Remember joy? It was a thing we used to have a lot of, and we talked about it heaps, back in the day. Then over the last year or so; not so much. So many new words and phrases have jumped into our vernacular that it seems we have forgotten some of our old faves.

And we’ve stopped writing and posting about our favourite things too. At least I know I have.

Things have gotten so serious and scary and strange, that telling you a story about how yesterday I thought I’d like to move to the country, so I drove for over an hour, some of it on dirt roads, to get to the old Kandanga School, a property that I thought I’d buy. When I go there, I realised: it was IN THE COUNTRY. Which meant there was country things like flies and dirt and cows, and not so much non-country things like cafes and homewares shops selling pinch pots and Witchery stores. It turns out that I don’t like the country quite as much as the romantic part of my brain thinks, and Country Road is really nothing much like country roads.

With the world doing weird-world stuff I feel a bit frothy talking and telling about the millions of things that go through my head (why does Woofa the shitcat sit on the back of the couch instead of on the couch, how did that wispy white cheek-hair grow to five centimetres when I only plucked it yesterday, should I start a combined chiro-cafe-bookstore called Crooked Spines, or should it be Aligned Spines, or should I also sell records and call it A Few of My Favourite Things and be done with it?)

So on my drive to the country I played Dan Zanes tunes on the way there (from when the kids were little and Hayls was alive) and Hamilton on the way home (now that the kids are older and Hayls would have loved the MadKing songs) and I remembered a little of who I was before the crazy stuff began. I remembered that I liked to go to cafes and drink coffee (only one or I can’t sleep) and write stories. I remembered that I liked to breathe deeply, to look a the sun shining on peoples’ faces and to talk to strangers about unimportant issues. I remembered that I am not a scientist or a researcher or a biochemist, I’m just a Mum with kids that I want to hold close for as long as I can, and take care of them the best way I know how. I remembered that I like it when people are kind.

So no, this blog doesn’t tackle the big issues. It doesn’t tackle any issues. But it does carve out a little space of joy for me, and so that’s what I’m doing from now on. Bringing back the joy.

Joy to the world.

What brings you joy? I’d love to hear…

…From The Ashers

Today, as I always do on your leonine birthday, I woke up feeling a bit perturbed. Nothing specific, it’s just that when you die you really die don’t you? No matter how much I try to trick my mind to believe that we are just busy in our lives right now, and that I’ll probably see you on the weekend (of course you’ll want to celebrate, you big show-off) I still know. Somewhere back in there, nice and deep, is a box with “Hayls” engraved on the lid in fancy-as-fuck script, and mostly I prefer to keep it shut. It’s not dusty though, I pick it up and turn it over in my hands often. I stroke the grain of the wood and trace the lock with my finger. I smile as I think of some of the treasures inside, and as long as I don’t open it, all is well.

But some days I am brave enough to flip open the latch and open that box a tiny crack. Snatches of conversation sneak out and hit the air and my heart. I might hear one of your catch-phrases (cats of Australia, vertebone, heeeeed, muff ’em Liam, big girl, a Billy Ray Cyrus) or maybe I’ll hear you laugh. I’ll definitely hear you laugh- you were always laughing weren’t you? Perhaps you’ll call me waif. I know I wasn’t called waif  in a good way, but I liked it anyway. You’re the only one who ever called me that (for obvious reasons), and I felt very Kate Moss. (I could use a bit of that now that I have an expanding menopausal arse, thanks.) Maybe you’ll call me a bogan for one of a myriad of transgressions, tell me how to eat my meal (chef has already seasoned that) or instruct me to drink some kind of weird cherry beer.

Some of our ill-thought out, fanciful plans might slither out, or if I’m lucky I might get an image- one of you prepping a meal, trying on a new A-line “cutesy” skirt, or getting ready to jump in the pool for our laps.

I might get your smile.

The thing is, I know exactly what’s in the box, so I don’t know why opening it is so scary.

Maybe it’s because even after all these years, knowing what’s in it and keeping it pristine-closed is safer than admitting that all I have left of you is some ashes and the contents of the box. I guess I want something more, which seems both selfish and just right at the same time.

I’ve been waiting all day today for someone to post on your page. I wanted everyone to remember that it would have been your birthday and you would be expecting presents and phone calls and cakes, but I wanted them to remember all by themselves. I wanted them to miss your smile as much as I do.

It seems they do. Is it weird or cruel to feel comfort in that? I don’t know any more.

Kaye posted a pic on Insta and you’d love it: you look both happy and hot (not in temperature). I think you’d rate yourself. Your hair looks fab.

Happy what would have been your birthday Hayls. I guess it still is your birthday, but it doesn’t quite feel the same saying that without you here in person. I ate cake. It was too sweet, but I put it on top of the weird stomach-wrench I already had, and it sat on top. I guess it will cover up the ache a bit shortly, the sweetness mixing with the sad and making something digestible. I guess that’s why you nourished so many people. You were healing them. Healing us.

Thank you for all of the times you did that. Even when we didn’t know we needed it.

Luv ya.

I heard about Mike Robinson well before I ever met him. 

As is the way with certain personalities, his reputation preceded him. 

I’d heard about him from Rick and Hayls, and they painted him on a big canvas, as daughters are sometimes wont to do. I think that when a fella has a presence like Mike, children can forget they are all grown up, and that they can be almost equal with their fathers. Part of them remains ever childlike, and they see themselves through the eyes of a man who thinks they still have pigtails and matching gingham ribbons. 

So when I imagined the man who I would later, much later, hold in my arms whilst he sobbed into my pointy shoulder, I thought he would be six foot tall and made of Kevlar. 

When I first met Mike Robinson I was surprised by his build. He was shorter than I had expected, but he had the stance of someone who was always on the balls of his feet. 

Ready, like a boxer. 

And I suppose he was. 

I never knew Mike before his girls, first the youngest and then the oldest, were diagnosed with cancer. I only met him after world had punched him, making him poised to fight. And I only ever really got to know him after his girls were picked off, first the oldest then the youngest. I don’t know if it was my imagination, but I sometimes felt like he never really dropped his shoulders after that. As if a part of his brainstem was always on alert, alternating between prayer and parley, hoping that his sunshiney middle daughter would be safe. 

Willing it to be so.

When I first loved Mike Robinson it was during one of his regular Chiro checks, back when Rick was on the wrong side of lean, and almost hysterically grabbing at potions and procedures and promises that could take the cancer away. We were discussing things that were beyond our control (his strong-headed daughters) and our respective roles in their healing. All of a sudden Mike Robinson jumped up, almost giving me a Liverpool Kiss as he scarpered from the office, saying, “I can’t do this.” I ran after him and somehow scooped him up in the carpark. He accepted my remedial hug and we both softened a little. 

It was nice have someone strong with me for the next part. 

When I first really listened to Mike Robinson it was when I was a new Mum, and everyone else seemed to offer wash-off advice that contradicted itself and disappeared like those tail-eating snakes as it puffed out of their mouths. Not Mike. Those eyes pierced right inside me with adviceorders and made sure I minded him. He spoke directly, that easy smile belying the intensity beneath. I carry with me so many Mike-isms, from “You can’t assume- every day is a new day with kids,” through to “You have to sell a lot of coffees to make rent.”

I learned lot more from you than you will ever know Mike Robinson, you funny, raw, truthful, stubborn, vulnerable, tenacious bugger. 

Thanks for allowing me in. 

I made you a list, mate. I think you’ll like it.

Mike-isms to Live By:

Don’t serve up visible onion.

Look after your family first.

Hug your kids more than you think they need

Choose your battles and then bloody battle.

Life is shorter than you think.

Don’t be afraid to tell people you love ‘em

Live loud, laugh loud.

Have the courage to say what you mean.

Love well.

Driving down the motorway, the familiar tightening in the back of my eyeballs starts. I know this sensation more than I ever thought I would. And more than I ever wanted to.

Every time it grabs me, I’m right back to the first time. The time when I thought that maybe things were still going to be okay. That life would go on as it always had. That this dash was a false alarm and I would be able to call my girl whenever I needed to know how to make spanakopita, again (“You know, the lamb one that you saw on SBS that time.”).  Or when I feel ripped off that there isn’t just one more sip in my capp (when I thought there was), and I can send a photo, and within moments my phone will ping with: #crook #fuckthat and I will know that I am heard. That there is someone in the world who knows my heart and my stories and understands my FW anguish.

Driving down the motorway, the familiar constriction of my throat starts, and I wonder if I have grown a tumour in the distance from Sunrise to Coolum- the looming head of the defeated warrior that is Mount Coolum seems to get me every time. What is it about dreamtime stories and connection with messages of the heart? The throbbing sensations of the rhythm of this land have a way of bringing me back to heart. And heart brings hurt. If it has been marked.

My heart has markings on it Hayls.

And you made them.

You made them deep and you made them good.

So tonight as I drive past the moment where I saw your last sunset, I allow the torsion in my eyeballs to wring their salty liquid, and I let it flow and flow and flow. The bruised greyblue skies reflect me, and the cane fields greedily devour our shared wrenching. The dusty cracks in the soil strain to be quenched with our grief. We nourish the sugar with our loss, and I wonder if there will be a bitterness in the sweet when it is refined. Or is all sweetness laced with loss?

The heaving in my chest surges like the Maroochydore River, and as I cross her, I say,  “I see you Maroochy. I see your sad and I hope you found your peace.”

I hope I will find mine, by and by.

Tomorrow we will cast the last of my girl into the biggest salty water, and I will watch her fly free, and wish I could have kept her here longer.

She will dissolve into that big blue, and I will not.

I will wish for one more laugh, one more lesson, one more conversation to stop the world turning. And I know that my wish will not be granted this day.

Not yet.

…From The Ashers

Make it count

Sometimes the beauty is in the spaces, isn’t it?

The pause between when you tell him you love him for the very first time, and you wait, one beat, another, and there is that delicious-scary anticipation, before you hear what he will say back.

The gap between the notes in your favourite song. You know precisely how long to hold the silence. You take your breath, before the lyric unfurls the next layer of story.

The very first moment when you become aware of yourself in the morning, when for a second or two you are no-one and nowhere, your brain is furry and unfocussed, and there is no cancer or death or pain that cannot be taken away.

The beauty of the space.

This week two more of my people died.

I know this is inevitable. That with every moment that passes, every beautiful space that passes me by, I draw closer to another death. A bigger space. Another one that can never be filled.

Those deaths take my breath away, every single time.

This week two more of my people died, and there is a space in my heart that can’t be filled, and nor would I want it to be.

What do you say when someone dies? Do you say: passed away, passed over, left this earth, deceased? I don’t like any of those. I say they have left a space.

And so I mark it.

In my appointment book, which is the thing that runs my days, I write their name, where the time for their check up would normally be. My Dad comes in most Saturday afternoons. Hayley comes in every second Tuesday night. Geoff comes in once a month on a Saturday morning, and Bob has 9.15am on a Tuesday, every fourth week. Don’t worry about my tenuous grip on reality, I know they aren’t actually coming in, but I can’t bear to erase them, to take away the space they held in my life.

In the beginning, the space is almost unbearable. The allotted time stretches out from my toes to eternity, and I think I will never endure the tock-tock-tocking of the moments passing. After the passing of months, that if joined together would wrap around the equator eleventy-million times, the space takes on a new form. The time morphs and passes faster, or perhaps it just has less barbs to be ripped out of the gentle skin of my forearms. The space holds itself, it never de-ceases, but I find that I have a fortitude, a fort, that I never knew I’d built, and I can sit in the space, and put the jigsaw pieces of my heart back together.

Some of the pieces are missing.

There are spaces where there once was a picture.

But there is beauty in the parts that are now missing. They are the memories of my very own. Invisible to another, but clear to me.

And they are wondrous.

…From The Ashers

A long time ago, one of my friends told me a story about how she only had five friends. We laughed at the time, but as the years passed I began to think that perhaps that was about right. We know more people than that of course, and we often have friends for various activities in our lives: the exercise friend, the straight-talking friend, the partying friend, but really, when you think of the people in this world who really have your back, the ones who know all about you, and somehow still like you anyway, there’s only a handful, isn’t there? Five, six, maybe eight tops.

Last year one of my top five died. You RRs know her by now of course, but if you’re new here, her name was Hayley and she bloody lit up the room whenever she entered. I wish you could’ve met her. She called my on my nonsense and she somehow knew just what to say to lift me up, no matter what the cause. A friend like that is rare and valuable. If you have one, cherish the fuck out of them. Because you are lucky.

So, in many of our long languid Queensland days, where we would chat and laugh for what felt like forever (we thought it would last forever, why couldn’t it last forever, dammit?), we named our top five, and, just for fun (and because we were sometimes assholes) we ranked them in order.

I was Hayley’s third best friend, and there was always much banter around that. I would joke of how I would knock Number One and Two off their perches one day.

But my friend Hayley died, and I never got the chance.

So now the rankings are set in stone, forevermore.

A little while ago BabyMac ran a competition for a gorgeous Uberkate silver banner necklace, stamped with the words of your choice. On a particularly grievish day I entered, boring poor Beth with the story of my sadness, yet one more time. I wanted to win so badly I even pulled out the Jamie Oliver card- sending her a pic of all three of us girls; Numbers One, Two and Three, and Jamie, relegated to a zero these days, with no Hayley around to shuffle the rankings.

And because Beth has a heart that is as kind and as sweet and full of substance as an Anne Cake, she let me win.

So the rankings shall stay as they are: Carlsy (and James, yes I know, you are 1b Jamesey), Jo and I. And now we have necklaces to prove it.

They don’t fix anything.

In fact, they might make things a little worse for a time. Because in wearing them, we recall our missing friend even more. The heft of it pressing on the sternum makes it a little hard to breathe at times. Perhaps it is heavier than it’s actual weight. It feels like it. But after a while, I hope it will get lighter, or perhaps I will adapt to the feeling.

I’m not sure if I want to.

And people will probably be attracted to it’s lustre. They will read the words, and they may ask what it means. And I will be able to tell them about my friend, talk her back into the world a little, make a space for her in the days that go on, even though she does not.

Lest we forget.

They are beautiful and shiny and bright, these necklaces. I am grateful to Beth and to Kate for them.

They reflect the light in a way that reminds me of my friend.

…From The Ashers