Domino Effect – Part 2

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On 17 September, after a nine month struggle with brain cancer, my mother’s twin sister slipped away from us. In many ways, she was like a second mother to my siblings and me. It’s been difficult to put into words the profound and unexpected impact of her loss, considering a year ago we were celebrating the twins 70th, unaware of what would come.

17 November 2014

Dear Aunty Barb,

It’s been two months since you left us. A week since I’ve been trying to write you my farewell.

There was so much I never had the chance to say to you.

You’re with me, in my kitchen, everyday.

The gifts you gave are more than they appear.

GlassYou’re the twist of lemonade in an ordinary drinking glass (you never did like plain old H2O).

You’re the kick of chilli in the curry powder tin (and I can hear your wicked cackle, now).

But it’s right that this is where your memory dwells.

You spent your life nourishing the family, and that extended out, to the community beyond.

You did it with a flair and an originality that was all your own – a fairy garden here, a hand crafted zombie pop-up there.

You always took such joy in the little details of our lives. Like my dream to write.

It was a doing kind of love you had. And I wish you knew how much that meant to us. To me.

But even as I say it, I know you knew, very well, the value of the things you did.

It was me who was slow to cotton on.

Cottonon

I was supposed to help you write down your memoirs. My deepest regret is never making time for that – I never did stay over like you hoped I would. The reasons why seem trivial, at best, now that you’re gone.

You left too soon.

You had your first sip of alcohol only after 60.

JarAge 69, you and your friends were out til 5am for New Year’s Eve, putting to shame the next generation who preferred to go to bed.

You loved spending time with us. It helped to keep you young, you said.

But your outlook always was more youthful than your age.

Which is why your departure, at 70, has come as such a shock.

In hindsight, all the signs were there. The refusal to participate. The angry depression. The impenetrable loneliness. The slips in memory.

When the tumour was discovered, your withdrawal penetrated our realities with slow motion, domino effect.

Who were we, without you?

Grandmother_0002

I always assumed my place was on the fringe. Most of what I knew of my cousins was from stories you would tell me of their lives. Somehow, as you took your leave of us, I found myself drawn in.

Nothing is the same as it was a year ago. When we gathered for the 70th reunion, I didn’t want to be there. And I left with an embittered sense of invisibility. A belief that no one understood.

But maybe it was me who didn’t understand.

Your departure has made us see things in a different light. For what we are, and for what we aren’t. To pull together in a way we’ve probably never done before.

My grief for you is that you missed out on the chance to know what else life had to offer you.

You were the centre of our family’s universe. You were a twin, a sister, a wife, a mother, a nanna, an aunt. You did what had to be done, perhaps beyond what we could rightfully expect.

You wouldn’t have it any other way, of course. And yet, you never did get the answer to your question.

Who were you, without us?

Barbara

Beyond the duties and obligations that defined you, the woman I knew was creative and curious and brave. Fun loving and spirited and shrewd.

That’s the person I will drink a toast to every year.

The one whose stories I will treasure, and whose laughter I will miss.

Whose lessons I will carry to my great unknown.

So cheers to you, Aunty Barb!

You came into the world as you left it – unexpectedly. A surprise package, as you liked to say, until the end.

Who are you thankful for, today?

 

Reunion

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It’s been a month of important dates – birthdays and anniversaries, culminating in a family reunion. With my mother and her twin turning 70, and my brother turning 40, our families got together for the first time in a decade. In ten years, we lost one and gained nine, bringing our number up to 25.

After two nights eating, sleeping, cooking, laughing, crying and reminiscing under one roof, we all dispersed back to our busy lives. Months of planning and, suddenly, there’s nothing left but a sensory impression of what was…

Screen shot 2013-11-14 at 11.40.03 PM

There is something non-linear about reunion.

Once removed

As if all the parts, once removed, don’t reassemble how they were.

Your place

You’re home and yet, you don’t quite know your place.

Bending reality

There’s a bending of reality.

Girl pointing

A girl pointing the finger.

Start

Where do we start?

Many a slip

There’s many a slip in our perception

What once was

Of What Once Was versus What Is.

Site shift

Site shift.

Family

Family.

Memories

Memories playing tricks.

Horizon 1

What we thought was locked in the museum

Museum

Reappears.

Passage secret

Is there a passage secret to

Diminish and ascend

The way that we diminish and ascend?

Fetch

We fetch the ghosts of our past

Washed up

But find ourselves washed up

East of the mulberry tree

East of the mulberry tree.

Plastic world

Plastic people, in a plastic world.

Shared weight

We laugh and, under a shared weight, ask

Horizon

For more information about the images, click here.

My Hard Yakka Dad

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Some of you may not realise (I know I didn’t until yesterday!) that Father’s Day in Australia happens on the first Sunday of September.  Which means in two days time!

It’s a bummer, really, because I had this Father’s Day all worked out since Susie Lindau’s post My Father the Madman back in June.  (If you haven’t joined her blog yet, it’s more than worth the ride… 🙂 )

The problem is, the mail usually takes longer to get to Tasmania than it does to the other side of the world.  And Dad doesn’t have a computer.  So now it looks like you’re going to get this before he does…I won’t tell if you don’t?

In my comment on Susie Lindau’s post, I made the mistake of saying my Dad was a ‘bit of’ an amateur inventor.  I didn’t expect her to be interested, but she was, so now I have to confess it was a ‘bit of’ a white lie.

My Dad is not so much an amateur inventor as an all-round fix-it man.  He is a builder by trade, and what that means is – even if he has not an ounce of engineering knowledge – he can figure out how stuff works.

Back when I was still young enough to be admiring, my Dad built a tractor-powered saw mill from second hand chunks of metal (that’s my technical term for it).  He welded it together, sharpened the saws by hand and it all worked like a dream.

I LOVED working on that saw mill.  I just wanted to be one of the boys, and Dad – desperate for all the help he could get – would let me play along.

I’d hang about on building sites and wood chops…

…even in the veggie patch…(actually, that’s not me, it’s a scarecrow 🙂 )

..and all the while Dad (and Mum, of course) were hard at work.

Maybe he could have been an inventor.  But there were never enough hours in the day for my Hard Yakka Dad.  (Hard Yakka is Aussie for ‘hard work’.  It’s also a brand of tough guy workwear.  Check out the video).

Even when we went camping, it was work, work, work for Dad…

And when eventually he got to stop?  Well.  No words necessary.

Over the years, we’ve had our share of differences. But the great thing about growing up is that you get to see your parents as people.  With stories, and a history of their own.

Dad, the eldest of seven kids, left school early to help his parents on the farm.

Later, he relinquished a Pacific Island dream at their request, and came home to build their house.

The rest, as they say, is history.

“What’s done is done,” he says. “No use dwelling on the past.”

But history is important.  It’s what makes us who we are.

Somehow, in its knowledge, anger dissolves.  It reveals a child’s disappointment in discovering the humanity of those we love.

Today, when I go home, Dad likes to take me on a tour of the homes he’s built.

He’s a stalwart of the industry.  One of the few remaining all-rounders.  Worth his weight in gold – they say.

Except Dad, out of some old-school sense of modesty, continues to charge less than half the going rate.

But at least he’s starting to enjoy himself.

Maybe one day soon, he’ll accept that retirement means ‘stop work’.

In the meantime, I’ll just love him for the Dad he is.

Wishing Happy Father’s Day to all the Hard Yakka Dad’s out there.

Maybe you know of one yourself?  Or maybe you, too, had a moment of discovery, when you finally saw the man?  Please share….

Dogs, Children and Toy Envy

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This topic was prompted by the angry outburst of a young woman who declared she was not that different to the dogs she trains.  I was impressed by the passion of her statement; one that some would consider an insult to their own intelligence.

It’s a question I am usually hesitant to voice on account of my family’s screw-faced disdain for four-legged things.  But since blogging has given me an emboldened sense of self-confidence, I thought I’d ask it here.

How different, really, are dogs from us?  Can they legitimately be called a child substitute?

A couple of years ago I happened upon a documentary that gave me all the ammunition I would ever need in defending my pooch spoiling ways.

On account of the incredible smarts of a dog in Austria, The Secret Life of the Dog puts a canine’s intellectual capacity on par with a child aged two or three.

This was proven, not only by the undeniable size of the dog’s vocabulary, but by it’s remarkable skills of toy recognition.  (It’s amazing what a bit of positive reinforcement can do.)

While the skeptics among us are busy squabbling over the science, let me just say I’ve personally witnessed two types of sentient being in no doubt whatsoever of the validity of this claim.

You guessed it.  Dogs and children.

The Christmas before Pepi’s brain broke, we went camping.  Best Christmas ever.

Next to us was a cute family of four, also trying to escape their relatives.

On Christmas afternoon, the little four year old girl wandered over for a bit of Christmas present show and tell.  The books went by without a whimper.  But then she made the mistake of bringing out the sparkling unicorn.

It might have been bigger than Pepi, but as far as he was concerned, that toy was, “Mine, all mine!”

The more she snatched it out of reach, the more incensed he became until, alas, poor Pepi had to be locked away in the tent and reprimanded.

Upon my return, her pronouncement that Pepi was a “naughty boy!” was disproportionate to the size and status of a little scrap of dog.  It smacked, just a tad, of triumph over rival.

Then there was the time my Neephs came to visit.

“He’s got soooooo many toys!” declared my three year old niece, and then the kids closed in and counted…one…two…three…SIX toys!

“Such a nice big bed!!” she squealed.  “I wish I had a bed like that!”

She would have climbed in with him, were it not for the self-protective yelp that Pepi gave.  The yelp of one’s belongings under siege.

To everyone’s credit, most of the kids I know are very good with Pepi – and likewise, he with them.  But there is something about the way they interact.

Some illuminating, though slightly worrying experiments on foxes in Siberia, show the way we have bred dogs to be frozen at an infantile stage of life.

Were it not for this, our dear little pups would be far more aggressive, cynical and, funnily enough, a lot less cute looking.

Which brings me to the conclusion of this little tale.

There are two resounding complaints I hear from a different brand of silver fox:

(1) That they don’t see their grown-up children enough.

(2) That their children didn’t turn out quite the way they hoped they would.

So here we have it, the real reason why people have dogs:

They never grow up or leave home.  They rarely disappoint.  And most of all, they love us cutely and unquestioningly for their entire life 🙂

It makes me wonder if this is also an unconscious reason behind the cosseting or curtailing of our teens.  Who is it that really isn’t ready to let go?

Of course, Dr Peter Rowley-Conwy also raises the question of parasitic relationships, but I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.

The moral of the story is, who could ask for a better child substitute? In the words of Dr Morten Kringelbach “What we get in return is probably sometimes much greater than what we put in”.

Do you have a similar story to tell about children and dogs? Or is this just anthropomorphism dressed in expert clothing? Please do share…

A Fairytale for Grown-ups

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I’m so excited this week I don’t know where to start.  But it feels like there’s a buzz in the air – is this just me?

Earlier this week I read a post, again by The Man of the Minivan, which detailed a funny – but much more cynical view – of kids’ stories than the one I’m about to tell.  How a child’s book, read through an adult’s eyes, suddenly becomes a story about…politics?

Personally, I love the way that kids’ stories are able to whittle down the complex issues to their barest, human bones.

And that is exactly what this modern fairy tale does.  Just don’t expect a fluffy ride – it’s called Brave for a reason, right? 🙂

It is the perfect answer to my quandary last week, when I stumbled upon a Grimm tale about fear and bravery.  I’ll try not to include too many spoilers.

Merida is the gorgeous, spirited Princess from the Scottish ruling clan of four.  Presented with a bow and arrow for her birthday as a child, she grows into a fiery teen who breaks all rules of Princessly decorum.  What’s a girl to do when she’s the apple of her father’s burly eye?

The clincher comes when Merida learns of her planned betrothal to the winner of the Highland Games, where the three eldest sons of the other clans compete to win her hand.

From here, the story unfolds as a battle of wills between mother and daughter, duty and independence, tradition and progress.  And it’s one selfish little tantrum that she throws!

It might be hard to believe that a Princess of that time would be quite so rebellious.  But we are talking fiction, here, and the joy is living vicariously through characters much braver and more selfish than we could hope to be.  (Plus, one only has to take a look at the husbands-to-be to take that ride!)

Merida’s rebellion takes a dark turn involving a will-o’-the-wisp, a wicked witch and a (quite literal) return to the wild.  The only way through is the hardest of all – to mend that familial rift.

There’s lots of little fun things along the way – like her impish triplet brothers whom she bribes to do her will.  The warm, loving and otherwise clueless men of the clan who are too busy fighting and drinking to know what’s going on.  The buxom maid.  The rest – you’ll have to watch to see.

I love this movie.  It is PG rated, but it’s not for the faint hearted.  So beware of your grown-up sensitivities and if you’re scared of your child’s emancipation, maybe stick with Cinderalla 🙂

If not, you could learn a thing or two.

Bravery is a balance.  While it can call for might, it sometimes also requires a more humble kind of resoluteness.  It is the hardest thing in the world to do, because it means negotiation and a compromise.

The happily ever after is suspended for a much more grown-up take on hope.  And what I really dig is that neither Merida nor her mother come out of this unchanged.

In the end, they learn from each other.  The child teaches her mother the value of breaking tradition, and the daughter learns the value of the legends that have gone before.  The solution – surprise, surprise – benefits the entire kingdom somewhere along the lines of ‘make love, not war’.

In a world of uncertainty, where tradition seems somehow to fail us, it gives us hope.

As Merida says:

“Legends teach us things.  But we are young.  Our stories haven’t yet been told…”

There are lots of political lessons to be taken away from this, too, if you want to go there.  For example, the fact that the lead character is a red head caught in a political crossfire (anyone seen our PM lately?) is not lost on me.  But that’s a whole other sad story.

They might be the rarest of them all, but I think it’s fair to say, in this instance, the reds have it.

Have you seen the movie?  What are your thoughts?  Is it just another kids’ story, or are there worthy lessons to be learned?

Adults are Supposed to be Brave

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If you’re lucky enough to be one of the significant adults in a child’s life, you’ve probably already discovered that your role is not exactly what you think it is.

A few months ago, I spent a day on the beach with my sister’s three kids – my Neephs.

After some time, my nephew had finally spotted a crab, and was busy explaining how I should pick it up.

“Why don’t you pick it up?” I enquire, hoping to be off the hook.

“’Cause I’m scared to,” says the little D.

“Well, then, so am I,” I say.

“But Aunty Nana, adults are supposed to be brave!”

It was a priceless opportunity, I thought, to give him a lesson in how adults aren’t always brave.

But we were there with his father, that day, and it wasn’t long before he was plucking some poor creature from the shallows and little D was giving me that look.

Great, I think, now I’ve just given him a lesson in how girls aren’t always brave!

Until that moment, it never occurred to me that our relationship was in the least bit gendered.  We were just people, fellow introverts, sharing a common fear of humans and other things that bite.

Clearly, I wasn’t the best person to be teaching him lessons about bravery 🙂

But it did lead me to question how we teach kids things.

The lesson, in fact, probably had nothing at all to do with bravery, and more to do with respecting natural boundaries.  A lesson in ‘live and let live’.  In co-existing with other creatures.

It would have been a simple lesson for a boy whose first response to others’ touch is often “Go away!”

All I had to say was “How do you think the crab would feel?” and he’d have gotten the point of empathy and kindness.

But even then, once Daddy came along to show him how it’s done, I suppose the lesson would have been that empathy and kindness is for girls. Grrrr.

Where did it all go wrong?

It used to be that Fairy Tales were the source of all things wise, where communities passed down lessons to their kids on how to coexist.

So I consulted with the Brothers Grimm, and it turns out, a little bit of healthy fear is not so bad!

Photo by samlevan courtesy stock.xchng

In “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was”, it seems the whole village knows what it is to shudder, except for one boy.  His inability to fear is a source of great shame, and eventually, he is cast out of home.  In his mission to learn how to shudder, he encounters seven swinging corpses, and a haunted castle filled with creatures of the night, his cousin’s corpse, a beggar and some body parts.

Not knowing how to fear, he starts off being kind to all the ghoulies.  The best is when he tries to warm his cousin’s corpse.  Instead of being grateful, the cousin turns into a zombie and tries to strangle him – to which the youth retaliates in kind!

Instead of learning how to fear, the youth learns how to fight.  In the end, his ruthlessness wins him a Princess and a place in the kingdom.  It is finally up to his new wife to teach him how to shudder, which she does by throwing a bucket of cold water on him in the night.  Cold shower, anyone?

The moral of the story, according to moi, is that communal life requires the skill of knowing just a little how to fear, and of respecting your place in the scheme of things.  What’s scary is that progress, in the world outside the home, seems to depend on a foolish and callous bravado.

Photo by Karen Barefoot courtesy stock.xchng

Is this the kind of brave we want our little ones to be? I can’t help wondering what will happen when little D no longer feels okay to admit that he’s afraid.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but I’m looking forward to next week, when Brave hits our cinemas here in Oz.  Tune in then for my take on a modern tale!

In the meantime, I’m curious to know your thoughts.  Can bravery go too far? Should boys be braver than girls? How do we teach our kids empathy without making them weak?

The Best Man in My Life

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What a rollercoaster ride this blogging business is!  Having dived in headfirst last week, I got to Monday and suddenly realized a few things:

–       I have to do this every week

–       I have no idea what to say to the thousand (Twitter) voices in my head

–       I need to get out of bed earlier!

Then I saw Coleen Patrick’s new blog and nearly had a tear.  Leaning into the Leap is a beautiful and inspiring lesson about the things we don’t want to do (or think we can’t), and the lessons we can learn from dogs.  It was so simple, and so profound, that I simply had to share it – here, on Twitter – everywhere.

On an entirely different note, it’s the little things that keep us going, right?  The biggest buzz for a newbie is getting a Like on your page within half on hour of putting it out there!

Ellayourbella was my first Like!  I’ve seen her around a few times now, and have no idea how she finds us newbie’s, but the best surprise of all was her blog.  An uncensored, wicked-funny romp through “My Discarded Men” – with some solid advice for single women (and men) on the dating scene (did I mention Uncensored?).

Anyway, for very different reasons, this blog is dedicated to Coleen and Ella – for keeping me going 🙂

Relationships are funny things.  The superficial ones you always know you have to work at and so, in an odd way, you don’t take them for granted.  But then there are those other ones that stick around, so long a forgotten limb – until they’re (nearly) gone.

You’d think sixteen years might make me pay attention.  But next thing I’m sitting in the therapist’s chair and she states, as if it’s nothing, “Well, he’s probably the most consistent relationship in your life up until now!”

And that was the moment that I woke up to the fact that the best man in my life was of the fur persuasion!

Meet Pepi

I met Pepi when I was eighteen years old.  As is usually the case with these things, it wasn’t like I went looking for him.  It was my flatmate at the time who wanted a man pup – but when I saw his brother, it was love at first sight.

I didn’t realize then that he was probably too young to be brought home, so little surprise now that he has a Mommy complex.

But who could blame me?  The morning after the first night – he loved me more, not less!  Before long, he was the only one with a toe fetish that was impossible to resist 🙂

When I think about it now, he has always had a lot going for him on the man stakes:

–       easy to clean up after

–       relentlessly positive and chirpy

–       fiercely loyal and protective of his girl

–       able to be physically controlled restrained in volatile situations of his own making

And that’s not all.

He always notices my sense of style!  The day I shaved off all my hair, he was particularly incensed.  Whether it was because he didn’t like it, or didn’t recognize me, either way his outrage was well founded, showing he’s a man of taste.

But best of all he loves me most in my daggiest of states (Aussie slang for ‘unfashionable, untidy and dirty’).  Okay, that is probably self-serving on his part, as it means (luckily for the rest of the world) that I’m not leaving home.  Still, it’s nice to be loved for who you are.

Which brings me to the present and the reason for my visit to the Doc.  I can’t leave home anymore.  The last time I did, after four days away, he had started on his own Advanced Vetcare Directive of Nil by Mouth.

The time before that, when I left him for a day with a friend at a retirement village, he cried so hard all day the neighbours worried he’d be next.

It turns out sweet sixteen is not so sweet for the little fella, especially when I’m not around.

I’m left with two choices.  One is – forever.  The other is – ‘inconvenient’, but it is a second chance.

It requires medication for his mind, pain relief for his bones, a walk every day before breakfast, home cooked meals and treats and Me – and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I think about the times I lived alone with him, huddled in front of a bar heater in the gloomy Melbourne winter, watching Xena while he gnawed my shoe.  He was there.  He was always there.  And once he’s gone, he’s gone.  At least now he has no doubt that he’s the Best Man in My Life.

What about you?  Do you have loved ones of the fur persuasion?  Do they know they’re loved?  What would you do if you had a second chance?

Karma is just another word for Genes

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My first week out has been a fascinating, if overwhelming, venture into the blogosphere.  With Mother’s Day just past, the topic that stands out is mothers, children and parenting more generally.

But first, I want to dedicate this one to two bloggers who made my week:

Lynn Kelly

Lynn is an awesome lady – she was the first to comment on my blog, and her welcome was so generous and warm it made me want to keep going (instead of run away screaming back to anonymity).  She has a fantastic, quirky sense of humour and her blog on Mums’ Absent Minded Moments was hilarious.  (Note to self: since you already have those moments, DO NOT have kids – borrow someone else’s!)

It was her Blogoversary this week, too, and reading where she’s come from to now was truly inspirational.

The other was a Freshly Pressed blog by the Man of the Minivan  who wrote about the Joys of Disciplining Someone Else’s Child.  It was a totally entertaining read, and all the more refreshing because he says it how it is (Disclaimer: if you don’t like opinionated, don’t go there).  This blog obviously hit a nerve, because his post has 209 comments and counting – and he’s replied to every single one of them! He seems like a great guy, and an awesome Dad to boot.

From everything I’ve read and heard in my life, I’ve pretty much got the picture that having kids is a show-stopping, life-changing event.

For those who’ve made the decision to have them (or the decision not to do anything to stop having them), here’s the thing:

Brothers, sisters, Grans and Gramps – it affects us, too!

Here’s how I know:

There was a day, many moons ago, when a well-meaning mother in a public toilet block mistook me for my sister’s son.

I’m not sure if it was the sexy Kermit outfit….

…or the attractive haircut my sister had just given me (‘I know, I want to be a hairdresser! Let me practice…’)

Anyway, ever since then I’ve been determined to live up to the fiction that I’m adopted.

And it was all going along so well…until my sister actually had a son.

We should have sorted out our differences before that happened, but alas, Karma is just another word for Genes (coming back to bite us on the butt).

It was like the universe waited until the Sun, Moon and Rising Star were aligned exactly how they were when I was born.  Then out he popped – a few weeks overdue.

Now our family had two shy but horrifically stubborn Taureans to deal with.

Whether you believe in astrology or not, it is impossible to escape that familial connection – that uncanny ability my nephew and I have to look inside each other’s souls and know what’s there.

It’s like the time, when he was barely three, he proclaimed how “Aunty Nana’s scary.”

He said it, probably because in that moment, unlike his mother, I wasn’t buying his tantrum.

We bored into each other’s eye sockets, and then he ran away up the stairs.

And he thought HE was scared.

Having now three nephews and a niece (if only there was a single word for them, like Neephs…cute little Neephs), I’ve learned a great deal about myself.

Like the fact that my mouth has an aversion to forming actual WORDS is a genetic affliction.

It’s unnerving, the way they can look at you, and look away, and without one word just sum yours up:

Eh, phony.

I can’t blame them, really.  I’d think the same if I had to listen to me trying to make small talk.

Which is why, as a family, we are much more comfortable in silent proximity to one another, admiring the wind in the trees.

Recently, I had a birthday, and was again reminded of the connection running through our veins.  My sister’s three each drew a picture, and later, the conversation on the phone went something like this:

4 yo: ‘I dwew you LADY BIRDS!!’

6 yo: ‘I don’t wemember what I dwew…yeah, it was a TWEE HOUSE!’

Mum (for soon-to-be 8 yo): ‘He doesn’t want to talk’

And I get it.  Sometimes it’s hard to say how we feel, or to even have anything to say at all.  And that’s where Art comes in.

I write because I love my Neephs, because there are things about the world I want to share with them, because – in whatever way I can – I want their world to be a better place.

Their struggles are my struggles – to deny that connection is to deny life itself, and all the lessons that it brings.

So what about you?  Does being an Aunt, Uncle, Parent, Grandparent – any kind of child relative – scare the pants off you?  Do you see karmic patterns in those little bundled genes?  How has it rocked your world?