JOURNAL
documenting
&
discovering joyful things
Ralph's gift
Last night in the middle of cooking dinner I went into the playroom and when Ralph saw me, he held out his arms and said "Mummy pick up? Cuddle?" So I picked him up and he snuggled his head into that little nook between my neck and chin and then he murmured, "Lub loo Mummy." (Love you Mummy). There is pretty much nothing better in this life or the next than to hear your child say "love you," unprompted.
Ralph's gift is that he makes people feel wanted. That is a powerful gift. Ralph doesn't judge your appearance, your intelligence or even your motivations. Ralph just accepts you for you.
From his earliest days, if I handed Ralph into your arms, Ralph would look at you and smile. People who were unfamiliar with babies, uncomfortable with babies, or just didn't like babies, loved Ralph.
Because Ralph would make them feel wanted, and everyone wants to feel wanted, don't they? Like when you're not a dog person but that orphaned puppy chooses your feet to sleep on. Or when the most popular kid in school picks you first for their tunnel-ball team.
Ralph makes you feel like that. He makes me feel like that every day. It is his gift.
Ralph. Is a sweet, gentle soul, who loves unabashedly and loyally. Ralph celebrates love.
Ralph. Calls loudly for cuddles and kisses, chubby arms and hands outstretched. Likes to kiss me on the forehead, like a benediction: "Kiss hair, Mummy? Kiss hair?" And I bow to him.
Ralph. Adores his sister Scout above all else. He can't pronounce her real name, so he calls her Sister. Now, we all call her Sister.
Ralph. Gets hangry. (Really, really hangry)
Ralph. Didn't crawl until he was almost one and didn't walk until 18 months, then seemed to wake up one morning with the ability (and ardent desire) to walk, run, climb and leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Ralph. It is our theory that that first year spent not-crawling was spent sitting and watching and listening and absorbing things instead, because suddenly Ralph emerged whip-smart, able to carry full conversations.
Ralph. Moves at full speed or full stop. He literally falls asleep face-first into meals. If I'm tickling him to keep him awake in the car (yes, I am THAT mother), he will simply shake his head and say "No thank you. Tired, Mummy," and then stick his thumb into his mouth and close his eyes.
Ralph. Is obsessed with animals of all kinds and, when his excitement becomes too great to bear, it manifests in shrieks of laughter.
A child's laughter could end wars.
Ralph. Loves to have his hands kissed, and offers them up to my lips like royalty.
When Ralph says "I love you" he always pronounces it "lub loo" and every time he says it, something constricts in my throat.
Thoughts on living small
This is not a story I think I’ve told on this blog before but, when I was a teenager, my family moved to a country property in the foothills of the mountains and, while my father built our house, we lived in a caravan. But mostly we lived outside. We even cooked and showered outside (until winter).
These photos are what my teenaged life looked like. The bottom photo is of our kitchen! We had no electricity or running water and at first we had no telephone (until a neighbour strung up a probably-highly-illegal phone cable for us from tree to tree along our kilometre-long, winding driveway).
My father was a social worker, not a builder, so this all lasted quite a long time. Many years, in fact.
There are so many stories I could tell you about this period of my life. Good ones and bad ones, a lot of funny ones. You can’t suddenly change your lifestyle without it changing you, possibly more-so because my brother and I were in the midst of our formative years.
From those years in the caravan, I learned how to slow down and pare back. You can't accumulate a lot of stuff in a caravan, or it will quickly smother you. And so you learn that you don't actually need a lot of stuff. Not at all. I learned to save, to conserve, and to value... everything. Every last resource was hard-won and frequently scarce, and therefore greatly appreciated.
A simple life. Days spent clearing our land for house and garden and horse, by hand. Picking up rocks, cleaning up giant piles of old glass bottles, half-buried. Digging out and gently burning off insidious lantana. Dad, throwing all his weight into the hand-held post-digger, trying to break a ground hardened by a hundred summers, but the ground almost breaks him.
Hardwood floorboards from a demolished 100-year-old farmhouse, used to build a gravity-fed tank stand. Hidden dry-rot. The tank-stand buckling under the weight of the water, and crashing down the side of the mountain.
Everything cooked on a gas burner or a hand-made, wood-fired barbecue. Everything. If you ever need to make toast on a frying pan, I can show you how.
Night-times spent gathered as a family around a single candle and a battery-powered radio, listening to old "talkies" (my favourite was an Australian comedy from the 1930s, called "Yes, What?").
Returning home one evening to find a baby sugar-glider, smaller than the palm of my hand, hiding on my brother's bunk bed.
In recent years I’ve read a lot of blogs about people undertaking tree-changes like ours. Simple living, wholistic living, tiny houses, that sort of thing. It’s funny the mixed emotions I feel whenever I read these stories. I’m not going to lie: sometimes, I feel a bit smug.
I think to myself, these people have NO IDEA how it really is when you seriously go off the grid. This isn't about making your own marmalade and spreading it on your homemade bread (I love doing those things, by the way).
It's about making a washing machine out of an old broom handle and a colander and using it for hours it to POUND your clothes clean, every weekend, until your arms and shoulders burn (that was mostly Mum, not me, although I helped. Poor Mum). Wearing headbands throughout most of your final years of high school, because you leaned too close to the candle while studying at night, and burned your hair. Showering from a canvas bag under a tree, in freezing wind. Applying the roll-on deodorant one morning before school and discovering that your mother had snuck around in the night and replaced all the actual deodorants with white vinegar. Spiders and beetles in your kitchen and bedclothes. Frogs in your drop-toilet.
We didn’t do these things by halves, my family.
But then alongside the smug is a hefty dose of guilt. Guilt because the way I live now feels so commercial and wasteful compared to the way I grew up. I confess: I love it when I can flip a switch and a light comes on. I like having the heater on in winter and I LOVE having the air conditioning on in summer. I like watching TV. I like doing the washing up with the tap running - it’s so much more hygienic! I really like to stand under a long, hot shower.
Please don't hate me but when I find a six- (or more)-legged creature in my house, I don't catch it and release it gently into the wilds of Carlton North. I kill it before it bites or spreads diseases to my children. And then I feel guilty and beg a silent, fruitless forgiveness from its corpse.
I feel like a traitor to my family, and to my planet.
Sometimes I think I find it more difficult to be a responsible global citizen because of the extreme way we lived when I was young. I’m like the kid that grows up without sugar and then makes themselves sick at other children’s parties (actually I WAS that kid, too).
But that's just excuses. I want to lessen my footprint on this world, to leave it a better place for my children. I COMPLETELY understand why all those other people I keep reading about are doing these things, and I admire them.
I have to fight with my own deep-seated selfishness, the side of me that says “I’ve already done my bit, made so many sacrifices. I've been the fourth person to step into an inch-deep bath shared one at a time, cleanest person first (I rode horses. I was the grubbiest). I've bucketed water out of said four-person bath and used it to flush a toilet. I’ve EARNED that long, hot shower, that air conditioner.” I struggle to find a compromise because I spent years not feeling properly clean, and not feeling comfortable. I’m not saying that it was all bad, not at all: a lot of it was fun. But I’m just saying… I don’t want to go back.
I don’t want to go back and I don’t know how to meet half way, because half way feels like I'm not doing enough and, if I’m going to give these things up all over again, it feels like it should REALLY be worth it. But who am I, to bargain with the world like that?
No great ideas, yet.
After the party
These photographs are the calm after the storm has passed. The quiet after the chaos.
When your child has a birthday, you want to take a moment. To pause, to remember: "this time last year, this time three years ago, this time 18 years ago…" I don't think the power of that day goes away for a parent, ever. Does it?
Because in that minute, the minute you are remembering, the world gained this new person. If that minute (and all the hard, gruelling, labour-of-love minutes that preceded it) hadn't happened, the universe would now have a completely different personality.
It would have a hole in it that could never be filled, and a regret that nobody could ever understand, and a loss that nobody would ever know how to grieve. The paths of every single person your child has ever met and will ever meet would have been altered, some of them subtly and some of them in extraordinary and powerful ways, but altered nevertheless.
That's the power of a birthday, when you are a parent.
Scout turned three on Tuesday, and I have been waiting for my own moment of reflection. Searching for it, even, in the frenetic, time-spinning events that have made up our hours and days of late. This is the first chance I've had to stop and think and remember, and now I find my thoughts and memories overpowered by my feelings, and I am without words.
"I love you," I tell her every night when I kiss her and put her into bed (and many times throughout the day). "I love you a million, billion, trillion." And she whispers, "To the moon and back?" "Yes," I tell her. "To the moon and back, and then more."
Every day since she was born, every, single, day, I have told her this: "I love you forever." It is because I believe that my love for her will transcend everything. EVERYTHING. Even if I die, my love is and will be stronger than my body. It is my most profound wish that neither of my children will ever live a second without love.
And that's the best I can do about taking a moment. Happy third birthday Scout!
Monday morning pyjamas + links
Yesterday I didn’t get dressed and I didn’t leave the house. In fact I barely moved from room to room. Out of the four of us, Mr B was the only one to don “day clothes” as Scout calls them, or to walk out the front door (to get coffees in the morning and later, to get ingredients to cook dinner).
We are just back from a little mini-break in Warrnambool, where Mr B had a meeting on Friday, and Scout was so excited you’d swear we were going to Paris. The second she woke up on Thursday she demanded “Is this the day we go to Warrnambool?” from her cot, and practically vibrated through the rest of the day until it was time to leave.
We picked Mr B up from work and headed out into the night, Scout quivering and chattering and singing the ENTIRE TIME. I do not think she drew breath from Richmond until the moment we pulled up in front of the hotel overlooking the beach. And not even then. At one point she had me singing Christmas carols for her in the car, and then she treated us to a Christmas carol-esque rendition of Humpty Dumpty, as Ralph snored softly and Mr B peered over the steering wheel into driving rain in the dark, momentarily blinded every time a car came towards us.
We didn’t do all that much on our break, to be honest. It rained a lot of the time and, when it wasn’t raining, the sea wind was FIERCE. Ralph and I were both coming down with a bit of a cold, so we all took it easy and stayed as warm as we could, only venturing into the bracing air for short periods. But it was still lovely to get out of town, to explore (briefly) somewhere new, and to be together. The children were divine, beautifully behaved, and it must be wonderful to be of an age when calling room service and tasting Coco Pops for the first time can truly transport you.
On the down-side, I barely slept a wink while we were away, with all four of us crammed into a room, Ralph snoring through his cold, and moonbeams not-so-romantically piercing my eyelids from an un-dressed skylight. Then last night our neighbour hosted a party, and everyone is allowed to host parties and it was Saturday night and he’s a lovely, considerate neighbour, but last night when I so badly needed to sleep, I lay awake instead listening to a bizarre remix of Britney Spears singing “Oops I did it again” to a duf-duf beat pound from the courtyard just below our bedroom window, accompanied by the conversations and laughter and (as the night went on) singing of a big crowd of happy people.
By 1.30am when I hadn’t slept yet and was sick and tired of feeling sick and tired (and jealous of my neighbour and his guests and the carefree life I used to lead even though I wouldn’t change things - I really wouldn’t!), I came downstairs to the couch, further away from the party, to try once more for that elusive sleep. I found it at last, and grabbed about four hours before it was time to get up for the kids all over again.
Which is a long way to lead up to the not-particularly-interesting news that not surprisingly, I woke up this morning with my cold fully realised, feeling stuffy and crabby and woozy and lethargic. And now we finally get to the point, which is: I spent the entire day in my pyjamas. Blocked sinuses notwithstanding, it was actually a wonderful way to close out autumn, filled with nothing much except craft and cuddles and giggles and train sets and makeovers-by-toddlers and stories and love.
So here we are. Back to work today. I’ve been absent from this blog for a few weeks and I’ve been dying to tell you about all the creative projects on the go right now, but that will just have to wait until I have more energy to share. In the meantime, here are some cosy links to welcome Monday and winter.
The Passion Planner (and other stories)
Good morning! This is my new diary. It's called a "Passion Planner" which is a dubious name for a fabulous concept. It bills itself as "the one place for all your thoughts," and also "the life coach that fits in your back pack."
The diary is filled with prompts and questions and lists and mind-maps to help you define the life you want and then get there, step by step. The idea is that you can manage your work tasks, your personal tasks, your creative tasks, and all the rest, all in the one place.
This is perfect for me because I'm trying to juggle so many things at once. I write freelance for a number of clients, so I have to keep all their deadlines and meetings and briefings and interviews etc under control. Then there are all the children's appointments, from daycare and music lessons to doctors' visits and vaccinations and play dates and parties. Mr B's work calendar, when it impacts on me because of meetings and missed meals and travel. And of course our own (limited but still it does exist) social life, and some big parties we are planning this year. On top of that, I have this blog and my snail mail and the book I'm illustrating and the books and zines I'm writing and several more dreams in the wings, and I want to keep on top of all of them but also be a little more strategic AND inspired about them. None of those needs and schedules exists in a vacuum, they all impact on one another, so a planner that can hold them all together seems, to me, genius.
I ordered my Passion Planner from here, and got the undated version (because hello May already?), but you can also get proper yearly Passion Planners, and in bigger sizes too if you want to scribble more.
How was your weekend? I know many people think Mother's Day is a commercial construct, but BOY I really enjoyed my day yesterday. Yesterday was like the poster child for everyone who says the Simple Things are the Best Things. Kisses from babies (the big, open-mouthed ones). "Letters" from toddlers. Toasted bagels with cream-cheese for breakfast. Warm salad of pearl couscous, chorizo and roasted vegetables for lunch. Paper-thin crepes rolled up with lemon and sugar for afternoon tea. (Are you beginning to detect a theme here?) Drawing pictures while watching old westerns on TV. Two children racing up and down the hallway, each pushing toy prams, laughing and squealing and yelling "We are going to the Lost City!" And affirmation. So much loving affirmation, from my family.
(Also both children ate all their vegetables and at least some of their tuna for dinner that night, by which time I was pretty much feeling like Mother of the Year.)
We are funny about presents in our house on "days" like this, and on birthdays, and anniversaries. Sometimes we give big, extravagant presents, sometimes we give a card and a kiss, or a meal out. (Sometimes we forget altogether, we are scatty like that). But that's because the love and affirmative words are given freely throughout the year. The gifts are big and extravagant when budgets and time and inspiration allow. They are smaller when budgets or time or lack-of-inspiration dictate. So nobody gets unwanted, pointless presents, only presents that truly mean something, both to the recipient AND the giver. I like it that way.
This year, despite me saying "It's too much," my family bought me not only a voucher for a massage and facial (oh! bliss!) but also a personal lesson from an artist on letterpress type and and line-art plates. And it is too much, really it is, but I've got to be honest, I can't wait to do this class. Do you want some letterpress mail from me? The deal is that if I enjoy it as much as we all THINK I will enjoy it, we will put our money-box savings into buying an antique letterpress at the end of the year. Now that's a generous family, don't you think?
How was your weekend?
A face that only a mother could love
Lately I’ve been thinking about faces that only a mother could love. Or, more precisely, about the origins of that cruel and silly saying, and about how much YOUR mother most likely loves YOUR face*, no matter what your face happens to look like.
Your wrinkles? She is SO PROUD of the decades of life and love that you put in to creating those wrinkles. Pimples? Your mother thinks they are perfect. She can’t believe her little baby is so grown up! Oh, your snaggletooth, it just breaks her heart! It is JUST like the snaggletooth that used to peep out from below your grandfather’s wiry moustache, and it is a powerful reminder to her of family and blood and the inescapable links created by DNA.
I am incapable of seeing my children through a fashion editor’s eyes. Of imposing on them those bizarre, objective, unrealistic attributes that are supposed to combine to create “beautiful,” like long legs, wide eyes and full lips. I look at my baby's chubby little thighs and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything more delicious. Ralph wears a dopey, droopy-eyed expression when he’s tired that makes me want to envelop him in kisses. Scout has short little legs that will probably stop her from ever being long and lean, and I smile with pride every time I see them, because they are just like mine.
My legs, that I have hated for as long as I can remember being aware of legs.
I spent decades wishing my legs were longer and thinner and smoother and more tanned. Yet now I look at my daughter, who appears to have inherited EXACTLY my legs (DNA, baby!) and, on her, I think they are beautiful. Perfect.
This realisation is changing the way I look at everybody. First of all myself. How can I hate my legs, when I see them on my daughter? She certainly doesn’t hate her legs. (She doesn’t hate mine either!) As far as I can tell she doesn’t think about legs at all, in any capacity other than how good they are at running around, and twirling, and splashing in the bath. If someone was to offer to take Scout’s legs off her and replace them with a longer, leaner pair, I would want to scream at them, and thump them, and have them arrested. How could they infer that ANYTHING about her was less than exactly right, or dare to make her feel that way about herself? But if those legs are perfect on Scout, how can I hate them on myself? When Scout is my age, I will still think her legs are perfect, and want to tear apart anyone who would try to tell her she needed to change herself. Maybe, possibly, probably even, my mother feels the same way about MY legs, right now. Ain’t THAT something to think about!
It is also changing the way I think about other people. Not that I’ve ever been one to walk around judging people on their appearances. I have many faults but, thankfully, that isn’t one of them. But now, when I’m absently people-watching, I’ll play a game in my mind where I'll focus on a feature of someone, like their nose. And I'll imagine what that nose must mean to that person’s mother. How their mother must know that person's nose SO WELL in the interior of her mind, how deeply every contour of it is etched in her heart, and how she would change nothing about it. Not one cell.
And so nowadays I look at all the people around me in all their different shapes and sizes and colours and regular and irregular features and all the rest of them, and I think just how much their mothers must ADORE all of those faces and bodies. It’s actually a really fun and special thing to do. Instantly, the guy at the counter when you’re paying for petrol, the middle-aged woman crossing the road ahead of you, the bored-looking secretary at the doctor’s surgery… all of them, seen through the eyes of their mothers and now me, are perfect.
* I’m aware of course that not all families are the same and not all mothers and children have the same relationships that I enjoy with my own mother and with my own children. Not everyone has known the love of their mother and that is tragic and heartbreaking and, if that is you, I am so, so, sorry. Everyone deserves to be loved, unconditionally, from the very beginning. I hope you know deep love, now. Either way, I want you to know that if I ever look on your face, I will be looking at you and imagining mother-love and I will truly believe that you, too, are perfect.
Photo is by Milada Vigerova, licensed under Creative Commons
The poppies
Last week at the Melbourne International Flower & Garden Show I stopped by a stunning garden of trees set around a lake like an oasis, with drifts of brilliant, crimson, crocheted poppies in clusters around it. Looking through the foliage and across the lake, the poppies continued all the way down, into some sort of field. When we stopped to admire them, Scout asked me to help her onto a rock and would I please take her photograph. This is quite rare. She patiently allows me to point a camera at her all day long but rarely requests it, and never before has she deliberately set herself up to pose with a backdrop in mind. As I was helping her onto the rock and pulling out the camera, a man lightly touched my shoulder and said “That is perfect. That garden was made for her. I made it for her.” I smiled and thanked him as he walked away, but was distracted moments later as Ralph started crying and the crowds were growing thick and we’d managed to lose both grandparents and when I turned back to Scout, she had decided to lie down on the rock and was pretending to snore. It was only later that I realised I’d bumped into the creative director of this whole amazing oasis, award-winning landscaper Phillip Johnson, and it made me so happy to think that he’d enjoyed seeing my daughter interact with his garden (which, incidentally, was an ANZAC tribute garden, making beautiful use of the handmade poppies contributed by volunteer-crafters from across Australia for the 5000 Poppies project).
So, belatedly, thank you for your kind words Phillip. We loved what you created and why you did it!
Beautiful
Every day I tell Scout she is beautiful. I tell Ralph he is beautiful, too. I don’t mean beautiful on the outside, although through my mother-eyes, I happen to think they are exceptionally good looking kids. I mean they are beautiful souls.
“Beautiful" in our house is an all-encompassing word that means kind, buoyant, loving, affectionate, funny, clever, quirky, creative and, most of all, bringer-of-joy.
“You are so beautiful,” I tell Scout, when she tenderly rocks her baby-doll to sleep saying “shh shh shhhhh, shh shh shhhh," or announces that she is going to twirl for the entertainment of the (blind) dog. “You are so beautiful,” I tell Ralph, when he scrunches up his nose with immeasurable glee because he has climbed onto a chair all by himself, or begs me to dance, or crawls over to the giant teddy and cuddles it with an audible “ahhhh.”
I text Mr B a picture of the children standing side by side at their little blackboard, drawing a duet masterpiece in chalk. “They are so beautiful,” he texts back. And later, on FaceTime, “Scout! Ralph! You are beautiful! When I get home I am going to kiss you and tickle you!”
But lately I’ve been second-guessing myself and my vocabulary. I am bringing up my children in a world that places a premium on physical beauty, and the having or the lack of said beauty is tied to everything from self esteem to bullying to professional success to relationships to personal finances to mental health.
Is it dangerous, I began to ask myself, to raise my children to feel worth from their parents in a loaded word like “beauty?”
“You are so beautiful,” I whispered to Scout last week, as I carried her up the stairs to bed. What I truly meant was, “Your soul shines like a beacon of good in my dark and confused world.” But as I walked back down the stairs alone, I started to panic. What if all she had taken from my words was “You have lovely eyes and your hair is shiny?”
Ultimately, though I think that this is where the combination of language and parenting can be a powerful thing.
Because I have decided that it is OK to tell my children they are beautiful. Often and with punctuation. In fact, I have decided that it is important for me to do this.
For many years to come, my children will learn - from peers, from strangers, from media, from pretty much everywhere - that physical beauty is something to be arduously sought. They will learn this whether I want them to or not, because we do not live in a cave.
But my children are learning their language by immersion, not from a text book. So far, nowhere have they read or been told “The word ‘beauty’ only means ‘looking good’.” So in these first, formative years of their life and language, their experience of the word “beautiful” is teaching them that “beauty,” first and foremost, means “goodness.”
Sometimes Scout pushes my hair out of my eyes and says “Mummy you are so booful,” and I know her words have nothing to do with how I look. She also tells the dog, the cat, her baby dolls, her baby brother and her friend Bella that they are “booful,” again with zero reference to their looks.
While I can’t protect either of my children from what others will tell them in the future, I am laying a linguistic foundation today that I hope will equip them to understand the aesthetic of beauty to be rich and complex and multi-layered.
And soul-deep.
So I will continue to tell my children they are beautiful. Because I want them to feel beautiful, in the full meaning that I have chosen to give that word, and because I want them to learn how to look for the true beauty of people they meet as they go through life.
And when the world starts to load "skinny" or "pouty" or "even-featured" onto their experience of that word, it will already hold, in their minds and hearts, something infinitely more... beautiful.
Image credit: Volkan Olmez, licensed under Creative Commons
Hunting for highlights
So gastro? Turns out it's not so much fun. All my plans for the weekend were washed away in a rather miserable and sorry-for-myself 48 hours of lying in bed and moaning and intermittently rushing to the bathroom to do unthinkable things.
The highlights?
* Venturing downstairs on Day 2 for half an hour and telling the kids I couldn't kiss them because I didn't want to make them sick, so Scout cuddled my ankles
* When I peered over the top of the stairs at one point to ask Mr B a question, Ralph looked up and yelled "Mummy!" with the biggest smile
* Hearing the children squealing with happiness downstairs, playing with their father. Actually that was bitter-sweet because I was SO jealous not to be involved
* Ralph yesterday morning calling "Mummy! Mamma!" from his cot, and hearing Scout explain, "Don't call Mummy, you have to call Daddy because Mummy is sick"
* Getting up this morning feeling about 60 percent, and discovering the house NOT trashed and most of the washing-up done and the clothes washed and the toys picked up. Mr B is the BEST
* Keeping down a cup of tea
I spent the two hours this morning between getting up and the kids waking up, putting my little kingdom to rights. Packing things away, and finishing the washing-up, and refrigerating the HUGE bounty of fresh, organic fruit and veg a friend had brought over the day before, and looking up recipes for ways to use said bounty before it all goes off, and packing the kids' bags for daycare, and giving the dog his eye-drops, and sorting the papers on my office ready to go back to work today.
It felt good to be back in charge of my tiny world again. I couldn't face the thought of breakfast, but that cup of tea was GOOD. Now the kids are singing in their beds, wanting to get up. I'm so relieved! I spent last night listening to their every cough, wondering if it was in fact vomit. Hopefully my miserable, lonely quarantine has saved them. All fingers and toes crossed!
So... how was YOUR weekend?
Image credit: Morgan Sessions, licensed under Creative Commons