family

The small one loves ducks so much we set off early and head to the creek

but we’ve never been to this creek before.
Rain wasn’t forecast and I tell that to the sky as it darkens and clouds and of course
pours all over us.

I keep checking the forecast and the sky and not quite understanding 
why the information doesn’t match
I’m cold and wet, but Finch loves the rain

I ask if he still wants to go see ducks
and of course he does, why wouldn’t he. We hide under trees wherever we can and he’s safe in the pram and mostly sheltered, but his little hands are freezing.

We see two ducks from under our tree by the side of the creek and I pull him from his pram and lift him to see and make sure the whole business was worth it
of course it was.

It’s always worth it when Finch has something new to talk about.
The rain gets worse before it eases, just like everything and I tell myself this
is an adventure, if you like rainbows you gotta put up with a bit of rain, but of course there are no rainbows

Just the rain followed by no more rain.

We head to a cafe and I get tea and he gets a marshmallow
and we share fruit toast and he smiles and laughs at everyone and I hold his cold hands
one by one in mine until they’ve thawed a bit and when it’s time to go he wants to go to a playground, so we do.

And how lovely to be so small but so in control of the day, the one day a fortnight we have together so of course I say yes to everything.

Like when we get home and he asks for pizza so I make him a little pizza for lunch
and he pulls the topping off slice after slice so he’s really just eating cheese and again
it’s all worth it.

Except at nap time he cries about having to get into his bed, even though he rolls around happily in there and then falls asleep for an hour and a half and it’s enough time for me
to sit in the sun because the sun’s really and truly out now 

and the washing probably will dry after all even though it got rained all over while we were out and I have enough time to do a bit of marking and check my emails and then write all this down. 

And maybe I don’t need a rainbow to reassure me every time, reassure me everything’s going to be fine
because of course, of course, of course it will be.

Debrief

Our eldest has just turned five, which marks half a decade of my partner and I discussing parenting every single day.

It started out as a sleep puzzle to solve. We would wake each morning and assess the quality of sleep, the night’s ups and downs and describe to each other the exact routine we went through at bedtime – how many pats did we give her, how loud was the shushing, how did you extract your arm slowly and gently enough not to wake her when you placed her in her bed and what gentle dance did you create to exit the room without setting off that one sneaky creaky floor board? 

Every morning we debriefed and every evening we tweaked the sleep dance accordingly. An art, a science, nothing left to chance and hope. We believe it worked and by 8 months old our very shouty, very sleep-resistant baby was sleeping 10 uninterrupted hours a night. I know this so precisely because it felt monumental at the time. One of our greatest achievements.

Five years later, we no longer talk about sleep — both the five year old and the two year old chat themselves to sleep and only wake in the morning when we open their curtains — but we still   debrief the day.

We discuss the things we were proud of and the things we were not so proud of, things we saw other parents doing and how impressive it was or strange it was, why we should try and do that in our family or why we would never. We think we parent very deliberately and it is often very tiring to talk about. 

But I’m aware our deliberate parenting style might look like quite the opposite from the outside. Instead of putting things in front of our kids and showing them how to use them, or jumping in when we overhear a voice getting raised or offering help before it’s asked for, we really want our kids to learn to figure things out on their own. Asking questions, rather than always providing answers. Over these intense five years we’ve realised that it’s okay if our kids get frustrated about something and that’s often where the best learning has happened. It’s okay if they express annoyance when something isn’t turning out the way they want it to – isn’t that so much of life?

This morning I helped the small one upstairs to where his sister is and closed the baby gate, explaining clearly that I’m going to have a shower now. The white noise of water calms my brain for a few minutes but when I turn it off Lotus is calling me. I pop my head around the door and ask what’s up. She’s upset because Finch is not listening to her, “I’m the boss of my body and I’m the boss of my room!” Okay, I’ll be there in a sec. 

By the time I dry off and wrap up and head up the stairs, calling out, ‘Are you okay, or do you need some help?’ Lotus has put some toys in Finch’s room for him and is looking him in the eye, calmly saying, ‘Next time can you just say yes or no instead of shouting at me?’ I help him get his diggers out of the cupboard and he asks her to play with him, ‘Yeah!’ she cries, ‘Yeah!’ he repeats. 

They have solved it without me and I couldn’t be more proud. What a gift for their learning and their relationship to sort these things out on their own. And what a gift for me to be given time to write while they happily play upstairs together – some complicated game with blankets and toys and nightlights and important bustling back and forth. I sit on the couch with my laptop and hear them singing happy birthday to a teddy.

Just as I’m really settling into a morning of me time and patting myself on the back for my excellent parenting skills, Lotus screams. Finch is ordered out of her room and when I get there I am too. There are big big tears and I take Finch away while Lotus screeches at the emptying room that she just needs time to herself. Humbled and wishing I had checked in on them sooner, I give Finch a cuddle and prepare snacks for them both. Maybe it’s time we all went for a walk. There’ll be lots to unpack at debrief time.

Summer rain

Our two week holiday ends with rain. Lotus calls it ‘mist rain’ the stubborn drizzly stuff that won’t be moving on until it has emptied the clouds entirely. No wind to push it along, or sun to sizzle it away. It’s been doing this for two days now and it makes me want to go to bed early. So I do. 

But rain highlights some of my best moments in the last two weeks: Jumping into the pool the night before Christmas once the kids are in bed, a gentle thunderstorm rolling past. A sprinkling of rain and a boom or two nearby. The sun goes down as I float lazily and a few bats flap overhead. I wonder if the thunder messes with their echolocation, confuses their navigation. For me it does the opposite and I feel grounded by this very Melbourne phenomenon of a summer thunderstorm. 

It rains all Christmas Day too, but on Boxing Day I strap Finch to the back of the bike and ride ride ride through park after park in the sunshine while he squeals and shouts. I turn briefly to see him pointing at it all, his whole body alert with amazement at trees and people and dogs and cars and just the details of the world really. It makes me laugh out loud. We’re chased back by a proper storm though – thick dark clouds wading through the sky, pushing their way towards home where the washing has already dried in the hot wind of morning. I pedal as fast as I can and I’m the one whooping now, laughing as the big ploppy drops start to fall and loudly reassuring the little guy that we’ll make in time, it’s my mission to get us back inside in time and I do. Buckets upon buckets of rain plummet down and we watch from the safety of the front porch.

There are warm days and cool days and days where nothing much happens, but we’re happy together and what at first felt like a daunting prospect: daycare closed and having to manage the big feelings and big energy of an almost four year old and a just turned one year old, turns to feelings of precious one on one time, making adventures of going to the supermarket together, building duplo towers and going to our favourite playgrounds.

In the last few days we have family visit, bundle ourselves into cars and drive to the museum where Finch again points at all of it with curiosity and astonishment, confusion and concern. There are dinosaur bones and bugs and giant crystals found within unassuming rocks. Lotus is fascinated by it all and I wonder if I’ve ever seen her so excited, engaged with everything, asking questions, pushing all the buttons. She’s wearing her gumboots so on the way to dinner, with our colourful umbrellas above, she finds the best puddles and stomps stomps stomps. Gutters run like rivers and her small hand is warm as she tugs me to the next big splash.

Today the sun is out. We’re up early and ready to go quicker than we ever have been. All of us on the bikes, but the ride to daycare is less than five minutes. Lotus is in the four year old kinder room now, meeting up with her friends and making new ones. Finch spends one hour getting used to the nursery where he will be three days a week. 

Last night in bed the drizzling rain reminded me of home, of other homes I’ve had where it rains depressingly often. The thought of these wonderful little people – loud and brave, curious and intense – going out into the world had me in mist tears, tears that won’t be moving on until they’ve emptied me out. But right now the sun is shining and we have stories to tell our friends.

Parenting is…

… 60% laundry, 10% a niggling feeling that you should be doing laundry. It’s waking up after two hours of sleep ready to get into the day or waking up after six hours wondering how you’re going to zombie yourself through the morning routine. It’s somehow managing to get through regardless. 

Parenting is laughing along with your three year old’s shenanigans – pyjama top half off or feet kicking away the socks you’re trying to help put on until it’s suddenly just not funny come on now we have to go. It’s a tiny hand in yours as you walk around the block marvelling at the bees in the weeds or a small piece of rubbish that sparkles in the sunlight. It’s that same little hand breaking free from you to fix a slouching sock when you’re in the middle of crossing a road. 

Parenting is back pain. Sometimes from lifting and rocking and patting and shooshing and jiggling, sometimes from being climbed on like a horse or scaled like a mountain or just from waking up huddled and scrunched. 

Parenting is a small collection of rocks at the bottom of a school bag, a handful of leaves carried faithfully then discreetly discarded, it’s a pocket full of things you’ve picked up off the bedroom floor intending to put in the bin at some point. It’s an assortment of sticks around the house that look like letters or dinosaur bones.

Parenting is finding a moment to go to the loo and on the way clearing dishes from the table, while I’m here I’d better sweep those crumbs up, take that discarded sock to the laundry – should I be doing laundry today? Checking the weather on your phone and reading three new messages before remembering you really need to pee as someone calls you to their own urgency. 

Parenting is a series of urgencies.

Parenting is a pattern of rushing chaos followed by eery calm. Moments of never having enough time interspersed with moments when everyone is finally asleep and you’re not sure what to do with yourself. Parenting is sometimes just not knowing what to do with yourself when you’re finally and briefly alone.

Parenting is calling your own parents to describe the quirks and frustrations of the stage you’re enduring – the explosions of emotion, refusals of certain foods, usually green – and being told I remember it well, unable to decipher the tone as wistful, empathetic, regretful or… vengeful?

Parenting is simultaneously looking forward to the next stage while scrolling through google’s remember this day? photos whispering to yourself, yes! How was that three years ago? or no, no, no, I don’t remember that day at all. It’s an exercise in letting go, farewelling each phase of the small person as they change before your eyes the way the sun sets just slowly enough to make the clouds pink around the edges, both brighter and darker at the same time. 

Parenting is watching a sunset and knowing you still have a whole night of maybe sleeping, maybe waking to get through before it will rise again. Perhaps the morning will be pink too or foggy with condensation and sleep deprivation, or perhaps the sun will rise above the clouds and stream down like divinity on the clothes line and tomorrow will in fact be an excellent day for laundry.

Waste not

If I were my mother I would cut the brown 
and bitten bits from my daughter’s 
collection of abandoned apples
cook them in a small pot
eat them with muesli and yoghurt.

If I were my grandmother I would never
have given a whole apple 
to a child in the first place, but slivered it 
into sharable pieces
arranged neatly on a plate for all.

I try to be a good mother
never raising my voice or hand
but I’ve always been awkward about fruit.
Buying blueberries out of season
just because I can.

I keep trying to protect my daughter from
the browning bitten parts of the world
but think guiltily of the apple crumble
we could be having as I send
spent, forgotten apples to the worms.

Blackcurrant Honey

Here’s another little snippet of my somewhat-unwieldy current work in progress, called Dear Billy… This scene is set in 1991.

(You can read another scene from this here, set in 1996)

I’m pretty sure Danny woke me, but he’s teasing that I woke him when I traipsed clumsily down the hallway. Mum’s out of bed now too and we’re all eyeing up the Christmas tree in the semi-dark.

Danny says he was just getting a drink of water.

‘Well I can’t sleep,’ I whine

‘It is technically Christmas day,’ he says pointing at the glowing digits on the microwave that shine out a time so unfamiliar it takes me a while to figure out.

‘It’s past three in the morning!’ Mum wraps her dressing gown tighter around her, frowns, and folds her arms.

‘Yes, technically Christmas day.’ Danny knows how to disarm Mum, with his cheeky smile that comes out so rarely these days. ‘And we are all up,’ he says.

Mum rolls her eyes, but it’s already decided and there’s no going back once she’s flicked the switch on the kettle. My brother gives me a wink.

We agree the first thing we should open is the gift basket from one of Mum’s colleagues, since it’s covered in cellophane and we can mostly see what’s in it already. The rustle of unwrapping wakes the butterflies in my tummy. Mum pulls out some boring looking crackers, a small bag of candied nuts, a solid brick of real coffee that smells horrible and some nougat. Pretty disappointing.

‘Where’s the chocolate?’ I ask, rummaging through the discarded cellophane.

‘Ooh this looks good though – blackcurrant honey,’ Mum reads from the label. ‘Yum!’ She leaps up suddenly with the jar in her hands and heads back to the kitchen, which is now full of steam from the franticly boiling kettle. She pops some bread in the toaster.

‘I’m having blackcurrant honey on toast!’ She calls out.

We laugh at her excitement. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my mum at three in the morning before.

‘Okay, well, me too!’ I call back.

‘Okay.’ She whispers loudly and peers around the kitchen door. ‘But, let’s not wake…’ she points to the ceiling which represents the couple upstairs. Our landlords.

‘Okay.’ I whisper back

‘Okay, okay.’ We whisper at each other and laugh.

I choose the next present to open and hand it to Danny. I’m grinning with excitement as he takes it and feigns complete shock at receiving something. I can’t sit still. He unwraps it carefully, knowing how long I spent in my room wrapping and compiling the items from my trip to the mall last week. He probably knows how long I’d been saving my pocket money for too, since he’s had to do the same. His reaction when he opens it is better than I could have hoped for.

By the time the sun comes up the three of us are a pile of shiny new things and ripped wrapping paper, sticky with blackcurrant honey. Mum’s beaming smile at every silly little gift she opened from us was completely priceless. She’s had a million cups of tea and no one’s even mentioned the gap under the tree where presents from Dad should’ve been.

In place

I’m digging beneath trellised nasturtium in the garden of someone new. Planting star jasmine in the sun as a rain cloud approaches, but it’s the other kind I long to breathe in. The kind of jasmine that gushes over fences, escapes rambling front gardens, permeates shared paths. I pick sprigs of it always, carry it until it wilts. It takes me places.

So much has happened and I wanted to tell you. I’m astounded at my capacity to forgive. I’ve opened my heart to the gently damaged people of this world over and over, let them project their hurt onto me. I get it, but I won’t do that anymore. They seek help or not, move back home as I work through, work through, work through. Soil under my fingernails and the smell of almost-rain.

But I wanted to say something about the visits home. The places where family live lives I couldn’t have predicted and I’ve decided to tell the truth now. Stop listening to that voice in my head that nags at me to speak aloud the words and just speak aloud the damn words. I’ve lived long hours in transit, just to reconnect.

It seems everything I’ve ever written has been a metaphor for clouds: looking down on them from planes, watching them roll in darkly from the east, trusting they’ll rain themselves empty or just move on. It’s always been about clouds. The way they look reflected on the water’s surface, distracting me from the reedy depths.

Seasons change and I let anniversaries pass through me like a southerly at first, but even the wind feels warmer when you look back. The red flag of that first betrayal wilts like picked jasmine, fades in the briefly sunlit garden of someone new.

Passage

Auckland, 1942

The man who will become my Grandad waits by the gangway of the Devonport ferry. Yesterday, he missed his usual trip home and took the later ride. He’s decided now to always be late, deliberately miss the more convenient passage home and wait half an hour for the one ‘the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen’ will be on. He steps into the queue just in time to walk on board with her. Later, at a dance, she throws confetti on him like a prophecy. The woman becomes my Grandma, of course.

Pokhara, 1978

The other man who becomes my Grandad quietly follows his son to the bus stop, where a significant goodbye takes place.  His son stays on board with the woman he loves for as long as he can then watches the bus leave. As it happens, they meet again, become my parents, but now he needs the comforting arm his father predicted. Both men walk home together, tears along the dusty road.

Melbourne, 2017

I’m on a train, swiping left, left, left. Attraction exists not in digital form, a few bad snaps of your weekend shenanigans and a poorly written bio. I look up to see people interacting with the space around them, the way they hold themselves as they stand, their expressions, absorbed in their own distractions – paperbacks and podcasts, a phone conversation. Someone photographs the sunrise. I hear a favourite song tinnily through someone else’s headphones. But I’m just trying to get to work these days.

“To be alive and to be a ‘writer’ is enough.” (Katherine Mansfield)

14067443_10157427125425232_7440296545315921025_n
Saradha as Virginia Woolf

It’s been a difficult couple of months. Individually, universally. Hell, it’s been a tough few years if you really want to start scraping back through it all and trying to remember the last time you sat still, looked around at your personal, professional and creative life and thought, Yeah, things are okay. I wish I’d made better note of those moments of contentment, but perhaps that would have shifted them out of the present and it’s being present in those moments that makes one content.

I’ve been counting words – proud of a year spent launching a novel and working on two more. Gathering poems into a third collection and reading everything I can find. But in there somewhere I lost count. Lost track of how to hold onto what was mine, lost count of the number of job applications, inquiries and rejection letters, the social interactions cancelled or rain-checked beyond redemption. I can’t bear to try and count the heartbreaks and moments of self-doubt of the last few years.

I have, however, counted the flights. 21 international flights in the last two years, 10 since moving to Melbourne. There have been adventures and family celebrations and always something good waiting at each end – but counting and losing count has made me exhausted.

My last flight back to Wellington landed 24 hours before the 7.8 quake last month and as lovely as it was to see my family and friends and know they wanted me there so they could check in, hug me and try to settle me after what felt like a complete life-fail, I got the strong sense Wellington was trying to shake me free. Again.

But slowly the after-shocks stopped and things seemed to shuffle into a shape I could make sense of. The feeling that home wasn’t quite home anymore, the outrage or compassion my friends expressed on my behalf at the situation I’d found myself in, the daily routine and purpose my brother provided and the obstacle-ridden journey my mum endured to come and see me, care for me and give me a copy of Sarah Laing’s Mansfield and Me all helped me feel like me again.

There’s something pretty special about Sarah’s book. Reading about her journey juxtaposed with that of our shared literary hero, Katherine Mansfield, reminded me of what I need: To stop counting, stop flying, sit still again and write. To be somewhere that could become home, somewhere bright, open, flat and stable beneath the feet. Somewhere I can keep putting my words down, one after the other and build something, anything, that looks like a life. And sure I need love and connections; to be honest with the people around me, to ask for help and show others I can help them too, but right now I just need to stay alive and to write.

Back in Melbourne and every day I feel slightly different. Last week, when the moment felt right, I cycled round to look at a spare room in a cottage on Mansfield Street. Stained-glass bay window, picket fence. In Thornbury, but it would not be out of place in Thorndon. I thought of Sarah moving to New York and Katherine moving to London and me, now, with all this hope and determination despite what feels like months of disappointment.

So I’ve moved to Mansfield Street, into a room of my own. The wifi’s dodgy and we don’t have a kettle, but my optimism is boundless. It surprises me sometimes.