The last few days have felt like a birth canal; pretty visceral, I know. Sorry. It is just the sense of being pushed and pulled towards something that you're unsure of...towards normalcy, of the Australian variety here.
I was imagining, all this time, myself sitting in a garden surrounded by green and sunlight, with some hours during each day to just have quiet. I have looked forward to this like an oasis--always a dangerous attitude, because I get too easily attached to my expectations. They become idols.
But today, I did sit in a beautiful garden in the sunlight, and prayed easily, fluidly, for the first time in many months. I looked around me, as if just born, blinking at the gift God gave me--the gift of answering gently, perfectly, my little picayune expectations. Our house was owned by an older lady who lived here for many, many years; once again, we are in an area that is just beginning to shift from older people to younger families. The Gardener, as I think of her, seems to have known and loved plants, like the Byrds who owned our house in Lander for so many years. In this garden, there are eucalyptus trees, myrtles, orchids, fruit trees, six garden plots with some food items growing, and a mysterious sand pit. Barry, our neighbor, solved this mystery for me. Barry is younger than us, and has a fiance and a little daughter. He looked over the fence in that friendly, straightforward way, and said, "G'day. You made it finally, ay?" Barry told me that the sand pit was, orginally, a beautiful frog pond. "We've lots of frogs over here now, looking for water." I am thinking about resurrecting the frog pond. How cool would that be if I got it right? How awful if I didn't? It could become a mossie (Aussie for mosquito) pond.
But to get here, to these few moments of a new normalcy? Wow. I haven't even been able to sit down and write anything for a few days: we got our beds, finally, and so moved over to the Bulli Road house, which we named Chutley House. Why? No why. Just Chutley. We also had to clean the Rausch St. house, and we thanked it for a good few weeks; I had to buy uniforms, school supplies, make a couple trips to the bookstore to spend oodles (and each time I bought TJ a subway sandwich, because he's not yet in school); get the girls to school and back; unpack at Chutley House...so it was like major compression.
The day I dropped off the girls to school was a lovely day...not too hot. Tangara (Aboriginal word for 'unity' I think) School for Girls looked all lacy and dressed up, with the beautiful parallelistic Australian woodwork, and the coral-colored brick. The school is like a California school, with all the walkways outdoors; it looks like a little village. Sophie and Ana, in their blue hats and plaid cotton dresses, looked more cute than I can say, and they handled themselves so well in their first moments there.
They didn't look back as I left; as hard as a new school is, they seemed to take it in stride. TJ and I went on our compressed way, shopping, cleaning, unpacking, getting lost, all the usual. When we picked them up at 3:15, Sophie said, "I have ten friends." Ana, more quiet, was thoughtful and philosophical about the whole thing. "I was a bit lost in math, but then I started to figure it out. What is a Pythagorean triad? I mean, I know what Pythagorean theorem is, sort of, but a triad? The girls are friendly, and nice, but boy are they wild sometimes and sarcastic."
I had all sorts of images of what 'wild' might be, but I know she's got her own perspective--which is, I surmised, different from my tough public school girl perspective, born of memories like ditching, sprinkling chalk dust on Mr. Phillip's head, or plastic bottle battles with Mr. Jones.
So I asked. "Well," she said, "they wanted to play Murder in the Dark down in one of the music rooms...so they went down there and then got sent out."
"Oh," I said. Ana is my little orchid flower.
Sophie was busy deciding a kind of persona she should adopt with Australians. She said, with her interesting mixture of strong ideas and timidity, "I am not sure how to deal with shy people."
I realized that I have my own, almost unconscious, deep hopes for them regarding school...again, a dangerous pastime. This came home to me when I picked them up the next day at the Swim Carnival. I saw the few hundred girls cheering and sitting in their houses (Ana and Sophie are in Atlantis--the others are Tintagel (Arthurian), Siena (St. Catharine), and La Mancha). I teared up for some reason, just sitting there at the Blacktown Aquatic Centre, at the side of the huge partially outdoor pool. It just seemed so rich, so full of potential, but not as sketchy or full of pitfalls as my entry into public school was in 1978. There seems to be fun, but ordered within a strong sense of mission, that mission being the end--the good--of the person, which only an eternal viewpoint can see or apply to young people.
I realized, even with the tearing up, that neither school would be anywhere near perfect. But it seemed to me good. And the beautiful facilities, the smiling girls, loping around like young fawns in their resplendent youth; there was a feminine ethereal quality, mixed with Aussie fun. I am often, as Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice is, 'hard on my own sex'--but sometimes I get the Glimpse of Adam: I see the beauty, like light, airy and inspiring, that is unconscious femininity.
I also realized that I have to let Sophie and Ana live it, and go through it...anytime they express doubt, I want to say, "Do you know how blessed you are?" --but I have to let them be themselves, and struggle where they need to struggle, for that is also a good. It is one of the goods that we brought them here to experience...to be stretched.
Tonight, Friday, I picked them up and through some traffic, we got home. Then we had to turn around almost immediately to get them out to Our Lady of Angels youth group. As I complained and wanted to turn around and snapped at everyone, and generally behaved like a three-year-old in the traffic and heat (I didn't give anyone the finger, though, and I'm starting to understand that Sydney drivers use their horns like cattle prods, little beeps that feel like small electricity shocks), I heard another, more mature voice inside me: "Usually, you know, when you are really getting frustrated, it means that there's devil-flack...he doesn't want you get them to youth group."
So I shut myself up.
We pulled into Our Lady of Angels, and suddenly it was another little slice of heaven; the seven pm light, that lovely golden slant, was pouring through the eucalyptus, and the heat of the day was just giving way to a cooler breeze. I could hear sounds of voices, singing, and I crept in after Sophie and Ana to the church. I expected to see a choir leader of some uncertain, heavy-jowled middle age (am I really that too??) frazzling away at timid teenagers, but instead there was an angelically handsome Filipino young man, maybe seventeen, playing the piano and teaching the other secondary students how to breathe. I sat in the church, looking at Christ; the young people started singing, and they sounded like the voices of wind through the trees, or rushing water, without a trace of the metallic edge of older vocal chords. It was beautiful to see them, on their own, praising God, some with their eyes closed. They instructed each other with a straightforward humility; it was just so good.
I left with TJ, who was literally climbing walls outside...poor little guy.
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