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.

Things to do in 2021

I don’t do New Year’s resolutions.  I don’t really see the point of them.  This year, however, inspired by an online person who I know in real life, I’ve decided to write myself a list of 21 things I’d like to accomplish in 2021.

1. Read 50 books this year.
2. Write someone a letter once a month.
3. Do at least 20 minutes of exercise each day.
4. Have an at-home date night with my husband every second Friday (no children allowed!).
5. Have dinner out with a friend at least six times this year (no children or husbands allowed!).
6. Have a night away for our 20^th wedding anniversary (COVID meant that didn’t happen last year).
7. Family movie night once a month.
8. Teach my girls to cook two meals each.
9. Alcohol-free January.
10. Complete a senior first aid course.
11. Write one personal and one work blog post per fortnight.
12. Plan and take a family holiday.
13. Get three paid writing jobs.
14. Write at least six chapters of the novel that’s been in my head for the last two years.
15. Take each of my kids out to do something fun (just me and that kid) once per month.
16. Talk to my mum at least once a week.
17. Start having Sunday brunch all together.
18. Wait thirty days before buying anything new to make sure I really need it.
19. Join a book club.
20. Volunteer in my son’s Prep class each week.
21. Start a story journal with each of my daughters.

So far, I’m doing pretty well with this.  Let’s see how I’m going by the middle of the year.

On the beginning of a new year . . .

So, roughly a year ago, I was musing about All The Things I'd done in the 2000s to date, and wondering about what 2020 would bring.  A global pandemic was not something that I anticipated, mind you.

2020 was a weird year.  There's no other way to describe it.  It showcased some of the worst things about humanity (physical confrontations over the last packet of toilet paper in the shop; people declaring their "freedoms" more important that following medical advice), but it also showed the best.  People delivering groceries for random strangers.  Drive-by birthday parties.  New ways to celebrate long-standing traditions, like lighting up the dawn on ANZAC Day. 

Last year also shone a light on the disconnect between science and the general population.  The ongoing changes and updates to scientific and medical advice were seen as a sign that scientists and medical professionals didn't know what they were doing.  For the record, those changes and updates were good evidence that science was working just as it should - when new information came to light, it led to changes in the advice.  

And who could have predicted that we'd have one vaccine ready to go by the end of the year, let alone multiple vaccines?  That is the result of an extraordinary effort all over the world by multiple groups of sciences and medical professionals.  It's an amazing feat that really should be celebrated.

Interesting, though, are my children's thoughts on 2020.  I sat down with them yesterday and asked the three of them the same few questions about the year.  I've been doing this for years and have an ongoing 'diary' for each of them that I update each year.  Yesterday, not one of them mentioned COVID.  There were no complaints about staying home or being isolated.  My eldest made lots of comments about how awesome it was to have guinea pigs and how much she loves them.  The middle kid's highlight and happiness was all around getting roller skates and learning to skate.  And my son told me how exciting it had been to go to Kindy, and how he can't wait to start school later this month.  

And it was like that all year.  Sure, they complained occasionally about the things that were cancelled (school, parties, sports, activities).  But mostly it was about the good.  They all talked about their friends.  Skyped with some for ages.  Told me how much fun it had been to walk around the horse park near our house and talk to the goats who are in the next paddock.  They talked about climbing trees together, drawing chalk pictures on the driveway, painting rocks to leave around the neighbourhood.  

Now, I understand that we were luckier than most.  Infection rates and illness here never got out-of-control.  We had no change to our income.  My husband could work from home easily and safely.  We live in a safe area with reliable services.  We had all the food that we needed, the ability to go outside and walk, things to do to entertain ourselves.  And my kids remember those parts.  They remember being together and having fun.  

So, that will be my take away from this rather unusual year - that it was all about being together at home with the people I love best. 

Happy New Year.