Travel diary excerpt: Why I went missing

This trip is going to be different.  Last year, when Dani died, I said I was going to Argentina to cry for two weeks.  And I did.  And I do.  But this is a holiday.  I am excited about it because it’s a proper holiday.  I’ve even rented an apartment!  An apartment in one of my favourite streets in the world:  Hipólito Yrigoyen, a narrow, dark strip that crowds French and Italian style architecture among the shops selling fountain pens and cashmere.

It’s the single woman’s experience, except that I’m not a single woman any more.  I’ve done, and loved, solo travelling both pre- and post-Shane, but things have changed dramatically, and suddenly it’s a wrench to consider 2 1/2 piddling weeks away from the man.  I’ve told him off already for spoiling solo travel for me, but while sympathetic, he also seemed pretty smug.

Missing people is fairly new to me, and I don’t cope with it terribly well.  My daughter cottoned on a little while ago that I tend to pick fights before I go on a trip, and she forewarned Shane.  That was literally the first time I’d heard this, so with this new level of self-awareness, I was on the lookout for any impulse I may have to pick a fight, and didn’t.  That avenue of release and detachment closed to me, I had only one course left to me:  get melancholy and miserable.

I said “I love you” to Shane before he said it to me, but he said, “I miss you” first, and this revelation freaked me out fifty times more than my confession of love could ever have freaked him.  “Ummm…” I stammered, “I don’t really do the missing thing…”

I’ll make the reason simple, so that I don’t sound too maudlin.

When I first migrated, I missed everyone and everything, but as the years wore on, and memories became half-forgotten dreams, I actually started to believe that I’d never see any of it again.  It was just easier, less painful, to shut the missing function down.  Any pangs or yearnings were dealt a swift, fatal blow.  Add to this a first husband who was absent much of the time when my definition of wifely support included never complaining about such things, and yeah, I did absences really well.

When my first post-first-marriage boyfriend Nigel rang from England where he was visiting family, he also dropped the M-word.  There was an awkward, interminable pause.  “Well?” he finally asked.  I explained that I didn’t really miss people.  By that time – having returned to Argentina after a 26-year absence and reconnected with family – I was allowing myself to miss, and saw that acknowledging people’s absence in my life was a healthy, normal thing to do.  But this hadn’t worked its way to, you know, men.  He was speechless.  From memory, I think there may even have been a small sigh.

“That,” he finally said, “is pretty hard.”

I apologised, ashamed of my hardness, but at the same time resigned to it.  I shrugged.

“That’s the way it is.”

No, that’s the way it was.

Last time I saw Shane I pleaded with him that should I die while overseas, he should pretend that on our last night together I came to bed wearing something flimsy and delicious, instead of collapsing in what I’d been standing in.

“If you die, that last thing I’ll remember will be lingerie,” he scoffs.

I prod a bit.

“I’ll be thinking of your eyes, and your huge grin.  The feel of your skin.  Your laughter.  You singing around the house.”

Let’s face it:  the very least I can do is miss the guy.

10/4/11

Lulu who?

I came into this job partway through the year.  For the first time in my life I am teaching adolescents – what we know as “disengaged youth” – and I haven’t yet reconciled my practice of adult learning principles with my practice of maternal principles.  Because of this, it’s probably the toughest gig I’ve ever had.

I was forewarned about these kids’ behaviour, but for all their using my markers to draw penises on the whiteboard, submitting worksheets written in Texta, their protests of “But Vee, you don’t understand: we don’t write”, their arriving drunk on campus, the biggest warning should have been about the open door.

I learned about the open door from my colleague K, who makes herself available to the students when they have issues to discuss.  And these kids have issues.  In my 40s, I am beginning to understand how sheltered I have been from certain elements in the world, even with a childhood that includes growing up in a secret warzone and having automatic weapons aimed in my direction.  But whatever I have experienced in my life, I have never experienced anything that is designed to keep me in place.  In fact, the reason my past is behind me is so that it can give me constant kicks up the arse.  Maybe it’s one of those kicks that got me here in the first place.

These kids often see this program as a last chance, and sometimes as a refuge from home.  When students walk through the open door to talk out their stuff, we listen, we act as much as we can within the limits of our duty of care, and then when they’re gone we debrief, wring our hands, and sometimes go home and shout or sulk a bit.  Or cry a bit.  I’ve spent a lifetime protecting my own children, but the powerlessness and frustration of being unable to protect children who are equally deserving is extreme. It may not drive me to drink, but it drives me to wish lung cancer on an abusive, emphysemic step-father, and I’m certain that has to be just as bad, if not worse.

The problem here is that it’s the end of the year and there is no closure.  I want closure because I’m used to it with my adult students, but most of all I want it because I’m a storyteller, and at the end of the story I want Lulu singing, I want students standing to attention on desks, their bright futures reflected on their faces, ready to seize the day every day for the rest of their lives.  But it’s not a story.  A week to go before we enter results into the system, and K and I have no idea where these kids are going to be the week after that when they stop attending, let alone next year, or next decade.

A week to go, and the student who is being emotionally abused has taken to self-harming with a car cigarette lighter.  The student who’s been fending for herself since she was 14, when her separated parents decided to make themselves new lives independent of their children, had a machete held to her throat at her new share house.  Parents tell the student with the talent, the ability, and the fire in the belly not to get a second job because it’ll affect her Centrelink payment.  A mother tells us at interview that she doesn’t have any expectations of her children, including the artistic son sitting next to her at aforementioned interview, just so she won’t be disappointed when they don’t amount to whatever hopes and dreams she might have had.

The day before the last day, we have a special lunch together.  After the hot dogs, soda pop and ice cream, but before the monumental food fight, the kids surprise K and me:  they’ve written a speech for each one of us.  A full A4 page of all we’ve done, and all they’ve achieved thanks to us, and how grateful they are.  Our eyes mist up, which satisfies both the kids and the teachers.  This is it:  our “Captain, my Captain” moment.

End credits would be nice at this point, but there’s another day to go.  A group composed of a student I’ll call Miss Junior Narcissist and the inwardly terrified kids who don’t want to get on her bad side gang up on the lovely odd-bod and reduce him to tears.  After I’ve shouted at the gang and called them cowards, and copped a serve myself for my trouble, the door is open.  When we’re alone and talking about it, he tells me that his mother didn’t have the bus fare for him to get to school that day, and they had to scrabble all over the house for loose change until they managed to scrape together enough for him to attend.  “Oh, mate,” I say to him, “I am so sorry.”

He shrugs.  “That’s my life.”

A day like any other day

We’re pretty sick-making, I know we are, but we can’t help it:  we’re just so into each other.  Into each other to the point where we constantly look at each other in disbelief and shake our heads at our dumb luck.  Where I have tears spring to my eyes, or where he goes all thing.  And we’re smug.  It’s the contradiction to the disbelief, but I guess we’re allowed ourselves the gloating that comes from finding a relationship worthy of our super-dooper hoo-daddy new-and-improved selves after crushing divorces.

So this weekend we were kid-free and at large, and spent it doing what we do so well:  being sickeningly into each other.  Perfect moment after perfect moment after perfect moment of closeness and togetherness and laughter and passion and talk, until today when we found ourselves in a café eating breakfast at 1.30 in the afternoon, clasping hands across the table, while I was allowing myself another self-indulgent tear and he was shaking his head again.  Outside, it was a brilliant, storybook day of sun and blue and puffy cloud and children playing in the park.  Even the green was that otherworldly green you know doesn’t belong in a land of fire and dust.  The only thing missing from the scene, he said, was a kite.  Suddenly, he narrowed his eyes and said, “Hang on… if I’m not very much mistaken… if I’m not very much mistaken… it’s our anniversary.”

I grabbed my mobile phone and checked the date.  The man was right.  It was the third anniversary of our first date.  And first dates aren’t usually very significant, except that ours pretty much instantly sealed the deal – even if we didn’t realise it at the time – so we happily celebrate it as The Day When Everything Changed.

“So it’s our anniversary, and we were having this beautiful time together before we knew it was our anniversary?  We were actually celebrating before we realised we should be celebrating?” I asked.  He nodded.  “Yep.  We tend to celebrate a lot.”

I have realised many things in this relationship, but this is one of the most important, if not the most important.  That there is daily thanksgiving and honour for what we’ve been given, not just in our words but our deeds towards each other, to the point where an anniversary can literally be like any other day, means I will not have to wait ever again.  The day I waited for all my life arrived three years ago, and though I wait for my eyes to close, I have yet to fall asleep.

The Pain that Only a Woman Can Feel

No, not childbirth.  Merely this:  you are reversing the car, and a complete stranger comes into view in your side mirror and starts winding his arms to indicate how far back you should reverse, what direction you should be moving the steering wheel, and when to stop.  I’m not talking backseat drivers here:  this guy isn’t even in the car.  He just appears by the tail light out of nowhere, and somehow thinks he knows better than you, and somehow you’re supposed to do as he says, and somehow actually be thankful.

Males are not familiar with this pain.  Not even male L- and P-platers.  Not even male semi-truck drivers trying to park juggernauts into the parents-with-prams parking spot near the playground at McDonald’s.  Just women.  And just when backing.

Now – I’m good at reversing.  Excellent in fact, thanks partly to a driving instructor back in the day when driving instructors actually had to instruct you to drive and not just to pass some test, and who spent hours teaching me this, and partly thanks to an ex-husband who had a very nice car he didn’t want dented.  Most of the thanks, however, go to me, for 21+ years of practice; I have reverse parked for most of that time.

“Look, Mac,” I want to say as I hang my head out of the window, “whatever prangs are on this car, I made them going forwards.”

I want to say to this guy that women are famous for doing things backwards.  We dance backwards.  In heels.  We put makeup on using a mirror.  (Translation:  backwards.)  We know (though viral women’s e-mails may be responsible) that “stressed” is “desserts” spelled backwards.  We are somehow more familiar with the size and shape of our bottoms than the construction workers who see us walk past the site every day.

But I don’t, of course.  Because like most women, I have also been taught how to make nice, even when it makes my teeth ache from the gnashing to make nice for a good deed that has made me feel like I should be sitting on a booster seat.   And also because I somewhat sadly realise that women often run so far ahead that we have to walk backwards awhile so the men in our lives have time to catch up.  If they’re lucky.  And savvy enough to know not to tell us how to do any of the million things we do each day; or at least, not if they want to feel the pain that only a man can feel.

Perhaps this guy is feeling a little left behind today and this is just his way to get a little ahead.  In which case, I’ll wave and mouth out my thanks, and it is he who can be thankful.