Christmas

In the subtropics

Dear Reader

It’s almost Christmas. Pray for my teenage daughter’s cooking. She’s an ambitious but fragile vegan and humidity tends to randomly ruin recipes.

This month’s newsletter is big with images, so it might be better to open it on your browser at the Substack site, as the email version will probably chop it to nonsensical pieces.

This month’s newsletter is an ode to observing this ancient wintery ritual in the subtropics.

It’s also a celebration of different kinds of family life. If you find Christmas¹ with family difficult, remember, there are many different ways to do crazy family life.

And lastly, aren’t my husband’s feet nice?

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Summer

Silence

and a deeper silence

when the crickets

hesitate

- Leonard Cohen, Summer Haiku

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12 Signs That You are Having Christmas in the Subtropics

1. It’s as cold as snow, because you are inside in the air-conditioning. Outside, the heat wave and the humidity are completely insane. You vow not to leave the house.

2. You are at a party where there is no air-conditioning or the air-conditioning can’t keep up and everyone’s hair is wet with sweat. You hug² one another and say what the fuck is with the air-conditioning.

3. You’re at a pub and friends say one more drink to wait out the storm before we go home.

4. Running errands for Christmas means having three showers in one day and changing outfits each time.

5. People have sex in the afternoons, after yet another shower, while laying naked under a lazy ceiling fan.

6. The lawn has to be mown twice in the week of Christmas just to keep up with plant growth.

7. If you ask hosts what you can bring, it always includes and pick up a bag of ice, will you?

8. The ultimate boast is that you are staying at the beach for Christmas.

9. You swim in the rain, which is warm.

10. Your egg whites won’t fluff and your antipasto cheese ball Christmas tree sinks.

11. Frozen Margaritas.

12. You feel lucky because you saw a Christmas beetle.

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Help! I Can’t Cook and I Have to Take a Plate to a Christmas Party

Baked Camembert, my friend. Or microwaved, actually, because we’re in a rush these days. Here is the dirtiest little cheat of a recipe there is. Tastes delicious, looks pretty, and is easy and quick to make. I promise.

1 cheap camembert

Gently crosshatch the top with a knife

Brush surface with a little bit of olive oil

Sprinkle with tiny bit of salt and pepper

Sprinkle with a reasonable bit of chilli flakes and rosemary leaves - ooh pretty, red and green like Christmas

Drizzle with honey

Microwave for under a minute (check it, should be soft and the lid of the cheese about to break, and otherwise needs a teensy bit longer). Don’t overbake or it the melty cheese will harden.

Serve with firm crackers to dip into all that melty cheese.

Need to bring a wine, too? Dry sparkling wines go well with Camembert, or a dry rose or dry apple cider.

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Other Families

What I really enjoyed about recently reading Don’t Call Me Home by Alexandra Auder³ were the little windows into her family life now. (As I have written before, we like prying into other’s home lives so we can see the possibilities of how to live).

Auder’s childhood home was notoriously dysfunctional - lacking boundaries, routine and often, a home - but lovingly enduring, all the same. Her memoir is such a record of love that it was difficult, at times, to detect whether Auder sees the mothering she received as neglectful or abusive, until I read this interview with her in Vogue:

I think the bond between my mother and I was a true bond in that somatic sense. I often think that even kids who have had truly horrible childhoods—anyone can determine whether or not [my childhood] was that; whether it was abuse or not abuse will be up for a discussion by other people—I think if a kid experiences that somatic connection with another person, whether it’s a birth parent or not, I think it’s deeply therapeutic. And Viva was really good at doing that. My sister and I are both grateful for that. We always felt, from a young age, secure in our physical selves, which was truly because of my mom.

Auder’s mother is Viva Superstar - fierce, demanding, famous and outrageous. But, ultimately, mother and daughter are both survivors, too. Their relationship has the kind of intensity that happens sometimes in single mother households⁴.

In this interview in The New York Times, Auder describes her mother as “a difficult person with no money” - and in case you are new to my newsletters, difficult people, - crackpots, eccentrics, like Kanye West and Nina Simone and my grandmother - are a whole theme I like to write about. (I appreciate the attention Auder gave to wealth in that description. As Hannah Black once wrote in an essay about mental illness, “(i)f you have a lot of money, you can go on being crazy without consequence for longer than if you have only a little”).

Auder, gifted and parentified, is now a middle-aged mother with two teenagers⁵, a husband, a strong sense of humour, and a career in film. She is the kind of wild spirit who also has a deep capacity for responsibility. While the core of this memoir is about Auder’s childhood, it is the glimpses into how Auder approaches middle-age that I found most interesting.

Before you read the excerpt below it might help to know this - Lui is the teenage daughter (see them below in this wonderful photo of mother and daughter), Miko is the little boy, Nick is the husband, Gaby is the sister and Viva is the author’s mother (remember?).

Difficult mothers and difficult daughters.

“I always fear that trying to not be like Viva has made me remote,” Ms. Auder writes. One day in family therapy, as she writes, her daughter, Lui, accused her of just that. The session spurs a memory of the night before Ms. Auder’s college graduation, when Viva paced the streets of Tivoli, howling like a character in a Greek tragedy as Ms. Auder hid in Mr. Nehéz’s closet.

“Daughters!” Viva cried. “If you ever have a daughter, keep trying to have a son. The girls will end up hating you.” There was much more, and the performance ended with this kicker: “Did Jesus Christ ask to be crucified?”

Sitting in the therapist’s office with her own angry daughter years later, Ms. Auder writes, “I had vowed to never say words like this to my own daughter, but I can’t escape the thoughts. Raising daughters is like a crucifixion. Shut up, Viva.”

Ms. Auder said she didn’t quite know why she had written the memoir. “Maybe it was some storytelling gene,” she said, “or the knowledge that there was something both distinctly idiosyncratic and universal about my life with Viva. I wanted to describe the burning love I felt for her and the maddening frustration and fury. As time passed, I began to see our story as a love story. One that falls apart. I see the story, now, as a feminist story. It’s about women! Strong women, crazy women, women in love, women in rage, women in despair, birth, desire, sex, single mothers, friendships only women can have, women trying to make art and raise a family at the same time, women trying to do it all and failing. Women enduring … each other.”

Raising daughters is like a crucifixion. God, I love that observation. This extract is from The New York Times article on Auder’s memoir.

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Family

My goodness, we think all our family issues are about our parents but are they really about our siblings?! Zoe Williams’ interesting article on sibling rivalry in The Guardian has had me thinking for days. No two children grow up with the same parents.

And now there are two, or more, and it is existentially important that you treat them both the same. Except that isn’t possible, because you are a person, and your partner (if you have one) is a person, and each child is a different person, and you’re at a different point in your life, and a different point in your life cycle as a parent. I think of the acres of time I just laid at my son’s tiny feet, no plans, no bustling, arrangements cancelled on a dime because the thought of waking him up or even rearranging any of my limbs was intolerable. If I’d acted like that after my daughter was born a couple of years later, my son would have had a thing or two to say.

This is the blessing and the curse of the firstborn, what psychotherapist Nicole Addis calls the “heir apparent fallacy”. She says: “There’s often a huge narrative behind the first child that the parents develop consciously and unconsciously, the hopes and aspirations within the relationship and outside it. There’s a lot that goes into that first child that the poor child ends up carrying. And I don’t think we ever do that quite the same way with the children that come after.”

This can look like favouritism to the second (or later) child, or maybe it looks like favouritism from one parent and anti-favouritism from the other. But however it looks, if the children experience it as differential treatment, they will take that out on each other.

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Tales of Communal Living Mothers

While we are on the topic of families doing it differently, there’s this loving reflection on an open home that appeared in The Guardian recently from Lynne Segal.

Today, it’s hard for me to sum up the diverse benefits and possible limitations of those years of collective living. Now middle-aged, Zim will still tell anyone who asks that he had a “wonderful” childhood. He certainly enjoyed the permissive openness of the house, with its large, wild garden, which meant he could, and did, always have other friends (mostly boys) around. The children were always racing in and out, and up and down the stairs, finding spaces to play or watch TV together. The supervision they received had a very light touch. Happily, I also hear from some of Zim’s childhood friends that their near-daily visits to our house were hugely important to them, even life-changing, especially as they moved into their teenage years.

I am far too aware of the challenges of parenting ever to suggest ideal ways of doing it. What I can say of my solution is that, as an unprepared mother, it seemed to work for me and my son to have domestic support from partners and friends who believed in the idea of collective care. It certainly created a household that was much more relaxed than my own childhood home.

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The Night Watch

If you’re in Brisbane there’s the chance to see one of my favourite artworks, The Night Watch by Francis Alÿs at the moment. It is included in the Fairy Tales exhibition at GOMA, which is a fantastic little collection including Tracey Moffatt, Kiki Smith, Polixeni Papapetrou, Del Kathryn Barton and Abdul Abdullah. And, my god, the witch’s house with all the umbilical cords is divine!

The exhibition is as menacing and beautiful as it should be with a name like Fairy Tales. How dangerous the family has historically been for children - stepmothers, ahem - and how very dangerous men outside the family have been for girls, too. Poor teenage Red Riding Hood!

Also, I was recently in Canberra and had the chance to see Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency exhibition. So good - and much to say about doing family differently. If you do go, then, I am wishing you a near-empty gallery like I was fortunate enough to get for this one.

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This is My Chance in the World

I believe that we, that this planet, hasn’t seen its Golden Age. Everybody says its finished.. art’s finished, rock and roll is dead, God is dead. Fuck that! This is my chance in the world. I didn’t live back there in Mesopotamia, I wasn’t there in the Garden of Eden, I wasn’t there with Emperor Han, I’m right here right now and I want now to be the Golden Age.. if only each generation would realise that the time for greatness is right now when they’re alive.. the time to flower is now.

- Patti Smith

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Inadvertent

I love an accidental Renaissance (Baroque) photograph.

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  The whole culture
is telling you to hurry,
                          while
                       the art tells 
                            you
                          to take
                          your
                  time.
     Always listen to the art.
- Junot Diaz

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Read a little, sleep.

For your holidays this year, remember..

Throw everything out of your mind. Read a little, sleep. The world will still be here when you wake up, and there’ll still be everything left to do.

- James Baldwin.

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Peace on Earth or Resistance Until We Get It

“I think the hardest thing for anyone is accepting that other people are real as you are. That’s it. Not using them as tools, not using them as examples or things to make yourself feel better or things to get over or under. Just accepting that they are absolutely as real as you are”. - Zadie Smith

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Recommend

Hey, did you ever get around to watching Better Things⁶ after I recommended it? If you did not and the reason was that you weren’t subscribed to the Disney streaming service, then Have I Got a Holiday Suggestion for You…

The first four seasons are now available on SBS On Demand.

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Finally

Somewhere over the holiday period, after the wild and delicious madness of Christmas⁷, look for some solitude and space. As Virginia Woolf says.

“I need solitude. I need space. I need air. I need the empty fields round me; and my legs pounding along roads; and sleep.. animal existence”.

More quiet walks. I’ll be thinking of you.

1. Or other cultural festivals.

2. Honestly, there is a kind of ‘high’ people experience in the humidity here that is not unlike the high people experience from a sauna, with their increased heart rates.

3. Remember I talked about reading her book in previous newsletters - here, when questioning narrative, and here, when talking about the problem with boundaries these days.

4. I’ve written about this a few times before, both in articles and in these newsletters. I was raised in a single mother household and for a time was a single mother, myself.

5. I think. Possibly the son is not yet a teenager.

6. Like Auder, Pamela Adlon, the creator of Better Things is a woman creating a thoughtful portrait of love about a mother whom others might consider to be ever so slightly abusive. What a fascinating topic!

7. Or whatever you do with this time of year.