Hello folks, hasn’t it been a while?! I seem to be making a habit of this whole not posting for a long time before posting a big long update with promises to avoid such lengths of time between posts in future. Well, I’m not making any promises tonight but oh do I have some updates for you!

Since my last post we successfully left Geraldton and we have been in Perth ever since. We have been staying with my Mum and at first we were making regular trips down to Margaret River to search for a home to rent, but then I started having other ideas.

I thought it could be good to go to uni, there’s an old dream I’ve had for most of my adult life that I sorta thought I could probably revisit, which would most likely mean we’d be staying in Perth. Then I wondered how the whole uni thing would work with homeschooling, and decided it wouldn’t so I shelved the idea and resumed looking for a rental in Margaret River. Then one day a few weeks ago I was visiting with a couple of friends and something in my subconscious prompted me to ask them both for more information about the Reggio Emilia inspired school their children attend. Of course I knew a bit about the school already, they’d raved about it for years and I even went to their excellent musical fancy dress quiz night fundraiser a couple of years ago, but I was asking this time with added interest because perhaps, maybe, I could just entertain the thought of sending the sprogs there…?

Ludicrous! We’re homeschoolers, right?

Well, maybe not anymore…

One of the friends arranged for Bean, the sprogs and I to have a look at the school that same afternoon and we discovered it was actually a pretty awesome place which had us thinking that perhaps it could be a good option for us.

A few days after our mini tour the school hosted an evening talk by Tim Gill which, while not telling me anything I hadn’t heard before and certainly not challenging my current values regarding children and childhood, affirmed my feelings that I could probably feel pretty comfortable sending the sprogs to that school.

The classrooms are not like conventional school classrooms, the children don’t have their own desk until end of term/year do us part, instead they have shared tables where children can do desk work as well as couches and mats on the floor. They have a playground called The Wild Space which is dirt, water and uneven surfaces – all the glorious things you never see in children’s playgrounds these days. They play with mud and have a school fire pit. Their school motto is “Listening to Children”… It’s a school, yes, and at the root of it all my educational ideal is natural learning not school, but I have to think about what I want from my life too. I can’t devote myself to homeschooling the sprogs if it leaves me feeling empty and unfulfilled. I really want to go to uni to realise that old dream of mine, and so for that to happen I need to let go of the homeschooling dream (for now?). This school seems to be the closest we’ll get to our educational ideal while not actually homeschooling so we’re giving it a go.

We know four families who are part of the school community and we feel comfortable with their positive assessments of the school, the children as well as the adults, so Sprout is having a trial week there next week. At the end of the week, if she is happy and we are happy, we will enroll her in full time* preschool next year and Moe will probably attend their three year old program 2 days a week.

Bean has been away at work the last 9 days, he’ll be home again from Monday night until Friday morning before he’s away another 11 days (11:3 fly out roster until early January). If this school thing works out we’ll be staying in Perth and needing to find ourselves a more permanent home than my long suffering Mother’s house. More exciting adventures afoot for The Wilde Things.

Aaanyway I reckon that’s enough huge news for one post, I’ll update you on the uni thing if/when it happens…

Wish us luck for school next week, I wonder if we can be organised enough to get there on time with all the bits and pieces that we are supposed to have with us?! That’s probably the most daunting part for me.

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*Every Wednesday the students from all years, including high school, finish at lunch time so the teachers can do weekly professional development sessions. I’m really excited that if we go with this option we’d still have some time together during normal school hours to visit places that are usually quite busy outside of normal school hours, or to just hang out together at home.

Here in Geraldton we’ve been living in a suburb called Beachlands. It’s full of old fibro houses and it’s a bit ugly, but there’s no other houses between ours and the beach. There is our road, a big wall, a four lane highway, a train track, and another road, but no other houses so that makes it beachfront right?! Ha.

We’ve only been to the beach a handful of times since we’ve been here, much less than once a week on average. There was a time where I was ducking over there for a solitary walk as soon as Bean got home from work but then his hours changed for the Winter and it was getting dark by the time he was dropped back from work each day so the walks didn’t continue.

Bean’s hours have changed again and it’s starting to warm up a bit here now. The last few days it has been hot. In fact, last night was so hot I slept in my undies with the ceiling fan on. I’ve been joking that it must be Geraldton’s comfort tax on my enjoyment of the beach yesterday, because we really enjoyed it.

Yesterday was the second consecutive day we wandered over there after Bean walked in the door at the end of the day and it was just lovely.

The sprogs played chasey with the waves, I scrunched my feet in the sand, we talked about what next… and we’re none the wiser after talking about it. Really, what next?!

I left the sprogs digging a pool at the water’s edge with Bean and went for a short walk up the beach. Even though I’ve been so lonely up here and I’ve been craving companionship I have felt desperate for time alone too. I’ve felt overwhelmed by the mundane nature of daily life up here. I’ve felt that my life has revolved around making food, cleaning up after the sprogs and entertaining the sprogs with little to no outside input. I’ve been on autopilot for a while now, not really conscious of what I’m doing but just acting out of habit.

In the last few months I’ve had many low points in my interactions with the sprogs and expectations of them, and myself, that are not based in reality.

The walk yesterday evening, however short it may have been, gave me time to breath and caused a shift for me.

This morning I woke feeling more refreshed than I have in a long time and I felt enthusiastic about spending the day with my sprogs.

Maybe it was the walk? Maybe it’s the knowledge that I’m leaving here in 5 short days? I don’t know, but whatever the cause I’m grateful for it.

The sprogs and I went to the green grocer this morning and stocked up on bananas, strawberries, watermelon and apple. We came home long enough to pop it in the fridge before heading out again in search of a paddle pool. We found one at the second shop we went to, twenty dollars thank you very much. Perfect.

We got home and the sprogs had a little rest while I inflated the pool so when they woke up it was ready to be filled. They hoped in with the hose feeding cold water in while I bucketed in scalding hot water from the tap. As one of the billions of buckets I carted was filling up I remembered the hippy bubble bath we bought yesterday and chucked a bit of that in too. The warm, bubbly paddle pool kept them amused for a couple of hours! When they finally got out we watched an episode of Grand Designs together on ABC iView before they decided they wanted to hop in the pool again about 10 minutes before Bean got home from work. The second time they were in there I decided it looked like so much fun I got my clothes off and jumped in with them.

I started swishing up the water and got some serious bubbles happening, we were a pile of bubbly giggles and it was so much fun. I think I’ll have sore arms tomorrow from all that vigorous water swishing but it was so worth it and the three of us are looking forward to more bubbly fun again tomorrow.

A week or so before Sprout’s 5th birthday this past July we got a brand new car, a Toyota Prius C (funny little hatch back hybrid petrol/electric car). We took it for a maiden voyage to Kalbarri, 150km away from Geraldton, just for the day.

Neither Bean or I had been to Kalbarri before, and obviously the sprogs hadn’t either.

We were suitably impressed. The day was warm and sunny, the people were happy and helpful… with the single exception of the racist git at the fish and chip shop who revealed his racist git-ishness after we’d bought our dinner from him.

When we first got into town we had a hot bevy at one of the cafes, grabbed a new sunhat each for Sprout and I then we took a drive out to some gorges. The Prius did very well on the gravel roads despite being a city car and the sproggets were happy enough to look out the window and be merry since the new car most definitely still had novelty value.

The gorges we were at were very exposed and quite busy so we weren’t so keen to have our lunch there. We got back in the car and found somewhere a little way down the road that offered shade, some water to dip our feet in, and a few less people.

After lunch Bean was itching to check out the surf break Jake’s Point. There was a large rock pool at Jake’s so while Bean was taking photos of surfers and cursing the fact that we couldn’t fit his surfboard into or onto the Prius the sprogs and I had a look in the rock pool. There were a few interesting shells, a crab and a seastar that was unfortunately already dead.

It was windy at Jake’s and the sprogs were getting cold because they’d got their kit off and had a paddle in the rock pool. I chucked a little tanty about not wanting to sit on a beach watching people surf & worrying about how close the sprogs would get to the edge of the rocks so Bean reluctantly agreed it was time to go.

We headed to another couple of beaches for a quick look but my absolute favourite, and the one we spent the most time at was the last one we checked out. Since it’s been a couple of months I can’t recall which of the colourful names this beach had been blessed with, I like to hope it was the one called Rainbow Beach (or something to that effect)…

We parked at the top here and walked down a path in a small gorge to the small, sheltered section of sand & tiny crushed shells.

It was such a magical place, although the sign at the end of the path warning us that lives had been lost at that beach reminded us of the danger in the beauty that lay before us.

We climbed the beautiful sandstone rocks at the far end of the beach to look out to the ocean.

We found ourselves standing next to some rushing water. Dangerously beautiful. We watched the water come in and go out with the tide.

Bean and I held tight to the sprogs hands, taking in the sights and the smells of the sea air before we headed back down to the beach to look at shells.

The sprogs and I managed to make a rainbow with the little crushed shells around us while Bean explored some little nooks under the cliffs on the other side of the beach.

The sun was setting, our tummies were grumbling and we knew we had to get back up that path through the rocks so we started to head back in to town to find some dinner before the drive back to Geraldton.

We found the aforementioned racist git fish & chips which we thoroughly enjoyed eating while watching the sun slip into the ocean at the town beach.

I started writing this post in the two weeks before Sprout’s birthday in July this year. It has sat unfinished in the drafts folder since then. It is perhaps a bit lengthy and heavy to be the first post in over a month, but the subject is one I have found myself thinking of a lot in recent weeks and, well, it’s my blog so here it is in all it’s lengthy, heavy, jumbled glory. Obviously it’s a fractured, incomplete snap shot of how I feel about mothering. At the same time that it’s complex it’s over simplified. Words on a page will never do justice to how I think and feel, and can’t begin to paint an accurate picture of five full years in the life of three people. Reading some of my (more negative) thoughts on my own parenting journey so far may bring up some unresolved emotions for some of you, please be gentle with yourself if you find this to be the case.

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 I did not intend to become a mother when I did.

Something many people know about my family and many more don’t yet know is that our eldest child, Sprout, was conceived the first time Bean and I had sex!

We had known each other a couple of years before developing our relationship from acquaintenceship to friendship and then romance and it was two and a half weeks into that new romance, which we were both enjoying but certainly not serious about, when I learned I was pregnant.

I told my closest friend first. I met her for lunch just hours after I found out, and I said to her,

“We haven’t been together long enough to deal with this!”

Her reply has rather characterised the journey I found myself on.

“No, you haven’t, but you’re going to have to deal with it.”

She was right. No matter the outcome we had to deal with it.

While I am pro-choice, supporting a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy for any reason, abortion was not an option I wanted to pursue myself. This I knew even before telling Bean of our pregnancy.

That afternoon I asked him to come to my house after work despite agreeing that morning when we parted company that we wouldn’t see each other again that day, because of this he knew something was up.

When I told him his response was,

“Oh… Shit.”

We spent a few hours discussing our options. One he suggested which I had lumped with abortion as not being an option, was adoption. His mother had offered her first child for adoption, so it seemed a reasonable option to him. For me, it seemed more painful than the prospect of abortion.

No. I was going to raise that baby myself, should the pregnancy go to term & result in a live birth.

The following 8 1/2 months were an absolute rollercoaster.

Our non-committal fling became suddenly serious.

Bean and I had chosen to stay together, seeing no good reason to separate simply because of an unplanned pregnancy. We were still enjoying each other’s company so we figured we may as well continue with our new relationship while that was still the case.

We called our foetus “Snottygobble” after a silly conversation we’d had about how so many of our hippy mates named their babies after trees – Jarrah, Karri, Wattle, Wandoo, Marri, Oak, Ash… We decided our baby would be calld Snottygobble after a small shrub that is native to the south west of Western Australia.

We often joked about our situation together and with friends, and we still do today, but the reality for both of us was (and is) not a joke.

Our relationship was hard. Being pregnant was physically and emotionally draining, something that Bean couldn’t, and in reality didn’t really want to, understand. Bean moved in to my Mum’s place, where I was staying, when it became clear we weren’t going to find a rental in the competitive rental market at the time. I was worried, I didn’t want to be living at my Mum’s place when I was about to become a mother myself. I was supposed to be an adult! Also, I was planning a home birth yet had no home of my own. Bean went out several nights a week and stayed out really late, often until sunrise or later, always coming home drunk or hungover. I began to seriously believe I’d be a single Mum, sometimes I look back on that time and wonder why I didn’t boot him out then, why I put up with his immature ways of hiding from the truth of an unplanned pregnancy. We both dealt very differently with the fact that we were to become parents in a few short months and we were incapable of supporting each other effectively.

My Mum ended up deciding to buy an investment property which we were to live in. Mum took me with her to look at a couple of houses, she went with the first one we looked at. It needed painting, and my elder sister suggested some no VOC clay paints which meant I could do some of the painting even though I was pregnant. My sister came most days with her own 3 month old baby while her elder child was at kindy, she worked hard to have the house ready for us to move in to with time for me to still get my nesting instinct on. She was such a huge support during that time (and many other times in my life!), I called her several times in tears over something Bean had done or a miscommunication between the two of us.

I came to love Bean, but at the same time I resented him. He wasn’t the one that pregnancy was happening to. He could still walk away at any time and regain the life he’d lost. He was still clinging to the life he had before we were together, minus the picking up at parties part. I felt so scared that he’d keep doing it after our baby was born, that I’d have no support from him.

Closer to the end of my pregnancy Bean began to decline invitations to go out, I was not up for going out as much as we’d used to and he was starting to choose to stay home with me rather than leave me home alone. Still, we didn’t really talk seriously about the elephant in the room – the big belly between us.

The first time he held our daughter after her birth I felt a shift in him. He began to become the father I had hoped he’d be. They now have a very strong bond. If I’m honest it’s much stronger than the bond between me and Sprout.

Our relationship was still a rollercoaster. Bean did some very hurtful things that caused a lot of damage and I spiralled into a deep depression.

Breastfeeding Sprout was intensely painful and a huge source of grief. Ever since I was a young child I’d known I would breastfeed my babies, I was breastfed until two years old and I intended to do the same for my own children. It never occured to me that breastfeeding might be less than easy, less than perfect. It’s natural, it’s the way babies are supposed to be fed so it should be easy, right? So very, very wrong.

Sprout had a tongue tie, it was misdiagnosed until she was 6 months old.

For the first 6 months of her life I went to breastfeeding clinics, maternal and child health nurses, lactation consultants and GPs seeking a diagnosis and a cure for the pain breastfeeding caused. I was diagnosed with thrush, vasospasm, “red haired woman’s nipples” (they’re apparently very sensitive?!), imaginary pain and bacterial infections. I took so many different remedies both pharmaceutical and natural. I hated myself for being broken and not having boobs that just worked. I stubbornly continued to breastfeed, despite the physical pain and the emotional turmoil. In hindsight I’m not sure that it was the best thing to do, but then I’d probably be saying the same thing now if I had chosen to give up breastfeeding.

Finally, with help from a friend and her friend who is an ABA counsellor I found a care provider who diagnosed the tongue tie and another care provider who believed breastfeeding was a good enough reason to divide a tongue tie. There was a light at the end of the tunnel. This breastfeeding hell could almost be over, and then I could get on with being a normal breastfeeding woman. I could get on with enjoying mothering.

Under 6 months of age a tongue tie can be divided with ease in a paediatrician’s rooms. Unfortunately, Sprout’s wasn’t discovered until she was just over 6 months old so she would require a general anaesthetic in hospital. After 6 months babies are too aware and it’s too risky to put scissors into the mouth of an older baby. Sprout went on a waiting list at the children’s hospital and at 10 months old she had the proceedure done.

Unfortunately it made little difference to the pain I experienced. By 10 months she’d worked out how to get the milk from my breasts, I had a huge oversupply and so she had become lazy in her feeding. I was shattered. I’d hoped and wished and willed that moment to be the end of my breastfeeding woes. I went on to feed her until she was 21 months old when I decided that enough was enough, I couldn’t quite make it to 2 years. I believed by that stage that any good that breastfeeding her was doing was being undone by the way I had been unable to cope with the constant pain. Breastfeeding became an exercise in emotional detatchment, not the bonding experience it was supposed to be.

The breastfeeding problems, while huge and at times all consuming, were just another layer to the overwhelming desperation I felt. I was so lonely there in the suburbs with my new baby. I was the first of my friends to have a baby, so I drifted apart from a lot of them once I was stuck at home with this child I hadn’t really planned to have. Friends were busy working during the days and socialising with each other during the evenings. I pushed some of them away because I couldn’t bear to show them how poorly I was doing. I wanted to be seen as someone who had it together, someone who had taken an unplanned pregnancy in her stride and become a wonderful mother. Not the scared, overwhelmed, ill-equipped, crying mess that I really was.

I made some new friends who were mothers, all with similar views on parenting as me. I felt simultaneously grateful for those women and also so afraid they’d decide I wasn’t worthy of their friendship that I pushed a lot of them away and greatly pissed off several of them too.

Sprout was a delight. She was, and is, happy and funny. My Mum always said, and still says, she’s full of the joy of life. I agree with my Mum on that one, Sprout is certainly joyful. She’s also very intense. She’s incredibly social, she’s very smart and observant, she’s loud, she’s attention seeking, she’s high energy. She needs a lot of stimulation, a lot of interaction, and a lot of physical exercise to maintain a level of calm that I can deal with.

A month after I weaned Sprout we began trying to conceive another baby. We tried once, and we succeeded. Sprout’s very high energy personality was revealed to me in fullness a short time after our second child was conceived.

Once again, my good friend hindsight tells me that perhaps I needed to spend a bit more time with Sprout before having a second baby, she was still a baby herself after all. I really wanted to have a second baby though, I wanted the chance to get breastfeeding right – I could have given myself more of a break before I started again. I wanted the chance to be a confident and experienced Mum, not a scared and unsure new Mum – I could have given myself the chance to become Sprout’s confident Mum.

It doesn’t matter anyway really, even though I was able to be more confident as a second time mother to a new baby I’ll always be a first time mother to Sprout. My poor eldest child who will cop all of my most experimental parenting. My poor eldest child who I was, and am, grossly unprepared for.

We’ve had a really rough start, at times I’ve thought I should have made the choice to terminate that unplanned pregnancy because this mothering gig is too hard and I feel like I’ll spend my whole parenting career fucking her up. I know I don’t really feel that, but oh I never knew how hard being a mother could be. I wouldn’t trade her for anything, my difficult, joyful, loving, frustrating, funny, clever and delightful Sprout. Completely unplanned and yet completely loved.

The house we’re renting for our short time in Geraldton is furnished. Not one single item of furniture in the house is to my taste, but whatever hey? We’re only renting it for four months and two of them have passed fairly incredibly uneventfully already.

The house comes with television. Three of them actually.

This is the first time Bean and I have ever lived in a house with television. Neither of us owned a TV when we got together so we saw no good reason to change that once we started living together. Blissfully we’ve lived without TV, relying on our computers to view TV shows and movies online when we wanted.

Last year, while living through a wet Winter in the tiny shed, I introduced the sprogs to Playschool. When we needed a change of mood and heading outside or to another room (we didn’t have another room!) was out of the question I’d put an episode of Playschool on the computer, buying half an hour of mental space for me and entertainment for the sprogs. Before this they’d had very little exposure to screens, always at other people’s homes.

Moving to a house with TV was a bit weird for us, it gave us another thing to do, but it was a thing we’d actively chosen not to do before now.

The (only) thing I love about this house is the amount of storage space. We have such a small amount of stuff here with us that we can’t possibly fill all the cupboards with it so there was plenty of room to put the wall decorations* into an unused cupboard where I don’t have to look at them and there was room in the same cupboard for two of the televisions also. Brilliant!

The third, and (by far) the largest television was in the loungeroom. It took up about 2.5 square metres of floor space (at least a quarter of the available floor space), the chairs all faced it and it constantly demanded attention, whether it was on or not.

We got a little sucked in to it, what with having no friends locally and being tempted by it’s awesome time passing ablities.

The sprogs watched a bit of ABC for kids. It became a more dominant feature in our lives where our previous screen time experience  was all about watching an episode or two of a chosen show before continuing with other screen-less activities. The TV was turned on and they watched whatever was on. They watched TV to pass time, using it as a fast forward button on the day rather than as a tool to enjoy a specific program.

There were shows (always children’s shows) which scared the sprogs and caused nightmares later on, but Sprout would always get upset if I turned the show off. Moe never really got so sucked in, if the show didn’t interest him he’d walk away and find something else to do.

For Sprout though the TV became a bit like a drug. Understandably, she was (is!) bored, there’s little for them to do at this house between the times we’re out and she wanted to pass the time. She became aggressive and violent, particularly immediately after the TV was turned off. Her capacity to enjoy time spent doing other home based activities diminished, her desire to do anything other than watch TV diminished. She began pleading and bargaining for more TV time.

The final straw for me was when she hit Moe for standing in the way of the TV. I was worn down by all the begging, I was irritated and overstimulated by the overwhelming images flashing before our eyes, the loud noises, the silly voices – children’s television is a lot brighter, louder and more intense than it was when I was a child.

That night I asked Bean to help me move the TV into one of the storage spaces and move the sprogs toys into the loungeroom.

It seemed so silly that their toys were in the sleep out, farthest from the main living area than any other room in this little shack, with no heating and flimsy fibro walls while the massive eyesore of a TV was in the heated loungeroom.

In a short time we had the TV out of sight and the toys in its place. The sprogs were delighted the following morning to wake to their toys in an already warm room.

There have been some questions about the TV, but they were answered and we’ve moved on. We’re back to the occasional episode of Playschool or some other short children’s show on the computer, with Bee Movie** showing most days while I’ve been sick this past week.

There are certainly times I wish we did have the TV set up so I could turn it on to a channel designed for children and have some peace myself, but the reality is that the break isn’t worth the angst at the end of it, nor does it feel like a break when there’s irritating TV noise in the background.

I’m glad we had the brief fling with TV, it had been so long for either Bean or myself that we’d forgotten what we didn’t really like about TV before, so it was good to be reminded. It was good to see such a huge impact on Sprout’s behaviour, which we were able to discuss with her and she was eventually able to recognise in herself. I’m glad we can now say we know rather than merely suspect that selective viewing, rather than turning on a TV and watching whatever is available at the time, works far better for our family.

*Wall decorations that made me cringe were not to my taste.

**The only children’s movie the sprogs aren’t frightened by.

One morning earlier this month Bean called me from work to tell me he was not supposed to be at work because his 5 day break was scheduled to start that day and they’d just forgotten to tell him!

I was irritated by the news because had we known earlier we could have gone to the WA Natural Learning Network camp that was due to begin the following day. Bean suggested we still go.

The camp was at Donnelly River, 720km from Geraldton.

“Yeah!” we thought, we can totally pack and drive there in one day. And you know what? We did it!

It was so very, very worth it. We made the decision at noon, by 3pm we’d eaten a decent lunch, packed the kombi and were driving toward Perth. We got to my Mum’s place in Perth at around 8.45pm and we stopped for the night. We left for Donnelly River the next morning and we got there around 1pm, a couple of hours before the rest of our group started arriving. We drove in rain the whole way from Geraldton to Perth and then from Perth to Donnelly River, but the rain stopped when we arrived at Donnelly and didn’t start again until we were leaving a couple of days later. Perfect!

As soon as we arrived we were mobbed by very friendly kangaroos and emus, all wanting to know if we had anything edible in our pockets.

After some time spent patting kangaroos & being gawked at by much more cautious emus we managed to get up the stairs and away from the wildlife, drop our stuff inside our cottage and go for a walk around the village.

Most of the rest of the group arrived that afternoon and evening, with a few arriving the following day too.

That night we had a shared meal at the old mill worker’s club which was fun, chaotic, LOUD and very fulfilling for the sprogs.

After dinner we visited our old friend who is the relief manager for the village and drank cups of tea around his fire while the sprogs played with his drum kit and drew pictures at the table. Quite late at night we trotted back to our cottage for a very, very cold night’s sleep.

The next day our group hired the flying fox for a few hours and the children all ran in and out of each other’s cottages, rode bikes along the street, fed the animals from brown paper bags full of food from the general store and bottle fed some orphaned lambs.

That second evening, which was to be our last, we asked the managers if they had a heater we could use in our cottage because our fire was not heating the space. The cottage next door, which our friends were staying in, was very warm where ours was cold and our fire had been going all day while they’d lit theirs just an hour or so before. The managers couldn’t find a heater and offered to move us to a different cottage as well as reimbursing us for the night and giving us two bottles of wine.

We accepted their offer to move, and gave the wine to our friends who had been sharing their wine and beer with Bean and sharing their warm loungeroom with all of us for the evening.

That night we all slept so well in our new cottage that we decided to request an extra night rather than a reimbursement for the previous night. Our request was granted so we spent the day hanging out with the group rather than packing and heading home.

The next day rain was forecast so we decided to pack early and head off once the rain set in.

The drive back to Perth was pretty scary. A storm had hit and trees were being uprooted in the paddocks next to the road, trees had fallen over the road, large road signs were ripped out with footings still intact and we passed a caravan that had been blown on its side while being towed in the other direction. We made it back to Perth in one piece though, where we had dinner with some old friends before heading back to my Mum’s place for the night.

For the return trip to Geraldton we took the new Indian Ocean Drive, a much nicer drive than the inland roads. The sprogs were so tired after the weekend they were happy to stop infrequently and Van Halen (the white kombi) didn’t miss a beat, sitting comfortably at 60mph on the open roads, so we made it home in good time.

It took me over a week to get to the bottom of mount washmore once we were home, but luckily the post camp high lasted just as long.

A brilliant spontaneous weekend. We’re looking forward to the next camp.

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Thank you all for your kind comments for my last post both on the blog and via email. I tried to respond to you all, however some of the emails were eaten in cyberspace as both I and my computer got used to the new mobile phone internet connection.

This camp came just after I wrote that post and vastly improved my state of mind.

I’ve been quite down these last few days, well in truth I’ve been down for years but it’s an up and down kind of down and lately it’s been feeling a lot more down and a lot less up than usual.

I feel on the verge of nervous breakdown and I wonder if that’s because we’re on the verge of paying off all our debts and having some financial breathing space which would mean I don’t have to keep plodding on. In a few short months I could drop my bundle and leave it to Bean to pick up the pieces and we wouldn’t have creditors knocking on the door asking jufor their money. Realistically I could ask for a break, I could escape on a backpacking holiday – the kind I never took before having kids. Of course, I won’t do that. I won’t leave Bean and the sprogs while I feebly attempt to recapture the beautifully free irresponsibility of my pre-parenthood days. It’s just that I could…

I wonder if that is why my ability to cope seems so diminished, because it’s not so long until I don’t really have to cope. Soon I’ll have an emotional freedom that only comes with not owing any money, my family won’t be bound to this lifestyle of one parent working long hours out of the home and the other working long (lonely) hours in the home. We can still do that if we want, but we can also not do it if we want. We’d be free to choose.

I called Bean in tears today.

“I can’t do this anymore. I can’t look after these kids. I can’t look after myself. I can’t be THIS lonely anymore. I can’t live here for another 3 ½ months, I can’t start again in this town after the last town. I can’t move again this Spring knowing I have to start fresh AGAIN. I just can’t. I don’t have it in me. I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. This is too much… I need friends. The sprogs need friends. We need to settle, I can’t keep doing this. I want to leave right now.”

I feel like running away again. I say again because I feel like I’ve been running my whole life, burning bridges as I go. In the decade since I first moved out of my Mum’s home I have moved 23 times. The longest I’ve lived in one house in that time is 15 months. Each time I moved I shut down some more, became more anti-social, more insecure. I’ve stood guard by the walls I’ve constructed – some to protect myself and some to protect others from me. I keep telling myself that people need protecting from me because I’m just so bad.

I don’t make friends easily anymore, like I did as a young adult, and I don’t feel like I’m a good enough friend. This then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy because I doubt my ability to be a good friend, and so fail to act in ways that good friends do. I’m too afraid to call people, too afraid even to add old friends on facebook since I got a new facebook account a few weeks ago*. I’m too afraid to offer help in case I offend or it’s the wrong kind. I’m too afraid to ask people about themselves and their lives in case I ask the wrong things, so I just tell them some things about me that I hope makes them like me, but then everyone knows no one likes people who only talk about themselves, right? Growing up in a house with a lot of conflict, I just want to avoid it at all cost, which in my distorted view of reality has become wanting to avoid people at all cost. I’ve become frozen by my fear of “what if…”

I’ve really been confronted with myself in these first weeks in a new town (again!), this time with a little more clarity than the last time I arrived in a new town, all thanks to my experiences in that last town.

I’m feeling desperate, wanting people to like me, but too afraid to invite them to. Too afraid to be likeable.

Maybe it’s because I know I’m leaving again soon? Maybe it’s because I’m afraid of getting close to people, maybe I’m a friendship commitment phobe? Maybe I’m fatigued after our difficult year in Albany? Maybe I’m just royally messed up?!

I feel overwhelmed by my role as a mother. I feel under-qualified and in over my head. I keep wondering when I’m going to start feeling like a real adult, a responsible person who doesn’t get scared and doesn’t make mistakes.

Of course rationally I know that there is no one in the world who doesn’t get scared, and that everyone makes mistakes, but I feel so much less able to be a good adult than all the other adults I know (well maybe not all of them, but most).

There’s that “good” thing again, never feeling good enough appears to be a theme for me… Never good enough at anything, it doesn’t matter what it is.

I worry that I’m letting the sprogs down, I know that I am with all this running. Sprout wants friends, she tells me she does. Moe is too young to care really but he will soon, just like his sister. I know that after this town, in just a few months, we’re settling. We’ll have a steady and comfortable income and we’ll have the means to settle in a place I’ve lived before (and been very happy). The Tasmania dream will not be realised… Bean wants to stay in WA where the work he enjoys is, and with him doing that work we will be able to afford to stay in WA so I’m ok with that, as much as I grieve the dream I had of Tasmania (perhaps a case of rose coloured glasses anyway? Who knows.). We’ll be living near both of my sisters, which is a good thing, all in all I’m happy about our choice of place to settle.

I’m happy the sprogs will have the chance to put down roots, to develop an attachment to a place and its people, to feel that they have a home – somewhere to belong. Yet I am so afraid. I’m afraid of messing up the friend making for them. I’m afraid of not making friends myself, and probably equally afraid of making friends. I’m afraid of dropping my guard and letting new (or even old) friends in, what if they decide they don’t like me after all?

I know it’s silly to dwell on problems (perceived or actual) and so I need to work out a way through this next few months and beyond. How am I going to get through the Winter in Geraldton and how am I going to get through the first months in the next, and hopefully last, town?

This afternoon, after my teary phone call to Bean, I found a junior gym class for Sprout’s age group and a kindy gym class for Moe’s age group. Thankfully Sprout’s class was this afternoon and I’m so glad we went. It was tough to keep Moe from trying to join in (he was out of turn and out of his league!), but it was so worth it for Sprout. Thankfully Sprout will be allowed to join in with Moe’s gym session next week because she’s on the cusp of the age cut off for both kindy and junior gym.

I also found out that the PCYC, where the sprog’s gym classes are, has a fitness centre and they have 3 creche mornings a week so I can potentially have 4 ½ hours of exercise and respite from the sprogs.

I have started an evening yoga class too, last week I did one class and this week I’ll do one class, then next week I’ll begin two classes a week. It’s a case of passing Bean the parenting baton as soon as he gets home and heading out the door for the 90 minute class. Bliss.

I also found a weekly Mum’s craft morning which I’m thrilled about. Once again, crèche included. I am so, so thankful for finding these activities. I hope that through them the sprogs and I will be able to establish some connections to help pass our time in Geraldton joyfully, leaving us feeling refreshed and ready to take on our next, FINAL, move.

On top of those outward and social activities I’m planning a week long juice cleanse followed by a slightly longer raw food cleanse which I’ll begin during Bean’s next five day break. I feel so tired all the time, so worn down by life and needing to shake this feeling of constant fatigue so I think a cleanse will help with that. I did a juice cleanse at the change of each season in the few years before becoming a mother and now I’m not pregnant or breastfeeding I am able to do it again.

I’ve also been getting into my art journaling again, and I’ve found it a powerful tool in the self reflection I’ve been doing. It’s giving me an avenue to confront myself rather than ignoring it.

I’m pondering whether I should combine the art journaling with some mindfulness and gratitude journaling, to try another angle in my bid to shift my tendency to pessimism to a tendency to optimism. I think I’ll have a good chance at turning my pessimistic and self sabotaging attitudes on their head with the cleansing, yoga and journaling.

I want to claw myself out of this depressive slump, I want to enjoy this time here in Geraldton and reinvigorate myself in preparation for our move to our forever town. I’m going to do all I can to do that. If you have any more suggestions please share them, I’m keen to receive them!

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*I deleted my original facebook account a couple of years ago, I needed to separate myself from it and invest a whole lot less energy in destructive online habits.

Well it’s been nearly 3 weeks since the sprogs and I joined Bean here in Geraldton so I’d like to share some of my thoughts on the place (subject to change with time and experience of course!).

I’ll get the rants out of the way first so we can end on a happy note eh?

Geraldton does not do waste well at all. There is no council recycling collection which seems so last century. We can deliver our tin and aluminium cans and our cardboard/paper to a depot but plastic and glass can’t be recycled here. To that I say,

“WOW!”

We don’t seem to use products in cans (other than the occasional can of tuna which Bean takes to work and doesn’t cart home again) and our paper/card is added to our compost heap as the carbon component to balance out the nitrogen rich food scraps. Glass and plastic are the recyclable wastes we generate most of, and we can’t recycle them here! I suppose the positive of that is that it gives us an opportunity to further reduce the packaging waste we bring in to our house in the first place. It’s been rather a rude shock to be producing so much waste at all after our time in Albany where our milk bottles were returned for reuse, the mesh bags and paper bags our vegies came home from the farmer’s market in were returned for reuse and our honey jars were returned for reuse as well. We produced much less household waste then.

I suppose it might take time to get to know where to buy the food we’re used to eating, it did take time in Albany. The farmer’s market here is a fairy average affair, especially when compared to the Albany farmer’s market. They are really trying though, and I hope it takes off. There are likely a lot less fresh produce growers around here than there are around Albany, the climate here isn’t the greatest for growing thirsty crops, so I imagine it’d be tough to find the selection of growers there are on the south coast. Luckily I’ve already found a green grocer who sells a fabulous selection of organic fruit and veg. They have agreed to take a weekly order from us and pack it all loose into cardboard boxes since they otherwise individually wrap their organic produce so they can tell the difference between it and the conventional stuff at the check out. They also stock Margaret River Organic milk (pastuerised but not homogenised) which is a reasonable compromise when raw milk is not available. Short of having our own cow or living within cooee of my dairy farming sister nothing can ever come close to the milk supply we had in Albany. Really, how can you beat reusable glass bottles filled with fresh, unprocessed milk delivered with a smile and a genuine enquiry after your wellbeing? In short, you just can’t.

The weather has been quite lovely, real “holiday” weather. Yesterday it rained for the first time since we arrived and it was a really rather dismal effort at rain, more like a sprinkle really. We’ve been at the beach most days and at the playgrounds every day since getting here. Mornings and evenings call for long sleeves but during the day we’re wearing short sleeves very comfortably, and today is the first official day of Winter. I have a strong suspicion Summer here would melt me into Ms Cranky Pants because Autumn has been about as Summery as I can handle. Thankfully we’ll be out of here early Spring so I won’t get to test that hypothesis.

I’m really glad for the outdoor friendly weather though because the playgrounds here are AWESOME! The best I’ve seen anywhere.

At the town beach there is a fabulous playground with two main sections, one aimed at younger children and one aimed at older children. The equipment over both sections caters to children ranging in age from pre-walking to teenagers. Next to the playground is a water playground that can be turned on by anyone with the press of a button between 9am-6pm each day, yeah… even now that it’s officially Winter.

The sprogs have had hours of fun at the water playground already, it really is fantastic and unlike any other free playground I’ve seen.

And that’s just the town beach playground, the rest of the playgrounds we’ve seen around Geraldton have been fabulous too. The only thing that could make the parks here any better is a play in the park program like the one the wonderful Jamie (the Clown) and his YMCA crew ran in Albany.

Our house is not bad, not a place I’d want to settle for longer that the four months we plan to be here, but it’s not bad. We had some issues with dirty carpets to begin with and in honestly I can’t understand how on earth we’re paying so much for it because it just doesn’t seem worth it (totally foreign rental market up here) but it’s close to the beach which I’ve taken advantage of a few times when I’ve gone for a sunset walk by the ocean all alone once Bean has come home from work. It’s been nice to snatch those moments of solitude because we’re back to having no friends nearby and I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed by the task of parenting the sprogs on my own for such extended hours while Bean’s at work.

Thankfully a south coast friend has put us in touch with a mid west friend and I’ll have to make contact now we’ve landed and settled, so the lonely days can be over real soon…

So far I’m liking Geraldton enough, there’s a lot about it that is awesome and it’s nice to have a change of scenery after a really tough year in Albany.

Well, well, well…

It’s been a while hasn’t it?

We’re in Geraldton now, the sprogs and I have been here for nearly two weeks. It’s been lovely to have our family all back together again.

So much news to share, so little desire to sit here typing for hours!

In a (fairly large) nutshell, here’s what we’ve been up to since the last post 6 weeks(!) ago…

My younger sister had a skate boarding accident (here’s a tip – wear a helmet if you’re planning to ride anything with wheels!) and pretty seriously hurt herself so I decided I’d head to Perth with the sprogs a little earlier than originally planned. I had hoped to help out a bit with my sister’s care since my Mum works casually and has no leave entitlements, as it turns out my sister is a terrible patient and can’t really hack being dependent on anyone so I wasn’t very useful anyway.

My elder sister came to Albany with her husband and their children to help me pack everything up, clean the house and get out of there. Words can’t describe how freaking awesome these people are!

My niece and nephew kept the sprogs well and truly entertained and helped them forget how much they missed their Dad in those early days. My sister came with her special brand of anal retentiveness and awesome cooking (I really, really don’t know anyone who cooks more amazing whole food and I’m not just writing that because I think my sister will read it either!). My brother in law revealed a skill set I was unaware he posessed when he showed himself to be the luggage tetris master. He managed to pack both kombis so full that I found myself making more “clown car” jokes than was probably necessary. My BIL also checked the kombis over for road worthiness, if I’m honest neither would really have escaped being slapped with a yellow sticker if they’d been pulled over that weekend but the major stuff was ok.

After scrubbing that house until it was cleaner that it had ever been before (well, certainly cleaner than the day we moved in to it at least), the sprogs and I piled in to Van Halen to head to Perth, and my sister drove their car which towed a trailer full of our junk while my BIL drove Brigit in convoy to their place on the south west coast where they’ll be garaging Brigit for us until we’re done here in Geraldton.

Once again my sister and her family have helped us out enormously, more than all we’ve ever done for them rolled in to one. It would have been nigh on impossible for me to manage the move and clean up alone, so I (we) are eternally grateful for the help.

In Perth the sprogs and I caught up with some friends, not as much as we’d have liked but the time we did share with old friends was lovely.

Staying with my Mum and sister was quite nice, particularly because the family in the town house next to Mum’s have a two year old daughter and a newborn daughter who both provided hours of entertainment for the sprogs. Spending time with Mum and my sister was nice too, although I felt fairly useless since I’d told myself I’d be helpful and my damned sister decided to need very little help after all!

Bean flew down to Perth a couple of weeks ago for his first R&R break and we drove back to Geraldton together a couple of days after he arrived.

The drive was smooth and fairly uneventful. Bean drove the whole way, figuring he owed it to me after I’d driven solo with the sprogs from Albany to Perth. The man’s a fool, I drove solo because it’s illegal to ask your child to take over! I’d have shared the drive if I had a willing and capable driver sitting in the passenger seat. Anyway, we left a grey and rainy Perth to arrive in a sunny, warm Geraldton and it’s been pretty much like that since we got here.

The locals are talking about how cold it is, and we’re thinking we’ve entered the endless Summer because it’s even warmer than Summer was in Albany this year.

I’ll rave a bit about Geraldton in another post, but for now I’ll leave it at this – THE PLAYGROUNDS HERE ARE AWESOME!