She wears a flower in her hair...

More on the best sorts of Christmas presents later but today I want to share some insights into my little Viking.  It's no secret that I struggle with my self-esteem and the concept of beauty.  It's been an interesting journey with some key moments since my tiny daughter was born.  It culminated fairly recently when I asked one of my best friends whether I really looked like the sort of person who was into clothes and stuff and he said yes, actually, you do.  It felt like I'd won a prize.  Really?  Huh.  I wasn't sure whether I'd succeeded in fooling the rest of the world or just myself.

Dressing well and looking good is not something that's ever come naturally for me.  As a part of my ongoing efforts to not be such a screaming tom boy, at the end of last year I challenged myself to a year of going to work in skirts and dresses instead of slacks and jeans (I did give myself a few casual Fridays in jeans but I compensated with pretty tops and shoes).  It was no easy thing, especially since I only really owned two dresses and a skirt at the start.  It involved a lot of op shop pillaging before I had a good wardrobe to work with that didn't leave people wondering if my washing machine was on the fritz.  Didn't I see you wearing that two days ago?  Yes, it's been washed, shut up.

The thing that surprised me most about that experiment was the response of my little Viking.  He loves his Mummy to be pretty.  He loves watching me clip my stockings to my garter belt in the mornings, loves choosing which dress I'll wear and strokes me possessively at day care when the other children come up to me, informing them quite darkly "she's MY pretty Mummy."  Having a mum who looks "pretty" seems to rank quite highly on the list of priorities.  I had no idea just how high though until Christmas.

Come Christmas at his grandparents' and he shoved a small parcel into my hand, bouncing around with glee. My mother-in-law was quick to point out very solemnly that he had insisted on this gift for me, chosen it himself and was super excited to be giving it to me.  He hopped from one foot to the other and literally skipped a lap of the coffee table while I opened it to reveal...

Three flowers on clips for my hair.  One of the things I learned in Charm School was the value of adding a simple flower to your hair every day.  I do this just for fun when I'm in the mood but honestly, while I've nailed the clothes and makeup aspect of being pretty (I refuse to say "girly"), hair is something that still eludes me.  Most days it just goes up in a ponytail and that's the limit of the attention it gets.  The flower is my cheat's way of pretending I made an effort.

My small son was practically vibrating with glee when I finally opened this gift.  I immediately clipped the black rose into my hair and when I had a quiet moment I asked him about them.

"Do you like it when Mummy wears a flower in her hair, do you?"
He nodded solemnly.
"Yes Mummy, I like it when you wear pretty skirts and pretty dresses and your pretty stockings...and Mummy I like it when you wear pretty flowers in your hair but you don't do it very often."
"Do I need to do it more often, do I?"
"Yes Mummy.  You should wear pretty flowers in your hair all the time because you're so pretty."

No arguing with the three-year-old Viking logic.  So I have faithfully clipped a flower into my hair every morning since.  But I wasn't aware of just how closely the small boy was watching and monitoring the hair flowers until I debuted the frangipani for a barbecue some five days after I first opened his present.

"Mummy I'm really glad you're wearing your yellow flower, but what about the red one?"
"I haven't worn that one yet, have I Buddy?"
"No," he frowned, his brow knitting and his bottom lip going out.
"Well I might have to wear that one tomorrow.  What do you think?"
"I think that's a very good idea."

And when it finally made it into my hair he climbed into my lap, snuggled in and kissed me.
"Mummy, you're wearing the red one!"
"Yes darling, I am."
"Thank you Mummy!  I'm so PROUD of you."
It's such a small thing but clearly to a small boy it's majorly important.  Maybe this year my challenge will not be clothes - it will be to do my hair every day and make sure I'm wearing a flower.

Wrath

There was a time when this blog was full of largely irrelevant, mundane posts relating to my day-to-day life.  This past year has been hell.  A lot of who I am has been burned away in trials by fire.  I'm still here.  I'm still breathing.  I'm just not who I used to be.  And I don't know who I will become.  This blog has fallen a little quiet during that time because I don't like to share bleakness.  I wish to be a positive force for change in this world.  Now that the tide is turning, now that I am deciding who I am I'm feeling the urge to write again but I don't think this blog, like me, will ever be what it once was.  I don't yet know whether that will be something people like or not but whether what I share has people's approval or not can't be the focus of my thoughts when I write.

The good thing about burning away so much of yourself and not knowing what's left is that at a certain point you come to see that the choice is yours.  The last few months I've worn some pretty disgusting behaviour.  I've taken it on the chin from a number of sources and I've taken it for a number of different reasons.  Partially because I felt like I deserved it.  Partially because I couldn't believe it was happening and I didn't know what to do about it, and finally because I tend to believe people try to do the best with what they've got and I couldn't bring myself to believe that the people perpetrating the behaviour were anything other than ignorant to its impact and effects.  Yesterday as I went through some of the more recent events my friend Luke called me an incredibly forgiving person in a way that implied that my tolerance and forgiveness exceeds the norm.  That brought me up short.  He wasn't the first person to say it.  I get a lot of people telling me I tolerate far worse than I should and I had to think about it.

A big part of it is that while I might be angry and upset, I don't think it's my job to judge other people.  I generally think the lives people lead are their own punishment or reward for being the sort of person that they are.  While I don't mind discussing my own life, I don't often like to talk about other people's private lives on my blog so instead of using recent examples from my own experience, I want to use two fairly public incidents that people are probably familiar with to demonstrate what I mean.

In March 1993 a photographer by the name of Kevin Carter took an iconic photo of a starving toddler trying to reach a feeding centre in the Sudan.  In the background a vulture stood watch, clearly waiting for the child's death.  This picture, to me, is horrific.  And to the world that saw it, it wasn't just the photo but the actions of the photographer - who apparently took the photo and left the child to whatever fate she met - that was horrific.  It's easy when you say it like that to immediately judge the man.  How could you?  I'll bet a million people or more saw that photo, heard the back story and thought that.  How could you do that?  But how many people were actually there?  How many had seen the countless helpless souls suffering during that famine?  How many lifted a finger to help?  How many stopped to wonder how a human being gets to a point where they could be in place to take a photo like that and not feel moved to help the child?  Can you imagine what horrors you'd have to see before you reached a point where you could take that photo and then just walk away?

Maybe you think nothing would ever scrub the humanity out of you - that you personally would never reach such a point in your existence where you would see something like that and not be moved to do all that you could to help.  How lucky we are that we're not in the Sudan trying to document a famine and wake the world up to the sheer magnitude of horror that that entails.  I'll bet almost everyone that knows the story of Kevin Carter's iconic photo was horrified...but how many were relieved that they weren't the ones there to take it?  Do you feel better when you know that ultimately Kevin Carter took his own life, leaving behind a suicide note that read in part, "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners..."  Was the taking of his own life enough to appease you?

Closer to home and more recently we have the case of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who took her own life after she was subjected to a prank phone call by 2DayFM DJs Michael Christian and Mel Greig.  Personally I'm not a fan of prank phone call humour because it always comes at the expense of someone, somewhere.  For that reason I choose to not listen to radio stations that do this sort of thing.  This time there was a tragic outcome that no one predicted for what should have been a harmless little prank.  Now the public are baying for the blood of the perpetrators.  It makes me wonder. Would it be better if these DJs killed themselves in turn?  Would that appease people?  It wouldn't bring Jacintha back.  It wouldn't make her family any less aggrieved.  It literally wouldn't fix anything.  And yet the harassment and abuse is hurled, pushing these people ever closer to the edge themselves.  The difference is that this time you can see it happening and still no one is doing anything about it.

Now we come to my point.  People always ask me why I don't get angry at things like this.  Come call for their blood, boycott their sponsors, write an angry letter - don't you care?  I do care.  I care more than you can imagine.  But the damage has already been done.  Nothing anyone said about Kevin Carter the photographer would ever cut as deeply into his soul as the experiences that made him into the man who took that photograph.  Nothing anyone ever says will remove the guilt and shame from those DJs who will always wonder how much they contributed to the desperation of a suicidal nurse who went over the edge.  They'll live with that for the rest of their lives - it will eat at them, claw at them, whisper to them in the quiet moments and nothing I could ever say or do would have remotely as much impact as what will happen organically.

Anger begets anger.  Violence begets violence.  We, all of us, get to choose who we are and how we handle  the situations and circumstances that face us each day.  And we all must live with the fallout of our actions.  Speaking in moments of anger, even when you think your rage is justified, is a dangerous, dangerous thing to be doing.  Because even if you get the chance to apologise, you can't call those words back and you won't ever be able to remove the memory of them from your target.  Sometimes words have fatal consequences.  On both relationships and people themselves.

My Christmas Wish List

For all that I love Christmas and the good times I get to have with my family, it still drives me insane on a number of different levels.  I hate tinsel.  I hate malls.  I hate Mariah Carey.  I especially hate Mariah Carey singing Christmas carols which seems to be the only Christmas album anyone with a speaker to blare at the public owns (not at all linked to the presence of said Christmas album in the $2 bin at JB hifi, I'm sure).  I hate the thought of millions of cheap toys being bought for half an hour of joy at the expense of both the environment and the people who made them.

Here's another pet hate - people's refusal to believe that what I truly want for Christmas either costs less than $20 or just cannot be bought.  They ask you what you want, you tell them nothing and they act like you're deliberately lying because you're a sadist bent on making their life miserable by forcing them to spend hours agonising and trekking through malls Mariahed in bad music while they find that perfect gift that's going to delight you.  And here's the thing.  Nothing they find will delight you and here's why;

1.)  Ideally what you want to buy is either something I need or something I want.  I'm not wealthy but I can afford to buy what I need when I need it.  Truly.  There's almost nothing I really need that I don't already have or won't just buy for myself the instant I need it.  With a few notable exceptions that we'll get to shortly.  Everything else is stuff I want and stuff I want is seriously limited.  I'm not really a stuff person.

2.)  I have spent this past year having a stuff tantrum on an almost monthly basis.  I've sent a household worth of stuff to charity and the tip.  I'm still trying to turf stuff so if you buy me something and it's not something I specifically asked for, chances are it will fall into the "stuff" category and all you're really doing is undermining all my good work. Here's what's going to happen to your gift.  For six months I'll have it out and about and try to use it - primarily out of guilt but also in case you come over and look for evidence that it's in use.  For the next six months it will sit at the back of a cupboard where I will avoid its accusing stare every time I need to get the basic item at the front that I use all the time and have owned for about fifteen years.  After that I will have a stuff tantrum and it will migrate to a crate in my garage where it will sit in stuff purgatory until I can then re-gift it or I have another tantrum and take it, along with a bunch of other stuff, off to a charity or a tip.  If you ever ask me where it is I will lie and either say it broke or that it disappeared after my 73-year-old father came to stay but we didn't say anything because he's getting old and old people are a bit like that*.

3.)  People never believe me when I tell them what I actually want.  You want to delight me?  Buy me what I actually asked for.  Yes, even though it's cheap and nasty.  Yes, even though it's impersonal.  It's what I actually want it just happens to cost less than $20.  Sometimes that happens.  It's a Christmas miracle!  My perfect gift literally only costs $3.

So - the things I actually want this Christmas, both tangible and intangible, for those that are genuinely interested**.

1.)  New oven mitts.  I worked out the other day that mine are 12 years old.  They're threadbare where it counts, I burn my hands almost every time I use them and I always forget to buy a new pair when I'm out at the mall. $3 from Kmart or something but I will use those suckers and be grateful I don't have to run my fingers under cold water for ten minutes afterwards for a long, long time to come.

2.)  A new plug for my sink.  Just like the oven mitts.  I forget this every time I go shopping.  I have to balance a pewter tankard filled with water on the plug while I do the dishes so the water doesn't drain away. Yes I do my own dishes.  No I don't have a dishwasher.  No I don't want a dishwasher.  Okay.  Buy me a dishwasher.  Secondhand or reconditioned or something.  If you must.  Seriously, just a new plug would be awesome.

3.)  Vouchers.  The Salvos (do they even do that?) and Bunnings.  I am always renovating and gardening.  I'm still losing weight and I frequently run out of stuff that fits.  Don't even get me started on the fact that the only clothes the shops are selling at the moment come in neon; just buy me a Salvos gift voucher so the next time I find myself looking like a denim sharpei I can do something about it without looking like Stabilo Boss Hi-lighter Barbie.

4.)  A fishing rod bag.  No I don't enjoy torturing fish for fun***, that's not what it's for.  I need a bag to carry my bongsul (fighting staff) in and apparently rod bags that are about two metres long are ideal.  My staff is 1.8m long.  Get me something a little bit longer than that.  If you must, whack a pretty keyring on the zip so I can tell which one is mine.  They're about $10 from a fishing store.  If you're feeling especially generous some sort of hockey stick or baseball bat bag arrangement for my sword would be full of win too.  Although I haven't measured it yet...

5.)  Tell me something that will keep me going.  This year has been awful.  My self esteem is crap and my ability to navigate the bad times is low at the moment.  I keep scraps of paper with good things people have said about me around so in those bad times I can remember that I am worth something to someone somewhere.  It doesn't have to be epic.  It doesn't have to be a letter or even a paragraph.  It can be just one sentence.  Write it out nicely on a piece of paper or in a card or something and I guarantee it will mean more than anything you could ever buy me.

6.)  Take me to lunch.  There are days where my anxiety is high and I need to get out of the office before I suffocate.  I love going and sitting in the sun for a cheap and cheerful lunch with a good friend so pony up a voucher that's good for one lunch and make an awful day somewhere in the future a whole hell of a lot happier.

7.)  Make me something.  Every year I churn out handmade Christmas decorations and gifts from my kitchen and that's what people keep asking me for.  Do you paint, sew, draw, write, cook?  Make me something with your own hands and I guarantee it won't be labelled "stuff" and purgatory will never see it.

Some of the gifts coming out of my kitchen this year...

The point is that most of the people I know have just about everything they need and can access most of the things they want on their own and I'm no different.  But, as my sister-in-law pointed out a year or two ago, we're all pretty busy people and what we really lack is quality time with each other.  It sounds trite but really and truly, everything I want for Christmas doesn't even have a price tag.  So please...enough with the stuff.

*  Hey Dad!  How you doing?  This is a lie BTW  *cough cough*  For the sake of humour.  *cough cough* I would never actually say this about you to anyone.  *cough cough COUGH*
** Do not under any circumstances buy me any of this stuff.  Because I know that I will get twenty of each of these things now.  This is just my annual Christmas rant designed to make a point about why you shouldn't try to buy me the latest teapot/four-in-one power tool/New York Times bestseller.
*** Participating in the noble/historic/meditative/timeless...blah, blah, blah I don't really like fishing so sue me, okay?