A long time ago I made a commitment to myself to try and do some kind exercise every day.
Some days, it’s easy. Other days, like today when I’m tired and still sore from yesterday’s session, it’s hard.
And on these days, when I debate in my head “will I, won’t I, go to the gym”, getting there and getting it done feels like a huge achievement. I always feel better when I go. It feeds my body and my mind.
And there is nothing quite like the relief of being done!
So I got a call from the lovely Ganella yesterday. She called at 12 noon to ask if she could come round to visit right now.
I was at work, I explained.
She pushed: “How about at 12:30pm?” It would be in her lunch break, so the least I could do is pop out in my lunch break too.
Oh fine. I agreed to meet her at 12:30pm. So I finished what I was doing and raced home, making sure I was early this time. She was three minutes late (but who’s counting, other than her). It turns out she’s German. In my mind, this explains a lot.
The meeting took about five minutes – I explained in person what I had been saying in emails for the past six months, and showed her what needed to be fixed. She said she’d organise someone to do the work, we shook hands, she left. No reference was made to the phone conversation, no apology was forthcoming. But whatever. I just want our house fixed and signed off so I can stop thinking about it.
So here’s the thing. Is it reasonable for me to be slightly annoyed that she expects to be able to pop around at a moment’s notice? What does she think I do with my days? I can’t be the only homeowner she deals with that has a JOB. I did explain to her that I had to take time off work every time someone had to come over to fix something, or when they call a meeting to discuss our work. She didn’t seem at all concerned about this, but it is really starting to irritate me!
I’ve encountered a similar attitude with most of the contractors I’ve had to deal with. They seem genuinely surprised and sometimes annoyed that I can’t be at home during the day for them to pop over. Am I missing something here? Maybe I should start suggesting we meet at their place, just so they get the point that they are at work, JUST LIKE ME.
What’s the solution? How do other people manage this problem? What do people do when they can’t just leave work at a moment’s notice to let someone into their house to do repair work?
The only solution I’ve come up with is to leave a key and hope they don’t rifle through my undies drawer while I’m not there. Once I even left a key in the letterbox and $300 on the bench and just trusted a contractor (who I’d never met) to do what we’d agreed. He was actually incredulous that I was so trusting, but I didn’t have much choice. And he did a great job, so phew.
Okay, well I am gobsmacked.
I arranged to meet with my project manager from Fletcher’s EQR (New Brighton Hub FYI) at 11:30 to sign off work that begun December 1st last year and is actually still not quite finished.
I arrived at 11:33, I figure I’m still within a 5 min window of “they may be late due to traffic etc.” (which I was). No one was here. I waited until 12:30, figuring maybe they were running really late. Then I called the Hub to see what happened and maybe reschedule.
So I spoke to a Community Liaison person (I think Ganella?) who said she was here at 11:30, stayed 5 minutes, then left. That can’t be right, I think. We must have just missed each other. So whatever, I’m not going to argue about 5 minutes, we need to reschedule.
So she launches into a tirade about how I am wasting her time and she is not prepared to reschedule with me at this time, and how she has bent over backwards to help me out and unlike me she doesn’t make people wait for appointments, so she has to go. And then hangs up on me.
Now, if you know me, you know that I am very polite when dealing with people over the phone. I understand they have a job to do, and they are not trying to make my life difficult on purpose. I wasn’t rude, I didn’t yell. I even asked for forgiveness for the 3 mins I was late if she could just reschedule with me.
Now I am sitting here thinking WHAT THE ACTUAL?? Let’s think about this. I’m wasting her time when it has taken us SIX MONTHS to get sign off for the work on our house and it isn’t EVEN FINISHED YET?!?! She has bent over backwards to help me when I have never actually met her, and have emailed asking the work to be finished at least five times over the past six months (extremely politely every. single. time. BTW).
And who the fuck is this Ganella person anyway? I thought I was meeting with my project manager Adele and the builder Steve. But actually, had I been palmed off onto some community person who was supposed to be … smoothing the waters because our job was taking an unreasonable time to get finished?! She needs a new job title.
So now what I have is an unfinished house, and Ganella telling me that I can have sign off when it suits her to come and see me, but she won’t tell me when. And look out if I’m not home and wasting her time again. Because obviously I just sit around at home all day waiting for EQR people to come over. It’s not inconvenient at ALL to take the afternoon off work REPEATEDLY so I can meet EQR people and discuss why my job’s not finished, or to let tradespeople in so they can do one of the many jobs on the list and then come back again next week.
So yeah, I’m gobsmacked.
Also, it made me cry. Not cool.
I’ve been trying to blog at least once a month, but to be honest, there hasn’t been much new to say. Lately my life has descended into a whirlwind of work, roller derby, gym sessions, family time, ice hockey, housework, coffee dates and sleep. So let’s talk about that.
It might sound like hard work to some people, but I love having a busy life and I’m not very good at going slow. Sometimes when I’m running from activity to activity I wish I had more spare time. But the reality is that after a couple of hours sitting around at home, I’m ready to do something more interesting.
From what I gather, some people need quiet time to rejuvenate. I reckon I’m the opposite. I’ve been that way for a long time. When I was younger, people would tell me it wasn’t good to be so busy, that I should be careful or I’d burn out. I used to listen to this advice – I struggled against my desire to do a million things at once. But then I’d feel like I was missing out on things I really wanted to do. More recently, I’ve paid less attention to that advice – I’m busy and happy.
The trick is to find the balance. I do get over-tired and it’s not fun when I have a meltdown (just ask Stephen). This usually happens when the things I want to do clash with the things I need to do, and I try and do both. Then sometimes it gets a bit out of hand. Case in point, every hour of my day last weekend, Saturday and Sunday, was accounted for. I didn’t have a moment to spare. I couldn’t have one of those every weekend. But this weekend will be more low key, so it balances out.
The most important thing to me is that I always make room for my family. As much as possible, my whirlwind world revolves around Stephen and the other important people in my life. Luckily Stephen is always up for an adventure so we get to experience life in the fast lane together. I’m having the time of my life.
This day has been a focus point for me for the past four years. On February 29th, 2008 I wondered where I’d be on Leap Day in four years time. Let me tell you the story of that day, and what happened after it. It’s not a short story, so get comfy. Or flag it altogether, I promise I won’t be offended. This is my story, for me.
On February 29th, 2008 I was lost. My life had been changing for a couple of years, so I didn’t notice the lost-ness creeping up on me. By the time it hit, I was a goner.
I don’t know where it started, but a couple of memories stand out. Coming home from work one evening in October 2006, a fleeting thought crossed my mind: “I’ve fulfilled my purpose in life…there is no point to me any more”. In the biological sense, I’d done my job. My son was soon to turn 18 and I was examining what I’d done with my life.
And I had a good life – a great job that I loved, two awesome kids, a stable relationship, a nice home. Lots of great friends.
On my son’s 18th birthday in November 2006, I had an overwhelming sense of sadness. For his passing childhood, and for the loss of my own youth. I grieved the teenage-hood I never had because I was too busy raising two young children. I know it was my choice and I never regretted it, not even for a moment. But sometimes when I saw my little people growing up, doing things I missed out on, it made me sad.
That moment passed and life moved on. But I think something shifted without me realising it. I had a growing sense of dis-ease. Like a faint voice in the background that got louder as time went by.
Restless, irritable, discontent. This was me.
My partner was diagnosed with cancer in 2007. He shut himself away from me and didn’t want to face it. That’s just not the way I do things, so I faced up to his mortality on my own while he ignored it. We grew apart.
My job changed from being a joy to a chore – I was bored, and had no room to move. My contented life was unravelling.
Fast forward to the end of 2007. I had planned a trip for my daughter’s 16th birthday. A big OE for us both – London, Paris, Athens, Rome and everywhere in between. The thought of that adventure kept me going through 2007. The faint noise had become a din. It threatened to drown me out, but I didn’t realise that then. I thought I could move through it – my attitude to life was that everything would be okay eventually, just wait it out.
I experienced the joy of watching my baby girl turn 16 in Paris. So grown up. So didn’t need me anymore (I thought to myself).
At some point during our holiday, my brain made a decision that would change everything. I have trouble saying that ‘I’ made the decision, because it didn’t feel like I was deciding anything – I felt compelled to change my life. It felt necessary for survival. After I came home in January, I ended my relationship with my partner. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. He had recently recovered from intense chemo and things were looking up. He might recover. This was my dilemma:
Do I stay with him only because he has cancer, and wait to see what happens? Or do I leave now, and become that girl who broke up with her boyfriend even though he’s dying of cancer? Rock / Hard Place.
Like I said, it felt more like a compulsion than a choice in the end. It’s one of the few choices I’ve made in my life that I feel truly bad about. It wasn’t the wrong choice – I don’t regret it, but it sits uncomfortably … if that makes sense.
At the same time, I made a decision to leave. I needed to get away. All the things that gave me joy in the past suddenly felt like they were crushing me. So I ran. At the beginning of February 2008 I quit my job, sold my house, left my partner. I’d never been so miserable.
Here’s how I remember February 2008. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t think. Everything I ate made me feel sick. I could only sleep for a couple of hours at a time before I jolted awake, exhausted but unable to sleep again. I got to cracking point in mid-February and went to a doctor for advice. She suggested I had a form of anorexia nervosa. She prescribed anti-depressants and sleeping pills. I didn’t trust myself to even fill the prescription. I tore it into tiny pieces and scuttled back into my misery.
On February 28th 2008 I was at bottom. I was too tired to do anything. I lay in my bed too exhausted to get up and eat or drink. I felt done. I was chatting online to my friend Scuddy. He told me I’d feel better if I got up, had a drink of water, ate some toast and went for a walk. It sounded so simple. So I did it. And I did feel better.
Whatever had descended felt like it might lift. It was like I could see a tiny glimmer of light down a long black corridor. I woke up the next morning with a resolve to find myself. I used to be happy. Where had that Bebe gone? She was there, I just had to figure out where exactly.
It was February 29th, 2008. Leap Day. It seemed like a good day to make a change. I took a bus to town and went to a jewellers. I purchased a plain silver bracelet. On the inside of the bracelet I had inscribed, “To thine own self be true”. To forever remind me of this day. I went home and figured that I had four years to find myself. In four years it would be February 29th again, and I’d be somewhere different. I thought about that unimagined future, and it gave me hope.
The voice that had been a din, drowning out all thought, whispered, “you can be anything you want, you can do anything you want”. It scared me, but another feeling was in there too, interest. What would I be? What would I do?
You know the rest of the story. In slow steps, I got to here and now. I left, I wandered, I cried, I found myself, I found peace. I came back, found a new job, became a grandmother, met Stephen and resumed life amongst the humans.
From this vantage point, I look back on 2008 Bebe and I’m thankful. As painful as it was to hit bottom, bouncing back up has been an amazing experience – because it is such a contrast. I’ve been able to reinvent myself and find a life for myself that is beyond my wildest dreams. And it’s a better life because it’s purposeful. I’ll never forget how I felt that day and what I did next. And if I ever do forget, I have a little jangling reminder on my left wrist.
My Twitter friend Lana tweeted the other night that she was writing a list of 30 things to do before she turns 30 in November. Since I’m turning 40 in November, I thought this sounded like a great challenge. Thanks for the inspiration Lana! Her blog is here.
Each time I achieve one of my goals, I’ll blog about it. If I don’t achieve them, I’ll blog about that too. Here it is, my 40 b4 40.
Stephen and I recently went to Auckland to visit with my brother. Usually, I love going to Auckland – I really enjoy seeing my little nieces and hanging out with my big bro (see Birthdays and Such for more on this).
So this time, as well is the usual crowd, we were visiting with my mother, who was over from Australia to visit with my brother and meet her granddaughters for the first time. Spending time with my mother is something that requires mental and emotional preparation for me. My mother and I have a difficult history. Let me recount some of it (without airing too much laundry). Remember, family-members-reading-this, it’s just my point of view. Feel free to offer your own POV below.
I am the second youngest of my mother’s seven children (my younger brother has a different dad). My mother tells me that she had post-natal depression with each of her children that got progressively worse with each arrival, so I imagine it had reached a fever pitch by the time she got to me. From all accounts, neither of my parents were that excited about my appearance. My parents separated when I was a baby and I lived with my mother until we moved away from Christchurch to Auckland when I was about five. Life was fairly busy between ages 5-10. We moved around a lot, various people came and went, including the rest of my siblings. Honestly, I don’t remember much of it.
The next bit I remember very well. Not long after my 10th birthday, my mother told me that I was being sent back to Christchurch to live with my father and stepmother – people I really only had a passing acquaintance with as far as I was concerned. I was devastated by this. For a lot of years after, everything in my life was measured by before and after this time. It changed everything I knew about myself (and I was only just starting to figure that out at age 10). I felt unloved and unlovable, rejected. By my mother, but also by my father and stepmother who didn’t seem especially interested in me.
After I left Auckland, I had limited contact with my mother. I recall her coming to visit with me in Christchurch before she left for Australia, and then a couple of phone calls after that. I guess I was confused and angry, I didn’t want to talk to her. The next time I saw my mother was in 1993 when she came to visit from Australia. I was 20, it had been 10 years. I struggled not to be angry. I had tried to put those 10-year-old feelings behind me in the subsequent years.
Seeing my mother and having those feelings bubble up all over again gave me the impetus I needed to deal with them. It took me a few years more, but eventually I made peace with how and why she left. I understood that actually, it wasn’t such a bad deal. She did what she had to, to survive. And she left me with family. And there were some nice people in amongst that lot.
So if we move forward a few years, my mother has popped in and out of my life irregularly since then. I like that I see her, but I don’t really have a mother-daughter relationship with her. I call her Albie, not mum. She likes to give me advice about how to run my life, how to be, how to conduct my relationships, raise my kids. This I don’t like. She has no right. I know I’m not alone in this – she bosses everyone around. She is very opinionated. I do my best to ignore it. But it grates.
I think my tolerance for my mother is a couple of days every couple of years. After that, I remember why I don’t like to spend time with her and need to get away again. It’s sad really. I would have liked to have a mother, I’d like my kids to have a grandmother, my grandkids to have a great-granny. But at least I have resolved in my head and my heart not to hanker after something that will never be.
So when I say I am looking forward to getting married and becoming a Frayle, this might help explain it. It feels like moving on.
Here’s a question: when it comes to bad news are you a ‘”I want to know everything” or a “Don’t tell me, I’d rather not know” kind of person?
I’ve been thinking about this a bit lately. It’s coming up to the first anniversary of Simon’s death, and it makes me remember back to his diagnosis, going through the process of finding out how sick he was, treatment, ending treatment, giving up.
One of the biggest factors in the ending of our relationship was that we handled the bad news so differently. His reaction to finding out he had lymphoma was to assume it would be fine and leave it at that. I wanted to know everything about it. I read everything I could about the cancer – causes, treatments, success rates, morbidity rates. Sometimes I had to stop when it got too scary (10% survival rates, no known successful treatment), but I always went back to do more research as we reached a new stage in the diagnosis-treatment process. It was a comfort to me.
Simon got his comfort from not knowing. He preferred to know as little as possible. He trusted his doctors to make the best decisions about his treatment, and he had no interest in discussing other options. He didn’t want to discuss death. It wasn’t going to happen. I heard him once telling someone on the phone that he had “mild cancer”.
So you can imagine it was difficult, for us both. Here’s me, busily becoming a lymphoma encyclopaedia and wanting to talk about it all, and Simon trying his hardest to pretend it wasn’t happening.
And how we each dealt with this devastating news reflected fairly accurately how we approached life in general. I’m an all-in kind of person. I like jumping in and worrying about how to do it later. Simon was a ‘slow and steady, read the manual before he opened the box’ kind of guy. We infuriated each other a lot because this. I’d be racing off to try some new thing, he’d be hanging back saying “can we just THINK about this for a minute”!?
I miss Simon a lot, and I think the thing that makes me saddest is that he didn’t accept the fact of his mortality, and so it was something we couldn’t share. I’d hope that, faced with the same situation, I’d handle it differently. How do you think you’d handle it?
I just finished a book by Elizabeth Gilbert (she of Eat Pray Love fame) called Committed. This autobiographical book is essentially an exploration of the idea of marriage that ends with Liz convincing herself that it’s okay for her to marry the love of her life. At the start of the book, having been married and divorced, Liz is adamant that she will never marry again. She even has a pact with her lover that they will never marry. In the end, she is married to him.
It’s a topic that’s been in my thoughts a lot lately. Why get married? I’ve been married. When my marriage ended in 1995 I decided that marriage really wasn’t for me, and that I’d never do it again. I still felt this way five years later when I met Simon. And he was fine with that. He didn’t want to marry me either. At this time in my life, I’d describe my feelings about marriage as ambivalent. I couldn’t see the point of it. I thought to myself, ‘Why get married at all when you can live with someone and have all the same rights as a married couple anyway?’
Then my life changed again. It happened in increments. Simon and I separated and I reevaluated some of my attitudes about life. I decided that I might like to get married someday, if the right man presented himself. I don’t even really know why this shift in thinking happened. Possibly as a reaction to the breakup. I was saddened at the ease with which we could extract ourselves from each other’s lives.
And then I met Stephen. Just before I met him (I’ve mentioned this before) I made a list of what I wanted in a man. One of those things was to be with someone who was open to the idea of marriage. I think it was probably on our 3rd or 4th date that Stephen said that he preferred to be married. It was one of the deal-sealers for me (along with numerous other things).
And now I find myself about to marry the man of my dreams. I try not to think about what it all means too much. Every now and again a stray thought creeps in …”why do I want to marry this (or any) person?” … “where did this desire to be married come from all of a sudden?” … “what if it doesn’t work out?”. I put them aside because I know they don’t matter. What matters is that what I’m doing feels right. Exactly right.
One of the things I missed the most when I was travelling overseas was the sense of connection that I felt to my place and its people. The longer I was away from home, the more dislocated I felt. I wasn’t doing the usual OE and so didn’t go somewhere like London and simply make a new place. Instead I was travelling around a lot. Always a new city, new landmarks, new people.
Eventually I landed in Temecula, California and stayed put for three months. Because I had been yearning for familiarity, I made connections quickly. I got to know all the checkout ladies at the local supermarket, the bus driver knew me by name. The coffeemakers at Starbucks missed me if they didn’t see me every day. Even the maintenance guy at the apartment complex would stop and chat with me most days.
I was reminded of this feeling of dislocation (and the contrasting sense of home) last night at dinner, and again this morning.
Last night Stephen and I went to Tulsi for dinner. We haven’t been there for ages, but we used to go all the time. We wandered in and the Maitre d’ greeted us warmly. He gave us a cosy booth and turned the heater on for me. Then he asked if I’d like my usual…”chicken tikka and a plain naan?”. It was so lovely to be remembered. When I paid the bill, he asked if we had moved out of town, and I had to break the news that no, we had in fact been visiting other establishments. Awkward moment.
This morning, I popped in to C1 for a morning tea muffin. Obviously I’ve done this more times than I am aware of, because the woman behind the counter greeted me with, “Hi, vegan muffin to go?”. It felt good to be familiar.
The Secret Life of Bebe 