Back to Work

Life has begun to return to whatever 'normal' is in our household. Mr M went back to playschool on Wednesday and Thursday, and now begins each day by announcing 'I am not going to school today'. It was orientation week at the university and so the demands of students are beginning to refocus J's mind.

I returned to work on Thursday and Friday to attend a training course. It's easy to be cynical about these things - and resentful because how will the office cope if you are away for two days - but it was a surprisingly useful course. Okay, we all know how to delegate and how to build teams. And we all admit we don't do either of these things as well as we might. But over the two days I had the opportunity to meet people I have never ever seen in seven years in my current place of employment. Not only that, we had the opportunity to get to know each other and work together. Now that was worth going to the course for. The course was called 'Leading From Any Position' and it was a useful reminder to stop grumbling about what you think can't be done and start doing what can be done. It brought to mind a saying I learned (I think) at another course: the only thing you can change is yourself.

The other big achievement for the week (and this is really big) is that I cleaned the bathroom. The sad thing about this is that I can tell you the last two times I cleaned the bathroom and that's not because they occurred in the last month. In the last 12 months I have cleaned the bathroom three times - on Wednesday, in October before I returned to work, and on 15 March before I had surgery. The October cleaning was particularly memorable because I broke a tile in the shower, finally knocked the vanity's wobbly leg right off, and broke a moneybox. I love a clean bathroom but cleaning it is one of the most depressing things I can do. The bathroom is old and the shelves are too full of trinkets and the cleaning process seems to emphasise all it's faults. I dream of the day when it is completely renovated.And I will keep dreaming. But at least, for the moment, I have a clean bathroom, some sense of achievement, and a renewed commitment to cleaning it again ... in less than four months.

Good Intentions

I had intended to write a long post about joining the crowds on the lawns of Parliament House for last week's National Apology to the Stolen Generations. But my evenings have been the victims of Mr M's disrupted sleep patterns. Some nights, bedtime is pushed back because he has succumbed to an afternoon sleep. Other nights, like tonight, bedtime is pushed back because he has developed a range of strategies to avoid closing his eyes. They include choosing at least six bedtime stories; asking for stories to be told after the light is turned out (Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a current favourite); organising four Wiggles dolls and Buzz and Woody so they can sleep on the bed too; changing beds (it's easier to look out the window from my bed); deciding he simply has to get out of bed, go outside and look at the moon and the stars; getting up to check on whatever it is Daddy is doing; asking for Daddy to lie down with us on the bed; asking for the ukelele to play him to sleep.

Now, a week after the event, my thoughts and comments seem a bit superfluous. So much has already been written and said and I still haven't managed to get my photos (which aren't great but give you a general idea) off the camera. Maybe tomorrow. I've decided that I really can't surpass Stephanie Trigg's summary of the day on Humanities Researcher. She might have experienced the Apology from Melbourne but it sounds as if her experience of the day was very close to mine in Canberra. And Ampersand Duck has some great photos of her experience of the day. There were so many ways to experience the day. Vicki's class was one of many that stopped lessons to watch the live broadcast. She wrote:

It was amazing to watch it with children who were so in tune to what it
was all about. The discussions after were so heart felt. One boy
broke down later on he was so relieved.

This image that was published in the Sydney Morning Herald has become one of my favourites from the day. It was taken by Andrew Taylor. It demonstrates that the day heralded the beginning of reconciliation on a number of levels. What do you think they all talked about as they sat in a row waiting for the Parliamentary Sitting to commence? What a pity Mr Howard wasn't able or didn't feel able to join them.

The day has given me a lot to think about. The importance of saying 'sorry' to enable other changes to take place. The terrible, often dishonest ways in which children were taken from their families. The way governments and churches and individuals let those children down, promising a better life but leaving a significant number of them to suffer mistreatment, neglect and abuse. But two issues have dominated my mind. The first is leadership. It seems to me at this moment (I'm reserving the right to change my mind) that Mr Howard's approach to leadership was very parental. He knew what was best for the country and heaven help anyone who tried to disagree. Perhaps it was the kind of leadership we needed for a while, only time will tell. Mr Rudd, in contrast, seems to understand the importance of the symbolic gesture, of the possibility that leadership offers to encourage people to do better and be better than they thought possible. It is uplifting - and that was the mood of the day.

The other issue that I've been wrestling with came, I think, out of Dr Nelson's speech. I'll have to check Hansard but he said something along the lines of good intentions having unintended consequences. If ever there is a lesson we should learn from the experience of the Stolen Generation, this is it. Whatever the intentions behind the policy of removal, the consequences for many were ghastly. Perhaps we should give all government policy an 'unintended consequences' test. What will be the unintended consequences of the current Intervention in the Northern Territory? What will be the unintended consequences of the war in Iraq?

We ended this momentous week with another short trip to the coast. Mr M finally made it back into the sea - although it took three days of playing near the rockpools, playing in the rockpools and filling castle moats with sea water to get him there. The weather was exquisite, the sea was a beautiful turquoise and we saw three dolphins chasing waves across the bay.

Coasting

This week we have enjoyed a few days on the south coast, despite rather dreary weather. We drove down the Clyde on Tuesday in the rain, stopping as we now always do at Pooh Corner. When we drove down the Clyde before Christmas, Pooh Corner was a mess. The little cave had been trashed and was littered with empty bottles, a dumped computer, the toys a mess. I took this photo on that visit - it's the least distressing. There are various stories about how Pooh Corner came to be. One is that the cave stored explosives during World War II. Another is that the first Pooh was left there by the classmates of a little girl who died in a road accident. The net is remarkably lacking in information.

The good news is that, on this visit, Pooh was sitting in his cave with Tigger and other friends enjoying a jar of honey (yes, a real jar of honey). He had obviously given the cave a springclean, removing all the bottles and offering the computer to charity.

We are lucky - J's parents still have their house a couple of beaches south of Bateman's Bay and so we have all the amenities of home and a sea view. It takes about 3 minutes to walk down the hill, shed the towels and bucket and spade and be in the water. And then takes about 6 minutes to walk back up the hill (it's very steep, especially when you are three-years-old) to hose the sand off feet and hit the warm showers.

Mr M has been visiting the south coast on and off since he was three-months-old. Oddly enough, the weather on that occasion wasn't dissimilar to the weather this week. On this visit, Mr M wasn't feeling very brave, declaring the beach 'too beachy'. And it was. The weather and water were grey. The tides were very high. The sand was covered in seaweed. So somewhat surprisingly, because in the past he has loved jumping waves, Mr M decided he wouldn't even dabble a toe in the water but sat well back on the sand building sandcastles and making sand cakes. I must admit that I found the beach 'too beachy' too, my new scar making me a little hesitant about fully submerging. I was very glad, given Mr M's mood, that we hadn't invested a lot of money going somewhere tropical.

We did, though, have a very relaxed time. Mr M decided to reacquaint himself with the afternoon sleep (on Wednesday he slept for three hours!) thus allowing his parents the luxury of an afternoon sleep themselves or reading time. The days slipped into a slow routine - breakfast, beach, a visit to J's mother at the nursing home, lunch somewhere pleasant, Mr M falling asleep on the drive home, a quiet afternoon, the beach again, dinner. We ate fish and chips too many times - but it's hard to resist sitting at the Boathouse at the Bay or in a park near a beach - and the boys discovered great milkshakes at the Mogo Fudge and Ice Creamery, where Mr M conveniently left his hat on Friday, necessitating a third visit yesterday before we drove home to Canberra.

Home again and we are continuing the quiet, relaxed mood of our holidays. Mr M is watching Toy Story. J is reading on the bed. The washing has been washed, dried, folded and put away. A cake is in the oven and it's fish for dinner.

The Last Week of the First Month

I'm trying to do too many things at once this evening. On the DVD player is the Shakespeare Retold episode, Macbeth, starring James McAvoy and Keeley Hawkes. Unlike the retellings of Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew, which I loved, this new Macbeth isn't holding my attention (although turning the three witches into three garbage men was quite inspired). I've been browsing the internet instead. Very addictive and a complete timewaster. Suddenly 90 minutes have disappeared with little or nothing to show for it.

This week just passed, the last week of January, has been dominated by medical matters. On Thursday, my portacath was removed (it's the little port that was popped into my chest just below my collarbone to make giving me chemo easier - and it did make having chemo easier. I didn't have to suffer any of that horrid searching for veins that many people have to go through). Having it removed turned out to be pretty easy. My favourite anaesthetist was with me, knocked me out and brought me round without any ill effects. I took painkillers on Friday and had my last hit on Saturday night. Of course, I still have to remind Mr M that I have a sore chest when he jumps a bit too exuberantly. And I will have a scar but it will be a very thin, neat one - not the big clunky thing that was there previously.

I had thought that the removal of the portacath might bring a sense of completion (I'm not going to use that terrible word closure) to last year's experiences. I'm still waiting. Instead, my eyes have just lifted to the next goal on the horizon - my first post-surgery mammogram in March. After that, there will be the next checkup and then the next and before I know it years will have gone by. In the meantime, I have most of February off work, finally taking the rec leave I was intending to take last April, before I became ill. No trip to Shanghai because of last week's surgery but I hope we will get some nice days at the beach.