Sew sew

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.

Slide night :: lost treasures

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.

Snow day

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

Slide night :: funky father

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?):

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.

Slide night :: cold

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.

agley

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. ...

Slide night :: the good looking side of the family

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

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.

Slide night :: glamour girls

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.

Comings and goings

When we were in Brisbane I looked at this photo a lot. I love the way it shows the baby still left in an increasingly kid-like Lu, who is all muscles and big words. But I love it more because it was taken in our backyard, just before all these comings and goings began five weeks ago. Throughout Canberra and Brisbane and then Brisbane again I've been home sick. I've missed my house and more so my garden, and most of all the rhythms we have as a family. The girls had a pretty good time in Brisbane - Grandad and Meema have a pool and a dog and there's a park down the road. Al and I were not so happy - even without the sadness of Grammy's passing we were at a loss outside of the home we've created together.

Getting back was so lovely, even though I was faced with a garden that had collapsed without watering. It's not going to be a season of plenty, more a season of grilled green tomato chutney and composting (which are both indications of plenty in their own way, I guess). But last night we ate well: a free range chicken from a place down the highway; and corn, boiled potatoes and a salad of lettuce and cherry tomatoes, all from the sad-looking garden. Eaten at our own table, it was a delight, even with the food on the floor and the screaming and shrieking and spitting out of food with bold declarations of 'Yuk', that are part of the fine dining experience down here. It was soul food and a reminder of why I live where I do.

Also, Nell can now say 'potatoes', and can eat about five in one sitting. I just love her commitment to food.

Today it's up to Sydney for a few days, to sound knowledgeable about stuff and to make awkward conversation over fruit platters at morning tea (I don't think I can stand many more fruit platters - it's been a year of fruit platters). I'm not super-keen because I just want to work in my garden, but then I'll be home on Friday night and maybe then we can get some of those rhythms back again.

I think I love that photo of Lu because she looks how I've often felt these past week: wistful and hopeful and looking to somewhere else. I'm happy that very soon, I'll be looking to where I am, not where I want to be.

Art is what you can get away with

Well, Warhol would know. I'm not a huge fan of his stuff, and when we went to GOMA today, I gave the big Warhol exhibit a miss. But there's some excellent kids' stuff: the usual drawing room where Lu abused her free paper privileges; a play area filled with Campbell's soup boxes and other people's babies for the girls to kiss; a space with silver helium cushions bobbing around; and a photo both wherein frazzled parents get to transform their units into little bits of pop art. Everything looks better in brights.

Gender bending

Today was Grammy's funeral. I walked into the room wearing my black dress - the go-anywhere black dress that we all read was a wardrobe basic in Cosmo , back in the late 80s - and Lucy looked at me and asked "Why are you being a girl today?". I thought that going out to work each morning dressed in trousers would be somewhat counter-balanced by my breasts and vagina (or at least my uterus might give me away) but no - despite our best intentions to to de-emphasise gender, girls wear dresses.

Oddly, Lu and Nell almost never wear dresses but Lu's very clear that they are girls (because they are brave, and apparently boys are 'often not so brave', poor possums). Kids' gender rules are more confusing than those in men's mags (and women's mags and just about everywhere else in society), that's for sure.

***

The girls slept through the funeral. On the way to the wake we explained Lu wouldn't be able to say good-bye to Grammy:

"But I wanted to kiss her".
"I know but now she is in heaven and so you can't".
"I want to go to heaven and kiss her".
"Well, we're going to the bowls club to eat cake instead".
"That's good too".

No use pining for things you can't have, I guess.

***

Thanks to all those who left such caring comments. It's been hard and sad but some peace is beginning to grow in my heart.

Last rights

My grandmother died on Wednesday evening while I sat in Brisbane airport waiting for a plane home that was delayed two hours, watching Lucy tear about being a horse. I had gone to Brisbane on the Monday evening to say goodbye and I guess I didn't really think what goodbye would mean. I thought there would probably be chances but it turns out that when I kissed her in the afternoon before catching the train in a storm, I was kissing her a final time.

Grammy started fading two weeks ago, pulled down by unspecified causes. The doctors had a range of theories but Gram was 95 and sad - isn't that enough to make the body wind down? The interventions were becoming increasingly intrusive and nothing was working and so Mum - but really, the whole family - decided to end all treatment. The nurses spoke to us of dignity, of not letting Gram linger; the doctors - all aged about 15 and dressed in very natty shirts and ties - talked about the failure of anti-biotics, the lack of further treatment options - but no-one really told us what ending treatment means. No drugs and also no food, no hydration - only pain relief. I don't think that it was a wrong decision but it's not a dignified death, begging for water without being able to speak because your dentures won't fit, not able to move even your arm or your head, hoping someone will divine your needs and say 'yes' rather than 'no'. Lingering is relative - I don't know how the minutes and hours and then days passed for Grammy, but for us, a day waiting for an end that the nurses said would occur twelve hours before is a really long time; a night keeping vigil over a woman balking at death, frightened and thirsty and wanting to go home is a dreadful, dragging time.

I wanted to stay until the end but in the end we thought it best if I went. I had Lucy and she was getting restive; the logistics of dealing with a three year old don't match well with the needs of a family waiting in a hospital room. Nell was in Launceston with Al, missing me. I had a plane ticket which couldn't be changed to an open flight date. I knew Gram would die quickly if I left and I knew that if I'd stayed she'd linger for two weeks and my own little family would be in turmoil. I was second guessing things that can't be controlled and in the end Dad said, just go, just stick with the original plan. And so Gram died while I waited at the airport in a storm, and I'm back on the plane tonight, this time with Al and both girls, with black clothes in our bag.

Our decision about ending Grammy's treatment was the best we could make and my choice to go home seemed the best in bad circumstances. But my, I feel bad. I said it didn't matter if I was there or not, as long as someone was (and at the end, it was my Dad, Gram's most loved and trusted son-in-law). But leaving seemed a poor repayment for 35 years of receiving nothing but adoration. No matter what I did or where I went, I knew there was an old woman who was boasting about me, swelling with pride over everything I did, loaning and giving me money, buying me pretty things, cooking me treats, telling me stories and singing me the songs that I now sing my girls as we walk through the neighbourhood. Grammy always did the right and generous thing by me and I worry that at the end I didn't do the right thing by her - I went, I didn't stay.

Centre of power

Until these past few weeks, I have never resiled from my position that Canberra is a hole. It is hot and circular and a nightmare for people who don't drive. It is flat and featureless, I always get lost, and everyone gossips about politics all the time. But now I think it is maybe not so bad; when I was there, I thought maybe this is the kind of place I could live in, maybe this is my kind of place.

Canberra is harsh in its drought but something beautiful has grown out of that: streets with verges and front lawns grown into small meadows as people let the lawn go rather than pour their laundry buckets on it. At every corner galahs nibble at the grass seeds, in backyards cockatoos casually strip fruit trees of their promise, and parrots eat out of the hedges. There's an awful lot of disrespectful medium density development going on - all horrible Moditerranean - but still so many humble houses with crazy veggie gardens out the back and no fences at the front. And the movies! The job prospects! The presence of friends who are easy and fun and generous, who make me smile when I see them. It's a heady thought, that possibility of a different kind of life where the dull bits of this one are coloured that particular shade of green you only ever see in grass on the other side.

Going away has thrown into relief some of the frustrations my town holds for me. It's re-opened that constantly recurring question: do we go or do we stay? Al wants to stay, the girls want to stay, I would go in a heartbeat if I wasn't bound to them. But when I leave the one movie cinema showing nothing I want to see, the lack of deep friendships, the less than promising opportunities my job currently holds, I'm also leaving our ability to live well on one income, to avoid the rush and stress that would come if we needed to put the girls into childcare, to travel without a half hour commute. Single and childless, I could breeze through the disadvantages of city living; as a mother and a partner in this particular family unit the thought of that life is daunting even as many of its opportunities are exhilarating.

I want my cake and I want to eat it too, but I've been well schooled in the knowledge that we don't get to do that. I think we'll stay because I've no wish for a brilliant career at the expense of my family's peace. Sometimes I think my decision to stay is more about my fear of big ponds and big fish, that I use my family as a cover for a failure of nerve...

But then yesterday, up at the area, the blackberries had arrived. And Lu, gobbling them down, said "Mmm, delicious and familiar". She knows what delicious means; familiar, I think, she's just trying on for size, feeling its fit in her mouth. But it reminded me that here is a kid who, for every summer of her little life has walked ten minutes up the road with her family to pluck the fruit from the thorns, who at less than three knows where the best pickings are to be found, and who could say with perfect honesty that those pickings are indeed delicious and familiar. The sharp edges of our big sacrifices are weathered to a softer shape by the daily reminders of what it is Al and I have chosen instead.

Our Christmas

... was full of good things.

Good things to eat. On Christmas Eve, our traditional time of celebration: oysters, salty and buxom, like Jane Russell; salmon terrine; olives and pepperberries and artichokes. And on Christmas Day: beef cooked blue; potato salad with gherkins; crisp salad; good bread.

Good things to drink. Bay of Fires Pinot Noir Chardonnay; raspberry syrup in soda water and the bubbly.

Good things to see. A Christmas tree looking just the way I've always wanted one to look - sparkly and modest and maybe even elegant (maybe); my girls reveling in time with Meema and Grandad.

Good time. No work (no thought of work), no deadlines, no lists, no email. Hours in the garden, tidying and replenishing. Waking up yesterday and then again today with absolutely nothing planned, nothing expected of the day. Napping when I want to, feeling my body clock tick-tock back into its own proper time and feeling so much better for it. Remembering the way the hours drip slowly by when there's no push and no pull, just the lazy currents of time at home with my family.

But the spirit of Christmas? Two huge lollipops in the Christmas stockings - all artificial, teeth rotting, mood disordering joy for my girls. There's been a lot of talk about hand made Christmas on the blogs I read but in our house, the ship's well and truly sailed on that idea.

On the right track

Over at bluemilk (my mac doesn't seem to let me make links but go there - it's such a great blog) there's a post about the opportunities work presents and the constraints we face in taking advantage of them. There are also some comments about the mummy track - the career path women end up on when they have children and find their organisations don't take them seriously as workers anymore. One of the commenters suggested concern about this is 'ego', and that things change over time. I think it's true - things can change - but the point about ego is stinging a little (and I acknowledge this response is about me, and not the writer's intent), so much so that I'm writing this instead of dealing with some work stuff that Needs To Be Done Now.

Ego. It's such a dirty word, and doubly so if you're a woman, and triply so if you're a mother. After all, motherhood is presented to us as the suppression of ego, as a state of sacrifice for the good of our children and our family (and the country's economy if the Treasurer had his way). Worrying about the state of one's career can seem a little off topic when we are trying to raise kids under all sorts of pressures, with all kinds of hopes and fears and caught in emotions so deep and complex - it's overwhelming and beautiful and frightening and there is absolutely nothing comparable in my paid work life. But I'm pretty much on the Mummy track at the moment, and I'm not always entirely comfortable with this, even though it is the best solution for balancing our family’s emotional wellbeing with our financial needs.

I don't like that in the professions, there is only one legitimate way of being a worker. So many organisational structures and cultures expect the total devotion of mind and body, in ways that disadvantage people who are trying to be parents (and in particular, mothers, upon whom the caring tasks most commonly fall). But more than that, I'm frustrated that I can't shine in my career when I'm shining as a mother. This strikes at the core of my identity: I've been a professional for much longer than I've been a mother and I've worked really hard to be respected and to get all the necessary letters after my name. My life was directed to success in my field; motherhood came late(ish) and the desire for children was absent for decades; Kris-as-mother is a pretty recent and unexpected character. That earlier sense of self was not sloughed off when Lu and then Nell came along; it lives side by side - often uncomfortably - with 'Mummy'. And there's ego in it too, I miss feeling that I am (or have the potential to be) a player, someone who's going somewhere.

Work might be vanity, it might melt in the air, but it does matter to me. The work-family balance is usually presented as a question of the fit between hours worked and hours spent with family, but for many women it also a question of balancing the different elements of who we are and what we focus on: worker and mother and partner, ego and sacrifice. These ideas are written as separate, and contain an implicit dichotomy (trichotomy?) but perhaps they should be presented as workermotherpartner, egosacrifice because they're all mixed up together.

I'm lucky that my work lets me write this from home, and that home is where work is currently happening. I'm lucky that I don't have to make a set of hard choices about career and family. I’m on the mummy track, and in terms of what my family needs, this is the right track. I've been telling my friends I have little ambition, and I'm comfortable with its absence. And I am, sort of. But there's still a part of me that wants to travel not the back roads of the mummy track, beautiful and quiet though they may be, but the great boulevards of a successful career, in a motorcade, with tickertape and a marching band and, sure, the key to the city (yes, my ego is that big). I may get there eventually but in the meantime, I'm sometimes going to feel sad and frustrated that and resentful that I can't be seen as a great mother and a shit-hot leader in my field. Because I'm proud of being both.

Never leave a man behind

For every lovely moment there's ten of these: offhand rudeness, selfishness, kicking Nellie in the face, biting and hitting to see if she can hurt me, anger, tempers, cruelty. My daughter can scare me and she sometimes breaks my heart.

*********

The hardest part of walking away in the morning is the sense of betrayal. I've got two hours of frustration, rush and sometimes ugliness before I'm out the door. I have some time to myself as I walk into town and travel out to work on the bus and then I sit in my office and deal with relatively civilised adults who are more less polite. Al gets a whole day of negotiating with a two year and settling a baby. There's no break, no down time, no space. When I'm home, we're in the trenches together; when I shut the front door at 7am each morning and jam the headphones into my ears I feel like I've left a comrade behind enemy lines.

Some days I feel like my family is falling apart. Yesterday, after two time outs before 6.30 am, I left the house to go to work and cried all the way down my street, around the corner, across the park, past the hospital and the cafes, by the fountain, at the bus stop, on the bus, up the stairs and in my office in front of the computer. I think it is fair to say that yesterday I broke apart. Yesterday, I didn't think any of us could be fixed.

So I talked to my boss, spilled it all amid tears and tissues, asked for leave so we could try to get some equilibrium back. Instead, he has given me leeway to organise my work in anyway I need so that I spend time with the girls and Al gets time off. He found some support services, told me some of his own struggles with his family, and asked how the organisation could help Al. Could you estimate how many such managers exist in Australia? Less than ten, I'd wager. The crunch so many of us feel as mothers and fathers and workers can only be changed through dramatic structural and ideological shifts but some days, an individual can make all the difference.

I ended my working day crying, telling Al what we'd been given. Today, I still can't believe my luck. I wish everyone had a boss like mine, I really do.

******

Today, I planted some seeds, we went to the duck park and I played with the girls while Al did some things that had been piling up. The girls were happy(-ish), Lucy was so much more relaxed, and they are both sleeping well. We realise both Nell and Lu have been stressed, maybe by our own stress, maybe by my absence, probably a bit of both. In the long run we'll have to re-visit how we manage our life and my work but for the moment there's some calm in our home.

Good for the economy

Turns out, it's a little too early for passionfruit planting, at least according to the erstwhile owner of Jeremy the goat (lately of 'Hobart'), who lives down the hill in a little house with a small and lovely kitchen garden. But there were strawberries to be planted in response to Lucy's stated 'never too many' policy, and as I placed these around the garden, in pots and beds, in a no doubt doomed attempt to ensure at least some escape Lu's impatience and ripen to the point of redness, I did some thinking.

I was thinking about why this matters, this planting and feeding, and how the garden and the girls intersect to form something so fundamental to my life.

Georg Simmel, one of my favourite sociologists, wrote with concern about money. He believed that when it became the primary form of exchange in the world, social relations would change, transforming from personal and emotional connections into rational, bounded and ends-focused transactions. How much we get would become far more important than how we get it. Simmel predicted a greater circulation of money would, ironically, impoverish our links with each other. There's some evidence to suggest this hasn't happened, and that in fact people invest money with cultural and personal significance. But I don't think that significance is as emotionally resonant as the shared and idiosyncratic exchanges I am weaving (planting? growing? - oh, the sensitive question of when to pun) into our lives through the garden.

The garden matters because it is a way of tying my family together, creating an economy based on love and care. Money matters too, and it is a prime element of my role in the family - I bring home the bacon - but I don't want that role to be the focus my relationships with Al, Lu and Nell. In true breadwinner style, I'm proud I can support my family but I want to fill our coffers with good memories, resilience, opportunity and sense of shared purpose. I want us all to feel we contribute to the give and take which is part of family life. I want our exchanges to focus on a set of values that can't be written with a dollar sign in front of them. Families make these exchanges in different ways and through different media: sewing, knitting, sharing passions, buying gifts, through experiencing travel or food or art together, or watching T.V. on the couch on a Sunday night, commenting on the footy or laughing at the same jokes. In our little unit, the garden is the focus. When I garden I'm investing the economy that matters most to me.

Circling outward, our garden gives the girls a choice as to which economy they engage with, and when. Thinking back on the discussions of 'frugal', I like the idea of a mindfulness of how we live our lives. My default position is 'don't buy' rather than 'buy' and I have a whole set of resources that allow me to adopt this approach in my life. Gardening is a way of sharing these resources with the kids: the practical ones (this is how you grow a tomato) and the intellectual and philosophical ones (this is what we value, these are the things we think about). In the end, they'll adopt or reject what I offer them, and that's fine(ish - how will I feel if they don't care to know the difference between a pumpkin and a potato?) because what I really want to gift to them is choice.

I took this photo at the beginning of the year, when Nell was still very new to the world, and I love it still.



A family meal, taken from and shared in the garden. A valued and ordinary part of our lives, and very good for the economy that matters the most.

(With me it's always) The little things

Sitting on a friend's back deck, eating orange and almond cake, chatting and watching our children play together.

Walking in the sun to the markets with Nell, and walking home again with tomato seeds that were sold out online, seedlings of pineapple sage, lemongrass and French tarragon, daffodils and lemon curd, which I eat standing at the fridge, scooping it out of the jar with my finger.

Planting seeds with Lu: pak choi, Hong Kong broccoli, rocket, broccoletti, poppies, lettuce (sucrine, brown romaine, cos verdi, purple oak leaf), coriander, sugar snap peas, hailstone radishes. Also planting seed potatoes (Nicola) and one of those mini-peach trees I used to be so snobbish about (peach-zee, really!)

Thinking (hoping, hoping) Lu may in fact be potty trained, wee-wise. Oh, the joy.

Baking apple and coconut muffins, cheese bics and an apple and rhubarb cake for dessert with Lu standing beside me, commenting and tasting.

Nell's first independent foray into the veggie garden.



A chicken and chutney sandwich in the backyard sun.

Reading a book - a whole book!

Cockatoos swooping down and eating the old walnuts in the tree out the back.

My pre-baby jeans fitting me again.

But also:

5 hours sleep instead of seven hours.

Bumbling about with Lucy and Jasper in the area and catching sight of an outdoor setting - the very type I've been looking for for over two years - at a garage sale down the road. Starting down, turning back to find the lost lead and then walking sloooowly with my two year old, watching people pull up and nab those tables and chairs just as we finally made it to the driveway.

Lucy on at me and on at me for a 'big bit of chicken, not those little cut bits, the big bits', on and on, when there's only the slivers, and she won't eat them anyway. On and on, with me explaining there's none until finally I yell, loud and shocking, "There's none to be had", and my child starts crying in fear of my anger.

But now a bit of West Wing and my honey, under the doona on the couch, scoffing the rest of the cake.