Notes from time-out-of-time

The solar year ended and began again at 12:04pm yesterday, at the moment of the Solstice (at which point I was busily sleeping off my hang-over from a very enjoyable Kooky the night before). So as far as I'm concerned, 2008 is OVER. But 2009 doesn't really start till 12:01AM on January 1st. By my own calendars, the 10 days between December 21st and December 31st are no-time, belonging to no year. This is time out of time.

I marked the passing of the Solstice, the ending and beginning of the solar year, by writing three lists about the year gone. Good Things, Bad Things & Things. I wrote the lists in a pretty notebook, and decorated them with gold and silver sparkling pens. I was sitting in a park with two beautiful new friends, soaking up the last sun of the longest day of the year. When my lists were finished I tore them up and set them on fire. First I burned the Bad Things (goodbye!), then I burned the Things (farewell!), then I burned the Good Things (I will remember you). Then the year was done with, a pile of burnt paper at my feet, leaving the smell of eucalyptus burning in the leaves beneath my little pyre and the feel of the sun on my face.

And then it was truly time out of time, this peaceful-raucous river-running time of festival, of plenty, of special moments between years. We left the park when the sun finished setting and tumbled around on the trampoline at home for a while, then ventured out (why not?) to dance away the shortest night of the year. I woke up late today and took myself to the beach, met with clusters of friends on the grassy hillside, hot sun, cold breeze, crashing waves. Came home from the beach and installed myself on the trampoline again, madly crocheting gifts with a cat purring on my lap. Was found by my housemate out there, and we harvested veggies from the garden together for dinner. Normal, beautiful things that should be every-day but usually aren't.

Today I have found my thoughts straying back to the narratives that have dominated the year just gone, storylines that have haunted me, and found myself able to shut them away. No slamming of doors, no denial of what's happened, just a gentle redirection. I can look forward without carrying it all with me, now, or I can look to the beautiful things immediately around me. I have said goodbye to this year, to everything that was beautiful and heartbreaking and challenging about it. I am physically and emotionally a different person for having lived through it (the same is true of every year, but the physical differences are so marked this year- my scar, the absence from my innards of that gland, the presence of muscles I have never had before- this is quite the changed landscape). And now isn't really for looking to the year ahead, not yet. Now is for taking a break from all of it, for floating along this current of festival-time and time-out-of-time, for holding the immediate and present close, and easy, and true.

Things I Have Recently Grown

I know I have mentioned it already but I am rich right now in beans & squash above all else (squash, you want squash? I have dark green zucchinis, pale green Lebanese zucchinis, adorable ruffled golden patty-pan squash, warty-skinned crookneck squash- and the beans, well, the Purple King are a bounty, the Blue Lakes are just warming up, and the Windsor Long Pod bush beans have just finished their season). The tomatoes are all green and limping along to ripeness- it's anyone's guess if I'll actually get any before they all die from some horrible disease. There's chilis on every chili plant and a new crop setting on the white eggplant, and the lemon tree is ripening a huge crop of small fruit. The strawberries are coming in strong, the silverbeet and lettuce are wilting in the heat, the potatoes are flowering, I've harvested my first (EVER!) cucumbers and broccoli and there's more of both coming.

I struggle with wanting to keep planting now, even though the solstice is looming and I worry about it being too late. I have new varieties of both bush and pole beans I want to try, two squash varieties that didn't make it in the first batch, new sweet pepper seedlings coming up, and a Purple Cherokee tomato seedling in need of a home. There's never enough room, never enough garden for all of everything I want to grow. I doubt there ever will be.

Older lovers & garden bloggers

Two things happened tonight. Well, many more than two (I dyed my hair, put on a dress, went back out to the dyke bar for the first time in quite a few weeks). But I wanted to tell you about these two things.

The first is that I walked in, sober in a pub just hitting it's peak (full of energy but not yet slurring), at the same time as the first shows were on. I bought my beer and stood behind a table to watch the shows. The first act was two people I know (sort of- we're not close), two performers within a few years of my age. They're good performers, I enjoy their shows, and this one was funny and fun to watch. I noticed halfway through their act that at the table in front of me were seated the two much older, very butch partners of the people onstage, and I thought, oh, it's Daddy's club. And more than I watched the act, I watched the older partners watching their younger partners onstage, saw from behind crow's feet crinkling above sharp cheekbones as they smiled and watched their young lovers perform for the crowd. Watched them clap and cheer and hoot, exchange glances full of pride. Later I watched them leave, the taller, older partners first, the younger ones trailing behind, all fully laden with the paraphernalia of performance.

I wasn't prepared at all for the cloud of whatever watching that brought up in me, much more fiercely than seeing only one instance of it ever does. Somehow the two plus two made it sharp and fierce and present like it hasn't been for a long, long time. I haven't missed the role of Daddy in my life in years, haven't craved that proud paternal presence, haven't really wanted to live being witnessed and appreciated by someone older and wiser than me.

The last lover I had that I called that was in San Francisco, 3 years ago now, a sharp, handsome creature who turned 50 while we were seeing each other, who took me to the fair at the beach and we went for rides on the sky-car. She bought me a very pretty dress and held my hand while I skipped down the street.

And I have wrestled with growing older, and what it means to be someone who has traditionally dated people so much older than me when I am growing beyond the point of needing a protector or a guide in my lover. I have dated so little recently that it's barely crossed my mind, or if at all I have thought of my most recent girlfriend, who was certainly not my Daddy but who was quite a bit older than me, enough years that our behaviour and ideals clashed but not so much that she could be benevolent and tolerant of me, and I have thought: I need to stop doing this. I need to stop being little, I need to grow up, I need to challenge myself with whatever it is that scares me so much about connecting with people my own age.

The years of not being Daddy's girl have been good for me. I own myself so much more than I did when I was 22, and craved a kind word or a harsh reprimand to validate every single thing I did. I have had lovers in these years who were 15-and-more years older than me yet who bent to my will and purred under my touch and were vulnerable to me in ways that those Daddies could never countenance. Who read strength and power in me, who craved it and chased it and gave me the gift of seeing myself as strong and powerful.

So, I was not expecting to react to that sight that I saw tonight, but I did, and I don't know what it means.

The second thing that happened tonight was that someone told me about their garden, and said: I was so inspired by your blog, I had to!, and I suddenly realised how little I have written on here about my garden recently. My blog, she is in identity crisis, and I am conflicted about whether this is a place to write about my garden or my messy heart or a place to pretend to have a coherent narrative in which everything makes perfect sense. But I am trying to sort that out, because I don't want to lose any of it. I want to tell you about my plants, because they matter to me, but I want to write about my life, as well, as much as I can (forgive me that I go so easy on the details, it seems the safest option for everyone).

I have some ideas about how to make this work, all these many different directions my life is spinning out in, how to make the best use of my bright new passions without losing this messy narrative of heart and life that I find so valuable. Stay tuned.

Vegan spaghetti bolognese recipe

I made this very tasty vegan spaghetti bolognese recipe tonight and thought I would record it for future reference. I neglected to take any photos- spaghetti bolognese is not the most photogenic of dishes- so this is not an awesome, sharp-looking cooking blog kind of post. Just a recipe.

Makes a share-house quantity of bolognese sauce, so use a big pot.

Ingredients
2 onions, diced
8 cloves of garlic, minced
1 1/2 C dry soy mince (we get ours in a big bag for $5 from Vegan's Choice on King St)
2t veggie stock powder
1/2C dry sliced shiitake mushrooms
Ends of sad veggies from bottom of veggie bin, finely chopped. I used yellow squash, zucchini, capsicum & green beans
2x 375g tins of whole peeled tomatoes
Lots of tomato paste. Maybe 5T.
1/2C chopped, pitted kalamata olives
Fresh or dried bay leaf. Mine was fresh.
2t fresh thyme leaves, stripped & chopped
Small sprig of fresh rosemary, chopped finely
Large sprig, maybe 2t worth of fresh oregano leaves, chopped finely.
Salt & pepper
Spaghetti

Method
1. Dissolve the veggie stock powder in a little boiling water in a big bowl, add the dry soy mince to the bowl, then add hot water til all the soy mince is covered. Stir so the veggie stock is evenly mixed through.

2. In another bowl, cover the dried mushrooms with boiling water.

3. While everything is rehydrating, chop up your onion, garlic & veggie odds & ends, and put a big pot of water on the stove to boil for your pasta.

4. Sauté onion over low-ish heat in olive oil til they're clear, add garlic, cook for a further 2 minutes.

5. Throw in your veggie odds & ends & stir through.

6. Drain the soy mince in a strainer, press out as much stock as you can. It has now done it's job. Throw the soy mince into the pan, stir through.

7. Strain the mushrooms over a bowl so you're saving the mushroom juice. Chop the mushrooms finely, then throw them in the pan and stir through.

8. Open the tins of tomatoes and use a big knife to slice them up inside the can. Throw into the saucepan and stir through. Add about 3T of tomato paste now, and more later if you think it needs it. Add the olives, too.

9. Mine was a bit dry at this point so I added some of the mushroom juice to the pan. Add bay leaf. Simmer for about 10 minutes, while your spaghetti is cooking.

10. Your big pot of water should be boiling by now- throw your spaghetti in with some salt.

10. Add the thyme & rosemary right before you drain the spaghetti, then drain the spaghetti, then turn the heat off the bolognese sauce and add the oregano. Oregano can't stand up to much cooking, so you need to add it right at the end. Also, at this point if you can find your bay leaf in there, fish it out so someone doesn't accidentally eat it.

11. You'll want to add pepper, but go easy with adding salt- between the olives & the stock this will already be pretty salt-happy.

12. Put spaghetti in bowl. Put bolognese sauce on top. Eat.

I ate mine with parmesan cheese because I am not actually vegan. My vegan housemates enjoyed theirs just as much minus the cheese.

About help

This post is not a cry for help. By the time I am able to articulate these things, I am no longer in a space where I need help. These are reflections on the past week-and-a-half of trying to recover from major surgery in a mad sharehouse situation, learning some very steep, very harsh lessons about when and how and who it's worth asking for help.

I have been struggling, hard. And it's nearly impossible to write about because everybody is so well intentioned, and so lovely, and it's not their fault that my need for help and their ability or willingness to deliver it fall so far from each other. The gap between those two points, with my need for help on this side and their ability to deliver it on the other side: that's fraught, dangerous territory. I can't point it out without offending people who are, after all, helping me in whatever way they can. But I can't erase my need for help, either. I can only sit here and wish that the people who assured me of their willingness & capability to help, when I was arranging these things before my surgery, who find themselves in the event to be unable to help, were able to say to me: It turns out I can't help you. Let me help you to find someone who can.

The suggestion that I should have just gone back to my parent's house and avoided burdening my friends with these needs is always there. And I think about it, think about recovering far from the reach of visitors, far from my garden, in a house full of people I am fond of but not necessarily close to, in a house full of meat where it would have been a struggle to find anything I could eat, in a house where there is no spare room for me so the chances are good I'd be stashed in the study between boxes of books. I think about the anxiety on my mum's face when she said: "Where are you planning on going after hospital?", and the relief when I said: "My house". I think about the fact that my house is three blocks from the hospital, while my parents live 40 minutes away.

I think about the fact that when I got my stitches out on Tuesday I walked down to the hospital by myself, because there was nobody to ask for help, nobody to come with me. Wobbled out again on unsteady legs, sat on a warm brick wall and had to wait for long minutes to get up the strength to keep walking up the street. And I thought about what would have happened if I'd been staying at my parent's house, the very high chance that neither of them would have been able or willing to take the day off to come with me. So I would have had to catch the train all the way in anyway, and been in much the same state afterwards but further from safety. I think about how, in matters of illness, I have always been expected to be remarkably self-reliant by my family, and that this is probably why my adamant refusal to return 'home' to recover surprises my friends, whose families allow the reasonable expectation of the experience of 'being looked after' when they're incapacitated.

I think that at the core of me, I expect to have to look after myself (I recovered from my first surgery in a prescription-drugged-out daze, alone in a skanky flat in Wollongong, aged 18, scared and stubborn and with no friends at all- my family weren't much help that time either. My expectation of no help from them is evidence-based, not presumptive). But somehow the chorus of offers of help and support, when I was scared and pitching headlong towards the surgery date, convinced me that to receive help was normal, a thing I could comfortably expect. I even brought myself to ask for help, which is something that I clearly & obviously struggle with. I felt so assured, so confident in this warm bubble of support. I had my primary support-person lined up to help me out with hospital drop-offs and pick-ups, and assurances of practical help from housemates. People said: "Is there anything you need?" and I said: "Soup. Food is the biggest thing. I don't know how sociable I'll be, how up for visitors, but if you can make some food that would be awesome. Thanks". I was confident. I was set.

And so. Some people's lives have exploded, and it's not their fault, or an indictment of them, but I fall off the radar. Other people's attention spans are short, and maybe when they see me up and walking and tending to my garden, they forget that I ever asked for help (they say "You're looking so well!", filled with relief of being let off the hook, because if I look so well I couldn't possibly actually still be in need of help). And people do help, they are generous and lovely and leave parcels of food or come around with treats to distract me. But still, here I have been, with this yawning gap between the help I need and the help I'm receiving, thinking: what did I do wrong? Everyone tells me that I need to learn to ask for help, but I did ask for help, and it didn't work.

The first lesson my stubborn, independent soul wants to learn from this is that I was right the first time, that there is no greater strength than self-sufficiency. That I should have made my own vats of soup before I went into hospital, and frozen them for later, should have shut myself into my room and expected nothing. I don't think that's right lesson. I think what I need to have learnt is to set contingency plans in place (and a vat of self-made soup in the freezer is not a bad place to start), to be very clear and very direct about the help I might need, and to be specific (said one friend: "If you'd asked one person for one pot of soup, you might have got soup, but you asked 10 different people, so they all probably thought someone else was doing it"). To enlist from people who volunteer to help an assurance that if they find themselves for whatever reason unable to help in the ways planned, they will let me know, and have a back-up plan for someone to pass the job of helping me on to.

What I have definitely learnt is that the fuzzy post-surgical, doped-up-on-painkillers state is no time to be having to negotiate the finer points of ego, of ability, of ruffled feathers, of faltering promises. That this stuff needs to be crystal clear, concrete, with three layers of contingency plan built in before I arrive at such a state, because once I am there I can do nothing to help myself or the people around me.

My anger at the people who I feel have let me down is passing. I don't really blame them. It's not actually their fault that their lives exploded, and that they found themselves unable to help me in the ways I was relying on them for. It's just incredibly unfortunate that I didn't think about needing back-up plans, and that they were unable to think of them for me. It's unfortunate that in my time of need I was unable to articulate what was going on clearly enough to procure the help I needed elsewhere, that by the time I was able to sort through it enough to ask, I was no longer in a state to need it. Unfortunate that you don't learn these lessons until you really, truly have to learn them.

So. I have learnt. I will use what I've learnt for myself, because I will probably need surgery again in the New Year to correct the damage this disease has done to my eyes (and that's a whole terrifying concept I don't even want to go into). And I will use what I've learnt for other people who find themselves sick or otherwise in need of help. I have learnt: that food is love. That errands are a blessing. That nobody who is sick or recovering from surgery should ever, ever have to wash the dishes. That a sick person needs more than one front-line support person- probably they need an errands & practicals support, and a household support, and an emotional support (in addition to food support, which is the best role for people on the second line- good friends & acquaintances who want to help in small, concrete ways). That the fact that someone can walk, and talk, and answer the phone (or even shower, dress, potter in the garden and otherwise look quite functional) doesn't mean they're actually fully able to feed & manage themselves. That when someone says: "I have friends helping me", it might be a good idea to say: "Which friends? What's their phone number? Let me give them my phone number in case they need back-up".