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Trick or healthy treat.

SarahAlderson

November 2, 2011

It’s trick or treat time. Being British I’m faintly disturbed by this tradition; squirmish about the concept of fancy dress (the effort involved seems commensurate with axing the trees to light your own funeral pyre), cynical of the commercialization of yet another pagan / christian ceremony and also mightily stressed out by the following email, which begins:

Come in Costume, laugh and smile a lot!

The British in me rears up like a dragon. Not only do they expect me to wear a costume (a costume!) but they also are demanding I laugh and smile? PER-LEASE. Who are these Americans? So crass. So happy all the time…

OK, I’m just a little envious. I’ve grown up in the land of Malcom Tuckers. I don’t know how to be happy and laugh all the time. I know how to be sarcastic and wry and cock one cynical eyebrow all the time whilst complaining about the weather.

We’re asked to bring healthy food for the pot luck and healthy snacks for the trick or treat, as environmental as possible (this is after all at Green School – the greenest school in the world or something).

I spend all week online googling manically for healthy Halloween recipes. I have visions of extravagantly costumed parents holding out little cupcakes with monster faces on whilst I lurk in my jeans and a t-shirt at the back handing out Haribo. The shame is too great and spurs me into action.

I head into the metropolis of downtown Denpasar to buy an oven and a little Chinese black box to make it work, which made a percussive sound when shook like one of those kid’s maracas. Though a child’s musical toy would probably not have exploded in quite the same spectacular fashion.

Annabel Karmel can make brain mush muffins. Well whoopppeee dooo Annabel.

Jamie Oliver can make fruit gums using real fruit. Congrats Jamie.

I however can make nothing because my oven has exploded. My NEW oven which cost me an arm and a leg plus the ‘fine’ that we had to pay for being foreign and driving a car past a policeman.

Secretly I’m quite glad that the oven exploded because as soon as I unwrapped it I felt a deep sense of foreboding, rather like when you were a kid and unwrapped the giant present under the tree convinced it was going to be the Barbie house you’d been hoping for for three years but was in actual fact a flower press. And you had to slap a face on you and act happy for the rest of Christmas day when all you wanted to do was go upstairs and hide the flower press at the top of your wardrobe and kick something really hard.

That’s how I felt about the oven. But I had to act happy and like I hadn’t just sentenced myself to a life of stress and drudgery. My inner monologue went something like WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

Anyway I woke up on Saturday morning, the day of the trick or treat thing, and decided that I was done with pretending (I know, I know I’ve said this about ten times on this blog) that I was a yummy mummy domestic goddess. I closed down all those google windows displaying images of mummy pizzas and googly eyed fruit salads and instead pulled out my phone and speed dial rang the pizza place, ordering three pizzas and five packs of cookies. They’re spelt flour – that surely qualifies them as healthy?

Relief has never felt so good let me tell you. I might have been $80 poorer but I was a million dollars worth of happier.

Then we get to the trick or treat village. I have to ask a passing Canadian what I’m expected to do when the kids come knocking. She looks at me weirdly and tells me I should compliment them on their costumes and hand out the cookies.

OK, I think, I can manage that. I hand out all the cookies, eating seven myself as I wait. (It was stressful, running over my lines.)

Alula arrives beaming with the shopping bag I’d given her filled with goodies. We empty them out.

Every single treat is a plastic wrapped one cent sweet from the local supermarket.

The unbecoming of a domestic goddess

SarahAlderson

3 comments

October 26, 2011

On my list of things to do in 2011 I have the following written:

8. Give up cooking.

So I’m not sure why I’ve just spent $100 on an oven.

(You can tell it’s a good oven.)

It actually just looks like a giant toaster. But with a spit thing in the middle just in case I fancy spit roasting a piglet (a whole pig wouldn’t fit) for Sunday brunch.

I’m not sure why I’ve bought an oven. I think if I stopped to analyse it, which I’m frightened to, I’d discover the reason was: because the ghost of Nigella haunts me.

Buried deep in my subconscious is the need to be a domestic goddess with an enormous bosom, even though the chances are nil to subnil of this actually ever happening (being a domestic goddess or growing boobs bigger than an A cup.) I mean I don’t clean or make my own Christmas decorations either. Perhaps too is the idea that if I can cook I will redeem myself in John and Alula’s eyes as being a worthy wife and mother rather than a half-hearted one.

If I can fill the house with the wafting delicious smells of baking cookies and fresh bread then — God I don’t even have the ability to finish that thought. I still don’t know why I bought an oven.

I told John I wanted to roast vegetables. But then I looked at the chopping board and the pile of veg in the fridge and was like, ‘But damn, I have to peel them first. How tedious.’

I bought Alula a baking cupcake tray. But now I’m thinking ‘Damn I have to buy an electric whisk cos no joke I’m not stirring that by hand.’

But then it all became a moot point. Because I got my hundred dollar oven back home (spit roast and all) and then remembered that last time someone plugged in a kettle they almost blew up our house.

I study the box. It has a lot of numbers and letters on it. I sigh to myself. Maybe I should have paid more attention in physics. Is this even Physics? I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s what dads are for. I have a fleeting thought that what will Alula do when she finds herself in a similar situation in twenty years? John certainly won’t have a clue. A generation of boys has grown up clueless of DIY and physics and my daughter will suffer as a consequence. I’m supposed to think something feminist at this point about teaching her about Wattage or amps and how to change a plug because why are we X chromosome holders relying on the Y people? Haven’t they already proved to us they’re useless? But really? Do I have to? She’ll figure it out soon enough on her own. Can’t I just teach her how to use google?

Or maybe she’ll phone her granddad, like I’m doing.

‘Dad,’ I say. ‘I have a problem.’

I switch the skype camera on and turn the lens to face my oven.

My dad asks me ‘What ampage do you have in the house?’

‘Huh?’

My dad sighs. I can’t read minds but I know he’s thinking ‘why’d I bother spending all those hours when she was 15 tutoring her through GCSE Physics? For what end?’

‘Do you know what a fuse box looks like?’ he eventually asks as a last resort.

‘Yeah!’ I answer rushing out to look. I’m just relieved he’s asking me something I actually know the answer to.

I return and tell him 240W.

‘That’s not an amp,’ he says in his patient voice, ‘that’s a wat.’

‘What?’

Eventually we figure out that the ‘interevertor’ – this plastic box which my driver bought me and which he assures me he uses to turn on his tv (No, not a remote) without blowing up his whole village – is actually an ‘invertor’ and that Chinese manufacturers from the 1970s just couldn’t spell.

I plug the oven into the black box, plug the invertor into the wall and then praying fervently, turn on the oven, whilst simultaneously shielding my face from any explosions that might occur.

The oven heats up. Nothing explodes.

I suffer a long-lasting pang of remorse because this now means I actually have to start using it.

Urgh.

I want to be A list. I don’t want to be a pleb any more.

SarahAlderson

4 comments

October 20, 2011

So I’m lying in bed and I’m thinking about Brad and Ange. And I’m thinking that the bed I’m currently lying in is big enough for Brad, Ange and their 6 kids to all sleep comfortably in. Hell, the Brangelina could have one of their infamous sexual showdowns (the kind that has their security guard bursting through the door thinking they’re being attacked by machete wielding robbers) whilst all the kids slept unperturbed and undisturbed. It is that big.

Anyway then I get to thinking that I bet Brad and Ange don’t have to worry about anything when they hit up a new city. They get taken care of probably by embassies and PRs and sycophants and probably even royalty. And maybe they have their own team of PAs supplemented by one of those global concierges that only the truly oligarchal can afford – who link you up with personal shoppers, that country’s top waxers and the phone number of every Maitre D’ in town …you can tell I’ve thought lots about this…

What I’m saying is that I doubt very much that Brad and Ange have to sit on the plane, rubbing the sleep from their eyes as the plane circles to land, trying to locate a pen and arguing over who has to fill in all 6 of their kids’ arrival cards. I bet they don’t have to queue to get through customs. I bet they get whisked off the plane and straight into a limo as the plane is still taxi-ing. I bet their lives are as smooth as one of Angelina’s expertly waxed legs.

I think life is so unfair.

I ended up thinking of Brad and Ange today too when the Indonesian embassy in Bangkok refused to give me my passport back. I’m telling you – I doubt very much that Ange has to put up with shit like this.

Ever.

You know those moments in films where you see the protagonist go postal, lean across a counter and blow their nemesis away and then the camera does one of those time slice things and spins around and the nemesis is still talking at the hero of the story and you realize you’ve just witnessed a fantasy – the protagonist merely imagining what they’d like to do but is too chicken to in actual life?

Well I had one of those moments today. Complete with time slice action. I smashed my fist through the bullet proof glass of the consular’s desk, grabbed the guy by the neck, slammed his head down and demanded he gave me my passport or I’d kill him with my bare hands. I swear Angie did something like this in Salt.

I imagined blood and violence. In reality I am said chicken. Also I am not CIA trained. So I cried.

‘No receipt. No passport,’ the man said, indifferent to my sobs.

Don’t you hate those situations when you’re somewhere official where the man literally has power of life and death over you? You know you have to hold your tongue which is a very, very difficult thing for me to do. But I’ve watched Spooks enough to know that embassy territory is sovereign territory. If I start yelling they’ll lock me up in some hidden underground hole and deny my very existence. They might boil me in chip fat or something.

And even me with my big mouth knows that yelling at the consular dude is not going to make things go my way. I thought about whether the wodge of rupiah in my wallet would make things go my way but didn’t dare try it.

And why don’t I have a concierge service who could sort this out? A fixer even who could pay under the counter, who could call the Indo ambassador and force this man to give me my passport back?

Angie would just have to click her fingers and it would be done. She wouldn’t have to bawl and plead.

‘But I lost the receipt,’ I said to the man.

‘I no give you passport then.’

‘Well what am I supposed to do?’ I asked, trying so hard to say calm.

‘I no know.’

‘But who else is going to come for my passport? You can just look at the photo. It’s me. I’m not going to steal my own passport.’

But of course reason is pointless in the face of ambassadorial bureaucracy.

‘You go police.’

‘And tell them what exactly? That you stole my passport?’

‘You make report. You tell you lost receipt.’

‘Are you serious?”

‘Goodbye.’

To give me credit where it’s due. I waited until I’d turned around before I started swearing. And I did it silently, images of me being bundled out the back door by machine gun toting Indonesian soldiers assaulting my imagination.

I asked about 15 people where the police station was. No one understood me. At this point I thought about lying down on the pavement and just crying. But instead I got a taxi to my hotel.

Then I begged them to help me. ‘Why you go police?’ the receptionist asked.

‘Because I lost a piece of paper.’

‘You no go police.’

‘Yes you don’t understand. I HAVE to go to the police.’

Finally after half an hour of trying to explain and failing I contemplated this time just crawling into the empty bath tub with a bottle of vodka and ignoring everything until someone else sorted it all out…and if they didn’t well then I’d just slip into a coma for the next five years by which point it would have to be over. But then a nice bell boy called Mr. Ball Ball walked me to the police station where no one spoke any English either.

They wrote a police report even though I was convinced they thought my passport had been stolen. Which in a way it had but which I doubted the Indo embassy would take kindly to seeing written in a police statement.

I took it back to the consulate and waved it tentatively at the man.

‘You come back at 3,’ he told me.

Bet you Angelina Jolie wouldn’t have had to deal with this shit. Just saying.

Drugs

SarahAlderson

no comments

October 11, 2011

I am ill with flu.

People have suggested various remedies: Having an enema, drinking colloidal silver, imbibing reishi mushroom tincture and green juice fasting.

Has no one here heard of Nurofen cold and flu?

I feel like some furtive drug dealer slipping them into my mouth whilst no one is looking….drugs are so frowned on here. Sticking a lubed hose up your butt and hosing it out is fine, giving up eating and absorbing all your body’s energy requirements by lying in the sunshine and smelling the pretty flowers is totally acceptable, raising no more than a nod of encouragement, but taking a little white pill of pharmaceutical goodness is so frowned upon you’d think I was snorting babies’ brains.

Even admitting your child has had vaccinations for tetanus and polio makes people tut and shake their head – as if you’ve admitted to having them tattooed with the numbers 666 across their butt cheeks.

Quick shove me up against a wall and break out the uzis.

Over here, all drugs, except the mushroom (non reishi) kind are BAD. Kill someone? Get out of jail free. Get caught with a joint? Line up against the wall whilst they usher in the firing squad…

Sometimes it feels like we’ve fallen down a rabbit hole.

Case in point – a fourteen year old Australian boy got caught buying some weed on the beach down south last week. He’s now in prison awaiting charges which could be in the region of a twenty year sentence if he’s lucky.

Can you even imagine being his parents? Too awful to contemplate. I have to say if my kid bought drugs in Bali though I’d be tempted (tempted I’m saying – not that I would) to just let him or her suffer the consequences because it’s Darwinism at work surely? It’s not like the warnings aren’t stark enough. It’s not really possible to miss the skull and crossbones that meet you when you get off the plane and the large sign saying ‘THE PUNISHMENT FOR POSSESSION OF DRUGS IS DEATH!’

And if you come from Australia there’s also the well-documented cases of the Bali 9 and Schapelle Corby – all Australian citizens caught trafficking drugs into Bali and who are now sitting in Kerobokan prison. But maybe those stories act like the pictures of lung disease on the backs of cigarette packs. Maybe most 14 year olds just ignore it all thinking they’re immortal, untouchable and it could never happen to them…

Which is why the other day we were discussing with friends when would be a good point to leave Bali and take up residence elsewhere. Unanimous vote on when the kids get to be teenagers…

Green School Bali

SarahAlderson

1 comment

September 30, 2011

Alula has started at a new school. Some of you may have heard of it. It’s called Green School and it’s sort of famous because it’s a) built all out of bamboo (even the toilets) b) Al Gore visited once and so did Ben & Jerry (you can tell which one made me more excited) c) it’s the world’s first eco school or something (I’m not actually sure) but what I do know is that once you see it you kind of come away wowed and wishing that you could be five again with really cool parents who moved you to Bali and were hippy enough to not really care much about the curriculum but who thought that skipping around a giant crystal in the jungle and learning songs about Mother Earth was the way forward (I exaggerate – the curriculum is actually British and the school motto is not ‘Do not follow the Guru, you are the Guru’ though I think it should be because that would be awesome).

It’s like Swiss Family Robinson crossed with Mallory Towers crossed with I’m a celebrity get me out of here crossed with an Ashram . See you’re nodding right? Cool huh? You want to be five again with me as your mother I can tell.

The irony is however that most the parents send their kids to Green School in huge 8-seater chauffeur driven people-carriers. The place is off grid, recycles student poo, grows its own food and uses banana leaves as lunch plates – just to put the car thing into context. I’m one of only a few mums who actually does the school run and definitely the only one who does it in a four seater tin can. Which also makes me guilty of being a hypocrite too but bear in mind Alula’s just turned 5 and I want to be the one to take her to school and I want to be there when she comes out to give her a hug and listen to the teacher tell me what stubborn, willful, challenging new behaviour she’s exhibited that day.

I don’t think that would be fair on a driver to have to relay to me.

Also I’m not about to cycle her to school given its 15 miles of lorry laden madness, broken up tarmac and having to avoid the potholes and splatted dogs.

And I’m lazy, you know that.

By the way, I’m using the I form rather than the we in that paragraph because John is currently in London where he is working because someone has to pay for all this crystal skipping, mother earth bamboo schooling taught by Ben & Jerry. Next week we will revert to we again. Actually we will revert to HE because frankly I’m tired of the school run especially as my ipod won’t synch spotify so I’ve had to listen to the same album by Snow Patrol about five million times (I know embarrassing right?) which I’d still rather do than listen to the free Learn Indonesian podcasts I downloaded, tired too of sitting gripping the sides of the bench waiting for Alula to walk out her classroom feeling a heady mixture of fear and angst as I scan the teachers’ faces, tired of having to wait for her to drink her slushy before we can leave…the list continues. John can take over for a while and errr, I’ll do something useful, like earn the money to pay the fees. Somehow. Or maybe I’ll just go for massages.

Here are some pictures of the school anyway:

The toilets are made from bamboo. There is one for weeing and one for pooing. This means you can sit next to each other and chat whilst vacating your bowels so long as the other person is only weeing. If you poo in the wee toiled I think you’d have to reach in and pick it out. It is quite a challenging set up for a five year old who hasn’t yet mastered pelvic floor control (not saying I have either) to switch between loos without emptying bowels on the floor in between them.

This is Alula’s classroom. It rocks huh?

The is the heart of school. That’s what it’s called. I didn’t just make it up.

Who you gonna call?

SarahAlderson

no comments

September 16, 2011

Alula has been doing her best impression of Damien from the Omen these last few weeks. And when I say ‘impression’ I mean that she follows the method acting school of thought.

Being Ubud, most people’s first response when I appear weeping before them, pouring the valium down my throat is – ‘Have you taken her to a Balian?’

Not – Have you taken her to see a therapist? Have you taken her for ice cream? Have you spoken to her teachers? Have you tried Supernanny?

But – Have you taken her to a witchdoctor?

And that’s not coming from the Balinese, that’s coming from the ex-pats – most of whom I count as friends and who aren’t the typical blissninny you find here – but practical, sensible, intelligent people with real stories about their own freaky experiences.

Hell, I’ll try anything at this point I thought, and what harm could a little opinion be? And I am a believer in some aspects of spiritual healing (though have never tried a witchdoctor before it must be said). So I emailed a Balian recommended to me and asked what he thought.

The Balian told me that two demons were squatting on Alula’s astral plane.

Yes you read that right.

Two demons. Squatting. Astral plane.

I mean where do you go with that? Other than to the dictionary to make sure you’ve understood properly? And then to the bathroom to lie down on the cold wet tiles clutching a bottle of vodka?

Suddenly I’m Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby.

So the Balian says he’ll do a clearing (I think that’s the polite terminology for exorcism…oh the irony. My child actually is possessed! Apparently.).

OK, I say to the guy. I mean why not? I’m also trying Omega 3 fish oils, lavender sprinkled on her clothes, a no sugar diet, approaches from ‘The Explosive child’, daily massages and lots of love and hugs. Having someone chant some words on top of all that sounds fine to me. I’m open to most things these days – except perhaps staring into strangers’ eyes and sending them the love of the universe. And it beats electro-shock therapy right? And thirdly, in this lurid list of self-justifications – what if, just what if, it might actually be true? I You’d be breaking out the holy water too believe me…

And guess what? Alula woke up this morning for the first time in about six weeks and told me in a sweet voice ‘I love you mummy.’ There were no screaming battles, no devil faces, no rages. She was placid as a lamb.

Maybe it’s the lavender. Maybe she just woke up in a better mood. Maybe she’ll flip out again later, or maybe Rosemary should have taken her baby to a Balian.

Why being a mother sometimes SUCKS BALLS

SarahAlderson

9 comments

September 14, 2011

I am sitting amidst a pile of cellophane wrappers and discarded shoes – plastic tweety pie emblazoned fake crocs, Disney Princess bow-clad horrors with heels, sparkly beaded flip flops. I am in tears.

‘If you don’t choose a pair of damn shoes by the time I count to ten I am going to send you on the next plane back to England,’ I hiss at Alula.

I know this post will probably send shivers of outrage through some readers. I don’t care. If it does go away and don’t come back. Believe me no one can judge me worse than I already do.

I know I’m not the world’s best mother but by God I try to be. But sometimes being a mother SUCKS BALLS and any mother who says otherwise is a big fat liar and I challenge her to a duel. Or to hand over whatever it is she’s taking because I want some of that.

Yesterday being a mother SUCKED MORE BALLS than I can tell you about.

Alula has four pairs of shoes including a pair of 30 quid Start-Rites bought in the UK which she chose herself and which she loved, up until she got bored with the Velcro strap and the three extra seconds it takes to put them on which stops her from getting to the sand pit first.

Right now those thirty quid Start-Rites are floating eerily sole-up in our fish pond where I threw them yesterday in a fit of pique. Alula didn’t care a jot about their watery demise, her only thought was for the fish who I might have brained in the process.

‘There are children living next door who have NO SHOES,’ I told her ‘and you have a gorgeous pair of shoes but don’t want them.’

Did she repent of her ingratitude and haul them out the pond and put them on sobbing repentantly? Did she heck. She just shrugged at me.

She also has a pair of crocs which she used to love but for reasons unfathomable have been moved from the endangered to the extinct list.

And finally she has the faux animal fur flip flops she chose just yesterday in the supermarket after in exhaustion I told her she could just have whatever she wanted, I no longer cared, even if they had six inch heels and a place to stick a flick knife.

Those shoes lasted a day. They weren’t comfortable she complained.

So here we find ourselves surrounded by cheap tatty shoes with me in tears and Alula unmoved and still shaking her head at every pair that the shop owner and I thrust her way.

‘Fine then,’ I said, ‘You’ll just have to go barefoot to school.’

‘NO. If I don’t have shoes I’m not going to school,’ she announced.

So just let her stay home you might think, or, just buy a pair of damn shoes and make her wear them, or refuse to buy her new ones and make her wear the old ones – she sounds like a spoilt brat. If that’s what you’re thinking then yeah, I hear you. I fully agree. And believe me I WISH it was that easy. I spend half my life online trying to figure out the best approach to her particular brand of challenging (supernanny, exorcism, the naughty step – tried em all).

And I laugh at your naivete. You haven’t had the pleasure of meeting our daughter. She makes mules rethink their approach to stubbornness. The words of my mother, said to me when I was about eight, come back to haunt me: One day you’re going to have a child just like you and then you’ll understand.

Ok, I want to add something else to my list of things that suck balls. KARMA.

And you know what else? That no one ever tells you how hard being a mother is. You think women might want to share that little secret a bit more openly. It would help. That too goes on my sucking balls list.

We had been by this point to two supermarkets, the Croc shop AND two local shoe shops. We had tried on every pair of size 29 shoes in Indoneisa. Flip flops, Crocs and any shoes with straps had been ruled out. What does that leave?

It leaves barefoot. But knowing the hellishness that would result the next morning when this became clear to her was more than I could handle.

Eventually, she tried on a pair of flip flops which had attached to it what looked like those little bath oil balls the Body Shop sold in the late 80s…remember them? Kind of squishy like boils?

‘Yes,’ she said, trying them on. ‘I can wear these.’

I handed over the $2.50 and we walked back to the car, me still in tears.

Let’s think about this for a moment

SarahAlderson

5 comments

September 9, 2011

Our neighbour Made broke his leg a year ago in a moped accident. He’s still on crutches and can’t walk. He’s also in a lot of pain. He just came over to show me his leg and I did well to keep my breakfast down.

I’m not good with bodily secretions. Least of all yellow oozing ones.

The thing is Made and his wife Nyoman are poor. They are so poor that they have just enough to feed themselves. They certainly don’t have enough money to pay doctors’ bills.

We provide their only income – paying Nyoman to lay offerings around our house and to babysit Alula in the evenings when we go out.

But in a country where the doctors are generally so corrupt that only money talks and if you’re poor you die, that money isn’t enough to pay for a prescription.

I heard only the other day that the doctors here are bribed by pharmaceutical companies with cars and televisions. The payback? To keep babies away from their mothers for the first 36 hours so their milk dries up and they are forced to buy formula. This in a country where formula milk costs more than most people earn in a day.

My UK friend has recently returned to Bali with her 6 week old son. ‘He’s so fat!’ the Balinese gasp. He’s not. He’s a normal healthy weight for a UK child who is only breast-fed. But the Balinese are so used to poor diet and watered down formula that some don’t even recognize what is normal and healthy in a child.

In the same week I have sorted our health insurance – making sure that it includes evacuation – because the one thing I’ve learned is that if we get into an accident I don’t want to be treated here. As I tapped in my VISA number I felt sick with guilt and also overwhelmed with gratitude at my own situation allowing me to just buy my way out of difficulty. Here I was with the means to get the best medical care available whilst my neighbour cannot afford so much as an indigestion tablet.

We’re taking Made to the only clinic we trust in town for a second opinion and then we’ll make sure he gets the antibiotics and that he takes them properly (like the watered down formula, people tend to stretch out the antibiotics – thinking to make them last, not realizing they need to take them according to the instructions or it’ll only get worse).

Bali teaches you nothing if not the value of good deeds and gratitude for your own circumstances.

Then last night I was reading this article in the Guardian about the dismantling of the NHS in the UK. It painted a dark future of a private health care system discriminating against the poor, providing only the best services (and most expensive treatments ie. Chemotherapy) for those who can afford them. The UK will have a US style system run on market principles. Which is also a system open to abuse and corruption – as seen in Indonesia.

Can you imagine in the UK having your neighbour show you his puss-y leg and ask you if you can afford to pay his medication bills? How would you answer?

I have had so many questions this week running around my head and making me feel unsettled. But really I figured out, it boils down to just one…

…Where do we go from here?

Thank god it’s only once a year

SarahAlderson

4 comments

August 28, 2011

Two four year olds stand before me, hands on hips.

‘Is there Birthday cake?’ one demands.

‘Yes.’

‘Is the Cake Raw?’ the other asks.

‘No.’

‘Is the cake Vegan. Because I’m Vegan,’ says the other.

‘No.’

‘Well, what will I eat?’

‘Um…'(I don’t know but I’m thinking there’ll be more cake for me). I walk off without finishing the sentence.

‘Sugar’s bad!’ They chant to my back.

Then we all trek off on a rice paddy walk…enjoy the scenery…walk in the subak…the man explained. So off we toddled.

Ten meters in the first casualty hit. A scream. A child has fallen in the rice paddy head first.

Oh shit.

I plaster on a smile and usher the other kids along like Mary Poppins on Ecstasy… ‘oh look isn’t this fun everyone? It’s only a bit of mud!’

‘What are we doing here mummy?’ Alula asks po-faced.

‘We’re on a nature walk, it’s fun. It won’t be for long.’

‘The grass is itchy. I want a carry. I hate this.’

‘Ok, I’ll carry you.’

Second casualty – another child survives a fall into the mud.

Third casualty – one of the mothers falls sideways three feet. She is fine but her shoes disappear, sucked into the rice paddy’s void.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, cringing at her mud-splattered trousers and bare feet.

She laughs but I see the rage behind her eyes.

‘This is not a success, mummy,’ Alula announces as I tried to tiptoe delicately along the two inch width of the rice paddy verge whilst holding her and the camera and simultaneously trying to apologise to women and children who are crying and limping.

‘No, no it’s fine darling,’ I whisper so as not to be overheard when secretly I’m thinking whose bloody idea was this? Oh yes, good one John. And there goes my shoe. My new leather shoe. Coated, destroyed, lashed with mud.

Bet the vegan / raw girls would be laughing over the karma of that one.

Then we get to the cake cutting part.

‘I get the biggest piece,’ this older kid announces, shoveling his way to the front and sticking his nose into the icing.

‘Err, actually I think I do,’ I say, thinking to myself, who’s got the knife kid?

‘Well I get the first piece,’ he counters.

‘No actually the birthday girl gets the first piece,’ I say lightly, ‘and no one gets any cake unless they say please and thank you!’ See that grin fixed on my face. See the danger signs Kid? There’s a whole field of mud just over there which I’m perfectly willing to throw you in.

‘Wow,’ the kid says, ‘Do you know who’s paying for all this? This is like going to cost millions…and millions.’

I’m still holding the knife. Ok, it’s only plastic. But I could use it to smear icing over his head. Then push him backwards into the paddy.

‘Where’s my goodie bag?’ he demands.

I put the knife down. Slowly. Carefully.

‘We’re all out of goodie bags,’ I say smiling like a Stepford wife.

When we get home I pour myself a Bottle of Gin with a splash of tonic. And order up a massage and sushi delivery.

And stuff myself with the three portions of cake leftover.

Casualty one down. The kids didn't like the idea of re-enacting a scene from Apocolypse Now

Mummy, I don't think this is a success

I just like this shot because I've got cleavage

Dance like no one is watching…

SarahAlderson

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August 27, 2011

It’s pitch black. I’m sweating. People around me are gasping and moaning and writhing.

There’s only one place this could be.

The Yoga Barn on a Friday night.

It feels so good to get back to ecstatic dance. It was up there with coconuts as the thing I missed most about being away from Bali. Ok and Kadek. And massages and $5 pedicures. And not having to do the washing up.

Or laundry.

Within thirty seconds I have stripped down to a bikini top and half a skirt. But it’s ok because it’s pitch black and I could be naked and no one would notice and likely not care anyway. Anything goes here. Even orgasms on the dance floor.

I am sweat slicked and after another five minutes I’m completely in my own world, unaware of the thirty other people around me. I could be dancing on the moon although it feels like I’m dancing under a waterfall of coloured light. I’m aware of the irony of expressing this because when I first went to ecstatic dance I wrote a slightly mocking post about the non-ironic Ballet Rambert impressions going on around me as I danced with one eyebrow arched in amusement. And yet here I am, the one dancing in a way that would probably have the Ballet Rambert choreographer choking on his own laughter vomit.

I’ve come a long way in the last year. I truly embody the phrase ‘dance as though no one is watching.’

I have embraced Bali life. I am even making my own raw porridge with cacao, flax seeds and goji berries.

And eating it.

And then the teacher plays MC Hammer. And I come down like the dude in Jacob’s ladder. I arch an eyebrow, dress myself and head home.