don't call me baby; don't talk in maybes

It's grand final week and it's school holidays and it's spring and the clematis is roaring up the sideway treliss and every single one of the many callistemon plants around these parts is thriving and is there a more beautiful sound than the magpie in song? I've taught my last class for the forseeable future. Goodbyes at my workplace difficult; more difficult than I'd really gathered. Difficult for the same reason that anything is difficult and that is due to navigating the whirlpool of interpersonal relationships. Some astounding gifts from students, and no doubt some gleeful thanks given by others. The more I see and the more I hear the more emphatic is my view that we are each no more and no less than the sum of our relationships with other people.

In the last weeks of teaching I saw “An Inconvenient Truth” two more times. Confounding signals have again struck me. For (20?) years now I have been aware of this as perhaps the dominant issue of our times. In Year 10 Science last week we handed around a copy of The Age “Good Weekend” magazine that I had saved from February 1989. On the back cover: a full page colour ad, featuring sunset, for cigarettes. On the front cover: a stylised globe of the earth, in the shape of an egg, being heated to the point of severe cracking. The feature article was about something called “Climate Change”. The central points of this 1989 article read almost identically to those of many 2008 articles. It seems that any sense of urgency has been lost in (scientific-popular) translation.

So I'm taking it on as an ACF campaigner on climate. We'll see. I hope not to bombard email addresses or to preach. But i'm not really sure where to start.
midnight oil's “blue sky mining” album is as good a place as any.
The river runs red, black rain falls, dust in my hand.

I expect to teach again. A rich and rewarding and challenging task, pitifully rewarded in our currency of money but abundantly rewarded in terms of the personal. And did I say time-consuming?
But enough – next will come the challenge of water and of spreadsheets and of a new workplace and new expectations and new colleagues and all that goes with them.

But that's next. This is now. This is a Tuesday night having played & cared for my girls this day and having them both sleeping contentedly in this very house while my lady is out with mates. This is an empty lindt wrapper and a half-full coffee mug (alright 2 wrappers). This is feeling is a cleansing feeling & like a healing feeling & like a Top End monsoon in its intensity and in its bringing of joy & of relief.
Breathe.
Music anyone? EP launch in Northcote in October*. Check it out: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=318922283
*yes this is a mate. Yes, check out the site. Songs there. & the details.

A family wedding recently. Stephanie & Kyla taken under the wings of older cousins happy to be playing the role of Big Kids; shepherding, fetching, cajoling. Perspective gained from seeing them running, jumping, laughing, sparkles in their eyes, with neither CJ nor I involved.
Pride.
It seems a great many people in my circles are suffering right now. Relationship breakdowns, illness, combinations of both. Hard to make sense of it all. No point trying, really, as I've learned.
Instead I am here. I am now.
Last week, considering this, it was put to me that it must only be a matter of time before illness/ tragedy knocks on our door here. I guess that's true. But when it does arrive, I aim to have been well rested & well nourished & well musiced & well loving in its absence. Who's waiting?
Love to all.

taaa-kew

A prod here; a poke there. Melbourne Writer's Festival. Growth of language & of arms & of sunlight & it's time for another edition. The sun is heading north again. Galileo would disagree and as a science teacher I shouldn't say it. But hey. Sunlight in the north windows here. The house on our northern boundary was demolished a month or two back. Winter sun fills our northern bedrooms now.

I'm sitting at the kitchen table and it's 9am. CJ at work. Steph sitting opposite me: “there are lots of these textas aren't there, Dad?” Kyla in the highchair: “texta! There-you-go! Ta-kew! Lid on!” Words. So many words. “Ta! Packet!”

What are you drawing there, Stephanie? “I'm drawing lots of pictures.”

Time marches on. Days are blurring together. It feels like we're treading water here. Nothing really happening. But then you look around and Steph is sitting on the potty. Or Kyla is sitting down thumbing through a stack of books.

Stephanie reading (memorising the words) to Meg & Mog; reading it to her little sister. Kyla memorising the sound effects throughout the story & chiming in at the appropriate page: “Whoo Whoo Whoo! Clip-clop clip-clop! Boom!”

The markers of time for me (aside from my work life, broken into 48 minute periods, week1 and week2 tiumetables, 10-week terms) is our girls. Kyla now with a sheet of paper on her head declaring “hat!” SJ laughing: “that's not a hat, Kyla.”

Yet I'm feeling stagnant. All my energy is gone. Family life leaves nothing for interests. No story-writing. No sport (even watching – what Olympics?). No tree-planting. No live music.

A late-night bike ride to catch Tim Rogers on a Saturday night rekindled thoughts of a life now passed. But a recognition that is won't always be thus.

Walking the Merri Creek. The creek has been up lately. Surging eddies and a drowned weir at the Northcote bridge. The CERES sandpit. Fleming Park. Cooking up Italian lamb casserole (again) on a weekend (again) to be thankfully plucked from the freezer on a Wednesday evening (again); Wednesdays being the one day when both CJ & I work, and amid the mad hour of screaming & tiredness the pre-cooked meal that everyone enjoys is worth its weight in prepared gold.

Cooking up lime butter fish in our kitchen in E Brunswick & feeling waves of Top End barramundi memories flood over me.

Flicking on some tunes after tea & the dancing of Stephanie & the copying of Kyla. Somehow, somtime, Jet's “Are you gonna be my girl?” became the default dance track here. Maybe it's the first track on the iPod. Whatever, when those first few bars of guitar ring out, girls run from anywhere into the dining dance floor & get down. It's great.

And I've taken a new job. Teaching is fun & rewarding & structured & family friendly & I think I'll teach again, but I've now taken an opportunity to reenter the water world. Three-days-a-week at the Bureau of Meteorology's new Water Division. A(nother) new challenge awaits.

Next? I'm aiming to experience a professional massage one day soon. Why not? I've heard good things. Also yoga. And to play more guitar.

Right now I feel a shepherd to these two girls before me as they make their way in this world. And that's taking about all I've got.

hand, it's time for bed

It’s mid March and it’s a stinker. 40 degrees today. 39 yesterday. Forecast for more 35+ days into next week. The whirl of time has sucked up January and February and the first school term is almost over.

We cleaned up our house through January. Late afternoon trips to the Northcote pool, girls splashing. Stephanie excited and nervous and jumping in the water. Kyla grinning and clapping and trying to wriggle free and swim on her own.

We enjoyed a week at the beach towards the end of January. Sharing a house with mates & feeling the dominance of children’s sleeping schedules over all else. Lounging around on trampoline, cockatoos screeching, koalas dozing overhead, echidnas rambling along the tracks. Getting down to the beach each day for a late afternoon splash.

Stephanie talking and enunciating each thought and each happening; watchful at the beach. Happiest with spade in hand , filling bucket after bucket with sand. Very wary of the ocean. Small, indecisive steps toward the water and then a sprint back up the beach as the next wash comes through.

Kyla wakeful through the night. A wriggly, squirmy, restless and beautiful little girl. Eating fistsful of beach sand and throwing herself headlong into any hole/ sandcastle/ splash of ocean she can find. No hesitation in her crawls – she seems willing to tackle long-distance ocean swimming.

Night times a struggle as no amount of consistency, teach-to-sleep, control crying, control comforting, blah blah is making a scrap of difference. And we’re rooted.

February and school is back and work is back for me and CJ is working 2 days/week this year. I’m on 4 days/ week. We share the child care – CJ 3 days, me 1 day and mum 1 day. We are both very lucky and very happy to have arranged our lives in this way.

Ky still struggling through the night and CJ & I struggling a lot by now too. Anger? Frustration? Chronic tiredness. No explanations. Flicking from helplessness to unconditional love and support and back again. Over and over each night.

Kyla’s first trip to the doctor. To rule out any medical ailments. She’s OK. When she inevitably wakes, sometime between 1am and 4am, I’m bunking down on the floor of her room, positioned for a good “shhhhhhh”, as she wakes. It’s been a week and it’s working. We’re all sleeping more but the next step is obviously to stop doing it.

Steph calling us by our given names. “Hey Dave, whatchya doing Dave?” “Caf, caf, I’m reading books with Fluffy, Caf.” She has an array of alter-egos these days. When she’s eating porridge, she is to be addressed as “Goldilocks.” (Me: “Have you finished your porridge there Stephi girl?” Steph: “No, no, I’m Goldilocks.”) When unthreading shoelaces, as “the shoelace fairy”. Periodically whenever giants or beanstalks are mentioned, as “Jack”. Sometimes when the mood takes her as “Captain Feathersword”.

Stephanie talks all day, every day. She gives voice to other characters, including her favourite Fluffy and other teddy bears. Each night her right hand joins in a conversation with her left, saying (through Steph) “I want to go to the park,” just as we’re putting pyjamas on. Steph will then admonish her own hand (“Hand, you can’t go to the park. It’s time for bed, funny hand”). Laughs all round. Imagination is beautiful.

Kyla recognizes things as spoken now. “Kyla, where is Paddy bear?” will see her scan the surroundings, locate Paddy bear and then scramble across the floor at light speed towards the white bear. She is pointing. Sometimes I think she says “toot toot”, but maybe I’m imagining that. She is just starting to stand up independently and sway back and forth a bit before falling down again.

The girls are playing well together, though if anything Kyla is the dominant individual. Not responding to verbal instructions puts her out of Stephanie’s control. And her tendency to grab and yank fistfuls of Steph’s hair whenever she can has made her a redoubtable play-companion.

Holidays soon. My birthday soon. Grew a beard over the past 6 weeks or so; shaved it and also most of my hair off last night. Times are a changing here. The nights and days of relentless tiredness and exasperation are ceding to a better life. I have begun to think a little period of Big Challenges might be behind us. Hope so. The last few months have been tricky. Holidays on the horizon now & the prospects are good.