Once upon a time, I met this guy . . .

I met him in an Organic Chemistry laboratory class – we shared a fume cupboard.  He had long, purple hair with one huge dreadlock in the back, had his nails painted black and wore a grey lab coat.  Everyone else had a white one.  For the first few labs, he wore a sticker on his lapel that said, “I hate organic chemistry”.  He was six weeks past his 21^st birthday; I had six weeks to go until mine.

He barely talked to me for the first semester of classes.  At the time, I figured he didn’t like me.  The truth was that he was an introvert and rarely made small talk with anyone. 

Later that year, he wound up in a night class with a friend of mine.  The class didn’t finish until nine pm, and he always walked her to her car after class, before heading to the bus stop himself.  She mentioned that apart from saying, “I’ll walk with you,” each evening after class, he rarely said much else.

He came back to university the next year, minus the purple hair and the dreadlock.  He’d worked on a mine site all summer and a haircut had been necessary in the heat and the dust.  He took to sitting on the front steps of the Chemistry building with a number of us between classes, and over time, conversations started to happen.  Once he knew you, though he remained quite frugal in his words, he was witty, sarcastic, cheeky.  He had the best deadpan expression and was extremely convincing, even when telling an outright lie.  He was pretty much always barefoot – he put his shoes on only for lab classes.  And he wore a lot of different band t-shirts.

By the end of that year, we were sharing a couple of late afternoon classes.  One of these classes featured multiple guest presenters.  Depending on the presenter, the class was either hugely interesting or tediously boring.  There was no middle ground.  Unfortunately for us, there were far more boring classes than interesting ones.  We sat together, four or five of us in a row.  During the boring lectures, we passed notes backwards and forwards between ourselves.  At some point, he’d discovered that I loved Fruit Tingles, and he would often buy a pack of them before a class and pass a note down to me with a Fruit Tingle wrapped in it.

Over the summer break, he went away to work.  A few weeks into the break, I got a letter from him.  It was in the same style as the notes that we used to pass backwards and forwards – random stories, quick comments, nothing serious.  It surprised me that he’d written to me, but I figured he was a bit bored while working away.

Once he was back in the city for university, he invited me to his place to watch The X-Files.  He knew it was my favourite show, and he also knew that I didn’t have a TV of my own.  He also cooked me dinner.  Technically, I suppose, that was our first date, but it took a little longer for us to be officially together.  My plan for that year (my Honours year at uni) was to not have a boyfriend and to focus on my Honours work.  Of course, making that decision guaranteed that I would definitely find a boyfriend.  And so I did.

Somewhere in the wee hours of New Year’s Eve (probably New Year’s Day by then . . .), there was a proposal.  Actually, calling it a ‘proposal’ is probably being generous – I said to him, “You should marry me”, and he said, “Ok”.  Not long after that, he got a job on a mine site in the middle of nowhere.  It was what Australians refer to as FIFO – Fly In, Fly Out.  In his case, it was a two-hour flight into the closest airport, followed by a three or four hour drive to the site.  He worked four weeks on, two weeks off.  His boss was a man my father had known for years, and the boss wound up employing quite a few of the scientists we knew over the years.  The second time he came back, we went out and bought an engagement ring.  He told me that since I’d proposed, I should buy him one.  I replied that I was quite happy to, but I wanted a ring too J  In the end, we bought just one.  My engagement ring never had its own box – I left the jewellery store wearing it and have rarely taken it off since.

The first person we told was my grandmother, who was in hospital after an operation.  She was a carrier of the staph infection, so she was in an individual room, and everyone who visited had to scrub on the way in and out, and wear a gown, gloves and mask while visiting.  My husband loves to recount the story of the first time I showed someone my engagement ring – by peeling back the latex glove I was wearing in my Nana’s hospital room.

We were married early the next year, nine days after my 25^th birthday.  We bought our first house late the year after, then moved across the country a year after that, buying house #2 and selling #1.  We lived in Canada for several years after that, then moved back to Australia in our mid-thirties.  After our eldest daughter was born, we bought our third house together, and we’ve been here for over eight years, the longest we’ve ever lived at the same address in all the time we’ve been together.  In my case, prior to this, I’ve never lived at the same address for eight continuous years.

Over half my lifetime ago, I met this guy.  He had a grey lab coat because that was what his mother bought, not realising that lab coats are usually white.  He had a dreadlock, which his mother showed to our kids last time we visited – she kept it after he had his hair cut all those years ago.  He still likes band t-shirts and refuses to wear shoes unless it’s absolutely essential.  He told me many years later that the reason he’d barely talked to me in the beginning was not just because he was shy, but that he’d always thought I was cute and he didn’t really know what to say to me.  He still dislikes organic chemistry, and is more likely to be working in the geology or engineering fields than chemistry these days.  He still doesn’t like making small talk or meeting new people, but he’s still a cheeky bugger if you know him well.  I can’t remember the last time he gave me Fruit Tingles, but he still leaves (rude) notes (generally as “suggestions” on the shopping list or my to-do list for the day) around the house.  He has to be careful where he leaves these notes now, since our daughters can both read.

After twenty-three years, he still thinks I’m cute, still likes hanging out with me and is still my best friend.  Twenty-three years haven’t changed that.  Multiple relocations across the country and around the world haven’t either.  And neither have the three children we’ve had along the way.  Some days (many days) we drive each other crazy.  Some days, we barely have time to talk to each other.  Sometimes, out by ourselves without children, we purposely sit and enjoy the extreme silence that comes without children.  Especially at a dinner table.  He can still make me laugh at the stupidest things.  He will do stuff sometimes that is so funny and yet so totally inappropriate (or done at such an inappropriate time) that it immediately goes on the list of “crazy stuff my husband says that I can never tell anyone about”.

And out of all of this, please let me tell you the one thing that I know makes for a good marriage.  Be kind.  Because he is a different kind of person to me, my husband has a different take on this motto.  His would be along the lines of Don’t be an asshole.  Both of these are equally useful mottos to live by.

When There Is No Village

They say it takes a village to raise a child, but what do you do when there is no village?

I grew up in small towns.  My father isn’t fond of busy, populated places – he always preferred small towns, or the outer-lying suburbs of cities, which can be almost the same.  Growing up, we lived in a procession of small towns – Meekatharra, Wittenoom (which doesn’t even exist anymore), Port Hedland, Karratha.  In between, there were years here and there living in a very outer suburb of Perth, the same place that my parents still live.  When I was a kid, we basically had the run of the town – we’d leave home first thing in the morning on our bikes with our friends, and we’d be home before the sun was down, or there’d be hell to pay.  I remember only one afternoon when we got home too late – our punishment was that we couldn’t watch Astroboy that night; the kids next door had to go to evening Mass in their play clothes.  We never got up to too much mischief in our small towns, because every single person around knew exactly who your parents were, and no one had any qualms about letting your parents know if you’d been up to no good (or even just a little not-good).  It kept us all in line.

By the time I had children of my own, I lived on the other side of the country from my parents and my in-laws.  I live in what is best described as an inner city suburb in a large capital city (“large” being somewhat subjective, but large for Australia).  My multiple relocations as a child meant that I don’t have a group of childhood friends that I see on a regular basis.  My extended family also live on the other side of the country, my husband’s extended family are all based in a different, more southern state than us.  Again, given that we live in Australia, even though they’re in state directly to our south, it’s a decent 10 – 12 hour drive between us and them.

When my eldest daughter was born, therefore, I had no village.  We’d only recently returned to Australia from a three-year secondment in Canada, so we’d left behind those friends, plus many of our local friends had moved away in the three years we’d been away.  I did have a couple of pregnancy buddies – a friend had her second son a month before my daughter; my sister’s son was born six months after my daughter – but neither of them lived near me – my friend lived in the US; my sister was based in the UK.  When my daughter was born, I knew exactly zero local friends with young babies.

Happily, the state health department had an excellent “new parents” programme, which involved attending four weekly meetings with a nurse.  The meetings were, from memory, a couple of hours long.  The first half was an informal chat with the nurse, the second half was a chance to chat with the other new parents (pretty much always mothers).  The meetings started when your baby was 6 – 8 weeks old, and there were 8 – 10 new parents involved who lived in the same general area.

And it was here that I found my first village.  Our mothers’ group started off with nine mothers, but one left after the first week and another dropped out later.  We continued our group after the four week course, catching up once a week for a couple of hours at a time, meeting at each other’s houses.  We picked up two other mothers along the way – a woman I met at a baby yoga class who had no family nearby, and the friend of one of the other mums who hadn’t really hit it off with her mothers’ group.  Our group continued to meet up weekly, at parks, at homes, occasionally at cafes or restaurants.  We weren’t always all there – most of us went back to work within the first year of having a baby.  Every six months or so, we’d go out to dinner together and spend hours talking and laughing.  We had a collective first birthday party for our children at a local swimming pool, and followed this up with a second birthday at a big park.  The communal third birthday happened on a sunny afternoon by the river; the fourth birthday party was rescheduled, due to torrential rain, and wound up going ahead a week late at a different park in the same part of town.  Once the older kids started school, it became a bit more challenging.  Even though we lived fairly close to each other, our nine older kids wound up attending eight different schools.

We were still meeting up regularly when the first of the second babies was born two years later.  Over the course of the next two or so years, the rest of us also had a second baby.  A year or so after that, two of us had a third baby.  For those playing along at home, this basically meant that for the first eight years that we knew each other, at least one of us was pregnant, breastfeeding or caring for an infant, or a combination thereof.

Two years ago, two of our number moved overseas; one to New Zealand, the other to Europe.  When we catch up nowadays, we aim for kid-free days, and it takes a bit of a juggle to make it work for most people.  My village of new mums is far more widely dispersed now, with our kids at different schools, our second (and third) kids at different ages and stages and a combination of work, after school activities and life in general making a group gathering more difficult than it used to be.  But I talk to a least a few of these mums on a regular basis; we still hang out and enjoy the “family” that we created out of that group.

Coming out of that, however, was the other village.  The one from school.  I was lucky to have one of my mothers’ group friends at the same school – her eldest daughter and mine were best friends from early on.  From the beginning, we determined that helping each other out would make life easier for both of us.  I took her school-aged daughter one afternoon a week; she took care of mine a different afternoon.  When our two eldest girls had two swim classes a week, she took them both to one and I took them both to the other.  When our four daughters were in a singing class together, I did the school pick up and took them to class; she picked her daughters up after the class was finished.  As time moved on and another friend’s daughter joined the same choir, we finessed this even further – we each took the five little singers to choir once every three weeks. 

Nowadays, my girls are older – 7 and 9 – and my son is 3.  My friend and her two daughters are in Europe, but my love of the collective helpfulness of a village of parents lives on.  Between them, my two girls do one weekly activity each during school hours, and six outside of school. One of these out-of-school activities (singing) is currently the same class for both girls, but this will change in a few months, when the older one moves up to the next singing level.  Happily, I have two friends with daughters at the same school who are similar ages to my girls and who do some of the same activities.  Between us, we negotiate getting children to and from singing (all five of them), tennis (for two, although I take a kid in trade for mine being dropped at her lesson) and art (for a different two).  The three of us all have three separate sign-ins at our school’s after school care, because we’re all authorised to take each other’s children.  There are another couple of friends with whom I have a similar (although less scheduled) arrangement with.  It is not unusual for me to show up at school with one (and sometimes two or three) children who are not mine, because a member of my village has an exam that morning, or needs to go to the dentist, or isn’t well enough to be taking kids to school.  A few months ago, between four families we negotiated the logistics of our school’s two different discos, leaving two mums at home with the four non-school-aged children, while two mums and a dad took the seven school-aged ones to the appropriate disco for the evening.  Several weeks later, I had an appointment that conflicted with when I drop my daughter and her friend at art class.  The friend’s mother was working and couldn’t make drop-off, so a third (totally unrelated to either of the artists) mother stepped in to take care of things.

My little village has come about via equal parts luck and organisation.  My daughters have managed to befriend other kids who like the same activities, and whose parents are people whom I like and (more importantly) that I trust with my children’s safety and well-being.  These parents have been willing to help me out with my kids, in exchange for being helped out with theirs.  And, a factor that I think is critical, we are all okay with the fact that sometimes we won’t be doing an equal part of the work.  Sometimes, one of us will be doing more than the others, and we all understand that.  When someone can’t do their regular thing, one of the others will step up and be able to make it work.  My village has reached a point where I don’t feel guilty about asking for help, or feeling as though I will owe someone a favour if I ask for something.  My village has become something bigger than that, what a friend once very aptly described as “the friends who function as family”. 

So yes, it takes a village to raise a child.  And villages don’t really exist in the physical sense anymore.  Building a village of your own takes a bit of work and a lot of luck, but it is worth the effort that it takes.  Your village will help you in times of need but, crucially, it will also give you the chance to help others when they need you.  And this will make you feel good, but it will also let your children, and all the children within your village, see that the adults enjoy helping each other, and they will learn this too.  And your village will help your collective children to learn how to be good people.  And this is a wonderful thing.

Once upon a time, I was an exchange student

In my late teens, I spent a year in Brasil.  And there you will see the first evidence of the enduring power of my exchange – I am actively incapable of spelling Brasil with a z.  In Portuguese, the country is called Brasil.  Ever since I lived there, I have written the country’s name with an s, even when writing in English.  It just looks right, and therefore, it is.

I will preface this by saying that exchange, like all things, is not for everyone.  Not every teenager will deal well with leaving everyone they know to go and live somewhere else, with a completely new family, where (most of the time) another language is spoken and there are cultural norms and directives that are completely different . . . but if that is your thing, then it will absolutely, 100% be the making of you as an adult.

I am, by nature, relatively introverted.  At high school, I was always classed as one of the “smart kids”, the ones who were good at maths and science and very much NOT good at sport or actual human interaction outside of my group of friends.  I was definitely not cool at school.  I’m pretty confident that no one will remember me J 

And then I went to Brasil.

At my Australian high school, I was unremarkable.  At my Brasilian school, my brown hair was significantly lighter than all of my friends’ hair; my green eyes made me practically exotic.  The part where I’d grown up on the opposite side of the world, in a place that my schoolmates had only ever seen on television?  Well, that made me exceptionally cool.  And it was both completely bizarre and wonderfully awesome to be considered fascinating after many years of being unremarkable.

I celebrated my eighteenth birthday in Brasil.  I went to (small town) Carnaval.  I came dangerously close to falling in love with a Brasilian man.  And I did fall in love with Brasil.  It is the most enduring love affair of my life, with the place that helped make me who I am.

I was homesick for Australia when I first went to Brasil, but that paled into comparison with the homesickness I had for Brasil when I returned.  I’d guess that I mentioned Brasil at least once a day for the first five years after I came back; it probably dropped to three or four times a week after that.  Even now, over 25 years past the experience, it is not uncommon for me to talk about Brasil, and I probably think about a specific event or person connected to my time there on a weekly basis.  Before I got married, I took my husband to Brasil.  He met the families that I lived with, spent Christmas and New Year with my friends and relatives.  Our eldest daughter’s name is Latin-derived, and I have always pronounced it as a Brasilian would.  Our second daughter’s name features in a Brasilian Carnaval song, and I frequently sing it to her.  I considered a Brasilian name for our son, but I decided against it – my favoured choice would have been horribly massacred by the Australian accent.  I often call all three of my children by Brasilian terms of endearment.

The dearest friend I’ve ever made in my life was someone that I found in Brasil.  Like me, she was there temporarily, also on exchange, but in her I found myself.  She’d always been one of the cool kids (or at least that’s how I saw her), and she was the first person that helped me understand that just by being me I was good enough.  She never compromised, never tried to be something that she wasn’t, and she explained to me one day how irritating it was to be seen as just the “pretty girl”.  I’d never actually understood how annoying it must be to be valued on your appearance only.  She was (and remains) the most beautiful person that I’ve ever met, both inside and out. 

It is 26 years since the day I arrived in that far-off land at the age of 17.  I can still remember the passengers on the plane applauding as we touched down.  I can smell of cigarettes in the terminal (it was still ok to smoke indoors in those days).  I can still see the handpainted sign that bid me welcome, waved by my host sister and parents.  I remember being overwhelmed by the size of the city; Australia’s population in a single place; being exhilarated and terrified and missing my mother.  

Literally every room in my home holds at least one tangible reminder of that year.  There is a small stone house on a shelf in our dining room, a gift I was given during my year in Brasil.  There is a painting of Rio on the wall that my husband and I bought while in Brasil just before we got married.  It’s hung on the wall of every house we’ve ever lived in over the almost 20 years that we’ve owned it.  Beside my bed is a notebook of “Day-sies”, given to me by the aforementioned dear friend.  That little book of quotes, one for every day of the year, has been beside my bed since the day I arrived home from Brasil.  There are two books of photos of Brasil in the bookshelf; a photograph I took from Pão de Acúçar that’s always hung on the wall.  And then there are the other types of reminders, the ones that aren't things.  There are the names that go onto my Christmas card list straight after our immediate family every year – my three host families, two close friends.  There’s the fact that whenever I hear a samba beat, I start to dance, in the same unconscious way that a mother rocks an empty pram (and I do that too).  There’s the way I can always recognise the Brasilian national anthem (and still sing a large part of it) when it’s played at sporting events.  And I always call it futebol, not soccer, just for the record.  I still have a full-sized Brasilian flag in a cupboard downstairs, which I’ve waved at multiple sporting events over the years.

When I picked up the forms to apply for exchange, when I sat the interviews and did all the preparation for my year away, I never imagined that, 26 years later, it would still be an active part of my life.  In the years that followed, I participated in the interview process, this time as an interviewer, and I worked with the exchange students, both in-bound and out-bound, to help them with any challenges that they might face.  And yet, I still never considered the notion that I’d still be thinking about my exchange year once I was grown up; married, with children and mortgages and all the rest.  And yet, it remains one of the central and defining features of who I am as an adult.

The best individual days of my life (so far) did not happen in Brasil.  For the record, one of those happened in a little church in Perth; the other three were in the maternity ward of a hospital in Brisbane.  The best weeks and best months of my life . . .well, I think most of those probably happened exterior to Brasil as well. But, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the best complete year of my life occurred between January 12, 1993 and January 12, 1994, and I can’t imagine that another complete year will ever match that one for its amazing, incredible fabulousness.  I was close enough to adulthood to be treated as such, but still not old enough to have much in the way of real responsibility.  I got to have that year of awesomeness in the land of Carnaval.  And I got to be cool while I did it.  

Once Upon A Time . . .

I started a blog.  It's been years (almost two decades . . .) between blogs.  And yet here I am again.