Oh Christ, is it you again?

It is possible that I drank too much at dinner on a weeknight. Friends were staying, more friends came to eat, and I had cooked for twelve. And a little boy had died. So there was wine to be poured and stories to be shared amidst food and grief and children and confusion.

It is possible that we all stayed up too late, drinking and talking and shedding a few tears. And then we headed to our beds, leaving the dishes for the morning.

It is possible that I woke with a hangover. My husband had left early for work. I crawled out of bed at 7.30, and crept down the hall to confront the mess. The debris of dinner covered every available surface; even the floor was a rice-scattered mess. My six-year-old was crying, ‘I don’t want to go to school.’ One houseguest stood at the sink, chatting, while his one-year-old clung to his leg, wailing. His three-year-old upended something noisy: no better way to get attention in a very full house. I grimaced and began clearing space to make school lunches.

At twenty-five to eight, there was a knock at the door. I knew that my other houseguest was being picked up for work, and so I ignored it. But then, as I stood there in a holey old singlet and saggy pyjama pants, bags under my eyes, hair standing on end, neither washed nor dressed nor caffeinated, I heard footsteps come briskly down the hall.

There was nowhere to hide.

And into the chaos bounced a bright-eyed woman, smiling, introducing herself, and naming our mutual friends.

A brother came to see a certain hermit and, as he was leaving, he said, 'Forgive me abba for preventing you from keeping your rule.' The hermit replied, 'My rule is to welcome you with hospitality and to send you away in peace' (The Desert Fathers).

I read these and similar stories, and I wonder. Did those monks exercise hospitality with children screaming at their ankles? Did they accept visitors with sinks full of dishes and eyes full of sleep and heads pulsing with hangovers?

Were I a spiritual giant, all vanity conquered and magnificent in my hospitality, I would have reached out my hand to greet this woman, and offered her a coffee. But I am not. Instead, I was a mother in a hurry, grotty, embarrassed, surrounded by chaos and clutter and screeching kids, who needed to get to school. And so I said, ‘I’d be delighted to meet you another time when I’m not in my pyjamas’, and turned my back. There was an awkward silence and a few muttered words, which I ignored, and then the sound of footsteps retreating back up the hall. Magnificent in hospitality? Not quite. Rather, it seems that I am magnificent in my rudeness.

I don’t really know what a spirituality of hospitality looks like for a family woman. We are charged with seeking Christ in the stranger, and welcoming all those who come to our door; but so many of our models and stories are monastic in origin. There is no question that I failed that morning, as I have failed so often. But compared to the humiliations and chaos of family life, I reckon the rigours of monastic life look like a walk in the park. How much easier to welcome someone when one's house is not overflowing with friends and shrieking kids!

So I need to balance the stories of hospitality with other stories: stories of monks who fled deeper into the desert; who closed the doors to their cells and ignored the knocks of visitors. I find comfort that they too could be rude, and abrupt, and ungracious. I need to remember that it is okay to assert some boundaries, to claim a small circle of privacy in the mess, particularly when the mess is caused by hospitality already offered to travellers and grieving friends. And I need to remember forgiveness: I can seek out that person soon, and explain, and apologise.

In any case, even those monks who are masters of hospitality experience ambivalence sometimes. In one of her books, Kathleen Norris tells a story that is close to my heart. A monk, charged with perfect hospitality, sees yet another person heading his way. As they approach, the monk seeks to welcome Christ in the stranger. But he is tired, and his heart sinks, and so he can’t help but mutter, "Oh Christ, is it you again?"

A gift from me to you

My daughter and I were riding down to Carlton on a Saturday morning. Every now and then, as we were riding, I felt a tickle above my left ear. Each time I’d give a quick scratch, trying to set right the choppy piece of hair that was so irritating.

We arrived and parked the bikes. While she went to her dance lesson, I ran errands. An hour later, I picked her up. We got back on our bikes and rode to our favourite café. As we were riding, I felt another little tickle. I scratched. We arrived, parked and locked up our bikes, then went and enjoyed our Saturday chat over coffee and hot chocolate. We went back to our bikes. I unlocked the bikes, put on my helmet, and felt a little tickle. I scratched. And flicked out a cockroach from my hair.

It landed on the footpath in front of half a dozen people, and ran around in dizzy circles while I hopped out of its way, scrubbing at my head and cursing.

My daughter is very kind. Had the situation been reversed, I would have collapsed laughing. She didn’t. Instead, she took a step back, then offered to hold my bike while I shook my helmet and swore and leapt to avoid the cockroach, which had some sort of perverse tracking device which drew it running back towards me over and over again.

This same daughter recently told me that I was indiscreet when we last had head lice. When I found them, I mentioned it to a couple of friends so they could check their kids’ hair. But when one of the mums said, ‘Oh! I thought it was the new shampoo that was making my head itch’, I got the giggles. And then I told lots of people, with great roars of laughter, and my daughter became quite cross. I explained that it was important to laugh at the minor indignities of modern family life. She said I was embarrassing her and her sisters, and I had to stop talking about it.

But now I’ve had a cockroach in my hair. How do I feel? Well, half a dozen strangers and my daughter saw me flick it out of my hair and onto the footpath, then hop around shrieking. I feel slightly humiliated, and sullied and unclean. So I am trying to think about it in terms of how she might feel about head lice. But, ‘You had lice?’ I want to say to her. ‘Well, I had a cockroach! Beat that!’

And actually, I don’t think the cockroach is my fault. So we have occasional roaches? That’s life in a warm city. That one wandered into the crevices of my helmet, then made little forays into my hair, is disgusting, but hardly a moral failing on my part. I find it hard to sympathise with my daughter, who has asked that I never mention head lice again. So we have occasional head lice? That’s life in primary school. That they occasionally make forays into my children’s hair is hardly a moral failing either.

But this is an opportunity to offer up my humiliation as a gift to my daughter, and as an opening to you. So I am telling you about the cockroach, that inch-long light brown glistening beastie, that I flicked out of my hair. I admit that it’s a plan which will probably backfire. When I tell her that I wrote about it she’ll blanch, and say I’m humiliating her all over again. She’s a very kind girl, mature and calm; but she’s also becoming a teenager. And what teenager wants a mother who is known for having cockroaches in her hair? How embarrassing!

Meanwhile you too may blanch and think, what sort of woman has cockroaches in her hair? Isn’t she embarrassed? Well, yes. But that’s the thing about tucking vulnerability into the crevices of stories: one must actually become vulnerable. And even if you blanch and I feel embarrassed I will keep on telling them, because the stories and the vulnerability build bridges which link together you and me.

Yes, this cockroach of mine is a funny sort of gift: a little bit weird, a little bit gross. You are free to ignore it, or to leap out of its way. As with all gifts, I can only offer it. Acceptance is up to you.

This post has been approved by an eleven-year-old.

Manna Matters: Investing in Homes and People

Our financial planner is interested in chooks, gardens, and pizza; he’s a Christian and a solid, dependable member of his church. A couple of years ago, my husband and I met with him to talk about backyard fruit trees, home-grown eggs and how to extract our superannuation from the stock market. We had serious qualms about how the market operates and how our money was being invested. Therefore, we wanted to set up a self-managed super fund...

To read more, click here.

And don't forget to check out the rest of the December 2014 issue of Manna Matters, with articles on the real estate market, household covenants and establishing a health retreat for Yolngu women.

The gorgeous illustration is by Shelley Knoll-Miller.

‘The nurture of adults by children in family settings’: Birthday cake

Someone we love is ill with depression. He also suffers from social anxiety and struggles to leave the house. When our kids ask why he doesn’t come to dinner anymore, we try to be matter-of-fact. We explain that he is not well. We explain that he has something called depression, which has various effects; among them, it is very hard for him to spend time with other people. But for all our matter-of-factness with the kids, we adults don’t feel matter-of-fact at all.

Because it’s been a long, long absence and I am beginning to realise just how much our relationship has changed. We used to invite him to things; but I realise that now we just invite his partner, and mention that he is invited too. We used to send him texts; but now, we rarely do. We used to ask him to do things, but now we are afraid of asking too much, and no longer make the requests. It’s been a gradual shift, never deliberate or intentional; but I am beginning to realise just how much we participate in and reinforce the social exclusion triggered by the illness.

And for all our tip-toeing, and wondering questions, and reading, and delicacy on his behalf, he is of course still ill. We never see him, and we miss him. We never talk, his burdens and gifts are never shared, and we still don’t know what, if anything, we can do to help.

Recently, it was my daughter’s eleventh birthday. A week before her birthday, she sought out this person’s partner and asked whether he could bake her birthday cake. When I found out, I went to my daughter and asked her about it. She hadn’t seen him for many months, and so I wondered why she had asked. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I thought it would be good for him to be included in my birthday. And maybe to know that he can give something to me, even if his illness means he can’t come to the party. Is that okay? Do you mind?’

Tears came to my eyes. I gave her a huge hug, and I told her that she was one of the wisest and most generous people I know, adult or child. She had stepped right across an invisible, toxic social line just by asking for a small, good thing; and I recalled the ancient text: ‘sometimes a little child shall lead them.’

Through his partner, our friend agreed to my daughter’s request. He found a recipe, his partner did the shopping, and he baked the cake. His partner brought the cake to the birthday party, and we all sang Happy Birthday. We missed our friend, and wished he could have been there to sing along with us – and yet, in some ways, he was. For in our midst, at the centre of our singing, sat the cake that he had made, that precious thing my daughter had both given and received: a blessing.

And it was delicious.

**

The title of this post comes from a study by Elise Boulding, who asked young people how they had nurtured adults in their families while they themselves were children. The article is not easy to find, but if you want to go hunting here are the details: Boulding, E. (1980). 'The nurture of adults by children in family settings'. In H. Z. Lopata (Ed.), Research in the Interweave of Social Roles: Women and Men (Vol. 1, pp. 167-189). Greenwich, CT: JAI Press.

Ululating at the graduation ceremony

My little sister has just been awarded her PhD. At the graduation ceremony, most of the audience seemed glued to their smartphones. To my right, young women scrolled through clothes on eBay; in front of me, others updated their Facebook profiles and visited the websites of modelling agencies. I sighed, and settled in for the long haul.

But then, a few rows down, I saw some little kids in pretty polyester dresses and down-at-heel shoes. Grandma kept close watch as they played, gazed round the hall, and peered at the brightly-robed academics sitting on stage. Finally, mum’s name was called, Grandma nudged, and they cheered and clapped. Dad took photos of the stage, where mum stood beaming with her degree, and I was reminded of the powerful effects parental education has on children’s lives. I became a little teary.

The ceremony rolled on. Women in headscarves, men in traditional dress, girls in miniskirts, were all awarded their degrees one by one. An African man’s name was called, and the row behind me erupted. Women ululated, hooting and calling and cheering, while he beamed on stage. A few minutes later, another African was awarded his degree. In front of me, a curvy woman in skin-tight red sequins leapt up and began dancing. Her hips swung in slow, erotic circles; her arms reached out in joy; and her upturned face radiated delight as she swayed.

As an elegant woman of Middle Eastern descent received her degree, all the Facebooking, eBaying, tweeting young people around me looked up from their smartphones to whistle and cheer; her fan club was out in force. A Malay woman in a headscarf received her PhD; an ornate embroidered dress peeked out from under the academic gown. The proceedings rolled on, and children and adults pointed and cheered and took photos. It could have been a citizenship ceremony at Coburg Town Hall, only the people in the ceremony all wore matching gowns.

My sister was third last. For over a decade she has studied issues surrounding forced migration, resettlement, and asylum seeking. She has sought to understand the mechanisms which facilitate the settlement of Iraqi families in Shepparton and Dinka kids in Sunbury; she has interviewed Iranians and Afghanis and Kurds about their experiences in detention. She has investigated the alternatives to immigration detention offered by best practice countries, and has been invited to speak with policy-makers around the world. Her work has been used by the UN and, thanks to her presentations and reports, several countries have released children from detention. Who knows what the ripple effects of her work will be.

I am so, so proud of her. When her name was called, I glanced at the audience. Many may have hailed from groups she has worked with and advocated for, but because her work is in the background, at the invisible but crucial level of policy, and because it is anathema to this country’s current government, nobody knows her name. She walked on stage, and I wanted the whole audience to leap up, whoop, ululate, gyrate, whistle, and take her picture.

Instead, her husband, her father and I sat, grinning like loonies, and politely clapped.

This post, then, is my ululation, my swinging my hips in a tight red dress in ecstatic public celebration. Whoo-hoo! Well done, Rah!

Response: The Tortoise and the Hare

The Tortoise and the Hare, first published in 1956, charts the slow deterioration of a marriage through the eyes of the wife, Imogen. Imogen is young, beautiful, and submissive to her much older husband, Evelyn. In the early days of their marriage, Evelyn found her somewhat helpless charm endearing. But fifteen years on, as his career reaches its peak, his needs have changed: he wants to be looked after. The more she tries to please him by effacing herself, the less regard he has for her. And the less regard he has for her, the more her confidence collapses. Gradually, his affections transfer to their neighbour, the frumpish, dowdy, overbearing Blanche Silcox, whose ‘figure with its bloated waist’ was held up by the ‘slender forelegs that unexpectedly support a bull’. Miss Silcox is effective, opinionated, good at huntin’ and fishin’, and at organising his life and everyone else’s.

For all that things have changed in sixty years, many elements of the story continue to ring true. My own husband is eight years older than me and has a well-established career which, like Evelyn’s, is in the law. I am a late bloomer, slow to understand myself, the sort of woman who has grown up enormously because of my loving husband’s care. In the early years of our relationship, I was overwhelmed by grief and struggled with everyday life. Normal activities like driving, meeting strangers, shopping, and working full time felt beyond me and, like Imogen, I was happy to spend many hours of the week doing very little. Because my husband has been patient, gentle and kind, there are many ways that he has husbanded me into being who I am today. But when I think what life could have been like had my husband been as politely, overbearingly selfish as Evelyn, then, like Imogen, I may very well have faded into invisibility.

There are also elements of Blanche in me. Like her, I can be very effective. These days I run a pretty tight ship, and the house is a reasonably neat, welcoming place. My husband comes home to clean socks in the dresser and hot dinner on the table. Bar the normal irritations of children, he has a comfortable home life. But The Tortoise and the Hare made me think, again, about how much many women, including me, still work so hard to meet the needs of their menfolk. Imogen tries and fails; Blanche tries and succeeds; I try and sometimes fail and sometimes succeed. My husband does not demand this of me; he never makes judgements if the house is grubby or I’m too wrecked to cook; and he does a fair bit of the workload. But I certainly do more than I need to make the house a home, whether cooking from scratch or folding his hankies before putting them away. Unlike Evelyn, my husband is respectful and committed to finding ways to share our lives; even so, the book helped me see some of the power dynamics that we unwittingly live out.

The book also recalled the marriage, and divorce, of several of my friends. Imogen is always polite and careful never to make a scene, even when her husband’s relationship with Blanche Silcox slides into a humiliatingly public, domestic, daily affair. And in one dreadful scene, Evelyn kindly remonstrates with Imogen because she has not tried hard enough to like Blanche.

It may seem incredible that a man could rebuke his wife for not making a better attempt to appreciate his mistress, but again and again I have heard similar stories. The man who left one friend and their newborn child because, since the birth of the baby, my friend had ‘selfishly’ failed to attend to his needs and he felt pushed into the arms of his (previously undeclared) lover. The man whose wife’s ‘preoccupation’ with their young children and her own ill-health ‘drove’ him to nightly consumption of internet porn, and to demanding the more brutalised sexual expression that had become his new norm. The man who left a marriage because his wife’s breast cancer was making his life too difficult. And so on.

These did not start out as abusive relationships. It was only after a long and gradual shift in the terms of each relationship that conversations in which the mostly victim was blamed for the actions of and abandonment by the mostly selfish were possible. Again, this is seen in the book. Imogen takes a long time to recognise what is happening. When she does begin to wonder, and tentatively frames a question, her usually polite husband explodes at her impertinence and lack of consideration for his privacy, and shuts down the conversation. Understanding that he will be considerate, polite, and gentle as long as she never broaches the subject, she leaves it until what was previously unthinkable has become so normal, so reasonable, so much a part of everyday life, that it cannot be challenged. And this, too, I hear from friends. By the time they realise what is happening, it is too late for questions; tentative forays are met with aggression, counteraccusations or blank denial.

The Tortoise and the Hare is an acute look at the power relations between many men and women, or income earners versus homemakers, and it raises interesting questions. Who is the hare, and who is the tortoise? Who wins, and what is the prize? Is the winner the woman who fully shapes herself to the man’s needs; and the rich, powerful, handsome man the trophy? Or is the winner the one who is cast aside and left with nothing but, perhaps, the chance to rebuild a life on new terms?

Questions are also raised about love, power, and work. What boundaries should be kept sacrosanct in a relationship, and how can one keep them or ask another to keep them? How much should one shape oneself or the household to meet the other’s needs? Evelyn works, while Imogen’s role is to be decorative and provide a sanctuary for him. How, then, does ‘working’ versus ‘homemaking’ affect the power relationship? Some things have changed since the book was written; now, both partners often work in demanding jobs. In thinking about Evelyn’s need to be cared for, I found myself wondering how we can find restoration and comfort at home when both partners are exhausted and the kids are ratty and we don’t have housekeepers or cooks.

These are all good questions, with no neat or universal answers. Instead, they need to be negotiated time and again. And while The Tortoise and the Hare does not offer solutions, it certainly describes aspects of many modern domestic relationships, raises questions, and holds clues to possible answers – and provides some beautiful, intelligent, incisive, and sometimes hilariously bitchy, reading along the way.

No suitable help makes it hard to be a minister's wife or even, for that matter, a minister

After all these years of struggling with work and not-work, I’m still struggling. I have days where I take the kids to school, drink a slow coffee, have a slow chat, then wander home and hang out the washing. I work for a few hours before it’s time to pick up the kids and leap on the after school treadmill. On such days I feel a bit guilty for not working as hard as my husband. But, said a friend, perhaps you’re not seeming to work as hard as your husband – and that’s a different thing.

There’s no question that my husband works hard, jolly hard. His hours are packed. Mine aren’t. At least, they’re not packed with ‘work’ things. I’m certainly doing the requisite hours and more of working and studying, but I also do a whole lot of other things, invisible things, that I somehow think don’t take any time. But when I reflect on them, they are actually significant parts of the day.

Take the other day. I razzed three kids up and took them to school, despite their usual shenanigans which required me to leave the room several times and breathe slowly and carefully so as to avoid losing my temper. Then I had a long pastoral conversation. I went home and worked on my thesis for a couple of hours. I ate lunch standing up, then ran out of the house to meet someone and do a couple more hours pastoral work and study. From there, I went straight to school and picked up the kids. One of them did a runner, so I chased her through the schoolyard and go to be That Mother who yelled. We squeaked home in time for piano lessons. I shunted all three through their lessons; brought in, sorted and folded three loads of washing; filled in school forms; washed the vegetable crisper; unpacked the weekly veggie box; prepared a healthy balanced meal; ate with my kids; bathed and de-loused them; supervised readers and homework; played a few rounds of racing demon; did the dishes with my six-year-old; got the kids to put their clean clothes away and their dirty clothes in the wash (which takes much more effort than seems reasonable); ushered them into bed; then sat down, at half past eight, with a cup of tea.

But my husband got home from work after nine. So I felt like I hadn’t worked as hard as him.

There are so many tasks that feel like not-work and like they should take no time. They appear on no balance sheet, and I expect them to fit into the cracks of the day. Filling in school forms. Paying bills. Planning and cooking meals. Buying groceries. Washing dishes. Sweeping floors. Mending. Any form of housework. Buying birthday presents. Most of the emotional work. And yet when you have three primary school aged children, washing, cleaning, admin, mediation, and food preparation take an hour or two every day.

The frustrating thing is that my consciousness is well and truly raised. I’ve read Marilyn Waring’s books. I’ve thought and written about the importance of homemaking, and despite my previous conclusions, I really do think that it’s work – in my head. But my gut still doesn’t really recognise it as work, or that it takes real time.

Last week my father, the historian, told me about a woman who came out from England in the nineteenth century. She complained loudly that there was no suitable help in the colonies, which made it impossible for her to perform her duties as a minister’s wife. It made me laugh, and then rock back on my heels. Because I am not the minister’s wife. I am, in fact, the minister. I am also doing postgraduate study. And I am the cook, the laundress, the mostly cleaner, and the gardener for a family of five.

I know all about feminist consciousness raising and The Wife Drought, and they’re all well and good. But it took a word from the nineteenth century for me to hear, quite clearly, that these other things are work, too. That, and talking with friends, and blogging about it time and time again. I am writing about it now as part of my remedial learning process. But I am such a slow learner. By the time I really recognise it as work, my kids will have all grown up.