On this day, 26 years ago

Sunday Blog 130, 7th April 2024

I’m feeling nostalgic this week. First I was going to wax lyrical about Easter, then I saw that I’d noted down a very big day in my life, 26 years ago. This comes from the work I have been doing on developing and editing memoirs, combing through old journals and planners.

For you, I am sharing both the Easter reflections and the Sunday Blog.

You can listen along here, if you like.

Easter 2024 Reflections

Growing up, we celebrated Easters at the family beach house in Gracetown near Margaret River. Then, after the long break of young adulthood and a decade living in Europe, Easters were always at the family home in Scarborough in Perth.

Easter 2024 was the first one since we sold the family home. I found myself cast adrift, wondering what was I to do? Where do I go? How and where do I create new rituals and memories?

Impulsive as ever, I booked to stay in my sister’s home town of Collie, 2 hours south of Perth as it was her first Easter as a grandmother. It felt right to have some baby energy at the centre of the celebrations. I booked Easter Thursday so I could beat the traffic (that worked well, would 10/10 do again) and headed home at 6am on Easter Monday, also to beat the traffic (ditto, 10/10). The place I stayed (Black Diamond Lodge) was just right, with its enormous, funky co-working space I often had to myself, the large kitchen to prepare Easter Sunday lunch in to take to my sisters, and the general charming ambience of the place. So homely.

I added into this a day trip on Easter Saturday to Margaret River to catch a glimpse of my nephew before he headed back to Melbourne, and see my niece’s just-walking daughter. 

As I drove back to Collie from Margaret River on Easter Saturday evening, I was engulfed in memories of all the Gracetown Easters. The church where I had my greatest spiritual awakening is not even there anymore. That was the Cowaramup Church, if my memory serves me correctly, which it rarely does. And I’m thinking the Easter of, say, 1974, when I was almost 9. The age where, as a good Catholic girl, I’d done my first confession and first Communion, felt terribly important after undergoing the extra training and donning the veil and white dress. 

“Make it three sins, now dear, make it worth his while”, the nuns might urge the spindly, innocent me as I headed into the confessional box, still too young to commit any actual sins.

Nine years of age is that magical period before questioning really sets in. And it was a time I really understood the Easter story, in the truest sense of a story, a metaphor. How hollowed out and despairing I felt on the darkest of dark days, Good Friday. The depth of despair. I remember how I felt it in my little heart. And then the Sunday, arising. I can only describe it as being swept clean inside. The petrichor smell of earth after it rains. Clarity. Purity. Renewal.

I’m guessing the Easter where I ate my Easter eggs so quickly I vomited before Mass must have been the following year. By then, religion didn’t really work quite the same for me. Older siblings were growing up and having relationships etc., which meant they were deemed “not in a state of grace” and my loyalty was being called on. Jesus or my sister? This dichotomy pulled at the threads of my faith. While it took several more years before I enjoyed a McDonalds Bacon Double Cheeseburger Deluxe on Good Friday to really stick it to the establishment—I never experienced that Easter transcendence again. 

But I remember that clean, cleared out feeling. It was a tender loss when religion was no longer something that worked for me. I think it’s tainted how I always feel about Easter to this day.

Sunday Blog 130

Sunday 7th April 2024

Diary Entry, 7th April 1998, 11 Olibiados Street, Thessaloniki

It’s the morning. I awoke at 4 feeling distinctly queazy after dreaming about eating a mouthful of dried Earl Grey leaves and then trying to get rid of them by washing them down with water.

Anyway, that plus the very vivid dreams I’ve been having over the last two nights finally forced me to buying a kit, which is sitting next to my breakfast plate showing PREGNANT!!!!! Egads!

How on earth will I tell the Tall One?

Reflections

I remember one reason it took me a so long to buy a pregnancy test was the cost. I took my meagre drachmas from my teacher’s salary to visit the corner pharmacy to get a pregnancy test. Did I imagine the staff member raising her eyebrows at the foreigner? The Anglida? See her thinking “How typical!” Or was that just my outsider imagination?

I remember taking time to puzzle out the consumer information leaflet all in Greek, waiting for the result after peeing on the stick. Sounding out the words, looking at the diagram. One dot is negative, two dots positive.

Two dots appeared. Bright. Much brighter than the leaflet. Miraculous dots to me. I remember my 33-year-old face in the mirror, sitting atop its ticking biological clock body. My face was wild, lit up with joy. The yelp of excitement ricocheted around the empty bathroom. 

I still have this quote written out and attached to this journal:

For generations, women accepted the role of legitimizing humans through marriage to a man. They agreed that a human was not acceptable unless a man said so.

Clara Pinkola Estes. Women Who Run With The Wolves

Yet more reflections

That night I met Zoe’s dad, I could have stayed home. Kept away from the Salonica nightclub full of ex-pats, travellers and locals who like to hang out with foreigners (aliens). There were so many nights I stayed home, often preferring a good book to the techno beats, having to shout inanities over the music, feet sore from standing, wallet emptied round by round. I was 33 after all.

Maybe my teacher buddy Chris wouldn’t have come out that night so he could be the bridge that introduced us.

“You’ll like Ilias. He’s been to Australia.”

Those words wouldn’t have been spoken. Perhaps I would’ve returned home to Perth in December 1998 as planned, without my beautiful watery stowaway, my daughter, in utero. Perth in December heat after nearly a decade of wintry orphan Christmases.

What, then, would I have done with my empty, aching womb? How could I have enacted my millennium plan of becoming a solo mama? Turkey basting my way to parenthood?

Or what if I’d stayed with in Greece with Ilias? Swallowed the caustic dose of bitterness and resentment daily? Squashed my life down into the only size and shape Salonica and Ilias allowed women to take? Let my daughter be fully bilingual, while I forever stalled and stumbled through the tangled web of Greek language?

But yes. I’m glad I entered the nightclub that night. I’m glad Chris was there to make sure I met Ilias. And I’m glad I fled with two heavy suitcases and one beautiful half-Greek toddler, back to our charmed Australian life.

Photo - 10 September 2023 - me at 11 Olibiados, the flat where I did the pregnancy test. My beautiful 25 year old daughter is taking the photo. We're just there on a quick trip to visit her father. It all worked out, even though it didn't.