The fact is that a woman friend is as rare as a true love’- Elena Ferrante

When I was a child, my mum had a very beautiful friend. She was exotically Irish with an accent. She was fashionable and had a name I’d only ever seen in a book.  Her home was filled with all the things I had long felt sure would transform my life if I was lucky enough to acquire them, i.e. things I’d seen on tv.

She had an elegant home that I loved to be in, with proper table lamps, a steam iron and a red setter that came when he was called. There were wonderful conveniences, like margarine so soft it would spread onto your toast straight out of the fridge, not like the cold blocks of butter we had that tore holes in the bread. There were smoky brown glass dinner plates that wouldn’t break if you dropped them. Dinner at my place was usually ratatouille, but they often had baked beans. It was pretty much my ideal family set up.

She had a daughter my age, and I spent much of my time longing for her life. If there was ever any power in wishing, she’d have been out the door in a blink, and me, the changeling in her place. She was by far the prettiest girl I’d ever seen, with light brown, shiny hair that stayed tidy when you brushed it, and smooth skin that tanned. I was pale and pink with freckles and didn’t so much tan as develop reddish blotches and my hair never sat how it should.

We had a lot in common. We were the only kids at school with divorced parents. Our mums had each embraced the hippy culture of the time in their own way as single mothers and caused us no end of embarrassment because they weren’t like the other mothers.

I thought of my own mum as having lost the plot when she left my dad, his neat house in the outer suburbs and the promise of regular cricket barbecues on weekends, for a shabby port city filled with Orange People, migrant families and shops that sold vegetables and coffee on the sidewalk. My mum immediately rejected the patriarchal constraints of underwear, make up and shoes, in favour of bare feet and loose cheesecloth caftans.  My friend’s mum took a more circumspect approach to the era, at least as far as I was aware, and mainly stuck with meditation and study.

It was not uncommon to walk into my house and be greeted by my mum vacuuming in the nude and her boyfriend tending lovingly to the dope crop in the backyard. It was not uncommon to turn into my friend’s street to be greeted with the thumping strains of a fist pumping political anthem about sex or suchlike loud enough to rattle the aluminium window frames of every brick and tile house on the street. We were familiar with the art of pretending we didn’t live where we lived by walking purposefully past our own homes.

It was enormously bonding.

In other ways, we were very different. She always seemed so unafraid, my friend. Wherever she went she exuded a sunny expectation of being welcome and included. She was relentlessly optimistic.

In contrast, I was always afraid. I lived in a fluctuating state, either desperately hoping to be noticed, or paralysed at the thought of being spoken to or looked at. I preferred to be left on my own with a book.

Despite these distinct differences in personality, we were Best Friends. This was the thrill of my life. A comrade, a cocoon, a partner. It gave me the feeling of safety and belonging I imagined other kids felt when they knew they wouldn’t be picked last on the softball team. There was someone on my side and someone to defend.

We played with Barbie dolls in the back shed, we would construct elaborate dwellings on the tops of old furniture my step dad would restore. We practised our kissing technique on balloons in my bedroom. We swam most days in the ocean near her house, when the waves were big and wild. We’d let ourselves be caught in the swell and thrown about, dumped on the shore with sand tangling our hair. We’d swim west, straight out as far as we could go until we got tired, and then we’d float on our backs, stare at the sky before swimming back.

We were like sisters, without the fighting.

In a few years from now, we’ll have been friends for 50 years, which is something. It’s an achievement. The ties of shared history don’t leave you.

The magic of a childhood best friend, rather than becoming an exclusion zone around one single friendship actually makes room for more. I’ve added to it with other women, and like the Magic Pudding one doesn’t take from the other, quite the opposite.

 

I’ve been found wanting many times. I chip away at the best of myself when I let friends down, but I’ve done it. More so when I was younger and didn’t know myself as well. I made bad choices. It’s something still shameful, and the older I get and the more I understand the nature of friendship the more I wonder what I was thinking.

I have hidden myself and hidden from myself in romantic relationships, bar the one I’m in now, which owes a lot to the friendship we share. My closest friendships are such because of the room for revelation, for the testing of secret selves we aren’t quite brave enough to see alone.

I am lucky to have many best friends. They are a mirror, a lighthouse, a sure path in the dark. Not so rare if you know what to look for. The truest of true love.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I remember you.

You intruded with your hippy music, weird food, your big orange pots and harem pants. We had each other’s measure. Enemies at the gate.

You were thin and pale with way too much hair, not like my dad. I wanted to blow you away, out of our house, down our street, back across the river where you came from. I waged a long campaign to drive you out.

The stand off over my cat which you wanted to give away before you moved in, burning sticks from the fire offered as sweet treats, with smiles that didn’t mean it, while we stared the other down.  Lining the pockets of my dressing gown with paper towel before dinner, so I could squirrel my food away for later after I’d provoked you into sending me to my room. The shameful lies I told my mum about your children breaking my stuff so she wouldn’t like them. How much it hurt when she knew I was lying and took their side.

You stayed.

So did the cat.

I don’t remember when we became friends, how we picked our way through the spiky path of mutual antipathy and found a way to love. Neither of us were good at it. We both recognised that much at least. Maybe that’s how.

I remember your kitchen and the food you made, nothing like the food I knew before. Ratatouille, coarse brown bread we had to slice ourselves, made into chunky croutons fried in olive oil when the bread got stale. I remember your aubergines and avocados, the beer you brewed in big brown bottles that were stacked in the pantry. The white parcels of bacon scraps we bought from Watsonia on High Street for five dollars and had with eggs and mushrooms on Sundays round the table, all together. I remember your stance on the evils of soft drink, which you demonstrated with a dirty silver 5 cent piece in a glass of coke on the fridge. The coin came out sparkling clean after a few days. I got the point but I still really wanted to drink the coke.

I remember your music that filled our house. Your record player with the good speakers, the real diamond needle and the blue velvet cleaner in its rectangle box. The shelves of albums in their covers with the plastic sleeves intact because you were careful about that sort of thing. Side by side, all in a row, their colours like a painting. We would play them every night at dinner, and all weekend. We’d play them on Saturdays while we cleaned the house, each taking turns with a room, week round. Mine was the kitchen which meant scrubbing your big wooden chopping board with the round cut-out for scraping food into pans and putting your knives back into their right place in the block. Or the lounge-room which meant dusting mum’s ornaments, chopping the wood and filling the wood basket for open fires on cold nights.

I remember you.

That time you and mum smashed the plaster off the wall along one side of the hallway and into the lounge, leaving the limestone bare. You had t shirts wrapped round your head for the dust. You used sledgehammers to break up the concrete out the front as well. I walked past with my friend from school and pretended it was not where I lived and you and mum were not my family. We weren’t like other families. Not like my old family.

I knew to my great concern you grew dope plants out the back near the chicken run and smoked it with your friends. I disapproved deeply. I did not know that elaborate glass contraption you kept on a shelf was bonafide smoking paraphernalia so I used it to water the plants and didn’t know why you thought that was funny.  I left the anti-drug leaflets they gave us at school all over the house hoping you would see them and fix your ways. You wondered aloud where mum found me and whose child I really was.

You’d surprise me now and again by getting me completely, even if you thought I was ridiculous. You’d smile at me with your pale blue eyes and I loved the light in them. I loved the way you laughed with your whole face.

That time you and mum pretended to be normal just for a night. You did that for me because you knew how much I wanted it. I had started at a different school and brought new friends home. I planned the event for days. I took great care to manufacture a scene from the family I thought I wished I had, and what it might look like. You on the couch with your newspaper, mum at the stove stirring the spaghetti sauce, looking for all the world like she had cooked it and not you. My friends round the dinner table, with a tablecloth and napkins, making conversation. You sat so well with your paper and your proper shoes and jeans instead of the harem pants you liked to wear around the house. Your friend with the wild eyes, wooly hair and bushy beard wrecked our efforts, when he burst in shouting for me to roll him a joint, he was joking of course but my fragile fiction was broken. I cried all night in the garden and you didn’t laugh at me then. You understood. And as it turned out, my friends didn’t mind and my life wasn’t over. And I loved your friend with the wild eyes, wooly hair and bushy beard, and love him still.

I longed for a mum and a step dad who went to parents’ night. I wished we had an iron and our school shirts were white and pressed like the other kids. I wished we did not dig up the hills hoist and use daisy shrubs we planted in its place to dry our clothes instead. But on weekends we’d do something magical like fill the car with helium balloons and release them from the tallest hill in town and then have fish and chips.

I loved our Christmas where you would dress up in mum’s red caftan and the house was strewn with tinsel and we had a real tree with prickles that smelt like a story book Christmas. I loved our family dinners where everyone was welcome, and there was always enough, whoever arrived. You would talk to us sisters, all four of us like adults and we would discuss real things like music and news of the day. You made me want to be smart, and informed and a good conversationalist. I didn’t tell you I was frightened Reagan would push the button and worried we’d all die from ruining the atmosphere with chlorofluorocarbons. I still enjoyed the chats. You taught me to play chess and card games like Find the Lady and Euchre.

You gave me the playlist of my life with your music. Songs I can’t hear without being with you still. I’m glad we have that, and it can’t be taken.

Sleep well. I’ll remember you.

John Lennon: Imagine.

Murray Head: Say It Ain’t So Joe.

The Eagles: Hotel California.

The Beatles: All of them, but mostly Sergeant Pepper and The White Album.

Supertramp: Crime of the Century.

Bob Dylan: Masterpieces.

J.J Cale: Naturally.

Cat Stevens: Tea for the Tillerman.

 

In the continuing saga of my life providing too few lemons or too many lemons, I find myself facing the latter dilemma. It’s a definite improvement.

But still, I have a LOT of lemons and I’m out of practice. A few years ago now the bloke took to my lemon tree with the pruning shears, much enthusiasm and not much knowledge. When I came out to check on his progress, I found him standing proudly by what was left of my once lush and bountiful citrus. It was a sad looking foot-long stump in the ground with nary a leaf nor a lemon to be seen.

I was thrust unwillingly and completely unprepared into the cut-throat capitalistic world of lemons at a price and the price was ten dollars a kilo. It was outrageous and frankly, UnAustralian.

In the years that followed I have survived on my wits. I considered lemons allowed to hang over sidewalks by careless gardeners fair game. I leaned on family and friends with lemon trees. I snaffled more than my fair share when a charitable soul left lemons in a box on their verge or brought a bag into work. FOR FREE. Fools, they know not what it’s like out there where lemons are traded for souls and first borns.

I tried salvaging my butchered lemon, well let’s call it a “tree” out of compassion. And I planted another one because you can never be too sure.

And success!  It’s been a long dry wait, but finally my new lemon tree has born fruit. Has it ever. So many, the tree buckled under the weight and drooped alarmingly to the side. We’ve tied it up with an old pair of tights and I’ve gently pruned some of the more lemony bits of tree back to manageably lemony. Obviously the bloke won’t be going anywhere near it with anything sharper than his wife’s resentful gaze.

I’m juicing a few for later use, and freezing them in ice trays. I’ll preserve some & also having a go at making an environmentally friendly cleaner. I’m on the hunt for more ideas.

The cleaner, which I’m quite excited by, involves peeling the lemons, avoiding as much pith as possible which is a bit fiddly. Then soaking the peel in a glass jar with white vinegar for a few weeks. Keeping it as pith free as possible is apparently important because otherwise the mix is sticky. Hoping it works.

Lemon Cleaner method

Peel 8 – 10 lemons, avoiding the pith. (could obviously do more but once you start avoiding the pith you’ll thank me for keeping your enthusiasm in check. It’s painful.)

Cover with vinegar in a glass jar, and let sit for two or three weeks.

Sieve into a spray bottle, with 50 per-cent lemon mix and 50 per-cent water.

Spray with chemical free abandon.

**********

I will update when it’s done. Meanwhile I’ll continue to hunt out more options to squeeze the very most out of my crop.

 

How I jumped off a skyscraper, lost my mind and found it again. An essay on trauma and recovery.

I always thought the best way to overcome your fears was to face them head on, and in a single puff, like Keyser Soze, they’re gone. They spin away, dandelion seeds on the wind. I’ve since found that’s not always the case. Some fears have deep roots.

On a Sunday afternoon in September last year, I abseiled down a 234m skyscraper. It was a charity event I’d agreed to despite a long-held phobia of high places.
Afterwards, I expected to feel exhilarated, but that didn’t happen. I just felt tired.

A few days later I was walking home from work, one moment I was soaking up some late afternoon sunshine, the next I was crying. There was a surreal sense of disconnection, almost as though I was floating above myself. Thankfully I made it home before the shaking began.

The trembling hit like a train and wouldn’t stop. My teeth rattled so hard I was worried they’d splinter inside my head. It was terrifying.

Several awful days passed where I was sedated to control the shaking. It would pull me out of sleep and strike at any moment during the day, like electric shocks you couldn’t see coming. My doctor referred me to a therapist who specializes in Cognitive Behavior Therapy for trauma.

I was diagnosed with Acute Stress Disorder. It has similar symptoms to PTSD. It’s something you might suffer if you’ve been in a car crash, or a terror attack, an assault or a natural disaster.

I struggled with the idea that I’d brought this on myself, through such a mundane event. I wasn’t hurt, I spent a Sunday afternoon dangling from the side of a skyscraper, securely attached, in no actual danger whatsoever. I found it hard to comprehend my disproportionate reaction. I was embarrassed.

The therapist led me from self-flagellation, which I’ve always had a talent for. I had a horrible phobia of heights to start with, I could barely stand on a chair without vertigo. I spent weeks before the event, publicly building it up, raising money and such so I didn’t feel I could back out. I drove past the skyscraper in question each day and googled videos of past events. My family panicked with me when I told them of my plans, and begged me not to do it. It’s safe to say I was quite worked up.

So much so by the time the day itself arrived, my therapist explained, deep in the instinctive recesses of my brain I believed I was going to die.

I was traumatized even before I’d left the ground, in the grip of the powerful fight or flight instinct I had heard about but didn’t really understand. I know more now. In order to respond quickly to a (perceived) life and death threat, my brain shut down unnecessary activity, like reason. Adrenaline started flooding through me, designed to help me flee or fight for my life. Except there’s another option when you’re cornered. The less well-known F. You freeze. Fight, flight or freeze. I froze.

When it came to the pointy end of going over the edge, I’d panicked, hyperventilated, desperately clung to the metal bar next to me, frantically tried to get a grip on reality. I focused as much as I could on obeying instructions. I was able only to submit.

The shock was extreme, which explained the subsequent feeling of exhaustion. Dozens of people take part in this event every year, and, apart from raising money for wonderful causes, they enjoy it. I’m still not completely sure why my experience was so intense.

I became hypervigilant. Always alarmed. I couldn’t drive, because I was so likely to see a threat where there was none, I was a danger on the road. I found it hard to be around people or noise. Simply walking along a footpath was stressful, because of the constant expectation something might jump out at me. I took to walking compulsively down the middle of the road as though that were normal, up and down my street.

I had awful dreams. Horrors involving my kids being hurt, my dogs or people I loved. I was utterly crushed by any bad news I happened to see. I felt I was drowning. There seemed no point to life, no end to pain. And I was so tired. I was tormented by nightmares in my sleep, I was tormented when I was awake. I recall asking my therapist if having such grim thoughts meant I was as monstrous as they were. It was a bad time, that lasted with varying degrees of intensity for several months.

I felt terrible guilt. We all like to think if faced with an emergency, life or death, we’d fight. We’d run towards the flames, punch the shark, fight off the attacker. We don’t always get to know what we’d actually do. But now I did. I’d go belly up like a submissive dog. What if it had been my child or my husband in real danger? I felt sick every time I thought about it.

They are symptoms, I was told, and there is a comfort in knowing your abnormality is normal, I guess.

I had relentless flashbacks of the event. The metal buckles and steel loops on my harness. The flat grey wall where we practiced before the descent. The scaffolding and pens, where we were divided off, that reminded me so starkly of the pens of an abattoir. The smell of the metal around me. The sense of shuffling backwards, my feet desperately looking for grip, and then that feeling of nothing.

We talked about all of this, my therapist and I. We looked at images of the brain, and lists of common reactions to traumatic stress. I practiced the techniques she taught me, designed to relegate the experience to the past where it belonged.

We talked about fear. To see its profound impact, to appreciate its effort to protect me. To be kind to it, like you might be kind to a child cowering from monsters under the bed. It wasn’t about facing fear and conquering it, beating it into submission or purging it from my heart. It was about acknowledgment and respect. It was about gentle perseverance and repair.

We identified each trigger. My panic attacks were not as random as I thought. We did that by talking and writing over and over about the event, so that I could begin the important process of distancing myself. I began to pick apart a pattern to the stimuli that would elicit a traumatic response. Heights, obvious. Less obvious, the smell of metal. But metal was so strong a trigger that stepping on a drain, or walking too near a wire fence, or even just the smell of metal would spark a panic attack. Knowing why, made all the difference.

We talked about avoidance. When it seemingly made the most sense to shrink from noise and the hidden dangers in smells, tall buildings and crowds, we discussed why it was important to attend to my reaction. I didn’t find this stage of the recovery easy. The instinct to turn inward was very strong, and I resented attempts to peel me away from myself and my vigilance. But I listened because I was desperate. I used the tools I was learning to coax my brain back to reason, even as it fought me.

We practiced exposure therapy. Once I knew the triggers, I could work through them one by one, until they began to lose their impact. I found places in the city, metal places, high places, crowded places, approached them with care and systematically worked through the simple techniques I learned to calm my brain.
It got easier and easier, until one day I stood on a giant steel bridge, high across the river, I faced away from the water, gripped the edge and tipped my head back. I was fine. I was rewarded then with a sense of exhilaration. I didn’t care that I must have looked a sight.

I went back to work, worried that I might not be ready, but it actually helped immensely to be busy. I simply didn’t have time to obsess. It anchored me. Routine was important.

The condition all up had me off work for two weeks, although it felt like a small lifetime, unable to drive for several months and in therapy also for several months. But I was able to recognize my symptoms on my own, and I had tools to deal with them. I was aware there may be tendrils of trauma that went deeper than this one event, that might further explain my extreme reaction, but I wasn’t interested in peeling back the layers of my past in endless soul searching. This was enough for now.

Almost a year later, I’m stronger than I was before, even as I’m more aware of my own vulnerability. I know we can’t ever entirely shield ourselves from trauma. There’s a lot in life we can’t control. But I feel better equipped to get through another sideswipe, should that come. Even if it took time, I could walk myself through recovery, if not on my own, with help.

I am very aware how privileged I am, to have somewhere safe to be, people who love me and a workplace which supported me while I was ill. I’m lucky to have a family doctor who would see me at short notice, and to have so quickly found a therapist I trusted. All of these things were crucial. I know the longer this condition is left untreated, the more complex it might be to untangle. The brain is a powerful organ and instinct is a formidable thing.

I think, in my experience at least, fear is a bit like grief. However unpleasant, it’s not something you get rid of, the idea of closure seems ridiculous. It’s a part of me and, like grief, I understand why. We wouldn’t grieve if we didn’t love. We wouldn’t fear if there was nothing to lose.

 

Recommended reading: Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet.

LIFELINE: 13 11 14
BEYOND BLUE: 1300 22 4636

 

 

 

I don’t mind that much when people talk about our town. I get it’s a bit weird to some. To paraphrase Churchill: it’s an enigma, wrapped in a mystery, sprinkled with patchouli.

But an ongoing conga line of serial whingers on social media and this recent article by Nathan Hondros have started to get on my tits.

It’s like they parachute in from some unnamed nirvana into the worst spot they can find, and the predictable bleating starts. Worn out, run down, they shriek. Unsafe. Empty shops. You can’t park. Hippies. Poor people. It’s hell on earth. Or at least as close as a place described as ‘rocking a Soviet era eastern bloc vibe’ can get. (note: if that’s a dig at King’s Square, Nathan, it’s hard to look your best with a wrecking ball through your guts.)

In other words, precincts and problems that mirror just about every other interesting city of any character anywhere in the world.  Find me one without, I’ll buy you a beer.

I’m pretty tired of it. And getting royally jacked off at airy suggestions about what Freo needs to do to suit them. More private investment. Less of everything that isn’t shiny.

Where the Nathans see “run down and worn out”, I see charming and sassy. Even a little louche in parts. That’s the point.

I see the Capri, the old  Italian family  restaurant in the Strip that’s been there forever. Wood veneer on the walls, the cheap nylon curtains that hang in the window, the vinyl, plastic covered menus that still feature a soup of the day, often minestrone or chicken noodle, that’s always been free with your main course. It’s been run by the same family since the 50s, I believe. It’s never going  to make the top 100 best restaurants in the world, but it’s part of Freo’s beautiful, beating Port heart as much, if not more, than the establishments funded by private investment where  food is more for Instagram than eating.

I see the Navy Club in the West End, where you take a slow  lift  to the top floor and walk into the best view in town. You can look over the Port, across to the Round House, all the way down High Street. It’s a bar full of people I imagine some would dismiss as ‘run down or worn out.’ They’re stalwarts and salt-of-the-earths, straight-talkers, raconteurs. Ex mariners who can find a beer at a good price and buy a ticket in the chook raffle. You’re not allowed to wear your hat indoors. They tell yarns and have a laugh that’s not always that pc. Private investors would shunt the lot out to a cold, soulless brick and tile cave in the suburbs where the view is of the car-park.

I see the dingy old high-rise block of  flats in Adelaide Street, dirty beige brick,  where the corridors all  slope slightly, and the entry smells tinny and a bit damp.  Our own Leaning Tower of Pisa if designed by Charles Bukowski. In no danger of being overrun by tourists. But you don’t have to be a discontented Subiaco lawyer with a penchant for a second investment property to afford the rent, and you can still walk to the train station.

I see our much-maligned working  port,  our run-down passenger terminal, the bulky container vessels, the cranes, our giant iron giraffes, our harbour sentinels. The old traffic bridge that’s barely held together after being hammered once too often by a straying ship in a storm. Private investment would love to send the lot down to Kwinana, raze it and build slick faux industrial apartments and sell them for millions. I catch the train across the harbour every day to work, and my heart swells. Even on its worst day it smells and looks like home.

 

I love the new wave of funky small bars, and I love eating great food, there’s a wealth of that all through if you choose to wander even a block away from the Strip. I love the bookshops and the small boutique art shops that rent out shelf space to a range of  artists, some who  craft robots out of old tin cigarette cases and rusty spanners and sit them next to bulbous lamps made of test tubes  filled with fairy lights.

I love driving out to South Mole near the lighthouse, watching the big ships come in and out, hopping back in the car where the view’s still good  when the Doctor gets sharp and chill.

I love the weird  mix of houses, the old Italian mansions with their tiled front porches and stone lions, next to an architecturally spectacular reno of an old Freo limestone semi, bumped against a beaten down weather board place, where the window frames are scarred by the relentless salt air.  No block after endless block of spiritless McMansions here.

I love the old nonnas that line up along Wray Avenue on Christmas Eve, outside the tiny narrow butcher’s shop that sells the best turkeys in town. On the street where no-one can find a park and you can always get good tomatoes for 99 cents a kilo.

The glorious oddball hippies with ideas, that paint crazy colourful  murals on the side of coffee shops, wear funny hats and refuse bike helmets.

I love it. The new, the old, the grim, the broken. The dirt, the age.

The worn out and the run down. Especially that. Not despite that, because of that. If you don’t get that, you’re unlikely to get Freo.

Private investment is fine although I’m always fighting a vague suspicion of it. The Mayor, in his recent blog gave us an update, if you’re interested.

I too, remember the America’s Cup and like a lot of Freo people, complained about never being able to get a seat at my coffee shop, and worried about the impact of big business, and also worried where we’d be without it. But it swept in and swept out as it tends to do, fickle as the wind. It’s no savior. The city that endures is the city that retains its pride in the  old as well as the new. The city that values the worn and the tired as much as the youthful and the shiny. Maybe more.

I get that I’m one-eyed.

But from my point of view,  if you have a problem with Fremantle, then the problem is you.