Last week my friend K called and asked if I could get away for two days and meet her in Orange. Each year her brother and sister-in-law hold a lunch at their property, Bell Hill, with Giovanni Pilu as part of Orange Food Week.
Lunch was sublime:
The location enviable:
But this is what was the best thing about it all. What 26 years of friendship looks like:
Onward my dear friends, onward.
Today was the funeral of a dear friend of mine’s father. He was two days shy of 62 when he finally succumbed to a long and bitter battle with kidney disease.
He was one of those men – kind, gentle, softly spoken, tough, clever and creative. The passion with which you could see he loved his beautiful wife, now bereft of her soul mate who had been by her side for the last 40 years, and their two children could honestly take your breath away.
A large part of my formative years did not feature a traditional mum, dad senario and there were friends whose families filled out that picture for me. I remember dinner’s with K’s family of Amazonian giants (seriously they’re all 6ft or taller) and being both scared, intimidated, in awe and in love with the volume and energy a dad at the dinner table brought. J’s dad was a farmer and that was another whole realm but one I just soaked up. I marvelled at how he’d yell at J and her sister in the paddock not doing whatever they were meant to be doing but then that was that, done with, forgotten. What happened in the paddock stayed in the paddock I guess. And then there was L’s dad. Beautiful man.
My faith has taken a great deal of interrogation over the last 14 years and I am in a weird twilight zone where I see the role faith can have in your life but no longer believe. Today’s service showed me, reminded me of the comfort a faith can bring in times of intense emotion.
Driving down to the service (just the other side of Wollongong) brought other memories flooding back. All the container ships sitting there off the coast. We used to stand on Nan’s verandah and count them and every Boxing Day watch the boats sail by in the Sydney to Hobart. Funny the things that stay with you.
A very dear person was at the funeral today. I had hoped she’d be there. Years ago – as in a DECADE ago – we had a dust-up on email. Stupid stupid email. It came off the back of a couple of incidents where I had behaved badly, lying to her rather than being honest and then both of us being at different place in our lives. For me I was jealous, intimidated by her and some of her friends and their confidence and comfort in their own skin. I felt like a very ugly duckling. Funny, I was always told how mature I was and yet I look back on how I let our relationship down and realise what a child I was. I found it so hard to move on from the ‘fight’, feeling self-conscious and clunky but now, I realise, I was embarrassed. GOD. Not a day goes by when I don’t think about her. Not one day. I think it’s about time I pay that forward yeah?
Felix came with me today – Chef couldn’t get away from work as his boss was interstate and it was a long way to go (2+ hours each way) on my own. Can I just say, my boy? He does me proud every single day. It was the first funeral he’s ever been to and he handled it with grace and care, offering me a squeeze and a hand around my shoulders every so often. We came home on the coast road, stopping for an ice cream at Stanwell Tops and marvelling at the view back down the South Coast. He went to say it was a good day but stopped himself for obvious reasons. But you know what, with immense sadness there was peace, reconnection and time to stop and say goodbye. I think he was right.
Onward.
I put a shout-out on Facebook this week about needing some new tunes to run to. Well, didn’t people come up with the goods – I mean, what is not to love about some Joan Jett, Adam Ant and Def Leppard to run to? But in additional to some oldies were some awesome new tunes.
For starters my friend EDG offered up The Black Keys El Camino saying it was good and ‘crunchy’. She’s right. It is crunchy and awesome to run to.
But somewhere in there I checked into the tags I had on Shazam and rediscovered this:
Ball Park Music. I checked out the whole album Happiness and Surrounding Suburbs. Shiny, happy, crunchy music. Every single track. Get on it toot sweet people.
ONWARD!
I think this post might need a public health warning – that here be deep thoughts and reflections. It is not meant to be depressing but just to say there is so much to be done. That indeed, every small thing each of us does matters. That one sponsoring of a child or volunteering with Youth off the Streets or baking a cake for a friend who’s feeling down – it all matters.
But I also think we need to be demanding more from our leaders – thumping our fists until we get brave, visionary leaders willing to make the hard hard decisions and manufacture real change from the top down. A fish rots from the head – great leadership equals a great nation, likewise lacklustre, short-sighted and self-serving bureaucrats gives us greyness.
I’m kinda sick of the greyness.
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I haven’t been that nice to my kids these last few days. With the good of reduced meds – no side-effects, improved libido, a return of my creativity, ENERGY – comes the bad – quick to anger, emotions ON THE LOOSE.
I have joked that I now realise why I was medicated – to be able to cope with our living arrangement and Oscar. But I’m not really joking.
I have been apologising to the boys for me being angry so easily. So often. For the poison that can just roll off my tongue before I even realise it.
I have been really struggling to be patient with Oscar.
Today he totally wigged out. A complete and utter screaming, crying, wailing, fighting mess of a meltdown. He didn’t know why and does not have the capacity to reign it in. It went on all day, from around 8am this morning until the last teary wake-up he had at around 11pm.
By that time I was just crying big lumbering tears with him, incapable of understanding what the fuck was going on, feeling so so guilty for just how short I’ve been with him this last week, my heart aching for him and his own confusion as to why he was behaving like this.
Someone had posted a picture to Facebook yesterday with the tagline, ‘my child is not giving me a hard time, they are having a hard time’ and HOLY CRAP PEOPLE why not administer some physical blunt force trauma to me as well because the emotional stuff is well and truly covered.
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This last week had my friend Eden in Africa with World Vision.
Just like that.
She was in Niger to see – and thereby raise awareness – the famine that is gripping the country and the plight of its people.
Many people commented and rallied around Eden, pledging support and sponsoring children.
Doing something.
She does not profess to have the answers or the solutions. The problem is bigger than huge.
I don’t understand how this has been allowed to happen, over and over again.
Famine, war, death, more famine, more trauma and on it goes.
Oscar has a friend who comes from Africa, his birth nation I am not sure but he and his brothers and sisters were brought to Australia to be by their mother’s side, who herself had been brought here for medical treatment by a Catholic missionary service.
I see them here, their mother now dead, being raised by people with so much love in their heart, so much generosity of spirit they are raising four children, three of which have additional needs when they were at a stage of their life their own children were just flying the coop.
These children, full of laughter and life. Who would they be, what would have become of them had these remarkable people not come into their lives.
Can you imagine being a mother watching her children die in front of her from a lack of food or water? or from a completely treatable, nay PREVENTABLE, disease?
At the blogging conference last week I was reduced to weeping tears from one mother standing in front of us sharing her story of her son Avery, who died inside her.
One mother.
One tragedy.
Multiply it by HUNDREDS of THOUSANDS.
I haven’t sponsored a child, I haven’t donated money. I’m really conflicted over this. Yes, each of us doing something small adds up to something big. But. In my brain there is a but. What are the governments doing in these countries? What is happening at an international political level?
I think each of us doing whatever we can is critically important. It keeps us engaged with the world on a much deeper and beneficial level. But if it’s just us with pick-axes while the powers that be sit by in their idling front-loaders, we’re not going to get very far. The bandaid on a cankerous sore.
So much at stake by shaking up the status quo.
A few weeks back Four Corners ran a program about the brutal austerity measures being metted out in Ireland. About deals struck which somehow see the people who can least afford it now being the ones made to ‘tighten the belt’ to make up for the gross excesses and greed AND MISTAKES MADE at the top of the pile.
Isn’t that like punishing your kid because you’re tired?
The pressure, the expectation for us as individuals to be doing something is not misguided, I believe it ties firmly to my own political belief that no one gets left behind, but that it stands on the battlefield for humanity without the back-up of the senior forces that are world leaders and nations of power just seems unfair and downright unacceptable.
Every day everyday people stand up and make a difference. I’m just so sick of people in positions of political power and clout not doing the same thing.
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Today we drove down to my Dad’s and Chef made me listen to a podcast called Two Chefs – or some such – out of the States.
Did you know, that of ALL the pork and chicken produce sold in the USA, only ONE PER CENT of it has been produced in natural surrounds – ie, outdoors, SUNLIGHT, room to move.
ONE FUCKING PER CENT.
In Australia it’s still ONLY THREE.
ONLY three per cent of the chicken or pork products sold in our country have been raised in a NATURAL environment, with SUNLIGHT.
In the US, the Defence Forces have reported that recruits are not reaching the fitness standards within the timeframe that they should be because they are NOT GETTING ENOUGH NUTRIENTS in their diet.
In the US there was an eColi outbreak in an organic spinach crop. How could an effluent born disease be transmitted by plant matter? Because an intensive feedlot nearby had contaminated the water table. That’s how.
In the third world they’re malnourished because of famine. In the developed world they’re fat but malnourished because of corporate greed.
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A few weeks back I went to an event in Sydney’s gorgeous Centennial Parklands to learn about the Vicks Breathe for Life is supporting Save The Children in Bangladesh by training local women to become nurses and providing immunisations and antibiotics to bring down the dramatic child mortality rate in that country.
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I watched Samson and Delilah for the first time last night. I spent most of the movie feeling nauseous – for the petrol sniffing, for the brutal reality it portrayed.
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There is so much that needs to be done, so much.
Violence.
Greed.
Abuse.
Poverty.
Hunger.
Irrespective of where you live.
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In 2009-2010 there were MORE THAN 286,000 reported cases of suspected child abuse in Australia. There are different reporting thresholds for “risk of harm” and “risk of significant harm” – wouldn’t it be a relief to just fall into the former rather than the latter.
Surreal.
From that 286,000, just over 131,000 cases were finalised, there were 46,187 substantiated cases of child abuse and just under 36,000 kids were in out-of-home care.
46,187 substantiated cases of child abuse.
Emotional abuse
Neglect
Sexual abuse
Physical abuse.
I’m trying to imagine how you can visualise that number. I guess imagine a Swans game in Sydney at the SCG versus a Top 8 team. That many.
Here we are trying to keep kids alive in third world countries from hunger and disease while the flip side sees a developed rich country such as our own we actually abusing their children ourselves?
I just don’t get it.
So I’m not going to sponsor a child in Africa, not because I don’t think it would make a difference but because for me, there are children here than need my help, whatever that may be and in whatever form it may take. That’s how I want to help.
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There’s just so much to do.
No one gets left behind.
Onward.
Every now and then a particular panic seizes me. Grips my heart, churns in my belly, brings on a sweat. This is the special “is this it” panic.
I get it often. That time is running out. That this can not be the sum total of my life. I do not say that to dilute the remarkable riches I have – an awesome husband who has (somewhat) patiently waited 15 years for me to find my libido, four boys who I am watching grow into men and well, that is a gift, a GIFT and possibly the most awesome diverse group of friends humanly possible.
I’m 40 in December. (On the 8th. Note that down will you. I want French champagne and jewellery. In case, you know, you were wondering.) The whole getting old thing does not bother me, inasmuch as I’m not one to hide my age or dress like a lamb, but all these weird health issues of late have messed with my head and it’s only now I realise just how hard the last couple of YEARS have been.
So I’m doing what everyone else is doing and writing the list of things I want to do by the time I’m 40 or indeed in the year I am 40.
First cab off the rank? Tough Mudder
Is that not the sexiest most awesome thing you’ve ever seen?
Tomorrow I start a 26 week training program with CrossFit Athletic specifically for Tough Mudder. At 6am. On the one hand I’m so nervous I could vomit in my shoe. On the other I am SO exhilerated to be doing this. THIS. For me. To see just how far I can push myself physically and mentally with other people wanting to do the same and having fun doing it.
As I have been want to say of late: bring that shit on.
Mind you, if you never hear from me again you’ll know I died. Died during my first training session.
This is me now:
Look, a champagne pregnancy!
The dog days are over
The dog days are done
The horses are coming so you better run
ONWARD.
So you know how I had my first CrossFit training session this morning? That I was nervous but pumped for it?
1. I woke at 4:20 following the rather alarming dream of turning up to my first training session in only socks and shorts. I fell back to sleep sometime after 4:47.
2. I just woke up at 6:17. My alarm did not go off.
3. It appears if you simply turn on an existing alarm on your iPhone for 5:30am, it’ll still ONLY go off on the days you set it to, as opposed to the days you WANT it to. So an alarm set for weekdays? Not so much on a Saturday.
Yeah.
The phrase “WHAT AN IDIOT” is coming to mind.