Men

I've only dated two men in my life, and I ended up marrying one of them.
I met the first one through a dating website. He was around 8 years older, had been married once before and was very independent. It was very much a rebound thing for me - I was ready to slip back into the comfortable relationship feeling I'd had a few months earlier and if he's asked me to move in or move overseas with him I would have considered it. I probably would have gone, actually.. Thank goodness it didn't come to that. He realised I was a bit more involved than he was and he dumped me over email. I was at work when I got it. That was probably the first time I've really been dumped on my backside and it was a complete surprise. My mother was thrilled; she thought he was an arrogant pig and now that I've had time to consider, she may have seen him a bit more clearly than I did.
I was still dating him when I met Moda (my Minister of Dangerous Activities). I went to a birthday party with a girlfriend and pointed him out to her. She was single, I wasn't, I told her to check out the cute guy in the kitchen and she asked him out. D'oh! They dated for about a month, then it kind of fizzled out. I think she was offended when I asked her if I could maintain a friendship with him - I thought he was awesome and it would be a shame to lose a friend just because she broke up with him. He and I just hung out for close to a year, we had a lot in common and got along great as friends. That was also the first time I hooked up with someone I'd been friends with first. Best experience, that - I totally recommend hooking up with someone you can be great friends with. We had our first blue amongst friends during a weekend trip to the snow - he spent two hours teaching me to ski, then went off to play with the "big boys" on the black runs. I stayed with the beginners (there were 5 of us) on the green run and then someone had a brilliant idea to go to a green run higher up the mountain. We checked the map and sure enough, it was green. So up the chair lift we went. It was Way out of my league. I fell about 10 times and at one point I fell on a big rock. I looked down & saw a bit of blood on my hand. I freaked out, wadded up some tissues & shoved my hand deep into the glove with them. I took my skis off & walked across to the others, put down my skis to check my hand at which point one of the skiis careened down the hill. I had horrible visions of it spearing into the back of someone's head (those things go like arrows, you know). So one of my friends cried "I'll get your ski, miss!" and took off down the hill after it. My hand was fine by the way. It was just a tiny scratch that bled a lot. The others were struggling to stay with me (it really was quite steep) so I told them to go ahead & I'd walk down & meet them for coffee at the kiosk at the bottom of the hill.
About 300 meters from the kiosk, Moda found me.

"What are you doing? Why are you walking?"
My friend slid over to us with the other ski.
"Why does he have your ski?"
"It slid down the hill."
"What, it just came off? We mustn't have done them up properly! I wonder what happened to the safety rope (that attaches them to your ankle in case they come off)"
"I undid it."
"...What?"
"I fell over, so I thought I'd walk down the hill and I took them off and one slid away..."
"WHAT?"
"And I think I cut my hand"
"How did you cut your hand with gloves on?"
"..."
"YOU WERE SKIING WITHOUT GLOVES ON??"
And so on. He made me put the bast*rds back on & ski down the hill. But mostly he was mad that I had panicked & made some silly decisions. He's a caring and protective guy but he doesn't have a lot of patience if I hurt myself through carelessness.
I had bought a house about 6 years earlier, and when Moda and I hooked up and found that we were likely to remain a couple for a long time, we sold that house of mine and bought one together. We live in a run-down ex-govvie in a great location and the plan will be to fix it up over time. It's looking awesome, but the project will take a lot longer than we initially thought.

Boys

I was in year 11 when I met my first real boyfriend. He had an undercut and braces and I thought he was sooo cute. We were together for almost exactly months (which was forever back then). Unfortunately we had really different friendship groups. He'd go off to parties every few weekends - parties that I wasn't invited to, but was allowed to see the photos of later. A friend of mine already had her own place and she had parties there every few weekends too. I have a few regrets about those days, I s'pose I shouldn't - after all, I wouldn't be me without them. Basically we would just get trashed. I got on with a couple of random guys even though I had a boyfriend. A mutual friend told me that if I didn't fess up, he'd have to say something (and fair enough). So I really did try- I walked all the way to his house from school on my own. I spent the afternoon with him bawling, I felt so guilty. He never asked me what was wrong, he just nodded & held my hand & wiped away my tears. If he'd asked me what was going on I think everything would have turned out differently but he didn't. So I didn't say anything - I just went home a few hours later. Then we went to a party together, and a guy I didn't know came up and kissed me. I was surprised, but I didn't pull away and I certainly didn't wallop him. My boyfriend saw it and dumped me instantly. Again, fair enough. I had no excuses, I was just 16 and stupid and selfish.
Not long after that I met a guy who was a few years older than me. Looking back, I wonder what he was thinking, picking up a 16 year old. I lost some of my innocence that year but I didn't lose much of my naivety.
So, by 17 I had dropped out of school and moved interstate with this new guy, into a share house with 4 other guys, all significantly older than me. I tried really hard to get a job - failed miserably in my first one and was fired within a week. I just had no idea of what to do and noone wanted to hire me (no academic qualifications and no experience). I was on the dole for about 4 or 5 months and eventually landed a really good job as an office junior in a law firm. Just as things were starting to look up, I was told that the city just wasn't working out and we had to move back home.
So once we got back, I applied for a job that had advertised no experience necessary. I became a ballroom dance instructor! Loved it - they'd teach me a step and the next day I'd be teaching that step to a student. The pay was terrible and the hours sucked but my contract stipulated that I had to stay with them for at least a year. That place did wonders for my fitness & my confidence. After 13 months I left them and went into hospitality. I was a buffet attendant for a year, which is really just a kitchen "go-fer". It was a good 12 months - plenty of work and great money since it was shift work.There is a Lot of talent in hospitality. My boyfriend said he wanted to go back to the big city and this time I said "no thanks", because I knew it would be a nightmare trying to get another job up there. We did the long-distance relationship for about a month and without him around, I began to see that I had a lot of options. I began to want a lot more than I had with him. When you live alone you have a lot of time to analyse things and I decided that I needed to make a change. We'd been fighting a lot and although he never hit me I always felt it was a real possibility. I packed a suitcase and left it under my bed for weeks, ready to go at a moment's notice. One weekend he came back for a visit and we had a fight. I called my mother to come and get me, took my suitcase and stood outside waiting. He was furious - I could hear him screaming and breaking things, I walked down the road a bit so people wouldn't know I'd just come out of that house. I'm sure they did know though. So that ended a four year relationship. I jumped straight into another relationship which was doomed from the start. I had initially thought the guy was deep and mysterious, but he was actually very shy and emotionally immature. So was I - I strung him along for far too long. We didn't have much in common at all. 12 months later I was in another relationship. This one lasted 5 years and started to deteriorate after about 3. I remember driving home from work, thinking "this is as good as it gets - you can decide to be happy or not. It's up to you to make this work". Thank goodness I came to my senses. I had some ambition - not a lot, but some. That guy had none at all. Zero. Unless you count sneaking over the back fence to go drinking with people so that you wouldn't get in trouble. So I needed to pull up stakes again. By this time I was approaching 30 and I was pretty scared about starting all over again. But I had a good job and some fantastic friends & a very supportive family. Not everyone is so lucky.
The next guy I dated wanted to sell his house & invest the money in mine after only about 3 months. I think he wanted to get married & settle down so badly that he didn't really care who it was with. Poor guy was a pushover to start with; would have done anything I asked. I wanted an equal, not someone I could bully. I told him to "man up" so he pretended to be all tough and mean, and it just annoyed me. We broke up before Christmas, he gave me the teddy bear he'd been saving for my present - he said he couldn't have it in the house. I suggested he just take it back to the store, but he basically threw it at me and told me to get out of his house. Drama, drama, drama.

Highschool

My parents got a divorce when I was around 11, so year 7 was in a new house. I'm still in touch with some of the friends I had then. I remember we used to have sleepover parties and all the girls would bring their sleeping bags. My bedroom was at the back of the house in a little "added-on" room and it got cold out there in Winter. There was a door from my room straight into the backyard and I had a heated double waterbed so things could have been a lot worse. One night a girlfriend brought over a bottle of her parent's port and we all watched scary movies and tried to get drunk. I don't think there was really all that much in the bottle. We had a lot of fun though, and my mother must have gone out & left us to our own devices because when she woke us up in the morning she had found all the glasses and pick sticky residue on the kitchen sink and she told all my friends how disappointed she was. I was so embarrassed. In my first year of highschool, a boy told me that a friend of his had a crush on me. I didn't know the kid so I was a bit flattered but didn't think too much of it. By the time year 8 rolled around I had met this boy & decided he was pretty cute himself. Although I wished it would, nothing happened. As luck would have it we ended up in the same year 9 English class. He was terrible at English and it was my best subject. The teacher would often pair us up, maybe hoping that I'd teach him something. I waited and waited a whole year for him to make a move. I guess he made it - one lunchtime he came up to my friends & I and flashed his undies at us. I was a bit taken aback. They were red & white jocks. From time to time we'd have a social dance class in the gym & one time he ran up to me to pair up as a "couple" straight away. It was great, I was thrilled! We had a dance & he moved down the line to the next girl. A week later we had the class again and he ran up to another girl instead. I was pretty pissed. Then finally, after years of hoping something would happen, he asked me to the movies in year 10. We agreed to meet out the front of K-mart on a Sunday. I waited 3 hours and he never showed. He apologised to me on the Monday at school but I wouldn't talk to him. Some random excuse about his Dad not letting him out of the house because he had to study maths.
Anyway, several years later I ran into him at a friend's work dinner. I was in my 20s and happened to be single. We were all invited back to his house for drinks and I went along. It was weird there - we sat down in his pokey little living room and watched home movies of him with different cars (and different girls). At the end of the night he asked me in front of everyone if I'd like to stay over. He said he's drive me to work in the morning. I might have actually stayed if he hadn't asked me in front of all those people... And also if he hadn't kept calling me Rebecca. I believe Rebecca was an ex-girlfriend of his.
I haven't seen him since.
One of my friends started having sex in highschool but most of us didn't until college. We drank a fair bit in year 9 & 10 though. I had another adventure with a boy in highschool - I met him at a Friday night ice skating disco. Under the disco lights I thought he was really cute and when he asked for my number I was once again very flattered and I gave it to him. He called me, set up a date and I went. He looked very different in the daylight. I didn't find him attractive at all. Poor bloke; I didn't see him again either.
The last one was when I was 16; I had the chance to go & visit my father overseas. Before I went, I met a boy at a service station. He told me I had good child-bearing hips. he asked if he could meet me at the airport before I went overseas and I said sure. At the airport he gave me a little box and told me not to open it until I got on the plane. It was a "birthday/valentines day/nice to meet you" present. I did as I was asked and opened it on the plane. It was a lovely little gold ring with a loveheart and a tiny diamond set in it.
You guessed it - no idea what happened to him.

Chapter 2

We came back to Oz when I was in year 5. I remember telling people that my old best friend was a little girl called Ashleigh, with lovely curly light-brown hair. I hadn't seen her since kindergarten. She was still attending the school and some kids found us and reunited us. I asked her what she was up to and she told me she had a boyfriend who was so handsome he made your knees wobble. It's funny but I went to high school with that boy and I remember him as a moody, gangly and awkward teenager.
That girl had a new best friend who was beautiful and I was quite jealous of her.
I've always wanted to be able to sing and one day I invited a girl to my house (it must have been about year 6) and I made her play a game where one of us would hide in the bathroom and sing a song and then it was the other person's turn. That was the whole game - I've pretty much spent the last 20 years positive that she thought I was crazy enough for her to have to go along with it.
My oldest sister had a bed in the basement made of two foam mattress stacked one on the other and I used to separate them and then do back flips onto them. That basement had a storage area under some stairs where all our old interesting "riches" had been stored while we were overseas. My father was furious when we opened that time capsule because his bronze bugle was dented which meant that someone had been in there while we were away. Blasted snooping renters. I still have the brass bugle. It's still dented and now it's brown and dull but I love it, and anyone who can play a trumpet can make it sing.
Canberra winters are very cold and the old water in the garden hose often freezes. It was during winter that my father took a bucket of boiling water down to the front lawn to thaw the hose. I don't know how he managed it, but somehow he stepped into that bucket and had a great deal of trouble taking his sneaker and sock off a grey, blanched and apparently painful foot.
That was a huge, beautiful 5 bedroom house in the very cheapest suburb of our town. It had a front lawn that was bordered by sleepers rising about a meter from the road. Kids used to ride down the hill onto our lawn, then launch off the lawn onto the road; several feet below. Once I was in the kitchen with my mother and we heard a horrible scream. She bolted out the front into the road an there was a boy in tears, holding both arms gingerly walking back up to our house. He hadn't reaslised there was such a big drop and had broken both his arms. My mother sat the boy down in her lap, held some ice to his forehead in a tea-towel and told his sister to get their mother. The sister pedaled off on a tiny pink bicycle and after some time the little pink bicycle returned with a drunk mother on it. My mum piled them both into her car and took them to the emergency department. That boy kept visiting my mum for a long time - it must have been close to a year.
While my father was away, we talked my mother into letting us get some pets. I was to get a rabbit and my middle sister was to get a cat. She was Furious when a little ginger cat "chose" me as its owner. I went into the cat cage with my sister. She picked the smallest, most pathetic little white cat - I doubt she was 8 weeks old. While I was in there a striped ginger cat came across to me and sat in my lap. She had no fear and was the only cat that approached me. I miss Tigger - she made it to about 18. My mother decided that Tigger was anti-social. I was the only person she liked and she was kind of protective of me.
My sister named her tiny white cat Tinkerbell. Tinkerbell eventually grew into a fat, greedy, narcissistic feline cow.

Chapter 1

I've thought for a long time that my memory was unusually fuzzy. I wanted to get some of my memories down in case I completely forget them. My lovely cousin recently told me that dementia can strike at any age and you can experience its effects twenty years before anyone realises something is wrong.

I guess I'd better start at the beginning then:

I was born under fairly common circumstances, in hospital, to a married couple with other children, in the early evening. I'm told I was late. I don't remember any of it.

Upon discovering that she was pregnant with me, my mother was initially told by doctors to have a termination. There was a large risk that I would carry the same hereditary disease that had killed my brother. Born into fairly unusual circumstances herself, she refused. Outright. My mother has always said that babies only come when and where they are needed. Her biological father was 76 and her biological mother was 30 when she was born. Her mother also had a tumour in her uterus the size of a football and she died from complications after childbirth. My mother's half-sister ended up adopting her.

My father worked in Defence and was posted to Jakarta when I was about 18 months old. My first sentence was in Indonesian. Our family had a cook and a nursemaid (as is the custom) so they must have been big influence on me.

After two years we returned to Australia spent a few years in Victoria and in the ACT and then were posted to Bangkok for four years. It was a fantastic experience - my sisters and I attended the International School there which seemed enormous at the time. We bought books of chits to trade for cafeteria lunches. The books cost 100 baht and I would buy them, tuck them into my sock and keep them safely at home only taking a few tickets out of it each day. I lost quite a few of those little books from my socks over the years. We had a traditional little playground with a swing and I used to swing as high as I could, then jump out of the swing when it reached its peak. It sounds dangerous, but the only time I got hurt doing that was when my pretty hilltribe dress got caught in the chain just as I jumped. The swing pulled me back with it and slammed me back down into the dirt. I didn't break anything, so it couldn't have hurt too much. There was a "Klong" at the very back of the oval and one time we watched a dead and bloated dog floating down it. I auditioned for the role of Oliver in the school musical and didn't even get into the chorus. My first boyfriend Charlie gave me some stickers (we were in year two). There were family holidays in beach cabins at Bangsaray where my father tried to shoo a wasp out of the house - while us girls were hysterically screaming and jumping around - it stung him through a tea towel. There were trips to orphanages where the babies were lined up wall to wall in metal cribs in huge rooms, always crying. My mother told me they were crying because they hardly ever got cuddled, even when they were having their bottle. We almost adopted one of those babies, a little girl called pooey. She had a lot of health problems; she had a club foot and a hole in her heart. Some American friends of my mother adopted a little girl who painted the wall above the bed in our spare room with poo when noone was watching her. We stayed at a holiday house in the country somewhere, could hear the thuds of tree snakes falling onto the roof and the deck. My oldest sister would walk with me to the school bus stop and once she nearly stepped off the gutter right onto a giant toad as big as a basketball. At least, I think it was that big... Toads from 25 years ago may appear larger than they were. When I was 6 my middle sister was 11 and my oldest sister was 16 so we didn't have a lot in common. I remember they fought a lot and from time to time I fought with my middle sister, but surprisingly not all that much. We happened to have the perfect neighbours; a family with two boys and two girls. The two girls were the same age as my middle sister and I, so we spent a lot of time at their house. Their parents were a lot more liberal than ours. They did all kinds of things that we would never be allowed to do, but they never seemed to get into trouble. Our parents thought those kids were a bit "wild". The apartments had cupboards with wooden lattice doors and one time my middle sister and her friend tied me and my friend up, trapped us in the cupboard and spat at us through the little gaps in the wood. Most of their spit got caught on the doors.

There was another family in the compound with two little boys around our age. One of them had a crush on me and he used to chase me around. One day I hit him hard in the face with a stilletto shoe; hard enough to draw blood. I felt awful for a long time but I don't remember apologising. He never told on me. Last I heard he was married; to a girl with my name! Odd how things turn out. There was another little boy in the compound who kept mostly to himself. My friend and I occasionally found dried bodies of little turtles and frogs on pathways behind the apartments and we blamed him. I have a vague notion that he had a violent father but I don't know if I've imagined that or I've just listened to some random gossip. I married him in the playground when I was about 8. One of our friends officiated and tied a rope around our wrists. He's a father now and I recently saw a photo of him shaking John Howard's hand.

So much of that time is vague and I don't know if that's normal or because I used to drink so heavily as a teenager. Kids can be pretty stupid.