A Sevenling for the Inevitability of Death (Poem)

Three things breathe the human pleasures of life:
The warm, damp weight of a sleeping infant, moulded to the shoulder;
The motorised hum of a lap-purring cat; the heart-clenching scent of jasmine, wild and insistent.

Three things cast the bones for the future:
A sky full of ice-bright infinite stars; a cough that will not leave;
The soft intonation of Genesis spoken aloud in a dim room.

For we are dust, oh yes.

- Kathy, 27/3/16

Term One: Done

So, term one 2016 concluded on Thursday afternoon. For us, picking my eldest up from school following her year 7 camp (at 3:15) was the transitional moment, after which we pottered home to enter an intensive 36-hour hibernation, which has involved reading, watching TV, playing games (both computer and card / board games) and lying around. The kids and I have yet to leave our property since unlocking the door at 3:30pm Thursday, and the two elder kids are yet to leave the *house*. (The youngest did play in the yard for a while yesterday, as my husband and I did some laundry-hanging and gardening).

It was a massive, massive term. My eldest daughter started high school, with all that entailed in terms of adjustment to routine, new commitments (including not insubstantial financial commitments), and letting go. My secondborn found her groove in Grade 6, running a Lost Dogs' Home fundraiser and displaying substantial leadership skills, and also suffered from an ongoing digestive complaint that has finally resolved in us moving her to a gluten-free diet (which does seem to be working). My little one had a good entry to Grade 2, although was upset and shaken by one of her closest friends leaving the school to move to Indonesia with her family.

We had birthdays (both in our family and multiple friends' celebrations), chess, netball, swimming, and music. My husband took up bike riding to add to his distance walking. Husband and I had a wedding anniversary day in the city.

For me, this term has been by far my busiest stretch with my freelance work since I returned to freelancing last June. In the 8.5 weeks it encompassed, I have billed more time than in the 4.5 preceding months, which is great financially, but has not been cost-free in health and family terms. I now have four projects live, with a fifth pending, although the longest-term of these projects (which commenced last November) is gearing down as it approaches its final stage. I will be just as busy for the first half of term two, with Projects A and B continuing until the end of May, and Project D (a smaller editing job) taking place entirely in April. Project C will still be rolling on after May until mid-July, and my pending project may kick in anytime from early May onwards, but I am still hopeful that life will be a little less frantic in work terms after A and B are signed off and handed over, and little D is done.

I have also been fitting in quite a bit of writing, mostly poetry, and am excited to be part of a planned anthology of poetry from my Month of Poetry writing group. It's a long road ahead to publication (we're hoping for January 2017), but we have a tentative title: Limina. I am not-so-secretly tickled at the idea of having some of my poems published.

My health has been reasonable, but with some hiccups. I have had some crashing fatigue issues again and some internal concerns, which have led to my specialist starting me on a test dose of thyroxine (damn you, Hashimoto's Disease!) and scheduling me for an exploratory & maintenance surgical procedure in April. I am not overly thrilled to be needing an operation, but it is minor, and hopefully it will resolve some of the persistent niggling issues that drag me down. (Of course, right now I have a stinking cold, which jaundices me on the whole subject of health and wellbeing, but infection with the common cold is hardly a sign of the coming Apocalypse, even for my over-heated imagination!)

We also have been chipping away at home maintenance tasks - the biggest of these being the replacement of our manky old side fence with a new super-high colourbond structure that we have dubbed the Great Wall of Suburbia. (It's over 8ft high). The neighbours wanted the extra height and I was happy to go along, as I felt like it would be a good thing to help block some of the noise from their occasional night-time shenanigans, and so far so good on that front. The back fence is next in the crosshairs, but will probably not be done until spring due to financial factors for the back neighbours (and I don't want to push, I know how tough it can be).

The kids and husband are on holidays now until term two commences on 11 April. I had hoped to be too, but in fact I have a couple of things I need to finish for various projects before I can down tools. Yesterday I did not touch any work, but I will try to get it squared away by Monday night so I can enjoy a good break with my family. On Tuesday night I am taking my youngest to stay at a fancy hotel in the city and then on Wednesday we are going to see Matilda, which we are both looking forward to immensely, and I definitely want to have purged work from my headspace by then.

Ambitions for term two? I think I'll settle for holding the line - keeping everyone reasonably healthy and functional, discharging all our obligations as well as we can, and keeping on writing. I am hoping that my surgery goes smoothly and that the thyroxine helps stabilise my energy levels. I want to make sure I carve out time for family things, regardless of how busy I am with work. And I hope to arrive at the winter school holidays in a good state to enjoy the next term break.

Sunday Morning (Poem)

Sunday morning, cloudy:
the chatter of the television a background hum
tea cooling slowly on the bedside table.

Outside, the neighbour's cat mews plaintively
further away, the local sad hound howls despair
crying abandonment to the autumn sky.

Inside, the body stutters and falters
head and nerves on fire, gut uneasy
rising from the bed like climbing a precipice.

One day soon it will all be over:
this little cocoon with its grey mournful animals
this daily awakening to pain.

One day:
the suburbs will be a faint, puzzling memory
and the spirit, released, will flee this flesh
flee into the pearly sky or the good black earth
leaving sadness behind, and fear, and pain,
whether to paradise or oblivion, it doesn't matter

Today, though, it is time to sip tea
move as part of the world, and be present,
stroke the importunate tabby cat behind the ears

Sunday morning,  cloudy
but promising sun later; here
in this ordinary sanctuary.

- Kathy, 20/3/16

A day in the life of a freelancer

I read with some amusement the Guardian's Secret Office Worker column when it gets published. I rather enjoyed this darkly funny portrait by five office workers - a Project Manager, a charity worker, a PR writer, a magazine editor, and a tech director - of their days at work.

It's been quite a while since I did A Day in the Life, so I thought, now that I am established back in my contracting / freelancing life, it would be a good time to have a look at it. Here is my day yesterday, at a time when I have three projects for three different clients (A, B and C) in progress.

7am       Get up, get children up.
              Do the whole breakfast / school lunch / finding clothing / hair & tooth brushing dance.

8am       Husband and eldest leave house for school and work. Time to chivvy younger two along.

8:35am  Take youngest to primary school. Middle child rides her bike and meets us there.

8:45am  Home. Kettle on, set load of washing going while computer boots.

9am       Drink morning cuppa while reading & responding to work email / flicking over online news.

9:30am   Commence work on project plan for Project B. Spend time gathering data and formulating
               the always-tricky purpose statements.

11:30am  Phone meeting with Client B to discuss scope questions with their project.

12pm       Lunch break - hang wet washing, do dishes, and eat.

12:30pm  Back to the project plan - two more sections completed and two follow-up emails sent.

2pm         New content to review arrives for Project A. Read through it and formulate / send email
                questions for clarification on several points.

3pm         Go to collect younger children from school. Once home, facilitate snacking needs.

4pm          Off to the doctors with all three kids (two of whom need medical attention).

5pm          Home from doctors. Swing directly into making dinner.

6pm          Dinner done. Kids read / watch TV while I spend an hour on reviewing the first third of
                 the material for Project A.

7pm          Swing into showering / bedtime stories / bedtime routines.
                 While this is occurring, wash dishes.

8:30pm     Another hour on the Project A document review.

9:30pm     Computer off; to bed to read and fall asleep.

My days, of which this is fairly typical, tend to be an ebb and flow of work and family duties. I usually do between 6 and 9 hours work on any given day (yesterday it was 7 hours, which is well within my norm), but a relatively small percentage of this is meetings, which is very good, and I rarely do paid work between school pick-up and dinner, which is taken up with family matters.

I don't work all my hours within the standard work day, and I don't work extreme chunks of time - a two-hour block is usually the maximum I'll do without interspersion of some other activity, which suits me (I find I am really losing focus by the 2-hour mark anyway).

Some days are more crowded than others, but what I tend not to have is much truly "dead" time - if I have hit a wall with one project or client, I switch over to another or to a household or writing activity, because there is no value in simply warming a seat while I wait for things to ungum or answers to arrive.

Freelancing from my home suits me much better than being in an office. I know now that it does. Assuming I can keep getting a reasonable flow of work, I think this is what I'll be doing for the medium- to long-term.

Do kids need their own rooms?

We are a family with three children (all daughters) aged 12.5, almost 11, and 7. We live in a three-bedroom house that in all other respects suits us extremely well ... but it does mean that two children have to share one of the relatively small bedrooms at all times.

When they were younger, this was not only not a problem, it was actively useful, as the elder two (who are close in age) shared interests, hobbies, and, from when they were both school-aged, a bedtime. We managed the space issue by installing two loft beds in the shared room, with a desk under the bed and cupboard space built in. To be totally honest, the beds are over-large for the reasonably small room, and they dominated the space, but we used them for the big girls for four years (from 2010 to 2014) and it worked.

Then, my eldest started getting too tall to sleep comfortably in the loft bed, and was hanging out for her own space. The youngest and the middle were keen to try sharing, so we switched things up and put #2 and #3 in together in the loft-bed room, while #1 now a room with single bed, desk and dresser to herself. This has been the situation for about 15 months now.

It hasn't been a roaring success, for a range of reasons. It's got slightly better since we got rid of one of the lofts (littlest really hated sleeping high, and frequently refused to do it) and have replaced it with a single bed for the 7 year old. Nonetheless, almost-11 is in Grade 6 this year and is agitating to have her own room to start high school next year ... a thing we cannot actually physically accomplish in our current situation. (She's the only one prepared to "sleep high", which unfortunately leaves her in the position of being the only one who CAN share, as we can't fit two single beds + desks in any of the rooms).

We're kicking around options for dealing with this. The design of our house makes adding a room on an unlikely measure - it could be done, but to do it sympathetically to the house is likely to be too costly to be realistic. We do have a detached double-brick slate-floor garage, currently used as a storage / junk space, and we're contemplating whether, after a big clean-out, replacing the garage doors, and the addition of skylights and cooling / heating, we could render that into a habitable room. This would be initially probably as a shared study / relax room for the kids, and maybe down the track we could add plumbing for an ensuite and turn it into an actual bedroom. (We don't garage the cars and have no plans to start doing so!) Another option that's been considered is building a small granny flat in the yard, to be used as a work office for me which would mean that one of the kids could have my desk in the open plan study area.

The other option, of course, is to move house - but there is significant reluctance to do this, for a range of reasons, not least of which is our constant awareness of the financial precarity that may come by increasing our debt now that I am a freelancer (so, have a variable income). Having looked at the market, I don't think we could move to a bigger, nicer house in the same or similar area without almost doubling our current very manageable mortgage, and I'm just not sure we want to, or should, do that. Although our neighbourhoood is not perfect, it's very convenient for our current lives - kids' schools, work, the community we have embedded ourselves in. I can't imagine being willing to take on more debt to live somewhere LESS convenient just to get one extra room.

I think what needs to happen is that we need to get proper professional advice from a builder about what would be required to turn the garage into a proper room, and how much it would cost, including, importantly, whether there is a feasible way to connect the garage to the house by creating at least a covered access if not a corridor. At the moment we're really flying blind.

The big question I have, though, is this: Do you think kids need their own bedrooms? At all? Always? When they are teens? When they are in VCE? Never?

I grew up having my own room, as did my brother, whereas my husband not only didn't have his own room, he didn't even have *A* room - he slept on a fold-out bed in the family lounge which had to be packed up every morning. So we bring very different lenses to this question,

Your thoughts welcomed!