A couple of weeks ago  I was privileged to attend a media conference marking the start of National Adoption Awareness Week.   I will preface what I have to say with the fact that I was grossly uninformed about adoption.  Grossly meaning  I knew nothing at all about it.

The media conference was an amazing experience in itself, held in a swanky hotel where they served teeny, tiny little yoghurts and bite sized portions of Eggs Benedict to the delegates and I got to see the woman who sleeps with Hugh Jackman, er I mean Deborra-lee Furness,  speaking so passionately about something she believes in so strongly.

I wrote a piece about intercountry adoption for mamamia.com.au which you can read here.  I focussed only on intercountry adoption even though I am well aware of the plight of many local Australians without families/homes/ love and care-  so don’t remind me of that, I know.  I tried so hard to be non emotional and factual and speak without bias or prejudice because, as I said, I am not an expert in adoption and I have no actual personal experience in that area.

And although I have now done quite a bit of research into intercountry adoption, I am still no expert.  I have some knowledge from the books that I have read, the legislation I have studied and the many, many opinions and stories on websites that I have perused.  That knowledge is important – it helps me understand the backgrounds to the law and the reasoning and rationale behind what lobby groups are campaigning for and why some people are so passionate and some people are so angry and countless people are just so sad.
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But I cannot help feeling that information will always be tinted with the images that I saw at the media conference and the impassioned, compassionate and extremely knowledgeable  voices of Deborra-lee Furness and Dr Aronson.

The rows and rows of cots with little babies with no parents and virtually no hope.  The children growing up on the street in abject filth and poverty.  These children, who are no different to the children of my friends, the children in my son’s class except for the one thing that has dictated the course of their entire future – they have nobody in a position to love and care for them.  You don’t have to have experience to feel your heart break, you just have to have a heart.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0-B4Qo3-oM&feature=player_embedded

My family is one of those irritating ones.  You know the type?  They like to be fed every single day, and most days, they require this feeding to take place three times a day.

Coming up with enough time to shop, prepare meals and clean up the unavoidable aftermath is one thing and somehow I find the time for it.  Some may argue that calling the local Thai and asking them to deliver is a cop out, but hear me out.  Although this one call does wipe out the inevitable list of chores that goes with actually preparing the meal yourself, it does not solve the problem we face every single day, at every single meal.

What the hell should we eat?

Usually I am eased into the day.  I send Mr Pencil off to work to fend for himself and forage whatever paperclips and staples he can find to sustain himself nutritionally (being a pencil, I do encourage him to stay away from erasers and over zealous sharpeners).   Myself, I am happy to eat the same thing every single day for breakfast (an egg is summer and porridge in winter – you know, just in case one day you are tempted to make me breakfast)   and so I am easily satisfied.  But then there is  Little Pencil.  And this is where the choices start.  Luckily breakfast is fairly limiting – eggs or cereal?  Easy you think.  But no.  Think off hand of how many ways you can cook an egg.   And now close your eyes and imagine the cereal aisle of your local supermarket.  There are a lot of choices implicit in eggs or cereal.

And then my day gets worse.

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As my mind slowly eases back into function after conjuring exciting and palatable ideas for school lunch, recess and nibble, it is brought quickly back into chaos by the thought of dinner.  Don’t get me wrong – I love to eat, I even love to cook.  But what?  What on earth can I cook every single night that will pass off as original, nutritious and healthy but still keep us all happy?.   Mr Pencil has high cholesterol – he shouldn’t eat meat but loves chicken.  Little Pencil is iron deficient and needs to eat meat – he loves chocolate.  I am verging on vegetarian and really do not like to eat chicken – I do however, love cake.

You see where I am going?

Okay now pretend, and I stress that this is a pretence, that we will all eat the same thing.  How do I prepare it?  There are thousands of recipe books around and hundreds of these are in my own cupboard.  Yet every single time I am faced with cooking dinner (ie around 350 days a year) I struggle to think of what to prepare and how to prepare it.

So I take out the Thai take away menu with its limited selection of 58 choices and I close my eyes and point three times.  And just like Dorothy I am home and hosed, dinner is prepared and I can start thinking about breakfast.

The other day I had to call in a pest control man and I was not happy. Admittedly ants had taken over our entire kitchen and the benchtops looked like they had a very modern, black streak pulsating along them but, I was not happy is because I felt sad about killing the ants. Yes I know I sound crazy and I have probably just lost about 7/8 of my readership but I am a very big softy and I don’t like murdering little creatures – no matter how small or irritating.

Anyway apparently Mr Pencil dislikes the ants more than I dislike killing them so the pest control man was called. I did try and soften the blow for myself by constantly calling it a bug “repair” man but no-one was fooled, especially not the Yellow Pages.

So the day of the extermination dawned and I put on my bravest face to greet the executioner. I knew him from a previous murder he had committed at our home so I was prepared for his work. Or so I thought. I led him to the scene of the crime that he was about to commit and made the terrible mistake of asking him if the ants would suffer. The mistake was NOT in caring about the ants. The mistake was in allowing this man to give me his views on life and death. Turns out that the bug “repair” man is an extremely religious man. An extremely religious, evangelical man. An extremely religious, evangelical man who can recite psalms at the drop of an ant.

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And as he left he was singing hymns and I wondered if the chemicals he uses come with a warning.  I also felt as sad for him than I felt for the ants because clearly this man was in more pain than they were (he did not paint a rosy view of the world), and well, because I worry about people as much as I worry about ants.

His attempts to change my views on religion and how I should live my life did not work but he did make me wonder. How polite do you have to be to a virtual stranger in your own home?

Up until last week I was feeling positively jealous of my niece.  What’s not to be jealous of?  She is tall, dark and magnificent, she has just finished school and she has the whole world in front of her.  In fact if I am honest about it, her youth alone would have been  enough to make me jealous but coupled with the whole beautiful thing – positively green making.

But now the reality of her youth has caught up with me and made me feel enormously glad that I am an old, married hag. This week marked the breaking of my niece’s heart.  Yup, her boyfriend in all his ignorant youth decided they needed a break.

All this heartache and teenage angst has floored me.  It has transported me slap bang to the mid 1980s where my heart acted like a plate at a Greek wedding for some time and I am renewed with fresh heart ache for the pimply, curly haired boy that toyed with my heart.  It brings up so many memories of my first love and the first time I felt like my world would end because the boy in question did not return my affections.

In my mind 20 odd years later, the boy in question is still 18.  He is not a man with a family, a job and a past filled with growing experiences.  He is just the 18 year old prick that broke my heart.  I have frozen him there and will not be thawing him at any stage in my future – he broke my heart so I see no reason to hit defrost.  Essentially I learned not a thing from the experience at the time.
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With him safely tucked in the freezer of my mind, it is easier to philosophise and to explain all the teenage angst away but that is only because over 20 years have passed.  And, when the hurt is not so raw and open, it even feels like it may not have been that bad.  But I know it was awful because at the time I did not have the benefit of experience and therapy, all I had was the ability to freeze people in my mind.

Seriously, I know many people say youth is wasted on the young but maybe experience is wasted on the aged…. God knows I would have benefitted from it when I was 17.

Does the crack that appeared in your heart from your first break up still throb at times?  What were the things you learned or did you just use my freezing mechanism  and learn nothing at all?

Every day that I pick up my son from school, I cross the pedestrian crossing twice.  Once alone and then once with my child (and on many occasions – lots of other people’s children).  Every time I cross I am accompanied by Lloyd.  Lloyd is an old man with a white coat and the most wonderfully lived in face – replete with every memory and summer day marked into his skin.  He has the social graces of a cactus but every day he stops the traffic and helps us cross the road.

Lloyd travels to and from our school every morning and afternoon by bus.  In the morning he helps our little princes and princesses out of the car at drop off and ensures that they have taken their school bags out of the car rather than their mother’s handbags.  He also makes sure that the car door is properly closed and that the children actually walk in the right direction to the school gate – in essence he is our valet man in the morning.

In the afternoon Lloyd comes back to our school to stand at the pedestrian crossing.  He always has a charming little witticism that he kind of says at you as he stops the traffic.  He never actually looks right at you when he speaks and his remarks are always a little bit kooky and quite insane but his heart is in the right place and he positively blooms when you say something  funny back to him.  And he always, without fail, every single day claps his hands twice and says “thank you driver” after he has stopped a car.  There is absolutely no chance that the driver can hear him but still he says it every single time.  EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.

This is the reason why the demand for medicines to help men deal with their inability to perform sexually has also increased generic levitra https://pdxcommercial.com/property/1705-1717-n-willamette-falls-dr/1705-n-willamette-falls-dr-brochure/ over time. Serotonin is a natural chemical that may augment time to ejaculation, purchase cheap viagra by slowing the pathways in the body that are associated with PE. Do not let other make a decision- Someone has said that you should always check the quality of the services provided at the drug store to make sure about the medicine. generic viagra prices These days the supplement have innovative ways of increasing the effect of the medicine generic cheap cialis jelly on your body. Lloyd was like the school walls.  Dependable.  Solid in places, slightly crumbling in others but always there.  And then last week I saw Lloyd with a “friend”.  Now I know Lloyd is just lovely but he is really not the kind of man that you can imagine having such a good friend that he would bring him to work in the afternoon, to stand in the road.  This friend kept turning up and standing with Lloyd in the middle of the road and I smelt something fishy (and no for all his quirkiness Lloyd has never smelt).

So this morning I approached Lloyd to ask him what gives. In his magnificently quirky way he told me that the powers that be, “the Jesus without a crown” has decided that he is too slow and he is being replaced.  I felt so sad, he felt even sadder.  He will still be our morning man but in the afternoon he will stand at the school gate and not the pedestrian crossing.  He will probably still clap to the drivers but he certainly won’t be heard there, not even by the pedestrians.

I will miss his strange little remarks and his double hand clap but, every time I cross the road I will say “thank you driver” because I really believe that at school, it is not just the teachers who teach and not just the children who learn.