Wondrously Other: February 2017

Protest and privilege

I feel it again; the pressure of wrongdoing and inequity pressing down on me and suffocating me by tiny degrees. I feel it taking more and more of my spoons to get through the day. I can tell because I hold on to the good moments until my knuckles turn white, I'm so desperate to escape the feeling of being crushed under a tidal wave of hate and abuse that I am powerless to stop.

I feel isolated from the people around me who choose to turn away from the things that aren't directly in front of their faces. To turn away, as if it were a choice not to see what is going wrong with the world.

Don't feed the trolls.

As if that ever made a difference, especially when the trolls rule the world.

It's a fact of my being to feel angry about the displaced and wronged; angry to the point of digging my nails into my palms while tears fall from my eyes in hot streaks down my cheeks.

When I worked with the NCT in the UK, we used to put on a pampering evening for local mums - 15 minute massages and manicures, that sort of thing. Every year, in amongst the colour and fragrant oils there was this one woman who would quietly put up her chair in the corner and help you to explore past lives.

I was fascinated by her (drawn to her even) because she radiated such an air of calm that she seemed to slow the dust motes in the air around her. The effect was magical, like watching moons bending to the will of the planet they orbit.

One year, I plucked up the courage to have a session with her.

I was pregnant with Esme and I felt out of sorts with the world. So I sat down with her and just opened myself up to whatever journey she wanted to take me on.

She placed her hands on mine, and I felt the heat of her skin as she started to talk to me about the travelling girl.

I can't remember the words she used, but the image and the emotions are still just behind my eyelids, even after six years.

She showed me a little girl in a plain grey shift dress, with two braids running down her back walking - no travelling - with her family. They are travelling from, escaping, and as she walks down an open dirt road she grips the large, strong hand of her father. There's fear, tension, of what I will never know. These are travelling people, she tells me, but this journey is different. They are moving somewhere new, not through choice, but through need, and the little girl is scared at the unknown that waits for them. I smell pine, and I'm aware of the tundra stretching away from the track on which they travel.

I have no context for these people, I have no kinship with this girl, but I can feel her emotions and see her world as clearly as I feel my own.

Maybe she's the reason why I feel so overwhelmed right now.

Or maybe it's something else. Maybe it's the simple result of an upbringing heavy on morality that I cannot see a wrong go unrighted. I am so aware of how fortunate life has been to me and my family, and I feel the weight of that every day. I feel a responsibility to my children to make them aware, to make them sensitive to the fact that the place they occupy in the world gives them a unique voice ... and a moral obligation to use it.

I feel humbled when my sister sends me the words of Ella Wheeler Wilcox to read, saying that they reminded her of me. But I also feel the ache in my bones, at a weight I can never put down.

Would I walk away if I could?

Who knows.

Monday, 27 February 2017 Comments: 0

Why do you go to work?

My children ask me a question that carries an impossible weight.

At some point, in the hour between rolling out of bed and walking out of the door, one of them will level me with a gaze and ask "why do you have to go to work?"

Some days I have the energy to tell them about the people I work with, about the positive change we’re trying to make. Some days I don’t.

But every day I feel the weight of the answers I give.

I want the children to understand that the life we have is funded by the work I do. That my contribution to the family may not be the fun of daily adventures, but that I contribute, and that it matters.

I go to work to earn money for us to live.”

I feel the weight of explaining the value of money, not in terms of what it can buy, but in terms of how hard it is to come by. That society looks at 40 hours of my time and compares it to the same 40 hours of other people and makes a judgement on what we are worth that makes no sense. That I make a choice to use my skills to make a positive difference because that’s the only way I can make it make sense.

I go to work to help make our country better.”

I feel the weight of telling my children about the privilege that we enjoy as a family. This life we lead is not something that they can truly appreciate, but somehow I need to find a way of helping them grasp gratitude without feeling the sting of guilt.

I go to the work so that we can have adventures.”

I feel the weight of expressing this as a choice I make. That my work is complex and challenging and stressful, but that I enjoy it. I am empowered by it. I want them to see work not just as an obligation, but as an act of communion with my peers and an act of devotion to their futures.

I go to work because I enjoy it.”

I feel the weight of all that is implied by the fact that I choose to go to work rather than stay at home with them. That somehow I prefer the company of my colleagues to them. The stark contrast with their father who, in their eyes, chooses to stay with them.

I go to work because it means daddy doesn’t have to”

They ask me "where are you going?"

Some days I can only answer "I'm going to work"

Sunday, 19 February 2017 Comments: 0

Attachment Parenting Feminism Inspiration Learning Working Mama

The Legacy of Coco Chanel

Way back in 2016, we backed a book on Kickstarter called Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls.

It seemed like the sort of book we might want to have on our Bookshelf of Beauty and Wisdom: The variety of life stories, the brevity of the format, meant that on any given evening I could cwtch up with the children and get a glimpse into an incredible legacy of womanhood.

The other week, we were flicking through the book, waiting for one of these women to leap off the pages at us, when Esme stopped us at the story of Coco Chanel.

I didn't know much about Coco and her tough start to life.

As we read the book it became obvious that Coco was the original creator of a silk purse out of a sow's ear. She came from nothing, she had nothing, but she took that nothing and rocked the hell out of it.

Since we were sitting on the sofa, we jumped online and streamed a brief video on her life story. Just to make sure we hadn't missed any of the important details.

We weren't more than a minute into the video when a small voice cut across the narrative.

"I want to design my own little black dress", said Esme with a degree of solemnity not often heard from her lips, "And I want to sew it, Mama. I want us to make it. Teach me to sew".

“OK,” I thought, “challenge accepted”.

The next day I taunted Google with such search terms as girl, body and outline to find a template over which Esme would be able to draw her little black dress. What can I say, I like the occasional flirt with HR worthy internetting.

That evening, giving the occasion its due pomp and circumstance, we sat down with the jar of crayons, and I presented Esme with her template before sitting back to watch the glorious black dress-ness unfold.

Esme paused, mirroring my solemnity, and surveyed the crayons before carefully selecting her weapon of choice.

As you may have noticed above, despite the promise of both brevity and darkness, the design turned out to be not so little and not quite black.

But it was a dress. And I had promised to help her make it.

Confession Number 1: I have never made a dress.

My basic knowledge of the sticking-clothes-together process made me think the next step should involve measuring and because I am an awesome adult, I couldn't be bothered to go and find the exact junk draw that my tape measure had been stuffed into, so I went to the cupboard under the kitchen sink and got Keith's measuring stick instead.

Hey, with everything else that was stacked against that dress, the accuracy of measuring was hardly going to make or break it.

Plus it gave me a chance to get Esme to write down some numbers, which is a rare and wondrous thing with that child.

We also got to talk about the concept of rounding. Like "hey, mama used a straight stick to measure a curved surface, while also having to stop your siblings from stabbing each other with spoons. Let's just round up your chest to 32cm, shall we?"

Confession Number 2: I hate shopping

My levels of enthusiasm were already beginning to wane with the whole deal, but Esme was determined that we would go shopping, once again proving that apples sometimes do fall very far from the tree.

Just to add insult to injury, it turns out Esme is ... I can barely bring myself to type it ... a browser. She actually takes pleasure in walking slowly round an entire shop and pondering her options (ALL of the options) before making a choice.

By the time we had talked over the prices, suitability and I had convinced her to tone down the sheer bloody pinkness of it all, I needed a lie down in a dark room, and maybe to stick some of my freshly purchased pins into my eyes for a bit of light relief.

Instead, we went home and I made an accidentally ironic dress pattern using one of Esme's very simple pinafore dresses to mark, cut and pin the new fabric.

Confession Number 3: I don’t own an infernal, whirry, finger stabber.

When I wing a project, I get to certain points and want to stop. Not because I’m fed up with what I’m doing, but because when I have managed to fluke my way into making something look good, I don’t want the magic to end by blundering into the next phase in my usual half-arsed way.

I felt a little like that about the pinned together dress, which was why it took me over a week to work up the courage to take Esme on a trip to Made Marion to rent one of their machines. I pretty much put it off until I couldn’t stand the nagging any longer.

When I did eventually work up the courage to go there, it was both a genuinely awesome shared experience and every bit the bloody nightmare I had feared.

The dress went together fairly easily, thanks to having an entire shop at my disposal for when I realised I had no thread, bias tape or bloody clue what I was doing.

The downside was that a lot of things in the shop were pink, meaning that while trying to sew Part A to Part B, I also had zips, buttons, feathers and ribbons thrust under my nose (and therefore in the path of my infernal, whirry, finger stabber) as potential additions to the dress.

Somehow, no fingers were stabbed. Somehow the seams were straight. Somehow the dress looks ... awesome.

And I may never really understand how people can get so excited about clothes, but I think I'm a little closer to userstanding what Coco meant when she said

Fashion has two purposes: comfort and love”

Thursday, 9 February 2017 Comments: 0

Attachment Parenting Learning Travel Working Mama

Travel Plans for 2017

It doesn't seem to matter whether you're in the glum midwinter of the Northern Hemisphere, or the midsummer heat of the south, the few weeks after Christmas and New Year suck.

This year it feels extra hard because three sets of good friends have left Aotearoa on new adventures, and our family are still here. I am feeling a lot more alone right now, and if I'm honest, I'm struggling.

I don't begrudge people their adventures (quite the opposite) but when you are a stranger in a country and your friends are your whanau, it becomes hard to see them walk away. Those impromptu "fancy a drink after work" texts or the "what are you doing for lunch?" calls seem so incidental when you can count on them being there. It's only when some far-flung beach Instagram pic reminds you that those people aren't around anymore that you realise how much you really miss them.

There was a time when we were considering packing up our lives and travelling. But then we bought a house we love and built a life here, so the plan instead is to do some longer holidays over the next few years.

Last year, we based our destination on the cheapest flights and had a blast discovering Vancouver. It wasn't a place that I had ever thought I wanted to visit, and maybe it was the passing resemblance to Wellington, or the awesome locals, but I accidentally fell a little bit in love.

This year, we are taking a different approach and flying to places we know we want to visit.

1. England

Ahhh the annual pilgrimage. Have I ever mentioned that Keith is one of the head honchos at an awesome car show called Retro Rides Gathering? No? You thought we went back to the UK every year because we missed the weather?

We don't.

English summers are a complete fallacy dreamt up by misty-eyed pensioners who believe their childhoods were spent running through fields in light cotton dresses while Jerusalem played softly in the background and Britain was Great. You know, before it joined the EU and floods of immigrants came to the country to collapse our women and steal our NHS. When bananas could be curved, prunes could be used a laxative, and jam was ruddy well called jam. Hold my drink, someone, I feel a rousing chorus of Land of Hope and Glory coming on.

So while the UK gets on with the business of Brexit, we have a short list of things to do:

- First item on our list of things to do: Run awesome car show.
- Second item in my short list of things to do: Catch up with some friends.

And no offense to the car show, but my priority this year is to spend time holding my friends as close as is considered culturally appropriate.

2. Gibraltar

Can it be true? Why yes it can! After 5 years, we are heading back to see the family, and to introduce the children and our friend to all that is awesome quirky.

I feel a little sorry for them, they have no idea what is going to hit them. I mean, I know we run a fairly Mediterranean household, but there is nothing that truly prepares you for the strength and, well, volume of being in a place like Gib surrounded by family. All of the family. The cast of actual thousands.

Then there are the weird cultural variations in available cakes for weddings. Because why would anyone want a cake made ENTIRELY OF CHEESE?! Nobody, that's who!! Especially one with no decoration of any kind and delivered IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT to a place only HEATHENS get married.

Ten years on and I'm still convinced she spat on my carrot cake.

3. Stockholm

Once we have ruined the children by making them both fat, deaf, and terminally argumentative our flights back to the UK take us (for reasons I cannot fathom) via Stockholm for the day.

How much can you fit into a 7 hours stopover? Yeah I'm not sure, but we have plans!

My friend and I found mention of a cycle tour online, and Keith is determined to track down the best Gravlax in town with our salmon loving son, so I sense a frantic, and probably exhausting day between flights.

In my head, it's going down like Supermarket Sweep, which does make me a little sad because I've always wanted to spend quality time somewhere that either has the best public relations crew in the world, or is genuinely full of stylish interiors, warm people and cracking food.

4. Indonesia

This is where we stop travelling and spend some time chilling. We hope. At this point, I have absolutely no idea where we are going to within Indonesia. Our plan is to spend some time with friends who are travelling there. That's the plan. No really, that's it.

And you know what? It's kinda exciting to have that open window that has no greater structure than a vague geographical location. We are ending the trip at the opposite end of the spectrum to the place where we start. We start with a visit that is planned down to the nearest half day and end with a visit that is planned to the nearest country.

Both those things are made possible by the fact that we travel light (ish), and our children are of an age where they are more help than hindrance in planning an adventure.

On paper, we shouldn't have a care in the world.

Thursday, 2 February 2017 Comments: 1

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