CHAPTER 35
It’s been some time since I’ve written a post about the creatures that came into our lives and stopped us buying the good wine, having intercourse and being able to eat at the nice places.
I do admit the fact we had another child kind of ruined the whole toddler theme and I went into the wilderness for a bit. The lack of a title (and a theme) hamstrung me.
I’ve had to take a second mortgage on my soul to keep them in bananas, blackberries, and crayons. Christ on a bike these things can eat.
Also, in my defence, the baby was a baby and just did baby things and wasn’t interesting enough to take up my very valuable time writing about it. It gurgled and stuff. There you go.
So, because the second one couldn’t do stuff, and because I was too dumb to come up with a new title, the whole thing went away – for a bit.
Due to an uninteresting character that had been introduced into “our world.” For the record.
But we’re back baby, yeah!
The children things are now called Goombah’s. A word made up by the newest Goombah. the new one does amuse us with words it creates. It still can’t pronounce the “S” sound, but its brilliance on a scooter is noteworthy and it’s a really cool human.
For ease of reference, the one formally known as the toddler will now be referred to as Donkey and Goat is the small one. Donkey and Goat. There we go.
Perhaps I’ll make a chart for those playing at home.
We good? Bonza.
So, a catch y’all up. I owe you, dear loyal readers, at least that.
There was a virus.
Then we were raising pandemic kids.
Apartment bound little people. Creatures who’d gaze out the window, watching the bats Tim Smith wanted to kill, cruising by and cheering them on.
Those times I won’t write about. We all know that part of our lives.
Goat is learning to socialise more as she was a true pandemic kid. Locked down for a lot of the two years she’s been alive. But she’s awesome and doesn’t know any different. She took a pandemic in her stride. But she still must face the reality of the world. She yet doesn’t understand other kids and how to socialise with them. She’s learning, lucky the Donkey isn’t shy and makes friends with anyone. But when the Goat wakes of a morning and her mother isn’t beside her, she starts to freak out. If her big sister is awake, then it gets odd, as she tells her their mother got eaten by wolves during the night and they dragged her body under the house. So, if she wants to see her again, she needs to go under the house. With the wolves.
That story scares me, let alone a 2-year-old.
Kids have sick imaginations and I’m so jealous that Donkey has a sicker imagination than me. I’m so ready to steal every story it comes up with. So ready. “Written by me” and go make the money. It’s 5 and doesn’t have a job. I pay for its 20 kilo a day banana habit; the kid owes me.
(We do not approve of this behaviour for the record.) It’s just fucking funny.
Sibling rivalry is as real as revenge, and those things go together with the Matier girls. I have a 5-year-old who can outsmart me on occasions and my immediate reaction is to be proud. But then I think it can’t be a good thing and by the time I’ve dealt with my emotions it’s convinced me to buy it an ice-cream and get a play in the park.
The little one (Goat), just loves me though. It likes cuddling and laying its curly head on my shoulder, sighing, and saying, “my daddy.”
It speaks now. It also toilet trained itself. I swear it took like 2 days. It wants to go to kinder so badly (it has another year to go) and we told it that kinder kids didn’t wear nappies, so it couldn’t go anyway. So, it toilet trained itself, grabbed a backpack used for picnics, put it on and expected to go to kinder. Didn’t we feel like wankers when it’s all ready to go to kinder with its big sister and we must tell it why it can’t.
For the first part of the year, we were living in Lennox Head. We didn’t want to leave. If it wasn’t for the job, I was on ending and the frigging pox flowing across NSW at the time, we’d still be there. It was bloody paradise and we do hope to get back.
However, on the day we left, the ol’ Rona was marching across the state and Victoria were shutting the borders that very day. I put the girls on a plane and headed South. I had the AC/DC catalogue playing, Monster Magnet and Behemoth to drive me on. I headed inland, adding hours to my journey, but I was expecting to be talking to hard coppers on the Victoria border and I wanted them to know I went nowhere near the Rona-explosion that was Sydney at the time.
The trip itself was bloody breath-taking with the views. I, however, was trying to get back to my own state before Armageddon took hold and I was trapped forever.
I was part way through BACK IN BLACK, when I hit a snag. The road I was on was flooded and placed a burr in my non-plan of just driving inland trying to get home. I was on a deadline. I had to get across the border before it was “slammed shut.”
I was now, as the kids say, totally fucked.
I found a road and kept going, it felt like I was going South, but I get lost in Ikea, so I could have been heading to Germany.
I was doing 150KM an hour across the flood plains and hoping like hell the rains hadn’t cut the road off further ahead.
To cut a 19-hour road trip short. I made it across the Victorian border without challenge. I was expecting the border to look like Christmas with all the flashing lights. But there was nothing. This changed within in a day. But making it across the border and a further 15KM into the state to finally pull into a rest stop, was bliss.
As Buck 65 says in the song Wicked and Weird –
“Five o’clock shadow, lips like mudflaps
Hands like eagle’s talons, eyes like hub caps
The further I get, I keep goin’ faster
Whispers in the wind and cows in the pasture”
I pulled to a stop. Texted the wife. Took a piss with a couple of bikers who were also wide-eyed. Then settled down for a couple of hours sleep while the people in the caravan next to me kept coughing.
A patrol car did a sweep of the parking lot, then that was it. I drove to the in-laws. I’d made it.
Then fucking lockdown happened. Again.
TO BE CONTINUED:
Danny Matier 