Veronica Foale

Author: Veronica Foale

  • A wedding ceremony, also eeek

    My rehearsal is booked and in under a fortnight, we shall traipse off to a park, to practise getting married, before coming home, freaking the fuck out about details and shouting at each other. I can accept this, just as I can accept the fact that we will still get married, because love is shouting at each other and still wanting to see their face.

    Eventually.

    The hardest part here is now I have to write a wedding ceremony, because everything I had read, all of the samples, all of the words, they all feel plasticky and cardboard, not real and made with parts of soul. Is that weird, that I think words can have souls?

    I suspect that writing my wedding ceremony will be harder than anything else I’ve done, but then, this is what I do. I write things down and make people read them.

    But.

    This isn’t a blog post, or words that I hide in the back of my computer in the hidden files – no, this is something to be read in front of EVERYBODY and help?

  • This Uncharted Hour #uncharted2011

    This is where I can be found this afternoon, watching the dress rehersal for This Uncharted Hour at the Theatre Royal.

    Tickets are limited, so if you’ve got a spare hour this weekend and you’re in Tasmania, head along. You can hear what I’ve got to say about it on twitter this afternoon.

  • Wedding and grief

    My wedding is in seventeen days and my grandmother continues to be dead. These things are not related, yet they chase each other around and around inside my head. I cannot help but think that everything would be so much easier without the lack that death leaves.

    Missing someone doesn’t have a timeline. Instead, it shows up and takes your breath away every time you wish that they were here, standing right next to you.

    Seventeen days.

    It’s isn’t that I’m not looking forward to it (I am) I just want things to be different. Slightly less grief-y and dark. Less cold and more sun. You know, in my perfect world.

    Of course, if my world was perfect we would be able to cure cancer, turn back time and render people mute, all with the power of our minds.

    Imperfect is what we’ve got and sometimes things are better and sometimes they are not.

    That’s the way life goes.

    ***

    Day nine of NaBloPoMo and I’m going mad.

  • School mornings.

    Tuesdays herald the start of the school week for us here, this year. It’s not that I don’t love the six hours with only one child following me around like a duckling – because I do, very much – it’s that the stress of getting everyone ready and out of the door on time for school drop off is sending me grey.

    It feels like herding cats, or shepherding mice. Like trying to get goldfish to swim in synchronicity without the benefit of a belly full of iron shavings and a magnet.

    And I’m trying not to shout, I really am, but when one child is squealing a high pitched squeal and slamming doors and the other child is trying to create a cat trap – when both of them ought to be eating their porridge, that’s when I start to get a bit shouty.

    Once breakfast is done, then it’s a haze of hair brushings and face washings and where the hell are your shoes and can you brush your teeth please, no, I mean really brush them and library book and stop shoving and just get in the car already, leave the bloody cat alone.

    But I know that even as I hate these mornings because the children are so small that I need to spoon feed them the next step in the getting ready proccess, it is worth it for the quiet. For the chance to drink just one cup of tea without someone shouting that SHE IS PUSHING ME or HE TOOK MY THING.

    Definitely.

  • And here we go again

    It’s like a ticking time bomb, trying to get something written here every morning before my children wake up.

    Tick.

    Tick.

    Tick.

    Once they’re awake, my morning is a haze of breakfasts and snuggles needed, of meltdowns and NO NOT THAT BLANKET, THE OTHER ONE. And WHERE IS MY DINOSAUR and I NEED DA ODDER CEREAL.

    It’s all good fun, until someone starts screaming and writhing on the floor.

    ***

    My son wakes up, demands warm milk and a blanket (da blue one, in da bedroom Mummy, not DAT ONE) and smiles at me cheekily while he does it. I rub his stomach and hug him good morning, until he breathes on me and I gag.

    That’s the part no one talks about – the morning breath, that on your husband is expected, but on your almost-three-year-old is a disgusting shock.

    ***

    It’s Monday, the start of our week again and I have so many things happening that I am alternately terrified and very excited. Good things will happen this week, I can feel it.

    Just as long as I can keep up, it will be all good.