Family

Teenagers, young adults, ageing parents and us, betwixt and between

Dear Reader

I don’t even like mangos, but isn’t the abundance of a fruiting tree calming to look at?¹

This month in my newsletter there are some notes from my journal from these last few months…

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Staying With My Father

We are all talking about how we fall asleep. Almost all of us have trouble either getting to sleep or staying asleep, except for my husband and my father.

“I go to sleep in an instant”, my father says.

“Same with me”, my husband replies.

“It’s a nice way to be, isn’t it,” my father says, “we must have clear consciences”.

Hmm, I think.

He points to all of us, his family, and says to my husband, “they really have to wear something off don’t they”.

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We arrive to the cacophony of drunken wedding karaoke next door to my father’s three-story home fand are invited to join it immediately. But, we’re too jetlagged to accept.

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My sixteen-year-old son finds my father utterly charming. Watching them, I realise that these will be his favourite memories of his grandfather. The moments are small and unintentional. Like, when my father instructs him on how to pour olive oil without making the bottle “greasy”.

He makes my father take him for a ride on the back of his motorbike. He has earned some favours from my father for being willing to get up early in the morning and go running with him. And, as luck would have it, for breaking too fast in the beginning of the run and wearing out sufficiently by the end of it for my father to beat him.

On another day, my son agrees to go on a hike with my father to a crowded landmark. My father quietly fumes with the rest of us - my husband (recovering from the flu) and my daughter and I - for not joining them. We nap in the car instead and watch an almighty traffic jam slowly untangle.

Later, my father accuses us directly of bad manners for not joining the hike. I have rarely seen him more bitter. He speaks as though an interior voice has been freed from his head. I am both perplexed and annoyed by the direct conflict. Get over it, I long to say. Raising this over dinner is, itself, bad manners. What is this lowering of inhibitions, I wonder. The accumulation of disruption from both travel and hosting or the increasing confusion of the world to him?

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Flying

Of his sister, my sixteen-year-old son says, “she’s wearing home gear. I wouldn’t be caught dead outside of the house in that, and she’s walking around the airport like she owns the place”.

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My daughter tells us to wait because she is changing into her sneakers. “Fair enough, get out of whatever that is,” her brother responds.

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An Indian teenage girl sidles up to my son while we are waiting in line. She says, “I shouldn’t be doing this, but I wanted to tell you that you have the most beautiful eyes and hair”.

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My son doesn’t like to wait with us in airports. Partly because after a couple of overseas trips he is a seasoned traveler and impatient to be moving. And, partly, because at sixteen years old we are all embarrassing to him.

Airline staff are checking his boarding pass and asking him if he is travelling alone today. He’s six foot three and so they call him sir more often these days. “No”, I call out, “he is with his loser family”.

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Vietnam

Early one morning I wake to hear the sound of a path being swept with a broom of fine sticks. It takes me straight back to my childhood in Indonesia.

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Travelling with my vegan daughter is like travelling with someone religious, there are multiple opportunities every day for acts of strict devotion and moments of moral outrage.

Everyone in our group is getting annoyed with her except me. I have some sympathy for the devout.

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The woman doing my pedicure has a tattoo across her neck reading:

I Was Born

To Be Brave.

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I love the way everyone on the road honks their horn in countries like Vietnam.

I am here. I exist.

Some of the horns are meant to be rude, but most of the time they are simply to mark your position on the road to others. It resembles flocks of birds. Geese flying or lorikeets coming to rest in the trees at night.

I am here.

I exist.

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All our hotel rooms have transparent bathrooms. What do I not know about other couples’ love lives?

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Travelling with a Vietnamese friend and she is having fun introducing me to all the new foods, and I am having fun trying her specially curated recommendations². She is thrilled when I spontaneously agree to join her for a massage.

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Pleasures

1. My son asked me for a recommendation from my bookshelf. He described what he was in the mood for and now he is reading Dave Eggers’ You Shall Know Our Velocity. I love that we are sharing books properly now. What a time of parenthood.

2. Remembering I can lock the dogs outside and have an intrusion-free space for a while.

3. Letting a dog into the bed for a cuddle when you feel sad.

4. How dogs behave at the end of the walk - so calm and gently attentive to you. And, the relief in all of us when I first let them off the leash to run.

5. Mocktails.

6. Making a really good ‘pantry challenge’ meal and feeling satisfied with your wise kitchen staples, budgetary constraint and imagination.

7. Knowing that cooler months are coming.

8. Homemade stock.

9. Homemade salad dressings.

10. Thinking about learning oil painting.

11. My friends and family learning pottery. Their pottery gifts to me.

12. If you want to know if I ever regret blocking you, I don’t.

13. The inner-peace I paid for.

14. Getting to an age where I know my most strongly held values. Almost at an age where I live according to those values.

15. Candles in candlesticks.

16. Going to bed with a book.

17. Letting my children go. Letting them travel together alone for the evenings in Hanoi. (Having my son’s consent to have him on a tracking app).

18. The pleasure my son and husband get from having me willingly on a tracking app on their phones. I had no idea how much they both wondered where I was and how late I was running all the time.

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Work-Life Balance

Husband: Stress looks good on you, Fox. Like a wounded animal.

Me: I look like prey.

- I am going to make a chilled cucumber soup with nasturtiums, I declare.

I don’t.

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Inadequate Effort at Dinnertime

‘Dinner for fleas’, my daughter calls it. The family dinners that I make that are apparently insufficient for the appetites of young adults and older teenagers. The kind of meals I have graduated into as a middle-aged person. Just a bit of this and that.

Salt and pepper tofu with some marinated cucumber salad. On another night maybe some homemade flat bread and some whipped feta dip with caperberries and nuts.

“No more nibble dinners,” my son instructs me.

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Daughter

My young adult daughter tells me her best friend is horrified to hear that I have redecorated my son’s room as a surprise for him to come home to from school camp.

“No,” my daughter tells her friend. “My mother is great at it, I’d love her to do it for me.”

I am filled with pride. I have been loosely inspired by Derek Jarman’s home, which we saw while travelling in England and which my son and husband loved.

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She collects young men who become accidentally besotted in her. It is then annoying for both parties when they realise the misunderstanding.

On her latest encounter, which has ended apparently with some slightly manipulative messages being sent from the wounded to her, she says, “my best friend and I both agreed, he was gentle parented”.

What an insult, I think. (Me, the attachment parent who sent my children to Montessori schools).

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My children’s godfather is an anesthetist and while watching my daughter tend to one of her bird rescue patients he says, “hours of fun with your science experiment?”.

“I think if it is eating and drinking it deserves a chance,” she snaps back.

He nods and then says more gently, “ok, you need to up the dose of tramadol then”.

“You give me good advice,” she smiles back at him.

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Son and Husband

“I’m surrounded by too much male energy,” I complain.

“Well, you would have had more feminine energy if you hadn’t rehomed the hens,” my son says.

“Oh god, this sewing kit. It’s so cheap and nasty. I can’t thread this stupid needle,” I mutter.

“You alright?” my husband asks. “Need some masculine energy?”

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How I describe travelling in the United Kingdom with my husband and sixteen-year-old son to friends who ask how was the trip:

“You have heard of the ‘forming, storming, norming’ sequential stages of team development? Well, these two were ‘the warring and the boring’³”.

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My husband gets melancholic while we are travelling. I watch his homesickness and realise he has been back in England for too long. He has started to put roots down again.

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We are up late at night arranging a stick sculpture and cutting curtains for my son’s bedroom makeover. “We’re the kind of parents you want and the kind of parents you don’t want”, I observe to my husband. “Because, not every parent does a Prospect Cottage makeover. But, some parents would get you the exact size curtains.”

“Fuck those people,” my husband laughs.

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The names of pubs and houses in England are like poetry. The eight bells. The groom and the horse. All three of us love poetry, so it is a good fit for us.

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"I won’t be making you Marmite toast again, sorry Mama. Vegemite’s demented cousin,” my son tells me.

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What kind of education did my son get, I wonder as we trek through historical and political sites and he asks inane questions. Either he knows absolutely nothing or he is deliberately trying to annoy me⁴.

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Back home I am filled with a sense of goodness. I have taken my son for a long country drive to pick sunflowers at a farm so he can get his driving hours up. We have a whale of a time.

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Gardening

For me, summer is a time for resting the garden. The garden is not resting, as such. Parts of it are either dying or doing their best to cling on. Other parts of it are living like a jungle, like something domesticated finding itself suddenly free of fences.

So, it is more that I rest my ambitions during the summer.

(I love this account, @gardeningwithcaseyjoy for making me feel comfortable with that. “We are encouraged to be perfectionists about something that is inherently imperfect..” And that failures and losses do not stop you from declaring yourself a gardener and, your pile of weeds, a garden).

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Dreams

My mother calls me to tell me about a dream. In it the family is all working on creative assessment pieces⁵. Yours, she tells me, was an intricate film piece making commentary about perspective. She said she woke up thinking her daughter (me) was so clever before realising it was actually her own brain that had created this art.

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I dream that I am swimming after a hot air balloon skimming gently along the water. I am trying to reach it because my purse, passport and other identification documents are in the basket. I grab hold of the rope just as the wind picks up. I instinctively let go of the rope. I can feel that the hot air balloon is going to rush up into the sky.

Meaning: Let go of some things about your identity or risk getting taken away with them. And, ultimately, realise that you could start again.

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Connection

Talking to my father is getting more and more Dada-esque. It is not helped by him being overseas. The conversations are fragmentary. They are sometimes devoid of supporting context. Like everything I am learning to work on with family, I let go.

“DADA, as for it, it smells of nothing, it is nothing, nothing, nothing” - Francis Picabia.

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I spent an hour talking to the eldest of my half-brothers. Both of us determined to stay in touch more, I suggest that we all go to France together. “I would like to see France through your eyes”. But as with some people, he hates his own countrymen. Italy, he proposes instead. I don’t have the money for either trip at the moment so it doesn’t matter.

One of my other half-brothers is living in Berlin. “Berlin is great!” he says to me. But then later, “it’s pretty grim and cold.. I’m currently bouncing around sublets”.

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My best friend tells me how much she likes my husband and I as a couple. Last year we holidayed on a canal boat together in Oxford. “I would hear you two laughing, and then it would go quiet and you’re talking. And then, a little bit later you’re laughing again”.

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She looks a little like Queen Camilla from a distance. Kind of haughty. But, once I am near her, I see that her gaze is actually just quite opaque. She appraises me before saying, “you can never have too much red lipstick.. my father always said”. I am cautious, because I know that kind of comment can be an insult.

“You can either go big on the lips or big on the eyes”, I say, looking at her eye makeup. “You went with the eyes, and I went with the lips tonight. You look great.”

She softens. “Oh, I love you”, she replies.

I am very good with the gently insane.

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Prayin’ On My Downfall

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Finally

See you again soon, friends.

1. When I was traveling in England last year, I saw all these fruit trees growing alongside streams and next to roads and I felt enormous envy. No wonder their children’s storybooks are full of fallen apples and pears. No wonder they are always making fruit crumbles. It’s everywhere. It’s on every walk.

Coming home I wished we could have something like that. But we have bats, possums, insects. Our animals feel like swarms. You can hear them eating at night. And then on a dog walk the other day I spied this mango tree and I remembered that we do have some escaped fruiting trees. Subtropical fruit trees.

2. I am vegetarian, but also, she carefully observes my tastes and habits as she develops her recommendations for me.

3. Possibly, there are more difficult ages in children for parents to be doing weeks of travel together with than sixteen-year-olds. But there can’t be many.

4. Ha, I was just tired and impatient.

5. Interesting that no matter your age you still dream about studying.