Right On Time

Today I sent Mum a bunch of pink peonies from Tynte Flowers. She has been feeling a bit down in the dumps lately, so I wanted to do something to cheer her up.

The flowers are for Mum, but I love having them in the house. If I had a limitless budget, I would order a fresh bunch of flowers every week. To me, it makes such a difference to have them around.

Actually, to be honest, every time I send a bunch of flowers it makes me wonder if I should do the Floristry course at TAFE SA. I've been wrestling with the idea of Fine Arts or Journalism as a bachelor’s degree, and if I did the Journalism degree, I could study Floristry as well since the degree is online. If I did that, I could work as a florist for a couple of years, which would be an absolute dream of mine — but ultimately, for work, I want something flexible so I can travel without having to wait for annual leave.

It must sound like I have no control over my impulses and a real inability to rein in my rogue thoughts about different vocations and careers. I think the ultimate goal is to be a writer, but I also have Fine Arts tendencies. Sometimes I think I should just stop studying — or even stop intending to study — and give everything I've got to that one vocation instead of stuffing around. 

This morning I had a meeting with my supervisor through the human rights organisation I volunteer with. My supervisor is the person I previously referred to as “she,” but they actually use “they/them” pronouns. They don’t know that I once referred to them as “she,” but it was something that stayed in the back of my mind throughout the entire meeting. When I was referring to other people, I found myself using “they” instead of “he” or “she,” just as the girls from uni had advised me to.

Something else has been brought to my attention about how people like to be addressed. I've talked before about "Jimmy," the former owner of my local post office, whom my mother and I have a good relationship with. Well, he still works at the post office for the new owner.

I was talking to the new owner and asked when Jimmy was working next. He said there was no Jimmy who worked there. And I said, "Come on, you know Jimmy?" He just looked at me and said, "You mean Jing."

My heart sunk a little, and I realised that Mum and I have been calling him Jimmy for all these years — and his name is Jing. I'm going to see him tomorrow morning when I go to pick up some stamps, and I'm going to ask him outright.

In so many ways, I hate it when people westernise Eastern names just because it makes them easier to pronounce. I was thinking surely Mum and I wouldn’t have just come up with “Jimmy” out of nowhere, so I’m hoping he told us to call him that. But if he didn’t, I will do nothing more than hang my head in shame.

The other night I had the most depressing conversation with my brother. He called me early in the morning our time, and we were just having a general chit chat when, out of nowhere, he said: “I’ve been meaning to ask you, what will you do when Mum dies?”

Now, to put things in perspective, my mother is seventy-eight, turning seventy-nine next month. She’s in good health. She has this “dementia” suggestion hanging over her head from my brother, but that’s just a suggestion, and it doesn’t look like she’s going anywhere anytime soon. So I didn’t know why he was asking me that. I tried to shrug it off a bit, but then he pushed me and made me talk about it.

To my surprise, my brother said I could live in this house until I sorted myself out. He told me that if I stayed longer than a year, I would have to start contributing, which really made my jaw drop, because he was suggesting he would pay my rent for up to a year. That’s very generous, and it made me feel a bit more secure than I usually do. He also told me that when Mum dies, he’ll jump on a plane and come back to Adelaide to help sort everything out.

He talked about her will, saying he thinks she should leave everything to me, which I found hard to believe — but there’s not really anything to leave. I couldn’t understand why Eric had raised this or why he was thinking about it. He was being generous, but then he asked how I would manage in general. I said of course I’d be devastated, because my mother and I are very close, but I also said I’d be in real trouble because I’d be completely alone. I don’t have a lot of friends, and no other family apart from Mum and Eric — and Eric lives in London, with no plans to come home any time soon.

Something else Eric said was that Mum and I could stay in this house for at least another year, but we might have to find somewhere else in 2027, depending on his financial situation. I think that idea scared me even more than Mum dying. If Mum and I have to move from here, we’ll have a real problem. I don’t have an income; Mum has her superannuation, but I don’t know how she’d go getting a lease. We also have two cats and so much stuff that we’re almost running out of storage in this relatively big house.

Still, I’m not going to think about that for now. A year is a long time, and a lot can happen in that time — I may have a job by the time we need to move. This conversation with Eric was incredibly depressing. I know he’s big on facing realities I sometimes fail to face, but I think it was unnecessary to talk about Mum’s non-impending death. In the unlikely event that Mum passes away in the near future, I’ll be a mess. But I don’t think engaging in a useless conversation about something with no credible evidence of happening soon is productive — or respectful — in any way.

This morbid conversation led me to really start thinking about the deaths of my father and Nanny. When both of those deaths happened, I reacted very differently.

With Dad, he had dementia for a long time — in total, around eight years. I lived closely with him while he was at home; I looked after him, cared for him, and watched his mental capacity deteriorate over a sustained period. When he moved into a residential care facility, he lost his faculties completely, and I would sometimes go there and just stare at him while he was talking because I simply couldn’t believe it was really him.

When he died, I was sad, but I didn’t really cry. I didn’t go to his funeral because I didn’t think he would have wanted me there, and I felt it would have been embarrassing to him to have a daughter with such a flaw present. So I didn’t go. I don’t regret not going; I stand by that decision because I knew my dad, and I knew what he thought about me. It was best to steer clear of the type of people attending his funeral.

When he died, I never really thought about before he got dementia — about the relationship we had before that. He was always very harsh with me, and I don’t think he liked me much apart from one thing: he always told me I should be a writer. In fact, just before he really slipped into the darkness of dementia, he read a piece I’d written for a writers’ group I used to attend. He looked at me and said I was a very good writer and that I should absolutely be a writer. Praise like that from him was unusual and unexpected. I didn’t take his advice then, but now I think maybe I should have.

Sometimes when I was in the kitchen making toast or some sort of food, he’d come up behind me and tap me on the shoulder or make a loud noise to scare me. I remember once, I was driving along North Terrace one morning, and the police pulled me over because I hadn’t paid my registration. I didn't realise and it was an honest mistake, but it really upset me. The police let me drive home, and when I got there, I was crying. Dad asked me what was wrong, and when I told him, he insisted on paying for my registration. He wasn’t comforting or gentle while I was crying — he just gave me the money and made sure I was okay.

I remember one day I got home and saw Dad reading a book. I looked at the front cover and it said Your Neighbour Is a Jew. He was interested in everything. He was a good man.

I miss him from before the dementia. I miss him during the dementia too, because I really did see a softer side to him in that period. But when he was completely free of body and mind, he was fierce, passionate, principled, harsh, and controlling — but good. Very good.

Nanny was also a force of nature. She lived a tough life, and she would have had it very rough with her husband, who was not a good man. She was racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, and extremely judgemental — but she was also the nicest person you would ever meet. I still can’t quite square up with the idea that she was a paid employee of our family. There would have been no Nanny if there hadn’t been an exchange of services and money, but I really loved her.

I remember when I was a young kid, I had a fight with my mother and told her I wanted to go and live with Nanny. I think that must have hurt Mum deeply. Then, when I was sixteen, I actually did go and live with Nanny for a while, and I remember Mum coming over to her place and reading out a letter she and Dad had written to me. I eventually moved back home.

Nanny’s house was like my second home. It’s so strange that I can’t go there anymore, and a million times stranger that she’s not around. I don’t compare the deaths of Dad and Nanny, but I felt Nanny’s a lot more deeply — and that’s because I had years to say goodbye to Dad, while Nanny’s death happened so quickly.

I’m really only just coming to terms with Dad and Nanny’s deaths now. I miss them both terribly. It’s strange how life goes on for those of us left behind, but it’s just not the same. In some ways, my delayed grief is unbearable. So I’ve decided to go and see a medium to see if I can communicate with Dad and Nanny. I’m not going to tell Mum or Eric about it, because I don’t want them to think I’m being disrespectful — or that I’ve completely lost my marbles — but I do believe that some people are tuned into the world in ways others aren’t. Maybe they can help me explore something I’m not entirely sure about, but that I’m open to.

On more uplifting news, I’ve scheduled some personal training sessions next week at the gym. They’re booked for around 5–5:30 each morning, and I’m going to go four times a week. I told the trainer that I don’t want to do cardio — I want to spend each session with her focusing on strength training. I can do cardio on my own, but with the trainer, I really want to focus on building muscle.

I’m going through a cocoon phase — or cocooning, as I like to call it. I’m simply going to the gym, studying and doing my volunteer work. But I’m not going to start anything new. I’m not going to meet new people, join new groups, or engage in anything I don’t have to until I lose some weight.

I’m really overweight now — I’m fat because of my flaw. I won’t go into the specifics of how they’re related, but ever since I gained the weight, I haven’t been able to shift it. Now my sole goal is losing weight. I’m giving myself until my birthday next year — 16 August 2026 — to re-enter the world looking better, feeling better, and being able to engage with the world better.

I don’t want the pressure of new situations where I feel uncomfortable or like I have to pretend to be someone I’m not. So now that I’m going to truly cocoon myself and spend all my money on a personal trainer, I feel free. I feel that if I trust the process, I’ll be where I want to be by my birthday.

I just enrolled in two online courses through edX. edX is this amazing platform with courses from universities and institutions around the world on all sorts of topics. You can audit the courses for free, or pay to get a verified certificate.

I enrolled in Human Rights, Human Wrongs: Challenging Poverty, Vulnerability and Social Exclusion, which runs for eleven weeks, and Understanding Poverty and Inequality, which goes for six weeks. Both courses are through edX but are run by the SDG Academy — the education and training arm of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), which supports the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

I think edX is such a wonderful platform for learning, and I’m so excited about doing these two courses, for which I’ve paid to earn a verified certificate. But I find myself at a loss when it comes to deciding what to do about formal qualifications. Should I be a writer? Should I be an artist? Or should I be a florist? Or maybe I should just take another year off and set myself a specific goal — like reading 300 books and blogging about it. I just don’t know.

It’s like the police check thing — it’s about my identity, and I can’t quite place what that is or means just yet. But I don’t think I’m late. I think it will come to me right on time.