Contentment

I never thought I could find so much satisfaction in washing the dishes, so much peace in vacuuming.
It was a beautiful sunny Saturday morning. My gorgeous wife had taken my equally gorgeous children to town and I was left to my own devices at home. This is a rare thing in itself, having time when I am neither working nor looking after children, but to actually derive some kind of enjoyment from domestic chores is unheard of!
But with the sun streaming in and The Audreys playing their bitter-sweet folk rock on the stereo, I discovered the joys of pottering around my own house.
We spend so much time at home that is chaotic; the mad morning rushes to get children fed and dressed and off to school or care. The mad evening rushes to get them fed and bathed and off to bed. And sure there are moments of great joy in amongst it all, but so often I find myself slipping into a state of grumpiness as I bark instructions that I’ve barked a thousand times before. “Eat your vegetables, clean your room, brush your teeth.”
A wise older friend (a psychiatrist who has raised three boys) recently told me the secret to a happy life is practising the art of contentment.
But I’m not very good at it.
I’ve tried counting my blessings, but it’s not the same thing. I just ended up with a list. (Loving partner? Check. Healthy kids? Check. Roof over our heads? Check.) But then I get frustrated with myself that I’m not living in a permanent state of nirvana.
But on that Saturday morning as I pottered around the house and the garden, I found it.
Contentment.
It was in the banana trees as I harvested a bunch of bananas. It was in the kitchen as I looked out the window at the mountains, up to my elbows in soapy dish water.
They say a man’s house is his castle. (How’s the serenity?) It is also where the soul comes home to rest from the hurly burly of the outside world.
We’ve made a big commitment to this place. (Me, my wife and the bank signed up for a threesome for 25 years.) We are putting deep roots down, connecting with the community around us while we watch the trees and the children grow up.
As I pottered around doing odd jobs, I had a sense that I was making this place my own, just how I’d like it to be. Enjoying my surroundings.
I felt grounded, connected, earthed to my home and my community.
I was expressing this feeling to a friend at a party later that night.
He asked jokingly, did I feel “rooted”?
No (although the description would certainly fit sometimes).
Every now and then you find that place where the serenity really is wonderful.

Too Many Toys

A friend of mine used to have a keyring that said, He who dies with the most toys wins. I thought this was just an amusing (yet accurate) summation of modern capitalism: that the accumulation of wealth is the yardstick by which a person is measured. But judging by the evidence accumulating in my kids’ bedrooms, there actually is some sort of competition going on to see how many toys someone can collect in a lifetime.
What they don’t know is that I am actively working against them in their quest to be regional toy magnates. Before Christmas or a birthday rolls around, I have a cathartic clean up of the shelves and toy boxes in our house. Anything that requires batteries, has parts that can’t be accounted for or hasn’t been played with in the past six months is moved on so somebody else can have a turn. (Op shop ladies all over Lismore light up when they see me coming with my armload of goodies.)
Of course getting stuff out of the house has to be done without the kids’ knowledge, otherwise they will claim each and every forgotten item is “too special”. Taking toys away from children when they’re not looking sounds cruel, but it’s the only way to keep on top of it. Otherwise I’d have to keep building shelves, and there just isn’t enough room in our house to accommodate everything that has ever spewed forth from brightly coloured wrapping paper.
Our eldest is eight. Let’s say she’s had 10 friends to each of her birthday parties. There’s 80 presents right there. Throw in eight Christmases, three birthdays for her little sister and numerous visits from the grandparents (who insist on showering them in gifts every time they come up for a visit) and we’ve got some serious storage issues.
And the more they have, the less they appreciate what they’ve got. (The thrill really seems to be in the getting and the unwrapping.)
I have never been a hoarder. Life seemed so much simpler when I could get all of my possessions into the back of a panel van.
The clutter of modern life annoys me (which is understandable given the amount of time I spend moving plastic ponies and wooden vegetables out of the living room), but I really can’t relax when it is in my face like that.
I blame the cheap globalised labour and throwaway culture that are symptoms of the rampant consumerism destroying our planet. So here’s a new slogan I’m thinking about getting put onto my key-ring: He who teaches their child to live with less wins.

A Right Royal Response

A girl called Kate kissed a boy called William and when she said “I do” she became a princess. It is the stuff of fairytales, but whether they live happily ever after remains to be seen.
Our house was a royal wedding free zone, but my girls still managed to find out about it. Eight year old Ruby tracked down a youtube clip of Kate arriving at Westminster Abbey and, like girls and women all over the world, checked out her wedding dress. (Is there a chromosome they have that attracts them to shoes and wedding dresses?)
“I wish I could be a princess,” she sighed.
At which point I had to point out that Harry was too old for her and any future offspring of Kate and William would be too young for her. There may be some more obscure princes lurking out there somewhere who would sweep a North Coast country girl off her feet, but the odds are against her.
The charming prince who rescues the girl from a perilous predicament is a recurring theme in children’s literature, so it’s not surprising she has bought into the whole princess fantasy. I tried to explain to her that the life of a princess may not be all it’s cracked up to be and told her “the sad story of Princess Diana” who, unlike the all the other princesses she knew, lived her life under the constant spotlight of the paparazzi’s cameras and died in a tragic car crash.
One good thing about the royal wedding is that it has re-ignited some reassessment of Australia’s relationship with the monarchy and the perennial question about whether we should become a republic raised its sleepy head again. Ever since I was old enough to understand the concepts involved I have been a strong supporter of the idea that Australia should throw off the final shackles of British colonialism and appoint our own head of state. But as we don’t seem to be able to agree on a model, I would like to suggest a radical new idea: our own monarchy.
Democracy is over-rated. The modern two party system is so fundamentally flawed that it needs to be assassinated in a carefully planned attack and have its body dumped at sea. Essentially it has been reduced to a popularity contest where figureheads representing various vested interests try to convince an apathetic population that the other mob can’t be trusted.
What we need is a benevolent dictator with a long term vision for the country. He or she would be able to pick and choose the best person for the job to head up a ministry, unrestricted by factional party politics or the fear that someone will knife them in the back and steal their job.
I would like to nominate Bob Brown (Green King Brown?) as our inaugural monarch. That fact that he is unlikely to produce an heir should not be a restriction. When Bob is ready to abdicate he can nominate his own successor or he can run his own reality TV show (So you think you can rule?)
So maybe my North Coast country girl won’t be a princess, but in this brave new world she could aspire to be Queen.

The Sound of Music

It was a beautiful moment for both of us. My three-year-old daughter Jemma came up to me and said, “Dad, can we play that Ring of Fire one again?” We had just been dancing madly around the room to Johnny Cash and she wanted to do it again.
Music has always been a big part of my life and the ability to share it with my kids is a whole new joy.
One of my favourite albums last year was by a Brisbane singer/ songwriter called Jackie Marshall. The title track Ladies Luck is Jemma’s favourite song and it still cracks me up every time she sings along:
I’m eating cherries and I’m drinking whisky,
We don’t have kids and there’s no man listening…
She has also developed an appreciation for The Beatles and will often request Baby You Can Drive My Car as soon as we are strapped in. And I’m developing an appreciation of her music too. (The piano player on Play School can really play!)
There is no doubt that there are some truly awful kids’ albums out there, but we have found a few gems amongst the rubble. Discerning parents should check out a couple of local albums: The Jambu Tree by Rochelle Wright and Rob Shannon, and My Backyard by Spikey and Friends. Also on high rotation at our place was the album by Kasey Chambers and her extended clan called The Little Hillbillies. (In the same way that Pixar and DreamWorx make kids flicks that appeal to adults, Kasey and Bill Chambers nailed it on this album with a bunch of songs that the kids can sing along to, but the parents can appreciate on a different level.)
Now eight-year-old Ruby is right into Kasey Chambers. She’s got three albums on the iPod and is developing a taste for strong and interesting female singers including Aretha Franklin and Emily Lubitz from Tinpan Orange. She doesn’t mind a bit of 70s disco either.
In choosing her own music she is developing her own taste and style and starting to define herself through those choices. And I know at some stage in the not-too-distant future I will probably hate her music and she will hate mine, but there is a brief moment in time, right now, where we can share our discoveries and enjoy them together.
Sometimes (usually when mum’s not home) I will crank the stereo and thrash about the lounge room with the girls to Jesus Built My Hotrod by Ministry, an awesome piece of speed metal from the early 90s. (Now there’s a way to let off some steam before bathtime!)

Compassion Fatigue

We used to sponsor a little girl in Indonesia called Rani. Through a registered and reputable charity we would send money that was designed to assist with her education and general well-being. Sometimes we would exchange letters, cards and photos, which allowed our daughter Ruby to develop a rapport with Rani (they are about the same age) and hopefully it also gave Ruby some kind of perspective that the life she is living here in Australia is pretty damn good.
Then out of the blue one day we got a letter from the charity saying Rani’s family no longer wished to be a part of the program. The charity had selected a new recipient for us, but it didn’t feel right. We had invested more than money in Rani; we had established some kind of relationship, and in a world where there are so many people in need, she was somebody we could help in a practical, tangible way.
I’m sure the new kid was equally deserving (although he was a boy and therefore less likely to get letters from Ruby) but I couldn’t seem to transfer my compassion from one kid to another that easily. Instead we decided to channel our monthly contribution into a general community fund rather than start the process of getting to know a new child.
It was easier, but the whole incident has highlighted for me a modern phenomenon known as ‘compassion fatigue’ – a feeling of being overwhelmed by the suffering in the world and powerless to do anything about it.
As someone who has worked in the media off-and-on for 15 years, sometimes I just have to tune it out because it makes me depressed. News media thrives on adversity and every day we are bombarded with images and stories of people struggling against natural and man-made disasters. The cumulative effect is that our emotional response is becoming increasingly dulled.
The 24-hour news cycle has a voracious appetite; survivors of today’s disaster are soon forgotten, superseded by others in more dire circumstances.
I remember as a young Media Studies student learning about the ‘news hierarchy’ whereby those closest to us, both geographically and culturally, matter more in terms of their newsworthiness. (This is why coverage of floods in Queensland and earthquakes in Christchurch will far outweigh something like the earthquake in Haiti a year earlier which killed 300,000 and left a million people homeless – Haitians are “not like us”.)
In some news organisations there is a culture where tragedy is celebrated. A journo who was working at The Daily Telegraph when Martin Bryant went on his killing spree at Port Arthur once told me there was a cheer every time the body count went up (and therefore the size and significance of the story).
It’s not quite like that at The Echo, where we do try and celebrate the good things that people are doing in our local community, but I wish I could do more and care more and just help a little girl in Indonesia called Rani.

The Hulk Within

Don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry. I still find it hard to believe that these words actually left my mouth and were directed at my three-year-old daughter. And while she probably didn’t get my slightly ironic, post-modern cultural reference to the 1970s TV show The Incredible Hulk, she certainly got my meaning.
I was at the end of my tether, and she knew it. (The chance of my clothes ripping and my muscles rippling was remote, but not out of the question.)
Friends and colleagues will tell you that I am generally a quiet person, not known for raising my voice in anger or sudden erratic outbursts. My kids may tell you a different story, but then nobody pushes your buttons quite like your kids. (Unconditional love can be hard work).
What should have been a simple task; making a banana cake for a school P&C fundraiser turned into a personal trial and a test of my patience. It smelled fantastic as it came out of the oven, but as I attempted to tip it from the tin, the bottom stuck and the cake crumbled. Not a disaster, but I was on a tight timeline and didn’t quite have the ingredients to make another one.
Given that my cake would probably only raise $20-30 I thought about phoning in an excuse and coughing up some cash towards the cause instead. But male pride got in the way – I wasn’t going to let those P&C super mums think I couldn’t make a cake!
I knew I could improvise my way around not having enough eggs and only having frozen bananas, but what I hadn’t really factored in was the attention span of a three-year-old.
Friday is Dad Day for me and Jemma and, after spending the rest of the week in the company of qualified carers, she has an expectation that I will take her out on the town for a good time. (We can get a lot of mileage from the library, the supermarket and a café.) And this cake business just wasn’t cutting it anymore.
I tried to engage her in some colouring in whilst simultaneously creaming the butter and the sugar for the second time (and splattering it all over the walls for the second time), but she just kept pushing.
I wasn’t attending to her wants and she wasn’t respecting my need to get the job done, and therein lay the recipe for conflict.
There was no gamma ray induced transformation, but, like Dr Bruce Banner, I feel I am on some kind of quest to control the beast within because I don’t like me when I’m angry.

Senior Citizen

It started with the hangovers that were completely out of proportion to the amount I had drunk the night before. Waking up with an aching head, reaching for the Panadol and thinking “this is not fair”, I’d curse myself for mixing the grape and the grain and lie to myself that I’d never drink again.
Then it was squinting at the specials board and not being able to read subtitles on TV. Before I could say “optician” he said, “read the bottom line for me please”, and I’m out the door with a script for a brand new pair of glasses.
Now the final indicator that I no longer inhabit the body of a young man has come along and, quite literally, knocked me off my feet.
A couple of weeks ago I did an injury to my back that had me off work for a week and required three trips to a chiropractor/acupuncturist.
This witchdoctor, with his pins and pictures of skeletons on his walls, had me up on the table with my pants and my dignity down without even a hint of foreplay. (Don’t I get a massage?) Crack, crack, crack he goes on my spine while I lie there trussed up like a Christmas turkey.
And what did I do to myself that I needed this kind of extreme treatment? Absolutely nothing! And that’s the sad and sorry truth. I probably wouldn’t mind so much if I’d been doing some extreme mountain biking, or parachuting off a high cliff, or even had a bad case of shagger’s back. But no, the reality is so much more senior citizen. I took part in a social bike ride, organised by a local Landcare group. We stopped for tea and cakes at the halfway point and I felt a bit of a twinge in my lower back as I got off the bike, but didn’t think too much of it at the time. By the time I finished the ride it was worse, and later that day I could barely move.
Lying there on my back, dosed up to the eyeballs on painkillers, morbid thoughts of mortality filled my head. I started to wonder whether a nagging back injury would be part of my life for the rest of my days and whether my best years were behind me.
Well it seems that reports of my imminent death were widely exaggerated, but it’s made me realise that on the great bell curve of life, I probably am over-the-top and sliding irrevocably towards senility and lawn bowls.
Maybe it’s time for a shandy.

Coming Off the Bike

It changes so quickly. One minute they are riding their bikes at the end of our quiet country road, a picture of rural domestic bliss.
The little one is just learning the joys of self-propulsion with the aid of training wheels and I watch her taking those incremental but inevitable steps towards borrowing the car and not needing me anymore.
The big one is coming down the hill, raising her hands on and off the handlebars, doing the “Look at me, I can ride no hands” trick. She puts her hands back on the bike and does a few tight turns, showing off as usual.
I think it before it happens. I should tell her to take it easy, but it’s too late.
She doesn’t handle pain well. She does not like to see her own blood leaking from her skin. She’s inconsolable and goes into hysterics at the suggestion of washing the cuts with water. We speak not of Betadine.
Coming off the bike is a matter of when, not if. It’s a rite of passage for most kids. Usually there’s no harm done and they’ve got a bit of a story to tell. But as a parent, it’s tough.
I try to comfort her, but I get frustrated at her refusal to let me do anything. And really, it’s a bit of graze on the elbows and knees and she’s been crying for half an hour. I think “harden up”, but I don’t say it.
This is not our first time off the bike. Once I got the dreaded call from a neighbour.
“Ruby’s had a bit of a fall. They’re just putting her in the ambulance now. Can you meet them at the hospital?”
It was her fifth birthday. Brand new bike, down 10 stairs off our front deck.
I think she was braver back then. The hospital staff were excellent and we left with three stitches and a bit of a story to tell. No harm done.
So she has a scar on her forehead, just like Harry Potter. And although hers is not the shape of a lightning bolt, it still bonds them in some special way.
We read the latest instalments of Harry’s adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and the pain vanishes, as if by magic.
She wouldn’t get back on the bike for a couple of days, but she’s tearing down that hill again now.

 

Inappropriate Content

And so it begins. The stage where I have to monitor my daughter’s use of the internet for “inappropriate content”.
Like most eight year olds, my eldest daughter Ruby can boot up a computer, open a browser and search the web, but still struggles to butter her own toast. For a few years she’s been able to get online and look at cartoons and songs designed for pre-teens, and for a while she was actually doing maths and spelling games (it was like tricking her into learning!).
But because we are mean parents who limit her ‘screen time’, she still sees ‘playing on the internet’ as a bit of a treat. It is usually a win-win situation where she can go and amuse herself for a while and I can get something else done around the house. (Although, as that is usually hanging out washing or doing the dishes, I don’t see how I win?)
Anyway, last week she came home and announced that ‘Ke$ha’ was her new favourite singer. She hadn’t actually heard any of the songs, but her friend was right into it and therefore Ke$ha was cool and Ruby wanted to check it out.
Google to the rescue.
As most popular culture from the past decade has completely passed me by, I had no idea who Ke$ha was, but 6.5 million other people had already checked out the video for her song We R Who We R on YouTube.
I could have ignored this butchering of the language, but when dozens of scantily clad women wearing too much make-up came on and started gyrating and feeling themselves up while giving the camera a sexually suggestive look, I reached over and shut it down.
Not surprisingly there were howls of protest.
To her credit she responded well to my little chat about it not being appropriate for her age and she suggested a compromise; minimise the screen so she could still hear the song and print the lyrics so she could sing along.
Okay. At this point I hadn’t really paid any attention to the lyrics, but I now know the chorus goes:
Got that glitter on my eyes / Stockings ripped all up the side / Looking sick and sexy-fied / So let’s go-oh-oh, let’s go!
Ruby was singing along to this when her mum came home and all hell broke loose. Lyrics were confiscated, there were tears and shouting.
I can’t wait for the teenage years.

Middle Aged Men In Lycra

On any given weekend in cities around the world, you will find large groups of lycra-clad men with carbon-fibre bikes searching for the perfect latte.
Visiting Melbourne late last year I was shocked at the population increase since my previous visit. Thousands of men in brightly coloured clothes with freshly shaved legs and mirrored sunnies were all moving as one, like a big school of fish along Beach Road.
It has become known as the rise of the MAMILs (Middle Age Men in Lycra) and is apparently what men having a mid-life crisis do these days instead of buying a sports car. (I’ve also heard them called COBWEBs – Crusty Old Bastards With Expensive Bikes).
And now, like Mulga Bill from Eaglehawk, it seems that I too have “caught the cycling craze”.
Although I own neither lycra pants, nor a flash racing bike, for the last couple of weeks I have risen early on a Saturday morning, met up with a couple of mates and ridden along winding country roads into Lismore. (I was dressed in board shorts and a T-shirt and had to borrow a friend’s bike because mine is an old mountain bike with a baby seat rusted onto the back that was never going to cut it.)
The ride to town is about 18km, predominantly downhill and it takes in some spectacular views of cloud-filled valleys along the way.
Riding past Richmond River High, we (quite literally) ran into a group of serious MAMILs, all geared up and ‘spinning’ hard. (That’s bike talk for ‘peddling’). We tagged onto the back of their pack for a while, but they soon left us behind. (I think my mates were taking it easy on me.)
Heading back home to Dunoon via Numulgi and Corndale there are some serious hills to climb which really get the legs and the heart pumping. And I guess that’s the point of it. The life of the modern man is a very sedentary one; from the computer screen at work, to the car, to the TV. You have to make a concerted effort to find time to get out and get active these days.
I’ve been doing a couple of ‘bootcamp’ style classes and some boxing to keep fit over the past year and it feels good to work up a sweat first thing in the morning. I’m not sure yet if I’m going to go all the way and become a proper MAMIL (and I certainly won’t be shaving my legs), but the other options for men in their forties looking for some sort of escape from their lives seems to be drinking heavily or having an affair. A bit of carbon-fibre and lycra will probably get me in a lot less trouble with the wife.