my day my week

Fathers Day. All the fathers down at the beach for a wave, on whatever they can get hold of. All the born-again surfers, the bankers and doctors on their longboards, the shaven head brigade with shortboards. And all their kids, paddling by their sides..

The fathers are surfing. All the fathers seem to be having fun on their waves, but not the ones on the sand holding the newborns. They are still getting used to things, like pushing the pram, no sleep, no surfing.



trying to write

Working, talking six hours a day, staying up late to try and work and think.
This week, one of my students came to me and told me that, after the MRI scan, it was determined that the damage to her daughters eyesight after the removal of two brain tumours was more extensive than thought. In fact, she explained, she had been in denial that her daughter would live anything other than a normal life. She was wrong, and would I mind if she presented her research another time?
There is no father in that family. He left, when the little one got sick.



nasty

Yesterday when I was in the camera shop, complaining about my camera (and wanting a new one,) the manager, who always serves me, came over close and said
“I think you have something in your hair” and he actually took hold of my hair and pulled a strand of dried seaweed out of it.
I don’t know which was the most unsettling, the fact that the seaweed was there, or that this man pulled it out.
“I’d hate it to be a tick”, he said.
Later, the woolly was teasing. “The man in the camera shop loves you .He was stroking your arm”
And I hadn’t even noticed, until the woolly told me, that he had indeed been stroking my arm as he spoke to me. And had extracted one of the two pieces of seaweed embedded in my nasty tangled hair.


self portrait with child

The daughter is surly to the nth dgree. She is a piece of cactus she is prickly she is sharp. She shouts and flounces. She argues and screams. She tries on eyeliner and scowls.
I think to myself that dealing with her sleeplessness and changing her nappies was far easier than dealing with that with which she encumbers me right now.


I have in-laws here from Europe:they cannot understand the flux in which my family exists. They are on holidays, I am not. I have mortally offended all of them. They think I am a failure as a wife to their beloved, because I work and do all the other things I do. I don’t speak German, so they give me a headache. I wish I could go swanning around the continent like they do, but right now I can’t. I shall look at the pics with the Damatijan families, on the beautiful coast of Croatia, and duly give my comments: pretty, lovely. The girls in that side of the family all look like supermodels, and make me look like a rotten old anglo-australian overbaked potato.



I hope they go soon.
I can’t bear to see myself through their eyes.