African reading ...

I've been reading a lot lately, mainly about Africa, Zimbabwe to be precise, in an effort to understand a bit more about where I come from and where my father came from. I guess it is partly to understand my father a little better, seeing as he is no longer around for me to ask questions. Also because some of the people described in these books remind of some of the people who came to my Dad's funeral - they all seem to have a certain look about them. In a review I read of one of these books, the reviewer intimated that the last thing the reading public needed was another white man's view of the situation in Zimbabwe but they did go on to say that the book in question did add something to the oeuvre. From my perspective these books did add something to my knowledge and understanding of my past and of the recent past of Zimbabwe. All three books resonate with a love of country and a bewilderment regarding the current state of affairs in Zimbabwe. The absurdity of day to day life in a corrupt third world country is highlighted as well.

The three main books I have read are:

The Last Resort: A Memoir of Zimbabwe
by Douglas Rogers
It was funny and sad and absurd all at once and the tenacity of the author's parents is to be admired. Rogers now lives in New York, but was born and grew up in what is now Zimbabwe. From goodreads: "The Last Resort is an inspiring, coming-of-age tale about home, love, hope, responsibility, and redemption. An edgy, roller-coaster adventure, it is also a deeply moving story about how to survive a corrupt Third World dictatorship with a little innovation, humor, bribery, and brothel management."


Cocktail Hour under the Tree of Forgetfulness
by Alexandra Fuller
The author's brother was born in the same hospital I was born in, the Lady Chancellor Maternity Home in what was then Salisbury. Fuller now lives in Wyoming with her family. She tells a moving tale of her family's long engagement with Africa, from Kenya, to Zimbabwe to Zambia. She clearly loves her mother, despite her mother's complaints that she is going to put her in 'another awful book'. "A story of survival and madness, love and war, loyalty and forgiveness, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness is an intimate exploration of the author's family. In the end we find Nicola and Tim at a coffee table under their Tree of Forgetfulness on the banana and fish farm where they plan to spend their final days." - goodreads.

When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa
by Peter Godwin
Written by another Zimbabwean who lives in the US, Godwin is a bit older than the other two writers and actually served time in the Rhodesian army. The book starts with his father's heart attack which really resonated with me given my father's heart condition and his recent death from heart failure. Like the other two books this concentrates on the recent collapse of Zimbabwe following the start of the farm invasions and land grabs that ultimately resulted in the destruction of the economy and looks at how the author's friends and family cope in the aftermath of this. His sister ends up having to leave the country and his parents remain in Harare sinking slowly into a poverty stricken old age.

Leaps and bounds ...

"We are born naked and stay naked for only a few moments until we are wrapped in our first clothes. In our small shoes, our little trousers and tops and shorts, until we grow out of them in leaps and bounds, and begin to develop our own ideas about what to wear - we have always got something or other on."

The Thoughtful Dresser
Linda Grant

Where ...

It has been a while between updates and I am slowly coming to terms with a whole lot of stuff that is happening at the moment. But, Chet continues to delight. He has lately become the boy who cried 'where?' - at every opportunity. I ask him if he wants some toast, and his response is 'where?' I ask him if he wants to put on his boots and he shouts 'where?', pretty much any question I might ask him could be guaranteed a response of 'where?' He still loves The Beatles and has a Beatles towel that we have to fix round his neck with a peg so he can run around and be 'super Chet'. Here is a photo of him enjoying dry wheatbix that he helped himself to while I was in the shower.

I have been reading a lot - my usual way to make sense of life. The other day I came across the following, which neatly sums up the way I am feeling.

"Whatever a family's tragedy, children demand to be cared for, fed, and played with. This is, I think, one of the great blessings they bring to our lives. Mourning must be filtered through the lens of their all-consuming needs, and their infinite capacity for joy." Death gets a time-out by Ayelet Waldman.

Reading ...

I have been on a massive reading bender which has been nice but feels as though my brain is a bit scrambled. I read the Millenium Trilogy very quickly on my Kobo and decided that Scandinavian crime really has got something going for it. I even bought the DVD of The girl with the dragon tattoo, that's how into it I got.

I also just read Sex and Stravinsky by Barbara Trapido which initially struck a lot of chords with me - the opening sentence "The time is the late 1970s so everyone in the house looks hideous" makes it clear that the book deals the 70s (one of my favourite decades), and is also concerned with the way things look. Tellingly, one of the main characters ends up with an architect. The book is set in the UK but there is an Australian character as well as several South African characters and part of the book is set in Durban, where my grandmother grew up and my great aunt lived for most of her life. I am a sucker for a book that references places and things I know about and the more the merrier. One of the main characters writes stories about a girl called Lola who becomes a ballet dancer - something I and a million other pre-pubescent girls have dreamed about. I liked the mirroring of Josh's academic world with the world of the characters where nothing is as it seems, everyone is wearing a mask and life becomes a funny tragic comic opera. But, I didn't like how it all tied up so neatly at the end. Two of the male protagonists effectively swap wives, and their wives in turn swap lives and daughters. I am sure that this does happen in real life but it didn't feel quite real in the book, and all happened too smoothly and easily with no real ramifications for the people involved - or so it seemed to me.

But, on the subject of husbands swapping wives, I recently read a beautifully written memoir by Jane Alison, Sisters Antipodes. Jane Alison's family became inextricably linked with another family when the two families meet in Canberra in the 1960s. Jane's father was an Australian diplomat and her family consisted of two parents and two daughters, as did this other family, who's father was an American diplomat. The daughters from the other family were of a similar age to Jane and her sister, with one of whom even sharing a birthday with Jane. Jane tells the story of the meeting of the two families from a child's perspective - somehow, she isn't quite sure how and no-one ever really says, the decision is made that she and her mother and sister will go to the US and then South American with the American diplomat while her father will stay behind with the mother and daughters of the other family. And so it set up a lifetime of wondering why and how and of searching for identity as well as the meaning of family and in turn of fathers.

Kobo

I just acquired a Kobo and am unreasonably excited about what really amounts to a small piece of plastic. But, a small piece of plastic that can contain 1000 books - how good is that? It comes preloaded with 100 books - all out of copyright, mostly Gutenberg Press titles - which is also very exciting. Finally, my chance to come to grips with Dickens and others. It doesn't work with Amazon but any e-book or magazine in the ePUB format will work with it which is one reason why I got it. And, it is relatively cheap, very simple and looks pretty good to me - although I would not say I was an expert on e-readers. We are preparing for a family trip to Japan in a few weeks and I am hoping to take most of my reading material (and Chet's) on the Kobo. This should lighten our luggage load considerably - I usually travel with at least three books and get edgy if I don't know where my next reading fix is going to come from. I have spent hours in cities in non-English speaking countries looking for bookshops with books in English, much to the frustration of my travelling companions. Now, I just have to download interesting reading material before I go and need panic no longer. It won't stop me from going to bookshops though - I just can't help it.

And, it looks as though Chet is also in danger of becoming a bookshop fanatic. When I pick him up from day-care he says to me "book shoff" in the hope that I will take him to Gleebooks around the corner from his day-care. He loves running in there, shrieking and searching for all the Thomas books. He often grabs a book, and lies down on the floor of the shop, in the aisle, and says "reading". How can I resist?

Been reading ...

I have actually managed to read a bit lately. Not sure how, perhaps it is the welcome addition of Gleebooks to the local shops. Perhaps it is the fact that there is less on tv, or my appetite for tv is waning at the moment. Whatever the reason, it has been really nice to reacquaint myself with the joy of words on a page, as opposed to a screen.

One of the books I have read recently is Breastfeeding older children by Ann Sinnott. I am breastfeeding Chet at 22 months, and while I don't really consider that at 22 months he is an older child I guess I am probably moving into that territory. There were mothers interviewed in the book that were feeding children aged 6 and over and also tandem feeding long-term. An interesting point made by the author was that (of course) feeding a 4 year old is very different to feeding a newborn. A 4 year old would probably feed a couple of times a day compared to the 8-12 feeds required by a newborn.

Although I didn't agree with everything in the book - I am not sure, for instance, that it is possible to suggest that all positive aspects of your child's personality and development are down to having breastfed long term - it was certainly a thought provoking book. I must admit to feeling some unease about really long term breastfeeding but I guess with children you never know where things are going to end up. I do know that when I started breastfeeding I was more focussed on whether it was possible and on the logistics of getting it all happening to even think of an end date. And I guess for us we will keep on until such time as either of us wants to stop.

I particularly liked one of the author's final points: "Sustained breastfeeding is however not emerging in developed societies but re-emerging. Today's long-term breastfeeding mothers ... are not only picking up almost-forgotten threads but they are also the continuance of a line of rebellious women." p253. Bring on the rebellious women I say!

Naturally there are many ways of being a rebellious mother - those Mamabakers down the south coast made me laugh out loud with their antics - thanks Mama Mogantosh for reminding me that us mothers can be tired, rebellious, feminist and funny as all get out.

Further reading:
Mothers who breastfeed beyond babyhood
Can breastfeeding really be good for older children? Emma Cook meets mothers who keep going up to school age and beyond.
The Guardian, Saturday 9 January 2010

Just a minute - August

Been a bit slack with the blogging of late - no excuse really when I consider how often some blogs are updated. Still, we were away for nearly two weeks in August and I go back to work in a month and I think I have been panicking a bit about that. And I had a cold all last week so doing anything aside from that basics was a bit difficult. Anyway, just a minute for August:

Travelling... to Tasmania and Melbourne - we got to Hobart, Port Arthur, Swansea, Launceston and experienced truly horrendous wind in Melbourne - telegraph pole flattening wind ... we enjoyed being away but we were all pretty pleased to be home as well.

Watching... Chet crawl around the coffee table laughing with excitement. He is just so pleased to be on the move. While we were away his crawling really developed from the commando style he favoured to the more traditional hands and knees crawl. The change seemed to happen almost overnight.

Reading... Holding the Man, Buddhism for Mothers, Lonely Planet Tasmania, Naked Motherhood: Shattering Illusions and Sharing Truths.

Thinking... about returning to work, the past year, the next year.

Eating... a fab lunch at Rockpool Bar and Grill with the K-man, sans Chet. A very pleasant Friday afternoon drinking wine, eating well and relaxing in style.

Buying... fabric, baby clothes from charity shops, 1st birthday presents.

Wanna play? Head on over to August Street.

The Slap

My concentration seems to have improved and I have finally managed to do some reading. In the past couple of weeks have read both The Slap and Loaded by Christos Tsiolkas. It was interesting to read his first and latest novels in this way and to compare the differences between them. Loaded was a Ulysses-esque day and night in the life of a young gay-ish Greek boy from Melbourne. It was an angry, uncompromising drug fueled sex romp through the homes and streets and clubs of early 90s inner city Melbourne. I liked it and am not sure why I didn't read it when it first came out. I could certainly relate to a lot of it, although my early 90s experience was in Brisbane. The Slap on the other hand was more assured, more adult, not so angry but equally uncompromising in its' own way. The sex and drugs are both still there and I was pleased to see the teenage characters going to parties and the Big Day Out and getting wasted just as the young and the not so young are wont to do.

The premise was interesting - the accounts of the lives of eight people who were present at a bbq where an angry man slaps a badly behaved 3 year old child who is not his own. The ruminations on marriage and family and parenting really spoke to me and certainly as a new parent it provided a lot to think about. Some critics have mentioned that the characters are not terribly likeable but I think that misses the point and that most of us wouldn't come across as terribly likeable if all of our inner thoughts were revealed in the way that Tsiolkas reveals the thoughts of these characters. I thought it was pretty true to life. I liked the structure although I wanted to read more about Gary, the alcoholic father of Hugo, the boy who was slapped. And, for a sleep deprived mama it was a pretty easy quick read. I bought it on Thursday and finished it on Saturday night, happy to return to my old habit of gorging on a book, reading it at every spare moment until it is finished. And I heard on the news yesterday that Tsiolkas won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for The Slap - well deserved I reckon.

Toowoomba city here we come ...

Chet and I went to Toowoomba for a week to visit my parents. Anyone who knows me will know that I tend to find any extended time spent with my parents slightly stressful and this trip was no exception. The main difference was that I had a small baby who needed my attention I wasn't so caught up in the drama that is my parents. That said, there was plenty to keep us entertained - my Dad checking the stock market every hour and getting upset every time it went down, which was every time he checked it; my mother worrying about the price of cat food - a worry that had previously been purely my father's domain; and I got into trouble for not putting the car into 5th gear when I took it 10ks down the road - apparently this wastes petrol. Still, Chet was adored by all and had a wonderful time. He mostly rolled around on a picnic blanket on the floor and played with his squeaky pirate, book and monkey and looked at Snout the cat with interest. He got to put his feet on grass for the first time and was only really upset when I left him with my mother for half an hour to get a facial. He seemed to cope pretty well with flying - he was asleep for take-off both times and he slept in a family cot that apparently my mother and her siblings had slept in as well as my brother.

After spending time with my family I always need to debrief and no one truly understands what I am talking about more than my brother. This was reiterated for me by Judith Lucy, who's The Lucy Family Alphabet I read while I was away. In amongst the tales of bad behaviour and amusing anecdotes she makes an interesting point about siblings: "No-one understands your parents or your childhood experience like a fellow sibling." It got me thinking about families and wondering how Chet is going to experience our family. And if he doesn't have a sibling (and it is quite likely he won't) who is going to understand what he is talking about? Hopefully my brother will be there for him in the same way my aunt was there for me when I needed to talk about my family experiences and hopefully he won't need to debrief too much after spending time with us. Time will only tell I guess.

Deep in a dream ...

I am currently reading Deep in a dream: the long night of Chet Baker, a bio of Chet Baker which I like to think is baby related as we partly got Chet from Chet Baker. Chet Baker's Chet is from Chesney however, whereas our Chet is from Chetwin. I hope there are other differences as well - Chet Baker was a junkie and lived quite a sad life, dying in suspicious circumstances in Amsterdam in 1988. Coincidentally, he had a daughter called Melissa and was apparently a beautiful square jawed blond man - and of course I hope that Chet will be similarly attractive.

And of course we both hope that Chet will be musically talented like Chet Baker. If he is it wouldn't be from my side of the family - we are musically challenged although my mother told me recently that a great great uncle was a music academic in Scotland. That, however, is the only musical relative I know of. The K-man's family however is musically gifted - he plays bass, his brother plays guitar, his sister sings and plays sax, his grandmother played the piano in church, his nephew plays drums ... and so on it goes.

Chet Atkins is another musician called Chet - his Chet comes from Chester. And the K-man has a friend in Perth called Chet who is also a musician - in a band called the Early Hours. Seems as though Chet is a musical name - let's hope Chet can live up to his musical heritage ...

We all breathe a sigh of relief

The holiday break is now well and truly over and we have all breathed a sigh of relief. The K-man went back to work today, the Minx is lounging on the outdoor table under the umbrella, Chet is happily playing with his feet in his chair and I feel that I can finally think clearly. The house is not resonating with the sound of the Family Guy on high rotation and the computer is all mine again. The Christmas/New Year period was good but pretty full on - lots of lunches and bbqs with Chet in tow - he was pretty good about being carted around here there and everywhere and didn't disgrace himself ... much. We had high-tea at the Sheraton, lunch at the Drummoyne Sailing Club, bbqs and drinks at friends places as well as a couple of overnight trips away from home. Here is Chet, asleep in his capsule on a friend's kitchen table surrounded by bottles of wine and corn chips - a sign of things to come perhaps?

In retrospect we probably took on too much over the break and the planned 4 days at Mollymook turned into three when we found ourselves in a house with 9 adults, 4 kids and 4 dogs, a highly overstimulated Chet, not much sleep for us or him - it was a recipe for disaster really. Still you don't know until you try and it could all be different next time we take him away. I got in some lovely swims at the beach though. We did try and take Chet swimming in a pool on boxing day but the water was quite cold and as soon as we put his feet in the water he screamed and held his feet as close to his body as he could! So, not wanting to traumatise him I didn't put him in the pool any further. We also tried giving him a cold bath in the backyard on one of the very hot days we had last week - he screamed blue murder and was very upset, even when we put warm water in. He might have inherited his father's dislike of cold water.

The K-man and I even managed a couple of meals out sans Chet. The K-man took me to dinner at Aria as a 'giving birth' treat and what a delightful meal it was. We got the summer tasting menu - K-man with wine, me without - and the sommelier gave me a couple of sneaky glasses of wine anyway. It was all wonderfully light and summery. Chet was looked after by his girlfriends in Surry Hills - they love looking after him and when we dropped him off he was asleep - although not for long as they poked and prodded him until he woke up! He also had some 'pants off' time during which Assy took photos of his nether regions until her mother told her to stop and she went off upstairs to sulk. We also had an anniversary lunch at the Bentley Restaurant and Bar - a very different venue to the one I used to frequent when I first came to Sydney in the mid-90s - then it was pretty grungy and feral, full of hippies, dreadlocks, dogs, flannel shirts and always joints being passed around the pool table. Now it is casual but elegant, with a wide range of wines and tapas on hand. No pool table and no joints either! We had the tasting menu and asked the sommelier to recommend appropriate wines for us; I had a lovely pinot noir which lasted me through the entire meal, the K-man had the pinot and a heavier Spanish red as well as a cognac to finish. All in all very pleasant. Chet was looked by after by friends at home this time and apparently he managed to hold his bottle all by himself - which is a first, although I never seem him drink from a bottle as that always happens when I am out or away from him for some reason.

I managed to get a few things down around the house - re-potting plants, endless washing, sorting out Chet's corner, getting rid of maternity clothes and winter baby clothes and generally enjoying the warm weather. I hung some curtains in the kitchen that I have been meaning to get to for well over a year and enjoyed a gin and tonic most evenings - just after a feed of course. I even read a novel - note just the one. Most summer holidays ever since I can remember I sit down and plough though a novel a day for a couple of weeks - this time I managed only, Vertigo by Amanda Lohrey. And it is a novella. Very good though, beautifully written and sad in parts as well. I also managed a story by David Foster Wallace - I felt the need to look into his writing after his untimely death last year. His story, A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again about a week long all-expenses paid trip on a luxury cruise, funded by Harper's Magazine was laugh out loud funny (I doubt Foster Wallace would have approved of acronyms such as LOL, neither does Hank Moody in Californication but I digress) - very droll and dry and serious at the same time. I hope to finish a few more of his stories this year and perhaps even tackle Infinite Jest - I realise that may be a little ambitious with a small baby but who knows?

Now we can look forward to settling into a routine of sorts - mothers group, walking, yoga, lunches and trips to the library - I think a quiet life for a little while will be good for all of us.