A message in a bottle.

Once in a while I send a message in a metaphorical bottle out to sea hoping that someone will catch it, and usually someone does.

I am lucky to have found/created a network of like-minded friends in both the physical and the online worlds which has been an invaluable source of support and given me a sense of belonging to a strong community. It feels good to know we're all in this - life, parenthood - together.

If, as they say, it takes a village to raise a child, then my village spans across hemispheres and continents, as well as across the time zones of my life. I have connected and reconnected with new and old friends. Some have babies of the same age as Hugo and we support each other as we stumble through the same stages,while others are a few months or years ahead and offer some much needed perspective.

In my physical life, I have found a small core group of friends I love and which I can organise my week around. On an ideal week, I am able to have a social engagement most days, whether it is a walk by the ocean, a coffee on Darby St. or an afternoon tea at home. Pretty simple stuff but this is what I love the most - afternoons chatting away as the sun drops towards the horizon.

Online, I enjoy the surprises of who and how people will respond. Yesterday, I posted a status update on Facebook about feeling a bit down and was cheered up by heartfelt messages of support. A friend brought me a coffee which we enjoyed by the beach. Another sent me an image of a garden inside a bottle. Another yet wished she was there to have a playground chat or take Hugo for a walk while another friend made sure I came to yoga this morning.

All these attentions, big and small, close or far, help me take a deep breath when I need it and they are the difference between being alone and feeling lonely. Luckily for me, I am neither.

"It's not you, it's him."

They're the words written to me by my very dear friend Rose when she had noticed that I seemed to be struggling on the napping front with Hugo and was blaming myself for it.

Of course, when I am perfectly rational, I do realise that if Hugo isn't sleepy, I can rock him 'til the cows come home and he still won't fall asleep but I can't help it.

I guess that I see myself as his surrogate. For him to be calm, I need to be calm. For him to be happy, I need to be happy and for him to be sleepy, I need to be ... uh, no that one doesn't actually work but you get the idea.

For the last couple of days, Hugo has been a little bit different to his normal self. He has been cranky and difficult to feed. He jerks away when I try to feed him and starts crying even though he'll still greedily suck on my hand or a toy. Maybe he's teething, maybe he is catching some sort of cold or maybe he's just not that hungry...

The thing is, I don't know and so instead, I blame myself. If he doesn't want to eat, then there must be something wrong with my milk. Maybe my supply is low or my milk tastes funny. Maybe I hold him the wrong way or try to feed him at the wrong time...

It isn't the first time he has done this and each time, it has eventually passed and he has soon enough gone back to his normal, hungry, cheery self... meanwhile, I'll just keep reminding myself that it's not me, it's him and not in a break-up kind of way but rather that he is a person who experiences the world and his body a little differently each day. All I can do is set the scene for it to be as enjoyable as possible. 

Illumination and routine.

Yesterday I went for a walk with Hugo. As he often does, he fell asleep on me in the carrier. When this happens, I usually try and walk around for a while, making sure he gets at least 45 minutes to sleep soundly. I know that if I tried to transfer him from the carrier to anything else, he would wake up so it's only fair to him.

On my walk, I decided to pop into the Newcastle Art Gallery to catch the current exhibition before it closes on Sunday and wow, am I glad I went. Illumination the art of Phillip Wolfhagen left me breathless and awed. I only wished I was able to sit down and contemplate but I had to keep moving.

Luminous is the word that comes to mind. Wolfhagen's almost abstract landscape paintings capture a quality of light reminiscent of Turner. Low horizon lines freeing most of the canvas for luminous clouds and skies over half-lit landscapes or turbulent seas.

One of my favourite works was a series of long vertical panels with a dark mass in the bottom of the canvas and the rest taken up by the sky. The work, titled, The First Five Days of April, shows the transformation through light of a single landscape, same but different each day.

I have always felt this way about living by the sea or the ocean and figure that this is why a 'view' of the ocean is such a prized commodity. A living painting, always framed the same way but different from one moment to the next, somehow always surprising, never boring.

Maybe the work of Phillip Wolfhang resonates especially loudly at the moment because this kind of variation on a theme type of routine has also become an integral part of my life with Hugo. Every day is 'same same but different', and definitely always surprising.

Apparently babies thrive on routine, and I would extend this to adults. However, my life as a parent is to try and maintain that routine for Hugo, while he catches me off balance at every turn. One day, a nap maestro (Rose) and the next, full of beans until he hits a wall of tiredness. One day calm and smily, the next a grizzly ball of dissatisfaction.

One day, the ocean is as flat as a lake and the next, it is turbulent and gusty... It's still the same ocean and it's still beautiful. It's just really unpredictable and it is this sense of the unexpected that I must embrace to thrive.

Dreaming of a bucolic life.

Typically, I would describe myself as a city girl. I have grown up in a city and it is where I have always thought I felt most at ease. In Australia, I have even become a little militant about arguing the benefits of growing up surrounded by concrete as a suitable alternative to grass, although I will admit I remain in a definite minority, even at home...

Lately though... something is changing and I find myself day dreaming about a life in the countryside. I see myself walking in some sort of field with 3 little boys running around me, walking ahead and behind, picking up leaves and pointing at trees. I then see us holding hands as we take our gumboots off and walk back inside. We might draw the leaves we have just picked up off the ground or have a hot chocolate in our light filled kitchen.

I also imagine Chris working away in his shed, with light streaming through a side window and wood shavings flying around him, dancing in the light and getting caught in his hair. I imagine light, space and silence. Just the sounds of nature around us and fields to run across.

I imagine that Chris and I work together, and that creativity - writing, design, photography, making - is at the heart of our life together. I imagine our children working away on some tiny projects alongside us. That they are not scared of using their brains or their hands, that they embrace their mistakes and keep going, towards their own self expression.

I don't exactly know what this means but Chris has just buried two grandparents in as many weeks and if there is one thing death is good for, it's to make us think about our own lives. Chris wrote a eulogy which he read at his grandfather's funeral and it reminded me of an exercise I had heard of to help people gain some perspective on their life. The exercise is in two parts. The first one is to write one's own eulogy based on one's current life. The second part is to write one's own ideal eulogy, based on the life one would actually want to be remembered for.

This vision isn't my eulogy and as lovely as it sounds, I don't think that this will be our life either but at the core is a strong desire to be there for our children, for Chris and me to work as a team in life and work and for creativity to be at the centre of it all. Beyond that, light, space and silence would be wonderful too!