Heppy Noo Yeeah

You know what this blog needs at the end of the calendar year? A meme! (Actually, what this blogger needs, lacking in writerly inspiration as I am.)

(Pilfered the idea from blue milk)

1.What did you do in 2009 that you’d never done before?

Baked mince pies.

2. Did you keep your New Year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I don’t really do resolutions. I think last year I wanted to be kinder and listen better. It’s an ongoing project.

I’ve been thinking about what I resolve this time around. Learning to do intuitive eating properly is a big goal, for me.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Yes! Actually, a few friends added to their families this year.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Ferris. Lola.

5. What countries did you visit?

This one, and not much of it!

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?

Good health. Perhaps a little more paid work.

7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

6th February, because that is the day that Ferris died. 7th February (Black Saturday) because of the fear and the horror and all that followed. 24-27th December because Christmas was such a lovely time this year, for Bean especially.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Wrangling with depression again and coming out on top.

9. What was your biggest failure?:

Not having the organised homely-home I wanted. Procrastination.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?:

Several colds and deathly gastro brought home from childcare courtesy of Bean. Physically, a couple of bumps and scrapes and aches and pains but nothing as serious as the year before.  Mentally, I’ve been sicker. And healthier.

11. What was the best thing you bought?:(was bought for you)

My shiny new iPod touch, for my birthday. Best that I bought: photo frames, for our loungeroom.

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?

Little Bean! She has been such a delight. In toddlerdom, she’s in her element. All that activity and curiosity which made her a tired and overwrought baby has made her a fun playmate and she grows in confidence every day so life is suddenly less angst-filled. Plus, she’s compliant and obedient for her age, for which I am abundantly grateful.
 

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?

Loutish young men: the ones who live next door and keep us up all hours, and their friends. 

14. Where did most of your money go?

Children’s clothes and toys and entertainment (Bean seemed to outgrow everything she owned in 2008 by about February). And all the boring things like car registration and insurance. And chocolate.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

Not enough. Need more joy.

16. What songs will always remind you of 2009?

Everything Playschool (Bean is obsessed). ‘Big Jumps’ by Emiliana Torrini. Bertie Blackman’s album, which seems to always be on rotation in my car.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i) …happier or sadder?

Happier.

ii) thinner or fatter?

Fatter.

iii) richer or poorer?

Hard to say. Same old same old.

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Writing. I had thought to write some short stories but even just finding time for an unplanned blog-rant can be hard. And I’m lazy, and watch too much television.

Seeing friends. I’m good at picking up the phone, not always so great at arranging the face time.

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Watching television. Complaining. Standing in the queue at the supermarket. Looking for things I’ve lost in my poorly organised house.

20. How did you spend Christmas?:

We had a lovely festive time. Christmas Eve at our place with my family: cocktails, seafood and carols. Christmas day watching Bean delight in her new things and lesiurely eating pancakes until it was time to see the in-laws for dinner. More delighting, more leisurely eating and drinking. Boxing day visiting Bean’s grandma for more unwrapping and eating of leftover ham. The next day at the beach. Bean learned to say ‘Pappa’ and ‘Nanna’ and she is so at ease with extended family now, it’s lovely. She has been calling out ‘bye Nanna!’ ‘bye Pappa!’ for days now, which I suppose means she misses them.

22. Did you fall in love in 2009?

I’m always falling in love.

23. How many one night stands?

Heh. None.

24. What were your favourite TV programs?

Torchwood, The Wire, Dexter, The Sopranos, Mad Men.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

No.

26. What was the best book you read?

Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

That one’s tricky. It hasn’t been much of a discovery type of year. Perhaps Mumford and Sons. Florence and the Machine.

28. What did you want and get?

More peace. More calm. More cuddles.

29. What did you want and not get?

Coffee with my brother.

30. What was your favourite film of this year?

Up! (I need to get out more.)

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

I turned 31 this year. I woke up to a little cherub holding a pile of presents saying ‘Mummy!’ which was pretty much the best thing that has ever happened to me. And then I took her to the zoo, and she screamed so we went home. Dinner at the local pub with a kids play area. Quiet, sedate. There might be more celebrating after everyone has recovered from Christmas.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

Lots more money: to hire a housecleaner, and enable a us to holiday nicely and pay a babysitter now and then.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?

Fashion? Moi? It’s not been a good year. Jeans, tshirt, sneakers. I’m in a rut and look like I shop at Target. Because I do. Sigh.

34. What kept you sane?

Naptime. For watching TV, drinking tea, sleeping, tweeting. That and my meds and the psychologist.

35.Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Matt Damon.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

Asylum seekers, homebirth rights, maternity leave, same-sex marriage. Reading about the healthcare debate in the US was pretty, um, stirring.

37. Who did you miss?

My dad, always. My dog. Friends living far away.

38. Who was the best new person you met?

No one from this year that stands out. But I have a friendship formed the year before which strengthened very much. Other-mother friends are the best.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009

Love is a verb.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

I’m going to make it through this year if it kills me (!)

41. What was your favorite moment of the year?

There are several. One watching my daughter sleep on her father’s chest. One the morning of my birthday.

One the day after Boxing Day, sitting on the beach watching my daughter standing at the shore holding her father’s and grandfather’s hands. Seeing how the shoulders of those two men sloped in the same way, and how their hands held her equally safely and tenderly. Sitting on the sand and crying because I am so happy for her, to be so blessed.

42. What was your least favourite moment of the year?

Everything between about the 5th of February to the 12th was horrible.

43. If you could go back in time to any moment of 2009 and change what?

I don’t even know how to answer that question. I think because I don’t tend to dwell on the should-have could-have beens – I spend enough time being anxious as it is!

44. What are your plans for 2010?

Set up Bean’s big-girl room. Graduate from beginner’s spin to a mainstream class. Come to some sort of decision about what kind of part time work I could do and when and perhaps do something about that. I will study, in some capacity, as I always do. Keep on writing. Try to take things more lightly. Play.

Count my blessings.

10 things you may not know about me

1) When I finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, I paused for a few minutes, turned back to page one, and read it again.

2) I first started calling myself a feminist during my first year of uni, after a guy who lived in my residential college accused me of being one because I had stickers from the campus Women’s Collective on my door. When I told him that yes, I was a feminist, he leered at me ‘Does that mean you’re a lesbian who hates men?’ Only certain men, I told him pointedly. And that was that.

3) My favourite colour is green. It used to be purple – I wore something purple basically every day for years, from my late teens on. I’m so drawn in by talk of chakras and auras and colour-mood interaction that I tend to believe that the reason I now love green is because personal peace is what I want. Back then it was all about emotional expression and ‘finding myself’ - you know how it goes.

4) A few hours after my daughter was born, when I was resting next to her sleeping form, my father came into the room and stood over her. He leaned over and kissed her brand new forehead. I could smell him, he was so close. It might have been a dream.

5) I have broken my left ankle, once and my left arm, twice. All three were the result of careless and mundane accidents but each time I tried telling inquisitive strangers that I’d been on a skiing holiday. The first break was when I was six.

6) When I was about twelve years old, I found some love letters that my mother had written to my father. They were tucked behind a poster of a horse that hung on the back of our toilet door. I thought I should take them out and put them elsewhere because I knew my stepmother might find them, since they had come loose from their hiding place, but I was too scared to do anything but put them back as best I could. When I went to check a few hours later, they were gone. To this day I wonder who moved them.

7) The first cassette tape I owned (aside from mixed ones recorded from the radio) was Kylie by Kylie Minogue. The year that I got it for my birthday I was staying at my mother’s house. When she was at work, my brother and I carefully unwrapped it and played it up loud on the stereo, singing and dancing all afternoon. Then we wrapped it up again before she got home. The first CD I owned was either Crowded House or The Cranberries, I don’t remember which. And the CD I bought most recently was Bertie Blackman’s latest.

8 ) I have an abiding love for 80s teen movies. I named my dog after Ferris Bueller, I watch The Breakfast Club pretty much yearly, and I still name Heathers as my favourite film when those Facebook polls come around.

9) I have a medical condition which affects my fertility. It took two years to conceive Little Bean. One of the many reasons she is so very precious.

10) There is an unopened packet of dark chocolate royale biscuits in my cupboard.*

* true at the time of writing

Turn, turn, turn

Remember the Great Banana Crisis of 2oo6? (Almost all of Australia’s banana crops were destroyed by a cyclone in northern Queensland, which combined with our strict ban on banana imports due to quarantine concerns, meant that there were amost no bananas available for a few months – and those that were on sale were ridiculously expensive and of low quality.) Personally I don’t eat a lot of bananas so I endured it with the minimum of whinging and instead bestowed my opinion graciously upon others – whether they had asked for it or not. It was my opinion that a banana shortage was just the thing we needed to remind us that food is meant to be seasonal and that our demand for food availability all year round has cost us a lot – environmentally and gastronomically. Not many people appreciated my thoughts on it – even my sister, a chef, said something rather more scatalogical than gastronomical about foodie idealism when she was cranky from missing her morning energy-boosting smoothie.

Anyway, if there were a Great Banana Crisis this year I’d probably weep openly in the streets for the loss of Little Bean’s favourite pacifying foodstuff. Which of course means it would be a far more valuable lesson for me this time around.

This is all just a tangential way of saying that even in this world of 24 hour fast food and lifetimes spent barely touching soil with bare feet, the earth has a way of being noticed. And it doesn’t always take a cyclone or a storm or a bushfire.

I noticed that it felt like Spring today. I can’t even tell you why, but I took a particularly deep breath this afternoon and thought winter has ended. And then I realised that I’ve spent the last couple of days doing more reorganising than this house has seen since I was pregnant and ‘nesting’. Because I wanted to. Because, maybe, there’s something intuitive about spring cleaning. Or maybe another, interior, fog is fading and lifting.

A mother’s work is… done?

I had a delightful conversation with my stepmum, J, this morning. ‘Happy Mother’s Day, for Sunday…’ I had ventured. Hoping she’d sense that I felt contrite, even though I could not say that the reason I had not called her was because a conversation that morning about my biological mother had left me feeling so raw that I avoided speaking to anyone at all for the rest of the day.

Anyhow, we got to talking a little about mothers and J said to me ‘I don’t feel like a mother anymore. I’m just not a mother anymore. I’m finished with that.’ What she meant was that now that her two biological daughters and I are all grown women, she doesn’t feel the same tugs on the proverbial apron strings and nor does she miss them. She said, simply, ‘I don’t do nurturer anymore.’  Now that’s not strictly true, since J is a farmer and a gardener who nurtures all manner of creatures, and who had her youngest daughter stay with her for a bit recently to ‘de-stress’. But I knew what she was getting at.

I guess some people might find that a bit sad, or even a little morbid. But it isn’t, because what she was speaking of was liberation. Her thoughts are not occupied with worry, her urge is not to put the needs of others before her own. She loves to see us all, and speaks to us often (sometimes my sister calls her daily). But our independence is not felt as a loss, to her.

She’s off making plans, working, doing, loving, moving forward. Organising her 50th birthday celebrations.

I love to mother and I know I’ll never not be a mother, now. But I kind of look forward to the day when I can say ‘I don’t do nurturer anymore.’