One and a half decades later ...

This is about the fifteen year old. I fell pregnant with him when I was 28 and the circumstances weren't brilliant. I had just bought a little house (on my own) and his Dad and I weren't living together. We fought a lot.

I had a roof to put over this baby's head. It seemed that simple.

The nine months passed and I veered between a kind of bovine contentment and terrified panic. My pet budgie died and I thought that if I couldn't even keep a budgie alive my ability to keep a whole human alive was probably questionable.

I listened to the Pixies album, Trompe le Monde, incessantly. I painted The Whole House. I tore up the carpet. I sanded the floors with my Dad. The vacuum bag for collecting dust from the floor sander blew off and my Dad copped a giant cloud of dust in his sweaty face and was jarrah-coloured for the remainder of the day. We stopped at a pharmacy on the way back to his house, a filthy middle aged man covered in dust and his equally dust-covered pregnant daughter. We looked like something out of Deliverance. I wanted bath salts, thinking baths salts might wash away the dust and my abject terror. I was eight months pregnant.

I remember thinking that I had a due date to fall in love, that no matter what else was going on, this parcel of love would arrive sometime near the end of February.

I grew up because of him.

Early this week he approached me with a request to go to a gathering where there was to be no adult supervision. There would be alcohol. His gaze was frank and steady and he maintains this gaze while I fly around the room like a rapidly deflating balloon - exhaling panic.

Without spelling it out he is asking me to trust him. He knows he needs to sit back and endure my furrowed brow, the tightness of my smile - he lets me waver. He knows it will be a death-knock yes or no. He knows that I know who he is, his faith in that is strong.

He is sensible. He is honest and kind. He has humour in his bones.

All week I feel like a fish pulled from the comfort of water. I talk to other parents whose views rainbow from outright prohibition to a weary resignation - a knowing look on the pain of letting go.

I make one last stop, the Mother of a friend of his - her knowledge of him soundly objective. She describes my sensible, kind, funny, honest son to me. It's reassuring that he presents the same self to everyone - that he has nothing to hide.

"This is about faith isn't it?"
"Yep,"
"And trust?"
"Yep,"
"He'll be fine, right?"
"Yep,"

I call him and give him the go-ahead. And because I am nowhere near as cool as he is I get all shrill and spell out "This is about me trusting you, okay?".

I want to surround him with a magical, protective forcefield. One that repels dick-heads and danger.

"Ily," he says. I can hear the smile in it.
"Ily too,"

So right now it's 9am the next day and I imagine he's sleeping, maybe he watched the sun come up with his friends. And the only way I can get through this bit is to write about it.

I remember being fifteen, the years wouldn't go fast enough. It was impossible to imagine a time when I might wish they would slow down.

Wolf Mother

I can pinpoint the moment motherhood flooded me with a joy so unexpected I wept. These moments have continued to surprise me in the last eleven years but the first one, which took my post-natal euphoria and turbo-charged it, was memorable more for what happened directly afterwards. It was an every-mother moment, my four-week-old son smiled at me for the first time. If one were to try to recreate the moment for the big screen it would be replete with a chorus of angels, the whole scene would go soft-focus and be drenched in heavenly white light, with cutaways to the tear filled eye.

It was probably five minutes later that he smiled at the washing machine. The chorus of angels became silent and sharply drew in their breath, the heavenly white light became a buzzing fluorescent tube, life was once again thrown into sharp focus and I understood from that moment on, there would be drudgery punctuated by moments of indescribable joy.

Eleven years later the list has expanded; drudgery, hand wringing, anxiety, exasperation, overwhelming love and indescribable joy - an utterly sustainable balance.

Last night this bolt of joy come from sharing music. It started with a debate about Wolfmother, a bunch of nice young Australian boys who fancy a heavy lead guitar, a crashing high-hat dominating the percussion section, hammond organ solo riffs, and a wailing lead vocalist on a search and destroy mission for ecstatic high notes, ie: Led Zeppelin. When sandwiched between the uniformly boring hip-hop mish-mash that dominates radio play-lists it’s not surprising that an eleven-year-old-boy might see Wolfmother as the saviours of modern music and then be completely indignant when his clapped-out, washed-up, has-been parents respond to this epiphany by snorting DERIVATIVE!

What followed was an air-guitar face off. We opened with Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song”, he volleyed with Wolfmother’s “Woman”. Burning with inspiration and nostalgia, an outstanding feature of which is poor memory, I countered with Led Zep’s “Battle of Evermore” and found myself playing air-mandolin, which sucks in comparison to the air-Fender Stratocaster. The coup de grace was delivered with Wolfmother’s “Mind’s Eye”, which enables the deft air-musician to show off his guitar, keyboard and drum skills.

I was gracious in defeat, stumping off to the bathroom for an anti-inflammatory after all that head banging, content that youth and vitality should shine over old age and cynicism, with the realization dawning on me that I was no longer letting him win like I used to at Scrabble, he could trounce me single-handedly.

Later that night, tucked in with a good anthology, I read the following by James Hamilton-Patterson “A drawback to getting older is that we find ourselves compulsively skipping to the end of things and experiences out of sheer familiarity. We know in advance how most conversations, people, jokes and regimes will turn out. And even when they’re a little different from expectation that, too, will fall within our bounds of recognized variables.”

Which sort of explains our feelings about Wolfmother, but not those indescribable bursts of joy.