Monday 11 November 2013

wrinkles

(*names have been changed)

we were sitting together in her loungeroom watching mamma mia for what seemed like the thousandth time. daphne* loves mamma mia and we watch it together often. and by often i mean often. like the number of times you’ve eaten toast this week, that’s probably the number of times i’ve watched mamma mia this week.

i loved mamma mia the musical when i saw it in london a few years back, and i enjoyed mamma mia the film the first time i saw it, but by its thousandth watch it loses some if its magic. you begin to realise (probably around the first viewing) that pierce brosnan, although lovely to look at, isn’t a particularly gifted singer. so i sat with daphne ­– bunkered down ­– ready to enjoy the sensation of my ears spontaneously bleeding to the tune of brosnan massacring SOS.

daphne is a client i work with regularly when i am at home in australia topping up my adventure-fund (you may have heard this referred to as a savings account by real adults). you’re not supposed to have favourite clients, but she is, without question, mine. she has physical and intellectual disabilities so life is a bit tougher for her than it is for me. when i go to work i help her to have a shower, get dressed and eat her breakfast. she loves movies and music... so a movie with music in it sends her into a joy spiral the likes of which i don’t see too often. we love to sing together. daphne is difficult to understand when she’s speaking and i often have to ask her to repeat herself three or four times before i figure out what she’s saying. but when we’re banging out some abba, beatles or simon & garfunkle classics together, her croaky, not-so-much-in-tune, hard-to-understand voice becomes one of the most beautiful sounds in my world. pierce could learn a thing or seven.

as i watched/endured brosnan ‘singing’ more of daphne and my favourite tunes, she looked down at her right arm with a puzzled expression on her face. “what’s that kt... who did that?” she was pointing to her right forearm with her clenched up left hand but i couldn’t figure out what she was talking about. “what is it kt... who did those patterns?” i thought she may have had a scratch or bruise on her and i became a little concerned, so looked a bit closer. but i couldn’t see what she was talking about. “those beautiful patterns kt... who did them on me?” i was baffled for the longest time... but after about ten minutes of questions and pondering i solved the beautiful riddle. she was pointing to her wrinkles.

daphne is in her 60s and i was sitting next to her when she realised for the first time that she had wrinkles on her skin... and she thought they were the most beautiful patterns she had ever seen... and she wanted to thank the person who had put them there. i only wish i was capable of creating something as beautiful as those wrinkles.


life is good people. be grateful for the skin you are in... wrinkles and all!

Sunday 8 September 2013

finishing

i’ll get to the cycling, just bear with me a sec...

i was ten years old the first time it occurred to me that i should be dissatisfied with my body. someone who hadn’t seen me for a while – an adult – walked into the lounge room where i was sitting and said, “hello kt, you’ve put on some weight”.

ten. years. old.

i think i mostly forgot the incident at the time, but i remember it hurt my feelings in a way that they hadn’t been hurt before. the real kicker came two years later when i was stumbling through puberty in grade eight at toowong state high school. a short, skinny kid with terrible teeth called brian something-or-other humiliated me in front of our entire bus on the way home from school one day. he told everybody that i had cellulite and that must mean i was fat. people told him to stop, but they were laughing while they did it, so clearly they didn’t want him to stop at all. brian something-or-other was on a roll and he had a captive audience. i really only realised he was short, skinny and had bad teeth when he said nasty things about me. not the first time in history that hate bred hate i suspect. for some reason – in that moment – i had to find something wrong with him so i didn’t feel so pathetic about myself.

if i had the choice to relive those twenty minutes of my adolescence or walk around for a full year naked with lipstick on my teeth, there’s a good chance i’d choose the lipstick. i hated that kid as much as i can recall hating anything ever in my life. it is an event which i can categorically say led to years of hating my body.

i’m kind of sick of hating my body. i’m sick of having the voice of brian something-or-other (and others like him who have made themselves known to me over the years on televisions and billboards) constantly in my ears telling me that how i look isn’t good enough. i’ve still got cellulite which means i must still be fat, which means everyone probably still wants to board a smelly bus and laugh at me. i’m really sick of it.

the truth is, that in conjunction with my mind, my body has done something pretty extraordinary in the last month. my body and my mind have travelled almost the entire west coast of america on a bicycle loaded up with a tent, a sleeping bag, a pillow and some clothes. i shouldn’t hate a body that is capable of that. i should give that body a pat on the back and say, “well done body. you did good”.

fog, ocean and mountains... these are the things i saw most days
i hope none of you hate things about yourself. your bodies, in conjunction with your minds, have been doing some pretty extraordinary things this past month too. some of you are parents. your bodies and minds have been doing things that i’m really not cut out to do. some of you teach. some of you heal other bodies. some of you cook and clean and love people really well. some of you use your bodies and minds to give gifts of extreme kindness and grace to the world in which you live. some of you create. some of you study so that your minds can make the world a better place. some of you courageously get out of bed when everything in you is telling you stay and drown where you are. we shouldn’t hate bodies and minds that are capable of these things. we should high five those bodies and minds... heck we should high ten them!

i’m done with the hating. i invite you to kindly remind me of this next time i ask if i look fat in my jeans.


me and my body

Thursday 29 August 2013

lessons

i’m well over halfway to LA on my cycling adventure. i somehow made it through san francisco yesterday without getting lost... more evidence to add to the ‘God is real’ file... but every day is hard. really hard. like harder than the hardest thing i’d ever done before this trip hard. crawling out of my tent every morning, popping on some lycra and getting on my bike day after day has nearly broken my spirit on more than one occasion. 2 nights ago, at midnight, a tree fell down in the state park i was staying in. the sound it made was truly terrifying and then for 2 hours the melodic buzzing of chainsaws filled the air as workers cut up the tree to clear the road. i spent the whole night frozen in my tent wondering if a 55 tonne redwood was about to fall on my head. the question still remains... why on earth am i doing this? i haven’t reached cycling nirvana, where my body loves being on the bike and i feel strong and invincible. it’s quite the opposite. i know i’m strong because i keep cycling mile after mile after mile, but i feel anything but. i feel small and vulnerable and confused most of the time.


conquering the golden gate bridge in all its foggy goodness
sometimes i go to bed at night and don’t lock my bike up. i make it look really pretty and accessible, hoping that someone will steal it and i won’t have to ride anymore. i could have given up about 10 days ago when a case of bike-short chafing got a little out-of-control. but something inside me wasn’t willing to quit over what was essentially just a nasty adult nappy-rash. so i’ve diligently powdered and moisturised and prayed that my bike would be stolen instead. but that doesn’t seem to be my destiny. maybe i’ll tape some money to it tonight and see what happens.

surely there is stuff to be learned in this undertaking. i’m racking my brains every day and not coming up with a lot, but here is one thing i’ve been thinking about this past week or so.

when i’m riding on flat ground or going downhill, it doesn’t really matter that i’m carrying about 20kg of extra gear strapped to the back of my bike. but when the day gets tough – when i’m faced with a series of 1000ft climbs – the extra baggage matters a lot. the extra baggage mocks me and makes it impossible for me to enjoy the scenery.  i hate the extra baggage in those moments... those moments where i’m forced to deal with every painful consequence of its existence. dragging the baggage up a hill for hours on end is hard. really hard. like harder than stopping myself from eating a fifth donut was yesterday.

the load i carry
sometimes we don’t know what garbage we’re carrying around with us until life gets a bit hard... until life goes uphill for a period of time. i’m wondering if maybe we all need to do challenging things a little more often to get a feel for our garbage, to see more clearly what it feels like to carry it in the hard times. maybe being forced to deal with the consequences of our excess baggage (emotional, physical or spiritual) is what makes it easier to put it down and choose some peace instead. if we just keep rolling along the flats and downhills of life making ‘easy’ choices, perhaps we’ll never realise the things we are needlessly carrying that will inevitably hold us back one day.


i’d like to think i could have learned this lesson wearing less lycra and spending much less money on baby powder and vaseline... but apparently not.

Thursday 8 August 2013

cycling

so i am three days into a month-long experiment called ‘is kt fit enough to cycle from seattle to LA?’ at this stage it feels as though the answer is ‘no, she most definitely is not fit enough and should stop the lunacy immediately'. but i don’t have a good history of stopping silly things until i have had a really good crack at them. so i’m going to persist until my legs... or my bottom... or my slightly/hugely unstable emotions get the best of me.

i’ve cycled a little over two hundred kilometres in the last three days. aside from a three-week frenzy of cycling in may when i got home from africa (mostly because i’d lost lots of weight and wanted as many people as possible to see me in lycra before i chunked up again) this is probably more than i have cycled in the last five years combined... and i’ve only covered ten per cent of my total journey. people should really train a bit more than i have to undertake this type of adventure. i guess.

the last twenty-four hours sums up pretty well how i feel about the whole situation. after a massive eighty kilometres yesterday of unrelenting hills and head-winds, i pitched my one-woman tent which looks and feels a lot like a coffin. 

me and my tent/coffin... fake smile
i went to bed on a pile of rocks, as has become my custom in the grass-free washington state parks. i got my usual few hours of sleep and spent the rest of the night trying to get comfortable on the rocks... ‘yep, if i get that rock just under my hip and that other one just above it, it’s almost like a form fitting mattress... almost.’

my feet standing on my 'mattress'

then it started raining and i discovered my one-woman tent isn’t completely water-proof, or water-proof in any way at all. the night was awful. i began to look forward to the pain of being back on my bike because then at least the rocks wouldn’t be severing my spinal cord anymore.

i got up early and packed my mountain of gear onto the back of my bike, leaving all my wet stuff hanging off the back to dry... ambitious... it was still raining. then ten kilometres down the road i got a flat tyre... it was still raining.

flat tyre... rain... gear on the side of the highway 

i pretty much hated my life and wondered why on earth i do these things to myself. the truth is, i just really love to challenge myself and i find that i learn the most extraordinary things when i do... things like... sometimes big interesting pieces of bark in the middle of the road look like squashed possums. i never would have learned that if not for this trip. the glass is most definitely half full.

Tuesday 25 June 2013

mum

i lay quietly next to her all night, curled up like a baby, as though regressing my life to that of a child would somehow turn back the clock for her as well. quietly i lay there all night and listened to her breathe. there was something so very wrong about that moment... so very, tragically wrong. when i was in about grade eight or nine my mum and i read peter pan together. i would go into her room after school and sit in bed with her and she would read out loud to me. i was too old for stuff like that and we both knew it. it felt wrong to be thirteen years old and still having my mum read kids books to me, tragic even, but i don’t remember wanting to be anywhere else. this night felt just the same. it was wrong – tragic even – but i didn’t want to be anywhere else.

i lay quietly next to her all night, willing my eyes to stay open so i could remember every line on her face, every freckle, every wisp of her peach-fuzz hair as it rebelled against the chemicals that had stolen it so many times. fifty-seven is too young to die. thirty-one is too young to be without a mum. who will make the weetbix slice? who will loudly proclaim “darling i just heard your phone ring. i think you just got an email?” who will sit and smile while we all laugh at them for still not knowing the difference between an email, a text message, and a missed call. i lay next to her wishing her skin was transparent so i could see how her heart got so full of love. occasionally she would moan in discomfort, my cue to stand up and get another syringe from the dressing table to ease her pain. dressing tables aren’t for syringes, they are for earrings and beads and chanel no. 5.

i lay quietly next to her all night. sometimes my cheeks were wet with tears. i felt like i should be praying, but i had run out of words for God a long time ago. i had told God i hated it. i hated the pain i saw and i desperately hated the thought of not having her. i had told God this more than once, but it didn’t seem to matter. i think He didn’t like what was happening either though, because tears were falling from heaven and splashing all over the bedroom window. there were no more words between me and God, just tears coming from a deep well. not the same well you get your tears from when you hurt yourself, or when someone is mean to you. these tears were from a new well. i hadn’t cried tears from this well before. it was the one specially made for the tears i would cry when i knew my mum was going to die.

i lay quietly next to her all night and at some point i heard the sound of her breathing change. it was the worst sound i have ever heard. her chest sounded empty and began to rattle with each laboured breath. it was like there was a rattle-snake trapped inside her. it seemed kind of fitting that death would sound like the animal i hate and fear the most. the rattling continued, my cue to begin using a different syringe from the dressing table. dressing tables aren’t for storing syringes to kill rattle snakes, they are for family photos, bibles, and drawings from your grandchildren.

i lay quietly next to her all night desperately trying to remember the last real conversation we had had together. the last few weeks had been a jumble of showering her, helping her on the toilet, and talking about food and medication. i couldn’t remember the last time we had talked about things related to life and not pain and death. conversations with mums should be about boys and which cake to have with your coffee. conversations with mums should be about harrison ford movies and the likelihood of lethal weapon five ever being released. they should be about flowers and the ocean, or french onion soup disasters. conversations with mums should not be about crippling pain and which ring you would like when she is gone.

i lay quietly next to her all night remembering the fun things we had done together. africa. london. new york. coffee shops... oh so many coffee shops. singing... in the car, at the beach, in the living room, at church, in the shower. laughing... in the car, at the beach, in the living room, at church, in the shower. there will be too many moments we won’t share now. maybe i’ll get married one day. who will make my dress? maybe i’ll have a baby. who will make it a dress? maybe someone will publish my book. who will force me to wear a dress to my book launch? mums should be there for those things.

i lay quietly next to her all night knowing that the only thing she wanted was to live. she didn’t want to live so she could own a bigger house or a new car. she didn’t want to live so she could become famous and stay skinny. she wanted to live so she could keep being a mum to me and my sisters... and to thousands of other daughters and sons all over the world. she did not want to die. mums who want to love the whole world should get to live.

i lay quietly next to her all night not knowing that in less than twelve hours she would be gone forever.