Waiting

At the counter, I am second in line behind a woman who is arguing with the receptionist.

‘My appointment was for one o’clock and now it is half past two. I can see the doctor straight away please.’

‘You just arrive, madam.’

‘It is half past two, I can see the doctor please.’

‘You just arrive, madam. You suppose to come at one.’

In the four years since I arrived in Abu Dhabi I have worked my way through such queues fuelled by incredulity, then by outrage, then by fascination, but it is simply part of the landscape now. When it comes to time and queues I no longer expect to understand or be understood. As long as it’s not my doctor she thinks she has come to see.

Another receptionist comes to the counter, begins the conversation again, this time in Arabic. I have never heard a woman from the Philippines speaking Arabic before. I imagine the conversation will be as circular in Arabic as it was in English.

The first receptionist looks at me and, without asking my name, ticks me off the list.

‘You are number four, madam.’ I am early and the doctor is running late.

The argument goes on, but I turn my back.

I am the oldest woman in the crowded waiting room. The woman in the seat just inside the door might be older than I am, but she has come to sit with her daughter, a young woman in a patterned abaya, smooth skin, her eyelids painted grey. The young woman’s hair covering is looser than her mother’s and she lifts it lightly with one hand (without letting go of her over-blinged phone). With the other, she pulls softly at her hair, brushing her fringe from her eyes, and then (still without letting go of her phone) she drops both her hands, resting them gently on the place where her growing baby’s legs might have settled. The only woman who might be older than me will soon be a grandmother. She will be a grandmother and she might not be older than me.

I sit between one woman waiting on her own, and another with three children – one in the pram, one in her arms and one climbing over the seats. If I spoke Arabic I would offer to read a book to the climbing child. I would ask him to sit on my lap, or rest against me, or just sit in the seat by mine and I would read. But he does not speak English, I do not speak Arabic and anyway, there are no children’s books in my bag. No books, no coloured pens, and no sultanas. I did not know to mark the day I removed the last piece of lego, the last pokemon card from my bag. It passed by unnoticed. The most remarkable of life’s changes happen piece by unremarkable piece.

I smile at the woman’s baby and then at the woman herself. She looks down at her baby, and she smiles, but not at me. Perhaps she did not see my smile.

My clothes are not immodest, but I am the only one with the skin of her arms and legs exposed. I want to say that my green shirt stands out amongst the black abayas of Syrian women and the muted overcoats of women from Palestine, but in all likelihood, I am the only person who has noticed my green shirt. Four years is long enough to know that I have more questions about their robes and veils than they have about my uncovered skin and hair. I am not as fascinating to other people as I think I am.

The television plays Bugs Bunny dubbed in Arabic. Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd. Waiting room televisions are always too loud, and they never help to pass the time.

The woman next to me holds a book so small that it fits in the palm of her hand. Its pages are aerogramme thin and their gentle crinkle as she turns them make me think of the Methodist hymn book from which my mother sang. She sang the longest and loudest when her atheism was strongest. It’s not for me to understand.

The book that I have brought is a hardbound text with thick pages and no poetry. My exams do not begin until next week and I should still have time for this and four other texts.

But I have not factored in an unexpected pregnancy and its ensuing complications.

This book, Biological Psychology (Kalat, 2009) has become an odd memento of my back and forths. Scribbles in the front tell me my appointment times, hCG readings, likely dates. A post-it bookmark reminds me of the day (last week) that I was 43 years 297 days. I copied those numbers from one of the orders the doctor wrote for the lab or perhaps the pharmacy. I have never seen myself described in such a way. I like that it is so precise, but so quickly wrong. It seems somehow to suit the whole experience.

Chapter Nine. Wakefulness and Sleep. I read and underline, babies cry, phones ring, time passes.

The receptionist leaves her seat to stand in front of the desk and call in Tagalog-inflected English, ‘Ladies only, please. This waiting room is ladies only. Gentlemen outside.’ On other days, I have seen men ignore her, but today they leave. Through the open doors and the uncurtained windows, I watch them settle into the rows of seats which line the corridor.

Another woman joins our row of seats. She carries a cardboard cup of chain store coffee. I take a breath in and as I breathe, I will the smell to leave me queasy. Last week it might have done so, this week nothing.

I drop my eyes back to the pages of book, and find my place by looking for the last sentence I have underlined. “Note that acetylcholine is important for both wakefulness and REM sleep, states of brain arousal. Serotonin and norepinephrine interrupt REM sleep.” It can only be minutes since I underlined it, but I have no memory of even having read it.

A Western expat woman (younger) takes a seat across from me. She has been speaking into her phone about a meeting she can’t get to this afternoon, but she is good for tomorrow morning. She wears a pencil skirt, white shirt, heels. No wedding ring. You can make an appointment without showing your marriage certificate and you can get pre-natal care, but it’s illegal for unmarried women to give birth here. That’s what the expat forums say, but I don’t know the truth of things. Anyway, I am married and do not wear a wedding ring. I smile, but she looks down at her phone. Perhaps she did not see my smile.

“Mrs Tracy. Tracy Crisp.” It takes two calls before I recognise my name.

The receiving room is one small room divided into two by a curtain. A baby’s galloping heartbeat plays from behind the curtain. Ga-whoomp, ga-whoomp, ga-whoomp. I have read that you can buy a Doppler device and take it home so if you wanted to, you could listen to your baby’s heartbeat every night.

I stand on the scales, and the nurse looks at the readout, but before she can record my weight a man walks in and speaks.

‘When is my wife? Show me the sheet.’

‘Sir, you will need to ask reception.’

‘Show me the sheet.‘

The nurse shrugs, shows him something and repeats, ‘Ask reception, sir.’

He leaves.

From behind the curtain I can still hear the baby’s heartbeat but I have not heard anyone speak. I look, as surreptitiously as I can, under the curtain for a nurse’s feet. There is nothing there, just the wheels of a trolley, the legs of a chair. And the sound of a baby’s heartbeat. I was left alone with my first baby’s heartbeat, and when the midwife came back she brought a doctor who cleared her throat before she spoke.

The nurse who is with me now looks at the scales again and calls to the nurse behind the computer, ‘One hundred and twenty.’

‘That’s not right. I’m about fifty five.’

‘Oh, sorry, madam, that is pounds.’ She flicks a switch on the scales. ‘Fifty five.’

There is some confusion about where I should be next. One nurse tells me to sit, another tells me to go for blood tests, the receptionist tells me to knock on the doctor’s door. I stand outside the doctor’s waiting room leaning against the wall.

A young woman, the youngest I’ve seen I’m sure, comes out of the next room and speaks in Arabic to the man who is waiting for her. I do not speak Arabic, but her smile is wide, and his voice is high.

I try to think generous thoughts, but only because I am seeking karmic reward. Most of me is thinking, ‘Why you and why not me?’ I tell myself that they must be expecting a boy, that this man would not punch the air for a girl. I try to stop myself before my fears breed further contempt.

My doctor is ready now. He smiles and I wish (again) that a kind and gentle doctor is all it takes. I have barely taken my seat before I say, ‘There is blood. Yesterday I started to bleed.’

He nods and his smile is gone. ‘Did you start taking the progesterone?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are British?’ he had asked the last time I was here and told him of my spotting, very light, less than I had seen in my other pregnancies, but spotting nonetheless. When I had said, ‘Australian’ he responded, ‘More British than American. For better or for worse, we follow American models here and if there are drugs available well, then…’

He had run through the risks and side effects and been quite clear that if it did make any difference, I would be the exception rather than the rule. He says, ‘I know that you are educated. I know that you understand.’

I am neither British nor American. I am 43 years and several hundred days old. My partner’s sperm are shonky. For nine years I have longed for another child. Yes, I started taking the progesterone.

‘You need a blood test. If your hCG levels have fallen, you must stop the progesterone.’

The man at the blood test desk remembers me. I am the woman rich enough to lose my health care card. I pay in advance, handing him hundred dirham notes, taking the receipt. ‘Are you sure you cannot find your card, madam?’ He always asks and I always shake my head.

The ladies waiting area is quiet, almost empty, just one woman, but she is sprawled in the seat where I usually sit. She wears a gold leather mask that covers her mouth and her eyes. Only women older than me wear that mask. She has kicked off her scuffed black shoes, and sits in one chair, her legs stretched across another. Her arms are folded, her chin is resting on her chest and her shoulders are lifting up and down. Her snores are only slightly louder than breaths. There is a hole in the toe of her stocking and hers are the first unpolished toenails (besides my own) that I have seen in many years.

I barely have time to find my place in my book when my name is called.

“Miss Tracy.”

‘I had you last time,’ I say to the blood nurse. ‘You did a lovely job, it didn’t hurt.’

She smiles, but she doesn’t speak. She pulls rubber gloves from a box on the wall, snaps them on to her hands and then she is using her fingers to rub at the crooks of my arms, right first then left. She shakes her head at the bruise in my left arm.

I clench my fist when she tells me to and I remind myself not to hold my breath as she pumps at the band around my arm. I do not always, but today I watch the needle go in, the syringe start to fill. The thinness of blood always surprises me. It should be less like water and more like full cream milk I think.

Plastic, metal, rubber, skin. The clinical and the visceral.

The nurse uses her thumb to smooth the sticking plaster down ‘Press down for five minutes,’ she says. ‘You did not hold it long enough last time.’

She looks at her sheet, then she speaks again. ‘The doctor will have your results in half an hour.’ Half an hour is optimistic. I have at least another hour to pretend I have a place in the waiting room.

I press at the sticking plaster. My arm has pins and needles.

the ups and downs of things

My eldest boy has been away on his first school trip and (you will not be surprised to hear) the peppermint foot spray I gave him to refresh his feet at the end of the day has come home unopened. Describing some of the logistics he dealt with he said, ‘Well, I just tried to think like you, Mum.’

One the one hand: how cool is that?

On the other: WTF? WHY WOULD YOU THINK LIKE ME WHEN YOU COULD THINK LIKE THE MISTER HAVEN’T I TAUGHT YOU ANYTHING?

Dickens

Cool stuff happens.

Like at dinner one night, my youngest lad tells me (in response to my earnest conversational prompt,’What did you do in English today?’), ‘We started Dickens.’ He talks with his mouth full and it seems I have overlooked the need to teach them to use a knife and fork. ‘We had to say what we knew about Dickens.’

‘Did you know anything?’

‘Yeah, I said that Dickens had trouble sleeping so he used to go for walks at night and that’s where he got his ideas for his stories and he always writes about the fog.’

Inside me I am all, ‘THAT’S MY BOY and my goodness me, that trip to London has CHANGED MY CHILD’S LIFE.’

And then he says, ‘And his name begins with Dick.’

The beginning

In the 2012 Abu Dhabi summer, this past Adelaide winter, the lads and I spent most of our escape-from-Abu-Dhabi time in Adelaide, but the mister came for a couple of weeks and we also went back to our block of land on Kangaroo Island. Our last trip to Kangaroo Island was just days before we left for Abu Dhabi and in between more than three, not quite four, years had passed. We missed our scrubby, wind-blown land.

I took my laptop to the shack, determined to write something (anything) that worked. The week before, one lad had asked me, ‘Don’t you want to write another book?’ A friend had asked me over coffee, ‘Are you still writing?’ A friend of my mother’s had asked, ‘Do you have any plans?’ They did not mean anything by it, there was no implicit criticism, but they had a point. It would soon be four years since my first novel was published, three since I published anything. It was time to confront my false starts and my ongoing, now-habitual failure to finish anything.

I sat at the table in our one-roomed, tin-roofed shack. The rain pelted against the window and the lads ran in and out of the cold, trying to keep their campfire alive between the bursts of rain.

I fossicked through the files on my computer, looking at everything I’d written over the last few years. Novel drafts, scraps of short stories, half-written essays and half-baked articles. I trawled through my many blogs. The public one, my experimental ones, the password-protected ones.

It soon became clear to me that there was a sharp line in my written sand.
Before my father’s death and after.
Before we moved to Abu Dhabi and after.

Little I had written since since those intertwined times showed the intensity and precision of the things I had written during my father’s illness and my children’s preschool days. How could it be that during the time when I had been barely had time to breathe let alone think I had written with such clarity and, then, when I was given the time and distance to think, I froze? It seemed entirely counter-intuitive.

But then I came across some notes I’d written while reading a book about grief by Caroline Jones: “I felt that I was behind a pane of glass on the other side of which people’s lives went on. But I was not part of that life. I now have come to think of grief as a sort of severe illness, bordering at times on derangement; an illness that dislocated me physically, mentally, psychologically and spiritually.” It had had sharp resonance when I first read it, but now, even more than resonance, it made sense.

During the time of Dad’s illness, when I got on the tram, or stood in the line at the check-out, I had a sense that we were all in this together. The details of each the lives of the people around me didn’t matter. Ageing, full-time caring, relationship breakdowns, falling in love, promotions, unemployment, travel, graduations, illness – these were the specifics, but together they all added up to a shared and universal understanding of what life is. We all lived with a layer unseen beyond our front doors. The mere fact that we were all here on the tram or in the shop together was something we should celebrate in a shared smile, shifting our bags onto our laps so that someone else could sit down and rest their life-worn legs.

During those times, I didn’t only observe people, I empathised in a way that I never had before. I knew what it meant to live a messy life with scattered thoughts and loyalties, with seemingly no time to think, but a mind that was constantly churning. This understanding gave me a sense of connection to the world. Just as the New Internationalist poster I’d hung in my room at university had promised me, we were inextricably linked by the common thread of humanity, by life and all of its complexities.

This is what it means to grow up.

But this connection was severed almost as soon as my father died. With four years’ hindsight, I can identify the moment that the pane of glass slid into place. I was on a tram travelling south down King William Street. I caught a glimpse down Flinders Street out to the Adelaide Hills. This was a sight that had always filled me with calm and a sense of belonging, but at that moment, I saw it differently. It appeared in a way I had never seen it before. I wrote about it in my diary that night, trying to make sense of it, but the only thing I had been able to articulate was a muted colour. Four years later, I saw that as the moment I lost the sense of belonging to other people’s worlds. There was the world which belonged to other people, and there was me, standing behind a pane of impermeable glass.

I no longer empathised with anyone. Worse than that, I didn’t understand. How did they do it? How did they keep going on, day after day after day? How did they pass the time? In the face of a life that made no sense, how could they keep on acting as if it did?

I no longer believed in the universal experience.

When people tell us that they know how we are feeling, they are telling the truth. Even in my middle-class world where adversity is easier to avoid, by the time we’re forty we have all felt the grip of grief to some greater or lesser extent. There is no more relatable experience than loss. And yet, for all these years, grief had been the loneliest and most distancing of times. I was surrounded by people who loved and cared for me and who absolutely understood what I was going through, but I had never felt more alone.

How strange that the most universal of experiences can leave us feeling entirely dislocated, absolutely removed from everyone around us.

Of course, the move to Abu Dhabi didn’t help. With its stratified and segregated society, it is no place to repair a faulty connection to the world. My exclusion from the local community immediately gave Abu Dhabi life a sense of a muted, half-lived experience. The constant reminders that I was a guest, the assumption that I was here simply for the money, the lack of any opportunity to be involved in a sustainable community all created a superficiality for which I was entirely unprepared.

I actively avoided the casual relationships – the interactions with people on the bus, at the supermarket checkout, at the traffic lights – that had been such an important part of my life in Adelaide. On Adelaide’s tram and footpaths and in Adelaide’s post offices and markets, I had reveled in the universal significance of even the tiniest of daily interactions, recording them in my journals, on scraps of paper in my handbag and in my blog. Trapped in a car on Abu Dhabi’s four-lane roads, my opportunities for connection were already limited, and, because I could not pretend that I shared anything in common with the woman on the checkout, the man who packed the groceries or the girl who made my coffee, I avoided those opportunities that were available. I smiled, said thank you, but I read nothing into their smiles, the flicks of their hair, the picking of their nails.

Where was my connection to the men who walked the streets day after day, dragging a bin behind them, picking up the rubbish dropped from cars, blown around by sea breezes? When white, un-airconditioned buses pulled up beside me at the traffic lights, curious labourers stared down at me, what else could I do but look away, disconcerted by their stares, my privilege, our divide.

I know that in Australia there is privilege and there are divides. I know that to many people those divides are impenetrable. But in Australia, they were divides I worked to understand. But now? I no longer knew how to even pretend that there could be some thread of humanity between us.

All of this, I could now see as I sat in my Kangaroo Island shack, was one of the causes for the drawn-out death of my blog. It was impossible to write anything without writing about these feelings and this sense of disconnection. But I was frightened of blogging such things. I did not want to write publicly about how harshly I was judging everything that I saw. I was wary of exposing myself, frightened of the consequences.

While I sat, listening to the Kangaroo Island rain and looking back over my writing, I understood what a pivotal part blogging had earlier played in the processing of my thoughts and the stimulation of my writing. Started during the time of my father’s illness, my blog had allowed me to give words to the intensity of my feelings and the one fed into the other. The more I felt, the more I wrote and the more I wrote, the more I felt.

In Abu Dhabi, where I felt unable to write about any of the personal encounters that I had during the day, I had lost this cycle. I maintained my distance and this distance was continually reinforced when I made myself stop thinking. I had occasionally felt words forming into the shape of a blog post, but I would quickly pull myself up and make myself stop the thoughts with the result that I was not properly processing my experiences and interactions. Where once, every interaction had given me a sense of connection to the world, in Abu Dhabi, and in the wake of my father’s death, the emptiness of every interaction had come to leave me feeling even further disconnected.

It lasted a long time, that sense of disconnection, but now, the campfire, the smoke in my eyes and my clothes, the drenching rain, the hail, the simple passing of time made me look at all the things I’d started to write, but never finished. I wasn’t at all sure where to start, but I liked the idea of starting to blog again, of having a place to test my feelings out, to put words down again.

Things got in the way, between then and now, but now it’s 2013. January. And we’re back on Kangaroo Island for a week. What better time to begin.

The End

I am closing this blog. I will still be blogging, but not right now and not right here. I did write a long-winded post about how blogging has changed and I have changed and the ins and outs of why I’ve decided to close this blog. But in the end, I think it’s enough to say that this blog has reached the end of its life. For Reasons.

Forty three

I turned 43 last weekend. It seems important somehow. It has seemed to be a coming of age in the way that no other time, not 18 or 21 or 30 or even 40 has ever been.

Perhaps it’s just that things are simple at the moment. Straightforward.

I suspect parenting is never so simple as when children are 9 and 11. Young enough that there is joy in their childishness (Mum, are you wearing eyelash polish), old enough that there is joy in the adults they are about to be (Mum, shall I make us some scrambled eggs, you seem very tired). I’m sure that helps to make life simple.

I’m still a fish out of water as far as my immediate surroundings are concerned, and there are clouds of unfulfilled dreams, but day to day, I know where I am going and I know what to expect.

It must be ten years since I felt this way and if I felt it before that, I did not know that certainty was a gift. I confused certainty with bordem and I did what I could to put surprises between myself and future days.

I don’t do that any more, and I think that is what I will most enjoy about being 43.

One evening

Last night, I was listening to Archie Roach while I wound some hanks of silk into balls. I don’t have a ball winder, so I have to use the backs of two of our upright chairs. I’m not a fan of this job and when I begin I’m in a slightly resentful frame of mind. It should be illegal, I think, to sell hanks that haven’t been wound into balls.

Still, it’s a peaceful kind of job. Rhythmic. And once you begin it soothes in the way that all such rhythmic jobs soon soothe.

Youngest was in bed and eldest was in the loungeroom reading. It’s a new system we’ve got. It’s supposed to stop the pre-sleep fartarsing that always leads to shouting. Youngest just wants to sleep, but eldest wants to fartarse, so one of us (an adult) goes in and tries to use reasonable words in a reasonable tone and that works for five minutes and then there’s more fartarsing, and youngest needs his sleep and because he wasn’t getting his sleep, the mornings were awful. And it was getting worse and worse and worse and every night would end in a shouting match. So now, youngest goes to bed at 8 or around and eldest comes into the lounge to read.

So that’s how it came to be, me in the lounge, listening to Archie Roach while I wound hanks into balls and eldest sitting on the lounge reading.

‘I like that rhyme of Paradise, with very nice,’ he said.

‘That’s funny, because that’s the bit Dad doesn’t like. He thinks the rhyme is too obvious.’ (The mister wasn’t there to speak for himself, because he was in Oman.)

‘Doesn’t Dad know that sometimes that what rhymes need?’

I kept winding. I was aiming for five hanks into balls before I went to bed.

Sometimes eldest was reading, sometimes he was looking over at the stereo.

‘One thing isn’t obvious. Are these songs about having love or not having love?’

I only had three balls, but I stopped my winding and went to sit and cuddle my lad on the lounge. He’s not as young as he used to be, is he?

Is it too late in the year to say, Happy New Year

I didn’t even think, until a lovely person left a comment this morning, that I had left things at an inappropriate pause.

The term finished at school, the mister decided to drain his annual leave, we went away and had a most excellent break, we came back, I had tonsillitis, the mister got sick, school went back, after school activities started, one lad forgot his saxophone, one his gym gear…my new year plans for world domination (which included paying more attention to my blog) got somewhat sidelined and have not quite got back on track.

I have lots of drafts behind the scenes of the blog. There’s one there about how surprising England is to an Australian whose first visit is in near middle-age. It’s surprising, because while we were so busy in Australia trying to be not English, the people in England kept being English so that now, if you’re an Australian and your visit to England is in near middle-age you can’t help but think, ‘Gosh! England is very English, isn’t it?’ That would be a not uninteresting blog post.

There’s another one about the lines at the Louvre which stretched for longer than any line I’ve seen, so we abandoned our plans to visit the Louvre and went instead to a bistrot for lunch and then, the following day, roused ourselves out of bed early so that we could be the first in line at the Musee Rodin. Only to find that the Musee Rodin had, that very day, closed for renovations until April, leaving the garden with a one euro entry fee as compensation.

There are several drafts about my re-entry to Abu Dhabi. Our three-year anniversary of landing here, the things I thought through the fog of tonsillitis, youngest’s current loveliness, in love, as he is, with the joys of life and being alive. There is even one about my follow-up to the dishy dermatologist and his surprise that I would share any of my health information on the internet.

I have no idea why I began those drafts and didn’t finish them. It’s part of my new year plans. To finish things.

A full stop, but a comma too

I have moved and am now blogging over here. I took all my old posts with me, because I couldn’t bear to leave them behind. You can still find the old posts here, but the cobwebs are growing and it’s starting to get dusty.

Thank you for visiting, and hope to see you at the new place.