Home Is Where The Heart Is

Last family shot before I get bumped by my darling innocent looking child

It's started.  Those jolly times when your kids get so mad at you for something so small that they start wishing your demise.  I can't complain, I was the queen of "I hate your GUTS I wish you would DIIIIIIIEEEE" when my poor hardworking mother told me we were having brussel sprouts for dinner.  Fair call though don't you think? - they're pretty gross.

Anyway, so yesterday morning my five year old was harassing me to put up a "chart" up on the fridge.  I've done it before - there are all kinds of columns such as "Make Your Bed"  "Tidy Your Room" "Sleep All Night In Your Own Bed".  They get stickers every time they do something and once the chart is filled to the brim with piles of coloured stars, they get some cheapo toy from the toy shop.  Basically it's bribery.  A kind of complicated manipulative bribery that is pretty more effective than "put your shoes on quickly and I'll give you a spoon of nutella" - *you can take stickers off the chart for being naughty, but you can't scrape that nutella off their tongue and put it back in the jar no matter how hard you try.

So back to the harassment.  It was 7.30am on a Sunday morning (the kids go to school on Sundays here - everyone say "Yaaaaaaayyyyyy"), and I hadn't washed my face or brushed the filthy overnight flavour out of my mouth. Basically, I wasn't coping with being upright.  So with both of them at me, I snapped and said something like "STOP it with the stupid chart talk I don't want to hear about it".  At that moment my husband walked into the kitchen.  My daughter's eyes lit up and they both exclaimed "Daddy!!!!".  Then one of the little buggers said "If one of you dies would the other person marry someone else?".  I replied "Did you just say that because you hope I die so that Daddy's new wife will make you a chart?".  She looked confused that I could read her mind (I'm sure she thought she was being very sneaky and complicated), and then that turned to shame and an unconvincing reply of "Noooooooooo".  Sprung.  My 5 year old wants me dead.  Not so she can have a new mother exactly, but so she can have a new mother who will make her a chart, which will then lead to her filling it with stickers and getting a toy.  Basically my beloved child would rather have a ten buck piece of shit from China than her loving mother guiding her through life and adoring her for the rest of her days.

Ouch.  But that's kids for you, they are so preoccupied with instant gratification that they cannot conceive how that hasty momentary decision could possibly go wrong some time in the future.  Meanwhile the rest of us are being encouraged to "live in the now" and fed some kind of shit like "the present is a gift, that's why it's called the present".  Ok, fine I get it - have a good time now - I'm all about the good times - but surely there are limits.  These limits had already been discussed at length at Glastonbury by myself and a friend in 1997.  We decided if we really only did live only in the now that would mean we would put our entire hash supply in a chillum and call the entire camp group over for one big smoke up.  Luckily we discovered we didn't quite want to live that much in the now, as it would have really sucked to not have been wasted in those final days of knee-high mud, over-flowing portaloos and tent robbery.  I thought that was pretty insightful at the time seeing as we were up to our eyeballs in hippy mantras and liquid acid.

Beautiful

But in saying that, it honestly felt like our entire trip back to Australia for Christmas was one big giant hedonistic joy of living in the now.  We didn't really make any plans, apart from buying plane tickets to Byron, Melbourne as Tassie, and we just let the whole thing unfold.  What resulted was glorious days and evenings of spending time with a large chunk of the people we love most in the world.  Highlights involved 3 days of perfect weather spent at my parents beach house 30 minutes from Hobart, long chats with my Granny in her house overlooking the Derwent River, cuddles with my two brand new nephews, eating a giant bag of good old mixed lollies with my sister and sitting up late at night while her babies slept in the next room, going out for great dinners, including to a brand new restaurant opened up by my friend's husband, drinking champagne with old friends and wrestling them in the backyard, and really just spending heaps of time with my family.  And the best thing was that Mum didn't make brussel sprouts once.  In fact she did so much for me that I honestly forgot what it was like to look after my own family and kind of got a shock when I realised how much washing I needed to do on a daily basis once I came home.  

Alternatively, when I asked my daughters what their highlights of the trip were - expecting them to go on how much they loved my mother's dog or the 10 kg of presents they got for Christmas - one replied that stabbing a flathead in the eye was her favourite thing (yes, this is the one who wants to kill me), while the other one replied that collecting "jelly blobs" on the beach was her magic moment.  Remind me to go out and buy a dead fish and some beach jellies instead of spending thousands on a family holiday across the other side of the world next year would you.

What's $500 bucks of Christmas presents when you can have a few blobs?

The fish that copped one in the peeper

Us at the airport - just a bit happy!

The other major highlight for me that is, was that we could leave our kids in Tassie and bugger off to Melbourne for 3 glorious nights.  My God.  How is that feeling?  Of course we had a fun NYE with my husband's nieces and nephews ( some of which had come to Australia from Israel for summer), the crowning glory of that night was at midnight when they did the count down and then let off the glitter bombs.  The glitter was actually meant to be dispersed over the room and sprinkle down on everyone, however, it malfunctioned and dumped 3 kilos of glitter on my husband and his nephew.  That was pretty amusing - my husband is not a glitter man.  In fact, glitter is already the bane of his life due to not only having our entire house strewn with the shit regularly, but also due to me 'accidentally' packing Vali's glittery "Elsa" Dress in his suitcase - which in turn spread 2 tons of aqua glitter all over his entire collection of t-shirts.  Those tiny sparkles really show up on black.  Anyway, they were both absolutely covered in the stuff.  My husbands nephew (a doctor) had to work in the psych ward of a hospital the following morning, and despite desperately trying to scrub it off, was alerted to the fact that he had significant amounts of glitter in his ears by a patient.  My husband on the other hand, copped even more of the Great Glitter Disaster of 2015 and despite 3 showers and a bath, failed to get rid of it.  The only good thing that came out of it was that some sleazy Russian chick tried to get some of it off him that night by rubbing her boobs all over him.  What can I say - some people really love their glitter.

Yep - it's a bathtub

Go Sunnush!

Get your boobs off my man

I recently read an article about a business that started up called "Send Glitter To Your Enemy".  Apparently you sign up for it, provide an address, and a seemingly normal looking envelope explodes in cloud of glitter when he or she opens it.  Sounds funny?  Not to the owner of the business.  He has been so inundated with business that his website crashed and he has massive problems keeping up with demand.  He put out a recent plea that somebody buy his business as he doesn't have the resources to cope with it.  There's a guy who must quiver at the sight of glitter, while also permanently being mistaken for a gay man off to a rave.

You'd never turn me away for television would you girls?  Girls??? 

The rest of the time in Melbourne was spent again with a sizable chunk of all our favourites on the planet.  The events came at a steady pace, and there was not much time for anything else.  But that's always the way.  I think I half expect to be that popular when we do end up moving back to Australia.  I think I'm going to get a rude shock.  I'll turn up at someone's door step with a bottle of champers, and they'll be like "Jesus Christ Emily, didn't I see you last week? Piss off would you, I'm watching Offspring".  That's life.  Despite my misgivings at how long term popularity would work out for me, I really found it difficult to leave Australia this time.  I really truly wanted to stay.  Like my mother-in-law said, I'd put it out of my mind.  I hadn't thought about what it would be like to move back to my home country.  After all, it has been a decade since I lived there, that's a pretty long time.  

I watched an interesting TED talk the other day about the modern difficulties of saying where your home is.  For example, my husband.  He has a Polish father and an Israeli mother.  He grew up in Australia but spent a lot of time travelling around the world when he was a child.  He was a resident of The Cayman Islands for years, but spent all his time living on Japan (with me!).  He has business in many countries and currently lives in Israel.  And for our children it will be more confusing for them to say where their home is.  They get mixed up already.  They are not sure if they live in Australia or Israel. For many people this situation is even more extreme.  It is of course a by product of our modern global world.  This kind of situation was not common in our grandparents time - people pretty much grew up and lived all their life in the one place.  These days it's very very different.  So it begs the question - how do you answer when someone says "Where are you from" or "where's home?" - as I often get asked.

Of course I always say Tasmania.  To be honest I am never planning to go back there to live there again.  But it still feels like home, even though I left there for the first time when I was 19 and have only returned a for two or three years at a time before departing more permanently in 2001.  I like being Tasmanian - it's more interesting than Melbourne or Sydney.  Whenever I get asked where I'm from here in Izzy, I always drop the T-bomb.  It's a talking point.  Some people have never heard of it, some didn't actually realise it was a real place, and some have heard of it, but never in their lives met anybody from there.  So on the drawing to a close of Australia Day - also known as "The Bogan's Christmas", it makes me wistfully think of all my friends and family over there drinking VB and screaming Aussie Aussie Aussie Oy Oy Oy.  Thankfully I have never heard a single member of my family  or circle of acquaintances utter those dreaded boganic sounds.  However, if someone yelled it down below our apartment in the street right now, I would definitely throw all my snobbishness to the wind and scream it out.

Now that I've settled back in my life here, it's got easier.  Israel is, of course, a crazy crazy country.  But despite my homesickness, I do love it, and for now I can definitely state that it is my home.  My heart is here after all.  I have a wonderful, fun, exciting life in Tel Aviv.  I have amazing family and friends.  My children are thriving and so happy to be living here.  Now if I want everything to stay this brilliant.....and more to the point stay alive......

I better go make that chart.  

"There are devilish thoughts even in the most angelic minds".