Tag: parenting

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?

February

It is an awesome time of year in Adelaide because the festival of arts and its fringe begin. It’s a wonderful time of the year, the city is full of vibrancy and vibe, and I find it fuels my motivation to create and to work harder at my own art. (Slightly political note: I think in this state we still don’t properly acknowledge that government policy which relies so heavily on festivals is not necessarily fabbo for fostering and developing local arts and artists.)

There’s quite a bit of parenting I’m shit at, but one thing I do well is take them to stuff. I curate an excellent programme that spans the spectrum of arts experiences from visceral to cerebral, I take a couple of risks, and throw in a few of the commercial certainties. It’s great, I’m terrific, you know this, it’s great.

So I’ve spent a few hours today looking through the programmes to see what there might be that the lads and I can do together. It’s been a bit more difficult today than in previous years. One of the reasons for that is that I’ve got a slightly fuzzy brain. You see the mister was less jetlagged than expected last night so we ended up going out and when we got there I realised that because the mister is here I don’t have to be a responsible adult and I proceeded to down gin cocktails like a teenager who has just discovered west coast coolers. The main reason though is that they’ve got their own opinions about what they do and don’t want to see and when they do and don’t want to go. It’s also not so easy to find things that not only appeal to adolescents but that they are happy to go to with their mum. Nonetheless, I’ve locked a few things in and even managed to squeeze in a couple of things before the mister jets back off to his mysterious life.

I made one interesting observation while I was analysing the programme, and that is that there is an ever-diminishing number of Dave/Davo/Davids plying their comedy wares. In 2009 when I was last in the fringe there were more Dave/Davo/Davids than there were women and that included if you added up all of the women in all of the lineups. This says something more about the age demographic than it does about gender, and watching your name go so entirely out of fashion is one of the more disconcerting experiences of ageing and certainly one that no one warned me about.

And now if you’ll excuse me I need to go and shake off the last of the gin haze because I am out for dinner where I am told there will be champagne.

Household ratios and relativities

In the house where I live the current adult to teenager ratio is 1:2.

The human to animal ratio is 1:1.

You will not be surprised to learn that there is some friction where these ratios intersect with the human to cat litter tray ratio which is 3:2.

Everyone is taking their turn and everything (cleaning the cat litter tray, not using it, before whichever smartarse gets in first with that one), but all the same and nonetheless adult humans and teenage humans have different standards when it comes to such matters. Particularly when – as as the case in this house – the adult human spends more time in the house than the teenage humans.

On an unrelated note, I went to the hairdresser today. When she asked me what we were going to do today I said that I was thinking maybe, I wasn’t sure, but if she thought it was okay maybe we could try a bit of red. She was thrilled. She’s a wonderful hairdresser and she doesn’t let you do dramatic stuff if she thinks it will make you burst into tears at the the end. So when she said yes I felt that I was in safe hands.

I did miscommunicate though, and where I thought we would be adding some red foils in the way we have been adding some blonde foils we instead made my whole hair red.

I have had red hair in the past a great number of times, but it has been some years since the last time. Seeing your red hair revealed is far more dramatic than seeing a few blonde foils. It is extremely red. Not a coppery red, a warmer more brunette red than that. But red. Do you see that green in the photograph at the top up there? If that green were red then that would be the colour of my hair.

That grass is not real grass which I think is what gives that green and my red their equivalence.

The problem with red is that just when you get used to it and think, I’m just going to find myself a mirror so that I can admire my fabulous red hair, it has faded and you are left wondering why you spent all that time and money at the hairdresser’s. But then you remember the massage they gave you when they were rinsing your hair and you think that it’s worth it.

Do you know how I know that my hair is dramatically red? Both of the teenage humans noticed that I had done something to my hair.

I would like to have got more done today, but in between being the adult in that series of ratios described above and watching my hair change colour I didn’t have much time left. I did do some fossicking on the ikea website because nearly a year after moving into this house the ratio of things that need to be put in cupboards to cupboards where things could be put remains more out of whack than the ratio of adult humans to cat litter trays.

I’m not at all sure what I learnt from today.

Unaccompanied

We tootled up to Dubai at 10 pm on Saturday night to drop the lads off at the airport. They’re catching the plane back to Adelaide for a stay with their granny before I join them later in August. They’re flying as unaccompanied minors. I wanted to take a photograph but The Floppy Teen was stroppy and wouldn’t let me. So here’s one I prepared earlier.

IMG_1392

That’s last year’s. So that’s two years in a row they’ve been packed off to Australia on their own and in this life, anything you do for two years feels like the foundation for a routine.

I felt enormously proud of them last year. I mean, it’s sort of no big deal. You take them to the Unaccompanied Minors Lounge, the people behind the counter put the minors’ passports and documentation in plastic folders and then, when the time comes to leave, they take them through the fast track lanes of immigration. The minors make the long, boring trip, get off at the other end and get taken through the fast track lanes of immigration and customs before they’re deposited with the people we’ve authorised to collect them.

The lads took it all in their stride this year, just as they did last. I guess I would have preferred it if they’d looked back – even a glance – to give one final wave to those of us standing behind the rope at the ‘Passengers Only Beyond This Point’ point. But more I was struck by the idea that I’d made children who could do this thing. Travel half way around the world with just each other. It’s so very far from the life that the mister and I had as children. And yet, it’s exactly the same. Visiting your granny at school holiday time, thinking not even one bit of the parents you’ve left behind.

I wanted to tell you more about it, but the time has flown and I need to get off to work. And pressing publish, that’s how blogs stay alive.

Where my piano led me

I’ve got a piano. My grandfather bought it for us when I was young and a piano was a monetary stretch too far for my parents, teachers in their late twenties who had not come from landed gentry.

Long story, but in the last year, the piano has finally followed us to Abu Dhabi. We’ve put it in the little alcove the stairs make. It was a pragmatic choice because I didn’t want to risk having it dragged up and down the stairs. The loungeroom was out because I know enough not to put a piano against an outside wall and the only other wall with enough space is the one we share with our neighbour and what with the baby on their side and the dog with the mighty bark and the lads who never stop running on our side a piano seemed a step too far.

As it turns out, it’s an excellent place for a piano. Just a few steps in front of the door, it fits nicely in its nook and having a piano at the physical heart of the house. It’s excellent.

I play it every now and then. I’m stuck on pieces I learnt as an adolescent. Playing those pieces conjures up times and places that have gone, but live so deep inside I can’t ever lose them. This has been especially the case over the last six months which have been sad ones for me.

Best of all about having the piano here has been watching my eldest lad. He plays the sax, and he’s getting ready for his first lot of exams, but he also picked up my first piano books and started to teach himself. My heart, she sang. Of course my heart she also wept as she was forced to relive pieces she’d already played a thousand, million times. Greensleeves, anyone? Music Box Dancer? Oats and Beans?

Still, I never scream ‘Stop, please stop’ unless it’s that one, you know the one that everybody plays and it’s got a high part and a low part? What’s that called? My mother used to yell at me, ‘Stop, please stop’. I suppose at some point I must have stopped. I wonder, when was the last time I played that piece?

Anyhoo and moving on, he didn’t stop and thank goodness for that, because then he started doing something I never did. Transposing it. Adding in new chords. Changing the timing. And now every time he walks past the piano (which is often) he adds another note or two. He’s written three or four little pieces now all of them really lovely (I know, I would say that).

My heart, she sings.

He’s got an excellent sense of humour that boy. He’s thirteen so my goodness me he’s a pain in the arse, but he makes me laugh.

Things are going well for him, but he is thirteen and he’s a little bit lost and I’m trying to find some anchors he might be able to use in the choppy seas that are a human’s adolescence. Books. Music. It’s all I really know.

This is me last night: Genius idea! I will introduce him to the magic that is Tim Minchin. And then he (my eldest lad) can see that he could put together all his ridiculous jokes and all his slapstick and all the little bits and pieces he is writing on the piano and make something fully sick, totes amazeballs and OMG.

I told you he’s thirteen, didn’t I?

We went to youtube. Look! I said. And there’s Tim Minchin with an orchestra. An orchestra! What could go wrong?

In our house, you aren’t supposed to sit at the computer with headphones on. Cyber safety and all that, but because of reasons, I am having to study the rules of netball in great depth so I asked him to put the headphones on so I could concentrate.

I concentrated. And so did my eldest lad.

I had forgotten about some of the more hardcore Tim Minchin pieces. In truth, I’m not sure I’d ever listened to the Pope song.

(‘Mum, have you ever listened to this?’
We listen together.
‘Okay, so apart from the swearing do you know what he’s trying to say?’
‘Yeah, don’t protect paedophiles’
I guess that about sums it up).

So today, there’s a whole lot of stuff me and the mister don’t need to teach our eldest lad.

And today I was sitting here, in this very chair, faffing around the internet, looking at the expat lady blog which today is asking why people think it’s okay to give you their second baby clothes and whether it’s better to buy your diamonds in Dubai or in New York. And Tim Minchin’s words, the ones I heard before the earphones went on, came back to haunt me. I try to be intellectually honest, he said.

I closed the bulletin board and I sat at the piano and played Fantasia in D Minor which I first learnt in 1983. And as I played, it occurred to me that my relationship with this paper and this pattern of keys is one of the oldest relationships I’ve got.

I played it again and then once more. I do hope that it wasn’t our neighbour’s baby’s sleep time.

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.’