Write Night 3

In process (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

I felt a bit of a fraud writing the last post about work on my fiction and, for this one, I feel even more so.

After the household illnesses came the catching up, then the realisation that I’d possibly over-committed myself on the writing front. I used to over-commit myself on the academic front all the time, saying yes to committee work, events organisation, joining associations and doing project things. It felt good to be collaborating with a broad network of people, doing different types of work. That’s how I thought of the amount of stuff I said ‘yes’ to, anyway.

While shedding academic commitments, I’ve filled the space with writing and blogging ones, including a bunch of promised guest blogposts and other short pieces and interviews.

 

Family compound

The gate (Photo by Tseen Khoo)

I’ve written a little about my intergenerational household on this blog before, most specifically here (a post from 2008).

My mum’s lived with me since 2005, and has been with us ever since we moved into the house (S. and my first home that wasn’t a rental) and had kids. That’s about seven years.

Last year, my brother moved into the same suburb, but he and his wife didn’t just move into the neighbourhood or even across the road. They moved in BEHIND us; they’re over the back fence. A fence that has a gate cut into it, which is frequently open.

They were looking for a place for a while and had started checking out some places nearby. When we heard that the place behind us was going up for sale, we couldn’t believe the coincidence.

Still, in amongst the machinations about early offers and building inspections and pretending to the vendors that we were interested but not that interested, we tried to retain a sense of perspective about it all. If it didn’t happen, it didn’t happen. We mustn’t get too upset about it.

The excitement in the lead-up to their landing the house at auction (oh, the suspense, the drama) was still delightfully high (we weren’t very good at keeping that sense of perspective, it seems).

They got the house.

 

School’s in

My eldest started school recently. It was a relatively easy transition for her from being on holidays (and three-day-a-week kindy last year) to being a preppie at the local primary school. She was excited, and the excitement has stayed strong. She was even asking to go to school on weekends. We’ve yet to decide whether this is encouraging or pathological.

The school’s within walking distance of our house and, while we didn’t buy here specifically for the schools, the high level of facilities available in the area did sway us. Neatly enough, these facilities included this public primary school that seems to have great input and engagement from the surrounding parents and community. It has a poncy new gateway, newish prep building that stunned me with its technology and friendly classroom spaces, and separate subject classes (French, Art, Music, Motor skills programme…). I’m so out of touch with contemporary school education and expectations. I’ve been ensconced in universities and I didn’t think I’d be having kids, so never paid much attention to what went on in the sector (terrible, I know. More guilt, please).

 

PHOTO – Fetes + small-talk

Teacup ride, primary school fete || Photo by Tseen Khoo

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The other day, I was reading this post about fool-proof parenting and, though I didn’t always agree with it, the final item has stayed with me and encapsulates how parenting is reliably made easier for me: “Revere play.”

It’s an exhortation that is hard for me to follow most of the time, feeling as I do that there’s never enough time to get my own things done, or craving down-time as I always do.

The kids’ exhortations to come and play often catch me when I’m just home from work, or I’ve just settled down to read something (possibly browsing junk-mail – I’m not that ambitious). My immediate response, which I often tamp down, is ‘No’. I’m slowly training myself to be better at embracing the moment because, when I do ‘revere play’, it can be (and usually is) grand and energising. And the kids’ pure delight at having me join in their games is precious.

Since having my first child at the end of 2006, one of things people keep saying to me about our family outings is that they are chances to “relive our childhoods”. It’s the kind of small talk that people indulge in when they see me with the kids, or hear about one of our child-friendly jaunts. I never say it, but I often think to myself, “It’s not really reliving my childhood; I never did those things” (e.g. went camping or had expectations of Santa [cf. this post]).

 

What the Gold Coast can do to you

I have a pathology about the Gold Coast that stems from childhood.

Our family had businesses there. They were ‘family businesses’. They did not do well. Bad things happened, financially and within the extended family. I don’t think I ever got over it.

The Gold Coast to me means cheap’n nasty deals, trashy flashiness, decaying holiday apartments, and areas peopled by the Bill Hunters of Muriel’s Wedding. Surfers, in particular, makes me both anxious and sad.

 

Cool random recents

Melbourne’s been hotting up these past few days (barring today’s return to Antarctic weather), and we’ve already had our first few BBQs of the season within our clan mini-compound. It has been an absolute delight. Not only is my s-i-l’s homemade coleslaw a perfectly piquant crunch, but the easy meandering between our backyards means the kids get to see their uncle/aunt constantly (but, one hopes, not intrusively). The incidental meetings and conversations to be had over time are the stuff of a deeper, contented lifestyle that I never knew I could have, let alone hanker for. Now, if I had to NOT have it, I would feel bereft. That ‘not missing what you never had’ can sometimes be too true.

 

Let there be zombies

Two posts in three days?

It may well be the apocalypse coming…or the fabulous publicity initiative by the Queensland Police Service and their tweets about World Zombie Day (which was a move that very cleverly and effectively promoted their disaster alert system, QLDAlert). Props on a catchy stunt that had a good purpose!

Readers of this blog and my twitter stream will know too well my family’s obsession with horror movies. We’re not fussy.

Creature features? Cheesy franchises? Movies starring Billy Zane (including Demon Knight - right)? We’ll watch them all and enjoy them.

I loved these movies so much that I even engineered my Honours thesis around them. I researched gender and contemporary sci-fi/fantasy films, comparing the representations of women in these genres. The full title is: “The Position of Woman in Recent American Science Fiction Film: The Representation of Women and the ‘Feminine’”. Yes, I’m cringing, too.

The films I managed to shoehorn into the dissertation included:

• ‘Hard’ scifi: Alien, Aliens, Leviathan, and Inseminoid (!).
• ‘Fantasy’: Legend, Conan the Barbarian, Conan the Conqueror, Red Sonja, and Flesh and Blood.    

Don’t judge me too harshly about the divvying up of genres, or for the films themselves. I was young. It was 1991. I was constantly listening to the Hoodoo Gurus.

The nice thing is that our love of science fiction and fantasy material in general has already started rubbing off on the kids. The entire family is dead keen (hah) on Plants vs Zombies. Most of us have played the game through a couple of times, and E. regularly plays a screen or two. G. is a bit young to play properly, but he likes collecting suns.

My brother loved it so much that S. made a PvZ cake for him in 2009:

 

Blooming

Apricot blossoms in the backyard; tree now covered in rows of green fruit.

A couple of weeks ago, I got snap-happy while wandering the garden and putting in a token weeding effort.

Let’s be honest, I’m not the green thumb in our partnership. Nor am I the one who obsesses about seed catalogues, bare-rooted fruit trees, and pond pumps.

As a dedicated armchair gardener, however, I have the ability (and gall) to appreciate the aesthetics of our garden and its increasing bounty. I’ve posted before about the aquaponics beds, fruits, and cactus gardens. The vegetable beds have already provided us with the loveliest sweet sugar-snaps and snowpeas. The sugarloaf cabbages are starting to fill out, and we’ve been harvesting choy sum consistently for a few weeks.

 

Missing things

It seems that most of Melbourne is beleaguered by flus, colds, and hacking coughs at the moment. Our family has had two bouts of lurgies in quick succession, with a spontaneous vomit in the car on the weekend. Mopping up the car, post-vomit, was not how I’d ever envisaged spending my Sundays…ever. The day was spent at the health clinic, finding out our daughter’s ear was “bulging” with infection (lovely), our son was feverish, and acquiring another (luckily, rare) prescription for antibiotics.

 

Aunts

My mother is going away this weekend.

She’s travelling to Malaysia to visit her family. It will involve constant outings to eat and shopping trips and overloaded baggage with presents for the kids. She started packing for the trip about a three weeks ago.

She will see her two sisters. They are the only two sisters she has left with whom she grew up. Another two have already died: one from breast cancer many decades ago, the other from an aneurysm about a decade ago. This accounts for four sisters.

She comes from a family of five sisters.

One of the sisters was given away as a baby to my grandfather’s brother, whose family had no daughters. We didn’t find this out until we were in our late teens and, when she told us, I think my mother was a bit sad about it and always has been; she remembers her mother not wanting to do it.

It was only on a recent trip back to Malaysia, in the past couple of years, that she re-met this ‘given away’ sister. They hadn’t seen each other for many years. My mother took many photos. I wondered if they found anything familiar in each other.

I remember looking at the photos very closely, studying this woman’s face. My other aunties’ faces are so known to me, even though I don’t see them very often. I know them because of the constancy of their presence in our lives, and the 100s of photographs that my mother insists on collecting. I wish I could meet this unknown aunt and get to know the contours of her face. There would be no constancy, however, as we will never be in closer touch. We have no common past or, indeed, present.

It’s hardly the case that I feel bereft of a relationship that I never had; that would be melodramatic and dishonest.

Perhaps it’s because I’ve had all good memories of the aunties who are my mother’s sisters. They have always been immediately close even though we’ve lived in separate countries since 1977.