Dear Reader
“In March I’ll be rested, caught up and human”.
- Sylvia Plath, 1953.
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Morning Ritual
Accustom yourself every morning to look for a moment at the sky and suddenly you will be aware of the air around you, the scent of morning freshness that is bestowed on you between sleep and labour. You will find every day that the gable of every house has its own particular look, its own special lighting. Pay it some heed.. you will have for the rest of the day a remnant of satisfaction and a touch of coexistence with nature. Gradually and without effort the eye trains itself to transmit many small delights.
- Herman Hesse1
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Celebrating Australian Suburbia
Sandy Weir’s Instagram account, Other People’s Homes is now a book. (I hope one day she photographs my little mid-century house. I hope it is after I have replaced the falling down fence).
Here she is in The Guardian with a sample of that eccentricity.
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Your Freedom is the End of Me
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Notes on Family Life
There are two mirrors bouncing reflections into one another and I am still lost about which parts of the bedroom are private and which parts are views.
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I was trusting and that had been a mistake. It had gone on so far because I had trusted the whole time. One wonders, how far would it have gone, if one had remained trusting. What kind of lesson is that about trust?
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All this summer I struggled with control. The humidity and the weeds were trainings in imperfection. They were my lurking anxieties manifested.
I tried to let life happen but failed.
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I have done an extraordinary amount of work, my fourteen-year-old son said. My husband looked away to roll his eyes.
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My son is still gentle and boyish, but his limbs are sharpening and elongating. He is unfolding, like something mechanical, something about to be towering.
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You’ve got a bit of a Tony Abbott smile, dog - my husband says.
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The teenagers never want to know if I am ok. They very much want to not worry. I, who did not grow up this way, want that for them, too. But, still, the lack of empathy annoys me.
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Here is my feminist task in raising a man. Not to let my teenage son mansplain to me, and not to let him practice passive resistance by asking for endless instructions on a chore.
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My husband and I are watching a family of strangers and I don’t like the look of the man. He nods and says, everybody in that house gets a beating.
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He is sculpting and I am writing. Where are the kids, he asks. Out being a pain in the arse somewhere else, I say. Good on them, he replies.
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You’re a sick cunt, a real sick cunt. (A young Aboriginal woman complimenting my husband’s therapy work with her).
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Husband: Sometimes a Northerner2 just wants a bit of trombone and sadness.
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This is the best of our house. The kitchen table is full of art projects and the chairs are full of drop-ins. And me, calm and cooking.
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I never noticed all the L plates on cars before now. I start seeing them as little signs of solidarity. Like, here I am, a parent with a teenager. I am struggling, too.
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I admire the way my daughter arrives with her bad mood and makes it everyone else’s business.
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My daughter is tall and blonde and nineteen years old. Young men are falling over themselves to help her. One day she rings me in tears. Freely sobbing, like a child. She has been attempting to buy her stepfather birthday beers and is refused service because her little brother is with her. Humiliated, less adult than she wants to be. On the other end of the phone, I hear a young man interrupt her. He is full of concern - sweetheart? She pulls herself together to explain. I’ll buy you beers, he says, and I hear him on the other end of the phone, rushing forward.
Another time she tells me she had been having trouble reverse parking on a hill when a young tradie approaches to park it for her. I want to tell her this magic power does not last forever. But, over the decades I know she will become more comfortable with it, and by the time it fades away she will have forgotten my words.
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I tried to explain the situation to my sister without explaining everything. I said, I don’t want to lose a sense of myself. I have to be careful that I am not just someone he does the chores with. So, now I am focusing more on the fun parts of myself. She said, doesn’t that just mean there’s more pressure on you to do the chores yourself, so you’re fun for him, as well? It can seem like that, I said. I have to be careful of that, too.
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We are helping her clean the house for her soirée. (It’s not a soirée, she scolds. I always called it a soirée, loved that word, sounded so glamorous). My husband cleans the toilet and I wash up some glasses. She is paralyzed by social anxiety on the couch. I think it is about some old wounds with her, but it is also about this generation not knowing how to host.
Here on the verandah is a nice place to set it up, I say. She responds with a list of potential disasters, including that hardly anyone will turn up.
I tell her share house stories from my twenties. How the two people you lived with plus another two coming over was a night. How on some evenings we would all take our glasses of wine with us for a long walk in the park together.
She smiles and her mood has lifted. We can leave her to it now.
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I come home from work to my fourteen-year-old son teaching his female friends poker. Charles Mingus is playing in the background. What have you been reading lately I ask one of the girls. Sylvia Plath.
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I saw Anne Enright speak. She kept catching my eye. She said I used to think feminism was about sex, and then I realised it is about nappies, all kinds of nappies.
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As a woman, no matter how much money you earn you can still worry whether your underwear is sexy enough for him.
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Naomi Klein says: Having a child gain access to an elite degree in an elite university. It takes you closer to the arms race of parenting.
I know what she means. My daughter, always troublesome and headstrong has done exactly this. It is hard to be comfortable with all the approval that comes our way. For her, it is perilously close to conformity. For me, it can feel fraudulent. Like, don’t think I haven’t made a lot of mistakes.
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My daughter is a changeling. The fairies switched her as a baby. My friend replies that this is the best explanation so far.
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I am looking forward to arriving alone in my hotel room. I do not yet know if I will howl with tears in the shower or lay on the bed and read for hours.
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My son is playing the lead in a student film. It is a horror film, and I am heartsick for an instant when I see his face on a missing child poster.
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Her consultation room made me feel like we were all in a play.
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My friend told me she gave in and got her daughter a tattoo for her sixteenth birthday. It’s the same one my friend and her older daughter have. A matriarchal family tattoo. You did the right thing, I say. I marvel at how motherhood is always different to how you think it is going to be.
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It’s a room full of middle-aged people, but most of them older than us, dancing to DJs playing vinyls from the 90s. It’s so joyful. My husband and I stay dancing for hours. I drink water for most of the evening. My husband very attentively keeps leaving to refill my cup, like he’s buying me expensive wines from the bar. The menopausal women move over to the doorways to fan themselves. The men who are in love with them follow to dance beside them. When they go out on to the street, they are all having their ‘special occasion’ cigarettes.
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I have ritualized cooking. But I am also increasingly the home’s only cook.
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You are the boring one, and I am the disinterested party, she says.
(I am listening to my friend telling my children about high school reunions and how you learn at these events that you have outgrown some people).
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Spoon me for five minutes before I get up, my husband says. I love the feel of your tits on my back.
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Christmas in Palestine
I saw this film a couple of years ago and loved it. If you’re wanting to see a bit more of Palestine, outside of this awful moment right now, then I highly recommend this documentary. It made me want to visit.. before all this.
We recently saw The Zone of Interest too, and I was completely blown away. The best film about compartmentalising and the Holocaust that I have ever seen. I found this film mesmerizing. My husband was not as enamored with it, because it is a very difficult watch, and in that way, we represented the spread of critics on this film.
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This Is the Poem I Did Not Write
while sorting mail, responding to posts.
Chasing a dream I can’t quite remember,
remembering things I never dreamed
could happen. Putting on rice, the laundry,
all the times it was time for pills or injections,
mounting the elliptical: stairs up, stairs down.
One martini late in the day. Writing other poems -
less impatient ones, better behaved.
- Rita Dove, 2021
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My Favourite Helen Garner Books in Order
Monkey Grip
This House of Grief
The Spare Room
How to End a Story: Diaries 1995-1998
Everywhere I Look
Joe Cinque’s Consolation
The Children’s Bach
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New Book
I have been following Mai’a Williams’ writing for a long time and I love seeing she has a new book coming out. If you are not familiar with her, then here’s a description:
Mai’a Williams is a writer and poet and lives in the U.S. with her daughter, Theresa. She worked in Quito, Ecuador in 2014 and 2015 as a journalist for teleSUR English, the global Venezuelan revolutionary news agency. In 2013, she lived in Berlin, Germany and worked as a writer and editor.
From 2009 through 2013, she was a community organizer and journalist in Cairo before, during and after the Egyptian revolution. In January 2009, she spent three days in Israeli detention with her one-year old daughter, during the bombings on Gaza, and after being freed from Israeli jail, she moved to Cairo and organized outreach programs with Sudanese teenage refugees/gang members.
She lived and studied in Chiapas, Mexico in 2007-2008 for six months and attended the Zapatista Women’s Encuentro with her baby daughter. In Minneapolis in 2007, she worked as a doula (birth assistant) for working poor Black American and recent west African refugee young mamas.
And, here’s a description of her new book - Apocalypse Here.
In “Apocalypse Here,” Williams explores living in a small rural Minnesota town in the Driftless region during social and spiritual unrest, climate change, and global and personal tragedies. Interwoven in the text are reflections on rural living, Blackness, Indigeneity, queerness, mothering, spirituality, climate change, ancestors, fugitivity, and desire.
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Crowd Your Walls with Art
Like this.
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Middle Age
I started messing around with early bedtime.
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The Chaos and Joy of Motherhood
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Fathers on Parenting
The very best parenting podcast around is Pop Culture Parenting. And it is a podcast by men3. I’m as surprised as anyone to be saying that.
Here’s some tasters.
True inclusive practice when a child’s trauma and dysregulation is aggressive.
How to approach a teenager having a violent outburst.
Why you have to care about the other kids in your community and not just your own.
Restorative practice - acknowledging what has happened that has been bad.
By the way, if you’re a parent with younger children don’t think that this podcast won’t be useful for you. More of their parenting discussions are relevant to younger children than teenagers - I just chose the ones about the more difficult teenage things to showcase here, because too few parenting podcasts deal with that.
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Daughters Leaving Home
Our daughter is a nestling, an only child who has spent a significant amount of time at home with her parents, due in part to Covid lockdowns, in part to her tendency as a homebody. We enrol her at the local high school, a school with a uniform, walking distance from our home, to be close to her peers – elements of my own schooling that I’d enjoyed and want her to enjoy, too.
Once they outgrow the nestling stage, baby blackbirds develop into fledglings, testing their wings while still staying close to the nest. Our daughter has other plans.
In Year 10, she successfully auditions for a specialist arts school to study drama and theatre. The school commute requires her to rise with the birds. Her new friends live all over the state – Frankston, Mernda, Barwon Heads – and there’s no uniform. Six months into her final year of high school, she sets her sights on film directing and producing. Highly pragmatic with a strong work ethic, she clocks that the Gold Coast is the centre of filmmaking in Australia and applies for graduate school in Brisbane. She gets an early offer from Griffith University.
In early December, she takes her first solo flight to Queensland to spend schoolies on Stradbroke Island with a group of close friends, several of whom have been accepted into an acting course in Brisbane. I’d anticipated that she would take a gap year in 2024 and travel overseas, as I did at her age, and I’d made plans on the assumption that we’d meet up in Europe, travel together as I’d done with my mother, making memories to last a lifetime.
From my friend, Angela Savage’s “Fledglings” in The Monthly.
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Family Night
I don’t know if I have told you this before but, I hate almost all children’s films. Most parents seem to have a soft spot for them, which makes them very nice parents to their children.
But, I never manage to even pretend I like children’s films, so we haven’t had a lot of ‘family movie nights’ together5. Fortunately, my husband quite likes some children’s films, so I tended to send him off to the cinema with them while I stayed home and cleaned the kitchen. (Yes, I would rather clean the kitchen).
Things changed when the kids became teenagers, and I could start introducing them to the films I like. But this isn’t quite the same as finding something new together to watch. So, I particularly enjoy the moments when we do. Our latest viewing find is The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin. We are a couple of episodes in. It’s basically an update of The Mighty Boosh, so it feels like you’re back living in a share house as a twenty-something giggling a lot in a beanbag. But, this time your kid is there too, and he’s got a lovely laugh.
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I Know It Is Not the Point, But Damn, She Is Still So Sexy
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Finally
The spiritual journey is not a career or a success story. It is a series of small humiliations of the false self that become more and more profound.
- Carl Jung
My favourite Hermann Hesse novel is Rosshalde. What is yours?
Northern England.
These men remind me of my husband when he is talking about his therapy work with his teenage clients.
How soothing is that Australian accent?
No, I don’t like Frozen or Toy Story or The Lego Movie or Up or, even, superhero films.
You’re a northerner married to a northerner. Also, I don’t think anyone outside Queensland ever uses the word soirée