Category: being a daughter

Nostalgia

These last few days I’ve been writing about homesickness and the different types of homesickness and its potency at certain times, and the way that homesickness can change or come upon you even when you’re sitting in your own well-loved loungeroom.

I don’t think it is any coincidence that I caught myself singing this song to myself.

I’ve always loved these lines, especially:

‘Somebody come with me and see the pleasure in the wind
Somebody see the time is getting late to begin’

By the time I had my children, Australia had a lot more of its own television and anyway, I pretty much limited their television exposure to PlaySchool, so my children don’t really know Sesame Street. I think that’s a pity.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOxe8u8Y9R8&fs=1&hl=en_US&rel=0]

Maintain the rage

I don’t remember where I was the day the Governor General was lambasted from the steps of Parliament House. In a tyre swing in the front of our house at Essington Avenue, Clare, I’m guessing. But certainly, the incident shaped my early childhood – I was simultaneously mortified and proud to be driven around a small conservative town in a car covered with stickers proclaiming in red, ‘Don’t blame me, I voted ALP’ and the pretty bloody dreadful ‘Tammy’s got one, Mal is one’.

My attachment to the ALP has been as much emotional as it is political, but like a lot of people, I lost any real sense of belonging at the time of Tampa. I was deeply disappointed in my father then. I could not understand how he continued to support a party which was so clearly disconnected from the values that he had taught me were non-negotiable. My mother would have left, I’m certain of that. We fought about it, my father and I, in a way we had never fought about politics and values before. It was a confusing time, because we had never been separated in such a way before. You fight for change from within the party, my father said. Or you fight it from outside.

I had heard the argument all my life, but this time, I wasn’t convinced.

That was about the time his own, personal fight began, so I guess I’ve forgiven him for letting the ALP battle go.

Maybe all of this has coloured my reaction to Malcolm Fraser’s resignation from the Liberal Party, because do you know what?

I am maintaining the rage.

I thank Malcolm Fraser for his stand against the Howard government and I thank him even more for his stand against the possibility of one led by Abbott. But equally, I hold him responsible for creating a political environment in which a Howard government could exist.

Fraser’s government came to power driven by an unwavering belief in it’s own privileged entitlement to power. Whatever else they did or did not do, this was the foundation on which their power rested. How could the people of such a government escape a ‘born to rule’ mentality, how could they not learn to view the electorate with contempt?

It wasn’t an inevitablity. I’m not saying the Howard government is a natural outcome of the Fraser government. But I don’t think it’s any surprise that the one led to the other.

I have no scientific evidence for my belief, no psychological, sociological or even political insight. It’s just a personal observation. And perhaps it’s not even a very sophisticated way of thinking. Maybe I’m just clinging to my rage, because if I don’t, then that’s just one more piece of Dad that doesn’t exist anymore. An essential piece. Perhaps I’m directing my rage towards a man I don’t even know because it’s easier than asking yet another question of my father and my relationship with him.

Whatever the reason, I thank Malcolm Fraser for his continued commitment to human rights, but I harbour no fondness for the man.

The search for meaning

I feel the fragility of life more keenly these days than I ever have before. This is my age and the impact my parents’ deaths showing. But it’s being away from home as well. Living here, I am way outside my comfort zone on about a gazillion different levels (I know, you might not have noticed, I’ve been keeping it to myself).

If I were to tell you each of the reasons I feel uneasy here, for many of them you would scoff. No, really, you would. There’s the obvious reasons and one or two of them are big, important things, but mostly, it’s a never-ending succession of small, tiny, itsy-bitsy things that leave me, each day, flabbergasted, trying to understand, but increasingly certain that for me, the place is incomprehensible.

Look at this article for example. In the town where I grew up, lads, young blokes, however you describe them, would have done the same kind of thing. I’ve been in cars that were driven by boys doing dumb things. This is not a culturally-specific event.

Only where I grew up, it wouldn’t have been so…I don’t know, so in your face. And plus, we were a working class community, with not so much money to burn on the roads.

I don’t know what it is that I’m trying to say here, what conclusion I’m trying to draw. The mister drives along that road a couple of times each week, my mother died in a car accident, I have my own two young boys to guide, I like public transport…of course watching this makes my heart race, my breaths shallow, the shoulder muscles tense.

But there’s something more to it than that. Something about my powerlessness that re-awakens or, more precisely, reinforces, my uneasiness. Perhaps it’s just that all over the world, middle-aged women are invisible to young men in cars. And it worries me.

Interestingly, if we try to go directly to the clip on youtube from here, it seems to have been blocked, but we can view it through the newspaper just fine. I don’t understand.

Another way of looking at it

He says: ‘Mum, ever since you’ve got that computer you’ve just been living on it.’

I reply: ‘I’m trying to get my book written, I need to work really hard on it, otherwise I will never finish it.’

He asks: ‘What’s this one about?’

I tell him: ‘It’s a memoir…’

He interrupts: ‘Oh, so it’s like your memories?’

I say: ‘Sort of.’

He is perceptive: ‘So it’s about Denis, right?’

I say: ‘Yes, and some other people.’

Eagerly: ‘Me? Am I in it?’

Thinking quickly about how I’m going to answer it: ‘Well, I don’t want to write too much about you and your brother…’

Interrupting (again): ‘Because we’re not memories, right?’

It’s true, I need to get out more

A while ago in internet terms, there was a post on Spike, the Meanjin blog about the site forgotten bookmarks, which I promptly visited. I liked it a lot. It’s the kind of blog that I love, feeding as it does, the social eavesdropper, collector, lover of books, librarian and general internet addict in me.

But even as I loved it, I found myself feeling unsettled by the postcard highlighted and transcribed on Spike. The one that was found in The Remains of the Day. I tried to write a comment on Spike at the time, but couldn’t get the words quite right so deleted it (as I so often do, I’m crap at commenting, I really am).

The discomfort I felt, however, kept following me. I would say it haunted me. I even dreamt about it one night. My discomfort had nothing at all to do with the general idea of putting these treasures on the internet. Like I say, I love the site. My discomfort was to do specifically with that letter.

Having, as I do, time on my hands to engage in emotional over-analysis, I have been doing some thinking about why I have been so affected by this particular postcard.

Probably, I’m more sensitive about things and artefacts and mementos than I might previously have been. Having, within the space of twelve months, co-ordinated the cleaning out of my grandfather’s house when he moved into aged accommodation; my family home after my father died; and my own house when we moved over here, has left me…well, let’s just leave it at sensitive for now.

In the last six months, I’ve been writing a bit about how it has been, what it means to deal with so many things, things that quickly translate into memories and artefacts and mementos. I’ve been fiddling it all into essays which will hopefully weave themselves into a book. Through that, I’ve been doing, as I’ve said, a lot of thinking about the rights and wrongs, the shoulds and the shouldn’ts, the oughts and the ought nots. The ethics of it all. Topped off with some postgraduate research into ethics and life writing. So, that’s affected (affecting) my thinking too. While the thinks that I’ve thought about life writing don’t automatically transfer to this situation, some of those thinks do.

Now in the end, I did leave a comment on the Spike blog, to which Jessica replied that I have raised an interesting point about privacy and ethics. I guess my comment over there does seem to be specifically about privacy, but actually, my discomfort goes deeper than simple privacy. It is more to do with the rights we do or don’t have to tell other people’s stories. Certainly, privacy is an aspect of this, but it is only one aspect.

Life writing cannot avoid the telling of other people’s stories to a greater or lesser extent. Each writer will need to decide whose stories, and how much of those stories, they are allowed to tell, and that decision will be affected by all sorts of factors (journals and books and essays filled with such factors if you are interested, let me know, I can point you at some good places to get started).

So it is with this postcard. Do we have a right to this postcard, its contents and the story it tells? My simple, general answer would be that yes, as a society we do have a right to such things and my simplest arguments in favour would be that we are all enriched, we all learn from them, there is more good than harm generally done.

But this particular postcard? Why is this troubling me?

One crucial issue is, I think, the time. It is dated 00. That’s 2000, barely ten years ago. In internet years, ten is a lifetime, but in stories of loves lost and found, ten years might not be much time at all. If I were a player in that story, if I were him or her, or if I were the person now wearing that ring, I wonder what I would think if I came upon that postcard on the internet?

And then I started thinking not so much, ‘What if that were me?’, but, ‘What if I were the custodian of that letter?’

If I had come across this letter in my father’s things, would I share it with the world? Possibly – probably – I would share it with my closest friends, but not with the internet. So if I can think of circumstances under which I might not share it, then wouldn’t they stand for a stranger too? Don’t we owe more benefit of the doubt to a stranger simply because we have even less chance of knowing their ins and outs?

All of these are interesting questions, but they are intellectual, theoretical questions and don’t explain what it is that is specifically bothering me. Why did I dream about that postcard? Why do I care that much about its publication?

It took me a while, but I finally worked it out. The real reason this particular letter is gnawing at me is because when you are left with someone’s things, you could quite easily become the custodian of such a letter.

You could easily become the custodian, but not even know.

So when I look at that postcard, I’m not thinking of all the boxes that I bundled up in my grandfather’s and father’s houses and took to my own. But of all the boxes I bundled up and gave away.

It’s Saturdays. They always make me homesick

Wettest July since 1888 according to last night’s weather presenter.

I must say, coming from Australia’s increasingly frightening drought, I find being in this rain…I’m not sure of the word exactly…not ‘reassuring’ not ‘comforting’ not ‘a relief’. But it’s certainly a physical and emotional response of some kind. Not that you can just swap the water from one side to the other. But just…I don’t know, I’ll think on it and see if I can explain it later on.

I got a haircut yesterday. First one since March, and a satisfyingly lovely one it is too. I’m thinking of going and buying a hairdryer so that I can keep it looking lovely. A hairdryer and one of those little round brushes.

After the haircut we went to the Rubbings Museum, then we walked home, my boys took photos of me:

From july2009

then it rained on us. We watched Spongebob Squarepants which is still weird.

In Edinburgh at the moment, there’s a million festivals on all at the same time. I was reading through the brochure for the Festival of Politics and saw the session “Annie Lennox and the SING campaign”. I am going to that for sure. She was one of those women that the teenage me adored. No, adored isn’t right. But she made me feel like you could do things. That there were things to be done. I remember one Saturday afternoon, watching a music show and there was Sisters are Doing it for Themselves.

My Mum, who would have been younger than what I am now, watched it with me. I remember that she stopped whatever it was she was doing and stood in front of the television and watched it. And she said something like, ‘They are, you know.’

I don’t know how much of my precious prepaid gigabyte I just used watching this, but more than twenty years of Saturday afternoons later, it was worth it:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pu0Fn1oRN4&hl=en&fs=1&]

Put up your hand if you’ve been drinking too much

Last Christmas Day, by which I mean the one before the one we had the other day, while the mister was in emergency getting my grandfather’s broken ribs seen to, I dished up the home made tartufo.

My dad peered into the mister’s mother’s bowl and said, What’s that? He was pointing at a Haigh’s truffle. Cupofcino or shiraz, I can no longer be sure which. The truffle was on the side, because the day before the day before the Christmas before the one we’ve just had, tartufo still seemed like a good idea, but an idea for which I did not quite have time. So I made the ice cream and decided to serve it in scoops rather than balls, and with truffle on the side, instead of in the middle.

An excellent plan which resulted in a mighty fine dessert. Except…

My dad, removing his face from the mister’s mother’s bowl said, ‘Where’s mine?’

‘I didn’t give you one,’ said I.

‘Why not?’

At times like this, people will know when you are not telling the truth, and so I did not even try to lie.

‘I thought it was wasted on your tongue, dulled as it is by this savage chemotherapy you’ve been enduring, but nonetheless cooked Christmas lunch through.’

‘And you also thought that I wouldn’t notice that I didn’t get one?’

The mister’s mother was shocked. But my Dad and I, thinking of my mother who was once caught hiding mandarins from her own children, laughed until our tummies hurt.

And when we got into bed that night I said to the mister, It’s going to be a hard year. And so it has. Topped off with a fairly ordinary couple of weeks I have to say.

But it was pretty ace being tapped excitedly on the arm at 6.45 and woken with the words ‘mum, mum, he came, can we open one yet, please can we…mum, mum, it’s light sabres…’. And because I’m a bit ambivalent to this whole Santa Claus thing, the best presents were clearly labelled ‘Love from Mum and Dad’. mp3 players (I know, kids these days) pre-loaded with a bunch of songs I thought they might like.

Of course, it has introduced a whole new argument to our family life. ‘Youngest Boy, I know you totally love Wipeout, but you have to have the volume at fifteen or less’. But what’s life without family arguments?

I’d better go. If the mister gets home and finds me blogging, I’m in fifteen kinds of trouble. There’s a lot to do round here.,

Up and down

Yesterday, I bought new bathers. My first new pair in 13 years if you don’t count that rather disastrous effort from last year. Which I don’t.

These bathers make me look like CatWoman. A suitably matured and rounded out CatWoman. I feel so good in them, I almost took a photo to show you. But then I saw M*rced*s C*r*y on the news last night and it kind of put me off people in bathers taking photos of themselves for all the world to see.

After I bought the bathers, I went to the ABC shop, then left when I realised the main reason for going to the ABC shop was to find my Dad a present.

I think I should stop drinking. Now. Given that it’s now too late to have stopped earlier on this evening.

So, in answer to your question, yes, I would highly recommend the new David Sedaris collection. These last few hours, it has been making me laugh. This is no mean feat, given that I am tired beyond belief and sad beyond comprehension.

When I had a mum and a dad we never used to celebrate the days of mothers and fathers, dismissing them as commercial crap. But of course I used to ring my mum and my dad to let them know why I wasn’t ringing them or sending them a card or cooking them a meal of roasted meat.

Do you know what I think is really lovely? The messages on my phone last night and today from my friends and from the friends of my mum and dad to let them know they’re thinking of me. If they had asked me about it earlier in the week, I would have said (and believed), ‘father’s day? I’ll be fine, hadn’t even realised it was on’. Friends do rock, do they not?