In the southern spring of 2003, not long before I started these pages, I went on holiday to Melbourne to visit my brother who had been living there for a couple of years at that time. (An annual or eighteen-monthly visit was a ritual of mine for those first few years of his domicility in that city.) As was my habit during trips away, I thought a lot about what I needed to do to reorganise my life and make it work better for me. I lived at that time under an assumption of the possibility of mastery, that if I changed x and rejigged y, something like tranquility and contentment would arise. I had spent six unhappy months applying for academic jobs abroad after spending much of the northern spring on holiday in the UK and was ready to quit that particular trajectory; I didn’t have the stamina for the three hundred or more applications it was widely alleged humanities PhDs should be prepared to make to get a university job anywhere. (I had a non-academic university job at home; I just didn’t like it very much at that time.)
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Unlike most of the rest of the time, when it comes to earthquakes and being in them I have left little desire to make windows into [wo]men’s souls. We were neither killed nor injured, nor was our home destroyed or damaged, nor did our animals run away, nor did our amenities fail. The massive ground accelerations of which you have heard in the city and the eastern suburbs were no more than a tenth of that size at Ilam, where I was at work at the university. A colleague and I clung to two facing doorways, and I thought as our eyes locked of that zoom shot at the end of Bonnie and Clyde, when the gaze of Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty similarly meets, in their case, for the last time.
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You are All My Base and belong to me
Little gives as much pleasure as watching my daughter realise her intentions: look at the object, reach for the object, put the object in the mouth. Her language-world is mostly sensate: primarily taste and oral sensation, but also texture to the touch. What she sees seems to function mostly as spectacle, as witnessed when she shook with giggles at the sight of each of the dogs eating their dinner. To “hi!” and “hello!” she can respond in kind, sometimes with the H and sometimes without. Consonants are less important in her world than long flat vowels.
There are other vocabularies too, and they accord, in some ways coincidentally, with those of her parents. The unserious epithet, Boob Lady, by which I at home go, has been tethered recently by her own name for me: a fixed-gaze to make sure I am looking, then, almost imperceptibly, a quick movement of the tongue that, latched, would bring about the start of a feed. This is not the reductive expression I might once have thought it would be, since there is no-one else, after all, who provides for her that thing, and I know the whole of what I went through to be able to do it.
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1. At Home
This is not my baby, nor is it my dog.
Among the variety of things that people made when I was pregnant were remarks concerning the dogs. Some simply asked, reasonably enough, “what are you going to do about them?” Others jumped to statements perhaps deriving from their own housepride, or shuddering at the thought of being in our shoes; “of course you’ll have to get rid of the dogs” came from more than one source.
Now, one does not spend years becoming a crazy dog lady to give up quite that easily, and so it was that I replied first with politeness and later with vehemence (since it is remarkable how people whom you see only occasionally will say exactly the same thing again and again over eight months of pregnancy) that no, the dogs would stay. It was part of my hitherby dragons philosophy for the year’s post-partum latter half: I didn’t quite know how we would manage, but manage we would.
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3am and all seems well. Harvestbaby and I have slept from before midnight. #
We are all okay tho’ the dogs are pretty upset. Power on, cable out. #
In between those two tweets, a whole story. The first, my usual night-feed check-in, scanning the smartphone client for the other nursing mothers and late-night dwellers. The second, of course, after the quake.
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Posterous
Tolerably Habitable
29 December, 2011
in at home,commentatrix,dogs,we are family
In the southern spring of 2003, not long before I started these pages, I went on holiday to Melbourne to visit my brother who had been living there for a couple of years at that time. (An annual or eighteen-monthly visit was a ritual of mine for those first few years of his domicility in that city.) As was my habit during trips away, I thought a lot about what I needed to do to reorganise my life and make it work better for me. I lived at that time under an assumption of the possibility of mastery, that if I changed x and rejigged y, something like tranquility and contentment would arise. I had spent six unhappy months applying for academic jobs abroad after spending much of the northern spring on holiday in the UK and was ready to quit that particular trajectory; I didn’t have the stamina for the three hundred or more applications it was widely alleged humanities PhDs should be prepared to make to get a university job anywhere. (I had a non-academic university job at home; I just didn’t like it very much at that time.)
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