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.