Twentysomethings

In which I discover that things are going okay

The main thing that happened while we lived in Abu Dhabi is that seven years passed. Lots of the woodo-psciences say that Seven Years is a Thing. If you google, you’ll learn that all of our development occurs in blocks of seven years, that our cells regenerate entirely leaving us (literally) a new and different person every seven years, that a different chakra dominates at each of our seven year cycles…all this and much more besides.

To be honest, I’m up for a bit of woo. I mean, I believe in climate change, and my kids are fully vaccinated, but I like to have a tarot reading every now and then. Astrology and tarot talk about seven year cycles too. There’s the seven year itch, the 7-Up movies, and maybe George Costanza wasn’t as silly as he sounded when he wanted to call his kid *swish-swish* in the shape of a seven.

So, anyway, we were away seven years (well, the mister was away for nearly 9, but when I say ‘we’ I guess I mean ‘I’) which means that when I came back I was seven years older. And so was everyone else. I’ve noticed this in all the obvious ways – children are taller than I am, for example – but what has taken me by surprise is the sudden appearance of a whole new generation coming up behind me.

They were always there. The twenty-somethings. And for nearly twenty years I’ve been older than them. Until recently – until I got back to Adelaide—I could sit in the lunchroom or a workshop with a twenty-something and it would be clear that I was older than her. But I wasn’t old enough to be her mum. Now, I sit in the same lunchroom or a workshop, and it is clear to both of us that there is a distance between us. The change has been generational.

I think one of the reasons this has taken me so much by surprise is that in my part of expat-world there weren’t really all that many twenty-somethings. They are too old to be there with their parents, too young to be there with work. It’s a segment of the population that I didn’t see. Out of sight, out of mind. And now, bam! Here they are again, everywhere I look.

My dad used to say that every five years or so (let’s call it seven) you look in the mirror and see yourself as they age you really are, not as they age you think you are. So maybe it would have happened anyway. But certainly, being away has exaggerated this effect.

If there’s a younger generation, then I must be part of an older one. In most respects, and as I think I’ve mentioned before, I like to think that I’m jiggy with getting older because truly it’s better than the alternative. But confronting the reality of my writing career has been a little confronting. Lurking in online writing groups, I see the many wonderful young women who have so very much to say and who say it so beautifully. They are so much better at navigating the world of writing now, working much more intuitively with a sense of what is needed in a world of always-on connectivity. Their writing has resonance and relevance that I only recognise after the fact and not in advance.

It makes me think that maybe I had my chance. It makes me ask myself: Is it realistic to expect that a middle aged woman in Adelaide can advance a rather patchy writing career?

The good thing about this is that I’m asking from a place of peace and satisfaction with my life. I am very happy to be a middle aged woman in Adelaide. After many tumultuous years I welcome the simplicity of my life as it stands at the moment. Not only that, but counterintuitively, recognizing that I have only a slim hope of establishing a writing profile of even small significance has given me back the joy of writing. This was really brought home to me a little while ago when I was listening to a conversation some people were having about the frustrations of trying to establish a career as a writer. I realised that I was entirely free of any of those problems. I don’t expect to be able to make a living from it and I don’t want to. I don’t expect to be able to do it full time and I don’t want to. I don’t expect to make shortlists (though I’d like to). I could empathise with every person in that conversation. I remember clearly a few years ago when I was paralysed first with grief and second with the knowledge that I would never be anything more than a second-tier writer (and not even that because no words would come not matter how I tried). For some time, I was sure that I would never write again. So when I heard them speaking about these sorrows and frustrations I knew exactly what many of them were describing. But I also realised that I don’t have them anymore. That I am, as I said, at peace with myself and my place in the world.

This year, I’ve had more energy and enthusiasm for writing than I ever remember having before. I’ve mapped out my next novel with a clarity that I have never experienced. And a few ideas for short stories and essays that have been wallowing in the deepest recesses of my brain have developed some form and some shape that seems perfectly do-able. And I feel confident that I’ll be able to get a script together in time to put on a fringe show.

This won’t last. I do know that. Life will happen around me or to me and projects will get put on the backburner. Someone will write a horrible review and I’ll be back in the pit of self-doubt and agony. I’ll get to a point in my novel where all I can think is, ‘What’s the point?’ But for now, I’m going to let myself enjoy this feeling. I think I will celebrate with an evening of solid procrastination catching up on half a season of Nashville.

Thursday

In which Leonard Cohen has the last word

Going out for a drink on a weeknight in Adelaide is easier than it used to be, but you can’t leave it too late because the only places that stay open after eleven have music that is too loud for our middle age sensibilities. We had to deal with the possum’s doorway to our roof space first. That meant we had to wait for it to get dark so we could be sure that the possum had left its cosy house in the ceiling space. No one wants to block a possum in. The mister and the floppy adolescent were on the case, but the floppy adolescent needed to finish his pulled pork enchiladas before he could even think of going up a ladder or holding a light.

The mister’s been here since last Friday night, and he’s leaving on Saturday and we haven’t had much of a chance to sit and talk and let the conversation take its path to wherever it might lead. The thing is, in a week, there’s been the Future Prime Minister’s cricket final spread across two days (his team won, and there’s hurrah!); a couple of deadlines; the mister wanting time to hang out with the floppy one, and so on. This is one of the very real challenges of this global commuting caper – finding time to have the casual conversations that glue a relationship together.

For example, I was half a glass of sparkling in when I was able to say, ‘Yes, that’s true, but we’re in a post-neoliberal age now.’

‘Wot?’

‘Yes, Paul Keating said neoliberalism is at the end of his life. I’m the one who’s coined it the post-neoliberal age, but everyone’ll be saying it by tomorrow. You can use it at work if you like.’

‘Keating, hey? Bet he didn’t tweet that?’

‘No,’ I said. It is hard to know where to take the conversation when you’ve got no real idea what you’re talking about and you’re a little distracted trying to work out exactly where you know the woman at the next table from.

We ordered two plates of tapas and I took another picture using the snapchat-type feature facebook seems to have ripped off in their latest update. (This is an aside, but when I discovered it a few hours earlier, I said it’s to stop the flight of middle aged ladies away from facebook and the floppy adolescent told me I was wrong and I said, ‘It might come as a surprise to you, but middle aged ladies do have value,’ and then both the adolescents piled on in a flurry of outrage that I would suggest that they have anything except complete respect for women.)

For my second drink, I joined the mister in a glass of shiraz there being no cabernet sauvignon available by the glass. It was my first red of the season, but the temperature in Adelaide had dropped to sufficiently autumnal levels to allow it. I am a most sophisticated wine drinker and said, ‘Well that’s more like a European shiraz than a Barossa, isn’t it?’ The mister agreed. ‘It’s still not cab sav though, is it?’ I said.

At 10.30 (not on the dot but close enough) the waiter came and said, ‘Were you interested in ordering last drinks at all?’

We looked around and realised we were the last ones in the bar.

‘No, thank you, we’ll just get the bill.’

The relief! Writ large across his face. Though of course, we should take our time, take your time, there’s no rush.

On the way back to the car we stopped and looked in the windows of a place that would be the perfect space for my new business. Well it would be perfect if it cost next to nothing and fitted itself out. And then we drove home along Anzac Highway and parliament was on the radio and I got a notification on my phone that the plans to make changes to 18C had been foiled but they still seemed to be talking about it on the radio but I did not feel like listening to odious people saying odious things so I arranged for us to listen to some music.

If I’d had Redgum’s It’s One More Boring Thursday Night in Adelaide in digital form I would have played that for the laugh. Instead, I put on Leonard Cohen’s You Want it Darker. I often listen to that when I’m driving home at night, but of course I’m usually driving home by myself and it takes me by surprise when the mister says, ‘What’s this? I haven’t heard this.’ At first he’s like, ‘Bloody hell, are we listening to this all the way home?’ But that’s okay because Leonard Cohen is like that, and by the time we’re on The Esplanade we’re up to If I Didn’t Have Your Love and the mister’s like, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful, isn’t it?’

So now next time I play that album, I can think of the lovely night we spent together, the mister and me on a boring Thursday night in Adelaide.

If I were the kind of person to have Eureka! moments then this would be one

In which I begin again

A good thing happened to me today.

The foundation stone for my next novel fell into place. It missed hitting my toes and everything.

And the world looked different to me.

I hadn’t realised it until about 2.30 this afternoon, but not having a novel-in-progress has been having quite an impact on the rest of my work. I mean I know that I’ve been feeling blah about my work, but I didn’t understand what I was feeling blah about. And in fact, the feeling of the blah was making me feel even more blah because I thought I should be feeling wonderful. I had assumed that getting my current novel back to the editor with its final-before-copy-edits edits would invigorate me. It would free me to get stuck into the other projects I’ve got on the go. A couple of things I’ve got are reasonably solid and should be easy to work on.

But no. Instead of sitting down and working with focus (which I’m actually not too bad at doing despite appearances) I’ve been bumbling around, picking one thing up and then another and not really sure what to work on next.

I sat down with my journal this morning and instead of trying to write an essay or a short story or get started on my novel, I decided to write about how I was feeling and what I was thinking about my writing work. I know. It sounds uber-naff, but I did it anyway. And after writing and writing and writing, I discovered that there was a deep, tight knot of frustration somewhere in my brain. This in itself isn’t unusual, but this particular knot seemed to have some kind of quality that other knots have not had. So I kept writing and writing, until…I don’t suppose you can call it an epiphany exactly after three hours and several pages of writing, but it was a revealing (I think revelation is probably a bit too biblical too).

For the past fifteen years I have lived with the foundation stone of a novel in my consciousness. I have not always been writing a novel, and I have not always known the details of that novel, but the foundation stone has been there and the rest of my life has been about building the novel up from there. By that, I mean that I’ve always had an understanding of what it is I’m trying to write about. Even if I’ve had to knock walls down and rebuild them a million times since, the foundation has been strangely rock solid right from the beginning. I’ve just always known.

Perhaps this seems an odd thing for a person who has only managed to produce two novels in fifteen years to say – that a novel is an anchor in her life – but as far as my work goes it’s been the only constant and I hadn’t properly understood until today the function that it has provided in giving me something to organise the rest of my life around. (An ungenerous interpretation would be that my powers of procrastination are so phenomenally powerful that I can’t function without something to avoid.)

So after I’d worked that out I turned the page on my journal and wrote down every single idea related to my novel that’s in my head. Of course its foundation had been there all along, and once I started writing with a bit of focus it came to quite quickly. So there you go, and that’s that then. I know exactly what it is I’ll be avoiding working on for the next three years.

A lot of capsules and many vials too

In which all that is robust is fragile too

This is part of an installation at the British Museum. It’s Cradle to Grave by Pharmacopoeia. The work shows a lifetime’s supply of prescribed drugs, using composites to create drug narratives for one man and one woman. The work excludes over-the-counter and recreational drugs such as panadol, vitamins and ecstasy, but still runs to 14,000 drugs knitted together and displayed in a mesh that runs for 14 metres. Of course, the composites are derived from the developed world and its focus is on our biomedical approach to health.

The woman’s drug story takes us through her vaccinations, pregnancies, miscarriage, hormone replacement therapy, chemotherapy, arthritis, a hip replacements, diabetes and a range of life’s random infections and illnesses.

I saw this piece in 2011 and spent a long time wandering back and forth along it and indeed the criticism levelled by one critic that the piece is a distraction from the rest of the room is a fair one in my case – I don’t remember anything else that was around it. It may be that I did not take everything away from the exhibition that I should have/could have done, but this installation haunts me.

It is the mister’s birthday today. He is 49. I know that age is just a number and 50 is the new 30 and life begins and so on. But bodies. They are robust, tangible proof of our existence, as fragile as our thoughts.

Ciggies

In which there are cigarettes

He wakes to the sound of a wattlebird, a call that starts as a scratching sound and ends in a song. It is as if, he thinks this morning although he has never thought it before, the bird is trying to clear its throat after a night on the piss with a packet of ciggies thrown into the mix.

Ciggies. The word belongs to her. If he were using one of his own it would be fags or smokes.

Ciggies.

She looks over the top of her computer from time to time and says, ‘I’m going downstairs for a ciggie. If anyone asks.’ But if you mention cigarettes and smoke breaks these days, people roll their eyes and say, ‘All right for some,’ and he doesn’t want to see them roll their eyes when it’s her, so when they ask (and someone nearly always does), he shakes his head and says, ‘What? No, haven’t seen her sorry. Is her coat still there? Yeah? Well, she can’t be too far away.’

He went downstairs with her once. Pretended he was going next door for a coffee then stood with her in the laneway, four metres from the door. She stood, carefully placing the outside edge of her boot on the outside edge of the line they’d painted four metres from the door. Black, with red embroidered flowers, she wore those boots once or twice each week in winter. They went past her ankle but finished well below her knee.

She smoked with her left hand and this was a surprise to him because that was the hand with the missing finger. Not her whole finger, only down to the knuckle, enough to leave her middle finger shorter than the other two that flanked it. She smokes the same way she does everything – quickly, but thoroughly, turning the white stick to ash faster even than his father ever did. He wanted to know whether that was the finger she used to flip the bird but then he thought a woman like that wouldn’t, would she? She wouldn’t flip the bird.

‘Can I get you a coffee?’ he’d asked, but she shook her head. ‘No caffeine after three,’ she’d said.

The wattlebird calls again. A car door bangs closed, an engine starts. From the other side of the bed, the alarm starts its call. He watches as his missus, his wife, the mother of his children, reaches out and presses snooze.

Visit to Sharjah

In which I am not the adventurer I think I am

I loved that green scarf my eldest boy had wrapped around his waist in that photograph. It was soft to touch, the creases fell out of it, and it matched nearly everything in my wardrobe. I took it with me whenever I left the house and it nearly always ended up wrapped around one of the boys.

At the time this photograph was taken we had been living in Abu Dhabi for ten months, and those ten months included the extended three month summer break that I spent travelling through Spain and then living in Edinburgh for a month where I staged my first (what would come to be my only) solo show.

We were spending the weekend in Sharjah, the small emirate that borders the other side of Dubai and is about 150 kilometres from Abu Dhabi. At the time, it had a lot more cheap accommodation and schooling than was available in Abu Dhabi and many people on low incomes would commute. Every day. They probably still do, but I’m not sure about details like that anymore.

By this time, we had found a place to live and while the lads and I were in Spain, the mister had moved out of our temporary apartment and into our new compound apartment. We had passed the first anniversary of my dad’s death, my grandfather was more settled in his new accommodation. In the shadow of the GFC and a company merger, the mister’s employment was not unstable but was more complex than we had thought it would be when he accepted the job offer over a year before.

I was also facing something entirely unexpected: I was not loving living in a different country and culture to my own. This messed with my mind because until now I had thought that I loved travel, that I wanted to live anywhere, everywhere allthewhere. For more than twenty years nearly every decision that I’d made had been on the understanding that I wanted always to be seeing new places. On our backpacking trips I had listened to everyone else’s stories of living in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Middle East and I had thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ You understand, don’t you, that when I say ‘thought’ I mean ‘believed’. I mean that this was who I thought I was. A person who wants to be in new and different places. Even if it had sometimes frightened me or made me feel uneasy, the opportunity to think beyond myself had always energised me.

This was not my experience in my first year of being in Abu Dhabi. During that time I was filled with such intense and debilitating feelings of dislocation that it was impossible to focus or concentrate on anything much more than the immediate task at hand. More deeply, whether I was conscious of it or not this was having a profound impact on my sense of identity and self.

On the weekend that this photograph was taken, I was taking practical steps to grapple with this mismatch in my expectations of myself and the reality of my feelings. I was organising trips like this thinking that it would help me to root myself more firmly in the place. That’s what I’d always done previously when I felt out of place and dislocated – I’d thrown myself fully into that space.

It didn’t work. I did not enjoy my weekend in Sharjah even for one second. The emirate of Sharjah is dry (that is, without alcohol), but the Russians we shared the lift with as we went down to the lobby of our hotel were clearly drinking something more than water. Sitting by the pool for an hour I felt like I was a character in a road trip movie only I was the only one who hadn’t taken three days of drugs to get there. The weather had not cooled and I hadn’t adjusted to the constant heat of the desert. I couldn’t get my head around the museums’ hours and so we were mostly wandering around between closed museums and empty markets. And I didn’t once feel that spark of excitement and discovery that I do at new museums and art galleries.

Of course, this was a temporary unhappiness. Soon enough, time would soften the sharp edges of my grief. I would make peace with the many changes to my identity – the changes that had been forced on me and the changes that I had made. I would stand steadily again even if the ground under my feet were sand.

But on the day I took this photograph I didn’t know any of that.

Coffee

In which I am, once again, a sucker for an accent

This is the story of how I know you cannot have an orgasm simply from drinking coffee.

Once upon a time yesterday morning everything went wrong starting from the moment when I got out of bed at 4.50 am to get a floppy adolescent to swimming training on the other side of the city. For example, the cat upended the food scraps bucket in order to get to the imagined delicacies contained therein. I have no idea what he was after because when they were upended on the floor all I could see were coffee grounds, carrot skins and an avocado seed. I will not bore you with the rest of the details because although they felt horrific as I lived them, when I write them it looks like nothing more than a boring list.

Anyhoo, I decided to treat myself to a coffee before I went to my office to do some work.

The barista said, ‘Can I help you?’ and his accent was Spanish, and this was the best thing that had happened to me all day.

‘I would like a skim milk caffe latte please, but I can have it only half…I don’t mean half the shot of coffee but half the milk.’

‘Ah, you mean like piccolo, I will make you piccolo.’ His accent was still Spanish.

We chat and I say, ‘I need the coffee because I get up early to take my teenager to swimming.’

‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ (Still with Spanish accent.)

I shook my head.

‘Where do you swim?’

A little more conversation ensued because he wanted to know where to swim that was not too expensive, because in his country he swims a lot and he is missing it.

Then, he passed me my coffee and said, ‘Are you a coffee member here?’

I shook my head and he said, ‘I will charge you only two dollars anyway.’

Spanish accent.

At my desk, I drank that coffee and not only was it made by a man with a Spanish accent who only charged me two dollars, it was the smoothest coffee ever made, ever drunk and I drunked it but I did not have an orgasm and that is the story of how I know it is not possible to have an orgasm just from drinking coffee.

But that is not the end of the story. I went back to the coffee shop at 3 o’clock in the afternoon and ordered another coffee although lunchtime is the time past which I do not consume caffeine. He only charged me two dollars, but the coffee was a little bitter and a little tired. And not every story has a happy ending.

Another anniversary

Exhaustipated to the point of exhaustipation I decided that there was no better time to deal with the last remaining boxes than now. Not the boxes of books that remain, unopened, in the shed. No, not those because I don’t have any bookshelves yet. I mean the three boxes that have stayed in the corner of my bedroom because they are labelled, somewhat ominously, with the mismatched labels “Stationery and Shoes.”

In the end, those boxes were not so hard, consisting as they did of lead pencils, notebooks and the rainbow-coloured sandal for the left foot for which I have searched high and low because somehow I brought the right in my suitcase and have assumed, all this past year, that the left must be here somewhere. But it was in transit.

This week, it has been a year since we moved into the house. This time last year the list of renovations included but was not limited to: knock down back wall replace with bi-fold doors; kitchen; bathroom; remove bar; put up wall; move bathroom; turn door into window; convert shed into studio; take up carpet in bedroom; remove built-ins; replace light-fittings; replace curtains; replace tiles in the entrance;…you get the picture and that’s just inside.

Current list of renovations: clean out cat litter tray.

(I hasten to point out that List A minus List B is not equal to the things that have been done, but I’m sure you already worked that out.)

We probably do need to do a bit of work on it. It’s been chopped and changed in a couple of strange ways so that now it’s layout is odd and that and makes for many oddities and quirks. But there is not a single day that I have not come home and thought, ‘Really? Do I really get to live here?’

In my adult life, I have never felt this way about a house before. That this is my house, where I belong. I have loved each house that I’ve lived in, but until now I’ve always known that I would leave. I know that there will still be many times when I am restless and filled with wanderlust because that is who I am. But I’ve found the home that I will always come back to. And one day, I’ll have all of the boxes unpacked.

Going to the fringe: Lana Schwarcz Lovely Lady Lump

There is not long enough between now and the time we have to leave for the airport to get the lunchbox muffins cooked. But if I don’t do them now then when will they get done? I keep the sugar in a drawer and when I lift it out, a thin stream pours through an invisible hole. It is like sand under my feet as I hurry to get the muffins done.

We are on the home stretch now, we tell ourselves. We all cry less than we usually do.

Home, cup of tea, washing in, right then, I’m leaving, I’ll be home in time to get your dinner done.

I am taking myself into the Fringe to see Lana Schwarcz in her show Lovely Lady Lump. Walking from the car to the park, the wind is cold and the sky is grey. This is not how I remember Fringe. I’m wearing a coat instead of a sleeveless shift, I’m shivering instead of sweating, thinking about a glass of red instead of a beer. The air is thick with the smell of rain which might or not fall.

I am late. I stand in the line to collect my tickets and I try not to click my tongue or clear my throat as someone forgets his PIN, someone else can’t decide what to do instead of the sold out show, and the woman in front of me holds up her phone and says to the cashier, ‘But look! My friend sent me a message on Facebook. She said she’s paid.’

The show is a few minutes in when I sit down, and I remember my phone is not on silent. What would be worse? To rummage through my bag or take the chance that this is the night someone chooses to ring? I sit, my shoulders tense, my teeth clenched. That’s ruder still, to bring tense energy in. I think, ‘I’ll wait for a moment, and then I’ll flick the silent on.’

Soon, the warmth and the energy of her performance shuts everything out and brings me in. It is the kind of show I love. A monologue, a stand up routine, a narrative. Truth and honesty and generosity. Here’s the premise of her show: A routine mammogram shows up a lump. Suspicious. She is barely 40.

The show is funny and it’s smart. Using her voice, her body, lights, sound and video she makes us feel her pain, but doesn’t let us wallow. I cry. Twice. And then, before we leave, she makes us laugh again. I am filled with admiration for her. Not only for surviving cancer, but for making art. For making this the thing she does, the contribution that she makes.

When I come out of the tent she is performing in, the air is filled with the lemon-scented gum, and from somewhere across the park a bagpipe is warming up. I drive home to the sound of Archie Roach’s Let Love Rule, a birthday present from a wonderful friend who said, ‘I know no one listens to CDs anymore,’ and I said, ‘Well, I do.’ At home, I take off my boots and my socks. If I leave them here in the door I will not have to scramble to find them tomorrow when we leave have you got your lunch, your stuff for cricket, your saxophone.

‘How was it Mum?’

There are not supposed to be more active screens than there are humans. And just like that, I’m exhausted. I put sausages on for them and the kettle on for me. The cat rubs against my leg, the kitten nibbles at my toes. And underneath my feet, granules of sugar. So fine they feel like sand.

Split – this is nothing even approaching a review, but it potentially has spoilers

I suppose it had to happen that I would get to a day where I had nothing to say and little time left in which to say it. It’s an hour before the end of the day. All day I’ve been trying to decide what I would write about, and now here I am. I did have an idea but it will take me more than an hour to execute that idea so I will have to do that tomorrow or the day after.

I went to see Split with the Floppy Adolescent today. (I think I should say spoiler alert here, although I’m not sure that I’m actually spoiling anything, but possibly I do, so consider yourself spoiler warned.) It was his idea to see it and even though I knew it wasn’t really my bag of chips I wanted to go to the something that he suggested as a gesture of goodwill towards him so often going to the things that I suggest. (It really isn’t easy at this age, is it, finding things to go to, because I can think of heaps of things he’d love to see but as is the case with so many things, once he is at a certain age I suddenly remember how it was to be that age, and what I remember about being that age is that going out with your mum is okay, but it’s not okay if you’re out with your mum at something where lots of people are out without their mum.)

I don’t think I enjoyed Split at all. This is not to say that I don’t think it’s good – I mean, I was completely sucked in by it, that is for sure, with the opening credits and music sufficiently suspense-filled. But I knew right from the beginning that it wasn’t going to be a film that I would be glad to have seen. I avoid, whenever I can, movies that subject women to humiliation or violence or some combination of the two. I thought Split did an okay job of avoiding being overly gratuitous. But I was (am) deeply uncomfortable with the use of child sexual abuse which I thought began as opportunistic and by the end had become exploitative.

There was a beautifully poignant moment in the closing scenes which was well-directed and beautifully-acted. That moment pulled a lot of things together for me. It left me bereft because all I could think about was the deep pain that some people live with all their lives. And then I wasn’t at all sure that I’d done the right thing going to it with my teenaged boy. Judging it simply as a film, I’d give it I think 3 1/2 or 4 stars out of 5. Judging it as a film-going experience?