Two very heavy suitcases

Sunday Blog 82 – 30th April 2023

Between deciding to go and leaving, there was a two week period. I packed two very heavy suitcases for that brief trip to the UK to “lift my spirits”.

It had been a long eight months, and after Summer had waned I’d endured Winter in snowy Thessaloniki in Greece with my baby daughter in a one-room flat with no backyard. And parents-in-law upstairs and a very distant, unavailable partner. My skin was tinged with the grey of a long winter of being cooped up with a toddler, bathing in the neglect and contempt of her father.

Packed in those heavy suitcases were also Summer clothes for Australia, as I was fleeing home, taking my girl with me.

I had arrived eight months earlier, with my seven-month-old daughter. I was cautiously optimistic I could coax a partnership from the chance relationship with a Thessaloniki local that had resulted in an unplanned pregnancy. I had met him when teaching English as a Foreign Language and then had proceeded with a pregnancy that Was Not Properly Sanctioned. He didn’t really want to be rushed into fatherhood. I went back to Australia to birth her there and planned a return to Greece to at least give the relationship a try.

So accordingly I had arrived in Thessaloniki with my seven-month-old daughter and some tender dreams. I knew within twenty-four hours of arriving that I had made a hideous mistake, but I persisted for eight months. Until the letter from a concerned friend woke me from the forlorn spell I was under. The letter touched a resolve in me.

In the two weeks between receiving the letter and fleeing, I cried a little about him, but I wept and wept at the unfairness of it all for her Greek grandparents. This perfectly beautiful baby would be their only grandchild, and I was taking her away. A child is a blessing, a grandchild is a double blessing, the Greek saying went. I packed and wept, packed and wept.

There was no room for honest conversations and dignified exits. There was too much risk I would be prevented from leaving. So the two of us left for the UK. It was a strange, sad farewell tour in the UK before we boarded for Australia.

The two of us made our life back in Australia and yes, we have always remained in some kind of touch with the Greek relatives. But it was not the same, of course, as it would have been if we’d stayed.

This treasured baby has grown into a woman who, among many other things, is a talented signer song-writer. Last weekend, I bathed in the excruciating sweetness of listening to her sing about the person she would have been if I hadn’t fled.

Her version of herself looks much the same. The green eyes which are a delicious blend of his velvet brown eyes and my bright blue ones. But the other her confidently navigates the streets and nooks of Thessaloniki. She is bilingual – not like the grandchild who had to endlessly apologies to Ya Ya (Grandma) and Papous (Grandpa) that she is sorry she can’t speak to them or understand what they say.

My sliding door moment was necessarily her sliding door moment too. That is the powerlessness of the child. And yet she’s transformed that into a beautiful song.

I listened and cried, listened and cried.

The Glass Window

Sunday Blog 81 – 23rd April 2023

For something a little bit different I thought I might share some of the rejected submissions I have been doing, adapting them to the Sunday Blog platform. Gets them out into the world somehow!

“I think I’m done,” she said. Until that moment, she was my boss. She was leaving the office, leaving the organisation, handing the baton to me. From that day on, I would be the manager of the Perth-based childbirth education non-profit we had nurtured. Much thought and care had gone into the succession plan to ensure that it would be a smooth handover. I had had an entire year working alongside her in a nominal role of Business Development Manager, but in reality, I was Manager in waiting.

I walked her down the steps from her office, now my office, to the front door. With more to do (there’s always more to do) I was going to head back upstairs and keep on working.

Our protocol was the last person in the office locked themselves in. The front door had a glass panel. She hugged me one last time and walked through the door. The key turned in the lock, and she was on the outside, I was on the inside. Without thinking, we both put our hands up to the glass and smiled into each other’s eyes.

In truth, the handover year with my colleague had dragged at times. There was an edge of triumph and excitement for me as I stood on the inside of the office, my hand up against hers on the glass.

Then she was gone.

I was Manager.

Locked on to the bucking bronco ride. The terror of giving media comment. The hard work of keeping government funders happy. Providing members (i.e. mothers and others), our most important people with what they needed. Keeping staff happy. Keeping the Board happy. An endless tightrope walk.

Three years later I got off that bucking bronco. I came out as an author with my self-published memoir Not My Story. I felt like I could no longer run and organisation and be an author. I felt like I needed to move on. For the next year I moonlighted in a non-profit, still working in health, but now I was three rungs down the hierarchy.

And I didn’t like it. Not being able to make decisions sucked. I forgot about the tough parts of being a leader, and just before my 50th birthday, I landed the opportunity to run our state’s patient advocacy non-profit.

As I have written elsewhere, this came to an end over a year ago, and I am back to moonlighting in the non profit world. I’m closing in on book number two, but now my writing practice is much more deeply embedded. I keep walking the labyrinthine path towards full time creative, taking many pragmatic job opportunity pit stops along the way.

It’s all Greek…

Sunday Blog 80 – 16th April 2023

I still remember when I was just about to leave London for Greece in 1996. So lucky to get a five year contract at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich in 1990, I had seen that out and had started on the next.

But something wasn’t right. I didn’t love objects so why on earth was I working in the museum sector? I had an itch to go, and I threw in the job to become an English Language teacher.

My farewell party at the Museum was held in the Queen’s House – perks of the job – and I remember sharing my fears about what it would be like to lose my super power of words, of being articulate. I was reassured that I would prevail. But in truth, I floundered.

I still remember my very first morning in Thessaloniki, Greece’s second biggest city, wandering around the streets feeling very unsure of myself. Looking up at the Greek street signs, puzzling out the names stirred up some old memory in me. A past life?

It was clear the headmistress of the school I was teaching at spoke very little English, and had a very poor opinion of English Language teachers. She asked what my name was, but found the diminutive “Pip” not to her taste. She asked through a cloud of smoke if I had a real name, and deemed I would be called Philippa from then on. Too frightened to argue, I went by my full name. In turn, I called her the Gorgon, but not to her face, obviously. It turns out that Pip is Greek for Blow Jo b so she was doing me a favour

Perhaps it was having to focus on English all day every day and pick it apart in a way I’d never had to before. Learning Greek was a slow and dilatory process. My time living in Greece – two years as an independent professional woman, and eight months as a dependant mother of a half-Greek infant – were not enough to ensure fluency.

My Greek has remained stubbornly elementary to this day. To non-speakers I can sound quite good, navigating around in a taxi and ordering food on the menu. But anything more than that and it all unravels quite rapidly.

I have just confirmed my decision to travel to Greece again this year, and have become quite determined to brush up on my Greek between now and then. It’s never too late to go for fluency, I have decided. I have become obsessed with my new language app. I have started Greek at Elementary. Sigh. However it assures me I have a better accent that 90% of the people on the app. I’m going with that…

Transfer papers

Sunday Blog 79 – 9th April 2023

It’s fair to say my father loved life, and left it reluctantly just before he turned 95, nearly three years ago now. Even two weeks before his death he was fairly adamant he would get behind the wheel again on discharge from hospital after another health setback.

The family meeting prior to discharge prompted his announcement he would probably get back behind the wheel by and bye. The gerontologist was firm.

“You can’t drive Gerard. You don’t have the strength in your legs!”

He looked slightly mortified at this aspersion cast on his capacity, but it seemed to sink in. He’d never listened to us telling him (again) that he may well kill someone while out and about in his car and how would he like that?

His red car gathered more scrapes and dings in the last years of his life. Once so fastidious about getting every dent repaired, he’d started to let them go.

Two weeks after his gerontologist told him he didn’t have the strength to drive, he was gone.

For the next two and a half years, the car largely sat in the driveway, only taken out now and again for a spin to the local shops. It had a very sensitive accelerator and roared rather unpredictably up the driveway as if keen to be back on the road.

And suddenly, this weekend, it was the right time to sell.

Mindful of the importance of a clean car on sale price, I took the red car out of its driveway for the last time and straight through the car wash. I then drove 30 minutes to my home to sell it from there. The wind and sun would dry it out to a car yard sheen.

Alone in the car for this last drive in our family, I found myself talking out loud. “What a beautiful day for a drive!” I reassured the car, or Dad, or myself.

It was. The stunning river to the right, the car sailing smoothly along to remind me what a beauty it is to drive.

Once I arrived at my home there needed to be a certain amount of vacuuming before any ads could be posted. Last bits emerged from under seats and in glove boxes like archaeologist finds:

  • Not one, but two UBD (Urban Business Directory or Map Book) – one from 2009 and one from 2011. Memories of navigating in the 1980’s swamped me when I opened one up. Where you wanted to go was always in the impossible-to-read crease of the map.
  • A holy medal to protect the driver (he never left home without one)
  • A tin of barley sugars with a best-before date of June 2020 (although clumped together, darling husband confirmed they were still delicious)
  • His trusty chamois in a Cottee’s jam jar – always in the glove box
  • Glass wipes for the winder (also permanently housed in the glove box)
  • Two unidentifiable bits that I hope weren’t vital for the car to operate
  • A notebook with his spidery writing with a list of plants and chores
  • A one-word shopping list, more spidery now, just asking for “Porridge”
  • A crumpled mask to mark the pandemic

Losing the ability to drive was such a curb to his independence. He would have dearly loved to have mastered the art of catching an Uber. He always called them “Yubers” and the only time I rode in one with him he was entranced by the magic of alighting without handing over any cash or card.

The red car’s new young owner seemed very happy with his purchase. He may even get rid of all the dents and scratches and the red car can ride again in all its glory.

Only connect

Sunday Blog 78 – 2nd April 2023

“Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer.”

Howards End, Chapter 22

Howards End began life as an Edwardian novel before being made into a movie with Emma Thomson, Helena Bonham Carter and co. Perhaps not everything from this book has translated well across time, just as not everything from the book made it across to the movie.

I first read this book in 1987 as a 24 year old and it is still a favourite. Every half decade or so I re-read it because it tackles death, class, money, social justice. What’s not to like about that?

The book worries away at the conundrum of how we tackle living in this practical world. Is doing well in the world and amassing wealth the only thing that matters? Or is there something more? The most idealistic character Helen asserts “We have to die… Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever… Death and Money are the eternal foes.” (Chapter 27) It all seems very bracing to me in this death-denying culture Western culture we live in.

One year ago, fresh from leaving my Executive Director role I was keen to rush off hatless to the tattoo parlour to mark the occasion. A wise colleague once told me to think carefully before getting a tattoo. Put a picture up on the fridge for a few months and if you still like it three months later, do it. And choose your tattooist wisely.

Certainly I have had many different ideas in the last year, and pictures have come and gone on the fridge. One with a feather pen and concentric circles with this quote “Only Connect.” But in the end I kept it simple. It was also going to be on the inside of my wrist, but in the end it went on my right shoulder. The woman sitting next to me on the plane on the way over the Melbourne on Thursday last week confirmed the wisdom of a shoulder tattoo to test the waters. Clearly I take advice from all comers, not just wise colleagues. To be fair, she had quite a few very nice tattoos on. I was very blessed to have my own nephew finish the design and ink me for the first time.

This quote reminds be of why I love the central theme of Howards End and keep coming back to dip in. To connect all the different parts of ourselves into a whole, to see and respond to the humanity in others.

Now I just need to hide it from my nonagenerian mother…

Sunday Evenings

Sunday Blog 77 – 26th March 2023

I’m still not sick of that glorious Sunday evening feeling when I realise that I don’t have to go to work on Monday. One year in and it still hasn’t got old. I get excited that I can just do my semi-vagabond creative thing. My working from home thing. My writing thing.

This week though a shadow fell over my days. My manuscript is out for comment so I need to scrabble around with other writing projects. Like the transition stage of labour perhaps, as I get closer to finishing the manuscript I’ve been working on with the Emerging Writers Program, the more doubts and insecurities plague me. What’s going to happen to my writing practice once my Emerging Writers Program mentorship comes to an end? When oh when am I going to get this book done? Will it take the next step towards publication? Does it suck?

And then there’s the parallel work life – because I do need to keep on working at least a bit. How much income is enough?

I dreamt last night I had gone back to my old workplace, and (I hasten to add, none of my real-life colleagues were in it) the dishes hadn’t been done. The staff kitchen was a mess. I realised I was going to have to put up a sign to make sure people did their own dishes. Then in the dream I found myself asking why on earth I was back at the day job?

I awoke to my real Sunday morning. Stretched in bed, made a cup of tea. Here I am, time rich but a modest regular income. A wise friend told me that if you want to work less, you need to tighten the belt. This is true, and it has thrown me back onto the simple moments of every day life. Making time to go down and watch the sunset at night – and not just when the sun dips down behind the ocean, but about half an hour later when it lights up like in this image.

As the saying goes, the best things in life, aren’t things. Happy Sunday evening, and I hope it is a gentle one for you.

Marshmallows

Sunday Blog 76 – 19th March 2023

The podcast Invisibilia is still riveting my attention. Like this 2016 episode. What must it be like to be a scientist whose best-known piece of research, aka The Marshmallow Test seems to be persistently and widely misunderstood? In summary, researcher Walter Mischel offered children aged four one single marshmallow. They were told if they could wait while he left the room for a bit, they would get two marshmallows. If they ate the marshmallow while he was away, that’s all they would get. One marshmallow.

If you’ve heard of this experiment, chances are you mistakenly think if we demonstrate poor impulse control as a youngster and eat the one marshmallow rather than waiting to get a second one, then that’s us for life. Burdened forevermore with our weak willpower and a life trajectory of failure or not reaching our full potential.

Actually he was trying to demonstrate the opposite – he had already discovered that personality is not a fixed thing. We will act very differently with our parents than we will with our friends. Our children. Our colleagues. At the time the 2016 Invisibilia episode, Mischel was still alive and they interviewed him to help clear things up about his marshmallow experiment.

“Well, it seems one crucial detail was left out of conversation. Some kids were given strategies to help them resist the tempting treat, such as closing their eyes, while others were not. And, it was the kids who were best at deploying these strategies who had greater success in later life.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/21/650015068/remembrance-for-walter-mischel-psychologist-who-devised-the-marshmallow-test

He discovered that we can use a number of levers to manage our brains. The way we frame situations, think about ourselves. There is so much more to the story than having fixed personalities that dog us for life. He had to write a book in 2014 called The Marshmallow Experiment, more than 50 years after he had first done the experiment to try to clear things up.

Then I jumped to a 2018 episode which included a researcher, Matthew Salganick who decided to stage a giant hackathon, where data nerds vied to create the algorithm to crunch thousands of data points on hundreds of kids over a decade and a half. Would there be an algorithm that could predict which children would prevail, and which would succumb to adversity? Spoiler alert, no. There are just too many ways life can go.

Don’t worry about the marshmallow or the algorithms. The still, small voice within us is the one to listen to and we just never do know what will happen.

Another ending…

Sunday Blog 75 – 12th March 2023

Map from the State Library – part of the real trial of the murder of Jock King or Little Jock in the 1880s – this story is woven into the novel The Sinkings by Amanda Curtin and this was one of the artefacts she reviewed in her research

It’s coming dangerously close to the one year anniversary of my final day of regular work – 31st March to be exact. I am thinking that I will have to stop calling it a menopausal gap year as this new life is becoming my new normal. Not retired, but working much less and picking up some of the strands of the work I once did, leaving others behind.

And Saturday was the very last workshop for the Emerging Writers Program I have been on for the last two years. I spent an hour before the workshop continuing on going through the edits from my mentor assigned to me as part of this program. (The wonderful Nathan Hobby, since you’ve asked.)

He rather innocently suggested to me during one of our meetups that three days per week work is the sweet spot for a writer. Next time we met I advised him I had quit my job. He blanched a little but this unconscious prompt for me to quit my job to spend more time on writing has been a game changer. Along with his thoughtful and incisive editing, which has seen a completely trashed five year old manuscript come quaking up out of the ashes into a tentative baby phoenix draft novella.

Our final workshop for the program on Saturday was a grab-bag of topics. Danae Gibson of RTR FM discussed radio interviews and how to ace them. Natasha Lester was interviewed about author branding and reflected on her journey to international bestselling author status. Amanda Curtin shared some of her experiences and tips about researching in the State Library. If you haven’t read any of her novels or non-fiction, do so immediately!

Then we got a tour of the library archive. The map in the picture above is an actual artefact from the trial of John Collins for the murder of Little Jock. This real event is woven into Amanda’s novel The Sinkings. We got to see the map up close and I took a snap–I found the book a compelling read and loved learning more about the stories behind its writing.

Today I sent of another draft of my novella to the ever-patient Nathan as we become closer to finalising our mentor relationship (I have a few more weeks yet!) It’s time to think of a new description for what I’m doing now, other than being on a “menopausal gap year.” A bit of work, a lot of writing, that’s my new normal. Semi-vagabond creative, if you will.

Little bits of Lencie…

Sunday Blog 74 – 5th March 2023

This phrase has been floating around my consciousness this week. Little bits of Lencie. She had many, many beautiful things and died much quicker than she had thought she would. Without the giant champagne afternoon tea planned to parcel out her many, many beautiful things. We instead had to trawl through these after she’d gone and so her endless scarves, jewellery, books have been distributed to family and friends, aka Lencie’s Crew.

When I headed to the Writers Festival last weekend I could just about see her around the corner. When I cracked open the Book Club book (Demon Copperhead) and imagined her comments about Gold Lettering on the cover (that was usually a Book Club no-no.) Would she would like it nonetheless? It’s a ripper read so far.

There were little bits of Lencie when I put on her ring, earrings and necklace to head to my first meeting with the Consumer Advisory Council of the hospital she died at. Carrying on the endless push for consumer and carer input into how our health services are run.

A few of Lencie’s Crew (as we called ourselves) watched the Perth Festival screening of the documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed on Monday night. We gathered to see the movie but also to talk about her. The documentary profiles New York based artist and activist Nan Goldin and her fight to hold the Sackler family to account for the US opioid crisis. Watching the Sackler family crack, just a little, as they have to listen to the recording of a mother’s 911 call when she discovers her son is dead is both horrifying and gratifying. Then seeing the Sackler name erased from prominent galleries. Woven in with the activism is a retrospective of Nan’s work. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and her 1989 AIDS exhibition, Witness: Against Our Vanishing.

We all agreed that Lencie would indeed have enjoyed it.

More than the worst thing we’ve ever done

Sunday Blog 73 – 26th February 2023

This post contains a trigger warning as it talks about perpetrators of serious crimes and sexual assaults, and explores the idea of restorative justice.

I swear it was a coincidence that the episode of Invisibilia I cued up to play on my drive to Casuarina Prison was on the subject of crime and rehabilitation.

I get obsessed with podcasts, and Invisibilia is my latest. As the blurb on the podcast says, “Invisibilia – Latin for invisible things, fuses narrative storytelling with science that will make you see your own life differently.” So it’s a very broad spectrum of issues discussed.

The podcast episode explored whether there is such a thing as a criminal personality – once a criminal, always a criminal. I turned it up, listened more closely as I turned took the right turn onto the freeway.

I’ve always had a thing about prisons. Maybe because of the picture in the lounge room of my childhood home. A woman, holding a baby, looking up. It’s supposed to be Mary holding Jesus but someone told me that it was drawn from a live model of a woman visiting her husband in prison, taking the baby for him to see. Whenever I looked at the picture I imagined the woman. How far did she need to come to see her husband? How was she getting by? Would he ever come out?

And of course Australia was colonised by a Britain keen to find a spot for all the prisoners they had, clogging up the prisons, loading down the prison barges on the Thames. Many of us are related to prisoners, often imprisoned for being poor and rebellious. I am a proud convict descendent. Or maybe it was the regular mentions at church where we went, well, religiously each Sunday. “I was in prison and you came to visit me” and all that.

My childhood was one of love, nurture and privilege. And truly, shelter. We may have known of people having brushes with the law, but never someone close enough to us that we would visit them.

Fast forward to my early adulthood and regular church has been abandoned, never to be frequented again. It’s the 1980s, an older sister who liked to push against the boundaries of our sheltered childhood had been dating someone who ended up in prison. The three of us had shared houses together and he was by then a friend. He was incarcerated in Fremantle prison, which was not much different in the 1980a than it was in the 1850s, in the early days of colonisation in Fremantle. The prison had been built by convicts and housed prisoners right up until 1991. Dickensian was how it could be described.

The first time I went to visit my sister’s boyfriend in Fremantle prison I would have been a green 21-year-old. It’s hard to forget the sound of the gate clanging behind you as you are locked into the prison doors for the the first time. To catch the look some warders give you because of you are a visitor, associated with a prisoner. The weirdness of picking up the phone on one side of the glass to talk to someone on the other side. The sudden stage fright of trying to think of interesting things to say. And not putting your foot in it. I got the hang of it more and more, and visited him as he transitioned through the prisons and out again. By then both he and my sister had moved on to new partners. He found true love as he was cycling out of prison and married her not long after. That was certainly an interesting wedding…

But I digress. Fast forward to 2002. I am on the other side of the equation – not someone visiting a prisoner, but a victim of a serious crime. Someone who made the call to police which set in motion their slow but steady processes.

I never hesitated to call the police after the assault. I mean, you wouldn’t ever think twice if it was a robbery, would you? But this was as a sexual assault. The act of making a call to the police started up the merciless machinery of the justice system, which pulverises both victim and perpetrator. The justice system in particular is not kind to sexual assault victims, and some research indicates less than 1% of reported rapes end in a prison sentence. The odds are not good.

In my own case the odds were much higher because it had been a home invasion. I had no prior connection to the perpetrator. I was “the perfect victim” because of this, plus I still carry the privilege of my nurturing childhood and social connections. No one has any trouble believing me. In fact, I am soon invited to various seats at various tables to have a say about how things could be better.

But a dreadful ache consumed me when the perpetrator was identified, more than 14 months after the event. I knew all weekend he would be arrested on Monday, but he didn’t. That feeling of inherently wrongness in shutting someone out from society reached right down inside me.

Also, how frustrating is the rhetoric that we just need to lock people up and throw away the key.

I became a volunteer prison visitor because I feel that prison is a huge waste of human potential. That people can change. That justice is a rich man’s game which means some of our most vulnerable languish in prison. That justice is riddled with racial bias, where 30% of West Australian prisoners are Aboriginal, while making up just 3% of our state’s population.

Most people are going to get out anyway, and wouldn’t it be better if they were well supported with education, employment, health, dental and mental health, drug and alcohol services before release? I became a volunteer visitor just in case I can help influence any improvements.

People can change. The Invisibilia podcast episode tracked one offender remaking himself bit by bit until eventually he was no longer the person he used to be. In the words of African American lawyer and social justice advocate Bryan Stevenson says, we are more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. And I say this not as a naive and idealistic citizen, but as someone who has had a bad thing happen. The most important thing for me is for something good to come out of that. Pushing that wheel of justice forward!