Twenty Years

This morning.  How can I get up at 6:30am and not have enough time to do everything that getting ready for school and kindy entails?  I only have to get myself showered and dressed, feed four mouths, pack two lunches, oversee personal grooming, the packing of bags, morning chores, and get up to the walking bus by 8:25.  It's not like I'm running a marathon or anything.   But could I do it?  No.  We finally got in the car at 8:28 (I thought it was five minutes earlier than that) and raced up to the walking bus, yanked the buggy out of the car, popped the baby and Greer in the seats and dashed across the road to lead the waiting group down the hill to school.  We were embarrassingly late.

The problem is that we are often late by at least a moment.  Mornings are a mission. I've tried tick charts, motivational sticker charts, showering in the evening, changing the order by which I do things... and some of those things help some of the time, but I've found no magic formula.  Every morning is just so different.

I saw Isobella off to her classroom and walked back up the hill with a heavy heart.  I was wracking my brains, trying to lay the blame somewhere.  Was it just my slackness?  Was lateness somehow tied up with one of the seven deadly sins and should I be going to confession?   Should I abandon the walking school bus, even though it allows me just to drop Isobella off most mornings, and usually only walk it once.  Or should we just pack up and sell our house and move nearer the school, right next door preferably, ideally on the side her classroom is on so I can just hoist her over the fence in the mornings....

On the drive back home I got thinking about a news item I saw last night.   A woman who has been partially disabled for twenty years following a brain haemorrhage and appears to be confined flat in her bed, has been refusing to eat for eleven days.  Her estranged husband was shown tearfully expressing his grief that the rest home she is in seems to be supporting her death wish.  As I was driving it suddenly dawned on me that this woman, who was once an attractive woman, full of life (we saw a photo of her in her thirties, perhaps), has for the last twenty years been lying in a bed barely even able to communicate.  For her, every day of the last twenty years has been identical. 

In the last twenty years I have finished secondary school, completed two lots of tertiary education, travelled overseas several times, worked in three completely different jobs, got married, had three children, bought two houses and sold one, been a landlord, started writing a novel, dreamed, longed for, wished, and made many things happen, and mostly, grown up.  From sixteen to thirty-six.  While this woman has done not much more than exist.

I am so grateful for this life.  This life with its crazy unpredictable-ness and with all its responsibilities and the rewards that follow.   How lucky I am to have things to be late for...  to have a (mostly!) sound mind and a very able body that can coral children and buggies at high speeds, that can walk down steep hills breathing in crisp nearly autumn air and then bend to kiss my daughter as she enters her classroom.  Not one day of the last twenty years has been the same.   Every day a new day, each one full of possibilities and challenges.   But who has faced the greater challenge, in those twenty years?  Me, with my jobs to do, deadlines to meet, events to arrive on time to, relationships to negotiate and children to care for, or that woman, lying in her bed, living in that strange, unknown space between this world and the next, not fully in this one, and yet not released to enter the next?  She is the hero.

52 Poems

Cutting the Cake of Life

I'm not quite sure where this story starts. Maybe it starts on June 30th, 2001, at our wedding. Maybe it starts in January on Great Barrier Island, when Paddy and I found ourselves waist-deep in the cool clear water of Karaka Bay, fully-clothed, and the words "will you marry me?" came out of my mouth. Or maybe it starts on a grey, tumultuous day some time last year,  one of many when we faced each other with angry words, full of misunderstandings.  Or maybe it starts even earlier than all of that.  In the moments when our younger selves began to imagine what our older selves would look like.  When we started forming our expectations, our hopes, and our dreams.

But beginnings are never quite as important as endings, and never as long and as challenging as middles.  Paddy and I started our lives together with all the best intentions, and with all the hopeful dreamy longings of two young people in love.  But we were two very opposite people and as time went on we became very good at being average.  It was unnoticeable to many, but it gradually became blindingly obvious to us.  There was an increasing sense of disatisfaction felt by us both, and an unanswered question hung around us in the air; "Was this how it was supposed to be?"

When you are faced with a situation that you are unhappy with, you really only have two options.  One is to change the situation and the other is to get out of the situation.  To sit with the status quo is not a real option, it's stagnation.   It becomes a gradual rotting away of all that was good, of what life there was.  We didn't like the second option, and I was rejecting stagnation, kicking and screaming all the way. So we had no choice but to change. And so, by God's grace, we did.   Are we still changing?  Of course.   Will there still be grey days and angry words?  Of course.  But we have reached a place of understanding and mutual good-will, and you can go along way on that. 

On Saturday we had a Naming Ceremony and Dedication for Abigail.  Our sweet, sweet girl.  We invited our immediate family and a couple of friends.  And we decided, the Monday beforehand, to surprise everyone by renewing our vows.  We had talked about it on and off since that unexpected moment on the Barrier in January.   And so we did it.   We ordered a cake, I went clothes shopping and got my hair cut, we bought flowers and prepared the house.  Nobody knew what we were going to do until the moment when our friend officiating said "and now Pat and doya are going to renew their vows."   Wow.   It was a dream come true, the fulfillment of Hope.

The cake was for all of us.   We put Abigail's name at the top to make up for the fact that we had stolen her thunder a little.  We cut together, one of us holding the baby, the girls holding onto our hands.  It was one of the best moments of my life.   And the cake was chocolate, rich, and very good.  It got eaten quickly!

But we might never have tasted it.  If we'd chosen to remove ourselves from the situation our marriage had become that cake would never have been bought, never eaten.  If we had given up and let status quo reign, there never would have been any change to celebrate, and no cake to celebrate with.  It's also possible that we could have planned the change and the celebration, but never followed through, and that cake could have sat there, metaphorically speaking, untasted, uneaten.

What cake is sitting in front of you in this season of your life?  Have you noticed how it's decorated, or appreciated its flavour?  Have you actually got out a knife and cut into it, taken a huge, greedy bite?  Or is it behind you on the table, ignored.  Maybe it's not the flavour you were expecting.  

But it's cake.  Come on.  It's got to be good.   Turn around and eye-ball it.  Take the knife and cut into it.   It won't be the only cake you eat in your life time.  There will be others, don't lose hope of that.  But taste that one in front of you now.  Relish it.