strange contentment

When I was little(r) I always always always wanted to be older, to have more responsibility, to be taken as an adult. - (To me, older was about 17) - So desperate was I that I chased worshiped "older women" (read: 16) and felt consistently distressed at having been born to late. I should have been the oldest. I came too late.

I was convinced 17 was an appropriate age to start having children called Eliza (named as a nod to Pride and Prejudice) and that I could totally manage study and child rearing at the same time. Thank God or Science I'm a homo or I'd have been barefoot and pregnant as soon as you could say "oops I skipped that sex ed class to go practice for the Shakespeare Festival."

I wanted respect which I didn't know how to earn and I wanted to grow into a person my childhood self would chase and worship. I wanted to look after people smaller than me or weaker than me, as evidenced by a saviour complex that gets me into trouble some days. "No, Maeve, you can't go punch that homophobic boy who called your friend a faggot. He's twice your size and you like your face a lot," she said last week.

This year, for the first time in my life, I feel content with the age I am. I am in my skin and while it is not entirely as I would wish it, it feels more right than it ever has before. I am flirting with having a sense of my place in the world and I feel...dare I say it...content. I have what I need. And it is leading me terrifyingly towards writing a blog that is neither funny nor angry. Panic Stations!

And yet there it is. My strange contentment. My small and colourful home littered in memories of houses spanning Sydney to Bathurst, family to friends, happiness to rage and pain. Vegetable garden. Flowers in tupperware vases and the most delightful, thoughtful musical housemates who bring the ice cream addiction and dance off madness I had always dreamed of.

I miss my drama though some days. I just can't invoke the misery or fear I used to run to. I can't hate quite as I used to or scream like I did. I yearn for the days when I could throw a lovers belongings at her doorstep and yell bloody murder. I don't think I could do it with a straight face nowadays... I am loving with a force field to protect me from past ills repeated and I am burying deep my guilt at this happiness. I have watched some of the most important people in my life crumble and fall so many times and I often wonder what I have that saves me from their fate. Am I foolish to not see the chasm of disappointment they find in the world?

I have rage, oh how I rage. But I don't convert it into the depths of sadness my loved ones tend to find. Sometimes I think the rage is so huge I can't fathom it so I ignore it like other terrifying unknowns which don't fit into my realm of understanding. Like outer space, how the internet works and why people find men interesting.*

*(excepting my beloved male folk who defy this generalisation and know who they are)

I ignore the fear that my family will never truly heal itself. I ignore my sorry conviction that I will, in fact, spend my life without ongoing romantic love, not because I think I am unworthy, but because I don't know that I have the staying power. I ignore the concern that I don't know what my contribution to society must be, that I have left it too late to create a career, that I still don't know what that career should be. I ignore the devastating awareness that I will not see, in my lifetime, a world I would be proud to live in. A world where I don't have to be scared walking alone at night just because I am a woman. Where we can sit safely in the front seat of a taxi. Where governments work for good not votes and the earth isn't dying.

I don't write about my personal personal life on this little blog too often. It's for rants and foolish musings. I find it painful when others do, airing the laundry of the inner west for all and sundry. I'm a talker. If you want to know what I think, I will, 99% of the time, respond frankly (ok tactlessly). I don't need this for an outpouring.

But I thought, maybe, if I acknowledged the fear and celebrated the contentment, I could get a handle on the balance of the two. Either embrace the simmering terror in my belly, or calm it with a good dose of 'my what a beautiful day it is how much do I love bagels and cheese.'

I'll see how I feel in an hour or so.

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