And by the way, Coco isn’t getting her transfusion for a few more weeks, but given the critically low levels of blood stores this week, I thought it was worth remembering how a little thing like a giving blood can mean so much to a little person. Coco might not like getting transfusions, but she definitely loves how she feels afterwards.
If you are able to donate, please consider doing so this week.
Today we said goodbye to our little exchange student, and we are bereft.
Wrung out.
We miss his big smiling face. His lively dance moves. The way he said, “What? Huh?” In a high-pitched voice to everything he found surprising about Australia, and anything we said that he didn’t understand (which was virtually everything). We miss the way he made us laugh and the way he helped us see our town as if for the first time. To appreciate the natural beauty, the weather, the faint scent of sugarcane and salt, the heaving sound of the waves.
We miss his enthusiasm to try new things, to stretch himself in ways we couldn’t even know. He was afraid of many things, here in this slightly crazy space of a country. The startling insects, the furry animals, the earthiness, the brightness of the stars. He was surprised by the casualness and the warmth of Aussies (Ozzees), but he allowed it all to infuse, and brew and become. We called him Watters, and he sent his Mamasan an email saying, “I’m an Ozzee boy now.”
Our throats got lumps in them.
We knew we only had him for a short time, so we stacked the days with experiences and we held nothing back. We told him what we thought of him, and we allowed him to bury deep into our hearts. Kind of like the way you do when you know your Dad is dying of a cancer that grows by dissolving vital organs, one by one by one.
But with more laughs than cries. Because nobody was actually dying. Even if you might not ever see each other again.
And that’s the thing. What I found today, is that grieving is not about the death, it is about the missing. Coco was beside herself when we were saying our final goodbyes. She is seven years old, so she didn’t want to do it, wanted to just leave without the sting of the final glimpse of her friend. I suppose she thought she would avoid some of the pain if she avoided the situation. Which is what we often do. Liam was completely different, because he said he knows he will see Watters again. A different protective mechanism perhaps.
And me? Well, I drove those emotions down nice and deep, somewhere down near my big right toe, where they can stay a while. I’ll take them out every now and then, have a little look, and slowly and slowly the feelings will become more bearable. A sense of creeping acceptance will begin to take over, until I can look at the whole experience safely.
I know how this works, by now.
Eventually and eventually you can smile with your eyes again.
And remember the people who scored your heart with their enthusiasm, and the way they could always make you laugh.
Watters.
Thanks for coming Watters. We’re gonna miss you and your crazy stunts.
A little dude from Japan has come to stay at The Asher’s for a couple of weeks. I call him Watters. He looks at me blankly when I do, even though I have explained that Aussiefying is name is imperative.
He has a little English at his disposal, and we have virtually no Japanese, despite the Evils (they shall no longer be called Geniuses) learning it attending classes in it for five and three years respectively. My Mum gave us a translation book, which has been both useful and a source of great mirth, as he pisses himself every time we speak Japanese to him. Personally, I’m a little affronted, as I’m pretty sure my pronunciation is excellent.
I have reverted to doing what I find most useful when someone doesn’t understand me: talk loudly, so they can now not-understand me with sore ears. As an added bonus, I also use sign-language. My grandparents were deaf, so in my family that’s what you did if words didn’t suffice: Auslan. So, yeah, I was signing my little fingers to the bone for Watters, until Liam said, “He’s Japanese Mum, not deaf.”
We were also using a translator App on our devices, but have given that the flick since I used it today to ask him, “If there’s anything else he wants to do in Noosa?” and he nearly wee-d in his Abercrombie and Finch designer jeans. I suspect I may have asked him something to do with my substantial mammary glands or Nathan’s gastrointestinal ablutions. He wouldn’t say. But every time he looked at me for the rest of dinner, he giggled.
He has a great laugh, our little Jappy Chappy, so we try to do things to make him giggle.
So far we have made him laugh at: urinals in male toilets, sparklers, meat pies, toasted marshmellows, a heat bag in the bed at night, kangaroo spit and koala poo, gravy, peas, Coco’s violin playing, five minute showers, the spa at a local resort, warm Nutella on ice-cream, Vegemite, weird rocks on the first Groyne, pelicans, driving a boat, Cheezels on fingers, ‘cranky’ tacos, blue-tounged lizards, our kids not eating their dinner, bacon and eggs cooked on the barbie, Woofa the shitcat, our footy team’s score today (we were NOT laughing), Nath’s singing, various Aussie stuff in shops, Liam’s speedos, pretty much everything at Aussie Zoo and my use of chopsticks.
However, the thing that has made him laugh the most is my dancing. Again, I’m shocked. Because I’m pretty sure that my dancing is tres fantastique (I may not have any Japanese, but by gawdy I know me French).
Last night we got out the “deck” which is a pumpin’ little speaker with a DJ function. We logged in our iPods and went to battle. Watters has a penchant for songs that are newer and boppier than a woman of my maturity can safely boogie to, and still keep the contents of her bladder retained, but after an aural arm-wrestle over “Blurred Lines” (Him: Yes, Me: Hell NO) we found common ground with Michael Jackson. Turns out this stylish, crazy, funny little dude from Tokyo knows the words to Thriller- including the Vincent Price bit- almost as well as me (not bad considering it takes fifteen minutes to find out where he went on his last holiday), but, even better, he knows the dance at least as well as The Wacko himself.
So Watters laid out the moves, and The Ashers followed along as best we could.
And his gutsy laughter rang out across our blue, blue seas.
Some days, when you have a kid who has a thing, and when the thing gets too much, she can cry because your extra sensory perception wasn’t working properly, and you gave her porridge instead of corn flakes, or too much honey, or not enough honey, or the wrong coloured straw to drink her smoothie (that you really want her to drink, because she needs every bit of help she can get right now), or you are helping her to get dressed because she is so damn tired, and you choose the mauve knickers instead of the pink, all before your morning shower. These are the days that you know you have to tell her. It’s time to tell her. Really, it’s unfair not to tell her, that today will be the day when she gets the blood taken for a cross-match. But still you waver.
These are the days that when all the other kids are jostling around, and straggly lining-up to go into class to start the last day of school, you will be sitting in the school car-park after dropping the big one off, applying Emla to the tender skin of the inner arm. Looking at the those thin blue streaks and hoping one of them will be plump enough to puncture.
These are the days when all the other kids are sitting on the mat in a circle, perhaps thinking about who they will play with at little lunch. Your kid is sitting in a hospital waiting-room that smells of chlorhexidine and the ghost of urine, hopefully also thinking of who she will play with at little lunch, but more likely thinking about nurses and tourniquets and things that pierce vulnerable flesh to get to the life blood beneath.
So these days are the some days when you think it could all go pear-shaped.
And then it doesn’t.
You tell her that it’s today, and she doesn’t lose it. Instead she looks at you, eyes so big and blue, innocent and wise all at once, sclera so yellow it’s almost green with the funk of excess bilirubin, and says, “Yes, I think I am ready for a transfusion, I pulled my eyelids down yesterday, and looked at my conjunctiva, look, they’re really pale. I must be low. Even though I’m not really that tired, only when I have to stand up for too long, then my legs get all wobbly. And what is the plural for conjunctiva anyway, do you think it’s like the word octopus?”
These days, your heart leaps and lurches all at once. It zings with relief, at the miracle of adaptation. That the plasticity of the brain, and the wiring of the body, can allow a human adapt to almost any situation, given time. Given the right conditions. And in that very same moment, your heart feels denser than element 117 and just as unstable, as you yearn for a life for her that doesn’t know anything about haemoglobin or conjunctiva or local anaesthetic creams or blood typing or even hospitals and their strange layered smells. You wish all there was was little lunch. And then big lunch. And shithouse spider craft.
Okay, this could be the last in these transfusion posts for a few months. Thanks for humouring me.
I had a bit of a big day in the office today. Lots of people in a bit of bother, lots more hoping to get in this week. I’ve been a bit busy. I got upstairs just in time to see the final reveals of the House Rules gardens. Phew.
I was sitting quietly at the kitchen table, inhaling my dinner, when I happened upon an egg carton cut-off. You know the bit where the eggs sits? That bit. It appeared to have some kind of pink glittery crap smeared haphazardly over it, so I knew from experience that, in this house, it would be known as “craft”. In addition there were eight green bendy straws roughly taped to the cardboard. I say roughly because only half of them were really securely attached. I counted the straws again, yes, definitely eight. Which led me to believe that this craft was indeed something specific. I think it may be known as “spider”, or possibly “octopus”. Hard to tell which.
I held it up gingerly between my thumb and forefinger. Not ginger because there was any realism- I was not afraid of being bitten by the thing that I shall refer to as spiderpus, as it was in fact the shittest piece of craft I have beheld in quite some time. “What, in the name of all that is holy, is this crap?” I asked Nath, who had been present at the time of presentation.
He looked at me deadpan, “It is in fact Coco’s spider. She has been constructing it at school for quite some time. Today there was a gallery of all of the mini-beasts, where the parents could view such monstrosities. It is an egg carton with eight straws un-securely attached. I suspect she will not get an A. I also suspect we will not be accused of providing assistance, or craft hot-housing our child.”
At which point we started pissing ourselves. Perhaps I was delirious from overwork and hypoglycaemia. That could be part of it, but I shit you not, this spider is truly the worst piece of craft I have seen thus far, surpassing even the Liam designed tuna-box, cotton-wool-ball and pipe-cleaner scorpion of 2012. We laughed until we had tears. Tears of joy at being such crap parents, that not only have we not provided sufficient craft-nurturing for our children, but also that we would find their ineptitude so hilarious. We laughed until I might have almost done a little bit of wee. Wee of relief that our kids obviously hold craft in such low regard that it is unlikely that we will be requested to create crafterpieces over the looming school holidays.
I can’t help but think of all the other parents, filing past the gallery of mini-beasts, fake smiles plastered on their faces, saying things like, “Wow, another octopus-like creature.” And, “Ooh, look, a snake(?), bat(?), centipede(?), ummm, thing”. And then they would have arrived at Coco’s. There would have been no.words.
I know what you are thinking: that I’m a bit mean. That the kid tried as hard as she could. That spiders can be difficult to create.
Okay then, get a load of this:
It has NO EYES. Or fangs. (Among other deficiencies)
I rest my case.
…From The Ashers xx
Post Script: Liam just saw the creation and said, “What the hell is that?” Coco looked up from her breakfast and said with a half-smile, “Spider.” Liam scoffed. I braced myself for tears of outrage, or some such. Coco replied with a shrug, “Beauty is where you find it Liam.”
And for a kid who is mostly yellow-ish and has limited enamel on her teeth, that’s not a bad personal rule.
kidzta on Lessons From Lego (and Liam): “Liam’s insight is refreshing – instead of decluttering, he suggests expanding, embracing new ideas and opportunities. A youthful perspective on…” Dec 21, 16:08
kidzta on Lessons From Lego (and Liam): “Absolutely! It’s akin to acquiring a larger handbag – you end up filling it with more things to lug around…” Dec 21, 00:17
Alison Asher on Something Delicious: “Thank you! That’s such a nice thing to say… Happy writing!” Aug 31, 07:30
Tracy on Something Delicious: “I love your style (writing in particular) and you inspire me to develop mine too. Love the “new” words and…” Aug 30, 23:20
Alison Asher on Change It Up: “I will. Reminds me of the good old locum days. Maybe that will be a thing again soon??” Aug 27, 11:01
Alison Asher on Change It Up: “Yes, as if people “have” a panel beater on call… Well I do, but…. Lucky it was you, is all…” Aug 27, 10:59
Recent Comments