Darwin is the capital of casual. If you think of Australia as the casual capital of the world, then Darwin is the casual capital of Australia. I’m talking thongs (the footwear, people, the footwear – get with the local lingo please!) are acceptable attire in pubs, fancy restaurants, hotel lobbies. Most people walk around in their bathers. Shorts and a t-shirt is almost overdressed. Alarmingly, hats are not seen as often as they ought to be, and I have witnessed a disappointingly surprising number of babies and young children without headcover, parents oblivious to the cancer and other long term skin damage risks at which they are putting their children.
For those of you that know Perth, you’ll know what I mean when I say conjour up an image of Northbridge and you have a pretty good idea what the inner streets of Darwin feel like. But hotter. Smaller than Northbridge, bigger than Broome, same kind of feel. Restarurants all staffed by foreign travellers – the food and service are both excellent, but no-one can make a decent cup of coffee to save their life.
Somehow, I still haven’t managed a dip in the hotel pool, and we’ve been here 3 full days already. I have stocked up on secondhand books at the most amazing and extensively stocked second hand bookstore I have ever seen in my life. I have acquired 4 new pieces of clothing at a very good quality red cross op shop. For a cost of just over thirty dollars, I got the equivalent of several hundred dollars worth of new attire. I have bought myself a new pair of havaiana thongs (get used to it folks) and scoped out some new sunglasses upon which I am still deciding.
So, retail therapy is in full swing. However, for some strange reason (strong sarcasm), it still doesn’t seem to make me happy. On my first day alone here, I wandered the streets feeling totally bereft. It may have had something to do with the fact that Fathers’ day was that weekend, and heavily advertised and in my face, and DH is not going to be a father this year (again) and boo hoo and all that. But more likely it was just the first time I have had alone, with nothing to do, no one to distract myself with, no deadlines to meet, no TV to watch, and the feelings just came right to the surface. Despite the warmth, the sunshine, the luxury hotel, the licence to spend money – I was thoroughly miserable. But at least I named it, and allowed myself to feel it, and I talked about it with DH when he came home that evening. None of that made it go away, but it made it easier to cope.
This is grief. It comes when it comes, sometimes at obvious moments, and other times unexpectedly. Sometimes it stays for days, sometimes you forget about it for a week and it comes back to blindside you all of a sudden, out of the blue. And, whatever form it takes, it never does quite leave you altogether. At the moment I am having to guard against it heavily, as I interact socially with the other delegates and their partners, and they all want to talk about their children and grandchildren. One woman I know from our posting in Derby. She and I began TTC the same month, Oct 2003. Her third daughter is 6 months old now. I have assiduously been avoiding her like the plague. I am not ready to cope with making small talk about her kids. After the birth of her second child she phoned me. What have you been up to? Oh, just my fourth miscarriage. She did not say “I’m so sorry”, she asked “have you thought about adopting?”. I all but hung up on her and have not spoken to her since.
So. It is a bit of a minefield around here.
I have to get this off my chest: The opening talk was about IVF (I know, strange topic for an anaesthetic conference, but they like to get in unrelated speakers for the opening address, for some reason) which DH found highly informative. At one point the speaker said “we are getting to a point where donor egg, donor sperm and surrogacy are being utilised in one package” and the room laughed. Poor DH said he felt so small. Hearing him tell the story made me so mad, and I still feel a bit like crying when I think of it. I wished I was there to stand up and say “Well take a look. Take a good look at the person who wants to start a family so badly, and can’t, through no fault of their own. Take a look at seven miscarriages and six years of trying to conceive, a wrecked sex life, emotional hell, a string of ruined friendships and feeling of failure, and isolation from many avenues of society. Take a good look at a shattered future. Think about how you might cope with this life, and THEN see if you still feel like having a jolly good laugh at our expense”. I can only hope that the reason they spontaneously laughed was that human brains are wired to respond in such a manner to incongruity, and it was more of a reflex than a measured response. I don’t want to think that a roomful of doctors is as heartless and uncompassionate as all that. But I do wish they had tried to think about the people that walk in those shoes for a second. Even if was only after the fact.
So, anyway. Welcome to my holiday. I don’t mean this to be a string of invective and complaint. It isn’t all misery, by any means. But as the title suggests, you don’t escape your feelings through relocating. And I haven’t. I’m doing the best with what I have, and this is where I am right now. It is sunny in Darwin, but it is still raining in my heart.
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