Garden Variety

Finis ...

2009-03-06T11:42:00.005+11:00

... which refers to not just an end but completion, the attainment of a goal. Very few of us will ever win, finally and for all time, the goals we seek: perfect happiness, enlightenment, the discovery of an authentic self or true love can only ever be momentary; but we try. This blog has been part of my trying, and though I'll never quite find the balance I want, I have written out myself to a point of calm and understanding. Finis.

I want to channel my words, my thoughts, my creativity elsewhere. I want to close some doors and open some windows, and lose and gain on other swings and roundabouts.

Thank you for reading and talking to my blog self.

Goodbye.

Tidy

2009-03-06T11:32:00.008+11:00

Last weekend we were up in the area, bumbling around when a man limped by and stopped to chat, wanting to know what the space was. And he said, "what a pity no one uses it".

In the past five years we have walked the dogs, watched sunsets, made plans, picked blackberries, collected kindling and sticks for my bean teepees. I have watched my kids learn to climb rocks and trees, to swing, to run down hills and climb back up them. We have eaten plums, picked flowers and jumped back and forth across the tiny creek. We have had picnics. We have played endless hours of Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. This is where I have noticed my babies growing into children.

I know what 'use' is code for, and I don't like it. I wonder how a dozen big houses sitting in ashphalt, with small backyards and big garages, could possibly prove a richer use of this space. To wipe out the mysterious, the possibility of adventures, in favour of sitting on a couch or mopping the tiles in the family room shows a lack of imagination and a misunderstanding of what space can mean for children and their families. I very much hope that guy is not sitting on the local council.

I pointed out that we were, in fact using it. (That families do in fact, exist.) And he had the grace to look a little discomforted. He tried to make things right by saying, the place could at least be tidied up a bit. I let it lie. Because if a person prefers concrete paths and banks of azaleas, there'll be no changing their mind.

2009-03-06T08:51:00.003+11:00

It's like a switch has been flicked: it's now cold in the morning, so cold I walk into town wishing for gloves; three weeks ago it was hot.

Yesterday I smelled the first wood fires that keep people warm in my suburb. In the past few years that smell has come to conjure both the peak of dry and dangerous summers and their end. It can't be the scent of comfort and home that it once was.

2009-03-05T16:49:00.003+11:00

I can't hear myself think. The clamour of work and now, for the past week, as Al travels for his job the girls' constant demands, have muffled my more intriguing words. my mind of words. I feel the desperation rising.

And then Al returns, with presents for the girls in the time honoured tradition. And a present for me: West Germany pottery from the 1960s. And something more valuable: space and time and quiet. He takes the girls for an adventure around the block and I wander the garden, checking the seedlings, plucking and pulling the green. Then I sit on a rock in the sun and eat four blood plums that have, for the first season since wwe've been here, escaped the birds.

There is a world of joy in four red plums.

Tellingly ...

2009-02-27T15:10:00.002+11:00

Lucy and I are playing with her dollhouse, with Lucy scripting as usual:

Well, now that we've finished the biscuits, let's have a conversation.
[pause]
So, what shall we buy next week?

I fear we have not opted out of the consumerist society quite as much as we think we have.

Bringing up baby

2009-02-26T21:45:00.004+11:00

I sit on the couch and watch it, alone, with Al in Hobart for work. I am frozen with horror at the 1950s approach. It doesn't ring true, this pitting of baby against parents in a battle for control, and it seems very cruel to me.

But more distressing is the mother of twins, weeping at putting her newborns out in the cold for hours, to 'blow the cobwebs off them', weeping because it seems so wrong and being told by partner and nurse to do as she's told. When both my kids were born, my self was disassembled, my confidence gone. But there was no-one standing by to tell me I was foolish, that I needed to back off, shut up, and let go of any last shreds of belief in myself and my knowledge. I was surrounded by people who trusted me.

It was painful to watch that woman so firmly put in her place.

Potato lead recovery

2009-02-26T13:23:00.009+11:00

Last night I went to hear Henry Reynolds, Peter Cundall and Buck Emberg talk about survival in a recession. They were charming - Reynolds is truly all that a public intellectual should be; even his hair is exactly right - and sometimes thoughtful (except for H.R. who is always thoughtful, never anything but).

Pete's main point: plant potatoes. And build more community gardens to foster connections between people and counter racism. Gardening can save the world. You'd expect nothing else from the classic materialist. I was at peace with my decision to grow more flowers but after listening to the praises for potatoes, my inner peasant has emerged and I'm wondering if a bed of purple sprouting broccoli would do a better job at recession-proofing our household than roses ever could.

Both P.C. and B.E. were so individualist in their proposals to something that will alter whole communities. Plant potatoes, help each other, get rid of debt, live with less. Yep, yep, yep and yep: it all sounds very possible. But then I talk to a friend, a financial planner, ironing his shirt before he goes to sit behind a desk and tell people to invest in gold, and he mentions scenarios that make me feel cold inside, cold for the people who are waiting for the axe to fall, and for those who've already got the chop. (And all the while his kitten bats at the striped shirt).

And I think perhaps that for many people, planting potatoes is not going to be enough.

Aging

2009-02-24T08:01:00.002+11:00

I am wrinkling, greying, thickening and losing my hearing; and I am okay with these changes.

But yesterday Al bought me a cord for my specs. And I accepted it. And my mortality loomed before me in a way it never has before. All those changes to my body are the marks of experience, but a cord for my glasses, well that just seems old.

There is a bee in my office

2009-02-20T10:36:00.003+11:00

Normally, I leave such critters alone. I like bees: their roundedness, their boldness, their sound, the way they look against the purple of the backyard artichokes they are mining for pollen.

But one floor up, in an office that looks over cars and asphalt and has no real opening to the outside world, this bee is out of place and threatening.

I cannot gently hustle him out. I fear it is about to end badly for one of us.

And it has.

Strangely distracting, and beautiful

2009-02-15T21:21:00.005+11:00

This is how Lucy described a painting she had finished.

Not 'a tree' or 'an ocean' but 'strangely distracting, and beautiful'.

Not 'strangely distracting, and oddly beautiful. Not 'strangely distracting, but beautiful'. I think she got it just right.

I love the elegance of my daughter's phrase.

***

Three days ago Nell told me a story of swimming in the ocean, fighting off a shark which had bitten her hand, and traveling to the doctor on the bus (we don't let the girls watch the news - they're both crazy for sharks and drama).

I love that two months ago Nell had only a very few words and now she uses them to invite me into a world that I will only ever see through a glass darkly.

***

I love that Al and I have offered the girls words and now those words are all their own.

Wychwood

2009-02-13T13:19:00.008+11:00

Wychwood is, I think, a very good name for a garden at the end of a lane at the foot of the central plateau.

It is a good name for a place with a labyrinth and a creek at the bottom of the garden;
it is a good name for a place that is quiet and elegant and intriguing.

I have no garden, really, at the moment. The dry and lack of time means I've some islands of brave plants soldiering on in an expanse of dust and, in the better places, mulch.

Sometimes I feel gardening is about being humble in the face of my own failure; sometimes I think it is about being fatalistic about those failures (but then I walk past an old, old woman bending down to pull up dandelions from her driveway). Sometimes, though, it is inspiring and exciting when I walk through a place that is loved, where plants are valued and trusted to seed and spread, and I see a gardeners' grace in the time, cost and care taken to nurture a piece of land that, of course, can't belong to them forever.

The stories of old people planting trees, knowing they'll never see them grown, are lovely for their message of faith in a long future that can't be claimed. But equally beautiful is the thought of building something for the time being, knowing it may not last out the decade - or the year - or even, quite horribly, the week - and doing so anyway because what there is today matters as much as the possibility of the future.

A place for everything

2009-02-10T08:50:00.003+11:00

In the glove box:

2 x parking permits
1 x sunscreen
1 x knife
1 x sea urchin

I think the car needs a clean out.

So does my in-box. My work is piling up, quite literally, into a tower that threatens to fall and crush me. I miss blogging. I miss the fun writing but seem unable to find space in my head and in my timetable to think about Things.

Life has become a matter of keeping on top of it all. I seem unable to balance my life with any grace or consistency.

And now, instead working the way I need to work, I keep reading about the fires and crying. My mind bounces back from what happened to people, to animals, to communities. I am truly thankful to be living where I live - I understand the hobbits.

Cool

2009-02-02T12:37:00.002+11:00

I am uncool. It's true, and it's okay. I'm a thirty-six year old mother of two with a house in the suburbs and a generally harried air and (I'm almost sure) the wrong sneakers; I'm not aiming for cool. So I'm not embarrassed to say that I love to visit the Launceston Horticultural Society's flower shows at St Albie's Hall down the road from Brickfields. I love it in a non-ironic, really looking forward to it, I'd like a lamington and a cup of tea kind of a way.

Two dollars gets me an hour to wander between of row after row of colour and form, funny horticultural names, and stalls with seriously cheap perennials. I am always the youngest person in the room, and I win the love of every older person who fears the art and science of flower arranging and growing for exhibition are being lost: I am the future of their passion, and I think I wear that mantle with some grace (but no cool). And lately, I have learned to become a dahlia fancier.

I think dahlias must be one of the most uncool of flowers: all soldier rows and elderly men pre-occupied with size and rigidity. But, check it out:

They're like little manifestations of mathematical formulae. Plus, it's easy to tell a good story in a dahlia show: Devon Carnival, Devon Temptation, Devon Caress, Devon Seduction ... and then the sad ending to the tale: Devon Citation. (Who new Devon was such a hotspot for licentiousness?)

Oh, the youth of today with their hair gel and those night clubs - they don't know where to go for a good time. But I do.

It's not you, it's me

2009-01-28T19:32:00.005+11:00

In my job, I write almost every day, and every word and idea is subject to multiple reviews, criticisms, feedbacks, unsolicited and solicited advice. This is not an exaggeration - everything is read with an eye to finding weakness or fault. The majority of what I write is valued in terms of its impact: who reads it, where it is read, what people do with it. Of course, nothing dam(n)s thoughts and words faster than the feeling there are one hundred eyes looking over my shoulder, judging me harshly for using one word and not the other.

This blog is something of a blessed relief. It lets me write what I want and play with words without, really, any significant effect on my life and my standing; it is liberating. Except on those low days when I'm feeling fragile, and no-one comments, or the comments seem to miss the point I was trying to make, or I feel obliged to reciprocate the comments left and I don't - then, I feel kind of crappy.

I don't want to feel crappy about the blog, I want to feel good. I wish I was the kind of woman who writes, blithely assured of her own good points and general elegance of thought and phrase, with no need to look for affirmation from the numbers and content of comments at the bottom of the screen. And usually - sometimes - occasionally - once in a while - the last Tuesday of November - I am. But I want protection when I am not my most fabulous self, and so I switched the comments off.

I rather miss people's comments. I like reading others' thoughts, their perspectives and their experiences. I love it when someone loves what I've written - love it. But on balance, I like writing out into the void, so that I don't become fixated on writing for a specific - and in my mind, inevitably judgmental - audience.

So, to those who are looking for the comments button: it's not you, or your computer, it's me. But you can get me on an email address, which is listed in my profile. It's not my everyday address, but I do read it relatively often. I might not reply to your email in good time because I have been buried by an unexpected avalanche at work, brought on by some sad events that are themselves sapping my energy, and when I do correspond with people I like to have something to say, something worthwhile reading - but I do appreciate and welcome your ideas, and your making the effort to reach out, and I will respond, almost certainly when you have given up hope of my ever answering.

Orange rocks

2009-01-27T14:15:00.007+11:00

This island is littered with the things ...

We spent Sunday up in a far away corner of the state. Mt William is deep in the backwoods: roadkill territory, spotted with old mining towns slowly, slowly emptying out. We had lunch under the trees by the beach, sheltered from the waves and the horizon, which terrify Lucy. She is afraid her parents will be swept out to sea, and afraid of that point where the two blues meet and people drop off the world.

It's a long drive from our place, and the journey was punctuated with the 'are we there yet?'s our own parents suffered. We did some mammoth drives when I was a kid: bundled into the Nissan Urvan before dawn, and driven from rural Victoria to Brisbane in one long, straight line, Dad driving through the night as we slept in the folded down seats in the back. The trips were in summer and I remember the blazing light and the heat in outback New South Wales, my parents stopping at small towns to buy us a can of fizzy drink. Oh, the delicious anticipation and the quandary: Passiona or green lime? The drinks came in a size that's long been phased out, much smaller than the standard 375 mls, and the cans were uncrushable.

I remember too, the car lulling me into my inner world, the place where kids fantasize when there's nothing else to do. Bored, bored, boring: Lucy uses these words all the time, now, to get my goat. I used to worry about my kids being bored - am I not enriching their lives enough?; am I cheating them of necessary experiences? But after some fidgeting Nell picked up her Barbie and told stories to herself (a two year old with a Barbie and a feminist mother - yes, there's something to be written on that) and Lu pulled over some books and then drifted off in an un-focused stare. Both were heading places where I can't, I don't want to, follow.

We take our girls to some beautiful places. They won't remember the heart stopping blue of the water on this particular Sunday, but when we strap them in their car seats, I think we are giving them a chance to explore something more than this particular island.

The perfect hostess

2009-01-23T12:30:00.002+11:00

Top four things to do for kids who visit my house for a play date:

* squash slugs;
* feed snails to chooks;
* be chased, screaming, by the Kris-witch until someone cries in fear;
* pick up the ever-present piles of dog poo on the back 'lawn'.

We also have one little guest who likes to vaccuum and wash walls when she's around.

I'm learning not to over-think the entertaining of children.

Conspicuous

2009-01-22T07:03:00.004+11:00

Gillian talks of being conspicuous. I understand, I understand: awkwardness exposed and magnified by my imagination. Misjudging a step down, turning one way when the person I'm with turns the other, my cardigan buttoned wrong - on raw days, I die a teeny tiny death of shame.

But here's conspicuous: being a learner bus driver, with a great big L on the front of the bus, turning a corner slowly, slowly, slowly, inching around, going wide and nudging a street sign on the corner; and then looking up to see a woman standing on the footpath, watching the progress.

Gardening in the summer

2009-01-21T09:23:00.003+11:00

I hate gardening in the summer. Down here it's dry and there's no lushness, no fecundity, and almost no growth. I'm just trying to keep a few things alive: the sad yellow basil, some sad yellow roses, a drooping tomato or two. Even the zucchinis, so overwhelmingly abundant in past years, are struggling to produce. This is a time of getting through, when stasis is a win. And I hate it. The things I love, the planning and planting of seeds, the tending of soil, don't happen as I spend my time watering and mulching and hoping for some rain.

But still, I dug around a dry bed of potato plants, put in when things were damp, and there, sitting just under the soil, were rosy Desirees, quietly waiting. Now, there's an allegory that's difficult to miss.

A good thing, too, as things here are at a tipping point. I have been smashed by a tsunami at work. I am the only one left standing as the senior team members are struck down by illness and bereavement. Not so long ago I was the junior person and now I am the senior, with all of the admin. and negotiations and constant emails and phone calls that entails. My boss has been divine in giving me actual, useful support and absolute flexibility in my working hours. But of course, as everyone in an office knows, each email, each phone call, takes a bite out of the time we use for something else. And I suspect I am like most of the working population, in that the something elses that are whittled away are the something elses that keep me half-way healthy and sane. Indeed, the something elses are what fill the well so that I can do my job.

I know this, I talk about this with every other mother I know. I know the magic list: yoga; walking in the morning; 8 hours sleep; no alcohol, sugar or junk food; something creative outside of work; some time with friends; some time by myself. But that list once again sits there unacknowledged and unchecked and I wonder why I'm doing this to myself yet again. I know the answer: socialisation, gender identity, organisational structures, psychological make-up; but my question is, why do I find myself asking the question when I know that answer? Theory alone won't bring about praxis.

So I am writing this down, for me, because when I put something in words it's real to me: I am doing my stuff first. Each morning I am playing with words, each evening I am pottering with the things that matter to me. Each day I am reminding myself that I am not a heart surgeon, nor a U.N. negotiator, nor a rescue worker; no one will die if I do things on my terms and at my pace.

This is an old, old song I am singing here, and I hope that one day, I'll remember the words and stay in tune.

Sew sew

2009-01-15T08:12:00.004+11:00

8am and it's a bad morning already. A bad night's sleep thanks to the new possum in the roof, gamboling in the space above our bed. (Or maybe it's a giant rat up there - oh, so much worse.) Girls up before sunrise, which in summer is awfully early. A plod with the dogs - no joy in the birds and the light, today. Al's in Hobart until tomorrow, so there's no-one to step in at 5.30 pm to take over the Inspector Gadget role play that is eating up my days and my soul. Bubbling anxiety over work. The girls at me, at me, atmeatmeatme from the moment I wake up, jostling over who stands next to me while I do a poo, eat a muffin, stare into space. All this culminating in my shrieking, shrieking at them as they fight over who gets to crawl under a particular but in no way distinguished dining chair. Shrieking 'Oh my god, would you just STOP, the two of you. Fighting before 7.30 in the morning: it's a disgrace. Stop'. Storming out (with my coffee - I wasn't so angry I forgot my coffee).

And then my rehabilitation, in the eyes of the girls and myself, as I mend a Barbie dress (Barbies, yes, another story for another day). I've never valued my sewing skills, which are limited and always end in shoddy bits and pieces. But oh, the magic in the eyes of the girls. Statistical analysis impresses them not all; my working knowledge of half a dozen computer programs is irrelevant, save that it lets me find cool stuff for them to watch on youtube. Domestically, I leave them cold: I vacuum while they watch T.V. and I only ever cook food that is disgusting, stinky and yukky. But sewing up a a shiny yellow dress with blue thread - that is the work of a domestic goddess of the most glamorous kind.

A bad morning takes a turn for the better.

Intimacy

2009-01-13T08:33:00.004+11:00

A man is slowly renovating a small white house with peeling paint. I track the changes as I walk past in the mornings and the evenings. I trick myself into thinking I know The Guy a little from the outside: he is green (a no pulp mill sticker on the car); he cooks (veggies in the rocks, a lemon tree in the corner); he once Did Things Outdoors(kayaks stacked on the side fence, gathering spider webs). I construct a life for him from the bits and pieces that lie around his yard. What an odd and presumptuous thing to do, but I am a curtain-twitcher, a peerer over fences and through the cracks in curtains; I take an interest in the bits of life that are unwittingly available to me; I will grow into a very gossipy old woman.

This morning, I walked past the house half an hour later than usual, after a slow start from a bad night's sleep. The Guy stood at the kitchen window, washing a mug, with no shirt on. I saw his soft white belly. His things are ciphers, something to play with as I walk to the bus but the vulnerability of his flesh and his domesticity shot a shock of intimacy into my solar plexus. In a glimpse of the mundane I recognised The Guy as a person, and I saw that of course, of course, I did not know him at all.

How odd. I will remember that moment when I am 45, when I am 60, when I am 80 - I am sure of it. I will remember it for no good reason, and for some very good reason I will never put words to.

How odd, how odd, how odd.

Nelly belly

2009-01-08T20:28:00.002+11:00

... it's just too delicious for words.

Serendipity

2009-01-07T07:53:00.004+11:00

There's a house not far from where I live, across the road from a landslip area where the most muscari can be found in the spring.

I think it might be a rental - it's not a house that's carefully tended, and its garden shrinks a little each week in the dry of the summer.

I walked past this morning with the dogs and saw, in the front garden, an old hydrangea with bright and sharp blue flowers, squatting next to a crayon pink geranium. It was unplanned, obvious and vulgar, and so lovely I stopped and stared and schemed for the same in my own front yard.

I think that particular blue and that particular pink are the colours of serendipity.

And now I must fly - there's an escalating dispute over a fallen lemon.

What I did on my holidays

2009-01-05T09:10:00.002+11:00

We caught planes, trains and automobiles; we visited friends, families, zoos, art galleries; we read books; we ran around and we sat still; we got sick (and no more shall be said about that); we celebrated my 36th birthday (36 - so far, it's not so bad); we lived without email and the internet for five weeks (the liberation!) and we realised that east or west, home is best.

This past weekend was the last before we start two full time jobs (at least in the short term - we're pretty sure something's gotta give) and we went here:

I swam because I was at the beach and by golly, that's what I do at the beach. I swam without a wetsuit, and once the numbness set in, it was lovely. Before the numbness, I could feel the ice crystals forming on the bits below water.

But I think there are few places where I can swim with cows lowing and butterflies and swallows swooping above my head. There are few places where my kids can splash nudie in the shallows,

and few places this orange:

Al and I have resolved to enjoy what we have, rather than looking always to greener pastures. We're stopping the circular arguments of should we stay or should we go, we're stopping the plans for the future, and for the moment, we're nourishing the roots we have here. Thinking back to the weekend, this shouldn't be too hard.

Queen Anne's Lace

2008-11-24T08:22:00.005+11:00

So the Queen Anne's Lace, planted in a fit of sentimentality for teenage melodrama has flourished. The plants are eight feet high and stand around the garden being battered by most un-summerlike gusts of cold wind. Eight feet sounds awe-inspiring but they've got the roots of a three foot high plant, and so they lean at impossible angles, nearly tipping over into oblivion, tapping my neck and brushing my face as I water the new lavender bushes up near the fig tree.

They are huge, gorgeous, and not at all what I expected - I want more of that in my life.

Poppies

2008-11-24T08:21:00.005+11:00

The girls call these ladybird flowers. In my head then, they become mixed up with 'ladybird, ladybird fly away home'; and a German poem about fleeing Memelland , the now-absent homeland of some of my family, my friend Ttina once recited to me; and thoughts not of soldiers in the Flanders fields but of the people who get caught up in the mess of it all. And then I circle back down again, to gratitude that I have a garden for growing flowers, and a family, a place in the world.

I missed Rememberance Day this year; I've missed every date this year. But the poppies in the garden still the minutes and open a small space for empathy and peace. No awkward silence, just thankfulness.

Swing

2008-11-21T19:22:00.004+11:00

Our town has fantastic dog parks but the kid parks are not so great. Maybe it's what comes of living in these old towns, where people own huge backyards with trees and space - the need for public swings and slides doesn't seem as pressing. With a few exceptions, the ones that are available to us are near major roads, unfenced, and are scattered with broken glass and discarded smokes from the local toughs' mad Friday night fun.

But up the road, in the area, someone has hitched a swing. A close to perfect swing: a plank on the end of some climbers' ropes, knotted to a high branch in the oak tree. It moves like the pendulum of a grandfather clock, back and forward slowly and serenely, with weight and purpose. The ground drops away so that even the tiniest movement propels a person out over the abyss.

Another trip around the sun

2008-11-19T08:33:00.006+11:00

Young Eleanor Veatrice-with-a-V is two today. Two years ago she was born, on the night of the season return of The West Wing. I spent the evening standing behind the couch, with pains coming fast, sure that I was not in labour because the book said they were the wrong kind of pains, and I am all about the book learning. And then, when I was hurting every three minutes for about two minutes at a time, Al convinced me to call the labour ward instead of watching a couple of episodes of Scrubs. The midwives thought sooner, rather than later, would be a good idea. Ninety minutes after I got into the car Nell was born in a tub, to the music of Paul Kelly, with Al dozing on a stool, almost out of his mind from fatigue after a day spent chopping trees. And so Al's great fear of delivering his own child in an elevator was avoided. And so Nell-Nell was born. And so it began.

***

Nell-belle, Belly-belle, Best Belle, Sweet Nell, Baby, Little Bird, Dear Love - what a delight you are, what a joy, what a challenge, what a gift.

When you were in my womb I couldn't see you in my mind's eye. You came to us fresh, with nothing expected, and it's been a wonder to watch you grow into the person you are. How could we have made it up before you did? You are a dancer, a singer, a twirler. You drawl. You say 'no' with hurricane force. You love babies and Dora the Explorer (Dodo), Lola (Lolo) and puppies who lick you. You like pink. When we role-play Skippy you choose to be Mark, the ineffectual older brother, and you spend the game riding on horses. You love snakes - every picture you draw is a snake, and one with eyes - you are very clear about the eyes. You eat beaked beans for breakfast and peas for dinner, you can't get enough yoghurt but you're not keen on salami or pickles. You like the yoga balance poses: vriksha-asana and a modified utthita hasta padanghustasana. You cuddle and kiss and push your sister.

We treasure all your details, boring to anyone else, because together they make you our baby/girl Nell. At the end of each day we sit on the couch and share out our memories of you and your sister, and wonder at the delight and hilarity of having you in our lives.

Happy birthday, sweet little one.

2008-11-14T12:03:00.004+11:00

I am walking through life and not really thinking about it - I'm not in my head at the moment. So I don't blog, which is fine, but there are things that will slip by, forgotten, when they shouldn't be.

Yesterday we went to the playgroup attached to Lucy's probable school. For the visit, Lucy chose to wear trousers, a long dress, a baby's bonnet in the shape of those old-style pilot helmets, and a white cape. And black patent Mary Janes. Not because she was dressing up, but because she thought this was a look that worked. And it did, because of course, it's not what you wear, it's how you wear it, and Lu brings such a taken for granted confidence and insouciance to her wardrobe choices. Spots, stripes, fluro, a mass of 70's paisley ribbons in her hair - it all looks good.

And now that Nell can open drawers and deal with armholes, she's strolling the same sartorial backroads as her sister: Tuesday's ensemble was a shirt printed with angry fruit from the Mission store ("Buy, buy, buy" - Nell) and a pair of Dora undies worn over tights, like some cracked super-hero.

When I see my girls stroll down the street looking, well, odd, I am so proud. Proud of their confidence, and proud that I can wear the eyebrow raises and smirks of strangers. Doubly, triply proud now that the cool mean girls have started to emerge at Lucy's kinder: all in pink, with curls and those super-cute mini-converse shoes, hanging out down the back near the swings, and missing only a ciggie and detention to complete the look of disaffected youth. Four years old - not even four - and they tell other kids they are disgusting, they don't like their clothes, they won't play with them. I love, love that my kids don't think to judge on the basis of what people are wearing (even as I am horrified that this is even an issue - four years old, for heaven's sake), that they don't judge at all, indeed, and don't care what people think about them. I love they have a confidence I have only recently achieved - tenuously - in my mid-thirties. Of the myriad of things I want for kids, this confidence and delight in themselves is perhaps the one thing I want most.

Last night I told someone I was a little disappointed that my girls refuse point blank to wear the pretty things I see around me, but that's not quite true, because really, I can't imagine having kids who matched their shirts and shorts, who didn't wear togas to Coles, and who pulled on what I chose for them.

And tomorrow, when we go to a fairy fair and I have to explain to the organisers that a lime green cape from a late 1960s bridesmaid ensemble and netting tied around the eyes in the manner of Themis is, in fact, very fairy like, so that my kids get the free ice cream that's promised to all comers who dress like fairies, well, I'll be proud then, too.

Snippets

2008-10-29T20:01:00.003+11:00

Kris: That guy next door, he intrigues me. He drives home every day, in his work clothes, and then he goes again. What does he do in there? He's not there for very long at all, he doesn't have time to do very much, and every day I see him I wonder what he's doing. What do you think he's doing?

Al: He works at the Coles on Wellington St. He comes home for lunch.

Some days, life in suburbia is a real let down.

Say them aloud

2008-10-27T19:13:00.004+11:00

It's not all misanthropic pharmacists ...

We went back to Liffey Falls this past weekend, and visited my favourite nursery on the way. It's in the bush, silent but for the birds, and with the possibility of sighting a wombat in the far reaches, down near the creek.

But mostly I love it for the names of the plants, which read like a list from a book of fairies:

Weaver's delight
Tunbridge buttercup
Bushman's bootlace
Eastern whorled cheeseberry
Creeping dustymiller
Pretty grassflag
Running postman and
Winter beardheath

And for those who prefer to garden in the shadow of the cauldron:

Knobby clubsedge
Swamp fescue
Kidney weed
Shiny swampmat and
Stinkweed

Some days, I garden with words, not plants. Because is there a backyard anywhere that wouldn't be more lovely for some sweet holygrass in the corner?

On the less than stellar service at the pharmacy

2008-10-24T13:54:00.007+11:00

I am pissed off, incandescent with rage, speechless ...

I went to the pharmacy to get a prescription filled. As I handed the paper over to the chemist he said, "You keep an eye on those kids, would you". And not in a nice way. Weird, and I shrugged it off. The girls wandered about touching and looking but never opening, never breaking and never running, and I stood beside them, making sure they didn't oh, you know, drink poison or eat soap.

Then this guy came out from behind his counter grabbed Nell and speaking to girls, with his back to me said to them, 'You go sit over there [in a seat next to a pile of cardboard boxes, at the very back of the shop]. It's not place to wander about unsupervised". And not in a nice way.

Well, I was brought up all WASP-y and the cold shoulder, the dirty look are my weapons of choice in times of crisis. But I lost it. I whirled about (and how often do we get to whirl in a chemist?) and went at him: "hands off my kids; how dare you!; how rude!; never once were they unsupervised!; they have opened nothing, broken nothing!; just who on earth do you think you are?; never in all my life ... ". And then I demanded back my prescription and stormed out in such a blaze of righteous fury, I melted the organic honey and beeswax lip balm, with Lucy saying her clear and carrying voice, "He was such a very rude man, Mummy"; my but she does enunciate well when I want her to.

Am still furious.

Really, can I be the very first woman with kids in the shop? Surely women are the key market, what with our taking responsibility for our families' health and loving all that lavender scented crap that lies around these stores. Or has every other woman allowed their children to systematically strip the place down, so that he only now, with me, finally learned his lesson?

Here's another couple of lessons: if you don't want kids touching stuff, don't leave illustrated boxes of chocolate and mint (!!!) face masks lying in a basket on the floor, and don't leave shiny lipstick tubes at kid eye-height, and offer somewhere to chain up the children (preferably with a bowl of water nearby). Stop worrying so much about finger marks on your marked down $5 crap, and stop acting like my kids' fingers are somehow nastier than all those people who walk around using the testers and never buying a thing.

And don't piss off a woman who comes in for birth control pills. Because if I don't get them, I'll have more rugrats and I'll bring them back to your store and let them run amok. And I'll hiss at you as you cower amongst your pills and cheap perfume, "You brought this on yourself, you angry fuck".

And to anyone who reads this and even thinks, "But some children are poorly behaved", let me say this: well, who isn't, sometimes? And also, shove it up your arse.

So, have a nice day, everybody.

Sky high

2008-10-15T18:03:00.004+11:00

I live with this reality almost every day:

Lu is a climber. She will climb trees, rocks, indoor climbing walls, chain link boundary fences, the top shelf in the linen cupboard, ladders and anything else that offers itself. We are often discussing at just what age she will be allowed on the roof (fourteen and that is final, even if Daddy is up there with her). And Nell, being the younger sister and a big fan of Ucy, climbs too, pulling herself up the same trees, rocks and fences - not as high as Lulu but with just as much skill and determination. They are proud, rightfully so, of their climbing. And so am I.

But I am not a climber. I've never been brave and since my second pregnancy I suffer severe vertigo. The thought of being on a ladder makes me want to topple over backwards. When the girls want to run amok in the library, they pitter patter to the second floor in the gleeful knowledge that I can't follow and will be reduced to standing five steps up from the ground floor, calling at them to Come. Down. Now. (I find this to be not at all effective.) So I stand and watch with a tremor in my heart and oftentimes, my body.

It's not the climbing, it's the falling. And it's not that I won't catch them, it's trying to stand by, not hover with my hands just behind their backs and under their bottoms. It's the letting go.

Talk about a metaphor for motherhood ...

Pop Quiz

2008-10-13T08:13:00.004+11:00

What is Eleanor, aged 1 year and 11 months, saying?

a) Why yes, Mummy, I am happy to do as you request. I love you and respect you.
b) While I acknowledge the legitimacy of your point of view and the wisdom you have gained from many years of experience, I have a different perspective on this particular issue. I hope we can keep the dialogue open and work together to find a mutually acceptable solution.
c) No.
d) NNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNO!

New season

2008-10-11T19:48:00.004+11:00

My broad beans are higher than the apple trees. I spent so long looking up, watching the tips race to the sky, I missed the beans down below until I stumbled upon them today when I was searching for snails. And so the first of the much anticipated seasonal treats has arrived. Soon there will be tomatoes, corn and basil, peaches and the flood of produce from the garden, where they currently grow quietly stuffed in between the flowers.

Despite my overlooking them, the beans are still small, small enough to avoid the double peeling that stops me making full use of the bushels of beans I collect. I boiled them up and we had them over risotto, with grilled asparagus on the side. Jackie French has written that you'll never feel poor with a vegetable garden filled with luxuries - this was very true tonight.

Helpful tips for gardeners

2008-10-08T08:13:00.011+11:00

Plant more flowers and fewer cabbages.
Plant in the hope of happier times to come.

2008-10-07T19:59:00.005+11:00

I leave the op-shop with a tantruming kid under each arm: Nell screams for a baby and Lucy screams for a wedding dress.

Feminist mothering : 0
Patriarchy: 2

The weeding

2008-10-06T14:33:00.004+11:00

Once upon a time, our house was owned by someone who knew how to garden. We have curved beds, expensive edging, some 'garden rooms' and other evidence of careful planning. And then in some later era of the pre-us history, a new owner moved in, someone whose planting criteria were ugly, invasive and just plain inappropriate. I have spent four years now arranging for the removal of trees that have ruined our foundations, fallen on the neighbour's house and sent up a forest of suckes that give me welts. I have spent a summer standing on a tin roof dragging some unnamed vine out of the elegant old apricot tree. I have spent a fortune on knee-deep mulch. I have sent Al out with a crowbar to do battle with unwanted and unproductive blackberries and root systems the size of a small city. And this past weekend I dug and burrowed out bulblets of some nasty plant, doing so imperfectly, with a sore back, and knowing that they'll all be back as soon as I put in the tomatoes.

Sifting through the soil and thinking of the forest of sticky-weed I've yet to face, I thought about all those well-meaning de-constructions and re-interpretations of 'weed': a plant out of place, a successful competitor, a too successful competitor, an as-yet un-identified resource, a victim of gardening fashions. Or maybe, a weed is a plant that brings with it a deadened despair; it is a destroyer of weekends, an embitterer of souls.

Alternate realities

2008-10-03T08:18:00.007+10:00

Things I thought I would never say #20067:

"Keep you toes out of the biscuit mix, please" [requested while the mixmaster was beating]

****

Lucy constantly demands I play Speed Racer with her. She is Speed, I am a baddie and I do things like throw her out of her bed, beat her up and put her in jail so that she won't be able to compete in the trans-desert/ trans-jungle/ trans-arctic race. Three weeks ago she demanded constant Cinderella role playing; as wicked step-mother I would yell at her and make her do the housework.

Generally speaking I hate role plays but I find these to be cathartic.

Now, a return to an old favourite: Skippy. But whereas in the past I was Skippy to Lu's Sonny (very relaxing - I just clicked my tongue every now and then), now I am Ranger Matt Hammond. This is proving to have great possibilities for psychic space. I am currently graphing wombat migration patterns as Sonny and Flight Ranger Jerry (Nell) save a possum in the backyard.

Al is Mark, the awkward and ineffectual older brother, played by a young man who over-acts and is never quite sure how to hold his body in moments of dramatic tension. This makes me smirk - even when casting decisions are made by a three year old, it's nice to win the lead.

2008-09-26T08:49:00.002+10:00

Things I want to remember:

Fifty black cockatoos making their way across the sky above our house. Flying above the suburbs, they sound and look like the product of some weird magic. And now, a gang comes past everyday about 5pm.

Six white cockatoos stripping the last of walnuts off the neighbour's tree, out the back.

Silver eyes, tiny birds I've longed for in my garden, eating pink flowers from the prunus in the front garden.

A bumblebee as long and as fat as the top of my thumb, moving across the broad bean flowers.

All the vulnerability of love and joy in Lucy's face as I agree to play princesses with her.

Nell drinking water from an urn on a grave, in the parish under the care of Josephine Pyecroft.

Nell interjecting 'Yep, yep, yep' in Baa baa black sheep. That flat drawl: I thought she was going to spit and then wish for rain; she's something out of Hanrahan

Lime green euphorbia, blue forget-me-nots and iris, deep pink magnolia flowering together in the front garden as planned.

So many flowers in the garden I run out of vases and give them away.

Babies and rhubarb

2008-08-20T14:57:00.005+10:00

I have been feeling odd lately. I think I may be disconcertingly, unexpectedly, happy.

In a different life, when my self was firmly anchored to a PhD, ambition and plenty of booze at the Regatta Hotel (for the locals: pre-bistro - I'm that old), I would turn up Indigo Girls' Closer to Fine* and sing and dance in the candlelight, in a melancholy and joyous release:

And I went to see the doctor of philosophy
With a poster of Rasputin and a beard down to his knee
He never did marry or see a b-grade movie
He graded my performance, he said he could see through me
I spent four years prostrate to the higher mind
Got my paper and I was free

I listen to this still, peeling the potatoes as Al and the kids watch Harry and his bucket of dinosaurs down the hall. It's taken me longer than four years but I think I am learning to acknowledge what makes me happy and to embrace these things without apology or interest in the opinions of others - this is quite an achievement in a world of shoulds.

*****

I started this blog to find some space for myself: some time, a community, and mostly - although I didn't know it at the start - some space in my head to figure out who and what I am. Having babies takes us apart and it's hard to put ourselves back together, especially when there are bits missing and things that no longer fit; the instruction manual is out of date and the tools we have aren't always up to the job. Blogging has helped, immensely, in figuring out who I am and how I want to live my life. Blogging and time: writing out my self has wound through 211 posts, two blackberry seasons, the growth of my kids from babies to girls, and now a second windy spring of pink bluster.

A few months ago an erstwhile friend commented that my blog was all 'babies and rhubarb', and it wasn't really his kind of thing. I shrugged at the time but I keep circling back to that flip and mean definition of my hard won self. It's simplistic, of course - there's some feminism and a few veggies in the mix - but he wasn't far wrong: I've appropriated the phrase as a distillation, not a reduction. I don't have a ten word answer to the question of 'who am I?' but I know my self when I see it, and I quite like that self, too. And babies and rhubarb have a big part in this self in its ebbs and the flows; that's to the good: what's the world without love and dessert?

So blogging has been a process of construction, of making sense, of sorting through. It's been liberating, which is a big claim for a string of short paragraphs and some photos, but a true claim nonetheless. But now, I think, it is time for a break.

There are words in my life, drifting about in conversation, plopping on the page as I write for work, but the words for my blog are coiled inside, somewhere between my heart and my belly; they aren't attaching themselves to ideas and floating up onto the screen. I'm off for a little while to tend the babies and rhubarb until the thoughts and words are once again in sync.

* I was going to be embarrassed by this but hell, my music tastes get far daggier than this. And anyway, wasn't this the soundtrack to the lives of millions of searching women in their twenties, if only they'd admit it now?

Worth the wait

2008-08-14T20:03:00.004+10:00

Things that have been a long time coming in my life:

* balance
* looking in the mirror and quite liking what I see
* a possibly perfect pair of checked trousers (not tragically hip, not weirdly golf)
* ranunculas

I planted ranunculas four years ago and they were lost to the dogs' digging. Three year ago they just disappeared on the watch of our very funky house sitter - I planted them but they never emerged (two passionfruit vines also went missing - she has no green thumb at all, it seems - and our dog was killed; but she's a lovely, lovely girl). Two years ago the free ranging chooks scratched the shoots away. Last year, it was a free ranging Lu. But this year, caloo callay, I have ranunculas. And they are lovely, like a stripped down peony.

They are easy to grow (when dogs, house sitters, chooks and kids permit) but just so glamorous and gorgeous I can't help but think that really, I am quite the backyard goddess. I shall have to life my game, sartorially speaking: bum cracks and daggy blue jeans are most inappropriate in this company ...

2008-08-10T13:56:00.011+10:00

Yesterday it was raining, and cold. I remember a Sunday like that some years ago, spent sitting in front of the fire and drinking tea; now I have two kids who are mad for splashing in puddles and twirling their umbrellas. We kit up and set off, walking the block in the rain.

Once the thrill of the wet starts to fade, the adventures begin. Yesterday it was Snow White but Cinderella is also in vogue at our house. I once wrote that living with a real princess is as testing as sharing space with the Disney kind. Now I have some experience in both and I'm starting to reconsider. And I wonder, where does this come from, and what to do to chase the wenches away?

We live in a sea of pink but we've never actually invited a pop culture princess into our home. That is, until recently when allowing Lucy to chose her yoghurt for kindergarten lead to a six pack of princess themed Nestle vanilla and strawberry milk-based product. We could have - should have? - said no but like parents everywhere we were keen to avoid a meltdown in the dairy aisle and so we forked out for some indoctrination. But I think it must have started earlier - why did she chose that particular option? - possibly around the communal kinder table, or outside in the playground when the pirate boys said girls can only be mermaids. I always assumed that I could through vigilance and firmness protect my kid from inappropriate gendered messages; turns out - yet again - I can't.

I'm tinkering around the edges of some of those messages. Snow White is a girl who is hated for her kindness, not her attractiveness and blah, blah, blah, she lives with the dwarves and plants a garden and manages their financial interests, acting as an agent and selling on the mined jewels and gold. Her post-poisoning salvation comes in the form of a prince but one who is also a doctor, so that at least some motivation comes from medical expertise rather than general heroic maleness. In the end, the doctor-prince, S.W. and the dwarves all live together, with S.W. continuing her role as financial administrator for the guys.

This is okay as far as it goes but the things about kids is, they act as a mirror to our own cracks and inconsistencies. In my story the guy still saves the girl and the day - why not a witch with traditional knowledge, for example? - the girl is still poisoned by a crone (thereby perpetuating all those nasty constructions of older women; and S.W. doesn't just politely say thanks and walk away at the end - she ends up working as an employee in the men's businesses. I bet she does the housework too. And then there's the whole issue of abusive female family members who are demonised and absent and neglectful fathers who don't get judged for failing their kids.

I am caught up in the structures and practices I critique; they shape my thinking about what's possible even as I so carefully try to create new narratives for my girls, in the stories I tell "in [my] head and [my] hands" (Lucy's words) and in their lives. I can de-construct a fairy tale, but as soon after Al moved down to live with me I stopped remembering to pay bills, lost my pin number on any number of occasions and - shamefully - I can't name our bank or our insurers; nor do I know when the rates are due. I make the money in this house but I focus a lot more on the muffins. I pretend this isn't true but of course I have my own fairy tales, and they have nothing to do with poisoned apples and tiaras.

I don't hate myself for this - I've never met a feminist whose walk always matches her talk; try as we do, our possibilities and improbabilities are shaped - sometimes obviously, sometimes secretly - by our gender. My feminist motherhood, probably like all kinds of motherhood, leads me to think carefully about myself as a person and a role model, and this can be confronting and sometimes liberating. And as part of my motherhood, I try to show my kids some of the many different ways they can be women; perhaps these examples come as much in my own failures and oddities as in my strengths.

In the meantime, I have kids who chase after the evil queen and throw a giant apple at her. They beat at monsters with 'ferocious sticks'; they describe themselves as strong and brave; they can't wait to grow up to go to work, have babies, drink beer and chop firewood with a BIG axe. Lucy told me today, "I protect little kids and herbivores. I am a really good girl." And Nell agreed in her flat Aussie drawl: "Yeah."

I have faith that those bloody Disney princesses will never have much resonance beyond the yoghurt lids. I don't really have a strong view on what women should be but if my kids turn out the way they plan, I'll be a very happy mother and a very happy feminist indeed.

Slide night :: lost treasures

2008-08-08T19:40:00.002+10:00

My Grammy and her younger sister Eileen. I only wish I were funky enough to carry off shirts like that. But on my good days, I can rock a headscarf.

Still life with lemons

2008-08-05T01:10:00.003+10:00

I have a lemon tree and it is bearing fruit. This is the source of more satisfaction than a bald sentence might suggest. When we moved into our house there was no lemon tree, which seemed a mysterious absence given that the yards around my suburb still bear the traces of more productive times, when a veggie garden and some fruit trees were expected; the old and shapeless trees, dripping fruit and dropping it to the ground, glimpsed through back fences, are the most spectacular, juicy evidence of this past. Tantalising evidence too, with all the lemony deliciousness just out of reach and largely ignored and unloved, or at the very least unused by those who don't seem to know their luck.

I'm not sure why our own yard was missing this mainstay of suburban productivity. We live on what was the rich side of the street; maybe those posh folks didn't want to suggest they were peasants in their planting. It might be it was sacrificed to one previous owner's preference for straggling and inappropriately large natives. Possibly the people before us, whom we suspect have family ties to the big names in the state's forestry industry, chopped it down and pulped it. Whatever the reason, we had none of the easy abundance that a lemon tree offers a home.

I planted a tree - a Meyer - in the courtyard at the beginning of last year and have plucked off the blossoms with great self-discipline, in the knowledge that this leads to more impressive yields later on. Further, I manured, watered and trained Lucy to wee on the tree whenever she felt the need for some alfresco relief. And now that she'll only pee on flowers I've been known to stroll out after dark, perch precariously on the raised bed and offer up a little goodness. It's a very peaceful thing, squatting there and staring out over the lights of the suburb, and not without a charge of danger now that we have cut down the trees that once shielded us from the very tidy neighbours' view. All this care is working well: the tree is still small but it's hung with fruit that is bright and gold.

I need a lot of lemons in my life. Not so much for lemonade, which has never really thrilled me. When life sends me lemons I'm more likely to make lemon butter, to eat neat at the open fridge door so as not to dilute the sharp-sweetness (and so as not to share). But I'm more of a person who demands lemons; I don't wait for life to send them to me. I need them to eat with avocado and salt and pepper on toast, with steak, over salads, stirred into spinach with butter and salt, on chips, in icing for biscuits and no nonsense cakes. In my cooking, lemons are as much a seasoning as salt and pepper; anything that tastes really, really good is almost always finished with a lemon.

There are two iconic lemon moments in my cooking, repeated over and over again. The first: making wholewheat pancakes by myself on days of mizzle and drizzle, standing at the stove and looking out at the grey and the wind, eating each one with sugar and lemon as the next one cooks. The second is as yet repeated only in my head and draws from some grim New Zealand family drama, all marital dissolution and pedophilia on a bay in a small beach house a little like this. Before each evening's debauchery, the parents sit in deck chairs on the lawn, next to an enormous lemon tree, reaching out for fruit to squeeze into their gin. Seasonal eating at it's very best, I think, and the driving force behind my own small tree out the back. It's winter now, but the deck chairs are ready.

Yellow

2008-07-29T12:26:00.003+10:00

I am walking the dogs a bit later in the morning, and the sun is up earlier. I hear kookaburras, not roosters, and I see these flowers in a front yard down the street. It is golden rule of gardening: Thou Shalt Not Plant Bulbs in a Straight Line. And I'm in agreement - usually. But there's something very cheering in this guard of honour, defending the possibility of loveliness in an otherwise neglected space.

Snow day

2008-07-27T19:09:00.008+10:00

Further to Angie's comment on the post, below: I can confirm the blossoms in Hobart are backed by snow on the mountain.

Yet another indicator of global disaster

2008-07-22T12:28:00.003+10:00

The unnamed peach has flowered early this year, I think. I've missed my chance to spray against the leaf curl, and there will be fewer fruits this summer. I'd blame global warming, of course, but that seems somehow churlish: this pink, that blue are perhaps worth a dozen less peaches for the birds to peck at in December.

Slide night :: funky father

2008-07-19T19:32:00.005+10:00

This is my Dad in the early 1980s, when he was starting up a Lutheran secondary school in Hamilton, in rural Victoria. He's looking decidedly understated here - some of his ties and shirts were eye-searing; I particularly remember a short sleeve bodyshirt with maroon paisley, taken from his dead father-in-law's wardrobe and worn until all too recently. Also fond memories of a leather jacket that I appropriated and wore with a very funky edge (or so I like to think).

My Dad kept a bottle of cordial at work. He has a sweet tooth but with two hyperactive kids in the family, there was a strict 'no red anything' rule in the house. Dad would have a sneaky shot at work, the way some men take whiskey on the sly.

So this is one half of where my food culture comes from. This is clear from his post, here, on eating, traveling and in the end, family. What the man doesn't mention is that when he travels he is always good for an ice cream or a beer (although suggested, perhaps, in the number of memories that include sweeties of some description). This makes him a most excellent traveling companion; he's not a man to save five dollars and potentially miss out on a good strawberry ice cream or an iconic sausage. (And what is a trip away without an iconic sausage in the mix?)

Dad, Al and I traveled together in Germany a few years ago and save for his driving, which often left me praying or in tears (he's had his cataracts done since then), it was great. He speaks German fluently and can be awfully charming when he wants to be - thus, we stayed in places, heard from people and had meals Al and I could not have negotiated ourselves. The backbone of my black and white photo collection came from this trip and in particular, a small junk shop in the back streets of a town in Thuringer (which does indeed have its own iconic sausage) where Dad regaled the two slightly shifty looking owners with our own family history that includes a flight from the Red Army at the end of WW2; it seemed to be the kind of place where a flight from the Red Army goes down well. I left with two dozen photos from before WW2, indeed, some well before the turn of the 20th century: soldiers, jolly women in overalls and gas masks at what must have been the beginning of the war (too jolly, surely, for what happened later); many sepia steins being clinked in rustic huts; and chillingly, some blurry dark haired children, not blonde like the rest, and I may be jumping to conclusions, but I cannot bear to think of what might have become of them. That last photo is one I look at only rarely and in solitude.

Here is my Dad with some of his own kids, dark and fair (another quiet shirt; can it be my memory is playing tricks on me?):

Food culture

2008-07-15T12:03:00.004+10:00

I must admit, I have a little bit of a literary crush on Michael Pollan - that wry voice, the honesty, his eyes (well, not totally literary) ... and mainly the ways he pulls everyday life apart and puts it back together again. The Omnivore's Dilemma was a staunch and intelligent book, but I've enjoyed In Defense of Food a little more. It's looser, less confronting - more of a chat than a charming lecture. Pollan's argument is that we have lost sight of food, focusing instead on its discrete elements as they are defined (and misunderstood) by scientists and nutritionists; in uncovering the mysteries of food, science has mystified our eating. Under the sway of nutritionism we rely on labels and experts, unable to trust our nose, our taste or our bellies. It's a broad brushstroke kind of an argument, and I do feel it lacks nuance and in particular doesn't adequately acknowledge key structures like class, gender, and movements like slow food and organics (which are also classed and gendered), but I think nutritionism, with its intended and unintended consequences, is one of the defining characteristics of contemporary, Western food culture. Underpinning Pollan's solutions is the reclamation of our traditional food cultures.

So I'm thinking about my own food cultures, and what Al and I are passing on to our kids. Food-wise, we don't come from sophisticated stock. The German side of my family has given me a real love for sauerkraut, wurst and obst-torte. The Irish has been lost - my grandmother was a 1950s hostess with the mostest, all devils on horseback and cream of mushroom soup. In our own childhoods, neither Al nor I knew asparagus, mushrooms or beetroot could be had fresh (aah, the tinned champignon). I have no memory of ever ingesting a vegetable as a child. And yet we've both emerged relatively bonny and eating widely and well; indeed, we both love food. I don't know how this happened to Al (he was allowed to eat as much ice cream as he wanted, for heaven's sake) but - and this will surprise my long-suffering mother, who for years has put up with our 'jokes' about her cooking - I attribute my own excellent eating habits to my parents.

Food as fuel is important, of course, but culture comes from the meanings and practices attached to what we eat and in this, my parents excelled. It's the fodder for dinner party humour now (fodder - food; geddit?) but the food rules and practices I remember gave us a sense that food was something to be shared. It wasn't mysterious and it wasn't external to our family; it was part of the common everyday. We didn't pick this up as kids, and my parents might not have deliberately created that message (Mum, Dad, comments?) but that is what I've taken from my own family's food culture, and it's what I'm now giving the girls.

I still worry about the lack of cosmopolitan fare (although not as much as I did a year ago) but here's the thing: my kids like to cook, they know that food is eaten at the table, together (albeit often sullenly, reluctantly, whiningly), and they know where food comes from and how to make it. Food's not mysterious, it's not good or bad, and it's defined by taste and colour, not lists on a packet. When I grit my teeth as the girls break the shell in with the egg when they help me make a cake, when I pull on the gumboots and step through the dusk and drizzle to grab some greens, when we sit down together at the table, when I take a moment to be truly thankful for what I have received, we are showing the girls that some of our most precious knowledge lies in the mundane.

This is what I tell myself to steel my nerves as the girls yet again sniff the smells in the kitchen and declare them to be delicious, look at the food and declare it to be delicious, and then eat two grains of rice and a pea.

Big plans

2008-07-12T16:38:00.004+10:00

There are some parenting moments that have been a long time coming and absolutely worth the wait: the first time my girls wandered into my bedroom together to say 'good morning'; Lucy and Nell playing quietly together with their toy animals; Lucy spontaneously kissing Nell as they hung over the sofa watching Charlie and Lola. The other day I had another big one: planning a garden with my girls.

Figuring out the backyard is getting to be a priority. The privacy went when we cut down the huge trees that destabilised our foundations. The lawn went with the coming of the dogs. The plantings are pretty shabby after drought. And there's more blackberry than you might at first think. When I look out the window my heart sinks at the ugliness of it all. The girls have dubbed a section of the yard 'the tar pit' and it's well named. It's to act.

I've been avoiding the issue. I stick things into the ground so that I can eat or pick them later on but I can't visual things in 3D, or 2D for that matter, and I've got no real sense of how plants will look together, or what will thrive where. So pulling together a space the size of an average suburban yard is daunting. But Lucy is keen. She has the colours chosen: pink, yellow and blue. She's figured out the plantings: sunflowers, geraniums, and daisies. And she's designed the new beds around the cubby house. Nell agrees with it all ('What do you think, Nellie?'; 'Desth'). The absolute confidence and arrogance of a three year, so often the source of my internal screams and gritted teeth ('No Mummy, that's not a P it's a D and it says ssssss'), comes into its own in this scenario. I'm really quite excited.

And if it all looks hellish and nothing works, I'll just blame the kid.

Slide night :: self + flower

2008-07-09T15:11:00.003+10:00

For no reason, just to relive those overalls. I'm surprised I've turned out as presentable as I have. And I'm still often to be found with a bunch of flowers in my hand.

Someone I once thought was my friend said to me, "I really like the way you always have flowers in your house. They don't always look nice but you really make the effort". She was mean; we lost touch by mutual consent. But I still have flowers - today, on my desk a bunch of creamy jonquils sits in a vase I bought for 20c. I make an effort to have flowers not because they prettify a room but because they are a moment of stillness and loveliness in sometimes very disappointing days, e.g., today, in which I am sick in bed instead of speaking at a conference in Melbourne and going somewhere interesting for dinner afterwards.

But if I'm lucky maybe Al will have managed to slip some lollies by the kids (who have superpower hearing when it comes to the rustle of a junk food packet). ... Here he is and nope, no joy.

2008-07-01T11:35:00.006+10:00

The Westbury cemetery begins where the town straggles to an end, the last of the blocks - part backyard and part paddock - trailing away to meet a rough road that leads over a hill. There is a cattle grid at the gate and a blue parrot in a thicket. We walk to the old section where things are shrouded with rust and lichen, and stones are often leaning or broken.

The girls love it here. For Nell, the pleasures are simple: space, birds, things to touch, and her family close by. For Lucy, the draw is darker. She is figuring out death, re-writing each ending so that they become a misunderstanding, a long nap or a trip to the shops to buy chicken. She wants to know about the people who sleep here: names, lives, the babies in their cots; mostly, she wants to know about the reunions where people discover that no-one died, and all are with their families again.

That's okay, because it's a nice story, a story I want for myself when I sit at night and miss my Grammy so much the weight of the sadness brings her to me. And the marking of death with its ritual and belief is only the theme that binds together the short stories told in this place. Each headstone suggests a life in two dozen words. And these lives caught together in the family plots tell us about extended families and a time when people stayed close to home. We can read about a history of peace and a history of war. We note, through the growing difference between 'born' and 'deceased' and the declining numbers of children listed the success of public health initiatives. If we were the type who knew about such things we could make a comment on the aesthetics of death, chemistry and ... stuff about plants (clearly we are not). And we are acknowledging an easily forgotten link between ourselves and the place and people we live among. When we go to a cemetery - and we quite often do, as a pleasant outing - we are sharing a lot more than an Addams family vibe.

Al has always joked that if we home school, he'll set the girls up with the 1984 edition of the New Knowledge Encyclopedias (which we do in fact own) and tell them to update alphabetically. But I'd take them to a cemetery and say "Take a look around, have a think, and let me know what you come up with". I'd hope they would have some very interesting things to say.

Tickled pink

2008-06-29T20:34:00.004+10:00

As a feminist, I don't love pink. I'm uncomfortable with its role as boundary marker between 'boy' and 'girl'. I don't like the way computers, bikes, play cars are splashed with that particular, searing shade to signify something as suitable for the girls. But as a person, I love pink. Not Cartland pink, a sad caricature of the warmth and loveliness. And not the pale pink you find on clothes for baby girls. But a deep, bright, rich pinkish pink - oh that I love.

I wear a bit of pink in subtle and small ways but I work in an industry where grey is considered quite a forward kind of a colour and so I try not to splash it about. But I am happy to stumble across pinkness: serendipity pink, like the flowers above, which sit under the gum tree outside my front gate. Or yesterday morning, sitting with the girls down a lane, in the sun, against the low pink fence of an old pink house. Above us deep pink camellias splashed against the winter blue sky. In our laps sat white boxes with raspberry framboise and a berry and custard brioche; we ate them with wooden spoons. Behind us a small bird, not pink but yellow breasted and blue winged, sang and flitted as Nell and I tried to catch glimpse. We sat in the pink of it all, for a perfect few moments. That kind of pink, I love.

Me! Me ! Meme!

2008-06-24T12:24:00.005+10:00

As per request of Zoe at the funky Rivetkitty , the community-minded powerhouse Daisy at Daisy patch and Jillian at the sly and sideways Flyleaf :

The rules:

1. The rules of the game get posted at the beginning

2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.

3. At the end of the post, the player tags 5 people and posts their name, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know they’ve been tagged and asking them to read your blog.

What was I doing 10 years ago?

Mid-twenties, not a good time. Al and I were living in a sad and bad share house full of passive aggression and side taking. We spent a lot of evenings walking around New Farm to get out of it all. The house is still there: a big old rendered place with a terrace on top of the garage, owned by an Italian family (it's in Hastings St, New Farm). Still, it is the only garden in which I've grown excellent peas, and I first discovered Spanish and lemon thyme, which remain two of my favourite scents. I also had some seriously gorgeous parsley.

What else? I was starting my PhD but without a lot of direction. I went to the gym. I saw movies but didn't read very much. I cooked for the house on Monday nights. I had just returned from a holiday in Thailand and Vietnam. I was kind of rudderless, which was my state of being throughout my twenties. I'm very glad to have moved on.

Five snacks I enjoy in a perfect, non weight-gaining world (and in this world as well):

Only five? Brie on oat biscuits, mars bar slice, chocolate eclairs, honey joys, Schulte's wurst, from up past Gatton.

Five snacks I enjoy in the real world:

Olives, hommous + carrot sticks, rice crackers with peanut butter or avocado, lemon and s+p, boiled peanuts (but I haven't had them for years - do people still make them?), BBQ flavoured chips (because no-one makes Atomic tomato anymore).

Five things I would do if I were a billionaire:

Tithe, travel, buy up all the wild spaces in and around my town, look after my family, establish a Montessori school in my suburb.

Five jobs that I have had:

Tutor for NESB primary school kids, waitress, tutor for ATSI tertiary students, phone survey gal, university lecturer.

Three of my habits:

I bite my nails, can never push a drawer completely closed, pull out weeds in other people's gardens.

Five places I have lived:

Hobart, Launceston, Brisbane, Melbourne, Hamilton (in Western Victoria). I regret never having had the guts to go live overseas.

Five things to do today:

Plant scavenged violets under the apple trees, buy some cream, crunch numbers, pick up Lu from kindergarten, keep the fire going. So far, so good.

Five people I want to get to know more about:

Well, in the spirit of Jillian, I dream of finding out about the following:

This guy, who used to manage my favourite cafe, Fresh, and then disappeared, replaced by the current team, under obviously angry circumstances. I didn't see him for four or five years and then three weeks ago I saw him driving an old black ute, pulling out of a driveway two streets away. And then on Saturday I saw him dragging a bag of concrete into the old house I dreamed of buying, up near the land slip areas with an orchard out the back and a copse of old pine trees sighing like the sea. All this time I've wondered, for no good reason, who is he?

Cate Blanchett, whom I saw at the airport last Tuesday, babe in arms and sons circling about, her husband rushing up ahead looking harried and just as rumpled as he appears in all the women's mags. She is so skinny and so white and I want to know, is it hard to be that skinny and that white? Are you always hungry? And where did you get that really great skirt?

The guy down the road from me, who is doing up his house with scavenged materials. He has a neat little veggie patch with lovely citrus trees and a prolific passionfruit vine. He used to own a goat called Jeremy, who loved him and brayed for his return of an evening. I've never seen anyone with the man and I want to ask, are you lonely?

The women in a house across the road from me, who never shuts up her vicious dog that goes for anyone who walks by and will start to bark when he sees someone from the top of the street. I want to know, why won't you shut up your damn dog?

The outdoors adventure couple who live at the corner and who are slowly creating a really lovely garden with a pond and pots of good things to eat. They have the tiniest house in Launceston and I want to know, how do you fit all your stuff in there? And where's the bathroom?

But I don't know if these people have blogs and so I'll ask the following mysterious types to share:

Janine at Lost in reverie (a friend for nine or so years - but what was she doing the year before we met?)
My parents at Grace Hill
Kate at Inner city garden (what do inner city folk have on a to do list on a Wednesday?)
Rach of Grandy and Baa (from Tassie to Sydney - what's the story?)
Ingrid from If .... (she's on a break but what does one snack on in a small Austrian village?)

Picnic

2008-06-20T18:23:00.006+10:00

We ate alfresco in the area yesterday. I can take or leave pink milk (banana and raspberry smoothie) and left over pannacotta consumed on a damp log in a thicket but I can't get enough of the seeing my girls turn into sisters, with a world and a love all their own.

Wine and roses

2008-06-19T19:12:00.005+10:00

Back from Melbourne: work and fun. Seeing friends I've not seen for three years, meeting their kids, drinking and talking late into the night, shocked and unsurprised that distance and time can't alter the ease of our connection. And especially, tramping into Tambo's rose paddock, with hundreds of plants in straight lines, snipping armfuls of over-blown, luscious, bold and refined flowers, snipping in the drizzle for half an hour without guilt or cost and then carrying them into the elegant little farmhouse and stuffing vases to stare at, in awe of such abundance and thankful to be part of it. Roses are always best on a kitchen table, to sit by the tea and gossip.

Holidays are a time to drink from the well. I once thought this meant lovely meals in expensive restaurants and shopping in big cities; but really, it's sitting quietly in the lives of old friends, remembering their rhythms and savoring their joy.

****

Yesterday the girls and I went into the garden and picked the first jonquils, which have popped up under the apple trees. Then into the kitchen where Lu and Nell created some elegant arrangements.

And now the smell pulls me back to an oval in the Western District of Victoria in the early 1980s, bounded by thickets of these flowers, discovered by Nicole and me as we rode our bikes around the town.

****

Today Lucy smelled a rose and murmured, transported, "Aaah, it smells like salami. So lovely".

Speechless

2008-06-12T06:36:00.004+10:00

All day long there are words, words, words. My girls talk, and so Tuesday, Thursday and Friday it's chat, chat, chat, mainly about babies, horses, dinosaurs, dragons, kittens and dogs. At work I have the same conversation about the same issues three times a week, I meet people, I write-edit-write-edit-write-edit, and send off a million emails; all my words get used up on things I am paid to say. By the end of each day there are almost no words left; I look for some silence, sitting on the couch and staring at the fire, maybe reading a book. I have all these thoughts swirling but no words to catch them. Sometimes I feel trapped in the quiet but mostly it's okay: some things don't need any words at all.

Sunday morning

2008-06-08T19:12:00.003+10:00

This morning was smoggy and grey outside and we spent it sitting by the fire. Nell bumbled and Lu and Al, and then I, began Narnia. After three years of spot, dot, rot, with a little bit of Lynley Dodd and some Seuss to keep us sane, the strong, wry, elegant words of C.S. Lewis are a joy to bat around. And Lu loved it, too: we're already almost through The Magician's Nephew, and the promise of a Lucy, snow and animals that talk in the next book keep her turning the pages.

We can rarely be sure where and when our kids pick up their words but one day of Lewis and 'vanish', 'tea', 'witch' are part of the lexicon. Which is just fine, but I can't wait until 'by gum' and 'I say' enters our our world.

****

And on language, Nell, who has around about twenty or thirty words to her credit can spit out 'yuk' with a clarity and conviction that makes me quail. Combining Nell's 'yuk' and Lucy's drawled and withering 'disgusting', mealtimes are somewhat of a trial at the moment.

Wish fulfillment

2008-06-07T06:28:00.003+10:00

Around a couple of corners, up the lane and behind a falling down fence lies a whole yard of what we call 'Santa Clauses'. Were they linked to wishes in childhood, cousin to blowing out candles all in one go, shooting stars, four leaf clovers and the rest? It's a great idea for keeping kids quiet: I remember my friends and I spending hours searching through clover for the elusive leaf and rummaging about for a specially marked flower amongst the yellow "daisies", which were some kind of aggressive weed. Not that I particularly wistful or wishful child - whining was more my thing. Nor did I plan to use my wishes for good - oh, I always claimed I would wish for world peace, to fit in with the other morally hoity-toity girls, but really, my plan was to wish for a million extra wishes and then use them at my leisure. No need for such loop-holes in this backyard.

2008-06-04T19:11:00.005+10:00

Today, the girls were at their carer's house and I worked from home. At lunch, Al came by and we went for a short walk, just around the corner and up a lane, so that I could show him a pink room in a house. We held hands and my body remembered itself at twenty-seven, in those lonely and confusing basil-scented days (were my twenties spent in gardens, lonely and confused?): no kids in arms and on shoulders, no prams and strollers, no toys that were Absolutely Necessary when we started out and discarded twenty metres down the road, no pulling dogs, no nappy bags, no work bags, no bus-is-leaving-in-ten-minutes-and-I-think-I-can-make-it-if-I-walk-faster
-but-not-too-fast-there's-nothing-sadder-than-running-for-the-bus-and-
just-missing-it-all-those-people-staring-at-your-sad-mistimed-self, no deadlinedeadlinedeadline, not even an ipod. I felt so light, I was dizzy.

Three hours later I pushed the bloody big pram, bane of my existence, large as a hay cart and just about as manoeuvrable, back home from the carers, laden down with: 2x screaming kids (reasons: 'cold feet', 'tired arm' and 'want yoghurt', and unspecified); 1x nappy bag filled with muddy clothes; 3x socks + 2x pairs of gum boots; 2x under-clothed baby dolls; 2x tupperware containers with half-eaten lunches; 1x plastic bag holding 1x tub Nuttlex and 1x carton soy milk; 1x over-eager labradoodle and 1x lagging greyhound. Two hundred and seventy-three strange and lovely years have passed since my twenties, and I'm not sorry about it, not a bit.

Driving the point home

2008-06-04T08:43:00.003+10:00

One of Lucy's favourite stories:

Once upon a time, there was a naughty little girl, who smoked and also liked to light fires; she was a FIRE BUG. One day, she lit a fire at the beach, and all the grasses burned and all the shrubs in the back dunes, and all the trees as well. And the animals had no where to go, they ran away from the fire which burned and burned and burned. And the poor animals had to run to the city because their homes burned, poor things, and they were very sad. And the beach was ruined and people couldn't swim there and people were sad too. But the police caught that naughty firebug and sent her in front of a judge in a COURT OF LAW. The judge said she was very naughty and sent her to jail where there was no telly and no nice food. And serve her right, that naughty firebug.

Our kids pick up all sorts of cues that we are not even aware of. But I feel it is useful to really hammer home important life lessons. Subtlety is for the weak.

This story also makes me realise that even after decades working as a sociologist, I am clearly seduced by a punishment rather than rehabilitation paradigm.

****

Lucy has just been introduced to Struwwelpeter and she loves it. It's falling apart and so she's not allowed to touch - which adds to its mystery and desirability - and in the morning over cornflakes we read about kids getting burned while playing with matches and starving because they won't eat the soup. I've not yet introduced her to the kid who sucks his thumbs and has them cut off by a ruthless scissor-hand creature; as an erstwhile thumbsucker I still find that a little too close to home.

Couldn't give a fig

2008-06-01T11:53:00.003+10:00

Sick, again. Al had tonsilitis last weekend and into the beginning of the week; I held on until Friday and am now wallowing in unspecified illness. How is it that no-one has splashed a red cross above our door?

I wandered out into the sun in the back garden yesterday afternoon, to indulge in a little morose drifting about. And there, in the far corner, next to the compost bins, on its small and sorely neglected tree, I came across the last remaining fig. It has escaped the birds, the kids, and the frosts, and was perfectly, sweetly, sexily ripe; purple and pink and pale, pale green; an unexpected gift hanging off the elegant bare branches. Normally, I share my finds with the girls, to encourage them to see the garden as a place of promise and deliciousness, but not when it comes to figs. No-one loves figs as much as I do, and these are my selfish delight, the one bit of garden produce I keep all for myself.

When I first moved down here, I lived in a small terrace house that backed onto a lane. (For the local readers: on Balfour St, the first terrace next to the Sporties hotel.) Two houses down, the yard was filled with massive fig trees, with branches that hung over the fence. When the fig season came I would wander down each morning, collect an armful of ripe fruit and then sit on my deck under the banksia rose and grape vines and gobble the goodies in the cool morning air. Even after we moved, I would sometimes take a walk past the fence at an appropriate time of year and renew my acquaintance with those generous trees.

Driving past the lane the other day, I noticed the trees have been heavily pruned so that there can be no more sharing with the neighbours. Even though the branches will no doubt grow back, and even though I hadn't visited for a couple of years, I felt that one of my special places had been irrevocably altered, and I was washed, inexplicably, in a subtle yearning for those lonely, confusing and fig-filled days.

Slide night :: cold

2008-05-23T19:38:00.002+10:00

My brothers: Peter, Robbie, Matthew.

Whatever happened to parkas and big, cone shaped beanies? Whatever happened to daggy kids? Maybe we were always the exception; Dad used to be so embarrassed by some of our looks. I think he was most distressed by Mum patching our jeans with huge red hearts and orange squares; from memory, we thought these trousers were pretty darn cool. Anyway, I look at this photo and begin to understand why my kids never look put together - family history, if not genetics, takes childhood elegance out of my reach.

Cold hands, warm heart

2008-05-22T17:38:00.003+10:00

I walk the dogs early in the morning, in the dark. Today it was so cold I jogged to get warm. I know I'm not the runner I once was back in my prime, but the greyhound didn't even break into a trot as I pounded along the road; rather insensitive, I thought

***

When I walk the dogs I go by a small cottage. Each morning, a bearded man sits on the verandah in a short sleeved shirt, drinking a cup of tea. Today, for the first time this year, there was ice on the ground. I was waiting on tenterhooks to see - would he be out today? And there he was, drinking his cuppa in a short sleeved shirt, 5.30 am and the temperature less than zero. I was comforted to see the big man with his brew, starting his day regardless of the weather.

***

I was the only person on the bus this morning, until it stopped to pick up a young guy, about sixteen, rumpled in a hoodie and baggy jeans. He was shaking with the cold. As he stood to get off at the Centrelink stop, Paul Kelly's Winter Coat started on my ipod; with that melancholy voice in my ears, the shivering boy seemed so impossibly sad. These kids, sometimes they break my heart.

***

I have poor circulation in my hands - they go white with the cold, no matter how warm the room or how thick the coat. Today, a workmate suggested I get some fingerless gloves. This is very sensible advice but ... I'm not a fingerless glove kind of a gal. Only women with really elegant fingers can wear these gloves and lovely though I am, I've never attained elegance.

2008-05-19T06:07:00.003+10:00

When we first started gardening at this house we were shocked by the state of the soil. The back, which is now the veggie garden and orchard, has been leveled with some really nasty fill - largely clay and grey matter (maybe concrete dust?), and the whole area was used as a holding pen for four large, mean dogs, which compacted and poisoned the soil. Even my Dad, who is pretty blase about bad conditions (he's of the 'if you plant it, it will grow' school), made a few shocked remarks. No worms - nothing living at all - and lots of those spirit mixer cans and broken beer bottles.

I've spent the last five years planting green manure and digging it in, collecting free horse poo and our chook droppings and them in, making compost and digging it in, digging trenches for scraps and covering them over, making leaf mould from the leaves I pick up around the neighbourhood and digging it in. We've also mulched with straw, which I don't love because it is an over-wintering hide-out for some bright and prolific sap-suckers, and weeds, which IMHO work much better. There's been way more digging in than pulling out. This makes me sound like a patient and committed gardener; I'm not but I am pig headed and hate being beaten at a task. Things are better now, though it's still a thrill to find a worm and not a beer cap. The soil, rather than the bits of the garden you can see, is my true achievement in this place and I'm very proud that if we ever do leave, we're leaving the land in a much better state than we found it.

Now, plants self-seed increasingly wildly, like the bok choy above (I think it's bok choy - that's the thing with self-seeding: you tend to lose track of what's what). In one pocket, there're enough little plants to make a salad for every night of the week. It's become such a generous piece of land. But still, it's a struggle not to dig it all in. It's a compulsion - yesterday I looked at all those juicy greens and thought, "they look delicious but think how good they'd be for the soil".

I fought it, though, and we had a lovely salad for tea.

TGIF

2008-05-16T21:53:00.004+10:00

Last day at a full time job, at least for the next six months or so. I forgot my glasses and left early when my eyes began to hurt. We went to the park. For the next little while, there'll be a lot more sentences like that last one, I'm hoping, and a lot more swinging on swings, kicking through the leaves and a slowing down of my days.

Thoughts about words

2008-05-14T08:35:00.000+10:00

What I'm thinking of as I gear up to Big Thoughts:

At breakfast:
Lu: What's hommous made of?
Kris: Chickpeas and tahini and lemon juice and garlic all mashed up together.
Lu: What's psydon made of?
Kris: Siden?
Lu (patiently but a little patronisingly, stretching out the word so I can learn it): Psy-don.
Kris: I don't know. Do you know what it's made of?
Lu: Picture frames.
Kris: It doesn't sound very good to eat.
Lu: It's delicious.

****

Lucy can say Pachycephlasaurus and I can't. The student has surpassed the master

****

Isaac Hayes realeased an album in 1969 called Hot Buttered Soul. Today, we live in a sadly ungroovy age.

Things turned out to be different on a Tuesday

2008-05-14T05:43:00.003+10:00

Thanks for all the kind words and advice when I was feeling down. Making decisions when we are sick is a bad idea but conversely, I think illness can strip away the veneer of coping and allows us, in our vulnerability, to be more truthful about what we want and what we can have - essentially, it lets us re-think what matters. So there are changes in this household and they were put in place last Tuesday; hey, it'll all be different on Tuesday!

When Al and I had our kids we made a commitment to not having them in child care. This wasn't - and isn't - a reflection on other people's choices; it comes from our own experiences as kids, from our desire to parent our own kids intensively, and it is facilitated by living in a place where it's possible (in theory) to live on one income. But it hasn't quite worked out like that. Some of the unraveling has been easy: Lucy wanted to start going to kinder and we found a really good one, quiet and relaxed, with sofas and yoga, and Lu loves it all. Some changes have been harder: it's clear that living on one income is not possible for us. We have an average size mortgage, no significant petrol or transport costs, a modest lifestyle but still our carefully stored buffer has dwindled to nothing - financially, we can't do what we set out to do. Lots of people do - this is obvious reading all those lovely blogs about parenting and living frugally - but we can't. In the end, we need money in the bank (this is a product of my own childhood experiences) and we like to spend money on some fun things occasionally. Sometimes I am disappointed by this but like most people I'm a product of my culture, and while I can wriggle about in it, it settles on my shoulders and it's hard to shake.

So, we are about to become a two income family, kind of. Al has found The Job, the job he has been looking for since he was seventeen, the job that might finally fit him and make him feel happy to go to work in the morning, and he'll be doing that four days a week. And as for me, well it turns out all those years of working like a man have paid off in some serious long service leave, which my dear and lovely bosses will allow me to take as 2.5 days a week over the course of the next six months, while staying on full pay (don't hate me, please - I am fully aware of just how good my work conditions are). So I get to come back into the realm of the domestic, to regain some knowledge of the routines of our home and the nuances of my kids. Nell doesn't have a lot of words and the words she has aren't clear - Al can understand her and I can't; I want to learn to understand my little one. The girls love to bake and read and play; I want to give them my time to do that. I'll get to pick Lu up from kinder, I'll get to ride the bus with them to the museum with the trains, I'll get to swear under my breath as I push the overladen, hummer-size pram up the hill to our house. And I get to go to work and do the thinking and writing that sustains me in a different way.

This is our way of getting some balance back. More paid work in the household but for me at least, and somewhat counter-intuitively, more space in my days. Al gets a chance to re-engage with an adult world. The girls get happier parents (I never really understood the importance of this until the last few months) and lots more of their mother with very little disruption to their lives. This is not a happy ending because this parenting gig is never going to end. But a hopeful beginning of the next little time in our lives.

These are our choices but they are choices that are bound up in a set of structures: social networks, educational opportunities, class, ethnicity, gender, workplace agreements, local housing markets, government spending priorities. But our particular path is also shaped by luck: I have good, good managers who personally understand the importance of work-life balance; Al happened to meet a person who opened the door to his new employment. It's a reminder that sitting in judgment on other people's choices is an act of ignorance, if for no other reason than we can never be properly aware of the luck and structure that open and close what's available to us.

Slide night :: one wage wardrobes

2008-05-11T19:45:00.002+10:00

Here's a photo of my Aunt Leona, my mother, my Nanny and my Grammy. I was thinking about the incomes of these women who raised families on a single wage, but it's not so simple as that. Leona and Nanny married farmers, and as farmers' wives contributed to the household income as much as their husbands did. Grammy married a salary-man turned small business owner; she worked in the shop and raised money through her chickens and eggs. Mum was the only one of these four who was a SAHM not directly bringing in an income, and that was until we kids were in primary school when she went back to work as a librarian. We were poor - not eviction poor but money was tight enough that my parents relied on credit, help from their own parents and a big veggie garden to keep the household going. On one memorable occasion they scraped up spilled rice from the side of the road, and we were picking grit out of the fried rice for about two years. Something to look into, I think: how hard was it for our own parents to make ends meet?; what were their expectations?; and what did they do to make the daily juggling of money a little easier?

Regardless, these women knew how to get maximum colour and pattern for their dollar - a lot of bang for their buck:

I planted a seed

2008-05-11T17:02:00.004+10:00

Early on in our lives together Lucy and I spent a lot of time in the garden but lately I've been out there alone. Sometimes Lu will stroll out with some seeds and chuck them about yelling 'Broadcast, broadcast, I'm broadcasting the seeds' but generally gardening has been a solitary past-time, squashed in between naps and nappies, books and pretending to be an attacking Allosaurus. I've assumed that my habit of hammering the point home hard has lead to some strong anti=gardening feeling among the locals.

Today I was out watering and surveying the estate; I looked behind me and there were Lu and Nell, turning over the bricks and very efficiently stamping on the slugs. And this evening, Lu requested rhubarb for dessert. She bent down and jerked out the stalks with perfect form. Then she wandered to the apple tree and pulled off a couple to stew up as well. These are not things you teach a kid - how do you specify the twist of the wrist to loosen an apple and keep the spur, the appropriate force of the yank needed to get the rhubarb stem out at the base? This is stuff you learn without thinking. And now, thanks to the garden, Lu and Nell will never want for slightly tart desserts best served with cream. And is there any greater gift than dessert?

Mouse house

2008-05-09T14:47:00.002+10:00

There's a mouse in the kitchen and he's not shy, he's militant - a militant mouse. I've seen him three or four times and just then, when getting a drink, I heard a rustle behind the bins. I abandoned the drink.

In different circumstances I'd be looking into another cat around about now. But what with the greyhound, that's not really an option anymore. That dog's very glamorous but now I'm thinking 'What use is she?'. Do greyhounds chase mice? They chase small furry things - maybe I should give it a try.

Al says he's going to put traps out. I'm opposed to this on principle but it's not inconceivable that one day I may need to use the kitchen, and that's not going to happen unless the critter moves on. He's militant, and so he might need more than a friendly suggestion. I think it is time for force - a justified war.

My golly, I'm scared of mice.

2008-05-08T06:34:00.004+10:00

I went out into my poor neglected garden on Sunday. It's a forgiving place: sporadic and resentful watering over the summer, little weeding or fertilising, almost no company save for next-door's orange cat who creeps over the fence and mooches about, but still there were sights to see. There's a carpet of self-sown rocket, patches of Asian veggies (also self-sown), and the daffodils, ranunculas and even some freesias are up. There's a sense of loose and relaxed abundance - very Jackie French. It seems my aim has been fulfilled with very little effort on my part.

I planted some flowers, all rooted in my past: stocks, flanders poppies and Queen Anne's lace. The stocks remind me of the annual-heavy gardens I had as a little girl, stocked by a nursery-man whose kids went to the school my Dad established. The poppies are for rememberance, and make me think of uncles and grandfathers who fought overseas. The Queen Anne's lace is exciting - I'd not seen it available before expect in a 'good bug mix' that didn't germinate in the dry summer; I only know of it through one the favourite books of a teenage me, Vita Sackville-West's Family History. Oh, it's the most lush of melodramas: love gained, love lost, death from a broken heart (and possibly an open window). And it has a line: "She hesitated, thinking of the Queen Anne's Lace in the lanes and the dogroses in the hedgerows", which has stayed with me since I read the book when I was 16 (a very impressionable age for love and betrayal and hesitation).

So on Sunday I planted a little bit of my own country lane in a patch that is destined to hold the rather less romantic sounding 'insect attractants'. I may as well seek out a dogrose too. There's something rather lovely in the word.

Wordy

2008-05-03T19:28:00.003+10:00

Lu: I think there will be dolls at the Mission store.
Kris: There might be, darling, we'll see.
Lu: There will be.
Kris: Well, soon we will see.
Lu: Please Mum, don't make my sure unsure.

My kid, she's got the knack of words.

***

Things here are changing, we think for the good. Thanks to all for kind words and thoughts.

agley

2008-04-28T19:33:00.005+10:00

Yesterday we went to a park where a brass band played in the rotunda and great big dahlias overbalanced in a single bed. It was sunny and cold and reminded me of what winter will be.

It was good to be out of the house after a week of illness. I was down with 'a virus' (thanks $70 doctor visit) with complimentary bacterial throat infection (oh, another $70?, well, sure); Al had the classic tonsillitis, which feels rather less childish than its ice cream and jelly connotations suggest. The girls have been low grade sick for weeks.

The last days have been horrible. It's hard when one party is sick; it's impossible when both parents are down with no-one to step in (my brains dribbled out of my ears after the fourth hour of children's television). But mostly, being ill threw into relief how utterly unhappy we are in our lives at the moment. The girls remain ... oh, difficult. We have almost no money. We can't find cash for a new pair of shoes for Al, let alone to send our kids to a school we feel good about. I work long hours on a professional wage, pay awe inspiring amounts in tax, and yet I have one pair of jeans and they cost $7, and I can't afford to get my hair cut. All the things I love - eating out, yoga, theatre, new books - have gone. It's hardly the underclass and we're not near to eviction or starvation - and I still have my painting - but our buffer has gone. As I've written about before, I've been frugal as a choice but now it's enforced and as much as I wish I could say otherwise, it sucks. It's grinding and boring and worrying.

When we decided to have kids we decided that one of us would stay home with them. We realised we would be taking a financial hit through this choice but that was okay because I really believed that for our family this was the best way, the path to a measured and free childhood for the girls, and a happy and relaxed family for us all. It seems those best laid plans are algey, and we're enduring the annoyances and rather larger sacrifices for not much at all. The girls are patently not happy and nor are we.

At dinner the other night Lucy said, "No-one likes your soup, Mum". I cried. It summed up how everything I've been trying for seems so irrelevant to my kids (yeah, I know, welcome to parenthood); Lucy doesn't want a slow childhood, she wants a pony and swimming lessons and as many dinosaur books and movies as I can fit in her bedroom (Nell, I don't know - she really like tofu and dogs). I feel like a loser: I'm a breadwinner who can't make enough money for my family to live on, a mother whose kids hate her meals, a hippy who wants to buy shoes, and my waist measurement puts me in the high risk category for diabetes.

I'm forgetting what we're trying to do here. ...

2008-04-20T21:02:00.004+10:00

A nice day: family bushwalk at Liffey Falls, followed by gelato (as all bushwalks should be) and a walk around Westbury admiring motorcycles (Nell and Al) and dahlias (Lu and me), and then a happy family dinner. We felt like a unit.

Autumn

2008-04-19T20:22:00.006+10:00

Five years down here and it's still a shock to walk into Princes Square and see the leaves tumbling from the trees and lying deep on the grass. For the first time, the kids understood just how much fun this autumn thing can be.

I take all my parenting tips from the Hollywood stars

2008-04-18T20:52:00.004+10:00

I never thought Angelina Jolie and I had much in common, save for us both being partnered up to hotties and looking awkward when we wear high heels. But turns out, we share the greatest bond of all: we're really crap mothers.

I think women's magazines are poisonous, what with their misogyny and those dodgy clairvoyants, so I never read them, save in doctors' surgeries (when it's like anaesthetic to dull the one hour wait for my four o'clock appointment) and the chip and fizzy drink aisle of Coles, where I wander forlornly, wondering who thought getting rid of Atomic Tomato flavoured crisps was a justifiable way forward for Samboy. And here I read that grave fears are held for Ange and Brad's kids. Grave fears are held because there'll be six under six (I only ever got to two under two), the kids fight, they're jealous of each other and they're given junk food (which according to a dietician is a 'ticking time bomb') to eat. Truly, these kids are doomed, damned and betrayed by such cruelty, as their clearly disturbed behaviour (Pushing! Fighting over toys!) shows.

I have no idea if any of the reports are true (though I tend to doubt the reliability of 'sources' and 'those close to the couple') or if people believe them, and can't think it actually affects A & B in anyway to have this written about them, but it really shits me that these kinds of messages are spewed into my world for the punters' weekly dose of moral indignation.

In the last day or so Nell, Lu or both have:

* eaten marshmallows and green cordial before bed and then fallen asleep without brushing their teeth;
* watched the whole series of Walking With Dinosaurs, twice;
* Eaten paint;
* Eaten chook food (in my defense, it was organic);
* Head butted and body slammed each other; in one memorable instance, Lucy kicked Nell in the face and Nell bit her toe (just like those python crushing the elephant/ elephant falls to the ground and crushes the python scenarios);
* Competed constantly for my attention;
* Screamed loudly and annoyingly in public places;
* Always wanted what the other one had;;
* Tantrumed because there'd be no playing in the dog park mud today.

And while I don't think these reflect the very best parenting practices and kiddie attitudes, I'm okay with all this (perhaps a little worried about the paint). Because I'm a good parent and my kids are good kids.

That magazine had a lot in common with the brouhaha over the 'I hate kids' posts a month or so ago, over at feministing. The posts annoyed me but I was really pissed off by the comments, here and at other sites, that often took a 'tolerant' stand of 'I don't blame the kids, I blame the parent'. People's whining about kids behaving badly reflects a belief that a) kids spring fully formed from the head of Zeus, all clued up on social rules and self-discipline; b) have no claim to freedom of movement or freedom of association; and c) that adults conform to social, legal and moral rules (cf. any early Saturday morning outside of the Saloon on Charles Street/ any other pub anywhere).

And I'm kind of sick of people holding parents to a standard of behaviour, a clarity of judgement, a commitment to purpose, that we don't expect of the childless. I'm not talking about systematic cruelty or on-going abuse but the daily stumblings as we try our best. People are fine about their 'addiction' to chocolate, their lazy Friday take-out noodles, their bludging in front of the telly, their spending money on expensive shoes instead of rent, their failed attempts to start exercising or whatever other quirky vices we all lay claim to. And that's fine, because we are all lazy and tired and forgetful and all the other things that stop us being The Very Best We Can Possibly Be. Yes, I do have a duty to my kids' welfare that is different to the duty we as adults have to our own selves, but my kids eat a lot less junk food and watch a lot less telly than the average Australian who frowns when the girls eat a brownie and whine annoyingly amongst a self-satisfied cafe crowd.

And I think there's a kind of irony in that magazine, with that article, sitting right next to the Salt and Vinegar chips and the Fanta in Coles.

Focus of attention

2008-04-18T08:38:00.005+10:00

There's an old man down the road from where we live, and he keeps a classically old man garden: trim and clipped and nary a leaf where it shouldn't be. Around the edges of his front lawn he grows dahlias. I'm not sure if they're prize-winning dahlias but they are of a startling size and colour and I wouldn't be surprised to see them in a wine bottle at the next horticultural society event at St Albie's hall (I love flower shows).

It's not how I grow flowers; I'm more an all in together, how much can we fit in this space kind of a gal. But there's something to be said for setting things out so carefully, so evenly spaced, so that each plant, each great big bloom, draws my focus in tightly. Each morning on my way to work I walk past the white picket fence and stop for a moment to look at the architecture and the more-varied-than-you-might-think colours of the dahlias. Sometimes, when he's feeling particularly gallant after one of our chats, the old man (is his name Tom? I have a feeling it is ..) cuts me a few flowers to take home, and hands them over with a wink.

I love this one the most, it's like the beginnings of an Eric Carle flower, bearing the brush strokes proudly.

I'm timing my trips home to catch the old man watering his garden, so that I can ask for a stub of the root. Somehow, this seems less bold than knocking on his front door, though I'm not sure why; what gardener isn't thrilled when someone loves a plant so much they want to take a little bit home?

Good night

2008-04-15T19:32:00.003+10:00

After dinner we raced through the back streets with the girls in matching yellow prams screaming 'faster, faster', the dogs running beside. We passed the little white cottages on the corner and the owner stepped down from the verandah to give us a bag of passionfruit. He had been sitting, waiting for someone to come by, so that he could share the bounty; tonight, we were the lucky ones.

So this weekend, pavlova.

Slide night :: the good looking side of the family

2008-04-14T19:41:00.004+10:00

I get my work ethic and my unforgiving standards from my father's side of my family. But my charm, elegance and good looks in a hat are inherited from my mother's.

Top: Great-grandmother Agnes Passmore and great aunt Nora
Bottom: Grandad and Uncle Wal.

Future perfect

2008-04-13T19:21:00.004+10:00

Back from Brisbane, I spent a few hours today in the garden. Spreading muck, sowing some broad beans, lettuce and broccoli, but mostly planting flowers: 60 mixed iris, sweet peas and Queen Anne's Lace, to keep company with the multitude of freesias, the 100 ranunculas, last year's daffodils and the 140 tulips still sitting in the vegetable crisper. If the plans unfurl in the way I hope, we will drift in colour for months.

Anyone who writes about gardening can't help but state that the planting of seeds is an act of faith; no matter how simple the science, there's something quite surprising in the green from the brown, the pink (or red, or yellow, or white) from the green. Today, the planting of flowers seemed even more a statement of hope than usual. When I think of that loveliness, it sits in a vase in our house - flowers in the garden are too far away for me. And in that image, the vase sits in a house that is serene, sharing space with a family that is happy and calm. A family, indeed, with a rather different emotional tenor to the one we shared today.

Today, Lucy behaved horribly, so horribly I can't quite remember a time when she did not (though I am almost sure that time was only about 48 hours ago). So horribly that is was all I - all we - could do not to scream at her, to hit out hard. Al and I don't physically punish the girls, and days like today strengthen that resolve despite - and because - we want so badly to smack her. On days like today that smack could only be vindictive. On days like today we come to the brink of something very harsh and I'm not sure what stops me - self-discipline perhaps, sometimes drifting into my happy place, a deep breath, screaming in my head, or the intervention of Al (who only fifteen minutes ago was in the same position). We're good and kind people, our own parents were great role models, we have a whole set of financial, social and emotional resources and still we come so close.

As a childless person I was blithely judgmental of any parent who hit their child in anger or laziness or frustration or resentment or any of the 100 other emotional states we are not meant to experience as parents, and to be honest I still often am. But my goodness, the only difference between me and those I judge is that my hand stops barely short.

I love my kids, it goes without saying. But sometimes I need to say it, to remind myself that it's true, and to hold on to that image of a vase of flowers in a happy home.

2008-04-06T14:00:00.003+10:00

In my time, I have thrown the odd, gorgeous party. Once, outside under the mango tree, with my own basil-cured salmon and enough champagne to swim in. Outside, under another mango tree, on picnic rugs, with candles all around (a guest, Paul, who knows a thing or two about hosting, told me I was a woman who knew how to use candles), ending with a pear and brie tart. Another time, in winter, serving seared kangaroo fillet and a mushroom risotto to good friends who brought good wine. At the time, and in hindsight, all really rather lovely.

I've also been a guest at the odd gorgeous party: farewell do's in pink mansions by the river, lights from the city sparkling on the pool; tipsy dinners on the verandahs of old Queenslanders, conversation sharpening as the wine flowed; a catch up lunch of corn from the garden and butterflied lamb, barbecued on Paul's deck and eaten under a grape vine, followed by sundaes with raspberries from his garden. My friend Tambo has made me peach bellinis for one birthday and Maggie Beer's quails in a fig bath for another (don't believe the book - removing those backbones and ribs is much trickier than you are lead to believe).

Today, I hosted my first proper kid's birthday party, a few weeks after Lu's actual birthday. Honey joys, chocolate crackles, and not quite enough Cheezels, red and green cordial, a cake with sky blue icing and a Tyrannosaurus marked out in sprinkles and smarties; carrot sticks that the kids didn't even sniff. Plus, lots of space in the park and ducks to feed. And balloons. I was hailed by the younger set as the hostess with the mostest.

Whereas I once measured the success of a gathering by the volume of the laughter and the lateness of the leave taking, today I was pleased that no-one got stung by a wasp or run down by the Little Athletics cross country carnival that was racing past the picnic table.

Now it's back to Brisbane to work for a week, taking Lucy to play with the grandparents. Grandad, Meema, be warned - there are plans to scare you at the airport tonight with much roaring like a dinosaur.

Music to my ears

2008-04-01T13:53:00.000+11:00

Lucy only ever sings two songs: I'm a Little Teapot and The Old Grey Mare (she ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be, ain't what she used to be ..... ad infinitum).

I've really never had expectations about what she would sing, but if I'd been asked, The Old Grey Mare wouldn't have made it onto my list of top five most likely.

Less unexpectedly, Nell loves to bop around to Wake Me Up (Before You Go-Go). Because it just keeps getting better and better, and it's poetry speaks to any age.

I think it might be Tuesday

2008-03-30T20:34:00.005+11:00

Down here, there's relief in the air: it's getting colder, and the ground is wet from rain these past days. The dark drops quickly and unexpectedly soon after the girls are in bed. Some days there are spaces when Lu and Nell play together and I can sit and stare into the middle distance or read or play on the internet. I've found a good yoga teacher. I've planted lots of freesias and very few broad beans; the bulbs from last year are already rising up under the apple tree with no effort on my part. It's been suggested it's time to start thinking about promotion at work.

Last night I walked across the park in the dusk, feeling pretty and singing out loud to The Church and The Triffids. I went out to dinner with women who have appeared rather suddenly in my life and who seem to like me. We ate Thai and drank wine and talked and laughed. I felt like someone resembling myself.

I used to share an office with a woman who was mad - sweet in many ways but really quite mad. (It wasn't a friendship that ended well.) When I was in a bad patch she told me: 'It can all be different on Tuesday'. In the dark times these past eighteen months it's been hard to believe that life could be anything other than what it is; time and joy were suspended. But things change, sometimes creeping towards difference and sometimes switching so quickly a person can lose their bearings. It can be hard on Monday night and happy by Tuesday noon. Joy cometh in the morning.

There have been many, many times these past months when I've believed I'd only ever remember happiness, that I wouldn't live in it again. But this Sunday night I think that maybe (knock wood, fingers crossed, God willing) the longed for Tuesday might have finally dawned. I worry that in writing this my Tuesday will slip away (I don't walk under ladders either, and freeze when a mirror cracks) but Crazy Kate gave me a gift when she said it to me, and without sounding too awfully, painfully pretentious and oracular I just wanted re-state that hope for someone else:

It can all be different on Tuesday.

Three

2008-03-25T12:12:00.004+11:00

Yesterday my first baby turned three. I can't quite remember the tiny dollop Lu was when the midwife first placed her in my arms but I remember that I recognised her immediately, because she was formed from a piece of my heart, much as Eve came from the rib of Adam. I had no expectations of how she would be but I knew when I held her that Lucy was exactly what we desired, even if we didn't know what that was; she was the perfect fit for our family though we had no plans about how we would manage the jigsaw.

But even as I recognised her, I couldn't possibly have foreseen what she has become. How could we know that she would be so remarkable and challenging and divine? That she would correct my pronunciation of dinosaur names, look at pictures of tornadoes on Flickr, sing when no-one is noticing but never ever dance. I would never have imagined the Lu would love a very few people, and love them with unwavering passion and loyalty; that she would spend hours in her head, dragging us along behind as Mummy raptor and Skippy and Fireman Sam and Daddy Wolf and puppy Nell and a dozen other characters. I didn't know she would climb rocks; wake up crying because she forgot to dream; argue the point; paint storms; love roses. When someone looks at her she stares back unsmiling, unwavering. She won't walk when she can skip or run or gallop like a horse. She owns the space she moves through; she rarely wears clothes, she likes to pee in the garden - who knew this is the person she'd become?

I've never understood why people want a girl. You don't get a girl, you get someone so unique, so unexpected, so utterly and completely themselves, there's not much connection to whatever it is we think a girl will be.

I wanted a child and I got a Lu, and she is exactly the right Lu for me.

Happy birthday, best Boo, love Mamma.

Just plain wrong

2008-03-21T09:58:00.003+11:00

A tomato plant popped up amongst my cucumbers and beans, and it's still going strong even while all Amish Pastes, Tiny Tims, Olmovics, San Marzanos and the rest have given up under the hot sun and my non-committal watering. It has huge fruits but they are not turning red - I think I've got a Verna Orange on my hands. And much as I love my properly ripened tomatoes, I can't bring myself to eat these. They are orange, not red, and in my world, that's just plain wrong. It's in the league of some of my other strict and inexplicable garden rules:

* Purple leaves are just plain wrong.
* Lilac roses are just plain wrong.
* Daffodils with any pink (or 'salmon') on them are just plan wrong.
* Those little round carrots - the ones that aren't long and pointed - are just plain wrong.
* Black radishes are just plain wrong.
* Freesias without a scent are just plain wrong.

Just something to remember if you ever plan to offer me a salad.

Slide night :: Fashion rules are for wimps

2008-03-18T21:13:00.002+11:00

(for bluemilk)

All through my childhood my mother was brave enough to let me choose my own clothes.

Now, I have really great bags and some funky shoes. As a general rule, I don't look too crazy at all. Sometimes, I even look quite nice. And I never mix my plaids, spots and stripes. Proof we learn from our mistakes.

2008-03-17T20:12:00.003+11:00

The old house down the road, the one I was worried would be knocked down and replaced by a McMansion, is safe. The new owners are living in a caravan parked on the road while they a rebuild the interior. When it's all done, they are holding a barbeque so that the neighbourhood can come by and see what they have done. They're getting rid of the roses but I can't have them: the local women have already claimed the plants (they're vultures, these long time ladies). I dream of these sorts of people buying houses in my suburb. I love that they acknowledge the interest and ownership of the the people who already live around here, I love that they respect what already exists, I love that they are offering free meat.

Over it

2008-03-16T14:28:00.005+11:00

In the northern hemisphere bloggers are complaining about their long cold winters and their need for spring. Here I am so over summer. It is autumn and it is 29 degrees (celsius), which is completely inappropriate. Tasmania should know better. The dirt has gone to dust and I suck it in when I dig in the garden; the 'lawn' has never looked so sad and uninviting; the flies ... the flies! the flies!

We are currently trying to rebuild a bit of a financial buffer and so have imposed a limit on petrol: one tank per month. That's almost gone and it's only the 15th, and so there's no trip to the beach. I am dying for something cool and blue.

Thus, I planted some of these:

Delayed gratification, yes, but cool and calming and something to get me through these dog days of summer.

Old School

2008-03-15T11:44:00.003+11:00

We just bought some flat bread and it sells itself as 'first made by the Ancient Phoenicians'.

That's old school.

Maybe still a little tired

2008-03-13T08:06:00.000+11:00

After many months - no, years - of not enough sleep things are finally getting a little better. Both girls have been pretty much sleeping through the night for a couple of months, and now it seems Al and I are learning how to do it as well.

But this morning I tried to open my office door with a banana. It didn't work. So I tried again.

It may be I haven't quite recovered from the three and a half years of sleep defecit. It may be we are all lucky I don't operate heavy machinery in my job.

Plural

2008-03-11T21:05:00.004+11:00

Yes, Tamsin, dogs-with-an-s.

If I had world enough and time, I'd have a tribe of kids and a pack of dogs. As it is, it's two of one and one and a half of the other. We're fostering a rescued greyhound. When I say 'fostering' I mean having a greyhound stay with us, knowing that she's unlikely to be placed and so is a de facto member of the family.

Her name is Squeak, which is very inappropriate; she drifts along so elegantly it really should be Saskia or Anna. I feel like someone out of a Russian melodrama when she walks along beside me. She's regal and gorgeous with big brown eyes. She's very patient with the girls who cannot believe she's not a horse (I don't think she's aware of her rights as a pet and so puts up with a lot more than our labradoodle, who's forever looking at us with barely disguised resentment). She wants to chase down our chooks and kill them but I know the feeling so can't really blame her.

In the words of another greyhound owner: Best dog ever.

A little bit of what you fancy does you good

2008-03-11T19:48:00.005+11:00

The other day at Clarendon Al turned to me and said, "There's a lot to be said for this kind of thing".

For a man who's long subscribed to the philosophy of if you can't eat it don't plant it, this was a turnaround, but not an unexpected one. The garden has become something of An Issue, at times even A Point of Contention, and once or twice sharp words have been spoken over who has failed to do what. This in turn is a cause for resentment - how has it come to pass that a place that for so long was a touchstone of my identity, one of the few rem(a)inders of a pre-child me, has turned into just one more thing to do?

Occasionally I read about the most luscious of gardens, filled with good things to eat, and apparently kept going on ten minutes a day. I've not managed that. The watering, the planning, the care of the soil eats into my time and is always managed with Nell on my hip and Lu tripping along beside me, wishing we were playing 'foot stuck'*. So we've had some nice veggies from the garden this year but aside from the peaches and zucchinis, not the bounty I'd hoped for.

But that's okay. For the moment I'm giving up my The Good Life dreams and recognising that I'm not a peasant and my family won't starve without a big harvest of tomatoes. I'm reading Jackie French again (and again, and again) and she writes that total self-sufficiency is a grim prospect; much better to grow what you want, what gives life richness and depth. Just growing anything without pressure does that for me, but the following things give me particular joy:
* towers of corn
* beefsteak tomatoes and cherry tomatoes for salads
* new potatoes for boiling and frying
* as much pesto as possible
* zucchinis
* broad beans to eat with Morrocoan meals and in a dip with goats feta
* raspberries, raspberries, raspberries
* lots of different lettuce for salads

With these in the garden, I don't feel poor or put upon. No-one wants to skimp and when I grow my own I don't have to. So while I'll keep planting other things, it doesn't matter so much what happens with them. Because the other luxury in my life is time when there's nothing demanding to be done. And at the moment, this is in inverse proportion with the number of plants in the veggie garden.

But thing thing that got me thinking and remembering was a comment from French's website: flowers are important. It's hard to feel deprived with a big bowl of pink roses in the room. But I want the right kind of flowers. I'm not so keen on those prim little buds in pink, red and yellow; I like things overblown and colourful, generousity spilling out all over. When it comes to flowers I like an excess of gorgeousness. Al, ever the poet, put it this way: "I don't really notice it but it's nice to have some things in vases something over there". Indeed.

We've had flowers in the garden this last, rather difficult year. But I've not often made the effort to move them into the house. It's been another 'one more thing'. When picking flowers gets mixed up in a general feeling of hopelessness about the garden, the house, the washing, the grocery shopping, the general never-ending-ness of domestic tasks, then it's time to do something about how I see the garden and about how I see my life.

So it's back to a re-think. This is always hard for me as I can be a little ... rigid. But there's something liberating and exciting about letting go of old expectations and allowing new ways of being in my life and my garden to emerge. I'm thinking many big, vulgar, pink roses (which is just how I like them), poppies bobbing in happy drifts, tulips, irises and lupins and anything else that takes my fancy. I've got at least half of these things in the garden already; the trick is to remember it, and when the glass feels half empty, to fill it with flowers.

* I get my foot stuck in a rock in a tidal river and Lu rescues me from certain drowning with a reed through which to breathe and levers to move the rock. I am tearful and grateful and hail her as a hero. And repeat.

Sunday

2008-03-10T10:50:00.005+11:00

Swimming at Paper Beach with the dogs and kids. Eating some lingering blackberries in a copse by the river. Finding my new dream house by the water.

Saturday

2008-03-08T19:51:00.008+11:00

Desperate to get out of the house, we went Clarendon today. It was glorious. The grounds were filled with sunshine. The only sound was the humming of the bees amongst the last of the roses.

Lucy whined the whole time.

Like Good Parents we tried to capture her imagination and help her relate to these surrounds, so filled with interest and mystery. She whined.
Like Bad Parents we tried to buy her silence with ice cream. She whined.
Like Defeated Parents we packed the girls in the car and drove off back home. She whined.

You'd never guess it from this:

There are lies, damned lies and statistics. And then there are family photographs.

***

On the way home we stopped at the Glover Exhibition, a Tasmanian landscape art prize, always glorious. I look closely - the paintings are so beautiful and after three days they are sucked into private collections; most I will never see again.

Today I turned a corner and my heart stood still. Because there it was: the painting I've always wanted to see even without knowing what it would look like. A hazy Bruny Island pastoral, nothing identifiable but recognised by my mind's eye. I bought that painting. I'll have no new clothes for around about three years but it's worth it. You can't wear a canvas, it's true, but in a world stuffed with Things To Buy it's not often I get that sudden rush of blood to the heart.

I climbed back into the car on a high.

And Lucy whined and whinged and waa'd all the way home.

Slide night :: glamour girls

2008-03-07T19:56:00.004+11:00

I have spent the past few days throwing up into a blue plastic bucket and tending to sick children - not my most fabulous self. In contrast to these glamorous types:

(Grammy (r) and a friend and ukelele - still a humorous prop after 80 years)

(Grandad (l) and unidentified glamorous friends)

I especially love the second photo though it's a bit spooky in its National-Socialist architecture and aesthetics. All the photos from my early 20s involve drunkeness and casual draping and a decided lack of glamour, even when the group were tricked up in black tie (and we were, more often than you might think a bunch of uni students would have cause to be - that's the UQ Law School of the 1990s for you). This on the other hand, has captured A Moment for the future.

My island home

2008-03-03T20:03:00.005+11:00

The photos from a few posts ago were snapped by Al as I walked back over the road after taking the above. We were parked at a small church in the middle of nowhere special, a church with a swifts' nest under the eves. It was summer; our weekend away at the beach happened at the same time the area got its first proper rain in two or three years. (The holiday-rain nexus is the common denominator in all our trips away.)

I look at this and I can't believe I actually live here. I'm a lucky woman; we're a lucky family.

Tassie seems to be enjoying a certain regard in the Australian media at the moment. In the Weekend Australian magazine Swansea has been framed up as an emerging hot holiday spot; Lonnie, where I live, is in the recent edition of Australian Country Style, looking as much like a cosmopolitan urban area as the writers could manage. But it's the moments and places we stumble upon accidentally that make this place feel so special to me. Day-to-day, I tend to forget what it means to live here - it can be hard to remember in the face of loneliness and the hassles of daily life - but photos like this snap our luck and our blessings back into focus.

Just when I thought I'd won the war

2008-03-02T19:39:00.004+11:00

A & M are coming over with their baby daughter, H, and their boy, B, who's Lucy's age and someone she plays comfortably with.

Me: We have visitors coming over. You need to put on some clothes. No nude-ness when we have guests.
Lu: No. Pants off is fine.
Me: No. You can wear trousers or you can wear a dress. What's it to be?
Lu: Hmm, a dress. B likes to see me in a dress.

How? What? Where? WTF? I'm not sure B can even say dress. I've never said anything like that; I don't know a woman who would. I don't know a man who'd hold a preference (or at least speak it in those terms). It sounds like bad dialogue from a soap - 'girl talk' to establish 'character'. But we don't watch that kind of thing.

I thought the enemy was at the gates but it turns out we've been infiltrated.

I am quietly freaking out and switched into remedial feminist indoctrination mode. And casting suspicious looks at everyone.

2008-03-01T21:20:00.002+11:00

I think today was the final blackberry session of the season. Last week, there was more than enough for all, even with a greedy labradoodle. Today, there were more pink and ungiving fruits than luscious black ones. Many looked delicious on the side that faced the sun but on the shadow side they were unripe. And the best picks have retreated beyond arms' reach, deep in the copses, available only to the birds.

I picked madly, but couldn't keep up with Nell's demands for more as she waddled behind me, mouth open and chirping like an insatiable baby bird. In the end she was most content on my hip, pointing out the particular berries she wanted. (I had a vision of the future and she was standing in an Italian market telling the stall holder 'Not that one, that one, that one at the back'.) Last year Lu was crazy for the fruit but this year she'll only accept the most perfect 'blackberry dazzlers' - the rest are licked, rejected as too furry/ spiky/ pink/ yuk and passed on to her sister. For Lu, the cemetary is now more delightful for the possibility of adventure to be found underneath the oak trees or through the head high grass.

The last blackberries and now a long wait over the year. But not so long as I thought - how is it that February has already passed and autumn visits us in th mornings now?

Better days

2008-02-29T21:17:00.008+11:00

At the end of a bad day, reminding myself it's more often good than bad. And when it's good, it's very, very good.