Blog – Page 2 – PipBrennan

Goodbye darling Mum

Sunday Blog 151 – 1 September 2024

Almost to the very end of her long life, my mother, Bet, remained who she was, of sound mind. Funny, spunky, unpredictable.

In the emergency department last week where she was being treated for her broken hip, she was next to a man who had imbibed a little too much alcohol. We were talking about him afterwards when we were (finally) up on the ward, and despite all the pain she was in, she still managed a quip. Never a potty mouth, she said from her prone position on the hospital bed, “He only had one word in his vocabulary. And it rhymed with ‘duck’”.

Between the hospital and coming back to the aged care facility, she wasn’t quite the Bet that we knew. It was so hard to see her, here but not here, and increasingly unsettled. So many times over the last few years, I have felt the truth of the Brene Brown quote above about caring for a loved one (from Episode 88 of We Can Do Hard Things.) Both are true. It is an honour. It is unbearable.

Thrown into this mix was my impending five week world-wide trip. London, Greece, New York, India. Writing and yoga retreats and workshops. Would I be the person who left, missed her mother’s death? Her mother’s funeral? I tried this idea on but it didn’t quite fit. There was nothing for it but to live with the agonising uncertainty and clusterfuck of guilt and confusion and sadness with a side-dish of selfish desire.

But just like Mum made the decision to move into aged care so we didn’t have to, made the decision to sell the house so we could get on with that mammoth task while she was still with us, she slipped away on Tuesday morning in the early hours. Considerate to the end, Bet made sure I’d be there when she died, and that I could be part of her funeral.

My grief and relief have been like a dog chasing its tail ever since her passing.

The day Bet died, the funeral home that attended to take her away presented me with a beautiful single protea. I followed Mum out of that aged care facility, protea clutched in my hand. I got to walk her out, just like I’d walked her in.

In the sifting and sorting of the last things, I found an incomplete diary of hers from the European family trip we took in 1979 when I was 14 and she was 54. It only covered the tortuously long flight over there and our first two days in London. We were away for four months in all and I longed to read her account of the whole trip, but alas, it was never written. Those few pages though took me right back to that life-changing time, when as a 14-year-old I knew my destiny and future would include travel. Much more travel.

So one week after the funeral, I’ll pack my suitcase and my journal. Head off on a valedictory tour for my beautiful, beautiful Mum. Finish all the diary entries, and the damn manuscript edits while I’m at it.

None of my Favourite Things

Sunday Blog 150 – 25th August 2024

Picture from the bottom of a hole, looking at an ivy covered aperture to the sky,

Of all the careers to fall into, like Alice down the rabbit hole, museums would surely have been the least likely one for me. Long before Marie Kondo, I understood all too well the dull sheen items get over time when they no longer spark joy. One of my favourite ever sounds is the thud of my bagged items hitting the bottom of the charity bin. To date, I’ve almost never thrown something away and later regretted it. And I’ve thrown a LOT of things away.

Back in 1987, in the last months of my Arts degree, I worried myself into a rag wondering what on earth I’d do. Then two weeks after graduating, there I was. Employed in the history department of the Western Australian museum on their collections catalogue (back when the hideous 1970s building was still in place.) I was just passing through though, and two years later I ended up in London’s Greenwich Maritime Museum.

About a year into my six-year tenure at Greenwich I met the woman who had the newly created role of “De-accession Co-ordinator.” Her actual job was getting rid of surplus museum items. Given that on average only around 3% of any museum’s collection is on display, there was quite a big scope for her role. How jealous I was at the time. Here was my dream job, disposing of unnecessary items and getting paid well for it.

Why is this topic so present for me right now? In this incredibly melancholy week which began with my 97-year-old mother breaking her hip on Monday, somehow the topic of shedding things keeps coming up for me. Trying to find a way through this vigil time of negotiating the end of a loved one who didn’t believe in religion any more but was a very spiritual person all her life. And was also a huge hoarder.

As I bumble and stumble through each day, I’ve been listening to the Pema Chodron book How You Live Is How You Die. She talks about how getting rid of as much as we can before we die is a good idea. Mum’s life is already confined to a small room in a residential aged care facility, but like all of us witnessing our parents transitioning, there seem to be so many lessons for us.

Shed the things. Embrace the joy of chucking shit away.

Grateful for gratitude

Sunday Blog 149 – 18th August 2024

It took me 39 days to complete my 28 day Gratitude Practice. It started with a bang – within the first three days I’d found a ten dollar note at Maccas when I went to use their loo, and then won an Instagram competition which included a 45 minute consultation with my US based writing mentor.

The messy middle included me dropping my gorgeous heart-shaped turquoise gratitude stone (see this blog) and chipping it. I ordered heart-shaped gems online which turned out to be tiny, but look fabulous scattered on my yoga altar.

After the too-small hearts debacle (Temu is persistent and confusing), I went to a gem store in person. Fully intending to purchase another turquoise heart, the range of heart-shaped gems was limited and didn’t include a light blue-coloured one. He showed me a lapis lazuli heart but it seemed too dark. Then he placed a rose quartz heart in my hand. My fingers curled around it reflexively, and he pointed out other stones in vain.

“You don’t want to let go of it.”

I bought it of course—it had picked me rather than the other way around (see image above). Then I read up on the qualities of rose quartz – love and harmony. While my chipped, blue turquoise heart represented communication and writing, what I’ve ended up with is a gentle pink love-infused rose quartz heart. I don’t even remember how the turquoise heart came into my life, I want to remember it leaving, and today I’m going to dispose of its remnants, let it go with, of course, gratitude.

But the gewgaws and faldelals of gratitude really are irrelevant. What I’ve really learned over the last 39 days of my 28 day gratitude practice is a) I’m not very good at doing things every day and b) how incredibly helpful it is to focus on being grateful.

And it’s not just about monotonously listing what you’re grateful for at the end of the day. You can be grateful for what’s not happened yet. The day I tried that exercise, I got mixed up as it looked like I’d already done my gratitude write up. But it was just that everything I’d visualised unfolded throughout the day. Other ideas that don’t involve repetitive lists is mentally saying “thank” when your left foot hits the ground and “you” when your right foot lands as you walk about your day. A kind of walking meditation and gratitude practice all rolled into one. You can also be grateful about the good things that will happen to people you love, and extend that to strangers or “the world” at large.

What happens for me when I’m grateful is the chatter of discontent and self-criticism quietens, my bandwidth of creativity and resourcefulness opens up.

So independent of any gemstones, I’m grateful for gratitude.

Through a mirror darkly

Sunday Blog 148 – 11th August 2024

This time last week I was poised on the precipice of three days of conference presentations, already reeling from the impact of trying to process insights from a pre-conference research symposium day.

At the time, I was intensely curious about the possibilities of “researching what we implement, and implementing what we research”. Could this be my next life focus? With my limited attention span, my idea of becoming more serious about research waned as the week lengthened and other subjects crowded in. Even so, research was on my mind.

Then I tuned into an episode of a podcast series I listen to regularly—Family Secrets with Dani Shapiro. Usually she interviews people who have written memoirs about uncovering family secrets. In this case, it was America Journalist Susannah Breslin’s Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment.

What rivetted me was her description of the moment she realised she was being watched. Aged seven, she had been already part of the experiment for about four years. Her mother signed her over to the 30 year longitudinal study largely to access the childcare. She’d already voiced what her actions had showed—that she no longer wanted to be a mother. So, little Susannah was dropped off each day at this special early childhood centre that was set up with one-way mirrors and hidden areas for the researchers to sit and observe in secret. Children could play or attend classes, all the while being watched. The study aimed to determine if adult personality could be predicted from childhood behaviour.

Seven-year-old Susannah was confronted with the M&M experiment. She was offered sweets, which she declined, even though she was experiencing the post-school hours of ravenous hunger. She wanted to be seen as mature. When the researcher left the room, Susannah lunged for the bowl but knocked it over, scattering the M&Ms across the table. “Not wanting to be caught making a mess, I grabbed candy and stuck it into my mouth. Then suddenly I froze and I could feel my cheeks getting hot. And I looked into this mirror on the opposite wall, and I could see my cheeks were pink, and I just had this sense that there was somebody on the other side of the mirror who was watching me.”

Both her parents were taken up with their research lives and divorced a few years later. Meanwhile, the study seemed to Susannah like “a third parent.” Only it was a completely impassive parent, making no move to support or guide her as she spiralled into problematic drug taking and acting out sexually as a vulnerable young teen.

She reflects on how mistaken was her belief the study was a third parent. “I had offered up my data on a plate to an entity that had consumed it and used it for its own purposes, which were not necessarily aligned.”

Many years after the study ended, Susannah, by now a journalist, visited the school where she had been a lab rat. There was a researcher still working there, and she called out to them, said she was part of the study. “Yeah, we get a lot of you around here.” More adult children in search of their third parent.

And so, one week later, my research zeal is already withering on the vine. Data extraction for non-aligned purposes does not excite me.

Ah well, think of all the time and energy this will save me!

Converging Threads

Sunday Blog 147 – 4th August 2024

I’m sitting here on the 23^rd floor of my Brisbane Hotel, here for the Health Innovation Community conference. It’s only the pre-conference day and already my thoughts are broiling with ideas and inspiration.

Today was all about early career researchers breaking into the digital health space. As one of the consumer advocates attending, I was banging my usual “involve consumers” drum.

In truth, I am very ambivalent about research. About how we measure it. The number of papers cited doesn’t really seem to me to be the key metric to see if what we invest in research is paying off into actual, genuine change for people. And what we research. What makes a perfect topic for a PhD may not be the issue that really needs addressing, from a community perspective. And don’t get me started about how involving consumers in research is so often an afterthought.

The disconnect between health research and health services is a familiar frustration for me as someone that straddles two worlds. My roots and first love are in working with health services and system change. But I recognise research is important to drive improvements. One of today’s speakers, Dr Christopher Longhurst, nailed it for me when he said, “we don’t research what we implement in our health services, and we don’t implement what we research.”

This.

What crept into my thinking as I heard this was an inkling. Maybe I need to become more serious about the tiny bit of research I am currently doing as part of a pilot program at Curtin University? Is this how I get the threads of my life of writing and health advocacy to converge?

Then he shared this quote “No one who loves life can ignore literature and no-one who loves literature can ignore life.” (A quote from Laura Esquivel, author of Like Water for Chocolate. This is from her non-fiction collection of essays, Between Two Fires)

His quote landed directly in my heart. Like a direct message to me, that my love of reading has not been wasted, and my love of advocacy is not in vain.

Let’s see how these two continue to converge…

My heart is bursting with gratitude

Sunday Blog 146 – 28th July 2024

Literally. You know how it goes. Or is it just me? I start a new practice and I throw everything at it. My latest one is a Gratitude Practice. Being thankful for all the things. I’ve been at it for three weeks now.

Get a Magic Rock, she says. Make it part of your practice and hold it at night and say thanks before going to sleep.

So I do. I’ve had the perfect blue gem, polished to a heart shape. It’s been knocking around my shelves for years—I don’t even know where it came from. But when called on to choose a Magic Rock, I knew just which one to pick.

But then? I fetishise my stone, my Magic Rock. I make sure it has the perfect receptacle on the bedside table. So it’s close at hand for night-time holding purposes, when I’m being thankful for my day.

And it goes on. I get greedy. Decide I need to take it on outings with me, in case it exponentially increases the synchronicity and magic of my regular gratitude practice as I go about my day.

I then decide I can enhance my morning’s gratitude practice (“Imagine saying ‘thank you’ through your heart”) if I put the Magic Stone actually on my heart. It’s brilliant.
Then I carry on with life admin and mindless scrolling. The stone warms to my body temperature and sticks to my skin. I forget it’s there. Remember only when I’ve gone to the bathroom and hear a gemstone falling. Hear the unmistakable sound of it chipping.

Sigh. What to do?

Maybe this is a lesson in keeping it simple. Not getting carried away with the symbols. Because this gratitude thing is the bomb. As someone who so often fights with what is, wanting things to be better, a gratitude practice has been transformative for me.
And I don’t really need the heart-shaped gemstone to do it.

But I want it. So I place an online order heart-shaped polished gems in every colour of the rainbow.

Colourful in Quairading

Sunday Blog 145 – 21st July 2024

Quairading pic with Pip in her loud trousers

There’s nothing like hitting the open road, leaving the city behind. After much longer than I’d planned, I was back in the Q. Quairading. The previous visit was May 2022 when I managed to jag World Labyrinth Day. Did I mention Quairading has a labyrinth? Were you already aware I am labyrinth-obsessed?

Pulling up into the main drag of Quairading, I felt myself to be a little ostentatiously dressed in my acid-trip pants. To be fair, they are quite loud in my home city of Perth. But still, I had the sneaking sense I was over-reaching myself as out of place townee.

Had I been more conservative in my outfit choice however, I would have missed this conversation in the grocery store.

“You’re admiring my pants” I addressed the woman next to me at the cashier. More than twice she’d stolen looks at their multi-coloured magnificence.

“Hmm. Not something I would wear. Out of the house.” Well, I never. Who wears flared pyjama pants? Oh, wait-

Or this exchange as I pulled up in front of The Makers Keep where six of us were enjoying a Writer’s Weekend.

“If your pants are having a litter, I want a pup” she said, expertly manoeuvring her dust-covered ute back out onto the main road, giving me no time to retort. But indeed, what could I have come back with to match that.

Classic. I should definitely get out of the city more!

Stars of the Future?

Sunday Blog 144 – 14th July 2024

By the time I was born, the sixth child in eight years (no multiples), my mother’s hair was grey. I mean, that makes sense right? Wouldn’t such a profusion of children dim the shine of most people’s hair? She’d started late for her generation – 29 when she married in 1957 and 38 by the time she had me in 1965.

I can still remember my dawning realisation that she had, in fact, existed before I was born. Why, the very idea! What was she doing all that time? I was filled with self-absorbed resentment at her living on this earth forty years without me.

This was around about the time we all gathered around our television to watch a show called Stars of the Future. Sort of like American Idol but with very very bad haircuts and cheap stage sets. And probably not quite so much polish and talent, if I’m honest. They often featured the Shirley Halliday dancers who were decidedly racy (this video may amuse you to watch.)

Anyhoo, one day I was shadowing Mum as she was doing what she almost always did daily between 1959 and 1989 – laundry. I was too small to actually help her, I was just tagging along. She has a beautiful singing voice and was belting out a tune as she pegged up the sheets. She taught us all to sing in harmony, a fiendishly clever thing to when you five daughters slogging over the washing up. We can’t argue when we’re singing.

So impressed was I with her vocal abilities that, grey hair and plain house dress notwithstanding, I exclaimed, “Mum, you should be on Stars of the Future.”

You know that laugh, when someone doesn’t mean to laugh so loud, but they just can’t help themselves? She fought to catch her breath between the next guffaw. The thought of a grey-haired matron in her housedress and apron, neck deep in laundry being The Next Big Thing was the funniest thing she’d heard all day.

Could I obsess over quality?

Sunday Blog 143 – 7th July 2024

Is it just me, or are podcast episodes by men always at least one hour long? I mean, who’s got the time?

While the lovely Rangan Chatterjee’s Feel Better, Live More podcast has “bitesize” episodes that are just under twenty minutes, I listened to a whole one this week. It was an interview with author Cal Newport. Apparently, I did have the time.

The episode had the arresting title of “Break Free from Burnout.” After all, I am the woman who had to quit her job in 2022 to break the hypnotic spell of over-doing it.

For decades I’ve tried countless methods to trick myself into doing less. I taped a card with the saying “No makes way for yes” on the wall next to my desk. I hoped it would work its magic on my personality. I’m FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) to the core. Newsflash – the card didn’t create the personality revolution I was hoping for.

Cal Newport’s interview was all about his new book Slow Productivity. Let me save you an hour by sharing the nuggets of slow productivity that Cal espouses:

Focus on a small number of high impact activities
Work at a natural pace – vary your intensity and activities to fit your own rhythms
Obsess over quality

Number 1 was interesting as he described high impact activities as those that move the needle forward. AND he said that all activities we take on come with an administration load. People like myself always envision the end product and bleep over this reality. I’ve always lamented that I seem to have an administrative soul and a creative soul, and the administrative soul always chews up most of my bandwidth. Hmm… that insight about administrative load has got me thinking. Perhaps I could use my envisioning skills to see any shiny new project as trailing a load of unwanted paperwork behind it. Could that cure my FOMO just a little? Number 2 is easier for me now that I have jumped out of the full-time working gig. (There are some good tips for those who have a line manager to work to – asking “which one of these projects would you like me to stop doing to get this done?)

But quality? That was something for me to really dig into. Last Sunday, I sent out my Sunday blog on Facebook with all the gobbldegook from my WordPress website. It had delightful text such as “this image is empty” or similar at the top of the post. I was very lucky anyone waded through that gunk to read the blog itself.

I’m often chided for the Sunday Blog typos that can sneak past my six or seven different filters I try to put in their way. Until it’s posted on Facebook, those last sneaky errors are invisible to my naked eye. Then they are in the full public glare. Like a naughty villager in the stocks, my transgressions are on full public display. Have I taken the maxim that “perfection is the enemy of done” just a little too far? Is it time for me to obsess over quality?

To have stumbled across this podcast in the week after my WordPress gobbledegook bungle was a sign, I’m telling myself, that I am at last ready to spend just a little more time on quality. Obsess over it if you will.

Let’s see if I notice any Facebook post bloopers this week.

Solo Mama Memories

Sunday Blog 142 – 30th June 2024

This week I’ve been submersing myself in the memoir edits (I’m revising my 2014 memoir, to get it up to the standard of my novella. Just play along with me!) My 2014 memoir skates right over the top of the reality of my life as a solo mama, and in this edit I’m letting myself sink down, down into the parenting chaos.
All that editing surfaced a replay a memory of a friend’s book launch in April 2023. Renae Hayward’s Say Hooray picture book. I’d watched her writing practice dip as she had her first, then her second child, and was so excited to see that she’d been able to co-produce her gorgeous book and get it out into the world.

The launch event was at Melville Library, a place I used to haunt when my daughter was young. When I arrived at the book launch, I made sure I had my copy ready for Renae to sign, sneak in an extra big hug before the event got underway. I was keen to get my copy posted to my niece for her to read to her little girl.

Renae signed my copy with a flourish, then reminded me I’d raved to her about Melville Library—probably about 2003, when we first met as colleagues. It had a creche, and I’d waxed lyrical about how wonderful that was for me. I had no child care arrangements in place at the time, despite all my efforts to get something organised. My daughter had been persistently miserable when left at day care and any joy I had when briefly snatching time to do my own thing was wiped clean when I saw her sad little face.
Somehow the Melville Creche was that miracle place where she was happy, and I could sit in the library or go to the gym or just walk around the oval crying for an hour. This conversation with Renae was over two decades ago now. I’d completely forgotten about it.

I sat down with my signed copy of her book, and watched as Renae and her illustrator co-author Rebecca Mills, marshalled and wrangled an enraptured group of children. They sat on their parents knees, on the floor or on chairs. It was a touchingly delightful and sweet scene. As Joan Didion says, “I’ve lost touch with a few of the people I used to be.” But the conversation with Renae had unloosed the memories of the “me” I used to be. The solo mum who went to Melville Library for a little snatch of freedom.

The children sing along and listen in rapture to Renae but they recede and I’m lost in the tug of the past. Just around the corner of my eye, I can see my daughter’s artwork from twenty years ago when she was four years old. It had received a prize and the right to be displayed at Melville Library. Zoe sitting proudly next to it, posing as I take photos, and then we walk off together hand in hand. It’s like friends I’ve long neglected have brushed past me in a crowd and disappeared around a corner. I’m calling out to get their attention, but it’s all too late. They’re gone. I want to tell that exhausted solo mum that in no time, but also a really long decade and a half, her days and nights and weeks and months will be all hers. Her daughter will be launched and gone.

The wash of two decades old memories became a wave, then a tsunami. I’m pulling painfully against the now, where my daughter is an adult. Well-established in her life now. I need to make an appointment to make sure we see each other regularly. That is the point of parenting, after all. To raise independent people.

But could we be closer than we are? Is she suffering through some really difficult adult crises that she isn’t reaching out to me for help for? I check my phone where a couple of my texts to her sit unanswered despite their excess of emojis. Then I sneak away from the book launch and the sight of parents and children sitting so close and entwined. I creep into my car just in time to ugly cry.

Before I finish, my darling girl texts me. I soar with the glory of connection. She’s sick, that’s why she hasn’t returned my recent texts or calls. There’s a gig that night and she’s not sure she can make it. She asks for my help and I roar out of the Melville Library parking lot, on the way to help and, help her get her show on the road.
PS if you want a beautiful kids book, I’d highly recommend Say Hooray. https://fremantlepress.com.au/contributor/renae-hayward/