oh dear, it seems i forgot how to blog. but i did contribute to the australian rainbow families blog so it’s not all bad. there’s a recycled post and a new post.
if i had been going to blog in the past few weeks, what would it have been about?
- christmas shopping?
- my adventure to the births deaths and marriages registry to edumacate their staff?
- the fun play date we had at our house?
- the twinkle’s best friend leaving the baby factory?
or would i just try to describe my happiest moment of the past few weeks?
yes.
when i got off the train on wednesday night, i came down the ramp at the bottom of the station and there were my girls standing side-by-side – k with the pram and the twinkle with her toy lawnmower which goes chatter-chatter-chatter. the twinkle was wearing normal hot day clothes – t-shirt and shorts – plus bright red party shoes, and she was eating an icy-pole. and we walked slowly up the hill and back to our house. licking the icy pole. clip-clopping in the party shoes. pushing the pram at a snail’s pace to match the twinkle’s pace. the lawnmower chatter-chatter-chattering. it was bloody hot and it took us ages to get home but it all made me feel so very happy.
the twinkle has mellowed out with a bit of language development, aided by a bit of comprehension development by us. she’s very difficult to understand to the untrained ear, but she has plenty of words and as long as we are tuned in we can mostly understand her.
the tantrums have also mellowed to some extent. or is it that i’m used to being a mother of a toddler? hmmm… this morning i went to 6 shops with her and i think she lay on the floor of 3, maybe 4 of them to have a cry about one thing or another. it doesn’t bother me as much now and she recovers pretty quickly. in the second op shop this morning i didn’t even need to help her out of the tantrum. she got over it after about a minute and came and found me at the front end of the shop, grinning at me. her biggest tantrums at home are when gay-hee (blankie) needs a wash. this happened this morning – our early morning gardening session had to come to an abrupt halt when blankie got runny dog poo on him/her (we mostly refer to blankie as “he” even though he’s pink). i gathered him up and put him straight in the washing machine on a hot cycle with tea-tree oil. the twinkle was devastated and cried inconsolably until he came out, and then she cuddled up to him as i hung him on the line to dry.
the other thing with her behaviour is that she has hardly hit us since the day we gave her a time out in her room. that experience totally worked as a deterrent. either that, or she was at her peak of hitting and couldn’t have gotten any worse with it, and could only get better. which she has. phew!
one of our favourite things that she says now, is kang-koo (thank you). she says it without prompting (but never when she’s prompted) and it melts our hearts every time. case in point, last night i was rummaging in the pantry for something to feed her for dinner and i said, “do you want two minute noodles?” and she politely said, “no kang-koo!” and k and i grinned like idiots at each other and cuddled our kid. today when we got blankie off the line, all dry and warm from the sun, she said “gay-hee keen, kang-koo!” cute!
this morning i was listening to the radio in the kitchen and i turned it up loud so i could hear it in the lounge room while we sat and had our morning tea (a white coffee for me, a warm cup of sustagen in a pony cup with popcorn poured into it (mmmmmm) for the twinkle). after a while, the twinkle disappeared into the kitchen, turned the radio off herself and came back to me. “purn it off, ma,” she said, making a little button turning action with her finger. more cute!
i’m so sick of the twinkle’s dummy. she mostly has it for sleeping and it doesn’t go out in public, but sometimes at home she hangs around with it in her mouth. and when she has it she drools like one of those slobbery dogs. her top will be soaked and there will sometimes be a trail of drool hanging from her chin and i hate it! it can also be hard(er) to understand her when she tries to talk with it in her mouth. and i hate it the most when she can’t find it and she needs to go to sleep and she screams the house down until it is found. (k has been known to drive to the supermarket and buy a new one when this happens. only once. or twice.) we’ve tried cold turkey but that was a nightmare and we gave in.
this year, sometime in the last couple of months, i heard grandma telling the twinkle that father christmas might want to take her dummies and give them to a baby that needs them. gradually this idea has gained momentum with us and now k and i seem to have embraced it and are casually throwing it into conversation with the twinkle. my only hesitation is that last year she was scared of santa and freaked out when she saw blokes dressed up as him and i don’t want her to be even more scared or resent him over this. but i want to see the dummies gone, so i’m taking the risk.
tonight, the last thing the twinkle said when i put her to bed was: “ya keese. eergh. gay…. boo” *shaking head*
this translates to “father christmas is going to take dummy and give it to a baby. but not the blue dummy.”
feeling better.
for the last few weeks i’ve been waiting for the jacaranda tree in our front yard to bloom. last year it bloomed overnight and was a beautiful surprise. this time i was tuned in to those little purple buds and knew to expect it. the nice thing was that the next day after i wrote my last post, i went out in the morning and it had bloomed! it’s a beautiful thing. and i decided i would use the jacaranda to remind me of M each year. a happy symbol, instead of remembering the details of last week.
it turns out the funeral was as bad, or even worse, than i feared it might be. i’m glad i didn’t go. the nice thing was that all my workmates were so shocked and upset about how the funeral didn’t suit M and didn’t honor him fully, that they went to the pub instead of the cemetery, and had a private and respectful drink for M. that would have been nice to be a part of.
happy things about the twinkle this weekend:
- i went to a school fete with her and the fake wiggles performed (i suspect they were teachers from the school) and twinkle was thrilled!
- the twinkle all of a sudden loves two minute noodles (poo noo) and will eat them happily. hooray for a food we can happily serve.
- she ate her poo noo with chop sticks. how cosmopolitan of her.
- she and i had devonshire tea at the garden of st erth and as she licked her jam and cream from her scone she said, “mmm, tastes good mum!” clear as a bell. a whole, understandable, sentence!
it’s been a long week and a half and i find myself sitting here drained of energy and emotion. it’s like the cloudy feeling of depression, although i know it’s not persistent and it’s not going to last and it’s here for a good reason.
last monday i took the day off work to go to the public hearing of the senate inquiry into the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2009. it was a warm, sunny day, i didn’t have to go to work, i had churros for morning tea on the tram, and i was going to hear this amazing mum speak. things were looking up. i sat through an interesting morning session, taking scrawled notes about the incredible things some of the christians had to say (because all the speakers against marriage equality were christians, representing christian organisations). rodney croome has analysed it here and here, so no need for me to go over it in detail, other than to say that he’s right about their arguments sounding laughable in the cold hard light of day. their arguments went along the line of, marriage is between a man and a woman because it just is/marriage is between a man and a woman because they can make babies, except for the ones who can’t but it’s a bit like they can even though they can’t/marriage is ours and no-one else is good enough for us to share it with/you say discrimination like it’s a bad thing – don’t you think then that it’s discriminatory that we don’t let people under 18 marry? if you scan this transcript you will find some gems.
so i was sitting thinking very much about the symbolism of marriage and what that means. how it’s about public recognition and how that actually means something practical as well as private. and sometimes i was sitting and letting my mind drift to the traditional girly daydream of wedding planning – the first time i’ve dared dream such a dream! (for what it’s worth, i was picturing the maribyrnong river, colourful flags, picnic rugs, new clothes for all three of us and this civil celebrant who was also a witness at the hearing.) and i was getting pissed off about how i can’t call k my wife, but “partner” is so wholesale – everyone uses it. i hear schoolkids using it. but we’re not going to the high school dance. and we’re not dating. and we’re not even fiancees, with sparkling diamonds and planning our dresses. we’re past all that. we’re the same as a married couple. and yet if i call k my partner, it’s easy for people to think she’s “just” my girlfriend, like we’re going round together and pashing in the car.
then at lunchtime i got a call from my manager. she told me that M had died. i couldn’t think who M would be. i was silent, scrambling through a virtual contact list in my brain trying to locate the name M. and then she said his surname and i realised she meant M from our unit at work. i was stunned.
M was a beautiful man. he was passionate about our work. he was quiet and strong and funny and gentle. he was my age. he was healthy. he was in his prime at work. he was happy and busy at home. he was a loving uncle and brother. he was gay. he had a “partner”.
his partner is now a widower. or is he “just” someone whose boyfriend died?
for the afternoon session of the hearing i was committed to listening carefully, but this time i wasn’t daydreaming about the joy of our wedding. i was grieving for the tragedy of a man losing his husband but possibly not being recognised as a widower. representatives of the catholic church spoke that afternoon and they pulled out that old line about “i’m sure they are capable of love and affection (the gays, that is) but it’s not marriage” and i just tried to remind myself that they surely didn’t represent all catholics. that catholic people are not the same entity as the catholic church.
it was weird not to be going to work that day or the next. no-one else in my world knew M so i had the strange experience of wishing i was at work to be around people who knew him, instead of being at home in the sun for a free day. at that stage we didn’t know how he died, only that he died suddenly over the weekend and it had been referred to the coroner. you can imagine the scenarios that ran through my head – most too awful to put words to in case they weren’t true.
back at work on wednesday, we were all a bit ginger but mostly getting on with work. and we heard that he had gone to bed with his partner on saturday night and not woken up on sunday. it was as simple and as confusing as that.
there were two notices in the newspaper for M that day. one was from a small group of friends, and one was the notice from the family, naming his six sisters and his mum and dad and mentioning his many nieces and nephews. it didn’t mention his partner. my heart sank.
that night, at 3am, i got a text message from my dear friend A. her brother had died. i called her and she told me it was her fireman brother (she has always described him that way – it was his defining characteristic, other than being a fine family man). he was 48 and had unexpectedly had a heart attack at home and died. my poor dear A has now lost her father and three of her brothers. again i was stunned.
days ticked by. i visited A and her mum. her brother’s funeral was announced. it would be a catholic mass on tuesday at the police academy with guards of honour from the emergency services and plenty of space for the huge catholic family. finally M’s funeral was announced, after a long wait because of the coroner. it, too, would be a catholic mass, on wednesday.
on tuesday k took the morning off work to watch the twinkle and i trundled off across town to the police academy. i sat between two of A’s friends who i didn’t really know. as soon as the mass began, i cried. i always cry at funerals (and, yes, weddings) no matter how well i knew the person. i cried all the way through the long mass. and i listened to the words, like “lord i am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and i shall be healed” and i was reminded of how much catholicism is based on us all being sinners who need to ask for forgiveness. i tuned in and heard all these recited words that are etched in my brain, which i know unconcsiously but have to really concentrate to hear consciously, and realised how far gone i am. how this is most certainly not my religion any more. i pondered the idea of picking and choosing the bits of the religion that suit me, but quickly came to the conclusion that you really can’t do that. and i know that my catholic upbringing gave me values like social justice and generosity and sacrifice and compassion and i am grateful for having these values instilled in me. but i do not belong to them any more because i am a lesbian and i am not the least bit sorry.
i made a conscious decision not to join in the prayers, but amazingly my lips sometimes involuntarily moved to say “amen” or “our father who art in heaven”, despite my efforts not to. right before communion my friend J, also from my catholic girl’s school, leaned across and asked,
are you taking communion?
no!
are we even allowed?
only if we’re prepared to repent.
and so we sat. after the funeral we briefly hugged A and we made our way home to my place and spent the afternoon talking about the mysteries of life and it felt so right to spend the day with a friend and it was a gentle way to follow up a funeral, even though we barely knew A’s brother.
all of this made me realise that i didn’t want to go to M’s funeral. i would cry a lot, probably even more than i had at A’s brother’s funeral because i actually knew M. and i would be crying amongst colleagues, none of whom i count as my friends. and it would seem like disproportionate crying because some people at work were close to him and i didn’t know him very well. and i would then have to catch a train home by myself. and it would be a catholic funeral and there would be talk of sin and forgiveness. and i feared that there would be no recognition of M’s partner. frankly, i was afraid. J and i talked briefly about how maybe i should go because of these feelings. defy them. but i decided not to. i decided i didn’t need to honor M through a mass. it would make no difference to his partner or his family if i was there or not – they’ve never laid eyes on me. it confused me at first to think that i was making some kind of political statement by not going, but it wasn’t that at all. it was a personal fear that i would feel too sad and that it wouldn’t just be about M, it would be about all the buttons that this week has pressed. and there was a risk that i would regret not going, but in the end i took that risk.
the office was quiet while most people were gone and i had a strong urge to go and sit in M’s chair and cry. i didn’t though. i still see M around the office – i have been all week. i see him in the shadows where he used to stop for a smoke on the way into the building in the morning. i see him through the cloudy windows of the meeting rooms. i expect his seat to be warm.
when the woman who sits next to me came back from the funeral, i asked how it was. she said it was sad but a nice tribute. i asked if his partner had spoken. she said she didn’t think so. she said she thought he was in one of the photos that they put up in a slideshow. one. my heart sank. my fears were realised and i was glad i hadn’t been there to feel angry in a room of sadness.
i’m trying really hard not to think the worst of people. not having gone to the funeral, i don’t know for sure how M’s partner was represented. (the woman next to me was sketchy on details – perhaps she missed something that his partner wrote in the mass booklet, or perhaps something was read out for him.) perhaps his family made sure he was included. perhaps they had a very progressive priest who didn’t harp on about sin and forgiveness and who was strong enough to acknowledge M’s partner. perhaps they hadn’t actually been together very long and they weren’t like husbands, they were more like boyfriends, so perhaps the family didn’t know him well. i don’t know and i certainly don’t want to cast aspersions on the good and grieving people in M’s family. i’m just talking about my reaction to what i’ve observed.
and a lot of it is probably not about M or his family at all. it’s probably about applying the hypothetical situation to myself or the people i’m close to. the wedding plan daydreams have been replaced by funeral planning. i have pictured the funerals of all of my loved ones this week and speculated about the hypothetical funeral details.
all of this and more has been swimming around my head for a week and a half, and was swirled into an eddy this afternoon when M’s funeral was on. i came home so tired in the head and the eyes and felt drained. little twinkle was a cranky pants at bedtime tonight – just standard tiredness after a fun day at the baby factory – and i burst into tears when she cried at me because i didn’t have the emotional strength or mental space to be strong and unaffected by it. and once again i counted my lucky stars i have a wife (of sorts) to take over when i can’t cope.
i think i’ll be ok. i needed to process all of this stuff. think about it, write about it. i need to sleep now.
thanks for reading.
the twinkle started counting all by herself yesterday. before that she could say the numbers after us, if she felt like it. now she’s shooting off YA, POO, EEE, WAR of her own accord. this new counting was inspired by the funny falldown show (finn’s new fave) which we watched together on saturday night. she kept asking for bore, bore. by the end she was doing her own stunts and has spent the rest of the weekend counting out loud then falling to the ground (cash!).
as is the current fashion, i think i will offer you some dot points about the twinkle.
- she is starting to become more rational (when she is not overtired/hungry/hot etc). we can negotiate with her sometimes. just before we went to piggy’s party, we popped into a cafe for me to get a coffee. in that posh malvern cafe she fell to the ground to have a tantrum (i can’t remember what it was over) and lay on the floor kicking and screaming while i juggled bag/coins/gift/hot coffee and people looked like they were choking on their quinoa porridge with rhubarb compote because of the disturbance. once i got both of us out the door (along with bag/gift/coffee/fewer coins) i said to her, “today we are going to piggy’s party and turkey will be the baby today. so you can’t be the baby. do you understand? this means you have to walk on your own feet and you can’t make baby crying noises. do you understand, twinkle?” and she listened carefully and nodded and at the party she was great. she was painfully shy (i can relate to that) but any time she tried to climb back up my birth canal or do whingey noises i’d quickly remind her that turkey was the baby today and she’d agree and calm down. k has had moments like this too, of rational negotiation. it gives us hope for the future. evidence that she won’t actually be 2 forever.
- her language is finally coming along. she copies lots more words. she tries lots of two- or three-syllable words. she makes sentences, although most of them start with “get” and end with one of our names – “get bore mook mum“. she babbles a little bit (she never did that baby babble stuff that most kids do). she understands concepts like big/small, under/over/behind etc. she likes reciting the alphabet (copying us, one letter at a time) but she can only doing by shouting. it’s a pretty joyful shout, too: “aiee! beee! ceee! deee! eeee! essss! sheeee! etc. i’ve also noticed she likes to get to w prematurely. it must feel good to say that one.
- one of her favourite two syllable words is skateboard. she is fascinated by them and says “kate-bored” a lot. we have just been debating whether 2.5 is too young to get your first skateboard for christmas.
- along with blankie, dummy, brobee and the “bore key” request, she now has another obsessive comfort item – her foofa clothes. we have to try at all times to have the foofa jacket or the foofa pjs clean because she falls to pieces if she can’t hold or wear one of these items. it’s ridiculous. but what can you do?
- she still eats no vegies. the other night we had a delicious stir fry of hokkein noodles with peas and broccoli from our garden and silver beet from dad’s. the twinkle cried when she saw dad hand me the silver beet. she cried tonight when k ate spinach dip in front of her. but apparently she ate two serves of pumpkin risotto at the baby factory today. go figure.
- she is very active and busy and adventurous. she climbs on stuff confidently, frequently falls and always has bruises on her legs. k was asked today (for the second time) how the twinkle got her bruises. it’s embarassing to be asked this, especially when the answer is, “i don’t really know”. but she never complains about being hurt so how would we know?
- she is growing up. k taught her that she can get out of her own bed and walk out of her room in the morning – she doesn’t have to wait for us to get her up. the first morning, she got up and silently padded down the hallway with her blankie. she passed our door and we were both awake and we both had a little twinge of “aww, how cute” and also “oh! she’s so grown up!”.
- k culled a whole lot of her clothes. she has finally grown out of size 1 pants. she wears size 2 pants now and is moving on to size 3 tops. also, she finally grew out of this little singlet that i bought a long time ago. it was the first time i ever dropped her off at mr peabody’s house to spend an hour or two with him. i had awful separation anxiety and had to called k who was at home to talk me through it. once i calmed down i tried to distract myself by browsing in a ridiculously expensive baby shop and came across a little singlet with a D sewn on the front and i loved it and bought it. that singlet has always reminded me of that day and how hard it was to walk away from my baby wren back then. i think this singlet will be my keepsake from her babyhood.
two weeks ago i bought these neat little buckets and put one in the bathroom sink, one in the shower and one in the kitchen. we catch enough water from hand rinsing, vegie washing etc, plus the cold water in the shower before the hot kicks in, to keep all our pots well watered and most of the vegies. this has been so simple and a win-win (plants win, water bills win… oh and environment wins!).
i’ve also gone back to using the egg timer in the shower, which is a good challenge on hair washing days. i have to work really hard to beat it when i’m washing my hair every second day. and if i shave my legs (once in a blue moon) i turn the water off when i don’t need it and turn the egg timer sideways. on non hair washing, non leg shaving days i can beat it by miles.
the twinkle has gone back to flatly refusing baths, so we fill a small bucket and wash her out of that, and save the leftover water for the plants.
we’ve also had a quote to get a 7000l rainwater tank installed. we’ll have to wait for the green loan to come through before we can go ahead with that one.
i think water is under-priced and much gets wasted because we don’t value it enough. i know the price will go up and we don’t exactly have the spare money for bigger bills, but i’m in favour of the rise because it will make us and others think more carefully about our usage.
we are just home from piggy’s birthday party. the twinkle had such a lovely time that we had to do a full re-enactment when we came home to om. it was a cooking party, so she used her fireman’s hat as a bowl and her spatula from the party as her spoon. flour and other ingredients were poured from a selection of books. we baked our biscuits in the wagon. while the biscuit was baking we danced and froze. she laid books out to play the parts of turkey, owl, pcat, piggy, arlo and huey. when we froze, the twinkle made the same face that pcat made every time a kid moved (surprised face with hands over mouth). then she did the splits (well, attempted the splits) because one of the older girls had done that while she was dancing. then she got the cooked biscuits from the wagon/oven and handed them out to us (me, om, herself and all the gabba characters in a book). then she gave us balloons. then we pretended to walk down stairs. then we kissed each other goodbye. then we sat on the floor in the hallway behind each other and drove home. then we lay down in the hallway and had a sleep. the sleep is the bit that actually hadn’t happened yet so it was like entering a timewarp when we re-enacted the anticipated sleep.
she’s now in bed coming down from the coloured popcorn high and trying not to sleep. but it seems as though it was a big, happy day in her little life!
the twinkle is really coming along with her talking. she tries two-syllable words all the time and we understand her more now, which in turn means she tries more. she also has a major meltdown if we can’t understand her so we try to keep calm and focus on communicating whichever way we can. we took a couple of train trips this week and she now recites the station names as we go through: weh –> hoh-croh –> air-cah –> la –> nu-port –> pot-good –> yah-ille –> seh… (if you live on the werribee line you may recognise this sequence, otherwise just trust me on this.) she is also obsessive about the listing of people she knows. “bore key!” (more people) is a phrase we hear many times a day. sometimes i think it’s because she likes trying to say the names, and sometimes i think she just finds it a comfort like her blankie and her dummy. either way, i think it’s been good for her language development.
this weekend she has been obsessed with my uncle steve. we see him just a few times per year but she remembers him well. he has a beard which is fascinating to her. we have looked at photos of him and pointed at random men with beards over and over these past few days. so it should have come as no surprise when she gave her little biscuit happy face a beard this morning at piggy’s party. yum yum!
in terms of greening the twinkle’s future, i have made a concerted effort this week to switch things off. i’ve been switching the tv/dvd/video off at the wall when it’s not in use. same with my phone charger. i got a bit overzealous and accidentally switched off the landline phone (cordless) but that meant the phone didn’t work for a while there. we’ve been switching the computer off overnight. i should also switch off the modem and switch the computers off at the wall but that would involve getting down on my hands and knees. i’m on the lookout for these switches for electric plugs that have a remote control. you can have one remote which switches off as many plugs as you want in your house – do it at bedtime or when you leave the house.
the other switching off that i’ve been doing is the bathroom. we have one of those 3-in-1 heater/fan/light thingies. they are big power suckers and i automatically, out of habit, switch all four switches every time i walk into the bathroom. i’m now consciously asking myself if i need the light on at all (it’s a bright room) and only switching on the fan for showers. i hope this will make a difference.
according to the acf we could save 750 kWh per year, or $115, by doing these things.
the other thing we did yesterday was go to my dad’s community garden and join in a <350 action. there are photos from around the world here.
so the first job i did towards greening the twinkle’s future this week, was starting to draught-proof the house. our front door is very drafty and so is the study, so i did a few simple things to stop the warm air escaping when it’s cold outside.
- i bought some stick-on foam stuff that goes around the front door frame to seal the door closed. this stuff was about $4 for enough to do one door. it is just like sticky tape – couldn’t be easier. and it has made a noticeable difference to the drafts that come in around the door – and the noise to some extent too.
- i bought a draught-stopper for the bottom of the front door. we had a snake but we never kept it in place so it was uselessly living against the hallway wall. the one that i got is like a long cylinder of fleece and i just had to screw two self-tapping hooks into the bottom of the door and the cylinder rests on them and rolls as you open and close the door. i think it cost about $16. it has made a huge difference already because we had quite a gap at the bottom of the door.
- i got a $3 tube of gap filler and squeezed it into the gap at the bottom of the study window. being an older house, and on stumps, and in the drought conditions, it has shifted a bit and settled unevenly, leaving a gap at the bottom of one side of the window where the wind and sometimes even rain gets in. this job was a little messy but sure did fix the problem. the only aesthetic problem is that the gap filler is white and window frame is dark brown, but that’s a minor thing really.
- i bought a roll of duct tape (the twinkle thinks it’s duck tape – quack quack) and taped up a hole in the black plastic duct for the heater vent in the study. i discovered this hole recently when fishing a metal ruler out of the vent and was horrified at the thought of alll our lovely hot air being blasted into the space under the floor. so that’s fixed now too.
i plan to go around to all the windows and doors in the house and check for draughts this week and seal them with a combo of the methods described above. the big one is the disused fan above the shower. a hole for all our warm bathroom air to disappear into. i found out about these this week and will invest in one. (then we’ll need to invest in a ladder and a powerful torch so we can go up into the roof cavity, but i think these will be well-used for various jobs around our house.)
the twinkle in my eye 
