I somehow knew my computer was going to let me write a post today.

I saw the most fabulous documentary film on SBS last night, ‘Unknown White Male’, just came across it by chance. It was about a 35-year-old man who found himself on a train one day with no idea where he was or who he was. He had no identification on him except for a note with a woman’s name and phone number. When the police rang her she didn’t recognise their description of him and couldn’t come and look because she was looking after her invalid mother.

Eventually he was in a psychiatric hospital and they told him they could not let him go until they had found some contact who could look after him. He rang the woman’s number again in desperation and she had a feeling the voice was familiar and asked her daughter. It turned out this man had dated the daughter a few times and this woman had met him once. The daughter rang him and said, ‘I will be there to pick you up in half an hour. You have a fantastic life. You’ll love it.’

As he recounted this part of the story he was crying. ‘Suddenly I belonged,’ he said.

His name is Doug Bruce. He had an apartment in New York but is English. He had been a merchant banker but retired at 30 and became a photographer. The fact that he is beautiful made the film just that little bit more poignant.

His sister told him, ‘You hated working. Money was important to you but you wanted to retire young. You used to come home from work and pace around the kitchen for half an hour before you could calm down.’ And his mother had died of cancer a couple of years earlier. He had been very close to her and had, apparently, taken it hard.

The man who made the film was one of his close group of English friends. Judging by the quality, he is a professional film-maker. There were odd bits of footage of Doug Bruce pre-amnesia and I was struck by the cynicism there. They all said he had had a sharp, witty tongue, was fun, was the life of the party. Now he was completely without ego, without guile, and filled with wonder. He was like a child with an adult’s mind. He had no pre-conceived ideas about the world, he just watched and learned and loved. He filmed his own ‘first’ experience of snow (something that many Australians experience for the first time as an adult too), he filmed himself entering his apartment for the ‘first’ time and discovering the external trappings of who he was, filmed his ‘first’ meeting with his father and sister. He described wandering the streets just watching how things happen, the body language of lovers or friends. He talked about the ‘first’ time he went to the beach and the awe of the enormous power of the sea washing against his legs. He talked about his ‘first’ experience of falling in love and how wonderful was that feeling to be fully immersed in someone and to love only to be with them.

He got to the point of not specially wanting his memory back. So did we, the audience. He found it harder to meet people he had known before because of some anxiety about their expectations of him. For many of them he had, in a sense, died. The Doug they had known and shared experiences with was no longer there. But he rued having no memory of being a child, or of his mother.

Apparently people with amnesia involving no physical brain damage have a 95% chance of getting their memory back at some point. I hope it’s a long time for him.

My daughter Sarah used to say she felt she had a black hole in her solar plexus. This was as a child and probably in adolescence. Jasmine has never had what you might call karma, but Sarah has always been the Karma Queen. It was clear she had brought a lot of baggage into this life and, you know, as a mother you want to be able to fix it all, but you can only give unconditional love and stand and watch.

She has made a lot of progress over the last 7 or 8 years with all the self-help healing modalities she knows, and the changes were quite profound. She went from being often depressed, anxious and flighty to being ca-a-alm, mostly and happy, usually. But she and I still knew there was a fundamental flaw, the central problem had not been fixed.

She felt unlovable. There was no doubt for her that her father and sister and I loved her but that was, perhaps, because we were so loving rather than because of her lovable-ness. She has been on a mission her whole life to find the person or circumstance that could give her the kind of proof-of-love that she needed. She has been looking outwards all her life for some kind of saviour.

She has had a relentless theme in the last few months of abandonment. Every single man she gets involved with stands her up, doesn’t answer his phone, her best friend came down from Queensland and stayed with someone else and didn’t contact her. She was here a few days ago, angry that this thing would never be resolved. She just didn’t want to save another free night for a boyfriend who stayed out with his mates and left her at home all dressed up and watching her recreation time slipping away unused. She shouted at me for lack of anyone/thing else to shout at. Eventually Jas and I tried humour when we ran out of things to say. Then she was angry because she didn’t want to smile, damn it, when everything was so hopeless, and she left. We had kind of abandoned her in her hour of need too.

Yesterday she said it has all changed. It is all over. She gets it now, and she is it now. Karma-free. Not looking for anyone to prove her lovability, she just is. Lovable. After she left our place that day she was so frustrated that she had gone through all this and that she understood intellectually what it was telling her but she still seemed to be emotionally in the same place. And she saw a picture of herself, as she had been, in a desolate place and drowning in quicksand, and that now the quicksand was gone. She was healed. She was still standing in the same hole in that same desolate place only now there was nothing keeping her there.

Now she knows who she is. She has a date next Friday with the stand-up boyfriend who is begging to be allowed to make it up to her. She has agreed to the date (assuming nothing better comes up), it might be fun, and if it turns out to be the same as all the other ‘dates’, she doesn’t care. He doesn’t have to prove her lovable. It doesn’t matter what his behaviour might say, she knows who she is.

Now she’s bemused about what life and love are for when you don’t need anything from anyone. I remember that same question.

For fun, mostly, and other wonderful things.

No, I haven’t fallen off the edge of the earth, but my computer might as well have. Today I found a way to trick it into allowing me to write a post, but I don’t know if I will always be able to do this. I have ordered a new laptop - wooohooo! - but it won’t arrive for a month or so, and this old thing seems to have decided it can retire now. So expect me to be back to normal form in a month or so and I’m sorry if I neglect you, my friends, in the meantime. I’ll do my best.

I’ve had lots of things to talk about all those days that I couldn’t, but today I’ve got, apparently, nothin’. We still haven’t found a rental house in the Adelaide Hills, but there’s no real deadline for that other than the fact that we’re looking forward to our new adventure. I have put purple pansies in the garden amongst the violets in readiness for the open inspections that I hope will be happening here soon, and also as a sign of gratitude to our landlady for how we have loved living here.

I often lately have that subtle bubbling feeling of anticipation you get when something exciting is going to happen, but I don’t know what the exciting thing is. Possibly nothing. The feeling is the thing. Perhaps I instigated it by wishing for passion in Sanctuary a few posts ago. (I actually have my tool bar back today but I’m not prepared to tempt fate by trying to create a link. I would just cry if it all fell in a heap.)

My ex?-partner and I will be staying one night this (long) weekend in my cabin in the mountains. I hardly ever stay there anymore but it’s just lovely in the winter with the wood fire and the high deck under the trees, looking across at the (sometimes snow-covered) mountains. C likes to find a spot away from the cabin where he can sit on the slope amongst the bushes and watch the wildlife meander past at sunset. Or sunrise, except, of course, he never manages to get up for that one. It’s the one place we can spend time together without me being required to provide his entertainment. He loves to test his camouflage out there too (Don’t talk to me about camouflage!) so I usually don’t even know where he is. You know, we have never seen a wombat there although we often see or hear evidence that one or more live there. They like to do neat grassy poos on high spots like rocks or garden steps. We are always stepping around them.

I may be working half days in the office for the next 3 weeks while one of the draftspeople there is on holidays. It depends how many of his jobs need adjustments or move to the next stage. Another of the draftspeople was retrenched recently because rising interest rates have taken their toll on the building industry and there wasn’t enough work. This is quite sad because I liked that man. Nobody likes the one who is on holidays much. We’re all scared of him, including the boss, but he has been there the longest so I don’t suppose it would have been easy to retrench him instead.

While I am in the office I might try and have a play with the ‘Chief Architect’ program on the newly-spare computer. I am still a manual drafter. Manual drawings look nicer but you can’t email them and other people can’t amend your notes without it looking obvious. I don’t know, everybody seems to use computer drafting these days. I don’t really know why. Most companies use auto-cad which I have learnt to use, but have never used in my work so I would have to learn it all again. And it is the same program that would be used for engineering drawings or even land-surveying and, possibly, mapping so it’s very long-winded. Chief architect is specifically for houses, so you are thinking in terms of walls, roofs, windows and such. I haven’t learnt how to do it but it seems that it should be a cinch to pick up. I’m thinking ahead a bit. I have to find some new clients in Adelaide and it gets harder and harder to find companies that want manual drafting. Perhaps it would be nice to take my new laptop to a cafe and do my work there. Can’t really lug my drawing board, drafting chair and tray of technical pens around with me.

I had to put some updated drawings into the planning department this week for the house I am planning to build on that property in the mountains. Of course I may not be building it after all now, if it turns out Jas and I want to stay in Adelaide, but having already spent several thousand dollars on this application I am going to see it through. I believe bureaucracy of this kind is on its way out. I don’t think it serves us anymore, and it’s ours. Anyway, point being, even when I don’t expect to be living in the house I am designing, I just love designing houses and gardens, ‘living spaces’ as we architects like to call them, for myself. I can spend a lot of what might be considered work-time nutting out the intricacies and ‘being in’ the spaces I create.

I’ve been losing weight in a haphazard kind of way which always feels fabulous, and we have brought a rowing machine to our house which I use for about half an hour a day. The walking is still in fits and starts (which makes me think of John Cleese out on the walking trail) but on the whole I can do more and more of it without old injuries complaining too much, and I just love that strong-in-the-lungs feeling you get when you are increasing your fitness.

So, I don’t know, nothing’s news but everything’s fabulous. Hope I will be back again soon.

I lived in the Adelaide Hills for most of the nineties, so my girls grew up there. Sarah had a pretty harrowing adolescence and always wanted to come back to Melbourne, which is where I am from and where all her relatives (on my side of the family) were. So we came back as soon as Jasmine was happy about the idea.

Those Adelaide days were probably the happiest, most exciting period of my life. We moved there because my (then) husband got a job there and, although we had already decided to separate, we didn’t want to deprive our kids of half of their parentage. And, more selfishly, the burden of child-raising is greatly reduced if 50% of it is being done at someone else’s place.

So there I was entering my thirties, newly single and not wanting to enmesh, stifle, engulf, or (I hope) spifflicate* myself in the quagmire of conjugal . . . um . . . entanglement. Didn’t want to do the happily ever after thing, might be another way of putting it. I was going for the ephemeral-pleasures style of life.

Suffice it to say I had about 9 years of ephemeral pleasures before we moved back to Melbourne. Not that Melbourne can’t be a backdrop for said pleasures and, indeed, I had a few here too, but I was getting tired by then, and my best e.p. buddies were still in Adelaide.

So now Jasmine and I are going back, but 11 years have elapsed. I am soon to enter my fifties, I have been leading a much quieter life, I am just not a sexy young thing anymore. Sexy old thing? Umm . . . perhaps. If you squint a bit. I don’t think my friend C and I will still be gatecrashing B & S balls making up with swagger, as we did, what we lack in youth. I don’t think I’ll be drinking myself under the table every Saturday night with all the hilarity that brings. That is seriously no longer on my list of favourite things to do. The hangover starts before the drinking stops these days.

So Jas and I will rent a house just to see if it’s possible to ‘go back’. Or go forward to a previous haunt. This is a tricky manoeuvre. Current rental agent requires 4 weeks notice. Most houses available for rent are available now. Or in about a week. They probably won’t want to wait and will take the next most qualified applicant. And speaking of qualified, they’re going to want to know that I can afford the rent and I work for myself and will have to set up a new list of clients there, with no guarrantees of how much work I will have. How do people move interstate? I’m not quite sure. And I’m sure I’ve moved from one rental property to another in the past, but I can’t remember what you do about that 4 weeks notice.

Major juggling feat. I should have run away and joined the circus that time. Would have been better equipped now. But I am of the school of thought that doesn’t worry about the imagined - well, that’s the theory anyway. We will just pursue all the options and applications and see what arises. We can’t wait for our whole new adventure.

(* I just found this word in my thesaurus - could you tell I was looking in a thesaurus? - and I quickly put it in before I looked up the meaning just in case it doesn’t apply since, seriously, doesn’t everyone want to use ’spifflicate’ in a sentence just once? OK, here’s what it means: ‘To treat roughly or severely; destroy.’ So maybe it’s a bit strong but I’m still gonna use it, OKAY? Work with me here.)

Last night we had an ‘Anderson Do’. (The name has been changed to protect the innocent. I’m sure some of us are innocent.) My father gets the whole family together to celebrate birthdays and since there are about 18 of us spanning four generations, that’s quite often. Actually, we clump them together and do 2 or 3 at a time if we can so, counting christmas, I think we have about 11 Anderson Dos a year.

The previous one was at my father’s place for Sunday lunch as they most commonly are. He seemed a bit unsure of himself that day, seemed to feel old, I thought. He asked me to take the lasagne out of the oven for him because he was afraid he might drop it.

Then the next day we all get an email to say he had had a bit of a health scare before we arrived that morning. His left fingers wouldn’t work and his speech was slurred. !! Didn’t tell us at the time because he didn’t want to spoil the party. He has since had tests, of course, and there is no problem but it does indicate a higher than average risk of stroke in the future.

So, one effect of this news is that there are to be no more Anderson Dos at Grampa’s house. Last night it was at my little sister’s. Let’s call her Sibling since, in fact, I do.

The wood fire is going and the house is full of cosiness and warmth. (Kevin McCloud of ‘Grand Designs’ doesn’t like the word cosy. Huh. And yet he built the cosiest ever little straw-bale studio in one show. Maybe it’s not an attractive word to the British. I did feel a lack of crispness to their houses when I was there which is a ‘look’ I would love to achieve here, but, you know, in a different country it just all feels different.) Nephew8 (Sibling’s son) is giving us a demonstration of his prowess on the drums when we arrive. I didn’t even know he’d been learning them, or indeed had any, but he doesn’t mess up right through the reasonably complicated song. I start pouring champagne (sparkling wine) for all takers, everyone of age except Sibling who already has a snifter of red to accompany her food preparation endeavours.

All the women in my family of my generation, which is one sister and two sisters-in-law, are fabulous cooks and love to do it. I am the black sheep. Oh, and so are the men, although they wash a mean dish. Last night was pumpkin soup (YUM. And actually that’s one thing I can cook with reasonable, if infrequent, success.), perfect roast lamb and glossy vegetables for about 13. I can’t even cook a roast for two! There’s always at least one undercooked vegetable to mar the (im)perfection.

Sibling’s daughter, my only niece, 10, has been training in gymnastics at the national level. Faaar out. S.i.l.1 (older brother’s wife) doesn’t approve. I so want to know what Niece’s chances are of being in those olympic selection trials they went to watch last night next time they come around (are you still with me, or do I have to fix that sentence?) but the conversation gets diverted to the ethics of competitive sport. Well, you try directing a 13-way conversation.

Niece10, and nephew10 (my younger brother’s son), tend to flirt at these gatherings, and nephew8 joins in the play and somehow never feels left out. (First nephew wasn’t there so doesn’t enter into the story, and anyway, he’s 27.) This suits us because they can go to another room and squeal their hearts out and we can surge forward with the discussion at hand.

My only brother-in-law, Sibling’s husband, asks S.i.l.2 if he can sit next to her. Everybody laughs. There is an ongoing banter between these two, one (B.i.l.) being right wing and the other being left and happening to work for the ABC, and B.i.l. always wanting a full report on where his (what we last night learnt is now) 9 cents a day is going, and demanding a full account of all work-related travel and dining expenses.

Sibling has always kept her walls covered in pictures and I have noticed a new theme of large stylised nudes. Stylised in a way that strongly appeals to me. I’m a fan of Toulouse-Lautrec a la vibrancy and leaping off the canvas at you, and these nudes had some of that. Focussing from my seat at the table I think I can decipher the signature: ‘Sibling’. Well not literally. Her name, actually.

‘Sibling, what’s with this whole painting thing? Since when have you been an artist?’
‘Since I did a 4 week kind of “Painting 101″ class at the CAE. I love collecting frames from op shops and I wanted to do something with them. So now I take the canvas out and paint over it. I took a few down to the local cafe to see if they would display some of them and they did, but they actually started selling before they had put them on the walls!’ Right out of left field. Who knew there was a successful artist in her? And she’s been working on a novel or two, inspired by her creative writing course at uni. None of us knew she was a creative writer. She always perceived herself to be the (comparatively) dumb one. She has the midas touch, the golden angle on everything, the belief that all will be well, all will be fabulous.

She doesn’t remember our mother, having been 5 when said mother died. Sometimes I was the typical sister who said euww, go away, enough with the sister germs. And sometimes I lamented the lack in my younger siblings’ lives and tried to give them nurturing and encouragement. With about the level of patience and commitment you might expect in a 12-year-old. When she was about 13 and my (then) fiance and I went to her school concert, she nearly fell off her choir bench for waving and pointing us out to her school friends. All that excitement kind of broke my heart.

Over Sibling’s home-made irish cream we relax in the couch, interrupted sporadically by a squealing, giggling 10-year-old, and S.i.l.2 tells us about her recent trip to Timor. I don’t follow the news, I don’t really like war and pestilence, which is odd in a family so full of journalistic types, so I thought Timor was still about the Indonesians. No one laughs out loud at my ignorance. The Timorese have each burnt their neighbour’s house down and now they all live in tents in the grounds of the Dili hospital, pretty much sums it up. Steve Bracks is there trying to teach the government how to run a country. So are some advisors from Portugal, since Timor used to be a Portuguese colony. Steve Bracks, wise, Portuguese advisors, stupid, was her summation, and the Timor government stuck in the middle with No Idea.

And then we discuss why Niece doesn’t wear glasses anymore (because she had an operation) which makes me squirm, which brings us onto that famous Anderson trait, squeamishness. Brother1 first discovered he was squeamish when he found himself lying on the floor of the toilets with a big lump on his head, in the maternity ward where he and his wife had been attending an ante-natal class all of those 27 years ago. He had been lying there half an hour. S.i.l.1 had been practising her breathing on her own wondering how long a toilet visit needed to take. None of us can give blood. More trouble than it’s worth. And we all have a much greater desire not to be told that squeamish story, ever, than curiosity, and a marked avoidance of people who don’t believe us.

I missed out on the Anderson nose (big) and the Anderson laugh (loud). Also, as Jas says on the way home, I am much less like a capricorn than any of them even though I was the only one born under that sign. Families can have star signs, she tells me, as can cities and countries. Which makes me realise that countries, cities and states also have gender. But I’m being nagged to come out and have ‘lunch’. So more about this later.

Jasmine has never been a big fan of housework and since we moved into this tiny terrace house I haven’t worried about that, since I spent the previous 7 years living with a man who actively resisted having a clean or tidy house. So I was just lovin’ the option of living at my own standards. And, other than cooking, I don’t mind housework all that much. Love hanging out the washing, for instance. I don’t know what’s so fabulous about it but there it is.

Suddenly she has found inspiration. She is up most of the night so I go to bed lately with the house in a certain state, and wake up to find the bath and shower screen sparkling, the inside of the microwave spatter-free, the dishes washed, the floor vacuumed. And the next night she finds more to flabbergast me with. It’s like being the shoemaker and having elves. I have had a cold and she keeps on bringing me honey lemon drinks. I must have trained her well . . .

I heard this story  years ago, but when Sarah talked about it a couple of days ago it started a train of thought that is really blowing my mind, but in a good way.

Just to sum up the story so you don’t have to go there, it is about a Hawaiian therapist who cured a whole ward of criminally insane patients without ever seeing them, by studying their files and healing that part within himself that created them. Well that’s how he explains it. As he read their files, he kept repeating, ‘I’m sorry,’ and ‘I love you.’

This is a step beyond what we tend to mean when we talk about creating our own reality, and drawing our experiences to ourselves. This is like, you could say, creating everyone else as well. This is like that 4-year-old me who sat watching my mother ironing and said, ‘Mum, are you really there?’ feeling my foundations wobbling not a little.

I used to look after my niece and nephew one day a week and my niece was about 7 and going through a rebellious stage of choosing to be ‘naughty’. She would look for that one thing I really couldn’t allow and do it. It was tricky. So I used this kind of reality creation, but always assuming, as I did then, that I couldn’t so much change her, as change how she wanted to behave with me. So one time she was trying to create trouble and I was busily picturing her being angelic and cooperative, and I could actually see her sitting there trying to implement the plan of action she had made and being unable to go there. She was quite confused. But happy, of course, and angelic. ‘Oh well,’ she seemed to think, ‘I will do that other stuff later.’

I don’t really want to go with the idea that everyone else in the world is only a figment of my imagination, nor do I believe it to be true, but in a sense you all might as well be inasmuch as I only draw into my world what I choose to experience. So if we come together, we have a kind of conjoined purpose for that interaction. If I learn of someone who could use some healing and I want to experience being the healer, we both gain what we came together to achieve.

The mind blowing aspect for me is that I am suddenly seeing everything in this world and universe, every part of my experience, as my own creation. This is ‘My World’. Your experience is ‘Your World’. A parallel universe might be the easiest way to understand it. As though I have gone into sanctuary,  into my imagination, and created the whole thing. Created dying Africa, war and pestilence, the unequal distribution of resources, George Bush, the television news that brings all these concepts into my living room, as well as art, culture, love, sex, sunrises, daughters and autism. It’s very complicated, this world I have created. It’s full of stuff and ideas and events.

But the biggest insight this view of the world brings is how ridiculous is it to see myself as a victim, or even as shy or snowed under by circumstances or limited by my own personality. A victim of my own creation? So yes, perhaps I wanted the experience of being a victim, but not any more. Shy of my own characters? In My World? So I’ve created characters that intimidate me, whose bad opinion might cut me to the quick? In My World? I’m thinking it’s time to take ownership and cut out the crap.

Not to say this means I can snap my fingers and change the whole creation. In theory I can, but I don’t think I’m able to believe that enough just yet. But I’m going to conduct an experiment or two. I’ll let you know how they go.

It’s my turn to contribute an episode to the nailbiting drama that’s been wending its way around the blogosphere. This is the second of Anonymum’s rolling post initiatives in which each writer adds 6 lines to a story that she has started. The first was called Splendid and it was. So splendid, in fact, that another one is just begging to be created: Too Splendid.

Here is the story so far with A-mum kicking off, and a paragraph each by Lightening, Javaqueen, Evyl, Anja, Jayne and Bettina, and my contribution is the last paragraph shown in italics.

~
The sun was orange as it set against the ocean.
As Natalie walked along the beach, she felt the sting of tears as they sprung to her eyes. How could he do this to her? What would she do now?
She had invested 12 years of her life into their marriage, thinking they were happy, only to have him say he was leaving. Her question of why had been left unanswered. There was no explanation or reasons. He had merely looked at her sadly and walked out the door without so much as a backward glance………….

The sand felt cool against her hot face as her legs buckled and she surrendered her weary body to the comfort of the course sand. She curled up into a foetal position, her mind willing her body to simply evaporate. The darkness enveloping her was barely recognisable against the darkness that enveloped her heart. A darkness that had been slowly creeping in over the past decade. Somewhere in the distance, a baby cried…. a cry that tortured her heart with memories of a dim and distant past……

Alone in the sand Natalie couldn’t stop thinking what if. What if she had been able to have a child? If she could have given him that, would she be in this situation now? At one time they had been so happy. She had foolishly thought that they could make it work by just loving each other. Natalie had told him from the start that she might not be able to have children. Back then he just looked in her eyes and said the only thing that mattered is that they had each other. Why had she believed him? Now, after twelve years of marriage she was all alone. They had tried for so many years to have a baby, but they never could. She had been through seven miscarriages and had given up hope. Now her husband had left her. She felt empty inside. If only he had known . . .

It was all a lie. No that wasn’t quite right. There was nothing false about the love at least not for Natalie. Yet the long nights lieing against Brad after the loving exchange of heated passion, whispering softly of the hopes and dreams of the sweet pitter-patter of small feet treading through the carpeted halls of a loving home. The faked miscarriages were not something that Natalie was proud of but it had been her last resort at maintaining a thin veneer over the stained lies that haunted their relationship. For though in her heart, soul, and mind, Natalie was one hundred percent woman, Natalie was born Ned. Yet, how could she have told Brad the truth. For Ned and Brad had been best friends in grade school. Playing catch at the ball park, racing bicycles down the quiet suburban streets, camping in the backyard until that fateful day, when everything changed….

Natalie stared at her perfect breasts in the mirror. That surgeon was worth his weight in gold. She was every man’s dream - beautiful, successful, able to strip an engine faster than any man, but she was missing that one thing - a uterus. Natalie thought she had given Brad everything he wanted. She knew what men wanted in bed; she knew that men liked hot sex, cold beer and sport on the tube. Who was better to know what a man wanted than someone who had spent half of their life as a man, and her husband’s best friend. Life was wonderful until that barbecue with the new neighbours. Curse that little baby with her gummy grin and corn flower blue eyes. Natalie knew their lives would hit a road block when Brad said “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had one of our own?” Natalie could do everything for a man, be everything for a man, apart from one thing… a mother….

Natalie knew there was one last trump card to play, although it was going to be a doozy -she would go back to her surgeon and discuss Changing Wombs. She decided that, after all these years trying to be the perfect woman for Brad, she’d like to experience that female condition with the roller coaster hormones, strange food cravings, sleep deprivation, painful boobs, constant toilet stops and be able to scare the bejebus out of other mums at Playgroup with her own horror birth story. Her surgeon had offered the optional plumbing in his original surgical assessment but Natalie had dismissed it, not considering for a minute that the sport-lovin’ Brad she had her eyes on would succumb to natures tug on his goolies. Having kept several bucket loads of Brad’s love juice on ice at a private storage facility proved the post-op turkey basting would not be a problem and could be a great surprise with which to win Brad back to her side. Natalie made her appointment, booked her ticket and was soon winging her way to motherhood.

Natalie slept for all of that long plane trip, exhausted from the emotions that had ravaged her mind, body and soul. She dreamed of what was to come, the look of surprise on Brad’s face when he saw her swollen with his child, of her triumphant return to his heart and his bed. During the taxi ride from the airport she let her mind wander to their future, longing for the look of wonder and awe as Brad looked upon her with their newborn child for the first time an event that would link them for eternity. She could never had prepared herself though for what was to happen as she entered her surgeon’s office. The sight of Brad sitting in the waiting room looking so pitifully embarrassed to be there, hunched over in his chair holding a magazine high in front of his face set her emotions whirling. His clumsy attempts to disguise himself with that stupid floppy hat and large dark sunglasses, may have fooled some, but not her, not when she had known and loved every contour of his face and tall muscular frame so well for so long. Natalie’s heart lurched as she quickly darted back into the foyer a million questions racing through her mind - What on earth was he doing sitting in the waiting room of the most highly respected transgender specialist in the country and how could she find out without him knowing that she had seen him there?

She was hovering in the foyer in a lather of indecision when the receptionist’s voice broke into her ruminations, ‘Mr Fothergill, the doctor will see you now.’ Before she knew what she was doing, in three strides and a dive she had caught Brad by the ankles as he approached the consulting room door and brought him down in a tackle that would have brought a smile to the face of their Under 10s rugby coach.
‘Brad! NO!’ she cried, desperate tears spilling onto her cheeks, ‘We’re running out of penises!’
‘ . . . eenises . . . eenises . . .’ echoed the enthralled silence in the room. She surveyed her slack-jawed waiting-room audience, surreptitiously adjusting her skirt with her free hand.
‘What?’ she blustered in confusion. ‘What would you do if your husband’s balls were at stake?’ But a fidgetting in the stalls suggested she was already losing them. A magazine page shuffled. At the reception desk a computer mouse clicked.
‘Balls at stake? Meh,’ seemed to be the view in the waiting room of the most highly respected transgender specialist in the country.
~

Contributers yet to weave a strand into this very-tangled web of intrigue are:
Cris
Red
Gemisht
Annie
~m
Sarah Flanigan
Cowgal

I will tag Sarah Flanigan for the next gripping instalment.

I have just come back from visiting Sarah to help her with The Entertainment of Jaylen on such a rainy day (mmmmm, rain), and when she left to deliver him to Joshua she gave me a Silvia Hartmann recording to listen to on her i-pod. Silvia Hartmann is the goddess of Project Sanctuary which is, to my mind, nothing short of genius. You can find more information about it here.

For all I have learnt or gained from Project Sanctuary I only actually did it for a few days or weeks when I first learnt about it several years ago, and haven’t been back since. But this recording talks you through going to sanctuary and creating the environment and checking it out. I went through the process to see if my sanctuary would be a different place to the one I had all those years ago.

No, same place. Some minor variations in design. You have to keep in mind that I am an architect so it’s natural for me to design my environment in my mind, and I had worked out my answers to a lot of the questions long before the exercise began. You’d think that would mean I’m suffering from too much mind interference for success, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

So it’s like you are, in your imagination, in a place. So far it has no features. First, what is the season of the year? Then, what time of day? How warm or cold is it? Then bring some landscape features into it. Is there a slope? Is there grass, are there trees, rocks, cliffs, flowers? Is there sea, a river, a fountain? It’s your garden, make it yours, paint it with your brush. And then find your dwelling - a small and simple one for now, it might develop more rooms or features later. For now it is about materials, textures and colours, or the cosiness or expansiveness of the spaces.

For me it was instantly autumn (which it is in real life, wooohooo!), one of those gusty evenings you get in autumn when you really know the season has changed, the colour of the light has changed, everything is deeper and richer. And it was instantly my real-life property in the mountains, which is where it was before, and I was standing on the deck with the still-warm, gusty wind bending the huge mountain grey gums above me. The deck was attached to a house which had one room up and one down, and upstairs had a balcony coming out from one corner hanging over the town. The deck had french doors (as we call them in Melbourne, a french window elswhere) onto the farmhouse kitchen. It was a building I had previously designed but with many adjustments that I ‘discovered’ rather than created.

Then she suggests a place to meet our ‘emissary’ which is some kind and helpful ‘person’ or being of any kind who might be a sounding board, guide, companion or whatever we may want to spur the action along. I didn’t want my emissary to be the same as it was last time because guess who it was. Jesus. I’m not actually a christian, but culturally I am, and we were a church-going family, and I embraced the idea with more enthusiasm as a teenager, so I guess he’s an appropriate symbol to me. He seemed appropriate last time, especially as he had the face of Viggo Mortensen, but by now I think of him as wanting to be left alone. ‘Stop hangin’ off my robes guys, for goodness’ sake! It’s been 2000 years already. I want to move on to new and different things!’

Anyway, apparently he still wants to be my emissary. I’ll discuss it with him when I have time and possibly interview a few more candidates, but I had to go with the flow while Silvia was continuing to talk. Then she said to find a wishing well in sanctuary with a bowl of wishing coins on the coping. I just couldn’t find the right place for my wishing well, worried about young children falling in and other such architectural concerns, but by now she had me holding a coin, making a wish and tossing it to the wish fairies and elves who lived in the well. ‘I wish for . . .’ I delved for my deepest desire, ‘Passion.’ And I threw.

Passion, huh. Who knew?

I am a recovering broken-footer. Almost two years ago now but I still can’t run. Maybe that’s because I broke it by rolling my ankle, as you do, with all the muscle and tendon damage that involves, so sitting on a couch with your foot at flop for three months probably means that these soft tissues are going to heal a bit shortened. Bone, fine, muscles and tendons, not so sure.

Hope I haven’t got you squirming as I would be if I were reading this rather than having actually gone through it. I could never be anything medical. Haven’t got the stomach for it.

Anyway, point being, I’m trying to get some fitness back into this tired old body so I’ve been walking, as I used to do, at sunset every evening, as sunset is wont to be. Well, trying to. At about the half hour mark I start to limp. The arch of the damaged foot gets tired and aches. This has been going on for ages and I don’t notice a lot of improvement so I’ve decided to try and strengthen the foot more gently with lots of short walks instead of few long ones. So rather than going for my morning coffee around the corner I can walk about 12 minutes to another cluster of shops, and then 12 minutes back. Among other strategies.

Two or three of the cafes there open at 7 in the morning, whereas the ones around the corner don’t open till 8. This would have had no relevance to me 15 years ago and prior, when getting up was the hardest part of my day and best avoided if possible. But of recent I have become an early-morning person and so have had the opportunity to notice that this is my favourite time of the day. Being out of the house by 7 is better than being out by 8, especially at this time of year when you are almost seeing the sun rise.

And the big city in the early morn (just to be a bit poetic because it is poetic) is a special thing. You have big city facilities available to you without having to fight for space. You have peace and quiet, the morning birds a-twitter and a-warble, open streets you can just walk across. Anywhere. In spite of peak hour being on the rumble.

I have to sit outside for my cappuccino or I get very sad and it is threatening to get to that time of year when the bones freeze and the fingers don’t bend if I do, but today I found a cafe in my newly-frequented area that has one of those outdoor gas heaters. Wooohooo! Might get me through the winter without ever having to cross a cafe threshold*.

Moving to the Adelaide Hills soon. Adelaide just doesn’t do cafes the way Melbourne does. Especially not the Hills, not at 7 in the morning. Am I making a big mistake? How important is a cafe in the scheme of things?

I’ll be letting you know anon.

*Did you know that a threshold is so named because it used to hold back the thresh? Back in, like, Elizabethan times when the streets were effectively sewer channels and they put straw on the floors to mop it all up, the threshold was a piece of wood across the doorway to keep all the thresh in. Somewhere in the intervening years we have dropped one of the aitches. Just a little something for your edification.

. . . or fathers’ day or easter, and wouldn’t do christmas if I thought I could get away with it. The thing about christmas is, if you try and ignore it it’s in your face. You can’t wander down to your favourite cafe and expect to get your usual morning cappuccino, you can’t ring up a random friend and organise to do something, you can’t watch TV and find anything normal, you can’t even go to the supermarket without a cacophany of happy christmases and cheesy grins. Cheesy snarls. That latter is me. I do my best but I DON’T LIKE IT.

My family gets together for christmas but it’s usually on christmas eve due to my father’s excessive pandering to the other side of people’s families. In spite of loud cries of dissent from those of us who do not have another side, and even the not-quite-as-loud observations from those who do that there is more than one meal on christmas day.

You could go bush, go hiking in the wilderness, a place where you should never know that the rest of the world is on hold in a glitter of green and red tinsel, coloured balls, and SNOW. But it’s in the air somehow, it descends like a pall over your mood and won’t set you free for 24 hours.

I have admitted defeat of recent and do my best to have a happy christmas day. I have had reasonable success. I love the christmas pudding you get from the supermarket and brandy custard, so I get together with my girls, their dad if he’s in the country and Joshua if he’s available (which he usually isn’t, having an excess of family) and they can supply whatever food they want and I will supply the pudding. They’re not good at that. It’s usually just the pudding, perhaps a few leftovers from the night before, but it’s OK. We love spending time together, although there is that consciousness on this day that it is enforced. Something about the inner-city hush never quite allows you to forget.

All these events are much more exciting when there are young children involved. I used to love mothers’ day when my children would come home from school with a card they had made themselves full of promises to make me breakfast in bed every day for a week, and wash the dishes on Monday, and clean their rooms, and give me a back rub (with skinny little fingers) and a hand massage. Or plait my hair into a thousand little plaits (because I love having my hair played with).

But now that they’re grown up I like normal life best. I must be a routine kinda girl. I used to hate that last week of school when the reports had already been written and we were given ‘fun’ activities to kill time until we could legally be released. It felt like grief to me. It felt as though everything was lost.

I love birthdays. Who’d a thought? Don’t know what the difference is, but I always make sure everyone makes me feel special on mine and do the same for them (minus the prompting). Maybe they’re OK for me because the rest of the world continues unaffected. Don’t know. It’s weird.