Into the Void
I’m not sure if people read (or write, for that matter) blogs anymore. Perhaps corporates and community organisations commission blogs to gain more traffic through SEO, a half-headed notion to flesh out the bones of their brand or their values. Trying to appear more human than not. Bucking the trend against personal blogging, I’m bringing it back.
The timing is strangely fitting – I started this blog in December 2010. At the time I was a stay-at-home parent to 3 small children, my youngest only a baby, his brothers only marginally more grown at 2 and 4 years old. No matter how full my hands or my kitchen sink at that time of our family life, this blog was a place where I could come and prime the gears of my mind and my heart. Here I found a little community of other parents and writers, and together we built our little houses of sticks on the wild, wild, web. For me, it was a rickety bridge toward a creative life. Writing here led to paid writing work, which led to a career change from management to communications. A step down in pay but a step up in passion and satisfaction, and work that I could awkwardly squeeze in and around being a mum to three.
Thirteen years on, again I find myself playing the role of a stay-at-home parent. My boys are all significantly older, larger and hairier – aged 13, 15 and 17 – all of the tiny seeds of their personalities now displaying themselves in all their idiosyncratic glory. Middle son is now old enough and cocky enough to buy his own barber clippers and give his youngest brother a haircut. Three haircuts in the last fortnight! He’s going to need a new guinea pig or else Mr 13 will be completely bald by the time school goes back in February.
Sadly, while his brothers thrive, one of my boys is struggling. The combination of Melbourne lockdowns, the pandemic, and turning 14 in 2020, threw this boy sideways in the tenderest years of his development. Despite his and our most-well meaning efforts, he’s spent the last 3 years circling the drain. He’s spent nearly as many days in hospital this year as he has as a free man. The toll it has taken on him, his dad and I, his brothers, and his peers, is immeasurable.
This year I’ve felt compelled to make what many onlookers have called some ‘brave’ choices. There was no other way. I’ve left my husband, moved to another, quieter town (still near the water) and I’m at home with our boy until he can get back to school, back to his mates, back to ‘doing life’ as he so cheekily describes it. I’m on unpaid leave from a communications job that I love, and trying not to panic about being back in a caring space for an indeterminate period of time. Some days I do the ‘not panicking’ successfully, dancing in the kitchen and happily whipping up food for us that is nourishing and tasty. Other days, I wrap myself in my king size doona and flop on the couch like a sad burrito, reading books and watching romantic comedies to stave off the existential angst that threatens to creep into the gaps of my day. There’s been a lot of fear and grief to process. Anyone who knows grief knows that it comes in and out like a tide with no rhythm or rhyme. In this quiet cedar house by the ocean, we’re collecting ourselves after walking through hell, and wrapping our heads around the illness that our boy will live with for the rest of his life. We may have climbed out of the hole that he was in, but now we have to climb a mountain to get the other side – whatever that looks like. In the day-less week between Christmas and New Year, we’re pausing before we embark on the next stage of his journey; me the sherpa, he the fearless adventurer.
Despite the trauma of the last 3 years, I’m full of an overwhelming gratitude that my kid’s not dead. Some days I wake up and I want to shout, “Man, I love this kid!” He is funny and bright and brave. If I were his illness, I would be scared. He’s not taking this lying down. I just hope he continues to point his nuclear energies towards generating light and love, self-compassion and kindness.
We still have a ways to go. I hope you’ll read along as I write into the ether. I’ll be writing about mental health, books and music, and fighting demons. So many fucking demons.
Wish us strength.
Onward.
the rhythm method 
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