Quite!

 A few weeks ago Andrew and I celebrated a wedding anniversary.  (Our own, actually - but we will be very happy to celebrate yours too if you send us the details...) This year the celebrations were wild - a storm hit Cape Town, and rain lashed the mountainside at our getaway.  So we chose the most obvious form of  adult indoor entertainment - we played Scrabble. As usual we were pretty evenly matched until that annoying stage when the board is full and all the high scoring letters have finally been pulled from the bag. (Are they weighted slightly more heavily, so that they sink to the bottom of the bag and are pulled out last, do you think?).  To get rid of the "Q" I offered the word "QUIT", and I was happy enough with the score.  But  Husband decided to add an "E", and write another word, turning my quit into QUITE, scoring himself very many points, and a frosty smile from me. 

This last week Andrew suggested I bring the Scrabble board with me during visiting hour. He has been in hospital fighting a nasty leg infection.  The antibiotics prescribed at A&E and the GP weren't working, so he was admitted to be dripped and prodded and xrayed and checked.  It has been quite an ordeal.  Andrew does not take illness lying down, except when he is forced to.  Now he has no choice, as that leg needs to be elevated, and he needs to rest.  

I found it quite scary.  There is nothing quite like a hospital ward to help one face the fact that everyone is mortal. It is something that is obvious and everyone knows in the back of their thoughts.  But hospitals smell different.  There is uncertainty  in the air, and the acknowledgement that everything  can change from solid to fragile very quickly.  Andrew was in the same ward that my Dad died in a few months ago, and that probably added to my feeling of fragility.  But the care and service was good, (according to Andrew), with the exception of the food.  Nothing new there!  In fact if you start to like the hospital food, it might be time to gather the family.

I reckoned that the Scrabble board wouldn't fit on the bed table so I didn't take it when I went to visit.  Besides Andrew was in a 4 bed ward, and I didn't think it was a suitable game for a public space.  He would have to make do with my scintillating conversations and the books I brought him.  It had absolutely nothing to do with my bruising loss last game.  

Andrew is back home now, and recovering nicely.  We discussed the need for him to possibly give himself a break from the continuous busyness that is his norm.   We'll see - old habits are hard to break.

This is the view from the hospital parking area.  It struck me as quite beautiful as I sat there one day - the mountain, the greenery, even the traffic - a mixture of the unmovable, the seasons and the flow of life.  We are so fortunate with the standard of (private) healthcare in South Africa, and in the beauty of the environment.  If we look carefully, and give it some thought, it doesn't take much to move from a desolate feeling to one of understanding and agreement - changing quit into quite.

That's something we can all celebrate.  And Craig -  you were absolutely right in predicting this blog.😄

 :

 

As the worm turns

 Why, do you think, are butterflies exalted and moths just tolerated? Indeed, butterflies come in majestic colours and gracefully dance on flower tips while moths are a dull brown or grey and tend to fly annoyingly around a light source. I love watching the butterflies in my garden, and feel quite privileged when a particularly beautiful one settles near me and keeps me company. But moths - not so much.

I have been watching the clivia plants near my washing line.  Some of the leaves are rich breeding grounds for worms.  They (the worms!) are stripey and obviously very hungry.  Unlike other caterpillars, these seem to suck the moisture out of the leaves, which look withered and discoloured.  But they don't actually eat the plant flesh.  I was wondering what to do.  Instinctively, I thought of picking them off and sending them to a unpleasant end.

  But I stopped to remind myself how much I like the next stage of their life cycle as butterflies.  So I took a judgement call that we could sacrifice some clivia leaves for a beautiful future.  I do need to keep an eye on the situation though, because too many worms will destroy all the plants, and that isn't eco-friendly either.  The masses of orange flowers delight me as much as the wild life in the garden.  It is, as usual , all about balance.  I hope I have judged the ratio of worms to leaves correctly.

Nothing other than hope is informing my judgement either - these worms could turn into those dull moths for all I know.  I had to look up the difference between the species too.  The main difference seems to be how the wings fold and unfold. And the whole daytime versus night time thing. Moths are not brightly coloured, but muted and dreary.

I am finding writing difficult at the moment.  This blog is an exercise in the the Just Do It philosophy, because writing is really important to me, and silencing myself feels a bit like the leaves that have had the life sucked out of them : Wilted, and on a one way trip to the compost heap.  But maybe, if I live with the unwordiness I am feeling now, some of those worms will turn into butterflies, and some light, attractive thoughts will land on my paper.  To be honest, I would be just as happy if they turned into moths.  Dull and steadfast is just as good for me.  

The beauty of a creature is about perspective isn't it.  Moths and butterflies are both exquisite complicated insects intricately formed, and as lovely as each other.  Worms and caterpillars too for that matter.  We all start somewhere until we evolve to whoever we want to be.

Here's hoping my pupa stage doesn't last too long.

Creating safe spaces

 We all need a place of refuge.  That space that allows us to drop all defences, all other people's expectations of us, all their judgements and Just Be.  If you have crawled high up Maslow's Need hierachy*, that space is probably internal, and thus accompanies you wherever you go.  Some of us haven't got that far in the self actualisation pyramid yet:  I am one of those who needs physical places to retreat to while the world is at war.

Parenting is (or should be) the process of creating that safe environment for a child to test boundaries, explore, fall, jump, fail, learn and get up and dust themselves off.  Home should be a safety net for freedom. (This is what I hope Andrew and I have at least partially achieved these past three decades.)

But I am sorry to tell you that I created an unsafe environment for one of our baby tortoises at the end of last year.  I meant well.  I wanted the two littlies to have a larger garden to explore with more rocks and plants to discover : a bigger playpen.  So I bricked off a substantially larger space than they were used to.  And then we went away for four days.  Nano must have decided to explore the rocks, and he, I assume, got stuck on the top of a ridge in the sweltering heat.  I found his paper thin shell - that was all that was left- on a Friday evening.  Poor Nano.  I had failed him through incompetence and ignorance and being blase.  Kind people have consoled me that this is nature - everything and everyone dies - and in the wild many baby tortoises don't make it to adulthood.  But I feel guilty, and sad, and the heaviness can drag me down. Pico - the remaining baby tortoise - now lives in a crate:  a safe, contained environment.  But it must be boring, so everyday, I walk the tortoise, so she can eat the fynbos, and build leg muscles. I watch her carefully, mindful of the fragility of life.

Globally, safe spaces are becoming harder and harder to find.  There are so many people who have been displaced by the greed and atrocities of a few. We watch with horror as people are killed, houses are bombed, threats of escalation of hostilities echo around the media.  And yet this never ends.  There has never been a time in history without conflict.  

Leadership is (or should be) the process of creating that safe environment for citizens to thrive socially, economically, and personally. World leaders are doing a dismal job.  Which leaves it up to you and me to create peace, internally and externally.  This is not an easy task in these volatile times, but it is a brave choice we can make.  Peace (and a safe environment) requires hard work, careful thought, tolerance, patience and the strength of self to be able to admit we all fail, all make mistakes, all have things that we need to apologise for. 

I was mulling over safe spaces yesterday and landed right back in my childhood home, in a cupboard I used to crawl into when I wanted to retreat from the world or have a bit of peace and quiet. 

I was never lonely in there though, because it was crowded with a kitten, a wolf, a frog, a young girl, an old man and various other friends.  I collected Pelham** puppets. 

It was a wonderful obsession.  I still have all of them, and when our kids were little, we hung them on our dining room wall for fun. 

 

  I have since found more spacious, brighter places with real people ( and no strings attached) to go to when I need a break from expectations, judgements and the craziness of the world.  I get grumpy and lose perspective without these islands of centering. 

Imagine if everyone in the world felt safe.  I imagine there would be far less conflict.

 

 

* Google, of course, can offer introductions if you haven't met Maslow yet.  A simplified version  of the theory can be found at https://www.thoughtco.com/maslows-hierarchy-of-needs-4582571

 

** Pelham puppets were first manufactured by Bob Pelham in 1947.  Every puppet is handmade and hand painted so each has an unique appearance.  The clothing was also cut by hand.  They are true pieces of art. (imho)

 

 

Beloved Nano - RIP

Drive Throughs and take aways

 My head and my heart need a distraction from the turmoil and unrest that overwhelms us as a country at the moment. Sadness needs to be measured or we run a risk of being consumed by it.   So here is my diversion:

Drive throughs and take aways.

Do these things remind you of your childhood?  Who remembers the The Doll House?  For out-of-towners, and anyone who is younger than.....shall we say middle aged....., this was a drive in restaurant in Sea Point.  We would pile into the family car (there were 6 of us) and  pull up in a parking slot and wait for the uniformed waiter to take our order.  It was health food all the way:  Hot dogs, slap chips and milkshakes.  And now for the exciting part:  the goodies were placed on a tray which could be held on a partially open car window.  There was a special skill involved in getting the food before the Sea Gulls did.  They were particularly fond of the chips. So my memories include the cry of the birds, my Mom's exclamations about their cheekiness, the background murmur of the sea, and good family times.

 

The place closed down in 1983.  It had had a long run, having opened in 1938 (nice symmetry of numbers there).  It was knocked down and the site is now home to apartments that benefit from the most wonderful sea and mountain views.  

To close the loop of past and present, I am hoping to be invited to tea there towards the end of the year (hint hint, B!) as my good friend has just had her offer accepted, and she will be moving in to her new home built on the Doll House site.

By the time our kids were around, Drive ins were not really in vogue.  We did take the children once or twice, and that was enough! And then the concept disappeared for a while, or least was not something we pursued.  And drive through restaurants became common and Nothing Special, even bribing the kids with toys because Happy meals need plastic figurines to make them palatable. 

I experienced a new type of Drive Through last week:  we rolled up, parked in the spot indicated, a uniformed person asked what we needed, and then she shoved a long cotton swab up my left nostril. Covid testing has to be my least favourite of the drive through options available, although I am grateful at how quick and easy it was. It brought tears to my eyes as the swab went through passages I didn't know existed.  Negative result. I was very relieved.

It feels like Everyone is dealing with a lot at the moment. So I need to look for the kindnesses people show each other.  Every smile, every comment of concern, all acts of humanity -small gestures, big efforts-, build the bigger jigsaw picture that will get us through these overwhelming times.

 Bite sized kindness can change the world. That is my take away.

 

 

 

No heartbeat

Ah - you found me. Thank you.

  Time is a currency, and your spending moments reading this blog gives a sense of value to my thoughts, so whether you stumbled here by accident, or sought me out, or got sent here by the magical whisperings of connections, I welcome and appreciate your company.  

Momentous things happen in just seconds…. the build up and ramifications take much longer, sometimes several life times, but the actual event is usually as fleeting as sneeze. So fast, in fact, that often it just fits into a regular day, and only later surfaces as a momentous occasion that deserves a second look. So I want to revisit some seconds that have shaped my life, and give them the gravity, and words, they deserve.

I hope you can relate to that feeling.   Please be generous with me - I may get messy, or confused.  I may even anger the grammar police.  I may annoy without intending to.  I see those as positives. Anyway, let's see how we go, and if we are compatible.  

"There's no heartbeat."  Her voice was flat, with a hard edge.  It wasn't her fault she had to tell me this news, although I think she resented it, judging from her phone call to the gynaecologist who had sent me to her.  She had turned the monitor away from my view, so I lay on the examination table, a human coffin, willing the tiny odd looking being inside me to come back to life.  It had been the Pregnancy from Hell.  I vomited every day, had to have a slew of blood tests, knew that this foetus did not match all the health markers of  "normal pregnancies" and there was the complication of placenta previa.  In fact, I had been sent to this specialist to have a detailed scan to check for Down syndrome, as I had summarily cancelled the amniocentesis procedure an hour before it was going to be performed.  I longed for this baby with an indescribable ache, so adding any risk of miscarriage or injury scared me.  (By the way, my cancelling a procedure I had been told to do was a huge act of courage on my part.  I usually did what I was told in those days.)

The death of an unborn child is often an unacknowledged trauma.  And when this happened - 20 long years ago- it was not deemed to be worthy of external grief.  Although, as anyone who has been through this sort of ordeal knows, that grief doesn't disappear just because we are not meant to be feeling it.   It, ironically, grows inside you until you are ready to deliver it.  And often that takes longer than 9 months.

The body had to be removed from me the following day.  At 17 weeks, the little being was fully formed, had to be broken into bits before expulsion. And then, an hour or so later, we were sent home to get on with life and deal with the trauma silently and politely.  People dismissed our experience with statistics (one in eight pregnancies is thought to end in miscarriage - usually before the 12 week mark) or with pseudo care ("you can have another one") or even with religious jargon ("It was not in God's plan").  So silence was easier to deal with.  It is a personal loss. 

It took just seconds to hear that the baby had died.  It has taken me years to process.

(It was not my first miscarriage, or my last pregnancy....it is just the place I wanted to start this blog.)

This is our only picture of Bug, taken at 12 weeks, when she was happily tumbling and dancing so much the radiographer didn't think she would stay still long enough for us to have an unfuzzy picture.