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In-flight questions

23/2/2014

Himemoana Baker wrote a post on the questions that exercise her, Ashleigh Young responded with questions currently circling and confessed a wish that there would be more questions and more responses prompting more questions. Now I want that too, of course. Great flapping bats.

At my work we have in-flight projects and I liked the wings of it and extrapolated and called other live, currently happening things at work in-flight but discovered it made no sense to anyone but me. It is the sort of mistake you make with a language that is not your mother tongue. Only Projects, I discovered, could be In-flight. Until now, and here, ten questions that haven't yet landed.

Why does eating raw cabbage remind me of my childhood more than eating any other food?
What happened to Heidi Willoughby? I met her on a three month exchange in Tasmania. Over there art history had a third practical component and we shared an art space and I bluffed being the sort of teenager who took art. She was good. We wrote letters for a few years, collaging our envelopes, photocopying poems, questioning lyrics, counselling each other - the whole bit. Her handwriting was an interesting mixture of upper and lowercase. Rebellious. Though I never got an Australian accent I still write Heidi style. There is a Heidi Willoughby in Alabama who advertises breast pumps.
Does anyone get lost these days unless they want to be?
Where is Alexandra's pack? Where is my watch? Where is the cut glass necklace that was once my grandmother's?
The terribleness of adolescence. What is the one thing I could say to my girls now that would make them not mind so much?
When Maggie was 4 and said we needed to unk, grate and put the colour in, what was she talking about?
If everything that went before determines everything else (something I can't argue with) and we have no control over anything, why do I, all the same, feel so tormented by my decisions?
Why did I let that well-meaning man talk me out of using the word fucking in a poem?
Will I ever go to a loud gig again and not have my almost overwhelming reaction be nostalgia for the times I used to go to loud gigs all the time?
Why was I so frightened by the pottery we went to yesterday?

Oh, you wonderful liberal darlings

17/2/2014

NB on the date. This was originally posted in the early hours of 15/2/14 but the post went down, so I've reposted.

Dear lovers of music, dear worshippers of freedom of speech, dear fellow freedom fighters, dear attackers of the appalling censorship of Odd Future, today is a wonderful day.

It's so heartening, so great you've spoken out in such vast and articulate numbers about Odd Future. I had no idea New Zealand was filled to the brim with champions of free speech.

You'll of course be horrified to learn that the banning of Odd Future is just the tip of the iceberg. Yup, if you think stopping these poor 'anti-establishment', grammy-nominated, critically-acclaimed, chart-topping artists from coming into the country(1) - probably winning them a hefty compensation package and a few thousand more fans - is a travesty, wait until you hear this.

Seriously.

Last year about 11(4) New Zealand women were censored. They weren't banned from playing some concert 12,000 kilometres from their home town. No. They were censored globally and permanently. Not a single country opened their borders to them, and not a single council let them play in their concert hall. They were denied their freedom of speech and their freedom of movement. The year before last the same thing happened to another 11, and the year before that, about the same. This year, maybe another 11.

Because every year, on average, 11 women are censored by their male partners or ex-partners who decide it's a good idea to shut these women up for good. They kill them (2). They probably kill them because they talked too much and said stuff that the establishment (these boyfriends or partners or ex-partners or the fathers of their children) didn't like. Or maybe they killed them because the women had said they didn't want to be in a relationship with them any more. Whatever, the men didn't like what the women were saying so they censored them. They stopped them from talking to anyone, ever again.

For every women irrevocably censored each year, there are hundreds more who are censored through rape, assault and fear. Who don't talk because it might cost them their lives, or their kids' lives.

And guess what? Some of those dead forever-censored women may have been or might be extraordinary musicians. They may have been astonishing rap artists, or DJs or poets. They might have sung like goddesses and danced like the devil. Or maybe not. Maybe they were just women going about their lives. Doing their best. Being nice, being horrid. It doesn't really matter. What what they weren't was an elite bunch of globe-trotting musicians who write and perform lyrics like I fuck bitches with no permission… Rape a pregnant bitch and tell my friends I had a threesome/Starve her 'til I carve her then I shove her in the Rover/Where I cut her like a barber.

What they don't have is a vitriolic and possibly entirely new fan base foaming at the mouth at the violation of human rights afforded by denying a few people entry to our country. One country, once. They don't have a bunch of liberal men getting all romantic about disagreeing with what they say but defending to the death the right for them to say But keep your motherfuckin' daughter's mouth shushed boy and every girl I deal and fuck/it's always against her will.

It would be tempting to think some men feel it is a lot, you know, more radical and open-minded and muso-hip to defend a man's right to say he kills women for fun, than it is to defend the women's right to be alive. But no, I know I must have that wrong.

Yup, awesome job on the freedom fighting today guys. Man, those really successful, wealthy, profoundly popular artists who are saying the same old hackneyed women-hating shite, really need your back.

And I'm totes looking forward to you proving that you're not just a bunch of needy blokes who are shocked to the gills with the idea that maybe you won't get to go to a gig you want to go to, or that your mates might want to go to. Or maybe your mates' mates (3). I am utterly convinced you're not just having a little freedom speech tantrum because you're so astounded things aren't going your way this once.

I can see with the fire in your belly, you'll be launching incredible freedom campaigns that will stop the irretractable censorship of around 11 women a year in this country. And stop the daily and widespread violation of women's freedom of speech and movement by men. Police won't be called out to a domestic violence incident every six minutes. Thousands of protection orders won't need to be issued each year.

And the Women's Refuge volunteers who are used to answering some 60,000 calls a year will instead be waiting around getting bored. Maybe they'll surf YouTube, find some blistering new artist, and get to listen to the whole track, start to finish, without some tragic interruption.

Maria

(1) On admittedly spurious grounds of possibly causing riots (update 17/2/13 as information has emerged it's looking less spurous to me - not just an incident when a policeman hurt his arm but a far more serious incident in Australia but that's another story ( or post?)
(2) This and other stats come from http://www.nzfvc.org.nz/data-summaries/family-violence-deaths and http://www.areyouok.org.nz/files/statistics/ItsnotOK_recent_family_violence_stats.pdf. It's quite hard to get the exact statistic I was trying to extract but I think from both these sources the 13 a year for partner and ex-partner male to female murder is not far off. Gendered analysis of violence fell out of flavour for several years in New Zealand so getting a good understanding of what was going on has been difficult. My number crunching wise friends may be able to be more specific (see note 4, I updated this from 13 to 11)
(3) Edited on16/2/13 from "...music you might want to listen to" etc, as I realised "gig" better reflects the situation with Odd Future that I am referencing. Anyone, of course, can listen to OF, they just weren't able to listen to them at one particular concert.
(4) Edited on 17/2/13 from 13 to 11. One of my wise number crunching friends did indeed say the official stats would make the figure closer to 11. My initial reasoning can be seen in (2)

42 things about Alexandra

7/2/2014

She is five.
This is her third day of school, she started at the beginning of term.
She only wears dresses except one pair of jeans which have purple sequins.
For her fifth birthday she got fabric markers and a white t-shirt. She drew a beautiful rainbow and then a sun. Then out of the sun came lots of black dashes which covered the picture and she said were IV. The bad stuff that comes out of the sun.
We tried to tell her it was called UV but she yelled at us.
She only lets Joe read to her at bed time. Sometimes I beg to and she says tomorrow, or next Thursday but when that night comes she says no.
She will cuddle me during the day and say Mummy is best and Jojo is poopoo.
She says, I can't hug you, you're too nice.
She says Mama is a poo poo.
She says you are the worst mother in the whole world. Maggie says calmly, no she's not.
The other day she was cross about something and yelling (she is often yelling these days) and she threatened to kill me. She was yelling but I said Lexy, we don't threaten to kill people. She yelled back, I WASN'T THREATENING YOU. I REALLY AM GOING TO KILL YOU. I PROMISE.
If she is at a gathering or party with us with no-one for her to play with, she invariably seems to end up with a crowd of adults around her that she will spend as long as possible directing them and telling them what they need to be doing. In these moments she appears very happy.
Sometimes when she is sad or upset or excited she does deep breathing holding her hand to her chest to calm herself.
Sometimes she will go into her room and close the door for quiet time.
She used to say "How about I make the rules?".
She still says "No, No. No. Never, never never."
From a little baby she has given us big hugs round our necks.
She asks why do numbers go on forever?
Three days after her birthday party she started planning her next one. depending on her mood she tells us that we can or can't come to her party.
She and I have a garden out the front of our house full of flowers. She likes to water it.
At preschool she liked looking after the little children.
She is usually very kind.
She sometimes punches us and pulls us though no-one in the family punches anyone else, and we get very stern with her with her when she does it. She seems to know how to curl her hand into a fist and pull a terrifying face. We haven't heard she does it anywhere else.
She helped plant the hedge three weeks after we moved in.
She talks a lot.
She says to our new kitten Tuesday, Good boy. Nooooo Tuesday. Naughty!
She laughs a lot. She and her sister both a laugh a lot and more and more make each other laugh coiling around each other in circles of ludicrosity and invention.
She is very interested in space.
She wants to go to ballet lessons, but I have found a no exams, no uniform mixed dance class, that I am hoping will do. It will do ballet among other things.
I suggested she might like to go to drama lessons as she is constantly putting on shows. And she said no. And I don't like drama. And then what is drama and when I explained that was she was doing just that moment, putting on a circus show, doing the MCing and introducing the amazing Rosa ballerina, and then being Rosa ballerina, was in fact drama she was surprised and a few days later said Yes. I do want to do drama. It would be fun.
She likes the Barbie tooth cleaning game.
She wants to be a maid.
I say would you like to start by wiping the table. And she says I told you not until I am thirteen.
She wants to be a ballerina and a rock star.
I say would you like singing lessons and she says I already know how to sing.
She asks, what is a rock star?
She likes to cook.
She likes to check the mailbox. Which is good because it is on the wrong side of our house and we somehow don't manage to get there very often and she collects the two near identical community newspapers and the bills.
For a while she adopted an astounded expression which involved her arms stretched wide, her palms upwards, her jaw dropped and her mouth and eyes open wide. How could you say that she'd say. She stopped doing it months ago, but it made the rest of us laugh so hard, Joe and Maggie and I, we do it to each other.
She makes friends easily. So easily she will go up to strange adults and ask their name and intoruduce herself.
She can make very good paper aeroplanes that fly better than any I made during my entire childhood. She remembered the instructions from pre-school and showed us all.
I show her things I hope will excite her, and she is obliging and says WOW. It seems she loves to be astonished.

44 things about Maggie

1/2/2014

She is obsessed by a fictional 13 year old girl detective called Ruby Redfort.
I took her and a friend - a fellow RR devotee - to the beach last night so they could swim and look for secret underwater caves.
She started cutting her hair to make it more like RR's when the holidays started and to make the chunks a bit more even, we agreed to chop it off. A relief as she doesn't like hairbrushes but wanted long hair.
She only wears trousers and she hates pink.
She used to like pink. Her five year old sister is obsessive about pink.
She loves to read.
Her favourite books at the moment are the Ruby Redfort series, the Molly Moon series, and the Famous Five series. In Famous Five she likes George more than Anne. She thinks the first Molly Moon the best because it was the most exciting, and she went from just being an orphan.
Her drawings are and always have been highly detailed and decorative with curlicues and spirals and flourishes. Often in black pen but with small coloured patches.
At school she did a multimedia house for a spider with televisions and an invented favourite programme, and places for the spider and its friend to sleep and eat. There were fold out rooms and sections of paper to attach.
She likes Moshi Monsters. She got a Paper Plus voucher for her last birthday and spent it on the Official Moshling Sticker Book. She turns the pages of the album and asks me, which is your favourite Fluffy? What about the Beasties? Which Dino do you like the best?
She likes to sit on her father's shoulders and groom him by running her fingers through his hair and picking out debris.
She tries to do the same with me, please your hair is really dusty she'll say.
Pleeeease, is her way of begging. Eyes big. Voice low and urgent. Teeth bared, chin thrust forward.
She likes dead bees.
She desperately wants a puppy.
She doesn't like walking much.
She likes things the way they are, she didn't want us to get a new refrigerator because she liked the old one.
When she is sick she goes quiet and I feel terrified.
Sometimes she finds it hard to say what she wants or needs.
She is quiet and will sometimes not talk much and will be considered shy. I am nervous of calling her shy as someone said once something that I can't remember that made me think it was a bad idea to label a child shy.
We talk of her sometimes finding it hard to say what she needs.
Her sister Alex is not quiet and sometimes we laugh together when Alex is performing and being loud.
With her friends she is bolstered and will make bold declarations and demands and be loud and impertinent.
She and her friends talk conspiratorially and earnestly. They go into the bedroom and close the curtains and laugh.
They love going into the garage. Our house has a section and trees and flowers
In the children's shoe shop, with all its dazzling, she chose black buckle-up sandals.
She loves having friends over.
She loves sleepovers.
She loves parties.
She loves scooting.
She loves her Paekakariki Granny's garden and planted her own but has hardly touched it since.
As a very young child she thought in colours, Mummy's work is purple, creche is blue...
She makes small, audience interactive books.
When she grows up she wants to make children's books.
When she grows up she wants one or maybe no children.
My latest bribery technique is a pebble jar which, when full, will entitle the owner to a treat (in her case possibly Ruby Redfort stickers (which we will have to print as there is no RR paraphernalia). Tonight I said she could get a pebble if she got straight into pyjamas and brushed her teeth without asking me. She did both those things and also rollerbladed back into the lounge to breathe on me and prove her case.
She likes minecraft. She builds 10-storey houses in the trees. All her houses have a library and a place to read books.
She isn't interested in music.
When I was pregnant she was certain she was having a sister.
When she is sad it sometimes sounds like anger and I berate her.
She climbs trees with cunning and delight.
She likes cute things.
She is unromantic.
She loves bacon and she loves shrimp crisps.

The new house

1/2/2014

This post is a few months old, but I just rediscovered it in my drafts. From a few weeks after my family moved from Wellington city to Kapiti Coast.

Today four fat kererū sat in low branches on the neighbour's plum tree. They were so close. Every day tuis. For the last three mornings Alexandra has gone outside in her pyjamas to feed the birds. The two girls spent hours on the lawn making gooey 'cakes' with flour, water, food colouring and something pale and granulated in a tall glass jar with a corroded red lid. It looked healthy and we probably moved into our previous house eight years ago. This move it has floated to the top again.

I am thinking about a new dining room table.
Maggie says 'No! No new table. I like this one'.
'Too much change, huh?' I ask. She goes silent for a while.
'Bad Mumma!'
Then quietly, 'I want to go back. Want to go back to Brooklyn'.
'I know you do. I'm sorry.
You miss the house and your friends. What else?'
I don't mean to torment her but to give her room to experience what she is experiencing. I think though I may be tormenting her.
'The park. The playground. The teachers at my school.'
'I know it's hard. And I am sorry. It will get easier'.

Maggie is homesick for the house we lived in. The house is about twice as big as our old one. It is dry and insulated. It has a garage and the girls each have their own room. But I remember homesickness. How it crushes your digestive tract and possibly your lungs as well because breathing is a bit harder. Homesickness is a weighty presence that you must lug with you.When I was travelling a bit for work it would hit me on night three. I wanted home and Joe and the girls when they came along. But as an adult I had tactics and ways to distract myself. I understood the problem and what would solve it. There was even a bit of gladness in knowing my body and mind were grounded enough to feel queasy when in flight. Maggie is seven and homesick.

Alexandra is less overtly sad but she is more grumpy than usual. Stamping her feet and being gleefully uncooperative. I think about how big feelings are. I remember hearing the idea that it is easy to dismiss children's feelings as smaller than adults' feelings because they are smaller than us. How that's wrong as their feelings are every bit as intense as ours. I heard the idea before I had kids and it struck me because I had been in that space of not taking children's emotions seriously. It rang true. My memories of childhood were full of big feelings. Now I think - imagine having the intensity of an adult's emotions in a child's body. With a child's mind not yet trained in scale or scope or perspective. How it must wrack you. I took my girls away from their home. It was more their home than mine because it was the only one they'd had. All the ritual and comfort of home was associated with our little slightly wonky cottage on a road beset with rubbish trucks.

Moving was absolutely the right thing to do. The girls play for hours outside in a new way. M's appetite has grown phenomenally - like she is now a young girl whose body moves as well as her mind. Paekākāriki has quiet streets where a child can live alongside. It has the sea and skies you can see stars in. We have places to play right outside our front and back doors. I dug up one strip of lawn where we'll plant potatoes and beans while the girls played hide and seek. They get to know the good places to hide and the really good places to hide. I get to know the sandy soil and try to figure out if I can tell those kereru apart. Instead of a mess of heavy cables and the houses across the road we see the Paekākāriki hills and the sky. We see the motorway and the railway in the distance. We see close things and faraway things which makes my heart stretch its legs a bit and take a gentle walk around. I am not homesick in the slightest. I bless the bathroom of the old house for failing to have a sound floor and prompting us, in realising the extent of the job, to disclose and sell and move.

'I know it's hard to believe', I say to my sad girl, 'but one day you'll be homesick for this place'.

In-flight questions

Oh, you wonderful liberal darlings

42 things about Alexandra

44 things about Maggie

The new house

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