Did you notice how considerate I was in titling this blog post Spider photos? I thought it only fair that I give those of you that are a bit worried about spiders fair warning that I am about to publish some close ups of a large brown spider.
I don’t know what type of of spider this one is. It looks very similar to a Huntsman but is quite aggressive and apparently gives a nasty bite.
I am just working out how to use my macro lens and my daughter Veronica has been giving me a tip or two. I took the top photo and Veronica took the bottom shot.
Once again I am following in my daughter’s footsteps.Veronica’s most recent post is all about sharing the love or giving a shout out to a blog that you enjoy.
I have a lot of really, really good blogs in my reader and once a month I am also going to be giving a shout out to some that I think should have a much wider audience.
This English blog isn’t for the faint hearted, Blood in the Sand is written by a man who went to war when he was the same age as my son. His writing is very compelling and will leave you lightheaded as you realise that you were holding your breath as his words sink into your brain.
I rarely comment on Blood in the Sand’s posts because my words feel empty and hollow to my ears. I wander away from my computer and I think about a man half a world away who is haunted by the ghosts of the dead.
I wont say anything more, other than I highly recommend that you go over and read this blog and that you honour this man who served his country by respecting his words.
Just remember to breathe.
I drove past the local tip the other day and noticed that the flock of roosters foraging in the paddock below it had grown. I had just assumed that some of the nearby farmer’s chooks had decided that there was better forage at the tip and that last season his girls had hatched out lots of roosters.
I was appalled to discover that people have been dumping the roosters there. I knew that people dumped kittens at the tip but the thought of going to all the trouble of catching a rooster and then just throwing it away shocked me.
There have been a lot of new people move here in the past ten years or so, city people looking for a treechange, mainlanders mostly, attracted to the cheap land and easy commute to the city.
I can wholly appreciate the excitement of finally having a bit of land with space for a few chickens, mmm think of all the lovely fresh eggs. And it seems to be all fine and dandy until the novelty wears off and the bloody chickens scratch your garden to pieces or a hen goes broody and hatches out a clutch of roosters. What do you do then?
Apparently you just throw the fucking roosters away. Aaargh!
It is the waste of all that good meat that does my head in, as well as the casual cruelty.
There are a number of tangents that I could spin off into here, I could pull out my soapbox and have a little rant about ethical treatment of animals and our responsibilities to our livestock.
I could blather on about the environmental damage that wild chickens do to the fragile landscape.
Or I could lead into a discussion about throw away roosters being the least of our problems in this 21st century, when we already have a well established tradition of throwing away the most vulnerable of all in this society of ours. Our elderly and our disabled, our mentally ill and our useless are all thrown away.
Not to the tip, like the roosters but our broken ones are marginalised and pushed to the very edges of society. Our elderly are packed off to sub standard and under funded nursing homes. Our indigenous are demonised and our leaders shame themselves and us as a nation, by loudly trying to “Stop the Boats”, when that tiny percentage of desperate people is the least of our problems.
Now I have run out of steam and the early morning daylight is filling the sky with interesting colours. I will gather up the camera and see if the play of light through the gum trees chases away these dark thoughts of mine.
That is what I reckon this post will be, all muddled up without a coherent train of thought running through it to pull it all together. But that is life. Life is messy and muddled and I just make it up as I go along and hope like hell I am doing the right thing.
I started to write this in response to my daughter Veronica’s post, about her grief and her sense of aloneness in all she is facing at the moment.
I had a long talk with Veronica yesterday, as we do nearly everyday. She prepared me for the content of post that she had written knowing that her sadness would make me cry. My parting words to her in her aloneness was the only truth that I could give, that at the end of the day she is “The Mother” and she just has to suck it up and get on with her life as best she can.
The only comment I could leave her after I had read her words was, to just keep on putting one foot in front of the other.
Because that is all we can do, just keep on plodding along.
The Ehlers Danlos Syndrome makes everything doubly hard for my little girl and then you throw a sprinkle of Aspergers into the mix and I don’t see any easy days in my daughter’s future at all.
So there is grief on top of grief.
Grief for all that we have lost with the early death of my Mother. Mum was an energetic whirlwind of a woman. A 5 foot tall bundle of contagious, hands on practical energy. Her catch cry was, “Lets Go!” and go we all did, swept along in the wake of Mum’s enthusiasm for life.
Grief for the loss of easy children, with simple answers for Veronica. We all want our children to be happy and sometimes the despair I hear in Veronica’s voice is enough to bring me undone. Again.
There is also Anger, frustration and a good serving of stress to top it all off.
I am slow to get angry but when I do my anger is like a flash fire, hot and fierce and all consuming. I am an Aquarian born in the year of the horse and my Chinese element is fire and apparently for those that know these things I am true to my signs.
I can feel my anger building. Anger with those that make my daughter’s life hard. Anger with members of “The Spouses” family who wont believe that EDS is real. And a general delayed anger that my Mother is dead because everything would be a hell of a lot easier with her here to help.
I believe in truth and for those medical professionals and assorted bystanders that don’t want to hear my truth, your denial isnt going to stop me saying the words and fighting for the best outcomes for my family.
Ehlers Danlos Syndrome isnt an easy illness to deal with. Ehlers Danlos Syndrome is pretty much invisible and those with EDS are used to being in pain, or feeling sick all of the time so they don’t make a fuss. But as the mother of two EDSy children and an EDSy spouse it is very hard for me to watch and feel helpless in the face of their illness. So I do the only thing that I know how to do and that is support my immediate family and try to educate other people about EDS.
I simply do not have any emotional energy to spare for those people who are unwilling to make an effort to understand what my family are going through on a daily basis.
The Spouse can not stand for longer than five minutes at a time without feeling like his hips are going to fall out and his back is on fire. He put up with this pain for a long time and was starting to spend longer and longer in bed because it was the only place he could be pain free. Until I dragged him, unwillingly I might add to our family GP and organised for him to have better pain relief in the form of slow release morphine patches. The Spouse has your typical Aussie blokes attitude to doctors and wont go to the doctor unless I push it. The Spouse’s remedy for his pain is to just drink more beer and hope it goes away enough so that he can sleep.
For a man with a very strong work ethic it is very frustrating for him to be limited in what he can do and that frustration often presents as aggression.I don’t take any notice of the grumpy old bugger when he is having a whinge and his anger whilst loud, is mostly directed at himself.
The parts of your brain that deal with pain are right next to the parts of your brain that deal with anxiety. So pain and anxiety go hand in hand. The Spouse hasn’t been to any of my exhibitions as he doesn’t like crowds. He wont go into the city and the only time he willingly leaves the house is to go fishing.
Both my children have varying levels of anxiety as well, this is all part and parcel of the Ehlers Danlos Syndrome.I am hoping that the psychologists at the pain clinic at the hospital can help Veronica without having medication that turns her into a zombie.
As I wrote earlier when you throw Aspergers syndrome as well as Coeliacs into the mix it makes for a very challenging headpace. I am missing my mother dreadfully and I worry about my grand children a lot. So I throw myself into my work and join another committee, set up ceramic blogs and facebook pages so that I don’t have to think too deeply about the future.
This Saturday the World Party will be held at the Hobart Town Hall. The World Party was thought up by Stephen Estcourt and he says,
” World Party is being held in a measure in memory of Zhang Tina Yu, a young Chinese student undertaking an accounting degree at UTAS, who was murdered in New Town on 25 June 2009. Whilst quietly remembering Tina however, the event is designed to offset the isolation and fear that members of the International Student Community can feel whilst living in Tasmania and to highlight that this should not be the case.”
I think that the World Party is a wonderful chance for ordinary Tasmanians to show the international community that we aren’t a bunch of racist bogans and that the vast majority of Tasmanians welcome people from all walks of life.
So that is where Veronica and I will be on Saturday.
Sunday is the Spring Festival at Oatlands and apparently it is a great family day out as well. I will be helping fellow ceramicist Lisa Rudd and members of the community make a ceramic mural.
It is going to be heaps of fun.
So if you would like to sample a variety of food from all over the world and listen to great music come along to the Town Hall on Saturday.
If you would like to play in the mud with me, come along to Oatlands on Sunday and we will have a blast.
That is my weekend organised my lovelies, What are you doing?
I always get a thrill when I see a pair of Eagles soaring high in the sky.
So you can imagine my excitement when I am able to take photographs like this next one.
Or this one.
The birds that live around here are all camera shy and I tend to get heaps of photos like this next one. It is a very clear shot of the power line with a blurry Welcome Swallow’s tail exiting on the left there, as the bird flew in circles above my head.
I spent about twenty minutes this morning trying to photograph these lovely birds as they were flying around above me catching insects. Occasionally they would perch on the power lines letting me get shots like these.
I am a point and shoot, opportunistic photographer. I was given a tripod but I never use it, so this morning it didn’t take long before it felt like my arms were going to fall off as I was trying to photograph the swallows. I was lucky enough to get this next photo, just as the swallow flew away, so I called it a day and wandered off to photograph trees.
And then my daughter Veronica will patiently correct me again. I will feel slightly guilty that by not immediately understanding all the minutae of Amy’s Aspergers and Isaac’s developing issues I will have put more pressure on my girl.
But that is life and at the end of the day no matter how frustrating my responses to Veronica’s statements are. I am her mother and she loves me. I will just pretend that I don’t hear the exasperated sigh in her voice as I try and find strategies to help me cope.Whilst I can empathise, I can’t really relate to the difficulties that Veronica is facing parenting Amy, as Veronica was an exceedingly easy child to parent herself and time softens the memories of the hard bits.
I am on a bit of a journey at the moment to readjust my thinking in order to help my grandchildren live in this society of ours with the minimum amount of stress. By stress I mean stress to the children not anyone else.
I was reading this post, “Portraits of Autism#10” and it helped to adjust my thinking slightly again. And that is what is important here, that I adjust my thinking and expectations.
As a society we expect our children to be perfectly behaved little robots that should be seen and not heard. Children shouldnt disrupt our lives too much, as they grow into perfect young adults who move out and have successful lives of their own. Leaving us to pick up the threads of our own perfect lives with plenty of time to do all the stuff we put on hold when they were small and needy and unrobotic.
Life isn’t like the magazines would have us believe though. Life is messy and ugly, chaotic and beautiful and perfect is incredibly boring. Blogs like Casdok’s, Mother of Shrek help me to re-adjust my thinking. New friends like Marita help me with strategies and Veronica patiently tells me the same stuff over and over until I have grasped some of the complex realities of her life.
I have no idea how I am going to help my grandchildren cope in this difficult world they inhabit. Like most things I do in this life of mine, I am just making it up as I go along.
