Nearly Sixty Years, Two Televisions and One Thumbnail

I’m a wife, mother, grandmother, writer, former businesswoman, lifelong dog lover and, apparently, someone who still hasn’t quite mastered the art of sitting quietly and doing nothing.

I’ve been married to Chris for almost sixty years, raised a family, built businesses, written and published books, lived in different corners of Australia and collected enough wrong turns, lucky breaks and unexpected adventures to keep me writing for quite some time.

These days, I write mostly about the things life has taught me along the way: love and marriage, family, ageing, friendship, loss, intuition, the strange things that happen to us that we can’t always explain, and those perfectly ordinary moments that don’t look important until, somehow, they are. I don’t write because I have all the answers. At this stage of life, I’m fairly certain nobody does.

But I do have a lot of stories.

Chris features in quite a few of them.

One of the secrets to our long marriage may be separate television rooms. I love a good soapy movie. Give me romance, heartbreak, impossible love and a reunion in the final ten minutes, and I’m perfectly happy. Chris would rather watch sport.

So we have two televisions. Actually, that undersells his arrangement considerably. Chris has his own theatre system, where he can sit with a beer, turn the volume up and swear at whichever team, umpire or referee has offended him that afternoon. I have suggested soundproofing. He, on the other hand, has no desire to hear me sobbing over a love scene. It works for us.

Perhaps that is one of the things a long marriage teaches you. You don’t have to love all the same things. Sometimes you need to know which room to watch them in.

Dogs have occupied a large part of my life too, and there have been many. Each one has had a different personality, and each one has left something behind. One of the hardest goodbyes of all was Patrick, a Guide Dog puppy we raised.

From the beginning, I knew Patrick wasn’t really ours. We were helping prepare him for something much bigger. One day, if all went well, he would become the eyes, companion and trusted guide of someone who needed him. Knowing that did absolutely nothing to stop me from falling in love with him. When the time came to give him up, I sobbed my heart out.

Patrick eventually went to his forever person, a blind woman who needed everything we had helped him learn. I was enormously proud of him. I was also completely heartbroken. Apparently it is possible to know you are doing exactly the right thing and still cry as though somebody has stolen your dog.

Dogs aren’t my only weakness. I also have a slight weakness for crystals. Actually, that may be understating the situation. Clear quartz, amethyst, rose quartz, citrine, obsidian, selenite, tourmaline, pyrite, jade, moonstone, labradorite… I could go on, and apparently I frequently do.

There are crystals around our home in just about every shape, colour and size, enough for Chris to have developed genuine concerns about the house’s structural integrity. According to him, if I bring home many more, the house will sink. I pointed out that houses don’t generally sink.

He informed me that we’re not insured for it because we don’t live on a boat in the ocean. I let that one go.

I still buy crystals.

There is one argument, however, that I haven’t quite given up on.

I sometimes complain that Chris isn’t romantic. He doesn’t arrive home carrying flowers. Romantic dinners aren’t exactly a regular feature on our calendar. And if I ask him how much he loves me, I’ve been getting pretty much the same answer for nearly sixty years.

“One thumbnail.”

That’s it.

Not to the moon and back. Not more than words can say. Not even a whole thumb.

One thumbnail.

And yet Chris is a keen gardener. Outside the window where I sit and write, he has created the most beautiful garden. He grows flowers everywhere, and sometimes I look out from my desk and the sheer beauty of what he has created takes my breath away. So yes, I know. The man who doesn’t buy me flowers has spent years growing them outside my window. Perhaps that is his version of romance. It still wouldn’t kill him to pick a few, put them in a vase and take me out to dinner occasionally.

I’m just saying.

My working life has been every bit as predictable as my marriage, which is to say, not very. Years ago, I was teaching beauty therapy in Perth when I lost my job under circumstances that, at the time, felt devastating. After the tears, telephone calls and enough wine and coffee to keep several suburbs emotionally afloat, a rather inconvenient idea appeared.

Start your own college.

So I did.

That decision took Chris and me across the country to Canberra, where I opened a beauty therapy college with more nerve than money. Thankfully, the students came, the college grew, and within two years, I was named Telstra Business Woman of the Year.

Life has a peculiar sense of humour. One minute you think something has gone terribly wrong. A few years later, you realise it may have pushed you towards something you would never otherwise have attempted.

Writing came with its own unexpected turns. I learned some publishing lessons the expensive way, including an early encounter with vanity publishing, before eventually deciding that if I wanted my books out in the world, I was perfectly capable of learning how to put them there myself.

I’ve been self-publishing successfully for years now, writing for adults as well as creating my illustrated children’s series, Little Hearts, Big Feelings, gentle stories designed to help children understand some of the emotions that can feel enormous when you’re small.

Perhaps the two kinds of writing aren’t as different as they first appear. Big people have big feelings too. And perhaps that is part of the reason I’m still writing.

At this stage of my life, I find myself looking backwards and forwards at the same time. There are decades behind me filled with people I have loved, dogs I still miss, businesses built, houses bought and sold, children raised, grandchildren adored, mistakes made, lessons learned and quite a few things I still can’t explain. And there is still life ahead. That may be what interests me most now.

Relationships find their way into my stories because they’ve been such a large part of my life. Family has shaped much of who I am, and ageing gives me plenty to write about, whether I cooperate with it or not. I’ve learned to pay attention to intuition too, because sometimes my gut has been considerably smarter than my head. Most of all, I’m drawn to the ordinary moments in life. I’ve lived long enough to know that they often turn out not to be ordinary at all.

If something I write makes you laugh, reminds you of someone you love, makes you think about your own life a little differently, or makes you feel that somebody else understands, then I’m glad you found your way here.

Thank you for walking a little of the long road with me.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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