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Not Last Night, but the Night Before: The Esplanade

A summer storm is blowing in and now is the calm before. The air is heavy but not heaving, the wind is a whisper and the sea is not-quite calm. The water, the clouds, the sky are grades of grey and blue. They suit my mood which, at new year, is resolvant melancholy.

(no, you’re right, resolvant isn’t a word, but what then is a melancholic when she is resolved?)

In the houses of The Esplanade – town houses with sea views from front windows and neighbours’ clotheslines from the rest – BBQs are firing, sundowners are downed. I walk along the wide paved path between the houses and the sand. Around me, thin and sinewed runners take straight lines while children on their scooters turn and weave. Babies in prams, on hips, in slings. Men and women grown old together are walking hand-in-hand, arm-in-arm or three steps apart.

Below, in the sand and the sea, families and couples and tribes of young adults (through the eyes of middle age these last are grown up children, aren’t they, but don’t tell them I think that way – they’ll only roll their eyes). Mothers wrap first towels and then their arms around shivering children. There are rubber balls, tennis balls and frisbees. From here, there is no sound when they hit the sand, a splash when they hit the water and, when the throw is bad, the stinging slap against wet skin (ya fkn dkhd, what was that?).

A spotter plane (fixed wing, I know these things) flies close to the shore. This summer, sharks are spotted every second day (it’s the bogans on the jetty chucking the crab nets off the jetty down at Brighton; how shocking sharks in their own habitat what do u expect u moron – this is what I’ve learnt from facebook). I have heard the sirens sound and seen the water cleared while helicopters hover and rubber boats charge out from the shore. Cartilaginous beasts and their teeth are not welcome here.

Dogs, their owners walking in opposite directions, slow down, sniff, then chase. Their owners stand, facing each other, calling their dogs. The dogs run, first to one voice then the other, back and forth, splashing through the shallows and kicking up the sand. The human voices first are high, then as frustration grows they deepen. Who knows why but the dogs stop their frolic and part, running towards their owners.

I have been past the café, the storm water drain (a trickle now but it will gush when the storm blows in), the sculpture. I have turned and now I’m nearly back at the start. My children will be home from cricket and surf lifesaving and needing to be fed. But I’m not ready to go home, not ready to leave this place where the land meets the sea and we are, all of us – walking, swimming, running, calling our dogs, chasing our kids – together but apart.

I sit on an empty bench. It is dedicated by plaque to a man whose name I will never remember by a woman I’ll never know. Now that I have stopped I can hear the sea rolling in. The waves are breaking softly across the sand. That sound must have been there while I was walking but I guess I couldn’t hear it above my thoughts. At my feet are three cigarette butts that were pushed out of shape by smokers’ thumbs before they were flicked to the ground or flattened under shoes. I see smudges of black ash, chewing gum stains and ants on their well-trodden path.

Snatches of conversation sound behind me. I don’t know what she wants from me … I know and that’s the situation in Germany too … yeah but mate, who gives a fuck.

Another plane – a jet – taken off from the airport a few kilometres down, flies out, gaining altitude over the sea before it banks and flies back towards the shore. I have already told you that I love the sight and the sound of those jets, but every day I love them more. They take my love and then they bring him home to me. The goodbye is getting harder but it takes less time to find my equilibrium.

A woman and a man are together in the sea. They are facing the shore, and she is behind him, her arms wrapped around his shoulders while his cannot be seen. He turns his head. Her neck stretches forward.

They kiss.

I think, Who knows what goes on beneath the surface.

Perhaps their feet are buried in the sand and they are grounded.
Or maybe they are floating.
Weightless.

The laundry

When I was of an age that I now recognise as young, but then believed was old, I used, sometimes, when faced with an empty knicker drawer, to go to the supermarket and buy another six pack of cheap knickers rather than do a load of washing. On other occasions I would get a load of washing on and then forget it for a week by which time it was a rotting mess of fabric that would have to be washed and then forgotten all over again and in the meantime I’d have to go back to the supermarket to get another six pack of cheap knickers. Wash, rinse, repeat.

When the mister and I first moved in together, some twenty six years ago (WTF and does time not fly) the household chores were divided by that most well-established tradition of Domestic Attrition. Whoever gets into the shower, looks down at the grime that’s gathered in the corners and thinks, ‘Oh, god, that is going to crawl out of the corner and eat me in the night if I don’t disintegrate it with bleach,’ is the loser and spends the rest of the day in a frenzy of fevered cleaning.

Except the washing. The mister always did the washing. At first we used the laundromat and then we inherited a twin tub which suited our youthfully optimistic recycling ways as we hooked hoses from here to there and used the water more than once. Well, when I say ‘we’ I mean ‘he.’

I overheard a conversation between the mister and his mother not long after we had started co-habiting, the main focus of which centred on the question, ‘And what does Tracy do?’

‘Mostly she has ideas,’ he said. It is perhaps the best character summation he’s ever done.

Our division of tasks became more, erm, traditional over the years, particularly once we had children and he continued to leave the house to earn an income and I stayed home caring for the children and having ideas. I even, for a good number of years, began to take on the washing. Nappies every day (oh, god, what was I thinking) and dedicating Fridays to the bulk of the laundry declaring in tones worthy of my grandmothers’ time, ‘I always do the laundry of a Friday.’

Then things changed again, we moved to Abu Dhabi, my mental health collapsed under the weight of exhaustion and grief, I started full time work again, and things shifted a bit. I continued to do loads of washing, but increasingly often left them in the machine to fester. And the mister, who is more often gainfully employed than I am, has a more urgent need for clean clothes than I do. One thing led to another and it became his job again. As it happens, I think watching the mister walk around the house with baskets of laundry clean and dirty, wet and dry, stands as the best feminist teaching we’ve done. We all pull our domestic weight. The mister coordinated it all, the Floppy Adolescent had to do the towels and the Future Prime Minister was in charge of hanging the smalls. And I continued to leave all of my clothes in a pile on the chair. It was an excellent system.

Except that now, here I am, living in a different country to the mister and I seem to be doing all of the washing again.

In truth, there are parts of the washing I love. Well, one part. Getting it out of the machine and onto the line. Carrying the heavy basket on my hip, breathing in the smell of clean clothes The methodical rhythm of hanging it on the line. The sense of order. But then, after that…I have three laundry baskets and I’m thinking of getting a fourth to hold the overflow.

‘We need a system!’ The Floppy Adolescent declared after a particularly terse morning of, ‘Mum! Where’s my…’ and ‘Mum! Have you seen…’ And all of the clean clothes, many of them folded, being tipped from the basket onto the unwashed floor as the Floppy Adolescent searched for socks and the Future Prime Minister looked for shorts.

I did not drive him out to a forest and tell him to find his way home. See how restrained I am?

‘You know what, Mum?’ the Floppy Adolescent said a few days later. ‘I’ve noticed it’s all been left up to you and so I’ve got an idea.’

‘Well, maybe we should just share it out a bit more.’

‘No, I know exactly how it’s going to work.’

The morning passed and so did the afternoon.

‘So, Floppy Adolescent, the washing…’

‘Wot?’ he said looking up, bleary-eyed from six hours of watching you-tubers playing games (no, seriously, WTF young ones what is with that?)

‘The washing. I’m running out of knickers, and school uniforms need to be done.’

‘Wot? Did you think we were starting today? No, today I just had the idea.’

Genetic mirrors, hey?

Christmas Eve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Christmas, my friends.

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

On umbrellas (and other things)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brothers on holiday together.

Needle, bicker, hug, laugh.

Rinse, repeat.

Add umbrellas.

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

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

‘Mum, we look fine.’

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

‘Mum. Please.’

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

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

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

We arrived at the tram.

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

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

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

‘How far is it?’

‘Just down here.’

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

‘Not long.’

‘How long is not long?’

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

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

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

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

My boys looked shabby and they had umbrellas.

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

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

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

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

‘Oh God, you’re crying, aren’t you?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Mum. Really?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘How do you know?’

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

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

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

There was no rain and the Norfolk Pines were silent.

Thank you Tuesday, you were perfect

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

Fortune cookies and the dentist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scrub dentist from the list.

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

Anniversary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I miss his energy and I miss his love.

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

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

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

The other thing he said: Keep writing.

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

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

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

I think I just wanted to talk about my dad.

Thank you for listening.

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

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

Statistics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Food

If I tell you that I have a personal trainer who comes to my house twice a week, it will sound extremely expat lady I’m sure. But since last September I’ve been working full time, studying full time (which became part time during the semester) and trying to finish my novel, and the personal training route became the only way I was going to get any exercise done. I couldn’t get to classes, and as my gym routines became old and stale I could feel my trips to the gym becoming less and less strenuous as my self-discipline and motivation dwindled. And that’s it’s own self-feeding spiral, isn’t it?

I need to exercise. It’s not only that I live a reasonably sedentary working life and the car culture I live in doesn’t promote much incidental exercise. It’s also that ever since we arrived, exercise has been one of the cornerstones of maintaining my mental health.

So I got a trainer, planning to revamp my strength training routines, get some new ideas and hopefully get myself back on the self-training track.

One of the things he tried to do was assess my food and nutrition. Okay, I thought, this will be good. I will lose those five kilos I put on my ‘to do’ list every single year. I downloaded the fitness app that everyone uses (I’ve forgotten what it’s called, and if that’s not foreshadowing I don’t know what is). And I started logging my food. Not right away, but after a week or so I started. And it was fun, like any of those things are. Looking at the pretty pie charts and bar graphs. But I never really got into it.

‘How’s your diet been?’ he would ask each time he came to the house.
‘Okay,’ I’d say and shrug.
‘You haven’t been filling it in, have you?’
‘Mostly.’
‘Have you stopped having the school lunches yet?’
‘Not really. They’re kind of delicious.’

After a few weeks of this he said to me one day, ‘Right, if you haven’t got on top of it by next week, I’ll put you on the paleo diet.’
‘Okay, but I won’t do it.’
‘You’ve got one week.’
‘But I’m telling you quite honestly that I won’t do it.’

And so I went on. I still ate the school lunches. Partly because they were kind of delicious and partly because it was a way of spending time with the children – the year twos love it when the librarian comes to the dining hall and they love to bring me a glass of water and to help me find the perfect banana. And although I tried to change my less-than-nutritious breakfast of two slices of toast with vegemite, a thirty-year habit is hard to change. Plus, I love it. I did stop drinking wine every night, but apart from that not much changed.

After more and more sessions of my increasingly apparent lack of interest he’s stopped asking and I’d tell you how long since I last filled in my fitness tracker but I really couldn’t be bothered going to find it. And now we just concentrate on the weights on the bar and he’s also trying to convince me I should do more sprints which yeah, nah, gah!

The other morning, when I was in the shower, I realised what a very big deal this actually is. I must be happy with my diet (used in the broadest sense of the word to mean what I actually eat rather than what I am limiting myself to eat) and possibly even with my body just the way they are. I do have a tendency to procrastinate, but if I really want to do something I usually find a way of getting it done. Like, if I wanted to care about my food that way I would have tracked it.

I have always wanted to be happy with these things. And I actually did stop going to a particular person’s classes because he kept insisting that the primary reason people exercise is so that they look better naked. I argued that no I didn’t, but I did assume that I was arguing more out of principle than out of an actual belief I actually held. But this is the first time I realised that I really am exercising simply because it’s good for my heart and for my brain. And if I think about it, I don’t remember the last time I stood in front of the mirror and thought, ‘oh, god, my legs.’ My legs haven’t changed – they’ve been more or less this shape and size and for twenty years – so it must be my mind. Pretty pleased with that.

I went walking

So my beloved and I were out walking and while we were walking we were chatting about this and that and mostly our chat was my list, ordered alphabetically, of Things That Could Go Wrong as I venture into unknown waters this week. And I was particularly keen to seek his opinion on one of those items as it is something about which he knows more than I, so I detailed my fear, ending with, ‘…but I’m being silly, aren’t I, that won’t happen will it?’

To which he replied, ‘It could, and in fact…’

At which point I stopped walking and said, ‘Yeah, nah, here’s the part where you snort and say, goodness no, what, how did you even manage to think that. No way, I know this is Abu Dhabi, but nah, you’ll be right.’

And he said, ‘Well, I just want to prepare you for the worst that could happen.’

There is a silence.

And then I’m like, ‘WTF BELOVED SINCE WHEN DID I NEED YOUR HELP PREPARING FOR THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN MY GOD IF WE ARE TALKING WORST CASE SCENARIOS YOUR IMAGINATION CAN GET FROM THE FRONT DOOR TO THE CAR WHEREAS MINE…HOW LONG HAVE YOU KNOWN ME LET’S START THIS CONVERSATION AGAIN, SHALL WE, AND GO BACK TO OUR CLEARLY DEFINED MARITAL ROLES.’
And he’s like, ‘Yes, let’s go home and I’ll pour you a glass of wine.’

(disclosure, this is just lifted from my facebook updates, but I’m desperate to get my blog going again, and it’s silly to give facebook everything)