Daughter at work

Click on the title!

Watch for the long blonde hair.
This is what she loves.
This is who she is.
I love her for it.

My amazing daughter;
Writer, director, artistic director, producer, and all rounder...anything to do with theatre.

This is my beloved daughter in whom I am well pleased.

Jam tarts for tea

Another year!
Sigh!
Busy with ancestry stuff and tracing lines of family back to their origins.
Sigh!
In recognition of my ancestors I am lucky to have survived to this day, 19 September.
Sigh!
So many gone before, and before this age.
Sigh!
I am emptying of anger and filling with grief.

Another birthday.
Another bright spring day when thoughts fly back to my father saying every year...
"Ah spring, the time when life is renewed and my youngest daughter was born".

You miss your parents and the idea of a 'birthday' means so little without them here.

I miss my children and they are so far, always so far, if not in kilometres in connections. They are truly independent.

But:
For four years both birthdays and Christmas' I have been asking for two gifts. One is mulch for the garden so I don't have to do so much weeding. The other is for a new pair of secetures for these arthritic hands.
I got 'em both!
I am delighted!
No little Princess here, requiring restaurants, diamonds, boats, holidays or travel.
Just 'dirt' ( as my youngest calls it) and an implement for snipping trees.

Me me me. Today is allowed to be about me.
But I am finding so little to say.

The rhyme goes;

It is my birthday today
Jam tarts for tea
Yum yum pigs bum
You can't come.

Another from the vaults.

My poor mum.
My dear mum.
My loving mum.
I came unbidden. I was an oops baby. Not planned, not desired. I think she wanted a boy. He said he didn't mind if it was a red head girl. I was neither. And there's the oops once again.
It does affect you.

So here I am.
Fifty six if you want to know.
I am now an 'elder' of my tribe.
I am equal to the male members because I am no longer fertile.
I am here.

And here I will stay until another day.

Cheers!!!

Jam tarts for tea

Another year!
Sigh!
Busy with ancestry stuff and tracing lines of family back to their origins.
Sigh!
In recognition of my ancestors I am lucky to have survived to this day, 19 September.
Sigh!
So many gone before, and before this age.
Sigh!
I am emptying of anger and filling with grief.

Another birthday.
Another bright spring day when thoughts fly back to my father saying every year...
"Ah spring, the time when life is renewed and my youngest daughter was born".

You miss your parents and the idea of a 'birthday' means so little without them here.

I miss my children and they are so far, always so far, if not in kilometres in connections. They are truly independent.

But:
For four years both birthdays and Christmas' I have been asking for two gifts. One is mulch for the garden so I don't have to do so much weeding. The other is for a new pair of sce

Something Happens

The gum tree near my great great grandparents graves. She was the daughter of a convict. Shamed and moved and impregnated early. She was 'adopted' and cast away from her kin into this desolate landscape that I finally visited this month ( August). She gave birth to my great grandfather and married a man who accepted her and him. I was moved to rub my hands over their names...so far from the rest of their folk.
And a lone daughter lays at rest, not beside her own husband but beside her parents. He is buried up the road with the rest of the catholics.


Something happens when a woman turns fifty.
There is a cosmic shift that she has somehow learnt not to declare. To recognise it for its significance is to be labeled by those near as being somehow in 'The Change' and therefore 'unreliable' in her thought processes.

Something happens in the heart as well as the body. A recognition of time, ticking through the veins of memory, hope and loss.

Something happens and she turns bewildered to her sisters who, like after childbirth, cast downward eyes and perpetuate the myth of calmness, matter-of-fact-ness, a silenced lie of the pain and sudden immensity of the task and the affects.

Something happens when her hands thin and the arteries slow and her mind wanders to her youth and hope and joy. She becomes one with the universe ( as in birthing) and she clamps her mouth shut in case the yell of life leaves her in tears, trembling and mightily torn (as in childbirth).

Something happens to the woman as she realises she gave her youth, her body, her time, her energies, her laughter, her sparkle to those around her who took and took and took and left the shell she finds when she glances, passing, in the mirror.


And in the morning of the 17 day away I awoke to the mist on the Murrumbidgee River at a little town not far from the infamous Gundagai.




Something happens to the past as it whizzes by the head and spins you out of control, but yet you stay in control lest they say 'those things' they say about women turning fifty.

And when you touch the stone at the head of a woman scorned, hard working, censured, mystical, you think how wonderous it is to turn fifty ( six).

Something happens to us as we recognise the movement of time and life and death. We cry more, we feel more, we care more. We get grumpy, angry, fed up, tired, and decide (finally) not to suffer fools any more.

Something happens to our men folk. Their lives seem weaker, their love stronger, their bodies softer, their minds less hurried. They cry more, touch more, care more, are less angry, fed up, tired and they decide it is ok to suffer fools as they have not had to too often in their lives, being white men of reason.

Something happens when finally we let go of all that has gone before, but before we do we women have to worry and wonder and work our way toward ourselves, our true selves.

And something happens when the passing of a few minutes means as much as the passing of dear friends and family.


Vale Alan. You were a good man, to my recalictrant brother, my neices and nephew's pa, my parents mate, and my first dentist.
Thank you. On this day of your internment when I could not be there. I wanted to be, but it was so so far away. I hold you close. In memory of a man who tried to make a difference in the Australian community. Thank you.

Life

Thanks to Bloggio Oddio.

YES!

This reminds me of a conversation I had with my dad one day.
He was upset enough when I was researching the Mormon Church but it may have prepared him for my 'conversion' to atheism.

My brother refuses to accept I am an atheist because I am 'too good a person'. I actually take this to be an insult as that means he does not believe me when I tell him a truth about myself.

Off on a journey. Can't afford it in finances nor time, health nor head space. It is needed for many reasons.

I will be traversing the central plains of NSW and over the border. It is winter in Australia and it is NOT cold where I am. But it is freezing where I am heading.

My bones ache, my back screams with scarring from having babies, my knees are that of an 80 year old, but I want to do this. I can imagine one day never ever being able to go anywhere. It scares the bejeesus out of me and the day I stop driving is the day I want to die.

So even though I have not been online, posting blogs or traversing the cosmos, I do think of bloggerland, the people I have met and the times I have experienced hatred, love, support and accusations.

The chances of me not surviving this trip are statistically significant. I wanted to write a piece each to my children to tell them the truth but I have not the time nor the headspace to do such a task. It would take me months to formulate the necessary words and intent.
It would not be one of those smarmy stories of 'A letter to her children' by a dying mum or anything. It would be more of ;
The love, the joy and the pain of having you come into my life.

I wish it all on them!! (and secretly MORE).

Farethewell until my next meeting online, on blog, in thought and in concept.

ME.

Survey

NEW WORLD FOOD SURVEY

Last month a world-wide survey was conducted by the UN. The only question asked was:-

"Would you please give your honest opinion about solutions to the food shortage
in the rest of the world?"

The survey was a huge failure because of the following :-

In Eastern Europe they didn't know what "honest" meant.

In Western Europe they didn't know what "shortage" meant.

In Africa they didn't know what "food" meant.

In China they didn't know what "opinion" meant.

In the Middle East they didn't know what "solution" meant.

In South America they didn't know what "please" meant.

In the US they didn't know what "the rest of the world" meant.

And Finally...........................

In Australia , they hung up, because they couldn't understand the Indian accent.