a word on emotion

This week I found out I'm probably going to lose my job. But not just me. Also about 40 other people, some of whom I have known since I was 18 years old. I say probably because the decision has been made but we have a week to fight it, and fight it we did at a public rally today that attracted an estimated 1000 people.
The people closest to me will know that I don't necessarily love my job. I have been a journalist for almost 21 years, but for the majority of that time I have struggled emotionally with what it means to work in the media. About three years ago, just before I fell pregnant with my third child, I reached what felt like the closest thing to a balance I could handle. I moved from the news desk, working afternoons and dealing with the increasingly bleak state of the world, back to features where I had learnt my trade. Day work, mostly positive content, friendly faces. I reduced my hours to 10 a week, which allowed me to drop off and pick up my two school-aged daughters each morning and afternoon. I worked around my husband's irregular shiftwork, and we managed to avoid the expense - emotional and financial - of childcare for our youngest. It was the best I could do, even though some weeks it felt like barely enough.
Now I am facing the prospect of losing even that. At first I was practical, and when my husband and I did the sums we figured we might just be able to manage, if he did regular overtime shifts. But then I went to work, and I saw the faces of those people I've known for two decades, who were there when I had my heart broken, who had their babies when I was having my babies. And I can't quite believe it's come to this.
As much as I have struggled against my job at times, I know that I have never been happier going to work than I have in the past 18 months. I know that I always work hard to do things right, just as I know that of my friends and colleagues. I know that as a mother, some days I am so grateful to be getting five hours of adult conversation, hot tea and oxygen. I know that the days I go to work are sometimes the only days in that week that I will brush my hair. And that anyone will notice.
And so I'm scared. That I will lose my job, and that with it will go a little part of me that I've become accustomed to having, ever since I was 18 years old.

ma-na-ma-na

I loved The Muppet Show as a kid. But when I heard about the new Muppet movie, I confess my first thoughts began with the words ''I'd rather bleed to death''. Fast-forward to this afternoon, two-thirds into a fairly shitty day from my perspective and not much hope of it improving. Three clicks of the Apple TV remote later, the girls were entranced. I have to admit I avoided the first two-thirds, apart from the opening which gave me the general gist and enough cheesy musical numbers to see me through. But what I did catch turned out to be quite the therapy session.
Imagine my horror to find that one of the muppets to get a gig in this new movie is the very same muppet that caused some of my childhood's most horrific nightmares. It was a blue dragon, and I didn't know its name at the time but apparently it was Uncle Deadly. That's right, Uncle. Deadly. Quite pleased I didn't have that dimension added to my six-year-old fears. I recall he was in an episode of The Muppet Show with Vincent Price (again, what were they thinking?) and as Wikipedia tells it, he only made a couple of appearances in the show's history. So why, oh why, did they have to bring him back in 2012 to scare the shit out of me and possibly my children?
But then, the magic of the muppets came back to me too. When they're back in the theatre and the curtain rises on all the little arches .. it's time to put on make-up, it's time to dress up right .. I just felt really inexplicably happy. Like I did as a child when that music started at the same time every week. There was something very comforting about it. Throw in Kermit, a riverbank log and a reprise of Rainbow Connection and I was ready to give Jason Segel an Academy Award.

the route of the problem

Driving home yesterday along the Pacific Highway after a long but lovely day, there came a question without notice from the back seat.
"Mum,'' said the serious voice.
"Where is U Turn Bay?''
As I drove on, marvelling at the clarity and innocence of the nine-year-old mind, I wondered. Where is U Turn Bay? And how on earth do you get there?

come sunday

There is one member of this household who is always overjoyed simply to be in my presence. When I go outside to hang out the washing, he sits beside me and just adores everything I do. Can't take his great big eyes off me. He never asks me for anything, never yells or sulks or demands to know where his pyjamas/favourite socks/pointless toy is. Never has to be reminded to say please or thankyou. Or to flush the toilet. Or to hang his towel up after his bath. When he's hungry (all the time), he will eat anything you give him and it will be the most remarkably delicious thing he has ever eaten. In his whole life. Some days I just really need that. And I was thinking yesterday, as I hung out the washing and my beautiful boy Sunday sat smiling up at me, I know what every mother should have this Mother's Day. Every mother needs a dog. They just make the bad days better.

and we say 'I know'

The girls have finished school for the year, an amazing year and Freya's last in kindergarten. I still marvel at how far she has come in the past two years, and when I read words like these I am reminded and I am grateful:

The sun has climbed the hill, the day is on the downward slope.
Between the morning and the afternoon, stand I here with my soul, and lift it up.
My soul is heavy with sunshine, and steeped with strength.
The sunbeams have filled me like a honeycomb,
It is the moment of fulness,
And the top of the morning.

D.H. Lawrence
The Mid-Day Verse

And though we haven't seen much sun of late, this one reminds me of a certain almost-two-year-old:

Under the new-made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways.

Dylan Thomas
Fern Hill

i don't want this feeling to go away

So, there was a meeting on Monday morning that I was to attend. It was not a business meeting, nobody had an agenda and nobody was wearing shoulder pads (that I know of). Its label is mothers meeting but it's actually much, much more and in a funny way much less than that.
But anyway, I found out first thing Monday that the meeting was to be at Merewether Beach. The main points of the 15,000 points that flashed through my mind in the next 30 seconds were: Rosa will run amok; I won't be able to actually sit down and ''attend'' the meeting; I need this meeting; I am a bad mother for not taking my toddler to the beach; I need this meeting. The result was, after about 10 minutes of just letting my brain run with it, I went alone to the beach and Rosa stayed with her loving father, completely oblivious of my whereabouts and the fun she was missing out on.
As I turned the corner and saw the still blue ocean I think I actually said "Oh, my" out loud. When I got out of the car and felt the warm, warm air I just knew that everything was perfect. It was all I could do to take the steps one at a time down to the sand, and as I walked into the waves there were hundreds of big, smooth rocks and shells at the soles of my feet that took me back more than 30 years to another beach and another lifetime. I dived in and the cold, clear water took my breath and forced me to the surface, gasping and just so happy to be alive and in the sea. I let the waves roll under me, then wash over me, until my feet lost contact with the sand and an age-old panic at the power of the ocean started to creep in. I washed off the salt and walked to the meeting venue - a picnic bench in the pavilion - and sat down to enjoy the magnificent day, the incredible view and the completely fantastic feeling that comes from sometimes just taking a breath. And having your breath taken away. I wish I could start every day like this.

a moment with Van the man and Mr Heinz

Let me start by saying there are few ills in this world that cannot be soothed by a bowl of Big Red tomato soup. And so it came to pass, some days ago now, that after a week in which all five members of the family had been struck low (thankfully not at the same time) with a heinous gastro bug, I sat down to breathe a great sigh of relief and warm my cockles with a little Big Red. Sorely needed to say the least.

At the same time, my dear husband was browsing through YouTube looking for suitably ancient songs and videos to entertain and educate the two eldest of our children. He asked me what I felt like listening to, and since I was in a wound-licking, contemplative kind of mood I naturally answered “Into the Mystic”. Because it is one of my absolute favourite songs ever, and I marvel at how beautiful it is every time I hear it. This led to another question from my dear husband, namely to which Van Morrison song did we dance our first dance as husband and wife. And the answer: These Are The Days.

I’m not sure if I had heard the song in the ten years since our wedding day. It certainly didn’t feel like it, as I sat crying silently into my Big Red, overwhelmed by everything that had changed in our lives in the past ten years, and by the one extraordinary, unfaltering thing at the heart of it all that is still exactly the same.