C is for ... Cardiac and for Cancer

Towards the end of 2011 events conspired and I was tested for my mettle. A number of trials appeared at once at my door and I had to find the reserves to cope and carry on. Just as I thought it was all over, my brother was suddenly and dramatically hospitalised. He's diabetic. He'd been managing this illness through diet and exercise and we'd all thought he had a handle on it. Even he thought so. But it is inherently human to become complacent, I think. Just as things begin to go well in our lives, we pay them less attention. And so it was with him. He paid less attention to what he was consuming, though still keeping a careful eye on his weight and continuing to exercise well. The result, however, was that he was whisked off to the emergency department suffering from congestive heart failure.

A dramatic, worrisome and tiring three weeks followed as he was treated and prepped for a quadruple bypass. My mother was teetering on the brink of going out of her mind with concern - seeing your child (whatever the age) in hospital, near death, is never an easy thing. As she said when told of his predicament, it was supposed to be her in hospital with her children hovering around the bedside not the other way around. We trouped through those weeks, emotions running high, energy running low. Visits to hospital blurred into one another and I fell into bed exhausted most nights. Coping with the sudden mortality of my brother, negotiating my own life around taking my mother to and from the hospital every day because I was concerned she shouldn't be driving in her emotional state, all took its toll. Eventually the surgery was conducted and he came through it. Not well. His recovery was slow. Much slower than it should have been. He spent longer than anticipated in the ICU. And he didn't bounce back to reasonable health as predicted. Instead he declined. He lost more weight, looked more frail and began to feel more despondent as his own mortality and the-things-not-done in his life came into stark reality. And we all became intimately, if unwillingly, familiar with medical euphemisms and language.

Shortly before Christmas he was hospitalised again. Nobody knew why he wasn't recovering on schedule and to the enormous credit of the doctors at that public hospital, they were not satisfied with simply letting him go home and cope. A litany of tests, and they truly were testing of him, were run. He was anaemic and nobody could work out why. There didn't appear to be any firm source of bleeding and every procedure to account for his blood counts came up negative. In the meantime, he became more and more frail and less and less hopeful. His talk soon turned to the possibility of no recovery, of leaving his family, his wife and young sons, without him. His mind went to dark places and struggled to see any light or hope.

Then Life played its trump card. He was diagnosed with cancer. Not any run-of-the-mill, relatively-easy-to-treat cancer, but a variety that was aggressive, insidious and rarely seen in this country. Again the various doctors swung into a flurry of action and he was quickly put onto surgical lists, treated as best as possible for his anaemia and readied for the inevitable extirpation of the tumour. Remember this is not ancient history. This is not told from the perspective of temporal distance. This is recent, nascent and unfolding. The day before his surgery, he sounded more calm, less breathless and better than he had for months. He was comparatively upbeat and appeared to have made a crucial decision in his own wellness. And I do mean "wellness" not illness or health. He underwent his surgery two days ago. Shortly after surgery, he was awake, sitting up, chatting and finally looking like he should have two months ago. He appears to have turned a corner. The road ahead on this particular journey is both long and arduous. Recovery will be slow and pot-holed, but his new-found positive attitude will, I believe, help to smooth the way.

I feel like I finally have back the brother I lost through life, circumstance and finally terrible, testing illness. I'm hopeful that he'll seize this opportunity at life and do all that he wants. And I'm intensely grateful for the lessons it has taught me.

Lizards in the Ceiling

Standing in the kitchen, serving myself dinner.

Thump, scrabble, scrape, thump, bump from the ceiling.

Possums? This early in the evening? How many of them are there?

The ceiling sounds like it's about to collapse. WALLOP.

Then it appears in the skylight in the kitchen.

A racehorse goanna.

That's when the fun begins.

How do we get it out?

There was much coaxing and many attempts to get it into a garbage bag so we could release it outside. It wasn't having a bar of it and jumped out onto the floor instead.

I did an impersonation of the guinea pigs, squealed loudly and jumped up on the sofa (essentially, I behaved like a great big girl's blouse!).

LomL and B1 eventually rounded it up (with no assistance at all from me or B2) and it was released into the backyard where it quickly scarpered off.

Removing the skylight cover to get to the goanna

It was not impressed at being coaxed into a bag

Fabulous fellow was hard to catch!

Abounding Life in the Backyard

Baby bobtail attempting to camouflage itself - see why they're so hard to spot?

Up close and personal with the baby bobtail

A baby bobtail lizard wandered lazily past the back door two days ago. What did the children do? They called me over to come see the baby. Not because they were particularly interested, new life is par for the course for them. They don't see the delight in sighting a baby of a species so recently under threat. Only a few years ago the population of bobtails in the hills was nearly decimated because of a virus. But for B1 and B2 it's no big deal, we've had a breeding pair on our property since before we moved in.

Magpie preparing for take-off

For me though, it was sheer delight and a sign that my garden is providing precisely the right kind of environment for breeding to occur. That's exciting on so many levels. My garden has become not only my retreat and haven, but that of other creatures too. We have nests galore filled with eggs of Red Wattle Birds, Black Cockatoos, White Cockatoos and Galahs are no strangers, Magpies, Twenty-eight Parrots and Bronze-wing Pigeons abound. We even have interlopers - Kookaburras and Rainbow Lorikeets stop by to eat mice or fruit. But there is something truly charming about having a garden that encourages bobtails and motorbike frogs to breed. And my heart is always glad at seeing them.

Sailing Ships and Sealing Wax and Fashion

Image via WikipediaI was reading about the Princely Treasures exhibit at the Art Gallery of Western Australia today and there are some interesting myths that abound about some of the art works on display. The one that caught my eye most particularly was one about the weaving of objet d'art into the hairpieces and wigs of women's hair in the 1600s, 1700s and 1800s.

It appears that there was a phenomenon of weaving whole model sailing ships (yes, like the ones you find encased in bottles) into wigs for women to wear as high fashion. Bizarre at the time? Perhaps. The reason it caught my attention so vividly though, is that I had indulged myself by buying Marie Claire magazine yesterday and had come across an article about Anna Dello Russo and her apparent slavery to fashion. Lo and behold, what should Anna be wearing in her hair? You guessed it. A ship. wonders will never cease.: anna dello russo for net-a-porter.: 'via Blog this'

Strange but true. Fashion isn't new, it's just a series of repeating cycles (some older and more tenuous than others apparently), cobbled together on a whimsy and sold with supreme confidence.

The M-word

There seems to be a growing phenomenon where I live, of random salespeople calling women they don't know "Mum" as long as they're accompanied by a child. Inevitably, these people are trying to ply their wares. They're snake-oil salesmen in different guises.

Today, a young woman who works for a children's photography company approached me with a chirpy "Hello Mum! Would you like to get some photos of the kids?". I'm sure that this was part of her training; a way to familiarise the target market and an attempt at a psychological inducement, emotional guilt, to capture those precious moments of your child's life before it's too late. I'm fairly certain this chipper greeting resulted from the machinations of a locked room, replete with degrees in psychology and marketing, working on the perfect pitch to guilt-trip parents into the investment of a photo package. No doubt it's part of the corporate training when you join up with the company.

Sadly, all it did was get my gander up. So here's where I need to back-track a little. When I got married, I didn't change my last name. There was a variety of reasons for this, but one was certainly that my name was as much a part of my identity as anything else about me. I have degrees in my name, I had gained employment in my name, I had learned to live with my name (there was a shaky moment when I was 8, but that's a story for another day) and, despite having to spell my name every time I said it, I had learned to love my name. When I stopped working full time, I felt like I had lost an enormous chunk of my identity. It was the first time since I was 15 that I felt an obligation to explain my expenditures. Not that LomL ever required that of me, it is simply what I felt.

When I became a mother for the first time, I was thrilled beyond measure. But the Damocles sword was that I instantly stopped being who I had been before. I became a milk factory, a nurse, a teacher, a guide, a maid... a mother. While a very very small part of me pined for the loss of my old identity, a much larger part thrilled in the prospect of the future to come. When I became a mother for the second time, I was more ready for the the way in which my identity would be subsumed by a child and I think I coped with it better. My children never called me "Mum". That was another stubborn strike for my own identity. I figured that in a playground or shopping centre in Australia, a child calls out "Muuuu-uum" and fifty women turn around. I didn't want to be one of them. So instead, I opted for "Amma" (mother in Malayalam); a nod to my cultural heritage and an opportunity to emphasise my difference in a world of sameness.

Up until the time my boys went to school, it felt like my identity had been hijacked by my role as mother. It has been a long, slow, continuing journey, punctuated by extraordinary friendships that has led me to where I am now; more comfortable with my multiple roles and multiple identities, fulfilled by motherhood, loving the work I do, seeking my more creative, artistic self that has been too long neglected for more pragmatic concerns, being the complex whole that I am.

So when all that I am, all that I hold dear, is reduced to an unimaginative, connotative, reductive "Mum" said by a stranger, my hackles inevitably go up. I don't doubt that it never crossed the mind of the young woman spruiking her company's wares in the shopping centre that she was, by her simple utterance, homogenising me. It is what I rage so hard against, and what I suspect we all rage against... losing individuality.

This is Australia

I drove around the corner on my way to pick up B2 from school when a large collection of animals in the paddock caught my attention. It was sufficiently unusual for me to slow down and pull off the road. I'm pretty used to seeing various animals in paddocks around where I live. There are sheep, horses, dogs, birds, small groups of kangaroos and even a couple of alpacas. But the sheer number of creatures is what stopped me in my tracks.

I drove up a lane that skirts the boundary of said paddock and there they were - masses of kangaroos. There must have been nearly 30 of them, lounging in the sun, munching on the grass and generally doing what kangaroos do best.

It's nice to be reminded that nature still abounds despite the creep of development. There's certainly very little that's more pan-Australian than a mob of kangaroos.

There has been plentiful rainfall and it's heartening to see the local wildlife flourishing. There are birds aplenty visiting the garden (including some finches I've not seen this far north before) and we continue to have breeding pairs of bobtail lizards around the house. All in all, it's shaping up to be a glorious Spring.

My "Like Water for Chocolate" Moment

It was Father's Day today here in Australia. A difficult day for me. My father died 14 years ago and every year since, Father's Day and his birthday have been days on which I fall into a terrible funk. I remember him and miss him always, but these two days are the ones I set aside for truly indulging myself. I allow myself to feel completely sad and bereft, only pulling myself together on Father's Day for LomL's sake. My darling, long-suffering and patient husband knows how I am on these days. He allows me the latitude to miss my father, to feel sorry for myself and wish for what might have been. He understands, he checks on me and he leaves me alone to weep at the sink.

Usually, I skip the Father's Day gathering with the in-laws. It's more than I can handle. The blatant reminder that my father isn't here. This year, I found myself there and offering to make food for the occasion. I woke early, helped B1 and B2 to make LomL's Father's Day breakfast in bed, then got on with making pies for lunch. I was washing spinach when it happened. I made the mistake of thinking about the fact that I was making these pies for LomL's father, but would never again have the opportunity to do this for my own father. It occurred to me that I had only one year with my own father after I married. The pain was visceral. A tear escaped my eye. That one tear seemed to give permission to all the others waiting just behind. I couldn't stop. I found myself weeping uncontrollably into a sink full of English spinach.

Ironically, in the middle of my weeping, I couldn't help thinking about the Laura Esquivel novel, Like Water for Chocolate. The image of Tita, grief-stricken and weeping through the preparation for Rosaura and Pedro's wedding feast, and the magical effect of her sadness transported through the food, leapt to my mind. In the midst of my sorrow, I couldn't help but wonder if my emotions would be contained in the food.

I was too tired and caught in my own thoughts to really notice whether that was so today. I wonder still.