I don’t often write about our children in these retirement blogs. Not sure why. One of them is half an hour away in Allerton Bywater and the other is half a world away in Western Australia. I don’t know how families managed when a letter to or from took three weeks (or whatever) to go one way. Even with free Facetime (which we’ve just finished) our son and I rarely talk although he and his mother do. I’m just relieved he and his partner (and his three ‘kind of adopted’ children) are all doing well.
That’s code for they are surviving everything that life in OZ is offering up to them. That’s to say all the challenges large and small that life anywhere brings everybody’s way. As far as I can make out, having listened to him talk for half an hour, that’s pretty similar to what they’d get if they were in the UK.
True, they’ve escaped most of the pandemic, at least so far, (but they do have bush fires and snakes and spiders), and that’s definitely not to be sniffed at. But otherwise their challenges have been those of relatively young couples the world over. So no, the grass is not much greener over there, in fact technically it’s usually considerably browner through lack of rain. But the metaphor still holds true.
Well, except as he told us this morning, he works for a large landscaping company and manages 63 gardeners. He wouldn’t have had that over here. But with responsibility comes stress whether over here or over there. He is currently involved in a project that involves clearing the ground for a large development of housing near Mandura, WA.
He is the go between, between the landowner (who only wants to lose a few trees): the developer (who wants all trees removing for maximum build – same the world over) and the local council who don’t want to lose any trees at all. As he says, it’s doing his head in.
He has decided he doesn’t want to chop any trees down. He described himself as a developing tree-hugger. His mother would be proud. But I doubt his company are quite so impressed. Otherwise it’s the same old stuff the world over – his last landlord refusing to return their bond; his partner’s health problems and, my favourite, one of his three ’sort of adopted’ children giving him grief. He gets on well with the two eldest from his partner’s previous marriage, but the youngest, 11, is apparently, a cheeky little bastard.
Ah, the joy. As a child who gave his father some considerable grief (his sister was five years old when we decided this is a doddle – she was a lovely child, we should have another one – wrong) during his growing up, I can only say, welcome to the world of karma my dear boy. That said I must admit it’s a pleasant surprise, with the emphasis on the ‘surprise’ part, that he is doing well enough to be managing 63 people. This as a boy who did not do at all well at school.
As the local psychologist ‘expert’ in behaviour management it was embarrassing in the extreme to be constantly called into his high school to talk to his Head of Year about his behaviour. Although to positively reframe this, he did provide me with a fund of stories about how badly I dealt with his behaviour as he grew up.
In evaluations after my behaviour management presentations in schools when asked – what was their favourite bit of my talk? the audience invariably wrote – the stories about how badly you brought up your son. Well, when you’re standing in front of 200 grumpy, secondary school staff who did not want to attend a training day on their classroom management skills, you took what you could get. If what they loved about me was my parental ineptitude, then fair enough.
By the way if you think he was embarrassed by me telling these tales you’d be very wrong. If he knew I’d done a presentation that day he would greet me excitedly and ask – did you tell any stories about me today? Such are my memories of the dear boy.
And now here he was, a bronzed, shaved head (he takes after me that way) and a beard that looks like it could figure in the tree-clearing programme, still requiring occasional, financial support, but, that apart, apparently doing rather well. Can I thank Australia for that? Maybe the grass is a bit greener, even when it’s actually, in reality, browner.