Life

It has been a long week. Long like I’m moving through treacle and the tired has hit me. Slammed down, there’s a weight in my shoulders. My feet are heavy with the kind of bone tired you only feel in winter, when the temperatures stay low and you wake in the morning with the world frozen solid. Winter white and sunrise through the fog. It’s beautiful but you’ll freeze to death watching it. Or maybe you won’t, but I might.

We went away for a big market in St Helens, and it was amazing and exhausting and brilliant and it nearly killed me, but I’m still going to do it again next year, because fuck it. What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger, right? Or maybe it makes me bendier, but hey, who’s counting that part anyway. We chatted to customers, both returning and new. I got to rave about my products, because I honestly love what I do, even when the cold is in my bones and I am hurting, I love how my soap smells, and how the hand cream feels, and how I feel when I share that with people. I love brightening people’s days, knowing that something I made with my two hands can make them happy, even if it’s only a little bit of happiness. It all counts, adds up, means something. To me at least.

Winter is in my bones, and it’s June again, which is always a month of remembering, of hospital rooms and death and funerals. Nine years on, you’d think it would be better, but it’s only different. Some things stay with you, like the trauma passed down through our DNA, making its mark on us all years later. Muddy boots on white carpet, you can clean it up, but you’ll never erase the memory of what happened. Nothing is ever gone, which is both blessing and curse really, love and loss, light and frost, the strength you get from putting one foot in front of the other.

My children are sick, and so there’s the incessant whining of “Muuuuum! I’m huuuuungry!” from the smallest one, and it’s inside my head. I hear it when I’m sleeping and it makes my shoulders bunch, because you. just. ate. five. fucking. minutes. ago. and if you’re hungry, maybe eat your damn crusts, and have a glass of water, and you can get your own yogurt out of the fridge, there is a whole fruit bowl available, why can’t you make your own sandwiches yet?

Then I feel ungrateful, because I am so lucky to have these small fragile creatures relying on me, but five minutes without needing me and get your own spoon, is it too much to ask? Really? I am not your slave, pick up your own toys, come and get your sandwich I am not a waitress and fortheloveofgodstopfuckingwhining.

Four is an interesting age, and it’s not my favourite, but it’s not my favourite in a slightly better way than 18 months old was not my favourite. Maybe. I’m not certain. So much of babyhood is foggy and lost now.

I am tired. Worn down and worn out.

[“Mum, I need a drink.”

“You can reach the tap, go and do it yourself!”

Heavy sigh. Huff. Stomp.]

And I remember this feeling from last year, but each year is a little worse, as I get a little older, as my collagen fails a little bit more, and I hold out hope for a short winter and the return of warm sunlight. The solstice is a week away and I am pining for the sun, for the light, for the warm.

I have filled my house with seedlings, in hope and new beginnings, in the germs of new life. I am hoping it helps to watch peas twine towards my roof and parsley grow wild on my kitchen bench.

We’re so close to the solstice tipping point I can taste it, as we slide down into the darkest bit of winter, the coldest bit, the hardest bit. August drags, but not in the same way June does.

One week left.

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I used to write every day. With music in my ears and words spilling out of my fingers, I would write and write and write. My heart was soul slick, bubbling over, unable to be tamed.

Now I’m a bottle with a cork it; a well fast running dry; a knotted ball of yarn. I know how this works but I’m angry and my fingertips have run dry. There’s no words as I navigate an almost three year old having a meltdown, a six year old with home reading and a desire to have me watch all the video games, an eight year old who needs to know the why of everything.

I am lost in a haze of no words, of chemistry, of fatty acid profiles and caustic experiments.

Who would have thought that making soap could run the word well empty so fast.

—

My three year old screams in the background, angry again.

The weather is ice and wind.

I can’t send them outside.

There is sharpie on the walls and someone has stolen all my notebooks and unpinned my scribbled notes from the cork board I use to organise my life. I frantically hunt for a pen while I take notes on the shaving soap cooking, but someone has stolen them, my pen cup removed from its home amongst the high shelves and left scattered on the floor.

Now there are two children screaming.

Please just shhhhhhhhh.

I can’t believe there are eight pairs of scissors in the house and I cannot find one of them.

—

Find a playlist. Turn the music up. The dog is chewing headbands again. Shaving soap cooks and I stir stir stir the caustic mix, waiting for it to come together, to trace, to be soap rather than a messy collection of liquids.

Business is good. I love what I do. But sometimes I feel like a shaken bottle of soda, ready to explode if the words don’t come out. I need to write. Making soap is my passion, but writing saves my sanity and god knows there’s little of it left.

—

School goes back tomorrow, and the almost three year old will spend the day asking when we can pick up her siblings and screaming because she doesn’t want them to come home and ruin her games anymore.

I can feel a splash of lye on my finger and I should go and wash it off, but the pain reminds me that I still exist in this tornado of business and screaming and need.

—

Everything is too bright, too dark, chaos whirlwind, around and around. My hands are soul slick again and I wash them off, down the drain with the bubbles, there go the words.

I used to write. Stories. Books.

I’m drowning in a desert of no words and I can’t find my way out.

The soap cooks in the slow cooker and I make notes, ready for markets next weekend. There are twenty weekends until Christmas and 16 markets if I get into everything I want, and don’t get sick, or have my body fall apart. I take vitamin D, magnesium, fish oil, slow release opiates. I sleep when I can, but sometimes find myself sitting wide awake at 3am, wondering what I’m doing.

—

MUM MUM MUMMY MUM MUMMY MUM MUMMY!

I am not hiding in the bathroom. No, I’m not. Go away. I need to pee. Just, I’m working.

You’re always working.

Yes. Because you need new clothes and our house needs a new bedroom and a dining room and money doesn’t just fall from the sky kid. As much as I would like it to.

—

The soap is almost cooked in the time it takes me to write this, broken and disjointed.

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It’s a quick slide down into winter. The mornings and my fingers ice over, frozen solid, moving slowly. We wait for the frost to burn off, the fog to burn off, the wood in the fireplace to burn off. Life is cold chaos and we’re moving through treacle again.

I tell myself: No. Not this year. You are too busy to be sad this year.

But there it is. The sadness cannot be willed away as we slide into June, the icy runway slick under our feet. A little voice in the back of my head sings, it’s June again, June again, we all know everything is terrible in June.

The vacuum cleaner breaks, and the woodbox of the fireplace splits a little further. It’s June again and everything is breaking around me.

It’s been six years this year, since my grandmother died. Since we walked the year-long cancer journey to its close, a whirlwind of appointments and hope and treatments stopping dead in a palliative care room in South Hobart. One half of my support team cut free forever, as the masses within her lungs and bones shut her body down forever.

Almost a year (eleven days, eleven days, eleven days and a few hours and how are you feeling Veronica? how is that ice in your bones today?) to when we stood around her, a circle of family and love and light and watched her go, the world a lesser place for her passing, a better place for her living.

A part of me will forever be standing in that room, watching her die. Over and over again.

The wound is less raw, but the missing never fades. Grief is an interesting concept, a fluidity to the sadness and the tears. Maybe you’ll feel differently tomorrow, maybe you won’t.

My children grow ever bigger, and my grandmother isn’t in this world to watch them grow. That is a tragedy all on its own.

We were five generations of women, then five generations, missing our fourth, then three. Three generations of women left. It seems unfair. There was so much family here and now … nothing. Maybe that’s the worst bit about death, it cuts families up into pieces, slack hack slice. You over there, you here, now there.

People don’t like to talk about death and dying. There is a discomfort about it, a recognition of our own mortality. If they died, then we might die and everyone dies OH GOD.

The grief of my grandmother’s passing irrevocably changed my life. Set adrift, missing 50% of my matriarchal life support, awash in a sea of grief.

Death, dying.

It’s June again. The ground and my fingers are frozen equally, as a clock ticks down the days to Spring inside my head.

Six years, six years. Here we are.

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I was in year nine when the girl sitting across from me during mathematics matter of factly told me she was living with her twenty nine year old boyfriend. She’d left home after her father raped her. She was 14. A few weeks later she disappeared from the school. Her name was called out for a few more weeks of attendance, and then that too stopped.

I don’t know what happened to her, whether she moved away or simply disappeared. I can’t even remember her name, although I can remember how intense her eyes were as I listened to her talk about how family was fucked and you can’t trust anyone.

She was not an unusual case.

I went to a disadvantaged school, in a disadvantaged area. In our uniforms, we were a rabble, often loud, with plenty of swearing. There were teen pregnancies and drama. When someone finally got around to teaching a sex ed class, two thirds of the class were already sexually active and had a better idea of how to get a condom on in the dark than the poor teacher showing us on a banana.

The classes were rowdy, full of angry teenagers and angry hormones. I took my work home each night to complete it, rather than fighting with the chaos, the noise. We laughed and teased and made the support teachers cry.

It wasn’t a good educational environment. Between the teenagers drinking and doing drugs, the raped and angry girls, the couch surfers and the foster kids, our teachers did the best they could, but there wasn’t a lot of privilege to go around.

On paper, I am exactly like my peers. I dropped out of college to get an apprenticeship, which quickly fell through under the pressure of work AWAs and subtle sexual harassment. I got pregnant at 17, was diagnosed with a degenerative disability at 20, ended up on welfare. I’m second generation welfare. At 26, I have three children. On paper, this is who I am. Teenage mother, dole bludging scum, college dropout.

But I am more than the sum of my disadvantage. The man I fell pregnant to, we love each other. We were married after our second child was born. I bought my house at 19. I freelance. I own a small business. I work around my disability.

It isn’t that easy for everyone.

At the end of the day, when I was a teenager, I had family who loved me. I had a warm safe place to go if I needed them, with plenty of food. People cared about my survival, about my school results, about my successes.

But then, I moved out of home when I was fifteen. I made bad choices, fixed them, made bad choices again. I lived in share houses, renting bedrooms from other people on welfare, all of us trying to eke out a living. I ended up in shitty situations over and over again before I met my partner (now husband).

I don’t know what the rate of teen pregnancy ended up being in my year 10 class, but I’d wager it was high. A lot of the girls I went to school with are mothers now, some single, some happily partnered. Some of us clawed our way upwards, some of us didn’t.

The things that separate the people who succeed and the people who don’t are often entirely insurmountable, an accumulation of things, one atop another. This person stayed in a stable home. That person’s mother walked out. This one here, that one there, a giant chess board shuffling us all around, grist for the mill.

I credit a lot of my successes to simply moving out of the suburb I was staying in, and the fact my partner had his drivers license. His driving opened up options for us which would never have been there. We moved into a tiny rental in a better suburb. We bought a house rurally. We moved away from the daily dramas, removing ourselves from the cycle of poverty.

Privilege is most often, at its core, good luck. The child who is lucky enough to be born to affluent parents in an affluent suburb has better chances than the child who is born into poverty and parents who are struggling to make ends meet.

My children are privileged now, even though we continue to fight the tyranny of distance when it comes to education. When you live rurally, your options for schooling are already limited. I’m hoping that having intelligent parents who love them will go a ways towards bridging the gap. But I also know that because of where we live, they won’t get the same quality of education as a child living in the centre of Hobart, with parents wealthy enough to send them to  private school.

The schooling system here in Tasmania is flawed. When it is easier to drop out of year 11, you know you have a problem. Some days there would be a two hour wait for the bus to take you home. There aren’t enough colleges for rural students. Housing is an issue. Getting to college if you aren’t lucky enough to live within the suburbs is hard work. Finding the energy to attend, day in, day out, despite poverty and no support system.

But the biggest problem lies with trying to pretend disadvantage faced by rural and low socioeconomic students doesn’t exist.

There is a problem if half of your students are going to school hungry, or unable to buy lunch. If there’s no support at home. If there’s no money for good food so you’re eating two minute noodles again because at least they’re cheap.

You can’t treat educational problems in a vacuum. There are societal problems everywhere, impacting on kids ability to engage and learn.

And if a good percentage of your teenagers see college or university as a waste of time because there’s no work anyway, well. What do you think is going to happen?

Disadvantage is a multifaceted thing, impacting on every part of life.

Shame won’t fix it. Privileged people refusing to listen won’t fix it.

There isn’t an easy answer to any of these issues, but we can’t pretend they don’t exist anymore.

We can’t keep refusing to see the poor people under our feet in the hope they will just go away.

And we can’t pretend that this issue is a simple one with children who don’t want to learn on one side, and children who do on the other.

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