1001 frustrations - good for the soul

The scene: me, sitting at a child's play table in our sunroom with two of my kids. The sun streams in through tall (dusty) windows as we sip tea from tiny cups. Then Kayla, 6, leans over towards me and intently studies something under my chin.

"Mum, do you know on TV there's a thing you can buy and put on your face and neck that makes wrinkles go away?"

Well gee, thanks. I'm speechless. I smile and say lightly, "I know, but it can't make ALL my wrinkles go away." And underneath there's a quiet internal conversation - yeah, even my kids can see it. I'm getting old!

Ok. I'm not quite halfway through a century yet, but I do feel I've aged years in the past 6 months. Or maybe the past 18 months.

And one thing I've learned in those 18 months is this: living the dream isn’t always what you expect it to be!

In September 2014 we moved to Thailand and I pretty much abandoned this blog. Getting our dream off the ground was all-consuming! Filling out visa paperwork, researching foreign school options and tracking down cheap flights all took time … but packing up 14 years’ worth of married life and kids was the hardest of all. We packed for what seemed like months - until the final night, when we crashed for a few hours of sleep in beds bare of sheets or pillows and woke at 4a.m. for the ride to the airport.

It was so surreal after 14 years of dreaming and questioning to finally ride the elevator up to the security gate with our kids and set out on that great adventure.

Settling in for the flight to Bangkok

And it was a great adventure. Don’t get me wrong. But it was so different to what I’d expected!

I first moved to Thailand back in 1998 to volunteer with a charity there. I came to love the people I rubbed shoulders with every day. Many had spent time in prison or suffered torture for their beliefs. I felt humble to be there alongside spiritual giants who took all this in their stride and refused to compromise.

One year in,  I met my now-husband Charles, who had volunteered on and off with the same organisation for a long time. He figured out on a team trip to Cambodia that I was the One. With my determination to be single for life, it took me a little longer! But in April 2000, I left Thailand to spend the summer with Charles' family in Ireland, and we headed back to New Zealand in late August for our September wedding. Then it was back to Ireland and a long stretch of wondering will we, won’t we, move back to Bangkok?

So arriving in the hot, steamy melee of Suvannabhum airport in Sept 2015 was beyond amazing. Amazing to walk out into the hub-bub of taxi drivers and vans and know there were friendly faces waiting there. Amazing to watch our kids gazing out the windows and remember our own awe the first time we drove through mile upon mile of high-rise buildings, signs in hieroglyphic Thai, flashing billboards and Dr Seuss-like concrete highways streaming over and under each other.

An hour or so later we reached our temporary accommodation - the far-from-luxury but totally adequate Rompo Mansion, just off Rama IV Road. And the next day we walked to the office and celebrated!

Kayla in the bus queue for IKEA

Within two weeks we found our new home - a clean and sunny two-bedroom apartment not far from the office with easy access to public transport. But - oops - sunny in Bangkok was a BAD idea. After moving in we found the lovely big plate of glass facing out onto the main road was a sun trap for most of the day, meaning temperatures hovered around 34C in the apartment even with the air-conditioning on at full blast.

Also, the narrow balcony outside our bedroom had an open metal railing - meaning Thea could easily slip through and sail down 28 floors to the ground below. And it almost happened - once! I went to get laundry from the bathroom and came out to find her halfway up the rails, leaning over to take in the view :-(.

View from our balcony, 28 floors up

We quickly realised homeschool in the apartment wasn’t an option - too isolating and waaaaay too hot. So the office kindly cleared a space for us so we could be part of the everyday goings-on and still get the schoolwork done. That was a huge improvement, but it meant hailing a taxi every morning - tricky as not every cab driver wants 2 adults, 3 kids and a collapsible buggy plus various bags and sacks containing schoolbooks, toys and the makings of dinner! Then in the afternoon we had a hot 20-minute walk, 20-minute public transport, 15-minute hike back home with Thea in the buggy, through swirling crowds of people in rush hour traffic.

Hubby and I love Thai food. Traveling alone, we’d always opted for street food. We thought we’d never have to cook in Bangkok - and in fact most Thai apartments don’t have kitchens! But when Thea got sick from bugs in the street food we had to revert to plan B. The girls in the office bought us a counter-top oven and I headed off to the wet market once a week with 2 enormous shopping bags.

Thea - sick for most of the first 3 months of our stay

Buying at the wet market - named after ice melting through wooden slats throughout the market - did have one advantage - you knew everything was as fresh as it gets! The bits and pieces of animals available had all been alive earlier that morning. In fact most of the fish, chickens, ducks and frogs were still leaping and clucking. Just take your pick, baby! Fruit and vegetables were freshly harvested and so much cheaper than the supermarkets. All good, bar the hassle of lugging those heavy bags out to the front entrance and hailing yet another taxi.

Frogs for lunch, anyone?

Cooking Thai-style also proved to be a challenge. In 1998 I lived above the office and ate on the street every day. I had never cooked in Thailand before! Sure, I’d cooked 'Thai' food in our well equipped kitchen back in Ireland. But in Thailand we relied on a handful of kitchen bits gathered on a day-long family trek to IKEA, involving multiple bus and taxi rides and the piling of purchases on top of our baby buggy, raising a few eyebrows on the way home! In this way we acquired pots, a wok, cutlery, plates, a bathroom stool, folding chair, clothes hangers, two clothes-airers, a rubbish bin, clothes hamper and bathmat. Applause accepted :-).

After IKEA - ready for the bus home!

Looking back, I can see how the excitement of those early days kept us sane through the initial challenges. We were just so glad to finally BE there, living the dream, that nothing else mattered.

Things did get harder after that - leading to the title of this blog post!! - and harder still since coming home last September. More to come in the next few posts. And I don't mean to imply that there weren't GOOD aspects to our year in Bangkok - there were plenty! For now, my point is that the hard work of dreaming doesn't finish once you 'get there'!

Both the frustrations of waiting AND of working out our dreams once we 'get there' are painful but good for the soul - because they clarify what we really want at heart, and why we need to continue the pursuit.

Hubby and I are working through some of these issues right now. We left Bangkok in Sept 2015 thinking we’d be here in Ireland for just a month or two before returning. But due to a completely unexpected (and painful) event soon after we arrived home, we’ve decided it’s best to stay in Ireland for now. We don’t know what the future holds, but the immediate priority is to rest, recover and wait for clarity.

It’s been an interesting ride, and it’s not over yet!

In the meantime, I’ve been feeling the need for symbols to keep my hope alive. I'm craving LIFE - big, crazy life - direction and purpose - and beauty around me to drown out the sadness of these last 6 months.

With all the uncertainty since coming home, the house has felt a bit like a way station. At first we unpacked just the bare essentials. As time went by, more and more things came out of the attic. Yet even now that we're here 'for a while', I still feel unsettled.

I’ve been admiring some beautiful hand-painted rice bowls appearing here and there on the internet. Something about them just makes me happy.

So I did something a little crazy - crazy because these things aren't life-essential and we're a little short on money right now! I ordered a few and put them in a kitchen cupboard, just above our drinking glasses, so that every time I reach up they put a smile on my face. These bowls are a reminder of Asia, and a reminder that life is filled with endless possibilities for creativity, beauty, joy, meaning and purpose. Right now they are oxygen for my soul!

Symbols of hope

Next post: Stories from the frontline :-)

confessions of a mousekiller

(Because some stories just NEED to be told!) 

(And just in case anyone questions my sanity, I am traumatised by the events described here, but I'm trying to make light of it so the whole thing will just ... go away. Forever, hopefully!)


Years ago, when we first moved into the house we built on the corner of my brother-in-law's farm, the mice moved in too. But we found the gaps they'd crawled into, blocked them up, and haven't seen them since.

But with the arrival of spring sunshine the kids have been flying in and out of the house, dusting off bikes, shovels and sand buckets, leaving the garage door wide open. As the kids went out, the mice came in - I saw the first one face to face last week just as I was heading for bed.

The next day, after getting the traps down from the attic, the girls and I saw another mouse in the playroom. We opened the patio doors and tried to shoo him out but he squidged himself under the adjoining door back into the kitchen. I got the kids to jump up on chairs while I swept mouse turds off the bookshelves.

"Why didn't you kill him, mum?" Amber asked as I muttered to myself, swishing the broom. Which is exactly what hubby said when I messaged him about the mouse in the laundry.

"I'm not fast enough, and besides, I just couldn't do it!" I said. "I've never killed anything!"

"But you've got traps for them, isn't that the same thing?"

Ah. "I guess you're right!" I admitted. That girl can think!

That night as I sat knitting on the sofa, taking in a movie after a hard day of keeping the kids entertained during mid-term break, a mouse wriggled through the leather sofa under my butt. I took that as a personal insult! Wretches! (We haunted the furniture showroom for months waiting for that sofa; and finally bought it only after someone scratched it while moving it, knocking the price down by 50%. Worth the wait!)

So I got up and baited two traps, setting them in the kitchen and playroom, and removed myself to the relative safety of the study and youtube.

The first trap went off just a few minutes later. I went out to check the trap under the kitchen sink but couldn't find it; it seemed the mouse had somehow flipped itself and the trap over a pipe and down behind the cupboard unit. Oh well, deal with it tomorrow I thought.

But when I opened the cupboard the next morning I nearly had a heart attack. The mouse hadn't flipped back at all, but fallen to the lower shelf where it still lay flipping about in smears of blood.

Sick to the stomach, I knew I had to kill it. All I could think of at the time was our meat mallet. A few quick jabs with my eyes averted and the mouse was dead. I flushed him quickly before the kids realised what was going on and cleaned up the cupboard, all the while feeling my stomach churn. Why did this have to happen while hubby was on night shift?

More mice surprised us that day - as bold as brass - and I found stuffing falling out of the leather sofa so I knew we had no choice but to set more traps. Alone again that night, I heard the first trap go off and walked out to find another still-alive mouse.

What to do? I couldn't face the meat mallet again. Heart pounding, I thought of the loo. Reaching forward gingerly, I picked up the trap by its' back end, keeping my hand well away from the wriggling body at the front. Snapped open the trap into the loo and hit flush. Phew!

But lately we've had problems with iron and manganese deposits in our water, radically reducing our water pressure, and the mouse just wouldn't go down. I stared in horror as he paddled frantically. No, no! Could this get any worse?

I grabbed the gallon bucket we use to get milk from the farm, filled it at the laundry tap and threw the water down the loo, eyes closed. Then looked again with huge relief to find the mouse gone.

Texted hubby, looking for sympathy. One down. He was alive - I had to flush him.

"Mousekiller!"

Are you serious? I've never killed anything before. I'll need counseling after this!!

Within the next hour or so, three more traps sprang, catching three more mice by the leg.

Texted hubby. Wish you were here.

Ha.

After four flushes the traps were empty and I couldn't set any more. Horrible useless things. I went to bed with my stomach still lurching.

The next day we bought more traps - great heavy things with springs so tightly wound that they wouldn't trip without savage pressure - I almost split my thumb testing them out.

Hubby's still on night shift - but tonight's his last night for a while. HE can deal with the mice after this. I'm calling it quits!

walking

Last week my hubby let our 20-month-old walk down to nan's house. Oh dear. Bye-bye buggy! She won't even get into it now, just shakes her blonde curls and shrieks, "noooooo ...!!!"

I took the kids out to the river this afternoon while dad slept between night shifts. Thea wanted to be "down!" like the other two, who had skipped ahead of me through the gate towards the sloping bridge. Thea of course stopped every 5 seconds to ooh and aah at the river, pointing at the rapids, hovering all too close to the electric fence wire just above her head.

As she walked the path for the first time I found myself mentally navigating the hazards ahead of her - parts where the track came right to the edge of the river, sections of mud with stepping stones, steep inclines, loose gravel and stinging nettles.

Some of my friends have hit road hazards just recently. I thought of two in particular as we walked the path today - one who's just said goodbye to a difficult marriage, and another who had a sudden and completely unexpected breakdown last week.

As I witness their struggles I'm seeing all over again that life is a delicate balance. We have so many roles and responsibilities to juggle! I don't know about you but sometimes I feel just one hair's breadth away from dropping all the balls and seeing them shatter into one almighty, seemingly irreparable mess.

I think that's what happened to my neighbor last week. Karen (not her real name) has a 7- and a 4-year old, a 9-month old baby, a terrific husband and a friend who's just stiffed her out of a job she had planned to return to after maternity leave. When she called me in a panic on the last day of school before mid-term break I thought someone had died. Loaded my kids into the car, rushed down, found her sitting sobbing in her driveway. She asked me to mind her kids while she ran up to my house to send an email. Huh? I didn't ask questions, just gave her the keys.

Karen's house is usually spotless. That day I knew she was not okay because there were clothes piled everywhere, plates stacked in the sink, food congealed in pots on the stove, tissues and used nappies on the kitchen counter. Baby J sat strapped in his pushchair, quietly mouthing his fingers. I sent the older kids outside to the swings and sat waiting to see what would happen next.

To make a long story short, Karen's in hospital. And I'm wondering how I missed the signs that she could no longer hold everything together. I think things had been unraveling for a while and her friend's treachery was the last straw.

It's tough to juggle kids, house, job, bills; maintaining, guarding and repairing all the 'stuff' we've gathered; and trying to figure out what happened to our dreams in the process. But if we lose sight of our dreams I think something in our soul dies; we get so busy watching for stones on the path that we forget the thrill and beauty of the river.

As Karen once said to me, "Life is a strange thing. We get up, eat, go to work, come home, go to bed, and do it all over again the next day. There has to be more to it than this!"

Yes, there's more! But often when we've hit a few speed bumps the fight begins to leak out of us, just like the diesel in our car right now (yeah, we need to get that fixed).

As I scooped Thea into my arms to carry her up a hill, I thought about what I've been seeing on the internet lately - people being raw and honest, navigating the road hazards for others who haven't got there yet: "hey, if you're going down this particular road, watch out for X - I hit that and nearly went under. But I pulled through it like this ... "

I have another friend who's watching her daughter battle an eating disorder.  I can tell her, "Yeah, I've been in her shoes. Watch out for this, and this - but don't worry, she'll be okay."

I can't navigate as easily for Karen, although I've had bouts of depression and watched my sister walk through it too. But I can at least be there when she needs me.

When I put Thea down at the top of the hill she cried a sad little "noooooo ...!" and held out her arms. I scooped her up again and she snuggled deep into my shoulder, drawing her legs up in a tight huddle.

Sometimes we need that - someone to scoop us up when our legs get wobbly and we just can't do it anymore.

But it's okay. We'll walk again, when we've had enough time - and support from the people around us - to recover.