Wednesday 26 November 2008

My Little Corner of the World


Amongst all Phyl's (my mother's) hundreds of copies of sheet music was a song called My Little Corner of the World. She hardly ever played it so I can't remember much about it other than the fact that it contained some dreadful lyrics...I always kneeeeew I'd meetsomeonelike yeeew being among them - which was probably the reason it was rarely played. In any case, its not the song - merely it's title which has stayed with me for so long.

Because, though I knew I never wanted the picket fence/McMansion stereotype life (and divorced one husband to prove it), I was always confident that I would indeed find a corner of the world and finally stay put there.

It seems like each place I've ever lived in was never it. It seemed that, wherever I was, I was only there temporarily. As a kid changing schools was so much part and parcel of the school experience that I went almost immediately from being The New Girl to being an Old Girl continuously throughout my educational career. That's just how school was.

Of course, boarding-school when the time came, was always temporary as everyone just lived marking time till they could go home from the moment they arrived. But I remember one rather sickening period when I was absolutely convinced that I had no home, nor parents either.

My parents had moved to a country I had never heard of to which I was to fly for the next school holidays. Well my father had disappeared into the ether first, and, at the time of my leaving our last home at the end of those holidays, no confirmation of his arrival had been given. Actually, once I lived there I could think of a hundred reasons for this not to have happened - ranging from his secretary having a new boyfriend to the lines having been accidentally cut by someone digging a hole. (Both true at various times).

But at the time I was not even sure Papua New Guinea even existed so had no idea of island time. Or life. But, what happened after my mother followed my father out in the great unknown - and subsequently into dead silence - was that I panicked and roused a dozing nun to come and help me find the place they were ostensibly going on the huge convent globe.

We found Papua New Guinea at last (in a completely different place to where either of us were looking for it) but of this city called Boroko, supposedly the capital city, we found no trace at all. I was definitely an orphan.

Later, I discovered that Boroko was merely a suburb of the capital city, Port Moresy (seems impossible now that I had gone 14 years into my life without ever encountering it before) and that Phyl and Gee were fine and excitedly kitting out the new apartment which would be home until we found a house.

So I first went to PNG to a temporary place I'd never seen...and then my parents moved into a place I didn't see until the next holidays. I was probably the only 15 year old kid in the world who had no idea what her own home even looked like. But that was just temporary.

After that, everywhere I've ever been has been "just until...." Just until I finish Uni; just until my father gets better; just until I'm sick of it;just until I've had this baby; just until I manage to escape from this homicidal maniac; just until I get my head sorted.

I now find myself in another just until period and it has dawned upon me that this just until has no noun or dependent verb clause. Just until.....what?

My job here has definitely passed its use-by date. Oh, not that I wouldn't stay if offered a consultancy job with appropriate fees and my own accommodation downtown. But in the absence of a fairy godmother pausing in her pumpkin- to- palace work to conjure that one up, my time here is coming to an end. What the hell am I gonna do now?

I know this is not an unusual question. It strikes most of us, with vary degrees of urgency, anything from once a day to once in a lifetime. But, hey, I really MEAN it. What the hell am I going to do? As Lewis Carroll put it "But answer came there none."

Now this is not one of those existential meanderings into the deeper mysteries of life and our purpose in the universe. (Though I can toss one of those off every so often when prompted enough). Instead I find myself with two positions which are unceasingly chasing themselves around in my head:Am I irresponsible and immature?
Or am I a carefree spirit who lives up to her ideas?

Because it's probably all very well, if not de rigeur, to go gadding around the world, living in places most people aren't gonna get to go to even if they stayed home on Saturday nights and saved for year, when you are young and unattached. But, once you hit mid-thirties it becomes brave. By the forties it becomes sort of enviable but with a touch of sniffiness about it. But after that, I am beginning to fear, it is considered decidedly eccentric. Thus attracting such less-desirable judgements as silly bugger, crazy woman and the ever-popular off-with-the-fairies tag, just in case you thought you had a shred of credibility left.

I have come, since my last trip to the UK, to acknowledge that there is something a little unusual about a woman of my age, with two fully-grown sons, having no fixed abode. And not having a bank account. The two are mutually dependent: you can't get a bank account if you don't have a place, country, address of residence.

For the past two years I have given this as my address. After all, its where I'm living, isn't it? But when my contract is over where do I get them to book me a ticket to? There is no family home, no white-haired mother waiting by the fire with her knitting, no life-long friends, no family that has met me or the boys more than once or twice, nor any town with an old apple tree where I carved my initials.

Not even a trace, it seems, of my little corner of the world.

So is it time I settled down, bought a dog, shut up the cows and started to carve one for myself?

Should I claim a country/town/place and put down roots, and make friends and make sure my pension cheque is going to get delivered when the time comes? Should I start learning about income tax and super-annuation, and Getting Seriously Down to Work to Ensure my Future? Do I owe it to my boys to establish a home base? Am I - once again - scarring them for life.(Both of them ought to look like the Phantoms of the bloody Opera by now, with the amount of scarring I've bestowed upon them already). Should I have a verandah and learn to knit for the grandchildren that will one day (but please not too soon) be crying piteously for their Gran? Should I grow organic vegetables and brew herbal teas and become one with the earth?

Or, should I rejoice in the fact that I am at last free to make my own decisions? Should I continue to trust in the world and its inexplicable way of working things out? Should I go with my gut? Or acknowledge that my gut is actually situated these days up in my head. Which tells me that I am just not ready, gimme a break and anyway I might just fall under a bus tomorrow and all the questions would become moot anyway?

And finally...the one that just about clinches it for me, every time: if I don't see all the little corners of the world, how am I ever going to find out which one is mine?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Cireena

The old saying "home is where the heart is" seems completely vacuous given your gypsy life.

My family did move around a bit but kept it all within the one nation. I can't even begin to imagine what it would've been like on school holidays, not just going to a different home but a completely different country as well? You must have a level of resilience and resourcefulness that is beyond the average suburban schmo.

I am doing my best to become the 'crazy lady' who lives in a weather beaten cottage on the side of a hill. At present pets consist of two cats, would love a dog or two - fencing an issue. At least that is what my aspiration is, and it is good to be aspiring - at least that's what current political thinking requires us to be - aspiring, although it oftens presents as grasping.

However my 'affluenza' is being waylaid by chronic illness which has given me a bad rep with my mortgage company. But I do have a bank account - for what it is worth. Superannuation - started a bit late for any long term benefit. Oh, and I didn't get around to going forth and multiplying either (first husband psychopath) subsequent relationships, well I was just being a little too foot-loose and fancy-free. Which also brought me to ask of myself the same question you asked: immature or free spirit?

Is there some kind of club for women who rejected white picketed McMansions in favour of being true to themselves?

Dianne

Cireena on the Dole said...

"Is there some kind of club for women who rejected white-picketed McMansions in favour of being true to themselves"? Well, at the moment I think there there is, its called the "Isn't She Wonderful?" Club.

You know, the way people, who are quite comfortable and settled themselves say "Isn't she wonderful? How she manages in that old place all on her own amazes me?" while looking placidly around at the vast empty stretches of a home they are working too hard ever to enjoy. The word "wonderful" in this case carries the actual meaning of As Mad as a Bloody Hatter.

But yeah. I think there should be one with an appropriate acronym like T.R.A.M.P.S. or something - but I can't think of what to call it that fits.

Re your situation: it was long my ambition (see, even went one better than 'aspiration') to become the village eccentric who lived alone in an old cottage accompanied by dozens of cats. Why I chose cats I have no idea, as I am a dedicated dog-person. Cats just seemed more eccentric, somehow.

I see you also married a psychopath. There seem to be a lot of them on the ground. How come we are never told about them? My mother warned me never to get involved with a man who didn't like animals, or one whose eyes were too close together, but I never heard a peep out of her about psychopaths. But then, if you have read the Dirty Old Men article, you'll realise that my mother was hardly a source to be relied upon.

And re the OLO cranks. They are part of what prompted the Misogynist article further back. The realisation that there were men - apart from the aforementioned psychopath - who really and truly did hate women knocked me for six. Although, judging by some posts, maybe a couple of them are psychopaths. Perhaps OLO is the gathering point?

Unknown said...

Cireena

Just a quickie - major family christmas upheavals - not pleasant but of the variety of the "family feud we had to have" (apologies to Paul Keating).

But just had to comment on:

"The realisation that there were men - apart from the aforementioned psychopath - who really and truly did hate women knocked me for six."

As a teen, it never even crossed my tiny mind that you could be hated for simply being who you are. Now women are as guilty of this as men - just be on the outer of the "cool" girls at school.

But I was never prepared for the level directed at women by supposedly adult men. Well, to be precise I think OLO has a monopoly on the B & T's (bitter & twisted's gentle reader).

There are too many things mamma never told me about. We were so ignorant.

Why do some men despise women because we go from being easily manipulated girls into wise women.

We are no less physically attractive, but we can't be fooled anymore.

Scary.

Cireena on the Dole said...

Artemis'
I truly hope that OLO holds the B&T monopoly because I think I would slit my throat if I truly believed its pages were truly representative of public opinion!

The first time I read John Knoxes hideous polemic on women I actually was reduced to tears and when, in tutorial, we were discussing it, I felt dirty, sullied and very definately Other. (This, I might add happened not when I was a dewy teenager but a matter of a mere 5 years ago).

This was probably when my great mission to redefine the canon of English Literature to include women's writing began.I found it enraging and damned UNFAIR that our studies included every anti-female tract,opus,play, sermon, book or letter penned by man, but not one of the corresponding rebuttals or savagely satiric texts written by women.

But I still, at that time, anchored the gender rhetoric in a historical context.

Reading all those mis-spelled, torturously syntaxed and savage comments in contemporary idiom on OLO also, at first, caused me to weep!

But what gets up my nose even more is that while it appears that there is carte blanche for those who consider debating skills to consist merely of ad hominum attacks on one's morals, parenting skills, appearance (even though unknown) and character, is the fact one is still constrained, by gender, from freedom of expression.

Ah, I don't mean by replying in kind - I mean that, as a woman, it is considered a complete no-no to point out that these blokes are a mob of semi-literates with I.Q's that demonstrably only just scrape into the double-figure category.

Once, goaded into indiscretion, I kinda pointed out these salient facts in an objective, PC sort of way...and brought the wrath of everyone from self-styled feminists to avuncular paternalists thumping down on my head.

I was being elitist. A far greater crime, it appears, than being mysoginist, cruel, slanderous, lecherous or possessing unreasoning hatred.If you are woman.

Men, it subsequently appears, can call each other no-hoping yobbos, but for a woman to do so is still one of the great no-no's.

This was, in essence the same argument that the (male)head of my faculty gave me for refusing to consider my thesis calling for the inclusion of women's work from the very beginning rather than just cherry-picking from the likes of the later, sanctified Brontes and Austen.

Perhaps that is why I get a great belly-laugh when these plonkers on OLO rabbit on about a Feminist-ruled education system: if they think that their shrill hyperbole is valid, how much more so do many of those entrenched in acadaemia consider their opinions to be?

Geez yeah, life is a learning curve, all right: - in the field of gender I'm learning myself up and down the curve and right round the bloody bend!