personal political

stella and the moon man

Today we saw Stella and the Moon Man at Sydney Theatre down by the wharves. It was brilliant. In fact that review I've linked to is quite insipid, I think - it doesn't do the production anything like justice. Perhaps we were bowled over by the stunning performance of the girl who played Stella - whose name we don't know as the role is shared by two girls and I don't know which one performed today. She had to be on stage for the whole hour as the central character and was calm, composed and magnetic the entire time.

A friend of mine who has a daughter the same age as Olle had tried to get them both into a two-day holiday workshop this week run by Theatre of Image (who produced Stella). Unfortunately the workshop was booked out. After seeing their work for the first time, I'm very keen to see if we could get him (and our friend) into any future workshops. Stella used shadow puppetry and ingenious lighting and projected images, as well as an original score performed live by the Australian Youth Orchestra. The whole production, from script to choreography, was fresh and original, funny and meaningful in an uncloying way - which is really saying something compared to most of the commercial crap which passes as culture for children these days. What a lovely school holiday outing! Olle and his cousin had a wonderful time.

school hols

It's school holiday time again. Two weeks break until we enter the final term of the year. Reduced-income time for me as I take some (unpaid) time off so that my son doesn't have to spend his time off in 'vacation care'.

Suddenly there are parents and school-aged kids on the buses, on outings together. A lot of fathers, I noticed yesterday. These days I think a lot of dual-working parents swap days off between themselves and with other parents.

Yesterday I took Olle into the city to visit Hyde Park Barracks with another mother, who had her two little kids and her older niece and nephew with her. Despite riding my bike past it most working days, this was my first time inside the Barracks and I found it very interesting, though being with young kids meant there wasn't a huge amount of time to properly look at the exhibits. (I was glad to be able to show Olle a flint, as we're currently reading Stig of the Dump in which flints play a big role and I could tell he hadn't much of a clue what a flint was.)

Afterwards we ate a picnic lunch in Hyde Park, which is not looking too tree-less yet, and despite the cool weather the kids all stripped down to play in a shallow fountain until a very nice parksman of some kind came over and warned us about the potential for broken glass in there. (Actually the other mother had thought of that and asked her niece to keep an eye out for any.) By that time Olle had jubilantly collected 70c from the fountain floor and instead of catching a bus home, he wanted  to walk so that he could spend his money on lollies. It turned out that the first lolly shop (the type where you use a shovel to serve yourself) we came to was just around the corner from home. This had been a good incentive for walking a couple of kilometres.

My mother was a housewife and school holidays were always a time for going shopping and to the movies, usually 'in town' (the city centre). It was the only time we ever went there. We'd make the long train journey in from the suburbs, go to a film and then walk around in David Jones, often in the patterns and haberdashery department. My mother seemed very at home 'in town' in a way which was slightly disturbing to me. Before getting married she had worked in the Commonwealth Bank in Martin Place, so her familiarity with the city streets indicated a life before me - a strange concept.

I loved school holidays - firstly because kids naturally love school holidays and secondly because it was when we got to spend this intimate and unusual time with our mother - a break from all the normal routines. And boy was life routine in those days. Nearly all of it was spent at home. We never ate out - never! Rarely visited anyone or had visitors. So going into town was special. And I realise now that it was one of the rare times when I saw my mother being an authoritative person out in the world - she knew how to catch trains, how to get to the cinema, where the tea rooms were, which floor at DJs had children's shoes etc. Otherwise she was 'just' a fairly downtrodden housewife and mother at home.

I don't very often find myself wanting to emulate aspects of my own childhood, but I do want to recapture some of the specialness of those city trips for my own child during his school holidays. Although he lives a very different life to the one I led as a child - he lives near 'town' and visits it often - there is still something unusual and slightly magical about planning little excursions for this two-week break. I feel as if it hasn't been a proper holiday if we haven't caught the bus, perhaps a ferry or train, to a museum, a theatre or the zoo. I take pleasure in pointing out landmarks to him and hope that he remembers me when he visits those landmarks for himself - maybe with his own kids - in decades to come.

food

My son is what is known in the parenting trade as a "good eater" - which means he eats a diverse range of food and will try new things without protest. He isn't a "big eater", though. He usually eats all of his morning snack at school (we used to call this 'playlunch' in my long-ago day - I think they call it, the actual food, 'recess' nowadays) but often only takes a few bites of his lunch - I think that's because the other kids are too distracting.

There are two children in his class who have potentially anaphylactic allergies (and the Epipens to go with them) - to peanuts, primarily, but all nuts are included, I think, as well as 'fish', which I think means tuna. (This was conveyed to us in the school newsletter.) I have to confess that I did send him to school with smoked salmon sandwiches last year, which probably weren't what they had in mind under 'fish', but does reveal that I didn't take the allergy threat as seriously as i should have. [I wasn't as bad as another mother who confessed that she still sent Nutella sandwiches with her child as it was one of the few things they would eat.]

When I thought about how I would feel if one of these kids had a shock reaction and died because of something I'd sent to school, I stopped sending the smoked salmon. It's an unbearable thought.

Olle himself is self-limiting about what he will have on sandwiches these days, not for the usual 'picky eater' reasons. He won't eat ham any more because his best friend is Jewish and in fact Olle has decided that he too is Jewish because I told him he had a Jewish great grandparent. We've tried explaining that that doesn't make him Jewish but he is standing firm.

He won't take cheese sandwiches to school because he tells me that one of the anaphylactic kids is also 'allergic' to dairy food. I have explained to him that cheese would only harm her if she ate it but that's not enough to convince him.

He says "I sometimes wish A and B weren't in my class because they we can't eat peanut butter but really I wish they were not allergic because I want them to be in my class".  [He hardly ever eats peanut butter anyway.]

Last night we ate at Red Lantern Vietnamese restaurant, which we had seen on the SBS-TV series about three Sydney restaurants vying for good reviews in The Good Food Guide. The food was really really good. Olle had a bit of everything that the four adults ordered - pipies (mussells) tossed in chili, crispy skin chicken, whole snapper, duck, red rice (tomato-infused), squid. He fell asleep with his head in my lap before dessert could be ordered. That's happened many times before in many restaurants, but now he's becoming almost too long and heavy to carry to the car, so he has to be helped to sleepwalk his way home.

rain rain go away

It never rains in Sydney any more. Really. In August at our place we had all of 0.1mm of rain. It hasn't been much different in September.

Until today.

Not that it's pouring, but this morning there was actual rain which required an umbrella.

Of course, this just had to be the day that Olle was scheduled to do a three-hour OzTag workshop. It's the school holidays again and I had to find something for him to do while we were both at work. I wasn't thrilled for it to be something related to rugby league - but Olle sure was. After dinner on Saturday night, he told us that he was going to be such a fast runner that no one would be able to catch him and proceeded to demonstrate this by running from the back door to the front door several times, pretending to kick and throw a football as he ran. (This was hilarious, more so because he had just eaten a steak, which did for him what sugar does to other children.)

Having asked me many times whether I was sad because I wouldn't be able to watch him demonstrate his Oztag prowess, he decided it was necessary to have someone there as a witness and asked if he could ring Geoff, the father of a (girl-who-is-not-the-slightest-bit-interested-in-football) classmate who coincidentally lives across the road (and works from home) from where the workshop was to be held. Geoff was delighted to be rung and said that he would certainly be able to come across to watch Olle.

When last night's forecast was for rain, I warned Olle that there was the possibility the workshop would be cancelled. So this morning when we received the call to confirm this, he wasn't devastated, though of course he was disappointed. He's spending the day at Geoff's place.

Now I'm wondering whether the OzTag people (in fact the trainers were all women) do birthday parties...

Another good reason for it not to rain today of all days is that it's council rubbish pick-up day and last night we finally put our old sofa out on the street to be collected. It had sat upended in our front garden (garden = about two metres from fence to house) since the new one arrived a few weeks ago, taking up space and blocking light from the front room.

Council rubbish collections occur every three months but this was the first time we'd had anything substantial to put out. (I'd like to think that's because we are exceptionaly efficient recyclers.) Even so, I have observed previous collections and noted that they invariably do not occur on the date that they say they will. Rubbish can sit around on the footpath for days, even weeks. As the footpath in front of our house is very narrow, simply putting the sofa out there was not an option. Besides which, I had a tiny doubt as to whether the council collects sofas. It says they collect "small items of furniture'. Our sofa was small so I hope it qualifies.

I'd been reconnoitring the surrounding streets, paths and laneways for the best place to put the sofa for the past week. I got the feeling (I absorbed this from the surrounding atmosphere) that there is a politics of rubbish collection and I didn't want to enter into any conflicts, particularly not with the paranoid and sometimes abusive man who lives on the corner (the classic nosy/cranky neighbour - thank goodness we don't live next door to him.)

Late yesterday afternoon, someone opposite and a bit down the hill put out a sizeable collection of rubbish - planks and whatnot. Aha - this would be the ideal camouflage for our sofa. As soon as it got dark, we carried it across the street, not saying a word as windows were open (balmy pre-rain evening).

I know that some market stallholders go round our area looking for bargains in the run-up to rubbish collection day (it's an affluent area and people put out some incredibly new and undamaged goods). Olle scored some kind of tigerskin whip last week, from someone who'd put theirs out early. I was half hoping that an ambitious person would see our sofa, recognise that it was essentially excellent quality and take it away to be re-upholstered.

No. Today it is raining and there sits the sofa, looking even grubbier and sadder than it did in our house. I wonder how long it will be there for.

[PS Visitors from Melbourne are coming  midweek. Surely it can't rain while they're here?)

amputees

I spoke to my friend Su in London last night (she's just become a grandmother for the first time and is thrilled). She also told me about visiting a woman in her reading group who recently lost a foot in a motor scooter accident.

That woman Jen is a midwife who was on her way home from work, turned right on a not-very-busy local street and a car ran into her. The impact severed her artery but incredibly, one of her neighbours who saw the accident rang her next-door neighbour who happens to be an anaesthetist who works in an Energency department - he came running and saved her life.

Jen was in hospital for only a week but faces a lot of rehab as she gets a prosthetic foot. Su said she is very goal-oriented - some of that was imparted by the hospital staff. She was in hospital as the last of the victims of the 7/7 Tube bombings was about to leave. One man, who lost a leg and had other severe injuries, was full of useful advice for Jen. Another support, who visited the amputee ward after the bombings, was Heather Mills, wife of Paul McCartney, an amputee herself.

This story was moving for me on two levels. The first is that back in the late 70s I shared a house with a nurse who'd recently had her leg amputated below the knee after a motor scooter accident on the way home from work. She was still attending daily rehab and suffering constant phantom pains, but was a remarkably resilient woman.

The other is that on the weekend I had read the heart wrenching story of Martine Wright, who lost both legs above-knee in one of the Tube bombings. Towards the end of the article, it becomes clear that she faces financial uncertainty on several levels. The British government can fund an army to go to war in Iraq (not unconnected to the bombings at home) yet Martine may not be able to get the prosthesis she needs on the NHS. Tony Blair has now promised to "investigate".

am i a lesbian?

... our six year old son asked co-parent last night during bathtime.

When she recounted this to me after he was asleep, I immediately jumped to the conclusion that one of the kids he'd spent yesterday with had mentioned the L word. (Most of the children who attended the birthday picnic have two mothers - two 16 year old boys, 13 and nine year old girls ... and Olle.)

No, it turned out that a girl in his class had said to another girl the other day "I'm not a lesbian." [I don't have any more context to go with that story, but intend to investigate!] This must have been percolating in Olle's mind all weekend until it popped as this question.

Co-parent said she told him that a lesbian is a woman who loves another woman (ie he is not one), that it's all about love, that men can love men, women can love women ... then the word "gay" came up and he asked about that. She told him that we are gay but that he won't know what he is until he's much older. [I had wondered when he would ask about that as it's a word we tend to use a lot when watching TV - as in "Do you think he's gay?" etc)

He ended up saying that he loves his best friend Joe and would like to live with him when he grows up but not get married and that he (Olle) would not mind "being the girl".

Fascinating. I should say here that neither co-parent nor I is ultra butch or femme, we both work, we both do the housework etc so he's not getting any blatant 'one's the girl' ideas from us. [There may well be more subtle variations on gender roles at work in our relationship, but that's beside this point...] Instead I surmise that he's absorbing 'one's the girl' from the basic (heterosexual) culture that he lives within, including the specific culture of the playground, where apparently modern-day seven year olds say to their classmates "I'm not a lesbian". {I think I was at least fourteen before I encountered that word, not that that was a good thing.]

As I say, I don't know what "I'm not a lesbian" was about, but somehow I'm not surprised that the word 'lesbian' first came into his view attached to a negative. There, in a nutshell, is what now confronts us - the inevitability of Olle's realisation that some people, some powerful institutions, don't think that the relationship which is at the core of his home life is a good thing. In fact, a lot of people, a lot of the culture, think it is a yucky, repulsive, repugnant, bad thing. How do we let him in on that without letting it overwhelm him?

Of the two 16 year old boys who were at the picnic yesterday, one seems totally comfortable with being his own (bohemian) person in the world. He's the one with the gay dad as well as the two mums (and his gay dad is in a longterm relationship, but the other man isn't seen as the co-dad.) The other seems less at ease and each of his mothers told me (separately) that they think he feels the social strain of having lesbian mothers. There may be reasons for that to be found in his life story and his parents' attitudes, but I don't know them closely enough to say.

At the risk of being banal, parenthood is such an enormous challenge. It's on some level very strange yet also encouraging for me to realise that my precious child has no real idea that he has lesbian mothers. All those years I spent repeating that word [lesbian feminist; gay and lesbian liberation; lesbian politics, lesbian and gay rights, lesbian and gay solidarity, blah blah blah] and it turns out to have no meaning to him! In the 70s and 80s I turned my nose up at those who said "I don't like labels", but thank goodness today labels have virtually no place in my life. [Probably only because so many of us embraced and argued so passionately over those labels at that time. Being label-less is my reward for all that activism, I'd like to think.]

For me the big challenge with all this is wanting to help Olle be the sort of person who can both fit in yet be apart from the crowd and feel at ease in both situations. I do see in him a strong wish to be like the others (not that there's anything wrong with that). Yet the father of one of his classmates, who is an actor and a very nice man, told me recently that he thinks Olle is very "comfortable in his own skin". That observation made me very happy. 

I suppose all will be revealed in time...

protest

From the Australian press today (the online version, anyway) you'd never know there'd been massive demonstrations against the war in Washington DC and London yesterday. (There was a mention on the tv news last night.)

Tom Engelhardt was in DC and interviewed people in the demonstration about their reasons for being there. He links to photos, a couple of which I reproduce here. It's worth reading.

rich text editing

So Safari doesn't support rich text editing. (I looked up Typepad Help). How boring. They suggest using Firefox. I guess I may as well give it a go but first I need to buy and download Norton anti-virus (so much work to do setting up a new computer...)

By the way, for Kay and others who asked, I bought an Unwired modem at the Apple shop, came home with the new iMac, plugged it into the electric socket, plugged the modem in and literally within 10 minutes of arriving home I was connected via wireless broadband to the Internet. It was so easy. It continues to be so easy. I really like the Unwired website, which allows me to keep tabs on my account and change my plan any time I want to. Leaves Ozemail for dead. (I still haven't been able to contact Ozemail, even to tell them I want to cancel my account. I guess I'll have to write and/or fax them.)

I did some research of the Google type into whether there are any health risks associated with wireless broadband. I found one article which suggested the risk if any is much lower than from the use of mobile phones. I'm prepared to believe that. After all, you don't sit there with the modem to your head. And I turn it off whenever it's not in use, even though you don't have to. (I'd give the link but am too tired to do the HTML coding - even though it was overcast I think I got sunbrunt today and feel wiped out.)

swim

Almost the first ocean swim of the season today - I went in up to the waist, plus hands, at Nielsen Park. But it was an overcast and relatively cool day and the water was cold. If it had been sunny I would have gone in, but hardly anyone was tempted. We were there for the birthday picnic for a family we know whose birthdays all fall this week. They had the same picnic at the same time (of course) last year and we all swam then.

Well, this is annoying ... this is the first blog entry I've made on my new home computer - the fabulous G5 iMac - via the Safari browser and in Typepad there is no icon for making hyperlinks - so I have to manually code it. It was like that on my old home computer too, but I thought that was because it was five years old. When I blog from my place of employment on a PC with IE, there is a simple to use button which URLises whatever I want to make a link to. Sheesh. Is there anyone out there who knows why this is so?

lathover

Damn, I had written a few paragraphs of a post when I accidentally leaned my hand on some part of the keyboard which made the entire thing disappear. I can't be bothered writing it again.

I'm giving up writing about Latham. I can't seem to put into words what I think about the entire sequence of events - the election, his downfall, his diaries, the reception to his diaries. I know it must seem odd that I, a lefty lesbian feminist, seem to be defending him. It's just that I think a lot of the focus for discussion has been misplaced. Andrew Denton in his interview said that he found it sad that Latham had given up public life in this way, as though Latham was a completely free agent for that change in his own and the nation's life. I think what is sad, truly sad for us in this country is that the election was lost and how/why it was lost. For Latham as an individual, I imagine it is unbearably sad that he developed a destructive chronic condition like pancreatitis at such a time - but he would probably deny that. [And I'm enough of a believer in the psycho-somatic connection to think that his pancreatitis was meaningful, not just a random condition.] [Even though it is also possibly linked to his previous testicular cancer.] I've always been suspicious of the "mad" label when it's used to try and silence someone and I suspect Latham has no more of a personality disorder than a great many politicians from both sides.