The Body of a Blue-Tongue

17/01/2021 

A yard inhabited by a blue-tongue lizard probably doesn’t house snakes. Daddy Long Legs spiders eat Red-Back spiders. This may be common knowledge for Australians, but not for people new to this place. No matter how many times a person might be told that the likelihood of encountering a snake is small, and no matter how many times a person is told that no one dies of being bitten by a Red Back (anymore), finding that nasty looking spider with the red splotch on its back, or seeing scales under a log is going to cause a visceral effect of flight, fight or freeze. I still feel that in the bottom of my belly on such occasions, and I’m by no means phobic. 

It is not so much that the skip is filled with things I deemed valuable, that are now destined for landfill. It is the utter contempt with which they were thrown into the space behind the shed, to languish and deteriorate beyond any kind of future usefulness to anyone at all. 

I come across the body of the blue-tongue lizard whilst clearing the chicken run of the furniture, containers, gardening equipment, collections of rocks and wood, and outdoor toys. It died at right-angles, wrapped around the corner of a small bookshelf. I don’t know, but imagine the small bookshelf being viciously shoved up against the lizard’s body, trapping it in place. It was a good sized adult blue-tongue lizard, with its distinctively broad, flattened shape, clearly (to me at least) not a snake of any kind. This is hard, even for me to forgive. 

Empaths pick up on the lingering fragments of other people’s feelings and experiences. I’ve stopped telling myself that it’s imaginary. When we came home, I picked up horror, loneliness, sadness and rage. It takes time to sort out emotions. They need to be sorted before they can be dealt with. 

Like everyone, I carry remembered emotions and sensations from my own journey through life, but as an empath I also feel for those around me. It is exhausting dealing with other people’s strong emotions. I have often felt pressured to repress my own feelings, in order to step up and respond to those around me. But my need to express and feel isn’t alleviated through repression. Pretending emotions away leads to mental and emotional distress and disease. 

I feel sad. I feel disappointed. I feel uncertain about my future. I feel so much, that dealing with life right now is just about all I am able to manage. I can’t look for work. I can’t plan ahead more than a couple of days at a time. I am floating in an asteroid field, dodging obstacles and desperately clinging to ideas of who I am and who I want to be. I feel I need to be cautious about what I can say to certain people. Self-censorship has always been part of my identity, but never more so than right now. It means I start from a point of defensiveness. I snap before I have a chance to assess the perceived threat that I’m responding to. I do not like the way I’m communicating with Brown Owl. It’s not fair for her to be treading on eggshells around my warped places. 

This is an extension of how I felt during 2020. Every plan I made, every intention was tested, tried and mostly found wanting. So much was discarded. My identity felt reduced to that of consumer, mother, wife. Stranger in a strange land. 

Of course, there were bright spots of friendship and connection. I don’t want to paint it all black and white. The country itself was incredibly welcoming. The big Alberta skies, the sunshine, mountains, lakes, farmland and even the small gritty suburbs of Red Deer itself invited me in to explore and settle. 

It was difficult to settle when my every decision, choice and action as a mother, wife and human being was relentlessly put to the mettle. 

Inevitably, Wizard and Jack played, bounced, broke, made, ate, drank, bathed and did all the things that human beings do. The push-pull I felt as an unwelcome alien in that house meant that my maternal instincts were squeezed and twisted into knots. I could not stop my children from living. I could not stop my children from being. I could not manage to reduce their days in that house to sitting in front of the screen and keeping their bodies from moving. I had to remind myself that I didn’t want to do that, either. 

For now, I remind myself to breathe. I allow myself space to respond. I try not to jump to conclusions. I pause and ask for time to articulate what’s in my head. I silence the perpetual judgments made about me by myself. I give myself permission to wait for the right time to present itself. 

One of the funniest things the day we arrived home from quarantine was opening the pile of mail that had collected. I first sorted it by recipient, and then commenced tearing open envelopes that were addressed to me. Oh – I’m due for a pap smear. Oh – an endoscopy, too. Oh – a home testing kit for bowel cancer. Poo. I know I need to see the dentist, and I have an intention to find myself a GP I can relate to. And – yes, I need another mammogram as well. 

It wasn’t so amusing to discover my driver’s license had been revoked. I put that down to inexperience. We would never advise people in our place to assume their snail-mail could wait for their return before being opened. We would arrange for a trusted person to open it for us during our absence. 

The image in my mind of the body of the blue tongue lizard surfaces at surprising moments, as flashbacks are wont to do. The small bookshelf where it died was one I bought for LabCat many years ago when we lived in Ways Road in Hampstead Gardens. LabCat went to a birthday party workshop and painted some wooden hibiscus flower shapes. We painted the bookshelf and affixed the flowers. It matched her cobbled-together desk, and it looked pretty. 

At this time I was consciously learning how to live in a rental property and assert my sense of style and purpose. My children, Guitar Hero and LabCat were around the same age Jack is now. They wore exclusively op shop clothes, and all of our belongings had previously belonged to other people, including the bookshelf. But it was not beyond our means to make useful things look pretty.

Acute Culture Shock

I come in from planting the vegetables that Chestnut brought me a couple of hours after we arrived home: eggplants, roma tomatoes, white zucchinis, capsicum lovingly grown and nurtured. The zucchinis, cucumbers and tomatoes my Dad planted and nurtured for me are doing well now that the temperature has cooled off. Last night I checked the compost bins and one was full of yummy looking compost crawling with slater beetles and woody cockroaches. I dug it into the surface of the vegetable patch I was planting today. The dirt there (I cannot call it soil) is dusty and hydrophobic. I will keep working on that. 

It was a shock to come home and see the place so dry and neglected. I made a rapid tour of the yard, as I’d planned, and found the apple tree and macadamia trees were gone, but the other trees are OK. The ground under the mulberry tree is littered with the dessicated remains of the mulberry crop. Similarly, the apricot tree seems not so densely green, and I can see where the apricots were left to rot on the tree. Oh well. I hope the birds enjoyed some of them. 

There are three beautiful shubunkins remaining in the pond, and a water lily bud is barely beginning to open. The pond is full of green water weed, which I have gradually scrubbed off. The filter is working well enough to clear the water, but I needed to give it multiple scrubs. All the lush plants around the pond are reduced to small clumps with lots of dirt. I have formed a plan for the area, and it’s coming back to life. 

I’ve booked a hard rubbish collection. The termite people are coming at the end of the week, and I’ll talk to them about the big bait stations I’ve found lying around the house, from some other pest control company. I’ve arranged for the lawn mowing man to start taking care of the grass again. I’ve bought a new bed for Jack, whose bed was dismantled, rebuilt and now falling to pieces. Brown Owl has been working on the bicycle situation, and the cats are home. We are gradually finding more things to deal with, as well as the energy to deal with them. 

It’s somehow easier to throw away things I’d treasured and created after they have been neglected for a year. Our chicken run is crammed with things of this nature that are now rubbish. I’m working hard to prioritise all the work that needs to be done, without feeling swamped. There’s time. We are home now. 

For the first three days I couldn’t face the yard at all. I started with the front yard, putting the sprinkler on and soaking the ground. It was very hot, and I did this in the early morning. I could feel the earth beginning to breathe again, and seeing the flock of honeyeaters in the Silver Princess was a sight I could not tear myself away from, just drinking it in. 

There are many things we would do differently now; things we would advise others against. Doing an exchange was a risky process, and a lot of trust was involved. A lot of trust was broken. The notes Brown Owl and I made do not seem to have been consulted, but I think much of that information was irrelevant in the tsunami of difference that must have overwhelmed our Canadian counterpart. 

Culture shock is an interesting experience. When we arrived in Red Deer I had no idea how to engage with the yard. It took me three weeks to work out how to collect the mail. The snow was so foreign to me. I can imagine that in reverse, for our Canadian counterpart. 

Learning how to take care of us day to day was an enormous task. Working my way around the kitchen was difficult. The refrigerator door was full of foods I wasn’t used to. I couldn’t find things that seemed like staples. I asked a lot of questions that may have seemed odd to the people around us. It took time before I was ready to try to drive, or to venture into new shops and start reading labels, for example. I never figured out a general term for “lemonade” and when the boys wanted “milkshakes” in the middle of winter, this seemed impossible to the Tim Hortons server. Canadians are very seasonal people, and they wait for the correct seasons to experience the appropriate flavours and decorations. (What kind of child needs a cold milkshake in the middle of winter?) 

We had been in Red Deer for less than a week. Brown Owl was at her new school, getting her head around the classroom when I called her frantically requesting that she drive to a house we were standing in front of, in the extreme cold, feeling as though it were a matter of life and death. I had bullied the boys into walking with me from our house to their new school (it was still Christmas break), which we had been told was a “9-minute walk”. Getting them out the door was hard. Walking through the snow was a challenge. It wasn’t late in the day, but it felt dark and foreboding. (The Alberta sunshine was a welcome revelation, but that came later.) By the time I called Brown Owl Wizard was refusing to go another step. Jack was shivering inside his winter gear. I couldn’t jolly them into walking home. This was culture shock. 

When we got home three days ago to The Little House of Colours, the house felt so small and cramped. Our luggage filled the lounge room. Wizard said that our Canadian counterpart had “made the house smaller”, when actually he has grown. A lot. 

Whilst unpacking and putting things away, differences made me double take. I had walked through the laundry many times before realizing the cupboards that used the line the wall and house our linen were inexplicably disappeared. There was a microwave sitting on the kitchen counter, and the kitchen counter was a different colour than it had been when we left. This was only the beginning. 

I opened storage cupboards to discover they were crammed with stuff deemed unnecessary to our Canadian counterpart. Fair enough I suppose – I also packed boxes and bags of extraneous stuff and stored them in her basement. The bathroom cupboards were full of cosmetics and hair products. The linen cupboard was full of curtains and cushions and sheets and towels we couldn’t use. 

During the sorting process I realized that our stuff had been just stuffed into the cupboards willy nilly. I’ve engaged in a forensic analysis over the last 72 hours, and I think I’ve worked out how it may have happened. 

Imagine feeling so squeamish that you cannot bring yourself to sleep in a bed that someone else has made for you? Need I defend myself by assuring that everything was clean when we left it? Here’s what I imagine may have happened: 

We arrived after our long trip, to a shabby house in a rundown part of town. It’s so hot! The walls are painted in bizarre colours and nothing matches. I already feel overwhelmed and in need of calm. Plus, everything looks so old and scratched and dirty. I can’t stand it. It’s so filthy and there are spider webs all over it. The red brick looks dirty, and the wood of the other part of the house is unpainted. I don’t understand why it looks that way. There are no screens on the windows. And it’s hot. I find some people with a pressure cleaner and arrange to have the whole house cleaned on the outside. I strip all the beds. We can’t sleep on their bedding. I stuff all the sheets and mattress protectors into a cupboard and replace them with new bedding I’ve just purchased. I didn’t plan to spend all this money on things they should have provided for me, but what choice do I have? These people are so strange. Why did they leave all their beans and rice for me? I can’t eat other people’s food, even if they left me a letter asking me to. I’m just going to move all these bottles of food into the cupboard and replace them with food that I’m used to. And what is it with all these mattresses and cushions? The beds are hopeless. Inappropriate. The rooms are so small and cramped. Why are there windchimes and strange homemade looking ornaments banging against all the external walls? I’ll rip them all off and throw them into the shed. I don’t want to have to deal with them. And these cupboards in the laundry with all these used 

sheets and towels? I’m obviously not going to use them, so they can go into the shed as well. The yard is a wilderness, crawling with bugs and spiders. I feel sick and anxious even walking outside the door. I’m not choosing to feel this way. It’s a response to the environment. I’m not going to be able to sleep in this house. I might go a whole year without proper sleep. I don’t have anyone here to help me and I’m not only responsible for myself. How am I going to take care of my child? Their car is impossibly old. It’s all scratched up and they obviously eat in the car. I hope they aren’t letting their dirty children eat in my new car. What kind of people are they, to think they can take their dirty rough boys to live in someone else’s home? What am I going to find when I get home? What are they doing to my house?     

The rage and bitterness I’ve expressed over the year has been displaced now with a feeling of gratitude. I am older, and from a different generation than our Canadian counterpart. My experiences of poverty and middle classness form who I am. My culture is very different. My style is the polar opposite. That doesn’t make me wrong and her right. It doesn’t make her wrong and me right. It’s just different. 

Culture shock is an interesting experience. I feel that I entered the exchange with an openness and expectation that as a small family we needed to be ready to contend with difference, rather than the other way around. I feel that helped me to learn how to live in another place, which was my impetus for doing an exchange.

QP#14 (15) Quarantine, Day 14 (15)

Getting out won’t feel surreal. It may feel hyper-real. Brown Owl says that for the first time she’s feeling a little reluctant to leave. We’ve all felt like prisoners at one time or another. What is astonishing to me is that Jack and Wizard have accepted the situation meekly, all this time. 

We play a lot of ball today, but the children are unfocused, continually collapsing any structure into wrestling and silliness. I sense their tension. I share their tension. Our nerves are stretched, as we wait. 

Wizard and I manage to complete a Beyblade tournament, only because I look into his eyes a few times and remind him that I’m not the one who is making him angry right now, and that I really do want to be able to finish the tournament for once. He declares a draw between the final two beys and I creakily pull myself off the floor, feeling satisfied. All this yoga and PE with Joe has been amazing, but I’m feeling stiff and a little sore this afternoon. 

Throughout the day, I potter around putting things slyly into garbage bags and sorting stuff. I have bags of stuff to pass onto 3 different families in the hotel, all labelled. I hope this goes smoothly, as I am required to leave the hotel before returning with the bags. 

We have so many masks it seems ludicrous, and we wonder what it’s going to be like to wear shoes for the first time in 2 weeks. Gradually, the room retracts into its emptiness. It’s not sad, or stressful, as it was in leaving Red Deer. We are all excited. We chatter continuously about how it’s going to be, what we are going to do, where we want to go… but none of it seems quite real yet. 

We come first in the hotel quiz today. There were several questions we got wrong, and a couple that we guessed. Jack supplies us with Gordon’s number: 4 (Thomas the Tank Engine). Wiz has picked up on some of the political and social goings on in the USA, and brightly enquires what it was all about. Brown Owl tells him that T#^%p has finally accepted that he lost the election. 

I hear from Guitar Hero that although he won’t come to pick us up in the morning, he will visit us soon. I am so happy to hear that, because I miss him very much. It will be wonderful to see people and hug them. My mother and my brother will collect us and all of our burgeoning belongings. 

We have a long chat with Brown Owl's folks, trying not to make too many travel plans, but unable to avoid wistfully wondering whether we will be able to go to some of the places we want to. 

We sit around watching TV for what seems like a very long time until the dinner knock. We have pizza for dinner, and bags of popcorn. Unfortunately, there’s no vegetarian pizza, although there are 3 chicken pizzas and one gluten free pizza. Brown Owl calls the kitchen staff, who deliver her a vegetarian pizza within 10 minutes. 

We adults select a movie that we’d like to watch with the children, but in the end we get them showered and hair-washed and just watch the usual two programs before reading and putting them to sleep. 

I have a hard time getting to sleep after finishing Pachinko. I lie awake for three hours, then get up and take some melatonin and water. I still can’t fall asleep. Wizard has come into our bed, sleepily complaining that he wasn’t able to sleep all this time, as well. I doubt that, but retreat to his bed where I finally fall asleep. 

I dream that I’m about to go swimming in ice water. I am with Laurie, whom I met in Red Deer, and a few kids. To reach the place to get into the water, there are two options. One seems too difficult for me, but everyone else manages it. I opt to climb up an icy incline which has been created for beginners (like me) and, apparently, the Royals. I struggle to the top, to find there’s a lip that bends the wrong way, and I am unable to climb over it. I slide back down, feeling stupid, but try it two more times before the others return to find out what’s happened to me. For the expedition I am kitted out with a hand saw. There’s some talk about needing to attack before being attacked (by fish?). I’m not sure I ever made it to the icy water. 

I slowly and reluctantly rise out of sleep, eventually hearing Brown Owl announce to the children that she is about to get in the shower. I’m confused, because the sound of the cooler and the sound of the shower are very similar, but I’m also relieved that it’s not too late in the morning. Brown Owl tells me that Jack and Wizard woke up at 5am, crowing that we all get to go home today!

QP#13 Quarantine, Day 13

Tomorrow is our last day. When Brown Owl talked to the cop last night, she said we had only one more day, and he corrected her, saying that it’s actually two more days. Brown Owl replied laughing, – yes two nights, but only one more full day! The medical staff have commenced asking us again about whether we are still maintaining quarantine. As if we would now start getting silly about it. Not bloody likely. 

The boys are happy when they get coco pops and toast for breakfast. Brown Owl is delighted when there’s marmalade for her toast. It’s funny that we enjoy having the same foods over and over. 

We have a conversation during the day about what our first dinner should be when we get home. Wizard suggests all the bough food he’s familiar with – Lulu’s Pizza, Beyond India and the Ghan Kebab House. Brown Owl and I groan, and suggest homemade sushi. 

I overhear Brown Owl’s side of a conversation with my Mum, where Brown Owl asserts that she doesn’t like shopping as much as I love it. I feel it’s necessary to clarify this – I actually hate the kind of shopping where one goes from store to store, seeing what’s there, trying things on, comparing attributes and finally making a purchase. However, I do love being at the tiller of our household ship, considering what’s there and what’s needed, making a list and going to get it all from familiar establishments. I love organizing and sorting and putting it all away. 

And yes, I am laughing at myself – just a little, today! 

I suggest a game of Cluedo after breakfast. In the time it takes to get the game set up, Wizard has selected the who, where and what cards and wants to put them into the envelope. Brown Owl coaxes him down, citing fairness, and Wizard takes the face-saving route of refusing to play at all. But he wants to play, so (ever the innovator), he invents another rule to suit himself. He will play the remaining 3 characters left and roll the dice three times each round. No. We don’t bow to his will. This time. Yes, he may use all three characters, but he doesn’t get three turns to our one. This kind of rigmarole is familiar to us, but Wizard isn’t all that riled up just at the moment, and we end up having a good game, won by Brown Owl, whose lucky guess at who where and what turns out to be correct! 

These are the birds I’ve seen from our windows: sparrows, swallows, one pelican, pigeons, an ibex and the boys say they have seen a magpie. 

Daddy Flippy spends a long time chatting with Wizard and Jack, while I write and colour. They love playing with the backgrounds and filters. Brown Owl and I reflect on how good it is, that our boys have other adults in their lives who aren’t so tired of being with them. 

The bouncing on the beds continues. Jack challenges himself to jump from bed to bed. The throwing of the balls continues. The piggy in the middle and bey blade tournaments continue. Wizard invents a new move where he stands on the bed with the jellyfish ball in his hands, jumps up, drops the ball and kicks out with both legs, landing on his back. This is tricky to coordinate. He doesn’t always manage it, but it’s spectacular when he does. 

We embark on a new 30 day yoga journey with Adriene. We’re going to take it even more slowly than she suggests, and do each day twice, over the next two months. We talk about getting up early to do yoga when school goes back. We talk about doing yoga in The Big Room. With such intention we have a good chance of success. PE with Joe is invigorating, rather than exhausting. I find sitting cross-legged for a long period of time just breathing is painful. It’s all a bit intense and mixed up. When we finally get a dog, I’m going to enjoy walking it. I think walking will remain my favourite kind of exercise. 

We settle down mid-afternoon on the children’s beds to watch The Queen’s Corgi. I’m not too impressed by its depiction of toxic femininity and toxic masculinity. I shouldn’t be too surprised, I suppose, as it’s a mainstream animation attempting to appeal to the lowest common denominator. There are a lot of sly digs at Prince Philip as well. Is it about the relationship between the UK and the USA? 

When I pit in my mind, the President and Prince Philip, neither of them comes across terribly well. Yet it’s not satisfying to compare the fates of those two top dogs (the British Prince with the American President) with Charlie and Rex (the canine top dogs), when one gets everything he wants, (i.e. the restoration of his position as the Queen’s favourite, his own chosen mate, life in Buckingham Palace with all his friends), but the other gets shipped without consent to be mated with the American bitch, thus losing his own self-respect, dignity and the camaraderie he’d been willing to sacrifice in order to gain power over his former best friend. 

I am so tired of crass and boring movies for children. I am so tired of settling for mediocre and needing to battle against media depictions of gender that are tired, dangerous, and violent. 

After dinner, I have a conversation with my sister. We talk about exercise, melatonin, parenting, anti-depressants and being the daughters of our mother. We have each other’s backs. There’s plenty of love to go around. 

Jack and I read the rollicking closing scenes of a John Flanagan novel. I’m listening to Wizard and Brown Owl, and find a stopping place at the same time, which Jack is not too happy about. Brown Owl and I then read for some time, marvelling at how easily the boys have gone to sleep. 

We are so fortunate that none of us got sick. This experience would have been so much worse, if we had. The day after tomorrow, we get to go home at 9:15 in the morning. I feel so excited about this. I know though, that no matter how quickly and efficiently we pack everything up tomorrow, the time for departure is set, and will not be affected. So I just keep breathing and try to stay calm.

QP#12 Quarantine Post, Day 12

It was LabCat who put me onto Instagram last year, when I wanted an audience for all the beautiful things I was crafting. I don’t spend a lot of time there, but love looking at her artworks. Today I decide to use one of her friends’ prompts and join Brown Owl in doing some drawing. 

The prompts are:  

 #1 must be wearing a ball and chain;

 #2 must be half-fish;

 #3 must be sweeping. 

Mine is not manga, and it’s not a replica of the original. I draw a fish-person in a green gingham apron, ball and chain around one of two feet, tail jutting out behind, in a warrior stance, brandishing a broom over its head, poised to bring it down HARD and break that chain (rendered in coloured pencil on scrapbook paper). A fun diversion. I also work on my colouring pages. 

After breakfast, we play Horseopoly. Wizard loses it before anyone except him has managed to have a turn, and retreats to the other room. We encourage Jack to play a decent game with us. I see him becoming restless 40 minutes into the game and call a halt. We add up our cash and the mortgage value of our properties and Brown Owl beats us both, hands down. 

I play a long bey blade tournament with Wizard. It’s going well, and I’m feeling good about my patience, when on the spur of the moment I launch from up high. Wizard doesn’t like this. He goes to his bed to be sad for a while, and when I start packing all the bey blades and launchers into the arena, he gets mad at me all over again. (There’s a fair bit of déjà vu during day 12.) 

We do a yoga session with Adriene that finishes so quicky we aren’t sure whether it’s because we have become stronger, or whether it was just a short session, so Brown Owl scrolls up and finds another. In total I think we do about 50 minutes of yoga. I’m connecting with my “core” in a way that never made sense to me way back when we did pilates. I’m still incredibly frustrated with the shortness of my limbs and the lumpiness of my breasts and belly, because in certain positions it is really hard to breathe. I can’t reach my hands to the ground on either side of my foot when I’m in a lunge position, which feels ridiculous. Grounding through my feet has really helped my balance. 

Brown Owl promises not to play savagely, so I agree on a couple of rounds of Song Birds. I explain to her after two rounds that it would be more fun for me, if we turned the berry tokens over at the end, rather than at the start, because then we wouldn’t know which row or column was adding up to fifteen or twelve (the birds with the most points in these rows or columns always win!) She looks at me quizzically, not getting it at all, and says “So then it’s completely about luck?” Oh well, one can but try. I like winning as much as others, but prefer to play for playing’s sake, rather than to overpower my opponents. 

Our third COVID tests come back, all negative. All clear for re-entering the world on Saturday morning. Hooray! 

I spend ages on the floor playing with Lego today. I manage to engage Jack for five minutes, requesting that he help me take some of the stuck on pieces off a base board. He manages this. I mentally pat myself on the back for finding a way of getting him to increase his finger muscle strength without triggering his “I hate making things” button. Everyone else is waiting for me to finish what I’m doing so Brown Owl and I can do PE with Joe and the others can go on the screens. I signal that need a bit of help with picking up the last pieces. Wizard happily joins me in pouring the tiny pieces into the boxes I’ve made. 

PE with Joe is strenuous today. My left calf twinges. I’m careful of my knees. He loves to make us do spiderman lunges and twisty turny things… I have enough alternative exercises in my repertoire now that I can substitute when necessary. Brown Owl and I laugh at the way we easily sustain jumping and running and shuffling for the full 30 seconds now. We couldn’t manage this a week and a half ago. Jack continues to refuse to join in with this. 

I feel kind of dreamy and withdrawn for part of the day, and find it difficult to engage with the boys. I’m not bothered by their antics and conflicts, feeling content to let them work it out for themselves. They throw balls, pillow fight, jump over the beds and wrestle to their heart’s content. Brown Owl, bless her, structures some exercises and ball games with them while I lounge on Wizard’s bed, playing Merge Dragons. 

We don’t watch our usual programs last night, because Wizard and Jack decide to watch Maleficent on the big screen in their bedroom. They both watched this movie at least once on one of the plane trips. 

Wiz puts the TV on in our room afterwards and finds a children’s restaurant show we’ve seen an episode of once upon a time. Brown Owl decides that since it was halfway over anyway, we might as well watch the rest, which segues into another show about a child learning to budget. Then the boys have showers, I make up all the beds all over again and we put them to bed. 

I read Pachinko into the night, stopping when I think I need to go to sleep. Sleep eludes me for several hours. I wish now that I’d just kept reading…

QP#11 Quarantine Post, Day 11

This morning, Brown Owl gives me her thoughts from overnight. She says that that just as people here in Adelaide firmly but kindly place boundaries against our whinges regarding the Tormented’s treatment of us, she hopes people in Red Deer are giving us the same benefits in the face of putative complaints and stories about us. 

Since all of this is in our heads, and we torment ourselves wondering about it, Brown Owl’s suggestion that we limit our negative remarks to one another, and not expect those who had the chance to experience and build a relationship the Tormented to back us up on our comparative lack of experience, makes a lot of sense. It’s wise, even. 

The less wise part of me, the daughter who longs for her mother’s sympathy and support, still finds this a bitter pill to swallow. But I’m trying. I know when we get there, to our home, all these fantasies in my mind will just fall away, displaced by the realities of dealing with what’s in front of me. I am fifty years old, after all. Surely by now I can separate from those apron strings and stand on my own two feet? 

The Spinoza Problem was an engaging read, but it left me feeling washed out. There is no reasoning with people who cling to their hate with such rigid passion. Rosenberg went to his death believing in his hatred. He was never able to shift his views that “the Jews of Europe” should simply go find someplace else to live, to answer the corresponding question of where they were supposed to go. 

I am triggered, as usual, with the melancholy sense of having no home, no place to belong. This is particularly poignant in light of the asylum seekers imprisoned in quarantine hotels.    

The characterization of Bento Spinoza as a being who kept himself so separate from Nature that he failed to maintain relationships with other human beings is simply sad. I’ve known people so inside their heads that they fail to spark any connection between their hearts and their gut. 

If I think about Spinoza as a self-sacrificing victim, a man with too much integrity to pander to the demands of the Jewish community that rejected his views as they excommunicated the person, I neglect the respect I feel towards his insistence that religiosity gets too much in the way of human beings connecting and living as part of the world. It seems he is very much ahead of his time. I suppose the Chasidic ideal presented in other novels, where the joy and connection and music are depicted as the channels for connecting people with the Divine is more appealing. Maybe if Spinoza sang, or danced, he would feel more real to me; less robotic. 

Spinoza’s idea of God as Nature, as everything that exists, is not far from my own ideas about God. Certainly, the idea of an individual having a personal connection with God has never made sense to me. I feel impatient at the expectation that my words, my feelings, my prayers will reach God in any specific way. For me, God is more the energy, the spirit, and the impulse towards life and connection with everything and certainly not just humankind. 

In the marginalia of the novel, an earlier reader posited “ennui” as analogous to the word “anomie” which appeared in the text. To my way of thinking, these are two very different states, which lead to very different approaches to the world. 

Ennui, world-weariness, boredom and apathy is something which one generates from within, whereas Anomie seems to me to be a response to something projected upon one from outside circumstances. It is possible to climb out or be pulled out of Ennui when something or someone external touches and transports us up and away from out limited inner world upon which we have focused our attention.

Anomie, and its associations to anonymity and annihilation, is the state a person reaches when feeling so utterly alienated and unable to make connections with one’s external world, that one takes a further step and dissociates from one’s inner life, as well. Someone who has decided they are not worthy of being considered with value by anyone else, becomes entrenched in bitter defensiveness, and walls themselves in with a ferocity that is almost impossible to resist. It characterises Rosenberg, the poor maligned, misunderstood, unloved and never belonging Hater, very well. 

Wizard and I spend time with the Lego we were given. I build a castle, expecting him to help, but he just lets me do it on my own and then complains, because his Lego knight army is someplace inaccessible in a box or suitcase. I embark upon a new project – to build a grandstand for the Slug Terra slugs to sit in and view a bey blade tournament. Wizard and I then bey blade for what seems like a very long time. 

I try to engage with the hotel staff in terms of regifting some of our things to other guests who have very little, but there’s no room to budge. We are hedged in between government regulation and safety protocols. I suggest we keep some of our stuff in quarantine for a few days, so it can then be passed on, but no. It’s just too hard. I feel disappointed. 

Nevertheless I go through our excess and bag it up. I make 9 parcels, hoping to hear from 9 rooms in the hotel, to whom these might be distributed. Only that initial person from the day before has responded to my offer. Brown Owl comforts me by saying that even if we can’t give them to other quarantine guests, we can still donate the stuff to others who will benefit. 

Brown Owl finds a third layer of coloured pencils in the box we’ve been using. Eureka! There are all the glorious purples and browns I’d been wanting. She is drawing a Manga character, using a guide from a book given to the boys. I am totally impressed by her drawing. Her next task is to draw the same character but give her a “chunkier” body. I continue to colour the pages of the Oy To the World colouring book. 

We watch the final of the first season of The Ultimate Beastmaster. We viewed the second and third seasons whilst in Canada and reserved this one for our quarantine time. 

I remember watching Big Brother and Master Chef and Simpsons with Guitar Hero and Labcat when they were in their teens. As a family activity these were fun and formed a basis for conversations, even though they weren’t shows I would have chosen to watch. 

I am amazed by how Jack and Wizard remember the names of contestants from all of the seasons, earnestly discuss the various permutations of the obstacle course, and compare the results. Jack becomes particularly impassioned when Deutschland, the nation he’s decided to support, loses all its contestants in the finals. He follows the presenters and switches allegiance to Brazil. I speak to him sharply when his invective becomes too full on. It is only a tv show, after all! 

Wizard finds a season of Australian Beastmaster which we will start tomorrow.

Too much watching. 

QP#10 Quarantine, Day 10

Today is a day for meltdowns. I think we all have one, in our own fashion. 

Mine is quiet. I melt into myself and feel miserable and inside out. I cannot bring myself to meet anybody’s eyes, and I feel disinclined to smile. I am grumpy about the usual tedious most ordinary unreasonable things – toilet paper and rubbish bags; dishes being washed but left to drain in the bathroom, blankets and sheets being too big and too small and too uncomfortable, the lack of privacy and the way the children monopolize my devices and my heart. 

Yet we have running water, toilets, showers, comfortable beds, windows, space, cool air, food, healthcare, computers, mobile phones, coloured pencils, paper, scissors, tape, games, toys… I remind myself that two rooms like this are unimaginable luxuries for families squeezed 20 in a three-bedroom house in remote Australia, a tent at Kakuma, cardboard boxes and plastic bags in the slums of other places. 

Brown Owl has several short, sharp meltdowns where she yells “OW!” and tells off one or the other of us for hurting her. Her toes get trodden on and bey blades crash into her knees. She savagely beats me at Song Birds over and over. 

Jack has the kind of meltdown where he accuses us of blaming him for stuff that isn’t his responsibility. He slams the door quietly and retreats to his room, appearing twenty-five minutes later with a smile on his face, asking what we are up to, whether he can join in, and whether we have heard him jumping from bed to bed in the other room. We haven’t. 

Paperwork arrives on the stools outside our door: a congratulatory letter from our “Pullman Adelaide Family” about our pending departure on Saturday 9th January 2021 (pending our last negative test result). The nurses are going to come and swab us again any time in the next couple of days, but they are busy, as the hotel has had another influx of guests arriving in the night. Accompanying the letter is a form for us to complete, advising SA Health of who we are and where we are going. 

I feel just a little ambivalent about getting out of here. Yes, I want to get out, but the process of gathering together all of our gear and getting it from up here to down there and into cars driven by my mother and my brother makes me catch my breath a little. 

Every time someone asks me what’s the first thing I’ll do upon arriving home, I lose myself completely. There is so much to do! So many trees to greet, so much uncertainty about where everything will be and how to sort it out. I want to reintroduce myself to our washing machine, hang out clothes to dry in the sunshine. Can you imagine? I haven’t hung clothes outside for a year. It’s OK. 

January 4 is the anniversary of our moving into The Little House of Colours in 2009. That’s such a long time ago! I think of my daughter LabCat, still at school at the time, and her brother Guitar Hero, who stormed off a couple of months into our new altogetherness, angry at our expectations that he wash dishes on a roster. There was no Jack of Hearts yet, nor Wizard. 

There’s fish for lunch. Wizard squeals and heads for the other room. He cannot abide the smell. I make him vegemite sandwiches. Brown Owl attempts to feed him some vegetables. We hope dinner will be more to his taste. 

I post to the quarantine guests group the protocol we followed in Alberta when the schools reopened. Anything brought from home could only be touched by the child who brought it. Nothing could be shared. If something arrived from home for a teacher, it had to be quarantined for 3 days before the teacher could touch it. Might such a protocol be implemented here, to be able to pass on some of our stuff to others with less? 

A recently arrived guest replies. She could do with some sensory supplies for her teenage son who functions on an emotional level of 4-6. I offer her some ideas, not knowing at all whether they are appropriate, but no one else responds. It's been "seen" by 40+ people. 

She messages me later, asking whether I would leave a “care package” for them when we leave the hotel on Saturday. The idea takes hold in my mind. I begin plotting to leave care packages for as many people as I can. I do not want to take all this stuff home and have to deal with it on top of all the stuff I left at home before we headed to Canada. 

Wizard has the most spectacular meltdown of all, late in the day, after dinner and before our night-time viewing. He and Jack are playing bey blades, with Jack commentating rather beautifully. Brown Owl and I are sitting in the other room chatting and enjoying listening to the flow of their play. 

I get up to answer the phone in the other room. It’s my Mum, calling back. Out of the blue, Wizard leaps up, screaming and shouting and attacking Jack. Brown Owl brings him into the other room, where I can still hear him for at least twenty minutes, until Brown Owl settles him in front of the screen, allows Jack to enter the room with them. It takes that long for Wiz to stop wanting to kill his brother. 

Evidently, the commentating had taken a turn. Wizard was incensed at the nasty things Jack had started saying about his (lack of) bey blading skills. 

The four of us settle down in front of the screen. Then I read with Wizard. We read one of his birthday books Hidden Underground. He and Jack go to sleep. 

I read on into the night. As my novel moves from the early twentieth century and the 1940s approach with their unforgivable inexorable foreboding, I grow simultaneously more reluctant to put the book down, and to stop reading on. Spinoza’s life bewilders me. I wonder who he would have been, layered within the intersecting possibilities of our time? How would he have conducted his life?

QP#9 Quarantine, Day 9

Bad night.

I am deeply asleep on Wizard’s bed, sheet-creased, when I become aware of the others moving around. Brown Owl also had a bad night and was awoken out of deep sleep by the breakfast door knock. 

We played musical beds last night. Even Jack seems super tired and grumpy. Wizard must sleep in his bed tonight, and not on the floor in his cubby. In hindsight I am grateful we didn’t try to stay up to see the new year in, as this would have messed with his body clock big time. 

There were noises in the night, that bothered me. The fan was off when I went to bed, leaving the rooms stuffy and still. I know I had a conversation with Brown Owl about this and she seemed to think it was good that the fan was off, but by morning, she is adamant that she turned it on and prefers it on. In any case, it was definitely off during the night when I had transferred myself from our bed to Wizard’s, as he had come into ours again and was elbowing me away. 

The noises sounded industrial. Big booms and metallic things bashing into one another and falling. I was in that hazy state where I couldn’t quite sort out the noise and the environment. I worried the hotel was being knocked down. It took me a long time to fall back to sleep and when I did, my dreams were vivid, confusing, disturbing. 

All of us are grumpy and short-tempered. It’s hard not to look at anyone, in such a confined space. I think of what I read last year about how Inuit parents teach their children to manage their emotions. It really hit home when I imagined several people in the confined space of an igloo with dangerous weather outside. While it helps to jiggle my perspective, this does not particularly assist me in dealing with two boys on edge, at each other, determined each to outdo the other in the shoulder-chip stakes. 

Can we go back to bed now, and start over? 

After several minutes of deliberation, Wizard decides that he will attempt to play Horseopoly with us. We manage for 40 minutes before he upends the board. Calmly, ever so calmly, Brown Owl and I work to sort and put away the pieces. We use this as our therapy and manage a smile or two in amongst the paper money. 

Wizard disappears to hide inside his bedclothes. Oops – now he’s angry again at the “someone” who packed away his cubby, pushed the bed back into the corner and made it all neat. Jack is needling him, throwing balls at him, jumping from bed to bed, making it impossible for him to be alone. 

I've made all the beds nicely this morning. I like making beds. I also like beds that are made. Alas, Wizard has it in for the beds today. Better the beds, I suppose, than us. In a rage, he tears all the covers off from top to bottom. It’s good exercise, and Brown Owl manages to catch him out in a laugh. He has learned to laugh at himself. Good. 

Jack sulks and storms. The tv on the wall beside the doors that adjoin our rooms gets a wobble when he slams the door, and we must not allow this to keep happening. There was a time a couple of years back when the clock we stationed on the wall of our dining room between the doors to the boys’ bedrooms regularly smashed, after being dislodged by the vibrations of a slamming door. No, it can’t continue. 

We play ball. We read with Jack. We let them watch. We play with the beys. Brown Owl suggests a lunch-time movie, to break up the routine. I opt out. I can hear How to Train Your Dragon II from where I’m sitting at the desk in the other room. I love these movies, and their music, but I’d rather colour in, than sit idly on an uncomfortable chair and watch the screen. 

After the movie there’s a knock on the door. Suddenly, another care package arrives. As usual, Brown Owl was in the know. I can’t believe she even exercises with her phone in her pocket, but maybe it’s because it counts her steps. Anyway, our dear friends the Prouds have brought us a gorgeous bag full of goodies, which the children fall upon immediately. It changes the colour of our day, and the rest of the afternoon is spent happily exploring. Thank you, Prouds. 

I pay less attention to the world outside today. There’s little point in pining for air and sun. Then we get a video call from the Kitty Cats 3 and they are at our place and we all crowd around the tiny screen, looking at our home, the one that’s waiting for us in just a few days’ time. I breathe deep. I know there’s going to be lots to do, and I can’t wait to get into it. 

After dinner, which was a terrific success (thanks kitchen people!) we put on Kiboomers again. We dance and move around a lot, throw balls, play floor is lava and work our way into feeling like we’ve used our bodies for something. Brown Owl and I did manage our yoga and PE with Joe, and we need the children to get physically tired out, as well. 

Wizard and Brown Owl start reading a book about dragons. Jack and I are still working through Septimus Heap. They take a while to fall asleep, and we give Wiz some melatonin to help. Tomorrow is another day. We are well over the hump, now.

QP#8 Quarantine, Day 8

This morning after breakfast we sit down to play a family game, but neither Jack, nor Wizard is interested. There’s some ball playing for a while, and then Jack wanders in and sees me setting up for a game of “Song Birds” with Brown Owl. I ask him whether he wants to play and he says no (of course), but the game pieces are so alluring that when I request that he turn over the purple berries, he begins to be interested in spite of himself. We end up playing a round together, and I bumble through the numbers, utterly failing to try and ease Jack into it, because understanding the strategy and trying to do things that will ensure I lose and he wins entangles my thinking entirely. Anyway, it’s a beautiful game and we enjoy it together, which is the point, of course. I play with Brown Owl later, and she wins one, and I win one. I hope she wasn’t “going easy on me”. 

Wizard just wants to launch his bey blades. We all take turns doing this with him. He is quite happy to win every time, and he’s very knowledgeable about what’s going to happen. I love launching the beys and watching them spin. It’s therapeutic. 

Yoga is lovely today. Brown Owl tells me the presenter makes $7000 per day from the ads on her videos. I ponder this whilst stretching and balancing. The only similar thing I can conceive of creating for an online audience would be reading stories to children. It’s something I love doing, but on the other hand I don’t want to encourage children to relate to the screen and would prefer to read to them in person. 

Ah… books, picture books. I miss them! 

Work lurks in the back of my mind. I am disappointed not to have been hired for the museum job I applied for in November, but it was a long shot. I don’t have enough head space and time to look for work here in the hotel, and it’s one of the things I’m hanging out to do. I haven’t had any paid work for 15 months. Hang on, I tell myself. Just keep breathing. The time will arrive! 

Just into our workout with Joe today, Wizard brings me my phone. It’s the Rosy Daddy, intent on educating me about puppy farms. I get the impression he knows he’s told me all this before, and that repetition will make it more likely that I’ll take the information on board and act upon it. So here’s my take: 

 - I am horrified by puppy farms and dog fighting scams. I do not want any part of these. 

 - In the last year, Wiz and I have researched dogs over and over and over again. We have a pretty good idea of what kinds of breeds we like the sound of. 

 - I do not support eugenics and feel awkward about trying to breed for particular characteristics. I look down at my own body and wonder what characteristics of mine, I’d want to have bred for. 

 - I’m never going to be involved with the Showing community. I want a dog to be a family pet.

 - Incidental puppies are much harder to come by in this day and age where dogs must be licensed and their unsupervised neighbourhood nosing around is restricted. 

 - I believe in hybrid vigour, and I love poodle crosses. I loved my Bennie. 

 - No offense to those who love them, but I do not want a staffy, kelpie, collie or cattle dog. 

 - I would prefer to get a puppy and socialize and train it, rather than take on a dog that has previously suffered maltreatment. 

 - Buying a puppy from a breeder is almost certainly going to give us the most satisfactory outcome. We will probably buy a puppy that is not show standard, but has the other positive characteristics of that breed and its parents. 

Thanks, Rosy Daddy – this has been helpful. Of course, I’ve only written my point of view – there are three other people in the equation…. 

It’s my turn to chat with the Kitty Cats 3, and I get to listen to lovely soft chook noises. I see a sparrow outside our window today. We chat about lots of things. I realise that I do have plenty to say. It’s just easy to fall into the habit of keeping it all in. We agree to help nurture our children’s freedom flights across the neighbourhood to one another’s homes and parks. This was one of the resolutions I’d made for our return to Oz; Wizard and Jack popping in and out of their friends’ homes and the local park. 

Neither boy partakes in our daily workouts. Their screen addictions are severe. By the end of the evening, whilst Brown Owl cleans up after dinner (they ate heartily at least…), I take them into the other room and insist they choose something from Go Noodle to do some physical movement. Boy do they need it! Both are listless and loopy, grumpy and bored. 

After a lot of pork chop behaviour and cross words from me, Jack finds a 5-minute workout with Joe. I get my heart rate up again, and Jack begins to smile. Wiz mucks around a bit, but finally settles on a couple of routines deemed too childish by Jack, but I see Jack grinning up on the bed, taking part. One is a Simon Says, one is a “freeze” dance. We repeat that one. It sends us whizzing off to the bathroom to brush our teeth before our final viewing and story-time. 

Wizard wants to sleep in his cubby again. He climbs onto the bed to read with me, though. We finish the book about the Greek Gods with Jason, Theseus and Helen. Such awful teaching stories. Such horrible behaviour from Gods and Demi-Gods. It says a lot about being human. I have enjoyed the Percy Jackson novels and movies this year, and I look forward to getting home to re-read some of my favourite feminist renditions of some of these characters. 

If Wizard plays musical beds again tonight, I’m going to veto the cubby house for night-time. We had musical beds all last year in Red Deer. Almost certainly one of the factors in my long-term exhaustion. 

I wonder what tomorrow will bring. We are on the countdown now.

QP#7 Quarantine, Day 7

Happy New Year. 

Happy 2021. 

I eagerly await Chinese New Year and the change from Rat to Ox, which will occur on Friday February 12. I have a feeling we might all get a reprieve then, from feeling so cornered and defensive. 

The hotel provides pancakes for breakfast – even me. They aren’t buckwheat, but they are gluten free, and yummy. The boys are happy to get chocolate milk again. 

Part of their journey towards home means that Jack and Wizard are keen to catch up with their friends and family. I know this is going to be a priority for the rest of January, and while part of me embraces the idea (I’ve also been lonely, and missed a lot of people), I also just want to go home and check in with the fruit trees. Settle in, bring the cats and chickens home, and make some plans for my future. I still feel like I am on hold, lurking in the shadows, allowing myself to fill gaps, margins and peripheries, without as much agency as I need. 

To ground myself, I embark upon a thorough tidy up of our premises. It’s laundry day again. I am determined to scrub the toilets with our dirty linen. I pack two shopping bags of excess stuff and stash them away in one of the cupboards. With a sudden creative impulse, I use a few left-over paper bags to fashion low baskets to store collections of toys. I use two bags per basket. One has Star Wars and ET action figures; one has horses, knights and dragons; one has an assortment of other figurines and the fourth stores the monster trucks, small cars and airplanes. 

Suddenly it looks organized. At least for five minutes. I like the way our rooms are thus transformed into looking sleek and trendy. All the bey blades and launchers fit inside the arena. I am always amused that changing the way things are stored attracts the eyes of the children. A change, they say, is as good as a gift-giving holiday. 

We decide to make a calendar and start blocking in some dates. I call my Mum, to work out when she wants to have our post-Christmas/Channukah get-together. I come up empty. The pandemic is still affecting so many people. My sister and her family are in N.S.W. They were planning to visit us in Adelaide once quarantine was over, but now the borders are closed. Again. My brother works in a remote area and had thought he would be available in January because he would be working over the Christmas period. Instead, the site closed for a couple of weeks over Christmas and he’s back at work again. We will get together with whoever can make it, whenever. We can’t mark this on our calendar!

My in-laws, also in N.S.W., call with some unwelcome news. Brown Owl’s sister and brother-in-law had planned to travel from Victoria to see them. Another plan cancelled. I’m not sure how Brown Owl’s brother and sister-in-law are going to manage their relocation from Melbourne to N.S.W. either, under these fickly conditions. 

I watch Jack make a list of all the friends he wants to see. He wants to see them all at once. He has a long list of people he wants to include, and during the day, he keeps coming up with more names! Wizard makes a list as well. He writes his name at the bottom and under his name: the host. His list is shorter, but no less precious. He might have several smaller visits, one-on-one with friends. I don’t write a list, but I keep one in my head. 

During the afternoon, Brown Owl tells me that the hotel is giving us all a special treat – fondue. We’ve been advised via the hotel quarantine guests’ page. I surreptitiously log on and post a comment that this sounds wonderful, and I hope it’s gluten free. 

Brown Owl gets all the goss – probably because if I am using my laptop, the boys generally want it, and if I’m not using it they generally get it, unless I’m doing something else with them, whereas she is able to use her laptop and they still remember it’s reserved for “work”. Sadly, Brown Owl has counted up and realized that after quarantine she will only have about a week and a half of home time before returning to work. 

Our dinner bags indeed contain the makings of fondue – all except the dipping chocolate. There are three boxes with dried fruit, marshmallows and rolled wafer biscuits, an extra tub of fresh fruit, presumably for me, in addition to four small containers of the most luscious looking strawberries I’ve seen this year. 

Brown Owl gets on the phone and in her best manner, talks to the restaurant people. Within 20 minutes, a small brown paper bag has appeared on the stool outside our door. It contains 4 tiny tubs of fondue sauce. Two are labelled “contains gluten”. I take my chances with one of the others, and I don’t regret it. Thank you, Brown Owl for being brave and not telephone phobic. 

Wizard discovers a space small enough behind his bed to hide in. It’s a narrow wedge between the wall and the headboard. Maybe he half-heard my suggestion earlier in the day, that he make a cubby, and he soon pulls the bed away from the wall and uses the long curtain and pillows to make himself a fort. 

He is determined to sleep in there tonight. I’m unsure how well reading is going to work with this arrangement, because there’s really only room for him and his beanie bears. Brown Owl lies on Wizard’s bed and reads with him. I lie on our bed and read with Jack. We are making our way through the first Septimus Heap. 

I am far too sleepy to pick up The Spinoza Problem and am only vaguely aware that Brown Owl has settled both children (Wizard needed melatonin in his pillow fort), switched off my light, and is crawling into her side of the bed. 

QP#6 Quarantine, Day 6

I sleep through the night. I wake at 6:00am, feeling rested for the first time in months. While we were in Canada, I experienced periods of vivid dreams. Recurrent themes included travel in strange places, getting lost, making unexpected discoveries. Some of the dreams I’d had before we went to Canada proved prescient. I experienced the same kind of déjà vu as I’ve had during other intense and stressful periods of my life. 

Last night I dreamed I was driving the children to their new school. We were running late. I was worried about exactly how to get there. Part of my mind was busily trying to work out which side of the road I was supposed to be using. I ended up driving through the school’s driveway and being told by someone that I wasn’t allowed to be there. I promised never to do that again. In the next scene, I was hoping to accompany Wizard to his classroom and meet his teacher. He and I were on the ground floor. It was busy. Suddenly Wizard is gone. I look up and figure out that he’s had gone up a tiny hatchway to the first floor. He climbed up a ladder or a set of stairs too small for an adult. Yet I knew there must be a way for an adult to gain access to the next level and began asking people for directions. 

My emotions following this dream are completely optimistic. I am suffused with the sense of a new place, new possibilities, and looking forward to getting to know the school and the other families. I feel like we are in a good place. I also connect this dream to the physical activity we are practicing every day, and an improved level of fitness. 

Contact with the outside world means talking to people on the phone. Never my favourite activity, but at long last, I call the provider and select a new number. I get my mobile working again. Hooray! Now I’ve no excuse not to talk to people. 

The Dads call us, with Granny and Mr Mack (their son). We chat for what seems like a long time to me. It will be so good to be able to get together in person, explore the farm, be licked by the dogs, meet their chooks and ducks. 

I retreat to the desk in the other room to compose a blog post. Brown Owl facilitates a video chat with the Kitty Cat 3 family. After the children have chatted, I half listen in to Brown Owl’s conversation with one of the parents. They are talking about our Tormentor. 

I haven’t been thinking much about our Tormentor for a couple of days. When I catch up with Brown Owl after this conversation, I decide she needs another epithet: Tormented. Not by me, not by us, not by our children, but by her mind, and an intense need to be seen as OK. It must be exhausting to be her. I’m ready to move on now. I leave her to her own complicated life. 

We start talking about the dog we’re going to get. I cannot resist quickly looking to see which rescue dogs are available. Maybe it’s silly to look, because of course I see one that looks ideal… We are committed to getting a dog, but we have a long way to go. Jack suddenly turns adamant that he will be responsible for walking our dog. All. The Time. It’s not so much that he wants to be Chief Dog Walker, as that he does not want Wizard to be. As I say, we have a long way to go before we are ready to bring a puppy home. I overhear Brown Owl telling her sister that the boys have decided their Mums are the Chief Poo Picker-Uppers. Um. No. That’s not how it goes. 

I download an application form for the puppy I like, and we have an ad hoc family meeting to discuss our collective answers to some of the questions – all hypothetical of course. I’m acutely aware that Brown Owl was not keen to have cats in the bed when we moved in together. She needs to feel comfortable with how we bring another animal into our family. 

Quarantine continues to drag on, but the days are not too long. We have a week to go. We follow the same general pattern of activity, with small variations here and there. 

The hotel sends everyone a bag of goodies for New Year’s Eve. It contains 2 small bottles of Prosecco, 2 bottles of Berocca, 2 bottles of green smoothies, 4 cylinders of fancy chips, glow sticks and Kit Kats. Brown Owl rings down and purchases me some gluten free chocolate and chips, so I don’t have to miss out. 

After dinner, (which for me is a delicious lamb shank), Jack and Wizard shower and we get ready to ring in the New Year. We put towels across the bed to catch the crumbs. We manage to choose a movie to watch, and we settle on the bed in front of the big screen with our snacks. It’s an Australian movie called “Go”, and we all thoroughly enjoy it. 

At the end, in lieu of Prosecco, Berocca or green smoothie, I serve us each a wine glass of milk. We wave our glow sticks around for a while. There are no fireworks to see but looking out over the dark city is endlessly fascinating. By nine o’clock or so, we put ourselves to bed. Another day down, and tomorrow it won’t be 2020 anymore.

QP#5 Quarantine Post, Day 5

Ah…… day 5. 

Breathe in the deepest breath I’ve taken all day… exhale through the mouth… 

I wake at 4:17am again and take myself silently into the loo. As I sit, still not quite awake, but mentally calculating the cost of staying awake from now until tonight or trying to return to sleep, a movement catches my eye. I peer through the glass wall of the shower and notice an earwig crawling in the mortar between the tiles that line the shower cubicle. Hello little earwig, I send, I haven’t seen one of you in almost a year. 

It makes me feel sentimental – the paucity of bug life in our home in Red Deer disturbed me, because it felt like an indication the place had been poisoned. It was probably the cold. 

I wonder how the earwig got into our hermetically sealed (not quite) hotel room, fourteen floors above the ground? I wonder what it means when our online yoga instructor tells us to plant our feet, our hands, our bottoms firmly into the ground, when the actual ground, the earth is so far beneath us? It probably hitchhiked in aboard one of the delicious fresh apricots my mum dropped off from her dog-walking friend. 

My sim still isn’t working. I suspect it’s because the old one had been disconnected and therefore won’t transfer. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get the gumption to do something about this, but I don’t want to have to remember more numbers…. 

This morning, I use some of the fancy textas we were given (thanks Aunty Nut!) to make myself a paper bag mask. I show myself to Wizard and ask whether I look glamorous now. His response? “You look like you have a bag on your head” did nothing for my self-esteem. 

Brown Owl and I do more mask-making today. We post a selfie on the hotel quarantine guest page. Another guest, several fortnights ago, also used the paper bags to good effect. We see a page of the masks she made each day that she was here. 

Joe, of PE with Joe is distracted today. It’s a video from March (2020), in his first week of presenting to a locked down UK. He keeps stopping what he’s doing, to listen to Nicky give him updates on how many people are participating live, and where in the world they are coming from. I wish he would just get on with the workout. 

In yoga this morning I start to be able to feel some connections between movements I make and the associated body parts. 

After lunch, we are advised that the littlest hotel guests will get a chance to be chefs this afternoon. We are awaiting the yoyo biscuit decorating kits to be delivered, when the knock comes on the door. Wiz whizzes into his mask and answers the door, but it’s a pair of nurses in yellow plastic covers over their scrubs, masked and gloved and ready to stick things into our throats and noses. 

Wizard is appalled when the nurse uses the same end of the swab-stick she’d stuck in his throat, for his nostril. I don’t think any of us really took much notice the first time. Jack’s result (negative for COVID) is already in. We’re waiting on the rest. 

One of the nurses is a man, and this sends Jack into the need to show off his footy skills. I’m not sure the nurse can take much notice, and he doesn’t say anything to the cavorting ten-year-old in the room behind the doorway, where the rest of the family is lined up, passports in hand, masks over face, awaiting our turn. 

I’m not sure how I feel about toxic masculinity at this moment. Is this a benign case of joyous self-expression? Is it a reaching out for connection of like with assumed like because of some shared social gender traits? Are we not doing well enough in our quest to teach our children that football, like gymnastics, like ice skating, like ice hockey (?) is open for humans of every gender to enjoy and participate in? Am I totally overthinking this? 

When I hear a particularly vile swear word used by the youtuber Jack is currently watching, I call it out. Jack sheepishly selects a different clip. “They don’t usually talk to each other with those sorts of words, do they?” I am dismayed, because from what I’ve been observing, this fellow seems to be generally positive, having some points in his favour. Despite his obnoxiously loud voice, and his tendency to talk over whoever he’s playing a game with online, he has friends whose accents hint that they come from a variety of places around the world, and he is so silly that even as a distant observer I am sometimes overcome by sympathetic giggles and belly-laughs. 

Brown Owl and I find ourselves playing piggy in the middle in the boys’ room, with the two jellyfish balls brought to us by the Dads earlier in the week. I distinctly recall how I hated the game as a child, but today it is fun. I giggle and struggle and succeed in grabbing the ball as it goes past me. The tentacles help. 

I cannot believe how much physical activity we are able to pack into these quarantine rooms. In the back of my mind is the constant necessity of being prepared to interrupt myself when engaging in other more solitary activities, in order to give to the boys. While part of me resents this, (not as much as when we aren’t in quarantine, when I tend to resist), I also know that anticipating and accepting these needs, and actively addressing them will absolutely and definitely forestall the painful conflicts that arise when they are too much ignored. 

It’s my turn to read with Wizard tonight, after our evening viewing. We are reading our way through the Greek Gods. Wizard announces that he will go to sleep without his melatonin tonight. It would be great if returning to the Southern Hemisphere has reset his body-clock. He knows himself well and puts himself to sleep quickly and without fuss. 

I manage to stay awake until after 10pm tonight, to finish the book I started, which was given to us by one of Brown Owl’s colleagues in Red Deer. A House in the Sky (2013) by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett, details Lindhout’s experiences of being held hostage in Somalia for 15 months. She survived terrible abuse during these 15 months. In her memoir are thoughts about Muslim fundamentalism, corrupt governments, capitalism, gender relations and poverty. It’s a challenging read. 

I drift into sleep, actively working to dispel the unease and sadness that lingers after I close the book. As my conscious mind gives way, I link the vile word used by the youtuber with Jack’s reaction to the nurse, and the endless questions Jack taxes me with, about power and violence and conflict. We chatted during the day about which local junior football club he might be able to join this season. When it came to explaining our idea about Kilburn Football Club being very “rough” and not suitable for him. When it comes to toxic masculinity, white working-class culture, xenophobia, Australia’s social underclass and intergenerational unemployed people, and our wish as parents to shield Jack from the worst aspects of this, it’s not easy to put this into words a ten-year-old will comprehend.

QP#4 Quarantine Post, Day 4

I get a great deal of thinking time this morning, lying awake from 3:14am. I wonder whether I’ll turn into one of those writers who is able to get up and practice their craft for an hour or two every morning before the rest of the household awakens? Then I remember our creaky wooden floors, and our children’s predilection for leaping out of bed at the slightest morning noise…. I spend my three hours playing merge dragons and words with friends, ruminating and playing music inside my head.

It’s my turn to answer the phone to the copper today. He only wants to know that we’re all OK. He doesn’t ask for names and relationships information. Brown Owl and I speculate that the phone calls have some strategic purpose in offering multiple opportunities for quarantine guests to connect with others, in order to maximise positive outcomes for interventions as need for them arises.

I am reminded of Anne McCaffrey’s 1982 book Crystal Singer, where a young woman named Killashandra travels to a restricted planet where she undergoes a physical transition which enhances many of her abilities and enables her to sing crystal. This transition is facilitated by a spore, so I guess it is parasitic. Infection and incubation are common themes in science fiction fantasies, often resulting in positive changes. The only ideas I’ve seen so far, that posit a positive reason for this pandemic are indirect and external, such as reduction of pollution or species extinction.

Jack has an excess of energy built up inside him. After breakfast, he commences emitting repetitive grating, booming noises that hurt my head. This is nothing new. Brown Owl takes Wizard into the other room to throw the jellyfish balls around. They do this for about an hour. I challenge Jack to do some shuttle runs, offering the timer on my phone as incentive. (He’s Gemini and digital native enough for this to make the prospect of running back and forth from door to desk exciting.) I do a minute’s worth of shuttle runs as well, and then we’re into sit ups. By the time it’s time to do PE with Joe, Jack and I are fairly pooped, but we plug away doggedly, and it feels good to have made the effort. Brown Owl and I do yoga as well, and I’m starting to feel my body again.

There’s a new game from Brown Owl’s folks, called “songbirds”. We decide to give it a go while the children are busy bey blading. I discover that Brown Owl has a head for strategy – she works out the rules and how to win. I’m entranced by the cards themselves, each of which is different and exquisite. The game involves placing cards in a grid, with the score building up in columns and rows. When placing the cards, I get caught up in making patterns, while Brown Owl works on making sure the cards add up to higher numbers. What fun!

Each of us seeks space today, by removing ourselves from the room where the rest of us are congregating: 

- Brown Owl lies down on a bed in the other room, trying to work the kinks out of her phone plan;

- I retreat to the desk, to do some colouring alone, and this writing; 

- Wiz takes himself away to recover from minor emotional upsets by rolling himself up inside the cocoon of his bedding. We know that he comes back in time and prefers to be left alone. 

- Jack is currently obsessing about footie. He spends time wandering around enacting Aussie Rules moves with a small, foam football my mother brought him. When he and I spend forty minutes practicing hand passes, he asks me to direct the ball to the edge of the bed he is standing on, so that he has a chance to throw himself around with great gusto and drama.

It’s not that we are unravelling, but our edges are just beginning to fray. The novelty is wearing off. We have ten more days and nights to go. I watch the swallows swooping outside our windows today. The pigeons generally fly much lower.

Today is fresh linen day. Stripping the beds and packing the towels and sheets into black garbage bags is a fun family activity. The hotel staff have sent us flyers describing how to make a bed. We are challenged to make the best beds, and there is a prize in the offing. Wizard embraces this with precious dedication. I make the beds, and Brown Owl helps him tuck in his beanie bears, artificial flowers and Jack’s dinosaur Roary (who famously travelled to Canada in his hand luggage). Wizard is also a Gemini and loves nothing better than to set up the perfect photo shot. He takes them, Brown Owl posts them to the hotel quarantine group and sure enough, we win a prize. More colouring books, more coloured pencils, two more sharpeners to add to our collection.

I have tried to give away some of our treasure hoard, but I am advised that 

    “Unfortunately, we are at the directives of the SA Government and we are unable to give or pass on         items from rooms to other guests or rooms. It is so sad, and also confusing as when you check out,         you would be covid-negative. It is just a blanket rule to keep everyone safe.” 

I’m feeling slight panic    at the burgeoning piles of stuff we are accumulating. Brown Owl says we’ll need a truck to get it all home! That word “safe” is so loaded.

When Brown Owl fields the call from a GP in the late afternoon, I listen in and wonder whether it’s a journalist. This GP is happy to chat, and the effect on Brown Owl is obvious – she’s more buoyant, more connected with the world outside these walls.

I’d been hoping for lamb massaman curry for dinner, as advised by the menu, but I’m not disappointed by the rice-stuffed tomatoes, which are delicious. I notice that the sticky label on our paper bags has become much more descriptive of our dietary requirements. It now reads:

ROOM: 1416 + 1418 (c / o 09^th Jan)

Ad: 2    Ch: 2    Inf:

Preferences: 1 x Ad GF (prefers veg most days) & 1 x Ad Vegetarian. Less “fancy” meals for kids i.e. pasta (no chicken nuggets). Conti breakfast for kids (toast/cereals/yoghurt) & 1x veg Adult.

Wizard and Jack are transported into delights when they lift off the silver lid of their hot containers to discover a bed of naked spaghetti… There’s a container of passata to pour over, and even Wiz manages to make his way around the bits of onion that float around, to almost inhale his meal. Eating for Wizard has always been a whole-body experience. Fortunately, although a dining table and chairs is about the only thing we don’t have in these rooms, the footstool that serves as the children’s table is upholstered in some special kind of fabric that scrubs clean after every meal. We got some extra towels in our linen issue and decide it might be best to use one to cover the footstool in future, all the same.

This evening we start a new Arcadia series, having finished the Troll Hunters. It’s called 3 Below and connects with the same set of characters. Followed by the obligatory Bey Blade episode, I read about Star Wars with Jack, and then we all go to sleep.     

QP#3 (Quarantine Post, Day 3)

The boys walk in together at 6:00am this morning, saying it is time to take off Jack’s cast. (He broke a finger a few weeks ago, slipping on a friend’s icy driveway.) Overseen by Wizard, Jack unwraps the bandage carefully, then gingerly pulls away the fiberglass splint. There’s no pain, but his hand looks raw and red. His fingers are locked into position. Gradually, he begins to bend and flex his fingers, making fists and then stretching out, as we had been advised by the plastic surgeon who saw him at Red Deer Regional Hospital. 

Later I give him a gentle hand massage to remove the last vestiges of cotton wool and adhesive. We have been supplied with small brown bottles of toiletries, and I have a different “lotion” from the hotel in Calgary. I ask Jack to select which one he likes the smell of. “Ugh,” he says to the first, (lavender and peppermint) and “oh this one’s OK!” to the second. 

The day is bright and sunny. Shortly after breakfast, the phone rings. Brown Owl picks up the receiver. I listen to the one-sided conversation, trying to guess who it might be. Housekeeping? Kitchen? Nursing staff? Nope. “It was the police!” she exclaims with bemusement. “Where do they think we are going? He asked me whether we are all ok.” We are. 

The medical staff also call us every day and run us through the same series of questions regarding our health – physical and mental. How many people are in your room? What is your relationship to Brown Owl? Do you have any Covid symptoms? I suppose for those unlucky enough to have contracted the virus, the answers might change, but for us, they are the same, every day. I have responded to people’s questions about our relationship in various ways, using various words, such as “wife”, “partner” and (notably) “husband”. The Red Deer taxi driver assumed we were sisters. I saw no point in enlightening him. 

One of my dearest friends, (let’s call her Chestnut), sends me a message through WhatsApp. My sim still isn’t working. She says she was very disturbed by my post the previous night and wonders why it was removed. I message back, explaining the inflammatory nature of the post and that Brown Owl had removed it, but that I am planning to revive my blog. I’m kind of relieved my words have been received by somebody who cares. 

Today is a day to reconnect with our people in the outside world. Brown Owl and I have a long conversation with the Kitty-cats 3, who had spent some time with and formed a relationship with Our Tormentor and their little Mouseling. These Kitty-cats 3 are empathic and generous. They confirm some of what we have gleaned about our Tormentor’s anxieties and loneliness. I begin to feel a shift in my outrage. A speck of sympathy begins to slide into view, intersecting with the hurt. It must have been awful to be in Adelaide, without family or friends, no support, and in lockdown. I am glad the Kitty-Cats 3 were able to offer them comfort and company. My parents were also welcoming and helpful to them. 

Wizard answers the phone and we all get to chat with my parents. They have dropped off another package (this one from Brown Owl's parents) and they have been working in our garden trying to ensure that something is still growing there when we get out of quarantine and home again. I’ve been colouring, but my fingers are also itching to get into our garden again!

Our days are spent doing the following activities, performed at least once, by at least some of the family members and in various orders: 

 - Breakfast 

 - Bey blading (Wizard’s passion) 

 - Yoga (today I join Brown Owl for the first time) 

 - Throwing around balls

 - Wrestling on the bed

 - Lunch

 - Watching youtube videos

 - Playing merge dragons (that’s just me) 

 - Reading

 - Cluedo

 - PE with Joe

 - Ultimate Beastmaster

 - Bey blading

 - Playing airports (the international flights are all coming into quarantine, according to Wizard)

 - Dinner 

 - Showers

 - Troll Hunter and Bey Blade episode

 - Reading

 - Sleep 

So, we are busy. We have other games and many puzzles to work on as well. 

The phone rings again in the early afternoon. Brown Owl answers. It’s Chestnut. I am so glad to hear from her. I lie down on Wizard’s bed (the closest one), and we talk. Our conversation is drawing to an end, when I thank her for messaging me this morning. We both know that with no privacy in our rooms, talking about this might be tricky, and I’d thought that was why she has avoided bringing up the subject. 

“Yes, well I read your story before I went to bed last night, and I must say it left me quite disturbed,” says Chestnut. 

As we discuss what has happened, I realise that Chestnut believes Our Tormentor is something I am struggling with internally. I begin to giggle at the idea that I’ve been so careful to veil and protect and excuse, that my readers are unable to understand what I’ve written about. 

I’m sure it is my attempt to use an inclusive pronoun (they) that has contributed to the confusion. 

Our Tormentor is a real person. We have never met face to face, and I hope we never do. I believe this person to be too obtuse to understand, let alone empathise with how their behaviour has impacted upon us, but there are other people they met and befriended in our absence, who may well leap upon an opportunity to scratch open and infect our wounds. So I’ve tried to be careful. 

The tight knot that sits between my diaphragm and my rib cage begins to dissolve into bubbles, and I feel suddenly happy. I keep giggling. It all seems so absurd. 

The burden of unbelief, the burden of believing I will not be understood, the burden of believing I am responsible, that I am incapable, that I am dirty, uncaring, destructive; the burden of believing there is no way other than to bear this burden, the burden of loving my family and trying to keep us all safe and well whilst battling Our Tormentor’s attacks has weighed heavily for months. 

“Just block her,” advises Chestnut. “She’s not your friend.” 

I can let that burden go.