As you get older the odds are higher, or say they say.  The older your group of friends are the more likely you are to experience not just divorce, but disease in your immediate circle.

A lot of my friends have been through divorces but it’s never really been a big deal to me. Maybe because my own parents divorced when I was a child I never thought of divorce as such an “out there” thing to happen. Except maybe for T and J, friends of ours for whom I was Matron of Honour and Mr Pencil was Best Man and they split 6 weeks after their wedding. That was a bit of a shock.

But disease is another thing altogether. Disease happens to my parent’s contemporaries. Older people.

Until I realise that the people I am thinking about as “older people” are actually people my age. I AM older. I’m not the child anymore and nor are my parents in their 50’s anymore like I picture them in my mind’s eye .

Recently an acquaintance  of ours was diagnosed with Hodgkins Lymphoma, but  because we were friendly when Little Pencil was very young and we hardly see them anymore it didn’t seem to close. And maybe it didn’t seem so bad because, although I know it is a cancer, the name didn’t have the dreaded “C word” in it.

But then on the weekend I got an email from a friend of mine. Admittedly I don’t see her as much as I used to (insert very busy and different lives) but in my mind she is my age, her older son is Little Pencil’s age and I remember well when she brought her youngest baby home from the hospital.   She wrote to me that she had just been diagnosed with breast cancer and was having her breast and lymph nodes removed this week.

I touched my breasts in reflex.  I went through my mind searching for symptoms.

Not only was my friend the same age as me (almost, she is actually 4 years older) but we were very much the same in terms of neuroses and paranoia.  Cancer is something we dreaded happening, not something that actually happened. It was the thing we almost joked about when we had a new bout of hypochondriasis.

I stilled my tears as I read her long email which was written so much like she speaks. Nothing was different. EXCEPT SHE HAD CANCER.

The morning of her surgery she sent an email to her friends listing all the things she was grateful for – including her family and the wonder that is first world modern medicine.

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I wish you could all go visit her. She’s beautiful. And brave. And FUNNY!

I asked her what make up she was using these days because she looks about 24 (BB Cream) , she told me about her drainage bag (made by the Girl Guides) and I stood outside when the nurses cleaned her drains.  We chatted about work and ageing and vanity and kids and cancer and how amazing it is that one day after having her breast removed she is off morphine and taking panadol only for the pain.

We spoke about how sometimes the reality of a situation is so much easier to handle than the hideous fantasies that play out in our heads.  How we torture ourselves with our thoughts and we don’t give ourselves credit for our strength.  In her thoughts a breast cancer diagnosis would have spelt death. In reality we were laughing about the fact that she was on Panadol.

She has a long way to go and she knows that – chemotherapy, radiation, adjusting to life without her right breast but she is still beautiful and despite what she may think she is showing tremendous bravery.  And she will get through it.

Maybe growing older brings a perspective we never knew when we were younger.

Maybe getting older allows us to appreciate what we have a little bit more

Maybe writing a letter of gratitude for all that you have instead of all that you want is a gift that comes with age.

Maybe age gives you strength to deal with the reality rather than panic in your mind.

Maybe I still have a lot to learn.

“I wish I were immortal” my son said to me one day as we walked through the city centre.

Thinking he might have chosen immortality because he wanted to live a long time into the future or because he was really afraid of death I questioned his motivation for eternal life.

“I want to be able to jump off really tall buildings” he explained.

For that he wanted eternal life. TO JUMP OFF BUILDINGS. Because you see, Little Pencil is a thrill seeker.
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Dear School That My Son Attends

I don’t suppose you have received many love letters before, even on Valentine’s Day Cupid doesn’t shoot many arrows into the heart of a school, so don’t be alarmed. There are just a few things I need to tell you from my heart.  I know it’s quite nerdy, and some would say sycophantic, to write a letter to your school and even though I am a bit of a nerd and I have been known to suck up to the right people from time to time, this letter is born neither from my position as nerd nor from my brown nose. This letter is born from sheer and complete happiness.
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Yesterday was Little Pencil’s last athletics carnival as a primary school student meaning it was the last athletics carnival I was welcome to attend, meaning that at any future carnivals I will have to go either disguised as a tree or incognito as a stalker-type. For the sake of son’s future mental health I plan to do neither so this was really the last one.

I was quite excited to go to the carnival although I am really not what you call an athletics enthusiast, it was just that this was the first time I was going to attend one of these events where I wasn’t going to be torn. I had NO work commitments, no plans and nothing to stop me from just being there.

I was also going to see some people that I never get to see enough of and I knew there was a canteen. Let’s be honest here – it’s not ALWAYS about the child, it’s often about hot chips.

Being the neurotic type I always over prepare myself for these events – but just not in the way that the other mothers do. Of course, like every mother, I took heaps of food, plenty of hydration and sun protection that would have been effective on the actual sun. But I also prepared mentally because, unlike every other mother, I tend to be over neurotic doubled with a hefty dose of ultra sensitivity. And I find school gatherings stressful.

Crowds of parents are just like crowds of kids and sometimes it can be a little treacherous on the playground for us adults. I am very lucky, I have some gorgeous and wonderful close friends at the school and I count myself very lucky to be part of such an amazing community. But I am also very unlucky because I over analyse and assess the shit out of every interaction I have. Geez I sound like fun to be around.

Maybe it’s just the memory of my own school days that corrupts my enjoyment of any of Little Pencil’s school activities. I am not one of those people that look back at school with thoughts of fun and laughter. More angst and tears.

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I wonder around the school mums from group to group with a big smile on my face and I chat and I laugh and I make other people laugh and when I start to feel like I’m actually grown up and past the shit of the school yard my inner child kicks me in the solar plexus with her Bata Toughies*. I start to unravel my conversations or worry about what I am saying or what the people around me are thinking or if I am being too loud/soft/opinionated/spineless.

It’s worse when I actually leave the place because without the people around me and with the disadvantage of time on my hands I really start to unpick every word and I play back conversations I am not even sure I had. (Yes, I AM sounding more and more like a fun person to hang around, remember NEVER to book accommodation in my head.)

And then it hits me that I don’t have to go back on Monday morning and like waking from a bad dream I jump up thrilled to be 45. Turns out there are advantages to being an old woman – you don’t have to go to school.

How was school for you? Good memories or bad?

*a South African reference maybe one person will understand

Sometimes I wish I were my husband.

Not the man that goes to work and deals with numbers and figures and things I don’t even understand from early in the morning to late in the evening. Not the man that cares for and worries about his brother, has also been known to be a “little concerned” about the amount his son eats or his dog walks. I’ve already got stressing about everything covered. Many times over.

Rather, I wish I were my husband in conversation.

I wish I had his deeper understanding of relationships, of dealing with the ins and outs of  dialogue. It’s not just because he’s incredibly smart and articulate but it’s the way he responds to exchanges with people that I want to make my own.

Where I hear anger and aggression, he hears passion and ardour. Where I hear whining and whingeing he hears someone that needs to be listened to. Where I worry that people are excluding me or somehow hating me (paranoid people like me do that a lot) he looks beyond the conversation to where it is coming from.

I don’t mean to make him out to be a saint because there’s been many a time I’ve wanted to pull him up when we are in the middle of a group conversation. There’s also been many times I’ve wanted to kick him to encourage him to shut up in company and I wont even mention the eye rolls and exaggerated exasperated sighs because quite frankly, sometimes I do not like listening to him at all.
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But he has something I don’t. He has the ability to cut out the emotion from conversation without being emotionless himself. I am the opposite.

I inject emotion into dialogue that doesn’t have any to start. I tend to take conversations and analyse them until I have worked myself into a state. I look back at each snippet of what I’ve heard so that it no longer matters what the person actually said. In my mind I’ve got have the whole thing worked out, the back story, the reason that tone was used and even what is going to happen next, the problem is that it has nothing to do with the conversation that actually happened – just the part that I took away and moulded in the privacy of my head. I am like a sculptor of other people’s words – I form them into objects that never existed before.

I colour my conversations with my  hang-ups. I  listen with my neurosis and not my ears. I’m so damn sensitive.

So maybe I don’t want to be my husband at all – I just want to learn from him how to let stuff go because he’s really good at that.

Do you analyse your conversations after they’ve happened? Are you an over-sensitive communicator? Or should I be spending more time with you as well?