a leap of faith

I've made a leap, and I want you to come with me.

how I got married on friday

I am an eye. I open, and I see everything. I close, and I am safe. My eyelashes are angels wings, they cover me.

I went away, I went up high. I looked out through the black sky and saw the tiny lights of another whole country. I looked out and saw myself. I was myself.

I came back, and I saw all the dust that had fallen into my eye, blocked my light, caused me pain. The dust was from another time. It was not part of this one. I said good-bye to it, I made my needs clear.

Then Paddy and I stood before each other in the same place we exchanged rings eleven years ago. We left those rings behind, traded old vows for new, and marked ourselves, in pain, with a ring that can never be taken off. Our new vows were etched into our skin, in a band of belonging. We belong to each other.

And how we will treat each other in this new now is quite different to how we treated each other before.

There will be no taking for granted, no leaning on each other for things we can do for ourselves, no more suffocating each other with our insecurities, no more silence that only makes temporary peace.  No, we are speaking for ourselves now, standing on our own two feet, side by side to face the world. We will be each other’s greatest champion, we will watch each other soar.

Those rings we wore the first time, they were easy to attain. We booked the church, got dressed in our finest. We paraded each other around like we had won a great prize, thinking finally I must be worth something. But the finery was only skin deep. Underneath our wounds were gushing. No ring could bandage them.

The marks we wear now were not so easy. They are spoils of war, the treasures hidden in darkness. They are not pretty, they do not shine. But they are our most valuable possession, worth more than all the gold and silver in the world.

happy birthday to myself

I'll have turned thirty-eight by the time I finish this post.

I have a running joke with the girls leading up to their birthdays. I say I'm not going to let them turn six, or eight, or whatever the number is. I tell them in no uncertain terms that I like them just the way they are and I don't want them to grow a second older. So no birthday, I say. They giggle and pretend to complain. It's a good gag, a nice routine. We all smile.

And I smile especially because I know how much I mean it. I really don't want them to grow any older, I really do love them just the way they are. I know how terribly quickly their few years have gone by, and I just want to grab them and hold them still for a second and look at them.

And then I chuckle to myself because I know how much I don't mean it. I can't wait to see them grow up, to see them become themselves. I think that will be the most amazing thing. I like them so much now... how can I not just carry on liking them more and more! I'm pretty sure that's how it's going to go.

I'm heading to forty, the halfway mark. Is it all down hill from there? If it is I think that will be a good thing, because I can tell you that it's been mostly uphill to get here. That one year old birthday girl being fed ice-cream by her auntie, she has no idea. And neither does any one else in her vicinity. No one could have imagined how complicated things were going to get. And stay. I've spent my whole life looking around and feeling like everyone else had it easier, or happier, or more normal. Until now.

The last few years I've been chipping away at myself. Scraping at the layers I'd wrapped so tightly. It was laborious, seemingly without end. At times I wondered if there was anything underneath after all.

 But there was, of course. There was me. And there were several points on the way where I saw myself. One when I started this blog. Another when I changed my name. Another as I understood why I had always felt so broken. Another as I negotiated my way through tricky days in our marriage. Spiritual direction was the vehicle for illumination and insight, time after time. I celebrated my crazy family and began to understand why chaos is all too familiar to me. I didn't give up on that book. I finally made peace with the girls learning at home. And I deconstructed whole worlds of belief. These moments were windows that came and went. Some days were dark and grey. Then there were the days I looked straight into my own eyes. Like I'm doing right now.

Going to Cambodia was incredible. I knew I'd have an amazing time but I didn't realise how momentous it would be. Something happened over there, far away from everything that was life as I knew it. Something happened to me. I left with a small suitcase, and I came back with myself. My very own birthday present.

life at home

I've been writing to you in my head for a week now, ever since I got off that plane last Sunday and spent the day relishing the family and feeling miserably cold. I was going to tell you about how we live under a flight path, and that when I left Auckland I saw our beach from the plane as it banked at the edge of the harbour and then took off. I wanted to tell you how I wasn't in a window seat but I managed to look out just at the right time and there below me I saw the estuary and the row of houses at its edge, the bush with our house somewhere in it, and the beach, our beach. A second later I saw the rolling surf of Whatipu beach at the mouth of the harbour,  that wild place that makes me dream novels. I carried those images tucked inside me as the plane sped upwards. I don't know how I could have left without them.

I was going to write to you about the flights, there and back. Listening to Josh Garrels and sensing a new story being uncovered. Watching the other passengers, the couples leaning in to each other, the children itchy for freedom. I wanted to tell you about the roar of the engines and the way my stomach flipped as we left Bangkok, next stop Phnom Penh. I would have written to you about the lights on the tarmac at dusk on the return trip and listening to Coldplay's Mylo Xyloto as we flew above Australia at night and the tiny outposts of light I saw as we crossed the outback. And the knowing that was becoming so clear, about myself, about my life and the journey my life has taken.

But then I came home to my people. They'd been more than fine without me, but still it took a week to get clean sheets on all the beds and clean towels on the towel rails. There were benches and corners to clear, and washing to fold. I walked through the flotsam and jetsam of a week that had happened without me. I was living my life again.

And then my dear friend's father passed away suddenly, unexpectedly, and threw us completely. Her heart is now an aching wound, and her mother's life has been ripped in half. How does that wife fill the space that was so warm with his presence? How can she even count the millions of ways he filled her days and made sense of them? He was sixty-two and healthy, so treasured by his family and friends. How do they go on now? They go on limping, looking upwards. There's nothing else.

I know about this. I know about grief that acid ache.I stood at the washing machine five years ago, on the morning after my Step-Dad Don died. We washed his clothes for the last time and I cried at the smell of him on his blue vest. My chest was tight and hollow, my stomach sour. It was the worst day I'd known, and there hasn't been one like it since. Losing someone is being handed a loaf of stale mouldy bread and being told to eat the whole thing, one dry scratching bite at a time. We have no appetite for grief. And yet it is work that must be done, a job that cannot be left unfinished, or else it will take our lives too.

My friend Marita rang from Sydney last night with news that a mutual friend of ours had died. My friend Corin, who got back in touch with me through this blog, was a writer I've known since I was at school. He died a long way from home, somewhere in the States where he'd made a new life with a wife who sang in a choir. We had a brief email conversation a few months ago. It was a tiny, momentary glimpse, like seeing him out of the window of a plane as I sped past. I hold that image close now. He was wild and beautiful and found.

good-bye for now

There are parts of Phnom Penh that remind me of Buenos Aires. The wrought iron gates with their ornamental details, the iron lattice bars over the windows, the tree-lined streets. There is enough of the air of L'Indochine left in the best parts of town to make me feel like I was sitting down to tea with a grand old dame. Well past her prime, but still with good taste, and fairly good manners for her age. That the city has any beauty at all is incredible, givZen that it was completely cleared out when it fell. Apparently, before the troubles, the city was one of the most beautiful in Indo-China. 

We went to Siem Reap this week and on the way up I saw houses on stilts, cows on the road. It was subsistence living in full colour. Siem Reap, however, has become a tourist mecca. The kids weren't begging (much) but they were peddling their wares with the same desperation. The prostitutes have gone underground in most places, but the girls who were offering massages and beauty therapy, a career that's used to get them out of the sex trade, looked tired and blank.

We went out to the Killing Fields by tuk-tuk this afternoon and life was hard where ever I looked. Don't ask me about the Killing Fields. There are plenty of complicated places around the world but this has to be up there near the top of the list. I can't explain how life here has evolved since the Khmer Rouge destroyed the very fabric of the Cambodian culture. Evolved probably isn't even the word. If Cambodia was a patient, a victim of some horrific act, they would be barely recovered, hardly even standing on their feet. Beneath the bustling streets and the commerce springing up around the tourist dollar and the floods of ex-pats in Phnom Penh, there is a vulnerability that is chilling. 

I'm getting my head around going home tomorrow. I'm more than ready for the ordinariness of family life, and I've got some things I just need to get on with. Like write that book. Mels has been my tour guide, co-adventurer, and confidante. She has put up with my absent-mindedness and my naive dreaming. I couldn't have done this, wouldn't have done this, if it wasn't for her. She has made a home for herself in the craziest of places, and she lives this complicated life day in and day out. We'll say good-bye to each other at the airport in the morning and she'll jump on a moto and drive back into the thick of it, while I fly right on out.

lines and light

 

I'm not sure what to tell you about Tuol Sleng, or S-21 as it was called by the Khmer Rouge. This is the school which the Khmer Rouge turned into a detention centre and used to torture and kill about 20,000 of the two million or more people that were killed all together.

I knew a smattering of Cambodian history before I came here but it did nothing to prepare me for this. I walked into the first room I came to and nearly walked straight out again. The room was filled with tiny cubicles, the partitions hastily built out of brick. On the floor of each cubicle was fixed a set of chains, and in some of them what looked like a petrol can and a long tin box. They were instruments of torture, left right where they were last used. I felt like I'd just walked into hell.

The rooms kept on going and going. I couldn't face them all. The last rooms we went into were the ones where hundreds of photographs of the deceased were on display . Every single person brought here was photographed. Their faces, blank with fear, shouted at me. They were all somebody's son, somebody's daughter. So many of them were children. One of the photographs showed a woman cradling her sleeping baby in her arms. She was sitting in an execution chair so horrific and depraved that I can't bring myself to describe it. The photo was taken a moment before she was killed. What happened to her baby?

These photos of mine don't tell you anything, except that taking photos was my therapy at Tuol Sleng. When I felt like the horror was going to eat me up I looked for the lines and the light. In the end I would have walked away before I'd even gone into the rooms with the photographs, if it wasn't for the holding cross I'd bought earlier that day. We'd been to the Peace cafe, a beautiful cafe and shop run to support Banteay Prieb (Centre of the Dove), a vocational training centre for Cambodians with physical disabilities run by the Jesuit Service. I unpacked that cross when I didn't think I could take any more, and walked through the last rooms holding it and turning it anxiously.

Tuol Sleng was left pretty much as it was when the Vietnamese Army finally overthrew the Khmer Rouge in 1979. You can see it gets swept occasionally, but that's about it. There was a chair sitting facing a wall in one of the upstairs rooms, and one of the blackboards still had the faint chalk marks of a french lesson. The floors are filthy, covered with years of dust and grime and blood turned rusty brown.

notes from Phnom Penh

I didn't think I'd be able to do this! I was prepared to have very little in the way of comforts, but here I am on Mels' laptop with a "dongle" stick, online. I have airconditioning in my bedroom, and there's a washing machine in the kitchen. This place is luxury. And what an adventure I am having! You can trace my steps.

how it is in June

My bags are half packed for Cambodia, I'm leaving in the morning. I've been sitting here watching these photos download off my camera, thinking about those girls of mine and how far away I'm going to be from them. We prayed together tonight, all five of us cuddled up close, and I thought, these people are my outpost, my base camp. They will be keeping life going more or less as it would normally, while I'm gone. I love them.

I should be in bed, obviously, but I'm dragging out the last stages of packing, and waiting for itunes to do its thing with my phone before I do. This thing that itunes does with my phone is something I feel I have little power over. I plug in my phone, that circle goes round and round, and I MUST NOT unplug my phone, or else! At the moment I'm not even sure that it's doing it's thing yet, I think it's getting ready to do it's thing. And I really want to make sure it does. Because I really want this lovely music in my ears on the flight. So I'm not going to bed quite yet.

It's been a whirwind week, and having a bad cold didn't help. I rushed around all over the place this afternoon, getting my jabs done (better late than never) and picking up all the things I thought I would have had time to get earlier in the week. The house is no where near as organised as I wanted it to be. I had visions of it spick and span with freshly made bread waiting in the freezer. But who am I kidding? It's been a strange thing, getting myself ready to go, and trying to leave myself behind at the same time.

owning my dissent

Today I wrote about my experience of toxic church culture over at re-inventing eve.

counting

So my baby is three today. Three years ago today they whisked her out of me, and ended my baby making days in one foul swoop. I now have mixed feelings about Abigail's birth day. I look at the video of her caesarean and see the smile on my face as clear and bright as a blue sky, and yet I know that in the very instant I am smiling they are doing the tubal ligation I requested, and taking away every other baby I would ever long for.

And she wants a baby too, that three year old of mine. She says “my need a brother and a sister.”  She is right. She would run the show if we let her, and a younger sibling (or two, or more) is just what she needs to help her remember that there are other people in the world beside herself.

Isn’t that one of the most important things we can teach our children, after all? Far better for them to learn it now than suffer the heartache and  loneliness that can only come from a life lived in expectation that everybody else should be about the business of making them happy.

We are away for the weekend, and I can see the ocean from out of this wide window. The white breakers are crashing on a faraway shore, and scrubby green hills rise up above the seaside-town-turned-suburbia.

With all this space I can finally hear myself think, and I am weighing up my life. Measuring expenditure versus income, checking the balance to see that it does, in fact, break even. I’ve never been able to do this before. I’ve never, not in my whole life, known where I start and where I finish. I’ve lived at the whim of everybody else’s feelings and expectations. If you were happy, I was happy. But it never really worked for me, it only made me tired and anxious and depressed. I don’t need to live like that any longer, and I am thrilled.

The three girls have been playing and playing today. They took armfuls of toys up to the rooftop deck, ran around, and then dragged them all back down again. This is nice, this having a three year old. The older two have spent so long having to put up with her interrupting their games, or messing up their creations. There have been things they wanted to do that they couldn’t, because a toddler had to be included, or kept safe. Now comes our reward for  that. Three girls who play together, who genuinely enjoy each other’s company. We can all relax a little.

I’m going to Cambodia for a week this month. I’ve been so busy with the wedding I’ve hardly had the chance to think about it. But the tickets are sitting in an envelope on my desk, and my renewed passport should be arriving any day now. I’m going to visit my dear friend Mels who has been teaching in Phnom Penh since January. We were talking on the phone a couple of months ago and she told me about the holidays she had coming up. “I should just come over and visit you!” I said, half-joking. I got off the phone and told Paddy what I’d said, and he agreed. “Go!” he said, in so many words.

I’ve been a traveller for as long as I can remember. I made my first solo overseas trip when I was eighteen, the summer after I finished school. I went to South America, mostly Chile, and I came back convinced that the only thing that I wanted in life was plane tickets. Since Paddy and I got married twelve years ago I haven’t left the country. We’ve dreamt of travelling, but it all changes once there are two of you, plus children.

This trip is my reward, in a way. I’ve put family needs and responsibilities ahead of my own ambitions again and again. Women do this without even thinking. It’s in our DNA. But eventually the time comes, or should come given the right circumstances, when we can reap a little freedom from the hard work we’ve put in.

I’m turning thirty-eight next month. I’m thinking of the next two years as preparation for my fifth decade, rather than the tail end of my fourth. And my preparation will be doing more of all the things that are important to me. More writing, more reading, more travelling, more walking, more babies and more abandoned enjoyment of that family of mine. I owe it to all of us.

adding to the family

Did you think that was all I was going to write about the wedding? People, I've only just begun! I couldn't wait to introduce you to the new members of my family. Can you believe that in one day I've gained a new step-dad, two step-sisters and three step-brothers, two more brothers-in-law, two more sisters-in-law, plus another niece and four more nephews? Do you think I'm happy about that? I'm telling you, happy is an understatement.

Right at the front of the photo, sitting next to Isobella, are Jack and Nevaeh, and up behind them next to Greer and Joy's son Isaac are Dominic, Liam and James. These boys got up to the cutest shenanigans during the ceremony, stealing flower petals from the girls and throwing them at each other in a manner that was just quiet and cute enough to get away with. Liam is the most stoic gluten-free kid I've met. Nevaeh is a sweetheart who has impressed my girls no end because she could ride a two-wheeler when she was three! (The girls on the other side next to Bill are Joy's Anna and my Abigail.) These kids love each other. They've got on like a house on fire ever since they all met, even the out-of-towners we only just met at the wedding.

Behind the boys are Bill's son Des and his wife Emily, and up behind them are Tim and his wife Casey, and Bill's daughters Aimee and Cathy, and their husbands Oliver and Dan, respectively. Then right at the back next to Paddy is Bill's son Caleb. The loveliest seventeen year old I know. I've always wanted brothers. Now I've got three of them! And you can never have enough sisters, as far as I'm concerned. Now I've got five altogether!

The girls have been talking about their "new cousins" since well before Mum and Bill got engaged. But I haven't breathed the word "step-dad" or "step-sister" or "step-brother" to a soul. It seemed a bit too forward, and a little weird given that Mum and Bill had only actually been dating since Valentine's Day. But I was quietly very thrilled. Then on Sunday night wedding photos were flying around on facebook, and we all got busy friending each other. I saw a photo that Bill's daughter Cathy had put up of Joy and I walking Mum down the aisle which she'd entitled "my new stepsisters and stepmum." I was chuffed, and that's when it really hit home. My family has grown.

I happened to be talking to a friend this week about families. She relayed a conversation she had with her mother at a time when she was finding her mother-in-law frustrating. She had started to complain mildly about her mother-in-law, who she loves, and her mother cut her off instantly. "Don't ever speak ill of her" her mother said. "She loves you and she is your ally."  I thought that was priceless. And so true. Our family is, or should be, by and large, our safe place, filled with allies.

My team just got larger this weekend. I've got more allies. More people who, if push came to shove, would stick up for me, look out for me, and speak well of me.  And it goes both ways.

giving Mum away

I've never seen her so happy. She was giddy with joy. I've never seen her so beautiful. The most elegant bride, of any age, that I've witnessed. And Bill, well he looked like the cat that got the cream.

They stood at the front of the church surrounded by their gorgeous grandchilden. The kids fidgeted and  made faces at each other, but the Bride and Groom wouldn't have had it any other way. Then they danced out of the church to that old hit by The Crystals, I met him on a Monday and my heart stood still, da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron, somebody told me that his name was Bill, da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron. The children followed them like they were the pied-piper, and together, in a glorious bunch of kids and beauty they did two laps of the church aisles while the wedding guests clapped in time to the music. Da do ron-ron-ron, da do ron-ron. It was pure celebration.

Five years ago Mum walked out of a church following my darling Step-Dad Don's casket. How could she have possibly known that even as she mourned her beloved Don she was being prepared for Bill. In a way, if you think of time like water, like a deep river we swim through, she walked out of that funeral and straight into her own dream wedding.

You won't have noticed it but she was wearing the same outfit that she wore when she married Don twenty-three years ago. We updated it a little, but the skirt and top were the same. Mum knew almost as soon as she and Bill got engaged that she didn't want to wear anything else. Some how it just made sense.

I understood this after I had a dream in which Don met Bill. In the dream we were all standing in a hallway, Bill on one side, Don on the other, and Mum in the middle. I turned to Don and asked him, "what do you think?" Meaning, "What do you think about Mum and  Bill?" He shrugged and looked cagey at first, as he was known to do, and so I tickled him in the ribs. "Go on!" I said, teasing him. And then he broke out in the widest grin. He smiled from ear to ear.

My sister and I walked Mum down the aisle. She didn't need bridesmaids, she had her gorgeous grandaughters for that, but she needed someone to give her away. It was the highlight of the day for me, made all the more special by the fact that the three of us knew, deep down, that my sister and I were doing it on behalf of Don.