mind if i share?

I am alone and the house is quiet, except for the hum of the dishwasher and the occasional clatter of a cat hurling itself at the walls and down the hallway. I’ve been alone all day, although I did manage to leave the house for a few hours. But even though I was surrounded by people, I was still alone.

This time last week I would have given anything for the ability to be alone, doing nothing, with no noise or distractions or feelings of guilt at not having enough entertainment planned for the kids. Time to myself, to think about what I want to think about, to make plans, to read or write or even sleep in the middle of the day if I wanted to. But on this, my third straight day of such blatant luxury, and for the first time in living memory, I am not so sure that I like being alone any more.

The girls have been staying with my Mum and Dad a couple of hours away, and while it’s something I sorely needed after a couple of bouts of the flu, it’s never easy to drive away from them knowing it will be days before I see them again. I know they will be having fun and they will be happy, but it doesn’t stop me from feeling rotten that I have to leave them somewhere miles away just so I can get some time to myself.

Not that I haven’t had a lovely time these past few days with my dearest husband and soul mate. I haven’t cooked a single meal, we’ve done dinner and a movie and just enjoyed the closeness that comes from not having three other people in the house. When we arranged the break, I knew he would have to work all weekend but he’d be home every afternoon and we would have the evenings together. What bliss, I thought, to have two days to myself. What will I do? Where will I go? Cafes? Shopping? Long walks on the beach?

Day one I went shopping, but it wasn’t as much fun as you’d think. Because the other word in it was ‘grocery’. Good job to get out of the way, but by the time I got home it was midday and after I’d had some lunch (okay, a chocolate chip muffin and a cup of tea) I really couldn’t get motivated to leave the house again. I put on some music and enjoyed the beautiful winter sunshine (and empty clothes line) instead.

Day two involved a trip to the farmers market for supplies, a hit and run mission to avoid the babies and cute children all rugged up against the cold that played into my mothers’ guilt. I hauled my bags to the car and thought about calling a friend to see if she was up for a visit. Knowing how busy she always is, and how long it’s been since I’ve seen her, I thought twice. I drove to a weekly trash and treasure market that I’ve always enjoyed looking around with the girls, and today was no exception. Lots of trash and a few little treasures, plus a chance meeting with a friend from high school who is just as lovely now, maybe even more lovely given my scarcity of friendships and desperate need for adult conversation.

I lugged my treasures back to the car and decided to call my busy friend. True to form, she wasn’t home. In fact she is not home almost as often as I am home. Which is all the time. Literally every waking moment. When I am not driving to or from school, which amounts to roughly 25 minutes each weekday and nothing on weekends.

So here I am. I have had my nap, I have read the Sunday paper, I have even done a load of washing to satisfy myself that I still exist. But despite having wished for this time, time to myself, time alone, I now realise how very alone I am. Maybe not lonely, because that’s a different thing. But sadly and forlornly alone.

I thought a bit of reading might help. But everywhere I look there are people leading full and interesting lives and feeling the uncontrollable urge to tell everyone about it. The newspapers are full of horrible characters, from the news pages to the social pages, and the online ‘presence’ of anyone with opposable thumbs is doing my head in.

In the past two years I’ve let lots of things go. Some go easily, others are harder. Hopes of an overseas holiday don’t seem to matter so much until you become an unwilling observer of somebody else’s holiday snaps and realise they are the closest you will ever come to that side of the world (or country). And nobody begrudges a person for having fantastic hair but it does make it all that harder to look into any reflective surface and be reminded that nine months have passed since your last visit to the hairdresser and the grey on your head is starting to match the grey of your face.

People are everywhere, sharing the minutiae of their lives every single second it seems. They have so much to say, but it doesn’t stop there. There’s all that information that somebody has decreed we the public must know. The newspapers are full of it, churning it out in great meaningless slabs that can really only be discerned from the David Jones and Myer sales ads by the altered font.

The vast majority of this is information I neither need nor want. My brain is overloaded with other people’s memories of misery and abuse and suffering and the only way to avoid it is to leave the newspaper at the front door in its plastic cocoon. I don’t want to know these people. I want a real conversation with a real person. It seems I want too much. It seems my company is no more appealing to others than it is to me.

I know I’m feeling sorry for myself. But the one thing I miss about being alone is being able to write. To take all the crazy thoughts that fall over themselves inside my head and get them out. So it is done. I have not walked on any beaches, mainly because Are you kidding? It’s freezing outside! And I have not visited any cafes, mainly because the point of going to a café is to meet somebody else there and enjoy their company. The point of solitude, in contrast, is to be alone. And not just alone surrounded by people. Actually alone. Like I am right this minute, save for a mildly concussed cat, although I am still really wishing I’d had somebody else to sit down with today and just share an hour and a hot chocolate. Unlike filtered Instagram photos of overseas sojourns and blissful firesides, that’s the kind of sharing I miss.

the arrival of oberon

A few days after losing Mao, I had a dream that another cat found me. He was a big chocolate-brown bear of a cat, so naturally enough I called him Bear. It may or may not be pertinent that I have a thing about bears, and also a thing about John Irving novels, which also have a thing about bears. But I digress.

When looking for our next cat, I was not really looking for a cat at all, and not for a Mao either. I was looking for a Bear. When I found the little Tabby/Tonkinese cross on Gumtree I was not sure he looked much like a Bear, but I wasn't sure what name would suit him. Then one morning I flicked open my very dog-eared baby name book and the first word my eyes fell on was Auberon (also spelt Oberon). And the meaning: Gentle bear.

We picked up our little bundle one recent overcast Sunday, after a long drive to the surprisingly affluent western suburbs of Sydney. And after the long drive home, we introduced our Oberon to HRH Violet and the result was not entirely unexpected. Much hissing and spitting but very little actual contact ensued for the next several hours until they settled on a respectful distance and realised that they in fact had more in common than first thought. By the next evening I had both of them asleep on my lap. At once.

But Oberon, or Obi as we have taken to calling him (Obi Wan Kenobi may have been mentioned once or twice), is no gentle bear. He is much more like a tiny leopard, all legs-like-steel-springs and wily manouevres on an ever unsuspecting Violet. He can be such a mischievous little boy, much like I imagine any little boy can sometimes be, and while I chastise him for his endless torment of poor Violet, I think both she and I can't help but love him. They will play, then fight, then play some more, then I'll find them curled up together on a chair where they'll sleep for hours. And when all is quiet at the end of another long day, and I fall onto the lounge to savour my thank-god-that's-over cuppa, I will feel a small presence beside me and my little leopard will jump onto my lap and curl up as quiet as a lamb. No bears allowed.

the story of violet

I knew we would never replace Mao. How could we? But I was less certain how I would get through the pain of losing him without the benefit of a cat. There is no better cure for heartache.

After a week, I searched Gumtree through tears for Tonkinese kittens. They were all outside the state or outside our budget, or both. Then finally a compromise: a Tonkinese/tabby cross in Sydney with a pedigree mum and a mischievous glint in his eye. He’d be ready in just over a month. I paid the deposit and said nothing to the girls. When they asked would we ever get another cat, I just said “One day.”

It was only a couple of days later that a series of random events led to me being at a park where I wouldn’t normally have been. I was with Rosa in the playground and we noticed a fire engine parked at the shopping centre, which seemed odd, but there were only a couple of people standing around so no emergency. Then another, bigger fire engine appeared, with a huge cherry picker on the back. Now any novice who has read her share of Golden Books can tell you that can mean only one thing: a cat needed rescuing. I didn’t think these things happened in real life either, but there you are.

We walked over to the people standing below the trees where the fire engines were parked and found a woman holding a towel. On closer inspection, we found that the towel contained the most gorgeous kitten in all creation, who was purring loudly and completely unfazed by the ridiculous scene unfolding before us. In keeping with the whole storybook theme, this kitten (we found out later it was a she, though there wasn’t ever much doubt) appeared to have escaped from some kind of palace, where she might have spent all day lounging on a velvet cushion and having her silken coat and mile-long whiskers groomed by a thousand tiny cat worshippers.

But she was not in the palace any more. On closer inspection she was covered in fleas, her coat was dirty and she had either given up or never really learnt how to properly groom herself. She had an accomplice, too. Another kitten had high-tailed it up the nearest tree and was refusing to budge, hence the fire engine. Apparently they had been found in the park together, but this little princess was slightly more keen to be rescued than her friend.

When I saw this sweetest of kittens, I couldn’t believe the universe could be quite so generous, I patted her and we both purred, and although I was starting to tremble with the excitement of it all, I managed to ask the lady who was holding her whether she would be taking her home. “I have two cats already,” she said apologetically, “so I really can’t”. Cue dream sequence music, soft focus close-up of Her Royal Highness the luckiest cat in the world, and roll credits.  

We took her to the nearest vet - she rode in the car on my lap and fell asleep - and they confirmed she was female, about five months old and not microchipped. We named her Violet, which suits her beautiful grey eyes and silken coat perfectly, and now she sleeps on a velvet cushion whenever she can and is surrounded by cat worshippers of many shapes and sizes, the largest and most devout of whom is me. Because whenever I see her I marvel at how she found me just when I needed her. And I hope she would say the same about me.

Next: The arrival of Oberon

The story of Mao

This is a story that’s close to my heart. In fact, so close to my heart that I hesitate even to tell it, in case I lose my grip on it and what it means to me. But I will tell it, because in many years I may need to be reminded.

This is the story of Mao, a beautiful cat who found our family when there were only four of us, and made himself a part of it. He was a Tonkinese cat, a noble and handsome boy who loved us from the very beginning. We took a little toy mouse with us on the day he chose us, and we waded into a house full of Tonkinese kittens who were running and jumping in all directions and all looked very much the same. We threw our toy mouse into the blur of kitten and out strode a sweet but self-assured bundle with the mouse in his mouth, straight to us.

I used to joke that he was the cat I’d wanted when I was single, when I would have been able to devote so much spare time to just sitting with him on my lap, but he didn’t seem to mind too much that my lap only became available long after dark, when the house fell strangely silent. And when another baby arrived, the lap stopped appearing altogether for a while, along with the silence.

He befriended our Labrador and they often shared a bed, unless Sunday was chased off and then Mao had it all to himself. We’d often see them running full-pelt around the  backyard, Sunday in front and Mao at his heels, tail in the air, then seconds later they’d come back the other way. It was hard to tell who was enjoying the chase more.

He was the Yul Brynner of the cat world, and I could see him in the role of the king in The King And I, all fancy pants and endearingly misguided ego, strutting about with his nose in the air but too lovable to resist. We all loved him, and he loved us back. So when he suddenly became very sick we were all worried. With good reason. Mao had acute kidney failure, and he spent six days at the vet, during which nobody was sure he was coming home. He did come home, and we loved him even more in the hope that it might fix the one thing I knew deep down could never really be fixed. He came good, with the help of daily injections of fluid and a special diet, and he was more loving than ever. He took to being carried around the house on my shoulders, and we walked him outside on a lead so he could get some sunshine. But it couldn’t last forever.

We said goodbye to Mao in early March, and I stayed with the girls, all of us weeping and me trying to console them, while Randal took him to the vet. He came home with the body of our beautiful Mao, who we buried in the backyard under all the flowers we could find. I told the girls that Mao was in cat heaven now, chasing little mice and sleeping in the sunshine, and he would never be sick again. Eventually we stopped crying, but I struggled for several days to come to terms with losing someone who’d become almost a part of me. The things we love most about our pets - their companionship, their apparent empathy, their unconditional love - are the same things that threaten to ruin us when we ultimately have to say goodbye to them.

But then I slowly realised that Mao will never really leave. He is in my heart, and in all our hearts, and I see him curled up there, purring and eternally content, whenever I miss him (which is almost always). And when Rosa, who is four, asks where Mao is now, I tell her he is in our hearts, and he will be there forever and always.

Next: The story of Violet

On not falling into booby traps

The last time I went bra shopping I was on a mission. A mission that involved leaving behind my third soggy collection of maternity bras and replacing them with new brassieres, distinguishable by their glorious absence of clips and by their focus almost entirely on form, not function. I wanted my next bra to be beautiful, comfortable and flattering. I wanted to be able to put it on in the morning and not touch it or even think about it for the whole day. No itchy lace, no metal underwires and no wonderbras.

Ultimately I found the very bra for me, so perfect that I bought three in various colours. That was more than three years ago, and they have served me well up until about six months ago, when they started to lose their elasticity (much like my skin) and failed to fit properly (much like all my other clothes) while also looking very much the worse for wear (much like me, and all my other clothes).

So a couple of weeks ago I ventured back into the bra department of a certain store which is known for selling big labels at small prices and I must say I was flabbergasted. There were literally hundreds of bras in this place, all on sale and altogether comprising roughly half the world's supply of sponge. Seriously, one misdirected match and the whole place would have gone up like Cracker Night 1978.

I don't care if you want to hoist your tits up under your chin, double their size and create a cleavage that small animals can disappear into. I really don't. It's entirely your business. But surely we should have other options. There was not a single bra in this shop, at least not in my very modest (some would say small, others would say "Why do you need to buy a bra anyway?") size that did not have at least half an inch of padding. Even the teeny tiny training bras, which in my day consisted of two nylon triangles that joined at the front with a sliding hook, would not have looked out of place in certain street windows in Amsterdam.

What is going on? Not only have we deluded ourselves into thinking that our own assets are not good enough, we're conning our daughters into thinking that too, before they even have a chance to decide otherwise. It's taken me 41 years, but I'm at a point where I just want a bra that's comfortable, that says "I care just enough to not leave the house without a bra on", as opposed to "Give me one more throw cushion and I'm wearing a two-seater lounge".

We should take a stand. Maybe take all the abominable foam bras out there and burn 'em. No lighter fluid required.

the greer woman

I have not read The Female Eunuch. I don’t know that much about Germaine Greer except that she did her best work in the 1960s and 70s and more recently has been known for criticising a former female prime minister’s choice of outfits because they made said PM’s bum look big.
I have watched Greer on ABC’s Q & A and enjoyed her witty retorts at right-wing nutcases, and last night’s program was no exception, featuring possibly the biggest right-wing nutcase I’ve ever seen, one UK author Peter Hitchens. The rest of the panel, writer Hanna Rosin and writer/activist Dan Savage, did their level best not to jump over Tony Jones and punch Hitchens in the face when he suggested the world was hurtling towards certain doom led by same-sex couples and their evil, selfish, drug-taking, alcohol-chugging ways.
It was a lively affair, despite the more eloquent surroundings of the Sydney Opera House Concert Hall. But then it was part of the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, so we had fair warning.
But then a woman, probably in her 40s, dared stand and pose a question to the panel. Specifically to Greer, she asked was it possible the women’s movement had gone too far? Had women moved away from their roles as nurturers by outsourcing the raising of their own children to paid strangers? Were we raising ever more narcissistic children as a result, and missing out on time with them, more tired and depressed than ever?
From my position on the lounge, I gave this woman a standing ovation. Because for the past several months I’ve been asking myself the very same thing. I am at home with my three-year-old daughter every day, for lots of reasons: because I was made redundant last year, because I did not have formal childcare arranged for her, because I do not have a job and therefore cannot afford childcare but also because I cannot get a job without first having childcare arranged. Turn left at the rock and you’ll find me just in front of the hard place. But I am also at home because I choose to be. I want to be. I know from experience, having had two other three-year-old daughters in my life at various times in the past decade, that this time does not last. One day you’re sitting on a very small chair opposite your sweet child, sharing Vegemite toast and discussing the various shades of green, and the next you’re driving home from school in tears because they are not in the back seat any more and you won’t see them again until 3.30.
This is not to say it’s all peachy. I have had many days in the past year where I’ve felt like I almost ceased to exist. I am the unpaid washerwoman, cook, cleaner and scullery maid, and on the lowest of low days I question my sanity and my ability to be a good mother. Actually, I question that last bit almost on a daily basis.
There are working women who do all these things too, I know. I did them all and worked part-time up until last year, but even that small window when I was at work was enough for me to come up for air. It gave me some balance. And sometimes I struggle to find any silver linings, but the struggle always passes and I am so grateful for the time I get to share with my littlest little girl.
Now back to the studio. What will Greer say? How will she respond to this woman who is asking, almost pleading, why is it not okay to just be with our children? I’m afraid the answer made me feel sick, and it still does make me so angry and frustrated and disappointed that I’m not sure what to do with it. This woman, who stood before a huge audience inside the Opera House and thousands more watching from home, was laughed at. Openly. By everyone on the panel except the right-wing nutcase. Savage gave a flippant “Well we should just enslave women again ..” and Rosin was similarly dismissive. When she finally got her turn, Greer was equally condescending and even concluded that what we need is more nursery schools (daycare centres) and preschools. Now Germaine Greer may be many things, but maternal is not one that instantly springs to mind. I think she might benefit from giving women the right to decide what is best for their own children.
I can’t believe that such a lively, informed and educated debate on subjects as diverse as hook-up apps and the decline of Christianity descended so rapidly. I was so disappointed I just wanted to slink into bed and forget it ever happened. But I couldn’t. The questioner (one Kimberley Adler, and I wish I could thank her and say how sorry I am for the way she was treated) even had to clarify her point because it was taken and shredded like a lump of raw meat in the lions’ enclosure. But it was to no avail. They weren’t listening.
I just want to know, if Germaine Greer’s whole life has been dedicated to making women’s lives better, and fighting the good fight for equality in the workforce and in society as a whole, why is there still this one category of women who are worthy of nothing more than denigration, humiliation and contempt? I thought it was about a woman’s right to choose. I thought we were all in this together. I thought we could decide to just be women, and for once stop trying to be men.

this one, she's a beauty

The Song of Wandering Aengus


I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And some one called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.

                                             W.B. Yeats