Family

Chasing lizards is always time well spent.

by frogpondsrock on August 8, 2010

in ceramics,Family,real life,thinking out loud

I have never regretted the hours I spent lying in the dirt with my small daughter watching ants drag sugar into their nests. Or the time holding my small son’s hand as we followed lizard tracks and hatched our own butterflies from cocoons.

The housework would always be there nagging at me but the lizard tracks were fragile and urgent. Time spent chasing fairies and feathers on the wind is always better than time spent shaking a toddler off your leg as you do the dishes.

When the spouse would roar at me about the mess, I would roar back and slam the door on the offending room and declare that it was fixed. I would try desperately to make him understand that the housework would always be there forever but that the wind was covering the lizard tracks and that small children needed to lie on their backs in the sand and look for dragons in the clouds.

In the spirit of hope and desperation I applied to do ceramics at the art school in 1991. They applauded my enthusiasm and kindly suggested that maybe a bit more of a background in ceramics rather than a couple of adult ed courses would serve my cause better and my application was declined.

I went home and put my dreams away and immersed myself in the business of raising my children and building my home. I was incredibly lonely but I only had so much energy to spare and I needed that energy for myself.

When the lonliness and frustration overwhelmed me I would rage at the night, I would howl at the moon, I would stand in the middle of ferocious thunderstorms and dare the lightning to strike me and when I emerged unscathed from the storm, I would drink some more.

I couldn’t afford proper materials, so I painted the carpet, the doonas, my clothes, the door of the bus and each time the spouse came home he growled his disapproval of the paint and the mess and I would want to vanish into thin air. My children were my anchor and I would walk barefoot in the garden until the energy of the earth soothed my soul.

I was 25 when I applied to do ceramics at the Art school and I was 39 when I eventually returned to clay.

In those rare moments when I experience regret I sometimes wonder where I would be today if I had persevered with my dream of going to uni and then as I read my daughter’s words or listen to my son’s music, I know that I chose the right path at the time and that there is a proper time for everything.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Ehlers Danlos, fear, frustration and dislocations

by frogpondsrock on May 3, 2010

in David,Ehlers Danlos Syndrome,Family,Veronica

Yesterday afternoon my daughter rang me, Veronica had dislocated the bone behind her knee and it was refusing to go back in. I was full of useless advice and it was a horrible but brief conversation. Veronica was in a lot of pain and I was unable to help her. There was one small consolation though and that was that Veronica was trapped on her chair in front of her computer.

I suppose if you are going to be in excruciating pain with a bone poking out the side of your leg and unable to move, there are worse places to be than at your desk in front of your computer. I told Vonnie to keep me up to date via twitter.

Here are some of our tweets over a three hour dislocation.

@SleeplessNights will straightening your leg out make it pop back in?

@frogpondsrock Nope, will tear the tendons.

@SleeplessNights Bloody thing! While you are stuck there you could look up quince recipes for me.

@frogpondsrock lmao – I think not.

Relocated. Excruciating.

It wants to pop out again.

All the painkillers in the house wasn’t (isn’t) enough to deal with that. #ehlersdanlos

@SleeplessNights now strap the fucking thing

@SleeplessNights not that strapping it will help but it will make me feel better.

@frogpondsrock It’s braced with tube bandage, lots of it. Best stuff.

@SleeplessNights Good. Now please be careful, I still feel a bit sick for you.xox.

@frogpondsrock I am being very careful. Can’t bend the leg at all. Funny – I didn’t do anything to dislocate it, just bent the knee.

It is that last line written by Veronica that sums up all my fears and frustrations with Ehlers Danlos Syndrome. The fact that you don’t have to do anything at all to suddenly have a dislocation and be faced with excruciating pain is frustrating and terrifying at the same time.

My husband, son and daughter all have Ehlers Danlos but with varying degrees of symptoms.The Spouse has only started to dislocate in the last few years and it is apparently quite common that dislocations will only start to present in middle age. David is in the middle of puberty and isn’t as bendy as his sister but to date he has dislocated his shoulder, elbow, fingers and his ankle subluxes. He can make a horrible clicky popping sound with his jaw and I worry that he will do it one time too many and bam out goes his jaw.

They all share the same symptoms of nausea, headaches, insomnia, low blood pressure, dizziness, achey joints, pain, stretchy fragile skin that tears easily, slow healing and they are also prone to infection. The Spouse and Veronica also have Livedo reticularis and Veronica and David have stretchmarks in strange places. They all have allergies, excema and asthma, poor circulation, weak eye muscles with a slight blue tinge to the whites of their eyes and I would trade them all in on new models if I didn’t love them quite so much.

Doctors in Tasmania know very little about Ehlers Danlos Syndrome and so it is very under diagnosed. Medical students only ever see the very extreme cases in medical text books and Doctors often fail to connect the dots. EDS has a lot of similarities with Lupus and EDS is commonly misdiagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Fibromyalgia.

The Spouse has two sisters who are suitably sympathetic towards our diagnosis of EDS but completely refuse to believe that their children could have EDS. *sigh* It is glaringly obvious to me that some of my nieces and nephews are definitely very EDSy and as much as I worry about them, I have to conserve my energy for my own children and grand children.

There are some very good bendy bloggers out there and I would recommend that you click over to Bendy Girl at Benefit Scrounging Scum or Achelois at The Tensile Times as well as my daughter Veronica at sleepless nights.

If you have any questions about EDS or if you think you have EDS leave a comment and I will get back to you and help you as much as I can.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

Coming out in a small community.

by frogpondsrock on April 30, 2010

in Arty stuff..,ceramics,Ehlers Danlos Syndrome,Family,potential insanity

When my children were small I dreaded going to the local primary school. I used to have to take deep breaths as I walked through the school gates, past the icy stares of the reebok squad and the condescending nods of the glitterati girls. It really felt like I was walking through a gauntlet of disdain and disapproval because I was the one who lived an alternate lifestyle.

When David saw me at school he would launch himself at me and I used to have to brace myself so that the force of his hug didn’t knock me over. Then together, we would walk out the school gates holding hands, swinging our arms and smiling to each other. Away from the horror that was a small town primary school full of prejudices.

We were that family. When everyone around us was building McMansions and driving the latest cars. We were building our house room by room from recycled materials. The fact that we had an outside toilet was a major talking point and my children were teased mercilessly by the children of relatives as well as the children of the school establishment. People that had never been to my home would tell stories in lurid detail of the wild drug orgies we participated in and the squalor in which we lived. The fact that we had few visitors and that alcohol was the only drug I used was quite beside the point.

At a time in Australia when people were encouraged to buy buy buy and credit was king. We stayed debt free and went without. The spouse was labelled a dole bludger because he was unable to work due to the pain of his Ehlers Danlos. We didn’t know it was EDS then we just thought he was broken and that his constant pain was due to a very serious motorcycle accident he had been involved in, in 1992 and then compounded by the injuries received when he was shot in a hunting accident in 1993. The label of dole bludger is a horrible one to carry though and living below the poverty line makes you appreciate the things you have.

If people were happy to make snap judgements based on the way I looked I was also more than happy to encourage their misunderstandings by dressing differently and not explaining myself or my motives.

Now that I am a bit more grown up I am ready to start to explain myself a bit. I look at the glitterati girls and they are still desperately holding onto their fragile crowns, their makeup is getting thicker as they try to hold back the years and I find it hard to imagine that these women’s gossip and innuendo once made my life difficult.

I am ready to step out into the light of my small community and announce that here I am, I am an artist.

Members of the Greater Green Ponds branch of Tasmanian Regional Arts are building up a collection of art and craft created in the Southern Midlands area. Their plan is to acquire works and lease them for display in public and private spaces through out the Southern Midlands.

I am going to ring them up today and offer to donate Boganvillainy to their collection.

I am a bit nervous, but it certainly isn’t as daunting as walking through those school gates were a few years ago.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

I balance amazing cooking with indifferent housekeeping.

by frogpondsrock on April 25, 2010

in Amy,ceramics,Distractions galore!,Family

For years I have had as my intro blurb thingy on various social networking sites, as well as in my about me page of my blog, a line that says I balance amazing cooking with indifferent housekeeping.I have been so busy lately that my indifferent housekeeping has fast descended into damn near non-existent and my cooking is only just barely covering my arse.

The Spouse is very fastidious, some might even say a touch OCD. Where as I am just a human bomb of chaotic clutter. I am a collector of everything from rusty nails and interesting rocks, to bells and antique bottles. I cannot walk past a secondhand bookshop and I am in dire need of more shelves.

When I was contacted by Nuffnang last week to say that a company that produces cleaning products wanted to advertise on my blog I thought it was a hilariously, delicious irony. Of course I agreed as I am always hopeful that one day I will catch the cleaning bug and my house will look lovely and shiny.

I work in my kitchen at the moment and so when I should be practicing my domestic skills I am messing about with buckets of clay.

As I was writing this post this morning I was forced to actually notice the amount of dust that has accumulated on my bottle collection. The bottles are on a shelf behind the woodheater and are a bit tricky to get to but instead of cleaning the bottles I photographed them instead.

Then I noticed this spiderweb, it is on the left, near the plant. I have lots of spiderwebs in my house, the spiders catch the flies for me and so I leave them alone. I will have to remember to ask The Spouse not to remove it yet as he is forever destroying the spider’s homes, the minute my back is turned. I would like to see the spider catch at least one fly before all her hard work is ruined.

I have run out of space to store my moulds and so I had to put them somewhere where they wouldn’t get damaged. Plonked in the middle of the lounge room floor seemed a logical choice. The coffee table is also covered with books, novels and half completed assignments but I will tidy that up later.

The Spouse was absolutely chuffed when Amy walked into the house the other day and saw my moulds in the middle of the room. She looked at me and very seriously asked me, “Nanny what’s this mess?”

So there you go my lovelies, If your husbands start to nag you about your messy houses just show them this post and you will be off the hook.

{ Comments on this entry are closed }

A new camera.

by frogpondsrock on April 3, 2010

in cancer,Family,fauna and flora,Grief,Sadness

Last year, Easter Sunday was Mum’s birthday, We had a barbie and then Mum and I went down to the hospital for Mum’s chemo. Mum wrote in her diary…

Easter Sunday, back to the hospital for another session of chemo, made sure I left with plenty of anti-nausea tabs, they provided a roast lunch this time and surprise I was able to eat most of it, made Kim feel a bit teary poor baby, I didn’t realise that my not eating was causing her so much worry.

Tomorrow we are having a barbie at Vonnies and it will be another first, another milestone to be gotten through in this first year of living without Mum.

When Mum was having treatment at the hospital, quite often we would have an hour or so between appointments and so we would hang around in town as it was too far to go back home. Often we would browse away some time in camera shops together, drooling over the latest DSLR’s. Mum wanted to buy me a DSLR but we decided to wait until we went to Sydney together. Mum died three weeks before we were due to leave.

So it was with mixed emotions that Vonnie and I went camera shopping a couple of days ago. If I hadn’t had Veronica there to explain the lenses and give me a gentle push, I think I would have kept on dithering and not bought a camera at all. It has been very hard emotionally to spend some of my inheritance on such an extravagence as a new camera. But I could also feel Mum telling me that It was now or never Kimmy.

So I leaped off the cliff and bought a Nikon D90 with a very good 200mm lens.

Time to step it up a notch I think and take my photography to the next level.