ANZAC Day in the age of COVID

At the time of writing, our pandemic lockdown is in week 5. We are not allowed to leave home except to go shopping for essential supplies, or to go to the doctor or chemist. We are allowed to exercise outside of our homes, by walking and biking in our neighbourhoods. We have bent the rules a tiny bit by driving to the local cemetery three kilometers away, where we can wander freely while still observing the requisite physical distancing mandated by the government.

One of the pandemic initiatives to spring up worldwide was to encourage people to put teddy bears in windows as a nod to the book 'We're going on a bear hunt' by Michael Rosen. While small children cannot even play on their local playground, they could go for a 'bear hunt' around their local neighbourhood.

As Easter approached, the Prime Minister assured children that the Easter Bunny (and the Tooth Fairy) was an essential worker, so was allowed to work over Easter - but added a reminder that he might be a bit busy, so might not make it to their house (and parents who hadn't stocked up on Easter eggs pre lockdown breathed a sigh of relief)

Easter eggs started finding their way into windows or in chalk drawings on footpaths and fences. A favourite in our very Westie neighbourhood was 'Happy Easter Egg" Unintentional, I'm sure, but amusing nonetheless.

Saturday was ANZAC Day, and in a time where gatherings of any sort are not allowed, people went to the end of their street at 6am for their own personal 'dawn service.'  There were reports of a bugle being heard across the whole suburb playing Reveille. People decorated their fences and windows with poppies. The creativity was joy to behold, but do people really know what this all means?

I do not get up for dawn anything, and ANZAC Day is no different. The few years after my Dad died it became a necessary part of my grieving process, but the pain faded and the sense of duty was no longer there.

On ANZAC Day itself, Nyah and I went up to the local cemetery and visited the memorial there. It is always interesting to observe social practices, whether or not we choose to partake in them. I was drawn to an information board which talked about the construction of the memorial, and about some of the adjacent graves. The Browne family lost four of their five sons. It is a loss incomprehensible to us today.

Just over a week prior to lockdown coming into effect, we visted Te Rau Aroha - a museum dedicated to Māori contribution to the armed forces, and the heavy price they have paid. It was a solemn and contemplative place to visit. My eldest son is now eighteen years old - the age he could have been conscripted into the armed forces and sent into the unknown - and possibly to die - like so many young Māori men in the service of their colonisers. Like the Browne brothers were. Parents the world over have experienced this heartbreak. Here we are locked into our 'bubbles'* to fight a war on a pathogen, but we have each other and we have relative comfort and safety.

As ANZAC Day dawned, I felt the grief of humanity. Grief for the boys who never came home a hundred years ago. Grief for my own father's lost youth and what it took from my whole family. Grief for my own son who is safe but who I have not seen for over five weeks. I miss him.

We have no concept of the losses families have experienced through war - especially World War I. Maybe the nationalistic fervor, poppy imagery and silhouettes of soldiers with heads bowed are us trying to make sense of it all.

We cry, we sing, we get up at dawn, and in the middle of a pandemic, we put poppies on our fences instead of in our lapels.




*'Bubble' refers to the small unit of people we can be a part of during the pandemic lockdown - our own 'bubble' is myself, Nyah and my two youngest children who live with us half of the time. Due to their movement between homes, our bubble technically also includes my two eldest children, their father and his partner. Our bubble does not extend beyond this, and we are not able to see any other family or friends. 

Holding on and letting go

School finished the week before work did, which resulted in kids coming to the office with me for four out of my remaining five work days before Christmas. It’s a one hour trip each way in peak hour traffic. Most people roll their eyes and groan about the time such a commute takes, but I take full advantage of it, knowing that car rides can be a perfect chance for plenty of quality conversation.

As we rounded the corner of a street half way home, Miss 11 asked "Why are there pictures of snowmen everywhere at Christmas?" 

It’s a good question. 

from 'A Kiwi Night Before Christmas'
By Yvonne Morrison
Scholastic, 2013

As a child, I accepted without question the Northern Hemisphere imagery and stories that were a part of our summer Christmas. Before bed we'd read Clement Clarke Moore's classic poem 'The Night before Christmas' which was full of references to snow and keeping warm indoors. We put up stockings for Santa and decorated a fake pine tree. Even now my fake tree has a glass snowflake ornament adorning it. 

But increasingly, New Zealand has started to adopt more and more antipodean language and symbols into our Christmas. We have the pohutukawa  and Santa in jandals driving a tractor with sheep instead of reindeer as part of our modern Kiwi Christmas imagery. 

As our collective traditions change, so do our whanau ones.  

My childhood Christmas was a heteronormative, nuclear family affair. Mum, Dad and two kids (one boy and one girl – seriously) My grandparents (happily married for a gazillion years, of course) would come along. In the morning my brother and I would unpack the stocking of goodies Santa had brought. Later my grandparents would arrive. My Dad would give Grandpa a tour of his vege garden and Mum would cook a traditional Christmas meal – turkey, ham, trifle, salad, new potatoes. We'd pull crackers, wear silly hats, and the meal would be a sit down event with the best dinnerset and the weekend cutlery. The fancy china teaset would have its annual outing later in the day, with Christmas cake served in the lounge. We would then have a relatively sedate present opening session, with each person taking a turn at opening something under the tree. 

I have fond memories of these rituals, so when I had my own children, I was keen to replicate them. I was perhaps too assertive about it. The Christmas after Mum and Dad died, my then husband and I hosted what we called an 'Orphan's Christmas.' My sister-in-law had also lost her husband that year, so holding on to traditions and family time seemed more important than ever. 

But after Mum died, I also started questioning everything. Holding to tradition worked for a season, but thereafter I started to ask 'why?' Of so many things. 

The first year after I left my marriage, I had limited funds, but I wanted to maintain normalcy. We bought $2 Shop crap and confectionery. They went into manky old socks hung on a TV cabinet next to a tiny 4ft tree. In fact I think that first year, Nyah bankrolled Christmas, because my income was just so low I couldn't. We sat down to a fancy breakfast and still have photographic evidence that we wore the silly hats from the crackers. 

As time went by, I shook things up. Nyah's large family, with many children who also spend time in two homes, meant Christmas wasn't a sit down meal, but a wonderful cacophony of children and food and comings and goings. Presents were no longer sedately handed out and opened, but neither did each individual get one. A growing awareness of overconsumption and its deleterious effects on the planet and our wellbeing means that Christmas has become increasingly less materially oriented. My first Christmas with Nyah meant an experience of exchanging family Secret Santa gifts that were secondhand or handmade. This year we were in receipt of a fruit bowl sourced in an op shop, and we couldn't be happier. 

As time has gone on, we have to make a constant assessment about what traditions we hold on to, and what ones we need to let go. What is the value in the tradition? Maybe the bigger question amongst all of this is whether or not the tradition enhances relationships? Buying things just because it’s a particular time of year is distasteful. We did buy gifts this year. In fact we bought all our families the same gift. Not because we are lazy, but because it was something that would work across the age range (3 to 53) it would make us think, it was something to start conversations, it was something that contained a little bit of all our stories.  

My Christmas yesterday was so far removed from my childhood experience I would not have believed it. A large family sitting under a shelter in the yard while children ran and played with water balloons. Lunch was served on mismatched, op shop sourced china. There was quinoa and coriander and pomegranate and the hostess was not responsible for it all. The eldest woman in the group was not in service to everyone else. Children came and went as they moved between homes. 

And I still reassess. Children with two homes often split the day between families. Does this really work? Do we need to have children with us on Christmas day just because its considered 'the done thing,' or would it be better to spread Christmas over a few days?  

The day after Christmas we had breakfast with my brother and his family, and it was just as festive and delightful on the 26th as it would have been on the 25th. Why subject children to the stress of the moving between homes on one day when it would clearly be easier on everyone for them to stay where they are? So many conversations I have heard or seen have contained the phrase "I will have <child> for X time until Y time" - using language as if they were an inanimate object. (And that is not a criticism, as I am as likely as anyone to use this language) 

If only we were all brave enough to make that call. Social rules are strong. 

For my family, it seems important that the best traditions are ones that enhance connection, communication and relationships. Not everything was perfect over our Christmas. There was the odd harsh word, and the frustration of teenagers who refuse to engage. But nothing ever is perfect, and things that are alive rarely are.  

But we are alive. That is key. We can move. We can change.  

We can hold onto snow and holly, or we can change them to sand and pohutukawa. We can hold on for dear life to something that needs to go. And we can let go and live for today. When we keep people at the centre, then we will know what to do. 

Finding my tribes

Photo credit:www.gaynz.com

As the New Zealand election campaign ramps up, I have, for the first time, begun attending election forums where candidates from each party put forward their policies about specific issues.  So far I had been to a forum on women's issues, education, and this week I went to the only forum in Auckland covering LGBTI issues.
This popped up on my 'events' on Facebook, and at first I dismissed it as irrelevant.  I have been resistant to the idea of being a part of the LGBTI community, because I didn't feel any need to for my own personal reasons, and maybe partly because I wasn't sure I fitted anywhere within the LGBTI alphabet soup.  Books I'd read said to go out and find the lesbians and hang out with them, but as a woman under 40 I wasn't sure if 'Lesbian Games Night' at the local Women's Centre (the only lesbian social activity I could find) was really going to be my thing.

I wondered what 'issues' might be relevant to the LGBTI community, because it seemed to me that many of the battles of the past had been won.

When I was a young Mum, I sought out the support of other people like me.  I found I was always a bit of a misfit amongst my mother peers, who were sometimes older, and mostly more wealthy than me.  However, we found common ground in our parenting styles, and for a long time I was a member of a mother-to-mother support group where I could be with mothers who mothered like me.  We perhaps had very little else in common other than that we had particular beliefs about how babies should be parented.  Often we talked about the solidarity and encouragement we felt from being with members of our 'tribe.'   I have recently left that organisation, simply because I have moved into new stages and my 'babies' are now aged five and over. When it comes to parenting, my concerns are more about education and behaviour than about sleep and feeding.

As I was driving home one evening (I do lots of thinking while I drive) it occurred to me that my tribe alliances were shifting.  I was becoming more interested and concerned about issues that effect different parts of me - issues that are important to me as a student, issues that are important to me as a mother of school children, issues that are important to me as a member of the LGBTI community.  Then it struck me - I had identified myself as being part of a community that I had initially dismissed as not needing.  I don't think it was appropriate to go looking for that community a year ago, but I suppose over time I have grown into it.

I wrote about a lack of hostility that I feel as a queer middle aged woman, so I took for granted that this lack of hostility exists everywhere.  However, it occurred to me that there are still battles to fight.  Adoption law needs overhauling, and transsexual people are facing uphill battles around how they are treated in the health and prison systems and within human rights legislation.  I am not being forcibly separated from my children and haven't lost my job because I'm in a lesbian relationship.  I realised that I take this for granted, but it wasn't always this way.  It is a great credit to activists before me that I can take these liberties for granted - I'm sure they hoped for a world where this might be possible.

So I think its only reasonable to 'pay it forward' so to speak.  I don't have to fight for the freedom to live how I choose, and if dealing with people's assumptions is the worst I have to deal with, then life is good.  At this particular time in my life it might only be weighing up issues in order to choose who to tick on a ballot paper, but I suppose turning up at a public forum to hear what the issues are to begin with is a start.

I learned more than I thought I would.  The visibly awkward right wing participants felt the world was rosy, but the gay/trans/ally candidates from other parties had a different story to tell.  I learned about gender discrimination and heterosexism in sexual health matters, that trans people have to fight to be recognised as human under our human rights legislation, and that things were not as rosy as we think for queer high school students, who still face unacceptable levels of bullying, and schools that are failing to keep them safe.

Afterwards, Nyah and I had a discussion about how these things would affect our children and her grandchildren.  These weren't just LGBTI issues, but issues that had the potential to touch all of both our families.

Children are not islands and it take a village to raise them.  This forum raised issues that could be a concern to me as a member of the LGBTI community, but moreso are a concern to mine and my partner's children and grandchildren.  Is my son going to be taunted at high school for having a lesbian mother?  Why should Nyah's granddaughter be the assumed conduit to keep boys safe from the HPV virus?  What if one of our children or granddchildren is gay?  Will they be safe at their school?  If one of them is actually a gender not aligned with their sex?  How will the world and the law see them?

They are issues for us as members of the LGBTI community.  But they are also issues for everyone.

Rundown of the AUSA Pride Week LGBTI election forum are here.http://www.liveblogpro.com/event/53fec1060e4a85d4718b458d