Diabolical Clay

As humans we like to judge. We apply our own experiences and moral compass to situations and make snap judgements.

Sometimes I read a post written by my daughter and it breaks my heart because the pain in her words is the only clue that I have to the pain in her heart.

Other times I will read a post written by Veronica and I know that it was written purely to get the words out of her head, to give a tiny glimpse into how difficult parts of her life are.

Amy is an exceedingly difficult and tempestuous child to parent. She stretches and challenges every single one of Veronica’s parenting skills every single moment of every day.

It is very nearly impossible to get Amy to do something that she doesn’t want to. It isn’t because she is naughty or because she has pulled the wool over her mothers eyes.It certainly isn’t because Veronica is lacking some vital parenting skill. It is because Amy is so focused on doing what she wants to do in that moment, that nothing else registers. Some of the parenting advice that Veronica receives makes me shake my head and roll my eyes with frustration.

I have impeccable parenting skills. My ability to get small and not so small children to behave is legendary. I am also very good with dogs and horses. But with my grand daughter Amy I am at a loss. So I don’t bother with traditional discipline at all. We skirt issues and avoid situations and I use distraction as my main tool.

We do the same things every single time Amy comes to visit. We check for eggs, then together we cook Amy an egg.  We paint a picture or two, play with some clay, watch a bit of telly together or read some books and then we go outside and throw the ball for the dog.

When Amy was still eating gluten we would do all these things at a frenetic pace and at the end of her visit the house would be trashed and I would be exhausted. Minus the gluten we are still very busy together and Amy isn’t quite so exhausting.

Veronica and I have been talking about Aspergers and Amy, we have been talking about how there is a very real possibility that Amy has Aspergers. Now that the A word is out in the open I can look at Amy’s behaviour with fresh eyes. Veronica and I are noticing more and more things that Amy does and more importantly we are noticing things that Amy doesn’t do.

So the next time you see a small child running amok in the supermarket or having a tantrum in the middle of a shopping centre don’t be so quick to judge, to shake your head, to glare at the obviously incompetent parent. And as for the whispered advice that all the child needs is a bit of discipline, a good smack will fix her.You can keep that under your hat as well.

It just goes ahead and does its own thing, skipping merrily along any number of tangential paths, spinning off in any direction it likes while the logical side of me gets very grumpy waiting for my brain to behave itself.

I can not explain to you properly how Amy’s sensory processing issues affect her because when Veronica explains Amy’s difficulties to me my brain misbehaves and wanders off into a ceramic daydream and I only process bits of the information. It is bloody annoying.

It was the same when Mum was dying. We needed to go to all the appointments as a threesome because both Mum and I relied on Veronica to remember all the information and then pass it back to us, sometimes Veronica had to repeat herself numerous times before it all sunk in. When Mum was in palliative care the doctor was showing us an X-ray of Mum’s shoulder and talking about the cancer in her bones and all I could see, was that the line of Mum’s rib cage would make a very nice shape on a large pot. *sigh*

As I understand it Amy sees her world very differently, it is like she is in a room with a hundred televisions all turned up as loud as they can go and all on different channels. The world screams its information at Amy and she cant handle it very well.

I don’t think that I would handle it very well either.

That is how I feel today, all blurred and mimsy. Yesterday I felt shattered, emotionally shattered and I missed my mother with an intensity that had me weeping at inopportune moments. It must be quite disconcerting to see a woman weeping into the oranges at the greengrocers.

Amy is being assessed by the early intervention people and she has some sensory processing issues. Veronica will write about this in due course and I wont go into detail other than to say the news reduced me to tears. I see a bright future for my grand daughter as she will be a strong, talented and determined woman but I also know that her time at school wont be easy and that makes me unbearably sad.

My gifted and intelligent youngest child has taken under-achieving at school to a whole new level. His school report is almost a carbon copy of mine at the same age and I worry about my son.

The spouse is as grumpy as usual, though he smiles and pulls me towards him for a hug when I take my teeth out and pull old lady faces at him.

The dog has rolled in roadkill this morning, thoughtfully filling the house with the delicate bouquet of putrefying possum. I am trying to ignore the persistent whining at the backdoor and I wish it would hurry up and warm up a bit so I can hose the dog down without us both risking hypothermia.

This Sunday the 15th of August is the opening of the Tas Ceramics Society’s annual exhibition. It is being held at the Rosny School house Gallery and will run until the 5th of September. I have two pieces in this exhibition and I will post some photos later on in the week as I forgot to take any before I delivered the pieces to the gallery. *doh*

Making a film is an incredibly time consuming and eye straining job. I really underestimated just how much work was involved and so I have temporarily postponed the zombie, mutant fish gorefest. I am working on a project using vision that my son and I shot while we have been driving through the Brighton bypass road works.

I have finished my three week sculpture block and it has been a delight to work with Belinda Winkler. Thanks to the ideas that Belinda shared I am going to make  some quite large dragon eggs for installation at Chauncy Vale and I will publish photos of the sculptures once they are fired.

I cant decide which of these images I like best so I have published them both.

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.

I was playing with my camera as Amy was drawing a picture for me. I have no idea what the shutter speed was but it was about a 3-5 second gap between the press of the button and the click of the photo being taken. I took a photo of Amy sitting on the couch and then before the camera was finished doing its thing I pointed it at the window. I really like these photos.

I do not moderate comments here on this blog and I generally do not remove comments either. I used to have my comment policy displayed as a page on this blog but when Veronica did the redesign there wasn’t any room left for it.

So I am going to republish my comment policy here now, just so as everybody is clear on where I stand regarding comments on this blog. I will also add it to the “about me” page.

I welcome any and all comments. I especially like the nice ones, they are chocolate for my soul.

You don’t have to agree with me. You can disagree with me in the comment section any time you like as long as you do so in a polite and civilized manner.

I like to debate and comments with opposing views to mine are welcome .

But be warned.

Trollish comments will be edited until they amuse me. I will mock all trolls and publish their details.

Abusive comments will be removed.

Comments with  links in them that are off topic will be removed.

Comments that give me the shits will be removed.

Is there anything that you think I have forgotten?

I enjoy watching birds, they always make me smile and a glimpse of an eagle soaring in the sky high above me always makes me shiver with delight.

Lately I have had the pleasure of a young eagles company. This eagle flies through my property and perches in the trees quite close to my house.

Sometimes I just look up and there she is, other times I am alerted by the calling of the forest ravens and I watch as they harass the eagle.

The eagle ignores the ravens and they eventually fly off, calling their way across the winter sky.

Now as a warning for the squeamish amongst you there is a photo of a dead wallaby in this next set.

This first photo is just to give you a sense of scale. The eagle is in a dead tree eyeing off a dead wallaby lying in the middle of the road. After I took these photos I dragged the wallaby to the side of the road and I was pleased to see the eagle eating the carcass the next day.

A few days later the eagle was back and was perched in a tree just below my back verandah.

I grabbed the camera and followed the eagle as she flew from tree to tree. She was being harassed by Ravens on this day and each time she shook her wings the Ravens backed off a bit.

Isn’t she just gorgeous.

Though the words stunned, amazed, horrified and saddened would have worked equally as well.

What am I babbling on about?

I was watching the telly the other night when up popped Jamie Oliver and I found myself being sucked in to the vortex that was, Jamie Oliver’s food revolution. I was totally horrified to see that a whole classroom full of six or seven year old American children couldn’t identify a potato, a tomato, a cauliflower or any other fresh vegetable you cared to mention.

I was sitting there with my mouth wide open, totally gobsmacked.

Now I knew that some children thought that eggs came from the carton and milk came from the supermarket but to be faced with this scale of food ignorance just blew my mind. It is easy as an Australian to dismiss this as just an American thing but as we all know, where America goes the rest of the world follows.

What are we doing to our children?

Here are some photos of the newest dragon eggs.