Tiff spends a lot of time in hospital with her daughter Ivy who suffers from the rare auto-immune disease Pemphigus foliaceus.  Tiff knows exactly what it is like to spend exhausted nights sleeping on chairs, or on the floor, because the ward where Ivy stays doesn’t have enough parent beds to go around.

Being in hospital is hard.  Being in hospital with a sick child is harder.  I was lucky enough to have a bed when Caspar had his surgery and it was still probably one of the most draining experiences of my life.  That some people have no bed at all?  That is something we can fix.

Tiff took a brave step asking for help.  Asking for money from people is not an easy thing to do.  And the blogosphere answered the call,  getting to the halfway mark in less than 48 hours.  At the time of writing, Team Ivy has raised $3,810.00 toward the goal of $5,000 for 5 new parent beds and a refrigerator at John Hunter Children’s Hospital.

And last week Nuffnang Australia came on board,  challenging the online community to bring the total to $4,500 and then they will donate the last $500.

That means only $690 to go and I’m inviting you all to help if you can.  Donations are tax deductible and all money goes directly to John Hunter Children’s Hospital through Everday Hero.

Donate to Team Ivy at Everyday Hero

(And if you can’t help financially, never forget that other important way you can help sick children and their families: Become a blood donor!)

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• Tracie’s Who Votes for Skipping April? about her grief when her abuser died, which I’ve always found is something others find difficult to understand.
• Several highlighting that healing is about having choices, about the complex ways we untangle our personal agency from self-blame, and about digging around in the pain to find out “who the abuse has made you” .
• A Glass Half Shattered’s “Goodbye Autonomy” about taking her first meds and concluding that “I’d rather say goodbye autonomy than goodbye life. “
• Marj’s post (and the comments thread there) about wanting counselling, not just “therapy”.
• Ethereal Highway’s The Shame Manifesto

And there is much more than that worth reading.

I had also intended to write about my Anzac-Day-ambivalence-bordering-on-repugnance, but aside from my personal family history it has been covered elsewhere.  Bob Ellis’ Battles lost, minds won and Jeff Sparrow’s Evolving history over at ABC Unleashed are both worth reading, as is Airminded’s Australia forgets (although I’m not comfortable with some of the phrases used in his last paragraph).   And for a  response to those Tweets which were offensive even  to those of us who don’t like Anzac Day, I recommend reading An Open Letter to Catherine Deveny. (If you missed that controversy, there is a screengrab of the Tweets in question there.)

For a complicated discussion of cultural identity and racism, I am still mulling over all the issues raised by Koraly Dimitriadis’ Overland post Wog – why whisper it? and the ensuing comments thread.  And Stephanie Convery’s post Canine country… Well, it just needs to be read.

And then of course, there are my unfinished thoughts on the whole blog writing vs. print debate raised by the publication on Miscellaneous Voices.  I will get to that.

I did, however, start work on a new short story.

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I have wonderful conversations with Caspar, and we often have pretend conversations with each other when we play with his toys, but it is so interesting seeing how he interacts with her in a completely different way.

I love the complete suspension of disbelief, how his gaze never drifts from her while I speak.  He laughs when “she” claps her hands or scratches her head as though she is thinking.  He speaks to her like a best friend, so it is almost like a little voyeuristic insight into the workings of his mind.

He is still rather shy sometimes with the other children in our lives, and most we either don’t see often enough or they are not at similar enough stages of development for him to really have that comfortable camaraderie.    With new children he often stands waiting for the other child to talk to him and you can see him just… wanting. But not knowing yet how to start.

And the problem is especially obvious with familiar children who have different personalities, whose interactions are more highly dependent on activity, who like to constantly be doing  and for whom companionship is simply having someone else doing too. Caspar likes that as well of course, but he tires of it sooner and longs for more conversation.  There is a rich imagination in there, and a strong social desire, which hasn’t yet found its peers.

He will love kinder next year, and will love school. (Hell, he’s been asking when he can start school since he turned two.)  It still might take him some time to find his “friends” – it took me a long time – but for the moment, Silly Monkey and I will try to help fill in the gaps and I can enjoy seeing him express that side of himself which hasn’t yet found its space.

I feel a little bad sometimes that I can’t provide this for him now but even with lots of activities, a like-mind for him is not something I can pull out of thin air.

He’s such a joyous, happy, thought-filled boy.  I’m looking forward to him having someone to share that with.

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There. Phew. She’s gone. Now…

As for me, I am procrastinating. It is my most finely honed skill. Instead of writing a post in which I really have nothing worthwhile to say I should be…

• Cleaning
• Cooking
• Doing taxes (Yes, they ARE rather late)
• Sorting out photo folders
• Practicing piano
• Practicing guitar
• Finishing my knitting
• Exercising
• Returning emails
• Organising garage sale stuff
• Building a compost bin
• Reading
• Writing (The other kind)
• Making some sort of list so I don’t forget all the things I’m forgetting here
• Finding out where the fuck “gets on my goat” came from…

Instead, I am doing this. Just sitting here, cluttering up your feedreaders to assist you in honing your own precious procrastination skills.

It is a vicious cycle.

In other news, tomorrow is Caspar’s second sports class.  After asking me all week if he can go again “right now”, he decided today that he does not like sport at all.  There were tears involved.  But I’m placing bets that he’ll run in there tomorrow just as enthusiastically as he did last time.

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Lately, however, something seems to be going wrong.  For some reason, my Mastercard transactions have not been going through and I’ve been left at the counter with a queue of people waiting patiently (or not) behind me and then I end up having to push the “Savings” button instead of “Credit” and there goes that litre of milk I might have needed next week, or Caspar’s Freddo Frog.

Today, in a random tweet from S.H. Convery of Ginger and Honey I found out what has been going wrong.  She got an answer from her bank, and I checked it out on the web.

Woolworths dumps Visa, MasterCard debit

Someone in the comments thread of that article thought it was an April Fool’s joke, but no.  Liz Tay confirmed the story with both Woolworths and Visa.  Woolworths is in the process of disabling the “Credit” option for Debit CCs across all their stores “including Big W, BWS, Dan Murphy’s, Dick Smith, Tandy, Thomas Dux and ALH, as well as Woolworths and Safeway supermarkets, liquor stores and petrol outlets.”  And they are expecting savings “in the millions”.

Woolworths says “We can keep our costs low enabling us to deliver increased value to our customers.”

Visa’s ANZ general manager, Chris Clark, says, “there’s very little cost differential” (between debit CCs and EFTPOS) and that the move is “anti-consumer choice”.

Well, sure.  It is.  And I don’t know about you but I always assume, based on previous experience, that when corporate spokespeople says “customers” in this kind of context what they really mean is “shareholders”. But consumer choice, and corporate profit-seeking really aren’t my biggest issue here.

In all their stores they display Visa and Mastercard acceptance marks.  This is not as simple as just showing a logo. Mastercard has Acceptance Mark Specifications and states, “Acceptance Marks and Brand Marks are not interchangeable. Each has a distinct purpose.”  That purpose is to notify customers that they are able to pay with their Mastercard and while there are various designs for various products, there is absolutely no brand acceptance mark I could find which makes a distinction between the debit/credit product.  I’m going to assume Visa uses the same practice.

I’m not a lawyer, and this is only my opinion, but doesn’t this qualifies as Misleading & deceptive conduct under the Trade Practices Act?

There is a very broad provision in the Trade Practices Act that prohibits conduct by a corporation that is misleading or deceptive, or would be likely to mislead or deceive you.

It makes no difference whether the business intended to mislead or deceive you—it is how the conduct of the business affected your thoughts and beliefs that matters.
_{~ Australian Competition and Consumer Commission}

I’ve already provided the example:  I walk into a store which displays a sign meaning it accepts my chosen form of payment.  That is the bait.  Then I shop and I take my goods to the counter to pay for them.  Once there, I am forced to pay by another method which costs me additional money.

Do I have the choice to just leave the store without purchasing the goods? Sure.  But as anyone knows (and especially a mother who has on occasion had to pay for food with 5 cent pieces) there is actually a lot of pressure in checkout queues to make your purchase efficiently and it is extremely uncomfortable  to even make repeat swipes, let alone just walk out knowing everyone thinks you can’t afford to pay.  So Debit MC/Visa card users are baited and Woolworths game seems to be  Hook, Line and Sucker.

Moreover, at no store where I have had this happen has the staff member at the counter informed me what the problem was.  They just let me repeat the Mastercard transaction until I give up.  Whether that is because they are poorly informed or have been instructed to not mention it is anyone’s guess, but either way… Surely that qualifies as deceptive conduct?

I should also note that I have this experience recently at stores which are not part of  the Woolworths Limited as well. I will not mention them by name here as I have not yet had confirmation but this looks like it will be an escalating problem.  As Chris Clark stated, “”It puts into question the competitive landscape for the entire payments industry when a major dominant retailer can decide not to accept a payment solution that is strongly supported by the public.”

We all dislike having mega-corporations pass their operating costs on to us to increase their profit margin.  We all dislike having our consumer choices limited.  And we really really dislike being misled.

So I’m asking you guys to please pass the word around – blog, tweet, whatever – so that Woolworths, and anyone else following suit, can’t just make these changes under the radar.

I’m asking Visa and Mastercard… Is it really okay for businesses to display your Acceptance Marks when they only accept the cards of some of your customers?

And I’m asking Woolworths Limited to tell the truth.  Just be honest. Put up huge signs stating you no longer accept our money our way.  Announce it regularly over the your PA systems in store.  Inform your staff that they must inform your customers at point of purchase.  Whether my understanding of the Trade Practices Act is right or wrong, doing anything less than that… Well, it doesn’t even come close to meeting community standards of integrity.

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I wrote Pt.1 in the second person.  I wrote it as addressing other survivors, hoping it might be helpful but aware, too, of how much that distances myself from them.  And I worry about that.

Of course, it is I.  It is how I feel.  It is my end.  Other survivors might have a different experience, or they might use different language.  Or they might have consequences, both physical and mental, that cannot so easily be separated from the past.  Everyone’s path through this is uniquely their own. I can’t really speak for them and speaking to them sets me apart.

I sometimes feel like an imposter here in this group of survivors, because I had my end. It is a feeling very like those I had when I first started on my own journey actually; self-doubt and minimisation and thinking I didn’t have a right to call myself victim.  And it is actually very hard to see so many people around me in pain when… I’m okay.

That isn’t a complaint. I suppose it is like survivor guilt, the kind the living sometimes feel when someone has died.  I just try to take it as a reminder of what life used to feel like and as a way to maintain my empathy.  I know enough not to accept those feelings at face value or let them weigh me down with responsibilities that aren’t mine, but I also know enough to realise that sometimes being okay can seem like a condemnation to those who haven’t reached the end yet.  I remember using others to beat myself down that way.  When I was trapped in the worst of it.

So… I worry.

But I keep going because while my own need to talk is gone, somewhere – everywhere – there is another small child being damaged right now and talking is all that I can do about that. Putting my hand up and saying -I am a statistic, is all that I can do about that.   And somewhere – everywhere – there is yet another person just stepping into their past and thinking that there is no way out of it.  So saying, -Yes, there is an end… That seems important.

And somewhere – everywhere – there are people who don’t realise, or don’t want to realise, how close to home child abuse is, how very commonplace it is, and that is what I consider one of the biggest hurdles to changing the realities of far too many children in our society.  So… Here I am, Exhibit A, putting my hand up.

But really, it is so much easier not to.

Before the end, and after all those feelings of self-doubt had been silenced, when I was made of nothing but pain and anger, all I did was talk.  And talk and talk and talk.  I let myself be that victim and I used all the sympathy and support I could find around me, sometimes to the point of exhausting it.  And sometimes I talked when it wasn’t “socially appropriate” at all because coming out and saying it made it real and I was screaming to be heard.

And that is good.  And that was necessary.  But there was a cost involved as well.

When you work so hard to define yourself as victim there is no guarantee that those whom you have given that identity to will be able to see beyond it when you don’t need it any more. Those closest to you had to learn to cope with your “crazy” by reminding themselves that your moods, behaviours, reactions etc were related to the circumstances of your past rather than taking them personally and that is difficult to unlearn.  When you are better and you have a genuine issue that relates to their behaviour, well, your credibility is damaged.  The habit of distancing themselves and deflecting, which was once necessary for their survival, becomes a real problem.

For me, that meant some relationships were damaged beyond repair.  Other relationships, I didn’t even bother to stick around for because I just couldn’t stomach the identity I saw reflected.  I wasn’t “her” any more.

And for new relationships? There was a desire to be understood, a desire for the history of my pain to be real to them because it was so central to who I became but at the same time I just wanted to be that person, without the baggage.  It is a difficult balance to find; exposing large vulnerabilities and having someone else recognise only strength.

It is much easier just to leave the past behind.

And the same problem exists in society at large. For those who have managed to avoid being touched personally by the issue, all they have to measure their understanding against is what the media presents to them, so when you speak up you once again become defined as victim.  They have their righteous indignation about it – because everyone is disgusted by child abuse – but you, as the “victim”, are simply an object of voyeuristic curiosity.  You are the car accident they slow down to look at.

No.  Of course not everyone is like that but there are enough who are to make continuing to speak when you no longer have a personal need to come with a price.  I don’t mean this as a criticism of people at all.  And I don’t want it to seem negative. For the most part, I think it is self-defense at the societal level:  Child abuse is an ugliness people don’t want to let into their lives.  However, when you’ve worked so hard to move from victim to survivor to person, being seen as an object, a statistic, rather than a very self-aware individual with the authority to speak is a bitter pill to swallow.

As someone whose journey ended many, many years ago, this remains a bitter pill to swallow.  For long periods I have chosen to leave it alone, chosen to just have what I earned.  And now, I just try to accept what it costs. I don’t like it.  I don’t know that I can change it.

I guess my point is this… After the war is over, it sometimes still feels harder to remember than to forget. But putting my hand up remains all I can do.

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The journey never ends, of course, because life continues to happen and there will always be new obstacles or new pains or new struggles to deal with:  Those things are a part of everyone’s lives.  I think the end is perhaps defined by those moments when you recognise that instead of each new problem sending you rushing back into the often self-destructive defenses of your past, you have actually drawn on the resources that you learned when you were trapped there.

Doesn’t that sound quite blissful? Always finding some strength with which to combat any adversity that comes your way?  What I just said is true.

But isn’t really like that.

Because the other moments which perhaps define the end are when you fuck everything up monumentally, and don’t handle anything at all. And then you recognise that these fuck-ups are completely your own; they aren’t regressions into self-defense, they aren’t abreactions, and even if they are inappropriate reactions to whatever the circumstances are, wherever they came from in your psyche it wasn’t that trauma.

The end is when the trauma has lost its hold over you, when you can think about it without crying, screaming, freezing, shaking, cutting, starving, or whatever else it is that you do to try and keep control. The end is when you can go days, or weeks or months or even years without thinking about it at all, not because you are avoiding it, not because you have managed to handcuff it to a chair in the back of your mind, but because you are busy living your life. Whether that life is going wonderfully or that life is difficult, that life is all yours and, knowing what you had to go through to get it.. That is your talisman.

And again I say… Doesn’t that sound blissful?

But it isn’t really like that.

That talisman, that pride, is not a constant light, always there for you in dark hours.  Well, it is, but sometimes you’ll argue with it and say it is a lie; you’ll tell yourself you aren’t strong, or that it isn’t your responsibility, or that you’ve wasted what you fought for.  You might even tell yourself that you aren’t really better, that you haven’t dealt with your history at all.  That you were just deluded.  Because sometimes you need to be weak, or angry, or sad and you won’t always want the burden a-life-completely-your-own is. Because everybody feels like that sometimes, not just survivors.  We are human, and messy, and we need rest.

Still, it is always there waiting when you are ready to take up arms again, and even when that doesn’t feel true you can hold onto it doggedly, stubbornly, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, with what will feel like blind faith but isn’t. Because you did actually do that. You did actually take back your life.

And even if you aren’t t the finish line yet, you are doing it right now. Every single inch that you have clawed your way through, screaming and bleeding, every single feeling of hopelessness, every single day that you can’t even imagine there will be an end… That is you doing it.  Know that, and let that be your talisman.

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I couldn’t remember what I had to say so urgently before and it seemed as though no new thoughts were pressing me to write them. But there is a germ here now; yeasty, brewing.  It is listening to music while spinning its gossamer strands for me to gather.  And all these words before those words are just a humming until the real song comes.

While I sit here waiting – poised and alert, catching at the scent of both danger and safety – while this story unfolds itself,  there is other writing that needs to be done.  One with a deadline, and another to complete earlier thoughts.

Instead of starting on those, I am sitting here, mixing metaphors and not worrying about it.   And playing the same song on YouTube over and over which relates to yet another piece of writing that has been brewing but which I haven’t yet found time for.

In so many discussion and debates about issues that I’ve had recently, I keep coming back to the idea that “art is the lie that shows us the truth”.  (A line which strangely found its way to me again today through a twitter link from OverlandJournal to an article on The Faster Times about an editorial by David Simon in the Times-Picayune in which he quotes Picasso.)

I keep coming back to the idea, also, that living is art.  And the way those two disparate thoughts conflict with and yet elucidate the other is a philosophical wonderland.  Even more so when we include the beauty of reason.

All these silvery trails crossing and recrossing.  It isn’t quite time to make concrete their nebulous connections with these things working in my mind.

-It’s all connected, I say.
-What?
-Never mind.  I’m just drunk on cold air and 3am.

Very little of this post makes sense, really.  It is just random words strung together with rhythmic movements while time passes quietly.  What is written is inconsequential, or perhaps… just gigantically and complacently inadequate.

It isn’t 3am but 3am is where I am.

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But I’m at peace with that.

I found an old song I barely remember writing. It seems complete in its simplicity.

no man
no man
no man is an island

i am
woman
i drown like an island

here is
my sand
beach yourself on my shoreline

because i
will stand
though the water’s are rising

i’ll hold
your hand
your hand
when the tide becomes lightning

and then
i’ll dance
i’ll dance
ill dance
and it won’t be so frightening

because i’m
woman
and i drown like an island

and no man
no man
no man
is an island

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I miss the stillness found there while surrounded by the electricity of people moving.

I miss being present outside of time.

I miss the vortex, the hunger, the sinuous bodies and all their abandon.

No sensation here. All is quiet and dim.

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So… Just your general parent-of-a-small-child talking to a parent-of-small-children conversation.

Except for the, “I’ll pay for that. Sport is my job,” with a shrug of the shoulder because it’s NO BIG DEAL. (Which made me cry a little bit because when you’re a single mother everything is your job and it gets a bit exhausting.)

Anyway, the point of this story is not really about how great it is to have very tall, baby-boy relatives with the highly under-rated sense of masculine, familial duty. The point is that Caspar had his first sports class today.

The question in my mind was… Which Caspar will he be when we get there? If it was the painfully shy one, then it might not be fun the first few times.

I took a wrong turn and we were 5 minutes late, everyone already lined up and ready to go. I held open the nets for us to squeeze through and join them… And he just ran into the thick of it.

He did try to follow the instructions as they ran, or stomped, or jumped from one side of the nets to the other to warm up, but he was just so excited (and giggling constantly) that co-ordination or anything that required slowing down was not on the cards. And when they formed a circle to do some bending and stretching, he, apparently, belonged in the centre of it showing off his crazy wiggles and fake-falldowns.

Attention-seeking Caspar had been another on my list of possibles. I think it is something that might be an issue in the first years of school. The problem is though, he is so delightful he’ll probably get away with it. (Which reminds me of my Grade 3 teacher, Sister Ursula, handing my empty workbook to my mother at the end of the year and saying, “I made sure she learned everything, but she is just so full of joy that I didn’t want to restrain her.”)

After that, he did some soccer exercises; slightly calmer, slightly better at following the instructions, only needing a gentle reminder to go to the back of the line after he kicking his goal instead of the front of it. And then it was time to cool down, which is when possible Caspar #3 showed up.

Playing musical hula hoops, jumping into hoops when the music stopped and having to share hoops as more were taken away, he always found his way into the teacher’s hoop. Sitting down in a circle to sing the goodbye song, he completely ignored the huge gap and squeezed himself right in next to her, almost landing on her lap and staring up at her with that flirty little sparkle in his eyes.

My charming little suck-up.

But the short story is… The first day was wonderful. Caspar wishes he didn’t have to wait a week for the next class. I think it will be very useful. And I love my unnamed relative.

(If you are wondering… The classes are run by Ready Steady Go, which operates throughout Australia, and I highly recommend them to anyone who has a pre-school age child!)

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But buy it now anyway..

Caspar’s launch review? “Grown-ups are too noisy.”

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So I’ll just wander through pieces here, touching words.

A lot of reading has been done, online and off, and I’m seeing so much tightly controlled beauty, where the control is invisible so that only the beauty is left. It is uplifting and humbling writing, with a rich, sparse poignancy.

I have always had the feeling that my writing was “immature” but I have always “known” that I was a writer, that that gift was somehow mine.  Perhaps the  discipline required to publish, or of even trying to publish, is what is missing .

But something in me still loves strong wind on the mountaintop, the uncontrolled wilds of words; their tangled hair. Something still says more is more, even while bathing in the luminance of not-one-unecessary-word.  Even while envying that stunning, profound writing, where things are pared down to essence, where exposure is the slow stripping that takes place in the process, not the text.

But I do not think I am that writer.  I am that writer dancing topless on a bar.  That vulgar, irrational, angry, joyous, defiant writer who still, at 37, writes words with no control and finds beauty and coherence in their incoherence. And I am still that reader who is happy to be tumbled about in waves and and then lie battered on the shore, spattered with sand and salt and words, vibrating somehow with the pattern that wasn’t written.

And I wonder, today, if Violette LeDuc would ever have been published.  And I wonder, re-reading Camus’ Letters to a German Friend last night, what an editor would say to him now. As a writer praised for that discipline to strip away everything but what is essential, those essays now seem overwritten, hyperbolic.  They are impassioned, anachronistic. They are difficult to critique, in the same way blogging is. They must be read within their historical context and can only be uncomfortably defined as “literature”.

Except… I am not uncomfortable.

I think perhaps there is room for the immaturity of unreasoned pains and passions in some future literary canon.  That perhaps discipline and craft are not always central to a writer’s worth.  That the mess of what is, while we are within it, can be as permanently moving  as a slow unravelling.

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I absolutely love the theme for this month which is Along the Path of Healing…

I’ve noticed that through my progress in recovery from child abuse, I’ve tended to align myself with others that are similarly situated along the path of the healing process. This is not a bad thing, but sometimes it helps to read posts from others that are at different stages than you. Whether it reminds you how far you’ve come or gives you hope to continue plugging along, reading about others’ healing journeys can be inspirational. So, this month, write about your own healing process. If you are toward the “end” (if there is such a thing), what would you say to those just starting out? If you are at the beginning, where do you want to be in 5 years? What does “healed” look like to you?

As always, the post you submit doesn’t need to follow the theme, doesn’t need to have been written especially for the carnival or even need to have been written this month.  And you don’t have to be a survivor to submit: All voices are welcome.

You can submit any post that relates to Child Abuse. On the submission page you will be asked to pick a category of – Advocacy & Awareness; Aftermath; Healing & Therapy; In the News; Poetry; or Survivor Stories. Pick onethat fits best but do not be overly concerned about it. There is no “right” answer. I’ll reorganize so that it makes sense.

Submissions are due by April 21st.

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