May Your House Be Safe From Tigers

May you always be my friend

From my Instagram

Dear Reader

I am a little adrift right now. But, reminding myself that I am supposed to change and be changed in this life. You are too.

Because of the routines we follow, we often forget that life is an ongoing adventure.. and the sooner we realise that, the quicker we will be able to treat life as art: to bring all our energies to each encounter, to remain flexible enough to notice and admit when what we expected to happen did not happen. We need to remember that we are created creative and can invent new scenarios as frequently as they are needed.

- Maya Angelou

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Group Picture

My favourite little ‘Wes Anderson’ your life is this one by Amal Al Balooshi.

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Small Town

We live in a big city in Australia, but my husband comes from a small town in the north of England. On the weekend we ride down for coffee. He said he is reminded of his grandmother. “I will show you how she would mount her bicycle.” And, he puts one foot on the pedal and with the other foot skips a few strides beside the bicycle before throwing his leg neatly over it. I can see the past.

Down at the café everyone knows him. I am struck by the ease with which he has found this sense of community where I have sought none. There’s something about the way he uses his time on the street. The way he takes his time ordering the coffees, buying wine from the cellar, asking if there is a table free, patting someone’s dog. The way he faces towards people as a word or two is exchanged, so that it may grow into conversation.

He is not more tolerant than me, in fact really, I am the more patient of the two of us. He sometimes complains about the sourness or tedium of someone he talked to while there. But, I think the difference between us is that he does not see the street as just a means of travel, and I do.

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The Women on My Mother’s Side

My most treasured heirloom is a huge round antique mirror. Like the full moon. It belonged to my great grandmother on my mother’s side. She was Scottish and Irish. I have the mirror she looked into, but I do not have a photo of her.

I also have a grandmother’s earrings. They are long, dangle drop crystal bead earrings and I wore them on my wedding day. She was a frequent divorcee, so I am pretty sure they bring feminist brides luck.

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My Mother Comes to Stay With Us

My mother is sitting at our kitchen table instructing us on how to toast one another. She looks at me and my husband, wondering how she will finish this sentence. “You're supposed to look people in the eye as you do it... or you have the curse of.. bad sex”.

“We know,” I say impatiently. “We always look one another in the eye”. 

She turns to my son and says, “well, that's reassuring, isn't it?” 

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My husband watches my mother taking leave to go to bed and says, “she can titrate her own dose of socialising, that’s a good sign”.

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Mythology

That my daughter should name her dog after a Greek myth. And, that while I am preoccupied with the Greek myth of Demeter and the dangers lurking underground, she is thinking about the threat of too much light.

In psychiatry, the Icarus complex is associated with bipolar disorder. Icarus is warned not only about flying too high, but also about flying too low. This is a myth for instability.

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Dreams

1. I dreamed I found a woman and her wolfhound had walked into our house. She said she had walked in by mistake, but I felt uneasy and knew immediately she was deceitful.

2. I read about opium dens and later dreamed I went home with a woman who wore a 1920s style negligee to bed. She fell asleep while we were having sex.

3. I dreamed about a conversation with my father. He was trying to tell me about something that was happening for him. “Like you, I’m in something of a muddle,” he said. He was cancelling his trip to France. I wondered if I could help him, but I lost track of the conversation before I could find out how. (Fear of lost connection).

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Observation from My Husband

“I don’t know what that boy’s father is like, but I know every time he sees me, he tries to make himself as small as possible, his footsteps around our house as light as he can manage”.

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On Acts of Destruction

I rewatched The Sopranos recently. It has held up surprisingly well. I first watched the series fourteen years ago when I was breastfeeding my youngest and we were cocooned alone together in those long witching hours. It was that time of mothering where all the baby wants to do is breastfeed and build your supply up. It’s a difficult experience, almost frightening, unless you can find some way to surrender to the immobility. And six seasons of Sopranos on disc was a great way to do that.

There is so much to love about Sopranos. The food. (Apparently there are more shots of Italian food than there are of killings, which says something in a mafia show). The murderous mother. The psychoanalysis. The dark humour. And James Gandolfini, my God, what a performance.

This time when I watched the show, that baby was a teenager upstairs in his bedroom. It is always interesting to revisit books and films when you have reached the age of the protagonists, isn’t it? To see what new meaning you draw from it. Sopranos is all middle age - parenting stroppy teenage children, caring for elderly parents, rising in the ranks of management, going to therapy, making sense of yourself.

I went looking to see if Sopranos is having a resurgence and sure enough it is. Here’s an article in the New York Times talking about young audiences discovering the show. And, I loved this quote in the article from Felix Biederman discussing the meaning of the show, which is about the decline of America.

Decline not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically breathtaking act of destruction but as a humiliating, slow-motion slide down a hill into a puddle of filth. You don’t flee a burning Rome with your beautiful beloved in your arms, barely escaping a murderous horde of barbarians; you sit down for 18 hours a day, enjoy fewer things than you used to, and take on the worst qualities of your parents while you watch your kids take on the worst qualities of you.

Eek.

Remember how Tony Soprano starts the show, which is by saying, “The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking: It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over”.

It’s an interesting time to reflect on change. The best is indeed over for men like Tony - white, brutal, greedy. But the rate of change feels extraordinary for all of us, at the moment, no? I keep thinking about how quickly recent events are being recontextualised. I mean it is largely good, but it discombobulating, too. This is most powerfully evident for me with events involving shame. Has any other social experience flipped as far and as quickly as the rules of shame?

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Have You Made Pesto¹ with Celery Leaves Before?

You must.

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Handfuls and handfuls of celery leaves (stop throwing the tops in the bin)

Couple of cloves of garlic

1/2 cup of freshly grated parmesan

1/4 cup of toasted nuts (cashews or pine nuts or almonds)

Whole lemon squeezed

Olive oil (and then a dash more)

Salt

Eat it with crackers, sitting around a low table together.

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Being Absorbed

“Indeed, one of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one’s own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people. Conversely, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious, to feel unabsorbed and cut off from the community and the surrounding world.”

- Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity

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I recently read Graft: Motherhood, Family and a Year on the Land by Maggie MacKellar and it’s my favourite new Australian book. I went to bed with it and read it in one sitting, staying up until midnight.. on a work night. That’s high praise for a tired, working mother.

MacKellar’s path into motherhood was inextricably linked with grief. Her husband died from suicide before their second child was born, and her beloved mother died not long afterwards. The joyousness of mothering has long been interwoven with the sorrow of loss. Now middle aged and remarried, this parenting chapter is coming to a close for her, with both children reaching adulthood and moving out into the world. But, MacKellar finds herself in an unusually difficult time for reflection, on account of their sheep farm being caught in the peaks of drought.

When lambing starts I give myself over to a different rhythm. Every year the time of lambing passes in a blur of early mornings, long days and broken nights, and I find it hard to tease out what exactly fills my days. This year there is nothing in the paddocks for the ewes to eat. They will survive on pellets and hay, but they will have to walk to find good water that is neither brackish nor heavy with mud. Instinct will battle with the genetics of the ewe. She has been bred because her mother was a good mother. But there is an older knowledge passed down - that to live, a ewe must walk away from her lamb. Only the ewes with the strongest mothering instinct will raise a lamb this year, and because of it they themselves might grow so weak they’ll die.

MacKellar and her husband are forced into grueling efforts to rescue stock, including daily searches of the paddocks for desperate newborn lambs whose mothers have died, and for the distressed ewes whose babies are dead. Many are now inevitably on the brink of death, themselves. So, MacKellar throws herself into the work of resuscitating them and attempting to pair them with one another. Again and again, she repeats the almost ritualistic task of transplantation - grafting orphan lambs to grief-struck ewes. You cannot overlook the symbolism. If successful, neither the ewe nor the lamb knows anything different and the tragic loss preceding this is erased for them.

It is motherhood, but this time without the grief.

MacKellar knows this kind of stuff could sink her, but her capacity for sadness is the same sensitivity that has given her such capacity for pleasure. Graft is also an account of the beautiful and fleeting sensory moments she experiences while out walking. Her book, in love with language and meaning, is really about what it is to be fully alive in the present.

Gosh I hope this book gets the accolades it deserves. I highly recommend it. Her newsletter is here for subscription, too.

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Daughters on Mothers

Willfulness becomes a connecting tissue between a mother and daughters.

- Sara Ahmed

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Daughters on Fathers

I’m sure it’s a common state to feel unseen by one’s father, but the fact that I saw my father only one week a year made my condition literal. My father and I didn’t see each other, and so we didn’t understand. It was clear that he didn’t know me, but it took a long time for me to realize that I didn’t know him either.

- Ann Patchett

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Being Considered the Wild Parents

From Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s interview with Alex Auder (author of Don’t Call Me Home) in Brooding.

Does it bother you, to feel judged by other parents? 
When we moved from the West Village to Philadelphia, we switched the kids from public school — PS3, where I went — to private school, a Quaker school where my husband had gone. And we were considered these wild, laissez-faire parents. I was shocked! Compared to the way I grew up, we were so conservative. I really feel like we were on top of things! I honestly think that it was because we seemed bohemian. The only thing we didn’t do was use the tracker on my daughter’s iPhone. And my daughter had a lot of boyfriends early on, coming to the house, and other parents were like, “Did you make sure the bedroom door stayed open?” And I was like, “That is so weird! No!”

My husband was tracking my book sales during the week it came out, and there was a fun moment, where, very briefly, my book was No. 1 on Amazon in the “Parenting Girls” category. I was like, “Fuck all y’all!” I wanted to make a flier and throw it on the lawns of all the parents I knew when my daughter was in high school.

I spent a lot of my childhood on a commune, and I loved the parts of your book where you describe the community that existed at the Chelsea — spending time in other people’s rooms among their things and their smells, blending into the background while the adults hung out. Sometimes I feel bereft for that kind of living — I don’t live like that anymore at all. Do you miss that?
My husband and I are always trying to re-create this. We’re really on the same page about this even though he didn’t grow up in this way. We have an open-door policy. We have this great little community, but that being said — and I don’t think my neighbors will be too offended by this — I feel like it’s not really reciprocated. I don’t feel like I could just walk into my neighbor’s house. My kid is growing up as an only child because his sister is so much older. We are always asking our neighbors, “Can we take your kids to the park? We will feed your kid, we will take them somewhere!” And the answer is often no. It’s much more boundaried. People don’t seem to want to give us their kids. I can’t fuckin’ pay someone to loan us a kid!

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On Loving Them

From Stephanie Danler’s “On Pretend Cooking”.

I started seeing a new therapist at the end of 2022, which required going back through my history, a task unavoidable for only so long. I was more than a little unnerved by how quickly and easily the therapist read my mother. “Like a textbook,” I told her.

My therapist said that it was in fact textbook—the relationship I was describing between an abuser and the abused.

I didn’t like it when she said “abused.”

I said, “That’s not quite right.” I offered instead qualifying statements about my mother’s behavior: her alcoholism made her rages worse. Her depression made her alcoholism worse. Her own mother abused her. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t have the capacity to mother me. And it wasn’t her fault that I was such a bad kid. It was mine. She didn’t really start hitting me until I was a teenager, so it wasn’t like abuse abuse.

“All right.” My therapist said, impassive. “What is abuse abuse?”

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Cold Water

Submerged up to my neck, sitting on my rock ledge, I feel safe. I watch the flickering leaves above, take in the slow tick of the forest, the tinkle of the nearby rapids. My mind is deliciously empty. And then there is a brush against my thigh. Just feather-light, but I’m submerged so it’s definitely creepy. I look down and it is the catfish. He (or she?) is brushing against me like a cat! I have swum in this water hole my entire life and I have never known a catfish to approach so far from the nest. Time’s up, I think, and paddle to the bank.

I loved this sensorial article by Jessie Cole about the interruptions to solitude by a catfish (with its wonderful double meaning for that word) in The Guardian.

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Biting Your Tongue

That’s a big thing we don’t talk about: the children. There is perhaps nothing lonelier than parenting teenagers. It’s exhausting work, demanding a constant stream of decisions and responses to issues that have potentially serious and lasting consequences. But we can’t — or we don’t — talk about it in the same way we used to discuss potty-training or sleep schedules, because the kids are older and deserve their privacy. Or maybe we’re just embarrassed. These years are not pretty, but we don’t want to sound whiny or ungrateful. We wanted these children; we love these children. We don’t want to appear overwhelmed — we’ve got this! We don’t want to be the ones warning new parents, darkly, “Just wait until they’re teenagers…” We hated that when we were new parents. 

How are you doing? 

Well, I’m trying to locate the narrow dirt path of parenting that winds between the weeds of over-permissiveness and the brush of authoritarianism, that tiny sweet spot where I’m on top of things but give my children appropriate autonomy. That place exists, doesn’t it? But most of the time I swing between extremes, biting my tongue until I can’t stand it any longer and crack down. 

From Faith Gong’s Parenting teens in middle age: Here be dragons at Addison Independent.

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How to Throw a Good Mothers’ Day

This is the gift of an entire day alone in the house. There’s more to it than taking the kids and fucking off for the day, although that’s the main thing.

The house needs to be cleaned beforehand so that it’s not a stressful place to hang out. You can do this or hire it out, but it needs to be done on Friday so that it doesn’t get totally undone by the rhythms of family life before Sunday. Saturday night, you’ll do some tidying and decluttering.

Sunday morning, you will efficiently remove the children from the home. Do not make her watch you drag ass getting the kids’ shoes on. Do not make her watch you pack while your kid undoes all your packing. If you do not think you can avoid being a feckless spectacle as you get yourselves off the premises, encourage her to go for a walk and promise to be gone by the time she returns. Oh, maybe light her favorite candle before you go! Now we’re talking.

From Evie Ebert’s Everything Happened - here.

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Wicked Witches

“That basically a book needs to be sexy. And it has to be young people having sex, not old people just being unsightly,” she says now. “Why do we always have to hear about the princesses? Why do we not get to hear more about the wicked witches and the stepmothers because that’s what the princesses will grow into eventually?”

These new novels dare to imagine the lives of women at the point where they have crossed into the abyss of middle age.

From Lisa Allardice’s “All the rage: the rise of the menopause novel” in The Guardian.

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Myself

I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again..

Georgia O’Keeffe, in a letter.

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Herself

I adore Jeny Howorth. She is my idea of the perfect way to get older. She is an inspiration for the kind of grandmother I might want to become one day, too. So joyful, so creased.

Tits Up

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Garden Rooms

I am obsessed with this idea.

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The Importance of Gates

See the world’s favourite gate.

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Witches

More men in the night sky, please.

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Scare Us

More dramatic boys in sport, please.

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May Your House Be Filled with Love

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When I look at my life and its secret colours, I feel like bursting into tears.

- Albert Camus, A Happy Death

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Finally

Thanks for being here, reader.

1. My darling Italian friend furiously reminded me recently that pesto literally means ‘with basil’ so you can’t just whack the name on any old recipe with crushed leaves. But, he knows what I mean.