Dear Ethan (aka Little Pencil)

Today is your birthday and although I tell you every day how much I love you, today I want to tell you that a million times over. And I want to thank you for all the things you’ve taught  – one for each year….

Love – You have taught me true, unconditional and overwhelming love. A love like no other. Every time you tell me you love me I tell you I love you more, and when you try to tell me that I don’t,  I have to explain how you couldn’t possibly love me more than I love you. “It’s impossible” I say and although you laugh (and sometimes it turns into a 20 minute word game of who loves who more) you will never be able to understand how much I love you. It’s not possible. Maybe when you have your own children. Maybe then…

Strength – If anybody had told me before I had children that my own child would be born premature and spend the first two months of his life in hospital I would have dismissed it. It couldn’t happen to me – I would never be able to handle it. But I did. I handled it without even thinking about it and every obstacle we have had in our way I have handled because doing it for you makes the mountains seem like slides. It’s easy to do it for you.

Patience – Okay so maybe I still have some way to go on this one but I am getting there. You and me both.  I know you’re going to find it hard to believe that I’ve become more patient – but I have. And I am going to continue trying

Joy –  There is no person on this earth that I know that loves their own lives quite as much as you do.  It is just amazing to watch you fill your every minute with joy. You are passionate about life and it makes me happy from the inside to watch you live your life.

The value of our family  – I often say to you and dad when we are just sitting at home all together and eating dinner or watching TV or just, you know, doing nothing that THIS is my favourite time.  You made us a family and you show me every day how important it is to me. And sometimes it’s not just the three of us but your aunts, your uncles, your grandparents and your cousins – you bring us together and you make us work.  And you make us ALL feel blessed and happy.

Friendship – To think that I ever worried about you being shy and lonely! But you were – shy, not lonely as a little kid. You went to pre-school and you clung on to Gaby and then Ilan and I worried that you wouldn’t cope without them, that you wouldn’t develop other friendships. But in hindsight I see that you were just learning about true and deep friendship and now that you have the biggest friendship circle I know, I can see just how important those very tight friendships were to you because you treat every one of your friends with the same commitment and love that you did for your two “only” friends in pre-school. You love your friends, you are kind to them,  you genuinely care about them and you make them laugh and they love you for it.  You are the best friend a child could have and I am so proud of that every single day.

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It’s not all about food – A hard one for me. I am a Jewish mother and I like to feed. And you know how much I like to eat. You ? Not so much.  It’s been a battle, no doubt about that, and though I’ll never stop trying to get you to eat a full meal, you’ve shown me that there is more to meal times than just getting as much food into you as you can – it’s also about being together. And laughing. And playing endless restaurant games. And bribing you to eat vegetables.

It doesn’t really matter what the outside world says – You don’t sweat the small stuff – you move on at a rapid pace. Your belief in yourself, your ability and your virtues is amazing and it really doesn’t matter what some one says or does in passing. You deal with it and move right on. Water off a duck’s back – I’m constantly watching and learning.

Compassion –  As much as you don’t sweat the small stuff you show tremendous compassion for the people around you and for your family. And you show it in the most unexpected and delightful ways like when you protect me, your mother – the one that should be protecting you, from the things you know will cause me distress – like puppies in pet shops , animals in distress, people suffering on the news  or trees being felled (although I think I really did want to see how that tree landed  the other day). You care deeply and sensitively about other people and their feelings. Inspiring – honestly.

Commitment  – It’s not just the tae-kwondo classes you’ve been attending twice a week since you were 4, or the way you practice your moves every waking minute of the day but the way you commit yourself to everything that you do.  You spend as much time trying to beat a game on your x-box as you do on perfecting the splits. You are as committed to your friends as you are to your family. You have lessons there you could share with the world.

Humour – It’s been said that a sense of humour is a sign of intelligence. If that is true then you should be waiting by the phone for MENSA to call. Your ability to make people laugh is superior to anyone else’s that I know, except for me (and we both know that when daddy is reading this he’ll be saying he’s funnier than both of us.) But truly you make me laugh and your comprehension and insight into the world comes out in your humour like a light that shines on to every one around you.

Happy Birthday my most beautiful child in the world. I love you more than you love me and it’s not impossible.

Love your mum (aka Sharpest Pencil)

Every day I get a text confirming my appointment at the dentist I’m not going to on Monday and I am not sure how to handle it. So I ignore it.

There’s history in this. Last year I suffered a hideous tooth ache which I ignored because I was too busy. Let me tell you this much, you should never be too busy to tend to toothache for a number of reasons

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• Toothache never just goes away like a headache or a sore throat. It’s usually there because something is broken or has a gaping hole

• Toothache makes you crazy with pain.

• Nothing is more important than your mental dental health. And as the point above attests to the two were somewhat related in my case

So eventually I went to the dentist and had to have a crown which went very, very, very wrong.

Let’s put it this way – I paid a shitload of money for more pain. Tons more pain. Even worse pain. Pain that needed prescription pain killers and 2 rounds of anti-biotics. Pain that meant I couldn’t let the dentist look in my mouth because it was too sore to open (and also I had not learned my lesson and work was insanely busy and dentist time was scarce).

Eventually when the pain stopped me from being able to speak I got a call from the dentist to ask me how I was feeling. Turned out he was calling from the airport on his way out of the country for a couple of weeks. Now to be fair, I knew he was going away – he had told me, but I didn’t think I’d still have tooth ache at that time. I told him I was fine – he suggested I go see a specialist.

It was December. Specialists are sunning themselves on islands that they have paid for out of the money we patients pay them in December.

Cut what is becoming quite a long story, short – there was no one to fix my teeth.

My friends were becoming worried because I was extremely quiet. I am seldom quiet. My teeth were killing me.

Eventually I got hold of my son’s dentist. I had stopped going to her because I didn’t want her to see how immature I am at the dentist – I wanted her to think I was a good mother – you know mature and responsible and all that which is silly because I am a good mom – I’m just scared of the dentist and it makes me cry.

So tail between my legs I went to see her and like magic she fixed me.  She said I have to go see the specialist as well and I promise I will just as soon as the new and other toothache I have is fixed.

Which brings me back to the text messages. Old dentist wants to see me to check up on my crown on Monday but I have an appointment with new (but old) dentist on Tuesday to fix my new tooth ache. Old dentist has now sent 4 texts and I am not answering unkown calls…just in case.

Complicated huh?

Anyway I don’t know how to tell the old dentist that I am not coming back. Ever. I thought of singing him Taylor Swift’s We are never getting back together but I worry that he’ll report my dental mental health to the authorities.  So I am going for the ignoring method.

Or hoping that he reads my blog.

How do you “break up” with a medical professional? Is ignoring them strong enough to make them stop calling?

So I’ve being travelling on my merry way trying to be as Zen as possible , holding the holiday feel as tight as I could and not letting anything creep in between me and my new found sense of perspective.  It’s been a riot – quite liberating and I have actually felt more relaxed about things than I have in a long time.  

There’s been lots of changes at work – you can read about them here. But I am in a good place. I bloody love working with Alana and I have more time than I’ve  had in the past few months to devote to my husband and my child and that is my top priority. Bar none. They are my rocks. My always there and my brand new perspective shone a light on that with a force so strong I can’t ignore it (and nor do I want to) .

But today something happened.  It wasn’t a huge deal (except in my head which wont stop ruminating) but something managed to sidle in between me and my new BFF,  Perspective. Not only did it creep between us – it shoved itself in and wedged itself tight. It makes sense to first get the right information regarding Finasteride before cheapest cialis india settling on it for hair loss treatment. The main tools that CBT uses are: – teach the victims to recognize and then monitor the symptoms when the attack happens – educate the patients about how the process works – train the patient in relaxation and breathing techniques – restructure the mental response of the patients – expose the patients to get 100% assured result. generico levitra on line Low levels of testosterone affect the ability to slow down order uk viagra and reverse the balding process thus can potentially grow new hair. Introduction Organization leaders and managers in a whimsical mood purchase generic cialis sometimes play a parlor game called ‘Spot That Jargon,’ in which the goal is to name as many past educational fads as possible. It obscured my view and after only a few minutes it took my mate perspective with it. And all I had left was that familiar feel of panic, dread and emptiness. 

I missed my new found perspective very quickly.

You see I think I have the balance all wrong. Being Zen-like I thought I had to try live in the moment, not project too much of my old stuff and just roll with the punches. Take it in my stride.  

I clearly have a lot to learn.

What I did today was to live in the moment to such an extent that I didn’t think about how it was going to make me feel afterwards. Patience is still not my strong point. Proving my point is still too high on my agenda. Old stuff is trying to make me stuck.

So while right now I feel flat and deflated and I just want my perspective to come back and eat Thai take away with me I think that maybe it’s a good thing that I had a little test today. 

I was feeling so smug about being all Zen like that a little part of me panicked*.  My strong feeling is that once you have learned all you can in life, your time may very well be up. If I had learned patience and perspective – well, my most needed lessons were learned.

I am happy to tell you I think I have a much longer time here than you could possibly imagine.

Onwards, upwards and to Thai take-away.

*Zen panic is quite an art form let me tell you.

Some people are so clever. Not Lance Armstrong, not even Oprah Winfrey – but the people who made this video.

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I love it. With apologies to the Lance Armstrong fans – for being fans not for posting the video.

Allow me to give you some advice: If you insist on entertaining on the weekend do not do it on a Sunday afternoon for lunch.  The problem with Sunday lunch is that it literally takes the whole week.  Well it does for me.

Monday and Tuesday I spend worrying whether I have invited the right combination of  people. Whether they will talk, like each other, eat the food and go home before dinner.

Wednesday, Thursday and Friday I am consumed with menu decisions – sometimes I have difficulty sleeping because I can’t decide on which salads to make. It’s quite a serious condition and I have been known to pore over recipe books in bed deliberating for hours and trying to recall past gatherings wondering which salad I made last and who has tasted what before. Do not even start me on dessert. That takes up all my daylight hours. All of them.

Some of Fridays hours are also spent worrying about the weather and alternating between WeatherZone and the BOM hoping for different and sunnier outcomes.

Saturday it starts in earnest – shopping to be done, cooking to be started and house to be cleaned. Although why I clean the house before I cook in it so that I have to clean it again after I have cooked I am not quite sure.  Call me crazy – remember I don’t sleep for worrying over salad.
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Saturday night plans need to be shelved for, I’m not quite sure what – but doing general cooking stuff always seems to take me way into Saturday night.

Oh and then there’s the actual day of the function. Sunday morning is a nightmare. Wake up early morning to clean the house AGAIN and try find a place for the golf clubs that your husband has decided he needs. Oh okay that’s just me and yes, I am a tiny bit bitter – who buys stuff when there is no where to store it and what the hell is wrong with the boot of the car for golf clubs?

Then just when you think you can relax the guests arrive and you have to entertain them and feed them. That takes up all of Sunday afternoon when you are left to clean AGAIN.

Cautionary extra piece of advice: If you have a big party on the Sunday afternoon before a public holiday you will also spend that public holiday cleaning up.  Somehow it just happens.

So my weekend was fun. How was yours?

I’ve often been quite dismissive and even a bit scathing of the very incestuous and extremely tight South African community I have around me.

When Little Pencil was in preschool there were 2 Australians in his class of 20 kids. That’s quite a huge (make that overwhelming) majority of South Africans. And they were pretty intense albeit very lovely – the mothers that is, not the kids. The kids were just lovely.

The very close-knit ex patriot community meant that the kids all had South African accents (did I mention most of the teaching staff were also South African?). My son learned that corn was mielies and mandarins were naartjies, that dinner was supper and that back home was South Africa although he was born in Australia and had spent only 2 weeks of his short life in “that home”.

I was excited to move Little Pencil out of mini South Africa to go to a primary school that was a little more, how do you say, diverse. Granted there’s a fair share of my birth countrymen there but it’s balanced and we’re back to saying mandarins and corn and we now eat dinner every night and giggle slightly when people say supper like its quaint and antiquated.

I still have a lot of South African friends who I love and of course my family will always be South African at heart although most of them live here now. But the distance from that very tight and insular community at pre-school made me a little more intolerant of the very closed South African circle.  There’s a saying that you can sneeze in Bondi and someone in St Ives will bless you – that’s how small the community is, but worse, that’s how much every body knows your business.

I found it stifling. Invasive. I backed away from it – found it loud, aggressive and constricting.
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A couple of weeks ago one of my closest friends suffered a terrible loss, the tragic and seemingly senseless death of her 38 year old sister-in-law in South Africa. She and her family went back to South Africa for the funeral and the customary days of Jewish mourning. When they returned they had a prayer service for their friends and family to express their condolences and pray for the peace of the departed, her family and her 3 very young children.

I didn’t want to go to the service. I had just stepped off a plane, I was in no hurry to face some of the people that I knew would be there and I wasn’t feeling particularly religious (in fact it was the same day I was toying with becoming a Buddhist.) But I love my friend dearly and nothing was going to stop me going to show her my support, to squeeze her hand and just be there if she needed me.

As I stepped into the synagogue where the service was taking place it hit me. This is what the community is all about.  The synagogue was packed, there were literally hundreds of people there. My friend and her husband have very few family members in Australia – maybe 6 people. But there was a synagogue full of people, people that genuinely cared and wanted to be there to do the very same thing I had – to squeeze their hands, to be there to support them and to show them that they are never going to be alone and that they are loved.

In good times and in bad their close-knit,  somewhat incestuous friends were there and it didn’t matter what accents they had or how they were South African more than Australian even though they had lived more of their lives here than there.  It made me feel very grateful to be part of such an amazing community.

I’m definitely going to try be less scathing.

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I always thought the point of holidays was to eat buffet breakfasts, scoff on ice cream at random and varied times and wear ridiculous tie dyed dresses that you invariably think you’ll wear back home but as soon as you hang them in your cupboard you also hang your head in shame. No one wears tie dye dresses to work. Or to pick up the kids from school. Or when they are not at the beach

Mr Pencil says that the point of holidays are to relax and unwind, to do things you normally don’t have the time for and to gain perspective.

If both of us are right I have had a really good holiday. I’ve eaten an inordinate amount of breakfast (in fact the only reason I haven’t put on 5kilos instead of 3 is because I have tooth ache AGAIN)*, I’ve eaten ice cream just because (not related to the tooth ache) and I have worn clothes that are strictly holiday gear.

I’ve relaxed, wound down and I most certainly have new perspective.   In fact I have briefly toyed with the idea of becoming a Buddhist which could be fun considering it’s my son’s Bar Mitzvah year and he’s already telling me he wants the party without the “Jewish stuff”.

And now I’m back.

And while there is nothing fantastic about coming home from holiday – so far I have finished four loads of washing, done the shopping, made a soup and read 87 emails – I am hoping that this time back will be different. I am going to be keeping a little bit of the holiday zen close to me.

In fact, as an act of holiday defiance, I have decided not to change my watch from Singapore time so expect me to be 3 hours early when you see me next.

3 hours early but very mellow.

*2013 is turning out to be a very bad year for my teeth but a very good year for my dentist

In what will be news to no one that already knows me I have realised that I have an awful problem, I cannot switch off. I don’t even know where the switch is.

I am in what could well be regarded as paradise – an idyllic resort in a blissfully quiet part of Phuket.  Truly magnificent surroundings, a choice of 3 stunning pools plus my very own plunge pool mere metres away from what could be best described as the most comfortable bed in the world and surrounded by people that I love and that love me in return.

I have seen the hustle and bustle of tourist Phuket, I have swum in spectacular azure waters and I have eaten (way too much) of the most sumptuous food on offer.  I have spent hours reading on the beach, lying at the pool and floating in the sea, I have had massages and a fully body polish and if my body was any more relaxed I would be declared dead.

But my mind is far from dead. It’s been ticking over at it’s normal pace of knots and the thoughts racing around my head are in dire need of a holiday of their own.

That’s just one of the reasons that I am so lucky that I am on holiday with my husband. Aside from having someone to put suntan lotion on my back, pay for all my meals and take care of all the tedious parts of holidaying (he’s an excellent packer and makes plans with seamless precision) he is also my very own personal therapist. And while he doesn’t charge anything he works harder and better than any counselor I have paid in the past. And Lord knows I have paid a fair few therapists in the past. 

But most amazingly after 25 years together Mr Pencil still comes up with insights into my own character that I didn’t even know where part of me.

The other night while trying to still the noises in my head and resisting the huge and almost overwhelming urge to go online and see what was happening at work, correct a typo, give my 2 cents, send a work related tweet (or 40) check on Facebook, organise school stuff for next term, worry about child care next year, even spend a few minutes panicking about my son’s Bar Mitzvah (which is more than a year away) I looked at him with “that” face – the one that says “I will never be able to sleep, I just can’t get close.”

I don’t even know what he was thinking about or how his brilliant neural pathways made the connection but he pointed out to me that my problem that night, and MANY other times comes from the fact that I always “have to be right”.

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Turns out you don’t.  I have always been too quick to respond, in too much of a hurry to make my point, too anxious to make people like me or believe me or maybe just believe IN me.

I have never been good at long term planning – more of a band aid girl rather than a watch and wait type of person. I want to solve everything now and deal with the fall out when it happens (and not a minute later). It’s not working and it’s exhausting me.

I know that sometimes people can see me as aggressive and I never really understood why, I am, in my own mind, the least aggressive human on the planet – I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about the effect I have on people around me and a harrowing amount of time worrying about everyone else’s happiness.  But I do know that I like to make my point – sometimes way too quickly.

Most times I do it to make people think about me in the way I want them to. My husband’s newsflash assured me I was doing the opposite.

 So I am going to take more heed of what Mr Pencil has to say (except when it comes to shopping). I am going to blog more, try and switch off and relax more, think calmly before I respond rather than rushing into it and stop trying to prove to the world that I am right.

It might be uncannily quiet given that my neurosis and on the spot responses make a lot of noise but I am confident that Little Pencil and Mr Pencil will more than make up for that – it’s just that the noise that they make will be better for my head. And in return it will be better for everyone around me.