The Cerebral Mum

So.

I just launched a new blog and now have 2 to write for.

I’m a moderator at the Aussie Bloggers Forum.

I’m about to start contributing articles to a group blog.

I’m hard at work getting a charity ready to go public.

And I just got an unexpected letter in the mail. From the Victorian Tertiary Admission Centre.

Apparently, despite the fact that I did not fill out all the requisite forms, or sit the requisite tests, or send off the requisite paperwork, or order the requisite reports, the Powers That Be have (in their great wisdom) decided that they would love to let me back into university this year to finish my Bachelor of Arts.

They aren’t sending me to the one I wanted to go to, though, so perhaps the powers of the Powers That Be are limited. Regardless, on Tuesday I’m off to enrol because of course I can be a single mum, and a moderator, and a triple blogger, and a charity administrator, and university student, at the same time as I single-handedly repair a broken down housewhich I can’t get to because I am currently a little bit blind.

No worries.

Methinks 2008 won’t have a lot of time to spare for depression!

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I didn’t write a Christmas post, or a New Year post so this will be my Year-That-Was post.

Guera, one of my new favourite people, who writes one of my new favourite blogs, A Roaming Aussie Mum, has challenged me to the Favourite Five Meme.

I say challenged because I’m pretty sure that I will find this hard. You see, the meme is this…

Post 5 links to 5 of your previously written posts, one relating to each of these key words:

1. Family
2. Friend
3. Yourself
4. Your love
5. Anything you like

The only thing I ever write about is No. 3. Yes, I am that self absorbed. But I shall give it a shot. You just hold the line while I go hunting.

I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.

(Some time later…)

1. Family

Not just sibling rivalry… is probably the post in which I’ve talked the most about my relationship with my sister, whose house I currently live in. Although I mention her often, I don’t really discuss the details of our relationship, or its ups and down. I don’t discuss those kinds of details for any of my real life relationships, because words are permanent and I hope that I am wise enough to use only the ones I can stand by, and that I have enough integrity to not lash out in an arena where there other has no means to defend themselves. Our relationship isn’t easy, and I talk about that a little in this post, but the overwhelming emphasis is on what is strong and good. As depressed as I may be, as difficult as life sometimes is, I do try to always focus on that.

2. Friend

There wasn’t an obvious choice for this one. There is a post that written for a specific friend in a specific circumstance, Because you remember what I remember…, but my care for her was written obliquely within my thoughts on the nature of friendship. I know it reached her, however and that she understood all that I was trying to say so it is an important post to me. And then there is the The first birthday party…, with a long list of appreciation for many friends who too often get lost in the darkness of my mind. As awful as it is to feel alone and abandoned, it seems somehow worse to fail to recognise those people who do not abandon you and who light your way. This is the post I wrote for them.

3. Myself

Oh, a wealth of choices! I think that makes this an even harder choice. I have a favourite but I have linked to it in several other posts so I’m going to choose the most special one, one I didn’t write myself: The Cerebral Mum, from another perspective. I was so grateful to HG for doing this for me, to help me see myself from someone else’s point of view. It is such a wonderful post in it’s own right, but it also made me feel fortunate to have people like HG in my life, and that perhaps I wasn’t so lost as I imagined.

4. My Love

Love takes many forms, I know, but many of them have been covered by the other key words. The obvious choice is Caspar, but I do not think that I have ever captured in a single post the breadth of my love for him. And I cannot help but read this as meaning an adult love, they kind you have for your partner. I don’t have one, I have written nothing about one., so I’m sitting this one out. At some stage, I will probably write about this kind of love, theoretically, and the way it befuddles me. But that post doesn’t exist yet. The bonus post under “Friend” will have to suffice.

5. Anything I Like

My failed attempt to complete 30 Poems in 30 Days yielded one poem that I love, Sapphics of the deep, so that is my choice. It is imperfect. It was written in a difficult metre that I was unfamiliar with, but to me the words are rich; dense with symbolism and mouth-filling. Those not familiar with the Sapphic may not recognise the rigid form in which it was constructed but for an undisciplined person like myself, restricting my writing in this way and still being able to create something large remains a source of pride.

And now the tagging. I generally don’t tag people for memes. Instead I ask anyone who would like to participate to let me know so that I can add their link. But often no one ever does so today I’ll break that habit and and invite…

1. Karen from Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum
2. Mountainmama from Careful What You Wish For…
3. Anonymum from The Nook of Oz
4. Missy from Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch
5. Stewart from The New USSR, Illustrated
6. Marj aka Thriver from Survivors Can Thrive

There are of course other people I’d like to tag but I’m only supposed to do 5 and January is half gone so many people have already written their retrospectives. If you want to be added, however, let me know because I was never that good at following senseless rules.

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Quite a while ago now I mentioned that I was working on setting up a new charity. We’ve just got the domain name sorted out and hopefully it won’t be long before I’ve got the site up and running. In the meantime, I’m going to tell you a little bit about it and ask anyone who is interested to start knitting.

As you know, my mother was working in Afghanistan recently as a teacher. Things are hard there with the war/occupation/whatever you want to call it. Things are harder in winter. While Afghanistan is an arid country where summer temperatures of 45-50c are not uncommon, in winter it is a very cold. In Kabul the snow can lie for 2 or 3 months and in some places it lasts beyond the vernal equinox. Temperatures of around -24c are the norm. The people there need warm clothes and too many do not have them.

The following letter was written by one of my mother’s students from Kabul.

Now, one can see only the sparkling white mattress laid everywhere. This joyful sight is not long lasting and is suddenly shattered when one thinks of the hundreds of thousands of families who can’t afford to buy fuel for heating.

One starts to abhor snow when one sees child peddlers or beggars running after cars, attempting to persuade those inside to buy their goods or give them some money. It is painful to see women in wet burkhas following cars and begging. One hears stories about families who sleep to cope with starvation, and yet cannot sleep because of the cold.

Children are stood in traffic, hands pulled into their sleeves as an alternative fashion to gloves, their sleeves white with snow. They run, many of them, after cars. Their faces appear at half misty windows, shuddering and begging, Khyrat Bedeh, their breath frozen on their lips. Their eyes tell the tale; they have not had breakfast; their skinny faces show clearly that they have had no food for an unknown period. Their torn jackets complain; they cannot protect them from the snow and cruel cold. Snow falls constantly and covers their hair, then slowly dissolves, changes to drops and slides down, freezing again before they hit the ground.

Some people think of snow as an elixir that helps them triumph over the fear of drought, but snow, for all its beauty, makes some people cry. Cry for a father whose children cry for food and a little warmth. Cry for a mother who begs out in the cold to bring food to her children, while her children cry at home for their mother to be with them. Cry for a mother who squeezes her tiny baby under her jacket to keep him warm, but can’t do anything to feed him. She, herself has not eaten enough, how can she feed her baby?

I can’t cry anymore. Help me cry for a family who live not in a protective shelter, but a tent with many holes in it, camped on a wet piece of ground, crying for enough food and dreaming of a little warmth.

Yes, these parents dream too. They are ordinary people and dream as we do. However, we have much more and dream of a better tomorrow. They dream for today. They dream of bread for their children. They dream of a time when their children are not hungry, and are warm. They dream of a time when they can look at each other knowing their children are satisfied.

It is some time since I first read this letter but reading it again today, it still makes me weep. The charity we are setting up does not require anyone to contribute money, but for those who have the time and would like to help, we are asking you to knit. Socks, beanies, scarves, jumpers, anything… Everything is needed.

At this stage, the items will need to be posted to an address here in Melbourne but we are in the process of organising a collection point in London as well, and hope to set up more collection points in the future. We have arranged for all the garments to be distributed in Afghanistan by Save The Children.

When the site is running, there will be more details available but if you are willing and able to help, please start knitting now. This winter has already descended. We are really hoping to be able to make the next one different for a lot of people.

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A few of days ago, Caspar broke my glasses. This wasn’t unexpected. In fact I was expecting them to fall apart any day even without his intervention. They were old and I was resigned to the fact that soon I would be walking around all geek-like with duct tape holding them together. In order to do that now, however, I would need to know where the arm Caspar snapped off was hiding.

I don’t.

After walking around for a couple of days with my glasses lopsided and falling off every time I moved my head, something worse happened: I lost them altogether. There is a chance that they are somewhere in the house but there is also a chance they are somewhere in the park. And that is not good.

They were annoying me while I was pushing the swing and lifting Cas to the top of the slide and bouncing up and down on the stupid, sprung see-saw.

(Seriously, when was the last time you saw a real see-saw? I mean, just a plank of wood? Is everybody so isolated these days that they don’t even build play equipment for two people any more? And don’t say safety issues. Those sprung things are way more dangerous.)

Anyway, I hung the one-armed glasses over my v-neck so we could play. Then we walked home. I’d like to think that I would have noticed if they were missing when we were walking home but my specs are for distances and walking with Cas generally requires stopping to examine every pebble or flower or leaf along the way. It’s very possible I didn’t actually look up the entire time.

Last night I realised the enormity of this loss. I’m not so blind that I can’t get around the house without them but I wouldn’t recognise my own mother walking towards me in the street. And I certainly can’t drive which, out here, makes grocery shopping both tedious and expensive. It leaves me with the local IGA which has hardly any stock that I would consider food (you know, the stuff that doesn’t come in five layers of packaging) and everything is twice the price.

It also means I cannot get to my house to fix it up, which means I cannot sell my house, which means that I will be stuck here in this hellhole the suburbs, crammed into my sister’s tiny spare room with Cas for the rest of my life. I’m really not feeling good about that.

And I’m supposed to go into the city next week. For the person who’ll be meeting me, I’ll be the one either standing there blankly or waving at anyone and everyone who might seem to be looking my way. If you want me to recognise you, you’re going to have to get close.

Of course, between now and then I might be able to locate them but right now I think the most likely outcome is that tomorrow I’ll find the missing arm.

After all, what is a paper cut without a little lemon?

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Yes, that dastardly ISP did it again. There I was, Caspar tucked in with his bottle for a morning nap and where was the internet, I ask you? Oh, it was there: Just long enough for me to start testing the coding on some elements of the new blog. And then it was gone.

What was saved and where I was at? Good question. Instead of having one more thing ticked off my list and an afternoon of fun, what did I do? I dug my heels in good and deep.

I spent three and a half (yes, that’s 3 ½ ) hours on hold listening to something that soundly vaguely reminiscent of muzak echoing through a mile of rusted pipe, interrupted only by a saccharine voice saying, “We are sorry for the delay. Your call will be answered as soon as possible”. And you know how much I love saccharine.

Of course, it might have been me digging my nose in to spite my face, rather than my heels. My call might have been lost in the ether. I’ve been told on good authority that can happen. (Big Sis. She worked in call centres until her spinal injury.) But, dammit, they’re a communications company! They should be better communicators.

I am stubborn.

(Unfortunately this story doesn’t have a dramatic ending and I can’t recount to you all the scathing things I said to them, the things I know everyone has wanted to say to “service” providers at some stage and gets vicarious enjoyment from hearing, because the connection returned all by itself and I hung up.)

But I have work to do. Just a little bit more tweaking over at Blogging Personal to get it ready for launching. In truth, I could have launched it by now. I have some things written and the site is functional. But I’m scared.

Writing a personal blog and writing a blog intended as a resource are two very different things. No matter how much you frame it as a conversation, because it’s your space it is in some ways a claim to authority. But I’m opinionated and I have convictions and if caring about something constitutes authority then I’m okay with that. I guess.

Another thing that makes it scary is that, even unlaunched, the site has already had a great response and I think that shows how many of us want someone to be talking seriously about personal blogging, not just calling it noise and moving on to how you can make the most money. That feels like a big responsibility and I really hope that I don’t disappoint anyone.

Yes, that sounds megalomaniacal. I’m not saying the worries are justified. I’m just saying that I feel them.

So to get over that, I’ve set the launch date in stone. The first post is being published on Tuesday, January 15, come hell or high water, so I’m off to spend the evening tending to my new baby, making sure everything is perfect for its arrival.

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This isn’t the most uplifting blog and even without my current state of mind, It will probably never be. I’m a serious person and, when I’m at my best, I have serious things to say. Intense, exhausting and emotional are probably the three most common criticisms of my character. The first two I accept but as criticisms go, I often consider the things I care about more important than them. The third one I reject as entirely mistaken. Having a passion for ideas is not the same as being emotional.

Having made that grandiose - and serious, and not uplifting - statement, that doesn’t mean that I don’t smile, or laugh, or feel happy. Sometimes I am am full of glee, like a child. So tonight, before I start playing in my theming sandbox (it is my night off after all), I’m going to take a leaf out of Lightening’s book, and have a Smiley Saturday.

I love rolling down hills.

In fact, anything that children take pleasure in, from climbing trees to fairy floss, gives me unadulterated joy.

I like how that word begins with “un-adult”. It should tell us something.

The word adulterate actually comes from the latin ad., “to”, and alterare, “alter”. The resultant latin verb, adulterare, means “to corrupt” and the word adult does not have the same etymology. It’s from adultus, the past particle of the Latin adolescere, “to mature”. Why am I telling you this, when this post is supposed to be smiley? Because that’s the kind of thing that makes me laugh.

I like my sense of humour.

The jokes I tell that I enjoy the most are silly plays on words and often nobody understands why I’m giggling. Someone will say some commonplace phrase and I’ll complete their sentence by finishing the quote from so long-forgotten poet they didn’t realise they were quoting. And I laugh because of the games that language plays. It’s weird contradictions, it’s accidental conflations. I laugh because they are looking at me blankly and I realise the odd, quixotic nature of my mind. I laugh at myself.

Un-adult isn’t really a particularly funny one but it does bring me to something that really does make me smile. A person. He’s not an adult and he makes me smile all the time, no matter how I feel.

He makes me smile when I ask him, What does a fish say?, and he pop-pops with his mouth, almost making the sound.

He makes me smile when he throws himself face down into the froth of my doona, with complete trust that there will be a soft landing, in spite of the bruise he got mis-aiming not so long ago.

He makes me smile when he sees the cat and leans down to rest his head on the its belly, giving it a cuddle.

He makes me smile every time he awakens and wants me to lift him to “touch the moons”, the mobile above his bed, still wondrously tracing their outlines when he catches one although he sleeps beneath them every night.

Those words make me smile: I like my son touching the moon.

He makes me smile because whenever he hears music he dances.

He makes me smile because he cannot get enough of pointing at things for me to name for him.

He makes me smile because he knows far more words than I am even aware of.

He makes me smile because he is purely himself. He is unadulterated.

And I plan on doing everything I can to keep him that way.

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