Hazy Hours at the edge of the Universe

Twice now I have personally witnessed the birth of a child. On both occasions my younger sister has given me the very great privilege of accompanying her through the hazy hours on the edge of the universe where women go to do this amazing thing they do.

My nephew was born 40 years to the day after my older sister was born. For my own mother, also present at the birth of her Grandson, this must have been an amazing marvel and I have to say some of the tears I shed after our gorgeous lad’s appearance were for my mum – who took that journey alone all those years ago. No sister held her hand; no mother was allowed in the room; no husband could witness the miracle. Only a crisply starched nurse held her hand as she gathered her strength to push life into the world. How things have changed for the better!

One of my clearest childhood memories is the day my younger sister was born. I was so excited as we crowded around her cot to welcome her to our lives. Pretty much every day since she has given me cause to marvel at her creativity and her strength. Sometimes, even when she seems at her most vulnerable – she digs reserves from somewhere and she brings beauty forth from pain.

No matter what I do in this life – it will never come close to that. But at least I was there to hold her hand and for that I will be forever thankful .

The Easter Message

I actually love going to Church on Easter Sunday. I love responding to the minister’s proclamation “Christ is risen!” with a resounding “He is risen indeed!”

And it’s not because I am a firm believer in Christ or the Judeo Christian philosophies – it’s because these Easter themes of loss and re-birth and renewal are universal and because hope, more than any other emotion should be celebrated and its joy and promise shouted from the rooftops.

I think about this stuff every Easter – but there’s no better time to be thinking about redemption and renewal than when you’re waiting for a baby to be born. And that’s exactly what I am doing right now; waiting. My sister’s second child is due imminently and we’re all coaxing it out by our sheer will.

So what exactly, this Easter needs to be cast away? To be let go of? And what needs to be turned over into the soil of my life providing fertile ground for renewal?

That my friends, is the money question. In recent times, I’ve never felt as great an urge as I feel now to push away from the shore – to cast off just about all the vestments of my former life and begin again. How exciting that would be in many ways.

I think of my sister bringing on new life and envy her the opportunity she has to explore again the duality of parental life; the opportunity to at once be your self and fulfil your own desires and yet also invest so heavily in the “invention” of another. I watch my friends beginning new relationships or reinvigorating old ones and I envy them their opportunity to reinvent themselves by being seen through someone else’s eyes. I think of my young, idealistic friends in Honiara and envy them their life before them; uncharted and full of promise.

And I think I want all of this and none of it. I want it all because I want to embrace renewal and rebirth and the freedom of starting with a clean slate – and I want none of it because I want at once both freedom from my past and the opportunity to turn the sum of my experiences back into my soul-soil and to finally learn their lessons.

But these things really are at the heart of the Easter message. A clean slate is ours every day if we want it. We forgive and are forgiven, we learn, we move on. It’s the forgiveness that’s the key. Whether of ourselves or others.

In the Christian story of Easter, Christ’s family and followers rolled the stone away from his grave and found him gone. Before ascension could be known and celebrated, first there was grief and a great test of faith. For me, rolling the stone away this Easter means embracing what must first be lost to ever be found again. I have to forgive myself the thousand errors of judgement that have lead me down the path I find myself on and yet simultaneously celebrate and have faith in my choices.

It’s a long time since I’ve swung on monkey bars but I reckon Easter is a bit like that; the moment of greatest fear and exhilaration is the dark moment – hanging with one hand - right before something solid and known can be grasped. Just like the birthing process I am about to accompany my sister through. And writing that, she has just appeared to say her waters have broken… He is risen indeed!

Papa can you hear me?

I miss my dad

I’ve been thinking about him a lot lately. Just this week there’s been a consultant from Australia staying with me who is in his mid 40’s or so and he has 2 daughters who you can tell he just adores. He gets this look in his eyes when he speaks about them; he is so proud of their teenage achievements and you can tell he’s enjoying being their dad now and can’t wait to enjoy watching them learn and grow. It’s really touching and I think its made me wistful about losing that particular unconditional love from my life.

When I was growing up, my dad used to ask me to sing for him- and for others like extended family and friends. I never would. I was always too shy; I wanted to shirk his pride – maybe because I felt I didn’t deserve it. I really wish I had indulged him a bit more. The old saying about not understanding exactly what you have until you lose it is so very true.

I miss my dad because he was a good man. He was wise and gentle and calm and if he didn’t know something – he would listen and learn. If he did know something, he would hold council but never shove something down your throat. Actually maybe I am placing him a little too high on a pedestal there; we always said his favourite phrases always began with “Now, what you should do….”!! But that’s exactly what I miss as well. I would have loved for him to be able to visit me here and have discussions about my thoughts and feelings about this place and this work. I would have loved to have heard the questions he would have asked – loved to be able to consider them carefully and see what he thought of my answers.

And right now, I would love his opinion on what I should do next. I’d love for him to teach me how to negotiate this path called life – the way he taught me to handle a car or learn the periodic table of elements. But now I’m laughing at myself because all I did when he was right there next to me teaching me those things was roll my eyes and wonder why I had to learn about the drive shaft rather than just starting the bloody car.. or why I had to make a silly riddle of something. If he were here and if I’d never lost him, I’d probably be complaining about the way he gives advice on everything.

I know he’s right here on my shoulder. And I know the gift he has given me is that he is the voice in my head that tells me to keep my cool or listen rather than speak – or walk a mile in someone else’s shoes. But gee I’d like to sing for him tonight. Or scratch his back and shoot the breeze a while.

And you know what? I can recite that bloody periodic table of elements because I still remember the way he taught me to do it. 24 years ago.

I think I’ll go and call my mum. It’s never too late to appreciate what you’ve got.

Vale

Today in Brisbane, my family will celebrate the life of my 96 year old Grandmother who passed away last week. Today, I wake with the hope that she’s on her last great adventure - or depending on how you view the universe and its vast mysteries, that she’s enjoying the adventure between her last conscious reality and her next.

Though she wouldn’t necessarily have called herself an adventurer, her life had its share of interest and intrigue and so as I reflect on the influence she has had on me, I know that part of what pushes me forward each day to new horizons, part of what makes me know I can do the things I try to do is the genetic imprint she has left in me.

Although my lasting impressions of my Grandmother will probably always be from a time when she was in her 60’s and my associations with her have more to do with the smell of her house on nights when the extended family would meet over Roast Beef, and my mother would argue with my Grandfather over University education, literature and history and we would read the books my father and his brothers and sisters had read and then climb into her impossibly high bed at the end of our child-sized night. Or with the fact that she selflessly arranged for the “box room” under the house at Chelmer to be cleaned out and wired with electricity after her grandchildren “discovered” it one Boxing Day, turfed out the suitcases and other carefully stored paraphernalia, declared it the underground home and themselves (along with Tessa, my grandparents’ Alsatian) the new famous five! I know another woman existed beyond the one who did the washing up in the kitchen listening to the radio, who would sometimes play the piano for us and who tickled my neck at the door as we would say goodbye.

As I got older, I got better glimpses of that woman- but still, I don’t feel I ever really knew the secret hopes and fears of her heart. Perhaps though I did; in eulogising her, my Uncle says that they were true and simple hopes – to be kind and virtuous and to love and care for her family. These things I have surely learned from her – though still only aspire to do them as well and as selflessly.

I may not have known my Grandmother in her heyday but that woman – the one at the edges of my imagination – is the woman who left Australia by herself on a ship to London in the 1938 under a cloud of scandal – gone to meet with her beau, later her husband and my Grandfather who was doing his PHD at the London school of Economics. She is the woman who sat in a flat across from a ballet school and typed her husband’s thesis while Hitler’s menace and the war in Europe drew ever closer; a woman who was aboard one of the last ships back home before the danger made that trip impossible.

Gran leaving for London, New Year's Eve 1938/9
In my 20’s when I took on the ritual I’d accompanied previously as a child - taking my Gran shopping on a Saturday morning - I probably didn’t see her as a veritable Jackie Kennedy; but I should have. In the 50’s, my Grandfather became a pretty famous Historian who met with Heads of State and advised on International Affairs; had his own TV show, a Journal of Politics and History – his admirers and his detractors. Because of this life of minor celebrity, there are photos of my Gran at Buckingham Palace Garden Parties, Presidential receptions and Balls –there was even one that hung for a while in the foyer of City Hall in Brisbane showing my Grandparents with Wally Campbell the one-time Governor of Queensland- and the guy who gave a toast at my parents wedding. Despite knowing all of this, I don’t think I have ever really reflected on the panache, courage and exemplary social skills it would have taken my Grandmother to stand beside her husband for all those years at all those events.
Gran and Grandfather in Sydney with Aunty Helen
My Grandmother had a formidable intellect. And although I knew the endless list of books she had read (in fact I just found out that she had read so many novels she exhausted the possibilities of 2 Brisbane libraries!) and the fact that well into her 80’s she continued to read three newspapers a day – I think that rather than engaging properly with her, I continued to see her as a product of her times as I cringed when she told me in my early 20’s lesbians shouldn’t be seen on the ABC (or anywhere really), or that the stolen generation were a product of a Government trying to “do the right thing.” But her interest in politics and her habitual watching of Parliament meant that she could have outdone most of my friends with degrees in political science on the history of politics in Australia – and added in a few funny anecdotes about people like Whitlam (who once kissed her!) at the same time. She and my father are probably responsible for my own slight obsession with Hansard and my nickname at one stage of “Hansard dot com”.

By the time I formed my own adult relationship with my Grandmother, I think I appreciated much of the person she was, and right now that’s a comfort to me. I only ever knew my Grandfather as a caricature of himself – and was only just beginning to come to have an adult understanding of my father when he died. My Grandmother and I connected most when it came to her love of travel. She accompanied my Grandfather on many sabbaticals and she was one of the most widely travelled women I know. In my 20’s and early 30’s, whenever I was travelling somewhere (for there was almost nowhere I was going she hadn’t already been) I would seek her advice on the places she went and loved and I would invariably follow in her footsteps and enjoy our conversations comparing notes when I returned. I remember especially our conversations about New York which we both loved despite initial scepticism. I think she loved the fact that so many of her Grandchildren ended up living overseas and I wonder if she ever realised that her own demonstrations of fearlessness and resilience were part of what made such bold moves possible. It is to her very great credit that she never stifled the ambitions of her own children or Grandchildren through wishing they would stay close to home; instead she applauded ambition and a sense of adventure- as long as it was undertaken with integrity and the desire to be productive and passionate.

One of my Grandmother’s greatest gifts was her compassion. Like all of us she had her human failings – but she believed that the pursuit of any person’s life was to show kindness and virtuosity in all things. I remember my father once saying he used to cringe when she told her 4 children that they had a “position to uphold”. I suspect he thought it reeked of elitism. And perhaps it did a little. Like it or not, in 1950’s Brisbane they were role models. My Gran used to raise money to build new kindergartens and libraries and my Grandfather used to be asked to open them. My older sister and I still recall our 5 year- old awe when a Graceville shopkeeper asked for my Grandfather’s shopping list one Saturday morning and ran around filling his basket for him asking “is this brand alright Professor?” It’s just how it was. Regardless, my Grandmother taught us all that who you were and what you did was of no consequence unless you were doing good for others.

And so it is that in understanding her I can understand myself better; that’s how we pass knowledge and understanding from one generation to the next. She was a product of all her experience; her father’s post first word war shellshock and his love of family Christmas, her own experiences in the depression, her love of the Arts – and so too I am the sum of her experiences and my own brought to me through those I know and love. She got the idea that wisdom is gained and transformed through community and for this, and so much more I so humbly thank her.

Vale Gran.