My tiny love story

I've been watching Modern Love on Amazon Prime.  If you're unaware, it's a series of unrelated love stories, based on essays written for a column in the New York Times by the same name.  The New York Times also has a column called "Tiny Love Stories", which asks people to write their love story in under 100 words.

I tried it.  Didn't think I could do it.  Turns out I could.  My first hand-written draft was 89 words long.  I modified slightly when I typed it out, and now it's 90 words.

At 21 we shared a chemistry class and a fume cupboard.  The year we turned 23, we shared our first kiss.  At 25, we shared a surname and a plan for a life just for two.  At 27 we shared a move across the country, at 30 one halfway around the world. By 41, we shared three children and a house in the suburbs.  And this year, at 46, we have shared over half our lives with each other.  Our shared life is longer that the part we didn’t share.

Locking it down

 We're in lockdown.  Again.  It's the fourth one so far this year.  On the plus side, our lockdowns tend to be short ones (the three others in January, April and June were all three or four days long).  For the moment, this lockdown (which started on Saturday at 4pm) is supposed to last eight days, providing infection numbers stay under control.  Given that this is a Delta outbreak, it might take longer than that.

This outbreak has involved school children and some teachers, and has sent students and immediate families from (at last count) five separate schools into 14 days quarantine.  Given that literally everyone I know is only one or two degrees of separation from one or more of those five schools, there is the potential for a lot more infections and a longer lockdown.  But we shall see.

My children, however, have seen the bright side in this.  They all slept in.  The girls got to use computers (luckily we have two laptops) to do their Mathletics and some writing.  They also both decided to do a "research project" and to write me a presentation about it.  Kid 1 presented on Vegemite.  Kid 2 went for "Foods I Love".  Kid 3 (who is still learning to read and write) did some drawings, attempted to write a letter (he got bored before it was done) and used an art app for a while.  And then they all did some artwork, painting big pieces of cardboard in multiple colours.  They are currently all reading quietly together.

Again, we're very lucky in all of this.  I'm a casual employee, so I won't work or get paid this week, but my husband can easily work from home.  We've got the space to have a home office plus room for the kids to do their school work where I can supervise.  We've got a decent sized yard and plenty of things for them to play with.  All the grocery stores are still open (and delivering), so we're not going to run out of food.  And the weather is warm enough that the house is opened up and the kids can play inside or out.

Other people are not us lucky.  A lot of people won't be able to work, won't get paid.  People may be isolated, or be stuck apart from their family.   And a lot of others have been quarantined. The Ekka (the Brisbane Agricultural Show) was due to be held in August, and it was cancelled today.  There will be implications for a lot of people from this.  Lockdown will hopefully limit the outbreak, but it has a number of downsides.  And it's hard to know how to best measure the effectiveness of the handling of COVID outbreaks.  Is it the lowest possible number of infections?  Particular economic outcomes?  Opening of business and larger events?  

People keep talking about "getting back to normal", but I don't think that's ever really going to happen.  We're just going to have to get used to some new level of normal.

On Motherhood

 My mother always says that her greatest achievements are her three children.  This is not to say that she was a helicopter parent, or the type of person who tried to (re)live her life through us.  She did not get any vicarious “see what I am responsible for” pleasure from any of our achievements, nor did she ever push us towards any activity or group because she’d wished for the chance herself as a child.  Even when we wanted to do things she really, really didn’t want us to do (like that time I decided that spending a year on exchange in Brasil was a great idea), she always supported us.  Unconditionally.  She simply wanted us to have all the chances and the choices that were possible, and she did everything she could to manage family life to make these things possible.

When I was a kid, I felt like we had pretty much everything we wanted and needed.  As an adult, I now understand that there was a lot of budgeting and being careful and going without unnecessary items to make sure that all the financial things worked out correctly. 

My mother was a stay-at-home parent; my father was the one who earned the money.  They’d agreed on this principle prior to marriage and stuck to it for our childhoods.  Relatively recently, my mum and I were talking about my Nan (her mother), who’d been a full-time working (single) parent from the time my mother was 11 or so.  “I decided then,” my mother told me, “that if it was at all possible, I’d always be at home with my children when they were there.  Always.”

My Nan was a working parent by necessity – my mother’s father died when she was young, and there were pretty limited social services to help widows and families in 1960s Australia.  My Nan was also an exceptional mother, and an excellent example of a brilliant human being.  My mother and my aunt never wanted for anything essential, and they always knew that their mother would be home with them if she could . . . but at the time, my Nan had to have a job.

And so we cut to the mid-1970s when I was born.  My parents were living in a town in the Western Australian desert, where my father worked at the local airport.  He was an electrician, and his employment worked on two-year cycles – he was always employed by the same corporation, but it wasn’t always in the same location.  He’d been in Perth for a while, Darwin for two years after that, then it was off to a place called Meekatharra.  That’s where they were living when I arrived, but medical complications required a relocation via the Royal Flying Doctor Service, and I was born in Perth.  And that’s another thing that my mother, my eldest daughter and I have in common – birth marred by medical circumstance.  My mother was born by emergency caesarean at seven months, my birth was precluded by medical airlift to a specialist hospital, and my eldest was born with pneumonia and not breathing and spent four days in Special Care after birth.

I cannot remember a time in my life where my mother didn’t tell everyone how amazing I was.  And not just me – when my sister and then my brother came along, she talked them up with the same level of cheerful supportiveness as she did me.  When we each got married, she then added our spouses to her “let me tell you about my amazing children” repertoire.  And when the grandchildren came along . . . well, she continued just as before.  Actually, she’s probably more effervescent in her commentary about the grandchildren.  She will often regale me with stories of my nephews (the eldest belonging to my brother and his wife, the two younger belonging to my sister and her husband), telling me how fantastically well (insert nephew’s name here) has been doing at (insert sport, activity, job here) and how proud she is of him.  It doesn’t matter if I’ve heard this from said nephew’s mother or father, she has to give me her (always slightly more shiny and amazing) version of events.  Having compared notes with my sister and brother, I know she does the same thing with my three children to them. 

Pre-smart phones, my mother carried a “brag book” with her.  There were at least a couple of photos of each of us (children, children-in-law, grandchildren) and she would pull it out at every given opportunity to tell people (mostly people she knew; occasionally random friendly strangers) about one or many of us.  Now she has a phone with stored photographs, she uses that instead. 

I asked her once what she did if someone told her they didn’t want to look at her photos.  She looked at me, genuinely shocked.  “Who would say something like that?” she asked me. “You’re all so interesting – of course they want to hear about you!”

The Fiction and the Furious

 I occasionally do the Australian Writers'Centre Furious Fiction Challenge for a bit of fun.  This one was written for a challenge from late last year, but never submitted (because I forgot to submit it.  Not because I didn't finish it).

Room 254.  Basic room.  Two single beds, zipped together as a double, small bathroom without a bath.  The fridge was tucked under a shelf, the electric kettle sitting on the bathroom bench.  The window was open, the plastic blind tapping a rhythm on the window frame as the breeze pushed it back and forth.  The guests had checked in and headed straight for the beach, their shared suitcase left open on the bed.  They’d clearly ignored the sign requesting “bath towels not be taken to the beach”, because there were none left in the bathroom.

Room 986.  Family suite.  Two bedrooms, with a queen-sized bed in one, two singles in the other and a pull-out couch in the sitting area.  Small kitchenette in one corner, bathroom with a shower over a relatively small bath.  They had stored their luggage in the wardrobes.  The fridge held three bananas, a tub of yogurt and some cider.

Room 1209.  Premier suite.  One bedroom with a King bed, a bathroom with a two-person bath in the corner and double jets in the shower.   The furnishings were rich and soft, mostly creams, with accents of sapphire blue.  Judging from the clothing in the closet, the female guest was a decade younger than her male companion.  The bouquets in the suite each contained two dozen roses.

P-100.  The Penthouse.  The hotel’s largest suite; three bedrooms, two bathrooms and two sitting areas.  The kitchen had a butler’s pantry and a tiny, gloomy elevator for staff.  The art on the walls was original – several abstract paintings and a photograph of the hotel from the 1920s.  The Penthouse had been occupied by the same guest for two months, an American working at one of the local fashion houses.  She was rarely seen, and she insisted that her room was serviced in a two-hour window while she was at work.  Cleaning her room took the entire two hours each day – she was a heavy smoker, an even heavier drinker and she regularly had several guests in her room overnight.

The lobby.  Reception staffed twenty-four hours a day by staff who spoke a minimum of six languages, a bar and a restaurant to the left.  Security at the front door were discretely armed and uniformed similarly to the police, with the hotel crest on the collar.

He nodded to security as he left the hotel, wishing them a good day.  No one stopped him.  No one checked his backpack.  He was in uniform.  He worked here.  He was safe.

The uniform had been stolen from the hotel’s laundry, the security pass snatched off a maid’s trolley, the photograph replaced with his own.  His backpack contained a watch from room 254, a necklace and three sets of earrings from 986, a camera from the suite and gold bracelet from the Penthouse.  He’d pass them to an associate before changing uniform and name and doing the same job elsewhere.  He had several uniforms.  It was an interesting way to make a living. 

On Fatherhood

 On our way home from Canada over a decade ago, we flew via Europe for a site visit to a refinery (as you do).  We decided to take advantage of being in London and took a week’s holiday to catch up with people we knew – a friend of mine in London, my sister and her husband in Bristol and an old university friend of ours who lived in Limerick. 

Our friend in Limerick was a new father – his son was four months old.  I remember sitting around one evening chatting, and he was talking about something he’d noticed about parenting.

“Men,” he said, “can be a dad or a good dad.  Women get to be a mum or a bad mum.”

The further into parenting that I get, the more I realise the truth in that statement.  When I am volunteering in my son’s classroom, I’m just being a mum.  A dad who volunteers will be congratulated on being a “good dad” for being there.  He doesn’t even need to do anything to be the good dad – he just has to show up.  My husband is often told what a good dad he is by random strangers when he’s at the park with a kid or two.  I can be doing errands with all three of my children (and occasionally an extra or two, just for fun), and I’m rarely told I’m a good mum. I’m far more likely to hear muttered comments about an even mildly misbehaving child than I am to get a compliment about my children or my parenting.

From what I’ve seen in my eleven years as a parent, people in general still have much higher expectations for mothers than they do for fathers.  Mothers are expected to have their (neat and tidy, well-behaved) children to school and activities and appointments on time, all the while keeping the house clean and organised, the shopping done (with children in tow, if necessary) and a home-cooked dinner on the table at the appropriate time.  If she’s got a (paying) job of any description, that’s expected to fit in there too, along with the unspoken notion that she should be the one staying home with a sick child if needs be.  For a father, the threshold is far lower – the children need to be fed and cared for (take-away fine, home-cooked meals optional), and if they miss a few appointments or come to school late (in the wrong uniform from an untidy house), well, “he’s trying so hard to get it all done.” People are also far more likely to congratulate a father for anything parenting-related than they are a mother. 

The other thing that drives me mad in the mother/father comparison, is when someone refers to a man as “babysitting” his children.  He’s not babysitting – he’s caring for his children. Maybe this is linked to the reasons why people are more likely to compliment a father who is with his children – they’re considering it as babysitting – another job that he has taken on as well as all the other things he has to do.  They’re not necessarily considering his role as a parent, and in some cases are almost diminishing it – “Oh, isn’t that sweet?  He’s babysitting!”.

I have absolutely zero issues with any parent or carer being complimented on their parenting, their children or anything related to either.  In fact, I think it’s essential that we do it – parenting (particularly when you’re the primary parent) can be hard, lonely and sometimes monotonous work.  Having someone tell you you’re doing a good job is such a lovely thing. 

One good thing that COVID has done has left so many more parents and carers working from home, and nowadays there are almost as many men as women at school pick up.  It’s been interesting to hear comments from the fathers who’ve found themselves working from home – so many of the dads that I know have negotiated working from home at least part-time post-COVID because they realized how much it helps everyday family life, and how much they enjoy having a more active role in it. 

My husband is one of these – 18 months ago, he worked full-time in the city, leaving home by 6.30am to catch the train, getting home around 5pm.  He’d always have breakfast with our son (he’s an early riser), but it wasn’t uncommon for him to leave for work before our daughters were awake.  He didn’t get home until after the majority of after-school activities were done, and usually his evening time with the kids involved having dinner and reading a story or two.  There wasn’t a lot of time for much else.

During COVID, he worked from home full-time; once his office re-opened, he could choose up to 50% work from home, with relatively flexible choice about how that was structured.  My husband now works from home half the time, three days one week, two days the next.  It means that he can start work early, yet still see the girls before school (he’ll have a coffee with them while they’re eating breakfast).  If one of the kids is sick and I have to work, he can generally reorganize his days to stay at home with them.  He’ll still work, mind you, but his office door is always open to whoever’s home sick.  On the days that he’s working from home, I can leave a kid or two with him while I take another one (or two) to activities.  A couple of weeks ago, I had to take one of the kids to an enrolment interview, and there was no way I could be home in time to get the other two to school, but he was home, so he could do school drop off.  And every fortnight, when he’s home on Friday and the kids are at school, he and I go out for lunch.  Together.  Where we can talk (or sit and enjoy the silence) and just hang out. 

Who knows – maybe a post-COVID world will have more fathers being more visible in their children’s day-to-day lives; at school drop off, taking them to the dentist, doing the grocery shopping with a toddler.  Maybe that’ll make the notion of a father with his kids no more or less remarkable than a mother with hers.  Either way, when the chance presents itself, always be sure to pass on a compliment to whichever parent you see.  No matter which parent it is, they’ll appreciate it.

The Extracurriculars

When my eldest daughter was born, I declared that I was not going to be one of Those Parents who was constantly running from activity to activity with my child.  She would not be doing All The Things.  We would be careful and choose an activity wisely.

When she was little, we had a regular Mothers’ Group catch-up, but that was as much for me as it was for her.  We also did baby swimming lessons (with my Mothers’ Group friends).  And that was it.  

When Kid 2 came along, the Mothers’ Group catch-ups were far less frequent (most of us were back at work at least part-time, we each had a second child within a few years of the first, and two of us wound up with three), but we stuck with the swimming lessons.  The entire time she was in the baby class (requiring me to be in the water with her), I managed to get the two girls into a lesson at the same time – Kid 1 with her own teacher, Kid 2 with me.  Both girls eventually did a weekly class (soccer for one, dance for the other) at daycare, but that was all.

Our son came along at the end of my eldest daughter's first year at primary school.  We’d purposely taken a break from swimming for her first year of school and hadn’t taken on anything else.  Every week or so, we’d get another flyer come home from school, advertising yet another organised sport or club.  There was soccer, swimming, tennis, netball, drama, singing, instrument lessons . . . there was a huge variety of options.  And eventually the girls wanted to try new things.

At first, my rule was swimming and one other activity.  Soon that became two activities, plus swimming.  Then it was “Well, you can do swimming at school, and anything else has to be at school or within walking distance”.  

And this is how it has come to pass that now Kid 1 does four extracurricular activities, Kid 2 does five and Kid 3 does two.  There is one overlap (the girls are both in the same singing class), a Saturday class that my husband has responsibility for and a couple where I take another child to an activity in return for another parent bringing my kid home.  This still means two days with both a before- and an after-school activity, and one day with four separate after-school extracurriculars.  I’ve only got three children – Kid 2 has two activities on the same afternoon.  Happily, the drop off/pick up times on all four activities line up perfectly, so it’s not too bad . . . although I do walk five kilometres that day and leave the house on five separate occasions because of my children.  

The kids do a reasonable spread of activities – all three of them sing and the girls both do drama and play an instrument (violin for the eldest, flute for Kid 2), plus my eldest does an art class, the middle one takes tennis and Kung Fu and the little guy does a movement and balance class. 

I started with good intentions of not doing too much . . . but here we are.  At least they’re all having fun!

 

When you hear That Song

 In very, very late 1999, my now-husband flew to meet me in Brasil.  I’d been there for five weeks prior; the two of us spent three weeks there together.  It was an awesome holiday.  One of my favourites.  Really.

But this isn’t about the holiday.  It’s about the trip home.  We’d flown there separately, but we came home together.  São Paulo to Johannesburg, Johannesburg to Perth.  Mid-January, 2000.

When we got on the plane in São Paulo, it was immediately clear to me that there were exchange students (approximately a dozen of them) on our flight, heading home to South Africa after 12 months in Brasil.  They were all with the same exchange program (it was definitely not Rotary, possibly AFS, maybe some other group I was unfamiliar with), seated in a big group a few rows behind us.  I was six years past the experience of flying home from exchange, but I recognized them the moment that I saw them.  They all spoke to each other in English, but their accent wasn’t (only) South African anymore – they’d all had their English changed after a year in Brasil.  The change was different for each of them, but it was a clear and genuine change of accent.  For some, it was only on a few words. For others, it was on everything; an edge that changed every single pronunciation.  Every one of them dropped Portuguese words into their conversations – not an affectation of any sort; a genuine “this is the right word” feeling that didn’t even allow them to understand that they weren’t speaking English when they said it.  Absolutely no one called them on any Portuguese word in an English sentence – my guess would be that they were all still thinking in both Portuguese and English and didn’t even notice that any of the words weren’t English.  And every single one of them (even the late-teen boys) were visibly sad (and many were openly crying) as the plane took off.

I knew who they all were because I’d been them a few years earlier.  And everyone else on the flight knew them a little later, in between movies when there was only background music playing.  Specifically “Time of My Life” by Green Day.  They all sang.  All cried.  All hugged each other and remembered the many, many times they’d heard that song when they’d been in Brasil.  Even the ones who’d not seen each other between their flights to Brasil in January 1999 and their flights home in January 2000.  It was That Song.  The one they’ll always, absolutely always, remember.

For me, That Song is “What’s Up?” by The Four Non-Blondes.  I’m 46 now; 28 years past my return from Brasil.  And even now, 28 years on, that song reminds me of Brasil, and very, very specifically of my best friend (another exchange student), my host brother (who’d previously been on exchange to New Zealand) and of one of the guys I went to school with (who was my only Brasilian friend who knew all the words to the song in English).  Every time I hear that song, I remember my favourite dancing shoes (black, strappy platform Mary Janes with a curved heel and double buckles), my favourite shirt (midriff, twisted up in the middle with bell-bottom sleeves) and the red-and-white striped dress that I bought especially for New Year’s Eve.  I see the river (called Green, actually brown) that I walked over on my way home in the last four months of my exchange.  I see the church that was across the road from my second house.  I remember the walk up the hill to my first family’s home.  I see the praça (square) in town and remember dancing in the Club with the balcony that overlooked it.  There are so many memories associated with that one song, and they’ve all persisted, nearly three decades later, whenever I hear that song.

On Reading

 I like to read.  So, that’s not really true.  I love to read.  It is my favourite past-time, the thing I’ve always done.  I will read anything, anytime, anywhere.  I usually have a pile of books beside my bed, some I’ve already read, some new, just in case I want to read something right now.

Before I had children, I probably read (or re-read) five or six books a week.  I read fast, and I re-read books that I love frequently.  When I was younger, I read so much that I rarely bought books that I hadn’t read.  I would borrow books from friends or from the library and if I really, really loved them, THEN I would buy the book.  That all went out the window when I lived in Quebec – the local library only had books in French, but the local bookstore had a very good selection of English language books.  Now, I do enjoy reading in other languages, but my primary reason for reading is relaxation, and reading in your non-native language is less relaxing that reading in your own language, so I have always preferred reading in English.  My only caveat to that is if the book was originally written in either Portuguese or French.  I will read them in their native language because that makes sense.  I actually own Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” in both Portuguese and in French, and I’ve read it in English.  The Portuguese version is glorious.  The French version is almost as good.  The English version . . . well, something in the language is lacking.  It is nowhere near as beautiful as it is in Portuguese.  I’ve read several of Paulo Coelho’s other books in Portuguese, and I’ve read one or two in English (only because I couldn’t find them in Portuguese).  And there is always a sense of something missing in the English versions, something that just isn’t quite right.  It may, of course, be all in my head, but that’s how it feels to me.

Now that I have children, I don’t read as much.  I probably average one book a week, but I don’t read every week.  A couple of weeks ago, I read three books in the space of two days.  I started a book last week that I haven’t even got a third of the way through yet. I still love to read, but I hate to be interrupted when I’m reading, and children always interrupt.  Or want to know what you’re reading.  Or what the story is about.  Or why is there a picture of a sad lady on the cover, Mummy? Or is that a murder book, Mum?  Why would you read that?

My two girls started reading the Harry Potter books a couple of years ago.  I read the first book to them both, at which stage my eldest, then nine years old, determined that she was going to read on by herself.  I was perfectly happy with that – my only requirement was that she and I read the more grown-up chapters (the endings of books 3, 4 and 5) together, so that I could answer any questions that she had.  She read all the way up to book six, but never got past the first chapter in that one.  Ironically, that chapter is “The Other Minister”, probably my favourite chapter in the entire series.  When I told her that (we were reading it together for precisely that reason), she said to me, “But why?  Nothing interesting happens.” She declared book 6 (The Half-Blood Prince) “boring” after that.  I think she’s probably still a little young for it (Harry and friends are 16 in the book; she’s now 10).  My younger daughter is now just shy of nine, and she stopped at the start of book 3 for a few months, then returned to the series (mostly, I think, because I told her that after she finished each book, she could watch the corresponding movie).  She’s since completed the entire series, re-read it a second time and is currently about halfway through her third reading. 

The books that she’s reading?  They’re mine, not hers.  I borrowed the first three Harry Potters from a friend and adored them.  Books 4 through 7, I pre-ordered and set aside the entire day of issue to read the book.  I even booked dinner at a restaurant those four evenings so that I didn’t have to stop reading to make dinner.  I picked up each book at 9am when the bookshop opened; I had read each completely by early afternoon.  My husband likes to tell the story of walking through a shopping centre back to our car with me walking directly behind him, one hand on his shoulder, while I read the first chapter of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

My kids have all inherited a love of reading from me.  There are books all over our house, because they all read (or in the case of the five-year-old, looking at) books anywhere the mood strikes them.  In bed.  On the couch. In the car.  On my bed.  Sometimes in very random spots, like on the stairs or while sitting on the swing or the monkey bars.  Anywhere, really.

The other thing that they’ve inherited from me?  Their disgust when the movie doesn’t quite follow what the book said.  I watched the first Harry Potter movie with the girls and all I heard the entire way through the movie was, “That’s not right!”, “This didn’t happen in the book!”, “Why did they miss <insert particular scene here>?  That’s one of my favourites!”  My husband just laughed and said, “It’s just like watching a movie with you!”.

Once Upon A Time . . . I was made redundant

 I was made redundant.  Doesn’t that sound awesome?  Redundant; business speak for, “You and your skills are no longer necessary.”

The specifics of it were nothing exciting – the mining company that employed me decided to relocate the lab I worked in from a capital city to a regional area, closer to a refinery.  I was “offered an opportunity to relocate”, as were my colleagues.  Given that I worked part time while my husband had a full-time job in the city we lived in, everyone was aware that I was unlikely to take that “opportunity”.  On the day that this announcement was made, the five affected employees were handed two sets of documents.  The first included all the information on a relocation, the second had details of the redundancy policy and a calculation for your own personal payout.

I was in a very lucky position, because I was not the major salary earner in our family (three of my four affected colleagues were the major earner), and because I had been working with the same company for sixteen years.  Company policy stated that you were paid out according to your years of service, so my payout was rather good, thanks very much.

The move to a regional site and the subsequent redundancies weren’t a surprise to any of us, but they came a year or two earlier than we’d anticipated.  The logistics of shifting everything out of the lab we’d been in for about 13 years took a lot of effort and six months to complete.  I managed that part of the process, and on my third last day of employment, I handed the keys to the laboratory building back to the company that owned it. 

Until that point, I’d been in some form of paid employment my entire adult life.  I’d worked full time, part time, shift work, nights, weekends.  I’ve worked in hospitality, in education, in laboratories, in offices.  And then, suddenly, through no fault of my own, I was unemployed.

At the time, I was in my early forties.  I have significant experience in a relatively specific field.  I worked part time, by choice, because my children were young.  I took three months off, didn’t even look at job vacancies.  Once I did start looking, it because apparent that there was a real lack of roles that were actually suitable for me. For starters, there are not a lot of part time jobs in my field.  There are a reasonable number of full-time, higher stress, travel and weekend/evening work type of jobs available, but I don’t want any of those things.  I was considered overqualified for the jobs that I did apply for.  In three months of applying, I wasn’t even called for an interview once.

Personally, I found it frustrating that I wasn’t even considered for some of the roles I applied for.  Yes, I will agree, I had far more qualifications than the job required.  Let’s be frank – I spent ten years at university, so I have more qualifications than many jobs require.  I had applied for jobs that I knew I’d be good at and that I was confident I’d enjoy.  Being thrown out of consideration because my education and work experience was more than the role required was frustrating.  I understand that employers may have assumed I’d be bored in the roles, but I had gone to the trouble of applying, which should have indicated a fair level of interest on my part . . . but apparently it did not. 

I kept looking for part-time roles and started volunteering – on the P&C at my children’s school and also at the local Kindy.  I also started editing and reviewing technical papers for some former colleagues. 

Nowadays I work at a Kindergarten as a teaching assistant.  The hours I work fit within my children’s school hours, which means I can still do pick up and drop off, and get the kids to their (many, many, oh-so-many) activities.  In addition to my own kids, I’ll often have an extra child or two to take to said activities (my friends and I remain committed to the notion of sharing the load when it comes to getting our kids to and from activities).  I’m finding too that the older my children get, the more just-being-around time there needs to be.  When they were toddlers, they’d tell me their entire life story in the twenty minutes it took me to cook dinner.  Now that they’re older, I find they might need to hang about and not talk for a while (and then be asked the right questions) before they’re ready to tell me about something from their day.

In all honesty, I always enjoyed the work that I did.  I would never have chosen to quit my job, because I did find it interesting and challenging.  Redundancy gave me the chance to spend more time with my kids as they got older, and that has been a lot of fun. 

Dear Australia (Take Two)

Today is the 18^th of March, 2021.  It’s roughly a year since the craziness of COVID started.  This time last year, I’d promised my daughter she could still have her birthday party if schools stayed open.  They stayed open for another week; she got her birthday party.  School closed a week later and stayed that way for eight weeks.

To date, there have been just over 29 000 cases of COVID-19 in Australia.  909 people have died from the virus.  Today, there are 2012 active cases, none of which are serious or critical.  In Queensland at least, all of those cases are in hospital quarantine.  The majority of these cases are returning travelers whose cases were detected while in the mandatory two weeks of hotel quarantine.

Vaccinations have started in Australia, focusing on health workers.  My sister (a hospital pharmacist) and her husband (a doctor) both got their first shots in the last two weeks.  Rollout for older Australians starts on Monday.  That will take care of my parents and my in-laws.  The rest of us will be waiting until Phase 2b, probably September or October. 

Things are getting pretty close to “normal” here.  Well, COVID-normal. It’s still virtually impossible to leave the country, and there are tens of thousands of Australian citizens and residents still trying to get back into Australia from overseas.  There are caps on the number of arrivals per week, because there are limits on the number of hotel rooms that can be used for hotel quarantine.  I don’t imagine that there will be significant overseas travel for at least another year or so.

In our local area, everything is operating – shops, restaurants, cafes, schools, churches, events.  There are still limits on numbers at events, with hand sanitizer everywhere and online check ins at various locations to aid any required contact tracing.  Parents are allowed back into schools – assemblies can be attended, classroom volunteers are welcomed and school fetes are being planned (albeit on a smaller scale and with COVID-safe plans in place). 

However, there is still that jumpiness, that sense of danger lurking in the background.  A doctor at a local hospital tested positive last Friday, having been exposed to a COVID-positive patient two days earlier.  As a precaution, access to all hospitals was limited, and nursing homes and care facilities were shut to visitors.  Masks were required in hospitals immediately.  Following a previous community transmission, greater Brisbane had a three-day shutdown, with a mask mandate for two weeks.  When Western Australia had a similar case, they shut down the southern part of the state for five days, including starting Term 1 a week later than scheduled.

In all of this, however, we’ve been lucky because we’ve had a lot of advantages that other places don’t have.  Firstly, we’re an island.  A very, very big island, mind you, but an island all the same.  We can stop people getting in very easily – all that was required was to stop international flights and ships arriving. And while we are a big island with lots of generally unmonitored coastline, we’re also a long way from mostly everywhere, so trying to arrive in your own little boat and sneak on in is not particularly easy.  Our population is relatively low for the size of our country – roughly 25.5 million people in a country that’s only 22% smaller than the US (population 328 million).  People tend to live in houses, not apartments, and not all of our homes have good insulation and central heating and cooling.  The average Australian had their doors and windows open much of the time.  COVID-19 also started in Summer here.  Australians live their lives outdoors in Summer.  While some of us might go to crowded beaches (I’m looking at you, Bondi), just as many (if not more) head off camping or fishing someplace more remote (and there are a lot of remote places in a country the size of Australia).  And all of these things made for less potential exposure to the virus that in other places, where people may live and work in smaller areas in locations with a much larger population.

And then there is that other helpful aspect about Australians – in general, if we’re asked to do something reasonable, we do as we’re asked.  Yes, there are some people who’ve protested mask-wearing or standing on the distance markers or whatever, but most Australians just follow the instructions.  As an example, when greater Brisbane was locked down for three days, we were asked to wear masks when we left our home.  At all times.  Which meant while exercising outdoors, while driving your car, while waiting in a queue.  If you weren’t standing within the property lines of your home, you were wearing a mask.  I went out for a walk on the afternoon of the second day.  I wore a mask.  Every single person I saw (over the age of 12) was also wearing a mask.  Every person in a car, whether alone or with others, was wearing a mask.  I heard a fair amount of complaining about masks being annoying, mind you, but everybody followed the instructions.

So, Dear Australia, a year into Living With A Pandemic, thank you to everyone who did what they were asked.  It means that we’ll get back to “normal” levels of interstate travel sooner (and maybe even be allowed to leave the country and return one day in the not-too-distant future!).  It means that we’ll be able to keep our elderly, our infirm and our people with other illnesses safe and well. And it means that we can keep going about our lives, enjoying our families and our communities and the activities that unite us.  Thank you, Australia.

On being prepared

 We live in an area where heavy rain, violent storms and flash flooding are relatively common.  The period between late October and mid-April is referred to as “storm season”, and there are years where it is not abnormal to have a hot, sweltering day morph suddenly into an epic thunderstorm, with a side order of hailstones.  The temperature can drop by ten degrees Celsius in a couple of minutes, it goes from sunny to black as pitch in minutes, and we can get up to 100mm of rain in a twenty-minute storm.

The year we returned from living in Canada, our final flight into Brisbane was diverted to Sydney because of a storm.  We could see the lightening out of the plane windows; when we were finally allowed to return to Brisbane several hours later, we saw the damage caused on the taxi ride to our accommodation.  The taxi had to take the long way home, due to flooding in a couple of tunnels and underpasses.  That particular storm caused millions of dollars damage in a group of suburbs, destroying homes with its strong winds and torrential rain.

A month after we moved into our current home, there was a massive flood, which inundated many of the suburbs around where we live.  Our suburb is bordered on three sides by the Brisbane river, and the water came from the river breaking its banks in some places, by the creeks flooding and by water coming back up from storm water drains.  Our home wasn’t flooded, but the nearby power station was, meaning that we had no power for six days.  Several friends had significant flooding in their homes – one basically required an entire rebuild of the ground floor.  Essentially the entire Brisbane CBD was flooded.  Parks all over the city were unable to be used for months due to possible soil contamination due to sediment washing into them during the floods.  The Army was called in to assist with the clean-up.

Another time, driving home from work with my two daughters in the car, a storm hit suddenly.  The rain was so heavy that I could barely see, but there was nowhere safe to stop, so I crept along at a crawling pace, windscreen wipers on their highest setting, headlights on high beam.  We made it home safely, the storm ended abruptly about ten minutes later.  We had an average month’s worth of rain in the 25-minute storm.

The week later, a similar storm started up.  This one came with heavy rain and stronger winds, and a large amount of hail.  When the winds brought down two of our deck screens within a minute, I took the children downstairs to the only window-less place in the house – the hallway.  We sat on cushions on the floor and read stories while the storm roared.  My husband arrived home from work just as it was ending.  Even though we have a garage with an automatic door, when he walked into the house, he was dripping wet.  He’d arrived home to find large tree branches down over our driveway, and he’d had to get out of the car in the pouring rain to pull them out the way.  He said he’d had to turn around three times on his way through our suburb because of fallen trees.

Another time, the tail end of a cyclone made its way across the state, drenching Brisbane in 330mm of rain in about 36 hours.  Schools were shut for two days because of the risks posed by the heavy rain.  It rained so much that the soil was totally waterlogged, and we had deep puddles in our back yard for two or three days afterwards.

Every year at the start of storm season, there are multiple ads (from state and local government, insurance companies, banks) reminding people to prepare for the season.  Suggestions include reviewing your insurance to make sure you’re properly covered, trimming trees and clearing debris from your yard, parking your car under cover to prevent hail damage, having 2 – 3 days’ worth of dry goods and water in the house and having candles, batteries and battery powered torches and radios on hand.

In addition to having lived in Brisbane for 15 of the last 18 years, I grew up in the north of Western Australia, where cyclones are common.  Cyclone season warnings were similar – have food and water on hand, be aware that the power will almost certainly go out and you’ll need battery powered lights and radios, and it may take some time (days, even a week or so) for services to be re-established and it may be days before trucks with food supplies could get through.

When I was a kid and a cyclone was heading our way, there was rarely ever panic buying.  Everyone kept non-perishable food and batteries around.  People might need a few extra batteries, or they might buy a little extra something (particularly fresh fruit and vegetables or bread), but no one ever raced out to buy everything in the shop the day before a cyclone came through.  Pretty much everyone had what they needed at home, and everyone knew that if you ran out of something important, your neighbours would certainly help you out.

And so we cut to nowadays.

Even with all the reminders, whenever there is a (big) storm warning or potential hazard, people will race out and buy far more than they need.  Even people who already have all the things they’ll need at home.  It’s almost like the panic one person feels when they realise there’s not enough <insert item here> at home and they race out to buy is catching, and everyone is suddenly “infected” with the need to buy more.  Just before big storms here, certain things (like bottled water) sells out fast. 

Now, in a storm or flood, sometimes we do lose power (and potentially clean water) for a while.  Sometimes it is impossible to get to the local supermarket because of physical barriers or dangers (trees down, flooding).  Sometimes, the supply trucks can’t get through.  So there is something more to the “panic” associated with that type of situation because you may indeed find yourself out of something critical (like drinking water) with limited ability to get more.  This, of course, does not explain why there is still massive panic buying whenever COVID shutdowns occur.

Let me point out – years of living where natural events can impact access to food and water supplies has ingrained in me the need to have enough non-perishable food and water for at least two weeks.  Quite frankly, it’d be boring food by the end of that two weeks (with some potentially crazy food combinations required as the supply dwindled down), but we wouldn’t starve, nor would we die of thirst.  If there was still power (and my freezer remained in play), we could probably manage another week or two.  I’ve never panic bought anything in my entire life – I have always bought a few extras of things (pasta, rice, tinned goods) until I built up an appropriately sized “stockpile” of dry goods.

Early last year, when the potentially enormous impact of COVID was becoming apparent, I did pay a little more attention than normal to what I kept at home.  Normally I don’t bother with a lot of frozen meat or vegetables – buying fresh is always easy where I live.  I did stock up on those sorts of things to ensure that we had two weeks’ supply, and I bought extra milk to freeze as well.  By the time lockdown went into place where I live, during that period of time where people were fighting strangers for the last rolls of toilet paper, we were barely leaving the house and definitely not going anywhere near supermarkets.  Strangely enough, the feeling that I should be panicking (and panic buying) was strong, even when I looked through the cupboards and fridges and freezer in my house and saw what we had available to us.

A few months ago, when we had a three-day lockdown, it happened again.  Lines of people waiting outside of supermarkets, limits implemented immediately on some items.  Supermarkets were not going to close during the lockdown, nor were we prevented from going shopping (with a mask on).  But still people panicked.  And again I felt that undercurrent of “you need to panic!”, even though I was perfectly certain I did not.

Maybe it’s because life has become so organised and orderly and easy now.  We can make a call (well, use an app most times) and get food delivered within a short period of time.  We can order our groceries and have them brought to our door.  We can have the book we want right now through an e-reader, or the movie we want to see by purchasing it through our tv.  When we search for something that we want nowadays it’s from the couch in our living room, scrolling through the pages on our phones.  We can do all manner of things reliably from the comfort of our home without even speaking to another person.  If we want to go away somewhere, we do, booking tickets and accommodation via apps and websites, finding the things that we want to do and fitting it into when we want to do it.  And COVID stopped a lot of that.

Travel was gone.  Deliveries weren’t as reliable or as quick.  Things were out of stock and not restocked immediately.  We couldn’t have the things we wanted straight away, and we’ve forgotten what that’s like.  And so when there were suddenly restrictions (one packet of toilet paper, two tins of beans, one box of pasta) we all started panicking that nothing would be available anymore.  The irony of all of that is that if we’d just stopped with our panic buying for a week or two, the shops would have been able to fully restock and we could go about our normal business (with masks and social distancing, of course).

The general ease of our lives pre-COVID made the restrictions to attempt to control the virus seem much harder than it would have even twenty years ago.  Generations before us have lived through world-changing events without the panic that we experienced.  Even if we were prepared in terms of having enough food in the house, none of us were prepared for the impacts of something like COVID.

And you may call me . . .

 When I was a kid, I called my friends’ parents, my parents’ friends and essentially every adult person Mr or Mrs or Miss.  By the time I was in my teens, there were a couple of Ms thrown into the equation.  Even my first boyfriend’s parents were Mr and Mrs Matthews; he called mine Mr and Mrs Lourde.  I don’t recall ever even knowing my teachers’ first names.  There were also the friends-who-functioned as family – my mother’s best friend and her husband were “Aunty” and “Uncle”, as were my Dad’s best man and his wife (and I still call them this now, even though I’m in my 40s).  The only family friends I can remember calling by their first names were our next door neighbours – for some reason, they were always Ella and Terry, and their kids called my parents by their first names. 

Nowadays, I’m the grown up, and without exception all of my children’s friends (and all of my friends’ children) call me “Meg”.  When I volunteer at my children’s school or work at the local kindy, the kids call me “Miss Meg”, but that was about as formal as it ever gets.  Truth be told, I’d feel weird being called “Ms Lourde” (or the Mrs version, using my married name) by the children that I know.  I still think of “Mrs Lourde” as my mother; “Mrs Married Name” is my mother-in-law.  And the only kids who call me by the aunty tag (and I actually prefer tia, not aunty) are my nieces and nephews.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that a fair number of my friends started having children relatively young – I’d only just turned 25 (and was four days into marriage) when the first of our close friends became parents.  I was still getting used to the idea of being a Mrs myself at that point, so the notion of our friends’ daughter calling us Mr and Mrs didn’t even cross our minds.  That set the scene for the rest of our friends’ kids – I was just Meg.  I did have one friend who liked her daughter to call adults by a formal title.  She was ok with her daughter using my first name, so long as there was a title before it, so that was the first time I was Miss Meg.  Another friend’s daughter always saw my husband and me together, so she assumed we shared a name – until she was about five, irrespective of if she was addressing us together or individually, she called us Marcus-and-Meggie (always in a sing-song tone, too).  I must admit to being very sad when she finally realised we had separate names and stopped using our combined name.

My children used surnames for their school teachers (with essentially all of the female teachers getting called something that sounds more like Mizz that Miss or Ms), but call most of the adults that they know by their first names.  The exceptions to this are a few of my father-in-law’s friends – he introduced them to my children using Mr or Mrs, and so that’s what we stuck with.  When first introducing my kids to a new adult, I do ask if they’d prefer my children to use their surname rather than a first name, but I can’t think of a single adult who has opted for that.  Even the adults who teach their after school classes go by first names (occasionally with a Miss or Mr in front).  And everyone seems perfectly happy with that.

On the topic of goodbye

 

My Nan always hated it when I went away.  Given I’ve spent most of my adult life in a different state (or country) to where she lived, sometimes we’d go a year or two between visits, and so she felt that each goodbye may well be the Very Last Goodbye.  Every time she hugged me when I was leaving, she would cry.  Every single time.

The first time I left Perth, on my way to Brasil for a 12 month exchange programme, my Nan made me promise that I wouldn’t come home early if something happened to her and Pa. She wanted me to stay and enjoy my exchange.  At the time, she was 66, Pa was a decade older.  I was pretty confident that they’d be ok, and I made the promise based on that.  As it turned out, my father, aged 46, was the one who got sick and required surgery to prevent him dying.  The surgery was successful.  I stayed in Brasil for the full year.

When I moved to Brisbane, Nan was just shy of 76, Pa was almost 86.  I still remember driving away from their house the last time I visited, a couple of days before I flew to Brisbane, the two of them standing on their driveway and waving until we turned the corner, Nan crying the whole time.

Every time we visited her (or she visited us), it was the same.  At the point of farewell, Nan would get upset and start to cry, then apologise for being “a silly old thing”.  Every time she would say something that indicated she was considering this to be the (potentially) final farewell.

Pa would get emotional, but he never seemed as worried as her that he’d never see me again.  Given he was ten years older and had several quite significant health issues (including the fact he’d technically died from the heart attack he’d had in his sixties) he was statistically more likely to die first, and we all knew it.

The very last time I saw Pa was on New Year’s Day, 2010.  I was nearly seven months pregnant with my eldest, and my husband and I had been back in WA visiting family for Christmas.  We stopped in to see Nan and Pa on the way to the airport.  Pa waved us off with a smile, promising to come visit when the baby was born.  Nan waved till we were out of sight, crying the whole time.

About a week later, Pa had a fall and they did a brain scan as a result.  They discovered he had numerous tumours in his brain; he declined all medical treatments except pain management.  He couldn’t hear well on the phone (he’d been mostly deaf for years), so I sent my mum emails that she read to him instead.  He insisted to the doctors that he needed to make it to mid-March because there was a great-grandbaby on the way.  He made it to the first of February.

His funeral was huge.  I know this, not because I went, but because my in-laws went.  I wanted to go, but both my mum and my Nan asked me not to come.  They were both concerned that flying back across the country at eight months pregnant wouldn’t be good for me or the baby (even though my obstetrician said I was fine to fly).  And so I stayed home.

Over the ten years that followed, there were multiple visits back and forth.  Nan accompanied my parents to our place several times; we went back to WA every year or so.  Nan’s last visit to Brisbane was in late 2015 to meet our son.  She was 89; he was 18 days old.  She always talked about visiting us again, but we all knew it was too long a flight for her anymore.  Instead, we saw her when we went back to Perth, the first time a year after her final visit to us, then for our son’s 2^nd birthday, when he sat on her lap while she sang him happy birthday.  She still got emotional at farewells, and it had grown to her getting teary on the phone when it was time to say goodbye.

Early last year, we flew to Perth for the first time in two years for a family wedding and my mum’s 70^th birthday.  Nan had been in hospital for an operation, but she was in pretty good form.  She loved seeing our kids, gave them lots of hugs and kisses, loved that we came to visit her house while she was convalescing.  And then she had a stroke.

The stroke happened while we were still in Perth, and I got to see her a few times afterwards.  I held her hand, stroked her hair from her forehead like she’d done for me when I was a child, and told her that I loved her.  Although it was sad, it was lovely to have that time with her, and to be there for my mum.

Nan died in April, and her funeral should have overflowed the room, like Pa’s did.  But she died at the height of COVID restrictions, so there were only ten people at her funeral.  I didn’t go to her funeral either – the restrictions left me stuck in Queensland, watching my Nan’s funeral via a livestream.

The irony of it all was that she was so badly affected by the stroke that the last time I saw her, she didn’t even know that I was in the room.  After all those years of tears and worry that this may be the last time she’d ever see me, my Nan was never even aware of that Final Goodbye. 

Living Away

 I’m the eldest of three, and the third of five grandchildren on my mother’s side.  Although my Nan’s family is large (she was the third of nine; my mother has 27 maternal first cousins), our particular branch of said family is not especially big.  My parents grew up in almost adjoining suburbs; they met at a church youth group when  Mum was 11 and Dad was 14.  They dated on and off from the time she was 14 or so and married just shy of her 21st birthday.

My mother’s sister had two children, each of them had two children, and the eldest of those grandchildren has a child as well.  My siblings and I have six children between us.  My dad had two sisters, and I have five cousins from his side.  My aunts and their families always lived on the opposite side of the country to my parents, so I’ve never met two of those cousins, and the most recently that I saw any of the older three was nearly 20 years ago.  Between those five cousins there are at least six children, but, again, I’ve never met them. 

Growing up, my family spent a lot of time living relatively distant to the rest of the family.  The maternal side of the family (my Nan and Pa, my aunt and uncle, my two cousins) lived within 120kms of Perth, as did my paternal grandfather.  My paternal grandmother died just after I was born.  For much of my childhood and early adolescence, we lived in a variety of small towns in the middle of nowhere.  Two of those towns were in the desert; one doesn’t even exist anymore.  Two others are on the north west coast and are now relatively large and prosperous (although small by world standard) cities.  We did live in Perth for four years when I was young (my brother was born in Perth), but we in a very outer suburb of the city, roughly 30 minutes from our closest family members in the state and a two hour drive from the most distant.  Even when we lived the furthest away (about 1600 kms), we still managed to visit at least once a year.

My husband’s immediate family live slightly further south of Perth than my grandparents; his maternal relatives are all on the East coast.  His father is an only child whose parents died before my husband and his siblings were born, but my father-in-law had three close friends who were like brothers, all of whom live in and around Perth.  It was amusing to discover that one of these friends was the father of my good friend Pedro, and even more entertaining to work out that when I’d gone to Pedro’s 21^st years earlier, my (then future) in-laws had been amongst the gaggle of grown-ups celebrating inside.

My father-in-law grew up in a small town about 60kms from where my parents live, and he met my mother-in-law when he was stationed near her family home with the Air Force.  After they married, they moved around a lot for his - my husband also lived in a town that no longer exists.  When my husband was about 7, they settled in the same town they still live in now, on the opposite side of the country to the rest of my mother-in-law’s family. My sister-in-law, her husband and their two daughters live slightly south of my in-laws; my husband’s brother is the only one to have left the state – he’s been in Darwin for years.

With the exception of the six years we lived in the North during his childhood, my brother has always lived in Perth.  He’s never lived further that 20kms away from my parents, and he has a preference for more rural living with plenty of space around.

My sister loves to travel.  Entertainingly, she met her English husband in Perth when he was working at a local hospital as part of his medical training.  When he went back to England six months later, she went too.  She married him several years later, and they spent many years moving backwards and forwards between the UK and Australia.  Their first son was born in the UK, the second in Australia.  Both of the boys have dual citizenship, as does her husband.  They’ve been living in Perth, in a bustling inner-city suburb, for over six years now.

As for me . . . well, there was the year in Brasil at 18.  Moving across the country to Brisbane with my husband at 27.  After three years here, we went to Canada for three more, and we’ve been back in Brisbane for over 12 years.  Much of my adult life (and the great majority of my married life) has been spent a great distance from my extended family.  All three of our children were born here.  The only house we own is here.  Our friends and our life is here.  We go back to Western Australia every year or two, but only to visit.  Home is here.

Having moved so much as a child, I don’t actually have a sense of a “hometown”.  I don’t have those old primary or high school friends that I catch up with on a semi-regular basis.  I’ve never been to a single high school reunion or catch-up.  None of that bothers me. 

The entertaining part in all this, however, is the fact that we’ve lived in the same area for the entirety of our children’s lives.  Our two youngest have only ever lived in the same house; we lived elsewhere when our eldest was born but we moved here (eleven streets away from our previous home) when she was nine months old, and she has no recollection of any home other than this.  My daughters have been at the same primary school since they started; their brother has joined them there this year.  My girls have done many of their after-school activities for several years.  They've been in the same speech and drama classes together for three years.  They’ve both also been learning to sing with the same choir (with the same group of friends) for four-and-a-half years; this afternoon, my son will be joining the same choir, albeit in the “young singers” group. 

My children have had a continuity in location and school and surrounds that I didn’t really experience, and I’m quite enjoying it.  I don’t even think that I’m enjoying it on their behalf – I had a lovely childhood and had the chance to visit lots of places, meet new people and move around.  Actually, when I was young, I loved to move house – it was fun.  I genuinely think that adult me is appreciating the continuity – the ability to stay and to be in one place, rather than have to go through the adult-related issues of moving (which takes work), organising schools/activities for the kids (more work) and making new friends of my own (the toughest work of all).  I like the familiarity of it, the comfort of community and the feeling of belonging.  That’s not to say that I wouldn’t be up to moving again.  It would just need to be for a very good reason.

Once Upon A Time . . . I worked in a male-dominated industry

I am a scientist.  When I was at university 25 years ago studying Chemistry, there were probably twice as many male students as female.  That has evened out somewhat in the intervening years, but the industry (particularly the mining industry) skews male.  This is particularly noticeable at the higher levels – General Manager and above.

There are a lot of reasons for this.  Predominant amongst them is what happens when a person starts a family, and how it tends to be the mother whose time at work is most affected.  Many women will take at least one maternity leave break during their career.  Some will take more than one.  Some will return to work part time for a period (or forever).  And there are many aspects of work in the mining industry that are not especially conducive with being the primary parent.

My husband and I worked for the same large mining company for many years.  We both flew in and out of mining sites, sometimes for a couple of days, sometimes for a few weeks.  At times, we managed to coordinate our trips to go together; other times one of us might fly in on Saturday morning from a week on-site, the other would fly out Sunday afternoon for a week on a different site.  We even did a couple of secondments – one a three-month stint at a refinery in northern Australia, the other a three-year transfer to a refinery in Canada.  Sometimes, we worked ten or twelve hour days, both on-site and in the lab.  There were days when we needed to come into the lab at midnight to take samples.  Some shifts were night shift.  At other times, there might be a teleconference with people overseas that had to happen at 5am or 10pm, or an experiment ran over and we didn’t get home till 8pm, even though we’d arrived in the lab at 6am. Travel to and from site often happened on the weekend or late in the day.  This was all just part of the job. 

For the first seven or so years of our employment, this worked well.  If someone asked, “Can you be there tomorrow?” we could both easily say yes.  While living in Canada, I was once asked on a Wednesday evening to be in Australia by Sunday (and I was).  If a colleague needed an assistant for the midnight sampling run, one of us could help out.  If something ran late, one (usually both) of us could stay to ensure the work was completed properly.  We were a useful team – we came to work together, so we’d leave together, which meant that any chemical handling (which requires two people to be present for safety reasons) could easily be managed by the two of us together.

The reason for this?  We didn’t have children.  We weren’t constrained to an arrival or departure time that worked with daycare drop off and pick up.  We weren’t juggling a cranky baby or toddler who didn’t want to go to bed when we were doing teleconferences at weird hours.  If one of us was away for work, there was no school run, after school activities or friends’ birthday parties to manage alone.    

Seven years into my employment with the company, I told my boss I was pregnant.  After the initial flurry of congratulations were done, I started hearing the same questions from everyone. “So, what are your plans?”  “What are you going to do once the baby’s here?” “How much time will you take off?” “Are you planning to come back to work?”  “How will you manage work and kids when you come back?” These questions were pretty much all just out of interest, friends and colleagues wanting to know what I thought I might do.  The interesting part was the questions that my husband got.  “What is Meg planning to do?” “How long is she planning to be off work?” “Do you think she’ll come back?”  Not a single person asked him what he planned to do now that he would be a father.  No one asked him how he’d manage to do his job while being a dad.  The assumption was that his (work) life could continue exactly as it always had, without being affected by his new “fatherhood” status.

Over the eight years that followed, his work didn’t really change.  He would still work long hours as necessary – while we continued working in the same lab, it was always me who reminded him that we needed to leave work to pick up the children from daycare.  He would still go to site, sometimes at very short notice, for a week or three.  If he flew out on a Sunday and back on Saturday morning, I’d organise everything to do with the kids, and then do all of the above myself.  On the occasions where he called to say that he had to stay an extra few days, I continued to manage it.  If he had a teleconference from home, I’d make sure the children weren’t interrupting. If there was an after-work event, or a special training course that we both needed to attend, I’d organise the babysitter or arrange for the children to be taken to and from their activities.

Over that eight years, I had three lots of maternity leave.  I transitioned to permanent part time (three days a week) work.  When requested, I modified the three days per week that I worked to suit the needs of the group I worked for.  If a meeting or a training workshop was scheduled on a day I didn’t work (which happened more frequently than you’d think), I would attend if required.  I would check emails and attend to urgent matters on my non-work days. The first time a public holiday fell on one of the days that I worked, my boss asked me what day I was planning to work to “make up” for the public holiday.  I asked him what day he planned to work to make up for his public holiday.  He never asked that question again.

I was asked to travel for work a few times during those eight years.  Once was while I was breastfeeding.  Another time was for an hour-long meeting in town to the north, that would have required me to leave home at 5am and not get home until after 7pm.  I said no and dialled in to the meeting.  My absence at the meeting was commented upon several times, “Why couldn’t you make it, Meg?  It’s not that big a deal.” The part where my husband was on-site somewhere else, I had a toddler (whose daycare opened at 7am and closed at 6pm) and I was five or six months pregnant did not factor into any of my (male) co-workers’ ideas of a “big deal”.  The only time I did travel was for an induction course that my boss insisted I take, mostly to meet some of his own objectives; “100% of senior staff inducted at the refinery”.  Because of the timing of the course, I had to leave home on Sunday at lunchtime to be on-site for a 7am start the next morning, and then not get home until 7pm on Monday.  I completed the induction as required, but never needed to visit the site, so it seemed a waste of time and money to me.

In the seven years that I worked pre-children, I was promoted twice.  In the eight years post-children, promotion was never mentioned.  All of my “career progression” discussions started with my boss saying, “Well, I know you work part time . . .”

My husband started work with the company a few months before I did.  He had a Bachelors degree and three years of experience working in the field; I had no field experience but an honours degree and a PhD.  His starting salary was slightly more than mine, and my salary never caught up to his.  In all the years he’s worked for the company, he’s always received an “above expectations” rating in his performance reviews, even in years when he’d received a promotion (he’s had five of those in time he’s worked for the company).  I worked for the same company for sixteen years, and I received only one “above expectations” rating – all my others were “meeting expectations”.  In one particular year, having gone above and beyond in my work, travelling extensively, getting excellent reviews from the third-party clients that I’d done work for, I pushed especially hard to be assessed as “above expectations”.  My boss (and his boss, when I took it further) told me that because I’d got a promotion that year, it wasn’t appropriate that I also got a higher performance grading.  When I pointed out that my husband had got a high performance review and a promotion in the same year, they told me their decision was final. 

My husband, it must be said, is an exceptional worker. He deserves those high performance ratings.  He deserves the bonuses and the pay rises that he gets.  It just always seemed that there was less need for him to push for things, whereas I always had to make my case far more thoroughly than he did, or deal with issues that simply never came up for him.