Purple things:: cabbages in the garden

'Veggie' just doesn't seem to do these cabbages justice. In my alternate life, if I were off somewhere very fancy (the Oscars where I was up for Best Screenplay, for example, or Cannes for the premiere of my much anticipated debut as writer director, "Drought Tolerance", starring Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette and Tim Minchin*) I'd ask some emerging designer to make me a dress modeled on a red cabbage. My cabbages look like haute couture should look - subtly coloured, a bit of a flounce and cunningly structured to look light while never loosing their shape.

Until chopped up and pickled in white wine vinegar and juniper, to be served with good pork sausages. Still, they had a good life.



* (an early birthday present for you, Janine)

Surprising things:: my baby turned one yesterday

We celebrated by watching the heavy machinery at work in town and eating chocolate eclairs, apple turnovers, snowballs and jelly slice from perhaps the only remaining old style bakery in the country. A good time was had by all.

Good things:: taking the girls and the dog swimming in the river

Down time

My dad is down to help with childcare while Al works for the union up to the election. We've been all having our butts kicked by the kids who have reached new levels of challenging behaviour. Dad said something the other day that made me almost cry with relief. He said the girls are difficult kids (and without going in to my own family history, Dad knows a thing or two about difficult kids). I used to think it was a dreadful thing to call kids difficult, to label them with our own perceptions of 'appropriate' behaviour. I thought any troubles with interactions, discipline, etc were the result of family dynamics. I say 'Ha! Get down off your high horse' to that previous, pious self. Golly she was an annoying twit and she's getting her come-uppance now.

It was so good to hear that it's not just me and Al, that it's not just that we're not cut out for this parenthood gig and found out a little too late. We've been able to stop self-flagellating quite so much, knowing it's not just that we somehow don't make the grade. My kids are difficult. My kids are difficult. It doesn't solve any of the problems we're facing, but some days it's enough to keep me going until the blessed 7pm bedtime.

I'm taking a break from writing because I realise that if I continue all there'll be is 'my kids are difficult' written with varying degrees of relief and resentment, and without any resolution. And one day I hope to show the girls this blog, and I don't think my kids need to know how desperate we often feel in the face of their behaviour. Plus, blogs help us notice and make sense of things but I need words to express that noticing, and the words are fast drying up under the 4.50 am wake ups, the constant screams and anger and violence and whinging and disobedience and dangerous behaviour both girls direct against each other and against us. There comes a time when there's not much more to say, when there's just a primal scream of 'make it stop', whirling in my belly and barely blocked from escaping out my throat wwith a violent and ugly force. There's only so many ways I can write my girls are difficult without becoming boring and repetitive and whiney.

So I'm going to stop finding well wrought ways of saying "what the f*** is going on in my life?" and I'll try to figure it in other ways instead. I'm going to post up photos of my garden, of the girls, of the things that make me happy in the interim, and when there are some more interesting words I'll start typing them in again.

Mutalabis

Rosa mutabalis

Just recently there have been days when I almost recognise myself. I'm starting to travel a little for work, I'm wearing smart trousers and nice shoes, flicking through powerpoint slides and looking over at people listen to what I say, as if I might know what I'm talking about (crazy!). I've started to stay in hotels in different cities. I've started to talk to important people on teleconferences. These are echoes of an older me who had drive and ambition and a fair(-ish) idea of what I wanted in life. But it's a shell, I'm only passing - all the constituent bits are there, but not the heart, not the soul.

****

Today I was fitted for new bras - my breast are not, it seems, returning to what they once were - and I looked in the mirror and was shocked at the body I saw. I've had more than my fair share of body issues back in the day but I don't hate my body anymore. But ... I'm not quite sure this is my body. It doesn't look familiar. I am wearing the clothes from my sprog free days but they don't fit the way they once did. The jeans look okay, the shirts cover the relevant bits without straining too hard but there's something slightly off.

****

I used to practice yoga a lot. A lot. An hour and half of Ashtanga seven days a week. It was utterly part of who I was. I've started back again, just twice a week, and it's amazing what my body remembers, even after such a long break. Sometimes my body, and my self, feel the way they used to. And then we move into shoulder stand and I look up and see my belly and I'm pretty sure someone is playing tricks on me with a crazy mirror.


This motherhood gig is a tricky thing. I can't got back, don't want to go back, but how on earth do I find a way forward?

I used to think maybe motherhood was like a piece of clothing, something I pulled on at the relevant time (great jeans and a funky little shirt, perhaps, casual and fabulous) and shrugged off at other times (business attire for the day; something sexy and elegant for when I became an adult after the girls had gone to bed). But it's not that easy. So then I thought, maybe motherhood is like a jumper that I knit from an old pattern someone passed on to me, using bits of wool from my grandmother's scrapbag in the hallway cupboard. Except it turns out the pattern is kind of old fashioned, and some of it is missing and anyway, I can't knit. And I don't think the answer lies in pulling something on, something exernal to me. I'm trying to recover that core of me, the part that remains the truth even as roles and bodies and ambitions change, but it's hard to remember what that was, hard to figure out where to look for it, hard to believe I ever had that core in the first place.

Tricky, tricky, tricky.

****

Rosa mutabalis is free flowering, with flowers changing from deep pink to pale yellow and apricot. It grows tall and it's tough, surviving through drought and neglect, but the flowers look like silk. I'm not sure what all this means for me, because I'm tired and sad and my thinking is fuzzy, but there's something about that rose that I cling to on bad days, something that makes me know things will change again and again and again, and that things will be easier one day soon.

Peace and quiet

Last week, in order to escape the logical consequences of Nell refusing to have her morning sleep (ie meltdown in suburbia), my Dad and I took the girls to Woolmers, the remnants of a once huge estate. It's quite a remarkable place. The house consists of a neo-Georgian annexe awkwardly attached to the original humble, and to my mind more elegant homestead, surrounded by the outbuildings used in its previous incarnation as sheep station and then large scale apple farm. Through the quirks of the family's residential and building choices, and by virtue of the fact the place was kept on down the line, the insides remain intact, tracking the changing styles and growing (and declining) wealth of the Archers.


The house is remarkable but I really like the outdoors - an open air museum where kids can run far and wide, where swifts swoop through broken windows, and where it's always quiet even then busloads of tourists arrive to see the buildings and visit the rose garden. The smell of it reminds me of my childhood - the heat on the ground and the scent of particular types of weeds drags me back to age eight again, running with my brothers through the paddocks.


Mostly, though, I am intrigued by the tidiness of the place. This is true for the grounds and gardens - well mowed and well tended - and for the history. I've taken the guided tour a few times, and the eventual decline and then end of this branch of the family tree tends to be presented as a bit of a tragedy. It's not something I weep over (generations of privilege supported by slave labour and dispossession - surely the family had a good run) but it is fascinating to look at the photos of boating parties and see the elegant gowns.




Woolmers is a bit like Tassie itself in this way, a veneer of beauty and ease built on exploitation (see for example, forestry practices). A friend was looking at houses to buy and she came across shackles, mortared into the walls of the cellar, used to hold the unfortunates who misbehaved - it's that kind of place, you live with the history even as you are seduced to forget it. I'm someone who mostly lives my life without being overly aware of what came before me, but the disjunction between the manifest and the latent stops me short and makes me think again of what it means to live in this place.

Slow food

I love the idea of the slow food movement. Celebrating the history and taste and context of food - it's a mindful and thankful act. But I do sometimes wonder how many people actually prepare some of those slow foods. Planting and tending takes time, it's true, and the husbandry takes decades, centuries even, but I'll not under-estimate the time it takes to cook broad beans. It's a fiddly process. The picking takes time as I fumble about the over-planted plot, trying not to break the stems. Then, being go-ahead culinary types, we'd never dream of just podding the beans - it's double peeled or it's nothing. So I sit podding - a lovely past-time out in the courtyard with my baby girl helping


but not something to do when there's an hour before dinner and nothing's done. And then I briefly boil and peel them again again. Mixed in with lamb and apricot and couscous, they are divine - a vibrant, sixties pistachio, and smooth the sweet and a little bit nutty. There's a real sense of accomplishment in cooking with broad beans - hours of work, bushels of beans and two handfuls of deliciousness to savour.

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Dad and I took the girls to Woolmers (an old estate built of government favours and convict labour) the other day, and I had a serious case of garden envy when I saw these:


My broad beans come from seeds I've saved for years from a now forgotten variety, and I had decided to rely on my own efforts for seeds from now on, but oh, these are too lovely and jewel bright to exclude from the garden because of some dull principle.