My happiest day...

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)

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

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

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

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

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?

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...