Archive for April 2009
Here’s to…
Friends.
A perfect Autumn day.
Laughter.
A special new playmate.
Fresh air, sand and sun.
Here’s to getting out and about and not feeling like the socially inept.
Dear horrible, HORRIBLE neighbour across the street,
I’ve put up with your ignortant, arrogant comments about our family being ‘loud and feral’.
I’ve ignored your complaints to council because you don’t like our dogs.
I’ve turned a blind eye to your children trespassing on our property, while we are out of town, your filthy death stares when we are in our own yard.
Your disgusting mud brick house and unkempt yard, your decomposing, non flushing toilet that stinks out the entire street.
I’ve ignored your stupidity when you call your kids inside because you don’t want them to be ‘exposed’ to Malachy.
I can live with your beliefs about us.
I will not tolerate you telling your children that the reason Mal is ‘stupid in the head’ is because his mother took drugs and alcohol while pregnant. I can not sit by and accept that you think it’s okay for your six year old kid to march right up to AJ and pronounce this.
AJ has enough to deal with.
Besides the fact that it is clearly none of your business, or your children’s it is downright disrespectful.
AJ does not need to hear family business being gossiped about by the likes of you or your horrid kids.
Have you no gall?
Have you no manners?
Even if you tell your children what you think you know about our family, at least have the decency to ask them not to discuss it in the street.
Teach them to respect other people’s feelings, for goodness sake.
It will make the world a much better place.
As an adult, I expect more from you.
My kids might be loud and ‘feral’ in your eyes but at least they have respect and manners on their side.
What do your kids have?
You as an example.
Enough said.
From now on, If I see your children in the street, I will be dragging mine inside because, frankly, I don’t want them anywhere near yours.
Yours sincerely,
I have a cricket bat and I will use it.
Blessings.
We walk through the hospital doors, her curls bobbing up and down with each skip.
Heads turn and people seem bewitched by her.
Little old ladies stop and comment on her hair, tell me I have a little Shirley Temple by my side.
Tell me how lucky I am.
She is a girly girl and loves dresses and hats and spangly plastic jewels that glint in the sunshine.
They ask me how old she is and I tell them three, well, three and a half now and they clasp their hands together and I can see memories of their own children flooding back through their eyes.
Three can be such a wonderful age, you know.
We go to admissions, where all the ladies know her now, they laugh as she twirls in the lobby, as I sign paperwork. She’s looking better, they observe and I thank them and start our journey to the ward.
We pass a cafe.
Visitors and patients look up from their coffee and cake. They point to her, my curly girl and smiles twitch at the ends of tired, drawn mouths because she has stopped to give her ‘chububba’ a kiss and a cuddle, oblivious to the workings of the institution.
Her world consists only of her and her baby doll.
People gravitate towards her, with sweet stories about grandchildren or sisters or long lost cousins, with upturned faces and ‘ringlets that you could slide your whole thumb into’.
Our entry to the ward, these days, is a slow understanding between the nurses and I of a little girl who is going to be doing this for a very long time. It seems this new ‘family’ are going to be watching her grow into her own skin as well.
We are finding our comfortable familiarity.
The doctors and nurses praise her and gift her with stickers because she hardly ever cries when the canula pierces her little vein anymore. She is wise to it now and knows that if she just keeps still it will be over soon and we will be left to wander the long passageways, in search of her favourite hospital treat – chips. Plain and salty.
The lady at the newsagency says the same thing every month,
“Nothing plain and salty about you, little one, is there”
and she looks up curiously. I wonder what she thinks, wonder if she understands.
Everywhere we travel, on these infusion days, we are tethered to a beeping, whirring reminder that things are not exactly normal. She makes the most of it though and balances on two prongs of the five that spread at the bottom of the IV pole, her head thrown back.
She watches the hospital world spin around, uses her machinery as a ride, a means of transport.
People chuckle and twitter and I that can see that the sight of my little pixie has made them happier, if only for a moment.
Many times we have come here and I have felt anger, resentment, sadness but today I look through new eyes.
We sit and have coffee with a friend;
“Ivy is such a blessing,” she says, ”Look at how she makes everyone around her happy”.
The circus *updated*
2nd Place?
Oh yeah!
“ The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another’s desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together”. ~Erma Bombeck
This weeks’ theme at I heart faces is self portrait.
At first, I took photos of the kids and I individually but in the end, I decided it was all or nothing because my family are all a part of my self.
They have shaped me into the person I am today.
Crazy, expressive,emotional (them, not me…okay, me too).
They inspire me!