Mess and Mr Turdiman

My husband G is away for a few days for work. After spending almost three weeks solid in his company over the Christmas break, it feels both odd and a relief. Love him as I do, it's nice to have the place to myself for a bit.

He does try hard to pull his weight. He usually does the washing up in the morning (and leaves the sink area a total wet mess afterwards) and helps with the hoovering (but not under furniture or on the top of skirting boards or those other little dust gathering places). He helps hang the washing out and is quite OCD about it: he has to pair all the socks together and drape them in pairs over the line before pegging them, likewise all his undies he has to hang over the line first instead of just grabbing a handful and pegging them. It drives me nuts watching him as it's double handling. When he hangs his shirts out he doesn't always check the sleeves aren't turned up, so he gets a surprise to find that some sleeves on his shirts aren't dry as the cuffs are turned in.  I mustn't grumble. Most women would be delighted to have the help.

I've been cleaning the house today. I don't think G realises how messy he can be. Crumbs all over his end of the kitchen table and under his chair. Shoes strewn in several places in the bedroom (despite me fixing up a bigger shoe rack for him in the wardrobe), drawers not closed fully (ooooh, that irks me!), papers left everywhere, and worst of all the pee drops on the loo floor.

Why the hell do men dribble? Can't they wipe their willies with a bit of bog roll? G doesn't even realise he drips. I've pointed it out to him and he's been astonished, but he still dribbles. And it smells. If I get in there quickly enough after him I wipe the floor with loo paper but I still have to mop it at least twice a week.

I have a nose which can be pretty sensitive to smells; on one hand it's nice to get a whiff of someone's perfume and be able to identify it, likewise the scent of a flower while walking along the footpath. But I'm very sensitive to bad pongs.

Which brings me to the other bad pong. Shit. G is a shitter. Some days are double dumpers, some are triple turders. The bloke just can't go once a day. We only have one toilet, so while the holidays were on I had to time my own daily dump between the numerous loo visits of G. I secretly call him Mr Turdiman. He doesn't know this. I've never met anyone who needs to crap so often.

So for a few days I have a clean, tidy house and a toilet that doesn't stink. Everything is in its place. I feel calm. It's like a holiday after the holiday.

Two houses and a haunting

Last weekend I drove past my old house. I was going to visit a friend nearby and thought I'd swing by. We have tenants in the place and their teenage son deals drugs and has friends who have sprayed graffiti liberally in the lane outside our house. They are moving out this week. The son has caused such trouble with my neighbours I have decided not to renew the lease.

But I digress.

This post is not about delinquent teenagers but about houses and districts - two of them: where I live now and have lived most of my life, and where G and I spent the first 7 years together.

So, I saw my old place. Jonquils I had planted years before were blooming in the courtyard garden at the front, so I nipped in and helped myself. There was nobody about to challenge me and as an owner I have every right to do it.

I was able to view my little house dispassionately. When we moved out I felt a little bit sad as it had been such a happy home for us. Six months later I've managed to disassociate myself and think of it as an investment property, with the occasional hope that the tenants appreciate the colour scheme and the garden beds (well, Sonny Jim certainly did with his marijuana plants) and are keeping the garden alive and tidy.

To be frank, I was able to look at the place with a sense of disbelief that I had ever lived there. It no longer felt like home. I have moved on.

I had a companion with me and was chatting to her on the drive. I kept my eyes on the road but it did feel weird driving back to my old house. I drove the route almost mechanically, not thinking twice about each twist and turn as we left the main road. I noticed subtle changes on the way; houses that had been knocked down for apartment buildings, houses which had been knocked down and were being rebuilt as a single dwelling. It was familiar but it wasn't my district any more.

Even the local shopping mall had changed hands and had a new name; if I'd had time I would have dropped in as their prices are pretty good and it's much bigger than my own shopping centre.

Back here, I'm still reconnecting. I didn't have many friends here when I moved out - being an insular bugger I didn't belong to sporting clubs, bridge clubs or have the school mums network to draw friends from. My friends are scattered.

My small local shopping centre, with its woefully small Coles supermarket, feels like my territory again now. I'm on nodding terms with the local dog walkers. I know all the dogs in my street - they all arrived before we moved back. I have a developed a new mental map of shops and businesses and services in my area and the surrounding suburbs.

It's taken me a few months to settle back into an altered reality of my old life. I lived in my current house since childhood until I met G. It seems odd sometimes knowing the master bedroom is ours and I'm living with G and not Mum in this house. I almost feel guilty, as if I've snuck a boyfriend home! I still miss Mum and expect her to be around; still save up things to tell her which I've learned from my friends.

Last week I know she was in the house with me. I smelt her scent, a faint hint of Johnson's baby powder, just inside the front door. I said hello. I believe she's here a lot, and helps me when I can't find things. God only knows what she thinks of the new furniture I've brought in.

My companion on Saturday was a psychic. I've mentioned her before. I was taking her to my friend's house as she was doing a reading for a party there and I was having one of the readings.

My house - my current house - came up in her reading. She said Mum was telling me to fix the window downstairs, and was being very insistent about it. I explained we had to wait for a tree root to wither and the house to settle down before we put a new sill in the window (I explained in case Mum was hovering around and listening).

The psychic told me that Mum strokes the cats and the dog, and that wouldn't surprise me. It's probably why Pwinceth Girl Kitten lies on the bed after breakfast, as Mum used to sit there in the mornings and talk to whatever cat we had at the time.

She told me that Mum and Nan watch over me, and I believe they do. My house is pleasantly haunted. You know, that actually makes me happy.

My Dad's list of books - a penchant for philosophy

"What's that pile of papers and magazines?" G asked, opening the cupboard under the kitchen bench.

The top shelf held tablecloths and napkins, the bottom phone books and a pile of…well… newspapers. Mum used to put old newspapers there to use to line the birdcage/cat tray/whatever.

"Isn't it funny," I said, "how you can live with things for years and not really notice them? I'll go through it all and chuck it out. Since we get the newspaper every day we don't need a store cupboard for the stuff."

So I did. Half way down, beneath the more recent newspapers (recent meaning dating back to 1997!), there was a heavy sheet of cardboard, and it became obvious that beneath that were magazines and news clippings Mum had hung onto.

I diligently went through them. Most of them were binned after a cursory read through, but I kept a few I found interesting (heaven help me! I'm turning into Mum!).

At the very bottom was an old-fashioned 1940s cardboard-bound foolscap ledger. I flicked through it and recognised Dad's elegant handwriting.

Most of the ledger was empty, and it had been used as an address book and notebook rather than for recording figures. Judging by some of the dates, it was Dad's book in the late 1940s. He'd written addresses for men he'd served with in the RAAF, with little notes beside their names about their families or what relationship they'd been to him during WWII.

Following the addresses, after many blank pages, Dad had headed a page Books. It was a list of books he owned, because I recognised several of the titles. They are still here in this house (although many of them are destined for the local church fete as I've tried to read them but they're not my sort of books). Most of them are popular fiction of the time by authors such as Ion Idriess.

The next page was headed Books to be read in order for educational purposes.

Now, Dad wasn't the most educated bloke on earth. He'd been second-last in his class in maths in high school. Having said that, he was intelligent - he'd been an officer in WWII, he was well-spoken and clever, but he hadn't had a classical education or been to university. Clearly in 1946 he thought his education needed finishing, for the list of 112 books began with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. It included all the Greek philosophers. Marcus Aurelius and Leonardo da Vinci made the list. Erasmus. Francis Bacon. St Thomas Aquinas. Milton. Descartes and Hume. Classics authors such as Thackeray, Defoe and Swift. Voltaire.  Goethe. Darwin. There were 112 authors on Dad's list, which ran to nearly four pages.

He'd marked off the ones he'd read or obtained:

• Plato's Dialogues
• Aristotle's works
• Lucretius' Of the Nature of Things
• Ovid's Metamorphosis
• Marcus Aurelius' Meditations
• The New Testament
• Maimonedes' Guide for the Perplexed
• St Thomas Moore's Utopia
• Montaigne's Essays
• Shakespeare's Complete Works (which I have in the house)
• Thomas Hobbes' Elements of Philosophy
• Rene Descartes' The Passion of the Soul
• Milton's Paradise Lost
• Newton's Opticks
• Kant's Critique of Practical Reason
• Ricardo's Principals of Political Economy and Taxation
• Hegel's Philosophy of History
• Darwin's Origin of Species
• Wundt's Outline of Psychology
• Nietzche's The Will of Power

I feel as if I've discovered someone I never knew at all; the Dad I remember is the Dad of my toddlerhood. Hardly a man to be sprouting philosophy to his two year old daughter.

The Dad Mum spoke of wasn't a philosophiser either. He was an intelligent man with a sense of humour, a careful attitude to driving and piloting, a man with a successful betting system for the races, a part time SP bookie, a carpenter and handyman, a man with a taste for beer and good wine, a man with a sometimes carefree attitude to spelling and written grammar, a man who'd pull his hat down over his ears and make a silly face for the camera, a man who had an affair and buggered off. I feel as if I know that Dad reasonably well.

I wonder now about that list from the 1940s; why he lost interest. I wonder who inspired him to create that list in the first place.

And now I'll never know.

The joy of getting physical

This has been the strangest year of my life so far; the saddest too. It's cognitive dissonance, living in my old family home with echoes of Mum in every room. I expect her to be there, but she's not. I talk to her anyway.

The weird thing is, I can't spend all day at a computer any more. I get twitchy. I also feel like falling asleep. I long to get up and DO something. Herbert knows there is plenty to do.

So my goal now is to do something for the house every day. It could be something small, such as tidying a cupboard. It could be washing a wall. It could be garden work. As long as it is something physical, which gets me away from the computer and the slightly depressed attitude I get when I sit at it for too long.

Most of my weekends are now largely computer-free. I catch up with Facebook but often on a mobile device rather than the computer.

Last weekend was lovely. Lots of outdoor work in the garden - poisoning morning glory (how romantic, the two of us under a camellia bush, one clipping the awful vines, one dipping them in a lethal mix of Resolva and diesel), weeding the lawn of dandelions yet again, recementing the stone coping around one garden bed, digging old and hopeless soil out of same.... Just great. I was sweating like a bastard in the early autumn sun, covered in dirt with a light coating of herbicide. Utter joy. My muscles ached pleasantly and my mind was on the vision of what this garden will look like when I've finished ripping out dead stuff, underperforming plants and a multitude of weeds.

Understandably I had trouble focussing on work today. The sun shone outside, beckoning me. We'd started the day with a brisk 30 minute walk as G was flying our for work at lunchtime so we didn't have to get up at six and get him out the door by 7.30 after a full breakfast. Nope, it was a leisurely if physical start.

I put up with work stuff until four, then headed for the garden, to finish digging out a bed we'd started on over the weekend. There was a ten year old golden diosma in there which I was heartily sick of, as it had gone scrawny and was too big for the bed, realistically. Ten minutes of tugging and carefully finding and pulling at roots saw it gone. We've had plenty of rain lately so it was a fairly easy job pulling it out. My back feels fine right now.

After digging I was able to plant out some young plants I had collected in readiness. It's so satisfying seeing a garden bed come together. I've chosen a predominantly blue and white scheme with occasional forays into red. I think too I'll have to pop a few more plants in there to bulk it up a bit - and keep the weeds out.

This is the smallest bed I'll be working on. I have grand plans for the rest of the garden area which will see me busy for months. And of course once it's all done it will need regular maintenance to keep it looking good. I'm planning a mix of ornamental and edible plants. It's funny how good a broccoli plant can look next door to something ornamental like a hydrangea.

Whatever goes in my garden will have to either be edible, look good or smell good. Or a mix of at least two out of those three! I can foresee some very physical times ahead. I think my winter workdays may be rather short as winter, with the cool days, is the best time to be outside, digging madly.

My Mum originally planted a rose garden in one bed, so one plan is to reinstate that. That's definitely a winter job, while the roses are dormant. If only I could get paid for doing the gardening, I would happily give up the day job.

The letter no wife wants to get

I have been sorting through my Mum's desk; a hotchpotch of letters, ancient receipts, brochures, information about the suburb I live in and much more.

Mum's letters have been scattered in boxes in her bedroom and pigeonholes in the desk. Some are letters from her sister, and parents when they were on holiday. Some are carbon copies of letters she has sent others. And there are, most interestingly and importantly, letters from my father. I have yet to put all these letters in some kind of chronological order, but have read most of them over the last couple of months.

Dad was an airline pilot and was sent to Geelong to train on the Boeing 707 in 1964, ostensibly for six months. He returned on leave to Sydney a couple of times at first, and his letters to Mum were initially full of love for her and for his little infant daughter, me. They also spoke of what he was learning. Then there was the letter a few months in saying he would stay in Geelong on his next leave and catch up on his study and try to get more flying hours in. The letters got shorter. I can't find any carbon copies of Mum's in reply to Dad's letters but they could turn up.

Then two days ago I found this one, in Mum's desk:

Geelong

19/1/65

Dear J---,

Well I did check yesterday and it was terrible although they passed me except for the night part of it. I am getting another go tomorrow at it. My flying seems to be going from bad to worse and so does everything else. I guess you can tell by the last few weeks that I am not interested in coming home again so I think it would be better for all concerned if I did not and we keep on going as we have been over the last six weeks. I will be up in Sydney as soon as I get through here & will give you a ring and talk about it, you decide what you want to do about the house etc as it is yours to make the decision also about "Carinthia". I am missing her very much and still think you are a wonderful person but cannot go on deceiving you and myself about our relationship it just worrys me all the time I am home so that it will be better this way. I guess you have been expecting this the way you were speaking before so do not be too upset. I think it is the best for both of us so please be sensible. Will ring you when I get to Sydney and still

lots of love

L-- xxx

I vaguely remember this time. I was two and a half. I remember waiting at the living room window with Mum, watching for Dad's car to come down the hill and into the drive on his return from Melbourne, but it never did. Mum cried a lot. I did too. I was told that Daddy wasn't coming home again. I was used to him being away for days at a time in the job he had, and always waited at the window on the days he was due home.

Mum reckoned she and Dad never argued. I don't know what went on in regard to 'the way you were speaking before' but I suspect Mum challenged Dad about him having an affair with what was then called an air hostess (hostie) - the woman he divorced Mum to marry. I think she suspected the hostie was also staying in Geelong and I suspect she was right. Neither of my parents is around now to ask, and Mum was pretty frank with me when I grew to adulthood about Dad and the hostie and my parents' marriage breakup.

Frankly, I think this letter is a copout. It's like being dumped by text or, in the 90s, email. My parents were married for 14 years before Dad wrote this letter. Mum was furious for years about it and called him a gutless wonder, because he didn't say what he needed to say face to face.

The copy of the letter is a photocopy with no original available. I suspect the original got used in the divorce courts when Mum was fighting for the house. Dad's letter clearly states 'you decide what you want to do about the house etc as it is your to make the decision'. Mum made damned sure it was hers!

I can't imagine my Mum's utter sadness when this letter arrived in the post. It would have wrenched her heart out and thrown it on the ground to sizzle and die in the Sydney summer sun. My poor lovely Mum, getting a missive like this. I think she thought Dad had had a mental breakdown of some sort and that he'd realise his mistake and come home then as the months went on in 1965 realised he was serious.

So now I have a cataloguing job ahead of me, putting this whole story together chapter by chapter, letter by letter, date by date. I can't bear to throw them out; this is my family history.

Many couples go through divorce, but in the 60s it was less common and a long, drawn out process which took a good five years to complete. There was a social stigma attached too, even in those modern times. My Mum wasn't alone in divorcing her husband, but her story is important to me and deserves preserving, even if I am the only one who reads these letters and feels my own heart wrench in sympathy.

The hardest time

When I was a child I used to be terrified of losing my Mum. Either she'd run away, as Dad did, or she'd get hit by a bus or die of a terrible disease… you get the idea. The very thought could have me in tears.

I have been lucky. I have had my Mum as both mother and closest friend for 51 years. And now I know what it is like to lose her, for I lost her on December 28 last year. It's numbing. It's a deep awfulness inside. It's incomprehensible to me that I shan't see her again or hear her voice, or feel her arms around me and mine around hers.

Mum had a stroke on 17 December and lasted ten days, fluctuating in the first week between a vague lucidity and a coma-like state. She couldn't move her left side. In the first few days she could talk in that the sounds she made were occasionally comprehensible. She only said one sentence clearly, five days after her stroke: "Get me a jelly bean."  That might sound nuts but it was a perfectly sane request by a diabetic worried that she hadn't eaten in days (she couldn't eat and was being fed via a tube).

If seeing her - this vital, wonderful, active woman of 88, she who was more up to date on current affairs  and politics than I - lying incapable in a hospital bed festooned with tubes and monitors wasn't bad enough, the last week was the worst of my life.

You see, the three specialists I spoke to all said it would be kinder to turn off the food and water and let nature take its course, as it was clear Mum would never recover and the best she could hope for would be a couple of months in a nursing home before the grim reaper paid a visit. Knowing Mum's horror of nursing homes, especially after seeing her own sister-in-law in the same situation, I agreed with them, feeling sick with guilt at the decision and in floods of tears.

What can be crueller than to watch the person you love most in the world fade away day by day?

Until almost the very last Mum could squeeze my hand or kick the blanket with her 'good' leg to answer yes/no questions, but even that wasn't enough to convince the doctors she had a fighting chance. They had her on low dose morphine and increased it when a gland in her neck started to swell and was obviously painful.

I did my mourning and grieving while Mum was still alive, being as brave as I could as I sat by her bed, talking of everyday things, telling her about the birds in the umbrella tree outside her house, telling her about the weather and mainly telling her I loved her.

It was outside the ward, in the corridor, that I would burst into racking sobs, wanting her back as she was, a bit frail but still independent, funny and clever.

When the phone call came at 3.45 in the morning, my heart turned to lead. We raced to the hospital but were fifteen minutes too late. I had asked the nurse to tell Mum we were coming, to hang on, but I think even her strong will couldn't overcome the inevitable. That, or she didn't want me to see her die, and I'm rather grateful for that if it's the case. Watching her dying was one thing, seeing her take a last breath would have been a killer for me.

I wanted to blog this as it was happening, to pour out my raw soul, but the internet connection at Mum's house where we were staying while she was in hospital was too slow. I had enough on my plate without ISP frustration.

So now it's nearly two months later, and I am ashamed that I don't cry on a daily basis; when I think of Mum though I get a beautiful feeling of warmth, as if she is still there beside me. I can imagine I'm putting my arms around her and I can feel her body, the shoulder that was damaged in a car crash in the 1960s slightly lower than the other.  It's a feeling of comfort rather than a feeling of loss, and I am grateful and glad my mind has decided I will transmute my grief to this rather than be the wreck I thought I would be, depressed and howling on the hour. I have had to be strong; Mum was a strong woman and I think I have somehow, in these weeks, garnered some of her amazing spirit. Maybe she's still around. I hope so.

I may have lost Mum, but I will never lose her. Does that make sense? I think it does. I love you, Mum.

What was he thinking?

My husband G is a lovely bloke. Thoughtful. Generous. Kind. I am very lucky.

He likes to buy me presents, particularly if he's sent overseas on business, and most of the time they hit the mark pretty well.

Earlier this year he travelled to India, and asked me if I'd like him to bring back a sari. Delighted, I said. Cotton, preferably, and with sequins. Something a bit over the top I can turn into an evening dress. Aqua colour. Bless him, he came back with an apple green polyester sari with no sequins. Not what I envisaged for an evening dress so one of my Indian neighbours will have to show me how to wear a sari. We have many Indian neighbours. There'll probably be an occasion to wear one. It's a very pretty sari.

Happy that he'd bought a sari, G then thought he'd buy me something else. Silk clothes are pretty cheap in India, so he bought me a silk top.

I think he probably went into the fashion boutique, as he said it was quite a fashionable little shop, and told the salesgirl, "My wife likes wearing bright colours. What have you got in silk?"

She was undoubtedly overjoyed to offload a safety vest green coloured top, the cut of which is designed to turn anyone with boobs bigger than 32" into an elephant.

I am talking BRIGHT green. Eye-piercing, blinding green. Yes, the glow in the dark colour favoured by all health-and-safety-conscious manual workers everywhere. This photo doesn't do it justice. It makes it look tame.

I am thinking the shop didn't sell many of these; G told me proudly he'd got it on special.

Being a polite person, I thanked him generously and said it was lovely, and tried it on. Because of those pleats at the top and the subsequent flow of fabric it immediately made me look 10kgs heavier. I hoiked it in with a wide turquoise coloured belt, which helped. 

Apart from the fit, or lack of fit, the problem is the colour. What the hell do you match blinding green with so you don't look like a roadworker? I guess I can tone it down with aqua and turquoise, and wear it with white capri pants. I could probably wear it under the apple green sari, come to that.

Because it's a present and G was so proud of his shopping capabilities, I am honour bound to wear the top and not give it away. I am too kind a person to let it meet with an accident. I can't even dye it another colour or he'll suspect he made a major error with the fuck-me-that's-green green, and feel bad about it. 

So I have to grin and bear it - or in this case, wear it. But... what was he thinking when he went through the decision process on this top?

Has anyone else been giving a present they don't like but have to wear lest the giver get insulted?

Dogs are from Mars, Cats are from Venus

There are dog people and cat people. And then, there are people who behave just a bit like dogs and cats.

I always joke that I am part cat; I share a cat's liking for my own company, I prefer peace and quiet to parties, elegance and order to chaos, and the opportunity to have a thorough bath/shower every day and feel well-groomed. I have a regrettable sense of schadenfreude that any cat would appreciate, and my night vision isn't bad either. There are times when I don't want to be touched; if I had a tail it would swish with annoyance then. I am a cat person.

That being said, I also own a dog whom I love dearly - I have had both cats and dogs in my home since childhood. But I relate better to cats than dogs when all is said and done.

My husband G on the other hand has something dog-like about him. When I first met him I was reminded of a jaunty terrier, cheerfully sniffing around me. If he had a tail it would wave plumily and happily. Many men are like that; they're like dogs sniffing for a bitch on heat. G is gregarious, and enjoys human company far more than I. He's bigger than I both in height and width and when he walks in the door at the end of the working day the house seems much smaller and less spacious. It's a small place anyway but suddenly, like the cats, I'm having to weave around furniture and G to get from point A to B.

You've all seen that joke Diary of a Cat and Diary of a Dog. The cat's diary tells of plots and plans of escape; it is complex, while for the dog everything except a bath is simply "My favourite thing!"

G reminds me of the dog's diary every mealtime. Even if it's only bacon and eggs for breakfast, or a simple steak and veg for dinner, or even just crackers and cheese for lunch, he responds the same: "Oh Wow!" When I present him with a divine and powerful curry, or a dish that has taken a couple of hours to pull together perfectly, it's still "Oh Wow!" My favourite thing! I have to laugh. (And he eats like a dog too, shovelling food into his gob as quickly as humanly possible!)

Like our dog, G manages to position himself in my path when I'm trying to do things around the house. I do most of the cooking because I truly enjoy it, and it's a creative release at the end of the working day - that or the opportunity to take my frustration out on food with a big, sharp knife! Whichever cupboard I need to open, I can guarantee that G will have moved himself in front of it, arms hanging gormlessly at his sides.  If it's not him, it's our dog. With the dog, I can point to the door and say "Out!" and she'll give me That Dog Look and move to the living room. With G, it's a constant, polite "Excuse me," as I move him from in front of the cupboards time and again, until he gets the message and stands next to the dog! (The cats, meanwhile, have found themselves high perches out of the way.)

G loves me with a dog-like devotion. This is a good thing, as my previous relationships were mostly toxic, with me being the one doing all the loving. He has had very high-maintenance, cloying women in his past and when we first started dating he used to ring me from his home interstate every night. I mean every night. Sweet as it was it could be a bloody nuisance if I was going out with friends; if he couldn't get me on the home phone he'd try the mobile, worried that I'd be annoyed if I didn't hear from him. When he's on business travel he tries to ring every night and I've told him not to when his itinerary is a full one. I am very understanding having had jobs in the past myself which involve quite a bit of business travel and won't get cross or feel abandoned if the phone doesn't ring. Like our dog, I think he suffers a bit of separation anxiety when he's away from me!

Still, I am blessed. I have two beautiful and loving cats (really! they are!), a lovely dog and a great husband. Love my own company and my solitude as I do, I suspect I am better with him in my life than I was before I met him.

So, can you draw a cat or dog parallel with your partner - or yourself?

And that was the me that was

I've been spending a fair bit of time at Mum's house lately - doing maintenance work and readying it for her return from hospital. She's home now, with a four-wheeled walker to give her some stability and confidence. Luckily her house has wide enough halls and doorways so getting around with the wheelie is pretty easy for her.

I'm back at my home now and feeling guilty at leaving her, although I'll be at hers again tomorrow for the night and will probably spend a night or two there each week over the coming weeks to assess how she's going and when - and it will be when rather than if - G and I have to move in permanently with her.

Hmmph, three paras in and I've already digressed. Back to Mum's house itself. And my old childhood stuff secreted therein.

Like Mum, I'm loathe to throw old memories away and I came across a stash of my old diaries in my first bedroom, high up in a cupboard near the ceiling. These were from my very horsy years: my teen years and early twenties.

The school-aged ones were covered in stickers and drawings, photos from old Hollywood photocopied from books, quotes, jokes, drawings copied from cool 1970s calendars. Meticulously I would decorate them during the summer holidays for the year to come, so there was bugger-all space to write in useful reminders about when assignments were due and boring old school stuff. They were works of art and I giggled as I flicked through them. What a little tragic I was! Anniversaries of when racehorses had been born or had died, with special attention paid to those put down on the racecourse. Jockeys' birthdays (namely those on whom I had a crush). The 'addresses' section was full of racecourses and - what a stalker! - jockeys' addresses (see that bit about crushes again). The only part of the diary that was regularly written in was when I went to the races, or went riding.

There's a sad entry on 30 September 1978 - simply "Nan died". My favourite person in the world, my grandmother, died unexpectedly in her sleep from an aneurism of the aorta, and my world fell apart. The diary was not completed often for the rest of that year until the last day of school when I'd scribbled "I'm FREE!!!" in big letters across the page. I remember bounding out of the school gates for the last time, undoing the top three buttons of my blouse (totally against the rules) and knowing I would never, ever, get a detention for it.

Even at 17 when I'd finished school and was at business college, and had my own horse, I'd kept doing the teen sticker thing. I'd written in when I'd bought horse feed, tack, had the farrier around and how much it all cost. I'd scrawled in when I had driving lessons. I used 'bloody' a lot (and still do). I made comments about the other horses sharing the paddock with mine, and their teenage owners. Ominously there are selfish comments about my grandfather who was then living with us. He was unable to live alone after Nan died; he had a blockage in a vein near his brain, which made him act like an Alzheimer's patient from time to time. He'd swear blind some days that you put your underpants on over your head. He'd leave the stove on and forget about it, letting saucepans boil dry and blacken. He'd put his gloves in the freezer. He'd eat food he shouldn't (he was diabetic). In short, he couldn't be left alone.

All teens are selfish. I cringe when I remember how I was back then. I was grieving for Nan, but how must Pop have felt, after living with that lovely lady for 55 years? Then having to leave his home - which we left intact and took him to visit - and his routine for our house and ours.  But I was bitter. Pop had changed as the blockage affected him more and more. He wasn't the lovely man I'd studied the form guide with every Saturday and went with to place bets at the local TAB. His vocabulary had dwindled; he didn't have much to say anymore except repeating, "What do you know?" every time he saw me. Gone were the tales from his past which used to enthrall me, stories from when he was a baker or a kid in the country. Now it was just "What do you know?". Over and bloody over, as I'd noted.

I grew to dread that "What do you know?". I hate people repeating themselves at the best of times and I think this is why!

I also grew to hate mealtimes as Pop was a ravenous eater and would hoover up the food on his plate and then stare at my plate or Mum's, unblinking, like a cat. We were slower eaters, although I soon learned to hoover too so I didn't have his eyes fixed on the food left on my plate. On days where I really couldn't stand it I'd take my plate into another room. (I recall standing in the laundry once, bitterly eating from my plate which was perched on the washing machine.) He wouldn't talk; just stare. I can't stand people staring at my food while I'm trying to eat it, either.

I grew to hate being in the same room as him. I couldn't talk on the phone to any friends I might have as Pop would come into the kitchen and listen; it was entertainment for him I guess. Purgatory for me.

In short I was a selfish teenager who could only see my tantrum-filled side of the story, and called him The Old Bastard in my diaries for 1979, 1980 and 1981. I was a little shit. I hated Pop at the time for tying Mum and I both down. Oh universe, oh Pop, I do apologise. I've felt bad over the years about being such a little bitch to you at that time, Pop. I put Mum under pressure too, complaining about Pop; Herbert only knows she was under enough pressure of her own, and having to play nursemaid to an ageing and sometimes non-comprehending parent aged her ten years I think in the three he lived with us before he died.

Staccato scribbles tell me that Pop went to stay with my aunt in the country a few times; he'd be away a month or two and come back with his diabetes in a total mess, which gave Mum and the doctor extra work to get him back on track. It gave Mum and I a break while he was away - we even had a road trip ourselves to Queensland and back in 1981 where I stalked a jockey I fancied. (We drove to his house and looked at it and drove away again.) A paragraph, cramped into the little space allocated for that day, states that jockey-boy GK and I talked over the fence at the races. We were supposed to go for a drink after the last but he disappeared. That didn't stop my lurve for him; my initials and his were childishly encased in love-hearts all through the diary (and preceding ones and even anteceding ones). I had his phone number; I rang him a few times and noted whether the call was a good chatty one or whether he simply wasn't interested in talking. Poor bloke, he mustn't have known what to do; a teenage girl very clearly wet behind the ears and still on V-plates chasing after him. Most guys would have taken advantage I guess even if they didn't find me attractive. GK, I discovered later, preferred blondes who were good time girls; I thought he was being a gentleman but frankly I wasn't his type.

So that was my late teens: a girlish crush on a jockey, and a grandfather whose marbles hadn't been handed in at the Police station. I was a child still in many ways; a kidult, vastly immature compared to my peers. I'd been brought up in a strict household and frankly didn't know how to rebel aside from stomping around the house with the shits. I didn't have a proper boyfriend but a fantasy relationship with a jockey whom I plucked up the courage to phone a few times. In fact my life was a fantasy existence to get away from my sulky teenage reality of a life revolving around keeping my grandfather out of trouble.

My grandfather died in 1981, and a simple "Pop died" is on the day, 4 October. I have noted that it's also the anniversary of Phar Lap's birth, as if the grand horse and the man who loved horseracing were somehow intertwined. On the day of the funeral I report my mother and her sister having a row at our place afterwards, and that I drove down to feed my horse Mikki illegally on my own. I was still on L-plates but there was nobody to drive with me.

It's struck me, reading these diaries, that I'm the age now that Mum was when Pop came to live with us. I hope, when we have to move back with her, I'm a nicer person now than I was then. I hope I can bite my tongue when she annoys me, because she is sure to; I still feel like a child when I stay at her house, and my inner rebel wants to scream. I hope I can have patience, and tolerance, and love. Mum's not like Pop; her marbles are thoroughly intact and she has a mind like a steel trap, but the generation gap is pretty much a chasm. When the time comes, I don't want to be a me I regret later.

Sick Mums and lots of Stuff

My Mum is in hospital at the moment. Given that she is 87, diabetic and a heart patient, she's had a great run and hasn't been in hospital since her triple bypass ten years ago. This visit was courtesy of a gallstone stuck in her bile duct, compounded by a fall which left her weak and lying on the kitchen floor for hours until I, worried that she hadn't answered the phone, raced over to her place and found her there.

So now it's a convalescent home for a couple of weeks until she gets the strength back to walk around again. Until now she hasn't needed a stick or a walker but at the moment can't walk unaided. The fall weakened her physically; her confidence has taken a dive too.

G and I have been staying at her place at weekends since she's been in hospital. Firstly it's been closer to the hospital than where we live; secondly I can collect any clothing, cosmetics and other things she may need.

It's also an opportunity for us to get stuck into maintenance and cleaning around her house while she's not there watching us.

Mum, you see, is old enough to have lived through the Great Depression and WWII; she has experienced hunger; she has experienced having nothing and living in a boarding house with her entire family in one room and shared facilities on the next floor. This has given her the mentality that you HAVE to hang onto everything in case there's another war or depression and things, in general, just aren't available.

So the cupboards in Mum's place are full of stuff from the forties and fifties right through to cheap tat from the $2 shop last year. An old metal Esky that she hasn't used since I was a kid as it's so heavy even unladen. But it's still 'good' so you can't get rid of it. An old electric frypan which I believe is broken but who knows, gosh, it could be fixable. My grandfather's damaged Gladstone bag (now on eBay but don't tell her). My great grandmother's carpet sweeper, a real collector's item (also now on eBay). Suitcases, the type made without wheels, that are totally empty but in the cupboards just in case. I'll never use them. I use the wheely kind. G and I snuck them out and off to Vinnie's where they may find a home with someone who WILL use them.  Old toys from my childhood. I'll flog some of those on eBay too; tin toys and believe it or not the free toys you got in cereal packets are quite collectable.

Then there are the pillows. Mum is sleeping on pillows from the 1950s and won't replace them because they are still 'good'. If lumpy and disintegrating is 'good' then let me know. We had similar pillows forced on us for our bed when we stay over. They went in the bin ages ago - we didn't tell Mum - in favour of new ones from Big W. I have now replaced Mum's pillows. In case she freaks I have put, to my regret, her original ones in her linen press.

Mum uses the area under her house - earth floor, under the floorboards, rather like a cellar but you can only crawl in there - for storage too and on Sunday G and I unearthed (almost literally!) an old rusting electric heater circa 1965, three rusting birdcages, a broken electric instantaneous water heater and the racks from her old dishwasher (kept in case of handiness but not used in 20 years). There was also a bag of ancient ugg boots. Jesus. This lot is going for council cleanup.

So far, aside from the above, we have filled two big bin liners with stuff she doesn't use and won't miss, stuff which is totally useless or broken or mouldy or manky.

The issue really is that at some point we may have to move in with her to be carers rather than let her go to a nursing home. Leaving her home permanently would kill her off; she designed the place, she built it.

In order to move in though we'll have to have room for our own stuff. Stuff we actually use on a daily basis as well as keepsakes and ornamental stuff. At the moment there's no room for us if we have to move in. So we're doing some surreptitious cleaning and sorting while she's not there to tell us what can go and what can't. It sounds cruel but we're working on the cupboards where she stores the things least accessed and useable, the cupboards she can only get to via a ladder and she won't be going up ladders any more.

If we do have to move in we'll have to compromise on furniture. Mum has a leather lounge suite which we'd use instead of ours. She has a bigger dining table too, although it's ugly 80s whereas ours is old with French provincial charm. G has a lovely old desk of his Dad's he wants to keep. We'll have to sell some of our stuff I guess and we'll have a surfeit of beds between us. I'm dreading it. As Mum doesn't like to give anything up without a fight, when we move back the house will be even more cluttered. The idea is making me feel ill.

Facing junk and clutter in Mum's house has had one good effect on me though. There was a giant fair at a local school last week. It always has good quality bric a brac. But I didn't want even go. I don't want to buy more stuff, no matter how tempting. We have more than enough.