Alone

As the youngest of three very strong, opinionated, passionate and somewhat enthusiastic in the participatory sense (ie, we interfere in each others lives) sisters, i have never really had the occasion to feel alone. I break my arm at four, my sister carries me to the house, first day of school, there they both are in matching uniforms to mine. We've seen each other through countless breakups, nights out, tears and teasings for 30 long years.
Sure, we've all travelled....and then we travelled right back to our family home to share bedrooms and secrets and secret eye rolling towards our parents. We've grown in different directions. Paths shaped by family, careers, passions and partners. But our paths always loop back to each other and the safety of looking two other people in the eye and knowing they (usually) get it and even if they don't, they have your back anyway. Unless you are currently in an argument in which case they are on the phone to the other one stabbing you in it until you see each other 24 hours later and wonder what all the fuss was about.

And now suddenly, i am to be without them? Excuse me?
Next week, I'm getting on a plane. Alone. To travel to a foreign country. Alone. To have a BABY. ALONE.

I never imagined I would be having a baby without my two sisters right beside me. Literally, beside me. The face of the father was always a little blurry in these imagining (handsome, capable, luscious) but the faces of the women who would hold that little baby and introduce it to its cousins? Those faces have been clear as day since my dad bundled me into the waiting room and told them they had a baby sister.

My sisters are my family.

And now, I have a new family. A tiny family of me, Welsh, and lifetime of promise in my belly. He sent me a text message the other day; "I just bought you some vegemite!!" He's over in Wales, painting our house, buying furniture and sourcing cots and god knows what else and he goes to the supermarket to buy me vegemite, so that when i open the cupboard on my first morning there, it will feel like home. I think of Welsh and vegemite toast and the baby in my tummy and suddenly, I no longer feel alone.

Fate, Destiny and Safeway.

I just ran into an ex work colleague's wife in the supermarket. When i mentioned i am moving to Wales, she told me she had lived there for three years and loved it. Apart from the weather. The last time I saw her was the night I met Welsh and a few months later her husband offered me an incredible job, just when I had decided to go to Wales. Oh and she had a baby in a foreign country with none of her family around her. I feel like she is quite central to my story, without even knowing it. You see, I used to nanny for her sister in law when we struck up a friendship of sorts. Then I met her husband and we started working together on a photography project with young mums. I ended up working with him fulltime for a couple of years. Then the organisation we were working for was taken over by a new boss. I gotmarriedquitmyjobseperatedfrommyhusband and then that boss had a birthday party which is where i met Welshy.

Oh and I am having dinner with her and my ex work colleague on Tuesday night. They have just moved house. She wrote her address down on a piece of paper and as I walked to my car, I glanced at it. I shouldn't be surprised, but i was; Wales St.

I forgot to tell you something

My divorce hearing has been scheduled for the 30th of June. I, of course, will be getting fat in Wales by then but will celebrate the day with some sort of mocktail and a folate pill.
So by my maths, I will be divorced by August one. Fancy that.

Knock knock. Who's there? Boo. Boo who? No need to cry, it's only a joke.

What the effing crap is up with these fricking baby hormones? I get it okay? I get that i need them to do....well, stuff i guess. Actually, on second thoughts, what is their real purpose? Apart from making me break down every time i accidently watch SBS, i mean. I saw the last five minutes of Australian Story this afternoon. BIG mistake.

I cry at the news, I cry at masterchef and yes my friends, I even cry at Dancing with the Stars. I bawled at Britains Got Talent whilst in Wales and continued to blub when i saw the Australian version. The people were trying so hard and some of them were so talented and it was touching and moving and profoundly inspiring! Not inspiring to me, you understand. I am too exhausted and baby brained to even consider doing....that thing...you know, that thing with the movement and the smiling...oh you know what i mean...dancing! Yes, I have always liked dancing. What were we talking about again?

I've turned into my mum. I have turned. into. my. mum.

I just booked a flight.

And now i am getting scared. The "what ifs" and the middle of the night dread is starting to creep its' way into my optimism. I have had too much time to think about this. To consider the impact it will have on my life. To enjoy all the things i am leaving behind.....

However. It is time to move forward. It is time to be brave and remember that this is an adventure. This little life of mine has always been interesting and i suppose this is the next chapter. The one called The Year I Moved to Wales and Had a Small Baby. But it's scary right? Leaving everything i know and love behind and shacking up with a Welshman. Jebus Jebus. Luckily this particular welshman is sweet and kind and has spent the last week buying furniture for our home and digging out a vegetable garden. Bless. I really like vegetables and i read somewhere that you should sometimes feed them to your kid too. You know, just for a change from ice cream.

I'm looking forward to the fresh air. To the quiet. To the slower pace and the easy smiles. Wales to me is Welsh sipping tea in the mornings. His nieces' tiny hand curling into mine as we wander down a lane. Kicking water at each other in a stream until we are all wet and laughing like something out of an OMO ad. The wild violets and the tame lambs. Oh, it's so beautiful there. So, so beautiful. You should see the sky at night. Unbelievable.

So on the 9th of June I will go to Bangkok (possibly have a massage) and then arrive in London at 7.15am (my Visa starts that very day and i don't want to miss Welsh for even a day longer than i have to.)

It's crazy really, isn't it? It's crazy.

Boom Boom Boom

Well, what an eventful day it has been so far.

This morning i got to have an ultrasound. I have had three so far which seems excessive really but without going into too much detail, i have had some....issues......with this pregnancy which may have been because of my heart shaped uterus, could have been caused by excessive exercise (who, me? what?) but is most likely Just One Of Those Things. I had four blood tests in a week which was wonderful as you can imagine. Especially the one performed by a trainee nurse with a lip ring. I mean, I am all for the learning process but if i wanted to be stabbed repeatedly with a needle by some emo kid, i would never have resigned from the crisis centre.

Ultrasounds are amazing! As my friend said "you get to meet your baby before they drive you insane." My baby is "very active" which dad says is pay back (yep, he was in the room as a woman inserted an internal ultrasound thingy. Difficult to maintain sensible conversation whilst that is happening.) and everything looked fine. By "fine" I'm sure she meant that the baby looked like the cutest, smartest, funniest, kindest thing she had ever seen.

Grown up

I feel so old lately. This is why:

1. I'm having a baby. Wow.

2. I don't get Justin Bieber. AT ALL.

3. Instead of thinking Lara Bingle is a silly little girl, i am actually really concerned about her. I really hope she has good friends and someone, be it a manager or parent, who is actually looking out for her. Give the kid a break.

That is all.

The blog post i almost didn't hit "publish" on.

Blogging is weird right?
Of course it is. It's like an open diary just waiting to be read. Blogs are sometimes really boring. Sometimes they are entertaining. Sometimes touching and sometimes, well sometimes they belong to your ex boyfriend and can be both fascinating and nauseating.

I suppose the question of who i write for has been raised a few times since i started this blog. The conundrum about anonymity. I kinda always figured that i would be 100% honest but then never say who i really am. But then of course, i have friends who read this blog, I know my mum checks it and I follow my sisters blog which is sometimes linked to her facebook account. So i suppose, people who i know, or even just kinda know, may know me a whole lot better than i realise. Friends of friends, workmates, even my ex in laws are all potential readers. So how honest should i be? How much truth should really find its way onto this blog? How open should my book be?

These are all questions i have been grappling with lately because of something i wrote last week but didn't publish. The problem is, i cannot keep blogging until i blog about this because this particular piece of truth is impacting on everything i think, feel, notice or create lately. God, I've made it sound bad haven't I? Just keep reading :)

So without further ado, i give you The Unpublished Post:

When she died, i never thought i would feel happiness again.
Time literally ground to a halt and i was so present, so aware of the situation i had found myself in, that I could not see the forest for the trees. Fuck, i didn't even know i was in a forest. It hurt so much and i was so blind sided that i didn't know how i would recover.
I was young. Too young to be married and too young to be touching that sort of grief. Of course people go through worse everyday, every second. Just watch the news or Oprah or actually listen to peoples stories and you'd know that trauma bites into people's lives all the time.
But this was my nightmare. My little piece of personal hell. Our wedding anniversary, a suicide note, a husband who would never recover from the shock. This was my story and for a little while there, i wondered how i could come out of it intact.

Well, now i know.

You just keep going. It's as simple as that. I never could envision that my future would look like this. I could not ever imagine that I would fall in love again. I remember crying to my sister on the phone saying that i was broken, that i was changed, that my heart was no longer capable of love. She told me i was wrong. Promised me, in fact that I was mistaken. Of course she was right. But at the time? God. At the time I was a fucking wreck. I always thought that you were my lighthouse but now i see that you are the rocks i wreck myself against.

And then i met Welsh and the whole world changed again. Where there was grief, there was joy. Where there was darkness, suddenly, there was light. My silver lining. My second chance. Loving him didn't save me. Being able to love him showed me that i had already saved myself. After a year and a half of feeling numb at best, suddenly I was alive again. We fell in love. And i was so surprised, so astounded that I had met him that i forgot to keep looking backwards. Forgot to be careful. Forgot that i was someones ex wife and started being someones girlfriend instead. Girlfriend! Even now, that word seems so girlish. So innocent and sweet. Instead of feeling like a constellation prize after a failed married, I had the feeling that i had dodged a very dangerous bullet. That i had almost missed the chance of meeting the love of my life.

And i get it now. I understand what it was all for. Life really does go on. Time really does heal. Life really is what you make it. You want to know how i know all this stuff? It dawned on me on my third day in Wales:

We are seated in a darkened room. Well, Welsh is seated, i am half reclining on a bench like apparatus. We are clasping hands. It's no understatement to say that i am absolutely shitting myself. We are staring at a screen and i am questioning my relationship with God. If i don't believe in him, why do i keep saying his name in my head? Soft, warping circles move across the TV, like a lava lamp, and all at once i see a tiny little vibration of static. "See that there?" the sonographer asks in her thick, curly, sing-song accent "that there is the heart beat."

And just like that, it is all worth it. The grief, the pain, the loss, the fear. The sleepless nights, the agony, the tears and the terror. Because this is all that matters. This is all that has ever mattered, i just didn't know it. I would walk through a thousand lifetimes of the last few years, just to find myself standing in this exact spot. I look at Welsh and he looks at me and suddenly, we are three.

Welsh is grinning and I am bawling and they hand us a little print out which we clip to the dashboard of the car. The sun is out as we leave the hospital parking lot. It's unseasonable warm for this time of year in Wales. Maybe we will call the baby Sunny or Summer. Maybe we will choose a family name like Nelly or Gwen. Maybe it will be every name of every person who ever led me to Welsh in the first place.

Or maybe, we will just call her Hope.




And what the hell, while we are at it, I may as well completely blow my cover. Here's a photo taken a few days after we found out i was pregnant.

11.

11 has always been my lucky number. Well not always, but for a couple of years.
Before that, it was 5. When i was a kid, my lucky number would change with my age and when i turned 5, my sisters informed me that i couldn't just change it because i had, had a birthday. Showing the already determined (stubborn, defiant, annoying) streak in my personality, I claimed that being five had nothing to do with my lucky number of choice and boy oh boy did i show them the day i turned six. I stuck to my guns until my 25th birthday when finally I realised that 11 actually was my lucky number. And that you cannot just choose a number, it chooses you. And also that claiming my favourite colour was peach just to be different from the pink my sister clearly had a preference for, fooled noone. (My other sister was even more of a rebel, painting her bedroom BLUE! The scandal!)

Anyway, I digress. Since i started noticing that 11 followed me around, it has always served me well. And guess what? The year is 2011. Which mean that this year (and i say this every year) is going to be the Best Year Ever.

The real price of moving to another country:

Visa application: $315
Taking a morning off to lodge it: $100
Sending the stupid thing registered, express post: $26
Train ticket to the city: $3.70

Being one step close to being in the same village as my boyfriend: Pretty effing good.

The Ultimate, Final, To Do List (for the next month.)

hi y'all.

I feel like i have so much to do before i can leave for Wales. So many expensive, complicated things.

Get a visa
Get a divorce (this i my fault, i have all the forms but not the $550)
Put the rest of my stuff in storage
See everyone
Work fulltime
Walk the dog every day (this is free.)
Buy a plane ticket.

and a million other things.
Do some washing.
Buy some gumboots.

good? good.