirtation no not even that is that Buddhism is all about living in the present: there is only the present and looking back is not so much discouraged but eventually the Buddhist does become less interested in it, less attached to that version of his or her historic self. Given my very limited understanding of Buddhism it does strike me though, that it is quite post modernist in some ways: the self is a construct, rather than a fixed and single entity; one is not always the one person but rather a whole lot of different persons; we are all floating identities and multiple constructs and there is no essential self, but rather a whole lot of different shifting selves etc.

But the way the Buddhists put it – post modernism always made me nervous and I always felt that I was losing something rather than gaining anything – makes the notion of the unstable self sound quite liberating, as if there is always the possibility of reinvention and freshness. But what do I know? I’m the person who always fell asleep in meditation classes and never wanted to go to Asia with the backpack and a single change of undies.

Certain strains of Christianity are definitely more focused on the future than the past. Not all strains of course. But during my time in Christian education – I was keen to spend time with my two new Irish catholic neighbors and they went to Sunday school, so I did too – I got the very real impression that life was all about doing time for that one original transgression in preparation for what comes after. I liked Sunday school until they threw me out for asking for some new stories because the old ones were getting boring.

“What are you going there for?” asked my bemused and thoroughly atheist mother. “You don’t believe in God, do you? Do you?”
“I didn’t but now I do and you are not going to go to heaven and I am and then what will happen when I am there and you’re not?” I wailed.
“Oh, I’m sure we’ll find each other up there”, she said, trying to hide her laughter and raising her eyes up to our kitchen ceiling.

But I still saw her un-belief and I hated her in that moment. What did she know about the future anyway? And I was too young to have any past worth mentioning. Looking back just isn’t an option when you are nine-years-old.

I left Sunday school a few weeks later and got working on my present by trying to get noticed by the grade five boy I was in love with at the time. I still remember his sir-name was Lord. Really.

* * *

When my old friend deliberately aborted his own suicide a few years ago, it left him with a bit of brain damage, which has meant that he forgets things. He’s the first to admit it and it’s not a problem for the most part. But as I have watched him in recent years go through a marriage breakdown and the loss of any regular work, I have begun to think that my old friend’s memory problems have, perversely, been a blessing at times. Certain memory lapses appear to have protected him from some of the immediacy and high flame grief. It’s as if spared the torture and exquisite detail of past conversations replaying themselves over and over in his head, my friend is better off than the rest of us. My friend lives like a Buddhist, in the present, and has a general optimism and lightness of touch. He’s no Tigger, but he aint no Eeyore either, that’s for sure. Whereas he was once, I think, a bit of a melancholic now that I look back on it.
My uncle had Electric Shock Therapy and some of us were scared it would make him worse but really, how much worse could he get? He was paralyzed with depression, unable to speak and trapped in his past. He was forever looking back and was dying from his memories. The shock therapy worked for a bit. It made him forget some of them. Now maybe he could either invent some new memories for himself or just be in the present. And maybe the present, without the past, is not so bad.
* * *
Classic stories are full of warnings about not looking back lest you lose something or destroy something else. Take Lot’s Wife. The clue to why she was turned in to a pillar of salt seems to lie in the words: “His wife looked back from behind him.” The phrase indicates that Lot’s wife was behind him, and has the meaning of lagging behind with longing. She was not only some distance behind the others, but as she looked at the cities that God was destroying she longed for her old life there. Her body had moved out of Sodom, but her heart was still back there
The angel had told them “Look not behind thee … lest thou be consumed.” (Genesis 19:17), but Lot’s wife simply ignored the warning and received the penalty the angel had warned her about. She was then “consumed”. Lot’s wife: one the one of the world’s first ambivalent migrants.
Maybe my ex husband didn’t look back when he was fleeing his own version of Sodom because he had the briny fate of Lot’s wife in mind.

And of course, there’s Orpheus who looks back at his beloved Eurydice even after the angels of the Underworld told him not to, and when he does, he loses the object of his desire forever – a sobering lesson in the essential unfulfillability of desire and the danger of looking back.

When I first read Shakespeare’s Macbeth in the late seventies at high school I learned two things. I learned that even great verse didn’t have to rhyme and that chuck was a term of endearment in Elizabethan parlance. I was a teenager and as yet unfamiliar with bitter regret and unbridled desire or ambition, so the psychology of character did not really interest me all that much. I was taken up with the movement and power of the language – we had a very good Lit. teacher – but the whys and wherefores didn’t really grab hold of me back then.

When I played Lady Macbeth more than twenty years later, for a touring theatre company, the play’s themes made a lot more sense. I had a past of my own by this stage and had formalized my looking back to once a week sessions on a couch in room somewhere in inner city Melbourne. Oddly, or maybe not so odd, I don’t remember the street, just the things my shrink had up on his wall and the little bits and pieces on his occasional table.

After the Macbeths murder their King in his sleep, Macbeth can never sleep again because he is so tormented by guilt and Lady Macbeth, in her determination to look forward, not back, urges him to get a grip:

“Things without all remedy/ should be without regard/What’s done is done.”
(Lady Macbeth)

As if. Her resolve does not last. Her husband can’t sleep and she walks in hers. Both end up dead. In their case, what’s done is never forgotten.

* * *

As I watch people on the television picking their way through the remains of their past: the chipped cups and tortured-with-heat-metal-bed heads; melted pink dolly heads and the spookily in-tact chimneys, I can almost smell the ash, feel the loss, know the need to retrieve something, anything that tells us about our past.
Something that signals that back then, before this, I had a past, a story and I just need something, a photo, a book, a toy, anything that tells me who I was.

As I write this, dead people are still being found and some are still missing in the wake of fires that consumed Victoria on the hottest capital city maximum in recorded history.

The messages victims are being given are still from the early stages of the grieving process, as they say. Eventually, these people will be encouraged to look forward, to start again, and not to look back.

“I can’t believe it. What can I say? says one man, as he stands awkwardly astride two bits of black wood that used to be his house. “It’s just, you know, it’s just … I’ve lost everything mate. Next door, though, they lost their lives. I’m one of the lucky ones. But I reckon I’ll start again. I reckon I’ll start again, yeah, you know, when I can.”

 

 

 

 

One of my second year students brought a black and white photo into our memoir-writing class.

You know, with all the kids lined up in rows, the tallest standing at the back, the shortest sitting in the front.

My student points to a sweet-faced short-haired, little girl and the only one wearing a blazer and tie. The rest of them look pretty scruffy.

I was pretty cute back then, she says. Wish I knew then what I do now.

Does she? Really? I don’t. I would have been a pretty miserable kid if I had done.

Then my student points out another little girl in the back row wearing a Peter Pan-collar blouse. She must have moved just as the photo was taken because her features are a bit blurred. But I can still make her out. It’s me.

My mature-age student and I compare notes: who were the nice teachers, the sadists, the popular kids, the outsiders… until all appropriate student-teacher boundaries dissolve into squeals.

What a coincidence! I mean, what are the odds? Oh my god, Mrs. Spilsberry was such a monster! You remember when she washed that girl’s mouth out with soap for swearing?

The next day, I take a different route to work and trawl, trance- like, through the streets of my childhood. The usual ‘trip down memory lane type’ things happen. Places look the same but somehow different; the creek is now a freeway and the distances between things have shrunk.

The house where mum and my sister and I lived with my grandparents has been renovated to within an inch of its previous life and except for the cellar’s porthole windows, nothing else of our 50s cream brick veneer with white wrought iron verandah and impeccably kept front yard remains. I loved that cellar; I’d go there when it was hot outside and sit amongst the sacks of grains and potatoes and neatly stacked beer bottles of spaghetti sauce we’d made last season, munching on dried chickpeas.

I continue to slowly drive through my old suburb and eventually stop outside the primary school where that photo had been taken more than 40 years ago. And it was then that I started to cry. Not just a quiet weep for the ‘good old days’ but a full-on sob as I realized with visceral certainty that that time at this school and living with my grandparents had been the happiest of my life and decided that I had to return here to live with my son.

It’s only here that we will be happy, I announce to my steering wheel.

What on earth am I doing living in regional Victoria? My histories, the best parts, reside here, deep in this suburb.

But what gives me the right to expect happiness? Happiness is for people with no politics and who have not suffered and who have bought the lie. I hate those people. I envy those people.

That’s it! I am selling up and going for custody. Family court will suck big time but it’s now or never.

I am out of the car now and loitering at the school gate. I have stopped crying. Who am I? Who is this woman?
A middle-aged single parent with a string of failed, well not failed but concluded relationships.
I work in education, journalism and the arts -three professions currently under major ideological siege in this country.
My younger sister’s suicide 2 years ago still attacks my sense of self and the ‘worthwhileness’ of just about everything. It has totally rocked my worldview. Do I even have a worldview anymore? What do I believe in?

I haven’t written a book in 4 years. But what do I have to say that hasn’t been said before?

I think I am going to start crying again so I walk. I wonder if the milk bar where we used to get mates and licorice squares is still up on the corner?

I think about that little girl in the black and white photo with the blurry features and I want to be her again.

I seem to be spending increasingly long periods of time in my past. I want to go back and short-circuit all of my bad choices.

My mother is 80 and getting older and is going to need more and more help. She thinks I am selfish. Am I a bad person?

I am a capital F feminist and a small P and small T progressive thinker I hate being an ageing woman. My hair has started to go grey and it doesn’t sit up like it used to. Am I a vain person? I have started to re-think my whole position on Botox and tummy tucks.

I envy people who still have big dreams.
I have stopped getting periods.

I am still really keen on sex and intimacy but maybe that’s just because I am not in long-term relationship and uncertainty and temporality are perversely erotic. Are my relationships immature and dishonest?

I am not wiser and more integrated but about as integrated a personality as an actor doing weekly Rep.

I want to run away. If Greece weren’t in financial free-fall I’d do a Shirley Valentine and lie on a rock, naked under the Mediterranean sun waiting for someone young to reinvent me.

I believe that youth is wasted on the young.

I want to be in a long-term mutually supportive relationship where we still have sex and conversations.

Only now that I am older do I truly grasp diverse sexualities and that there are so many weird and wonderful consensual things I want to try if only I wasn’t so tired and confused about whom I should be doing them with.
I trust people less.
I need friends more.

Living with my son for half the week – because he spends the other half with his father – still feels counter intuitive and lonely.
The nuclear family model is outmoded but still, perversely, I wish had seen it up close and functional at least once in my life. Too late now, I guess. Oh God! It’s too late. It’s all too late!

I am saddened by representations of ageing women as asexual, envious, daffy and embarrassing.
I enjoy some pornography but mostly I think that it is dumb, imaginatively bankrupt and impossible.
I worry that our kids will see bodies and sex that are so far off the radar they’re getting insanely skewed ideas and expectations.
I wish more women under 30 had pubic hair. But that’s just me.

Don’t call me a grumpy old woman. Don’t tell me I am just bitter or jealous or depressed.
I want to say fuck off! to at least 2 people a day.

A new car that doesn’t shake over 80 would be nice. A better house and a new love affair would help me feel less empty. I’m sure they would.

I worry about what kind of life my son will have.

I regret the past and can see my future.

I am in my early 50s and this is not what I had planned for my life. Something has gone terribly wrong and I am working with someone else’s script here aren’t I?

I am not driven to succeed like I used to be and I often feel like a phony. As someone said on this program recently, I no longer have ‘clear cut hunger’. But I am always hungry for something.

And I am angry. In this neo-liberal part of the world of ours, the commodification of just about everything makes it so hard to maintain one’s moral compass.
I worry about global warming, computer games and the prevalence of mental illness. But increasingly feel at a loss as to what to do about these things.

Have I been a bad daughter, sister and mother? Is it too late to make amends?

I am not sure if I am bored or lazy or just deeply shallow.

 

The term mid-life crisis was actually coined around the time that photo of my grade 2 class was taken in the 60s. So? What? People didn’t have existential crises before then?
I am not keen on the notion that it’s a crisis, I prefer the psychotherapist, Erik Erikson’s ‘life as a progression of 8 stages approach’. All you need to know is that midlife crisis stage, or as he prefers to call it, the ‘generativity versus stagnation stage’ is number 7. You don’t want to know about number 8.

Erikson believed that in this stage adults begin to understand the pressure of being committed to improving the lives of generations to come. A person realizes the inevitability of mortality and that they will not be around forever and the ‘virtue’ of this stage is creating a better world for future generations in order for the human race to grow. ‘Stagnation’ is the lack of psychological movement or growth. Instead of helping the community a person is barely able to help their own family. Those who experience stagnation do not invest in the growth of themselves or others.

This is relatable to midlife crisis because a person becomes aware of the time they have left on Earth and needs to decide how they want to spend that time.

Lots of us, not all, but most people I know anyway, panic. Some panic in more obvious ways and act out the midlife crisis clichés we are all so familiar while others panic in less visible and neurotic ways.

This is me panicking on national radio.

But no more panicking, it’s time to stop stagnating and to start generating.

It’s time to get back in my car and drive to work. I’m going to be late. And anyway, the school bell’s just gone. It must be playtime already. Playtime.

Okay, okay. There’s nothing left to see here people. The crisis has been diverted. It’s time to move on.

 

 

My twelve-year-old son has just got a dog.

It was his father’s idea and Lily lives with them. But last week I suggested Lily come for a sleepover because I thought it was time I met my son’s new best friend.

They say it’s good for a child to have a dog but dogs are a foreign country to me.

Having a Labrador x Kelpie puppy in my house is outside my comfort zone.

Dogs make me happy: THEY ARE ARE EPIC.

I always had cats. My father who’s lived in the bush most of my life reckons dogs are for working although he cried when his Short Haired Pointer died.

My mother and grandparents whom I lived with growing up didn’t like animals inside the house but I was allowed to have a cat. I snuck Ginger into my room once but Mum reckoned Ginger smelled and made me put her back outside.

My grandmother used to give Ginger pasta and lentil soup and when I suggested tinned cat food she’d just scoffed. ‘She’s a cat. She’ll eat the scraps.’

We had chooks too but they were for eating and so were their eggs.

Italians aren’t great with treating animals as family members.

Even though this theory is probably nonsense I think of it when I remember how my grandfather got rid of Ginger. I’d looked for her everywhere for days and it was only years later I discovered she’d been driven out to the boondocks of Melbourne and left there. They told me Ginger must have run away yet something never felt quite right about that explanation.

But when my son’s new dog Lily bounded into my life and into my kitchen last week I fell for her right away. I liked how my son was with her, affectionate and confident.

Lily slept in my son’s bedroom on a special mat on the floor but when I went in there during the night to check up on them both, Lily was on the bed and I didn’t have the heart to move her.

I’ll just wash all the linen and put it through an extra hot cycle. I’ll need to vacuum too.

The next morning we got set to take Lily for a walk. She needs two a day apparently because she’s so frisky and not content to lounge about on a couch or play computer games all day.

She isn’t very interested in eating either.

Clearly she is more Kelpie than Labrador.
‘I’ll take her’, I say to my son.
‘She has to be on the leash Mum. You can only take her off it when we’re in the bush.’
‘Okay’, I say, taking the leash in my right hand and patting Lily on the head with my left. Her ears are so soft.

‘She pulls pretty hard’, says my son. ‘You got to keep the leash short otherwise she’ll take off.’
‘I know, I know.’ I say, like I’ve had dogs all my life.

But my son is right Lily does take off. Like a rocket.

I run to keep up with her and it’s fun at first, invigorating. Look at me with a dog! But Lily gets faster and faster.

And then I see it. Up ahead there is a man with a small white dog and Lily is heading straight for it.
‘Stop! Lily Stop!’ I shout uselessly into the wind, pulling on the leash like a drunken equestrian.

I watch myself flail, tumble, shriek and finally fall on the pavement with a thud like it’s all in slow motion.

***
Lily is licking the back of my neck and the other dog owner is saying, ‘Are you alright there?’ and my son is hissing under his breath, ‘Get up Mum. You’re soooo embarrassing.’

I lie there on the ground mentally checking through my body for injuries, my thoughts floating about madly…

To fall from grace: Done that. Didn’t we all originally.

To fall in one’s own and others’ estimation: I’m not a perfectionist but I do have a diligent inner judge and jury, so if others are not disappointed in me I sure am.

To fall out with friends: It used to happen a lot as a teenager and seems to have started up again in middle age.

To fall in love with the wrong man: Been there done that all too often but still can’t figure out if I attract the wrong kind of man or the wrong man just sees me coming.

To fall into a pit of despair: The Black Dog and I have been in an on and off relationship for years.

To fall pregnant: Yes did that a few times and only one child to show for it. Enough said.

To fall upstairs: An American expression meaning to be elevated above one’s station. A version of the Imposter Syndrome that most people I like possess to some extent.

To fall upon something: I discover less by accident now. These days I search things out more and don’t expect anything to fall into my lap.

To fall through the cracks: Those people who live disenfranchised and outside-the square, the ones our government cares less about.

To fall asleep: What I do easily but then wake up 3 times during the night. Menopause? A bad pillow? Worrying about falling over for good?

My eighty two-year-old mum fell over recently and hasn’t been the same since. Her body is fine but her confidence is shot.
***
The man with the small white dog is trying to help me to my feet, and my son is standing there dumbstruck. I feel a little embarrassed but mostly I’m annoyed with my son for not being more sympathetic.

‘But Mum,’ my son says once we’re on the move again and he is now holding Lily’s leash. ‘You are sooo not used to dogs.’

‘No kidding,’ I say.’

‘And you gotta admit it was kind of funny the way you were running and shouting and then how you fell over. It looked really bad.’

To fall seven times and stand up eight: One of those neat Japanese proverbs about never giving up no matter how rubbish life gets.

So while I can still look forward to the first coffee of the day, to my son’s face when he’s sleeping, to falling in love again, to the next Almodover movie, I won’t be giving up anytime soon. And I wont be walking no dog again soon either.

 

The best thing about spending 7 days at a health retreat in a sub – tropical rainforest with 25 strangers, is that I learnt how to Salsa. I was rubbish but I loved it.

The worst thing about living in a hermetically sealed wellness universe for a week with 25 strangers is that some of what this universe accepts as given truths are not always so universal.

Not all of us believe in guardian angels or alternative therapies lock, stock and barrel. Not all of us buy the Positive Psychology model as the superior path to happiness and self-fulfilment. Not all of us consider wearing a name tag day in day out normal.

But then what’s normal about chunking-up my mortgage to pay for a week’s holiday (first in 10 years) to some place where I wake up at sunrise for Tai Chi? What’s so great about sustaining a 2-day caffeine withdrawal headache and enduring the daily torture of something called a spin class? Why chose to be on intimate terms with mosquitos that think they’re fighter-bombers?

Before I paid for this health retreat that promised to coach me into submission with a personalized ‘wellness vision’, have me living outside my comfort zone and without virgin olive oil, I figured out that my repayments were about the equivalent of 3 lattes and 2 sav blancs a week.

I can do that. Not a biggie when I put it like that. I mean I deserve a break. My stress levels are off the radar. I’m self-medicating with booze and carbs like a wharfie on a busman’s holiday. My family and work commitments are overwhelming and my love life is … well…complicated.

On arrival at our health retreat we all stand about self consciously, summing up the other in a glance. She’s looks like a pain. He’s a fitness freak bozo. Those two in charge are just too perky-positive to be real.

I am wondering if it’s too late to ask for my money back. This place looks like an upmarket school camp but without any of the sugar highs or sexual experimentation to look forward to.

As the day progresses my initial defensiveness dissolves into some kind of surrender – although I do maintain a fairly active bullshit metre throughout the stay. Initially I leaven it with humour and self-deprecation and then gradually give up the performing for the more serious stuff like learning how to breathe. Apparently I haven’t been breathing properly for 50 years.

Sometimes the daily discussions and workshops about exercise, diet and the latest in neuroscience and mindfulness training really get to me.

Such first-world concerns! I wouldn’t be here if they hadn’t had a special price on offer. Everyone from the psychic flower reader to the life coach with a PhD in chutzpah thinks they’re a shrink. This is a kibbutz but with less concern for the community good and way better bathrooms. A massive share-house for rich people with nothing better to do than talk about gluten intolerance and strengthening their cores.

Other times, like when I’m striding sweating up and down mountain-sides, the local fauna scuttling up the forest trees, the air clean, damp and smelling of frangipani, and all the while chatting intensely with a couple of my new best friends about everything from kids to kayaks, I feel the best I have in ages.

As we talk and walk, every day a barrier down, a revelation shared, I am blown away by these women. By day 2 we are laughing or crying like adolescent girls on a night out.

We are 20 women and 5 men; the usual gender ratio at this place apparently. There is a husband and wife team too and I just can’t imagine coming to such a place as a couple. I don’t know why exactly but it just seems to defeat the purpose or something. The men are blokey-jokey and we are most of us probably over 40 and at one of life’s crossroads.

I don’t avoid the blokes but the subtle peculiarity of group dynamics means that I end up spending most of my time with 4 women in particular.

I am alone in my real life quite a bit but there’s always a distraction at hand. Here in this technology-free-capsule I am alone in my room by 7.30pm and it’s just me and my little fast-detoxing brain. I am not used to this kind of silence and it’s confronting. My leg muscles are burning. I can hear my heart beat.

Is it possible to make substantial changes to the way I am living my life after only a week here? They say it takes 21 days to change a habit. But there’s no denying the power of hanging out with a bunch of people who are all trying to be better, let alone tall he palpable goodwill and positive vibes.

By day 4, I have done 16 hours of exercise, had 2 massages, 1 facial and participated in over 10 workshops about everything from love and intimacy to navigating the hormone highway. The one about stress, cancer and heart disease scares the bejeezas out of me.

But it’s the dance classes where I really let myself go and forget to be embarrassed. I haven’t danced in years and it feels fantastic.

The chef is a fat-free, sugar-free genius and living without alcohol, coffee and chronic negativity is a welcome change to my usual routine back home.

A member of staff here is one of the funniest and inspiring people I have ever met. Another is more inappropriately flirtatious than my car mechanic.

Some people snuck food in. One burly fella had a secret stow of protein shakes. Another, the token husband, becomes the skinny, hungry guy I give my desert and mid-afternoon snack to. One woman confesses she’d panicked and secreted an empty tuna can in her room safe after a late night binge.

I never thought I’d like yoga. I always reckoned meditation was for other people. I’d never really savoured food without oil, tea without caffeine, and sharing 3 meals a day with people I had little in common with. I never thought I’d keep a straight face in a steam room full of naked people.

It was my sister’s birthday while I was away – it’s 2 years she died- and the retreat’s head gardener suggests we plant a frangipani for her on the day. He tells me he’ll look after it and send me a photo when it flowers after giving me a quick hug and leaving me with my plant. They’d be red flowers, he tells me.

I wonder what my sister would have made of me coming here? She probably would have said something like,

“Jesus El! You would have been better off giving your money to asylum seekers or something! But then, if it makes you feel better and you know, more able to cope with me being gone now, and everything…. Oh, and I saw you doing The Salsa by the way. Don’t give up ya day job will ya?’

By day 6 most of us have become sufficiently institutionalised to be feeling apprehensive about re-entering our former lives. I want to take home the funny and inspiring staff member to keep me on the right track and off the beaten one.

What’s not to like about a week of company, community and conversation? What’s not to feel grateful for after a week of pampering, positivity and papaya fruit?

Back home now and my real-world first-world problems are all still here. There’s been an initial exchange of mutually encouraging txts with my new best friends –

How you handling it? Retoxed already. Stay with it!

But they have stopped now.

It feels a bit weird and lonely all of a sudden. It’s like the end of an affair you both knew had no future but was gorgeous while it lasted.

Most nights I tell my son a story – a messed up fairytale we call it. But some nights I don’t feel like it and feel like I have no more stories to tell.

But even when it’s late, a school day tomorrow, and even if we’ve had an argument the story telling ritual has become crucial to the completion of our day. It’s our way of coming home to one another.

Come on Mum just tell me a story. It will calm us both down.
***
Life’s a mess. It’s incoherent and lacks structure. You can make all the plans you want. Plans are good. They provide shape. But living a life is not like writing a story about it.

I suspect that all my so-called plans have been about wanting to find and make a good home. But things rarely go to plan and making a good home? What is a good home?

A year ago I moved to the country because I wanted my son to live in the same town as his father; I wanted to make a new home for us (a home with a wrap-around veranda and a garden. I had always dreamed of such a place) and I needed to escape again. I needed to escape one home in order to create another.

When will I be allowed to call here home, I wonder? When do I get to be a local and not an immigrant? When do I get to feel at home?

I look up home and find
‘A home is a place of residence or refuge’.

I look up home and find
That it’s ‘where a person grew up or feels they belong.’

I look up belonging and find
where the word longing comes from.

Where my son lives is home for me. But he lives with his father and stepmother half the time too and speaks only German there, so does that mean that when he’s not with me, home becomes a house?

The ache for home is in all of us and it can be an ache so deep that we may never find any permanent relief from the pain of it; no opiate lasts long enough, no love affair salves the wounds, no house, no place, no person, no thing gets rid of the ‘home-sickness’. Heimweh the Germans call it. They have a word for everything. Avere nostalgia di casa the Italians call it. They always need a few more words to say everything.

‘Home is where the heart is’.

After the fires, the floods and the Tsunamis, devastated and traumatized people who had just lost their homes said things like:

It’s all gone. Our house, our photo albums, everything is all gone but they are just things. They are all just things. We are alive. We are the lucky ones.

And then if these people are asked will they come back to where they once lived and rebuild or start again or pick up the pieces they almost always say that of course they will because this, this rubble, this unrecognizable mess of mud or cinders is their home. Where else would they go?

I look up home and find
the home less
and ‘that home need not be a place’ – tell that to the man who lives in a cardboard box in the park – but instead, it can be ‘a mental or emotional state of refuge or comfort.’

I feel so at home with you.

I look up home and find
my little sister and I with our Nonna in her kitchen. A yellow Formica table, fluorescent light… Nonna telling us stories while she cooked. Mum was working. She worked a lot and we lived with my grandparents. Mum wanted to buy a home of her own but my sister and I already had the best home ever and we didn’t understand why one day we moved to a new house in an another suburb and left our grandparents in theirs.

I look up home and find
the day my son was born. His father in the blue paper hospital cap and me all smiling, bloated and blissed out. I was home at last. My baby brought me home. Not the other way around as it usually is.

I look up home and find
me in the single bed in the study at my dad’s house and waking up to find him smiling at me. He’d been watching me sleep.

I look up home and find
my mother and her grandson talking quietly together into the night about all manner of things

I look up home and find
old friendships well worn and new ones still trying it on for size.

I look up home and find
women mostly and where men are silent, absent or just visiting.

I look up home and find
my sister dead and my grief homeless
She was never at home in Australia. In Chile, Nicaragua, Mexico, El Salvador, Italy, East Timor, but never here. She was at home with languages other than her first, a stethoscope around her neck, a bandana around her head.

I look up home
and decide to travel- not to escape but to travel – and wonder if when we travel do we become more of who we are or less? Do we become more like our real selves or do we invent a different self to suit the place?

I went to my Nonna’s village in Tuscany, sat on a hill and looked over the grey-brown stone village where she was born and I looked for home. My grandmother had eloped when she was16 and fled a violent father, never to return, never wanted to. I looked and felt something, but it wasn’t home.

‘Home is where you hang your head.’

When we travel are we abandoning our life?

I come from ‘a broken home’.
My son comes from a broken home.
When will home feel like it is mended?

I left home at 17 and kept on going back home whenever I got too poor, too miserable or too sick of trying to be a grown up. And today, 30 years later I am still leaving home regularly. I keep on leaving or running away and am yet to find that ‘emotional state of refuge or comfort’ they tell me about. And if I ever do, occasionally find such a thing, it feels so fragile, so untrustworthy.

‘You take yourself with you, wherever you go’.

When I got married at 40 in my grandmother’s garden it was because I wanted a new home. I thought that having a husband and a father for our child and one who stuck around would make a home. He didn’t stick around and yet he used to say to me when we were both still new to one another and when he was overseas and I was looking for somewhere for the two of us to live, that it didn’t matter where we lived because for him where I was, was home.

Being in love can feel like coming home.

We can spend our whole lives trying to recreate a childhood experience of home, a time when we remembered we were happy. When life was right, the best it could be.

We can spend our whole lives trying to displace our early version of home because it was awful. We remember it as awful.

‘Home is where the hurt is’.

These days I live between two houses. Homes? I travel to the city for work half the week and live with my mother –-‘Womb sickness’. It’s as if I’m always yearning for a new home and craning my neck at the same time trying to get back to my original one. I spend the other half of my week up here in my house-home with its yes, its garden and wrap-around veranda.

Perhaps in some kind of sympathy with my son who has lived such a double life since he was 6 months old I too am trying now to make two homes for myself?

But I remain neither here nor there. I have a bag permanently half-packed and two of everything – toothbrush, pyjamas, face cream, black pants…
I’m always in transition and never seem able to give in to one place deep or long enough for it to become home. I have two pairs of running shoes too. I’m still running. Away. From home. To home?

***
Last night my son decided to change my story telling brief from messed up fairytales to stories about a boy with secret powers:

Just, you know, he can do things that no one knows about and sometimes he gets into trouble and everything but he always gets home before anyone finds out his true identity.
Come on Mum tell me a story. It will calm us both down.

My 83-year-old mother is in hospital.

I sat in the front seat of the ambulance, Mum’s handbag and a pair of slippers in my lap.

This is it, I thought. This is the day it will happen. This is the day my mother will die.

What did we talk about when I saw her yesterday? Did we argue? Oh yeah, she’d told me to make sure I wore a greeny-browny silk scarf to the gig I was doing that night, and I’d suggested back that she stop telling me how to dress given I was over fifty now. Then she’d said that at my age I should always wear a nice scarf because your neck will always give you away no matter how well you take care of yourself.

The ambulance driver tried making conversation with me but all I could hear was the other ambo in the back with Mum.

‘Can you hear me love?’ he asks her.
‘Does she speak English?’ he asks me.
‘Yes. Very well.’ I tell him. ‘Her English is better than mine. She corrects my grammar and she reads voraciously and she was an English teacher and she’s very smart and independent and…’

It must have been her Italian surname.

‘We’re taking you to the hospital now love. Your daughter’s here.’
‘Mum? I’ve got your bag.’

Like she cares about her bag.

I’d expected to sit in the back of the ambulance with her. You know, holding her hand reassuringly. But they don’t let you do that in real life apparently. So I’m sitting up front and the driver is asking me something again but I can’t make out what she’s saying.

This is one bumpy, noisy and fast ride.

I realize I’ve brought the wrong slippers; these ones ‘have had it’ she reckons.
When I’d gone to Mum’s yesterday to pick her up for our daily walk in the Botanic Gardens she’d said she felt too tired to walk. I’d tried to cajole her into getting dressed. Sometimes one of us is too tired or too low so one usually convinces the other to snap out of it.

‘Everything always feels better after a walk,’ I’d said to her yesterday. ‘Come on, the blossoms out. Get off your bum.’

I spend the next 12 hours with Mum in the Emergency department of a large regional hospital.

At one point, about 3 hours into the wait for triage, she and two other elderly lady-ducks are all lined up on their trolleys against the wall in the corridor like, well, ducks, all flying high with delirium.

Mum tells me to put a clean singlet on my sister who’d be in her late 40s, if she were still alive that is.

I offer some water to another woman, who takes the paper cup in her paper-white hand and calls me Patrick.

My mother is staring up at me and I have never seen this expression in her eyes before; startled, unrecognizing, blazing.

‘Does she know who I am?’ I ask the ambo who’s been waiting with me all this time.
‘Love?’ he almost shouts at her. But then it’s so noisy in Emergency – all the beeping and buzzing, talking and dashing about that maybe she just couldn’t hear me earlier when I’d been holding her hand and stroking her feathery silver hair.

‘Love? Do you know who this is?’ he’s ushering to me to come closer now. Mum appears to nod and tries to speak but nothing comes out.

My friend is with me and she stays a long time. She must have followed the ambulance in the car but I hadn’t really noticed her until now.

Eventually we get moving. Mum is wheeled into a small area behind a blue curtain and it’s hard to stay close to her because so many people are around her now asking questions, speaking about things I don’t understand.

She has a temperature of 105 and is muttering all kinds of crazy stuff. Every so often she tries to leap off the trolley, so I hold her, steady her, cradle her in my arms to prevent her falling off the narrow wheelie bed and onto the hospital floor, ripping at all the tubes and leads.

During the course of the night I drink cups of tea and eat white bread sandwiches from those plastic triangle shaped boxes.

I wander the ward and over-hear all sorts of things that ought be private. Sick people, exposed people, doctors, nurses, cleaners, families, friends, we are all here: compressed humanity up close and personal.

Hospital is another country and I have been living the hospital life for the past twenty-two days now. But although I am l beginning to learn the language and to eat the food of my new country, I will never be accepted as a local. I will always be that middle-aged daughter who comes to see her sick mum every day, asks too many questions and doesn’t stop tidying up and rearranging her bedding and flowers.

She’s like her mother isn’t she, I imagine the nursing staff saying, she really speaks her mind and is so bossy.

On good days Mum and I talk and gossip and on bad days she just lies there quietly furious and shocked with her recent and uncharacteristic decent into indignity and powerlessness. Handing over is not in Mum’s DNA, neither is being cared for.
This large regional public hospital never stops. It seethes and functions like one massive sighing, grieving, struggling, sucking, weeping, eating and purging single organism.

The hospital is under staffed, there are not enough beds, the food is awful, the air is too warm, the nurses are efficient, their use of language often more pre-school teacher than medical professional, the doctors are either inexperienced and tentative or less entertaining versions of Doc Martin.

Although some are so wonderful and kind you can’t help falling in love with them just a little bit.

Everyone is this place is run off their feet and working like dogs.

In her recent Quarterly Essay, ‘Dear Life: On caring for the elderly’, writer and Dr. Karen Hitchcock observes: ‘All general medical departments are under enormous pressure to treat and discharge patients as soon as possible.

They have such a large number of patients that extending each patient’s stay by even a single day would cause emergency departments to choke up.

However, elderly patients are complex and time is needed to offer them the care they need, to talk to them about their wishes, listen to their experiences of their illnesses, and together forge ways to make their lives bearable. To do well, patients need to eat, move and remain mentally active in hospital – three things the hospital environment specifically hinders’.

Mum is being discharged next week, they say, and will be able to go back to her home. But it remains unclear how will she be changed and how she will re-adapt.

She is scared stiff. So am I.

Today she talked her head off about politics and our recent change of leadership.
‘You watch’, she said. ‘Shorten will step up now. You just wait and see.’

Then she demanded I take her credit card and go pay her rates, wash her nighties, and buy myself a decent set of saucepans and a new greeny-browny Italian silk scarf.

How do we teach our adolescent boys about feminism?

On YouTube, there’s an animated series called ‘Feminazi’. The episode #GlassCeiling scored over a million views. There are lots of other episodes: Feminazi Getting Owned. Feminazi Fail. Feminazi Gets Triggered. Feminazi gets Reckt.

Note the use of gaming language; usually the province of adolescent boys.

I scrolled through a few of these clips which tend to show plump, bespectacled, trouser-wearing ‘feminazis’ raging away about their rights and gripes to some passive cartoon-bloke. There are other mash ups of real feminzis accompanied by a male voice-over pointing out how extreme and hilarious, how hysterical and irrational such women are.

I hear my 14-year-old son’s guffawing from his room and then he calls me in to watch one of these hilarious clips.

I can’t believe you’re watching this crap! I say.
Calm down Mum, it’s just a joke, he says.
It is not a joke. It’s sexism. Don’t they teach you anything at that school of yours?
Okay, okay. I’m sorry. Stop taking it so seriously. It’s just funny.

I’m furious. I should be calmer, more mater of fact. I have to stop with the lecturing and hectoring. The more I suggest it’s contraband, the more he’ll want to see it, right?

I wonder what our schools doing to engage with and challenge what students are getting out there about feminism? What if the orgy of misogyny on the net is over riding what educators are doing within school hours? And aren’t commentators and social researchers constantly telling us that in order to change public opinion and behavior, it’s all starts education?

Oh, and by the way, I tell my son. ‘Feminazi’ is a word invented by sexists.
I didn’t say sexist pigs. I mean what am I some kind of 70s second wave feminist or something? Some kind of ‘Feminazi’?

I tell my son that I’m a feminist, most of my friends, both male and female, are feminists – I think – and that he comes from a long line of feminists and doesn’t he realize that feminism is about equality and equity between the sexes.

‘That’s random, ‘he says. ‘Who’d be against all that stuff? Can you get out of my room now please?’

Here’s what I have to confront: sexism isn’t something that only exists amongst sociopathic, violent, shady men – it can be much more insidious than that. It’s often part of lovely, kind, open-minded boys and men in our own families, who would never think of themselves as anything other than supportive of equality.

And yet there is this kind of disconnect that persists within the moral compass of many of them.

Hear it in the quiet chuckling between the fellas, enjoying Eddie McGuire’s ‘joke’ about drowning his colleague Caroline Wilson, and hear it in the snorting laughter of my son and his friends watching these Feminazi-type clips on YouTube.

See it in the plethora of sexually explicit material that covers billboards and magazines and the Internet.

Still!

The thing is, once upon a time, our culture would’ve belly-laughed at all manner of racist jokes that would now be seen as utterly not OK. Ah yes, the lines we’re prepared to transgress and trample, and the ones we’re not. And yep, women are still totally fair game.
There are some great programs in our schools working with students around issues of bullying, sexuality, racism, mental illness…

In my home state of Victoria the government’s ambitious program called Respectful Relationships is currently being rolled out and the intention is for it to be delivered in every state school within the Victoria in the next 2 years. And it looks great. Here’s hoping teachers are not already so overwhelmed with administrivia and an over-stuffed curriculum that they have time to teach it and within the constraints of curriculum.

And let’s hope too that our educators are sufficiently supported and trained by the government to do so.

It’s all very well to announce new shiny education initiatives, it’s another thing to get them working on the ground and for real, particularly within our more disadvantaged schools.

One day, I’d love to see the history of feminism taught as a mandatory unit in history, alongside other key social justice movements like Aboriginal land rights and industrial rights.

I’d love to see more schools have explicit value statements and mottos around equity, and see more English and Literature classes study feminist texts.

Helping adolescents become more self-aware is part of it too, and helping them understand the links between attitudes, language, objectification and violence against women – because we’re swimming against a mighty media current with some nasty little rips.

Maybe then my son and his male and female friends wouldn’t think that lambasting feminists on YouTube is so funny after all.

A couple of old friends, I mean women friends, I have known for more than twenty years – I met them both when we were all about 20 so that’s, no, it is, nearly 30 years. My really old friends, shouted me an afternoon at the local Japanese Bathhouse last week for my birthday. Actually there is only one truly authentic Japanese bathhouse in Melbourne, apparently, so I guess it’s local, no matter what part of the city you live in.

One of my friends is an old hand. She’s travelled to Japan a lot and spent a deal of time with its culture, its food, its art and its traditions of communal bathhouses. Except, of course, that in the olden days, as my son would say, community bathhouses were just that, for the local community – places where people gathered to gossip and exchange news as well as wash. (Although in the 19th century, the sexes were separated). In those days no one, or hardly anyone owned their own bathroom, let alone a bath. Even so, these days in Japan, it’s still a fairly common pursuit. Although doing little to nothing in a hot, steamy and soporific environment with lots of semi comatose naked bodies is hardly much of a pursuit, when you come to think of it. More of a sit and wait, than a pursuit. More of a does my bum look fat in – in, well, nothing, than a pursuit.

My other old friend is a detective and an old hand at far too many things, I can’t even begin to imagine, given her line of work. When the three of us meet up before our communal bathing experience, she has just come from several hours coordinating drug raids. You know, like in The Bill or in Cagney and Lacey and involving a lot of kicking down of suspects’ front doors and all that. Her life, her other life, is a mystery to me and to all of her other ‘outside the force’ friends.

‘As if I’d tell you anything,’ she replies wearily when I try and ask her day’s been.
‘I never talk about my work you know that. It’s confidential. Anyway you’d be horrified. Or just use it in your next book or something.’
‘No, I wont,’ I protest. ‘I’m never writing another memoir as long as I, as long as I memoir!’
‘Talking of memoir, will I have to be naked?’ I enquire of my old hand at all things Japanese friend. We get inside the place and are politely asked to remove our shoes and put them in a little locker.
‘Yes, of course you will. It’s a bathhouse. You are here to wash your body and to relax, to contemplate and yes, you will have to remove your clothes at some point. But it’s OK; it’s fine, I promise. You don’t have to walk around or anything.’

My heart sinks. Which is very ungracious of me given it’s a birthday gift and that it includes an hour-long Shiatsu massage as well.

There are announcements, little signs all about the place. Most are instructions on how not to look like a big fat clumsy western idiot ‘doing bathhouse’ and the others, more than one, are reminding clients against ‘inappropriate behaviour’ and that ‘this is not a place for picking up’. There is also an elegant little sign on the front door of this salubrious establishment informing people who are in pursuit of anything else, sex, specifically, it states, to go away please. They must have had a few mix-ups in the past.

Naked. OK. That’s Ok. I can do naked with old friends and some other ‘sisters’. I’ve stripped off tons of times in dressing rooms back-stage before and during a performance, before and during sex, before going to bed at night and during the night when peri-menopausal hot flushes can hit me like an assailant. I think that’s what they are.

I am reminded of that Rosalind Russell quote, at least I think it was her.
‘Acting is standing up naked and turning around very slowly’.

Pull yourself together, I tell myself. You have known these women all your adult life – but you have never seen any of the other women in here before. But it’s hard to tell really, given they are all NAKED! And it’s not like you can look at their faces properly or anything. You can sneak a look but then you appear unsophisticated, like you’re gawking, like you’ve never seen a naked woman’s body before. Come on now, I chide myself, you have seen each other in various states of dishabille, fatter, thinner, fitter, slacker, younger and now, older, over the years.

 

This is nothing, I continue to myself. I have just removed the first layer of clothing. So you are naked. Bid deal. This is just the literal equivalent of having written a bare-all memoir. Some nice symmetry. So get ya gear off! No one’s going to look at you and point and scream, yuck, or uninteresting, or predicable, or who in the hell are you anyway? like that Sydney reviewer did about your book recently and who didn’t even spell your name properly. And who didn’t even put his/her own name on the review. No, no one is going to reduce you to a non-event in a hundred words or less. So get ya gear off.

There are a few other women about but everyone is judiciously avoiding eye contact. So where’s the gossip? What do we contemplate? And where’s the little Zen garden to look at while I am doing it? And don’t try and use that tiny scrubbing piece of modesty material the size of a cravat they gave you along with the towel and your locker key to try and cover up your private parts. As if. As if anything about me is private anymore anyway. Absurd. Idiotic. Pathetic. Vain. So I have Caesar Stomach, so what! My friends are way more casual. Integrated. They are just standing there naked and waiting for Little Miss Weirdo to hurry up and do the same. I do.

‘You can’t take the towel into the wet area,’ one of my friends tells me. ‘You have to leave it out here on that hook otherwise it will be too wet to dry yourself with later’.

The wet area! I feel like Meryl Streep as Karen Silkwood about to get done over naked with a mean looking scrubbing brush in those open showers after she’s been contaminated with radioactivity.

The wet area is an open shower and some taps and tubs and where you sit on a little stool and scrub your body, wash your hair and reassure yourself that no one’s naked bum looks good squatting on a very low stool. Then you WALK to the bath area. It’s warm, no it’s hot, and there you all lie about in a spa without the bubbles and without the noise and no one says anything. I do, a bit, to my Japan -savvy friend but my other friend just closes her eyes. I guess running multiple drug raids over a 48-hour period can be tiring work.

In the tradition of the Japanese bathhouse, the actual bath needs to be kept pure, undirty so you need to yourself clean, before you get into the bath. I like the idea of it, the ritual of it. Pity I am so uptight. But then I am the one who could never learn to meditate.

In the water with the women and it feels fine. Naked. Fine. Good. Simple. Calm. And then after ten minutes, it feels well, perfectly normal. I mean, I’m not going to be getting up and bouncing about playing volleyball like they do on those nudist beaches, but it’s fine. I look at the other women. Really look this time and they are all, all of them so different and so fantastic and all of a sudden I am so grateful to my two friends who have brought me here for my birthday and whom I have known for nearly thirty years. Because, damn it. I feel safe.

I doesn’t last long though because I start to feel claustrophobic too and am, I admit, starting to get a bit bored. After we dry ourselves and get into our little cotton two-piece
Jujutsu outfits they provide us with, we make our silent way to a room upstairs where we all lie on mats and have the hour-long shiatsu massage. This is good. I get massage. No trepidation there. Know the rules of massage. Complete abandon in that department.

I fall asleep, I think, because when I wake up, I feel all otherworldly and carefree and the feeling lasts for at least the rest of the day.

I have learnt something. And it’s reassuring to know that at nearly 48 years of age I can still have a brand new experience.

And what have I learnt? Clothes, who needs em! Bad reviews, who reads em! And friends, you gotta love em!

My 13-year-old son has just got his first job. While I applaud his initiative, I suspect that accompanying him three days per week after school to haul bags of catalogues up and down the streets of our town in the half-dark does not actually count as a ‘real’ job with any ‘proper’ responsibility attached.

Delivering junk mail under the cloak of sundown is not my idea of a good career move either.

Already, a few mates have spotted me surreptitiously stuffing the luridly coloured items into the too-small slots. And while we have a good laugh at my expense, I hurriedly inform them that my son is doing the other side of the street and that it’s really his job, not mine.

“See? There he is, over there in the parker and beanie dragging that trailer-buggy contraption his father made him for the job. Look! It’s even got lights front and back.”

Is it even legal to employ a 13-year-old in this country?

Yes it is, as long as he has his parents’ approval and the employer has procured some special permit. But nothing in the contract I saw mentions my son.

Instead, it reads as if his own father is the employee.
Is this exploitation, or is it fine that our son does half the work and his father and I do the other half? Because there is no way he can sort, collate, lug and deliver 300 fat-arsed catalogues on his own within the three-to-four hour time frame the employer reckons is possible.

This week I am delivering junk mail. Last week, I sang in our local pub for beer money and danced with a man wearing an eye-patch and a cowboy hat. This is life as an over-educated, under-employed, middle-aged woman living in a large regional town 90 minutes out of a major city.

Then again, I’ve had more jobs and more career changes than Walter Mitty, except that mine were real, so I guess I can weather this latest one.

As I scale our town’s hilly streets, using my mobile-phone torch to check for any No Junk Mail signs, I think about how to use the experience as material for a story, because otherwise I would just feel pissed off.

Those hilly streets are often unmade roads. You try clambering up one of them with two canvas shopping bags full of freshly folded landfill.

My own first job was at 16, waitressing in a pizza bar during Year 11 (or Form 5, as it was called in the late 1970s). I used to get felt up by the blokes making the pizzas.

Other blokes, customers, would pat me on the bum as I headed to the kitchen or slip crumpled notes into the front pocket of my little white apron. One of the notes said, ‘Hi beautiful! Give me a call ’cause I wanna make you happy.’

He must have been at least 40.
I left that job for two reasons.

First, I needed to study for exams. Second, one of the pizza-makers drove me home after work and put his hand down my shirt and called me a pretty little tease when I pushed it away.

After exhaustive anecdotal research I have concluded that women around my age were usually sexually harassed at their first jobs in the ’70s and that most men, in their first jobs, were usually sacked for accidentally setting fire to the fish-and-chip oil or for telling an employer to go jump. Younger women I spoke to have similarly funny or exploitative stories to tell about their first jobs, but there is less mention of any sexual harassment.
In the old days, kids did lots of tough jobs and started younger than they do today. Is this because we are just more careful with, and respectful of, kids now? Or is my tramping about with my son and his hundreds of catalogues after school just helicopter parenting in full flight?

My son’s father and I have not lived together for over 10 years, but this latest development in our son’s life has had us kind of hanging out together in an almost-companionable way.

My ex-husband sorts, I fold, our son packs.

Just like a traditional little nuclear family – Mum and Dad helping out their only son navigate his first job.
Our son looks baffled.

Either because it’s one of the rare moments he has seen his biological parents in the same room cooperating like a Sesame Street sketch or, maybe, because he can’t believe his first job is so boring.
“As soon as I save enough money for a new computer I’m quitting. Okay? Mum? Dad?… Okay?”

I can see it out of the corner of my eye. When I am confident that no one is watching me I move closer. A little closer. Until finally I am looking right at it. The visible abs, the sleek toned arms, the strong, sleek legs… Finally, guiltily, I reach out for it and begin to consume the magazine hungrily. Too quickly. I have to buy it. I need to take it home with me. I must examine it properly. In privacy.

Where’s my 9-year-old? There he is. He’s got one of his own too that he’s scoffing with a similar greedy enthusiasm. (He gets his addictive personality from me, obviously)

Have I got enough pocket money left for this Mum? You buying a magazine too? What is it?

I try to hide my secret purchase but he’s caught me. I can’t pretend any longer. That section of our newsagency has become temptation – a siren’s cry – and I can no longer resist.

I haven’t ever bought this before. I say defensively. I just thought that if you can get an expensive magazine I can too.

So we both take home our newly acquired paper-treasures: his, the latest POKEMON, mine, the latest RUNNER’S WORLD.

My name is Elly Varrenti and I am a runner.

I have never been a magazine buyer but since I have been running again and in training for the half-marathon (yes, you heard right) I have become a little bit compulsive. (Is that like saying a little pregnant?)

As my son buries his head in his mag, I do the same, searching for pointers, inspirational anecdotes, dietary and endurance advice.

A decade ago I had a major trauma in my life. My husband walked out on our 5month old son and me and I started to run. My baby came along in his pram back then.

I ran away. And through the pain and during the escape-process I got physically stronger and dealt with the depression and the shock. And without drugs for the most part.

A decade later an another major trauma- my sister’s suicide – and I am running again. I am running, jogging, sprinting and purchasing niche mags my way through the shock pain, the fatigue and grief.

Mum! You look so embarrassing when you run. Your bosoms go up and down and your tummy is all-

Yeah, all right, all right. So, come on then. I’ll race you to the end of the street. Then let’s have a kick to kick down the oval. Then 50 stomach crunches. Let’s go!

***
I sometimes get lost when I go on a run. Up around the goldfield hills and mounds where I live in the country ,it’s not hard to get disorientated. When you’re in ‘the zone’ and have been at it for an hour it’s easy to end up somewhere you’ve you never been before.

Once I got lost and ended up on the main highway. Semis tearing past at 110 clicks, honking their horns and occasionally calling out stuff I thought had gone out in the 70s. Finally after nearly 2 hours on the road, exhausted, bedraggled and unseemly, I found base camp.

Running is a kind of getting lost, or a kind of surrendering myself to the momentum, the adrenalin of the solo motion. But I did not mean to get lost literally like that. On the highway looking like and extra from Wolf Creek.
I couldn’t move for 2 days.

Keep still! Mum said. You’re bloody manic.

I was a manic in the early montsh after my sister’s death. I was afraid to be still. Scared to go to bed. Too restless to sit with anyone for longer than 20 minutes.

So I kept moving. I cleaned. I weeded. I walked. I worked. I ran.
And I ran and I ran and I ran.

I don’t take an ipod. I don’t want funky accompaniment. I want to hear my own thoughts and let them go the way they will without any artificial enhancement – even the really horrible thoughts.

11 months down the track the manic aspect has subsided and I am now approaching it all with a degree of measured sanity. Besides, there are just not enough free hours in the week to run as much as I used to. back then the only I could put in so many hours was not to work or sleep.

51 years old this year and the fittest I’ve been since I was 21. 51 this year and I admit that sometimes I’ve had serious concerns I’d get to 52.

My son’s onto another magazine today and I haven’t bought one since that moment a few weeks back where I found myself in the newsagency being lured away from the newspaper and journal sections and lured towards the glossy muscular thighs and exposed flesh section.

This morning on my run in the bush I met two kangaroos.

Hello you two funny looking Aussi icons, I called out to them.

They stopped dead still, stared directly at me and then were off into the opposite direction before you could say ‘who is that crazy, middle-aged, sweating woman running as if her life depended on it?’

Who is it? It’s me! I called after them. It’s me!

You know that gripped feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you’re rejected? You know how you mouth goes dry when there’s a party on and you’re not invited? You know how you can feel the beads of sweat forming on your upper lip and your armpits starting to smart when you’re not chosen? You know how weird and surreal the world looks from the outside and how it’s as if everyone else knows the right lines and moves to make and you don’t?

Left out. You are feeling left out. And it’s awful isn’t it?

***
My son’s been waking at night.
Please! Can I play? Are you still my friend?

He wakes and comes into my bed. I hold on to him in his half-sleep-state and tell him that’s it’s OK and that we all feel left out sometimes.

But I feel really bad Mama and I just get really angry.

I tell him that he’s a good kid and that the world’s like this sometimes. You know how it feels when you’re saying words to protect someone you love and how it’s almost impossible sometimes to get those words out without choking on your own lack of commitment? He gets angry!

I just wanted to go yell at those mean kids and tell them to, well, to grow up. Trouble is grown ups are not much better when it comes to the exclusion game.. I remind myself that I am the adult here and that his schoolyard cohort of cool jazzmen and good time comedians are nine year olds.

It’s up to me to reassure him that while his feelings of devastation are valid that this too will pass. Just like when he borrowed that library book ‘Weird but True stories’ that included one about a girl who had fingernails as long as her torso and another one about wolf-man who was so hirsute you couldn’t make out his face. He had nightmares about that stuff for days but they stopped.

Jealousy, fickleness, feeling left out, trying too hard, my son had learned all of these words and the exquisite and confusing feelings associated with them by the time he was seven. Today he makes good use of the f word, in particular.

Luke told me he hates but last week I was his friend. He’s so fickle, isn’t he Mum?

Yep. I taught him that people are not always the same day in day out and just because someone likes you one day does not mean they necessarily will the next. We may call these people fickle, I told him. I figure it helps to allay his misery by attributing clear language to such confusing behaviour.

There was a birthday party recently and all of the gang were invited. Except him. I felt sick and all of my own not so repressed feelings of abandonment and inadequacy came to the fore.

His father told me that he (our son) needed to learn that this is the real world and that he needed to learn that there are ways to deal with such miserable and sleep-robbing emotions without our interference.

He can’t be – we say in German, gripping on to the strings of your apron-
Yes, yes, I get it.

Bullshit! I couldn’t bare my son’s discomfort and self-doubt any longer. Or is that my self-doubt and discomfort? Like me, he can seesaw between
the it’s all my fault position to the it’s all their fault one overnight. From neurotic to narcissist in a few REM-sleep blinks of an eye.

Yes, said his teacher, the other boys have been horrible to him but we are dealing with it as a class.

I appreciated her directness. She had called it for what it was and not ambushed the obvious with all that educational no blame, no praise, euphemistic PC speak we are compelled to endure these days.

He is making some good choices.
He is getting along OK and has not set fire to the rubbish bin lately.

He is working well on his concentration and his boundaries are improving.
He is not interrupting and calling out in class all the time.

He is beginning to understand that he can be empowered by stopping, thinking and not making poor choices.

He realises that whinging, crying and dobbing wont get him any brownie points with a gang of boys who can love and leave him more times in a week than I’ve had men do the same to me in a lifetime.

I am eager to show his teacher that I think my child neither perfect nor blameless. I do not want his teacher to think me ‘that kind of parent’; the kind that thinks their child is ‘special’.

The fear of rejection and the desire for approval can make us crazy and pretty unattractive actually. Recently I appeared at a festival and am now embarrassed at how left out I felt when the festival neglected to include me in the daily program of events. It was a technical oversight, not a personal attack but if my son’s bed were big enough… He has a single bed and is the child and it’s simply inappropriate to expect him to make me feel better about such things. Isn’t it?
I shared anyway. I told him that I read a story at the festival and that I was not completely happy with how it all went. I told my not quite nine year old that I should have done better and was feeling bad.

There are those of us who from an early age have so thoroughly internalised a healthy sense of self-worth that life’s little (and big) failures are painful but not devastating, lessons, not reasons to give up altogether. There are some people who, when rejected or left out feel it but don’t become it. I am not one of these people. I hate these people. These people are very lucky people. How did they get to be this way, to have such thick skins and look so dignified in the face of perceived failure?

They don’t care, that’s how. These people care less about what others think and mean it. These lucky bastards are secure and safe in their own bodies and unattractive over-weening behaviour like mine (shoot me now), and my son’s (bless him) are simply not part of their response to life repertoire.

But I learned my repertoire from the experts. I learned from migrants who needed to adapt, assimilate, fit in and be liked and who learned English faster than the customers in their café could say ‘cup of chino’ or ‘grassy arse’. I learned from a smart chubby wog boy father who went back to school at 25, did an honours degree at night and worked at General Motors during the day and still, never felt accepted. I learned from a mother who bailed us out financially when he lost the job but determined to improve himself further and further. I learned that only a good education could make you feel good about yourself and have people respect you. I learned how to present well while never quite feeling that you are enough.

Look good, speak well, go to school, be charming and maybe no one will ever guess that you are feeling like a failure and an interloper most of the time.

Yeah, I learned form the experts how to work hard and to cover up with humour – His very funny, your son, his teacher tells me, the real class clown -and to beg the world to forgive us for never quite measuring up.

When my son wasn’t invited to that birthday party I wanted to ring the birthday boy’s mother and tell her that it’s not on and that to exclude my son was just plain wrong. But I didn’t call her. And anyway, my son appeared to get over it sooner than I did because two days later he was playing with said kid and I was pleased I had not acted on said impulse like I usually do.

Just because I learned from the experts doesn’t mean he should.

OK class, now I want you all to write an essay about what you did on your summer holidays.

You remember them asking you to do that and how bored you already felt at the very thought of it? I don’t know why but as soon as I was compelled to reflect on the last 6 weeks of the summer holidays– or maybe it was more like 8 weeks back in the 70s- I was overwhelmed by a blanket of amnesia of the ‘what did I actually do in my holidays?’ variety.

I don’t think it’s fair to ask them what they did and then, worse, to have write about it in a classroom of 24 kids all restless and arrested in their new light weight uniforms, pens poised, noses pink and peeling. The very point of summer holidays for kids is that they just … happen, and some of it’s great, much of it’s OK and the rest is, well, nothing to write (home) about let’s face it. Those bits that are great should probably not to be re-accessed until adulthood or when we are in therapy or writing a memoir or never.

Even the most imaginative and bright of kids will inevitably write constipated rubbish like – I went swimming at the holiday house and then I went home and then my sister had a fight with me and them Mum made lunch and it was funny when the dog got all wet in the sea blah, blah… Nothing about what is was really like, how it really felt.

We didn’t have a holiday house but Mum did rent one for a few weeks during the holidays with another single mother with kids and then my friend came too and she is my best friend and then we went swimming and then we killed mosquitoes all night with our slippers and my best friend sang Elton John songs all the time and …

 

If I was asked now in a class to write about what I did in my summer holidays it would go something like this:

In the holidays I felt so disengaged, isolated and pissed off that everyone else in the world, except me, had gone away that instead of writing a book, reading 10 others, planting the cactus garden on my sister’s grave or training for the half-marathon (that’s true!), I lay on the couch, sucked on Strepsils and watched the entire 1st, 2nd 3rd series of Madmen.
***

When my son returned from his holiday away with his father and step-mother and after we having finally exhausted the movies, the available mates, the pool (and anyway it was raining,), the board games (bor-ing!) and the erudite conversational exchanges concerning the parity of the Aust/US dollar, the contentious causal relationship between climate change and the floods and the success or otherwise of John Ralston Saul’s latest, I discovered a little add in the paper for the National Lego convention or rather, the BrickVention (because it is not run by Lego itself but by the fans of Lego) and even I got a bit excited.

‘What do you think?’ I ask my son who, having moved from restless to bored to really annoying with seamless dexterity is now hanging upside down off my bed with an icy pole in one hand and Lego Spiderman in the other. ‘Do you want to go?’
‘Yes. Yes! Yes!! He hollers as he falls off my bed, on to his icy pole and runs for the front door in only his underpants.

So we travel into the city by train and towards the Melbourne Town Hall with the swagger of those who reckon they’ll be early and beat the crowds.

Hah! Crowds? You aint never seen crowds like this since Woodstock and you aint never seen a queue like this since Russia circa 1985.

But somewhere amidst the out-of-work actors dressed up like Darth Vader, Chewbacca or Jabba the Hutt there is a snaking, choking and surprisingly orderly queue (not like Russia at all) that goes an entire city block. Slowly. Very slowly. How slowly? ETA (that’s estimated time of arrival) at entrance of convention 2 hours give or take.

So we stand in line in the sun grabbing the little mercies of shade from a building and make our way around the big city block. We snake past the posh shops (who actually buys stuff from these shops?), the inner city hotels (who actually stays in these boutique establishments except for honey mooners and adulterers?), the underground car parks (who actually believes how much they charge, these oversized concrete cashiers?) and the Uniting Church (who actually- nah, I’m not going there. Not in this column anyhow.)

There must be thousands of us parents and kids in this queue and the parents all look increasingly inpatient while the kids attach and un attach to other kids in the line sharing little witticisms and questions about this and that and all the while we, the parents are hoping it’s all bloody worth it. I am also wondering how I got to be standing on hot concrete in the middle of the CBD for over 2 hours just because I want to keep my kid entertained and out of jail during the school holidays.

‘I hope it’s good’, I say to my son.
‘It will be’, he says with the certitude of the nearby Uniting Church’s minister.
‘I mean’, I forge ahead. ‘I hope it’s not disappointing or anything. You know, waiting so long and everything.’

My son is negotiating the wrought iron fence now and some woman is screaming at her 6 year old to ‘Come down off the fence or you’ll kill yourself!’ Tempers are fraying. Adults are carping. Children are starting to fall apart, their enthusiasm falter.

‘Hey you!’ The rangy bloke with 3 kids, one on his shoulders, one in a stroller and the third at his side is calling out to me. ‘Don’t you try and push in lady. I think it’s about time you got back to your place in the line.’

He was nasty. I didn’t stop for air. I was feeling nasty too by this stage.

‘Take it easy mate. I have no intention of skipping a couple of pathetic spots in the queue. Just calm down and don’t take our your frustration on me OK’.

I kid you not. I said that. I notice that everyone else is looking away now- the adults, not the kids, they’re fascinated.

‘That was very embarrassing Mum,’ says my son. He’s back at my side now.

It’s getting to me. The waiting, the sun, the kids, the craziness, the holidays.

And then we can see it – the entrance! And suddenly the energy, in our part of the snaking line anyway, changes perceptibly and we are all as one and looking forward with optimism towards the future.
* * *
We are in. A swarming mass of people and mainly of the male kind. My son is off but not before we agree on a meeting place if either of us get lost. But he’s back in 5.

‘It’s amazing. It’s so incredible. Mum, it so so completely worth it. Come here, come here look at this look at this!’

Table after table of Lego constructions and they are amazing but more fascinating to me are the people behind the trestle tables, the fans and zealots who actually collect, construct and covet these little blocks of bliss in all their varying colours, shapes and sizes. These are not merely toys; these are a life style choice. Just ask any of those over-30-something blokes with their geeky tea- shirts and mini figures characters attached to their nametags.

Every so often I lose my son to the throng, panic and then surrender to the controlled chaos of it all. So this is a convention run by the fans, made by the fans, for the fans. The atmosphere is good, not graspy or merchandising although there is one corner where I can make out wallets being held aloft and smaller hands grasping at stuff on a table. (Later my son convinces me that to spend the rest of his Xmas money on a Lego mini figure is an excellent idea because it is ‘totally rare Mum’. But how rare can it be? It’s a bit of plastic the size of my thumb, not a remnant from the lost city of Atlantis.

All the same, I am glad we stood in line for hours and that I had a fight with that father of 3 because here we are in the Melbourne Town Hall with its arcane organ and turn of the century balustrades. Hundreds of kids and grown ups (some girls and women sure, but they are definitely in the minority) either behind or in front of the multitude of tables covered in a cornucopia of worlds – seafaring, space age, medieval, railway, automotive, pastoral, urban, fantastical, sci fi and- what’s that? You must be kidding, surely not. It is. It’s a religious world and there’s Lego Jesus replete with his little crown of thorns and hanging on his little Lego cross. Weird. This place, these people, there is definitely a bit of weird and nerdy going on here amidst the more innocent obsess ional delight.

I stand still and just take it all in. What, I wonder, might be the equivalent of this level of fun, this fever pitch of excitement, this overload of myopia, this sheer joy for me? Nothing. Nothing comes. I did stand in line for 3 hours at the Uffizi in 1986 and that was pretty good once I finally made it inside. I have been with my tribe of actors and theatre addicts on an opening night and that’s felt something like perfect joy. But these days? Nothing. I get my kicks vicariously I suspect. I watch my son get his kicks and his excitement give me an approximation of the experience.

So what did I do on my summer holidays then? I got vicarious kicks 2 ways. The first, by watching all 3 series of Madmen on my own and luxuriating in the slick, sexy aesthetic, the tight and erudite writing, the controlled and uptight lives, the secrets and lies all wrapped up in a delicious and controlled tasteful package that is early 60s in America. This series is a fetishist’s dream. Not only are the clothes and hairstyles perfect but the attention to décor, to the visual and sociological minutiae of the period is positively indecent, it’s so sexy.

I am a voyeur and a couch-potato-excitement-seeker. I am a woman who desires everything but doesn’t know how to mobilize her own desire off the couch and out the front door.

And here, now at the National Lego convention I watch my son as he sidles up, again, to the 20 something-year-old with his new baby in one hand and a mini figure in the other. My son is asking all kinds of important questions about the new-father’s collection of hybrids and originals and the expression on his face is one of total concentration mixed with slightly embarrassed unctuousness.

‘So what did you think?’ I ask him after dragging him from his pleasure palace after almost 3 hours.

‘It was awesome as,’ he says. I was so excited, I felt kind of sick.’

It is all about desire after all.

So. What did you do on your holidays?

In Elena Ferrante’s book Days of Abandonment, the author vividly, excruciatingly, describes the experience of being abandoned by one’s lover.

‘The circle of an empty day is brutal and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.’

Reading is all about timing of course and because my lover abandoned me, reading Ferrante’s book is good timing. It’s reassuring to have my obscenely abject behavior and self-hating-thinking-post-breakup so honestly portrayed from inside Ferrante’s abandoned woman’s head.

Hers is a mind in extremis, at the very limits of rationale and civility, a mind struggling between reason and madness. So was mine.

Grief is a kind of madness. Abandonment is a disintegration of self.

As Adam Phillips in the London Review of Books writes in a piece about self-criticism ‘…we murder ourselves to punish ourselves for having such murderous thoughts. So unrelenting is this internal violence that we have no idea what we’d be like without it. We know almost nothing about ourselves because we judge ourselves before we have a chance to see ourselves.’

Since he left me there are whole suburbs I can’t visit. It’s the knowledge that his body may be close by.

Worse.

That his body may be with another’s body and that I might see them together. And that I shall appear wretched and soggy with sadness and they, blooming with smugness, as if they are the Robinson Carusoes of love.

Oh, hi I shall say to him because that’s all I can manage even though in my head I have rehearsed the perfect script for such a moment.

Hi, he shall say, all faux casual, except that he is a rabbit in the headlights.
He shall go to introduce ‘her’ and then think better of it. Best not provoke the mad ex. You don’t know what she’s capable of and my God, just what did I see in her.

You know the rest.

I think my boyfriend left me but he broke up with me by stealth. He didn’t actually use the words – I think our relationship has run its course. I still love you but. I’ve met someone. I can’t give you what you want. – but things perceptably changed gears over a period of weeks. There were subtle recalibrations in his tone and expression. He lingered less on my face, and was no longer in the lover’s thrall to the ordinary details my day.

We had sex less. I became self-conscious whereas previously I had felt like he wanted me even if I’d had no sleep and looked less than my best and sounded like a grump. He was falling out of love with me. I couldn’t put my finger how or why or when it happened, I just felt it.

But then you do don’t you?

The more he withdrew the needier I became. The less interested in us he became, the more I focused forensically on our relationship and wanted to talk about it all the time with him. As he talked less the more became vigilant I became. What was he thinking. Where was he going? Had he been? Wasn’t that a new sex move he had started to use in bed? Did he just roll his fucking eyes at me? I had become the Relationship Stasi.

We never had ‘the conversation’. It’s as if he’d had all the conversations already with someone else – had he started to see a therapist perhaps? – or in his own head. So by the time the news reached me that he didn’t want to continue our relationship I felt robbed. He was through the worst of it and my chaos was just beginning.

Ferrante quote:

It’s passive aggressive the way he left me. It’s moral cowardice. It’s unkind. It’s unevolved and unsophisticated. Or is it just what happens; there’s the Leaver and there’s the Left however way you spin it.
I sent him texts, emails, smoke signals, parcels and meeting requests that were never answered. I sent my missives into the ether knowing they would never be acknowledged, perhaps never read. Then he blocked me. What a horrible word; blocked.
In between the crying and cursing I drank too many wines, ate too much ice-cream, had broken-hearted sex with people I didn’t love, and bored everyone rigid with my moaning repetition.
Why was I not enough? How could he do this to me after all we went through together? Why does this always happen to me? Our whole relationship was a lie.
I was having an affair with a married man. Our script together is a familiar one. It is a common narrative. Clichéd. Painful. Hidden. Exquisite. Yearning. Hopeful. Beautiful. Passionate. Humiliating. Shameful. Real. Infuriating. Clandestine. Special. Powerful. Shameful. Delusional.
Him: I will leave, I promise.
Me: When? You have been saying that for the last four years. There is always a reason not to.
Him: I don’t love her anymore, not in the way I love you. But she is the mother of my children… I still care about her…I told you, when the girls finish high school…then…then I can leave…. I can’t just…You said you understood this.
Me:I did. I do. But it still hurts and I am starting to think that you will never leave, never tell her the truth about us, about how we fell about each other—
Him: I don’t want to hurt anyone … I never meant for this to happen. I love you. You know that don’t you? Don’t you?
Me: But it’s not enough is it? Love is not enough. The fact is, you need and want both of us. You want your family to stay like it is because it is a safe lovely place to be and you want to be a good father. She is not a bad woman. You still like each other. You may even love her still. In some ways you are still good together. Your parent well. You are a finely tuned domestic engine.
Him: Stop. Please stop crying. I hate it when you do this. I just feel guilty and ashamed and I just want to—
Me: You told me, you didn’t have sex with her and that that part of your relationship has been over for a long time and that it is me who consumes your erotic imagination, who offers that kind of intimacy.
Him: That’s true. That’s all true.
Me: Oh my God, I am a fool, a big fat clichéd fool. I am The Mistress. The archetype guys back a long way and I am simply carrying on this story.
I cannot openly grieve the loss of hope that we would be together some day. I cannot share my story of heartbreak with people because my brokenness is wrong and shameful, and so I pretend that my weight loss is because I have been dieting and exercising. But really it is because I can hardly get out of bed to be bothered fixing myself food. I am like that woman in Ferrante’s novel- abject, mad, unravelling.
I tell my adolescent son I have the flu and that he must spend more time at his father’s for a while because I can’t look after him properly. My mother knows. I told her when the affair started and she told me that it would all end in tears; my tears and she was right.
When is too old to feel stricken when someone leaves you? Unceremoniously granted, but all that therapy and experience and my weary heart still misses a beat if I see someone whose walk reminds me of his.
Does everyone have issues with saying goodbye, with abandonment, endings?
Do we all think after it’s over that surely things could have been conducted with more dignity, less hurt and miscommunication all-round?
Does everyone wish they had said this or that or done one thing or another after it’s too late?
Does anyone dream of a better braver and more self-loving version of themselves?
Of course they do.
If the prototype of all separation anxieties is our birth, then from thereon it figures that if ordinary losses; garden variety rejection and normal rejections are handled poorly in our early lives for whatever reason, then people like us struggle bad with abandonment issues. And often we even go about unconsciously replicating them. We may not like feeling abandoned but people like us are accomplished in making sure people, intimate others mostly, do, abandon us that is.
Recalibrating one’s sense of self after someone has left you is as much about the geography of the brain, as the geography of terrain. I may have not been able to enter any physical space that reminds me of my ex but I keep on travelling down the same old paths in my brain,
Our lives are a series of bonds made and bonds lost, attachments and detachments.


As Elena Ferrante says of the abandoning lover in Days of Abandonment, my ex is not a scoundrel or a coward but his ‘behavior is that of a human being who deprives another human being who deprives another human being of his love. He knows it’s a terrible action, (I think he does. He must. Surely?), but his need for love has taken other pathways, and he can’t do anything but fulfill it.’
And he’s a cruel prick!
I like Elizabeth Gilbert – The Eat, Pray Love woman – on this love and loss thing.
‘In the end, it seems to me that forgiveness may be the only realistic antidote we are offered in love, to combat the inescapable disappointments of intimacy.’

An act of psychic violence

‘Is tomorrow a daddy or a mummy day?’ my son asks me. He should be able to work it out for himself given he’s currently learning the days of the week in Prep.

My six-year-old son is leading a double life and he’s been living like this, an intrepid little traveller, since he was six months old.

This year he started school in the city with me and lives with his dad and stepmother in the country on the weekends. The rhythm feels easier. Our son is more settled. I feel better. His father probably feels more cut off.

These days shared parenting is common, they say. One in four families – or is it one in three- is co-parented, blended, or outside the traditional nuclear model. These days children commonly have two homes: two bedrooms, two sets of photographs and Lego. In my son’s case, two different linguistic universes as well. My son and his father and stepmother speak only German when they are together. I don’t speak German.

The first time I handed my six-month-old baby over to his father for a couple of nights it felt like surrendering a limb without anaesthetic.

‘Don’t do it. You’ll regret it’, said a friend.
‘You’re still in shock!’ said my mother.

But I did do it. I handed over my son, I mean, our son, to his father that first time because even though his father had stopped loving me, I knew he hadn’t stopped loving his child. I knew he was as good a parent as I was. Maybe even better, given I had post-natal depression at the time. I grew up without my father; I wasn’t going to let it happen to my child.

Today and five and a half years later it still feels like an amputation every time my son goes off to his father’s house for a few days a week. Except that now it’s the status quo. Now I am meant to be used to it. I should be relieved my husband and I separated when we did, and not later, when our son had got used to the idea of his parents living in the same house.

I have friends who do it. Some do the one-week on, week off thing or the half-week here, the other half there. For us, there’s one birthday party in the country and another one in the city. His father lives in the country and I live in the city. That’s our shared-parenting set-up. It’s a little bit country, a little bit rock n roll. It’s a little bit acrimonious too.

Usually it’s the logistics, the legalities and the nuts and bolts of how to co-parent we hear about. We all know for example, that it’s a far more workable scenario if the two parents get along amicably. It’s even better if they live close by. You hear less about the complex and confusing emotional life of the co-parent spending half the time outside their own child’s life.

I’ve had ‘child-free’ time for some years now and can even look forward to it. It’s the time I fill up with work, friends and half-hearted searches for new romance. But I still feel at a loss after my son leaves: it seems counter-intuitive somehow.

It’s the missing.

There’s a growing demographic of co-parents out there who spend half their time intensely involved with their children and the other half trying to work out who they’re meant to be while the kids are living with the other parent in another house.

We are all of us negotiating double lives as well as trying to understand that our child is leading one too. Sometimes we may know little about what he does or how he does it while he’s living it. When I ask my son about his daddy time, he usually mutters something vague and unilluminating and I am none-the-wiser. So I just have to wait and hope the details of his alternative identity emerge in more indirect ways during our time together.

‘When I’m with you I miss daddy and when I’m with daddy I miss you,’ said my friend’s eight-year-old daughter to her mother, recently. My friend rang me in tears to tell me.
‘I didn’t know what to say to her! It all seems too much for her to manage. Or is it just me who finds it hard to manage?’

Creating a functional family is an on-going challenge and its beauties and terrors come with the territory.

Regardless of whether it’s a mummy or a daddy day.

So, International Women’s Day got me thinking. Thinking about women. Women’s business. Some of it secret and some of it that shouldn’t be. Some of it that should be so public, so much that should still be a part of the ‘dominant public discourse’, as they say, that we might need to burn bras all over again in order to attract more attention. (Not many women did actually burn their bras back in the high flame feminism of the seventies, but it’s become a convenient, dramatic, if not, slightly daggy symbol of women’s right to freedom – freedom from the stifling confines of patriarchy and under-wiring.

In 1908, 15,000 women marched through New York City demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights and International Women’s Day was born. In the late 70’s I used to do an adolescent trudge on the 8th March. I’d wag school with a couple of like-minded mates, and we’d make our way into town to be a part of something we didn’t quite understand, but knew was important, a little subversive even. I marched for lots of stuff in those days. Did some more marching in the 80’s, once or twice in the 90’s, but, and I am ashamed to admit this, my perambulating-in-protest days have come to an almost-halt now. Although, my inertia was successfully challenged during the whole Tampa and Children Overboard travesty and I did spend a few nights down on the Melbourne docks in 97, or was it 98, during the now famous water front dispute. Down there, alongside the silent ship cranes and their ghostly scaffolds, the atmosphere was pregnant with expectancy and communal ‘bon amie’. Amidst the half-light, the makeshift living arrangements, the shared food and the clothes people had probably slept in, it all looked like one of those scenes from films about the end of the world, or you know, when only a few people are left on the earth after some catastrophic event that’s wiped out all other living creatures and we, the few, are left to scramble about atavistically in the name of what’s still good and right. So there you are, there’s a single man and two other single women (of course there are), there’s a family of four, (one’s still a babe in arms), there’s a scruffy and exhilarated union rep type, a bully baddie vigilante type and a posh lawyer dressed down for the occasion, giving out legal advice for free around a fire in a bin or something.

But mostly, my idea of protest these days is a good long sit. I might fly off a few group emails when our government has done, or is threatening to do, something stupid, unfair or both. Or when Amnesty tells me to, I sign stuff, send stuff. But as to actually hitting the streets, I haven’t really done it since having a child more than five years ago and really, you’d think that being a parent, I’d be even more motivated to want to interfere with the future of civilization.

I marched with my mother in the Vietnam moratorium in the late 60’s when I was still a child and since then Mum and I have gone on a couple of other exhilarating protest stomps through the city streets. They were great those times with Mum. She slipped easily into the lefty activist gait of her youth and it was like her body just remembered what to do, how to be, and she looked twenty-one all over again. We linked arms once in the thrill of the moment and I cried with the closeness and the, we-are-oneness of it.

International Women’s Day is, these days, less a collective commiseration, a complaint en masse against the massive gender inequities and injustices throughout the world perpetuated on women by the patriarchy – although there are still plenty of those to worry about – but is more, these days, an opportunity to celebrate all things woman – all things women have achieved, the advances they have made socially, politically, sexually and all that. In some countries the 8th of March is treated more like another Mother’s Day, except that you need only be a woman and not necessarily a mother to be getting celebrated.

On this program last week a terrific young woman author actually admitted to being a feminist. With much self–awareness and some irony, she just came out and told everyone, with some shy pride too, I thought, that she was a feminist. Because these days, apparently, feminism is a dirty word. Well, not so much a dirty word, but more a redundant, and outmoded concept. No need to announce oneself as a feminist these days, apparently, because these days, most people assume that if you are a woman and if you have a job where you earn as much as your male counterpart, then you are one. That if you can tell a man what you want, where you want it and for how long, then you look like a major one. That if you think that Raunch Culture is just Feminist Culture, but spelt differently and way more fun then look out, you might actually think you are one. That if you take no crap from a man, just because he is one, then you are so definitely one. That if you chose not to get married because it’s an irrelevant patriarchal construct, or maybe just because you don’t want to, even though you don’t know which one of your grandmothers had already fought that one for you, then you sound like one. Apparently.

Maybe these days it’s just assumed that even though you mightn’t use the f word, you are simply living proof that feminism, first and second and now, so called post, has touched you. Changed your life for you. Given you choices. Fiddled around permanently with men and women’s mental wiring so that certain gender inequities just look stupid or plain wrong now. These days. Maybe you just don’t think about it enough. Or not at all. Maybe you think all the battles have been fought and there’s nothing left for it.

But maybe too, it’s still a good idea to get off your f word backside and march anyhow because there is nothing like a good march to set you thinking about all that you are taking for granted and all that you could still do to make a difference. Maybe a good march makes the personal political, the cynical sign up. Maybe being with lots of people, lots of other women people if you are a woman, might make you feel connected to the oh so old fashioned sisterhood and maybe, just maybe, you might feel less lonely and confused about it all. About the whole ‘you can have it all school of feminism’ that you have been trying to negotiate, to get right, as best you can, but have found yourself in your forties still torn, still wanting. Wanting more. Wanting less. Wanting something else. Wanting a mentor woman person to show you how it’s done, this contemporary-women-can-have-career-children-husbands-sex-families–time-to-read-a-book-swim-a-lap-and even-go-on-a-march, thing.

Maybe, yeah, maybe I should have marched last Saturday.

I went to an ‘opening’, the opening of a new Australian play recently because I have been doing some theatre reviewing again. But don’t worry, this isn’t a theatre review, it’s just an excuse to tell another story.

There was yet another festival in town so I went to some execrable shows in converted venues that would have been better off keeping to their original purposes in life and to some other shows too that were good, some really good. Some made me even miss being an actress. But then as soon as I remembered those days I remembered the misery and the poverty, the rejection and the dieting so I stopped missing them.

I have a great and hilarious friend who reviews theatre too and she will always make me laugh or admonish me with the certitude and concern of an exasperated parent. She is the best person to have with me in a foyer most times.
“Just stop it, ignore him, he is bad for you, you are better off without him and just remember… I am watching you’.
“Yeah right thanks, like you haven’t made a few really bad choices in your time?’ I said.
“True, very true but I stopped and so can you.’ she replies, sounding like the grown up.
She is wise my longstanding foyer friend but sometimes I feel like I don’t want to admit to everything I have been up to -mostly when it involves bad choices and men.
“And another thing,’ she adds, ‘ignore everyone’s advice, ignore mine, and go carefully amongst people’.
The last thing sounded like Jesus, but I liked it somehow.

But this time I went on my own to see a new Australian play – more of a ‘non-text based song cycle, revisioning and re contextualizing’ of something and I already had a really bad feeling about it. But I went along with some renewed positive energy since having won a battle with my ex over where our son was going to school next year. And also, I ended up sitting next to my cousin too. Oh and it wasn’t so much a battle as an impasse and I have not won really because I suspect that whenever you feel victorious about anything the hubris is just as likely to trip you up on something you hadn’t accounted for. So I wont go on and on about how happy I am about having won, I mean having got my own way, I mean about our five year old son living with me during the school week next year and not with his dad in the country, because something is bound to compromise the good news. It always does, I suspect, when ex husbands and children are involved.

So anyway, the play, the show was not great but what was great was that I ended up sitting in the theatre next to my relative. This is my cousin who I hardly ever see and who I like a lot and with whom I share a family history. My father’s family hardly speaks to each other, hardly ever. How does this happen? My son has never met our entire big Italo-Australian extended family because it is so extended it snapped years ago.

When my cousin tugged at my shirt as I edged past her on the way to my seat, I looked at her and as usual I saw a bit of myself in her face. We don’t look all that much alike but we are around the same age and I just know we see the world through a similar genetic prism. We were pleased to see each other. We like each other I think. We even have people and interests in common but there is also always some shyness and embarrassment when we see each other too. A few years ago all the female cousins on that side of the family, we are all around the same age, got together and it was great, a bit strange but great and we committed to making a regular thing of it but didn’t.

So my cousin tells me she is getting married. I didn’t know and when she tells me she is a bit reserved and I can hear the sub text. ‘I am getting married and I am sorry I have not invited you to the wedding but you didn’t invite me to yours and well I thought about asking you, my first cousin whom I like, but I decided not to and when I discussed it with my future husband he agreed that you and I are not really close, we never really see each other so I shouldn’t bother’. So she told me that it was just going to be a small family thing and then the play started and we were both relieved of our mutual discomfort and just a bit of sadness too. Sadness that our family does not get on, does not mix in the same bowl, and because we, the daughters have inherited the mess.

When the play was over my cousin and I chatted in the foyer, the way you do, and I asked her, really asked her to call me. She said she would, she said she would call me but hasn’t so I am going to call her and invite her and her husband and her dad, my uncle, my dad’s brother, to Christmas. That’s what I am going to do because life’s too short for idiotic family legacies and most of us inside those families are often just too stubborn and lazy to change the status quo.

It’s true than when you have children and when you get older things like relatives you like but never see for some reason can be one of those things that we decide to do something about. It’s true too that when you have children and when you get older the hunger or fantasy for the big happy family can really get to you and even though you know that such yearnings are infantile and indulgent you can decide to call your cousin and invite her and her husband and her dad to Xmas at your place.

Sometimes I run in an inner city park that’s a peak hour thoroughfare for office workers in suits and trainers. It’s also home to Captain Cook’s Cottage (weren’t people so much smaller in those days?), The Fairies’ Tree, muscular Morton Bay Figs, ‘picknickers’ with children and tartan rugs, Japanese and German tourists, an Art Deco looking toilet block that was a popular beat in its time and … homeless people.

There’s a generosity about a park like this; testament to our forefathers’ vision for a free –to-public-oasis smack bang in the middle of the city.

Homeless people have ‘set up house’ (so to speak) on the veranda of a small clinker brick building in the park (it’s got some kind of power generator inside it). I ‘ve been running here for over 6 months and there’s always been people sleeping there, often still huddled under blankets if I get here early enough. I feel like I’m invading their privacy.

Welcome to ‘the world’s most liveable city’. At least no one’s moving them ‘right along’ I guess.

Sometimes I see them carrying a towel and a toothbrush to the Deco toilet block. But this is no holiday in a caravan park down the coast, this is sleeping in a park because you don’t have a home to go to because you are poor or you have a mental illness or both. (Or you’re a writer or actor doing some comfortable research.)

It may not have the dimensions or super-real impressiveness of the blue tarp shanties and cardboard boxes in Shinjuku railway station where Tokyo’s homeless live, but it is an oddly attractive construction this building. Beneath its awnings there are doonas and mattresses, blankets and plastic bags all neatly stowed or laid out – depending on the time of day. No, the homeless people in the park where I run some mornings are not living in cardboard boxes but too many in my town are sleeping rough.

The soaring Gothic hubris of St Patrick’s cathedral provides ironic commentary on this homemade, home-less shelter. It’s the modest and organised neatness of the set-up that strikes me day after day. This is not just a place to crash for the night; it looks too resigned to its own permanence for that.

On this day I get hot after only one lap of the park – menopause probably but that’s another column- and so remove my outer layer, a black and white jacket thing, and drop it on the steps of the clinker brick building. I know that it may or may not be there when I get back.

When I do get back I can’t find my jacket. And then I see a man – a long legged, tattered but neatly dressed in a make shift suit, Mr Bojangles type and he is carrying a pile of clothes. And there’s my jacket amongst his pile!

No worries, I think. He needs it more than I do. I have another jacket and he probably doesn’t. I live in a house and he sleeps outside. He looks old but probably isn’t much older than I am. I run to try and stave off old -age and he runs to get out of the rain

He shuffles with some intent for a bit (where is he going with the bundle of clothes? Does he need a hand?) and I continue to watch him from a distance. I am doing my stretches now and pretending to be thinking about other things, not about him, when something happens.

As I watch this man walking down the garden path, a bundle of clothes in his arms, it’s as if he is all of a sudden in slow motion and I can see this man’s whole life in this decelerated journey of his. The man and his life appear to exist in this moment. I can see his life in glimpses, only of course. I can see it in this slow deliberate walk, his face impassive, his shoes too long for him, jacket too loose. The slow-mo sequence contains a whole life and I can only guess as to its ordinary–tragic dimensions.

It probably takes less than a minute for the man to reach the rubbish bin (so that’s where he was headed!) and now he is bundling his collection tighter so that he can … he can … drop it into the rubbish bin!

I give a sharp, shocked little laugh and he turns to look at me. Face to face for the first time this homeless man and me. Then he kind of laughs too and in an ostentatious gesture performs that ‘wiping your hands clean thing’. And with a pretend-appalled toss of his head:

Filthy bastards! Leaving all their bloody rubbish all over the place. Whaddatheyreckon this place is? The Hilton?

With that he continues back down the garden path towards the red clinker Deco building where he rolls up his grubby flat mattress and hangs blankets over the railing to air them out.

I am looking at the rubbish bin now that contains my black and white jacket. I quite like the jacket. My sister’s. Do I make my way casually to the bin and rummage about for it or do I just leave it there?

Something in the man’s expression when he was brushing himself off, deriding us ‘bastards’ for leaving our rubbish lying around, settles my dilemma for me.

Jackets are easy to come by. Dignity not so easy to hold on to.

After my marriage ended I started running.

It took me two weeks to get me out of the lounge room and off the couch and another three weeks to get me out of the house. Then the baby, the pram and I hit the streets.

We both liked being in motion. It had just taken me a while to realize that regardless of whether I was inside or outside, my husband wasn’t coming back and so I’d may as well start moving. At least this way I wasn’t eating everything not nailed down and my baby was in the fresh air. At least if meant I had to get dressed and out of . I me

For someone who’d always shunned regular exercise, particularly the outdoor kind my becoming a runner gave friends no end of amusement but they couldn’t help being just a bit impressed. ‘She seems to have got through that really bad patch okay and she looks quite fit doesn’t she?’ We all know that exercise is beneficial to our health but until you do it consistently you resent such salutary advice. I did.

Running made me feel good.

I started to look better. I came alive again. Then I gave up running. Not sure why, I just did.

Eight years later I moved to Castlemaine XXX. My son turned 8, I turned 50 and my sister died. I started running again.

It’s because I run that I see the things I see and think the (ridiculous) things I think like other people’s lives, other people’s home. those homes.

I live in a leafy, well-heeled Melbourne suburb and everyone else seems to live in those homes whilst I live in a flat, not an apartment, a flat. I bought close to mum and close to my grandmother’s old house when things went pear-shaped because although I’d successfully got out of the lounge room and then the house, I just couldn’t quite mange to get out of the suburb. So when I run I see these homes.

You know the kind of homes. Preferably a weather board, rambling one with the wrap around veranda, the wicker chair, shambolic garden, the not-too-new-swing and the more than two pairs of muddy shoes untidily, but lovingly left at the front door. A home that probably has a biggish kitchen with a requisite big table and something or other always cooking on the stove.

Where did I get this fantasy from anyway? And why do I imagine that these homes, these children’s book homes where all is right and busy and cosy in the world actually exist?

When I run I see these homes but rarely the people. And when I stomp by all sweaty and stupidly envious I can’t believe how powerful the hunger for happy families is. So I wrestle with my ridiculous thoughts and try to run a bit faster to sweat them out but just as soon as those ones disperse others surface. I am meant to use this time for reflection surely not rumination. But all I can think about are banal things like what will I cook for dinner and can my son get away with no bath tonight and perhaps I should ring that person up and apologize or whatever? I can’t believe how petty and fixated on the minutiae I can be.

I am near the river now jogging along the river and it’s beautiful and the air is crisp and the light is perfect and all I can think about is that bloody post-graduate student at the university who inadvertently sent me an email calling me a ‘silly cow’.

She actually meant it to go to a fellow student and instead it ended up in my inbox instead. Some would say that she did it accidentally on purpose but I say that I don’t care. I shouldn’t care. She is only one of fifty of my students and not all of them will like me, be reasonable.

But I start to compose a careful response to her and then it all gets messed up and before I know it I have a discrimination case on my hands. Stop it. Just run, let go of the rubbish you can’t do anything about. What’s that Serenity Prayer again? ‘God give me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change …’

What am I running from anyway? At first I used to have a couple of basic running mantras of the how-did-this-become-my-life kind and the energy of the anger was great for my endurance. But then the anger turned into something else and I needed to find other images to fuel my stamina. I am an incessant list writer and on the top of this list, this week, is Be Good. Think more about other people, particularly when you are feeling terrible. (Must read Anne Lamott’s book again.) Be nicer to your mother and try not to hate your ex-husband because he’s happy with someone else and the men you meet are so wrong.

Don’t get angry with your son and don’t try and reason with him – he’s a teenager not an accountant. Don’t dress too young. It’s not a good look and remember remind a friend, the candid detective one, to tell you when you have the whole mutton-dressed-up-as lamb thing going. Don’t lie or smudge the truth because you think it’s easier in the moment and you don’t want to hurt someone’s feeling. It always backfires anyway.

Read more non-fiction. Eat less dairy. Give up coffee.

Spend more time with people who need you even if it’s a bit dull and you’d rather be elsewhere. Try, really try to stop crying whenever you see or hear or think anything that reminds you of your sister. Instead spend more time with her 9-year old son who is so much like her and needs you. And try, really try to cease fantasizing about the perfect house, going back to the big smoke to live because the town you are in has never and will never feel like ‘home’. Don’t give up completely, but try, just try not to feel so lonely-loser-lost because you are single and middle-aged and if only you were with the right bloke, life would be easier, calmer.

My running is getting faster now; in fact, I have broken into a sprint. God I haven’t sprinted since 1975.

Why do so many of us spend so much of our time trying to change who we are, where we live, what we eat and who we don’t like? It’s exhausting. Maybe it’s because I don’t believe in God that my level of disquiet is so insistent? Maybe if I belonged to some kind of a group or had faith in some kind of higher power?

I’m sitting down on the riverbank now. My heart is fast. Very quiet considering it’s still inner-city and I can hear all sorts of birds. Those trees. That light. That breeze…

My dear friend died 6 months ago. I looked after him during the last 3 years of his life. He lived in my street. He died and some of me died with him.

I still run.

My Year 8 son gets home, issues a barely perceptible ‘Hi Mum’, hurls his ginormous school bag to the floor, yanks open the fridge to look for food, chucks off his school shoes (laces still tied), exchanges the top half of his uniform with a back-to-front tee-shirt and, in this single adolescence dance, somehow manages to take a gulp of water from the kitchen tap.

All the while, he’s maneuvering his iPad from hand to hand, couch to chair to kitchen table, where he does his homework, on, yes, you guessed it, the iPad.
Half an hour later he moves with the clumsy stealth of a labrador to his room, where the iPad proceeds to function as a virtual mall. He plays games, chats with friends, shares ’10-most’ lists, makes videos of himself narrating games and browses on YouTube.

What an intrepid little traveller the iPad is: it’s on the train to school, it’s in the classroom, it’s often in the schoolyard and then it’s back on the bus at the end of the day.

The iPad may look like an innovative teaching tool, a very ‘moving forward’ education initiative … but the trouble is it comes home every night after school for a sleepover as well.

Research surfacing indicates that the learning and teaching efficacies of such technologies are, well … the jury’s still out. But I’m yet to be convinced that students do any better at school with a personal device in the classroom. And I’m a parent and a teacher.

These days when I ask kids to open their books at the start of a class, they open their iPads instead.

These days, a landscape of small silver squares unfurls before me with students’ heads bowed over their screens in homage.

Having conducted exhaustive anecdotal research with other parents – who all feel they are failing somehow because they can’t control their kids’ screen use adequately – we all agree the situation is getting out of hand.

One parent suggested I put my son on a ‘technology fast’ because apparently it reverses much of the physiological dysfunction produced by daily screen time. It’s probably too late for me to go cold turkey, but his frontal lobes aren’t even switched on yet.

But how can my son go on a fast when he has to go to school five days a week and his drug of choice in mandatory?

Don’t get me wrong. I love technology. I procrastinated writing this column and watched the final season of The Good Wife on my laptop instead.

It’s not just kids. Mamamia staff member Jessie Stephens was so addicted to her phone, she gave it up for one week. 

In Reset Your Child’s Brain, American psychiatrist Victoria L. Dunkley explores six major effects of screen-time on the developing nervous system:
1. Disrupts sleep and desynchronizes the body clock. (Check.)
2. Desensitizes the brain’s reward system. (Seems about right.)
3. Produces a light-at-night. (Check.)
4. Induces stress reactions. (Absolutely. In the parent even more so.)
5. Overloads the sensory system, fractures attention and depletes mental reserves. (Um…God!)
6. Reduces physical activity levels and exposure to “green time.” (No comment.)

And this, from Australian adolescent psychologist Andrew Fuller’s  book, ‘Tricky Teens’:

Addicts crave things. A computer-addicted teen when denied total access will throw every trick in the book at you. It will take some hard headed parenting for teens to turn off their digital identity and turn on themselves instead. Don’t expect much change in a month and expect no gratitude.

When I was my son’s age, Mum used to say things like “Go outside and play with the hose”, and “if you continue to watch so much junk on TV and talk on the phone to for hours every night to friends you’ve spent the whole day with at school already, you’ll end up with square eyes and you’ll never get a decent job later in life”.

Maybe things are harder for adolescents these days – their world more distracting, complex, and spirit sucking than mine was in the 70s.

One of my son’ teachers recently emailed me:
“To concentrate more in class, I would suggest that he put his iPad on my desk so that he won’t be tempted to use it.”

Maybe if iPads were not such an embedded part of the school’s culture, he would not have to put anything on his teacher’s desk apart from an apple maybe.

Show me the hard evidence, the improved educational outcomes, our kids’ better quality of life as a result of the classroom iPad.

In one of those Scandinavian countries whose education system we wish we had – because teacher salaries are higher, the profession more respected, the teachers more rigorously trained and the overall education system more equitable – they are pulling students’ personal devices out of the classroom.
Maybe that’s the approach we should take.

I don’t know … I don’t have the answers … I can’t finish this column right now.

I’ll get back to it as soon as I update my Facebook status from single to currently in a hyper-stimulating relationship with my Smart Phone.

Memoirs sell. Talk therapy is more popular than ever. Honesty, self-revelation, public displays of confession and ‘real feeling’ make the headlines.

Everybody loves a secret but these days, keeping them is less fashionable, less ‘healthy’ than it used to be.

In the olden days (even my mother’s generation is uncomfortable with self disclosure) such openness and preparedness to demand what you want, say what you think and confess how you feel was unseemly, culturally inappropriate, undignified, or just plain wrong.

Finely tuned, complex, often ostensibly silly codes of conduct and well-rehearsed performances of protocol all meant that much was inferred unstated, silent, and that true feelings or desires stayed buried.

Take that Face book. Imagine that YouTube. Get yourself a priest you ingrate.

Today it’s all about being authentic.  A word once the province of antique auction houses has now made its way into educational pedagogy, self help-literature and the sound bite. To be authentic is to be in touch with your own truth or, as the Existentialists might have had it, to live one’s life in ‘good faith’.

Today (and I am talking post capitalist western worlds here) to confess and tell all is deemed functional whereas to withhold and repress is pathological. We are all being urged to ‘reveal ourselves’.

Everyone is a memoirist. Everyone has a story.

And yet most of us, let’s face it are just not that fascinating to anyone than an intimate other or a therapist who’s being paid to look like she is.

A Lacanian looks for the meaning in language (not what you say); A Freudian elicits truth in your dreams (baby); A Chinese Doctor unleashes the blockages in your the supply of blood to your liver, (and the needles hurt); A Yogi releases you from your former inauthentic self (the past is not real, the future is out of your control, it’s the present that holds the truth but be careful not to hyperventilate).

It seems that from primary school – ‘Now Ernie, tell me how that made you feel when Oliver punched you in the face and called you an idiot?’-  to ‘post disaster ambush style grief counseling’ everyone is being encouraged to talk about how they feel; to excavate and confront their secrets even if some of those secrets have been repressed for good reason.

Still we all love a secret and we all can lie but some of us are more accomplished dissemblers and/or truth-tellers than others. Some of us are conducting double lives and managing to move seamlessly, without a blush or a stammer from one to the other. Whilst others find such duplicity excruciating and impossible to sustain, only to expose the secret or confess the lie in a fit of miss-pitched remorse or a fluster of self loathing confession.

Secrets and lies some deep and dark and others small and white are kept and compartmentalized during the course of our negotiating an ordinary day. Such half-truths are the lubricating stuff of relationships weather it be with a lover, a child, a colleague or a panelist on the selection committee of the Australia Council, we learn how to massage the truth, to lie early in life.

Did you take that money from mummy’s purse? No. Kind of. But I didn’t mean to.

We keep it up to as we age and as we begin to learn that life is neither fair nor human relationships simple.

Does my bum look big in this?  No, not at all, curvy maybe but not big.

Are you having an affair? No. Kind of.  But it only happened once and it didn’t mean anything.

Do you love me? What a question!

Is that a core promise or a downright lie? Both. It’s both. Thank you for the question.

Are there weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?  Yes. No. Kind of.

Fit, attractive, single, self-sufficient, sociable, authentic and romantic man seeks lady to…

Yes, yes.

I think that lying gets easier the more you do it. If you are unhappy enough or sufficiently fed up with the version of your life you have found yourself living, secrets and lies, little inventions, exaggerations, fabrications and strategic omissions can all help make your life look better from the outside and you feel better on the inside. For a moment. Until the moment you catch yourself at it again one day and the next word gets stuck in your throat like old meat. Either you choke on your own recklessness or you are found out. It is now you realize that your life has become unmanageable. You need a holiday. You need to be you somewhere where it doesn’t hurt so much and where no one gives a stuff who you are, what you do, who you have sex with, how you parent, how many people turned up to your last birthday party, if you are a glittering success or a miserable failure.

Then when you return from your time away you can tell everyone how remarkable it was to be away and then, within 3 weeks start pretending all over again.

The worst lies are the lies we tell ourselves. We live in denial of what we do, even what we think. We do this because we’re afraid. We fear we will not find love, and when we find it we fear we’ll lose it. We fear that if we do not have love we will be unhappy. We fear we will never be good enough to love.

There are innocent lies, seamlessly executed omissions, harmless untruths perpetuated in the belief that to tell the truth will only cause hurt. Then there are secrets and lies that have the potential to do irreparable harm, to rupture trust for good and to turn the world, as we have previously understood it, on its axis.

Recently I revealed a secret. A secret I had promised to keep. But in a fit of fury and hurt and stupid selfish pique I told.

Can you keep a secret/I don’t suppose you can/
You mustn’t laugh, you mustn’t cry/But do the best you can, you can, you can you can…

The ramifications have been horrible. I have lost a friend, betrayed a lover and learned my lesson well and good. I was rendered mute once I had fully absorbed the shame and regret of my indiscretion.

These days we embrace the assumption that revealing secrets is morally superior to keeping them and that it is automatically healing to reveal a secret. But some secrets are just that.

Families can create and perpetuate secrets and lies. For whatever reasons a culture of conspiracy and avoidance perpetuates a precarious balancing act that the historic secret or lie exposed over one Xmas lunch or funeral wake or sister’s wedding can mean the whole family scaffolding can come tumbling down in a moment. The suspense, the drama, the shadenfruede, the fall-out is the climax or narrative reversal of so many films and plays and novels.

* * *

Since my sister’s suicide 6 months ago I am experiencing myself in the world as a different person. Grief is not predictable or pretty and it does not necessarily make you a better and more caring person. My house is tidy and ordered, the paintings on the wall are tasteful and thoughtfully hung, the towels in my bathroom are changed regularly and there is always fresh fruit in a bowl and my son always has a clean uniform on Monday and a healthy snack packed for recess. And yet the home in which I shelter is a lie. The walls that brace my son and me harbor secrets. The lovely 1940s English teapot has a tiny chip in its spout. I am a different person now. No one can see it. It is a secret. Everyday I tell myself necessary little lies so as to get through another one without stumbling. Every night when I kiss my son and tell him a story I reassure him that the world is a safe place and that tragic things are not the truth.

***

Last week at the public pool my son held me in his arms and proudly carried me aloft through the water. I looked up into his boy-face.

I bore my son and now my son bore me. For a few minutes, everything made sense. No more secrets, no more lies. The whole world in the shallow end of our local pool.

Tell me a secret.

I love you.

Your turn.

I love you more.

There are those people who carry on talking volubly during the previews at a movie and those of us who just hope to God that they will shut up before the opening credits or before you are compelled to turn in their general direction and do the curmudgeonly shh thing.

After all, when you go to a movie you expect to be snug in the dark and quiet; to escape from the ordinary and from your self for a couple of hours, not forced to endure the details of someone’s bowel motions.

That’s not a lame joke. It’s true.

The last time I went to movie the couple of middle aged – (Hang on I’m in my late 40s so I am technically middle-aged now).

One of the sixty-something women seated in the row behind me discussed the dodgy sausages she’d eaten the previous night and how they were playing havoc with her digestive system.
‘And then my stomach just went on me and I knew it must have been those sausages. I liked sausages when you knew what they put in them. Not like these days when they stuff anything they like in there.’

I didn’t mind so much, because my mother and her friend always talk really loudly before the movie starts and I like that Mum and her best friend, both in their late seventies, still see a movie together once a week.

More importantly, I like, that they are still girlfriends and that at their age, girlfriends still matter. A lot. Which brings me, finally, to the film I have just seen.

Sex in the City is all about female friendship. Supposedly. Although last time I looked – and I look at my girlfriends a lot – they seemed and sounded less like drag queens and more like single women with great senses of humour, lots of intelligence and plenty of bones to pick. (Those bones often belonged to the opposite sex).

Sex in the City is still about female friendship, I suppose, but it’s also about the search for love in the Big Apple.

And it’s much better still, if that love is good in bed. In this film, though, the object of devotion is more often than not a designer shoe, bag, dress or a diamond ring shaped like a flower and the size of an avocado. The product placement in this film is so unapologetic, so blatant, that you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching a two and a half hour info commercial, rather than a romantic comedy.

Let me state for the record, that I was late coming to the whole SITC phenomenon. It wasn’t until its second, or was it its third incarnation, that I turned on. Up until that point I had bagged the series for its vapid-affluent-flip-smart-sex-talk-repartee. I had discarded its camp and preposterous female characterisations as absurd as they were impossibly adept at the fast and witty riposte. And then I actually watched a few episodes and got hooked. I looked forward to my weekly fix of skinny Carrie and her clever punning female cohort. I enjoyed playing about vicariously with my contemporaries-on-heat who had more disposable income than I did No-Name shampoo.

I laughed out loud at their humour, their candour and their messy musings with post-feminism. Sure, it was glib and over-easy and I have never actually met any women like them in real life, but I did enjoy the muscularity of the writing and all its talk of sex and orgasms, single womanhood and female friendship. Sex in the City was the late 20th century incarnation of those black and white thirties and forties movies I still love, where the women always have the better lines, clothes and lighting than the men.

The femme fatales were sexy, sure, and they usually ended up dead, but they were smart and witty too. The woman often worked in newspapers and magazines and even though they usually ended up married and tamed, they were never too easily silenced.

But no matter how outré or risqué or modern it purported to be, Sex in the City, still had, at it’s a core, a conservative and romantic agenda and the movie length version has conservative and romantic in spades. The film may try and hide its conventional agenda behind a blink-and–you-miss-it-naked-penis in a shower or the occasional perfectly styled and coiffed nod to female self determination, but when all’s said and done, what women want is still true love and romance, a well-appointed apartment and absurd clothes and accessories that look like carnevale on acid.

Sex in the City, the much anticipated and over-hyped movie version is disappointing. Worse, it’s ordinary. I ‘work refused’ and went along on my own to cheer myself up and I was so disappointed it wasn’t more fun.

Instead, it’s relentless branding and babbling bored me most of the time and for the rest of the time I was preoccupied with Sarah Jessica Parker’s tiny forty-something ballet body and her awkward early 21st century take on ‘La Coquette’. Whereas in the series, the script did take a few risks, the film is predictable, tame and self-conscious. Even when the oldest of them – you know the promiscuous one who loves sex and who in the film has been trying to go conventional and monogamous for the past 5 years and is finally chomping at the bit – even when she talks dirty and we watch her watching her young neighbour, Dante’s, Calvin Klein perfect nakedness, even then, it’s seems so performed and faux-erotic, it’s just silly. She looked like she was doing a commercial for Flake chocolate bar. Remember those. And watching the object of her lasciviousness, I felt like I was watching PG gay porn.

People have been saying how they have all aged. Have they? Really? They all look pretty good to me. I like that they are all in their forties and still talking and wanting sex, still placing so much store on their female friendships. The only male friend was a screaming queen, interestingly.

Carrie is forty and getting married – nothing wrong with that. I got married for the first time at forty. And although her ceremony of choice default position includes a Vivienne Westward fairy princess dress, two hundred guests, a wedding planner and the Manhattan Library as venue, her Mr Big kind of freaks out at the alter. Not because he doesn’t love her, who wouldn’t? She’s sexy, has a wardrobe the size of my entire flat and she even wears glasses in bed while reading famous love poetry. But Mr Big still freaks out big time at the alter. They do end up getting married though, of course, but not before she has a little breakdown, complete with Jackie O dark sunglasses and squinting into the ‘Unruly Sun’ (that’s from a famous love poem by John Donne, by the way) and uttering a barely audible ‘What day is it? Or No, I’m not hungry’, before turning over and going back to sleep for another two days. I used to be able to do that when I was heart broken but that was before I had a child and staying in bed after 7am, for any reason, became impossible. The even skinner Carrie then decides to hire a personal assistant to help her get back on her feet. And I don’t know if it’s just me, but something about her choice of a plump young black woman with a heart of gold and a penchant for serving kindly white mistresses, who end up buying her expensive gifts, made me a tad uncomfortable.

The lawyer career woman has a husband and a five-year-old son and she is so tired and steeped in the domestic that she has gone of sex – Che bizarro! – and so he has a one-night stand with someone because he feels so rejected. She leaves him – no discussion about how their five year old kid might handle it, or not – but they finally get back together again.
The dark haired pretty one who is still a bit dippy and lives like she must have inherited her father’s something or other dynasty is now happy with a very nice bald man and their adopted child from China. But they end up having their own baby by the movie’s end.

Samantha, that’s the older promiscuous one’s name, I think. Samantha finally dumps her Hollywood actor boyfriend of five years and decides that she is not the monogamous kind after giving it her best shot. ‘I’m sorry,’ she tells her blonde toy boy, as she starts to wrench the fifty thousand dollar flower shaped ring he bought off her finger. “Keep it, ‘ he tells her. “OK, she replies, in the bat of a fairy wing.

At the end of the film, our four friends are all sitting around drinking coloured alcoholic drinks again – a set-up that some more recent chic lit TV series like Cashmere Mafia and Mistresses do a lot of as well. The girls in the city are celebrating Samantha’s fiftieth and her self imposed single-dom and the other three are all happily united or reunited with their true loves.

Sex in the City is so Hollywood romantic comedy formulaic that you can just hear and see the pages being turned and the boxes being ticked. It is shot like television, the writing only hits the odd high note, whilst the rest of it falls flat. And its compulsive preoccupation with commercial consumption is enough to want to make you go out and buy a pair of ACME runners from Dimmys.

Just as the film starts and while Carrie is busy getting us all up to date on the history of all the characters for all those people who hadn’t watched the TV series for six years, one of my sixty something friends asks her friend loudly, she was sitting right next to her – ‘I hope this film has a bit of depth.’ Sorry Mame it does not. Your story and the dogdy sausages gave me a better laugh. And the film it’s not funny or clever or sexy either. The girls have become parodies of their former selves and as my six year old is tragically and prematurely inclined to moan these days, it was just ‘boooring.’ Bring back the Mary Tyler Moore show, I say. Oh, and the final message of Sex In The City is all about forgiveness. Sorry babes, the bird flower in the hair I forgive, the Hewn Pine acting I forgive, the little dog humping the pillow joke I forgive, the lazy script, I forgive. But that Louis Vuitton bag with those shoes!

Unforgivable.

God, I hate Christmas, I announce to my friend.

Why? Really? God, it’s not that bad, surely? She is a bit shocked, which surprises me given she’s seen me through many a festive season.

No really, I say back, determined to stay with it. Yes, it is that bad. Well. It’s not Christmas per se, I add, trying to sound less like Scrooge, it’s just all the rubbish during its lead up. That’s the worst part.

But I love it, she says. Well I used to really love it when I was young but I do still enjoy the buzz. You know, the feeling in the air that something is about to happen.

I know what you mean I say, but only for me it’s a different kind of buzz – more like a you-better-bloody-well look-forward to- it-tinnitus. (I have always been Grumpy to her Happy.) And that’s part of the problem, I continue. All that expectation can take its toll. It can wear you down, make you feel exhausted just trying to organise it so that something IS about to happen, something fun and friendly and family. It’s just too much pressure for any one woman!

My friend looks at me with a combination of pity and outright irritation. You are such a pessimist, she says, finally. And you expect too much.

I am aware that being a pessimist AND expecting too much are kind of a contradiction in terms, but she is obviously on a ’just shut up and count your blessings roll’, so I make another cup of tea instead and take the pasta sauce out of the freezer for dinner because pasta and apples and cornflakes are about all my 6 year old will eat these days. Great Xmas lunch that’d be!

I adore my son. He’s the best thing in my life. The day he was born I made a morphine to- do list. I lay there in recovery – it was a Ceasar – while our son lay in his father’s arms for nearly and hour and half before I had a turn – and I made a blissful drug induced to-do list. And it went on and on and it was all going to be absolutely do-able because now I had baby and now my life would change and I would change for the good, and things like to-do lists, even if they were fuelled by opiates, were only the beginning. My life would start now!

Someone said to me recently that ‘there must be a word for madly in love and scared to death. A special word just for mums.’ There should be. And another word, too, one of those big fat composite words the Germans like so much for ‘wishing you could look forward to Xmas and the summer holidays without an all consuming sense of dread, boredom and irritation.’

I have had a big year. One of the busiest and complex and most demanding years of my life and my son started school too, so add that into the mix and you have one mother of a year! So now it’s time to take stock, isn’t it. Make a new to-do list. The resolutions that we all know are bogus but secretly hope that we’ll at least honour one or two of them; The lose weight, get fit, and ‘resolve a life-time of conflict with your family’ ones for starters.

They had a Xmas service at the Anglican Church next to my son’s school last week and I stayed a while, cause he wanted me to. The minister’s name is Marj and she sounds like the recently dumped NZ Prime Minister. I did love the preps with their over-sized sheep masks and the grade three boys wearing their towels and the tiny blonde girl with the star on a stick turned the wrong way around. I sang every song with such gusto and determination to try and be ‘in the spirit’, that at one point half the church, including my mortified 6 year old, turned around to look at me. Mama, stop singing. You’re loud!’

I don’t believe in God but my son does apparently. Jesus was born on Xmas, mama and there were three wise men and why don’t you believe in God? God made the world and you say that nature made the world but God made nature. Pause. I don’t want to do Baha’i next year; it’s a bit boring. And if you don’t do RE or Baha’i you just get to work on your own activities, so I want to do that OK.’

OK. Fine with me. I’d just thought I’d better give him a few options so that I couldn’t be accused of not only being a ‘Xmas loathing curmudgeonly pessimist’ but a ‘perverse soulless atheist’ as well. I mean, God help us! Where would the world be with another atheist, I ask you?

As I get into the car after the Xmas sing-along where only I sang and no one else went along (with it), I heard it go from acoustic to pre record, with some bloke singing Jesus saves, He is the way, to the tune of Jungle Bells.

This time last year I was writing the final chapter of my book and it was all about Xmas and how I wanted to wrestle it from the clutches of bad dysfunctional tradition and have it at my place – an open house with whoever and what ever and with no pressure and just lots of Bon Amie, Bon Vivant and Bon Jovi.

Yeah right. Well I am sorry to report that nothing’s changed in the last year – nothing in that department anyway and I am still fantasizing about escaping to the beach with my boy and a basket and a blanket. Oh, there is a bloke on the scene now days, so maybe he could come too. That is, if my son doesn’t put him off. Last week I heard him shouting- my son, not my boyfriend – “I have a super-penis and it will save you’. What can you do? I am re-reading Steve Biddulph and appreciating that at nearly seven years old, he has fallen in love with his father and may want to spend more time with him from now on. That he doesn’t really think he has a ‘super penis’ but that it’s just a developmental phase he is going through. But then he also woke up the other morning and cried I was having a good dream. How can I have it again? I was a mermaid. I want to be a mermaid again!’

How many more sleeps are there till Xmas? Well, when you hear this, there will probably be less than 10 to go. So just get off your pessimistic bums, make a to-do list, think of all the good and decent things in your life and go do something nice for someone else. It’s true you know, it’s a bit naff and a bit Christian, but it actually makes you happier making someone else happier. It’s true too that working too desperately on making yourself happy just doesn’t work. I know. I have spent my whole life working too desperately on one thing or another and where has it got me? Don’t answer that!
This is my to-do list. Today. No drugs involved:
Lose weight and Get fit (Joke)
Don’t neglect your friends because you now have a life that’s so busy your own son has to book in for a cuddle
Stop whinging, it makes you boring and no one will like you
Clean the window sills
Read Joyce
Join Amnesty International

And I am passing the following on to you because it’s definitely working for me today, at least, and we all can probably use more calm in our lives during the lead up to the so called festive season, can’t we. Some doctor on the radio this morning said that the way to achieve inner peace is to finish all the things you have started.
So I looked around my house to see things I’d started and hadn’t finished and, before leaving the house this morning I finished off a bottle of Merlot, a decanter of Baileys, a block of Lindt dark chocolate 85%, the rest of the Prozac and Valium, the frozen cheesecake…
And I feel so good. Bring on Yultide, I say.

No, but honestly now. That Dr Scott Peck bloke – I’ve mentioned him on this program before – he says that people change for one of three reasons. To paraphrase: they hit rock bottom, they’re desperate, or they learn to change. Who are you?

Or if you prefer, because I am all out of original aphorisms, try this:

God (or Father Xmas or whoever, because God’s not an option when you’re a pessimist-atheist-humanist-grumpy old woman) grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can and Wisdom to know the difference.
Be curious, not fearful, Tashi, not Henny Penny. Because, contrary to popular opinion, the sky is not falling.

Now, Merry Xmas. Really.

My friend died last week. He was young, youngish. Forty-two. My age. Near enough anyway. He was, is one of life’s good people. He is because the friend who delivered the eulogy spoke of him in the present tense – ‘His body may have left us but his spirit hasn’t. He’s still here in this room with all of us today’. I wanted to believe, to understand this kind of talk, this language around death and dying because it was so sad, so horribly, painfully sad, the whole thing.

I was asked to sing. I had sung at his wedding. A cruel symmetry. His wife searching for shape, for logic amidst the incomprehensible mess. The wedding had been at a big old house in the botanic gardens with smiling, affirming people, a band, too much food and a shared belief that this wedding, this match was a beauty! That these two were made for each other… And it was a beauty! And now he’s dead, passed away, moved on, gone to the other… Like the children’s book: ‘We can’t go over it, We can’t go under it, We’ll have to go through it!’ We all, all of us there in that big room with the glass and the garden and the candle and the urn, we have to go through it.

Funerals, like weddings can be confusing. I mean a wedding is meant to be happy and a funeral is meant to be sad and we the participants, the audience are meant to adhere to the rules, the protocol. The rules of weddings are be nice, look nice, be happy for them and if you feel a little tight with that barely disguised single or separated person’s envy then just keep it quiet and stop drinking before you humiliate yourself and ruin their special day. The rules of funerals are be respectful, listen to all the great stuff everyone is saying about the person and don’t tune out, be sad, but restrained (this is Australia after all) and if you don’t know the words to the Lord’s Prayer, look like you do.

At my friend’s funeral, it didn’t appear remotely necessary to pretend about anything much because for the first time I believed the eulogy – all of it. And so did everyone else I suspect. And so many people knew the Lord’s Prayer. How come? When someone was, is good, really good not flawless of course, but really is, was all of those things – honorable, loyal, generous, loving – it’s so wrong that he’s dead that it’s really hard to exchange your indignation for sorrow.

A friend from an Italian background like me whispered that he’d never been to a funeral like this – it was strange, so different, so ‘Anglo’. I think I knew what he meant, “You mean there are no Italians and the God thing is not so much a focus and people have been invited to throw comments into the ring as to what kind of person he was and his wife talked, actually talked to us?” She had to go through it.

We resort to cliché in times like this because it’s so hard, so confusing to say, feel the right thing. At those traditional Italian funerals, the rituals are more or less accepted and expected. You can just get caught up in the language and the movement of the mass – get swept up into its arcane certainty.

But what if you don’t really know what you believe about death and what if those people really close, those who have been living on adrenaline for the past four days don’t know what kind of script or props or music to use to say goodbye so publicly?

Sometimes, like at my friend’s funeral, people are surprisingly poetic, spontaneously apposite. When someone from the back of the crowd called out, “He was a builder. Spirit Level”. It was so perfect that if it had been a play the scene would have ended there. The film would have gone out on the sound of all of our clapping. Instead we milled, we ate, we drank and hugged, a little too desperately, his wife and their two small girls whilst they moved through the crowd. They had to go through it.

A careful caressing of a life. Lots of photos on a screen, things his daughters had made, a St Kilda scarf, an urn, -or a terracotta pot – which contained the dust. His dust. Some left soon after and others couldn’t let go and just kind of hung around moving plates about, chatting with people whose names we’d forgotten…

I know about spirit levels because my father had devotedly described theirs and so many other carpentry-like functions to me when I was a child and he’d wanted for me to share his passion. “See this little bubble? Well we know that the wood’s straight, perfectly level when that bubble is right in the middle”. It was a beautiful object to me and I even have one still, a very old one, as part of my father-daughter collection on a shelf at home somewhere. My friend was like that object, his life true, his spirit level.

 

‘The beginnings and endings of all things are untidy’. John Galsworthy.

And my latest ending and beginning prove no exception to Galsworthy’s not so famous, but reasonably apt aphorism. I could go on and on with such sayings, of course, because the world just loves quaint old or new- age fragments and imperatives that evoke endings and beginnings.

There are invariably references to the proverbial ‘new beginning’ and I always think, but why do you need the word ‘new’ when it’s followed by ‘beginning’? Surely it’s redundant and a beginning is, by definition new? Sorry, but I work with a couple of language pedants – a poet and a philosopher – both of whom drive me gloriously nuts with such observations daily.

I have just sold my home in the city– the ending – and am moving lock stock and barrel to the country –the beginning – and both situations have brought with them the usual attendant grief and loss, excitement and hopefulness.

Although I am characteristically better at doing the grief and loss part since I have now well and truly reached grumpy middle age. Excitement and hopefulness are simply less sustainable these days, when one’s default position is a kind of ‘But what if..? stance when faced with the unknowable future.

So last week on a Saturday afternoon – I know this is selfish, but please don’t rain.

People won’t want to go to an auction in the rain. – my oldest friend and I huddle in the door-way of my place and listen like school girls to the auctioneer making little jokes about ‘the grey clouds of real estate’ and telling the story of me and my son and our moving to the country.

And as my friend and I both hold on to each other, I am reminded of another time almost 10 years ago when this same woman, this same oldest friend, held me like this.

The nice real estate agent – I am loving him now– reduces my story to a few sentences told to a bunch of strangers and then eggs them on to bid for my little flat in its ‘terrific blue chip area’.

I am nervous about this ending and the prospect of a new beginning, and it’s just like I felt the morning of my wedding almost a decade ago. It was the end of my life as I had known it and the beginning of a new one married to a man I’d known for a year and whom I met the day after he’d migrated to Australia.

His, was bound to be a big new beginning dream. But was I meant to be part of his dream or not?

And am I doing the right thing now? Selling my place, leaving my city life with my friends and family and life-style and moving to a country town to be close to the man who I had once been married to and to his wife, whom he left me for?

‘Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end’. Seneca.

On the day of my auction last weekend my oldest friend holds on to me tight and reassures me like she did the morning of my wedding and when she insisted I get my hair done properly, her shout, because ‘You deserve to get your hair done, El. You’re getting married today for God’s sake and you haven’t had your hair done since your 21st!’ So I crane my neck and my head into the basin, the young woman washes my hair and adds too much conditioner, even though I asked her not to, and chats the way only a hair dresser can, and oohs and ahs, clicks and comments at all the right places.

And I felt then like I did last weekend at my auction – excited and nervous, scared of having made the wrong decision and worried that I’d miss my old life and stuff up my new one. (And that all the conditioner would make my hair limp.) Because even though my old life had not always been smooth sailing – now that’s an understatement – I was on intimate terms with it and we had known each other well and how well did I know this man I was going to marry?

How sure was I last week at my auction that my decision to start afresh in a new town was the right decision? I don’t even know where we are going to live and I’ve already booked the carriers.

It’s too late to ask any of you what I should do – to help me weigh up the pros and cons, to counsel me on the benefits and demerits, gains and losses of such a decision. Anyway I didn’t listen to anyone 10 years ago, so why would I now?

Things end and then other things start and in real life it’s always untidy. Messy. We all like to narrativise our lives though- to try and give it tidier and more coherent beginnings, middles and ends. Most of us search for the narrative patterns and readable journeys of our lives to try and get a grasp on the messiness of it all, to make sense of the randomness.

But the truth is we never really understand the past and few of us ever really learn from our so-called mistakes. Most of us admit to having regrets and to having made poor choices.

As this year ends and inevitably another one begins, I am the sum total of all of my past beginnings and here I am again worried about what I can’t control – The ‘what if?’ mind-set.
God (or whoever or whatever) give me the serenity (or the drugs) to accept the things I cannot change (or control what my ex husband and his wife think of me or what happens at Copenhagen or what my publisher makes of my next book) The courage (or the self sufficiency not to need anyone else to approve of what I do) to accept the things I cannot change (Like, um, the past) The courage to change the things I can (like where I live and what time my son goes to bed) And the wisdom (that’s what you are meant to acquire with experience and age) to know the difference (Hah!)

They rang a big bell to signal the beginning of my auction last week – a charming allusion to the village town crier, I thought – and my oldest friend held me and said some things to me I don’t remember but she used the same voice she used when she’d taken me to the hairdressers the day I got married.

It was soothing, but directive, at the same time.

Someone, some one nice, bought my place 14 minutes after they rang the bell and my new life started.

The next day I began to clear out the old and the, you know, usher in the new. I started with my address book -an old red leather thing whose pages are crinkled and the writing often illegible. Those names I didn’t even recognise or would rather forget I passed over quickly. Some people had died and so I crossed them out. Some used to be friends and lovers who I no longer saw and whose lives I no longer understood. Some were people I had not spoken to for ages and I vowed to contact in the New Year.

Some names made me laugh.

Others, it hurt to read.
‘Every exit is an empty somewhere else’. Tom Stoppard.

So, to beginnings and endings and everything in between! Merry Xmas, Happy New Year and may you harness the serenity, courage and wisdom to get through this next few weeks your dignity in tact. May you break your diet, reconcile with your mother and your oldest friend. And may you be kind to your past but cease being in love with it. And, may you surrender to and fall in love with your future.
And if it’s a boiling stinker on Xmas day, take along one of those dinky, portable little battery operated face fans that look like vibrators. So I’m told anyway. And if that doesn’t help, just have another drink and forgive yourself.

Everything.

I have come to dread this time of year. As curmudgeonly as this sounds, please do read on and give me, and others like me, and my family a break.

Please?

From the moment I see that first bit of tinsel perfunctorily adorning a shop window I panic. Or a sweetly sketched bunch of holy atop my son’s final school newsletter for the year I cringe. Or when someone enquires politely ‘And what are you doing for Christmas?’ my heart catches.

It’s not all bells and whistles, pudding and pressies, family and fun you know. For some of us this time of year is hard, really hard. For some of us whose families are, at worst irretrievably dysfunctional and at best stoic and resourceful, this time of year throws into oh-so-high-holy-relief all that is damned sad and unfair.
But it’s about the kids isn’t it? It’s for them we ruefully drag out the fake tree from under the house and discover that after a couple of Rieslings the infuriating task of unwinding miniature Christmas lights is not so grim an exercise in displaced anger after all.

And it’s for the kids – my 11-year-old and my late-sister’s 4-year-old – that my mum will still make her unsurpassable crème caramel and I will attempt the turkey stuffing.
I have even put up a festive-type-arrangement on our front door. That’s a first. I have sent a handful of Christmas cards – real cards, not weird virtual ones that sing and move – and have bought 8 panettones and a case of Proseco for visiting friends or if friends drop in – although they don’t nearly as much as I would like. These days, dropping in unannounced is like dinner parties: passé. I love an open house.

When did unscheduled hospitality get so problematic?

Our family is small now. Italians are meant to have extended, rowdy and magnanimous families but ours has become all shrunken, disappointed and dispersed for one reason or another. I like a rowdy, peopled house. It’s easier to dissolve loneliness and self-focus in a crowd and kids love benign chaos.
When I was a kid our family was bigger, looser and friendlier. You could get lost in all the food preparation, back-yard antics and relatives. I loved Christmas back then. But now I dread it.

When my sister got really sick, any family get-together was a potential psychic bombsite. Her illness sometimes made her obstreperous, volatile and vile when family were compelled to congregate. Such was her own abjectness, her own feelings of lost-Christmas because she used to love Christmas as a kid even more than I did.

We’d both wake up Christmas morning to fattened pillowcases at the end of our beds, full of stuff secreted by Mum in dressing gown and slippers the night before. We used to leave a biscuit and a glass of milk for Father Christmas and the biscuit would be gone but only half the glass of milk. Mum always hated milk so she must have swallowed hard that one night of the year just for us. There were always books in our pillow cases, sure, but she used to mix them up with other exciting useless stuff too.

My sister was generous with her gift giving. My neatly wrapped paperbacks and jars of hand cream always looked a bit inadequate in comparison. If she was going through a manic stage she used to spend lots of money on all of us and go about inadvertently ambushing Christmas again.

But her acute political brain meant that even under the influence of prescribed (and un-prescribed) medications she could debate the best of them under the table. And her impersonations were sketch comedy gold, although they could dominate the rest of the day’s less high octane proceedings.

Sometimes I’d drink more than usual to keep her close, while our mother would try hard to make things nice with her crème caramel and elegant table. My sister and I would end up laughing together a little too hysterically as we’d madly roll cigarettes, huddled like naughty students beneath the garden brolly.
When my sister took her own life 3 years ago it was like all fun had abruptly been decreed over and done with forever. How can we possibly celebrate anything, enjoy anything now that she is dead? Why on earth bother going to the trouble of stuffing a bloody turkey, baking a freaking flounder or boiling a blasted pudding now that the worst has happened to a family. The worst has happened to a mother.

This year I have been convinced to take the boys to Christmas mass at our local. The priest is a progressive, friends tell me and apparently half the congregation don’t believe in God but just go for the feeling of community and grace.

We will this year have a fully decorated, fully stuffed Christmas for the kids – and kind of for us too – because we have to and we must.
Anyway, I make a mean stuffing and that case of Proseco is top of the range and my 11-year-old is one fine comic impersonator, just like his auntie used to be.

I sit huddled with the doors and windows closed, the blinds drawn and I can hear them falling. Thud. Thud. Thud. The saddest sound I know.

They are cutting down the trees. What is this? Are they shooting Dr Suess’ The Lorax out there or what? : ‘Gentlemen I wish to speak for the trees…”

It’s drizzling outside and it’s the kind of gentle and unthreatening rain that people round here have come to appreciate with two massive floods in less than a year. Kids floated down my street on deck chairs the water had collected on its travels. It was like a joke on Venice.

Our very own Grand Canal and people came from all around to see it.

It was wonderful. It was shocking. It was terrible.

Days later there were piles of stuff outsides people’s houses – 3 legged tables, soaked mattresses, bikes with crooked wheels, couches, a pram…

Our pub was hit the worst. 120 years and it’s the first time it’s flooded like that.

Outdoor benches screwed to the ground out the front were torn up and one of them ended up rammed against a tree in the creek 100 metres away.

My house was OK. It’s built up high. My front garden went under and the stuff stored under the house was mush. But the rest was OK.

We all helped clean up the street and hauled things from people’s rooms that’d been thigh high in water. I bought my first pair of professional gumboots.

But now, 6 months on they are saying, some of them, that because of the floods they must get rid of all the willows either side the banks of our creek that runs parallel to our street.

***

I stand in the early morning drizzle and cry. My neighbour is standing next to me. He’s not comforting me in any demonstrative way but he’s there, and his 3 year-old-son is watching me cry.

Why’s Elly crying Dad?

She’s just sad mate. She’s sad they are cutting down all the trees.’

The last time I cried like that with my neighbour was a year ago when my sister died. He didn’t put his arms around me or anything then either but it was good he was there still.

The man with the chain saw has stopped. He’s finally heard me calling out to him.
Hello! Hello! Can you stop please! Please! What are you doing? Can you stop please!

Later on that same morning I am standing outside – it’s still drizzling – with a man from the DSE – The Department of Sustainability and Environment- who I requested meet me ‘on site’ to ‘walk me though it’ all. He is affable as he tells me quietly why all the trees have to go.

But I am only half listening because I can’t stop staring at what is now a disgrace of stumps and branches. But I have stopped crying.

Now, longer hidden from view by a wall of willows there are train tracks and station sheds, lights and steel poles, houses and mounds of dirt, smoke stacks and machinery. I can’t bring myself to look out my windows anymore and I try to come home after dark.

The man from the Department of Sustainability and the Environment is a bit embarrassed by me I think but they must have expected people would go bezerk though surely?

What do I know? I’m just an urban interloper who bought a house in the country nearly 2 years ago – the kind she could never afford in the city– and who has treated it more like bolt hole than an abode.

All I knew about willows back then was that Ophelia had gotten herself all tangled up in one and drowned in the creek with garlands in her hair. What do I know? I’m a just a ‘café latte sipping artist type wanker’ from the city who doesn’t know her indigenous species from her ‘weeds of national significance’.

And now I’m standing outside in the drizzle with a bloke from the DSE who
lets slip that he doesn’t really think that getting rid of all the trees is going to make all that much difference should we have another flood. But they did need to clear the waterways of blockages cause it’s a real mess.

Sure. Clear the blockages. So do that. That makes sense. I get that. But what’s with the sudden blanket demolition? Why weren’t we told? Where was the community consultation? The notification of intent to destroy the psychic well being of those who live here? Except for those whose houses were flooded, that is. They ‘ve been lead to believe that clearing the area will curb any future floods. So fell the bastards!

There was a flyer that said something vague about the necessity to clear the creek of bracken and sticks and thorny berry bushes or something. But nothing, no one, prepared any of us for what has happened.

The DSE bloke gave me a DVD called A Way With Willows with a blurb on the cover by Mel Gibson.

A couple of days later after we all started ending emails and making pone calls and organising ourselves they suspended works. It’s just red streamer-fences blowing in the wind, a temporarily abandoned bobcat and the miserable Lorax- landscape.

Today I am part of a ‘residents community action group’ and involved with the ‘ongoing consultation and project management plan for the river and its banks. We all meet in the pub and plan for the future. Choose new trees. Organise planting days. There are coloured maps and charts set out on the billiard table.

Even though outside my place is a moon landscape we can still make a difference to the rest of the street.

I am learning a lot. There are lots of contradictions though depending on whom you listen to and what side of the tracks they come from. And I do remain unconvinced that denuding the river is going to minimise future flooding. And I am pretty sure that creatures living in and around the place are going to be pretty upset when their natural habitat disappears. The poison they use to spray the stumps doesn’t sound too good either.

But they’ve agreed to leave us some trees and have tied yellow ribbons around those ones, so that when the man with the chain returns he knows not to touch them.
***
I have started looking out my window again. I just take a deep breath, open the blinds and accept my new worldview. Soon the 100-year-old elms along my street will be green and full again.

I have always seen Opehlia’s drowning in the river all tangled in willows as an accident. She was crazy with grief sure, but she didn’t want to die.

This week is the one-year anniversary of my sister’s suicide.
And soon the elms along my street will be green and full again.

What’s that? Nothing. It’s nothing. I’m an idiot. There’s nothing there.

I make sure the Doona doesn’t cover my ears, so that I can hear as well as possible.

There it is again. What is it? A mouse. It’s one of those teeny weenie field mice and it’s got in the cupboard and it’s scratching and struggling to get out. Oh poor little thing. They’re sweet those little field mice, not scary, not alarming at all. It’s not a rat, or a big man in a balaclava, it’s a tiny mouse and –

More noise. Has a different quality this time. This one’s louder, more confidant. It’s not a mouse – it’s not a mouse-kind-of-a-noise. It’s, it’s something bigger, more human. There it is again.

Mum. My Mum is staying over. Escaping the city for a few days to spend time with her elder daughter. Her grandson is at his father’s so it’s just the two of us. Mother and daughter. Together. Alone. In the country. 50 years of relationship squashed into 3 days. She is not accustomed, Mum, to having things done for her; cups of tea given unrequested, car trips proffered with no particular destination in mind. My mother is definitely due for a break and it is brave of her -at just shy of 80 -to come and spend some time in the country with her middle-aged, neurotic and high-strung daughter. I promise myself not to whine or complain about anything. I vow privately to smile more, to surrender to her ‘stuff’ and to let go of my own for 3 days.

We have done well so far. Not too many battles, not too much silent disapproval flowing both ways. She is funny. I had forgotten how funny she could be. She loves me. I had forgotten how she still loves me. And now the noise! She was asleep. It was reassuring to hear her breath. Steady. Sure, still. What IS that noise?

In the split second it takes for me to get out of bed – it’s freezing! I have not been able to resist whining to her about how I wish I could afford central heating and how if I had a more grown-up kind of a career and a rich husband and didn’t spend so much money on food and books, coffees and Lego- that I would be able to afford central heating.

I listen for mum’s breathing and thank God, or whoever, that it’s only Mum and I at the mercy of ‘the noise’ and that my son is safe and sound elsewhere.

The police. Where’s my phone? I must get the local police on speed dial. Damn! The phone’s in the room where the noise is coming from. Of course it is. I am so unprepared for this kind of thing. Deadlocks? Hah! Window bars? Yeah right? The numbers of closest neighbors? As if. The thing is, I have never been scared of the dark. I have never had personal-safety-anxiety-issues like some people I know. My fears are more abstract. I have free-floating anxiety about lots of things but not about the bogeyman, or woman. Not until now, that is!

As I make my way down the hallway and towards ‘the noise’ I am pleased I am wearing these pajamas and I remember the story a woman told me about how she is moving out of her house because she had a break-in of the scary television news kind. She was on her own in her house in the inner city and was woken up by a noise. Was it a noise or did she just sense that there were two men at the foot of her bed shining torches at her vulnerable flannelette mass? They said nothing those men. They just went to another darkened room wielding their torches and lifted some stuff – computers, mobile, that kind of stuff.

Where were you? I ask her
In the bedroom still, just listening to them, she says.
Were you still in bed?
No, I was up, you know, but I was just kind of standing there listening.
What were you wearing? I ask
That’s so funny. Everyone asks me that, she says. I was in a very unattractive tracksuit thing. No, I wasn’t naked.
How did they get in? I ask somewhat predictably.
Everyone asks me that too, she says. The dining room window. They got in through the window.

It occurs to me that we – ‘the perp’ and ‘the victim of crime’ – are both using the same script and have watched the same movies. Crime clichés.

You poor thing, I say. That’s horrible, horrendous. Did they then just leave or what?
Yeah, then they just left with my stuff, she says, and then I kind of fell apart.

I had never met this woman before and it was of those times when someone tells you something that you just know is a going to be a part of them forever in some way.

What are you doing El?
Mum is awake too now.
There’s a noise. I don’t know what it is, I bleat. I am 9 again.
What is it? She asks perversely.
I don’t know Mum. That’s why I am up creeping down the hallway like a deluded heffalump on point. Even now, even in the minutes before my imminent death, I am getting annoyed with her.

She is up too now. ‘She’s traveling’, buttoning her dressing gown. She is so little and frail. I must protect her if it’s the last thing that I do.

You go back to bed Mum. It’s OK.
Don’t be stupid, El. I can’t hear a thing. Where’s the noise?
I am getting annoyed with her again.
There! There it is. You hear it?
Ah, yes… just. It’s in there. It’s in the kitchen, she says, as she makes to go in to the kitchen.

She has lived on her own for 30 years– save her daughters intermittently using her house as a regressive retreat during a relationship break up, job loss, bout of depression or plain inability to pay the rent. She is used to taking care of things herself. Even at 78, she pushes ahead of me.

Mum, come back, I’ll go. Let me go.

As she disappears for a split second into the kitchen I am overwhelmed with grief. This is not how I want her to go, how I am meant to lose her finally. Not like this. Not as local rag headline.

Mum! I cry out. Whatever terrible intruder is here in the dark in the country in my house with my mother in her dressing gown is well and truly across the dynamics of this particular mother-daughter relationship and is probably wishing he had broken into some one’s place who didn’t have such ridiculously attuned hearing and who wasn’t such a bloody whiner!

It’s in the cupboard, says my mother, half laughing now.
I’ll get the broom, I say.
I’m going out on the veranda for a cigarette, she says.
What? You can’t! You have to stand there when I open the cupboard door and help me to –
It’s a mouse El. It’s just a mouse. Get rid of it in the morning. I’ll never be able to get back to sleep now. You are so neurotic. You really have to calm down, you know, she adds, just for tradition’s sake.
Oh OK. So you just go and inhale a few hundred chemicals and I’ll just calm down then shall I? I’ll just eat a carton of biscuits then shall I?

We are both back in our beds finally. She is in her 8-year-old grandson’s. I offered my bed but she said she is small, like him, and it’s a comfortable bed anyway. She should know because she bought it.

We talk for the next half and hour lying on our backs in the dark in separate rooms but close enough. And we both laugh and talk about people and gossip and she tells me I am OK and I tell her I am glad she came to stay. I feel safe.

I can still hear the noise but only faintly now because we have closed two doors in between ‘us and it’.
Goodnight Mum.
Good night El.
Her steady breathing starts up almost immediately. And she complains she never sleeps anymore.

 

 

These days, since moving to a country town, whenever I let on, or people just know that I am a columnist and that I actually make a bit of living from perving on people and rendering their lives, and my part in them, public, they say stuff like, ‘Oh really? God, you better be careful, it’s a very small town, you know’.

But how very small is this country town I have just moved to? I mean, is seven and a half thousand small? When does a Victorian country town an hour and half from Melbourne become an outer (outer) suburb?

Sorry if any locals are listening, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean that I want it to become an outer suburb of course, it’s just that, well, this town is becoming less local and mono –cultural and with so many people moving here from the city it’s bound to change isn’t it? It doesn’t necessarily have to be in a bad way, does it? My tree-change is not someone else’s tree-loss necessarily is it?

I feel the need to do some fast pre-emptive apologising here. Sorry that I am now living in a town where you can see the same person in the same outfit up to three times a day when you’re not even stalking them. Sorry that before when I wrote about things, before when I lived in Melbourne, I was apparently taking less of a risk that people might actually hear or recognise themselves or their friends or the friends of friends.
It is different here. I can already feel that and I have only been here for 7 weeks. And yes, I do know I have to be careful not to come across as some instant authority on all things provincial and end up sounding like a poor woman’s Germaine Greer. I mean, ‘What does she know? She’s an outsider? And doesn’t’ she sound incoherent and shrill lately?’

But here it goes anyway.

This is me, the outsider-interloper making a few half-baked, under-researched observations about my, sorry, this new town I now live in.

So get ready to hurl the ‘you’re just a latte-drinking blow in, what would you know about us here?’ Or if you are a local – IE you have lived here for at least 33 years – feel free to tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I love listener feedback. (But please can that person who keeps on sending me those carefully hand written letters about how good God is and how bad I am, please stop.)

So far I am really liking it. I like that my little boy is outside most of the time doing stuff with friends or kicking a ball around our yard – that’s right, our big back yard. (Although sometimes they are friends he has just met at the bike track 14 minutes before).

I like that I can see the stars at night – that I can look up, when I remember to, and really, really see the stars.

I like having a big veranda and big trees with other big trees and even more little trees. I like that, if I am not being told where to get the best organic tomatoes, celery and soy decaf latte in town, I am chatting to a bloke in the local pub with more tats than Robbie Williams and vernacular from Dad and Dave.

‘There you go. I told ya! No bloody pants on fire there mate!’
‘That fella, there,’ he tells me, gesturing to some lean and hungry bloke with a hat and a face with more lines than a Melways. ‘That fella there is straight up. You know, straight as a die. ‘Nother drink love?’
(You know, ‘Liar liar, pants on fire …’)

And the fella wearing the pants that are not on fire looks like he’s walked out of Russell Drysdale painting.

In that same pub where the food is sensational and my son has decided he is a pool shark, some of the local lads humour us and play a couple of games. My not quite 8 year old ends up real struttin’ proud that these couple of twenty year old country boys – a bee-keeper and a cabinet-maker – are calling him ‘little tacker’ and telling him he’s ‘doing good’ and that his last shot, even though he did pocket the white ball is ‘tops’ anyhow. I like the bee keeper in particular. He is dark haired with blue eyes and for a bee –keeper he is un-surprisingly meticulous and patient when showing my son how to hold the cue and what part of the ball to go for.

Both young men watch my friend and I – also a latte drinker arty high strung 40 something female who’s moved up from Melbourne – with a mixture of bemusement and amusement, as we both talk endlessly, a little nervously, about what a great game pool is and what fun it is even though we don’t know the rules and our right shoulders ache from the unfamiliar muscle exertion.

Are we trying a bit too hard to fit in?

This town throws into high relief the haves and the have nots, the new-alternative middle (ish) class with their slow food and their authentic fireplace restorations and those living in increasingly pricy rentals with their fast food and authentic wrecked motor bikes

Last weekend we went to two school kid parties, both at either end of the socio-cultural or old-new spectrum.

At our first party there was not a fizzy drink or snag in white bread in sight and the host parents seemed so organised and in control of proceedings. At the second party, more shambolic and less concerned with dietary requirements – not a wheat-free party pie amongst it all – at least 3 of the kids (the boys) had portable computer games and yes, were getting increasingly frantic with every un-organic and processed morsel ingested.

I loved both parties. My son loved both parties. (Maybe he loved the one with the ‘cooked within an inch of their little lives sausages’ and the sunset-red fizzy drinks a tad more?)

I felt an outsider at both gatherings, but I loved them both nonetheless. I was new. It was new. Here was this new place with these new people with their various ideologies – some offered, others worn unobtrusively like an old overcoat) I have a chance for self-renewal, reinvention.

Here is this new town my son and I have the opportunity to start again. I mean we aren’t changing our names and growing a beard, or anything, but still, it’s exciting, this newness.

There’s so much to learn, to offer afresh, to be shit scared of, when the locals hear me talking about them on air.
I have already had a couple of moments where I fear I may have offended someone – I am more concerned about offending people now, that’s true. There are only so few friends and acquaintances to go round here, and chances are that if my blundering and extrovert (read, at times, inappropriate ways) will be ill-received or misinterpreted. I stand to lose potentially a third of my friendship group in one foul (swoop).

Today I received in the mail a Residents Welcome Kit and it felt good to be noticed and requiring a welcome. They like me. They know I’m here and they care. They spelt my name wrong though and the welcome, from my new shire, was addressed to Mr Varrenti. But still it was nice.

So far I’ve had two clichés about country life confirmed.

One: folk are friendlier and more relaxed in the country by and large and two: it is a great place to bring up kids.
And two clichés debunked.
One: that life is simpler in the country and two: that clean air and open space will have you forgetting all your petty worries and make you less anxious.

After 8 excruciating phone exchanges over 4 days with one of our major telecommunications companies – beginning with‘t’ and ending with ‘ahhh!’- I am stressed and angry. During my last and final conversation about my faulty internet connection, I cried.

The Indian man remained impossibly calm and unflappable.

Tree-change. New life. Slower life. I am on a very steep learning curve. Bring on the calm.

I am becoming very good at disappearing and I am not alluding to the notion that an ageing woman is an increasingly invisible one. No, the older my son gets, the more I am required to negotiate the delicate balance between on-tap mother and mother who disappears in a puff of smoke when son is asserting himself within an increasingly cut throat peer group.

Where is he at for God’s sake? One minute he is all over me like a puppy with big feet and too much hair and the next he is hissing at me through the side of his tight-lipped mouth to go away! Or to stay where you are! Or to stop talking now! Or to piss off and return only when he gives me the sign and, preferably sporting an extra large bag of chips and half a dozen chocolate frogs for sharing. My nine and half year old’s version of How to Make Friends and Influence People.

And why? Why is he behaving these days like a peri-adolescent with Turettes? Because we are approaching The Zone that’s why. The cool kids’ zone. The kids he wishes he was like or wishes would like him. That zone. It can be a skateboard park, a bit of asphalt at the supermarket, down the oval at school, his friend’s bedroom when they are both in there together doing secret cool kids’ business. And it can be in the street if he sees kids walking our way. If they are older girls then I am not only ordered to shut up because I am embarrassing him but I must also run home and get his other jacket.

Since when did he care about what jacket he was wearing or how skinny his jeans are or the bloody name of his skateboard or, and this really makes me worried, the label on his underpants!

He lives in the country. His father is anti-everything. I am a helicopter parent. How did he come to be such an over weening conformist? Where are his powers of contextualisation? Why can’t he reflect on his own status anxiety and realise that he’s been sold a pup? Why indeed? Two reasons:
1. He lives in 21st century culture and it’s an identity minefield out there.
2. He is only 9.

The Steiner educators call this period in a boy’s development The Crossing. Not that my son has had anything much to do with the Steiner community in the big regional town where I live and one that houses a big Steiner demographic. They would probably think I am a bad parent and that my son is over stimulated and I would probably think they are a bit precious. I am also probably a bit envious at what looks like such a lovely alternative to the current chaos at his local primary school. The new Head is already on stress leave apparently and he is being bullied so that doesn’t help.

I bet Steiner children don’t bully. I bet Steiner kids don’t harangue their parents for stuff all the time or whine about doing chores, going to bed, or constantly wanting to socialize. Anyway I can’t afford private education even if I could get past my deeply entrenched knee jerk ideological reservations about it in the first instance. The number of old Leftie liberal thinking educated and former card carrying socialist parents who I have uncomfortable discussions with these days about private education is astounding. It can make or break a dinner party. Not that so many people are having dinner parties anymore. Why is that I wonder? Are we all so middle aged and boxed in that a dinner party is just too hard, too expensive and maintaining friendships too confronting?

But I digress.

According to Steiner – and many other educational and developmental paradigms for that matter – between ages 9 and 11the child no longer sees himself as an organic part of the environment, but as a separate independent entity. Prior to this the child lives in a world of pictures, and sees himself as a part of the world around them. Then he starts to see that he is separate.

“Why an I me Mum? Why aren’t I someone else or you?”

You recognize this question or something like it? It’s when your child has gone from monosyllabic technology addicted Whirling Dervish to a short-arse-Descartes in the blink of a metaphysical eyelid.

What to say though? How to respond when all I’ve got is, “I don’t know darling. Just because, that’s why.’ Or, “Hey! Just thank your lucky stars you’re not that kid with the teeth thing or that I’m not Paris Hilton or Michael Jackson’s GP’.

Apparently at the ninth year the child becomes, sometimes quite suddenly, aware of him or her self as a separate identity. This can be accompanied by fears of being alone, of death, of loss and even feelings of inadequacy or depression. Oh Jesus! I knew it! Why don’t kids just have childhoods that adults don’t even notice anymore?

‘I am so confused’, my son tells me disconsolately.
‘What are you confused about? ‘
‘I don’t know.’ Long face. Can’t look at me Chucking his stuff around the room lethargically.
‘About everything. I can’t explain it’.
‘So let me try and do it for you’, I proffer. It’s like everything is kind of messed up and nothing seems to be working properly and you don’t know who likes you or who doesn’t and you don’t know what you want but you just know someone else has it and you don’t. Is that kind of like how it feels.(Not that I am putting words into his mouth anything. Not that I am projecting or anything)
‘Yeah. Kind of.’

Ah! My son is me. I am my son. I am separate from my son bit I am not separate from him. We are merged and inter-dependent. I am Crossing Over into Menopause and he is Crossing Over into pre teen hood and both transitions are naviagating very choppy waters.

Last week he jumped off our back yard sand stone retaining wall last week playing chasey (some things never change, thank god) and sprained his ankle. The Doctor said he could either use crutches for a few days or not. His choice.
No brainer for my Crossing Over fella.
Crutches mean he can legitimately opt out of competitive stuff he is finding hard to manage at present.
Crutches mean the bullies will give it a rest probably.
Crutches mean he gets heaps of positive attention at school.
Crutches mean he can stop trying to conform and fit in and can be a legit observer- outsider without the uncool – misfit labels that go along with living on the periphery.

Today he has given the crutches back to the chemist from where I rented them but I’m betting that next week he will invent a new temporary for himself.
And me? I am just trying to be invisible when he needs me to be and helicopter Mum when he needs that too.

You want to come to the opera with me tomorrow night? Free tixs?
What is it?
Magic Flute. Mozart.
Thanks. No. I can’t.
Why? You got a better offer?
No. It’s just that…
What? You hate the soprano? You’re jealous of the soprano? You used to sing with the soprano when you were both young and hungry music students and had dreams yourself of becoming a star?

No. I just can’t listen to opera anymore. I particularly can’t listen to Mozart.

He was my sister’s favourite composer and since she died I can’t listen to Mozart. Not even mashed up versions of him in the supermarket without falling in a heap of dirty gasping sobs or discrete inaudible ones.
Sorry…
Actually it’s not just Mozart and opera it’s most classical music. And anything by the Beetles. And anything with panpipes and from Latin America – anything in Spanish. And Queen. And any political songs and …
OK. I get it. Sorry. Sorry. How long’s it been since your sister…?

14 months. But some days it’s like it just happened and I can still feel like when Mum told me. I dropped the phone. I fell to my knees. It was like what they do in the movies. I ran outside and down the middle of the street with my Ug boots on and I when I reached the bush on the outskirts of town I cried and screamed into the gums. Why! Why did this happen? She was remarkable. So smart and so beautiful and funny and bloody unusual. Why was her experience of living in the world finally so unbearable she had to kill herself? Anyway…. And then I lay down on ground and everything, and I mean everything, just, stopped.

Sorry. Sorry. It must be very hard for you. It’s just…time. It’ll never go away completely I know. But I’m sure that with more time…I mean, it’ll fade. Change. It wont hurt so…Sorry. What do I know? Talk soon. Take care. Talk soon.

***
I have heard that the second year of grief can be worse than the first. Jesus! Really? Why is that? Because…what is it they say? It’s because ‘the reality’, ‘the bloody ordinary ‘reality’ of what has happened and what has been left sinks in finally. It finally sinks down deep into who you are now and takes up residency in the new you. Is it, that after a year it’s as if every cell in your body has been permanently rearranged?

Is it as if your heart has been removed from its cavity, and then reinstalled at a different angle? Is that why the second year of grief can be worse than the first?

My sister gave me a book – The Atheist’s Guide To Spirituality – and I only just opened it last week. Got as far as the inscription.

There are photos of us as kids – she’s the blonde, wiry younger one. I’m the dark chubby older one. They are on the mantelpiece. Like a shrine. Is it time to take the shrine down? When Mum had her when I was 7 it really pissed me off.

I was desperate for a sibling, some permanent company sure, but not one that was so much younger and so annoying.

There are her manuscripts and other various bits of writing, mostly political stuff. There are journals covered in coloured stickers and slogans. There’s her bible whose marginalia is a book in itself. But every time I determine to read these things, to give them their due, I can’t.

If I catch myself enjoying something – a film or a show or a book or a friend or a man or a drink or a run or my son or her son I feel…what is it? I feel guilty. I feel guilty and ruined. Her suicide has ruined me; it has taken away something, not just her but something. But then when she was alive and very sick I would feel like that too. Guilt yes, and confused and resentful too.

Someone I know said to me that when she started to go out again after her mother had died, she would always end up feeling angry with people. Why couldn’t they see how she was feeing? Didn’t she look different now that she’d had such life altering loss? Why did people just keep on doing normal stuff and not notice or even acknowledge her pain? It made her angry.

It’s over a year now so most people don’t even ask anymore and I don’t think I want them to anyway because it can be uncomfortable. How long am I permitted to ‘use’ my sister’s death as a reason for my sadness, my erratic behaviour at times?

I see her face and her lying there in her rose wood coffin, a crucifix, a Che Guevara badge, a FSLN flag, a photo of her son in her hands and in that moment of such vivid recollection I stop breathing too.

It’s the music. There has been no music in my life since she died. When will I be able to listen to music again?

My son is doing a project on things –German.
Mum. I am half German, you know.
Yes. I do know darling. And I am the other half.

And he has chosen Mozart for his project because when he was in Europe last with his father he went to Salzburg and got chocolates in Mozart wrappers and he brought me home a couple that he’d managed not to eat.

Mozart was a famous composer.

Yes, he was.

Shall I put something of his on so you can hear how amazing he was? We could listen to it together. OK. Here we go. This is The Magic Flute. It’s got one of the hardest songs to sing in it ever.

We can listen to it together.
Do we have to? It sounds a bit boring.

Yes. Yes. We have to. We have to listen to it.

Dad cried when I was born. Not because he was happy, although he says he was – very – but because I wasn’t perfect. “There’s something wrong with her. Look at that ear, it’s pointy’. He told my mother I wasn’t normal but it was he who wasn’t normal, making such a fuss and behaving like an hysteric over a pointy ear.

Dad has always been interested in how I look. When I was in my early twenties and sharing a flat with an attractive art student he said that if he’d been conducting a job interview, he would chose my friend over me because I didn’t, when it came down to it, present as well as she did. ‘Didn’t present as well’ meant that I wasn’t thin and that I often seemed miserable. I wasn’t fat but I wasn’t thin either. And I wasn’t constantly miserable either, although I have always been a glass half empty kind of person. Thin signals confidence, control and self-respect. Melancholy signals volatility, introspection and neediness. We were just sitting there, the three of us, and Dad demolished me in the two seconds it took him to bring the coffee cup up to his lips for the next sip. I wanted to tip the coffee on his head, but instead, I started to make secret plans in my own head about how I could go about making myself more presentable for that hypothetical job interview some day.

I adored him. I hated him. But then don’t most daughters adore or hate or adore-hate their fathers at some stage, particularly if they think their fathers have abandoned them. It’s so clichéd, so ordinary, so much the bread and butter of so much therapy that I almost too embarrassed to mention it. But I have mentioned it, so now no one need arrive at such a distracting and prosaic conclusion all by themselves at some later stage. The catch is, though, that just because we think we know what our basic raison d’etre is – that we understand what our won special and fundamental reason to keep on stuffing up our life is – it still doesn’t make it easier to manage. On the contrary, these days I wish I knew less about why and more about how to never again.

After I was born the three of us – Mum and Dad and me – lived in Brunswick, an inner-city Melbourne suburb. I don’t remember a thing about dad being there and Mum reckons it’s because he always wanted us out of the house so he could study for night school. I was too noisy; too much of a child. But being compelled to spend so much time outside of the house must have eventually made me good at socialising and making friends. ‘You always needed people around. It was bloody exhausting trying to keep you entertained all the time,’ Mum reminds me, even today, when she thinks I might be spreading myself around too thinly. But you can end up paying the price for needing and liking people a lot, because there’s bound to be times in your life, particularly when bad things happen and when you are single, that gregariousness can start to look like neediness. It’s like how intellectual and sexual experimentation when you’re young can start to look less attractive and more like instability when you get older.

They started building the Berlin Wall the year after I was born, and even though I appreciate it’s a bit of a stretch, I mention this fact because I have always been connected with communism, in one way or another, all my life. I have never been a communist – I’m more of a tribal socialist these days – but a lot of my family was communist and I married, and divorced, a man who hated them because they ran the country he grew up in. This makes it sound like we got divorced because he was reared in a communist regime but that’s not what I meant. Although it may have had something to do with the why we didn’t finally fit together all that well.

I was baptised a Catholic when I was six months old, although neither of my parents were religious. But I had to be baptised – otherwise my father’s mother wouldn’t let me inside her house. Mum and Dad both thought it was ridiculous at the time because who was ever going to know, either way, whether or not their first-born had been cleansed of original sin for Christ’s sake. But my grandmother on my father’s side could be pretty scary, so they capitulated to keep the piece. Even though keeping the peace has never been something any member of my family, including me, has ever been very good at. Disrupting the peace, stirring the pot, shooting form the hip, causing a bit of a stir, having a go is more like it. My sister, who was born seven years after me, got herself baptised when she was an adult because she thought it was unfair that no one had made a fuss either way when she was a baby. When she was six months old and all set for a dunking, dad wasn’t living with us anymore and so visits, en famille, to his mother’s place were less likely to pose any problems.

My mother always got on well with my father’s side of the family, and whenever I see any of them at a wedding or a funeral these days, I think it’s a shame that we didn’t have more to do with them when I was growing up. Our big Italo-Australian family is so extended; it snapped a long time ago.

Memory is a bitch. How can we ever know if a memory is an encoded one or has been stored well or if its retrieval is a big mistake? What if our memories are false but we still remember them like we they were yesterday? What if something I remember as good is something my sister or my mother or my father remember as bad? Or what if I am misremembering and I don’t even know it? The perils of looking back.