Alphabet Soup

by Melissa Doyle

  But not everyone has such luxury. And it certainly doesn’t get a lot easier as the kids start school.

  We’ve heard the stories of parents arriving with their deckchairs at midnight to secure their child a place in before- or after-school care. Others delay their start time at work and cut back on lunch breaks so they can negotiate the school drop-off or pick-up—and save a small fortune.

  For me, shift work meant I could juggle the school pick-up, homework, activities and dinners. Just as my neighbour did as a nurse, working night shifts for most of her children’s young lives.

  Other mums quit full-time work at this point in their lives and instead start their own business, allowing them to work from home and choose their own hours. But of course there’s a fair amount of risk and bravery involved so if you’re feeling financially vulnerable that might not be the answer.

  But if ever there is a time in your life when you can do more than one thing at a time and have the determination to make it work, it’s now!

  Yes, it’s hard work, and yes, it’s tiring. But I figure it won’t be this way forever. I’ll rest when I’m grey, take up golf and palm a few jobs off to the kids.

  Memories

  I keep a journal for each of my kids. It’s basically an over-stuffed notebook where I write down all those humorous and embarrassing stories that are worth retelling at their twenty-first birthday party. Sometimes I’m consistent and write regularly, other times I only manage on birthdays or when something stands out.

  It’s packed with all the amusing things they say and do that give their grandparents a good laugh but bore anyone who is not related.

  There are a few great notes in there that the kids have written to me, like Nick’s ‘Ime not felin wel’, which he taped to his remote control car and sent down the hallway to find me after he was sent to his room.

  There are sports awards, little homemade books of kisses and Mother’s Day cards. Maybe it’s all to remind me of how sweet and loving they once were so I can reminisce when they are horrid teenagers. Or maybe it’s more to remind them!

  There is Talia’s letter to Santa, ‘for cristmes I want enythin’, and Nick’s ‘I do not want all of this’ to prove that once upon a time he had restraint and simple tastes.

  I keep the notes they write to each other to show they once got on, and all the cards and letters sent by their grandparents.

  I have a drawer full of their favourite artwork but do my best to cull every few years.

  I keep report cards, awards and ribbons . . .

  Each has a box stashed at the top of their wardrobe with class photos, their first shoes and favourite but no longer loved toys.

  One day I will hand it all over to them as a sort of jumbled 3D history of their growing up, and mine.

  Such sweet memories, indeed.

  Mess

  There are a few things you have to let go of when you become a mum: your abs, a spontaneous social life and your desire for neatness.

  That’s not to say I ever had a six-pack or an immaculate house, but now that I’m stretching my time between four people instead of one I’ve had to relax my standards a bit.

  I now live with school bags in the kitchen, notices all over the fridge, footy boots at the back door and homework all over the kitchen table. We’ve built extra cupboards, hung notice boards and encouraged the kids to work in their rooms, but it seems our kitchen is the natural hub of all activity and clutter. So I live with it.

  School holidays, particularly wet ones, are the most challenging. I would come home from work midmorning to find two kids still in their PJ’s and a variety of projects on the go.

  For Talia this usually involves scissors, textas, sticky tape and mountains of paper. The table becomes art central as she makes pictures, letters and cards for everyone.

  Nick assembles his regular holiday tent. He strings sheets across his room and drags his mattress onto the floor. He has a sleeping bag, water bottles, a torch and a wonderful time. So what if I have to tiptoe around the chaos for a fortnight?

  As long as the place remains hygienic I figure we are doing ok. I won’t let salmonella kill us but I don’t want to let stress get to me either.

  We do lots of baking and I take a deep breath as flour covers the floor and the occasional egg is dropped. Floorboards are easy to clean.

  That’s not to say I don’t have moments that really stretch my patience. I remember the very day we moved into our house. We found a corner for the kids and set them up with a few toys to keep them busy as we went about unpacking. Talia was a toddler and I put her in front of her easel. What I didn’t bank on was her sweet little eye seeing a blank canvas that was exactly the same colour as our lovely clean walls. Her artwork covered the paper then continued onto the wall beside her. Luckily it washed off.

  I have a friend whose toddler decided to paint her fingernails, and the bathroom tiles. That was a little more permanent.

  As my husband taught me to say, ‘Control the controllable.’ If it’s an accident and I can fix it, then I can deal with it. There is no point in going off my head over the small things.

  One day the kids will leave home, the place will stay tidy and I probably won’t know what to do with myself. I also know my social life will return.

  But I think my abs have gone for good.

  Mother Lions

  There is something extraordinarily levelling about motherhood.

  Our circumstances are vastly different, as are our challenges, but mothers the world over share one particular common trait: an instinct to do anything to protect our children.

  That mother-lion streak was what surprised me the most when I first had my babies. The belief that I could and would do whatever was required to keep them safe and loved.

  Maybe that’s what unites us as mothers. For it was meeting other women in remote, poverty-stricken parts of the world that taught me no matter how different our circumstances are, our motivations are the same. Australia, Mongolia, Africa—clearly, as women, we face different challenges but we all want the same result for our children. Safety, health and love.

  Travelling to the Dadaab refugee camp in 2011 was one of the most depressing assignments of my career. But there I met women whose dignity and determination will stay in my memory forever.

  Dadaab is a small remote town in Kenya, in the north-east of Africa, which is home to one of the world’s biggest refugee camps. It’s an enormous, dry, dusty expanse of tents, children and uprooted lives. It’s been there for close to twenty years, but recent droughts and civil war have forced more people to seek refuge and when we arrived nearly half a million were living there, having to queue for food, water and basic household items.

  We travelled to the camp in convoy with local World Vision staff, aid workers and police officers carrying machine guns. We were warned about the dangers of carjacking and banditry, and briefed on emergency evacuation procedures.

  It’s a desperate, volatile place. One thousand five hundred people were pouring into the camp every day, the majority of them women and children. Most had walked all the way from Somalia. They would arrive at the pre-registration tent exhausted, give their details and collect their first food ration: a bag of maize, oil, flour, beans and one BP-5, a high-energy nutritional biscuit. This would have to last them for three weeks or until they were moved formally into the camp to join hundreds of thousands of others, who were just as desperate.

  Babies were crying, toddlers were tired and hungry. Between 40 and 50 per cent of all children there are acutely malnourished. Their mothers seemed to be barely holding it together. But they were the lucky ones. They told me the camp is better than what they left behind.

  Such families had endured unbelievable heartache as many children had not survived the long walk to the camp. One woman I met had lost two children, her home and her livelihood, but not her dignity. She was tall and stood proud, her beautiful face clearly sad but positive at the same time. She carried her youngest chil
d on her hip while the rest ran around and played behind the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) tent that was now their home. They still managed to find some fun in this desolate environment, as only kids can do.

  Tent, mud house or two-storey brick home—the details and challenges may be different but there is something so consistent and familiar about motherhood. And that recognition between mothers is a bond that unites us.

  That bond was apparent when I travelled to Ethiopia in 2011 to meet my World Vision sponsor child Eliyas. His photos are on our fridge and, after many years of correspondence and watching him grow, he’s become a familiar part of our family.

  After two full days travelling, we reached Chencha, a remote village high up in the mountains. It was wet and surprisingly green, so much so that we were forced to abandon our cars when they couldn’t navigate the thick, sticky orange mud and we had to make the last of our journey on foot to Eliyas’ home.

  Friends and neighbours had gathered to welcome us, crowding around Eliyas and singing as we approached. Dressed in his best clothes and holding a bunch of freshly picked flowers, he stepped forward to greet me with the warm but shy hug of a fifteen-year-old boy.

  But it was meeting Eliyas’s mum that touched me the most. We couldn’t speak the same language but it didn’t seem to matter. She embraced me with such warmth and looked into my eyes with gratitude and kindness, and we both had tears in our eyes. I have never felt so deeply rewarded, humbled and satisfied.

  I knew she appreciated the somewhat small role I was playing in her son’s life and future. And I was simply so grateful that there was something I could do.

  I experienced a similar sentiment when I met the mother of our sponsor child in Mongolia. I first met Khulan when she was just eight years old. She was a sweet, happy little girl who was excited to have visitors from so far away and was besotted with the soft toy koala I had brought.

  Khulan’s mother has a heart condition and struggles just like any single parent to support them both—a task even more difficult in a country as harsh as Mongolia. The temperatures can plummet to minus 50 degrees Celsius in winter and go up to 40 degrees Celsius in summer. Nearly half the population live below the poverty line, which for most means a choice between food or firewood.

  The landscape is barren and harsh. Khulan and her mum live in Selenge, a remote village in the north of Mongolia near the Russian border. They share a small two-room hut with Khulan’s aunt and baby cousin. It’s relatively comfortable compared to some houses I’ve seen. There is carpet on the floor, albeit worn and torn, a compact kitchen, and a single bed for mother and daughter to share. There is nothing but hard dirt in their yard and the remains of a former vegetable patch.

  Like any other suburb, kids play outside, kicking a homemade ball. But here it’s dusty, desolate and freezing cold.

  I knew the essentials about Khulan. She loved to dance, and she jumped at the opportunity to dress in her sparkles and show me a routine. She was doing well at school, as evident in her neatly written maths homework. With the book and textas I gave her, we sat on the step in the sun and she drew a picture of herself and her mum.

  It’s a rather surreal experience to meet a child whose life you play such a significant role in. I didn’t feel like a stranger. I knew so much about her and her face was so familiar. We even managed an awkward hug. But I knew to this little girl I was a complete unknown, not much more than a distant pen-pal.

  But sponsorship means Khulan can continue at school and her mum can afford life-saving medication.

  It’s also given me so much. Primarily, the opportunity to help someone else but also the chance to understand and appreciate a life so very different from my own, and a recognition of the inequalities in our world.

  In 2013 I returned to see how Khulan was doing, but this time with my twelve-year-old son, Nick.

  We met a polite young woman of fifteen doing remarkably well at school and hoping to one day work as a customs officer, a prestigious job that would pay her well.

  Her mother had since remarried and Khulan now has a baby sister. Her mum and I communicated through an interpreter, and I learnt just how valuable our sponsorship has been and how grateful she is that her daughter has such a positive future ahead of her.

  I also hope this journey had a positive impact on my son. He saw what real poverty looks like and I hope he took away an understanding of the struggles that face a family when they don’t have what we have. He may not fully absorb the lesson yet, but I hope in time it will influence his compassion and view of the world.

  I want him to know that not everyone lives in a house with electricity and running water, a school up the hill and a doctor just a phone call away.

  The picture Khulan drew for me when we first met all those years ago still hangs above my desk. It’s of a little girl and her mum standing outside their house next to a tree and a garden of pretty flowers beneath a giant yellow sun. It’s happy and colourful and drawn by a sweet little girl with gaps between her teeth whose outlook is positive and future is now just that little bit brighter.

  It’s that sense of hope that I took away. When we left in 2013, Khulan smiled and waved, and she and Nick shook hands with the awkwardness of youth. We drove away knowing we had given her some security for the future, and that, as a mother, I had been able to do something for both my own child and someone else’s.

  As a journalist, I get the opportunity to tell a lot of different stories—some are told to give the audience a smile, others simply need telling. I am privileged that my job allows me to do both.

  As a World Vision Ambassador I am humbled that I can be a voice for these children, and help raise funds to make their lives a little easier.

  As a parent, I can give my children so many opportunities. They have access to a good education, top quality heath care and a carefree childhood.

  But most importantly I hope I can give them an appreciation of what they have and an understanding of what so many others don’t.

  As a woman, I have a profound respect for the women I have met and admiration for what they face and how they manage.

  According to World Vision, women do 66 per cent of the world’s work and produce 50 per cent of the world’s food, but only earn ten per cent of the world’s income and own just one per cent of the property.

  Aid agencies tend to focus on women because for every dollar earned, women and girls reinvest around 90 per cent back into their families compared to a 30 to 40 per cent reinvestment rate for men.

  I used to think I would never understand how these women in the Third World keep going, what strength drives them to walk hundreds of kilometres to a refugee camp, how they face another day when they lose a baby or worse, more children.

  And although I don’t for a moment pretend to have an ounce of their strength, I think I understand a little more about what motivates them and drives them to survive at all costs.

  Such drive is at the core of all mothers. Whatever our children need, we will do what we can to provide it for them, and I can see in these women a determination to fight on. I can’t imagine losing a child would hurt any less living in a refugee camp than in a comfortable four-bedroom suburban home. And I can’t imagine the desire to keep your babies close and safe is any less strong either.

  These are the women I admire. Women whose sense of family is as strong as mine but whose challenges make mine pale. ‘First World problems’ as my husband says when I have a whinge about something that really doesn’t matter.

  I wish we could all have a little more understanding for our wider mothers’ group. Meanwhile, I will teach my children to grow up with compassion and kindness and hope they will one day do their bit to extend a hand.

  I feel so very proud that I too am a mother lion.

  Movember

  Telling your man he needs to see the doctor for an annual check-up is usually met with the same reaction as ‘Honey, we need to talk’: fear, avoidance and excuses.
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  But in November, it’s all about the men in our lives, and the lives of our men. The idea is to grow a moustache and raise awareness of prostate and other male cancers. So for four weeks men focus on their own health and we applaud them for it.

  It’s a motley sight to behold—from the shag piles of seventies glory that would make Magnum PI jealous to the freshly sown lawn with just a few measly strands poking through.

  Some are scattered with more salt than pepper that ages them overnight; others would make Merv, Dennis and Boony proud.

  But what it does do is get the boys thinking about their health. And just like Samson who gained strength from growing his hair, some even take the next step and visit their doctor for a check-up.

  Why is it the men in our lives usually do all they can to avoid a doctor’s surgery? Are they stoic, too busy or scared?

  Prior to an overseas holiday, I booked our kids and John in for a number of injections. We didn’t tell the kids until the last minute in order to avoid an emotional build up. In the end they were actually ok when the needles came out. It was John who went pale and passed out. And with childhood delight, they will never let him forget it.

  So girls, encourage them to give the razor a miss in November and think about their health. And then start December as smooth as a bauble on a Christmas tree and leave the fuzz to Santa.

  But next to the beer and cookies, we’ll leave him a little reminder to go for a health check-up once the seasonal rush is over.

  Mummy Olympics

  One of the worst aspects of motherhood has to be the competition.

  And it all starts when you’re pregnant. There is always one who takes great pride in having the worst morning sickness, biggest weight gain, smallest weight gain or most frightening complications.