Bounce

I did not know how much lifting, stretching, twisting and bending I did until I was enforced to refrain.

 

Truly!

I had myself well-pegged as much more lazy than I apparently am, if the discomfort that I was feeling from being refrained was anything to go by.

I mean, it wasn't all doom - I did do some reading, and a bit of quality napping happened.  But whinge - oh, I am sick of my own whinging.

A week (ish) has gone by and I am just now getting to the point of thinking "ah yes, I get it" but its possible I don't just yet.

On top of that, we are currently without a Paris in the house and this is harder than I thought that it was going to be.

I have spent a little time THINKING ABOUT dipping my toes into genealogy's pond - but that gets bigger before I make a start and I leave only slightly ruffled around the edges.  I also binged (interspersed with napping) a few UK Who Do You Think You Are episodes.  One of the good things about watching such stuff about people who you actually already know nothing about is that chances are, you know as much about their history as they do.

I did also go through my photo albums and loose photos and have discovered about 3 of the last 23 years in a pile with no labels - and the other 20 are either in a box downstairs or on (hopefully) the hard drive.

I have not mopped the floors or spring cleaned the windows or sewn up a storm.  No go me!!

The child currently at camp (yes, we are pretending that this is normal and not a previously unthinkable hurdle cleared) will, however, return to find her room tidied - I know, that sort of horrible mother.  

The good news is that I can interrupt her protests with showing her a photo of the person that I was who actually tidied a whole share house when she moved into it in 1994 (?).  I can't show her a photo of the house (although it was a truly awesome house) because apparently the early 1990s were before photos were the disposable commodity that they are today.  It was across the road from The Valhalla, and awesome little cinema that always had a double feature on Sunday nights, and from The Craven, the coffee shop next door that I frequented for other cleansing purposes.

I will show her the photo and say "see, its nothing personal" and no doubt launch into the moral tale about the 26 coffee mugs but she will pay scant attention.  She is at that age - where the phone actually commandeers her waking hours.  And I know, just say no - but the moments of no are filled with the desire to go back on its a constant battle.  That being said, there are cracks appearing in the shell - there is the whole going to camp and rock-climbing and her living through the last week a little bit older.  

We were discussing parasites recently (as you do) and I mentioned how one version of her blog name had an association with such, as when I was pregnant with her I had a tag that was "Parasitic Alien Life Form" (for some reason only one post comes up with the tag these days...)

I did mention that it was also due to the Paris Accord (and not really because it was Copenhagen by the time she got around to being born and V mentioned that his view is now offers no sense of humour about environmental agreements). 

She might have listened.

 So I am off to bed now.  Again.  And being quietly proud of Paris.

Imposter Syndrome

When I was a kid, I remember this one particular afternoon - it was a school swimming lesson and I would not have been more than 7 - I can't remember if it were before or after the lesson - but I remember walking past one of the "big girls" - Susan or Joanne or someone like that - and thinking "imagine being THAT grown up.

And then I was that big and I realised that it was not so very big any more.

And thence in boarding school.

I often marvelled at those around me who really had their acts together - I was alternating between trying to figure out if there were a defined set of rules that I should have read somewhere, and trying to read them by braille.

I really was stumbling myopically - figuratively AND literally. 

There was one other girl with my first name in the whole school - my name was not a pencil case name - and not only did we have the same first name, we had the same surname initial, we were in the same year - and we were both blind as bats. 

And we were both too vain to wear our glasses around the school. She was slightly ahead of me in the alphabet due to strategic vowel placement, but I had it all over her in being a klutz.

Boarding school was five years, during which time my knees hit bitumen and cement and rock, gravel and grass so often during those years that, for some periods, there was skinlessness and other descriptors designed to make you shudder.

Ejected by age and matriculation, I went to university still largely thinking "at some point in my future it will all start to make sense, and then you will be deemed a grown up." 

This was interspersed with thoughts of "Grown ups. Ha. What do they know. Who'd want to be one of them."

Then I got a proper job. One a thousand more KMs from "home" and I did stuff. Proper grown up stuff like catch public transport and pay rent and buy  alcohol and other stupid things.

I remember once saying to my sister - another grown up with a proper job far away - as we ordered a meal together: "this is what it must feel like to be a grown up."

But I also was a bit - well, contrary might be a word we should consider.

Because I still didn't quite understand how this game worked. 

I must admit that a lot of my 20s and 30s I lived a life that, when coming to forks in the road, I would choose every time the path less travelled. Not because I was adventurous and foolhardy, but because it looked like fun and was slightly foolish.

When I turned 30 I had a beautiful baby. 'Salina really was good clay. Moving up a generation must get me my grown up badge by default.

My 30s were very much a "lash to the mast" rideout.

Then I moved to Paradise and met V and got married and surely that's got to be grown up, hasn't it?

P&C President (to be fair, myself and the whole P&C were as shocked as you. It was a case of needs must rather than the winning of any popularity contest.) Grown up enough?

Having my own business, even. I mean, not a hugely successful one as I had no confidence in my boss. Still. Grown up?

Baby. Taxes. In the thirteen clients/jobs I have had in the last fourteen years, I have been confident and successful in twelve (including the one I am currently in). I must be getting close.

But things erode confidence. Teenagers. Car troubles. A pandemic. Cancer.

In two days having a renovate with all things hysterical banished - I am making some room for audacity. 

Not a "save your life" manoeuvre this time - more an "improve your life" issue.

I am starting to think that I really must be a grown up by now.

Although I still haven't found the manual.

Of mothers and such

 Happy Mother's Day!

Let me start this by stating that I do have the best mother in the world.

Sorry, all the rest of you, but she was such a good mother, even when I was a spiteful teen hating everything in the world but with the focus on the few who loved me most?  She wasn't the top of my hit list.

Wasn't fourteen shades of that for EVERYONE?

Paris is 13 years and nearly 5 months old.  We are at a sweet spot this week.

I am choosing to believe it may last forever, because I do NOT want to be on the other side of that.

I mean, it may be my memory playing up on me, but I don't recall 14 year old 'Salina, and I am willing to plead dementia but I am hoping that it is instead that I had a charm.

Doing a bit of digging into the family foliage of late, but really don't have time and resources yet lined up to take it at all seriously.

However, I would like to pay homage to a few remarkable "Matriarchs" unearthed.

My great-great-grandmother Hannah, who at 8 moved with her family to the other side of the world from Cambridgeshire to Central Victoria; as a very young lady then moved to help extended family in the newish city of Adelaide; married, was widowed and had a baby - or vice versa - but within a few years was back in Central Victoria; met an Irishman and married him; left her daughter with her parents and had another 5 children during which time she moved between Victoria, the United States, Hawaii, New Zealand and Queensland, while dealing with the death of another child, the severe illness of another, the financial perils of being married to her husband; then was abandoned by said husband while she had a defiant daughter who had argued with her father about matriculation and attaining her credentials as a teacher - she won, he disappeared (I will never know if the two were connected), a second daughter who had nursed her while she had been bedridden for the previous several years (yet miraculously arose from said sickbed upon his departure) and two teenage sons.  Now, I don't have sons and therefore cannot even begin to guess what bringing one of them up must be like let alone two, but everyone survived.  GGG Hannah actually lived for another 30 years after her husband left her - and in that time her daughters were her most devoted handmaids and she got to participate in the upbringing of her three grandchildren.

The great-great-Aunts - these were the heroines of my childhood - the Great-Aunts (as my mother and her sister called them), or the Aunts as known by my grandmother, her sister and her brother (and anyone else who knew them) - were two of the most beautiful women in the world.  They were strict and staunch but also loving and kind.  They plucked these children from the wilds of the North and had ensured that they were clothed, fed, and most importantly, educated.  "Never Trust a Man" was their dictum, not (just) because they were harridan spinsters, but I now realise because they had lived experience.  Always have something that you can fall back on, and the most effective something that you can fall back on is knowledge.  Perhaps the reason that Aunt Jane had her family-famous ball of rubber bands was indeed because she had to account for every penny and every piece of string while still showing a front of being genteel and proper.  The reason Aunt Sarah was so terse about keeping within your lane was because she knew just what a tight grip you had to keep on your independence because you could never afford to let go.

 

My grandmothers and their sisters and sisters-in-law, who took turns in looking after not-always-lovable in-laws in turn, who did all the thought-load of a household pre-refrigeration, pre-electricity, pre-phones.

My mother and my aunts, who tried their best to give us skills in how to be the best that we could be and gave us the ultimate power of believing that we would always be safe because we were surrounded by people who would be there for each other at every turn.

Unwittingly or not, at some point in the above generations, the family story became  "perhaps a freak squall on Sydney Harbour" rather than "never heard from again and assumed dead when they had to sell the family home 27 years later" (or indeed "died interstate intestate and no mention of marriage or children on the certificate").

I am learning new awe of these people and just how they got through.  Happy Mother's Day to all of them, and thank you.

The garage, the grandmother and holidays

It's a long weekend here.

Monday is Labour Day.

Or the long weekend straight after Anzac Day that you never quite take enough advantage of. 

I remember as a kid wishing that the public holidays were more spaced out.

It's caught us unaware, to be frank, although what a welcome little bonus it is.

Double bonus is that we are child free tonight. Lush!

I have been dabbling a little in family history of late, with regular visits to my parents and contact with a - well, her father and my mother were cousins, so that would make me - what, third cousins?

In the exchange of new information from both sides, understanding of what has happened in the past makes you realise that documenting of things tell the stories that make history.

I have, through my own hoarding through the phases of my life, plastic boxes of writing and paperwork and filing and photos and projects that I am going to get around to one day.

When I have nothing better to do. Long weekend possibilities.

I have learned many things this week, including something that would have devastated - or delighted - my grandmother, revisited another family secret that has so many layers. 

I have also remet through my third cousin one Christmas of my childhood.

The Sunshine Coast in the Seventies was an event for us, and a week at Christmas very much anticipated.

School holidays were impossibly long, with 2 months of nothing to do (if you were a City Mouse) - or first needles, Christmas, branding, school shopping, covering books and naming clothes if you came from the bush.

So Christmas at the Sunshine Coast in the Seventies was a spectacular highlight of my childhood.

I do recall - correctly or otherwise - we were inadequately catered to carwise for the trip, having a sedan and three kids going away for a week at Christmas.

Add to that Summertime heat, pre-air-conditioning, gravel roads, roadworks...

These days, this trip would take quite a comfortable maybe half-day with stops? Then? It felt like weeks.

Again, I might need to check Dad's diary but I do believe that that particular road trip that day was that sedan's last - and our saviours that day were my mother's cousin and his family.

See, we knew that we were going to meet them that holidays - but not like this.

We had imagined well thought out outfits and good rest prior - as, no doubt did my parents - not hot, sweaty, untangling our legs from detritus and overcoming car sickness.

Looking back through the lens of time, my mother's cousin's wife - my third cousin's mother - was probably pretty upset that her quiet evening at home with her own little family before the craziness of hosting a huge family Christmas - especially when the crazy family mainly belongs to your crazy husband's side - was rudely interrupted by the influx of an additional two adults and three children around your dinner table.

They had a trampoline. There were boy cousins my age! I didn't know cousins came in boy! We didn't have that many cousins at that point and my age and above were all girls.

My third cousin was the oldest of the whole generation. She had long hair and was a proper teenager. We were in awe.

This was the Christmas of the tree.

Several days - and swims and adventures involving shops and/or ice cream and/or cars and/or tyres and/or feasts - later, we went to their place for the Christmas feast.

I remember someone got a slot cars game. I remember that the pool table was converted to being a dining table as there were so many there.

But I mainly remember the four cousins. Or four third cousins.

The sophisticated teenager. The 2 boys. And the to die-for cute toddler who wanted to be with us all. 

So yes, ready for the long weekend. 

In between the mowing and the reclaiming daughter from being a modern teenager. And cooking.

Ready your dragons

 Happy St George's Day.

So lovely to share my celebration with George - pretty impressive based on his write up.

When I was a kid my birthday always fell on a holiday - the local show always fell on my birthday (as it did this year - I didn't go)

And I have met many a top person - so many special people in MY life who are 23rd-ers, even a few who share the day.

Oh my yes.

 I know that I am so much older today for I just discovered that I have slipped from the generation that had elders only celebrating "on this day!" but now the list is all "what the heck is a tick-tock star?" (and yes, the generation that knows bloddy well what a tick-tock star is THEORETICALLY but kinda wishes they didn't)

Shirley Temple is apparently no longer a relevant name - nor Shakespeare.

I got to do so many things that I love today - I got to stay at home, and when your life gets about hither and thither (and when I compare myself to some who thither far more crazily than me or there) staying home is a desire.

Both of my girls and v were with me but not in your face sort of with me but in the general vicinity sort of bliss.

I got these flowers

I also got a shopping trip sans everyone yesterday courtesy of 'Salina and Paris doing stuff together while I went and got what I wanted with no regard to anyone being bored, hungry, tired, in pain or on their phone.

I got to solve a phone mystery with my Dad. He rang me on his mobile because someone had called him - did I remember Pat's nephew - but he couldn't get his number which he wanted to pass on to someone as the nephew hadn't heard that Cyril had died and Cyril had been so good with Pat but all I can find is Molly's number.

We worked out that it would be best that I called him back on his landline so I could talk him through the finding of the number. 

I am that child who is "the techy one" so I get all the techy questions. This is despite me also being "the android one" in an apple family who ensured (through the age old indoctrination method of passing along an old phone)  that he have an apple.

I settled in for the long haul and told him to press buttons that I could only imagine while he gave me his findings. 

No elusive nephew's number.

A light bulb then flickered.

"How did he have your mobile. He called you on the landline, didn't he?"

Ah yes.

So I video called him so he could show me the handset - theoretically much easier.

Except - have you ever had to explain to someone where the camera is on a smartphone so they can show you the image of something? With an elder? With my Dad?!

It's not a problem that his generation had to encounter.

I eventually saw enough of the handset to ascertain we had something similar - and I was able to give the right instructions for him to locate it.

Once he had written it down he offered to "hand me over to Mum". The wrong phone was transferred.

I cooked a cake.

I enjoyed the sun and coffee and phone calls and messages.

I used appliances and made impromptu coleslaw and koftas and meatballs and happy sauce.

My girls decorated

I had a bath. I got presents (true, none were a surprise but all were appreciated).

We feasted.

Just what this girl wished for.

And in 3 months today we shall be thithering ourselves, but at the other end is a kitchen that my hostess (& also a loved one) will be willing to share which is my idea of the perfect holiday destination.