Pram people

The entire world seems to be being overrun by pram people. Babies are the new must have accessory and let me tell you I’m over it! It’s not that I have anything against the babies themselves, or the parents either for that matter. It’s more the all pervading attitude society takes with regards to the rights and privileges that go along with pram ownership.
Let me give you some examples. The other day I went swimming at a local public pool. It was during the late morning so, not unexpectedly, any number of children from the local Primary school were having swimming lessons. Both the change rooms and the pools were overrun by wild, screaming, giggling children. Fair enough, kids should learn how to swim. No problem there. I decided to go from the pool to one of my favorite cafes to have a quiet lunch and read the paper. Delighted to find the place not busy I settled myself at one of the larger tables so that I could spread the paper out and read it cover to cover. Just after my food and coffee had been delivered to me some pram people arrived. Now I must point out at this point that there were any number of other tables available in the café, however, I was asked to move tables so tat this couple and their one child could have the bigger space. They of course had a pram. Not that the child was at any time in the pram. They seemed to bring it along just in case!
Example number two also finds it’s setting in a café, this time one in Brunswick St where I was making use of their free wireless broadband. I had ordered my lunch special pasta and glass of wine and was engrossed in my emails when an ear piercing screech eminated from a nearby toddler. The person dispatched to deal with the screaming child could have been no more than 12 or 13. ‘Could this be the father?’ I wondered in dismay. It took some minutes of continual screaming before anyone else decided to take responsibility for the situation. Finally the mother arrived on the scene and made some excuse about the toddler being tortured by his older brother. If this had been the end of the incident I perhaps would not have been bothered. The trouble really began when the two mothers in that party, both with prams, paid their bill and left the café just before me and decided to head in the same direction as me. Now as many of you will know or imagine, footpaths along Brunswick St are not that wide in fact they are almost exactly the width of two prams side by side! I know this because it took me some minutes to navigate my way around them and even when I excused myself indicating that I needed to pass, the eyeball rolling and exasperated sighs that I, an insignificant pedestrian, should wish to inconvenience the almighty pram people!
And finally and perhaps most disturbing of all was the presence of a pram at the pub the other night. It was well after 9:30 at night and my friend and I watched in horror as a toddler was allowed to roam freely around often lingering near a door that was opening frequently. The poor little thing was almost beside herself with tiredness but her parents seemed to value their Friday night social life over their childs’ need to sleep.
I know that it is important to create child friendly spaces in our world, but can we agree that there are some spaces that are just inappropriate for kids?

Cancer

It’s a scary word right? It has all of these connotations straight away. It’s one of the biggies, one of the things we are scared of. My brother has cancer. In fact he was similtanously diagnosed with two separate, unrelated cancers. The first one was bad but fixable. The second one is bad. It’s aggressive and it’s rare. Only a few patients get this type of cancer in Australia each year. It’s in his lymphatic system. Before this I couldn’t have told you anything about the lymphatic system. Now I can tell you where it is, what it does and what goes wrong when cancer is found there. I can tell you how they treat it. I can tell you what happens to your body when they treat it. I can tell you about the side effects of chemotherapy and the possible risks involved in having you immune system intentionally decimated. None of this is knowledge I ever wanted to have but it’s amazing how quickly you can learn about something. It’s amazing how motivated you can become to understand words like neutropenic, haemoglobin, and methotrexate and mabthera. It amazing how familiar a place can become – like a hospital you didn’t know the address of before becomes a place you visit every day. And the people you meet there, the doctors and nurses and other patients, become this strange little community to you – like people thrown together on a cruise ship, only without the drinks with umbrellas in them! And it’s strange how even though you feel tired and don’t know how you will summon the energy to make the journey in again, you still find yourself looking for a car park, or at the train station because you cant bear to think of your brother lying there by himself in a hospital, unable to do the simplest things like brush his teeth because his mouth is full of ulsers. And you get there and he is relieved to have the company and be reminded that he is not going through this alone.
And then you find yourself agreeing to be the one who stays with him in between treatments, because somehow you are the natural person to do that. And even though that means checking his temperature every four hours and making sure he takes his medication when it is due and worrying when you see him pale, or sweaty or lethargic, you do it because you can do nothing else. Because it is the only thing you can do to ease this journey he is on.
And I am sure in a few years, when he is well, and we look back on this time it will not feel as scary or as tiring or as unfair as it seems now. Am I sure? I am hopeful

The best laid plans

How does that saying go again?
I am a planner. It’s part of who I am. It’s part of what makes me good at my job and good at maintaining friendships and good at travelling. I can organise things and I can organise myself.
I had a great plan for this year, my year off. I was going to have a rest, a holiday for the first couple of months. I was going to spend some time in Perth, then move in with a friend in her fabulous new apartment for a couple of months. I was going to ease into my study, I was going to create a nice little routine when I took my reading to cafes and lived the inner city life for a few months. I would catch up with friends, I would swim everyday. I would spend time with my nephew and then in march I would go overseas. After my fabulous journeys I would return to Melbourne and spend the final six months working out if this city was somewhere I could live again.
It was a good plan.
The day after I arrived back in Melbourne things went decidedly pear shaped (see post entitled ‘cancer’).
The problem with being a planner is that when the plan hits a wall you still want to make the plan work somehow –because it was a good plan and you had worked hard to organise it. And the more you try to resist the tangent your life has taken the more frustrated and disheartened you become that your plan is gone now. And it’s not that you don’t want to be doing what you are doing now, in fact under the circumstances you are doing exactly what you need to be doing.
I just wish the circumstances were different. I’m sure I’m not the only one!