Love Thy Neighbour

I infiltrated the Golden Triangle four years ago, having journeyed from the far-east, that is, Midland. I quickly noticed I was the only fat brunette within a five-kilometre radius, which, far from making me stand out in a crowd of thin blondes, gave me amazing powers of invisibility. Nobody spoke to me for weeks. I set about trying to fit in. I bought Capri pants and a couple of pairs of slip on loafers. Still nothing. I volunteered to be the “Class Parent”, whose duties included making new mothers feel welcome, so I took myself out for a latte. I managed a sustained campaign of zeroing in on other mothers at the school, affecting what I thought was a pleasant smile, and endeavouring to make eye contact. The empty space around me at pick-up time appeared to grow a bit wider.

I made a note that many mothers were wearing tennis whites, so I bought some of those too. Three days a week I’d stroll in to school for drop-off looking ready for a quick hit, then go home, eat cake and smoke.

I would go to work, where I felt noticed and loved by the few people who’s lives had been entwined with mine for fifteen years, people who had come to my aid at five o’clock in the morning to help me find a lost cat, who arrived with flowers within hours of hearing of the birth of my children. We would marvel at my powers of invisibility and wonder how to remedy it. One of them came up with the crazy idea of me going up and saying “Hi”, just like that, but it was too freaky. By then the weeks of being unseen had sucked from me all but the courage it took to deliver my son to his classroom and scarper.

I spoke briefly to my new neighbour about my invisibility, “Nobody smiles at me,” I mewled.

Higher in the parenting ranks than me, she gave me a bemused look and an unsympathetic snort. “You can’t just go around smiling at EVERYONE.”

Of course not. Clearly I was on the edge.

Whilst watering her front lawn one afternoon she shouted across the street “Have you got any mates yet?”

Wounded that my friendless state had been broadcast to the entire street I decided to mount an attack and hollered in response “No. And how are your haemorrhoids today?”

“Fine,” she roared, an evil grin creeping over her face, “the abortion knocked them around a bit.”

In that second, the impenetrable armour of niceness and decorum that I had imagined to be cladding the women of the western suburbs seemed to dissolve and something within me shifted. It wasn’t them, it had been me all along.

The very next day I struck up my first conversation with another mother at the school. That we were discussing how I had just backed into her car simply didn’t seem to matter.

Faith Off

I am in dire need of a faith lift. It’s not so much that I’m suffering a loss of faith – more that I never really had one in the first place. I need radical faith reconstruction.

I have been half-heartedly window-shopping for a faith for years. Sometimes I designate the serious research work to a diligent friend and she brings me stories of Baha’i, Islam and Judaism, I listen to the rules and whine.

Having given up my personal space and my brain space to family life, I have difficulty coming at anything that involves more self-denial.

The thing about faith is that it looks so good on other people, and every time I try it on it just doesn’t seem to fit. An experience which is devastating enough on Bay View Terrace let alone within the darkened corners of one’s soul.

Faith on other people is beautiful, and light, like a Collette Dinnigan dress, and I want to sniff at it and touch the hem of its garment while I clump around in my spiritual sack-cloth and ashes. And deep down I know that if I just had me some of that faith, my sack-cloth and ashes would feel like a Collette Dinnigan dress. But maybe I accidentally got bleach on my epiphany and now I just can’t seem to find it.

I have a friend who is a Buddhist and while I know little about this faith other than that it was HUGE in the late eighties - like Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen, I do know they don’t like to kill things, even little tiny terrifying things with lots of legs. Whilst suffering our yearly caterpillar infestation, an annual gift from our Cape Lilac tree – I sought advice on the Buddhist approach to such a situation.

“You have to ask them to leave.”
“And what if they don’t?”
“Well, you apologise, and then you kill them.”

Perfect.

Then I wonder if faith is like a buffet, if one can be a little bit Country and a little bit Rock n’ Roll, as it were. Say, Shamanism early on in the week and hell-fire and brimstone on Fridays, which would fit perfectly with my Circadian Rhythms.

My diligent friend and co-faith-window-shopper recently found herself in Buddhist Temple in Thailand, witness to a cleansing ceremony. Strange things happened there. Inanimate objects moved of their own volition. An egg, which had been rubbed on someone, FLEW across the room. Her Manolo Blahnik's felt strangely inappropriate.

“I’m a Buddhist now.” she said later, sheepish, fresh-faithed in her divinely fitting epiphany.

As I watched her scamper, bare-foot and blissed out, off into the white light, I was filled with envy. “Can I come too?” I wanted to bleat.

But epiphanies, like Manolo Blahnik's, aren't for sharing.

A tired tirade about George W

I like to torment my children by reading poetry to them. While perusing Hillaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales For Children, (1907) I found the following, which I have brought up to date by adding one letter to the title.

GEORGE W
WHO PLAYED WITH A DANGEROUS TOY, AND SUFFERED A CATASTROPHE OF CONSIDERABLE DIMENSIONS.

(upon the dangerous toy exploding…)

The Lights went out! The windows broke!
The Room was filled with reeking smoke.
And in the darkness shrieks and yells
Were mingled with Electric Bells,
And falling masonry and groans,
And crunching, as of broken bones,
And dreadful shrieks, when, worst of all,
The House itself began to fall!
It tottered, shuddering to and fro,
Then crashed into the street below –

Belloc ends the poem by simply stating “The moral is that little Boys should not be given dangerous toys.”

We are the company we keep. Our PM is fraternising with a man who led his nation, and ours, to war based on five falsehoods. Weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist, links between Saddam Hussein and Al Quaeda when one was secular and the other fundamentalist, Iraq, he said, posed a threat to its neighbours, each of whom had superior military powers, Saddam Hussein, we were told, with his antiquated and exhausted military, posed a real and present danger to the juggernaut United States and finally, altruistically, George W wanted "liberate" the Iraqi people.

But all of that is old news and I am merely joining the long queue of Bush Bashers.

As John Howard and George W approached the media throng last week, their dual images beamed into my lounge room on the six o’clock news, I couldn’t help but notice the matching blazers, the twin pale-blue shirts, their button down collars jauntily askew – the absence of a necktie on both of them seemed to say, “We do more than just business, we’re pals.” And while giving our PM a verbal pat on his bald pate, George W declared their hair to be their only difference.

In the daily deluge of stories from Iraq it’s easy to forget this started (sort of) in 2001, as one plane and then another crashed into the twin towers when with dreadful shrieks and worst of all, the House of George began to fall.

At tables lit by 19th century candelabra and dressed in pistachio-coloured silk cloth, feasting on squash soup and barramundi, our PM toasted the President “a world without a dedicated, involved America will be a lesser world, a less safe world, a more precarious world."

Elsewhere, in our precarious world, in the darkness shrieks and yells were mingled with electric bells, and falling masonry and groans, and crunching, as of broken bones as another 36 liberated Iraqis were added to the daily body count.