Notes from Wairiki Rd

2010-05-08T19:57:00.000-07:00

Shrinking, Part 2

I have taken a long time to purge this second instalment. Writing about this stuff makes me wonder if I am being too negative and then I get coy. But, I thought about it, and figured my plan was to get my stories out there before they became too blurry. A lot of them just happen to be, er, not great.

I think our brains have a fairly good filing system. Archive bad data and move on. But the files still lurk back there and cast a shadow over day to day life that you may not be aware of. Until recently, I had underestimated the reach of that shadow. I have this idea tugging away at the back of my mind, that if I write the nasty bits down, my archives can be genuinely purged of a lot of that negativity, with me safe in the knowledge that there is a hard drive in some server out there storing them, unperturbed by the nature of content. And perhaps then I will feel more liberated. It seems to be working so far.

So back to the not so delightful Jill...

Jill could be quite pleasant when she chose to be. Despite that, Dad's work colleagues heaved a sigh of relief when she left him. Jill fancied herself as something of a vixen and her sexual overtures at work functions had earned her a reputation. One colleague told me that Dad was asked to get her to tone it down. They split in July of the last year of my Master's degree. Dad asked that no one tell me of the split until November - he didn't want to distract or upset me so close to the end of my studies. But while he believed the news was too bad to share, my well meaning older sister felt the news was too good not to share, and divulged the secret in August. Jill, on the other hand, with typically impeccable timing, called me with the news the day before an exam. I feigned surprise in November when I finally got the call from my father.

Jill married my father in April 1992, on the day of my mother's birthday. I am not sure whether the significance of the date occurred to my father when they booked the reception venue. Even if it did, I think it is unlikely he intended any slight. Venues can be hard to secure on a Saturday, so you can't be too picky. Rae had remarried the previous year, and clearly despised my father. That he should marry on her birthday should cause no hurt. At least, that would be true for a normal, functional human being.

Rae, on the other hand, is deeply narcissistic, so of course she believed the choice of date was all about her - a deliberate swipe. She and Rob threatened to crash the party, she even found out the location of the nuptials. The threats were credible enough for Dad and Jill to hire a security guard for the wedding. As cruel as Jill could be, no-one should fear for their own safety on their wedding day. I cannot recall whether or not Rae turned up. In fact, the wedding was largely unremarkable, aside from the dance I had with an uncle who kept on standing on my feet, and the dance I had with my sister's fiance who took the formal dancing part very seriously, and pressed me close to his chest. I blushed with utter embarrassment. I played a lullaby on the flute as Jill walked up the aisle. I duffed many notes - more blushing.

Leading up to the wedding, a radio station was giving away 91 return flights for two to Honolulu. Every letterbox in Auckland had a card put in it that had an individual number. On weekdays, the morning DJs would read out a range of numbers. The first person to call with a card that had a number within that range, won a trip. I checked with Dad and Jill whether they wanted the card and planned to participate in the competition. No, and no. So I asked if I could. Yes.

Each morning I turned the radio on during breakfast and listened for the numbers. One morning, as I walked to the radio to turn it on, Jill called out "Don't forget to turn on the radio!" When the numbers were called, the number on my card was in the range. I called up the station, got through, and passed the phone to my father with a whisper, "Have the trip for your honeymoon." I can't remember whether it was planned on my part, or impulse. Jill and Dad had planned not to honeymoon because of the cost, so it seemed like the nice thing to do. Jill did not make it feel that way at all.

I didn't look for gratitude, I was just quietly chuffed that I, a young girl of little means, could do something wonderful for my Dad. But Jill took the wind out of my sails. First it was "We never would have won that trip if I had not reminded you to turn on the radio that morning." Then it was, "This house belongs to your father and I, so that card belongs to us, not you. We are entitled to this holiday." And later, "This honeymoon has become a bit of a hassle - accommodation is expensive, and we had no plans to spend the money." Then, "Your father and I have already been to Honolulu before - it would have been much better to go somewhere else, but now we feel obliged to spend our money on a place we don't really want to go to." When they got back, she had this to offer: "The honeymoon was OK, but we would have preferred to have gone somewhere else."

Without having opened my mouth, I was berated bit by annoying bit for what I did. She really was a complete nutter. The worst part was Jill describing to me how the low point of her holiday was when she was giving my father a blow job and room service barged into the room. She had his ejaculate in her mouth at the time. She then added that it tasted like alfalfa sprouts. Like I said, a complete nutter.

A year after they wed, I became a finalist for a scholarship to a United World College for a year to complete an International Baccalaureate. Up until that year, the government had annually funded two scholarships, but the country was in a midst of a recession, and everything was getting cut, so I was vying for a single placement. I went to Wellington to be interviewed, and made it to the final two. The decision board could not decide between me and a lovely girl from Thames, so apparently they flipped a coin, and the other girl was chosen. She was sent to New Mexico for the year. I was told that if they could twist the government's arm, they would send me to Wales.

With the prospect of escaping my home so tantalisingly within reach, it was hard to focus on my studies that year. The night I returned from the Wellington interview, Dad and Jill took me out to dinner and said they had something to announce. "You're having a baby!" I blurted out. Jill gave my father daggers "You told her!" I thought it was all rather obvious - two people, wed just a year, have an important announcement to make. What else could it be? I suppose it could have been a divorce...

Soon after, either that same night or some other day, I cannot remember, they dropped a bombshell - as soon as I had completed my end of year school exams I had to move out. Jill did not think that the house was big enough for our family, and despite the fact that she had agitated to move house up until that point, she had decided she no longer wanted to move. So I had to leave to make room.

I spent the rest of that year in a state of deep anxiety. At seventeen, when I was about to embark upon my university studies, I had to find a new home and a means to support myself. Jill and my father made it clear that they would provide no financial assistance. Nor was I allowed to take my bed with me. I was earning a very small part time wage and there was no way that by the end of the year I would have enough money to purchase a bed and join a flat. In fact there was no way that anyone in their right mind would take on a seventeen year old girl as a flatmate. The scholarship fell through which was, perhaps, a small mercy as I would have not been given any assistance to buy toothpaste, let alone a change of underwear by my parents if I was in another country.

I was shamed by my predicament, but as the school year came to a close, I must have opened up to some friends. Fortunately, I received an offer from parents of two friends (twin sisters) to stay with them for a year. The twins were heading to Otago University to study, so there was plenty of room for a boarder at their place. The board they charged probably did not cover the cost of having me there. They were angels.

Weeks later, my sister moved out after Jill held her up against her bedroom wall by the neck. While she was being choked, Jill told her that she was a little bitch and that she had what was coming to her (or words to that effect). Moments after it ended, my father entered the room. My sister told him what happened, Jill denied it, and demanded that my sister take it back, or leave. She left, sent back to the instability of a life with our mother. My father called me in tears, unsure of his decision.

Meanwhile, I was having a glorious taste of normality living the year with my friends' parents, with all the freedom that comes from being a university student. That year turned into two and, feeling that it was time to move on, I rented a room at another friend's house. That year, for reasons beyond my control and too boring and bureaucratic to go into, I could not have a regular income until the end of semester one. I was the most skint I have ever been and became stressed and ill. Out of desperation, behind in rent and with two dollars left to go in my overdraft, I asked my father for a two-week loan of two hundred dollars. I had never asked for a loan from anyone before and I was deeply embarrassed to go cap in hand to him. He said he would have to run it past Jill.

At this point, I need to take you back six months, to the phone ringing in our flat on a balmy Sunday afternoon. The voice on the other end was that of a friend, inviting our small household to a spontaneous party. These were the days when liquor sales on Sundays were prohibited, so we needed to think creatively about our refreshments. I called Jill and Dad, who lived around the corner. In a small cupboard dwelled a bottle of sparkling that they had no intention of drinking. It had been a Christmas gift and I could have it if I paid them $10 - its retail price. I had no cash on me, but went around anyway and picked it up, saying that I would drop the money off that week. I dropped an envelope containing $10 in their letterbox the following Friday.

On Saturday, they summonsed me. Jill then lectured me on how I was unreliable and had taken advantage of them, by taking the bottle, and then not paying for it right away the following day. Up until this point in my life I had been the very picture of reliability and trustworthiness. I had been a good student who did her homework, never got into trouble, never rebelled, did chores, studied hard, and was a free baby sitting service (for their new baby). And now I was being lectured like a child, more than two years after being kicked out of home, on how I was unreliable and how that was "unacceptable". It occurred to me that as a non-resident I no longer had to put up with bullying in the form of a "family meeting" (We used to have regular "family meetings" to air concerns, but the children were not allowed to have concerns. It was, in reality, an opportunity for Jill to nitpick over minor indiscretions, such as when she suspected we were using more than two sections of toilet paper (our allowance) each time we peed). I stood up left, but not before announcing "I don't have to put up with this shit any more, so fuck this and fuck you." Wow, that felt good.

And that story is the reason that was produced when my father reported back with a "No" from Jill - they would not lend me $200. I had committed the crime of paying them on a Friday instead of a Monday, market price for a bottle of wine they got for free and had no intention of drinking. I was unreliable. A friend lent me the money, and I paid it back two weeks later. I was able to buy food and I recovered from the flu.

Jill left my father and very quickly established a relationship with another man. It happened so fast, we suspected that relationship was already in motion prior to the split. The man she hooked up with was a comedian well known in New Zealand. He also proved to be a bit of a wife beater, which was somewhat ironic. That relationship ended, and was replaced by a series of connections that appeared less than functional. Over subsequent years, she bounced from home to home, car to car, job to job. I don't know that she will ever have tranquility, nor will the people whose lives she touches. But boy, am I glad she is no longer a part of mine.

2010-04-21T15:29:00.000-07:00

Shrinking, Part 1

When my mother kicked me out of home at 14, I moved in with my father. He then took steps to gain custody of my 6 year old sister. If my memory is correct, he swooped in and took her from school one day, like a knight riding in on his white steed (which is a generous metaphor for a moustachioed accountant in a 1986 blue Mitsubishi Super Saloon).

I remember that summer was idyllic. Even though I was a long way from my friends, and from the beach, I was safe and secure. The house was peaceful, I wasn't afraid, there was routine, and no-one was drunkenly railing at me. No-one tried to hurt me, at least for a time.

Early in the New Year we moved in with Dad's girlfriend, who I will call Jill. She seemed nice, and I was glad that they were happy together. I don't really remember when the weirdness started, but I do know it happened early on. It is a big call to have your partner and his two children move in with you less than a year into a relationship, and I can appreciate that there would have been some speed wobbles. But Jill was something else.

Jill was 17 years younger than my father, but undeniably wore the pants in the relationship. She had a legion of rules and regulations that we had to comply with, overseeing the house like the commandant of a Nazi war camp - capricious and vicious. She was especially hard on the 6 year old who had hitherto lived with little discipline.

Her level of clean was something I have not encountered since - and I know my fair share of clean freaks. Most of all, she was very hard to please, and if she had decided she was going to be angry at you, she would find something to be angry about, or would create an impossible situation.

I once accidentally broke a glass jar before school. She flew into a rage and declared that I must return home that evening with an exact replacement, or not return at all. Dad was forbidden from giving me any money, and all I had was my bus fare home, a paltry amount. All day at school I fretted. I either walked or got a lift to my sister's school that afternoon (I picked her up each day) and we walked to the local supermarket. We only found plastic jars, which was just as well as that was all I could afford. I returned home with some trepidation and waited for her to return. She flew into another rage. Not only had I not bought an exact replacement, I had insulted her by buying plastic, not glass. She knew that it was beyond my means to provide her with what she wanted. Even if I had the money, I would have also needed a license and a car in order to drive about town to find the same jar, which for all I knew was no longer manufactured. She also knew that I had to return home as I had my sister in my care. Perhaps she simply couldn't see past her rage.

There were shades of "Mommy Dearest" in her ways. On another occasion she flew into a rage because Jane and I made toast for afternoon tea. She decreed that toast was breakfast food, therefore forbidden in the afternoon. We were, however, allowed to eat un-toasted bread. "Why not toast?", I asked. "Because toast makes a mess." "But we cleaned up the mess before you got home." "But I could smell the toast." That was the best explanation she could give for the blanket ban on toasted food in the afternoon. Perhaps slightly more bizarre was that she flew off the handle even though she had not yet established the toast rule. As odd as it was, if we had willfully flouted an actual rule, I could at least rationalise her reaction.

I had come from a freaky environment, and initially I coped with Jill's weirdness by telling myself that life with Rae would be much worse. And it would have been. With no palatable alternative, I quietly accepted my lot.

Something that people still find hard to believe is that under Jill's regime I was not allowed to know my phone number. The official reason was that if the unlisted number was known to me, my mother may trick it out of me and resume her crank calling and midnight phone threats. Implicit in this was that I was not to be trusted. Embarrassingly, even the school was given instructions to not let me know the number. Can you imagine what affect this had on the social life of a teenager? I lived a long way from my friends at my new school (I had to change schools when I moved in with Dad, and for odd reasons I was sent to a school out of zone even though it had a poor reputation) and if friends wanted to get hold of me, they had to drive around to my house (if they dared).

All that taken into account, perhaps I don't even need to mention that I was not permitted to call my friends - Jill did not want me tying up the phone line. Making calls only happened in the holidays when I was sure that Jill was not going to pop home from work. Even then the activity was fraught with danger. If Jill phoned to find the line engaged, she would be angry. Inevitably there would be some important call that she was expecting. With no answer phone, goodness knows what she expected would happen if I was not home! It is probably also needless for me to say that my friends had a hard time believing this story, and a couple of them thought I was simply being a snob, withholding my number on purpose. As the new girl at school, it didn't help my social standing.

I challenged Dad and Jill about it once when I was 16. I wanted to know what would happen if I got stuck somewhere and needed their help but had no number to call. Dad's response was "Dial 111" (NZ's emergency services number). That night, indignant, I went out to town with a friend, going into bars underage, and staying out late - things that were out of character for me, and that I knew put me at risk. At some point in the night, we strayed behind a building and a couple of guys chased after us while reaching into their jackets. We ran to safety, what little rebellion I had in me quelled. I arrived home in the wee hours, breaking one of the golden rules of our home - if you were out late, you were to return no sooner than breakfast time. There was no concern for where I might end up, just so long as home was not my destination any time after 11pm. This was because Jill's sleep might get disturbed. Inevitably, the next morning I was in trouble for the interruption.

I was not allowed to socialise on Friday nights as they were set aside for cleaning. I was also responsible for ironing to Jill's exacting standards. Between my father's business, attire, Jill's nurses uniform, and my school uniforms, I spent hours ironing every week. If the pile started to get too big for Jill's liking, she would get angry.

Jane understandably had some behavioural issues and by the time I had collected her after school and then cajoled her into the 20 minute walk home (which took significantly longer most of the time as she was reluctant), it was often 5pm when we walked through the door. Jill expected two things when she came home - that the washing had been brought in and that our bags were put away upstairs. On the days that we got home late, it was a race to accomplish these two tasks. If I heard Jill come down the driveway as we stepped into the house, I would have to decide which would make her more angry - washing on the line, or bags in the lounge as there was not time to attend to both.

Life in the house was fraught with anxiety. Anxiety that we would make a mess, not complete a task on time, not attend to a mess quickly enough, not complete a task to standard, say the wrong thing, or break some unspoken rule. One of those unspoken rules was that I was not allowed to converse directly with my father when Jill was in the house. If she heard us having a conversation, she would intervene, or get angry and inflict some kind of punishment, ostensibly unrelated to my conversation with Dad, but I got the message. I gave up trying to talk to him in the end.

At the time, Jill was charge nurse of the Ear Nose and Throat ward at Greenlane Hospital. Sometimes she would bring home videos of nose job procedures, and play them over dinner. The images were gruesome and confronting, but we knew better than to complain, or let her see that the images disturbed us. She also habitually fondled my father's genitals. Every evening she would thrust her hands down his pants, and would stare at us, willing us to look at her. I used to think it was a weird territorial display, but now I am not so sure - maybe she took some sadistic pleasure in creating unease. I learned to look away, but like the toddler who is ignored, she would escalate until she got attention - trying to lure me into conversation while she carried on her foreplay. On good days, she would just give up.

She sucked her thumb and threw tantrums. I later learned that during some of those tantrums, she physically assaulted my father. She also sneakily assaulted my younger sister in private. I guess I was lucky in some respects. The worst I had from her was a request, via my father, that when I returned from my after school job at night, that I squat and pee outside as the tinkle of my urination disturbed Jill's sleep.

I think that is enough for one blog post. Stay tuned for part two ...

2010-04-18T21:05:00.000-07:00

Patrick James Owens, b. 2 January 1843, Isle of Wight, d. 14 February 1931, New Zealand

I am very lucky to have a relative in my family who is a keen genealogist. She has filled in a good part of the family tree going back several generations and has been diligent in searching out information relating to my great great grandparents, Patrick Owens and Mary Murphy, who sailed to New Zealand in the late 1800s. What makes this lady particularly dear is how she makes sure to pass this information to the younger generations of the family.

Her latest offering is an obituary she found for Patrick, who enlisted in the army at the tender age of 14 - so heart-breaking. It reminded me of how a while back I talked about the legacy of dysfunction. Human history is full of screw-ups on an epic scale. The many victims of those wars, oppressions, repressions, and famines are damaged directly, but generations to follow can indirectly bear those scars. Here is the obit below:

OBITUARY: The New Zealand Herald Tuesday February 17th 1931

INDIAN MUTINY VETERAN

MR PATRICK J OWENS

The death of Mr Patrick James Owens aged 88, one of the few survivors of the Indian Mutiny, occurred in Auckland on Saturday.

Mr Owens was sent to a Dublin school for the sons of soldiers and upon attaining the age limit, at the school, of 14 years he enlisted. His father and his two uncles were soldiers. In addition to the strong incentive of family traditions Mr Owens was influenced in his decision to become a soldier by the fact that the Indian Mutiny had broken out.

The 60th Rifles, the regiment in which its youth enlisted, reached Madras in December 1857, after a passage of 118 days. The return journey 10 years later in the tea clipper Tweed which conveyed the 97th Regiment, to which Mr. Owens had been transferred, was made in 78 days. On account of his youth Mr Owens did not actually take part in the repression of the Mutiny but he retained a vivid recollection of the horrors associated with it. He was engaged as a soldier in India for about 10 years. At the age of 22 he was drum major. On one occasion the regiment marched over 700 miles, being on the road for three and a half months. Mr Owens was stated to be the youngest drum major in the British Army at that time. His promotion was rapid. He was a corporal at 19 years of age, a sergeant at 20 and a drum major at 22. Failing eyesight however, terminated his military career.

After spending about seven years in civilian life in England, (Ireland) where he was married, Mr Owens came to New Zealand in the ship India in March, 1875. He began life in the new country by working on the cutting down of Fort Britomart and reclamation works. He was later employed at the Auckland Mental Hospital for 23 years. In recent years Mr Owens had been living in retirement in Ponsonby. He enjoyed good health and retained his excellent memory up to the time of his death.

Mr Owens is survived by three daughters and four sons. There are 20 grandchildren

2010-03-29T17:49:00.001-07:00

The legacy of a narcissistic mother

About 12 years ago I read an article about Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and I was struck by how it reminded of both my mother and step mother. 8 years later I looked it up on Wiki and saw how my mother could so easily fit the profile of someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD). There wasn't much I could do with that information, save put a name to what was horribly wrong with her.

Someone with NPD is not necessarily someone who is particularly in love with his or herself. In fact, self loathing is a common characteristic. However, such a person is extremely self absorbed and generally lacks both empathy and self awareness of their dysfunction. There is a lot more to it, and if you are interested the wiki page is here.

Recently I met a woman, who like me had identified that her mother had NPD, and she referred me to the website for Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers (DONM). This was a watershed moment for me. I had never really considered Rae as a narcissistic mother (as opposed to simply a person with NPD), and I had not considered that my experiences as the daughter of such a mother would follow a pattern repeated by thousands of other people around the world who had been raised by someone with this disorder. Perusing the forum of this website I am humbled by the sheer numbers of women who have shared in my experiences. Women who would understand if I told them I have nothing to do with my mother. Women who would not squirm if they heard the details of my upbringing. Women who would accept, wholeheartedly, that a relationship with my mother would open me up to more years of torment and abuse. I am still slightly dizzied by the notion that my mother is not so unique, that so many children have lived, and continue to live that life.

As a mother myself, I often despair at how undervalued the role of the mother is in society, but my experiences also tell me that the role is somewhat idealised. While we do not necessarily give mothers the props they deserve for their role in shaping the nation, we also seem a bit blinded to the idea that not all mothers are capable of living up to the ideal. Some women are so damaged psychologically, they bring down, rather than bring up their children. The NPD mother is a lost cause. Incapable of self reflection, her abuses will continue unfettered until the day she dies.

I ceased contact with my mother in 2002. As she was what is referred to on the DONM site as an "ignoring mother", ceasing contact was easy. I simply never called her again. She made no attempt to contact me. In her world, she is the centre of everything, and it is our obligation as children to worship at the temple of Rae. She will not lower herself to contact her children, except when she needs something, or wishes to abuse us. If we do not contact her, then she simply moves on to her next victim. If we do not feed her cravings, we are simply of no use.

I have had the occasional person tell me it is a shame that I have no contact with my mother. In the early days of no contact, my siblings were the most vocal in this regard. They have since either gone low contact or no contact themselves. What the 'normals' (people who have had a decent upbringing) often don't and cannot appreciate, is the hopelessness of the expectation of a even a slightly normal or healthy relationship with an NPD parent. To the NPD parent, a child is an object to be used up. It is common that they do not love their children, however they do rely on their children for what is termed "Narcissistic Supply" - the children are seen as chattels to feed the narcissism and sadisitic tendencies of the NPD person. This is not a 'relationship'. This is a transaction in which the child pays with his or her soul.

Children are perfect for Narcissistic Supply as they are vulnerable, dependent, and therefore easily manipulated. When they reach independence, guilt is a big reason why such children stay connected to the abuser. This brings me back to the idealisation of mothers. To turn your back on your mother is a big taboo in our society. The child of the NPD parent has spent a lifetime trying to be perfect and trying to please, because that child has been made to feel inferior and responsible for the unhappiness of the abusive parent. It is common that the child struggles with criticism, constructive or otherwise as criticism is a tool of abuse that has been wielded in a wholly negative way for for that child's entire life. This deep fear of criticism is possibly why the NPD child allows his or herself to be abused into adulthood, because to turn your back on your mother - in this society - risks opening oneself up to the criticism of others.

Another startling revelation was that my ex-stepmother ticked many of the behavioural boxes for the NPD parent. She was so different to my mother, it is hard to imagine that they should have anything in common. They did, however, have the same underlying dysfunction, just in different flavours. It is a relief to be able to say that the woman was abusive. My younger sister has opened up to me about a few things that the stepmother did to her, and I now feel free to admit that she was the kind of woman the Brothers Grimm had in mind when they wrote wicked stepmothers into their tales. I have hitherto tread carefully on the subject of her as she is still a part of both my brother's and father's life but right now I feel emboldened enough to call a spade a spade.

I am intrigued that my father should be attracted to and marry two NPD women (although I should add that the second may carry traits of other personality disorders). My father and I have talked about it, and I like to think he might do a bit of soul searching. If he does, he is sure to be led to the memory of his father, and the effect that his father had on his own feelings of self worth. But that is a whole other psycho-therapeutic blog session!

2009-10-12T17:07:00.001-07:00

Magnetron

Here is the new addition to our family, made by Martin Horspool.

His name is Magnetron, he is a Retrobot and he is very cute.

2009-06-11T20:34:00.000-07:00

Spooky Coincidences

I read the Celestine Prophecy years ago and thought the whole "there is no such thing as a coincidence" angle ridiculous. The idea that all coincidences somehow mean something suggests that they are engineered by a higher being. But imagine if, despite the demands of probability, there were no coincidences. Now that would be spooky. If all coincidences stopped tomorrow, I would hang up my atheist hat "toot sweet" (in the immortal words of Kath Day-Night).

However...despite being a curmudgeonly non-believer, I do love a spooky coincidence. So I thought I would share a few with you now...

Grant and I travelled to France some years ago, and knew of three people living in Paris. The couple we were staying with and a woman that we used to know many years earlier, but did not keep contact with. We bumped into her on our second day there while eating at a Left Bank bistro in an out of the way lane. Spooky.

A few years ago a Australian man was convicted in New Zealand of trying defraud a government department of millions of dollars. When the case was in the news, I was convinced that I had met the man while we lived in Sydney. He worked in IT, so I asked Grant if he knew him. Grant said that he had only a passing acquaintance with the man through a project he had been on in Wellington. So I knew I couldn't have met the guy through Grant. For weeks it bothered me, until the penny dropped. I had worked for the guy at Vodafone for a month when we lived in Sydney. Grant and I had independently known the guy in two different countries, and through working in two different industries. Spooky.

In 2005, when my eldest was still a wee babe, our fledgling family went for a holiday in Rarotonga. We stayed in a house with a deck that stepped straight on to the beach. Each day we watched many people stroll back and forth past our villa. A few days in, while holding my wee one, I stood on the end of deck and watched a few people pass. I saw an elderly man, gnarled walking stick in hand, make his way slowly along the sand. For no particular reason, I stepped out on to the beach and approached him.

His name was Bill and he was subjected to many questions from me. I quickly established that he lived in Puhoi, a small and historic settlement an hour north of Auckland. I knew the area from childhood and shared some memories with him (I love to 'share'). He told me that he used to own the Coach Trail Inn, at Waiwera (just south of Puhoi). This was a regular haunt for my family. My parents would have a Ploughman's lunch while my sister and I swam in the hotel pool (they figured that was cheaper than paying entry to the neighbouring Waiwera hot pools.)

Once, when I was four, Melissa and I swam there while mum and dad helped themselves to a meal (and no doubt a beer or three). This being 1980, and them being my parents, they were fairly relaxed when it came to water safety. In other words, there was no parental supervision - the swimming and eating were two rather separate things.

The pool had two depths, linked by a short transition ramp. I distinctly remember standing in the shallow end and thinking that it had been a long time since we were last there, that I was a big girl, and that by now surely I would be able to touch the bottom in the deep end like Mel could. I stretched my leg out on to the ramp, discovered it was rather slippery and quickly slid down into the deep and under the water.

I recall it like an out of body experience. I can see my hair floating around my face, the string from my frilly red bikini waving about, my limbs hanging useless about me, and a man with large sunglasses and big sideburns leaping in fully clothed to pull me out. There were not many people around and I was very lucky that he noticed me go under, otherwise it is likely I would have drowned.

Bill looked at me with his mouth agape, "You were that little girl that I saved?". There had only ever been one almost drowning at that hotel, it was in 1980, and Bill was the hero of the day. Coincidentally he had been talking about the incident with friends a couple of weeks earlier - the first time he had done so in many years.

Slightly overwhelmed, I thanked him for saving my life, and thereby making my little boy's life possible. I invited him up to the deck to rest his legs, and he was soon joined by his (much younger) wife. They told us about their life in Puhoi, their home, their family, and we said we would try to stop by when we were next in the area (we haven't yet - gulp).

I was glad that, so unexpectedly, I was able to close a chapter of my life that I didn't even realise was open. And I imagine that for Bill, there was a certain satisfaction to be had in our meeting, especially coming as it did in his twilight years.

Spoooooky.

2009-06-05T18:12:00.000-07:00

Airing out the Linen Cupboard on Facebook

Recently my younger sister posted a bunch of family photos on Facebook, carefully editing her selection to include as many horrid photos of me that she could find. I would call her an old slag, but she is neither old, nor a slag - dang.

Despite being confronted with the evidence of my numerous crimes against hair fashion, I have enjoyed the dialogue that has ensued between my older sister, young sister and me on the web pages. It is like flipping through an old family album together, and then having a (semi)permanent record of the conversation that follows. Even better, because our reactions are written rather than spoken, there is some time for reflection and the dredging up of memories hidden away in dark corners. OK, so we are sightly prone to too-much-information syndrome, but I think that makes it a little more fun. I have pasted one of these conversations below. I also find it fascinating how slippery memory can be - as you will see here. Mainly I am just amused at how bizarre our childhood really was.

Me: when I was 12 my hair was bad, ok? Why is our house always sick tidy in these photos? Oh that's right, I was always tidying it! I am pretty sure I have been snapped clearing up after cyclone (YS)-4 years old :-)

damned iPod - I was trying to say so tidy, not sick tidy.

Younger sister (YS) - a ha thats what little sisters are for! ps that hair is HOT.......I am sure it was bad for a tad longer than that! Oh thats right I have photographic evidence to prove it was! he he

Older sister (OS) Remember that photo, think I took it, you were cleaning up. Background sofa couch is what that alchie Rickie slept on in your old room, pissed on it so much in his sleep it went right through to the carpet & rotted it. Classy

Me - he was so dodgy. He gave me a book called something like "the little black book for boys and girls" when he moved out. It was full of "self abuse" and sex stories and in hind sight read like a book designed by paedophiles for "grooming" children. I was 9 or 10. I was disturbed by it and gave it to Rae who hit the roof. He was very nice to me then turned out to be such a weirdo

hmm that was probably too much information, but isn't it great that on facebook we can bring something different to each photo. Shame we don't have a photo of Cath, Dolly Rocker, or the cat burglar "Piorrhea Pete with the marijuana breath" and his trusty whippets.

OS - Actually the cat burglar was a little ginger man called Paul, I helped him & Mum weigh up ounce bags of weed on our dining table.there was also penguin Pete who went down to Campbells Bay beach & got naked to call in the penguins.... he had a rather pirate edge to him AAARGGHHH.Not forgeting the swinger Cliff Hill. We also had GH the rock photographer who had a penchant for Leather trousers with no undies. He was a strapping 40kg. He accused Mum of drugging him & renting him out for anal sex with brooms. One time we had a 'gathering at ours, Cath came up to the lounge & said something in her incoherent vagrant dribble, then disappeared behind the couch where she lay in a cheap booze coma. God I miss the suburbs
(PS I will remove this once read xx)

Me - Now, I am sure his name was Paul the penguin and pete was the Ginger man with whippets and oral hygiene issues. Cliff Hill in being incredibly tall had such a fitting name. Do you remember that the penguin was a pyromaniac who stayed up until the wee hours burning things in the backyard? He had a Charles Manson vibe.

PS: forgot to mention the photo montage GH did for me of stryper - that Christian metal group that toured in 89. Sooo sweet of him even if stryper wasn't quite my thing. That same year he was covering a music festival up north and we went along and were introduced to joe walsh and the herbs. We then slept in a marae and had pipis for breakfast. So I do have fond memories of the guy even though we did tease him and rae mercilessly for him being an old hippie with patchwork leather vests and skinny jeans. We certainly knew how to drive away those boyfriends!

YS - Don't bother deleting them they are so funny! At least our lives growing up were colorful to say the least. Don't remember penguin man but you are right Pete was the ginger.. his name was Pete shit bags who went out with a prostitute on k road. I don't think i want to know why his name was shit bags! But he did remind me of neil off the young ones a bit. I think he ended up in a Psychiatric hospital... or maybe it was his hooker girlfriend.
God i remember I hated cath the bag lady. She was such a horrible woman.
Actually funny and true story mum went out with this guy Rick who offered to pay Jade and I $50 each if we pashed each other. Anyway this was when we were over at his house, mum found out and got mad and got even. In front of some (I think french can't quite remember) Homestays and us stood at the top of the stairs and said... hey guys look at this.... whipped down her pants pissed in his glass and then gave it to him to drink... which he did.
Our mum was all class...

Me - Ok - now we are all getting very confused! The ginga and pete shitbags were two different Petes (or pete and Paul according to mel's recollection). Jane, that story is at once horrifying and hilarious. Horrifying and hilarious .... those two words pretty much sum up life at 274.

2009-04-25T19:15:00.000-07:00

Cutey cuteness

While I am loathe to bang on about how adorable my children are...actually, that's rubbish. I love banging on about how adorable my children are and here are some reasons why:

This week, Mr Four was kneeling on the floor, crying. Mr Two, hauled him up (by his neck!) hugged him, turned to me and said "I wuv my brudda".

This morning Mr Two stubbed his toe, and was crying. Mr Four got him a tissue, and said "You are so bwave."

They love Ben10. Whenever the forces of good need to overpower the forces of evil in our household, Mr Four turns into "Four arms" and punches the air. Mr Two becomes "Accelerate" (cell-wait), and blasts the air with his robot hands (Accelerate doesn't have robot hands - the boy is just riffing).

Jet Ray is a character on Ben10 Alien Force. Mr Four calls him "Jet Raid". Mr Two calls him "Jet Brain".

They both think "McDonalds" is actually "Big Donalds".

Mr Four tries to say "footpath", but it comes out "Poof Parf".

Mr Two still puts his hand down my shirt, a hang-over from breastfeeding days. Sometimes, when we are snuggled up for his bedtime at the end of the day, I ask him "Do you love Mummy?" He shoots back, "No, I wuv your boobies." That's him cracking a joke.

Mr Two thinks "Oh my goodness" is said "Oh no goodness!"

Their laughter is a chuckle in their belly that bubbles up and out of their mouths, and sounds like liquid honey.

Their idea of heaven is 20 minutes at Merv Smith's hobby shop.

For his birthday (in 7 months), Mr Four wants a deluxe Knappford Station for his Thomas set, a Ben10 Alien Force DVD, and Barbie Mermaids.

2009-04-22T20:29:00.001-07:00

Escaping

My mother married twice. The first time was to my Dad, the accountant. In those days he wore a grey v-neck jersey with his jeans and sneakers. Sometimes it was a scratchy brown jumper. He was (is) olive skinned, with blue eyes and had a thick moustache to match his wavy black hair. He loved the races, and watching TV sport.

Husband number two resembled my father in eye colour only. I will call him "Rob". Rob had a brown afro, a ruddy complexion and was thin, short and wiry. He was an artist, on the sickness benefit, who worked in oil, acrylic and collage on board. The scenes he created were post-apocalyptic explosions of colour and chaos. There was something very dark going on in his mind, but his art had a certain fascination to my 14 year old self.

It seemed as if Rob moved in the night he met my mother. I think he had been living in a halfway house, but this was according to Rae (I mentioned before it is hard to extract truth from the fiction in her stories.) When things later went pear-shaped, my mother said that he was a recovering heroin addict, who would soak methylated spirits through a loaf of bread when he couldn't find a fix. Whether that was true...I really don't know. What I did know was that she had found a drinking buddy, and I think that is why she let him stay.

Quite soon after his arrival, and following a big drinking session where Rae had been winding Rob up with sob stories about her past with my "terrible" father, he started laying into me. Not in a physical way, but with his words. This became a regular thing. He would stand over me, jabbing his finger a few centimetres from my face, and spit out the most horrific things. He mostly described in vivid detail, his fantasies of how he would dispose of my father. He was like a barking, vicious dog. I could feel his spittle and hot breath.

In the many scenarios Rob played out to me, his favourite themes were sodomy and the torturous death of my father, preferably combined. He once yelled to my face that he was going to hire a band of "fags" to gang rape my father, the finale of which saw him sodomised off the top of a tall building. Rob used to go into all sorts of explicit and stomach churning detail, and I think I have blanked a lot of it out. I couldn't bear to remember it. The most enduring memories are visual. The fire in his eyes, his face red like the devil, and the vein that pulsed near his temple. I don't know that a person can appreciate how terrifying it is to be screeched at like that at close range by a deranged and drunken and relatively powerful person, until it is experienced. Rob's power over me was the support he had from my mother. She would stand behind him, egg him on, and fuel his poisonous words. That was the most crushing part of it.

To a tiny 14 year old girl, these episodes were dark and horrifying. One way I coped was to become remote when it happened. I would create a mental wall between his jabbing finger and myself. I would look on from above like a third eye. But this strategy didn't change the fact that I used to dread the end of the school day. I used to dread the hours after 9pm. I never knew whether it was going to be a good night or bad. It is such a cliche, but I felt alone and helpless. In my head I was rattling the bars of the prison that I lived in, but no-one noticed, and I was too terrified of what my mother would do to tell someone about what was happening.

It all reached a climax in October 1990. My father had recently returned from Honolulu, and came bearing a gift of white Reeboks. These shoes were too good to actually wear, at least not for a couple of weeks. I left them in their box, and after school I would race to the wardrobe, and carefully fold back the tissue to look at them. One afternoon they weren't there. My mother got home later, wearing them. They were scuffed. She had worn them down to the beach and used them for climbing about the rocks. Finally, I saw red - straw, camel, back - tantrum time. It was partly because my shoes were scuffed and I had not yet worn them, and partly because of the disrespect my mother had shown me. She had taken my most treasured object (at the time!) and trashed it. "Oh God, she really doesn't care", I thought. I grabbed a pair of scissors, and a bunch of my mother's clothing. "How would you like it if I damaged your things!" I screeched. I ran into the lounge and made "snip, snip" sounds. I never cut the clothes - I wouldn't have dared, but I was being rather provocative. It was my mother's turn to see red. This is as much as I can recall of what came next. She grabbed me and pushed me down the stairs. She then tried to push me over the bannister of the second flight. She then threw me to the ground, grabbed a wad of my hair, and pulled me along by it. She finished by kicking me in the stomach with her pointy shoes. All the while she screamed obscenities at me. Rob, of course, joined in.

My siblings screamed at her to stop. Someone called the police. Someone called my father. In the interim, I overheard Rob telling my mother that one day he would like to kill me. She didn't utter one word of protest. The police came and as per usual, put it down to being a domestic and left. My father arrived with his flatmate. Finally, the big showdown. Here was Rob's chance to have it out. Rae threw rocks at the car, and dented its bonnet. Rob hid behind her, peering out to occasionally rant. My mother went back inside and threw all of my clothes out of the bedroom window into the garden below. From that night on I lived with my father.

Weeks later Rae and Rob wed. A year later, they had a child. A few years after that they acrimoniously split. Soon after the break-up, she had her house exorcised by a priest organised by the Anglican church across the road. She felt that too many bad things had happened in that house. She wasn't wrong. The priest fell to his knees in front of Rob's artworks and declared them the work of pure evil. She burnt them.

2009-03-04T17:27:00.000-08:00

Do you remember the time when...?

Sometimes my older sister and I go on a thoroughly unproductive trip down memory lane. I say "unproductive" because the stories are often unpleasant and I don't believe we get catharsis or personal growth out of it. But, the stories are irresistible. Possibly because our childhood was oftentimes black and lonely, the bizarre, amusing and tender episodes shine. Here are a few short memories of the girl next door that make me smile from time to time.

A while ago I talked about our old neighbours who were horrified when my mother's ex, Arnie, ate a pretend poo. One of the neighbours, Cheryl, had a daughter who was a bit simple, and to be kind I will give her a different name - Shona. It is such a cliche to say, but she had a heart of gold and was very kind to me, even though she was fifteen and I was only ten. Once, on her birthday, I gave her some "paint on, peel off" nail polish that was all the rage with girls my age. Even though it had a clear description on the label, Shona came to me concerned that the polish I had given her was faulty. "It goes on really well, but, um, it peels off as soon as it is dry and I have to put it back on again, and then it peels off, so I have to put it on again..."

Shona had some interesting ideas. Someone had told her that brushing too vigorously and too often was damaging to the enamel on your teeth. So Shona only brushed hers once a fortnight. Sometimes, when she needed a boost to her self esteem, Shona would lean up against the street light outside her house, dressed in tight clothing and wrap around glasses, holding a sign that said "Toot".

Poor Shona, not being the sharpest pencil in the bunch made her vulnerable. One evening, my sister and our 20 year old boarder, Steve, challenged Shona to a game of Strip Jack Naked. They plied her with alcohol and cheated their way to victory. Shona concluded the evening by running naked through our house with her arms above her head shouting "I'm a nudie rudie!" Or something to that effect - as were the terms of defeat.

While we did not live what you could call the high life, we had toilet paper more frequently than our neighbours did (that may sound like an odd thing to say, but toilet paper was a precious commodity in families like ours. For good reason do I know that the best way to wipe yourself with a magazine is to scrunch up the pages over and over again until they are soft enough to apply to your bottom). Shona's household was constantly running out, so Shona would frequently come and relieve herself at our house, and would leave looking like she was trying to fake a pregnancy - her jumper bulged with wads of stolen toilet paper. We thought it was hilarious, but my mother would be rightly annoyed.

My mother saw Shona a few years later with two children, well turned out, and looking happy. Here's hoping that life and people have not treated her badly since.

2009-02-10T13:41:00.000-08:00

Black Christmas

This is the story of a couple of kiwis who were caught up in a fire storm, on a beach, with only wet sarongs to fight with, and push bikes to escape on.

In 2001, Grant and I took up cycle touring to fulfill a childhood dream of mine to see France en velo (yes, that's right, Grant made my dreams come true - awwww). To get some experience before heading to Europe, we planned a summer holiday cycling down the South Coast of New South Wales. A few days before Christmas we wheeled our bikes, weighed down with camping gear, on to a train at Milsons Point station, near our Sydney apartment. We were headed for Waterfall, the gateway to the Royal National Park, the second oldest national park in the world after Yellowstone in the US.

We had cycled through this park's glorious forest earlier in the year, in the popular Sydney to the Gong (Wollongong) bike ride. In November it been a fun and noisy trek surrounded by hundreds of people. This time we were alone but for the cicadas, birds and the very occasional passing motorist. The hilly terrain proved hard work on heavy touring bikes but the canopy of eucalyptus and cedar provided respite from the heat that was building as the morning wore on. Calls from the bush, and the rustling of leaves punctuated the sound of our steady breathing, pedals cranking and tread grinding on the road. The evaporating morning dew enlivened the verdant and earthy smells of the undergrowth and soil, and the oily scent of the tar on the road. The fern and wattle made a pattern of rich and vibrant greens, and we could see peeps of the blue sky through the canopy. Each time we coasted downhill, we generated a gentle breeze to cool our limbs, hot from the uphill work. Each sensation was magnified by my feeling of excitement that we were headed off on a great adventure together. It is a very free and strangely powerful feeling to be riding out with everything you need on your bike. And to be doing it with Grant made it particularly special.

Out the other side of National Park - a view towards Wollongong.

Through the other side of the forest we stopped to take in the great expanse of ocean bordered by high cliffs and heathland, then free wheeled down to the breathtaking, cliff hugging coastal road that leads south. Our destination was a campground in Shellharbour, just south of Wollongong. There, a swim at a vast stretch of underpopulated beach was a relief after a long drag along flat roads in the penetrating heat.

The following day was tough. It was hotter than the day before and our route went up and down hill after hill as we followed the coast. The vistas were spectacular, but the going proved too much for two touring novices. At Kiama we caught a train most of the way to our destination - Shoalhaven. Again, we found ourselves on a romantic expanse of beach, but struggled to protect ourselves from the heat.

The stunning coastline from atop one of the many hills we climbed that day

The next day, Christmas Eve, was hotter still. We set off as early as we could to avoid the worst of the heat, and on the way had a change of plan. Our destination was a campground in Jervis Bay, not far from Nowra. But while the area was, as the crow flies, close to the township of Huskisson, it was separated by Currambene Creek. The way by road to "civilisation" and fresh food was a trip of dozens of kilometres. We contemplated the delights of a Christmas dinner of tinned food in the scorching heat, and decided to go to Huskisson instead. We called ahead to the Huskisson Bayside Motel, situated by the beach. This proved a fortunate decision.

On the Nowra bridge that straddles the Shoalhaven River

We had been told that Jervis (rhymes with nervous) Bay was beautiful, with the whitest sand in the world and we were not disappointed. A sheltered and friendly white sand beach, with warm, crystal blue water was our reward for three days of pedalling away beneath an unforgiving sun.

Huskisson

We shared the beach with European tourists who had also chosen to spend a Christmas away from home. Our motel room, functional and spare by any other standard, was like a palace to us that day. A palace with air-conditioning, a fridge, and a TV.

The view from Huskisson across the Currambene Creek to where we were going to camp before we started craving air-conditioning

We took a Dolphin cruise that afternoon, and marvelled at the beauty of the area from the sea.

As promised, we got to see dolphins.

But the first sign of trouble ahead came into view. Smoke billowed from an area roughly north of us. No one seemed particularly concerned, and we watched with growing fascination. The bush was on fire, but it was difficult to tell exactly how far away from us that smoke was.

That evening, after a pub meal, we settled into a satisfying slumber in a cool room, on a soft bed.

We awoke to clear blue skies and a blissfully quiet street. So pleased I was with our weather that day, that on waking I took a photo from our motel window. The photo made for a good comparison as the day wore on.

We called our families with merry Christmas wishes and settled into a day that promised nothing much other than real food and lazing about. Perfection. Sometime later in the morning, out of our motel window we noticed a plume of smoke rising in the distance.

This made us slightly nervous, but we continued to enjoy our day, taking a dip at the beach and watching some Christmas junk on TV. As the day wore on, the view from our window became more intense, and the smell of smoke crept into our room.

We sat down for a lunch of garlic prawns, but didn't enjoy it much knowing that the fire was creeping ever nearer.

After we ate, I was part way through watching an Olivia Newton John movie "A Christmas Romance" (it was Christmas Day, we were in Australia, it seemed right even though it was so wrong), when the power went out (perhaps a small mercy). So, we headed back down to the beach for a swim. Outside the air was becoming thick with smoke, and the view to sea was obscured. A hot wind had picked up and was howling seaward from the direction of the fire. From the road we looked across the creek to the campground we originally were to stay at - it was going up in flames. We lost our desire to swim, and went back to our motel room.

By now, we could hear the roar of the fire, and the wind felt like it came from a giant blow dryer. The sky had turned orange, the air was getting thicker with smoke, and panic began to set in.

Sky on fire

Suddenly came the screech of tyres and brakes. Out of the window we could see cars tearing one way up the street, and then moments later passing us at speed in the opposite direction. We went down to the street and learned that both roads out of Huskisson were blocked by fire.

Panic on the street

The only fire engine we were to see for a while

We went back down the beach to take a photo, and then hurried back to our room. We decided that if people were panicking, then perhaps we should be ready to evacuate.

We had no idea what we were going to do, or where we were going to go, but we had at least decided we didn't want to fry in our motel room. We put on some cycle clothes, packed up our gear, loaded up our bikes and left.

This is how you know this is not a fashion blog

Once outside, I felt a stinging sensation on my back and arm. Embers were falling from the sky, and were melting my nylon clothing as they landed on me. The decision to put on cycling was a bit stupid in retrospect, but then again we didn't have much else to wear.

We decided that the best place to be was on the beach, because, we reasoned, the sea cannot burn. If the fire came too close, we thought that we could swim out until the bank leading down to the sand had burnt out. That was the plan, at least until I pointed out that I cannot swim. Grant motioned towards a rocky outcrop that we might be able to seek refuge on. We happened to take a photo of it the previous day. In retrospect, if push came to shove, it would have been us and the rest of Huskisson trying to perch on the little outcrop - in which case push really would have come to shove.

The rocky outcrop

A different flaw in our plan became apparent very quickly. The air was getting heavier with smoke, and we both were finding it hard to breathe. As the wind blew hard at us from the direction of the flames, we knew the smoke was only going to get worse. And that wasn't good. I think it was around this point that I stopped planning and started panicking. It dawned on me that Grant and I were going to perish there on that beach.

It frustrates me that I cannot adequately remember what went through my mind once I believed I was going to die. I know that my life didn't flash before me. I know that it occurred to me that my life wasn't flashing before me. I also know that I tried to think about my family, but I found it too hard to think about them all at once. In fact, I wasn't even sure about how I should be thinking of them. I do recall that there was one thought that kept on invading my head, and that was of our wedding that would never happen. Grant and I were to be married the following November, but no-one knew as we planned to keep it to ourselves until closer to the date. We had never put much importance on being married, but in that moment I was devastated that it would never happen for us. That we would die there, on the beach, unwed. I was about to say that for those who know me well enough, it is odd for me to be so preoccupied. But now I wonder whether even I didn't know myself well enough, and that in the heat of the moment, a light was able to shine on to a small, yet undiscovered part of my psyche. I can also confirm that when you believe you are about to die, you are likely to want to poo your pants. I didn't poo my pants, but I had to fight the urge with gusto.

But enough of that. The fact that I am writing this 7 years on proves that we did not die that day. In fact, the belief that we would die only lasted for half an hour or so (that said, it was difficult to measure the passing of time). An Australian man on the beach scoffed at my concern. He was convinced that we would be fine. He'd been through it all before, and said that the volunteer fire service wouldn't let the flames get to us. I felt a bit sheepish at letting myself be so dramatic (I had hitherto been the sensible one in my family). However, what he or I weren't to know was that we were in fact at the centre one of the worst fires that NSW had seen, and that that day was to come to be known as "Black Christmas". The fires in Victoria over these past few weeks have also made it horribly clear what an unpredictable beast a bush fire is. I feel a bit less of an idiot now than I did in that moment.

I don't know whether it was this man's nonchalant attitude, or the fact that the bank was catching alight, but I snapped out of my morbid and panicked thoughts and got mobilised again. At some point Grant and I had ditched our cycle clothing, and dug deep into our bags for cotton clothing. We soaked the clothes in ashy sea water before putting them on and put wet bandannas around our faces to make it easier and healthier to breathe. We then set about, with others, trying to put out fires on the bank with what we had to hand. We fished a couple of sarongs out of our bags, wet them, and started beating at the flames. Just when we thought we were making progress, falling embers would reignite another patch. At the northern end of the beach we could see the bank was ablaze and people were struggling to contain it. Grant disappeared off in that direction to help. Wheelie bins were found, and strong men filled them with sea water to douse the flames. That fire eventually sizzled down. I learned that fire crews were busy fighting flames in the road behind the street that the motel was on. The fire was randomly picking off some houses, while leaving others untouched.

All of a sudden, the wind that had been bearing down on us stopped, and a fire crew came into view. I had not ever, and have not since, experienced relief like that.

Grant ambled down the beach looking like he had stuck his fingers in an electrical socket. It was good to be able to find some humour in an otherwise horrifying afternoon.

It is funny the little things you remember from moments like this - the good and the bad. The woman in the photo below was from somewhere in South America, and we were beating at the flames together. She was a very personable lady who we were to get in touch with once back in Sydney, but for some reason it never happened. I think we wanted to put it all behind us at that point. On the other hand I met another woman, who I handed a sarong to so she could help with dampening the fire on the bank. Instead, she quietly skulked off, sarong in hand, and I never saw her, or the sarong again.

A small but determined fire left burning on the bank, after things had calmed down

That night, Grant and I settled in for a very unsettled sleep in the motel room. I was afraid that the wind would pick up again, and that we would die of smoke inhalation in our sleep. If I was being a bit more rational, I would have argued to myself that there wasn't much bush left to catch alight, but I was tired and scared, and logic was a luxury.

Terrified but tired

The following day shopkeepers spilled out on to the street, trying to sell off what they could from their non-functioning chillers. The community mingled there, swapping tales of losses and near misses. Our motel had become a kind of refuge for locals who had lost homes, and campers who had to flee the bush. One European family had left everything at their campsite in situ, jumped in their car and driven as fast as they could out of the forest. They had lost everything, including passports, but were philosophical - at least they had escaped with their lives. The motel owner let all the fire refugees stay for free. We were forced to stay on longer than we had planned due to road closures and he also wouldn't take any money from us for that extra time.

When we were able to leave we exchanged some kind words with the proprietor and hit the road back to Nowra. The ride was sobering. On the way into Huskisson, we had enjoyed cycling through a beautiful forest that blanketed a gently undulating landscape, and the salty smell of the sea. On the way back, all we could smell was burn. The undergrowth was gone. Scorched trees punctuated a landscaped razed by the fire.

Telephone pole

Scorched street sign

Our plan had been to head to Robertson via the Kangaroo Valley, but uncertain of the fires, we settled upon a less bush clad route up to the Southern Highlands that involved hopping on a bus. For some reason we thought that once up in Robertson we would be well clear of the fires. We were only there an hour before we saw this:

We stayed with a friend and were constantly surrounded by billows of smoke. It was a tense time after what we had experienced, as we knew how quickly it could turn bad. The fires were never far away and eventually Robertson was blanketed in a haze. We slept poorly. After a couple of days we decided enough was enough, and cut our trip short. We wanted to get back to Sydney and as far away from bushland as we could. I remember a nervous bike ride into Bowral to catch a train on the morning that we left. The closer we got to Bowral, the hazier the air got. We didn't want to get caught out in a fire on push bikes again. We happily made it to the train, but to our dismay the smoke did not subside as we made our way into Sydney. We arrived to find the city shrouded and surrounded by a ring of fire, which had torn up Lane Cove National Park on the North Shore. This was not far from the city centre, and not far from where we lived in Kirribilli. We were never in danger, but we felt somewhat hounded at this point, and wished it all over. Smoke. Ash. It went on and on.

A couple of months later, Grant's parents came to visit. We took them to the Royal National Park, our first visit since the start of our Christmas holiday. The fires had ripped through the park about the time that flames were eating up the Jervis Bay area. The undergrowth was gone and the trees were charcoal pillars. But while it was a sad to see, here and there was a little green sprouting of hope. In the short time it had been since the fire, seedlings had taken hold, and small ferns were triumphantly peering out of the blackness.

Before I finish, I wanted to say something about the people who perished in the Victorian fires. I have heard many kiwis question why they didn't evacuate. What I learned on our trip is that a bush fire is something that the community fights. If you want to save your home, you need to be prepared to do it yourself. Australians are well accustomed to fighting these fires, and I completely understand why people stayed to fight. Firstly, where would they go to? For many of them, friends and family would have also been in vulnerable bush clad areas. Moreover, they could not have anticipated the ferocity and scale of the fire that engulfed them. They were not silly, and they were not foolishly brave. They were doing what they had always done. They were pitching in. It is just a horrible tragedy that this time it wasn't enough.

2009-01-01T12:17:00.001-08:00

Dirty Ditties

I was reminded recently of the dirty ditties that my mother taught me when I was a child. I did a quick web search to see if I could find any of them online, but to no avail. I was a bit careful about my search words (not too keen on stumbling across nasty pages) so I cannot be sure whether or not they have been recorded for posterity. In case they haven't, I am posting the few I can remember. It is not the classiest way to begin the New Year but if I don't do it while I think of it, I will forget.

This 'underground' stuff is part of our history and our cultural fabric, but being crass and not particularly enriching, I imagine it lives on in the oral rather than written histories (oh, one wonders how New Idea slips through). So all the more reason to record it.

As a word of warning, these rhymes are mildly offensive (in case you hadn't already figured that one out!), so if you are offended easily, don't read on.

The following rhyme has a tune to accompany it. If I ever get around to it, I will record it and attach it here.

Old Farmer Jock

Old Farmer Jock had a fifty foot cock and he showed it to the lady next door,
She thought it was a snake, so she hit it with a rake,
And now it's only four foot four.

Captain Cook

Captain Cook, the bare-bummed rook, went sailing down the river.
He hit a rock, and split his cock,
And left his balls to shiver.

Captain Cook, did a poop behind the kitchen door.
A bunch of grass, tickled his arse,
And made him do some more.

Michael and Mary

Michael and Mary went down to the dairy,
Michael pulled out his hairy canary.
"Wow!" said Mary, "What a whopper!
Let's get down and do things proper!"
Three months later, all went well,
Six months later, things began to swell,
Nine months later, what a shock!
Out came a baby with a fifty foot cock!

I had second thoughts about including the rhyme above. I really don't like the imagery of the baby. I know it is only a nonsensical rhyme, and as a child I robotically repeated the lines with scant thought to what they meant. I was simply amused that that they included naughty words like "cock" and "arse". Now that I reflect back and have wee ones of my own, it makes me very uneasy. But, it is what it is.

There was another rhyme my mother told us. In it, a rhyming couplet would begin, but the second rhyme in the couplet would only be implied as the rhyme would segue quickly off into the next line before the "naughty word" was uttered. It was the kind of rhyme that came at you like machine gun fire, which is probably why I never picked it up very well except to recall that one of the implied rhyming words was "arse".

If you are at all bemused as to why a mother would teach her young children this kind of thing, she never really grew up herself. For more explanation, check out the "childhood" and "family" labels.

Happy New Year!

2008-12-28T20:57:00.001-08:00

I'm still here

A month of no blogging followed by a month without a computer (horrible, horrible) broke my blogging habit. Actually, it was more of an occasional autobiographical vomit than a habit. Anyway, it broke. It broke baaad. In the meantime I enjoyed plenty of chocolate, got hoips of hugs and kisses from my small ones, lazed around the house drinking champagne at 10 am, had long lunches in my nighty, a brief liaison with Daniel Craig, listened to lots of Coldplay and rejoiced at the change of government in NZ. The first two things were true. The middle part was delicious fantasy. The last two things are too scary to contemplate.

Speaking of scary, we went to a Billy Joel concert a few weeks back (OK, like people under 25 will think that is sooo uncool, but the tickets were free, awesomely close to the front, and he still got great pipes. Yes, we had to endure "We didn't start the fire" and "River of Dreams", but the rest was pretty good), anyway, what the @*$# was I saying? Oh, that's right, Grant went for a pit stop halfway through and saw NZ's shortest broadcaster staggering out of the women's toilet block. We had seen him a few weeks earlier hosting the charity dinner where Bob Geldof was guest speaker. He seemed to get a bit slurry as the night progressed and at question time he referred to St Bob as "Bob Dylan". It reminded me of the time he hosted a special in 2003ish to mark 30 years of Split Enz (I think that was it). He was manic and verbose. OK, that is not particularly unusual for him, but it all seemed a bit too too.

Oh dear, my first post in ages, and all I can do is harp on like a writer for some lame Sunday gossip column.

Oh double dear. The family is spiralling into manic "we need dinner" crazy hour. S'pose I should cook something, or reheat something, or something. Will blog again soon and it will be articulate, and witty and, oh feck it, it will probably just be more drivel, but please do check in again.

Luf and kisses

2008-10-22T18:22:00.000-07:00

Ten questions for our feathered friends

1. To the blackbirds - Why, when you venture into my house, do you hop in, but then try to fly out, trying every window but the open one?

2. Do you wait until your bowels are full before you come in, or do you just shit all the time?

3. To the sparrows - Why do you only eat the bread I put out and turn up your beaks at the fruit? There are children starving in Africa, o little birds, and here you are, further down the food chain, behaving like fussy children.

4. To the seagulls - I see you, malingering around the sea shore, and gorging yourselves on the hot chips that young children drop during a fish and chip picnic, or that are thrown to you by insouciant young couples who think they are doing you a favour. Why aren't you fat?

5. To the magpies - whenever I am in Sydney in the early spring you harrass me. You eye me up and down the street. You wait for the opportune moment, and then you swoop. Why me?

6. To the peacocks - you spend a lot of time preening, and being big show-offs about how beautiful your feathers are, and yet you will hook up with some dowdy pea hen who looks like she fell off the ugly truck. These are classic signs that you are in the land of deep dark denial. Do you plan to come out any time soon?

7. To the tui that sat in the Pohutukawa tree outside my house in Wellington - For months on end you loudly sang the same tune over and over - it obviously wasn't working for you, so why didn't you change your tune?

8. To all the birds in Australia - you sound like pea hens look, but on steriods. Sorry, that wasn't a question.

9. To the ducks - Why don't you figure out a way to stop tasting so bloody good? Humans would bother you less.

10. To the chickens - sorry about all this cage and cramped conditions carry on. But guys, there are lots of you, compared to the farmers. You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain - Why don't you get organised?

2008-09-28T19:32:00.000-07:00

Damn this guilt habit!

I saw my cousin on the weekend (at a crazy 5th birthday party at Lollipops play land - kids know how to party hard!) He was busy fielding questions from family members about his previous job at the helm of a local branch of an investment bank. We knew that he was an investment banker, but I am sure most of us didn't think more on it other than that his (and his wife's) income had afforded them a magnificent cliff top home, and that he was "semi-retired" at 40 to spend time with his family (the inverted commas allow for the fact he still works more hours than most). But I can imagine he has recently been on the receiving end of some discomforting questions, snippets of which I heard on Saturday night. He is a very nice guy, with an even nicer wife (who seems to embody all the good aspects of US culture - open, warm, inclusive, laid back) and I felt momentarily sorry for him for being scrutinised by his family when he probably just wanted to jump on the bouncy castle with his kids.

That I was related to an investment banker also did not figure into my last post when I pretty much dumped them all in the same basket - acquisitive and self-serving. When I saw my cousin I had to check myself. I don't really think that they are all like that. However, I do think that there are particular industries that more likely to attract greed - and investment banking is one of them. And while I don't believe that a desire to make lots of moolah is dangerous per se, when it is combined with questionable ethics, and has broad impact, it is a problem. A problem that seems intractable.

Right, I am well over writing about things I know little about. Perhaps in my next post I can talk about the Herculean effort I put into cleaning that *@#*$*@ oven of ours on Sunday. I told my husband that it is the last oven I ever clean, and that if we need to clean the oven in whatever rental we move to when we are renovating, he is doing it. Our new oven will not exert these dainty fingers. Bless you De Dietrich, for developing pyrolytic technology.

2008-09-16T12:43:00.000-07:00

Where did all the good guys go?

Markets are feeling the full force of sub-prime mortgage crisis. We knew it would happen, but we didn't know how hard we were going to fall. It makes me wonder - where did all the decent, ethical business people in the financial services sector go to in the last decade? Did they get pushed off the back of a truck?

We will always have this problem - those who are concerned about the fellow inhabitants of this planet don't end up in finance companies or investment banks. They become humanitarians, public servants, counsellors, volunteer workers, politicians (yes, I know, not all politicians are there for altruistic reasons, but some must be!) Nobody runs a finance company because they want to make the world a better place. No-one becomes an investment banker because they care about the malaria epidemic or the plight of the working poor. They do it because they care about money and how it will make its way into their pockets. So why should this be a problem? Ideally, as well as making lots of money for themselves, they are providing a necessary service that moves money and capital efficiently to where it is needed, it assists in economic growth and we all benefit as a result. Because of the trickle down effect, even the poor and vulnerable are on the winning team.

Great in theory, but the pursuit of short term profit maximisation doesn't always align with economic growth and the needs of the people within that economy. The greed of an unethical few can drag the rest of us into the financial poo. It can cripple our economies. It can make the working poor, the unemployed poor. By shattering the economy it reduces the money available to deal with problems like malaria and AIDS. This is that other trickle down effect that they don't teach you about in Economics 101.

2008-08-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

Fashion - a glimpse of the past

I have been reading a few fashion blogs lately - ya know, the ones with the pretty pictures - in particular, The Sartorialist. Like most women, I care about what I put on, but until recent times I have never been particularly interested in "farshion" as we call it in my house. To be an utter bore, I will bring up that Daniel Pink book yet again. I am wondering whether my increased interest in aesthetics has something to do with my right brain looking for a bit of action. A new found desire for good design also has implications for our house renovation. We are spending enough on it now to warrant moving into a home in a better area. But we love the idea of a well thought out home, designed with our family in mind. So we stays put.

Getting back to farshion, I marvel at all the beautiful young things on these blogs (another interesting one is Face Hunter). An Aunt recently had a photo posted on facebook of her with her ex in the 60s. She looked like a beauty queen. She commented that all young people seem beautiful through the filter of age. It makes me think of myself 15 years ago. I was 17 and embarrassed at being small and thin. Being a uni student in the days of grunge meant I could cover up with baggy jeans, work boots and vintage men's shirts and (cringe) pyjama tops picked up from the op shop. I curse myself for not embracing my youth when I could have been more adventurous with clothing.

Anways, the point of this blog was post a few more family photos (many from my father's cousin's mother's side - no blood relation to me, but they were the best dressed in the pile!). I love how years ago dress was so much more formal. Impractical, but lovely to look at.

Once upon a time, dressing up didn't mean wearing a dress, or jacket - you did that anyway. Dressing up meant donning your furs:

When one picnicked, one slouched around in vests, bowties, and jackets:

When one dressed as a hobo, one simply wore one's suit askew:

How embarrassing! One has been photographed in one's bathers!

I love how dapper the man on the left looks:

I think these ladies are playing at dress-ups with the vintage wear of the day - the point gets lost through time however!

My grandparents were factory workers. Granny had to make most of her own clothes. Here she is, 20 or 21, pregnant and two kids in tow. What an effort it must have been to turn herself out so well (being so young must have helped):

I included this because my father (left) looks like he could have flown home using those protrusions on his head - bless his little knitted jumper:

2008-08-23T02:01:00.000-07:00

Big picture thinking

At the risk of banging on a bit too much about this Daniel Pink book, he has had my head cogs working overtime, and I can't resist another A Whole New Mind post. I have had one of those wonderful "eureka" moments that he talks about in his book, when seemingly disparate ideas and/or experiences work together and you come to a realisation. Hopefully that realisation will be the solution to what you thought was an intractable problem, or perhaps it will be some incredible business idea. This time around my "aha!" moment is simply an answer to a niggling question I had about another book I read recently, which I will give some attention to here as I quite enjoyed it.

The book is another business paperback that my husband ordered through Amazon, John Seddon's Systems Thinking in the Public Sector, which provides what I think is a fascinating insight into how systems thinking can benefit these service organisations. While this sounds dry, his style is very plain speaking, and even quite emotive at times. His approach to improving systems is so simple, elegant, and brimming with common sense that, for me, it borders on genius.

Even I find it a little odd that a full time mum reads and finds a book of this title interesting, but bear with me. When I lived in Sydney, I worked in a large call centre for a financial services company. They had a new fandangled call management system based around targets for productivity and quality. The quality aspect was really just about ticking the boxes with each call you received. Did you answer the call in the proscribed manner? Did you ask all the right questions? Were you efficient at retrieving information? Did you sign off in the correct manner? The productivity measures were where I felt something had gone really wrong for the business. Eighty five percent of all calls needed to be answered within 15 seconds, and to achieve "job mastery" a call centre worker needed to field 80 or more calls a shift. Some customer service representatives answered upwards of 100 calls daily.

(PS: if you have made it this far and are bored out of your brain, read the post under this one - it is all touchy feely and lovely)

An important part of our role was follow up work from calls - checking on requests to the redemptions team, passing on complaints, finding documents, faxing out information that and been requested, etc. However, we were not and could not be measured on this work. Those, like myself, who cared about the customer (I am not immune to a bit of self-aggrandisement from time to time ;-)) would make sure this work was completed, but it took us away from answering calls and we struggled to meet the productivity targets. Others in the call centre met their productivity and quality targets consistently every fortnight, which I think had something to do with them not spending much time on follow up work. Another trick mastered by the crafty was to hang up on a call the moment it beeped through - of course all that meant was that the poor sod who had been waiting in the call queue had to call back again, but at least the call centre rep was one call closer to his or her daily target. Unsurprisingly, a lot of calls I fielded pertained to work that should have been, but didn't get done, and I spent a lot of the day dealing with angry and frustrated financial advisors and their assistants. Fed up with the mutual exclusivity of providing good customer service and meeting targets, I quit the job after nine months. Looking back, it always bothered me.

Seddon, in his book, brought home to me the reasons why this system didn't work - it was because we were there to serve the targets, not the customer. The first question that Seddon would ask is - What is the purpose of the organisation? If the purpose is to provide financial instruments through which people can invest, grow their assets and then redeem their investment when the time is right, then we need to ask whether or not this purpose is being achieved by the current system. If I were to just look at the redemption aspect of the system, I would say it was not a satisfactory service. There were long delays in redeeming funds and anxious customers would make several calls to follow up on progress. The problem, according to systems thinkers like Seddon, is that targets institutionalise waste - ie they create massive amounts of rework. Many of the calls put through the centre would not have been made if a request (such as for a redemption) had been resolved at first point of contact. In effect calls like these are the waste of service industry. And every unnecessary call brings with a load of follow up work - more waste. If we had focused on achieving purpose with our system instead of achieving targets, the waste could have been stripped out, and a more efficient system could have emerged.

Another aspect of the Systems Thinking approach that hit the mark with me was the idea that customer service and administration did not necessarily need to be separated. Why not give service reps the power to complete the most common admin tasks and resolve as many requests as possible at first point of contact? Infrequent and very complex requests can still be passed on to specialists.

I am probably delving into it a bit too much now - if you find this vaguely intriguing, I recommend reading the book. I am no specialist, yet found it a great read, and honked with laughter at some of the ridiculous aspects of public sector services provision in the UK (which I am sure you can find carbon copies of here in NZ).

But there was one thing about this book that niggled and niggled at me - it all seemed so bloody obvious - why didn't managers in the organisations he spoke of see where they were going wrong and right the course? (Actually, as Seddon points out, it is usually the underlings that have a firmer grasp on system failings). The other niggle I had was why could I not define purpose for each of the projects he spoke of so succinctly as he could.

This brings me back to Pink's book. As I have mentioned in a previous post, people who are good right brain thinkers can contextualise well and see the "big picture". Big picture thinkers don't get mired in the detail. They are like giraffes, poking their heads over the tree canopy, looking out for landmarks, and getting a good understanding of where they are heading. I think Seddon is one of those very good big picture thinkers. I would hazard to guess that with his years of experience, identifying purpose, and what is needed to achieve purpose has become second nature to him. I also think that his ability to write a book that makes his solutions seem so blindingly obvious is a testament to his superior grasp of the big picture - he just makes it seem so simple.

To contrast with this, I was reading a post today by a technology guy who was essentially arguing a similar point to Seddon - that good solutions require systems thinking. Good solutions are elegant, purposeful and not necessarily about complex document and content management systems that can impede a worker's ability to "join the dots". But, my God! His blog was opaque and mired in detail. It barely communicated his point. He is smart and has a lot of information in his head - but he doesn't see the big picture clearly, and I suspect he believes the important stuff is tied up somewhere in the mess of extraneous information he provides (I can't believe that she of the rambling post dares to charge another with such a crime!).

My husband lies somewhere on the continuum between the blogger and Seddon (closer to Seddon). I have noticed that over the years he has developed into a good big picture thinker. His thinking has changed to the extent that he has become frustrated with the constraints of his organisation, which is very traditional in its approach - apply technology to a problem, stir, and simmer for 12-24 months. I sincerely hope that this does not dispirit him too much - he does a great job! Love you darling :-)

Righto - my next blog will be less dry.

2008-08-21T17:12:00.000-07:00

That warm, fuzzy feeling

On Wednesday night I joined about 160 others for a viewing of "Smart People", a movie I liked much to my surprise, given the lacklustre reviews. The movie session was arranged as a fund raiser for an acquaintance who at 32 has a terminal illness, and who could do with some extra cash to cover her medical and other expenses. She doesn't know about it yet. A few friends will be going to her place tomorrow to let her know that around $4000 has been raised for her, with more to follow if plans for an auction take off. Originally they were nervous about selling 100 tickets, to generate profit of $1000. But around 200 tickets were snapped up very quickly, and donations rolled in. I am touched by the generosity and empathy displayed by people, including those that have never known her. Some days I feel a bit cynical about the world. There are so many negative stories out there, it is hard not to. Wednesday night was a good antidote.

Three of the donations came from women on my father's side of the family - his sister, a cousin and her daughter. I picked the donations up from the mailbox after I had been out grocery shopping with two ratty toddlers who had worn me thin (they were tired). The kindness of these woman to a stranger gave me a lift that carried me through the rest of the day. Coincidentally, also in mail was a CD full of over 300 old family photos that had been compiled by another cousin of my father's (the brother of one of the women) and his son. Every photo had been carefully retouched and many of them date back over a century. The photos had been passed down the generations, and added to in an album until technology made it possible to easily distribute the images amongst every member of the family. What an incredible gift. And another blow to my cynicism.

My father is lucky to have come from a family full of very caring and empathetic people, on both his mother's and father's side. My grandmother is a soft touch, and I remember her often in tears over the TV commercials during the Ethiopian famine in the 80's. Her daughter, Eileen, is one of the kindest, gentlest, and most generous people I know. A grandmother herself now, she devotes a lot of time to helping to care for her eight grandchildren. My father's cousin who compiled the CD, Athol, lost his mother and father (my grandfather's brother) when he was in his teens/early 20s. They died five years apart, both of heart failure (I think).

Athol included a memorial notice for his parents in the CD:

Twenty years have gone by,
Many times we have wished you would walk through the door,
Forever held close in our hearts, mum and dad.

He, his brother, John, and his sister, Noelene (who donated the money) were also devastated when their sister, Raewyn, died of a sudden stroke several years ago.

I think this goes some way to explaining why they have treasured their family heirlooms and taken care to distribute photos to the family. The importance of what you have is magnified by what you have lost.

Getting back to my broken cynicism, I gave a friend a lift home from the movie the other night. She is a very talented person, with a real can-do attitude - I have always admired her zest for life and new experiences. She told me that she was teaching blind children about musical instruments once a week, the last session being on the bongo. "I didn't know you knew how to play the bongo", I said. "I can't", she said, "but it is not so hard - all you do is bang it in different places to make different sounds." She is introducing them string instruments in the next session. And that warm fuzzy feeling keeps on rolling.

(The picture at the top is L-R - my grandmother, Eileen, my grandfather's sister, Dorothy, My Grandfather, Ray, and Athol's parents, Kathleen and Jack. The picture above is my grandfather as a baby with his twin brother, Tom, and his other siblings, the twins, Jack and Vera, and Dorothy (centre).)

2008-08-18T20:32:00.001-07:00

Upload, Metaphor and whatever...

It occurs to me that this blog is all over the place like a mad woman's knitting. I now have a possible reason why. I am a mummy and in US parlance, I have a "Mommy blog". Bud Weiser in his review of Pre-Wife on The Rising Blogger (too many links..making me dizzy...) makes the following comment:

"This blog is a bit all over the place in the way a “Mommy’s Blog” can be. We mean that every event the author finds note worthy and posts about is not always fascinating. But, when he is amusing he can be very funny."

When I read that I had a self reflective cringe moment. But, you gotta box on. I am waaay too undisciplined at the moment to create a theme for this blog, although at one point I did teeter on the brink of the "childhood stories to slit your wrists to" theme. Actually, there will be more on that later when I get back into writing my piece-meal memoir of a 30 something. (It must be incredibly irritating to people who have lived a long life to hear a sentence like that. I read a profile recently on Diana Athill who has recently had another volume of memoir published at 90, and is a best seller. Death and old age sell nowadays - for some reason that makes me feel warm and fuzzy. If you do read the profile, perhaps you, like I, will find the gawping and wide-eyed wonderment at her 'temerity' to shag black men, somewhat jarring.

But getting back to the point, I am going to resist a theme for a little while yet. And I will flow with any tangent that goes.

I have read a little further on into that Daniel Pink book A Whole New Mind and I just read the part about the rising importance of "Metaphor" as a conduit to understanding. I had a momentary lapse into self congratulatory back slapping (in the metaphorical sense only - I find it very hard to actually slap my back having been born with what I am sure are abnormally short tendons and ligaments - the only way I can explain how someone so skinny can't bend in half - oh I am loving these tangents today). I recently posted a rambling "Letter to a Friend" in which I used the metaphor of a car as a way to revisit some of her major life events and to understand her trouble in sorting some stuff out. Using a car as a metaphor for life is pretty cliche and "old hat" (snort!) but I think I made good use of it in this particular instance. The superstitious blip in the back of my mind (atheists shouldn't really be superstitious) is waiting for lightning to strike me down now, or for my pants to split when I next attempt to touch my toes, without bending my knees.

Pink talked about metaphor in the context of how "Symphony", or the "ability to put together pieces" as he puts it, are skills that are becoming increasingly valued - "...recognising patterns, crossing boundaries to uncover hidden connections, and making bold leaps of imagination." And as he later states "Modern life's glut of options and stimuli can be so overwhelming that those with the ability to see the big picture - to sort out what really matters - have a decided advantage in their pursuit of personal well-being." I like that. In fact I like a lot of what he says in this book. It makes a scatty person like me feel that my scattyness has some point - I am making "connections" due to having my interests spread over a "broad range of disciplines". I suppose other people would still just call me scatty and unfocused. If only they could see that I am riding a brilliant wave of right brained symphonic inspiration flashes, while crossing skills boundaries and grasping relationships between relationships in a single bound. I am like "Gloria White-Hammond, a pastor and pediatrician in Boston; Todd Machover, who composes operas and builds high tech music equipment."

In case it is not clear to those in the back who are talking and chewing gum, I am being mildly ironic. My hubris does not take me quite this far.

As a small postscript, I have been trying to upload images onto this site, but our upload speeds on our broadband plan are in the vicinity of 2M per year. Maybe one day I'll get there and you will have something prettier than text to look at.

2008-08-14T19:07:00.000-07:00

Hemispheres and Mini Sagas

My husband has an addiction. A perfectly worthy one mind you. He expands his mind through compulsive book buying from Amazon. He is a consultant and tries to keep on top of what is going on in the world of business boffin book writers. Fortunately for me, the truly dry and esoteric tomes he reads are borrowed from dry and esoteric people (Competing on Analytics never really took off in our household), and get pushed out the door soon enough. The volumes that adorn our bookshelf tend to be quite interesting 'flavour of the month' material, and I have found many of them adequate for end of the day reading. But I do have some quibbles with 'business lite' writing. Some books seem to be one idea stretched out a couple of hundred pages more than was necessary by having small pages, lots of pictures, and plenty of repetition (Dan Roam's The Back of the Napkin, an engaging and insightful book, could have got its point across on the back of the napkin, perhaps two). And some books probably could have benefited from a bit more rigour.

A Whole New Mind by Daniel H. Pink falls into the latter category. To be fair, I am only halfway through. The book is about moving away from analytical left brain dominated thinking to more creative right brain dominated thinking. With that in mind, perhaps it is appropriate that his approach is not particularly academic. And I must 'fess up to finding this book, like others of its type, eminently readable and persuasive. As I said, it was just a quibble.

For his narrative, Pink relies on the hemispheres of the brain as a metaphorical device to explain where the economies of the developed world are heading. Pink argues we are moving away from what he terms the L-Directed Thinking of the Information Age, that is, thinking characteristic of the left brain "sequential, literal, functional, textual, and analytic." Our destination is R-Directed Thinking, which is, you guessed it, characteristic of the right brain "simultaneous, metaphorical aesthetic, contextual and synthetic (in the 'synthesis' sense of the word, not the 'artificial' sense)." He is not, however, arguing that one hemisphere is becoming redundant as the other becomes ascendant, after all he is envisaging a whole new mind.

Key to Pink's argument are the effects in the developed world of Abundance, Automation and Asia. Abundance has satisfied our material needs, "boosting the significance of beauty and emotion and accelerating the individual's search for meaning" - steering us towards right hemisphere satisfactions. Concurrently, as happened with manual labour last century, automation and outsourcing to Asia have relieved white collar drones of logic and analysis work - reducing the economic value of those left hemisphere skills. (If you are interested in this topic, you should also read Rolf Jensen's Dream Society. Jensen is a futurist who wrote his book a few years prior to Pink. He comes at it from a different angle but his vision for the future is similar).

Pink provides tips on developing your skills for this future economy. I have just read the part of the book where he provides advice on how to enhance your story telling ability (a skill hitherto under appreciated in the modern economy). Being lazy by nature, I was particularly taken by his suggestion of writing mini-sagas. A mini-saga is a particularly short piece of flash fiction told in 50 words or less. (I prefer this to the very difficult challenge of writing a story in 6 words - who could top Hemingway's poignant "For sale: baby shoes, never worn.")

I thought I would give a fifty worder a bash:

As the moon's reflection shimmered on the glassy surface of the sea, and the water gently lapped at her milky white shoulders, Harriet came to the realisation that the incoming tide had stolen away her chance of retaining any semblance of modesty when she walked back to Christian camp.

It is a bit rubbish really - all one sentence. Send me your better offerings. It will give me a thrill. I will post them too.

2008-08-10T23:43:00.000-07:00

Oo er

The US olympic team is on a high and news services are abuzz with the US winning the 4 x 100m swimming relay, and breaking a record in the process. But...ummm...where are Michael Phelps' budgie smugglers?

Yes, yes, I am tacky and superficial. But televised sport bores the pants off me (snort!) I need more.

2008-08-07T19:58:00.001-07:00

How not to counsel a battered woman

I thought I would update you on "Kate", who was in a relationship with "Keith". What I am about to say was entirely predictable, and I can already hear the mass exhalation of air from those who are going to be disappointed by what I have to say.

She is going back to him.

He hit her, put her down, controlled her, was jealous, ordered her around at home...yadda yadda, you know the drill in these cases - all abusers tend to indulge in the same reprehensible behaviours, just to differing degrees - and she is going back to him.

Entirely predictable, but nonetheless disappointing, especially as she is pregnant (which increases the likelihood of his behaviours escalating, but my main concern is that a child will be born into an environment of emotional and physical violence.)

Apparently he is going to counselling in order to change. Unfortunately they are also going to relationship counselling. This indicates that they believe the problem lies within the relationship, but the problem lies within Keith. If the problem was about that particular relationship, he would not have the history that he has of abusing women in his previous relationships. The horrible fact is that most abusers cannot be reformed. Most domestic violence situations only get worse.

But tell that to a battered woman - who has had the guts to leave her partner and has confided in you - and see what happens. She may be initially receptive, but once she has offloaded her despair at her situation, her main focus becomes, "How do I mend my relationship?", and "How do I deal with the fact that my friends and family no longer want to associate with my partner who I have outed as an abuser?"

The first question is easy to address. The woman pursues her abuser through making contact. The abuser, usually well experienced in this game, gives her the silent treatment for a while. When he eventually responds to her pleas for contact, his "generosity" at letting her back into his life bit by bit is received like a gift from above. "Wow," she thinks, "he is being civil to me. He is opening his heart to me once more." That heady feeling of being in love creeps back. His voice is like a warm fire and glass of red wine in winter. Seductive.

The second question is a little trickier. What to do about those friends and family who are scandalised at what has unfolded. Those closest to her are usually the ones feeling the emotional burden the most (aside from her). The ones who have supported her and who love and care for her most will have the sleepless nights, and will be the most distressed at her decision to return to him. So they are the ones she will push aside first. Those who have not outwardly expressed that they do not condone his behaviour, usually those less close, or those close but too afraid to say the wrong thing, will remain in the loop. To push friends or family away, the abused woman does not have to look far for a reason. They have become emotional wrecks too, and their anger, frustration and desperation will spill out into words. Those words will be her reason for cutting them out of her life.

This is where I come in. Unfortunately when someone close to you enters the terrible downward spiral of an abusive relationship, you don't get a handbook outlining the rights and wrongs of supporting that person. You have your instinct, you have your raw emotion, and perhaps you also have some threads of information. After speaking to a lovely woman at a domestic violence hotline, I knew that it was important for me to let her know that whatever happened I would be there for her. Even if I was pushed away. But she also said that it was important that I made it clear that I did not condone his behaviour. Perhaps I made this a little too clear.

I received a call from Kate. It came just after I had been talking to her father. He told me that she had, following an argument, likened him to Keith - ie implied that he too was abusive. I was enraged. Her father had been very supportive during her turmoil. But she could not see that he too was only human, and it was natural that he would be annoyed with her following her decision to let Keith back in her life. Her insinuation seemed callous. It blindsided him and cut him to the bone. So when she called she got me at the wrong moment, and I told her all the things she needed to hear, but in a pretty blunt way. What I did not think about at the time was what she needed to hear (what I said) would not be what she would hear (you need to apply the "battered woman who is looking for an excuse to push those close to her away" filter).

What I said was:

How could you be so selfish and ungrateful as to say something so terrible about your father who has been there for you. It is appalling.

How could you go back to Keith knowing that you will be bringing your child up in an environment of emotional and physical violence - your decision is tantamount to child abuse. That too is selfish.

You are stressing me out with the decisions you are making.

You are deluded if you think that Keith is going to change.

And the worst one - When is it all going to stop, Kate? You lurch from one drama to the next, and every time you drag us into it and bring emotional turmoil into our lives. Before Keith it was drugs, before that it was smoking and alcohol. Before that it was not studying and dropping out of school. Is it ever going to end? Is there ever going to be a light at the end oft the tunnel?

I should add that this was all peppered with swear words.

What I meant was (that is what I would have liked to have said in hindsight and absent the raw emotion):

Kate, I love you and your father very much and it pains me to hear you talk of him that way.

Kate, I love you very much and it pains me to think that you will return to Keith and subject yourself and the baby to an environment of emotional and physical violence.

Kate, I feel for you and love you, but in all honesty, I am finding this really emotionally draining and I don't think that right at this very moment in time I can give you the support you need. Let's talk again tomorrow.

Kate, Keith is never going to change. Please believe me. I only say this because I care for you and love you so much.

Kate, the dramas in your life are hard for us to deal with sometimes. We would love to be perfect support for you, but we are flawed human beings and try as we might, we are going to get things wrong sometimes. Please bear this in mind when you talk to us. If our words are sometimes harsh, it is not because we don't love you, or don't want to be there for you, or that we don't want to help smooth out whatever is happening in your life. It is because we get tired too. We have our own families and our own problems to deal with. Sometimes when you call us for support we have been up all night with sick children, or we are trying to cook dinner for the family, or we are just exhausted after a day of running around after the small ones. It is not that we don't want to be there for you, we just can't be there for you in a perfect way, at any time. We have our ups and downs too. We will try, and we are sorry if we sometimes don't give you what you need. We won't give up on you, so please don't give up on us when we get it wrong.

What Kate heard:

I don't really love you. You are a useless human being. We are so over your dramas, and wish you would just go away. We are anti-Keith and nothing you can say will change our mind. We are anti-Keith because we don't love you and we do not respect and support your decisions. We don't believe Keith will change because we do not love and respect you. We wish you and your dramas would go away because we don't really love you anyway and you are just a big pain in the arse. It would be better if you were gone.

Kate, as well as returning to Keith, has cut those closest to her out of her life. It is a dangerous situation for her to be in, particularly while so vulnerable. Her reason for doing so was my rant. Despite my apologies for my tone of delivery, and protestations that I really do love her and will always be here for her, she has decided that my one emotional outburst revealed my "true" feelings. She will not hear more. I suspect that this is because she is looking for a reason to push me away. How else do I explain how one outburst could undo years and years of love and support - throughout her entire life? How else do I explain why after being used and abused by Keith he remained her Facebook friend (she did not want to "cut the lines of communication"), yet after one outburst from me over the phone, she has removed me and two others from her list?

She was standing at the top of a cliff, hoping to jump into the arms of Keith. Unfortunately, because I was an idiot, I let myself be ruled by raw emotion. I was the breeze that knocked her off her feet.

I chose a really bad time to have a moment of weakness.

Fool I am.

And to those in a similar position to me, my advice is that you cannot be weak. For their sake. It may be hard to control your emotions, but it won't take much to push a battered person away. Absolute self control is difficult to attain, but there are moments in your life where it is necessary. There are moments in your life where it is of absolute importance that you do not let go of the ball. No excuses. Don't be a fool like me, as you will be beating yourself up and neglecting your family with the worry of the consequences you have wrought.

2008-08-03T00:52:00.000-07:00

Life as a Car - Letter to a Friend

Imagine that our lives are cars, in which responsible adults sit in the drivers seat. Each person is responsible for driving their own car. Sometimes we have to get out to give others a push start, but at the end of the day, we need to be back in our own car, because we are the only people that can drive it properly. We decide where we need to be going, we think about how we are going to get there, and once we are on the road, we steer the car in the right direction.

We can go fast, we can go slow, or we go at a moderate pace. Sometimes we need to slow down to reassess where we are going. Sometimes we make stops along the way: to take breaks (taking time out from the grind, whether it be in a book, on a holiday, etc); to get directions (advice from people we trust); and to take the car to the mechanic for maintenance (perhaps from time to time we will need serious life coaching or counselling). However, most of our time is spent driving. If, for whatever reason, the car has stalled, we try to start the engine ourselves although, as mentioned, sometimes some of us may need a push start.

Some of us have kids in the back. This means that we have to consider their needs and not just our own as we drive along the road. Where do they need to go to? Which direction do I need to be heading in order to get there? One day, our children will need to be able to drive their own cars. There is an awkward transition that begins long before adolescence, when children move from their parents' car to their own car. From dependence to independence. They will flit back and forth between cars until they have learned how to drive and are ready to be out driving their own car full time on their own. Sometimes, while they are still young (under 18 and legally dependent), a parent will hop into the child's car and help with the steering. But eventually, the child will be out there on the road, on their own. To get to full independence, to learn how to drive, the child needs: basic life skills (cooking, cleaning, financial management, personal hygiene); social skills, self confidence; self esteem; self reliance; emotional independence; financial independence (which will require some form of education and then a job) and crucially, a good sense of personal responsibility.

Kate*, this is where you come in. Something went wrong while you were transitioning to your own car. For some reason, from a very young age you were keen to be in the driver's seat of your own car, before you had learned the basics of driving. You gave up on study at a young age, and you left school early. The only option for you at that point was to start being responsible for yourself and join the workforce. But you were not ready to drive your own car. In fact, you didn't seem to have a clue to how to drive it, and once you cut free, you stalled. At some point you seemed to give up on driving the car altogether. You took drugs, and drank a lot. You partied and socialised. You no doubt had some fun times. But no one was driving your car. You went to the mechanic a lot, and got an analysis of why your car did not seem to be working. You made lots of stops for advice along the way. But even with all this information at your disposal, you still did not hop in the driver's seat and you did not drive your car.

Then something crucial happened. You went to a new country, in a bid to find a new car that worked better. But when you got there, you still did not drive your car. You partied and revived your drug dependency. You opted out of personal responsibility. You opted out of your life. Thankfully you realised what was happening, and you came home soon after with your tail between your legs but with a determination to get your old engine started and become a fully fledged driver. It started when you went to Narcotics Anonymous. And then you looked at study options and decided to pursue a degree. It must have been hard, but we were very proud of you. You were learning to drive! You had even decided where you were going!

Things were starting to look good, but then you met Keith. The good people at Narcotics Anonymous told you that while you were in recovery, starting a new relationship was a bad idea. We now understand why. Keith is a controlling, manipulative and abusive person. It is a strong personality type and the prospects of him changing are unfortunately slim. Keith intervened in your life at a time when the most important thing that you needed was space to become a confident driver - to become independent. You were not quite there yet and you were still very vulnerable - low self esteem, unsure of yourself, still developing your sense of personal responsibility, self reliance, confidence, emotional and financial independence, even basic life skills. But Keith, as his type is wont to do, created a dependence. It is no surprise that a man like that sought you out - the vulnerable types are the ones they look for. They start with little put downs - like how he pointed out your physical and personality faults, while telling you he was just being "refreshingly honest". Over time, and as your self esteem was worn down, the put downs intensified, and his behaviour became more controlling. Your self esteem diminished further, and again his controlling behaviour and insults intensified. Eventually his controlling behaviour turned to violence. This vicious downwards spiral is a pattern repeated in his previous relationships.

To return to the car metaphor, you were in the process of learning how to drive. But Keith took you out of the driver's seat, and moved you to the back seat. What's more, by chipping away at your self esteem, he wore down your battery. You couldn't even get the car started any more. But that didn't seem to matter, because he was pushing the car and had his hand on the steering wheel. He made sure your car moved slowly, and in the direction he wanted it to go. You didn't have to worry about learning how to drive any more. However, to complicate matters he would reach into the back from time to time, and pummel at your emotions. At other times he just pummeled you.

So was this a good situation? Your car was was moving, but not very fast, and not necessarily in the direction you would have liked. Your car was also in pretty bad shape. If Keith left you, he would have left your car an absolute wreck. And trust me, people like that move on to greener pastures in time. I know several abusive, controlling people, and they all did it.

So, now you have taken the initiative and you have left Keith. Fantastic. But you feel adrift. I suspect that you feel that all your problems stem from the fact that Keith is no longer driving your car. But, I hope you realise that your problem is not that Keith is not driving your car. Your problem is that YOU are not driving your car. Your friends and family are all here to give you a push start, given that your battery is pretty flat. We will build your self esteem. We will help out with some of the necessities of life. But what concerns us is that we will push and push and push, but you will be in the back seat, looking out the window and wondering why your friends and family are not pushing the car faster, wondering why your friends and family are not steering properly. We will give you a push Kate, but at the end of the day, we have to get back into our own cars. The kids are in the back and are waiting for us. If you want to go faster, if you want to build momentum, if you want to go in the right direction, YOU need to be in the driver's seat. YOU need to have your foot on the accelerator. We can't do that for you. And neither can any man.

Before I wind up, I want to address the possibility of Keith changing. There is a very small possibility that this will happen, but it cannot happen on your time. Driving and learning to drive your own car is going to take all of your focus and energy. You cannot afford even small distractions right now, and he is going to be one big distraction. If he changed, it would happen in increments. Until he gets there, he will still be running down your battery, and he will still be reaching in from time to time, trying to steer the car and giving you an emotional whack. And if he does it even a small part of the time, this will completely undermine you on your path to independent car driving. In fact, with the opportunity to control your life at his fingertips, there really is no way that he will change. It would be like expecting the heroin addict to give up in a room full of loaded syringes. He has to change outside of this relationship. But in reality, him changing is a pipe dream.

You can do it Kate. Driving a car is not as complicated as it seems. But you have to be determined to do it, and you have to learn to be more self reliant. We will only push you so far.

Lots of love

Your friend xxxxxxx

*names have been changed

2008-07-25T18:29:00.000-07:00

A P for all

From the NZ Herald:

$135m drug bust: six stand trial

New Zealand's largest drugs bust foils a plot to flood the country with enough methamphetamine to supply a hit for every person in Auckland...

I remember my teachers always said, if you are going to suck on a lolly in class, be sure to have enough for the rest of the class.

The kids and I just wanna say, thanks for the thought, guys, but you didn't really need to.

2008-07-23T21:46:00.000-07:00

Melissa

As an infant, my older sister Melissa was scooting about the kitchen in a walker one day, when she reached up and pulled the cord that was hanging down from the kettle. Boiling hot water coursed down her face, over her shoulders and across her chest and back. My mother, Rae risked drowning her in order to save Melissa’s face, but third degree burns scarred her neck, shoulders, and upper torso. Her skin literally melted under the heat of the water and in time became pale, gnarled, and shiny.

She has a scar on her hip from where a skin graft was attempted at Middlemore hospital. She was nil by mouth for the procedure, and woke up hungry. She must have burrowed her way into her bandages as she was discovered chewing on her newly grafted skin.

As children we would stroke each other’s back and I remember liking the feeling of her silky smooth, yet uneven skin that swirled beneath my fingertips. To me, she and her burns were beautiful, but to some other children, the burns made her a monster. She never had the freedom to run around in her togs as a child. She always covered her shoulders, and wore her hair down to disguise the scarring on her neck.

Melissa also has a large scar on her chest. She was born with a hole and a murmur in her heart, and when she was 18 months old she had open heart surgery. In the days before keyhole surgery, her chest was cut down the middle, her ribs broken and spread apart, and her heart operated on. I never appreciated how harrowing these events must have been for my parents until I had kids of my own. I look at their tiny little bodies, and cannot comprehend something so traumatic happening to them.

Fortunately, Melissa’s scarring did not dampen her popularity with other kids. She had (and has) a lucky combination of being full of charisma, having the gift of the gab, and being beautiful. Her presence is felt in a room. Unsurprisingly, Melissa always had a good-looking boyfriend on the go. I remember one of them being particularly crushed when she jilted him. I could not comprehend why she would dump a guy so gorgeous…so out of my league. I was her younger, smaller, paler, and mousier sister, who elicited barely a glimmer of interest from boys.

Oddly, I don’t recall ever being jealous of her popularity. On the contrary, I puffed up with pride that this amazing person was related to little, boring old me. I probably thought that if people realised I was her sister, some of the glow of popularity would rub off. I don’t think it ever did, but it was of no consequence - I was more than happy with my small group of friends, and quite terrified at the thought of ever having to kiss a boy.

Melissa made the mistake of making a star pose wearing just three grapevine leaves as a child, long enough for my mother to take a photo. At the time it must have seemed hilariously cute. Unfortunately, my mother tortured my sister with it once she became a teenager. Whenever a new flame, or prospect was to drop by, Rae would threaten to bring it out and humiliate her. Whether she was really that cruel or just astonishingly ignorant, it is hard to tell, but my mother inflicted a lot of pain on my sister that way. For a teenager, a semi-nude child photo is embarrassing enough, but for a young person with scarring, it is unthinkable that another young person may see it.

The morning of Melissa’s final school exam, Rae “confessed” to her that she didn’t love her. Melissa, distraught, never made it to that exam, but still scraped through with a University Entrance from her other subjects. It was her misfortune that Rae had a propensity for inserting herself into the pivotal life events of her children and causing as much damage as she could.

Lacking support and encouragement, Melissa drifted away from formal education, and entered the workforce full time. She was a talented sales person, no surprises there, and did well for herself, but she had some rough years as a young woman, left home early (although drifted back from time to time) and struggled with her past.

Outwardly, Melissa and I had an adversarial relationship. She was always trying to shake me off. I was four years younger than her, a bit of a nerd, and must have been a pain in the arse, trying to hang around her and her friends. By the time I was seventeen, things between us changed. We had lived in separate households for three years by then and the separation, and the fact I was no longer a kid, allowed us to build a new kind of relationship. We became good friends.

Eventually she settled down with a loving, caring, sensitive and committed man. Together they established a family of their own – two kiddies and one on the way. He made some money from professional rugby in Japan, and now, back in NZ they run a small business together, have a beautiful home, and are very comfortably off.

I am grateful for happy endings.

2008-07-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

I am hostage to a cold virus. A particularly nasty one. I am fine, but the kids caught it, one after the other. So it has been looong days at home, contemplating the state of kids TV. While channel surfing to appease my sniffly youngest child, I happened upon an animated show about walking, talking piñatas - Viva Piñata

I can kind of see how we got to having walking talking piñatas on the telly - it is apparently based on an Xbox game (we have not yet been dragged into the income sucking vortex of games consoles) - but for the most part, I am baffled. I am trying to imagine how the pitch to the network went:

Steve: So Todd, hit me with your team's ideas for kids TV next season.

Todd: Well, Steve, first up we have Tiffany's idea for an animated soft porn series based on a forbidden love between dolphin and father of four, Kevin, and his sea urchin mistress, Pinky. Our working title is "The Prickly Adventures of Kevin and Pinky". We kinda figure that pornography is the new frontier for kids TV, now that we have pushed the boundaries with animated violence. It should ruffle a few feathers, Steve, but give it a few years and I think it will be the Pokemon of this generation.

Steve: Hmmm, anything else?

Todd: Gary has drawn up some fantastic storyboards for a musical series based on the real life experiences of tax auditors, actuaries and file clerks. We imagine this will be aspirational programming for white middle class kids who watch American Idol, but who also want to grow up to be just like daddy. We see feature potential in this one.

Steve: Anything else on the boards?

Todd: Well, Microsoft have approached us about a game they have in production featuring walking, talking piñatas...

Steve: Let's go with the piñatas.

PS: If you are looking another installment of my childhood stories, it is in production...with hopefully more funny, and less grim.

2008-07-18T18:48:00.000-07:00

Internet Service Providings

In NZ we are lucky to be relatively advanced in terms of service technology (I am thinking of banks and online services), probably because we are a small country with low(er) levels of bureaucratic inertia, and quick uptake. So it is frustrating that competition has only just been introduced for broadband, following unbundling of the local loop network (after the government wedgied Telecom, then threatened it with a chinese burn, then got fed up and passed legislation). Presumably because it was omnipotent, Telecom kept a pretty crappy network, so speeds were (and are) quite slow compared to other OECD countries.

Now that we have competition, we have something new to whinge about. At home we have an unlisted number to put off those pesky telemarketers. Unfortunately, this cannot stop the door knockers who come by shaking their tins, exhorting us to switch ISP - usually while I am cooking dinner and fending off hungry toddlers. They use all manner of tactics, but my favourite is the "I can offer you this package today only" approach. Yes, YOU can only offer me this package today only, but the exact package is still available from someone in your call centre anytime. Oh! The cheek!

And all this boring trivia I have been blathering on about, is why I find this fonejacker stunt so pants-wettingly funny:

2008-07-16T20:40:00.000-07:00

I am trying to think of a way to open this post that does not involve this atheist giving a shout out to that big pretend man in the sky. A Christian has the luxury of calling out "Jesus!" in exasperation. An agnostic may venture an "Oh Gawd!" An evangelical Christian will say something totally lame like "Oh my Gosh!". An apostolic friend of mine wouldn't even say "Golly" because she believed that all you are really doing is swallowing your desire to use the Lord's name in vain (but his name is Jehovah according to another door knocking friend, which just confuses things, sorry).

Richard Dawkins likened the belief in God to believing in something equally ridiculous like the Great Teapot in the sky (in fact I think he said it was somewhere in the solar system - look it up if you must). What I feel like saying (because my mother cried it out a few times a day) is "God Almighty!", but perhaps I should say "Oh, Great Teapot!", or "Gene Simmons!" or something else totally ridiculous.

OK, here goes...

Gene Simmons! I have been a bit po-faced in my posts in the last couple of months. So let's talk about sex (tee hee, snort). My old school friends and I had our first weekend together since...we first started having sex (not with each other, silly). Back then we talked it out the door, down the street, and all around the neighbourhood. After years of reading Cosmo, we couldn't get enough of the sex talk, having had REAL sex. I had recently been jilted by my boyfriend so I told them that his penis was the size of an asthma inhaler (ha! The ultimate revenge!). Poor guy. They probably erroneously think that to this day. I am married to him now. Sorry love.

You know what? During the weekend with my friends, a couple of wines and we were back to the sex talk, albeit with a twist now a few of us have kids. We discussed how often and how long we waited after giving birth. We gave sympathetic nods while discussing pedestrian "making a baby sex". Then there were the war stories - women's bits that look like they have been hit by a cluster bomb after a third degree tear, big saggy boobs, small saggy boobs, infrequent sex post marriage, post baby, post 30.

But my favourite part was the common feeling that our men had lost the art of seduction. There is something stultifyingly unsexy about your man asking for sex. Like when you are in the middle of slathering moisturiser all over your face while toothpaste foam is dripping down your chin because you are also busy with the electric toothbrush, and you hear a meek voice call out from the bedroom, "Can we have sex tonight?" My friend's husband will nonchalantly ask her while reading the paper, or surfing the internet. If she says, "No", he carries on reading as if she had turned down a cup of tea, or passed comment on the exchange rate.

It's not like this stuff is terribly important to us, we are just a bunch of old perverts who like to have a good "snort your wine out your nose" laugh after a couple of drinks.

2008-07-07T20:49:00.000-07:00

What about Arnie?

Sometime near the end of Arnie's relationship with my mother, Rae, my father had a brush with him at the Birdcage pub in Auckland City. Dad was enjoying a drink with a colleague, when Arnie approached, 24 stone, 6 foot something, moustachioed and intimidating. He glared down at Dad, who was seated, and spat out “You’re an arsehole.” Dad looked up at him, and said, “No mate, you’re the arsehole.” Dad’s friend started kicking him furiously under the table. “Anyone who comes up to someone they don’t know and says “You’re an arsehole”, must be an arsehole”, Dad continued. His friend persisted in kicking Dad’s legs energetically. Dad asked Arnie who he was, and he indicated that he was with Rae, who lingered further back in the pub.

Rae would have told Arnie the usual stories she told all her boyfriends, actually anyone who would listen - that she was a victim of physical abuse and marital rape at the hands of my Dad, and that to rub salt in the wound, he had indulged in various indiscretions. Rae was prodigious in her efforts to inform the world of a past that I suspect was a product of her own imaginings, and that over time became more real to her than the truth. She was particularly fond of dramatic public statements. One day, she vandalised her own home in order to publicise her tale of woe to the neighbourhood.

Soon after the break up with Dad, I returned home from school to discover my mother had spray painted his name in big blue letters, followed by the words "is a RAPIST" on the dark brown block work at the bottom of our house. I froze at the top of the driveway, my legs felt disembodied, my heart pounded in my chest, and an ache radiated out from my stomach. Her graffiti was clearly visible from the street. I fretted for my father. I didn't know what a rapist was exactly, but I understood they were not far off murderers. Was my father a rapist? I couldn't reconcile my experience of him as a funny and caring person with this dark word. Not for the first, or last time, I pushed aside my confusion. It was quickly replaced by deep embarrassment at the thought of the kids I knew who often walked by. They would see it, and they would read it. Their parents would see it, and they would read it. Perhaps they would know what a rapist was, and believe that my dear father was a bad, bad man, and that I must be a bad, bad girl. Up until this point, life experience had buffeted my innocence and worn it down. But this was a gale force wind precipitating a landslip. I questioned who my father was, and what that made me. But in short time it was the question of who my mother was that troubled me the most. I quickly learned to distrust her.

Whether my father raped my mother I could not say categorically. If it were true, it would be a great surprise to me. Whether he assaulted my mother, I don't believe so. I never witnessed such a thing, and neither did my siblings. The funny thing is, we only recall Dad acting in self-defence. We were witness to the numerous attacks Rae made on Dad for some real or perceived slight. She hurled crockery and pans of boiling water, lunged at him with a meat tenderiser, and threatened to the children that she would take his life while he slept.

As for the indiscretions, my father is an outrageous flirt, which I presume he was in those days, but he maintains he was never a philanderer and I have no reason to think otherwise. The only evidence of cheating came from Rae's quarter.

“Rae has obviously been feeding you rubbish.” Dad told Arnie. “Why don’t you listen to my side of the story?” My father then enquired about where Arnie worked (he laid paving) and said that he would pay a visit to the work site the next day. Arnie turned and left.

Dad turned to his friend. “Why were you kicking me?”.

“You didn’t know who that was?” asked his friend. “He’s ex-Hell’s Angels. He’s been in jail for manslaughter.”

Dad had no idea of the man’s past, but his friend thought Dad was very brave, all the same. Then Dad explained, “I had my palms under the table the whole time. If he lunged at me, I was going to flip the table and run for my life.”

Dad turned up at the work site the next morning, but Arnie wasn’t there. Perhaps my father was courageous after all. Or perhaps he was a touch a foolhardy.

I think it all ended with Arnie when Rae accused him of an indiscretion with a client. She told me that she confronted Arnie at a work site. I also recall her threatening to contact a client to tell her that Arnie had probably been stealing from her house while on the job. By then he had lavished my mother with money and gifts, including two silk outfits and a gold and opal ring. My mother gave it to me years ago, soon after she met her second husband. “It’s probably stolen”, she told me. I don’t wear it.

2008-07-06T23:00:00.001-07:00

For better and for worse, till infidelity do us part - Part Three

Near the end of the marriage, Dad began to suspect that my mother was being unfaithful. His sense of unease intensified one Friday, late in 1984, when he received a strange call from her while he was at work. “You better not be home late tonight”, she warned, “I’m going away for the weekend. I won’t be here when you get home.”

Dad returned home to find Rae gone, and Melissa and I looking after our baby sister. It wasn’t the last time she would leave us alone together, and I never ceased to find it terrifying. The weekend passed without Dad knowing where his wife was, until she phoned him on Sunday night. She said she had had car problems, was stuck in Wellsford, and would have to stay in a motel. Dad then discovered (by means he cannot remember) that Rae had been away with one of Rhys’ friends, Peter. Although Dad did not know it, Melissa had previously discovered our mother and Peter on the couch in an embrace. Rae paid Melissa ten dollars to keep her mouth shut. While Melissa didn't get paid the second time she caught them, she still kept it to herself.

Rae returned on Monday morning, as Dad rushed out for work, with no time to confront her. But that night he told her that he had made an appointment with a lawyer for Thursday - the marriage was over. The day before the appointment, Dad was at work in a boardroom meeting when he heard a commotion in the office. Dad walked out to find two suitcases full of his clothes on the floor. A secretary told him Rae had stormed in and dumped the cases, shouting “Tell that fucking asshole not to come home!” In a masterful move, my mother took the high ground, creating ambiguity around the real reasons for the separation. But my father’s colleagues probably knew enough for Dad to not be in danger of losing friends and support.

As of that moment, my father had moved out for good. When my mother announced that Dad had left ‘us’, not her, but ‘us’, I felt abandoned and deeply hurt. “What had I done”, I wondered, “to make him want to leave?” I struggled with chest pangs that I now identify as grief. At school I burned with the shame of a child who came from a ‘broken home’. I had been demoted, in my own mind, to a lower rank of child, just above the bastards, but well below the legions of children from stable homes.

My mother must have had regrets. Soon after the suitcase debacle, she called Dad. There was a prowler at night, she told him, and the girls were scared. (Over the years, she repeated the prowler story. She was unfortunately frank with us about her fears that somewhere out there lurked a man, waiting to peep through our window, or break in and harm us and I was often paralysed by the fear of what stirred outside the window.) Dad agreed to come and stay a couple of nights. What she told her children was, “Daddy’s coming home”. I was buoyed, hopeful, cautiously elated.

When Dad came home, Rae tried to seduce him. What ensued was heated, but not reconciliation - they argued vociferously over a phone call Rae had made to Dad’s cousin, accusing the man of meddling in her marriage. Dad left.

Oblivious to what had just passed, I ran home from school that day, desperate not to waste precious time that could be spent welcoming him. Dad’s car was not in the driveway. I ran a bit faster. The front door was wide open. I tore up the stairs, calling out to him, and paused. It was quiet. Why hadn’t he called back? Where was he? A sense of dread crept up from my stomach. I searched every room. I found my mother in a bedroom in the far reaches of the house, draped over some cushions on the floor, sobbing.

“Where’s Daddy?”

“He’s not coming home.”

“Why?”

“We had a fight about your uncle.”

For a long time I believed it was that argument that ended their marriage, and I would go over it again and again in my mind. Everything was going great, why give up after one silly argument? What about my uncle could they possibly have to argue about? I found it intensely frustrating. I felt powerless and useless. When they were together, Melissa would always attempt to play peacemaker when they quarreled. She bargained and pleaded with them. She inserted herself to remind them that there were children to consider. I always felt a bit useless then too. I didn’t have her words or confidence. The best I could do was attempt to cry like she did, but I had to fight for those tears. I felt like a spectator. I was remote, and my parents seemed far away. The space around me shrank and pressed against me.

When my mother told me there was not going to be a happy ending, I felt numb, and mildly sick. I can’t remember whether I cried, I probably did, but I do remember thinking that my happy life was over. I had a sense that life was going to get particularly hard from that moment. And it did.

2008-07-06T22:59:00.000-07:00

For better and for worse, till infidelity do us part - Part Two

My mother was a hairdresser before she met my father, but by 1984 she was a full time mother of a 12 year old girl, Melissa, an 8 year old girl, me, and an 8 month old baby, Jane. Rhys was 18, and while no longer legally dependent, he drifted in and out of home. My parents had been married 14 years, the last eight of which had been spent living in a 1940s weatherboard home in Campbells Bay, in the East Coast Bays of Auckland’s North Shore.

In the early 1980s, the East Coast Bays was not buzzing with diversity and excitement. In the preceding years, the area had attracted a lot of young, white families, presumably drawn in by attainable real estate and the beach lifestyle. There were few Maori or Polynesian children at any of my schools, but that tiny few still outnumbered any ethnicity other than Pakeha.

We lived in a suburb of commuters. During the working day, mums would busy themselves with childcare, housework, shopping, the school and kindy run, or the occasional coffee group. There wasn’t a thriving restaurant or café culture, and there were few pubs. For teenagers there was not much to do other than linger at the beach, or throw out of control parties when Mum and Dad were not home.

In the early days of her marriage, my mother seemed to make a go of living the life of a suburban housewife. We were dressed nicely, the house was relatively clean and tidy, breakfasts were usually cooked rather than cold, and dinners were always tasty. She assisted with Melissa’s school outings, and was the fun mum who shouted the children an ice block at the end of the trip. Wednesday was shopping day, and as a special treat we would visit the market gardens in Albany for our produce. My mother would sometimes take us down to the rock pools at the beach, take photos of us playing with our many pets, or bake biscuits for our school lunches.

My mother was also creative, a competent painter and sketcher who collected shells, and made intricate dioramas for Melissa’s school assignments. She still socialised with her more eccentric and artistic friends from her former life, and our house was filled with the paintings, sculpture, and pottery she bought over time from local artists.

If this all sounds like a recipe for an ideal childhood, I am probably leading you astray. I don’t think the life of the suburban housewife suited my mother’s temperament, and the cracks showed from the start, going by my father’s realisation eight weeks into the marriage that marrying her was a mistake. My mother was host to a wild beast that she let out for air periodically. She had a temper that could set damp wood on fire, and would fly into a jealous rage quicker than you could say, “Watch out Dad, the crockery’s airborne”.

There was a night when it got a bit dangerous for my father. I was only three, so my account is based on his recollections, and those of Melissa. On one of the car-less days, my father’s ride in the carpool lingered after work and returned dad home late. That evening, my mother had fueled up on wine, and worked herself into a lather over his tardiness. By the time Dad’s ride pulled up, she was in the lounge chanting “I am going to stick him with this knife” while slipping a Wiltshire knife in and out of its sharpening sleeve. A sharpening sleeve isn’t quite so dramatic or intimidating as a sharpening steel, but you make do with what you have to hand. And it terrified us sufficiently.

Melissa and I scuttled out of the house and up the drive. “She’s got a knife, and she said she’s going to kill you!” Melissa screamed. We begged him not to go inside, but Dad told us not to worry for he hadn’t done anything wrong. He boldly made his way into the house and into the kitchen. Before he could get out an explanation my mother hurled a bottle of wine at him. He dodged it, and it made a hole in the wall. Immediately, she lunged at him with a metal meat tenderiser that she had held in her other hand. She raised it above her head, and brought it down towards his, with force. He grabbed her wrist and twisted it out of her hand, leaving a bruise. The following day she went to the doctor to get the “abuse” on record.

Alcohol was my mother’s drug of choice, and was usually involved in her more erratic and abusive behaviour. She also smoked marijuana and even, she once told my brother-in-law, tried LSD when she was pregnant with me. She never shared this with me, but she did confess, like a teenage boy tallying his can tabs, that she drank a bottle of beer a day throughout that pregnancy. It didn’t sound like much until I realised she was talking in quarts, not stubbies. My father also recalls her falling down drunk at a pub in Albany while six months pregnant with Melissa. The advice regarding alcohol and pregnancy was not so stringent then as it is now, but even so, I suspect drinking to the point of passing out while pregnant was not within the recommended guidelines.

Despite all the drama, my parents had their special moments. Rae once told me that early in their marriage she was opening the fridge when Dad came up behind her and held her tenderly. At that instant, a potent wind threatened to escape her. She desperately told him to move away, before he felt its power. But he refused to move. “I love you so much”, he said, “that I will get down on my knees and smell your fart”. So he did, and ended up on the floor dry retching and exclaiming that he had never smelt anything quite so vile in his life.

There were also the numerous occasions when, in the middle of the day, my parents would barricade the bedroom door with an ottoman. Rhys would knowingly chuckle and tell me to get away from the door as I stood on the other ottoman, straining to find out what was going on through the keyhole.

Passion aside, what maintained that marriage for a long 14 years largely remained a mystery to me. My father is an accountant. For me that summed up why a union with a creative eccentric was a Bad Idea, but I will add that he adored weekend sport, and was prisoner to the weekend paper. In those days he was also particularly preoccupied by home maintenance. He can’t have been great adult company after a week of looking after children. As for my mother, I know from first hand experience that she is high on the list of ‘Difficult and Unstable People To Live With’.

But if I think on it harder, there are some clues as to what kept this marriage going so long - a strong sexual connection; my mother’s need to be provided for; a desire to hold things together for the children; and the moral weight of my father’s catholic upbringing. My father is also obstinate, yet conflict averse, and this may go some way to explaining why he flogged that dead horse. Maybe he didn’t want to admit to his family that he had made a mistake. Maybe he was afraid of creating even more drama. But if Dad was looking for a catalyst for divorce, he found it one day, late in 1984.

2008-07-05T22:44:00.000-07:00

Rae’s mythology

My mother had something in her nature that made her the way she was, but her less than ideal childhood must have fuelled whatever strangeness lurked there. I cannot be sure of the facts, as I have found that her memory can be inventive, however this is how I understand it. She has said many times that she was raped when she was five, by a family friend. It apparently happened while she sat on the man’s lap in the back seat of a car that her father was driving. He put a stop to it when became aware of what was happening. I feel guilty and disloyal to admit that over the years, aspects of this story have troubled me. The violation would have been difficult and excruciating for a small child, probably evoking screams of pain and terror. How did the man progress to actually rape her? My mother has a habit of depicting herself as The Victim, The Raped, The Violated, The Abused, and The Betrayed. I am sure this man did something to her, but whether it was rape is hard to know. The story, of course, may be devastatingly true. If so, considering the tragedy of the rape never being resolved, and to the best of my knowledge, no charges ever being laid, I would consider it a possible cause, rather than product, of her victim’s mentality. In any case, it has become a part of her mythology.

Her parents must have had a tough relationship. They lived in Whangarei, north of Auckland (my mother was born further south, in Waipawa). Her father, Les, was as an accountant. He was an unusual man. My father thought him quite mad, with somewhat of a mean streak. Grandma did not want a lot of children, but Les believed that contraception was a woman’s responsibility and refused to use a condom. These were the days before the contraceptive pill, so unsurprisingly; Grandma brought seven children into the world – one boy followed by six girls. My mother was the second girl out.

An Aunt recalls that my mother was a particularly difficult child, so much so that her grandparents refused to look after Rae when her parents went away. The only solution was for my mother to accompany her parents on holiday while the others were left behind with the grandparents. Apparently my mother read this special treatment as evidence of the special place she held in the hearts of her parents, above that of the other children. If it was a misunderstanding, at least it was a happy one. But I have a niggling feeling that it was an early foray into spin. Had she not spent the prime of her life on the Domestic Purposes Benefit, she could have cut it in PR.

The family was quite well to do by standards of the day. They were even the first family on the street with a refrigerator. But their relative affluence was short-lived. My mother relates the story of being handed the local paper by a classmate at school one day. In it she found out that her father had been sentenced to seven years’ prison for embezzlement. Sometime after, her mother, Helen, shacked up with another man (and had no more children so presumably he was of the opinion that contraception was his responsibility.) My mother alleges that this man then molested her and other girls in the family.

Sometime during her father’s incarceration, the youngest five children (including my mother) were sent to a brethren children’s home in Marton ‘for the weekend’. When their mother never returned for them, they realised that their stay was permanent. In the home, according to my mother, discipline was harsh, food was meagre, and bullying was rife. She told me that one day, fed up with being beaten so readily, she wrenched the leather strap from the hands of the home’s patriarch, and turned it on him.

My mother left the home at sixteen, and went to stay with her mother. This was a short-lived arrangement. According to Rae, she told her mother that she had been molested by her mother’s partner, and was promptly kicked out.

When she was 20 and living in Auckland, she became pregnant to a man about town called Peter. He didn’t stick around, but Rae kept her baby boy, Rhys. In 1966 it must have been tough being a single parent. There was no state assistance, so she had to find a way of supporting the two of them from moment he was a tiny baby. I know that she was a hairdresser, and provided domestic duties in return for board. There were also rumours of another form of income, but I will give her the benefit of the doubt. And if those rumours were true, well I can’t imagine she had many options.

My mother told me that at some point when Rhys was a baby, they spent a night sleeping in a digger on a building site. Like so many other stories, it is hard to know what is truth, and what is dramatic license. Perhaps there was an alternative on offer, but not packaged in a way she liked, so she decided to sleep rough in a martyr –like gesture. I know this is horrible to suppose – for all I know she was desperate and there was no alternative – but I also know her ways. She is cunning. Whatever the truth of the circumstances that led to that night, it pains me to think of my brother as a baby, sleeping out in that digger.

For the following five years my brother, a gorgeous wee boy, saw a lot that a young child should never see. My mother still liked to party, and men came and went. It must have been such a relief for him when my father introduced stability to his transient world.

My mother’s parents did not live long lives. Her father went on to marry a woman called Jill, who he treated poorly by accounts. She was young and a drug user. She died suddenly one day, of heart failure. The police questioned my grandfather following her death, but I do not know why. He died of a heart attack in his fifties, but I was only two so I have no recollection of him. My grandmother smoked heavily and died of lung cancer in her early sixties. I was seven when I was ushered in to her room to view her on her back in her deathbed the morning after she died. The sight of her face, contorted and coloured orange and purple, terrified and haunted me. For years I would never go to sleep on my back for fear that like her, I would never wake up.

2008-06-15T13:44:00.001-07:00

For better and for worse, till infidelity do us part - Part One

For years, and despite all the drama and calamities of his union with my mother, Rae, my father would not be drawn into the subject of their relationship, or her nature, in front of me. He was also not one to relive the past while those wounds were still raw. By contrast, my mother never spared us a nasty detail about our father, and if I were not so incredulous, I might to this day believe him to be a very wicked man.

In 1998, worn down by my dogged questioning, and licking his wounds after being left by his second wife, he illuminated the subject of the end of his first marriage. “I married her after knowing her for eight weeks,” he told me, “and it took me eight weeks to realise that I had made a terrible mistake. Unfortunately, it took me fourteen years to end it.”

My father was raised, the middle of three children, in a working class catholic family in Panmure, a post-war suburb nestled in between Auckland’s wealthy Eastern beach suburbs and the Tamaki Estuary. Following a shot-gun wedding, his parents lived for a time with my father’s maternal grandmother before they spent a year living in a cramped two room home in an army camp bordering Auckland Domain. Fortune smiled upon them when one of the new state houses in Panmure was finally offered to the growing family in the mid 1940s, a home shared by my grandmother and uncle to this day.

My grandparents were both factory workers, my grandmother never schooled beyond second form. She sewed their clothes, cleaned, and made the small amount they earned stretch to feed a five-person family. My father remembers his father as a stern man who once stubbed his cigarette out in his mashed potato, ordering him to eat it after the young boy had complained about the smoke blanketing the family dinner. Granddad could also be terrifying when he rolled home drunk from the pub in a mood for intimidation. But it could have been worse. My grandmother recalls a neighbour who was often brutalised by her husband, according to the screams she regularly heard coming from her house. When I asked if Granny ever called the police, she said that it broke her heart, but in those days people did not involve themselves in the marital problems of others. I don’t think that in practice there is absolute equality between the sexes today, but nonetheless, I am grateful that I was not born 50 years earlier.

My gentle and sensitive Grandmother, alive today, was a good catholic who must have found refuge from the drudgery and hardship of everyday life in the ritualistic rites of the church, and its seductive promise of eternal paradise in the next life. She held the church and its leaders in very high regard. It is no wonder then, when she asked Dad one day what he wanted to be, and he said “maybe a Priest”, that he found himself sitting across the kitchen table from the leader of their congregation the very next day. Not wanting to disappoint, my father entered a seminary in Christchurch at 17 years old, and spent the next five years trying to figure out whether the priesthood was his vocation. His quest ended during a weeklong catholic retreat, which Dad used for meditation on the conumdrum. With the end of the week approaching, and frustrated that he could not come to a conclusion using logic or philosophy, he sat in a field and made a plea to God. “Father”, he prayed, “if this is my true vocation, make this dandelion bend over”.

“But for a gust of wind,” he says today, “I would be a catholic priest.”

After leaving the seminary, he enrolled at the University of Auckland in a Bachelor of Commerce. Nearing the end of his study, he planned an OE with two friends, and was in the process of booking tickets for a six week boat trip to the United Kingdom when he locked eyes with heartache and trouble at the pub. My mother was pretty, petite, had curves in the right places, a short skirt and long red hair. With little experience of women, and some years to make up for, my father fell easily for this more experienced vixen, fully possessed of her sexual power. A friend of his once told me that his enduring memory of that night was of my parents spending much of the night getting hot and heavy in the stairwell.

A few weeks into their relationship, my brother, then five, asked Dad if he could call him “Daddy”. Enamoured of my mother, and feeling responsibility for my brother, he changed his travel plans for wedding plans, even as he wondered whether Rhys had been put up to the “Daddy” line. Recently, when Dad was questioning the hasty nature of their union, I asked, “Do you think, perhaps, you were…er…blinded by the sexual nature of your relationship?” He stole my true thoughts when he muttered “I think they call it cunt-struck. Yeah, probably.”

His parents were bitterly disappointed that he chose to marry a woman he barely knew who had a child in tow, but Dad was disinclined to heed the advice of his father. The marriage was a low-key affair, held at the home of my maternal grandmother. My mother wore a tight mini dress in black, lime green and orange. It laced up the front, ended just below her bottom and was paired with knee-high boots. We know this not from photos, the photographer was drunk and forgot to put film in the camera, but because the items of clothing remained in her closet years later. After the ceremony and a small bite to eat, my parents spent the ride home in the wedding car making the most of their updated marital status, to the amusement of the people riding up front.

Embarking upon the marriage was relatively easy compared to the decision to divorce. It must have been hard in those more religious and socially conservative times to face its stigma, even if by then my father was a lapsed catholic anyway. But there came a time when marriage dissolution went from tantalising possibility to unavoidable reality.

2008-06-12T19:59:00.000-07:00

Writing that last post was like opening a window to the past and memories have been blowing in ever since. But the memory that has intrigued me most in the past few days comes from my sister, Mel.

I have probably already mentioned my mother's close relationship with alcohol. As the men have come and gone, and the children have over time slipped out of her sphere of influence, the booze has remained a loyal, if punishing mate. Sometime in the late 80's, tired of the drunken ranting, Mel, who was perhaps 14 or 15, and my brother, Rhys, 6 years Mel's senior, thought they would try their hand at a bit of drunken hypnosis, mixed up with some mischief. While Rae was out drinking somewhere (in those days most likely the Sports Bar at the Windsor in Mairangi Bay) they placed a cassette tape in a battery powered stereo which they in turn placed in her wardrobe. When they heard her arriving home, they ran in and turned it on. She stumbled into her room, and into bed. I don't know whether she heard any of the tape, but it was entertaining enough stuff for us at the time. After thirty minutes of silence, Rhys had recorded, in a small high pitched voice, a plea:

"Help me ...... help me.... I'm in here.....can't you see me....get me outta here.....help me!"

After some minutes more silence, he adopted a deeper, more soothing voice:

"Raaaae, Raaaae, this is your cooonscience speaking. Stooop the drinking Raaae. Stooop the driiinking. Your children neeeed you."

While I don't remember any fall-out on that occasion, Mel does recall the reaction they got to another cassette tape escapade. We had tried many times to explain to Rae how distressed we were by her drunken rants and erratic behaviour. She never took to this information kindly. If we were game enough to bring it up, we would be subjected to a vehement tirade of insults. We were told we were vermin, that we drove her to drinking, that it was her only luxury, that we never wanted her to have fun. Writing it down makes it seem almost innocuous, but the snarl in her mouth, her beady eyes, the slow drawl winding up to a screech, the spittle coming out of her mouth, the finger pointing - I remember it as terrible and terrifying. So, one day, Mel and Rhys recorded her drunken ravings, and the next day, they took the "ghetto blaster" down to her room and hit "play". Mel recalls that Rae emerged from her room hung-over, and bewildered. But, as the penny dropped that it was in fact her own voice from the previous night, she bared her teeth and claws. When Rae was angry, the violence in her words, her tone, her manner, could be vivid, and scorching. It would feel like she was holding a torch to my skin, was blowing a horn in my ears and was slowly squeezing my heart with her gnarled fingers. Mel says that on this occasion, she had never seen Rae so livid.

Mel and Rhys left the tape recorder alone after that.

2008-06-04T20:29:00.000-07:00

I am fascinated with how dysfunction is passed down - a legacy of genetics and poor parenting could stretch back generations.
It's probably the case in my family. Finger and toes are crossed that I arrest the process.

As I get older I realise that I have a past full of very funny, and very sad tales. On occasion they burn in my chest, but as time passes the colours fade and I am left with tatty little memories that are losing their emotional punch. So it is time to start remembering the good and the bad taste. I have enlisted my sister to help me along. Hopefully between us we can preserve in technicolour some of those moments that shaped us.

Our recorded memories may help our kids understand us in time, the way the patchy stories of my mother's bitter childhood in part explain the woman she is, and in a way, the women we are. (I say patchy as she has a casual relationship with the truth.)

I am thinking that I would like the narrative arc of this episodic life story to be comedic - happy, sad, happy - because despite all the past crap, life is pretty bloody marvellous now. So why not get started with a funny tale...

Around 1986 my mother, Rae, hooked up with a 27 stone maori guy called Arnie. I first met him one night outside a pub in Auckland, where my mother had been imbibing and socialising. My 2 year old sister, Jane, and I (10) had suffered an evening in a cold, old Corolla, scanning the dark car park, willing each shifting shape to be her. Eventually, two shadows approached. One of the shadows was immense, and as the person hulked into view, I was surprised to see that second shadow was not a child, but was in fact my diminutive mother. When Rae introduced Arnie, he seemed genuinely concerned that we had been left to our own devices for so long. Rae told us that on hearing that she had two bairns outside, he had insisted on moving their party of two to the car. That night, Arnie came home, for what I think was Rae's first "stranger sleep-over" following the marriage break-up (although other vague acquaintances had shared her bed previously). Arnie went rapidly from one night stand to live-in boyfriend. This jarred for us, the children, but as years passed we became accustomed to virtual strangers becoming sudden housemates. And Arnie proved to be a generous man with a big heart and an appetite to match.

At this time, Cheryl lived next door. She was, a sad, small, pale and bedraggled mother of two who bore a passing resemblance to Jimmy Barnes. She appeared to have suffered through a hard life of drinking, smoking, and poor treatment. Luckily, she had found an angel in her new partner, Terry, who treated her like a princess, and protected her in a way I am sure no man had ever done before. Terry was a robust, large and jovial woman with a florid complexion who drove a forklift at a local timber yard. Terry and Cheryl's relationship was a source of fascination for our family, not just because lesbianism was a novel concept to us, but also because they were physically and emotionally an odd pairing.

Obesity wasn't all that common in 1980s North Shore and Arnie's capacity to eat was a talking point for the family, and the neighbours, even though Terry was, herself, no waif. One day, this reputation came in handy. Around the time of Arnie's stay, we had a problem with a local dog shitting at the top of our driveway. We suspected it was Terry and Cheryl's dog, but they denied it. Rae, ever the mischievous plotter, hatched a plan with Arnie. The next time a dog left a brown present, Arnie took the usual step of transferring it to Terry and Cheryl's driveway. As was her usual response, Terry sent it back. Arnie crept it over again, and over the course of a Saturday, this poo to'd and fro'd between the two properties. Rae then concocted a faux poo from cocoa, flour and butter, and deposited it at the top of the their driveway, while Arnie disposed of the original offender. When Terry returned the cocoa poo to our driveway, Arnie called out to her, and asked her what she thought she was doing. "You know bloody well what I am doing, keep your shit away from my house!", she fumed. Arnie strolled up to her, and said, "I can do better than that". He casually leaned over, retrieved the poo, and slowly, deliberately, chewed his way through it. "Jesus, Cheryl," she called out in alarm, "he's eating shit!"

2008-06-04T20:14:00.000-07:00

In my last post I had a short list of the things that are most important to me. After much procrastination, it is time to think about how I will live my life according to these priorities.

My two beautiful, gorgeous, fun, loving boys:
Get up earlier, get the necessary chores out of the way, and then play my boys, take them out, have fun with them. Listen to them properly, make them feel like they matter.

My hard working husband:
Get up earlier so that I have more time with him. Go to bed earlier for the same reason. Consider what is important to him and how I can support that.

Good relationships with my extended family and friends:
Invite them around more.

Sleep:
Go to bed earlier

A sharp mind:
More books, less TV

A healthy body:
Start running again. Eat less junk and more fruit and veg. Go meat free two nights a week.

Our precious environment:
Introduce a new habit every month, aimed at reducing my carbon footprint.

Our precious freedoms:
Vote, be vocal about what I believe in, keep in touch with what is going on in NZ and the world.

A healthy, happy community:
I might leave this one for when the kids are at school, but by living according to the plans above should go some way towards contributing to a healthy and happy community.

2008-05-05T18:54:00.001-07:00

The important stuff

I'm thinking that to have good perspective in life, I need a clear idea of what matters to me most. I think I waste a lot of time on things that don't really matter (eg housework), to the detriment of those things that I love most (eg the kids). So to make the good decisions I am going to list the good things:

My two beautiful, gorgeous, fun, loving boys
My hard working husband
Good relationships with my extended family and friends
Sleep
A sharp mind
A healthy body
Our precious environment
Our precious freedoms
A healthy, happy community

There are probably more, and I will add these to future posts. My next post will look what it will mean to my way of living if I put each of these things at the forefront of my mind.

In the meantime, I'm off to work on point number 4.

2008-05-02T19:12:00.000-07:00

Kiwi food nostalgia

While there was a lot of sadness in my childhood, happily, many fond memories dwell in tastes and smells. There was much comfort and contentment to be found in the food cooked by my mother and grandmother. This morning I was trying to conjure up the memory of a cornmeal souffle that my mother made on special occasions. The aroma, the taste and the texture have left a warm glow in the hard drive.

Then this afternoon I was reading about the kiwi cooking tradition in the Listener, and 'celebrities' contributed their fond food memories. For the record, here are some more of mine from my mother's pantry:

- Bacon butties in the morning, on vogels bread with a thick layer of butter
- Bubble and squeak
- Vol au vents filled with shrimp and sour cream
- Baked potatoes filled with cream cheese and garlic and then baked a bit longer
- Cauliflower groaning under lashings of cheese sauce
- Pork stir fry with fried egg, cashew nuts, and pieces of pineapple (my mother was adventurous, if not authentic)
- Chicken breasts on the bone, topped with herbs, breadcrumbs, and butter, then baked
- Shepherds pie made with shredded cooked meat left overs and grated carrot, topped with mashed potato and lashings of home made tomato sauce
- Chop suey with plenty of ginger, bacon and soy sauce
- Vegetable soup, cooked slowly with a bacon hock
- Preserved peaches from the tree
- Mandarins and grapes from the backyard, and guavas from the neighbour's tree

Most of what we had was made from scratch. No packet gravies and sauces, and food didn't come out of a box (unless it was the cereal box). I still would rather go without gravy than have it from a packet - what would be the point?

My grandmother's cooking also holds special memories. A stay at her house would usually involve:

- A breakfast of weetbix warmed with boiling water and topped with a thick layer of sugar and cold milk, followed by a poached egg on a thick slab of white toast dripping in butter, and topped with her own mix of salt
- A lunch of tinned spaghetti that would sprawl across a large brown dinner plate, accompanied by a crispy bun from the bakery in Ruawai Rd, Panmure. Or if not spaghetti then cucumber and thick slices of her homegrown beefsteak tomatoes
- A dinner of crumbed lamb chops, mashed potato and parsley, and homegrown runner beans, followed by tinned fruit and ice cream, and then sweet milky tea in front of the television.

Of course, eating was not all happy times. My mother made her own version of Duck a L'Orange which was chicken slowly roasted in a sea of Raro. She used to boil the crap out of vegetables until they disintegrated in your mouth, yet I remember chewing steak until my jaws ached. She also had a penchant for offal and Irish stew which never went down well with the kids. But it was these experiences that made the good food all the better.

Because she was who she was, she also made the most delicious plain biscuits, however these were mostly laced with marijuana.

Happy times, happy times.

2008-04-29T17:18:00.000-07:00

Smacking children

The NZ Herald reports that a petition to repeal NZ's so-called "anti-smacking laws" failed to collect (by a small amount) the necessary number of signatures to force a referendum on the issue.

I am gob-smacked that at least over quarter of a million New Zealanders would sign a petition to assert the right of parents to hit their children. I am even more bowled over by the fact that some mean spirited Dickensian group has gone to the extraordinary effort to collect such a vast number of signatures so that mums and dads across the land can hit their children with impunity.

I could understand going to great effort to collect hundreds of thousands of signatures for petitions that would genuinely improve the welfare of children, such as petitions aimed at getting:
- the government to put pressure on the UN to step up in Darfur.
- funding for Plunket
- more funding for equipment in children's hospitals
- more action towards ending child poverty, here and abroad
- improved public facilities for families
- more help for special needs children

But a petition aimed at the so-called right of a parent to hit a child? What have we come to?

Children have rights. They are not sub-human. If it is not OK for my neighbour to give me a smack on the bum because my dinner guests from last night were a bit rowdy, then it is certainly not OK for me to smack my child for whatever reason. Find another way to channel your anger, away from the children, and find another way to discipline them. Good parents don't resort to abuse.

2008-04-08T20:39:00.001-07:00

Holy crap batman! It has been a long time since I last posted, having promised myself I would post Nearly Every Day. Idiot.

I have been looking at the sad little list of blog ideas from months back and they are now incomprehensible (third generational skid marks?), irrelevant (the demise of Runescape - 14 year old brother fell into deep angst), or not interesting (TomKat zzzzzzz).

But wait! There be one topic I can really talk about, but eeek! It is home renovation! Three little words peeked out at me - 'closed in deck' - and the idea came flooding back (actually, not enough to be a flood, more of a trickle.) It goes something like this:

"Modern suburban life - why the planet will be a ball of dust in 50 years"

-Home owner thinks, "wouldn't an outdoor living area be nice" and builds a deck, preferably with good orientation to the sun, and perhaps even cuts down some trees to let in more light
- The sun beats hard through the gap left by the trees. The home owner thinks, "Hmmm that thar sun is too darn hot", and introduces artifical shade
- Home owner decides the deck is too cold in the evening and commits carbon crime by getting an outdoor gas heater or fire that attempts to heat the great outdoors
- Home owner thinks, "stuff this, if I enclosed the whole thing, we would keep warm, the mozzies wouldn't get me and I would have another room on the house", and turns the deck into a conservatory
- Home owner decides the conservatory is too hot and installs blinds to shut out the light.
- Home owner thinks, "wouldn't an outdoor living area be be nice"

Fooking 'ell

2008-02-04T17:30:00.000-08:00

Touchy Chocolatier

I am one of those annoying people who will, when I can be bothered, contact producers of food, or anything else that I buy for that matter, if I think there is a problem with a product. In the past I have asked whether there are GM products in spreadable butter, complained about excess packaging, and bad milk, asked why product lines were deleted...you get the gist. While I don't do it that often, some people probably think I am a pain in the arse. I like to think that I am an essential part of the quality assurance chain (insert groan from older sister here).

Last year I bought a bar of my favourite chocolate and noticed the flavour had changed. My e-mail to the chocolatier earned me my most entertaining response thus far in my consumer vigilante career. I was probably a bit of a twat about it, but I really do hate that almond essence flavour...

Me:

Hi

I really enjoy your bitter nib chocolate, and bought a bar from ****** yesterday. This particular bar (exp 20/12/07) tasted to me of almond essence or something similar. It could be that there is only a trace amount in the block - I very much dislike almond essence and perhaps I am overly sensitive to the flavour. I thought I should let you know anyway in case there was a production problem. It was definitely full of cocoa nibs so it was not a mislabelled block.

The chocolatier:

Hi,

Thanks for your mail. We do not use almond essence, never have done, never will, it is tacky, cheap, artificial and suitable for bottom feeders only. We do not use essences of any flavour at any time. Our commitment is to expensive, real ingredients only.

We used to make the bitter nib in 70% blended bittersweet which is a general chocolate made from 4 different beans to achieve a general chocolate flavour. We now produce the bitter nib in a single variety chocolate, so if you were used to the older chocolate you would certainly notice some difference in flavour. This single variety has flavour notes of peppers,spices and fruit.

If you are getting other flavours, please check with ****** to check that "almond essence" has not been used close to the stored chocolate. Even though it is sealed... Who knows ???

Hope this clears it for you.

Cheers,

*****

Me:

Thanks *****, that explains the flavour change. Perhaps I picked up on a hint of cherry in the fruit flavour note.

The chocolatier:

Thanks for having a discerning and "in touch" pallette.

In chocolate,

*****.

2008-01-16T16:53:00.000-08:00

Three things have caught my eye since the last post. First up, I watched some of "Cool as Ice" the 1991 film flop starring Vanilla Ice. That persona and those clothes almost defy description. I had not remembered that "Word to your mother" originated with this guy. Thanks to Wiki, I now also know that Robert Van Winkle is doing the reality TV rounds. It is quite sad that the prime of his life will be tarnished by the memory of his sudden rise to fame, and subsequent free fall. According to Wiki, in the early 90s his peeps put out a biography of him full of lies to make him seem more credible. Talk about adding fuel to the fire of public opinion. I think I will now drop the white hip hop thang - my efforts at humour pale in comparison to Van Winkle. Although, seen another way, perhaps his story has more pathos than humour.

Number two eye catcher was a review of Darkmans, a book by Nicola Barker. The ghost of John Scogin, a 15th Century jester in the court of King Edward IV, inhabits characters in the book. From what I can gather, his is a nasty, yet intellectual kind of humour. Barker said that he changed the history of comedy. It is hard to imagine that in a world without mass communication there could be a prevailing type of humour. But perhaps what we know of humour back then is confined to the court.

In a world of print publishing, TV, and internet, the fashion of humour seems to change at the blink of an eye (although it will always be true that Adam Sandler will never be funny) which brings me to my third point. A 16 year old boy, Corey Worthington, from Melbourne, Australia has earned notoriety by hosting a party that got out of control while his parents were on holiday. His star is ascendant now that he has showed himself to be quite the lovable idiot, but with a selfish "me generation" twist. I am predicting a move back to this lovable idiot kind of humour (think Wayne's World with lots of text, big sunglasses and family dysfunction). This trend should last at least a couple of weeks.

2008-01-12T13:43:00.001-08:00

Most of us fancy ourselves as comedians at times and the bulk of us are funnier to ourselves than we will ever be to anyone else. I am definitely in that category. My mother is too, but in a nastier way. I recall my mother's sense of humour revolved around her trying to shock people and getting a kick out of their reaction, or making fun of Indians or people from the Phillipines. If she were a nine year old boy she would be frying ants with a magnifying glass and slanting her eyes at Asian people.

One genuinely funny moment came years back when I dropped a Christmas tree off to her. My husband (who was my boyfriend then), had barely met her, and was waiting in the car while I took the tree inside. In the lounge skulked the biggest drop-kick loser you could imagine as a boyfriend for your mother. She had known this joker for a while but at that moment the penny dropped that they were in a 'relationship'. The inverted commas allow for the probability that 'relationship' actually meant plenty of boozing together and a quick poke before passing out (should an erection have miraculously been possible). I returned to the car, and wound the window down to ask her if she was sleeping with him. A small woman, she fired up (big red hair and Irish blood blazing) and hooted in a voice meant for passers-by, "So what? I can FUCK SANTA if I want to!" punctuating 'fuck' with a thrust of the hips. My husband, whose mother reminds my sister of Mrs Bucket from "Keeping up Appearances", was in tears of laughter. I don't think he knew that mothers could be that way.

My mother's boyfriend is still on the scene, still her drinking buddy and still cannot string together a coherent sentence. Presumably the acohol preserved rather than killed him. You may be interested to know that my mother has had red dreadlocks for about 9 years now - her big anti-establishment statement - is missing teeth and is falling apart physically the way that alcoholics do. When LOTR was in pre-production, she was approached for a photo by one of the production team. We will never know what came of it, but when the first movie came out, I suspected she was inspiration for the Orcs. I am thinking very hard now about whether I should leave that sentence in as it harks back to my mother's nasty kind of humour. Can't resist. It stays.

I crack myself up in the privacy of my own home by pretending to be gangsta and bad. I don't mean to take the piss out of hip hop culture. I simply find ironic humour in a white middle class suburban house bitch try hard trash talking to her sister and baby-daddy. My inspiration is my 14 year old brother, who a few years back tried very hard to be gangsta. As a very small, very skinny and very white 11 year old, he aspired to membership of the Bloods and wanted to become an assassin (although I am not too sure that being an assassin is particularly gangsta). He spent hours practising spelling out bloods with his fingers, and wore pink shoelaces (I am not too sure that this is gangsta either, but I suspect that even at the age of 11 he had a sense of irony). His street talk was gold. It was a guide for my phone etiquette. If my husband or sister called I would answer with a Randy Jackson/Iced T word riff -"Yo, yo, yo, dawg, go with the flo, word up to you and your peeps". It helps that I have no idea how to really talk hip hop. It back-fired recently when I answered the phone with only a cursory glance at the caller display, thinking it was my husband:

"Yo, yo, yo, word up mother fucker G."

"Er, hello?"

"Please let this be my sister"

"Er, no."

It was an acquaintance whose son has a play date on occasion with my son. She is also a PhD in some kind of mental health discipline. Fortunately, having grown up with a mother like mine, it takes a lot more than this to embarrass me.

2008-01-08T23:26:00.000-08:00

Detailed accounts of other people's home renovations are much like updates on a newborn baby's development. Fascinating to those relating the story, and snore inducing to those on the receiving end. This is true no matter how eloquent the story teller. Hilarious accounts of birds nesting in guttering and threatening to occupy the house, are not actually hilarious. In fact, home renovation threatens to turn the wittiest columnist into a crashing bore.

With that in mind, I should warn that this post is about renovating our home. Once this is out of my system, I will endeavour to only post something on the topic if it is pertinent to world peace talks or solutions to the cryptic.

We moved into our 1920s bungalow a few years ago, champing at the bit to complete a home renovation that the previous owners had begun. But we ended up doing nothing - due to a new baby, then another baby, mixed in with a dollop of idleness. But doing nothing is starting to get painful. Our kitchen needs to be scrapped. It has accumulated years of grime and is some home handy man disaster from god knows when - several different decades I suspect. The oven is full of carbonised food leftovers that didn't budge when they had their final eviction notice served by a crack oven cleaning professional last year. The fridge covers holes in the floor that are the right size for rats, big, grey, twitching and hungry. The pantry shelves camber towards the floor, so food must be placed as deep into the cupboard as possible, lest we get taken out by a falling can.

It got too much even for these lazy bones. I contacted an architecture practice. So far, after one meeting with two people, we have gone from plans to replace and relocate the kitchen, to plans to knock out the large extension and garaging; extend the house back; create a new room; move the laundry; replace a bedroom with part of a new garage; and create some kind of outdoors dining oasis. Not forgetting, of course, the new kitchen. Oh fuck.

I am particularly enthused about the potential to go carbon neutral. We can allow for solar panels, but won't install them until a cheaper product that is made more efficiently is available here. Our architects feed back to the grid from their own home - that would be brilliant. Grey water - rainwater collection for laundry and toilets - is also on the 'nice to have' list.

An exellent book on the topic is Sustainable Home, written by a green architect from Sydney, Michael Mobbs. In the late nineties he converted his Victorian terrace house in Chippendale into an eco-idyll. He not only feeds back to the grid and collects rainwater, but also treats sewage on site. This sounds disgusting, but read the book and you will be turned on to the idea. I am a little curious about doing the same here, but the architects tell us that the Auckland City Council is not interested - yet. Mobbs says that testing has proved the treated waste water to be potable. I am sure this is true, but I doubt I would be offering it as an aperitif at my house - "sparkling shit water, anyone?".

It is astounding to think Mobbs manages all this in a dwelling that is not stand-alone. From what I can tell on his website, all is going well over a decade on.

Now I have dreams swimming through my head of a vegie patch and greenhouse, fertilised by our worm farm and a bokashi. The rats could feast like kings and not even have to come into the house.

The hippie home renovation spiel has been brought up and I am feeling much better now, thank you very much.

2008-01-08T17:26:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I feel like the woman who knew too much about parenting. This is not to say that I know how to parent better than the next person, I have just read a lot of stuff, too much stuff, about toilet training, building self esteem, discipline, good nutrition and so forth. I do think it is a good move to seek parenting advice, but beware - it will open you up to a lifetime of guilt. Right now I am eating a walnut and ginger biscuit and I am feeling guilty. Guilty because I breastfeed and in eating those nuts I possibly expose my son to the risk of developing a tree nut allergy (now here is something I recently learned - peanuts are not tree nuts, they are legumes). I'm not sure that the link is proven, but all the same, who wants to risk giving their child potentially fatal tree nut allergy?

There is a balancing act we all do - the trade off, the momentary lapse where we can't be arsed being super-mum. Today's lapse is this biscuit (and ones that will follow). Yesterday's lapse was giving the three year old a gentle shove (after he had pushed his little brother over for the 3045th time in his short life) to teach the toddler that being pushed may not hurt, but it hurts feelings. This is against all parenting advice out there. Your kids need to trust you and see you as above petty things like that. But, I thought, feelings are such an abstract concept for a kid to understand. So, without anger, I gave him a calculated push, with one hand behind him to catch him. It didn't seem like much - but the wounded look on that delicate face broke my heart - he was so hurt. I apologised, hugged him, and said "See, pushing hurts feelings". Now I realise, he didn't need that lesson at three. He needs it when he can understand the concept of feelings better, and I won't need to push him to teach him that by then. Right now all he needs to know is that he isn't allowed to push.

See? A lifetime of guilt awaits.

One of hundreds of things that I am trying to be conscious of (remembering that I had a poor role model in parenting) is my reaction to creepy crawlies. They are called that for a good reason - they crawl around like bloody creepy things. Iggy and I have a long standing insect agreement. I will deal with the Wetas. He deals with everything else. I thought this was fair. Weta are the ugliest critters you could imagine, but they also don't come indoors a lot, so there are less to deal with. But Iggy drew the short straw. I think the last time I dealt with a Weta in the house was 1998. Since then there have been hundreds of other little creatures come our way, including cockroaches the size of small rodents, rodents the size of small cats, and a large, brown and hairy huntsman spider in our Sydney years.

Again, I digress. Since the three year old came on the scene, I have been the spider's friend and the bugs buddy - so determined I have been not to give him a complex about insects. But then out of the blue yesterday he had a big freak out about a daddy long legs spider. He was convinced that it was on him (I suspect he had a bit of cobweb on him) and wouldn't put his legs on the ground. Bless his little Bob the Builder acrylic socks - he really is a chip off the old block.

2008-01-07T11:43:00.000-08:00

Clinton or Obama? Given I live in NZ and am an NZ citizen does it really matter what I think? Probably not, but it is hard to not have an opinion.

In my last year at university I wrote a (disappointingly bad) dissertation on candidate selection pratices of parties of left in NZ after electoral reform and the effect on women's representation. One mildly amusing discovery was that Jeanette Fitzsimons, co-deputy leader of the Alliance party at the time, referred to the committee that determined the party list as the "knitting committee." This was a reference to the challenges of weaving together the various interests of the party (the Alliance party was an amalgamation of a number of political parties, all with specific interests), while allowing for representation of women and ethnic minorities (Maori and Polynesian). The Alliance was a minority party so the composition of the top ten places on the list mattered a lot and working all those interests into ten spots had to be challenging for the decision makers (why the party did not implode earlier I do not know).

But I digress. In the course of research I became increasingly convinced that we need more women in leadership. And if there are more female leaders, this should in turn widen the pool of quality female candidates for decision making roles. We need inspiration for our aspirations.

When Jenny Shipley became NZ's PM, Helen Clark was leader of the opposition, and Theresa Gattung was head of Telecom. I would hear people bang on about how women were running the country, as if there was a new injustice. I heard how women were "taking over", how it was reverse sexism. This was a ludricrous notion. Parliament and decision making roles in the public and private sector were dominated by men. It just so happened that three high profile positions were held by women. But I hear this talk less lately. In the early days of her being PM, I heard Clark accused of a harsh appearance and of being selfish for not having any children (incidentally I have never understood why not having a child is a selfish act. Isn't the passing on of your DNA one of life's great vanity projects? And each child we have is going to put more pressure on the Earth's limited resources. Surely, therefore, procreation is the selfish act). You didn't hear such criticisms directed at male politicians. Perhaps I am too out of touch, now I am out of the workforce, but I seem to hear less of this criticism of Clark nowadays. I wonder then, are we growing up as a nation and getting used to the idea of a strong women in positions of power. And why might that be? Having women in high profile roles for a decent period of time must have helped us along. Clark has provided strong and effective leadership for over eight years, and few could question her competence and credentials.

I am hopeful about what this means for young girls and boys who have grown up during her term. I hope that they will see that aiming for great heights is something special, but not specifically extraordinary for a woman (as opposed to a man) to do. I hope that they look back on the days when people were concerned that women were running the country, and have a good old belly laugh.

So back to the original question, Clinton or Obama? From a "fair" representation perspective how could you value one over the other? I was surprised to hear that my husband (let's call him Iggy) was barracking for Barack, meanwhile I was hoping Hilary would prevail in Iowa. Iggy's argument was that there had never been a "black" president before (I always found the word black a bit odd - American "blacks" are not black - but then again I suppose "whites" are not white either, with the notable exception of Marilyn Manson.) I pointed out, on the other hand, how there had never been a female president before, "and women make up over half the population, so ha ha, I win". I don't pretend to know much about American politics, so my observations didn't get much deeper than that, although I did point out that she had been there, done that as first lady, whereas Obama is the new kid on the block relatively speaking.

Regardless, either would be a step up from George W, who would have made a lovely teddy bear face model (think frowning, quizzical Georgie), but isn't my hot favourite as US leaders go.

2008-01-01T00:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, like now, I am in awe of how Civilisation is a tiny eency weency blip on the timeline of the planet. And look what has happened during that blip. Empires have been built and destroyed. Cities have sprung up on a vast scale. Cars, computers, telecommunications, aviation happened. Penicillin was discovered. The atom was discovered and then split. Billy Ray Cyrus had a hit with "Achy Breaky Heart". All manner of mind boggling things have happened. Man has created a big, heaving, carbon belching monster that is destroying, at an alarming rate, what has taken billions of years to evolve. Terrifying and awe inspiring all at once.

2007-12-31T14:00:00.000-08:00

This blog is for me to practise writing with. Feel free to correct, suggest, encourage. Happy New Year.

2007-12-30T18:48:00.000-08:00

I mentioned in my second post that my mother was a really, really, really crap mother. That was a sweeping statement for me to make. She was quite crap a lot of the time. Some of the time she was quite good. Let's start with the good. I grew up on Auckland's North Shore, which in the 80s was a bubble of white surburban blandness. Nothing much happened (except for out of control teenage parties) and the biggest danger was the occasional paedophile that haunted the beach or prowler that lurked outside lit windows in the dark. But in the pre-teenage years, the Shore was pretty good. Living near a beach is great for a kid. And in those days, while stranger danger was starting to concern our parents, some still had freedom to skip down to the beach unaccompanied, and meet up with friends. In my household, we had an even longer leash than in the others.

My parents split up in '84. For 14 years, my mother had played housewife with varying degrees of success, and was less than successful in the latter years. An appetite for booze, herb, parties and younger men got the better of her. And so it was that my father moved over the bridge and my mother made up for lost time.

So, we were in the bubble, but we were not of the bubble. For those who watch the local TV series 'Outrageous Fortune' we were the Wests of the Shore. Our place was known for its parties. My mother, known for her herb. And us kids, well, you could say we had broader life experience than most other children on the Shore. This is the good I was talking about before (but this was a small silver lining to a rather large storm cloud). My mother was also about as 'foodie' as you got on the Shore in those days. While money was tight on the Domestic Purposes Benefit, there was usually plenty of food in the house, and my mother was championing local produce, fruits of the sea, and home grown (and no, I don't mean marijuana) long before wealthy Cuisine readers started driving to Matakana in their SUVs to stock up at the farmers' market. There were other good things about her - she was creative and appreciated art, she never cared what others thought, she was individual, she lived life her way. She wasn't boring.

But...she was also a selfish, emotionally abusive narcissist who regularly endangered and often harmed her children in the pursuit of a good time. A child deserves better than we got. I had always thought so, but becoming a parent was like shining a bright light on to all those things from my childhood that didn't seem right. Now I know so. A child needs the basics - food, drink, clothing, shelter. A child also needs security and unconditional love. It was these last two things that we didn't have. It can't have been easy being a single parent. In '84 my younger sister was still a baby, I was 8, my older sister was 12 and my brother was 18 and recently diagnosed as schizophrenic. But there are a few obvious things you can do to be a good parent, even when times are tough. I have devised a list that I think should be reasonably easy to stick to:

don't regularly have parties with loud music into the small hours on a school night;
don't regularly refer to your children as 'vermin';
try not to invite strange men home from the local, particularly with young girls in the house;
don't invite virtual strangers to live with you, particularly with young girls in the house;
try to spend most nights not drunk or high on weed;
try not to shoplift bottles of gin in front of your children;
don't resort to emotional blackmail, particularly when the victims are your own children and are too young to understand what that is;
when your partner hurls abuse at your children in a drunken rage, restrain yourself from egging him on;
don't send a letter to your child's school telling them that your child is, despite the outward appearance of being a good student and nice person, actually a little bitch;
practice saying "I love you" to your kids, without qualifying it with 'but...'
try to be the parent, not the child;
as much as possible, put the needs of your children first - they didn't choose this life and they depend on you;

There is plenty more advice I could offer, but I will leave the list at that.

2007-12-30T17:44:00.000-08:00

I am a 30ish mother of two pre-school aged boys. I parent full time while my husband works hard for the money as a partner with one of the Big 4.

I did fairly well at school and university and always imagined myself in a career that actually pays a wage. Somehow I became a mother, a housewife, a cook, a wash-lady, a tidy-upper a cleaner (OK, an occasional cleaner).

I am a committed feminist; my political leanings are left; I am an atheist; I am concerned about the environment; I read the Listener, and women's mags make me nauseous; I don't bake; I am hopeless at arts and crafts.

Despite all this, or perhaps because some of it, I love my life at home, as a mum. I love my family. My boys are delightful, even if sometimes the three year old poos his pants, and the one year old is still waking in the night for a breastfeed. I love my husband, even if he regularly misses our wedding anniversary due to work commitments. He is there for his kids more than many fathers, he cooks, he cleans, he believes in equal partnership, and equal parenting, he accepts all my eccentricities, and puts up with me when I am bossy. Most importantly, he gets up with the kids most mornings while I sleep on.

But while I love being a mother and wife, I sometimes feel guilty about letting down the 13 year old girl who hoped to one day being a foreign correspondent, or diplomat. I feel guilty about letting down the teachers who had high hopes for me. I feel guilty about letting down my high school science teacher by never doing science or maths at university. I feel guilty about not educating myself so that I could make a worthwhile contribution to the planet (no offence to the Auckland University Political Studies Department intended). I had ability, and I probably wasted it.

So, I will continue on this road, perhaps somewhat selfishly. I will enjoy what this life has to offer me, and I will give all that I can to my family. I had a really, really, really crap mum and I am determined that I will be a great mum to my boys. So, while the planet may be a ball of dust in 50 years time, I hope that my boys will be equipped with good self-esteem, and life skills to muddle their way along in the meantime.

And perhaps by then I will have worked through my guilt issues ;-)