The Idea of Home

Not quite drowning

2012-01-31T13:45:00.001+11:00

At last, the heat has broken and a gale from the south has charged through the house, sweeping out the stale air before it. Now I sit, well rested after the first cool night in weeks, and wonder why I don't feel fresh, too. Instead, I feel stale and dried out, with nothing much to say.

But the sort of writing I do needs great swathes of silence; incompatible with a seven week school break and three girls screeching around the house. Next week, though, school begins again. My two older girls will go back; and the third will start kinder, which I can only think of as six hours each week of silence. We are also starting a child swap: in return for looking after a delightful four year old one day a fortnight, on alternate weeks my youngest will be at her house and I will have a whole day alone.

Since I had my first child eight and a half years ago, I've rarely had a full day to call my own. We chose not to use professional childcare, and our combined commitments mean that days to myself are very rare indeed. I've been happy enough with regular half days, but suddenly today, with a week to go, I'm hanging out to be alone for hours on end. I'm looking forward to a time when writing isn't at the expense of everything else. Having enough time to do more of other things – exercise, read, listen to the wind – feels spacious, luxurious, a great privilege; who knows what will unfold?

In the meantime, though, I wait, up to my ankles in paper snowflakes and French knitting and marbles and jigsaw puzzles and all the other things that have drifted to the floor; up to my waist in Charlie & Lola and The Muddleheaded Wombat and A Necklace of Raindrops and all the other books I am required to read aloud; up to my elbows in Cluedo and crazy eights and ship o' fools and ludo and all the games that require my participation; up to my ears in kids' music and play dates and the horrible sounds of squabbling sisters...

In a sea of young children I wait, not quite drowning, one arm raised to next week.

Caffeine hits and sugar spikes

2012-01-19T15:59:00.000+11:00

More than a year ago now, I wrote about how much I needed wine in the evening. I didn’t drink half a bottle, just a glass to settle my jangled nerves while the kids squabbled and I cooked. It was either that or shouting everyone to table and bed. I felt bad about the dependency, but there it was.

Nine months later, I was placed on a very restrictive diet: no sugar, gluten, dairy, fruit, alcohol, or caffeine. I was worried about how I’d manage without that glass of wine at the end of the day, but my health problems were sufficiently severe that I adopted the diet almost immediately.

To my surprise, I coped just fine. There’s been no real yelling, in fact less than usual, and, while I missed the social aspect of wine with friends – not to mention toast with butter and jam – I didn’t miss the daily glass one bit.

Had my personality suddenly changed from wound up spring to positively yogic? Or had I been deluded all this time into thinking that my jangled nerves couldn’t get through a full day without a glass? Well, neither, really.

Four months into the diet, it came time to reintroduce or experiment with the restricted foods. Like the good girl that I am, I started not with fresh fruit (it blows me up like a balloon), but alcohol. Last Thursday, an old friend came for dinner and, in for a penny in for a pound, I drank two thirds of a bottle of wine. I was on top of the world, and the next day felt fit as a fiddle. It was wonderful. And while I don’t intend to start drinking every night, it seems I can enjoy wine with friends from time to time – and I will. Wine restores me to my rightful place as the storyteller at the dinner table, a role that I don’t fill to the utmost when I am stone cold sober.

Next I tried caffeine. Within minutes my body filled with adrenalin, my heart started to race, my hands grew sweaty and I became highly anxious. A sense of foreboding swelled and bobbed like a threatening grey balloon just above my head; my chest constricted in fear. I wandered around for a few hours waiting for the axe to fall, but it never did. Instead, the caffeine gradually cleared out of my system and all was right with the world again. Hmm, not so good.

I had always assumed that being anxious and highly strung was just part of my neurotic and irritating personality – but was it since I started drinking coffee? I certainly had a lot to be anxious about at that time. I had recently moved countries; my mother was very ill; and a lot was going on. Perhaps the coffee only exacerbated how I was already feeling, back then. Now, however, there is little to be anxious about, yet my high levels of anxiety had faded away only when I went on the exclusion diet.

A few days later, I tried sugar: pure candy, which I never usually eat, and with nothing to slow its effects. Within fifteen minutes, I was screaming like a banshee at a child who had left her shoes in the hallway. When I had calmed down I apologised, and had a think.

I had previously suspected sugar to have a volcanic effect on my temper, which is why I rarely eat much of it. Having completely eliminated all sugar for four months and, during that time, never shouted unduly at the kids; and then, having eaten three test candies and positively erupted, this was proof enough for me.

I was seventeen when I began drinking coffee, which means I’ve had nineteen years of two to four coffees a day, sometimes more, with a small sweet treat to pick me up in the late afternoon.

Nineteen years of jangled nerves and pounding heart, with a sugar spike just before dinner time.

Add children to the mix and it’s no wonder I self-medicated with alcohol. Take away the caffeine and sugar, and dinnertime is fine; no wine required. I realised that it wasn’t the kids who were the problem at six o’clock; it was me and my bad habits.

It’s shocking to think that I have razzed myself up daily for almost twenty years and never really noticed. I wrote myself off as an anxious person who doesn’t cope with stress when, in fact, the things I don’t cope with are caffeine and sugar. In other words, all this time I have been causing the majority of my stress through the things I have chosen to eat and drink.

I don’t know whether to be frustrated that we have endured so many years of my carefully reined in bad temper, a temper that now appears not to be an intrinsic part of my personality, or just deeply relieved that I have found the key to letting the temper fade away. Mostly, however, I feel glad for my kids that I have found a way to be calm. I no longer have to use all my tricks – counting to ten, leaving the room, or transforming the shouting into an operatic aria – as I now rarely feel the surge of rage that leads to the urge to shout.

I also feel sad for my own history. My mother was far more highly strung than me. A wrong word could set off an explosion, and I was the expert in wrong words. Our relationship was always fiery, never calm. Now I wonder if she, too, was winding herself up every day with her dozen cups of tea and a sweet biscuit in the afternoon. Meanwhile, she tried to fit in a lot more than me, combining child rearing with demanding work. She was always tired, and always felt guilty because she never had enough time to do everything she wanted. If she was feeling as physically wound up and anxious as I have been feeling, then, combined with the stresses she placed on herself, it is no wonder that she exploded regularly; we just couldn’t seem to get along.

I have a fantasy that we could meet each other again, no caffeine, no sugar, no work pressures. No shouting, no surges of aggression, no adrenalin spikes, just two women on odd diets but otherwise quite ordinary going for a stroll along a riverbank. In quietness, we could listen to the water tumbling by. We never knew each other calm, but I wonder whether, in such a space, we might find a gentle peace.

On Silence

2012-01-09T09:27:00.000+11:00

This piece appeared in The Sunday Age Faith column yesterday. The church is the South Yarra Community Baptist Church, but if you come looking for a blogger with three young daughters, beware, there are two of us in our tiny congregation!

***

On Silence

When I was a child in church, prayer was long and wordy. Responsive prayers dragged on for hours; extemporaneous prayers were worse. Forests grew and glaciers melted in the time it took some to say their piece. I would shift in the hard pew, trying to get comfortable, and wiggle my toes in their Sunday shoes dangling above the floor.

Encouraged to pray publicly from an early age, I could think of nothing to say. God didn’t need me to point out what was wrong with the world; I was pretty sure God had a handle on it all. On the other hand, I was reluctant to raise personal matters out loud, so I kept quiet in the stiff silence of disapproval. At home alone, I couldn’t pray either. When I tried, I felt awkward and fake. My words rose no further than ceiling, there to rebound and fall heavily to the floor.

For a decade or more, I didn’t pray at all. The words didn’t work; I didn’t know why. I stumbled in and out of churches, wondering, until by God’s grace I found myself at a church which taught the beauty and wonder of silence. Like most churches, we sing some prayers and say others – but then, together on a Sunday and separately during the week, we make time to sit quietly and let God in.

In silence, no words are necessary. I learned that I don’t need to say anything; instead, I just listen. Listen to the voices and the chatter in my head. Listen to the errands I am planning, listen to the worries that spin around, listen to my self-condemnation that I can’t make silence. I remind myself that it takes practice, practice and gentleness...

And as I practice, and identify the voices, and let all the noise float away, gradually I become aware of a cool sea breeze, sweeping in like a southerly and driving out the stale air; and that’s when I begin to trust.

With it may come a sense of calm, forgiveness, or hope. Other times, it’s accompanied by an image. Green tendrils, burgeoning new life, throw out joyful shoots. Arms flung wide welcome me in. Laughing children run into the sky. A universe of stars rumbles with laughter. An old typewriter waits just for me.

From such an experience may arise a new understanding, or a direction, or an affirmation. Other times, it offers only mystery, to be held gently and pondered; or solace when it is needed most.

Whatever is there is always surprising, always a gift. From silence, I surface, restored. Quietly, I stretch and take a deep breath; and quietly I get back to work.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

2011-12-29T20:44:00.000+11:00

Many of you have, no doubt, read the extract from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that made so many people so hot under the collar. In it, Chua detailed what appeared to be her absolutely brutal methods for driving her children to technical excellence in school and music. Like so much we read in the newspaper, the extract was designed to polarise and it did so perfectly. It created an absolute furore, a wealth of free publicity which led to mega sales of the book. I certainly found Chua's article appalling; however, I recently sat down and read her book, wherein I discovered a more complex story.

Battle Hymn opens with Chua's claim that she, and all good Chinese (read: strict immigrant) mothers, know how to raise their children properly. They are dominant and controlling, and commit themselves utterly to driving their children to excellence. Growing up, Chua's two daughters had no play dates, no sleepovers, no school camps, no television, and no extracurricular activities except music. Thus they had plenty of time to work hard, get perfect grades, and master an instrument. Satisfaction, claims Chua, is to be found in mastery of something, and mastery doesn't come easily. So her daughters practiced their musical instruments for more than an hour every day, and three to five hours if a performance was looming; and when they were unwilling to rehearse Chua stood over them screaming, threatening to destroy their soft toys and even withholding food and water until they had completed their practice.

This is pretty much where the article stopped and, of course, it was ghastly. We were left with the picture of a psychotic mother brutally dominating her children as they attempted to master the instruments of her choice. This is not an entirely inaccurate impression, but it omits the good humour, the self-deprecating tone, and the way Chua's methods fell to pieces with her second daughter, which are all detailed in the book.

Daughter one, Sophia, was willing to get with the program. She went along with the rules and the practice, and calmly excelled at everything. Lulu, however, was different. Lulu just said no. The battles grew more and more heated until, despite her natural gifts, years of accomplishment and a love of playing, Lulu flat out refused to pick up the violin. The book details how mother and daughter interacted and how Chua eventually admitted defeat, allowing Lulu, at thirteen, to make some of her own choices about how to spend her time. Lulu now sets much of her own agenda and, shock horror, wastes time playing tennis.

Chua relates her ambitions and her methods as well as her rages at Lulu and where she went wrong, and freely admits the things they missed when both of them obstinately refused to give way. The girls continued to practice when travelling with the family; and there were times when the whole family missed one thing or another because Lulu refused to practice and Chua refused to leave the hotel until the practice had been completed. At one level, this is crazy; at another, I have some sympathy for Chua – unlike so many of us with our children, at least she stood her ground.

Battle Hymn is more than a parenting story, however. It is also the classic immigrant tale. The daughter of migrants, Chua had limited opportunities and was determined to be successful in a measurable way. Now that she has made good, Chua is absolutely determined that her own children will have every opportunity made available to them. Utterly predictably, her oldest child has taken up the mantle and excels, while the second child has adapted to the dominant culture and rebels against the strict cultural mores of her mother.

The book is also about family and Chua writes simply and well about her parents and their shift from China to America; the illness and death of Florence, Chua's mother-in-law; and the terrible leukaemia of Katrin, Chua's sister.

Overall, the book is candid, moving and very funny, and Chua has a nice self-deprecating tone. She is an odd mix of extremely sharp and charmingly naive, brutal and fragile, and I found myself loving to loathe her.

On a more personal level, Chua's book raises serious questions for me as a parent. While I will never be the sort of mother who will stand over her children for hours of music practice or drive them all over creation to see particular teachers, I often wonder whether I don't demand enough from or for them. I'm not sure how to balance the needs of childhood – for play, daydreaming and exploration, which my kids excel at – with the fact that they don't seem to be learning as much as I would hope.

At home, my husband and I have focussed on relational demands: respect, obedience, graciousness and kindness; but I wonder if we should be demanding more intellectually. One of our daughters is constantly bored at school; the school fails to stretch her academically. A parent like Chua would be in there, devising curricula and making it happen, while I sit at home, fretting and naively trusting that the school will actually do what it promises. I don't want to compensate for the school's lack by filling my daughter's hours at home with academic challenges – surely that is what the hours at school are for – but I am afraid of her becoming lazy and stupid just through sheer lack of exercising her thinking muscles.

And yet, like most concerns I have for my children, these issues are really about me. Chua writes that letting most kids follow their passion leads to ten hours a day on Facebook as they lack the discipline to become really good at what they love; they need parents to provide the drive. In fact, she goes on, most people really suck at what they love because they are too lazy to practice enough to become good.

Her comment stings. I was bored out of my skull for most of my schooling and doodled around at home, and now I'm an adult who is often not quite sure what I'm doing or why. Were I slightly different or had I more drive, I would have written books or be working on a newspaper or doing something else professional rather than sweeping the floor, wiping snotty noses and making notes on a blog from time to time. In Chua's eyes, I am certainly an underachiever, but I don't know where her drive comes from or how to get it.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that people with great drive are always settled in themselves, or even kind. And there's the nub – what is success? Chua is very focused on measurable success: learning things quickly; being top of the class; earning the praise of well-regarded people; having a prestigious career at a famous institution. But the kind of success Chua dreams of often comes at great cost. Chua's daughters had a nanny (Mandarin speaking so that they would grow up bilingual, of course); and Chua details the many years that she and the girls lived in one city and her husband in another as their careers took them in different geographical directions. Meanwhile, Chua spent her girls' childhoods racing from work to school to home to music lessons and back to work again, desperate to fill every minute with useful activity, which is the sort of behaviour I associate with a certain emptiness in oneself. I can't imagine running on that sort of treadmill, or paying that sort of price, to gain the conventional markers of success. What is life if it is not about raising one's own infants, or spending evenings with one's own husband, or just sitting listening to the silence?

As for the hours her daughters spent practicing their instruments when others would be throwing snowballs or hanging out with their girlfriends – it's hard to know what really matters in this life. It might be rather thrilling to be a musical virtuoso; it might be rather satisfying to be sought after by prestigious institutions; but then again, I have had most of my life-giving experiences when I'm just doing nothing. Reading Chua's book raises the all-important question, what does it mean to live life to the fullest? Is it to cram every moment full of work and family, or is there more? Battle Hymn doesn't claim to answer these questions; in fact, it ends with these questions, and the answers, of course, differ from person to person and shift and change for an individual over time.

As for my parenting style, I can't dismiss Chua's methods all-out. I know far too many kids who seem to spend their lives in front of a screen, and have so little real attention paid to their gifts, interests and development that it is hard to imagine them growing into anything much other than consumers. There is merit in a strict, disciplined and intentional upbringing; and it is great for kids to become so good at something that they are brimming with a sense of accomplishment and pride.

Chua tells a story in which she tore up the birthday cards her daughters had made her. They had been slapped together in five minutes, and she rejected the lack of care they had put into the cards, demanding more from her daughters. The bloggerati was horrified, yet I think Chua was right. We constantly praise our kids for drivel, but it hardly encourages them to stretch out and discover what they are capable of; instead, it tells them that a lazy mediocrity is just fine. And perhaps such a mediocrity is enough in a society in which a major university has plastered billboards with slogans of 'Relax' and 'It's all good' – but it hardly encourages excellence.

As a parent myself of daughters who sometimes make beautiful things and other times churn out horrible slop, I found myself cheering Chua – and when the next piece of crap came my way, I gently raised an eyebrow. I asked whether it was really the best my kid could do, and talked about how presentation and effort communicate a great deal about love and care or lack thereof. I didn't yell and tear the piece up, but it disappeared and something decent took its place.

Chua's methods and goals are extreme; but if they give our parenting a nudge, so that we kindly and gently ask our children to do a little better, then we might just be surprised at what our kids are capable of; and our kids might have the privilege, too, of being delighted by their own strengths and abilities.

Poems for all the Lovely People

2011-12-20T10:27:00.001+11:00

When she's not cooking or cleaning or reading aloud or writing or singing, what on earth does a woman at home with kids do with her time? (Yes, I get asked this question occasionally.) Well, one of the other things I do each week is sit in a classroom reading and writing with a bunch of terrific kids, most of whom have a refugee background. It's great fun, and I freely admit I probably get more out of it than the kids do. You can read about one instance of 'more' here.

And just as, a year or two ago, I wrote a set of poems incorporating names from the classroom, over the last month I have again written a set of poems which include the class list, and collated the poems into a little illustrated book. It is no great poetic work, just a heap of lovin' fun to make some fantastic kids belly laugh. The book was debuted in class over the last two weeks; and each kid has taken home a copy to keep and read over the holidays. You, I am sure, have enough books to keep you occupied over the holidays, but here's a couple of the poems for the child in you.

***

Faiza (pronounced fay-zah)

Faiza plays a
Game of catch.
Away rolls the ball
Into a patch
Of shadow where the light grows dull.
Faiza runs and finds her ball.
Faiza gaze a-
cross the green.
Here comes a man with a mowing machine!
Faiza runs off with the ball
And bounces it against a wall.
Marbles, four square,
Hopscotch, hey!
Faiza plays the
Days away.

***

Ziad

Ziad's name means 'more than enough',
But enough of what? Well, that's a bit tough.
Is it dozens of smiles? An abundance of brains?
Plenty of sunshine? Or showers of rain?
Does he have a herd of elephants
To carry him through the streets?
A great big pile of umbrellas and hats
To shade him from the heat?
Outside his window perhaps he sees
A fleet of shining cars
Or looking up above at night
A universe of stars.

Or could this 'more' be what he gives
As he fills our lives with joy?
Whatever it is, however he lives,
Ziad is our abundant boy!

***

Jibreel

How does it feel, Jibreel, to be
Climbing the branches of a tree,
Pushing through leaves way up high,
Arms reaching out to touch the sky?

How does it feel, Jibreel, to run
Round the oval in the sun
Through the grass or kicking a ball
And hearing it thud against the wall?

How does it feel, Jibreel, to rest
Down in the shade with one of your best
Friends in the world, chatting away?
How do you feel, Jibreel, today?

***

Why did I start reading with these kids? Click here to find out.

Moving Pictures

2011-12-10T10:48:00.001+11:00

I was sitting in my grandfather's chair, a daughter curled in my lap. She was watching a video with her sisters and had asked me to join them. As Eloise scampered around the screen, I glanced out the window and saw that the butterfly bush was in full bloom. Great sprays of purple flowers swayed and danced in the breeze.

Then I saw the butterflies. One, Two and Three were on the bush, sipping at nectar; Four and Five circled each other in a great lazy spiral upwards; and Six flitted in and out of my field of vision. One and Two drifted up and swapped places and Six had a rest on a leaf. Four and Five descended again and paused for refreshment. Three floated over the fence and, finding nothing but a line of carports, soon ducked back to a cluster of flowers.

'Look!' I said to the girls, 'look! Butterflies!' and all three turned and stood to get a better view. Butterflies darted past, butterflies rested on flowers, butterflies drifted over the fence. The moving picture on the small screen trundled on, unnoticed, while we gazed at the living moving picture framed by the lounge room window.

Praying into the Night

2011-12-06T10:31:00.001+11:00

This piece first appeared in Zadok Perspectives No. 112 (Spring 2011). The Summer edition is out now, with my reflection on a visit to a witch doctor. To subscribe to Zadok, click here.

***

Many ancient traditions prescribe prayers for waking, for eating, and for going to sleep at night. I think this is great. I’d love to be the sort of person who formally prays at these times, but I never really manage it. In the hurly-burly of family life, when waking means being kicked in the kidneys at half past five by a restless two year old; when eating means sitting down to a child’s ‘no like that’, popping up a minute later to fetch milk in the pink cup, no the green cup, and having someone’s crusts flicked onto one’s plate; when sleeping means staggering to bed at the end of the day after half an hour’s respite lying flat on the couch... well, I just can’t manage a long structured prayer at those times; and this bothers me.

Is formal prayer necessary? Perhaps. It’s certainly something I do every week at church, and have used at various stages to help structure and guide my thoughts; but now I have three young children, it feels too hard. I spend some time most days sitting quietly and listening, but the effort of words is too much.

Yet I’ve started to realise that, for all my concern, I do pray constantly. It’s just not particularly consciously nor in the long wordy way so many suggest. When I wake, the first thought that usually comes to mind is ‘thank you’. Thank you for this day, my gentle husband, those hilarious children, the crisp winter mornings. For a thick coat and my red woolly arm warmers, for things large and small, I am grateful. It’s not a deliberate prayer, nor is it carefully articulated; instead, as I lie in bed and ponder getting up, I am momentarily flooded with gratitude.

Later, as I make coffee and hover over the toaster, I give thanks for this drink which smells so good, for hot toast and cold butter, for enough in my belly and the bellies of my kids. I remember the children who are hungry, and ask ‘please’. Please feed them, please teach us how to share, Lord have mercy on us all.

On the walk to school, a driver in a hurry shoots around the corner; I yank back my kids. Then I yell at the car and wave my finger in the air. A minute or two later, the fright and anger ebb to be replaced by a wave of ‘sorry’. Sorry that I cannot control my temper, that I have not yet learned the ways of gentleness. Sorry that I am aggressive in my fear; sorry that my children had to see it. I apologise to my kids, and to the One who is always present, I apologise also.

At a dozen points during the day – a swirl of yellow leaves dances through the air; a toddler announces she loves me; a sweet mandarin segment explodes in my mouth; the perfect word slots into place – I am momentarily overcome with sheer gratitude at being alive.

When the moon is up and the house is quiet, I slide back into bed. I soon grow warm nestled into my husband; and in the darkness I drowsily think ‘thank you’ once again: for this bed, this family, this house, this day, for the things that have gone well. Thank you too for the gracious presence at the places where I stumbled.

As I drift off, it becomes less a conscious thought and more a way of being. I am no longer just a tired woman falling asleep. Instead, this very ordinary person is becoming a small miracle, a conduit of gratitude, as with each slow breath I exhale my prayer deep into the night: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

A Spider, A Gift

2011-12-02T14:08:00.001+11:00

I never thought of myself as a wise woman until a spider came to live above my kitchen sink... I chat with her as we do our housework: me at the dishes, Arachne at her loom. As water splashes into the sink, I contemplate webs and weaving, fear and friendship, and whatever else her presence evokes.

***

You can read more of my reflection on a friendly spider in Barefoot Magazine's Summer 2011 issue. This is a bittersweet announcement since it is, very sadly, the last issue of Barefoot.

You can find Barefoot Magazine at all good newsagents, or order your copy here.

Advent List 2011

2011-11-29T13:37:00.001+11:00

Preparations for Christmas are upon us. Sadly, most preparation rituals do not seem to have much to do with the coming of a bearded prophet who recalled to us the poor, the outcast, the refugee, the dispossessed, the imprisoned, the widow and the orphan. Instead, we are bombarded with tinny carols, silly plastic evergreen wreaths strung from the light poles as the Australian summer begins to sizzle, and exhortations to buy buy buy.

A couple of years ago, I wrote about developing some small non-commercial rituals for Christmas with my kids; and, as I am story crazy, they of course involved a pile of picture books. So then I put together a list of some of the books we will read during the four weeks leading up to Christmas; you can read the list here.

However, many of the books on the list are out of print and hard to get. Meanwhile, since then I have found lots more wonderful stories, so I have drawn up a new list, adding the new stories and letting go of some of the old.

These are not Santa stories. Nor are most of them explicitly Christmassy, let alone Christian. Instead, they are stories which honour and celebrate hope, joy, generosity, gratitude, sacrifice, community and love. In particular, several focus on welcoming the stranger into our midst, which has always been a central calling to both Jewish and Christian peoples and would seem particularly appropriate as some of us, at least, prepare to welcome in the form of a baby the most strange and wonderful human the world has ever seen – and a refugee, to boot.

***

So let’s start with that. Jane Kurtz has written a lovely book about immigrant children, In the Small, Small Night. Kofi and Abena have recently arrived in America, but Kofi is so worried that he will forget his family in Ghana that he cannot fall asleep. So his sister Abena, recalling the village storyteller so far away, recounts two traditional stories from home: Anansi and the pot of wisdom; and the turtle and the vulture. As Kofi listens to the stories, he is soothed back to sleep.

The story is told without a hint of mawkishness, yet it is very touching as these two young children, so far from home, talk about their fears and what they have left behind. What is just as moving is the way Abena has brought the gift of storytelling with her from Ghana. The wisdom contained in the stories will sustain them as they start at a new school, in a new culture, where everything is different.

Sean Tan’s The Arrival charts the journey of another immigrant. This book without words is for all ages, as the story is told through hundreds of eerie sepia-toned illustrations. The Arrival will raise all sorts of questions about why people flee and resettle, questions which may be extended to the Advent stories or to the refugees in our midst.

Nail Soup is a retelling of a traditional folk tale which reminds us to welcome in the stranger. A traveller, denied all but the meanest of shelter and sustenance, convinces his host that he will make soup out of a nail. As the 'soup' bubbles away, the host is gradually persuaded to add ingredients that turn it into a generous meal they can share, demonstrating that a little hospitality leads to a rich bounty for all.

Welcoming in the refugee and the traveller is all well and good, but we are also to care for the poor in our midst. In The Happy Prince, Jane Ray retells Oscar Wilde's tale in which the statue of a prince gives all it has – its ruby eyes, its gold leaf – to the city’s poor via an obliging swallow. Ray’s richly detailed illustrations add greatly to the story.

The Quiltmaker's Gift is similarly themed, as a fabulously wealthy and utterly miserable king yearns for the one thing he cannot have: a patchwork quilt from the famed quiltmaker, who gives her quilts only to the poor. The quiltmaker tells the king that she will only make him a quilt once he has given everything away, and he gradually learns that joy is found not in material objects, but in self-sacrifice and caring for others. The detailed illustrations, which include dozens of quilt squares themed to the story, are absorbing.

Thinking of self-sacrifice recalls The Mousehole Cat, a tale from Cornwall. When winter storms close the harbour and bring a Cornish fishing village to the brink of starvation, Old Tom and his cat Mowser find a way out and brave the wind and the waves to catch fish for the town, knowing that there is a good chance that they will never return.

Old Tom reasons that there is nobody left to grieve for him; it frees him to risk his life to feed others. In Amelia Ellicott's Garden, a more passive older person feels abandoned by Time. Amelia struggles to maintain her beautiful garden and longingly remembers when she had people to share it with. It is not until a great windstorm blows her garden, her chickens and even Amelia over the fence that she discovers the host of neighbours – from all over the world – living in the flats next door who long to share the garden, and their lives, with her.

Getting to know one’s neighbour, the first step to love, also features in Rose Meets Mr Wintergarten. In this lovely book by Bob Graham, a young girl moves into a new neighbourhood. When she loses her ball over the fence, her openness and her fairy cakes disarm the miserly neighbour who has terrified the area’s children for decades.

Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge is a good neighbour, too. He lives next door to an old people’s home and is particular friends with Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper, who has four names just like him. Miss Nancy has lost her memory, and Wilfrid Gordon sets out to find it for her.

Margaret Wild’s Hop Little Hare is a simple story, also showing the love between the generations. It is not until Little Hare spies sheep nibbling at a curative boffle bush, which will ease his grandfather’s rheumatism, that he feels sufficiently motivated to hop!

A more complex gift giving between young and old features in the classic, Now One Foot, Now the Other. Bob teaches his grandson to stack blocks, tell stories and walk. When Bob has a stroke, it is the little boy who patiently teaches his grandfather to stack blocks, tell stories and walk again, using the same loving words his grandfather once used with him.

Love handed down between the generations is also found in Love You Forever, by Robert Munch, which he wrote in homage to his two children who were stillborn. In this story, a mother sings a special song to her son as he moves through the life stages; and as she ages and nears the end of her life, her son takes up the mantle and begins to sing it to his daughter.

Of course, we are called to love not just our family, our neighbour, the poor, the traveller, or the refugee; we are called to love our enemy, too. A Child's Garden tells of hope in oppressive circumstances. A boy tends a vine which throws out seeds on either side of a high barbed wire fence; the next season, vines grow on both sides of the fence and intertwine, symbolising hope for a future peace.

The story of the vine recalls, too, that we are to love the earth and everything in it. For All Creatures uses gliding alliterative language to describe and celebrate all manner of things that creep and crawl, run and jump, slither and slide upon the earth. ‘For spirals, shells and slowness, smallness and shyness, and for scribbled silver secrets, we are thankful.’

This celebration of the natural world is also seen in Owl Moon, in which a young girl goes out late one night with her father to see an owl. Owl Moon is a hauntingly beautiful children’s book, drenched in awe. An excellent book to read quietly at night, just before bedtime.

In Jeannie Baker’s Belonging, like so many of her books, we are shown one way to be partners in the creation: and outside our very own back window! Like The Arrival, it is told entirely in pictures, making it a book that people of all abilities can pore over.

Let’s finish with two books about Christmas. The first is a lively rendition of The Nativity by Julie Vivas. Drawing from the gospel writer Luke’s account, she illustrates the story in her singular style: the angel Gabriel is a ragged punk and shares a cuppa with Mary; the naked newborn, hands outstretched, is still attached to the umbilical cord; shepherds loom, peering into the cot; and in the final scene, Mary pegs out nappies. In Vivas's interpretation, the Christmas story is not a far-off super-spiritual event, but something immediate, physical and real, that happens even now. I particularly love that Mary is enormously pregnant, pendulous breasts and all, and not a skinny medieval nymph.

Finally, what would an Australian Christmas be without a reading of Wombat Divine? Wombat desperately wants to be in the Christmas play, but he is too short, too clumsy, and too heavy for any of the parts. At last, Emu finds him the perfect role and Wombat is, quite simply, divine.

As are all these stories. Read, prepare, enjoy.

The Zoo in You

2011-11-20T11:21:00.000+11:00

Years ago, I decided to pay attention to God’s feathered friends as one metaphor for God’s presence, and in doing so, I have discovered this: that the Holy Spirit is heard in the kookaburra, who laughs at our pretensions and wrestles with the snake;... she’s found in the white-faced heron on our neighbour’s roof; she’s recalled by little finches at my grandfather’s funeral. When I'm soulsick and sinking, she calls out my name; of Cornish ancestry, I hear her in the language of my heart, which leaps at the crying of the gulls.

***

Yep, another piece is being published, this time in The Zoo in You, a book exploring the animal imagery of faith. If you can cope with a bit of God in your reading, you should love this book. Each reflection is grouped with a prayer and a poem by Cameron Semmens, and is illustrated by Hamish McWilliam. My reflection can be found in Hope with a Cockatiel.

The Zoo in You is now available for pre-order for $19.95 plus postage here. Orders will be shipped from 2 December, and should arrive in good time for Christmas.

If the God stuff's not your thing, no matter – just wait 'til the next book!

Jones Park / Resurrection

2011-11-15T13:11:00.001+11:00

When I first moved to Brunswick more than fifteen years ago, I lived in a share house backing onto a dingy oval. The oval was fenced on two sides by an old tip, a great sloping hill of dirt, rubble and weeds cordoned off by cyclone wire. On a third side crouched a shabby playground, but whenever I thought to go there for a meditative swing I felt so nervy and trapped that I left within minutes.

Now I live five blocks away, and it's one of my favourite places. Ten years ago, the council cleaned up the tip and turned it into green space. They refurbished the oval, took down the fences, and turned the two sites into one enormous park.

Let me take you on a tour. At the top of the hill is a platform. The oval and the old playground lie behind us. To the east roll hills, a hazy grey; to the south, city towers stretch up small and hopeful under the wide blue sky.

Heading down the gently winding path, you see groves of young trees. A mother and her baby picnic under the casuarinas, where the breeze flowing through the needles recalls the sound of the sea. To the left, a woman shoots hoops and you can hear the basketball chick! through the net, then thud to the ground.

Further down winds a dry creek bed. But turn towards the new playground, instead, with its concertina tyres; they wheeze notes when we jump on them. Hit the colourful mushrooms with the mallets; listen to them toll. Climb the spider web with me; at the top, hook in your feet and reach for the sky; the spider web gently sways. Below us, the creek bed curves into a large pond; let's run down the steps.

Lie on the boardwalk and peek over the edge. See the water beetles scoot through the reeds, wings flipping so fast they blur! See the tadpoles, with their translucent tails and the bulge of budding limbs! An aquatic ladybug, fat and red, bumbles and rolls on by.

Above us skitter large dragonflies, grey and fat like army helicopters; tiny dragonflies dance, blue as sapphires and impossibly slender. Every few minutes frogs start up, creaking like a hundred thumbs pulled across a hundred combs, then just as quickly fall silent again. Larger frogs add their deep popping bass notes; crickets rasp; the pond sings.

Rushes tower, ten feet tall; and behind them, the Serbian Orthodox Church soars, turrets ablaze with gold.

It will never be as it was two centuries ago, a place of untouched wilderness sloping up from the Merri Creek. But from town dump to this: a place where mothers and babies picnic in shady groves; joggers run puffing up the hill; kids shriek with laughter at the top of the spider web; men sprawl in the grass with books; women shoot hoops; couples nestle in quiet spots; and tucked right down in the far corner lie I, flat on my stomach and peering through the boardwalk at the golden light and watching and listening as the frogs and dragonflies and honeyeaters and wattlebirds and finches and lizards and beetles and countless other small creatures whose names I do not know get on with things -

Life has indeed returned to this part of the city.

Incidentally, in trying to learn about my local corner I discovered there are 324 known species of dragonfly in Australia! Who would have thought?!

Don't Kill the Birthday Girl

2011-11-08T11:37:00.000+11:00

'Hi, I'm Fred.' Really? Well, I'm Alison, and I have a wicked temper and slightly depressive tendencies; I'm allergic to this, that and the other; and I have a weird and pathological fear of looking beautiful, thus the extremely short hair, the lack of makeup and jewellery, and a wardrobe almost completely devoid of skirts.

Fred is edging towards the exit by now, as well he should be: such an opening is hardly the path to a little light conversation, let alone the beginnings of a beautiful friendship. And yet it is common. I certainly have been guilty at times of identifying myself primarily by my weaknesses: Little Miss Asthma, Lady Mother Dying, The Homesick Chick. But now I prefer my primary identification to be something other than my neediness, so I prefer my vulnerabilities to be largely invisible in social contexts. I prefer it to be mostly invisible in others, too.

One thing I like to be invisible about is allergies (except, obviously, in this post). Before we talk more, we need to clean up what allergies are. The word 'allergy' is often used carelessly; I hear people say that are allergic to wheat, meaning that they get a bit windy when they eat a sandwich. What they suffer is an intolerance; this is not the same as an allergy.

Bundling allergies in with intolerances risks linking them with food fads and Hollywood diets; and this, I reckon, is part of what leads people to think that allergies are kind of funny, certainly annoying, even imaginary. Yet if people don't take them seriously, and then have anything to do with the food we eat, people with allergies get more than a bit of wind; they get a full blown reaction as their immune system goes berserk trying to rid their body of the allergen. I'm allergic to a few things, and by allergic I mean that I react to eating them by wheezing, vomiting, and, occasionally, going into anaphylactic shock.

Of course, trying to act nonchalant as a young teenager when everyone else is stuffing their face with prawn crackers – and I grew up with a crowd of south east Asians – is not easy. I have vivid memories of eating those crackers in full knowledge that they would make me sick, but hoping so much that this time it would be okay. I just wanted to fit in, but of course the dry mouth, thick tongue, itchy throat and major stomach cramps hardly helped with that little project.

As a young adult, one birthday was particularly memorable: someone bought me a Drambuie, a hitherto untried drink. I took one sip, and felt that telltale tickle – the beginnings of anaphylaxis – at the back of my throat. But I didn't want to mention it, or be rude. So I took another sip and, of course, immediately started hawking and coughing and spluttering as my throat closed up and I could no longer breathe. Not cool, Alison.

Many allergy sufferers could tell similar stories of risking their health if not their life for the sake of trying to appear normal; and I am sure many allergy sufferers would have made the same decision as me time and again, of not using or even carrying the dreaded EpiPen and risking the hubbub, the nausea and the trip to the emergency room that follows. Instead we try to flush out our systems with water and Benadryl, and hope for the best.

So it was with a mixture of trepidation and interest that I picked up Don't Kill the Birthday Girl, a memoir about living with allergies. I was afraid it might be an annoying whingeathon by someone who identifies herself primarily as 'Allergy Girl', but I was pleasantly surprised.

Sandra Beasley is allergic to many things, making it very difficult to navigate eating out in any context in a culture where eating out is the norm. But to my great relief she opens with the statement that "those with food allergies aren't victims. We're people who – for better or worse – experience the world in a slightly different way", and that attitude carries, more or less, through the book.

Beasley mixes up personal anecdote with social observations and a great deal of information. I learned how the body forms an allergic reaction; why a friend's son had a second, stronger, reaction to peanut oil hours after his first reaction; why the American food landscape is so infested by soy; how food labelling laws are the result of allergy lobbyists; and what it's like to be an allergic mother to children who are allergic to different things. She dispels some of the myths surrounding the current explosion in allergies, and uses her experience as an entry point to explore many aspects of American food culture. Much of what she says is interesting, and she is up front with how her personal agenda is sometimes rattled by what she learns.

Beasley asks some particularly good questions about ritual, especially communion. Communion is the high point of the Christian religious service and involves, in one way or another, the sharing of bread and wine. At my church, we have wine and water available (the latter for those who are allergic to grapes and for recovering alcoholics); and wheat bread with a rye embellishment (the rye is for those who are allergic to wheat). Many congregations have similar practices. But some, notably those Catholics who follow the explicit directives issued by Ratzinger, are forbidden from using any alternative to the Papal-sanctioned wheaten wafers, thus excluding many congregants from communion.

She is not a churchgoer, but she raises important questions about the nature and purpose of ritual, asking "Is it inclusiveness that makes rituals valuable? Or is it maintaining the ritual's integrity that matters, even if that leaves someone out?" She writes about being the child who never got a birthday cupcake when they were handed out at school, and being the young adult who could never accept a slice of wedding cake, or shake hands with or kiss anyone who had, and how painful those exclusions were.

In the same way, it is intensely painful for Christians to be excluded from communion, and Beasley's observations on communion and church policies are helpful for the general reader. (I will add that it is clear to me if not the Holy Father that, since the greatest commandment is to love, what the communion wafers are made of doesn't matter one iota; what matters is welcoming people in.)

She also asks good questions about the current hysteria surrounding keeping children safe. Is it really necessary, she asks, for entire schools to go nut free? Surely children must learn to manage their food allergies and use a little common sense. She cites idiotic news stories, such as the evacuation of a school bus because a peanut was rolling around on the floor (apparently a threat, even though no one was planning to pick it up and eat it), and asks whether it really takes a whole village to protect a child from a peanut.

Don't Kill the Birthday Girl is sensible, thought provoking, and also darkly funny in its tales of anaphylaxis at the most inconvenient times. One thinks of people with allergies as being so terribly, terribly earnest, but Beasley has a refreshingly self-mocking stance.

The book wobbles a little as it navigates between personal anecdote and more general information – I would have preferred the information to be less bound up in Beasley's personal experience – but overall it is a good read. What I found especially valuable was the normalisation of my experience: stories of anaphylaxis and its aftermath; and stories of not managing one's allergies well because of peer pressure and the desire to join in.

More than anything, however, I valued Beasley's stance that our weaknesses – whether allergies or, and I'm extrapolating here, other health and wellbeing problems – are only one part of our lives, and they are far from the most interesting part; nor do they warrant special attention. They need be mentioned only when necessary and can otherwise stay in the background. Don't Kill the Birthday Girl is a call to understand the particular problem of allergies, then move on.

As Beasley writes, "Not every page is meant to tell your story. You are not the focal point of every canvas. This town is busy... My job is to center on staying safe in this world, but my job is also never to assume the world should revolve around keeping me safe. We have more important things to worry about. Don't kill the birthday girl. The gifts are wrapped and the piñata waiting. We have a party to get to." Hear, hear.

Small Ghosts

2011-11-02T13:15:00.001+11:00

Small ghosts trail behind so many families, invisible to the naked eye or the quick hello.

Rena bustles around her son's birthday party, passing food and welcoming guests. During a lull, we chat. 'Did you ever think of having a second child?' I ask. 'Oh, we did,' she says, 'but he died. He was eight weeks old. He got an infection, it entered his heart, and he died.' I place my hand on her shoulder; there are no words.

***

You can read more of this All Souls Day reflection published in Eureka Street here.

Writing Avoidance Techniques, or What I thought about last Thursday

2011-10-25T13:18:00.001+11:00

Did you know there is an entire Medical Romance series within the Mills & Boone cadre? I have stopped drinking for a few months, and since I feel like an idiot sitting for hours in my usual writing space – a bar – with only a mineral water to justify my presence, I have had to resort to the local library. And in our busy library full of chatty people, the quietest corner is tucked into the romance section.

I must admit that Doctor Delicious, a large print medical M&B romance, caught my eye. So did The French Doctor's Midwife Bride, an elliptical title that leaves me longing to know more. The Surgeon's Pregnancy Surprise was surprising, indeed, for who if not a doctor knows how babies are made – but then, I suppose we all forget things in the heat of the moment.

Up until now I have been fairly happy as a WOLGER*, and indeed the house is being painted and the plumber has just fixed our hot water service. Looking at these titles, however, makes me wonder if I am missing something.

Would I have more fun as The Sheik's Blackmailed Mistress or as The Sheik's Wayward Wife? Or would the desert sand irritate my buttocks? Perhaps being At the Greek Tycoon's Bidding might be more comfortable; a yacht with clean linen sounds nice.

I'm probably too leathery to pass as The Millionaire Tycoon's English Rose, but I might enjoy being Pleasured in the Billionaire's Bed or, more submissively, Bedded at the Billionaire's Convenience. Yet the latter title has an off-putting lack of alliteration; Bedded at the Billionaire's Behest would have worked better for me.

It's certainly a bit late to be The Desert King's Virgin Bride; to be honest, I'd have to say that I'm more The Lusty Lawyer's Lovely Lay type.

But wait! It seems I have lived a M&B romance. For on spinning the rack I see The Boss and His Secretary, nestled right next to Accepting the Boss's Proposal. And many years ago, I did.

Though come to think of it, I proposed to him. I'll have to write my own book. How does The Secretary's Saucy Suggestion sound?

*Wife of lawyer getting excited about renovations.

Just one bed

2011-10-21T12:46:00.001+11:00

'When I grow up,' announced my three year old, 'I want a house with just one bed in it. I don't want to live with ANYBODY. And I don't want any kids!'

I was shocked. I found myself wanting to yell, 'No! Having kids is the best thing you'll ever do!' because it is, it really is. It just comes at a price, and that price is solitude.

Right now, I am keenly aware of this price: my sister has recently moved into a flat all by herself, and I am ever so slightly sick with jealousy.

No one touches her stuff. No one turns on her bike lights and leaves them to go flat; no one scribbles on her crossword with bright orange texta; no one leaves fridge magnets strewn across her kitchen floor. No one has fist fights while she's trying to concentrate, and no one throws a tantrum when she gets off a tram. She doesn't have to talk first thing in the morning, and she never has to remind people to pack their lunch, practice the piano, or use their inside voice. She can cook what she wants; and if she doesn't feel like cooking, she can have a bowl of cereal. There are never piles of corn flakes under her kitchen table, let alone day-old spaghetti strands glued to the floor.

More than anything, she doesn't have to listen to chatter twelve hours a day. Yes, it's delightful; yes, it's revealing; yes, it's funny. It also drives this reflective introvert completely and utterly insane.

There are hours, even days, when I long to have a little place of my own, just a room with a bed, a table, a chair and a great big pile of books; and perhaps a pot of geraniums to brighten the window sill. And yet of course I feel guilty for wanting that, when I have an airy house, an affectionate family and the chance to read every night when the kids are asleep.

So when my three year old articulated my secret longing, which I am so careful never to voice aloud, I was shocked.

Yet it was such a wonderful thing to hear her say. She's the youngest of three, and her whole day is dominated by other people's rhythms: school drop off and pick up and reading with the class; eating when I'm hungry and resting when I'm tired; going shopping when she wants to stay home and catching up with friends when she wants to play with mum.

When they're not at school, her two older sisters try their best to boss her; meanwhile her parents insist she use her manners and wait for them at every single road crossing. No wonder she dreams of a time when she can set her own agenda and be left in peace, and it was lovely to hear her articulate that.

Too, I was encouraged to realise that at least one of my children can imagine a life that isn't exactly like mine. Of course I'd love her to experience the joy of having children; but if she wants to live alone before or even instead of having them, how wonderful that she is not so dominated by me that she feels my life is the only option.

So instead of protesting, I breathed out my shock and asked, 'would you like to live all by yourself one day?'; 'oh yes!' she cried, nodding emphatically, 'all by myself.'

Then she took my hand and asked me to come have a cuddle in her bed.

I guess solitude is something that she, like me, is prepared to wait for.

Guess Who?

2011-10-05T21:26:00.005+11:00

I was poking round a traditional op shop, dark and tiny and located at the back of a shopping strip, when I found a Dutch version of Guess Who? – Wie is Het? – with the beguiling hand written label Improve your German! ‘Tee hee hee,’ I thought, and picked it up to give my kids. They can play Guess Who? just as well with Philippe and Lucas as they can with Richard and George, and with any luck they might even play it in German or Italian or any of the other languages in which they know half a dozen phrases – sadly, like whoever wrote the label, this doesn’t include Dutch.

Then I turned my attention to the stacks of linen, and there, carefully folded, was an Onkaparinga blanket. These gorgeous blankets, incredibly soft and warm, were once manufactured in the Adelaide Hills; they are the stuff of my childhood. This particular one was pink and green and absolutely perfect, so I snaffled it up. On the coldest nights, we sleep under a hodgepodge of picnic rugs and crocheted lap blankets; whenever we have a family stay, we are a blanket or two short; there was no question that we would use it.

Thrilled, I paid for the game and the blanket, then tottered around the corner to pick up something for dinner. At the grocery store, the assistant asked me if I had found the blanket at the op shop. ‘Oh yes,’ I gabbled, ‘I’m delighted – I have three girls and this will be perfect.’

‘I’d hope you’d give it to the homeless,’ she snapped as she totted up the bill.

I stood there gasping, my mind racing in frantic guilt overload – was I really such a thoughtless bitch? – and found myself right back in an argument with my mother, who has been dead these eleven years.

Op shops are for those who need them, she said, and you can afford to shop somewhere else. Stop being so selfish!

But there’s too much stuff in the world, I muttered, and anyway, far more is donated than the op shops can ever sell; the rest has to be shipped overseas or sent to the tip.

The homeless are freezing to death, she said. There are people on the streets who need that blanket!

My kids are cold too, I said, and anyway, the homeless wear their blankets until they are fetid and then throw them away. This is too beautiful to throw away!

So the homeless shouldn’t have beautiful things?, she asked.

And on and on it went. We debated whether op shops are fundraising stores for charities or opportunity shops for the poor; we agreed on the need to limit manufacturing waste and share resources but argued about what that really means.

I couldn’t win. Her voice runs round my head like a broken record.

On the other hand, she’s long dead; perhaps, I thought, I might have the last word on this one. So I tossed my head, stood up straight, and said rather briskly to the shop assistant, ‘We give thousands of dollars to charitable organisations every year; I feel quite good about taking this blanket home.’ Then I grabbed my change and the groceries, gathered up the blanket, and stalked off.

Later, when I unfolded it, I discovered to my delight that it was a double. I have been sleeping under it ever since, tucked in safely with the comforting heaviness I remember from childhood. My daughters are asking to nap under it, and in less than a week it has become a fixture of our household, one of those items that will be used for decades, an object of nurture and care.

And even I can now see that this a good enough use for my mother, their grandmother; she must be pleased. As for those voices in my head who masquerade as her, like the predictable characters in a game of Guess Who? they have yet again been unmasked as demons; they can just fly away.

Until it's time for the next round.

Zero History, and other style notes

2011-09-22T10:53:00.005+10:00

I am lolling on the couch in my favourite denim, a heavy right hand twill, but not, I'm afraid, selvedge. Nor is it slubby, unlike my partner's long sleeve t-shirt, an irresistibly slubby item.

I know all about slubby thanks to William Gibson's latest novel, Zero History, which has as its major (ahem) thread the search for the maker of a secret brand of jeans, Gabriel Hounds – and no doubt like every other slightly obsessive William Gibson fan, I now find myself googling slubby denim and wondering where I can get me a pair of those mythical Hounds.

Which is fascinating. I am not one of those women who usually spends a great deal of time thinking about clothes. I have my uniform – black or blue jeans; black or blue scoop neck top with or without subtle horizontal stripes; grey or blue jacket; coordinating scarves and sleevies for chillier days – which I almost always wear. These clothes are rarely from the high street or the mall; instead, I buy them second hand, fair trade, or from local makers. I'm hardly the stereotypical fashionista.

Yet I do have fantastically strong opinions about what I will and will not wear. I hate it when clothes fall apart or stretch out of shape; and I loathe the way garment makers are so often treated as slave labour, rather than as skilled workers. Too, I must admit that when my clothes are well made and suit me, I feel good; and when they aren't and don't, I feel self-effacing and grumpy.

So I spend time searching out clothes that are sturdy and timeless; and when I can't find or afford them – which is usually – I look for quality second hand. Then, of course, I often give up and head to the mall; but I dream of finding clothes which are made to last.

In his magnificent book Local Wonders, Ted Kooser writes about the experience of putting on a shirt his mother made for him when he was 14. Sixty years later, it still fits and still has wear in it, unimaginable to this child of the throwaway generation. It is, however, imaginable to the maker of Hounds, who is fascinated by the clothes that once were commonplace in America: 20 oz selvedge denim, and shirts and jackets so sturdy that they endured for decades; these are the clothes she is re-inventing.

Zero History is about the power of this secret brand, which has as its only advertisement the quality of each garment. It is also about the hunger of an advertising agency to find the genius behind such a simple yet powerful marketing tool; and the way even this brand is taken on board, in the end, by the fashion mavens. Concurrent themes include the way US military style has so deeply informed street wear; the phenomenon of pop up shops; and the cross over between the worlds of music, art and fashion. Just to keep it all ticking along, there are also eccentric private hotels, a few high speed chases, corruption in high places, and a performance art skydiver.

William Gibson's last three novels have investigated in one way or another the influence of branding on our lives and the infiltration of the military on general society, and while Zero History is perhaps not quite up to Pattern Recognition, the first of the three, it is still a thought provoking read and a terrific romp.

I must say, too, that it gave me quite a fillip when one of the characters revealed that he had bought his Hounds at the Rose Street Market in Fitzroy; I have bought a heap of clothing, bags and notebooks there over the years. Nice to know that one of my locals gets a mention in a novel set in London, although it gave me a jolt to realise I may be very slightly cooler than I thought.

On another fashion note, I had a weird moment this week. Having just read Zero History, I was trying to work out why some outfits make me feel terrific a la Hounds and others make me slope around. I was thinking, too, about how I almost always wear the uniform mentioned above, and so I found myself flipping through Secrets of Style at my cousin's house, To my astonishment, I discovered that the editors of In Style magazine think a uniform is good, and that it is better to have a few quality items in one's wardrobe than a mountain of ordinary clothes. They also recommend buying up big when an item suits one well, and I puffed up in pride at the thought of my three identical t-shirts and three identical black singlets sitting in the wardrobe.

The main difference between their wardrobe and mine appears to be sticky fingers and budget. Thus I wear not cashmere turtlenecks, but wool; not tailored pants, but denim; and not low heels, but amusing flat shoes. But it was an odd moment when I realised the editors of a style magazine were on the same track as William Gibson and his imaginary maker of Hounds, and me.

It was especially surprising given the waste of an industry which has as its focus the generation of desire, which leads to our insatiable and destructive hunger for the new. But once I recovered from my astonishment, and my general embarrassment at reading a style guide, I must admit Secrets of Style was very helpful, not least for giving me permission to stick to my grey, black and blue wardrobe of things which are not particularly fashionable. It was full of good tips, too, on which cuts suit which features, and what to look for when buying clothes (fabric, shape, length, stitching, seam width, and more).

Spring is here, and if you're like me you'll have just discovered you have about three things to wear. My modest tips, diffidently proffered given the lamentable state of my own wardrobe, are to read Zero History and have a think about fashion (anyway, it's great fun); flick through the style guide, which will help you send all the clothes that make you feel awful to the op shop, and understand which clothes may suit you; scroll through the ethical shopping guide I put together here; then forgive yourself for anything you have to buy new from a sweatshop reliant chain store. Just buy the best quality you can afford, so you only have to buy it once.

And look out for something slubby.

(I have decided to crosspost my notes on books from Lost in a Story here. They will still appear at Lost in a Story, along with all the previous reviews.)

The power of a sleeping baby

2011-09-14T21:20:00.003+10:00

Picture this: a young baby sleeps peacefully in the arms of someone who, we know, feels no peace... the sleeping baby is the medium of God’s passionate and pastoral love. It communicates a powerful message of acceptance and worth to a fractured adult. In so doing, the baby is engaged in pastoral care. (The Priesthood of All Believers: An exploration of the ministry of children to the church and its implications for congregations, Paper S186, Zadok Papers, Spring 2011).

***

If you need a little light holiday reading, the Zadok Institute has recently published my paper on the ministry of children to the church, all 12,729 words of it (plus a few more for endnotes).

Interested in such things? You can order a copy for the princely sum of $4.00 ($2.50 for the pdf copy), plus $2.50 for postage and handling, from Zadok; this is less than .0003c a word, a steal at twice the price! Download an order form here.

Mortimer, Mohammed and Me

2011-09-05T16:39:00.003+10:00

This piece appeared in Zadok Perspectives No. 111 (Winter 2011). The Spring edition is out now, with my reflection on praying into the night.

***

Mortimer, Mohammed and Me

Every Friday, I spend a few hours reading with kids at a local school. I listen to each child read their reader, and then I offer them a choice: they can go back to the classroom activity, or they can have a story read to them, which they choose from the books I bring in. Mostly, they want to listen to a story; and mostly, they choose a little book by Robert Munsch, called Mortimer.

Mortimer can’t sleep, so instead he sings loudly (‘Bang-bang, rattle-ding-bang, Gonna make my noise all day’) and drives his family crazy. Person after person comes upstairs to tell Mortimer to be quiet, but as soon as they reach the bottom of the stairs he starts singing again. Eventually, the family becomes so agitated that they start yelling at each other; and while Mortimer waits for someone else to come up, he falls fast asleep.

As you can imagine, it is a very loud book. I have to sing Mortimer’s song four times; and mimic the sound of lots of people coming upstairs and shouting at him; and evoke the noise of Mortimer’s mother and father and seventeen brothers and sisters and even the police yelling downstairs – this book is a riot.

Meanwhile the listening child sits, spellbound; sings Mortimer’s song along with me; and almost invariably gets the giggles.

I read Mortimer aloud fifteen to twenty times each week; and at times I find myself wanting to rush. They’ve all heard it before, many times. There are very few volunteers and lots of kids, and I would like to read with every child every week – but I can’t. I find myself thinking that if we hurry this story or read less of the reader or maybe even give up reading stories but focus on the readers instead, then I’ll get to one more, and one more, and one more, child.

Yet the whole point is to give these kids, mostly refugees with very few books at home, the opportunity to wallow in stories just as my own children have wallowed. We can’t do that in a rush.

So I work hard to breathe deep; to sit on the class list so it doesn’t catch my eye; to read fast when the story begs to be read fast; to read slow when the story begs to be drawn out; to make room for quiet spaces and expectant pauses; and to look at the face of each child and etch it onto my heart.

One Friday, I was reading Mortimer for perhaps the seventeenth time, as always achingly aware of the kids I wouldn’t get to and wrestling with the impulse to race. I glanced at Mohammed, listening with rapt attention, and I suddenly realised that we were on God’s time.

Between two words, I dropped into that great yawning space, that vast universe where there is more than enough time for love however long it takes; and in this spinning dizzying sense of the infinite I was surrounded by a great rumble of belly laughter, a deep chuckling, love wiping its eyes in hilarity at the story of Mortimer and at all the little boys and girls who drive their parents crazy, and at all the crazy adults who think that love can be scheduled or rushed.

And then I was back at school, where I found myself sitting on the carpet singing ‘Bang-bang, rattle-ding-bang, Gonna make my noise all day’ and beside me Mohammed was now singing, his face aglow, and I started to hoot and he got the giggles and a classmate joined in and another picked up the thread of song, and surrounding us all were the floating filaments, the echoes of heavenly laughter.

(The boy’s name has been changed. Robert Munsch has a fantastic website where you can look at his books and listen to stories; Mortimer is here.)

Armfuls of roses

2011-08-30T14:51:00.003+10:00

There were many things my stubborn and self-righteous old grandfather did wrong. There's no doubt about that; even he admitted to and apologised for many of them. But I'd like to remember what he did very well indeed: he made a marriage last for 64 years; he saw himself as his wife's husband even when she was almost completely silenced by Alzheimer's; and he was faithful to the end.

There were many things this child never saw or understood, but these are the things that remain: he was surprised and delighted every time she brought out the violet crumbles, rubbing his hands together in anticipation before tucking in. He thanked his wife every night when he sat down to dinner, and always remarked on how delicious the food was. He patted her arm and called her 'pet', and meant it with great affection.

A person could do worse than to be grateful: for his sweet but vague wife, for the meals that appeared with clockwork regularity, for every shiny foil wrapped sweetie. A person could do worse than to plant a garden so his wife could have armfuls of roses whenever she did the church flowers.

A person could do a lot worse than to cherish someone for decades. As they aged, my grandfather seemed to became more affectionate towards my grandmother. He had always been thankful for her to some degree, but in later years, after a lifetime of gratitude, he expressed it in small ways every day. As she became more and more forgetful, I watched him wrestle with his frustration and choose to be protective, instead.

The choice ran deep, so that for the last couple of years, my grandfather sat with his wife at a nursing facility hour after hour, day after day, as she gradually lost all her faculties. He refused other options, seeing it as his duty to stay by her side, keeping his familiar face in sight, and acting as her protector and advocate. As her memory faded, her speech disappeared and her reflexes returned to those of an infant, still he sat, her husband to the end.

The man who had been angry and judgmental, even violent at times, the man who my parents' friends from student days, now grandparents themselves, still refer to as 'Father Abraham' in slightly awed tones, learned late in life to curb his temper and his tongue. At some stage he opted for patience and gentleness; and with regular practice, he mastered them.

A person could do an awful lot worse than to soften as they age. He gives me something to aim for.

Photo shows my grandmother: what a woman!

Keith Milne

2011-08-28T13:39:00.003+10:00

A few words for a beloved family friend, Keith, who recently passed away.

***

Spirit
Seventy years could not hide
Eyes and grin like a little boy
Who stole a plum from the neighbour’s tree
And twinkles still with remembered joy.

Body
His gnarled hands, one nail snapped short,
turned an eggcup from huon pine
so fine it seems too good to use.
On tapering leg
it holds my egg
and memories of those hands,
that grin, the van the yellow of soft boiled yolk,
sparkling eyes that loved a joke,
a little boy in old man’s skin,
a loyal friend, one of those men
who loved and served and lived life well.
Finished now, like my eggshell.

Mind
What I will miss most
Is how he always turned his head,
Cupped his hand behind his ear,
And leaned near me
As if everything I said,
And you said and she said,
As if everything we all said
Was worth hearing.

More than enough

2011-08-14T10:36:00.002+10:00

As I stride along in my big red boots, an early spring breeze ruffles my hair. I swing the bag holding pink and purple wellies, a birthday present for my youngest daughter, and I can't help but laugh aloud. It's Thursday night, and I'm out and about with a bit of money in my pocket, heading to my favourite bar. There I'll chat with the barmaid about her new hat, then order a glass of wine and a toasted sandwich and call it dinner. Warm and fed, recharged by an hour or two alone at the back, I'll wander off to choir and sing.

How delightful it is to have a few dollars in my pocket! How lucky I am to have an hour or two out! How glorious it is to meet up with friends! How fortunate I am to have money, time, companionship, love!

Rockefeller was rich as Croesus; yet when asked 'How much is enough?' he replied, 'a little more, always a little more' or words to that effect. But a good pair of boots and a thick blue jacket; a glass of wine and a bit of toasted cheese; the joy of three daughters; the company of friends; and a husband warming my bed at night – what more could I possibly want?

Whatever was Rockefeller thinking?! So much more than enough, this is life in abundance. In the late afternoon, as the sun dips low and sets the sky alight, even the shabby streets of Brunswick are paved with gold.

Once was a schoolgirl

2011-07-29T14:31:00.002+10:00

Recently I visited my old primary school, a place of great pain. It was where I learned to sit down and shut up; where I was bullied by a teacher or two; where I was routinely humiliated in front of the other students. It's a place I still can't talk about without my voice growing strident; I was so scared and lonely there.

For months I have thought to visit and lay a few demons to rest; and one funny Saturday, it felt like time. So we trekked out to the eastern suburbs; my lovely family dropped me off and waved goodbye; and I walked the old path to school. The gates were open, and I ducked in and discovered what a little place it is.

The looming platform where the vice principal used to lecture us has shrunk to the size of a few steps, just enough room for a portly gentleman with a red face to stand as he bawled out several hundred kids. The great banks of the oval, strictly out of bounds and where I used to hide with a book, are barely big enough for a child to stretch out and be invisible from the main schoolyard. The assembly point where I was spontaneously pulled out of line and marched down the hall to a younger grade for the year, thereby losing all my friends and the chance to learn anything, has been subsumed into a new building. The classroom of my most vindictive teacher was shut up, of course; but even from the outside it was clear just how insignificant it was; it even looked cheerful.

Hard to imagine, really. That teacher loathed me, and no day was complete until she made me cry. I used to wake at dawn, sick to my stomach, and sobbed every morning before I left home. That year I broke my writing arm in the first week of third term and so for the thirteen weeks I wore a plaster cast, I was detained at recess and lunch to rule lines on scrap paper; she wouldn't let me write messily in my books. Every piece of work I carefully scratched out was returned with a rebuke; my left handed writing was unacceptable. Most wonderfully, later that same year I caught mumps then measles, and spent the entire fourth term deliriously feverish, and safe at home in bed.

In the centre of the school between two lines of classrooms stands an old eucalypt. When I was a student, lorikeets nested in its hollow and we were forbidden from going near it. Thirty years later it's still there. As I looked at it, remembering, a sudden movement caught my eye. Jutting out of the tree at hip height was a rainbow lorikeet, the great great grandson perhaps of the birds I had known, lurid green and blue and red and yellow, one beady eye fixed on me. I stood still. The bird flicked its head this way and that, assessing the risk; then shot out of the tree like a bullet. I walked over quietly and peeked into the hole; I caught the flash of a bright red beak as a nesting lorikeet turned to look at me. Our eyes met; then it ducked out of view and I let it be.

I walked around the grounds and remembered the humiliations, once so enormous; I recalled the loneliness, and the pain. The school is on a rise, and catches the wind. As I peered into windows and checked out the shelter sheds, the cars on the main road bounding the school roared past. I realised that it has always felt like a school on a cliff. The traffic sounds like the incoming tide, and over the top sings the wind. On this particular Saturday, a gale from the south and the noise of the cars rose up and swept through the school and me, scouring away hurt and leaving a quiet woman washed up on a peeling old bench, a few toy buildings dotted around, and winged rainbows darting overhead.

Once a place to constrict my heart with fear, it is finally becoming ancient history: a setting for stories, nothing more. What happened, happened; what remains are just memories; and time, the great healer, has done its work again.

Small Acts of Courage

2011-07-22T14:46:00.008+10:00

These are some of the things I am scared of: drawing, singing, meeting people, doing new things, talking on the telephone, making appointments, ladies in waxing salons, performing in public, nuclear power, global warming, and the zombie hand that might reach out of the toilet and drag me down when I’m sitting on it. It’s true: I am scared of most things. I always have been; I’ve been waiting for the axe to fall for as long as I can remember.

It’s easy to explain. My mother loved me, yet was highly critical of everything I did; I had some abusively bullying teachers in primary school; and between one thing and another I’ve never quite got over the combination. As a child, whenever I stuck my neck out and often when I didn’t, somebody shrieked at me.

Add to that three key caregivers, who looked after me from when I was a baby and who died when I was four, and this little girl learned that the world is not a safe place.

So I became a mouse. Every now and then the lion came roaring out but for the most part the mouse is with me, whispering that I should sit down, shut up, and not move a muscle lest the farmer’s wife come running, carving knife in hand.

Yet I don’t want to grow into a querulous and fearful old woman. But unless I practice being brave now, that’s exactly what’s going to happen. So, timid as I am, I’ve spent the last decade working on my fears, and addressing those voices which tell me that I’m no good at anything and that the world is fundamentally dangerous.

How?, you ask. Well, to begin with I found myself a nice pen, and at least once a week I’m doing a drawing in which no line can be erased. I’ll never be an artist, and that’s fine; the exercise has other purposes. It’s to remind me there’s nothing to be afraid of: I’m an adult now and no teacher is hanging over my shoulder and telling me what I can’t do. It also reminds me to observe closely and look, really look, at the world. I enjoy the feeling of my brain shifting into another gear and my hand cruising across the page; I enjoy laughing at the terrible drawings that result. It’s been a small exercise in bravery, and I think it’s making me bold.

Because the other day, as we were eating our lunch, my youngest daughter and I heard ‘fresh new potatoes!’ blaring through a megaphone. For years I’ve heard this call once or twice a month as a white ute cruises slowly through our suburb. I’ve been intrigued, but am too cowardly to flag it down. I worry that the veggies might be sprayed with pesticides, or the sellers rude or annoying... what if they hammer on my door every time they come into town?

How ridiculous. The worst that will happen is I spend a couple of dollars on some bad potatoes that can always be thrown to the chooks. But the other day, having done half a dozen drawings lately, I was feeling heady. I grabbed my daughter; we ran out and waved the truck down. We met a lovely couple, husband and wife, who run a small organic farm and trundle through the suburbs of Melbourne to sell their produce direct; and we bought the best apples and potatoes I have seen this year. We had eaten most of the apples by the end of the day.

The apples gave me such a burst of courage that I left the house on my Thursday ritual thinking about other fears. I can’t shave under my arms; I get terrible rashes. I don’t mind being hairy, but it does make me sweaty as I power walk to school and back. My lovely waxing lady, found in a previous burst of courage, moved to a small island off the coast of Scotland late last year and I’ve been shaggy ever since. But filled with good apples and knowing there were new potatoes on the kitchen bench, I strode straight into a convenient salon to make an appointment. It was quiet, and a woman could see me immediately. I’m pretty scary under there, I said; and the woman, taking a look, said ‘I’m not running away yet’ and started to giggle. Somehow our eyes met and the giggles turned to a shared belly laugh. I relaxed; she smeared on hot wax and ripped out the hair; and that was that. No big deal, after all.

While I was putting my clothes back on, my mobile rang and I felt compelled to answer it. As I chatted, I reflected that despite my fears I’ve been practising this telephone business for years now, and I feel like I’m starting to get good at it.

All this courage! I certainly need it. Although I am scared of singing anywhere other than at home, a few years ago I joined a choir full of strangers. Truth be told, I chose my children’s school not because of any recommendations but because of the parent’s choir. After my own primary school experience, where teachers were deliberately cruel and parents sidelined to the point that I seriously contemplated home schooling my own daughters, this seemed to be a healthy sign. And the choir, and the school, have been good.

Being in the choir’s scary enough, but we’re rehearsing more seriously than usual; our cheerful group, normally focussed on red wine and gossip, has been asked to perform at a public event and I feel sick at the thought. I was anxious about rehearsal; then again, I was full of new apples from the potato man; I was freshly exfoliated; I had chatted on the phone; and I’d just done a drawing. It was pretty bad, but one or two lines have signs of life that are slightly encouraging.

I may not be able to do much about my fears of nuclear power, global warming or the hand that lurks in the s-bend, but it’s about time I performed in public. So despite my anxiety, off I went to choir practice; and at some stage, as always, I began to enjoy it.

That’s the funny thing about small acts of courage: they almost always make me happy.

And look! I posted some drawings of mine... wildly imperfect, but another small act.

How two chicken-loving enemies became neighbours once again

2011-07-12T15:39:00.003+10:00

Not so long ago, I had a bit of a rant about our unfriendly neighbours. We have one spectacular neighbour, but most of the others are cool veering on cold. And for years, our most immediate neighbour has appeared to hate us. When I greet her, she ignores me; when I see her in the street and smile, she turns her back. It has made me scared and fearful and anxious and angry and defensive. I have always tried to acknowledge her even when I feel bad; and I have always spoken well of her in front of our kids, but it's really ground me down. I have thought, from time to time, of dropping in and asking what the problem is, but I have been too cowardly. It's hard to know how to ask someone why she hisses through her teeth at you; and it feels slightly pathetic, like a jilted teenager begging 'But why don't you like me anymore?'. So the frostiness has continued.

Then something happened that made me furious: we had a visit from the council about our lovely chickens. Apparently, there's been a complaint. Now, we have met the council guidelines listed on their website and when I spoke with the officer she said they were satisfied – for now – but I was really angry. It's not the first time that we've had a complaint against us, and always from the same person, our neighbour.

But I don't want to be like her; I want to be an exemplary neighbour. So while I simmered, I asked people I trust for the support I need and thought about what to do. As much as I wanted to throw eggs and shout and yell, I'm tired of living with a sense of deep hostility bristling from next door, a house which is so close we can see in each other's side windows. I couldn't bear to make it worse.

The next morning I had a few hours without the kids, so I took myself out for a fast wintry walk. I marched around and found myself heading to our local hill, built over the old rubbish dump; it felt like a fitting place to yell. I did a few muttering laps of the oval first, then up the hill I went to say my piece to the wind. When I was done I ran down the hill like a little kid, loose and gangly and arms windmilling through the grass. The rage was abating, so I strode homewards, still wondering.

I passed a centre for spirituality, and in the window were the usual accoutrements: gentle words in flowing calligraphy, soft scarves, and candles. All these things may be helpful to a regular spiritual practice, but it suddenly occurred to me that any spirituality that runs deep will be nothing like a beautifully draped silk scarf. Instead, it will be hard and messy; and it will be about the most mundane areas of life: how we act when we're afraid; how we respond to people when they are cruel or rude or thoughtless; how we meet a thousand different challenges in the small exchanges of the household, the playground, or the local shops. And I realised that, no matter how afraid I was, I had to go talk with my neighbour.

So I went home and collected the day's eggs, still warm. Then, feeling sick to the stomach, I boxed them up and headed next door.

When my neighbour answered, the first thing she said was 'We are enemies.'. I wanted to cry. Instead, heart thumping, I asked why. It turns out that she perceived a serious slight five or six years ago, and the council and her son did their best to maintain that slight - the story is long and complicated, and the details are irrelevant. Enough to say that, at the end of it, we had unravelled a serious misunderstanding, and I apologised profusely for my part in the episode; then we talked for a good ten minutes about this and that, like normal neighbours do. She started to smile and then laugh, and finally, finally she agreed to accept the eggs to feed her grandkids who, she reckons, have never tasted really fresh ones.

Ironically, when I asked her if she had any concerns about the chickens she said 'I like the chickens!', and that's when her face really softened. Apparently they remind her of her childhood; she enjoys hearing them move around our garden. So for all my fear that it was one more thing she didn't like, I was wrong about that; and for some reason, I am not worried about who else objects to the chooks – as long as it is not her.

Before I left, she said that there is nothing to be enemies about; and I begged her to drop in if anything ever bothered her - or even if she just wanted to join me in a cuppa.

I'm sure this is not the ending. Something else will come up – we are all so far from perfect – and I will need to work to maintain this new civility. I still don't know if the council has anything further to say about our hens. But I feel like a scouring wind has swept through the street and made it clean. A once frosty neighbour smiled at me and told me a few stories, and I felt my fear slowly trickle away; for now, that's ending enough.

From Heavy Heart to a Sense of Hope

2011-07-04T14:38:00.002+10:00

What follows is a reflection presented to the South Yarra Community Baptist Church on 3 July 2011. Not quite the usual post, but some of you may find it interesting. The text referred to is Matthew 11:25-30, which goes like this:

Jesus broke into prayer, saying: "Father, Lord of earth and sky, thank you for keeping the religious experts and the sophisticated intellectuals in the dark about these matters, while at the same time making them as plain as day to the average toddler. But of course, Father, such reckless generosity is typical of the way you like to do things!"

Then, turning to the crowd again, Jesus said: "My Father has put the whole show in my hands, and it all hangs on the strength of our relationship. No one really knows what makes the Son tick except the Father, and no one really knows what makes the Father tick except the Son. Anyone else can only know if the Son chooses to let them in on it. If you are worn out and overloaded, come to me, and I will let you put your feet up. Come and work for me, and take a leaf out of my book. I am gentle on people, and down-to-earth; and with me your whole being will be able to relax. The job I will give you is piece of cake. The load I will ask you to bear is a feather-weight."

(Australian paraphrase © Nathan Nettleton, laughingbird.net).

***

Tonight's gospel passage holds a somewhat hideous fascination for me. I've always been told that I'm pretty smart, and I've studied theology. Yet in the reading from Matthew, Jesus says that God has hidden many things from the intelligent and wise, and instead revealed them to children. It's a reminder that cleverness is not the be-all and end-all, and that God's wisdom may often look foolish to our minds – but of course, it makes me very nervous about preaching!

So rather than engage in a big theological exposition, unravelling the text using historical, socio-political, linguistic and liberation-theological tools, I will instead talk a bit about my own journey as a member of this church, and how I think it relates to this passage.

Here I should add that I see church participation as the primary expression of faith. I have been influenced by Elizabeth O'Connor, who argues that the first work of the Christian is to participate in the formation of the church; in fact, she describes it as the only task. "In it," she writes, "we can find ultimate meaning. We are not looking for that thing which may happen next week, next month, or next year. We believe ourselves to be engaged this very moment in that which is the hope of the world... because [Christ] is how we can learn to live in a new way." (Elizabeth O'Connor, The Only Task).

Yet like Jesus' words, O'Connor's claim too has a fairly awful fascination to me. I hate joining things, I hate being part of groups, and at some slightly pathetic level I have to admit that I think I'm a little too good to be linked with a bunch of strangers in a Christian community; it's not very cool, after all. I've been told too many times how fantastically clever and gifted I am, and there seems to be little use for that in the church. So there's a voice that tells me that I'm wasted here; I should be out doing amazing things with important people somewhere else, always somewhere else. In a coffee house in New York, at a conference in London: somewhere important, I could be doing something important and feeling good. At least, that's the myth.

Yet I also know that turning up to church here week after week, month after month, year after year, is the primary discipline that has helped me grow and mature, and which has enabled me to articulate what my gifts are. So what do I do with that?

Well, going back to tonight's text, after putting Miss Clever-pants back in her place, Jesus invites her to link up with him; and he says that his yoke is easy. Preachers often suggest this means we can pretty much put up our feet and rest – even our paraphrase has words to that effect – but I don't really buy that. The bullock driver doesn't harness up the animals only to have them sitting around the barn all day! What I hear is a call to work, but not the work that seems important to us and to the world. Instead, we are to engage in the work that Jesus wants us to do; and I've thought a great deal about what that is.

Since I've been a part of this congregation, I've slowly identified that I am a writer, by which I suppose I mean that I can weave words together with relative ease. One dominant myth in our society is that our profession forms our primary identity, and this can be especially true for a writer. When you read writer's manuals, they usually say, in effect, that the writing is more important than anything else; if you're a serious writer, life has to fit around the writing. This may mean not having children, or choosing to have just one. This may mean holing up in a garret and writing for hours every day. This may mean sacrificing a marriage or other significant relationships if they get in the way of the craft. And this may all be true if one is to write Great Works of Literature; I don't know because I haven't written any great works yet!

So our profession is usually understood to be the same thing as our vocation, perhaps especially for any sort of artist; and the two words are often used interchangeably, even by Christians. In my life, however, I find myself living a paradox. On the one hand, it is through living out the Christian life that I find myself becoming a writer; on the other, following God's call in its myriad aspects, which is the Christian vocation, seems to compromise my attempts to write.

This is because the work Jesus calls me to only sometimes looks like writing. Sure, I have a couple of blogs, and write for various publications; and sure, I try to infuse a sense of the holiness of the everyday into most things I write – and when I manage it, it feels like I am doing something good. And yet I am often called to do work that doesn't look like writing at all, work which, in fact, seems to detract from the writing.

I felt deeply called to have children, not one but three; and I have no doubt that it was the best thing I could have done. Yet trying to write with three children in the house is infuriating. Writing is a slow, contemplative, solitary endeavour, requiring a sharp and rested mind; children are messy, noisy beings who require frequent and immediate attention, often in the middle of the night. So solitude and rest, two things a writer needs, are rarely to be found in my house.

As well, I feel called to be part of church life. Belonging to any community involves commitment and work; here, I do the notice sheet and the kids' sheets. I don't mind the work, in fact I quite enjoy it, but any writer's manual would have hysterics at the precious hours of solitude I spend every week on those jobs.

I feel, too, that being part of a church is often hard work emotionally. Not only do I have to turn up when I'm in a foul mood or exhausted or just plain bored, but I have to work to resolve conflict and engage with all sorts of people. As you all know, it's difficult at times. Getting along with one another, learning to love one another, is hard. It is the work of long commitment: showing up, and biting one's tongue, and saying sorry – and at this church it often feels especially difficult. We live far away from each other, so we rarely bump into each other and have those spontaneous conversations that can be so life-giving; we are all different ages, so there is no big peer group that I can slot into and pretend that, with these cool people who affirm my lifestyle choices, I am forming church. Instead, I have to engage with everyone, not just the easy people; and I have to work on the relationships. This is not to say that the relationships aren't enjoyable – but they're certainly not always easy.

Most of these efforts – the conversations, the conflict resolution, the kids' activities, the notice sheet, the child raising, the laundry and the floors – don't look much like work in the eyes of the world. No one would call them my profession; and few understand how they can be part of my vocation. Yet they all arise out of invitations I have experienced at times of prayer. At my core, I have no doubt that they, along with the writing, constitute the work I am called to do; even so, this lack of cohesion or a dignified title can make me resentful.

That's when I need to hear the second part of Jesus' call. Not only am I called to do his work, but he says that his work will suit me, and the burden will be light. It is an invitation to joy – an invitation to find the work that leads to growth and maturity and delight in life.

There are times that I think I want a bit of acclaim as a writer; I dream of being a lonely artist making it in the big city. However, I am actually a very fragile person with all sorts of tendencies towards compulsive behaviour, depression, and self-hate. Loneliness and stress – which loom large in the highly stylized writer's life – are, for me, doors to a downward spiral, the sort of spiral which results not in Great Works of Literature, but in self loathing and the crumbling of any ability or desire to write, or indeed do much at all.

So what I need, that is, what suits me and has matured me and made me into someone with enough resilience and courage to begin to write, are the stability of a good marriage and loving children; the regular demands of family life; the steadiness of a church community; the practice of doing small jobs for others with faithfulness and humility; and the understanding that this life, too, is valuable. Staying true to these disciplines is part of my calling as I follow the way of Jesus Christ; and engaging in them has indeed eased my burden considerably.

Looking back at the disparate aspects of my vocation, I sense that they have had a great refining effect. The last decade has taught me all sorts of lessons about patience, humility, faithfulness, kindness, gentleness, hospitality and forgiveness. I have a great deal to learn, but I can also see that there's been a huge shift. I'm no longer the churned up and largely furious person I once was. Although those elements are still with me, I no longer feel dominated by them – and for this I am deeply grateful.

So in a nutshell, then, responding to the invitation of Jesus to take on his yoke does involve work. It may not be the sort of stuff we think of as work; and it may not lead to great respect or professional fulfilment or any of the other rewards we often think we should receive in return for our labour. In fact, there may be times when the work of Jesus feels absolutely tedious, like a bullock walking circles in a mill pit. But Jesus never promised we'd be ploughing fields with nice views, or that we'd see the fruit of our labour; perhaps our job is just to grind away. It doesn't matter.

What does matter is that this work, this acceptance of a yoke that, for me at least, means a quiet and largely invisible life built around personal relationships not professional acclaim, is slowly turning my heart of stone into one of flesh, the sort of flesh that can experience not only hurt and anger but also a wildly soaring joy. I used to experience life with a heavy heart, as if it were an enforced long march, or something to get through; now I find myself strolling along with a powerful sense of hope. Accepting Jesus' yoke and its various disciplines has led to my burden being lightened, indeed. And that, of course, is worth writing about.

The work of being me

2011-06-21T10:43:00.002+10:00

This piece appeared in Zadok Perspectives No. 110 (Autumn 2011).

***

At the end of last year I was constantly sick and felt run down, even exhausted. Yet other friends were juggling kids and paid employment; and here was I, a stay at home mum, so wrecked I fell asleep at nine o'clock every night. I finally had a big cry with my husband. I told him I felt like a complete failure: unlike so many other mums, I didn't even work, and yet I was so tired my bones ached.

He looked at me bewildered. He pointed out that I did at least a day's volunteer work every week. On top of that, I juggled three blogs and wrote more than a hundred posts for them in a year; I published ten articles in newspapers or journals; I drafted another half dozen articles that had been rejected and were sitting in the back of the filing cabinet; I gave a lecture, wrote a paper and tutored a subject at uni; and I was raising three kids, two of them pre-school. Put like that, I guess I did a bit of work. Perhaps it was okay to be tired.

Even so, at some level I felt like it wasn't. After all, it wasn't 'real' work. I enjoy fooling around with words; I enjoy reading with refugee kids; I enjoy preparing resources for churches; I enjoy tutoring uni students; and for the most part, I even enjoy my own children! And I've always loved doing the laundry. But when I enjoy it all so much, it's hard to feel that doing these things is anything more than a hausfrau fooling around.

Yet it is work that needs to be done. Someone has to do the washing, or we won't have anything to wear; someone has to raise our kids. Someone has to read with refugees, teach students and engage the church. Someone has to tell stories about this crazy sad and wonderful world. In a small way, I have been invited to be that someone.

When I put these activities together, however, they're not neatly encapsulated in a role like 'doctor' or 'lawyer' or even 'writer' or 'housewife'. Instead, they reflect a whole life, sparkling with love and play and work all mixed up together. This whole life is not a job; instead, it's no more and no less than just being me, responding to the invitations set before me: a process I might identify as following God's call. So although the things I do are clearly tiring, it is difficult to name them as work.

Sadly, too, just being me doesn't pay the bills. And so the other reason that all this industry doesn't feel like much is that it was, for the most part, unpaid. I earned a little from tutoring, a little from published articles, a little from click throughs from my blogs to an online bookseller – all up, about half a mortgage payment. Hardly enough to break out the champers, or feed and clothe three kids.

Living without making a significant financial contribution to the household is an ongoing exercise in trust, and at times I feel like a freeloader. Sure, my husband and I negotiated this position; it makes perfect sense for him to be in paid employment, and for me to run the household. But every now and then, I panic. I want to earn my own money, show him my worth, and stop being dependent. In our society, the money we earn is a quantifiable achievement, and the thing that so often honours our ability, training and hard work. I feel like I am missing out.

I find myself browsing blogs on how to make my own blogs pay; or thinking about articles that might sell for cash. When I'm really down, I even contemplate being a secretary again.

– and then I wake up to myself. I'm not going to put tummy slimming ads on my food blog, or gaudy advertisements next to a post on grief. That's far more humiliating than being financially dependent on someone who respects me for who I am, not what I earn.

There's a lesson in that. My husband knows my worth and values what I do; my friends and community don't judge me for the lack of a weekly pay packet – so why judge myself? While my activities may sometimes feel pointless for their lack of coherence or direction, they also feel right. Could I ignore the money, and think about the blessings of living out this call instead?

When I stop for a moment and reflect, I soon realise how great they are. After all, how privileged I am to be able to share books with young refugees. How fortunate I am to be able to tell stories, and to have found a medium to share them. How honoured I am to be asked to guide students in their studies. How fun it is to dream up activities and watch the church kids run with them. How delightful it is to cook for my family and friends. And how lucky I am to love doing laundry, and to have a family that generates so much of it!

A Thursday ritual

2011-06-09T15:54:00.003+10:00

My husband is in charge on Thursday afternoons. He comes home early from work; collects the kids from school, always remembering a snack; takes them to the park of their choice for a long play; then brings them home and cooks dinner. Later, he reads them stories and puts them to bed.

Because I can't keep my mouth shut, can't stop myself from taking over the kids and the cooking and the shouting if I'm at home, I agree to be banished from the house. I head to a local bar, buy a glass of wine, and settle down at 'my' table to read or write. Later, perhaps, I might meet a friend and grab a bite to eat; then it's off to choir to sing my heart out and sit round gossiping with a group of mums. It's a highlight of my week, the evening I look forward to from sometime early Wednesday. Sure, most weeks sparkle with small good things; but this ritual feeds my soul. And what is good for my soul is good for my kids; without it, I have a tendency to become tyrannical.

What intrigues me is how easily I will jeopardize, even cancel, it. Last week, there was no choir; instead, our choir director held a concert of her piano students, which include my daughter. Meanwhile, my husband had not been able to be home for dinner yet that week. Because there was no choir and my husband hadn't been home, I thought I should stick around; even so, my husband urged me to go out, then meet us at the concert. But I decided that would be selfish; that we needed to eat as a family; and that I should stay.

When my husband and the kids surged in the door from school, at least one person looked disappointed that I had crashed their only weeknight together. I began to worry about dinner and what we would eat even as my husband heated pasta water. One kid shouted, another shrieked, I yelled, and my husband looked at me. 'Maybe,' I said, 'maybe, I really should go out? Would you mind?'.

'Go!' he urged me, 'please go!' and gave me a big hug. So finally, an hour later than usual, I pulled on my boots, packed my bag, and toddled off, wittering and apologising all the way – and feeling so selfish. Extraordinary, really, given that I had done the whole kiddie food – story – bed routine three nights in a row, and would do it again on Friday; Fridays are always a late night for him.

I have internalized so many ideas of what makes a good mother; one of them is about being present. A good mother doesn't go out for no reason; and she certainly doesn't squander money on wine in bars and a meal out! And yet, is this really true? Surely after seven years I have learned by now that without this sort of activity I become lonely, bored, ground down and angry; going out gives me the fillip I need to enjoy my children and to want to be with them most of the time.

My life revolves around laundry and floors, playgrounds and dishes; my Thursday ritual gives me a bit of structure, a bit of adult input. I get to walk at my speed, chat with adults or sit quietly. It's the only meal I eat in complete dignity, with no need to discipline anyone, no complaints about the food, and nobody's crusts ending up on my plate. Even without choir, just two hours alone out of the house far from the jobs that perpetually nag me is profoundly life-giving.

I may not be able to claim it for myself every week, but I give thanks for a husband who is wiser than me, who can gently nudge me towards the front door. 'Go!' he urges, 'Go!'. Obedient wife that I am, I nod my head, pull on my shoes and pack my bag; and dutifully I walk right out that door.

Photograph shows my middle daughter 'flying' to Mousehole in Cornwall - it's how I feel when I leave the house on Thursdays!

A linen package, sealed with wax

2011-05-31T15:00:00.004+10:00

When's the last time you got a package from Dharamsala? I received one this week. It was stitched into a linen pouch and sealed with red wax. As I collected it from our veranda on a chilly autumn morning, I thought I heard the whisper of Tibetan horns sounding through the Himalayas.

I've gone through a few shirts lately, and also a couple of pairs of pants; I am one of those rare women who wears her clothes out. When you have as few clothes as me, losing a few things means a bi-weekly washing cycle and regular dressing crises. So I trawled through the op shops, but didn't find anything; in any case, second hand leggings are icky. My options were to go to the nearest mall and buy an armful of stuff made in sweatshops, or try a little harder. The mall is what most of us do most of the time; and sometimes, when I'm frantic, I do too.

However, I try not to. For one, buying clothes made by someone in desperate conditions is hardly ethical. That someone is probably not Western, nor well paid, nor looked after in their workplace. That someone is almost certainly poor. But because that someone is so far away, so abstract an entity, we pretend they don't exist. We pretend that the clothes have dropped out of the sky, untouched by human hand until they landed on this clothes rack, here in front of us. Supporting this system holds people in a system of entrenched poverty and powerlessness that they cannot easily escape, and it's not a system I want to uphold.

I wonder if we'd change how we shopped if every item of clothing was tagged with a photograph of the worker who made it, with a description of their wages, the cost of living, their working conditions and their family situation. Could we still buy a $12 t-shirt if, attached to the label, was a photograph of a 15 year old Guatemalan girl named Maria: lives in a concrete bunkroom, sleeps on the floor with a dozen co-workers, works 12 to 14 hours a day, and hopes to save enough money for a bus ticket home so she can visit her mother, who is dying from poverty-related causes? Sewn from cotton grown by Ravi, who is sprayed with toxic chemicals on a regular basis and whose village water supply has been contaminated by industrialised agriculture? If it was personal, if we could attach a real person to the production of this t-shirt, these trousers, perhaps we'd investigate organically grown fabrics, and clothing made under fair trade guidelines.

I hear suggestions that such workers need to unionise and get themselves out of this mess, and certainly many workers are beginning to do just that. But millions aren't there yet; and rather than hold them down, I would prefer to be part of the solution, helping to create a market for fair wages and good workplaces.

I'm also not convinced that the way out of poverty is through charity. I'm looking for a more permanent solution. And I think that when people are paid fair wages for their labour; when they work in safe conditions; when they farm in non-toxic ways; when they belong to collectives that ensure their children go to school and have access to some medical care, then we are all participating in a system that is dignified, merciful and fair.

After all, we are degraded when our consumption exploits others; and as charitable donors, we can easily slip into self-righteousness. But if we make good decisions when we buy the stuff we need, we can become no more, and no less, than ethical consumers. At the other end of the arrangement, producers don't have to live and work in terrible conditions, nor do they have to endure our charity. Instead, they can become no more, and no less, than ethical farmers and manufacturers. We are all dignified by fair trade.

So instead of going to the mall, a few weeks ago I spent half an hour online and ordered some things from a workshop in Dharamsala. People of Buddhist, Muslim and Hindu faiths, many of them refugees, work there. The workshop provides skills training and supplementary education, and all workers, both male and female, have access to sick leave and maternity leave. The workshop is certified by an external body, so I feel assured that the conditions are fair. On my desk, I have a printed catalogue; it includes a photograph of the workers. Their workplace is an exception to an industry that is renowned for its ruthless brutality – it is no wonder so many of them are smiling.

And in the parcel that arrived today? Soft leggings, two shirts, and a gorgeous red scarf the colour of His Holiness the Dalai Lama's habit. Perhaps that's why, when I opened the door, I could hear the echoes of Tibetan horns calling from across the world.

Chunks of this blog first appeared in the article 'Looking Good' in Zadok Perspectives No. 104. I am reproducing it here because a few people have asked me to post a list of where I buy fair trade stuff; the list is here, or find it under the 'pages' headings.

Great house, shame about the neighbours

2011-05-17T14:31:00.003+10:00

What does it mean to love thy neighbour? I'm confronted by this question every day, because I don't.

On one side is a disgruntled older woman who loathes us because we, to her, represent gentrification. We know this not because she talks with us – she won't even acknowledge our greetings – but because, having refused to meet with us regarding our renovation, in a surprise move she took us to the building tribunal to complain. When we appeared before the panel, her issues turned out to have nothing to do with the building; instead, she and her adult sons ranted about the yuppies who were changing the suburb, and told everyone how hard their lives had been in the post-war migration period fifty years earlier. Notwithstanding that they now drive a large late-model Mercedes, they are, apparently, life's victims and we are the privileged ones they love to hate. It's been five years since our renovation, and they still haven't forgiven us; and I am beginning to realise they never will.

Yesterday, I discovered a sturdy five-foot-long wooden bench in the hard rubbish. As I carried it home, my two year old tripped over and skinned her palms. She began to wail, so I put down the bench, sat on it, and gave her a big cuddle. I had a vague thought that we may have presented an amusing picture, even charming – mother and daughter having a moment on a green bench in the middle of the footpath – but clearly not. My neighbour bustled around the side of her house to see what the commotion was; but when she saw us, she ignored my cheerful greeting, hissed through her teeth, and turned her back on us. Again.

A few doors up in the other direction is a couple who moved in perhaps four years ago, then had a son. I've greeted them every single time I've seen them in the street or bumped into them at the local shops, and the mother is yet to do anything other than stare straight through me.

There's another guy who doesn't acknowledge my greetings; the invisible people who scurry from their back doors to their carports and so out via the lane; and the family across the street which, although I have dropped in with gifts of quinces and cake, still do no more than wave if they're caught directly in my line of sight, and I wave first.

For a few years I thought that perhaps we hadn't been here long enough, and that if I kept smiling and greeting and waving, then we'd settle into the street. But lately I've realised we've been here almost ten years; before I know it, one of us will be carted out in a pine box and our neighbours will barely register.

When I was a kid, we were in and out of the neighbours' houses. Kids flowed between four or five houses in the street; neighbours stopped to say hello and swap lemons and figs; there was always someone around when we needed an emergency babysitter. Our street was choked with traffic, but we'd climb the tree in the front, hang over the footpath and give pedestrians a start; we'd share rides and walks to school; we'd hang out after school and play. Here, this is unimaginable.

It's not that I want my neighbours to be my best friends. But I'd like a cheerful greeting, a bit of 'how's the weather', or a cup of tea in someone's kitchen from time to time. I could use a safe house to drop my kids in an emergency; and I'd love to have a neighbour's kid come by for a play. For that matter, I'd even appreciate the simple courtesy of people returning my greetings. Yet with the exception of a busy older couple who live across the street, I have no indication that anyone else wants any form of interaction at all.

And at some level, why should they? They, like me, must have dozens of friends and companions and fellow-travellers; why add the connections of neighbours? Who really needs to know anyone else?

And yet, why not? Why pretend we're all islands? We overlap at the shops, at the library, at school; our cars jostle for the limited parking out front of our houses; the cats explore each other's yards. Could it be possible that a little interaction might make our stay here a little more enjoyable, a little easier, perhaps even a little bit fun?

A couple of years ago, I wrote about some of my efforts to connect with my street. Sad to say, beyond calling 'hello' left right and centre, we haven't kept it up. We've hardly been encouraged; and in any case, there are times when it feels like whenever we go out front someone across the road is screaming abuse at someone, or our most dotty neighbour is shuffling past, shrieking. For a while, my kids wouldn't go out the front without me.

But they're older now; and we have a new bench. Yesterday's find is on the veranda beside the front door. It's exactly the right height for me to dump my groceries while I fumble for the key; but even better, it's perfect for a kid to sprawl on. The wood has been rendered soft by decades of other people's bottoms; this is one comfortable wooden bench. So comfortable, in fact, that last night, for the first time, my kids asked to go out the front and wait for dad to come home. They turned on the outside light and took books; he found them curled up in a pool of light, on the bench, the oldest reading aloud to the youngest.

It made me wonder whether it's time to dig out the chalk again and let them loose on the footpath while I sit out there shelling almonds. Maybe we can find a way to be present on the street again; maybe someone will smile at the kids; maybe someday someone will return my greeting.

And if not, then at least I will know we have tried.

Report Card: 36

2011-05-04T14:14:00.002+10:00

When do I get to be entirely comfortable in my own skin? I've just turned 36, and I've been awkward my whole life. In many older women I see a confidence that I long for, and I've always hoped that by the time I'm forty I might, like these women, have grown into myself. But from where I'm standing now it feels a long way off, certainly further than four years.

Like so many women, I don't love my body. I don't hate it, and don't want another. Yet somehow I always feel the wrong size. If I were thinner, my clothes would fit better and I wouldn't have this muffin top peeking out my jeans; if I were fatter I'd be more beautifully rounded. My skinny friends are always stylish; my large friends just gorgeous; but somehow my thin bits are scrawny and my big bits are lumpy and I never, ever feel just right.

The only time I've loved my body was when I was pregnant. That's when I began to swim, my enormous balloon of a belly wafting below me as I meandered up and down the lap lanes. Once I had the babies I stopped swimming, however; I can't stand being seen in bathers. I love the feeling of being suspended in water, but every time I look at the swim bag I feel sick. I've tried sidestepping this with tank tops and big shorts, but I hate wearing them more than regular bathers; they just make me more obvious.

Yet the discomfort doesn't seem to have much to do with my body, per se. I can't imagine I'd feel different if I were glamorously thin with perfect olive skin. I would still hate being looked at, or feeling scrutinised by strangers. Really, the discomfort is about being noticed; and the physical side is only one aspect. At times this aversion has dominated how I've felt in public. I never used to sing, or laugh; I'd get highly anxious in shops or on public transport; I'd become flustered and stammer in coffee shops when the waiter came to take my order. I've only danced under the influence of exactly the right dose of alcohol, and usually not even then. Much of the time, I hate being observed; and I struggle with this.

I long to grow out of this discomfort, this desire to be invisible which has, at times, crippled me; I get so frustrated that I haven't managed it yet. But I'm beginning to realise it's a thing to keep working it, a gradually dawning state that will come with effort and patience, for when I look back over the years, I see change.

Although I never sang for many many years, now I sing every day. A few years back, having spent several years at a small church where singing was paramount, I realised it was time to get over my fear. I stayed at the church, joined a community singing group, and began singing to my kids. I've learned to listen, and to modulate my timing and tone; my singing voice has shifted from a whisper to a bray to something moderately tuneful. Not only that, but where once I stood stiff as a board, these days I find myself swaying, sufficiently lost in the act of singing to be able to move with the sound.

I used to get wildly flustered in shops, and at times I still get anxious. But gone are the days when I avoided them altogether; now I enjoy the hustle and bustle of the city streets. I used to get so panicky on public transport that I'd disembark early to avoid missing my stop; now, I stay seated til journey's end. For years I wore only black; but now I wear colour – lots of muted blues and greys, yes, but also pinks, reds and greens, impossible a decade ago. My black boots have been replaced by burgundy; my black Mary Janes by clogs sprinkled with flowers. Small things, perhaps, but indicators of change – though what slow change it is! At kindergarten, I smothered my pictures with thick black paint so no one would comment on their strangeness; they showed perspective and depth. At school, I found it easier to draw like everybody else, formulaic flowers and little girls in pink. Thirty years later, I am gradually unlearning the drawing, peeling back the paint, and depicting the world as I see it. I use words now instead of a brush, but it's the same game; and I'm finally doing it in public.

So at 36, looking back, I find things are progressing. Healing may be possible. It's taking a long time, quite literally decades, but I'm well on the way. No longer stuck in the desolate years of my teens, or that awful black hole of my early twenties, I feel like I've found good earth and am sinking down roots; I'm sending out new green shoots. And the more I unfurl in spirit, the more I unfold in public.

One day in my forties, perhaps I will blossom. I will put on a pretty dress without wincing; I will wear my bathers casually. I will write something long, and become one of those women I adore, big and bold and confidently present. When that day comes you will probably know; for not only will I be singing aloud, but you'll probably find me dancing.

Blame and Grief

2011-04-19T08:57:00.001+10:00

Last week we were minding a baby, and from time to time she cried a little. It didn't bother me, except on Wednesday. On Wednesday, I felt angry; and when she cried, I wanted to blame somebody. I couldn't blame her; she's too little. So I blamed other things. For a while I blamed my own kids. If only they wouldn't play with the baby and make her so tired; if only they were a little more willing to walk another block or four while we settled her in the pram; if only they would just for five little minutes shut the hell up.

Then I blamed myself. Perhaps I took her out for too long; or held her upright when she wanted to lie flat; or lay her down when she wanted to sit up; or put her in the cot when she wanted a cuddle; or put her in the sling when she wanted to kick her legs on the floor. I blamed my floppy old body that is tired from hauling babies and toddlers around and resented carrying her in the sling all day. The previous day I had hauled her and a two year old and two backpacks for a mile; and on Wednesday I felt it, and I blamed my eco-pride that meant we walked not drove.

Meanwhile it's school holidays so my older two are home; and after a week of four kids at my side and a toddler with the runs and the baby in the house and cooking with my arms outstretched as she nestles in the sling, I also blamed my streak of perfectionism that drives me to make something nice for dinner and which makes caring for four children so difficult at times.

But late in the day, after all this angry blaming, I finally recognised my sadness.

Wednesday was my mother's birthday and because she died so long ago, nobody remembered. Tired or not, I waded through the day holding onto the baby like a life preserver. She cried for only a little while, but I was in such a hole that I played the blame game for hours; and still I held her close. As I breathed in her scent, hour after hour, slowly I realised I wasn't really angry. I just felt utterly bereft.

My mother and I fought constantly. We never really got along; even as a little girl I lived in opposition. Yet other children loved her. As I grew into adolescence and adulthood, I watched kids flock to her. They would crowd around her and tell her their secrets; they would nestle in and listen to stories; they would kneel beside her wheelchair, bumping against the footplates, and play with her shoelaces.

She died years before I had children of my own. She never met her grandchildren, and she never saw me become the adult I am now. A decade later, I find myself beginning to realise we are no longer in opposition, and I am no longer defined against her. I may not be her, but somehow I too have become one of those women children tell stories to, the sort of person who spends a party showing a four year old guest how the kitchen scales work, how to use the oven timer, how to make the apple machine spin. I know when a baby needs a feed or a sleep; and choose to spend days rocking a friend's little one who needs to snooze in this draughty old house that is not her own.

When this baby cried on Wednesday, instead of finding someone to blame perhaps instead I could admit the long-reaching tentacles of loss, and name them as the source of my anger. The baby, my kids, my own self: they didn't really bother me at all.

Instead, it was grief, pure and simple: my missing my mother's floppy grey cowl-necked jumpers and her tiny spotted hands; my remembering the way she used to run her fingers through her short thick hair; my yearning for her long-gone fisherman's smock, the pockets stuffed with crumpled tissues, the stub of a pencil and the little battered notebook in which she recorded the birds she saw; my recalling so many birthdays so long ago, and wondering which of her apple cakes she would have liked me to cook; and my slow realisation that perhaps the best present I could give her is this: to hold a friend's baby, to pat the baby's bottom, to pace the hall up and down, up and down, and to sing as she settles into sleep.

Babymoon

2011-04-09T08:32:00.002+10:00

I'm enjoying a babymoon, dreamily in love with a little one. I'm drinking in the smell of the back of her neck, the sound of her trilling, the softness of her thighs. It's not my own, alas. But this fortnight, a friend is recovering from radioactive iodine treatment, which means she cannot spend time with her little one; and while her partner is at work I am caring for their girl. What a gift!

Every morning she is dropped off and has a cuddle in my arms. We go for a walk, and she sleeps in the pram; she wakes and chugs down her bottle, smiling all the while. Tummy full, she lies on her back and grabs her feet; she examines her toes, or chews something interesting. Later, I strap her into the sling and we hang out the washing, dust the house, or pick beans and figs from the garden.

This little one chuckles at every tickle and blurt. Lying in a pram under a shady tree, she stretches her arms to the dancing leaves and sings with happiness. In the sling, her body nestles into mine and my heart skips a beat in sheer delight.

I watch her and remember how much I have learned.

I struggled to love and make time for my first. I was the first of my friends to have children; I hadn't held a baby until I my own. I didn't understand that she needed to be near all day; she couldn't be left for hours while I did Important Things. Worse, I had no emotional capacity to offer what she needed; I was so drained that the very idea of holding her often made me cry.

But she taught me well. Slowly, I learned to hold her; slowly I learned to stay in eyesight and wait until she slept before hanging out the washing. With my second and third, I learned these lessons more perfectly; and my capacity for love grew vastly.

Paradoxically, it is only now I have three kids of my own that I have the time and energy to add a fourth. When I heard that friends were struggling to find a carer for their child, I offered at once. There is plenty of room in our lives for a little one – and the rewards are so abundant, as I knew they would be, that I feel almost selfish in offering.

So I want to say thank you, my sweet sparrows, for teaching me so well, and for showering me with gifts:-

The gift of baby time: I have learned that there is always time enough. We can watch a baby kick her legs, we can sit for hours and croon and sing. We are surrounded by great oceans of time, and all that needs to be done will be done; there is no need to rush. My children taught me to slow down and fall into the infinite universe of a baby's eyes; they taught me to savour it.

The gift of generosity: I have learned that love breeds love. Not one of my girls has uttered a word against this baby who has borrowed their mother's attention; instead, they have adored her and speak of her as their sister. Again and again they show me that love is expansive, generous, infectious; love generates love.

The gift of cuddles: I have learned to love with my body as well as my words; now I'll hold a baby close against me for hours at a time. For the most part, this is love enough for a little one; and their loving body close against mine feeds me no end.

The other morning, a friend and I took a walk with the baby. He held her up to little trees and ran her fingers through soft leaves; he paused under dappled light and talked about shadows. We stopped for coffee, and other patrons dropped by to admire and make eyes at the little one; she is neither of ours, but we took full credit and glowed with pride.

These two weeks have become a joyful holiday, a delightful break from the norm. And once again I find myself taking lessons from a baby, who reminds me that we have time in abundance; that love abounds; that everything is fascinating; and that babies need nothing but the world.

PS Years ago I read Annie Dillard's stunning autobiography, An American Childhood, in which she wrote that her mother referred to her children as 'my sweet sparrows'. The phrase must have stuck somewhere deep, because lately, perhaps a decade later, I find myself blurting it out at groups of children; it so perfectly describes a group of little people hopping around my ankles, cheeping frantically, and stealing the crumbs from my plate.

Mrs Perfect, Slight Reprise

2011-04-08T20:34:00.001+10:00

Mrs Perfect: As usual, someone said it better than you.

Me: At least I'm willing to admit it, and share the link!

Mrs Perfect, go to hell

2011-03-23T14:43:00.001+11:00

Many people use the time of Lent to give things up, things upon which they are unhealthily dependent, as a way of investigating the hold those things have over them. This year, some friends gave up drinking to investigate how reliant they are on beer as a social lubricant; others gave up not drinking, to investigate the ways they might be holding back from social situations. People give up social media, or even all electronic devices altogether, and kids often give up chocolate, or a particular game or toy.

Me, I'm not giving up any of those things. I might need these props to help me challenge the one thing I am trying to tackle head-on, with, it must be said, no expectation of success. But perhaps there is dignity in the attempt!

This Lent, I'm trying to give up Mrs Perfect. She's not easy to give up; in fact, I've been trying to silence her for years. But in these next few weeks I am putting some serious energy into naming and shaming her.

She's the sanctimonious voice that whispers, 'A real mother wouldn't have done that', or 'If you were a better person, then....'. She's the one who tells me a hundred times a day, in a hundred different ways, that I'm not good enough, never have been, never will be. And it's more than time that she went to hell.

These are some of the things she says, and which I struggle to deny:

You're not a naturally maternal type. It's true that I'm no earth mother goddess. I don't breastfeed my kids past six months, I don't make my own yoghurt, I don't bother with a highly charged tantric sexual practice with my husband, I don't home birth, I don't knit, and I use the public education system. Worse, I'm shy around strange kids, I'm scared of kids in groups, and it takes me time to get to know them.

But what exactly is a 'naturally maternal type'? I have given birth to three children, with very little intervention. I have raised them as best I can in a relatively clean and loving home. I have cared for five other little kids while their mothers went back to work; and I am about to be trusted with a sixth. I spend hours every week with kids – kids in the classroom, kids in the schoolyard, kids in the playground – and the ones I know smile when they see me and tell me their stories. Their friends come over and introduce themselves and have a conversation too.

Mrs Perfect, I don't know what you're talking about. You're a silly old bitch.

If you're not going to be an earth mother goddess, you could at least work. By that, she means I should be back in paid employment and building a career. Her comment stings, because at one level I think I want a career, and yet my actions show me I don't. If I pause for a moment and reflect, it's clear why not. On the one hand, I can't stand to leave my pre-school kids in childcare, or even for very many hours at a time, with anyone except my husband; and on the other, I had perhaps fifteen jobs before having kids, and I pretty much hated every single one of them. Sitting at a desk and doing repetitive tasks in an air conditioned office turns me toxic. I hate phones, I hate politics, I hate work clothes, I hate commuting... enough said.

On a bad day at home with kids, a grindingly repetitive task can make me cry. But at home at least I can weep with frustration and let those healing tears do their job; at work, the emotion turns inward and sour. So no, Mrs Perfect, I won't go back to crappy paid employment unless I absolutely have to. In any case, what, exactly, is work? I run a household, garden, cook and clean, I read with kids and I write. Couldn't that be enough?

But if you were really serious about writing, you'd have written a book by now. Perhaps, I say, but I haven't. I've slowly written the equivalent of a book, but instead of having generated a great burden of hope, a mass of paper which bounces from rejection to rejection, I've put things up on the blog and had some fun with it.

That writing is pointless, says Mrs P about a thousand times a day.

I certainly have times when I can only see the flaws, hate what I write, and despise myself for having written it. Habits of self-loathing runs deep. But I write in faith, which is not a feeling but an attitude. With that attitude, I write the best I can about what is most pressing at that moment, then set the words free. It doesn't matter how I feel about myself that day. Someone somewhere may find my words useful; and I write in faith that they will.

That's all very well, but you're terribly lazy. Well yes, that may be true. For example, my father is picking up the older girls from school and staying for dinner. I'm not planning much, just half a quiche leftover from last night and a couple of salads. I will fret about this decision all day, and feel guilty that I'm not cooking up a storm; but the food is there, and it is very good, and in any case I'll probably bake something for afternoon tea.

Apart from failing to cook a three course dinner, the floor needs a mop, the toilet a scrub, and here I am writing. Perhaps I am lazy, but the writing exhausts me – and yet, for all its exhausting pointlessness, it feels too necessary to ignore it and scrub the toilet instead. When I'm finished writing, I'll sit in a chair for ten minutes before the after school onslaught begins. Better a dirty floor than to make myself so tired that I scream the kids to bed.

Speaking of that laziness, you're still carrying the baby weight. Well, it bugs me too, but it's time to get over it. I've had three kids; I'm hardly going to look like I'm eighteen. Anyway, when I was eighteen I was miserable and fat. I don't have a nanny or a personal trainer and, like so many adults who spend their lives hanging around little kids, I keep getting sick. Every time I get into an exercise routine, I catch another cold or bout of gastro, and that's it for a couple of weeks. You may remember, Mrs P, that I was up until one last night hacking away with my latest chesty cough?

Anyway, I suspect my kids think my soft breasts and tummy make for nicer cuddles. So there, Mrs P, you scrawny old prune.

Observation: Every morning and afternoon, my two year old runs into the schoolyard and throws her arms around first one mother, then another, then perhaps a child she is particularly fond of. A wildly confident passionately loving child like this does not come out of a terrible home.

Conclusion: My parenting is good enough. There is always room for improvement, but that doesn't mean I have to listen to that sly voice which tells me every hour of every day that everything I do is flawed.

Conclusion: Mrs Perfect can go to hell.

Confronting the violence within

2011-03-09T14:25:00.002+11:00

Today is the first day of Lent, a period of particular introspection and reflection on the good, the bad and the ugly within ourselves. I thought I'd kick it off with a reflection on violence.

***

I always thought I was the sort of person who would never hit a child. And then I had kids.

I have discovered great wells of violence within me. There are moments when my kids, those fantastic people I longed for and love to be around, drive me absolutely crazy, and I realise I want to hit them – and as awful as those moments are, those are the good ones. When I realise that's how I'm feeling, I walk out of the room, or take a deep breath, or sit on my hand and pray.

Worse are other moments, when everything's just fine or at least only a little bit wobbly, and then something happens and before I realise it I've smacked. It's only afterwards that I register what I've done, and then I'm appalled, absolutely revolted, by my action.

On Monday it happened again. After a long day with a stubborn two year old, I picked up my other kids from school. They were foully grumpy, squabbling and slapping and snarling at each other and me. I understood that they were hungry and tired, so I sidestepped numerous confrontations, and instead whisked them home and put together an enormous snack full of protein and carbohydrates. When they had eaten and drunk, and cheered up a bit, I suggested a calming bath.

Two chose the bath, and here I must admit that I may be the only parent I know who loathes sitting in the bathroom while kids slosh around and drink the bathwater, but there you are; it bores me silly. Some days I take in stories to read aloud; other days, I sit with the cryptic crossword.

On this day, everyone was sloshing around happily until my four year old threw a toy in her sister's face. I told her to get out. She wouldn't, so I ordered her. She stood up and screamed 'I hate you!'; and I snapped. I smacked her so hard I left fingermarks, then sent her to her room.

Her behaviour was so minor, and my reaction was so out of proportion, that I feel sick. She was tired; I know she is playing the 'I hate you' card these days; I know I'm the adult around here. But it got to me so fast and so hard that my hand reacted before my mind realised it was going to.

My daughter cried for a minute, then dressed herself and began to sing. Meanwhile, I shook and wept on the phone to my husband; and I still feel nauseated by myself and the violence within. I feel like she really should hate me now, this awful monster who hit her; and yet it doesn't seem to have affected her at all. She's been cheerfully affectionate ever since, with no discernible difference in her behaviour.

It reminds me of being smacked by my own mother. She always yelled a lot, but she rarely hit us. The yelling was awful. I became a secretive and scared child. I'd hide what I was doing and withhold information because I never knew what would send her off; when she yelled, she ripped shreds off me. Even now, as an adult, I withhold information just in case my gentle and generous husband, who has enormous reserves of patience, suddenly flips. It's completely irrational, but the learned behaviour runs deep.

Maybe half a dozen times, my mother smacked; and the smacking was great. It was a discrete event, usually deserved; it was quick and clean; and, unlike the yelling, it didn't make me feel like a worm.

On one occasion, my sister and I deliberately drove her wild. We pushed and pushed and pushed until she finally snapped, smacked, and burst into tears, and we were so filled with remorse that we hugged her, and stroked her, and told her, truthfully, that we deserved it; we told her that she'd done the right thing. Of course, that made her cry even more.

And here I am today, sobbing over having smacked my own daughter, who despite it has continued to cuddle me and stroke my hair and show me infinitely more affection than I deserve. Yet again a child shows more maturity and generosity than this woman in her thirties.

This is not to say that I think smacking is okay; I am big and strong and it is abusive for me to use this power against the little ones. In any case, my children mimic the behaviours they see, so if I smack, then they will hit and it will all spiral down. But it is complicated – smacking is obviously violent, but in my experience words can be just as damaging – which is why I'm trying to unravel what happened that night.

I realise I only smack or scream when I'm tired, alone with the kids and have no one to deflect them to. It happens when I can no longer curb my first – and worst – impulse. When I'm feeling fine, I'll engage in preventative action, that is, make choices so that we never get to the inflammatory stage. However, last night, I was wrecked. I ran the bath, then sat there doing the crossword and feeling irritated that they were drinking the bathwater.

Instead, I could have taken a story book into the bathroom and read to them; I could have sung or made a few jokes while they were splashing around; I could have engaged in role play while they filled the plastic cups and had their tea party. Or, if I was cranky already, I could have avoided the bath altogether. Quite simply, if I'd paid enough attention to myself or to them, the situation may never have arisen. Even if it had, I might have been more able to recognise 'I hate you' as a tired four year old's request for a cuddle; this is how I usually interpret it, and a cuddle soothes that temper every time.

The frustrating thing is that I know all this. I know that smacking and shouting get us nowhere; I know alternative ways to parent and usually use them, but, like every other area of life, it's easier to do the right thing when I'm not tired. As to how to have three children and be talked at incessantly and engage in constant discipline and murmur positive encouragement and prepare five meals a day and do all the housework and engage in some restorative adult activities and not be perpetually tired, well, that's a puzzle I am yet to solve.

My only hope is that by confronting the violence within myself – by naming it and trying to understand the triggers – then next time I might see it coming and choose a different path.

(There are some great lists of alternatives to smacking – or screeching – on the internet. Try here for 21 alternatives, or just google 'alternatives to smacking'. You will find some creative ideas for different behaviours and different ages.)

Even my failures can produce something beautiful

2011-03-03T15:42:00.002+11:00

The kids were exhausted, so I fed them early. I couldn't face either the food or the hour, so while they were eating I prepared something else, then turned off the stove. A stack of stories later, I caught a whiff of burning; extricating myself from a pile of daughters I found I had left a burner on. My adulterated beans were now a charred mess. I whisked the saucepan outside and dumped it on a table in the rain, next to a curl of chicken poo, and went back inside.

The next day, I flicked the burned beans to the hens and brought in the pot, filled it with water, and put it in the sink to soak.

Hours later, I was reading to my four year old and listening to our kitchen tap. It drips intermittently, and has for years. This is one overdesigned tap: there's no washer to replace; instead, the whole tap has to go. A new tap has been sitting in the study for months, and every time I go in there I look at the box on the desk and sigh. It reminds me that we need to get a plumber in, again; and also that we have a leak in the roof, a leak that has been around for five years three plumbers and a friend and which somehow symbolises all the things I have not done. The roof leaks; the paint is peeling; the doors stick; we have no fly screens; the trees are buggy; the backyard is covered with rotting pears; and there's chicken poo on the outside table. As the tap drips, I hear the sound of failure over and over again.

But this day, reading to my daughter and listening to the drip, I happened to glance up and see a kaleidoscope of light. With every drip, the light contracted then exploded, sending bright shards across the ceiling. The surface was alive with pure white light refracted from the filthy cooking pot.

Wedged into a chair with a daughter in my lap, the sun slanting in, I saw that even my failures have a beauty of their own. The burnt pot, the dripping tap, the leaky roof, the peeling paint, the fight with a daughter, the grief for my mum, the toes I step on, the nights when I shout: everything I do badly shrunk down to size, and for a moment I was transfixed not by my failures, but by a ceiling charged with shooting stars.

Sunday, 10pm

2011-02-17T15:37:00.002+11:00

Above me,
the rustle of a bat
the soft thump of a falling pear.
Behind me,
chickens stir then settle,
crooning themselves to sleep.
Around me,
cool night air
the muffled voices of neighbours
the clink of a glass.
Below me,
my mother's wicker basket
a tangle of wet towels.
Before me,
a clothesline, some pegs,
my mother's hands at work
and peeking over the fence:
the moon.

Housewife / Writer

2011-02-01T10:49:00.002+11:00

Last Monday, I went to see a new GP. As it was my first visit, I had to fill out an intake form. Like every form, there was a space for 'profession'; and, like every form, I left it blank. I hate to write 'housewife', and 'writer' seems too try-hard. Anyway, it doesn't earn an income.

The doctor checked my details, then asked me what I did. I explained that I was home with kids, but added that I sometimes write. 'Oh,' she said, 'you're a writer', and filled in the box, just like that. 'But I don't have time to write much,' I protested. She grinned. 'Anyone with three kids doesn't have time for much,' she said, and stood up; and I, filled with pride that according to this calm and lovely woman I Am A Writer, dropped my pants and had the most relaxed pap smear of my life.

On Tuesday, I took a daughter to a new friend's house for a play. As I was chatting with the mother, she asked me what I did. I explained that I was home mostly, but, remembering the doctor's office, added that I wrote a little. 'Does that earn a living?' she asked, one eyebrow raised. I found myself apologising that my husband earns enough for all of us, and so it didn't really matter – though in fact I did earn a little. 'Enough to pay for a few hours of childcare,' I added in a little voice, then felt so pathetic that I crept out the door.

Later I was filled with rage – first at her, then at the lovely doctor, and finally at me. Yet all three of us were operating out of the same model, society's dominant model: that a profession is the measure of someone. How each of us understood this differed, but the model was at the root of my rage, because in this model, I have no worth.

Although I initially felt affirmed by the doctor, on reflection I realise she dismissed four fifths of my life. I spend most of my time cooking, cleaning and fooling around with kids. These activities aren't always interesting or satisfying; but they are my reality, and they feed the writing no end. Without them, I'm not sure I could write at all. I can't dismiss them; and nor should she.

On the other hand, the friend's mother hinted that being a writer was suspect because it's not salaried. I regularly encounter the attitude that a good wife contributes financially to the household. If she has children, she contributes less than her partner because she spends more hours doing childcare and housework; however, her financial contribution is the fundamental indicator of her worth. I know many women who have put their kids into childcare and gone back to work not because they want to, but at the insistence of their partners that they 'contribute'; and I wonder who, exactly, does all the housework now?

I have no problem with willing women going back to work, and I understand that in many cases it's a financial necessity, but I reject the premise that a woman's contribution – or anyone's contribution – is measureable only in terms of economics. Other things, such as caring for kids, cleaning the house, offering hospitality and engaging in volunteer work make an enormous difference to a family, and to a society. They are indispensable, even if they're not economically valuable.

Would the world be a better place if I parked my kids in childcare, became a dental hygienist and added a second income to the household? Clearly not, although my kids' teeth might get a little cleaner. And yet the housework I do is so often dismissed, by others and, so much worse, by me, because it's not a profession; and the writing, because it's not an earner.

I found myself wondering when will the world – including women – value women's work: answering questions, wiping bottoms, folding clothes, peeling carrots and telling stories? No one asks whether I earn a living working from seven in the morning to eight at night, rinsing out wet undies and preparing meals and weeding the vegetable patch and swooping the vacuum cleaner over the floors. No one asks about income when I'm years short of sleep and woken at five in the morning by a kick in the kidneys from a four year old's foot. That work's a given; of course I do it, and of course it's unpaid.

And it is work. Sometimes it's so boring I could shriek; sometimes it's so frustrating and lonely and enraging and tedious that I could run screaming out the door. Other times it's fun, satisfying, enriching, enjoyable, or just a doddle. It's like any job, really: good and bad, except it's fundamentally relational, and it's grounded in love. I am lucky, too, that I can also write about it, and tell the familiar story. Whether or not the sweeping and the story-telling earn an income is really beside the point.

So I can't remain angry at the doctor or the mum for wanting to put me in a work box one way or another; they're just reflecting a societal attitude. In any case, the person I'm really angry at is, of course, me. I am the one who doesn't want to put 'housewife' on any form; I'm embarrassed to be such a fifties cliché. I am the one who feels apologetic that when I'm not caring for kids I'm not really earning money either. I've fallen into exactly the same trap as the doctor and the mother; I struggle to feel valued and, more importantly, to value myself in the work I do. Whether it's mopping the floors or stringing sentences together, picking up blocks or jotting down ideas, I still don't feel like it's Work.

Perhaps it isn't in the eyes of man, but to this woman, it undeniably is. And it's unavoidable. For all my ambivalence about what I do and how I describe it, I still have meals to cook, children to care for, and the burning urge to write. But can I stop being dismissive about it, to myself and to others? Can I claim it, name it, shout it from the rooftops? Can I turn questions about money into questions about worth? Can I write proudly on a form 'Housewife / Writer'?

The evidence suggests not yet. But someday, perhaps, someday.

In which I am yet again shown up by a two year old

2011-01-13T11:37:00.001+11:00

My two year old announced that she'd like a haircut. She's my last baby; and her hair still has soft curls. I love to slide my finger into the ringlets, or to pull them gently and watch them bounce. When her hair is cut, the curls will go, and I'm not ready to say good-bye to that final sign of babyhood. I said no.

She begged, 'Pease may I haba haircut,' and she's so polite, in fact so unbelievably adorable, that I said I'd consider a fringe. She hates clips and bands, but her hair grows straight into her eyes and picks up hommus every lunchtime. A fringe makes perfect sense.

My daughters have their hair cut at a friend's house. The next time we went, I asked my friend what she thought. While kids tore around shooting water pistols at each other and I sheltered my cup of tea, my friend took a look at my two year old. She pointed out that my daughter's forehead is shallow and her cheeks are round. A fringe might make her face look a little squat; and it would need a trim every six weeks. So we decided against it.

Instead, my friend braided my daughter's hair across the front of her head and down the side, so that it hung away from her eyes. And then, because my daughter whips out every hairdo within half an hour, my clever friend held her up to the mirror, and suggested she might like to keep it in to show daddy.

To my surprise, my daughter did. She kept that braid in for three days, and showed everyone.

It finally slipped out. I can't braid hair, especially not soft baby hair; and in any case my daughter takes anything I do out. So she's had her hair in her eyes for another few weeks. Until yesterday. While I was working upstairs and my husband was in the shower, she found a pair of scissors and, like her sister before her, carefully cut herself a fringe.

Remarkably, she did an exquisite job. It's straight, it's halfway up her forehead, no more; and she took out none of the surrounding hair, just the section that falls into her face. Now you can see her enormous blue eyes and her high cheek bones. A ratty bit of hair, constantly knotted and frayed by adhesions of jam, has been removed. She looks fantastic.

I feel like an idiot. She needed her hair out of her eyes; and she hates any sort of hair ties. Only because of some pathetic vanity – oh, her beautiful face may look a little squat – my friend and I thwarted her plans. I am ashamed. For all my words to my children about our worth being about how we act, not how we look, they're pretty hollow if I won't give a two year old a haircut in case she looks fat.

Well, she showed us. Not only can she articulate what she wants, she will do it if the adults won't let her. It reminds me that she's not just a baby. She is two, with a strong personality and good cutting skills; and she's shown me time and again that if I'm going to block her on silly things, then she's going to do them anyway.

I find her engaged in a forbidden activity; she looks up and says 'I'm ALLOWED to'. 'Who says?', I ask; and grinning, she answers, 'Me'. A child with this much sense of self is not easily thwarted; and if I have any nous at all I'll get out of her way. Give her a haircut when she asks; let her wear the clothes she wants; turn a blind eye when she mixes Vegemite and honey on her sandwich. What does it matter if she's not perfectly groomed? Her life revolves around chickens and puddles and painting and mess. She experiments daily with sticky things; she loves glue; she loves mud. Any decisions about clothes or hair should make her play more enjoyable, not be about how she looks.

Yet again, a two year old has shown me my weakness; and I'm sure it will happen again. In the meantime, I can console myself with the thought that this time, I'm not a mess of tears. When her sister cut her own hair a few years ago, I sobbed. There's some improvement, at least.

So we'll keep cutting her fringe until she's old enough to want differently; and perhaps we'll finally learn to let her have her way on more of the little things. We should know by now that if we insist on less, we give us all a break; but we're slow learners. At least we've realised that if we reserve our energy to fight the good fight, she will know, when we fight things, that they matter.

A glass of red

2010-12-30T09:31:00.001+11:00

A few weeks ago, some friends and I were talking about wine. All of us have children, and drink wine at dinner. In our conversation, it came out that most of us have had to think seriously about how much we drink, and how much is okay. The more children we have, the more serious the discussion became. As one woman said, the recommended daily allowance of alcohol should be indexed to the number of kids in your house.

I certainly never drank so much before I had kids. It used to be an occasional thing; more on weekends and holidays. But after breastfeeding the third, around about the time she got stubborn, I got in the habit of having wine most nights. Sure, I have an alcohol free day about once a week; sometimes even twice. But for the most part, by five thirty or six, when everyone's getting ratty and I haven't had a moment to myself all day and dinner's almost ready and someone's just slapped someone else and as I'm taking a hot thing off the stove I stumble on a small rolling toy that someone has snuck into the kitchen... well, you get the picture. A glass of wine is welcome.

More than welcome. Anticipated, longed for, and finally enjoyed with dinner. I rarely drink to excess; I hate feeling tipsy. I usually have only a glass. But without that glass, and the calming effect of red wine seeping into my system and soothing my frazzled nerves, we'd all be a screaming heap by bedtime.

Sometimes I decide not to; then I shout the kids into bed. Sometimes I have a glass, and the kids are so ornery that I shout anyway. But for the most part, a glass of wine lubricates everything so that I can trick, wheedle and charm them into bed; any urge to shout becomes a spontaneous operatic recitative, sung heartily up the echoing hallway: O! Teeeeeeth and toilet! Right now! Get your pyjamas on, pyjamas on my darling. Put them ooooon!!!! Right now!

The problem is that while I love savouring wine, I hate knowing that I often drink it to ensure that I'm expansive rather than brittle at the end of the day. It doesn't stop me from savouring it, but the experience is tainted by that self-knowledge.

I want to be expansive without the wine, but I worry that I can't be. By the end of the school year, when everyone was exhausted and everything was hard, the idea of getting three young kids bathed and fed and into bed without a meltdown was unthinkable unless I had a bit of red sloshing around my system - especially those several nights a week when my husband was at end of year functions and I was doing it alone. Even worse, it breaks a taboo. An adult drinking by herself, even when it's a single glass of wine with dinner, sets off alarm bells.

If I lived elsewhere, I imagine it wouldn't be such an issue. My European friends certainly snicker at any suggestion of a night without wine. But I'm not European; I struggle to separate how I feel about the abusive swilling of alcohol from the enjoyment of wine. It's made trickier by the fact that my glass is often a coping mechanism.

In my family history, alcohol was the demon drink; it was the catalyst for family violence. A few stories have surfaced: a mother flits between safe houses, her children posted as lookouts for their drunken dad who rages around the suburb terrorising the neighbours as he searches for his punching bag. Alcohol is associated with humiliation and shame. It has taken three generations for it to be rehabilitated back into wine, that is, a simple fermented grape product to be enjoyed with food. In my family there is still, and perhaps always will be, ambivalence attached to any alcoholic drink: some fear, some guilt.

For all that, I'm beginning to realise it's an ambivalence I can live with. I need my dinner to have some dignity, especially those nights when it's just me and the kids at five thirty. The meal may be kiddie pasta, and I may just be eating with little people, but that doesn't make me an infant. I'm an adult, and the wine reminds me of that. It helps create ceremony and mark the occasion. We take our time, use our manners and chat about the day. The wine also soothes my nerves, and saves us from the screaming which doesn't do anyone any favours: not my kids, not my neighbours, not myself.

This week my husband is home from work and has taken charge of the kids. I've had hours to myself to write and to garden, and to enjoy the company of one child without two others competing for attention. I've had another adult around while preparing food and, to my surprise, it hasn't even occurred to me to open a bottle. I'm calm, we're all enjoying each other's company, and bedtime with two relaxed adults guiding the process is nothing more than a quick wrangle.

So perhaps, too, the problem is not the wine itself. With another adult around, I don't seem to need its medicinal effects and it returns to its rightful place: something to grace a meal. The problem is this nuclear family structure, these small gardens and busy streets and hidden neighbours, in which one adult looks after the kids and they're all underfoot and everyone's sick of each other by the end of the day.

Dead sober, I close my eyes. Before me floats an image of houses set around a village green. Children flow between the households; and as dusk falls, the workers return and everyone gathers for dinner. I see a long table, and there we sit – my kids and your kids, and you and me, sharing food and telling stories. As the evening passes into night, we pour out the good wine, and this time it feels like a celebration.

French Salt

2010-12-09T17:25:00.001+11:00

Last week, my two younger daughters had a fever. The fever would rise and rise, then break for a couple of hours before building up again. Four days it rose and fell; four days they perspired and grizzled and napped on my body; four days they woke at midnight, and two, and four in the morning; and on the fifth day, they were well.

But on the fifth day, my husband was headachy. Then his forehead became hot and he began to sweat. After three days in bed, hot and delirious, with headaches and muscle aches and nausea to boot, he went to the doctor. Unlike the kids, he was diagnosed with strep throat, and is now on antibiotics.

The next day, my oldest complained of a sore tummy and a pain in her throat. And my youngest started sweating again. So we went back to the doctor, and the oldest has strep throat; but my youngest just has a rotten cold.

It's now Day Ten of illness. Two members of the family are on penicillin, a third has a hacking cough and is pouring snot, and a fourth still has the pale face of fever. And this morning the fifth, the well one, that is, I, woke up with a sore throat and a bad taste in the back of her mouth. But I am determined not to be ill; I don't have time. In desperation I quaffed scalding hot drinks, and then I remembered salt gargle.

The only salt we have was a gift from a friend, who brought it with him from Europe. It's an unrefined product harvested from the salt marshes of Guérande. The crystals are large, damp, and blue-grey. It may be artisanal, it may be precious, it may be highly desirable, but it does not look like something I want to put in my mouth – I usually throw it onto my food without looking too closely.

But I had to make gargle. So I dumped some into a shallow coffee cup and dissolved it in hot water. Clear against the white cup, residues floated: black and brown specks suspended in a grey solution.

I sighed, took a mouthful and threw back my head. And was immediately thrown into the waves at Port Beach in Fremantle, where we used to swim as children in a landscape of container ships and silos. I remembered the slow rollers pushing my body, and the elation the first time I managed to leap up at just the right moment, paddling frantically until the wave caught me and I bodysurfed into shore.

The salt water pushed at the back of my throat, and I recalled hot nights and burning vinyl car seats and the way my thighs would stick to the seat so that I'd have to peel them up one by one. Going home from the beach, I'd sit on my wet towel and feel the weight of my hair hanging in a heavy rope against my back. My bathers would be full of sand; my lips, delicious with salt.

We lived in a narrow terrace on the hill overlooking the jail. The tiny front garden was filled by a single small tree, a frangipane, and the terrazzo veranda was heady with its scent. I'd pick a creamy white flower and sink my nose into its golden throat; my sister and I would pin the blossoms in our hair.

As my breath petered out, I spat out the first gargle and looked at the water in the cup. Small grey filaments were forming; they looked like little sea worms. I shut my eyes and took another swig. I felt the salt water hit the back of my throat, clearing out the passages, opening it up just as sea water channels through a limestone cliff.

And remembered a day long ago spent playing in a deep rock pool. Long straps of kelp were rooted to the ocean side. My sister and I swam across and clambered up the rough wall of rock, fighting the waves. At the top, we grabbed the kelp as the water roared over us, pulling and sucking at the heavy strands and at the girls wrapped around them holding on for dear life, hearts pounding, heads ready to explode for lack of breath. The kelp forest was filled with a golden light, and lime green and pink seaweeds drifted past. My body rolled with the kelp and scraped against rock, and as the current surged I heard the rattle and clank of rocks tumbling across the sea floor. Short of breath in the here and now, I opened my eyes and spat.

I took a third mouthful, and remembered sitting outside away from adult eyes and gargling. My sister and I would tip our heads back and gargle until we giggled so helplessly that we choked. I remembered hacking away, great strands of mucus and water shooting out of my nose and mouth, and the two of us howling with laughter, sides aching. And when we'd recovered, we'd wipe our faces, and do it all over again.

I couldn't remember the last time I had gargled, or blown bubbles with a straw, or laughed until something went nasal. I felt the salt water scouring my tonsils, and my throat relaxing at the thought of old laughter. I smiled. Water sloshed out the side of my mouth; I spat, and wiped my chin.

I took the last mouthful and as I tipped my head back I thought of my friends in Berlin who had given us this healing salt, this key to old memories. I recalled the friends this week who had phoned or dropped in to see how we were; the friends who took two daughters for the day; the friend who wanted to cook us a meal; and all the other offers of help. As water tumbled around the back of my mouth, small rivulets breaking loose and trickling down my throat, I felt myself floating on an ocean of friends and family and memories.

My eyes pricking with salt tears of gratitude, I gave the water one more swirl, leaned into the sink, and spat.

My happiest day...

2010-11-22T13:59:00.001+11:00

should have been each time I gave birth to a child, but oh! the first birth was so fraught and difficult, days of labour and a contemptuous obstetrician and a supervising midwife who talked about me as if I wasn't in the room and I wasn't really sure I wanted a baby anyway let alone like this being ripped to shreds and when the baby was born she didn't sleep for hours just lay there looking at me with her big eyes and sucking out the ragged remains of my soul and I've been picking up the pieces of my shattered self ever since.

Perhaps it was the second birth, or the third – but then again, each time the hospital wouldn't let me go as soon as the baby was born so I paced the room like a caged animal and did crosswords to distract myself while my husband held the baby and adored her; and each time I was filled with guilt that my husband was more affectionate than me, even as I was frantic to whisk my daughter home.

It might have been the day that I married, but my mother had exacted a death-bed promise that we not postpone it. A week later we held her funeral; and a week after that, the wedding.

I wore my favourite dress, a red cheongsam slit up the side. Instead of pants, I thought I should wear stockings. I hate stockings. In my grief-stricken muddle, at the last minute I stripped them off and went bare legged. As I stood on the steps up front, I realised my white thighs were on display to the congregation, and my new sandals hurt. I beamed anyway at my pale and grumpy groom, who was standing at a lean; he had an ear infection.

Undeterred by sadness or dresses or illness or shoes, I bowled through the vows until 'in sickness and in health'. I had hoped to gallop through unthinking. Instead I stood there on the brink of eternity with my mouth gaping open and no sound coming out; although I loved my husband I didn't want to nurse him as my father nursed my mother – bathing, dressing, feeding, toileting, propping up with pillows and turning in the night – and I sure as hell didn't want him to nurse me. The congregation waited out the minutes, grieving with me, and out of the silence I felt them lift me up and find the voice to make that hardest vow.

Perhaps it was a day in Italy, where we had a long holiday with friends. I sat on a hillside and for the first time put pen to paper and knew I could write something that wasn't academic. I wrote about visiting the Sistine Chapel where the guards bellowed at the crowd to be quiet; I wrote about God, and Michelangelo, and the sanctity of chickens. And later it was published. A good day, but I was a tourist there; to be deeply happy, I need to feel at home.

Perhaps it was the day I first had dinner with my husband and stayed for hours? The day in Washington when it snowed at Christmas and our grandfather took us sledding at midnight? Or was it one of many days we picnicked on a hillside; or the cold night we built up the fire, stayed late and, as the thermometer dipped to zero, watched for an eclipse?

Or was it a rainy day, uncomplicated by anything much? I was a child, I don't know how young. My parents were gardening and, in the joyful lunacy of being outside in the rain, were at peace; my mother didn't even criticise. For the time being, we were safe.

My sister and I wore raincoats and plastic pants and gumboots. A shallow concrete gutter ran down the side of the house, keeping the water which ran down the driveway at bay. We floated leaves and sticks down the gutter and ran races, leaf against stick against leaf. We watched our little boats churn into the drain, then scooped up the water and drank it, clear and cool like a mountain spring, flinty, earthy, tinged with eucalyptus from the trees which hung over the drive.

We jumped in puddles and sent them splashing; we kicked up water and threw it around as rain sheeted down and the drive shimmered silver. The world was awash.

At the end of my sleeves, my shrivelled hands were pink with cold. Damp tendrils of hair curled around my face; my lashes were beaded with droplets. Rain ran down my runny nose and dripped onto the ground. I was sodden, yet I burned with delight; I felt ablaze and alive and wholly me.

And, as simple as that, and for all the adult joys and delights, that's probably it. On that well-remembered day in a year long gone and otherwise unremarked, I was, however briefly, the happiest.

Quiet Interlude (22’17)

2010-11-15T09:22:00.001+11:00

I'm lying on my bed, fully dressed. I can hear my two year old in her room telling herself a story, and the creak as she rolls over and settles in for a snooze. The other kids are at school, at a friend's house. Outside, the north wind is roaring through the trees with the sound of crashing waves. Dry leaves and tan dust and deep pink rose petals are tossed through the air. A battered cardboard box tumbles down our street, flapping broken wings as it rebounds from parked cars and telephone poles.

Inside is cool and still. I sink into my husband's pillow and inhale his faint scent.

I think of all the things that have not been done, the jobs that are waiting; but tell myself that I will open my eyes at the right time. Other worries rear up. I breathe them away for later, and with each exhalation feel my legs, my fingers, my arms, my belly, my face relax. With a sense of permission and a surge of gratitude, I glide down into the space of sleeping awake.

I can hear the wind, the trees, my toddler turning in her bed; I can feel myself sleeping. The faces and events of the morning, the week, the month scroll past and I wish them well as they drift away...

The house of my childhood...

An overgrown garden...

A sky full of rain...

And it is time. My eyes spring open. Filled with sweetness, I flip my legs over the side of the bed and float down the corridor. I make coffee in a dreamy state, and stand at the kitchen sink sipping and watching chickens; then I glance at the list, sigh, and get out the vacuum cleaner.

The inevitability of tears

2010-11-03T14:17:00.001+11:00

You're standing in a circle of women, chatting about winter boots or a place to get good coffee, when someone asks you a simple question and grief hits you over the head like a baseball bat. Suddenly you're sobbing, the school bell is ringing, children are streaming out of the building, and people you barely know are looking at you with kind eyes and rubbing your shoulders. Read more.

It may be Cup week, but it's also the week of All Saints and All Souls, days to remember our dead. As I've thought about some of my loved ones, I've found myself reflecting on funerals and the slow work of grief. You can read more at Eureka Street.

A fistful of poo

2010-10-22T21:13:00.001+11:00

Yesterday morning began when a toddler came crying into my room, holding a moist and squishy turd in her hand. 'My done a poo!' she was sobbing, aghast as it oozed between her fingers. She's been experimenting with nappy off time lately, and this is the first time it's coincided with a bowel movement. 'Well, that's one way to learn,' I thought, as I somewhat gingerly knelt to cuddle her, then called for the other girls to bring me some wipes immediately.

'We can't find them,' they called in singsong unison. I told them exactly where they were, but again they sang, 'We can't find them. They're not here.'

So I left my two year old with instructions to Stand Still Don't Move!, and fetched them myself from exactly where I said they were, where they have indeed been for six years and eleven months now; and cleaning up the mess I fumed at four and six year olds and their selective blindness.

Twenty minutes later my four year old traipsed chicken poo through the back room.

And that's when I began to shout. I shouted and shouted as I dug out the paper towels and picked up stinky chicken droppings from the mat and the rug, and collected a great green-tinged ball from under the kitchen table.

And then I had to say, 'I'm sorry.'

I've been exhausted lately, tired and flat and sick of the kids and life at home. I feel like I had one child too many. I'm more than ready for them all to be out of the house six hours a day while I do other things. I'm tired of watching 'ballet concerts' and puppet shows and tired of picking up the mess or corralling them into doing it. I'm fed up with their squabbling, and the two year old's tantrums, and hearing her shout 'no' every minute of the day. I'm tired of being the adult, understanding and mature; and I'm tired of failing to be the adult, of losing my temper or just shutting the kids out. I'm sick of being patient, of tricking a two year old into keeping her shoes on or sitting in a car seat. I just want to slap her.

My two and four year olds squabble over who gets to sit in my lap; who gets to listen to a story. 'Go away!' screams the two year old at her sister, 'Don't listen!'. I talk about sharing until I'm blue in the face; I talk about the expansiveness of love. And then one of them hits the other. I'm so sick of them fighting over the pecking order, I could scream.

And I'm totally fed up with faeces, human or otherwise.

I've felt this way for months, on and off. Yet I do have a two year old. I can't park her in day care five days a week just because I'm fed up; yet I wonder how I got to the point that I even daydream such a thing.

I can't really believe I made the wrong decision to have a third child.

I had been certain we should have only two kids and yet was devastated by the thought. In private I cried time and again; and late one night, after I picked up a friend from the airport and we talked the way you do when it's dark outside and you're driving fast, I started sobbing, blinded by tears as I roared on at 110. I wiped my streaming eyes and nose with my sleeve, and glanced at her. She was looking at me oddly; then she said kindly, quietly, 'You can have three, you know.' It was a thunderbolt, a revelation, a gift; and I snuffled and wept in pathetic gratitude as I turned onto Bell Street and steered the way home.

And I had such clear visions, such beautiful images when I sat with the idea. I saw a group of children running up the stairs into the sky, colourful skirts swirling and voices laughing; I saw loving arms extended towards me, and a baby lying between us, and knew that to enter into the presence of love was to pick the baby up.

How did I get from that to this? Is my two year old really so hard, so devastating, that I don't want to be home with my children anymore? Well, no. She may be flexing her independence, but even in my jaded state I can see she's an absolute delight. Maybe it's just that, after almost seven years at home, I've had enough. And yet I have no choice; I must find ways to cherish it or I'll go mad.

After school today I put on a video, too flat to encourage another option – my kids don't fight when they're hypnotized by tv. But instead of using it as a babysitter while I rushed around and did things, for once I sat in the lounge room and watched with them. My four year old came and curled up in my lap; my two year old snuggled into my side. After the movie, my six year old wandered over for a hug and a kiss.

And maybe, just maybe, there's a clue. Maybe it was okay for the floor to stay crunchy; the second load of washing can wait. Maybe the garden can stay weedy; the papers can stay in a heap on the bench; my inbox can load up unread emails while I watch Mary Poppins. Maybe if I could sit with my kids more often, rather than forever Organising and Doing, things might feel a little easier.

How to manage it, I don't quite know. The washing can't wait forever; kids still have to get to kinder and school; the floor really is disgusting most nights. But a latte and a babycino in a coffee shop; a long play in a shady park; a lazy morning with books or friends; a slow visit to the library; a shared cooking activity: perhaps these ways of taking time, of drifting at a childlike pace – exactly the activities that are so easily axed when it all feels too grindingly tedious and the drive to be busy dominates – perhaps, just perhaps, they are as necessary to our family's health as the prompt cleaning up of the poo.

Notes from the periphery

2010-10-22T19:24:00.001+11:00

Yet again I am flicking through the real estate guide, looking for something. I watch myself searching, and I wonder at the persistence of illusion. Why, oh why, do I still seek something that I know isn't there?

I often feel like I am not quite living my life, but instead observing it. I watch myself do things, foolish and wise; I stand on the edge of a ring of mums, listening to them talk in the playground; I eavesdrop on conversations in shops and on the tram; I forever watch my friends, my family, even my kids. With all this observing going on, it's hard to get out of my head, to feel unselfconsciously at home.

Instead, I always feel on the edge of things, always outside looking in. And I feel this about where I live. If only our house was closer to the city, or closer to school; or perhaps in a bigger city where more things happened; or perhaps in a smaller town where I could really sink my teeth into things, well, then I might not feel on the periphery. I might feel in the centre instead.

But I've lived in big important cities. I lived in Washington, where I met the Clintons and lunched at the Cosmos Club from time to time. I knew people who worked at the White House and NASA and even the CIA – and I still felt my nose pressed against the glass as those interesting important people swam around the fishbowl that is DC. I realised then that it wouldn't matter where I lived or what I did; if I didn't feel at the centre of things there, I never will.

As for the other end of the scale, I grew up in churches and imagine small towns might be similar. There is no centre in a church, just people who care and people who don't. And those who care, the ones who look like the centre don't feel like the centre; they usually just feel exasperated, and tired.

If I take a moment to think about how people might perceive me – hosting drinks on a summer evening; braying a cheerful if somewhat flat alto in the choir; telling stories in the schoolyard; listening to kids as they share their news; making suggestions and watching in surprise as a church takes them seriously; connecting A, B and C and having them all for dinner; writing pieces which are beginning to appear in this publication and that: I'm not sure many people would think of me as lurking around the periphery.

This feeling of being outside is not about who my friends are, or where I live. It's certainly not worth changing city, suburb or house for; I know by now it won't go away. Instead, the feeling is about me.

We are all alone; and at times when I watch myself on the outside looking in, this self-awareness, this knowledge of our fundamental loneliness, suffocates me.

When it weighs too heavily I get restless, and flip through the real estate guide in an attempt to avoid it; I talk too loudly and drink too much as I try to fill the space; I panic about all the things I have not done; my demons assail me.

But if I accept its weight, let it settle onto me, and sit with it a while, if I let myself fall into the darkness, I find something else: grace, perhaps, in the recognition that this loneliness is a gift.

The observer's stance, the self-awareness that makes it so hard to settle is what enables me to notice and appreciate what is before me. It motivates me to send love letters into the world; it is the distance I need to write.

And for this gift, so elusive and yet so fundamental; this thing for which I live and breathe: for this, I am overwhelmed by gratitude.

House Hunting

2010-10-14T16:30:00.001+11:00

From time to time, quite often actually, I think about moving house. I flick through the real estate ads and try to find a house closer to school, with fewer roads to cross and bounded by quiet streets. Or I dream about living on a hillside somewhere damp and fertile, somewhere with a view. I check out houses in country towns or on their outskirts; and occasionally I even go to inspections, and imagine living here, or here, or here.

Earlier this year, my partner and I so thoroughly investigated one country town that we even checked out the primary school, the yoga studio, and the train times to the city; and dragged our kids and a friend to inspect a romantic-looking cottage. Perhaps fortunately, the house backed into a mine; it was dark and poky and stank of cigarette smoke; the bathtub was not plumbed; the lounge was lit only by a candle chandelier; and the 'orchard' was a single tired quince tree standing in a field.

It wasn't quite what I wanted – but what, really, was I looking for? The thing is, there's nothing wrong with where we live, and so much that is right. Sure, the traffic's heavy, but other than that, it's perfect. My husband can cycle to work downtown in twenty minutes. We are serviced by ample public transport. We have a supermarket at each end of our street, and an organic market a mile down the road. We can buy anything we need, from almost any country on earth; we can buy many things made locally. We can walk or ride to the library, the pool, the kinder, the school, the gym and most of our friend's houses. We have a hundred restaurants or coffee shops nearby; half a dozen bookshops; a dozen op shops; and several ethical clothing studios where garments are made on site.

Our neighbourhood is dotted with guerrilla street art: brightly coloured pole warmers; a life-size stencil of Red Riding Hood feeding the wolf; snatches of poetry scribbled onto walls; trompe l'oeil gardens painted onto brick; and up a nearby laneway, a large blue dinosaur.

Our across-the-road neighbours give me lemons and the kids cuddles; the guys at our veggie shop laugh at my jokes. Our Lebanese pastry shop is decorated by pictures drawn by my daughters and the guys there wave as we walk by every day. My four-year-old buys pita bread by herself while I stand around outside; she chats with the owners who have watched her grow up. The men at the hardware store give free advice and carry stuff to the car when I cannot wrangle it into the pram; the ladies at the Italian wholesalers admire my toddler's cheeks and offer bread and olives for her to snack on. The waiters at our favourite coffee shop kneel to chat with my children before taking our order. This is our neighbourhood; in a quiet way we are recognised, and we belong.

And our house is wonderful. We chose it for the block – small for our city, but large for our suburb – and have been working on the garden ever since. Now our study is shaded by a ten foot high tamarillo tree, its leaves like elephant ears cooling the room. We have a dozen fruit trees, and in the pantry lies a sack of almonds that we picked. My girls spend summer afternoons on the trampoline nibbling on grapes from the vine that insinuates itself through the netting; I come home, wheeling my bike down the path, and pause to snack on figs plucked from overhanging branches. We have just acquired four chickens, who happily scratch and peck at the bottom of the garden under the old pear tree – and right now the tree is covered with blossom like a bridal veil. In just over a week, the crab apple will bloom and the air will be filled with drifting petals.

We live in a bountiful garden only five miles from the CBD among shops and services many can only dream of. Why, oh why, would I look to move?

I suspect two things are going on.

For one, we live in a deeply consumerist society. The constant message is that we never have enough. If we have three t-shirts, why not four? If our jeans are unfashionable, why not buy a new pair? If our house is a mile from school down a busy road, why not move? Forget travelling the long way – just upgrade, update, renew! Make it bigger, better, more convenient! Amen!

Yet while a new house might be closer to school, it will be further away from everything else; any imagined convenience, and its transforming power, is an illusion. And as for moving to a house in the country – well, living in an Australian town is like living in a spread-out suburb; living on a hillside means a twenty mile drive to school. Two weeks ago I spent the day in a fashionable town where the traffic noise was louder than where I live, and we couldn't cross the road for the cars. If I want peace and quiet, I'm better off sitting in my own kitchen, where during the day I can hear the wind sing through the sheoak and listen to the chuckle of happy hens.

I wonder too whether, if a house is like a skin, then perhaps I am trying on different skins, different ways of being. There are days when I'm uncomfortable in my skin. I'm tired and grumpy and fed up with the drudgery of being home with kids. I'd like to work again, and be paid for it; I'd like a little less vomit and a little more dignity.

I suspect that I look at houses because, at some deep level, I imagine that if I lived elsewhere then things might be different. If the walk to school were easier, or the house a little smaller or arranged a little better, or the street a little quieter, then perhaps I'd feel more at home – in my skin and in the world.

But whatever constitutes this idea of home, I reckon that the dream of finding it in a different house is just that: a dream. Our suburb is terrific; our house is comfortable; our garden getting better all the time. There is no perfect house, or perfect life, waiting for me to slot in to. Instead, this is my house, this is my life.

And when I pull my eyes from the real estate guide and draw a deep breath, when I look around and notice the delicate stars of jasmine flowers clustered on the fence, when I realise that the pear tree is in full bloom and the almond's heavy with nuts; when my four-year-old walks around with a chicken under her arm and my two-year-old finds an egg, then I have to admit that, from where I'm sitting, it's a damn sight more than good enough.

Right here in my own backyard, for all its messiness and imperfection, we have life in abundance already.

Sick of scratching your head?

2010-10-01T16:02:00.001+10:00

Sick of scratching your head? Tired of staring at a grid until your eyes are fuzzy and your brain is numb?

Help is at hand! The solutions to my very own cryptic crossword are now on Spike. Click here and all will be revealed...

Ladies Prefer Brunettes

2010-09-30T09:26:00.002+10:00

You can read about a six-year-old's sense of fashion or my three-year-old's impromptu haircut; you can reflect on veils and fancy underwear or my gorgeous red heels; along with me, you can ponder women's clothes, leg waxing, the confessional of the hairdressers and why appearance matters so much. Or you can tuck the kids into bed, peck your partner on the cheek, meet up with your sister and your girlfriends and head for Ladies Prefer Brunettes, a show put on by a small troupe of the women's circus. My writing may bring a tear to your eye; the show, addressing the same issues, will make you laugh til you cry. Same result, different methods, but I know which I prefer.

Ladies Prefer Brunettes is set in a hairdressing salon. Tumbling with a baby and a vacuum cleaner, performing aerial acrobatics on a depilatory pole, preening on stilts or boozing in a German wheel, women – armoured in their LBDs and handbags – reflect on haircuts, hair colour, depilation, high heels, women's work and self-esteem. Redheads win out in an epic Gillard-Abbott wrestling match aboard a trapeze. Live music by The Hairband, and a songstress perched halfway up a pole, make it just about perfect.

The show is hilarious and heart wrenching and, like Ginger Rogers, they did it all in dresses and heels. I was enraptured for every single minute; and I laughed so hard that I thanked the sweet Lord I've kept up with my pelvic floor exercises. Oh, it was good.

Ladies Prefer Brunettes
Performed by The Cadettes, with guest musicians The Hairband
THIS WEEK ONLY!
Thursday 30 September, Friday 1 October, Saturday 2 October, all at 9.30pm.
(Go early for ticket sales and drinks at the bar.)
Arts House Meat Market, 5 Blackwood Street, North Melbourne.
Tickets $15/$12. Tickets at the door, or book online.

Fashion and a six year old

2010-09-21T14:14:00.001+10:00

I recently realised that my six year old knows more about fashion than I do. I have strong opinions about what to wear. That does not include my daughter tucking her shirt into a high waisted skirt, or, more precisely, a normal-waisted skirt worn high. But the other day she was dressed just so, with her singlet and t-shirt bunched underneath, giving her a thick spare tyre; we had an argument. Her outfit reminded me of a particularly ungainly woman I once knew who wore skirts hoiked up to her armpits. This same woman had red bushy eyebrows, surprising tufts of nostril hair, and a terrifying lack of social skills, so when my beautiful daughter appeared with her skirt way up, I freaked.

I would like to think that I'm too mature to be bothered how she looks; in reality, she regularly wears outfits that make me wince, but I say nothing. However, occasionally she tries a combination that makes me cringe so badly that I ask her to change. "Just pull your skirt down a couple inches," I begged that day, "and untuck your shirt." She refused, of course, and said that she looked good. I told her she was Harry Highpants, even if she was wearing a skirt. "Make that Harriet Highpants," I added. "Don't be ridiculous," she shouted, "I look beautiful and I DON'T like you making comments about my outfit." Blech, I thought, and angled for a compromise – to drag the skirt down, at least.

As we were arguing, I realised that I really do want my girls to look good, even if they wear mostly second hand clothes. At some level they are a reflection on me, even of me. When they look grotty and mismatched, people give me critical looks or even – and this never fails to embarrass me – sympathetic glances. Even as I remind myself firmly that women and girls shouldn't be judged by their appearance, it bothers me. On the other hand, when my girls look good, we get warm glances of approval and compliments and that, of course, is lovely.

While all this was flashing through my head, I was also wondering where she got the idea to wear her top and skirt just so. No one in our household tucks their shirt in; it's not what we do. I always wear hipsters, so there's nowhere to tuck – and who can be bothered tucking in a baby or a four year old when they'll immediately come undone?

Then I suddenly realised that in every shop window are manikins looking just like her. They have high waists and wide belts and floppy blouses tucked in. Yet here am I sounding just like my mother, and her mother no doubt, frantic that my beautiful daughter is looking ridiculous, even hideous, because she doesn't dress like me.

Instead, she's looking around and trying things on, things that have a different meaning. High skirts don't remind her of an odd older woman with bushy eyebrows; they look cool. She is pulling away and defining her own style, her own sense of self. Even more shockingly, she's noticed and is trying the current fad, something I wouldn't dream of doing. I feel like I've suddenly plunged from being her beautiful mummy to has-been.

I wonder if I'm big enough, confident enough, to let it go? I want her to find her own voice and express herself, but I'm not sure I'll always be up to letting her explore – let alone be willing to help her.

That said, I felt okay about that day. When I realised what was going on, I stopped arguing with my daughter. I yanked down her skirt an inch but left the shirt tucked in, and smoothed her singlet and t-shirt so it wasn't so bumpy underneath. I still didn't like it, but she was happy with that, and we went out the door.

It felt like a small thing, a step towards helping her find her style, a step towards it being something we work on together. And for an imperfect mother and a stubborn six year old, that's probably good enough.

On veils and fancy lingerie

2010-09-16T14:25:00.001+10:00

A while back, I was out shopping for underwear. As I deliberated over my usual modest choices, five women in burqas came into the store. Chatting and laughing, they headed over to a selection of lacy g-strings, holding up the garments for all to see as they checked sizes and made loud comments about each pair of panties.

In the wake of a Perth judge's recent decision that a woman cannot wear a burqa to testify in court, we have seen some hostile articles attacking the garment. Conservative Muslim women have been characterised as oppressed victims of violent households, and the burqa has been described as an abomination. But if you'd like to read a different approach, where I ponder sexy underwear and the subtleties of modesty, visit Eureka Street or click here.

Visitation

2010-09-07T14:21:00.001+10:00

Yesterday. The tenth anniversary of my mother's death. The first day of my period. Yet another rainy day. All I wanted was to curl up under my favourite bedspread, hand printed with blue stripes and swooping cranes, and gaze out at the falling rain; to roll over and watch the faint shadow of wattle branches dance against the wall. I'd be my very own Japanese painting, beautiful and sad.

Instead, I loaded the washing machine and changed dirty nappies and ran around with the vacuum cleaner and hung out towels and listened to incessant chatter and picked up toys and wiped the bathroom bench and took phone calls and pegged more washing and tidied the kitchen and collected my kinder kid and made lunch and watched crumbs fall onto the clean floor. My two-year-old slept in the pram on the way home from kinder; my four-year-old would not rest; and I had no time to myself all day.

And just when I thought I couldn't stand it anymore, those endless mundane jobs constantly interrupted by the demands of small children; just when I thought I couldn't bear to read one more story or nurse one more bump or wipe one more grubby face, my four-year-old shouted at me to come and look. 'In a minute,' I said, but she shouted 'NO! Right NOW!'. The urgency in her voice made me rush over to the window; and there I saw a white-faced heron standing on our neighbour's roof. It was staring at us, perhaps trying to discern our shapes distorted behind the glass. We stared right back, quiet and still.

After a minute, or maybe three, it turned its head and picked its way delicately along the roof line, then swooped away with a great heavy shake of its wings, spindly legs dangling.

And the phone rang and my toddler fell down and Grandpa arrived home with my schoolgirl and the oven timer beeped and the girls began to squabble and I became stroppy. Then I remembered our visitor, and the way my mother had always carried a notebook with her to write down the birds she had seen. With a surge of gratitude I felt the house come alive, electric with people like a pond charged with darting fish; and I, standing in the chaos like a gawky old heron, watched on in fascination, and love.

Calling all wordsmiths!

2010-09-02T14:48:00.001+10:00

And now for something completely different...

I wrote a very cryptic short story recently; that is, a short story in which are embedded the clues to a cryptic crossword. If you're a bit of a wordsmith and want to read some fine Australian writing besides, then rush to your local independent bookstore, buy a copy of the current Meanjin, flip to the back, find the crossword grid, sharpen your pencil and, um, blacken the centre square in the bottom and penultimate rows (a typesetting error, I am told) – then solve the puzzle! If you're a bit strapped for cash or live overseas, visit the Meanjin blog Spike, which has reproduced the crossword. Print it out, delete the words 'seventy years', find your favourite pen and away you go...

Today Spike features not only my puzzle, but an interview with the fiendish David Astle, aka DA who sets the cryptic crossword in the Saturday Age. To be linked with the master – such delight!

The answers to my crossword will be posted on Spike on 1 October.

Notes on a Table

2010-08-31T13:25:00.003+10:00

A friend sent me this piece today, which I wrote way back in 2000 when I was living in a group house - well before kids had entered the picture. I had forgotten about it, but, reading through, it seems nothing much has changed. So I've blown off the dust and present it here, a message from the archives.

***

Our house has the happy combination of a large dining room opening off the kitchen and a pleasant dining room table.

The dining room is the brain of the household. It contains the telephone, the household diary, the newspapers, and the message pad. Most conversations take place in the dining room, and most decisions are made within the walls.

But the wooden table is our household's heart. Like all good hearts, it has been scratched, scorched and scarred by careless users, but is still large and serviceable. It stands in the centre of the dining room. As one housemate moves around the kitchen, another sits at the table and reads or puzzles or doodles. Conversations float between the rooms.

The table is the setting for glorious Saturday breakfasts. Housemates and guests come together to feast. We load the table with croissants and rolls, fruit and cereal, butter and jam. Sections of the newspaper litter the floor. By coffee time we have solved the general knowledge crossword and we can start to unravel the cryptic. Conversations fly as we catch up and gossip and tell stories. Our household is sanctified by our Saturday morning breakfasts.

We have held countless dinners around it. Candles light the room, red wine flows, conversation bounds along. One of us jumps up to consult a dictionary; another wanders to the kitchen and, still talking, brews coffee or reaches into the oven for a pudding.

I have a Scrabble friend who lives in Hobart. When he is in town we play fierce matches. The table stands placidly through the squalls.

Flowers adorn it; papers litter it; magazines clutter it. A cat sleeps under it and is outraged when unsuspecting visitors inadvertently kick her.

In the late afternoon the sun slants across its surface. We drink endless cups of tea and chat about cats and community, and we place our hands where the wood glows with warmth. Our heads propped on our hands, we lament over lost loves. We tell ridiculous stories and laughter bubbles up from deep within. The table is steeped in these moments, and every meal taken at it, every game played on it, every conversation held over it is infused with traces of this joy.

I have lived in houses with eating areas far from the kitchen; houses where the dining rooms are dark and poky; and a house with a fiendish table whose legs tripped the unwary. Never again. I have been converted. My church is a well-used kitchen, and a large and serviceable table.

Originally published in Patmos, 2003.

The scent of violets

2010-08-21T17:11:00.002+10:00

The daffodils are blooming; the scent of violets drifts through the air. Late winter, my favourite time, when everything is full of promise. I've planted a yellow gage to replace the ancient rotting plum; I've put in grape vines to clamber up a pergola and shade the back of the house. Tiny buds are forming, once dormant roots are sending out exploratory shoots, the soil is moist and crumbly, there is a hint of warmth in the air. The almond has finished blossoming – as always, impossibly early – and is covered by soft new growth.

This year I long for shady vines and the silhouette of fig leaves against a red brick wall. I'll look for pink peach blossom and sweet ripe fruit; for the lemon tree to rally and grow; for the creepers to haul themselves up and cover fences with flower and leaf. The ruby chard is thickening, the rosemary is covered with soft shoots, and I sense possibility.

Like a sower with seed, I am casting round handfuls of rich manure and watering it in. I am clipping back scrawny growth so new shoots can grow. I am plotting, planning, piecing together a dreamy little landscape: a place of refuge, of gentleness, of love. You will know it by its lush growth and tangled vines; its fruits exploding with juice; its tantalising scents floating through the air and teasing at your nostrils; its flirty little flowers just around the path, bobbing in and out of sight.

At least, that's what I tell myself. Really, it's a mess. Weeds are knee-high; the pear's full of codlin moth; and a child stepped on my Correa and snapped it near the base. For all my plans we'll never get round to them – every weekend is a whirlwind of birthday parties and veggie shopping and piano lessons and minor illnesses and guests and cooking and laundry. Sure, I'll do what I can. I'll shut my eyes to the weeds, to the gaps left by smashed plants, to the beds that need restoration. I'll try to forget that in six months' time, the garden will be whipped by the harsh north wind and baked by the sun. I'll pretend I never cursed the day my ancestors left rainy Cornwall – and that I won't curse all those jobs that I don't do this spring.

And yet, and yet. Despite all this, and against all reason, I hold fast to my vision of being surrounded by growth, of being enfolded by a garden, of sitting and sharing a drink in the evening while friends talk and children play. The voice of despondency mutters away, but I will look for the hope which is drifting past, as elusive and energizing as the scent of violets. And because of that hope, that vision of loveliness, I will work, and watch, and wait.

Small healings

2010-08-09T15:49:00.003+10:00

JS Bach's Cello Suites.
Sipping beer, putting up my feet.
Starting to write. Learning to knit.
Taking time to stop and sit
on sunny step with tea and friend.
Managing to tend
the garden. Unexpected fun.
The gentle light of winter sun.
The warmth of it upon my hair.
The hug of grandpa's velvet chair.
Watching laundry dance and flap.
Singing loud. Women's chat.
Emptying the well of tears.
Ten years.

The night we all got parking fines

2010-07-27T12:03:00.001+10:00

The week before last, my grandfather died. It's just eight weeks since my grandmother passed away, and in a great creaking emptiness I've been to Perth and back twice now, carting home old photos, some crockery, and my grandmother's tablecloth.

Yet grief has a way of opening up old wounds, and so I find myself reliving time and again nothing to do with them but instead a day ten years ago come September, a day when the hospital called and told me to hurry over there and I called my sister and while I waited for her to pick me up I couldn't decide what to wear so I put on awful clothes that felt all wrong and made coffees for the car and called my lecturer and left a sobbing message on his machine; then my sister and I drove to the ends of the earth, which was what my father always called Bell Street, and plunged down that old familiar hill to the Austin Hospital and parked the car and went inside and met our father and my fiancé and sat with my mother until she died.

I did so much wrong that day.

I felt puffed up and important, as I knew something Big was happening, and I hated myself for feeling like that, for not being able to rid myself of self-conscious awareness. I was impatient, even bored, as we sat for hours listening to each ragged breath, to the dreadful prolonged silence that followed each one and wondering if this, or this, or this would be her last.

I was so exhausted from her years of illness that I couldn't wait for it to be over. I wished the end would hurry, even that it had come months earlier before quadriplegia, blindness, hearing loss and everything else had set in. And I wondered what sort of person I was, that I was impatient for my mother to die.

As the day wore on, nurses she knew well came in to say goodbye and I found myself resenting that even now she made time for them just as she had always made time for everybody so often at the expense of her children; and I felt so petty. As usual, she stage managed us; as usual, it nettled me and I rolled my eyes at my sister.

She asked me to remove the oxygen mask. I unhitched her; but I was scared not to have any back up, so I left the hose dangling loose and the sound of oxygen hissed through the open valve for hours. All I needed to do to stop the hissing was to turn the tap off at the wall; but I didn't. Near the end her drip ran out, but she didn't want any more intervention so we left her hooked up and ignored the machine which beeped every few seconds to tell us it was empty. So there we sat, in a cold ugly hissing beeping room, feeling awkward and waiting.

Deep in the night, she finally died. We sat for a while longer. Then I touched her cooling face and said goodbye. I wanted to stay but I didn't know why or what for and the doctor came in to certify her death and everyone else wanted to leave so I left too. I still feel guilty for leaving her body at the hospital, for not being able to take her home and look after her in death. It's the worst betrayal I ever did. The next time I saw her she was faked up before the funeral. Then the coffin was closed, and we held the funeral; the coffin was wheeled away, and I never saw it, or her, again.

I don't know where the body went; but years later I found out that a box of ashes was kept by the funeral parlour, then placed in a memorial wall. We held no ceremony then; I don't even know when it happened. I still haven't seen the wall, and don't know which niche is hers. There is no plaque. In her death as in her life, we did so much wrong.

But what did I expect? We are ordinary people, after all. And the other thing I remember is that we might have been in a sterile room at a hospital that I hated; we might have been clumsy with exhaustion and tongue-tied by grief; we might have failed to turn off the oxygen properly or talk about the meaning of life or stroke her arm to the end, but for all our frailty, we were not alone. The room was overflowing, positively exploding with passionate love; it was radiant in there. Love filled the room like a pulsing sun that pushed at the walls and shot flames under the door into the corridor; we spent that long last day in a fierce and fiery circle of care. And we did say goodbye, and laugh at her jokes, and talk about important things. She died messy and farewelled, with laughter and tears; and, really, that is enough.

At three in the morning we went outside, took the parking fines off the windscreens, and drove in miniature procession through the night back to my father's house where he strode around gathering up the dried flower arrangements which he had always hated, and threw them out. Then he put the kettle on to boil. While it was heating, he tossed her pretty little sugar bowl into the back of a cupboard, pulled out his big bachelor's bowl from some dark recess, filled it and said, "Well, she won't complain. She's dead." We started laughing at the flowers and the sugar bowl, and the awful ridiculousness of it all. We laughed and laughed until our sides were sore; then one by one laughter turned to tears and we sobbed as if our hearts would break.

And in the days that followed, they did.

My grandmother’s necklace

2010-07-22T14:35:00.001+10:00

My father's mother had a pearl necklace. Her husband, my grandfather, bought her a single pearl each year that they were married; by the time she died, it was a long string.

My husband and I don't do that sort of thing.

But this morning as I was gazing out the window thinking about the necklace, a light breeze shivered across the damp garden and a silver pearl, lying in the cup of a nasturtium leaf, tipped around and around, rolling like mercury. There was a sudden puff; it teetered over the lip of the leaf and splashed onto the ground, rebounding in a hundred tiny droplets and down again.

Did I think of the necklace and see the pearl? Or did I see the pearl, and think of the necklace?

Either way, how wealthy I am! As long as there are nasturtiums in my garden, I have as many pearls as drops of rain will bead upon a leaf.

A sheepish PS

2010-07-02T14:41:00.001+10:00

Sometimes I am so obtuse that it's a wonder I have elbows.

My grandmother has just died and my grandfather is in palliative care; it's no wonder I'm not feeling motivated. Instead of going to the gym I've been cooking and thinking about old stories, such as the time my grandfather cored apples with an electric drill; the time my grandmother discovered canned beetroot and didn't let on; and of course, lots of meals at their house over the years.

For these and other reflections, click on the latest posts on my food blog.

Happy in my jimjamjarmikins*

2010-06-29T12:52:00.001+10:00

How long until I exercise again? My bike chain slipped off and the pedals spun back; one whacked my knee and it blew up like a balloon. As it subsided, I came down with a cold; I wanted to write something; I had a few bad nights and just had to nap; a friend in hospital needed a visitor; I helped someone move; and now it's raining. Also, I need a haircut. When I get out of bed my hair stands on end. It flattens only with a shower, but I don't want to wash twice in a day and I don't want to go out looking like a rooster and I can't exercise without knowing there's a hot shower at the end of it. So I stay home from the gym, feeling flabby.

Somehow, in the space of a few weeks, I lost the motivation. I am The Motivator, the one who gets children dressed and out the door and usually looks neat herself; who invites people over and cooks from scratch every night; who reads with young children and draws up crosswords for her daughter's class; who squeezes writing and thinking into every spare minute of the day; who finds it terribly hard to sit still even with friends present and chatting. After dinner, when most people rest, I do the dishes and fold the washing and run around with a vacuum cleaner. Sickening, really. But I just lost my oomph, for the gym at least.

Here I am now. It's 13 degrees and the heater's blasting; I'm curled up in PJs and hoodie with coffee and chocolate to hand, and wondering about throwing in the towel. Why, oh why, do I need to hurl myself at the wretched machines, headphones in? It takes so much time and effort to get there; it's expensive and undignified; and now I'm so unfit that it will be like starting again.

And how many times have I started again? Between babies, holidays and a twice ballooning knee, between sickness and colds and exhaustion, I've had to start over and over. Back to walking, not running; back to feeling wrecked not exhilarated by the experience.

At some level I feel like I should get sorted; that there must be ways to live that I don't need the gym's artificial construct. Surely gardening and walking and riding should be enough. But they are not.

My back aches, and I have little points of weakness from years of picking up children. Without regular weight training, I hurt. And without intense cardio activity, so much harder than the walk to school, I feel tired all the time. As if to prove a point, my back is starting to niggle again; last night I went to bed at 9.30, and slept for ten hours.

Exercise is not just physically beneficial. In the mindless activity of the cross trainer, I do some of my best thinking, and some hard emotional work. Small essays, sharp sentences, are plotted and planed as I row and puff and pull down weights. Despite all the sweating people in the room with me, the headphones and gym etiquette give me such a feeling of solitude that when feelings bubble up, I have the space to work out what's going on, and why.

For these reasons and more, I should go. Yes. But looking at the clock I see that yet again I've left it too late, fiddling around with a bio for a magazine, a submission, this blog – and I'm glad, glad to be home in the warm, glad to have done these things instead.

But where has my motivation gone, I wonder. Sure, the writing's good, but I need both. I'm feeling lopsided, but the more I get out of balance, the harder it is to exercise again.

On Thursday I have another chance, another couple of hours without children. Perhaps I'll make it then, rain, runny nose and all. Or perhaps I'll pour a glass of wine and bunker down instead, leaving it for another week. I wonder.

*What we call pyjamas, of course.

Worth getting angry

2010-06-17T16:44:00.001+10:00

From time to time, questions like mantras come to mind. They stay with me for several months, perhaps a year, turning up unexpectedly when I most need them, and then, like Mary Poppins, disappearing when they've served their purpose. A few years ago, the words "Why not love?" sprang up. At a time when I disliked almost everyone – myself especially – time and again those three little words came to mind, soothing my response to people and giving me a choice about what sort of person I wanted to be. Softer now, in love with life and most people I meet, I almost never think them any more – they've done their job.

These days, I have a new question. When my daughters whinge and argue and stall; when friends or family let me down; when a toddler kicks a door or arches their back as I'm trying to strap them into a pram, I find myself wondering, "is this worth getting angry about?". Even in the midst of a swelling rage, even when I've already begun shouting, I hear the question. And most of the time, I can answer: it's not. I take a deep breath, the rage dissipates, and I try something new: a joke, a song, a quiet reprimand, a blind eye – whatever comes to mind, which is why you'll so often find me singing loudly as I wander down Lygon Street. It's the way I dispel my rage at reckless drivers on the walk to school.

But today my daughter was brushed by a car. Our little procession – me, the pram, and two girls on scooters* – were crossing with the traffic at a green pedestrian light. A stopped car facing the red light suddenly rolled forward half its length while we were in front of it. I simultaneously screamed and yanked the pram back and tried to grab at my four year old; the driver slowly braked, brushing my daughter's dress; and my family staggered to the curb. I turned back, still shouting, and the driver looked right though me. And I thought, now that's worth getting angry about.

And then I burst into tears. Weeping, I walked to school, all the while thinking of a walk we did in England and envying a friend who was reminded of her daily walk to school by my story.

But is it worth staying angry? Hours later, after my husband came home from work and I had another big cry, I'm not so sure. Getting angry is great when it fuels creative work, or provides an impetus for change. But getting angry at the way people drive in our suburb? Unless it leads to a social movement, which I lack the time, energy or heart for, it will eat me alive.

Of course I was justifiably angry – and terrified and panicky – at the moment of the incident, but there is no point carrying the rage with me. It doesn't change anyone's driving habits; it only poisons my relationships with husband, children and friends – and any other cars which cross my path.

So instead I weep, and I write. I'll probably drive for the next few drop offs; or, if the weather fines up, go the long road again. And tonight I'll go to choir and sit with friends and drink too much red wine and sing loudly and swear outrageously as I tell the story and then someone will say something utterly ridiculous and we'll all laugh our heads off like those bold scary women we just love to be. As my eyes fill with tears, of laughter this time, the weight of anxiety pressing down on me will vanish like an evening mist; behind it, I'll find stars.

*We never did get that courier bike. We planned to buy it ready for this school year, but the older girls shot up so much over the summer that it was no longer worth it. My advice is don't leave it too late!

St Jerome had a skull on his desk

2010-06-10T13:38:00.002+10:00

Me, in an idiotic random aside as I'm getting dressed: I think I'm getting too fat for these pants.

Her, matter-of-factly: Yes, you're almost dead.

***

A couple of weeks ago, I flew interstate for my grandmother's funeral.

Her, screaming: I want to come, I want to come.

Me: Not this time.

Her, stamping her foot: It's not fair. I've never seen a dead body and you get to see another one!

***

Her: When you go to heaven, Mum, you can see your grandma and your mum. When I go to heaven, I'm going to see Lucy [a dog].

***

St Jerome had a skull on his desk to remind him of his mortality. I have a four-year-old.

Organic Carrots...

2010-06-09T21:12:00.001+10:00

I wish I could say the champagne's out, but a bottle split with my husband on a quiet Wednesday evening seems a little excessive. But I am excited! I wrote an article on why we buy organic, and it was published here this morning.

Perhaps a celebratory square of fair trade organic chocolate will suffice.

Who can be bothered?

2010-06-07T14:56:00.001+10:00

Who can be bothered?

Weeds are taking over the garden. We've got the henhouse but failed to buy chickens, the pear tree's still buggy and the almond needs a prune. The snails ate all the veggie seedlings, and we'll have nothing out of the garden this month except celery.

It's rained for five days and the upstairs bathroom is awash from the leaking roof. We've rearranged our dining room to fit the clothes horses in front of the heater; just because I can't get their clothes dry, my kids don't stop playing in mud.

I'm fed up with nappies and have finally switched to disposables, six and a half years after having our first child. Though they're riddled with holes, the cloth nappies wink at me and I still feel guilty.

'Read story mama,' says my little one, and I'm bored bored bored with cuddly puppy and pudgy piglet and the other ghastly books we've been given. I recite Goodnight Moon from memory instead, even as most of me plans dinner.

There's genocide and gendercide and drought and corruption and viciousness and bombs and oil slicks out there. The world is going to hell in a hand basket and there's nothing I can do. I can't think of a thing to write, and am slumped into myself.

'Go to the gym,' whispers the little voice. I hate the gym. It's shallow and undignified and silly, it's noisy and it smells. But it shrinks things down to size; it gives me energy again. Grumbling to my husband, hating that I know how to fix myself if nothing else, I haul myself out of my chair, grab my stuff, and head out to my bike.

And my four-year-old's bike rests against it. On the back of her bike is a seat for a doll, but no doll sits there. Instead, she has carefully strapped in her garden: a Thai takeout container filled with potting mix, planted with grass seeds and tiny daisy cuttings, peopled with a wine cork with texta hair and sunnies. Over the weeks the grass has grown, and she has carefully cut it back with scissors.

As I look at this ragged little thing, a spot of green hilarity tacked onto a pink bike painted with fairies, I start to grin. If she can be bothered making a little garden and cutting the handkerchief lawn, strapping it onto her bike and taking it for a ride, I can be bothered.

I can weed the potatoes and find a chicken farm and call a plumber and give the nappies away and say a prayer for the world. As tiny as her little garden is, it's enough to make me enjoy it all again. Perhaps I'll make a cake for dessert to celebrate.

Women on a train

2010-06-01T09:03:00.001+10:00

My six-year-old daughter and I were on a train. We had two seats in the middle of the carriage, my daughter against the window. Across the aisle sat a rough looking woman with her face downturned, the brim of her hat pulled low, her arms tightly crossed. She held the aisle seat, and the three other seats in her section were empty. A woman coming onto the train lightly brushed past her as she went to take one of the window seats. The first woman started screaming. "Don't touch me!" she shrieked, "I hate anyone ever touching me!". She yelled and carried on while everyone looked on, flabbergasted. Then she stood up, crossed the aisle, and sat next to me.

My daughter huddled into a small ball against the window, and her face went still. "I'm scared," she said softly. "How can we get off the train without touching her?"

I didn't know, but told her not to worry, we'd work it out. At each stop, the train became more crowded: people coming home from a musical, a rugby match, a football game. Some men were loudly drunk, and started a fight at the other end of the carriage. My daughter huddled even smaller, and I sat there anxiously running through possible scenarios. How would I get my daughter off the train? Would the woman yell at us? Would I be able to speak calmly, or would I get scared and shout right back? Should we go a few extra stops, hoping she'd get off first? Could we climb over the back of the seat?? Am I a total coward?

Across from my new neighbour sat another woman. As the train filled up and I worried away, she began to weep. I don't know if she was anxious about the fierce woman, or the crowd, or something else entirely. But she sat there with tears rolling down her cheeks, which she tried to hide as she carefully wiped them away with a tissue.

And the woman who had been screaming just minutes before leaned forward, asked if she was okay, and patted her. 'I get that way myself sometimes,' she said. And suddenly it felt completely normal for one woman to weep and the other to sit there, smiling tenderly and nodding at her from time to time, and my fears evaporated.

Who was the screaming woman, I wonder. What had made her so volatile, so touchy? And where had she found such wells of compassion for a stranger on a train?

A gentle silence hovered over us until our stop, when both women, one still teary, the other surprisingly compassionate, moved their legs and bags and carefully eased us – touching and all – into the crowded aisle.

Eating Seasonally

2010-05-31T14:23:00.002+10:00

Because I am a madwoman suffering from delusions of free time, I have started another blog. This one's about food. Why food?, I hear you ask. What about the life of the spirit?

Well, it may be about food but I reckon food is about spirit, too. Eating well is important on lots of levels. For one, it's hard in our society to live within limits. We are constantly bombarded by advertising for cheap goods – food, clothes, and a thousand gadgets we'll never need – and it's hard to resist this. Yet it's so destructive. Our cheap stuff is the result of cheap petroleum, cheap labour and the total devastation of soil, air and water, and in the long run it's no good for anyone.

On a more personal level, I don't believe it's healthy for us to have whatever we want whenever we want it. We become like spoiled children, always wanting more, never satisfied with what we have, and blinded to the needs of others. We substitute shopping for creative acts, consumption for self-building, and are reduced to people who define themselves by what they buy and the shows they watch. But I want more from life: I want to grow into myself, become mature; and I want life in abundance. Even more, I want my children to have life in abundance too – and that means teaching them to live within limits, and leaving them clean air, pure water, and rich fertile soil.

So I place limits on our consumption, and value on the health of workers and waterways, soil and livestock, in an attempt to live in a way which benefits commonweal. We try to consume only what is good: fair trade, nontoxic, and only what we need.

This approach affects many areas: how we shop, how we entertain ourselves, what we wear. And it also affects our food. We try to buy food which is healthy: healthy for us, healthy for the workers who grow and harvest and deliver it, and healthy for the earth. We get a weekly veggie box filled with locally grown organic produce, which provides the bulk of our food for lunch and dinner, and supplement it with other foods from local suppliers wherever possible.

We're not fanatics. When we run out of home bottled tomatoes, we buy canned tomatoes from Italy; and we flavour our food with Japanese soy sauce and Italian parmesan. The recipes will reflect this. But we're slowly trying to shift the bulk of our food back to our own backyard, or at least to farms within driving distance of our house.

Because this is a learning experience – I'm learning what's available when, and how to cook it up – I thought I'd write about it from time to time.

If you live in Melbourne and are interested in eating seasonally, the blog might be a starting point: recent posts will tell you what is in season and give you ideas of what to cook. Those of you who already eat seasonally might enjoy reading about our family's efforts. You can follow along, get ideas, contribute recipes and so on and so forth.

So if you're interested, click here!

Beauty in a Windsor knot

2010-05-25T09:56:00.001+10:00

A woman folds a cloth; I am transfixed.

At our church, a long strip of coloured fabric – a stole – hangs over the lectern so that the tails face the congregation. The tails are sewn with images evoking the church season. On Sunday we celebrated Pentecost, so the stole was red and decorated with dancing flames.

And on Sunday, we had a guest preacher. As happens every week, the preacher placed the stole over his shoulders before speaking. As happens every week, when he finished he placed the stole back on the lectern before returning to his seat in the congregation. And although he didn't just flop the stole back onto the lectern and although it wasn't left in a crumpled heap, it was crooked and awkwardly short, and the hand sewn flames were no longer visible.

After the sermon, we have a time to pray at different stations around the room. While people slowly moved about the space, I saw a woman, the gifted seamstress who made the stole, walk quietly to the lectern, pick up the cloth, re-fold it with her skilful hands and, in a single flowing graceful movement, drape it perfectly over the lectern again.

Because our worship space is flat and we worship in the round, her act was unobtrusive. Yet it was utterly beautiful, prayer lived out, and I was transfixed.

It took me back to stories of the women who tended the body of Jesus, or who found the tomb empty with the graveclothes neatly folded. I thought of Joseph and his coat of many colours and the gifted hands who sewed it for him. I was reminded of the time each week when we set the table for communion, and the cloth is floated over the table, then smoothed down ready for bread and wine.

And then I found myself thinking about how I toss sheets in the air and let them drift down onto a laughing baby as I make my children's beds each week. I thought of hanging out the washing, how I snap my husband's shirts to shake out the creases before hanging them up to dry. I recalled flipping a jacket around my daughter's shoulders and easing her arms into the sleeves, and the way I used to swaddle my babies, folding cloth around their bodies to hold them tight. I saw my husband putting on a tie, and knotting it with a flourish.

And why not?, I thought. Why not see the beauty in a Windsor knot and the expert hands that form it? Why not see the sacred in a square of cloth, in the snap of wet washing, in the dance of tea towels upon the line? Why not see it in the act of dressing a child? These things must be done, so why not pay attention to the way life crackles in the interplay of fabric and hands, bodies and cloth?

It's cold and winter comes. Thoughtfully, I pull on my sleevies and concertina them just so, then spin a long scarf around my neck and leave the ends dangling; my children like to play with them. And then I say quietly, Amen.

The voices in my head

2010-05-11T11:41:00.001+10:00

We spent the weekend with friends who have a place in the goldfields. On Saturday afternoon, my husband and two children were asleep, and our other child was chatting with our friends and doing jigsaw puzzles. I realized with a start that there was nothing I had to do, so I picked up the Saturday newspaper and wandered out into the garden.

As I slowly nutted out the cryptic crossword, that little undertone, my constant friend, reminded me that I had brought my laptop and I really should write something – or if not, there was that book about American politics in my bag that I haven't managed to finish – and of course, I must go for a walk and get some exercise and explore this little hamlet – and my friends were probably going nuts with my daughter's incessant chatter so I should rescue them from her and take her out – and by the way, now that I'm 35 I'm not getting any younger so when am I actually going to achieve anything?

But the sun was warm on my face and I was enjoying the crossword, so I told my little undertone to shut up, reminding it that without rest I become the psycho mother from hell – rather like that little undertone itself. The undertone gave a surly mutter, sprayed me with a final sense of guilt, and slunk away.

So I sat there dozing, only stirring from time to time to put an answer in the grid – my unconscious is far better at cryptic crosswords than my waking mind – and I suddenly heard myself think, 'You trust me' and then, 'I trust me, and I trust You, and that is enough'.

And the world, already green and sunny, suddenly felt deliciously expansive and I saw the oceans of time ahead of me when I might wonder and write and dream, and it was such a joyful feeling, such a relief bubbling up from the centre, that I felt my face crack open in a large loony smile

and grinning like the Cheshire cat, I finished the cryptic. Oh happy day.

The party animals

2010-05-04T14:39:00.001+10:00

Last weekend we had a party. It wasn't a birthday party per se, although a birthday was the catalyst; it was just a chance to invite a heap of people over and play some music and make drinks with bubbles and have a few conversations out of the usual contexts and feel the house bursting at the seams.

Because so many of our friends have children, it began at 5. By 6 o'clock, the house was pumping with energy as a tribe of kids ran around, bounced on the trampoline, and spilled fruit juice on the floor. They were like liquid mercury, splitting into bubbles and joining together again as they moved through the house. We turned up the stereo and peeked through the glass doors of the lounge room as a group of four to seven year olds practised their groovy dance moves. People talked loudly and waved their glasses around as plate after plate of food was demolished and a good dent was made in some serious pots of soup.

Soon after 8, kids were getting ratty and most of them were taken home. Friends without children began drifting in, but we were totally exhausted and the house was a bombsite. Three hours of partying with kids is quite enough for us these days. We ended up slouching around, listening to old jazz and chatting quietly. So much for partying.

It was weird. I felt like the party should start once the kids went to bed – after all, now it was adult time – yet clearly it had ended. With the kids gone I was curled in an armchair telling old stories and trying not to yawn too obviously. I felt tired and a little boring, and worried that I don't know how to party properly.

But for the first half of the night I had had a ball. I cuddled a baby and chased some toddlers and chatted with an eight year old and put on music that made the kinder kids really shake their hips. I realised that I really like parties with kids. I don't invite them because I'm a kind and thoughtful person who knows how hard it is to get a babysitter; I invite them because I like it loud and chaotic and lively. I like to see the barriers between adult and child melt as we all demolish cheesy pastries and wiggle to the music; I like watching children of all ages form a tribe and vanish upstairs; I like talking with people who are too young to be self-consciously clever or fashionable or funny, or be anything but themselves.

Wherever did I get the idea that a party is an adult affair? Why did I feel like the 'real' party should start once the kids are in bed? Because that's not true for me anymore – in fact, I'm not sure it ever was. I never felt comfortable standing around nursing a drink and trying to be witty or interesting. At a 'real' party, I feel lumpish and can't wait to get home. But lace a party with a bunch of young kids, and I loosen up and have a ball.

Yet again, my assumptions have been shattered by the laughter of young children, and I've learned something important about myself. Just as important, I've learned that the real guests at a party are not always the handpicked ones, the interesting and intelligent adults; the real guests, the ones that make the house rock and the party bubble and everyone laugh with joy, are the people forced to tag along with their parents, and who go to bed at 8.

Many happy returns

2010-04-29T18:11:00.001+10:00

Yesterday was one of Those Days with kids. I couldn't work out why it was so bad; were they testing me even more? Well, yes, one was. My youngest has decided that the way to eat is to shove everything into her mouth until her cheeks are bulging, squirrel-like, then slip down from her chair and run around. I believe this method poses an unacceptable health and safety risk; also, it's rude. And so at breakfast we spent half an hour as follows: I put her on her chair, she slipped off, I removed her food, she screamed. And so on.

At snack time, she grabbed a handful of walnuts, and then we spent 45 minutes arguing over whether she could wander around the house with them in her mouth, or whether she was to remain in her chair. After that time, I forcibly removed the walnuts from her mouth, the walnuts she had refused to chew and swallow while she sat in a chair, and set her free. What an ordeal; and how humiliating to be so shredded by a 20 month old. I was so exhausted I rinsed off the walnuts and ate them myself.

Was her behaviour enough to make it a bad day? Somehow, I felt worse than I usually do at the testing of a toddler. It was one of those days when it seemed like everything was slipping out of control, and I wondered whether, like my daughter, I had bitten off more than I could chew. Only my problem wasn't walnuts. It was kids.

I wondered too whether the problem was Monday's public holiday. As pathetic as this sounds, public holidays throw me. I do all my weekly housework on a Monday, to get it out of the way and set the house up for the week. But this week, I went on a picnic instead. Lovely, of course, but now the house is a bombsite, and that always depresses me.

Even worse, my birthday loomed. This is, after all, my annual opportunity to review all my failures and the things I've never done (run for more than ten minutes, let alone climb Mt Everest; get a job I enjoy; deal with the leak in the roof...) – and as I steadily move through my thirties, I find myself realising that if I haven't done these things by now, I probably never will. Perhaps I don't really want to – but I'd like to cross them off the list.

For whatever reason, it was a bad day. And bad days get worse at twilight. The light grows dim, the kids get ratty, I still have an hour before my partner gets home – and during that hour I somehow have to bathe three children and cook a nutritious and delicious meal for five. Getting dinner onto the table by 6.30, while my kids argue and my youngest wants to turn the light switches on and off and everyone argues over who can help and maybe one throws a tantrum or punches the others and someone else keeps rolling a wheeled toy into the kitchen – it's a daily miracle that can be witnessed six times a week at our house. (On the seventh day, she rests.)

And on this bad day, when the dreaded twilight came my four year old was wrapped round my legs and I was shouting at her to just leave me alone for a minute. And then I heard myself saying, I can't do this anymore. I stopped shouting, carried her into the hallway, then ignoring her wails shut her out of my bedroom. Mercifully, the wails cut short and she ran off and squabbled with her sisters instead, while I spent fifteen minutes in blessed peace sorting two enormous loads of washing.

After that respite, everything went well. Baths, dinner, bedtime: all calm. There's a lot to be said for a little time out, however difficult it is to achieve – and even if it involves sorting washing.

This morning was my birthday. The plan was that I would sleep in, then get up late and have croissants for breakfast, supplied by my husband and daughters.

The reality: for the first time in weeks, no child disturbed my rest. Instead, at 6.15, I was woken by a grinding pain in my lower abdomen. Half asleep and wondering if I was sick, I staggered to the toilet and discovered I now had my period. What a gift.

And now I know why yesterday was hell. It wasn't really the anticipation of my birthday, or the fact that I'm incompetent, or my kids. They might have exacerbated how I felt, but mostly it was hormones. I'm not sure if I'm relieved that my mood has a chemical explanation, or whether I'm utterly depressed that, after 22 years as a menstruating woman, I still cannot recognise the havoc my period plays on my sense of wellbeing. Month after month, I have a day where I sit in a grey cabbage-scented funk, sure that life is passing me by, I have no friends, I'm completely incompetent and I cannot manage my children. One would think that, by this age, I might come to recognise the signs and be a little more gentle on myself, but no.

I dealt with the mess, then lay on the gritty grotty lounge room rug, full of self-pity. Sadly, everyone had heard my movements, and within minutes they were climbing on me.

But "Morning Mama" said my youngest, as she does first thing every morning, and, as always, it broke my heart.

And then I dealt with what I can only think of as the Birthday Bed Wet. Thank you darling, I muttered, grimly shoving the sodden waterproof sheet, other sheets (it was expansive) and pyjamas into the washing machine.

I'm glad to say the day improved drastically from there. Chocolate croissants, a husband home for the day, an art book, and a story about a horse and a fox written and illustrated by my six-year-old just for me. What else could a mummy want? Well, I got them too: no cooking, no cleaning, no dishes, no sweeping. Lunch at a cafe, and takeaway for dinner. Choir and a bottle of wine with other mums at night. And a party to look forward to on the weekend.

I'm not pregnant, my kids are lovely, my friends make me laugh, and I'm a reasonable enough mother who even manages to write a little. Life is good. Many happy returns.

Fairy forests and thwacking bracken

2010-04-22T13:18:00.001+10:00

Last week we spent some time at a friend's rural property. Despite the hills and the trees and the many things to investigate – burrows, dells, a shack near the point of collapse – my girls began moaning that they were bored. I recalled other children here, boys, who used to spend hours energetically slashing at ferns. "Why don't you thwack bracken?" I suggested. My girls looked blank. "You know," I said, "hit it with sticks and knock it over." They stared at me as if I had two heads. And with a vague sense of failure I said, "Well, you could make a fairy forest."

"Ooooh!" they squealed like something out of Enid Blyton, and ran off to build a little place of magic.

Now, I have to admit it is an excellent place to dream of fairies. The bracken towers over their heads, waving softly in the breeze. It casts dappled shade on lichen-studded stones and moss, and nearby, under pine trees, red polka-dotted toadstools grow. The landscape recalls an English story: pleasantly damp, threaded with springs, the fields and folds curve into forest. We have spent enough time there that my girls feel comfortable wandering and playing by themselves; yet the blackberries and the burrows and the forest and the leeches are mysterious enough to feed their imaginations. No wonder they want to build a fairy forest.

But where do they get the fairies from? My girls have been playing fairies and princesses and brides for years, often conflating the three. I never encouraged it, and they watch almost no television, but even so these themes dominate. And I find myself in a bind.

I want them to grow up with options aplenty. I want them to get interested in science and maths and trucks and how things work; I want them to feel free to be doctors or judges or engineers or construction workers, and not feel confined to girly roles. But they are so interested in pretty clothes and sparkly shoes, little fairies and babies. "Have I unwittingly shaped them?" I wonder as I watch them carefully don a bracelet, or a headband embroidered with flowers. They like glitter and beads; they choose their own outfits; they prefer pink. They wish I wore dresses and high heels, and often tell me so. I have no idea how they turned out like this. Giving them options, when all they choose is pink, is challenging.

At times I am tempted to burn the pink, and throw the dolls away. Yet my own mother was a professional who fought to gain acceptance and recognition in her field – and who banned dolls and pink from the house. She was so afraid of forcing us into domesticity, as she herself had felt forced, that she made it difficult for us to engage in domestic role play. Ironically, of course, despite her good intentions, the bans imposed limits of their own.

I studied maths at uni, to a great extent because I had been told for years that women should study science and I convinced myself to enjoy it. I didn't hate it, but I was never relaxed; I had no sense that I deeply belonged there. Yet I rarely explored domesticity, never holding dolls or even babies until I had my own children. I always assumed I would be a busy professional, no kids; instead, I am at home with three of them, and, for the most part, loving it.

It's taken me years of unlearning to recognise that, like so many women, I love children, I love being home, and I love words – and nurturing these loves is as authentic as smashing through a glass ceiling.

Now, as a mother, I want to give my daughters the freedom to know themselves better than I knew myself, to have less to unlearn in their twenties. I want them to consider parenting and part time work with the same seriousness and delight that they might consider a professional life with no kids, for surely the whole point of feminism is options.

So I let my girls have dolls, along with trucks and blocks and things to hit – and they do trundle toy trains around, they do wear blue. At the same time, they spend much more time with their dolls, breastfeeding them, changing their nappies, swaddling them, and singing them to sleep; and I can do a full load of pink in the washing machine.

Perhaps my generation, daughters of the revolution, are always going to find the balance difficult; not quite comfortable at home with kids, not quite relaxed in full time employment, and not quite sure what we want for our daughters. How do we let them pursue their interests without choking on fairy dust? How do we encourage them to explore different roles without preferencing some over others? Thinking about these things, I watch my daughters, and I realise perhaps it's both simple and difficult. All it takes is for me to be as comfortable watching them build a fairy forest as I am delighted when they pick up a long stick, stride purposefully into a field, and get busy thwacking bracken.

Three stages

2010-04-13T12:25:00.001+10:00

We were driving on a rural highway last week, and passed a fast food outlet with a bright plastic playground. My four year old begged to stop and play there. We explained that we couldn't; it was attached to a restaurant where there's nothing for us to eat. "Why not?" she begged. Because you can't eat anything there that isn't meat, we said. "I want to eat meat," she said. As she has, to date, screamed if anything looking like meat touches her plate, we suggested she'd have to prove it.

Five minutes later, we came up behind a truck full of sheep. "Aargh," screeched my six year old. "don't get too close or we'll be covered in piss!" We parents were amazed. Where did she get it from? School, perhaps? Or could it be... us? And we remembered a time a year ago when we were driving in convoy from Adelaide and the car she was in was, indeed, sprayed with liquid gold sloshing out of a truck full of livestock. And even as we tried not to laugh, even as we wondered how horrified we should be about her language – can a six year old say piss? Or is it too crude? Why is 'wee' okay but not 'piss'? and other pressing questions – my four year old confidently announced where she thought the sheep were going.

"The farmer is taking them to the shops," she said. At which we all exploded. We asked if he was taking them to the shops to be sold – "yeah, to be killed", said the six year old – but no. In fact, the four year old was adamant she didn't want them to be killed. "But that's what meat is, silly," said her older sister. "Now you can't eat at that restaurant."

"I don't care," said the four year old, "They're NOT going to be killed. They will wait in the truck while he buys some things, maybe bread, maybe some nice food for them." "Well," said the six year old, starting to cackle again, "they'd have to wait in the truck or else the shop would be covered in piss!"

"Piss!" echoed the twenty month old.

And there you have it: three stages. The six year old, pushing the boundaries of language and politeness; the four year old, her worldview solidly anchored in the domestic; the toddler, mimicking everything she sees and hears. And five minutes of disgusting hilarity. Want to come for a ride?

Dreams like darting fish

2010-04-07T10:26:00.001+10:00

So many traditions encourage us to find silence, to spend time in solitude and see what is revealed. When I can, I do sit quietly and seek what lies beneath – but with three young children, I struggle to find the space or time. I have no desert cave or platform on a pole, no quiet place of retreat; even if I did, my children would come searching, crying out for a glass of water, a cuddle, their other shoe. So now I look for silence in different places.

I have discovered there is a silence in the presence of others. In the car driving home, children all asleep, my husband and I sit in quiet companionship and the silence descends. Old stories emerge. I speak them quietly into the darkness, then leave them to drift through the night.

At the gym, headphones in, I power away on the cross trainer. And despite the electronica the silence enfolds me. I remember forgotten things. Unvoiced hopes, buried emotions surface; eyes brimming with tears, I exercise on.

Hanging from a strap on a crowded tram, I slip sideways into another place and catch words like butterflies, still beautiful in my net.

As I push the pram, the baby chats happily. The slap of my step sets the rhythm of my thoughts; then the thoughts evaporate and I am left with nothing but possibility.

Mid-afternoon, my four-year-old dozes next to me. I tumble into the space between breath, and discover typewriters, goldfish, gratitude.

There is silence to be had in the midst of a crowd, in public places, on a bicycle late at night. There is silence to be had in a house full of children. It bides its time, hovering, waiting for us to notice. And if we do, if we make the effort to be aware, we will be plunged deep into the mystery. What we find there – fragments, words, dreams like darting fish – is ours to keep. Surfacing, we offer it up; the catch becomes our gift.

A toast, a toast!

2010-04-06T10:33:00.002+10:00

I wrote an article about the children I read with each week, and it was published in a real live newspaper this morning! If you would like to read it, you can click here. And to all of you who have been reading along for the last year or so, who have emboldened me to keep writing, I raise a metaphorical glass of bubbly and call for a toast!

To mercy and laughter
To the web and weave of us
To patience and kindness,
To love and water!*

May faith, hope and love prevail.

And thanks to you all.

(*I came across this glorious toast here.)

The great unspoken

2010-03-31T14:15:00.001+11:00

You know, I love my kids, but they drive me up the wall. I don't know that a day goes by without me feeling annoyed. I often shove down my temper, take a deep breath, relax my shoulders, tell myself to keep my big mouth shut – and still I end up shouting. I lack patience, always have.

My toddler opens cupboards. She's mastered the child locks which still foil my friends, and empties the contents onto the floor. Dozens of things, hundreds of things in a day. I pick up plastic lids, cake tins and duplo from wherever she's dumped them: in her bed, on the bathroom floor, under the couch cushions. I've been keeping the toilet door open so I can keep more of an eye on her, but yesterday she brought her stool into the loo, positioned it at my feet, and stood on it so she could stare into my eyes. When I asked her to go away, she turned around and tried to back onto my lap. I found myself laughing and shouting and crying in the space of ten seconds, able to see the funny side but so starved of privacy that I wept.

My four year old is terribly shrill; I hope it's a stage. She fights with her sister and shrieks and wails; they squabble and snap and drive me to distraction. Kicking, punching and slapping have become daily events in our household. I don't know why it has to be this way; I'm totally fed up. I try to talk them through it, but then they do it again and again. And at some point, I yell.

My six year old has moody days. She ignores simple reminders – brush your teeth; you need shoes; we're going to be late for school – and when I repeat myself, then raise my voice, she puts her hands over her ears and makes this harsh prehistoric shriek, the sort of noise I'd expect from a pterodactyl. It's like fingers on a blackboard, but it's scratching at my soul.

I'm bigger than this, I tell myself. I'm the adult around here – I should behave like one. My kids are little, testing the boundaries, expressing strong emotions that they can't navigate. My job is to help them.

On good days, I do. But so often, I snap.

Recently, we had our worst encounter ever. Over many hours, my six year old had said no so often and so forcefully, utterly refusing to do anything or listen to anyone and continually making that prehistoric shriek that drives into my skull and drowns out all softly spoken words of reason, that I literally saw red. The world went soft and hazy like it was backlit by fire, my ears started ringing and I started to scream. As she ran from me, the bitch mother from hell, I kicked her behind then grabbed her by the plait and yanked her back. I'm forever grateful that my husband was around, because I don't know would have happened next. But he took her away and I, completely appalled by my violence, took my horrible self to my room where I lay face down on the bed and sobbed.

I would hide this from you all – I should, if I want you to respect me – but I know I'm not alone. I know a woman who, regularly enraged by her children's fighting and the chaos while she's trying to cook, slams down her chopping knife and runs out the door. The alternative is unthinkable. One of my friends met some new neighbours recently. "Oh yes," they said, "we know your voice." They'd heard her screaming at her sons. Yet another exhausted friend was so vexed by her baby's crying in the depths of the night, she shook it. The baby, now 20, is fine, but it's a scary thing to have done. Myself, I once threw my child across a room and onto her bed, slammed the door and left home for a while.

It's possible that we are the worst women in the world. At times, it feels like it. But I suspect not. We're certainly no paragons, but I don't think we're alone.

The thing is, we're all human. We're all of us fragile and tired and pre-menstrual at times; we have all sorts of things going on. We fight with our partners and mothers and feel lonely and afraid and our kids shriek in our faces when we already feel like hell. No wonder we explode.

I sometimes think the miracle is that we erupt so rarely. Particularly in this world of small families, where a lone adult cares for children; where kids aren't allowed to roam the neighbourhood and are under parental supervision all the time; where they are often inside and underfoot instead of outside and out of earshot; where there is no grandparent or elderly aunt in the home who breaks up tension and provides a different focus; where the adult has no peer to talk with; where neighbours are strangers, transient, at work, invisible – it's no wonder we go berserk.

A friend grew up at a time and place when kids had much more freedom. He tells of riding within earshot of the family dinner bell. He'd roam his town, by himself or with friends, exploring, hanging out, away from the watchful eyes of parents. He was free after school until he heard the bell, when he'd jump on his bike and pelt home.

I hear that story and am filled with longing for a place and a time where kids go exploring while we cook in blissful peace; where our lives are not so entangled that we drive each other wild; where a community of adults takes responsibility for children, so they are safe as they wander; where adults don't hover and kids roam free.

Two pounds of potatoes

2010-03-24T11:42:00.002+11:00

We've never been big potato eaters; we eat rice and pasta instead. But over the last few years we've been trying to eat more locally – and we live in potato country. More recently I've been feeling so disconnected from my home that it was time for some positive action. So I signed up for a veggie box scheme. Each Saturday, boxes are delivered from a local organic farm to a house nearby; and each Saturday, we go pick up our box, have a chat, and heft our box home.

My hope was that the veggie box will make me feel more in touch with the land and the seasons – and it will compel us to eat local food. But I realised at our first pick up that it's better than that: just by dropping in once a week to pick up my box, I will feel more connected to my suburb. The scheme is run by two lovely people, and other participants come and go. Soon there will be a dozen more people whose faces I might recognise as I walk along the streets.

And as for the box: wow! Our first box was incredible. On top lay cobs of corn. We demolished them for lunch. They were so sweet they needed neither salt nor butter; they exploded with juice. We ate them with a beet and mint salad, and raw summer squash sliced paper thin, drizzled with olive oil and lemon. I exclaimed and sighed and licked my fingers and reached for more. Saturday lunch became a feast.

What else was in the box? So many veggies: turnip and tomatoes, beets and broccoli, snow peas and summer squash, cucumbers and capsicum and cabbage, celery, lettuces and a solitary onion, and two pounds of potatoes. Various apples, sweet and crisp and enough to make sauce, and nashis sized small for a lunchbox. A centipede, a slater and a dun coloured beetle, which I tossed into the garden. I washed the veggies and loaded the fridge. Combined with the fruit, herbs and veggies in our own garden, we won't need to buy any more produce.

I'm feeling inspired, but it requires a different approach. Instead of shopping for ingredients, I'm reading for recipes. I made a simple beetroot soup which will brighten my lunch – but potatoes? My kids have never loved them, 'not even mash'*, but I guess it's time to learn. And this is where it gets difficult. We live in a culture where we can have what we want whenever we want it; everything is always available. So this choice to limit our options to what's in the box feels challenging. After all, my family prefers rice to potatoes, even if rice cannot be grown here. It's hard to relegate it to a treat.

And I think of my friends who race from work to aftercare to home and throw dinner together – this is where local organic eating so often falls flat. The veggies in the box were wonderful, the genuine article: muddy, unprocessed, with the occasional peck. But my friends don't have time to tease mud out of lettuce leaves or find recipes to use up a box. They buy clean potatoes, washed leaves and frozen peas; they cook in twenty minutes. Until fresh local produce means scrubbed veggies and choice – or people are willing to trade shopping for cooking and that probably means cooking ahead – it's not going to take deep hold.

For myself, I figure we'll do what we can. Perhaps in this challenge, I'll find a new sort of freedom. I may be hemmed in by what's in the box, but I'll be free from concerns of distance or land care. Anyway, I have to admit I like a puzzle – even if it means cooking potatoes.

*Lola: "And I don't like potatoes, not even mash, so don't even try." (Lauren Child, I will not ever never eat a tomato, a most excellent book for a fussy eater.)

The line beckons

2010-03-16T10:15:00.001+11:00

How is it that my kitchen bench is the regulation height, so I can comfortably peel carrots and wash dishes for hours; but when I write my back aches? I write on a laptop on a card table tucked into a corner upstairs; I sit on an old wooden chair. Downstairs is the family computer, with an adjustable chair and a proper desk. But after years of enduring, I've admitted I can't write there. My children run up and down the corridor and shriek just outside the door and burst into the room halfway through a tricky paragraph; and I have to share the computer. I've finally given up and retreated heavenwards, twenty steps, a child safety gate, and two solid doors between us.

I can't blame anyone but myself for the furniture. Several times, my husband has suggested we go shopping for a good desk, a better chair, a rug to brighten the room. I refuse. I say that the time we spend shopping is time I could be writing, and I guard that time jealously. Also, I am weighed down by the acquisition of stuff. I don't know where to buy a rug that is fair trade but beautiful; and how can I have something on my floor that was made by debt slaves in Pakistan? So I make my excuses and sit at a card table, while my lower back aches in protest.

I skirt around the other issue: that I'm writing at all. If I buy a desk and a chair, then I'm committing to the endeavour, and that's frightening. Because if I'm writing, then what of it? What if I'm never able to find the time and space to write something really good? Will I ever do more than notes on a webpage? And what will be the effect on my kids?

When I write too long I am stroppy with my children; I resent them and the demands they make on me. I don't want to cook or clean or have anything else to do with the household. Yet there is a paradox. It wasn't until I had children that I began to write. In having them I came to know myself enough, grew enough courage, to begin. They are both impetus and impediment. I don't want to disappear into the world of words, failing as a mother as I dream always of the next image, the next sentence, when I am with them; but I can't stop telling our stories.

And at some stage my aching back will force me to go shopping, and admit that this tapping away, these words on the page, are as necessary as breathing, as vital as eating, as important as washing the dishes.

And maybe there's a clue. Not all of us were born to write great works of literature. Maybe some of us, one of us, was born to wash dishes, to watch and observe the daily and to write about it, to remind her and you of what it's all about. I think of myself as telling you stories, stories of me which are stories of you, about who we are and who we were and who we will become. Stories that remind us how abundant life is, how the mundane can crackle and bounce if we only make the effort to notice.

As I type, the washing machine trills. In a moment, I will stand and stretch my aching back. I will go downstairs and fill my mother's ancient basket with cool clean clothes and carry it outside. The morning sun is just clearing the fence. As I lift up the washing and peg, it will shine into my eyes. I will bend to the basket and stand again, bend and stand, the back of my neck cooled then warmed as I duck in and out of the shadows. There is beauty here, a small sacred dance offered by countless women to the light, to the dark, to their household, to the god of the daily. I will dance, and I will notice, and I will tell you, because it is my story and your story and the story of generations stretching back beyond memory and surging forward past imagining, the story of all of us who wash and cook and work and clean in the cool quiet stillness of home.

I will wash and I will write. The line beckons.

Discombobulation

2010-03-10T09:01:00.001+11:00

Darkness. I wake with a jolt, completely disoriented. In front of me, a looming shadow. I have no idea where I am. Heart pounding, I concentrate, try to remember through the jetlag.

Slowly, it comes to me.

I'm home.

I've been away for nine weeks. We've stayed in ten locations, ten different hotels or bedrooms or basement floors, and I have not woken once without knowing exactly where I am. Now, only now, am I completely disoriented.

When we arrived, I headed straight for the kitchen. And was staggered by the floor. "Is this our floor?" I asked. "Is this really it?" I didn't recognise it, couldn't reconcile it with my memory of the place. Later, preparing food, I found myself staring at the bench top. "Has it always been this colour?" I wondered. Everything, but everything, feels unfamiliar. I have to stop and think; I can't remember where I keep the tea towels, and I'm wandering around the kitchen with my hands dripping wet, searching like a stranger.

I'm shocked by the decor. As my girls shriek in play, the sound drills into my skull. The floors are bare, the walls empty, the windows in the public rooms naked. Noise bounces around. Our house is cool, spare to the point of being dismal. "Am I just camping here?" I think. "Where are the rugs?"

They say home is where the heart is. I thought that meant we longed for our houses, but as I walk around my own house, a house that my friends love, a house that I've written about, I wonder what I'm doing here – and I realise I had it all back-to-front. It's not that our hearts are linked to our houses; it's that our home is where our hearts yearn to be. And this is what made our trip so wonderful: my heart delighted in every rural location, every little town, every river bank, every muddy puddle and glistening stone and gnarled oak tree . After a lifetime of living in big cities, negotiating traffic and broken glass, ambition and consumption, appointments to see friends and rush hurry bustle, my whole self was exhausted. Away, my heart expanded. I felt at home almost every place we went.

So now where is my heart? Is it with me in Melbourne? Perhaps, given time, it will come back to me here as we devour ripe figs and eat sweet grapes from the vine. The pears are ready to be picked; the almonds are dropping from the tree. Eating food from the garden always helps me feel grounded. Perhaps, too, as we share wine and stories with people we love, I will remember who I am and with whom I belong.

But at times I think I left it in Cornwall. A month ago, I sat in Glasgow Cathedral and prayed for home. Thinking of my own city, I was instead flooded with yearning for a grey town of stone and water, threaded through with lanes like crooked fingers. In the hazy light of the cathedral, blurred further by my unexpected tears, I saw before me sea and sky merged into one. Above me, I heard gulls.

A shell, a cup, a shoe

2010-03-01T09:35:00.001+11:00

My youngest daughter is 18 months old. She walks around the house tapping on a coaster, pretending it's an iPhone. She holds a shell, a cup, a shoe to her ear. 'Hi!' she says, 'yes, yes, yes, bye!'. My not-quite-four year old places a book face down on the table. 'This is my laptop,' she says, and taps away on the cover. She draws little circles on sheets of paper, and types on those too.

My six year old watched my husband closely, figured out his passwords, and now uses the iPhone whenever she can find it. She has, on occasion, quietly shut the study door, booted the computer and found her favourite website, hoping I won't notice her absence for a little while.

I worry about my children growing up in a world of bells and whistles and zippy little gadgets. I worry that they won't play and instead will rely on electronic toys for entertainment. I worry that they will forget how to be quiet, and how to drop into that perfect space where they are unaware of anything in the world except the story they are telling themselves as they move small twigs around. I worry that they will be infected by acquisitiveness, always wanting the latest this or that, always wanting more. We're already fielding requests for video games and Wii and all the other things owned by kids at school.

Perhaps one of the attractions of travelling is that it gets us out of the house, out of the city, and well away from most gadgets. Last week, we were visiting friends in rural Maine. Our house overlooked the vast Passagassawakeag River; the yard sloped down to the river bank. On a typical morning, we'd watch the tide ebb. As the shore became exposed, the gulls drifted in. They floated down, carried mussels up into the sky, dropped them onto the rocks, then swooped back to pick out the flesh. As more land appeared, my girls climbed down the wooden steps at the end of the garden and collected pretty stones and shells. They arranged them in patterns on the damp driftwood for us to admire; choice specimens were brought inside.

Around the river bend we found a lobster pot, washed up in a tangle of ropes and netting; we found a faded oar. We clambered on rocks, and in an act of glorious giggling destruction, smashed up slabs of ice the size of coffee tables beached by the receding tide. My girls sucked on the shards. The shore was covered with loose shale, and the flakes of stone were perfect for skipping across the water – and the more rounded rocks made a satisfying splash.

All very simple, all utterly glorious. There's something about wind and water and rocks and seaweed and the infinitely changing landscape that keeps us endlessly entertained. Life feels so simple when travelling. We have five people and three bags, and want for nothing. Our entertainment is the world outside; or, when it's wet, a few pens, a bit of paper, a book. But next week we go home, back to the phone and the telly and the desktop, back to work, school, kinder, volunteer jobs, back to crazy traffic and crowded lives. I feel exhausted just thinking about it.

But last week, I saw a loon glide past, surprisingly low in the water. A seagull bathed, arching as it splashed. As I watched, I congratulated myself that my kids are still absorbed by the simple things: rivers and rocks, waves, seaweed and gulls. Snow to throw, ice to slide on, puddles to jump, rocks to climb – such joy! Here, I think, we don't need the iPod, the laptop, the telly, the DVD player. Here, the world is enough.

Smugly satisfied, I wandered inside. Framed by the picture windows, the mighty river flowed, the snow lay in drifts in the yard, the shore beckoned. I found my not-quite-four year old curled into a corner of the couch. She started, looking guilty. 'I have a screen,' she said with a big embarrassed smile, 'I stole it from dad when he wasn't looking.' I glanced down. She was playing on the iPhone.

Postcard: A Travelling Mother's Guilty Pleasures

2010-02-19T06:26:00.005+11:00

Driving our hire car, the biggest monster in the lot.
Eating a frosted donut and calling it breakfast.
Shoving clothes in the dryer, never glancing at the sky.
Leaving crumbs on the floor for the cleaner to deal with.
Gazing out the window, just doing nuthin'.

A Valentine’s Tale

2010-02-15T21:58:00.002+11:00

Valentine's Day. It's the sort of day I don't usually notice. If I do, I might snort at the advertising in the shops and make some curt comment about the greeting card holiday. But this week I'm in the US, Boston to be precise, and Valentine's Day is BIG. There are hearts everywhere; women are walking around with flowers and balloons; romantic music is drifting through the square opposite our hotel. People are lining up to have their photograph taken in front of an eight foot high Perspex heart. Horse drawn carriages circulate, couples snuggled inside sipping champagne. They are visible from our hotel room; my girls are glued to the window. The youngest is neighing.

As usual, my partner and I did our best to ignore the day. But the square has free WiFi and I'm wandering far from home, so I went down in the cold to check my emails. I was sitting on a concrete bench, hunched over my laptop while my tail froze solid, when a young man slid into my peripheral vision brandishing a single long-stemmed red rose. I looked up.

'I saw you; this is for you,' he said, smiling. I stared, flabbergasted. Then, because I am an unromantic cynic, I asked him what it was for. 'It's Valentine's Day!' he said, looking at me like I was an idiot. Then he smiled again, handed over the rose, and wandered off.

I was so startled, I laid it down beside me and kept on with the emails. Perhaps I thought I imagined it. After all, I've been married almost ten years now. I'm in my mid thirties, I've borne three children, and I'm always tired. Nice crinkles are developing around my eyes, but stronger, more obstinate lines mark my mouth. I'm getting a little grey. My hair is cropped unfashionably short and I don't even own any makeup, let alone use it. Since we've been travelling I've put on weight, my skin has dried out and I need a haircut. Also, I have a pimple on my bottom.

Other than this totally random pimple, I'm not ugly, but I don't use the usual feminine markers of attractiveness: long hair, pretty clothes, delicate jewellery. The world treats me accordingly. Much of the time I am invisible, particularly when I'm with the kids. No one checks me out, and I'm quite fine with that. There's not an ounce of flirt in me. Whenever I hear that some shockingly high proportion of people have extramarital affairs, I'm amazed. I'm so far off the market that I just don't get it. My husband maintains I'm the least romantic person he's ever met and I'm the last person you'd give a single red rose to – although he delights me with tiger lilies from time to time.

So I couldn't quite believe what had happened. But the rose still lay there on the bench and, whenever I glanced at it, seemed real enough. I finished my emails, picked it up, and sniffed. It smelled of nothing. Those Valentine's roses have no scent, and it's a crying shame.

But its petals were blood red, and soft as velvet. I stroked it against my cheek, remembering how delightful it is to be noticed. And a little voice cried out exultantly, See! You're not past it! Maybe you're more attractive than you realise!

– and then I was horrified. I asked the rose, Am I insufferably vain? And what on earth am I going to tell my husband?

I felt slightly guilty about this odd encounter: had I sent off an improper signal, staring into my computer in the freezing cold? And what did it mean and why didn't the guy stay and talk and what is this American culture anyway?

The rose was silent, silent and beautiful.

My frozen tush demanded I cut short my musings, and the surprising young man was long gone. So I gathered my things, picked up the rose again, and wandered back through the Valentine's throng to the one who loves me best, the one who knows about the self-doubt and the frown lines and the plain clothes and the pimple, the one who still wants to grab my butt anyway.

PS - Monday morning, I happened to walk past the giant Perspex heart again. In the absence of crowds I realised it was, in fact, an ice sculpture - heart, velvet-cushioned throne, balustrades, urns, vases and giant cupids. Wow!

Help Wanted!

2010-02-09T03:49:00.003+11:00

I read each week at an inner-city school with refugee kids.

The school very much needs some other people to read to and with the preps on a regular basis, at least weekly but preferably more often. So if you live in Melbourne, have some time in the mornings, and like books and kids, send me an email and I can forward you more details.

If you have young children of your own, you are welcome to bring them and have them play in the classroom while you read.

You can read about my experience reading with the kids here (how I got into it) and here (looking for books for them) and here (some of the things I've done with them). I've absolutely loved the experience, and can highly recommend it!

Postcard: Black Crag, icy wind

2010-02-09T03:40:00.001+11:00

UP>> I'm cold where are my gloves what can I eat why do we have to do this it's too muddy dada carry me mama hold my hand slow down my feet hurt isn't there anything else to eat I have a runny nose my hood came off you're too fast my legs are tired sore aching when are we going to be there why can't we go hoooooome???

DOWN>> running laughing leaping flying skipping jumping tumbling falling giggling yelling: There's a dog! It licked my face! There's a waterfall! And another one! A kissing gate! Two ponies! One sniffed my hand! The river! The waterfall! The village! Chocolate!!!

Please can we do it again?

Into the Clouds

2010-02-06T03:36:00.001+11:00

My six year old grumbles most days on the way to school. It's about a mile, longer when we take the quiet way. She's tired, she's bored, why can't we drive? And I can't blame her. The traffic is deafening, the footpaths are hard on her feet, and the quiet way is loooooong. So we look around us, trying to notice the small good things: the Borzois running at twilight, the setting sun illuminating their flowing fur and transforming them into fiery angels; a fallen nest lined with down; a pole with a neck warmer (guerrilla urban landscaping at its best). But often it feels like slim pickings.

Happily, though, we've ditched school for a while and are roaming around the UK instead. This week: the Lake District. Our house is in a tiny village, surrounded by fields and woods and rivers and mountains. So I dragged my reluctant daughter out for a walk. She grizzled as we put on her waterproof pants and snow boots, and stomped out the front door. 'Think of it as a treasure hunt,' I suggested. 'We have a map, we'll follow the clues, and we'll look for treasure: views, rocks, leaves – whatever is interesting.' She rolled her eyes and sighed.

So we headed down our street, over a river (saying hello to the ducks), past the pub, under the railway bridge, through a kissing gate (mwah, mwah), down a path between two dry stone walls, through another kissing gate, across a field, over a steep stone stile, down a driveway, and along the street home.

When we saw the ducks, she cheered up immensely. And from thereon she was exuberantly happy. She waded through the deepest puddles and sloshed in the mud, made kissing sounds at each of the gates, and clambered up the stile even though its height gave her pause. A train went by, and she waved. We saw sheep and a tractor and heard water everywhere – a tiny stream running beside the road and tumbling over a ledge; the drip of a misty rain; and of course the river. Mosses and ferns grew out of the stone walls. We inspected the fallen leaves (mostly oak); we looked at algae and the colours of the stone; we saw footprints in the mud and counted how many different shoes we could find. I read out the directions bit by bit, so she could locate the stile, the gates, the yellow arrows showing the way. The distance – longer than the school run – felt completely insubstantial. She raced home, described every step of the way to her father, and asked to do it again.

The next day, she begged to go for a longer walk. So while my husband and our middle child caught the train to Liverpool, home of Anfield football ground (motto for LFC and all families with young children: 'You'll never walk alone'), I strapped our toddler onto my back, took my six year old's hand, and headed out. Nothing heroic, just three miles. Our path took us past the cemetery (hello Elizabeth, there's always an Elizabeth), along the river (with a view to the weir and its endlessly fascinating falling water), across some farm land (investigating molehills and sheep poo, as one does), then straight up a hill into the twelfth century woods. After climbing for 45 minutes, we reached the ridge. We hung our jackets on a tree, sat on a damp bench, ate a chocolate digestive and admired the view: miles of rolling fields and hills, patterned by walls and hedges; sheep on a slab of rock, looking startled; patches of snow in the folds of the nearby mountains; and everywhere moss, fallen leaves, and trees. We saw and heard no one. It was just us, and the world at our feet.

Rest done, we rambled on. To my delight, I found Yggdrasil. Then, in a clearing, Yggdrasil again, but from this tree's massive branches hung rope swings. My daughter shouted and ran, leapt on and flew through the air; the ground sloped away. The trees were ancient; the view was glorious; the ground was covered with soft leaves. We had climbed a small mountain, and were so pleased with ourselves. And then this, an unexpected gift, treasure indeed. Heaven on earth in a rope swing.

After a while, we followed the path out of the woods and into the clouds which had rolled in below us while we were on the ridge. We walked through mist across the fields: up six foot high ladder stiles with slippery rungs, through kissing gates so narrow I could barely fit with the baby backpack, and over a stone stile which landed us in a stream. We learned more about how to read directions on a map, and how to find those little yellow arrows in the landscape which show where to go. (Rule One: It's always more obvious than I think.) All the way, we were engaged, talking, energised, relaxed.

As we trotted down the final hill, negotiating our way over a cattle grid (bypass gates are for wusses), I reflected again on the walk to school. It's a big issue for us, a long and often exhausting part of our day. How can a mile at home be a gruelling slog, when three miles here are pure joy? What makes walking in our suburb so hard?

If only our daily walk went over a stream, into the woods, or through a kissing gate; if only it had a slightly dangerous rope swing or a stile too high for comfort; if only it were quiet enough I could hear my children speak; if only there were no traffic and they could run ahead at will; if only...

If only our path led us into the clouds.

***

PS – We do plan to buy a courier bike, which will carry all three girls to school and back, but even so I will still need to negotiate traffic in a big way – and the girls will get no exercise.

PPS – The walk was such a hit, the whole family did it again the next day. My not-quite-four-year-old, who demands to be carried for any distance longer than a block, ran, leaped and climbed the entire ramble. Every time she began to lag, I'd point out the next stile and she'd shout with glee and sprint across the field. Joy.

PPPS – Incidentally, this walk is a simple loop around a town that barely features on a map. It isn't one of the Great Walks of the Lake District, just one of thousands of rambles in the area. Yet it was so beautiful and satisfying that I'd happily do it every day for the rest of my life – and I haven't even begun to explore the other walks in the local photocopied guidebook.

Postcard: English Food

2010-02-04T15:18:00.000+11:00

Creamy potatoes freshly dug, so sweet, so sweet. This morning's mackerel look surprised, still shocked at being caught. Onion soup, unctuous, fragrant with beef stock. Apples crisp as frost explode with juice; my chin is sticky. Fat crumbs of cheddar fall from doorstop-thick bread. Clotted cream, heavily crusted, weighs down a scone. Baby chard, lamb's lettuce, watercress clean my palate. Hand cut chips are crisply golden; inside, clouds. Pale ale, bronze ale, winter ale, stout –

I think my jeans have shrunk.

My grandfather's ears

2010-01-26T01:42:00.005+11:00

We occasionally drive up a particular hill in suburban Melbourne. Each and every time we crest the hill, I panic. Laid out before me are thousands of houses. I think of all the women living here who have to drive everywhere - to school, the shops, work, the train station - and I start to sweat. My heart swells into the back of my throat, my palms go clammy, and I obsessively rub the tops of my thighs as I try to calm down. I can't live here! I blurt at my partner, my eyes prickling with tears. He smiles patiently - it's the twentieth time we've gone through this ridiculous scene -, strokes my arm and reassures me.

I know how silly I sound. After all, we have a house in an inner suburb; and if we ever had to move, we'd certainly find something smaller in the same area rather than head out east. Even so, I still feel our house is too big, the streets too wide, the shops too far away. It may the closest thing to 'my' suburb in Melbourne, but even after fifteen years, I still don't feel like I belong. The roads are choked with traffic, and people just aren't that friendly. Most of the smiles I offer are not returned; few shopkeepers recognise us; few parents like to chat in parks. I don't know why (is it a symptom of city life? or is it me? is it me??), but that's the way it is. So often I feel I am floating away, adrift, not tethered to house or suburb or anything much except my family and a few friends. Where do I belong? I wonder.

This week, I'm visiting Penzance, the land of my forebears. Some streets are so narrow that the houses seem to touch overhead; the houses have party walls. The roads go up and down and roundabout; there are no straight lines. The footpaths are so narrow that they only just fit the stroller. We often walk on the street instead. The shops are tiny, the shopkeepers friendly, and they recognise us already. I am relaxed here.

At some deep level, this town feels familiar. This is how people should live, I think - in an anthill, with fields to the back of us and ocean to the front. We can see where the food is grown and caught; we can do everything on foot; this world is people-sized. Water runs through the town, in brooks and fountains and gutters. The dark stones glisten in the rain and make my heart leap.

The landscape resonates, and so do the people. Here are the people who smile back. It's a bustling town, but people nod and grin in the street. Here is the origin of my family's flash smile that lasts less than half an instant. I've seen it on face after face. Here are the people who chat with strangers - it's not just me! As we watched the waves crashing against the sea wall, a chatty man told us tales. Here are the people who sing. This afternoon I walked behind a woman singing to herself; she could have been me. Last week, on request, I gave the local grocery a rousing rendition of the Vegemite song, followed by an Aeroplane Jelly duet with the girl on the register. Time and again, my eyes meet another's and I feel a jolt of recognition.

Talk about the illusion of belonging. I don't know anyone here and am cheerfully oblivious to private life - but the public life is so familiar, I could weep.

My grandfather's ears walked past me yesterday. They were on someone else's head, but I recognised them instantly. This morning I saw an eighteenth century clock, its face inscribed with the maker's signature. He had my father's name.

Postcard: Sailors' Eyes

2010-01-25T02:16:00.004+11:00

Old men's eyes here run blue. After years of watching wind and waves, they radiate light; they cannot focus on earthly things. They gaze past, through, beyond as we pass by.

Bread and circuses

2010-01-19T00:57:00.004+11:00

I spent last week in London wondering what it means to belong. My ancestors are from England, but they fled the crushing poverty and emigrated to Australia. 150-odd years later, I was born. 34 years after that, I thought it was time to check the place out!

Mooching around, with a big apartment to go home to, a down jacket to keep out the elements and money in my pocket, was a blast. We spent four days in a blur of touring: Buckingham Palace (where I was most gratified to see a cleaning lady burst out a side door, weave between two soldiers, and stuff a sack of garbage into a dumpster halfway through the otherwise highly choreographed changing of the guard); the Tower of London; the National Gallery; the Portrait Gallery; and the British Museum. We saw the greatest hits of British history and English colonialism: the Rosetta Stone, Egyptian mummies and the Crown Jewels, and dozens of paintings that left me gobsmacked. I spent hours gazing at art, thinking and dreaming and wondering, and have been nourished for months to come.

All well and good. But my ancestors left for a reason. They were tin miners in Cornwall. With the opening of the mines, life expectancy dropped to just over 20. Children as young as seven worked in the mines, and babies were cared for by even younger children and invalids. Industrial and household accidents were common. Nutrition was abysmal, disease was rife, and everyone was poor.

By contrast, life expectancy in South Australia, where my family moved, was 45. Fresh food was available, young children did not work, and people had a reasonable chance of survival. The only reason I can afford to waltz around London, three kids in tow, is because our people left the UK many years ago.

So I have mixed feelings. I may be visiting the home of my ancestors and drinking deep from cultural wells; I may be relishing the ice and snow and grey skies and muddy puddles; I may feel a deep sense of comfort in the narrow laneways and the squashed together sort of living - but I also feel resentful. For all the grand buildings in London, for all the wealth represented by the acquisition of paintings and antiquities from around the world, for all the money spent on war with the Spanish and French, my people, along with many thousands of others, went hungry. As much as I love visiting the galleries and museums, I no longer belong here because my people had to leave in order to live. We were at the bottom of the social scale at a time when there was no safety net.

Our London apartment emphasized the class structure. It was a flat in a grand old mansion. The lounge was triple the size of our lounge at home, with three couches taking up only half the room; large bureaux and arm chairs were dotted around the remaining space. The dining room held a mahogany table that seated eight. My husband and I enjoyed sitting at the far ends of the table and waving - but the footmen never reported for duty, so we spent most of every meal walking laps just to pass the food. The front bedrooms were high ceilinged and generous. The kitchen, however, was accessed through a dark narrow corridor, and through the kitchen one found the third bedroom and bathroom. They were low-ceilinged, single glazed, and cramped. It was the servant's quarters. There was no structural reason to have low ceilings in the back part of the flat. Instead, it was a political statement: your ceilings are low, your rooms chilly, your cornices devoid of decoration, because you are a servant. I may have slept in the front bedroom this week, but I belong in the back, and I resented it.

Down at the Palace, the band played martial music and then, to my astonishment, an ABBA medley. The Union Jack hung limply from the flagpole. The Queen was not at home. As we stood in the crush of tourists, listening to Mamma Mia and watching the guards stride around in front of an enormous empty building, all I could think was, Bread and circuses.

We walked away and my father said, Well that's the one good thing that came out of the monarchy.

The disparity in wealth here radicalised my family. On all sides they were dissenters, passionately opposed to the State Church. 150 years on, their great great grandchildren simmer still.

Postcard: London Underground

2010-01-13T08:05:00.001+11:00

The sign says the next train is WIMBLED. What does it take to wimble a train, I wonder? Will it still run? Are there clowns at Piccadilly Circus? Druids and oaks at St John's Wood? What do they grow at Chalk Farm? Who are the Seven Sisters? The King's Cross - what made him so? Which is the Shepherd's Bush? Who is Bec, and why is she Tooting? Does the Elephant live in the Castle? Can the Angel fly?

Dear Nancy

2010-01-08T20:39:00.005+11:00

Dear Nancy,

You told me that it didn't matter if my kids were grizzly when I was eating croissants in Paris. I've been thinking about it. Because now the whole family has been sick, and we've spent the last few days apologising: to a maid in Hong Kong for soiling her shoe; to airline stewards for throwing up on a seat; to our hostess in Berlin for the vomit on the pillow and the vomit on the mattress; to our friends, for missing a birthday dinner.

Last night, as I was on my hands and knees throwing up into a bowl - couldn't make the toilet - I started to cry. Hot tears ran down my nose and dripped into the sick. But it wasn't the vomiting, really, or the distance from home which made me cry. It was that this was the night we had planned a babysitter, and dinner and a long conversation with our friends who live here. I miss them so much.

As my husband helped me back to bed, I sobbed like a baby. And watched the snow fall outside the window and wondered, would I prefer to be home?

And guess what, Nancy? You were right of course. Still glad to be here. If one must vomit, it may as well be in a beautiful old apartment in Berlin. The ceilings are fourteen foot high, and I could ride a camel through the double doors between each room.

Round the corner is Stephane, who sells French wine and cheese. He doesn't lock his shop, so I wandered down the precipitous stairs into his basement shop to find something to eat. But the light was so dim and noone was there, so I came back upstairs, puzzled, only to find a guy running across the park, waving both arms in the air and cheerfully calling 'Hallo! Hallo!'. Stephane was running late.

We've been to our favourite boot store, which reminds me of a temple. The walls are white and spare, with boots and shoes tucked into carefully lit niches. The shop is absolutely quiet, except for the hushed voices of the assistants. Our tired baby cried throughout, yet the staff only told us to relax, try on another pair. Babies are supposed to cry, they said. Then they weatherproofed our new boots so we could wear them out into the snow. My new boots have a double layer of leather. They're weird and funky and a gorgeous red. You won't find them in Melbourne!

I threw a snowball at my sister and it exploded in her face. O joy! My children are entranced. It's the first time they've seen snow. They examine the flakes on their sleeves, then turn their faces skywards to catch it on their tongues, on their eyelashes. We went to the playground, climbed the icy steps and rode the flying fox over a soft white world.

We've been stuffing ourselves with bread and cheese, and those little rolls that taste like pretzels. Raspberry jam and French wine cost nothing here; the butter tastes like heaven.

So yesterday I decided, yes, I'm glad to be here - even with my head in a bucket. And today, I'm feeling better.

Al.