Year in review 2021 (compiled from snippets of memory and Facebook)😎
- JANUARY - Ring in the new year in Singapore. Go to bed at 8pm
- In the swing of happy insular covid family life, working from home, having family dinners. Give away more suits and heels. Making rainbow rice & playdoh, cooking cupcakes, playing instruments, jumping in puddles, celebrating fresh bread and flowers, painting rocks, doing science experiments.
- JANUARY - Enrol 2yo Parker in Montessori after watching her gaze through the fence longingly when we drop Matilda off. Tell the school that she has respiratory issues and cant wear a facemask. Spend next 18m fobbing off attempts to make her wear a facemask, make me provide doctors letter etc.
- Watch Singapore become worse and worse with covid. Facemasks inside and outside, checking in and out of all buildings, stupid rules like 'no more than 2 people at a table even if they are from the same household'. More and more people in the street telling me to pull my mask up, to put masks on my kids, photographing my kids without masks, and me with mask down. Feel hatred and disgust, tell lots of strangers to fuck off.
- FEB - start paying architect for concept plans for 133 darling street renovation.
- MARCH - go on bizarre 'cruise to no where', so excited to pack a bag, leave Singapore and wake up to the ocean, even if the reality is we are just floating around Singapore on a boat. Have such a good time that...
- APRIL - try second cruise to nowhere which involves many many stupid rules, men shouting at me for not standing on my cross, wearing mask properly, distancing correctly. Being told empty restaurants and empty pools are booked out and full. Enough of the cruises. So desperate to get out of SG though.
- MAY -Schools are closed for 8 weeks. Try home based learning for one day, it sucks, let kids do whatever they want for a couple of weeks and then we are told kids can go back to school because i work in cyber security. Heart breaks seeing pictures of a total of 6 kids ats school wearing face masks AND face shields, watching a teacher on a tv screen, no one allowed to touch anything in classroom or play in playground.
- Jason claustrophic and miserable and hating Singapore but has taken up bike riding which brings joy. Agree to move home April 2022 when lease is up.
- MAY Argue with Jason about needing to go back to Aus and empty my mums house. He says have movers put the whole lot in storage or have the whole lot thrown in a skip. He finally agrees to come because i cant do the job with kids around and he doesnt want to look after them on his own for a month.
- Fly to Australia and spend 2 weeks in quarantine. Quarantine is an beautiful holiday characterised by gentle quality time with kids, no rushing, no decisions to be made. One of the happiest times of my life.
- JUNE - Empty out my mum's house. Intense emotion working through documents, file notes and letters in her study, learning more about her marriage, life, a time when she was bullied at work, disappointment, heartbreak and fears. Learn about her happy times, youth, courage and adventures also. Read letters between us going back decades and remember our relationship, some good times and some very hard times. Difficult reading.
- Find own journals from age 14-30. Flick through. Decide there might be some amazing poetry, reflections, travel writing and enlightenments in there but there is a lot of alcoholism, addiction, pain, trauma and verbal diarrhea also. Realise they document my spiral out of control and find many pages covered in ash with the handwriting becoming illegible. Throw the lot in the recycling.
- JUNE - Visit Dan's kookaburra farm. Magical and memorable weekend! My heart breaks realising how much I miss nature.
- AUGUST Pee on a stick and find out I am pregnant. Overjoyed. The day i go to see the OB I start bleeding. He gives me progesterone tablets. Walk down a hill saying to the baby 'please stay with me. I will take care of you'. By the end of the week the bleeding is done and I am not pregnant any more. Remember relapsing over a miscarriage before Parker was born and explaining that's why I relapsed, as though it was a perfectly acceptable reason to drink. Realised that I didn't have to drink over a miscarriage, or a bus driver yelling at me, or a fight with Jason. Realised there is no 'good enough' reason to drink and no bad situation which will be improved if i start drinking.
- SEPTEMBER - Fell pregnant again. Peed on stick. Overjoyed. Tell Dan. Go to OB who looks at progesterone levels and says baby is stable. Feel a sense that the baby wants to be born.
- OCTOBER - Singapore passes a rule to ban people from shopping malls, buildings, zoos, attractions unless vaccinated. After a month of not being able to buy bread or take my kids anywhere , waiting while jason and other mums take the kids to cool places, I get vaccinated. Feel defeated.
- NOVEMBER- Tell Jason I am pregnant while he is sitting on couch drinking beer and watching a movie. He does a slow dark hollow laugh. Then goes silent. No more mention of pregnancy.
- Still negotiating with Singapore General Hospital over 100k bill for former helper's brain surgery. Paying off what I can.
- Performing visible and stressful global L&D role at work. Ask for promotion and payrise. Recieve these.
- DECEMBER - start paying builder for renovation for 133 darling st. Start of painful expensive process.
- Gossipy helper tells whole neigbourhood we are pregnant and people start congrautlating us in street before we have told the girls.
- DECEMBER - Jason starts to talk about pregnancy as though he has accepted it. Fly to England for simultaneously lovely and disastrous trip. Announce we are pregnant at happy family Christmas with Jasons parents. Find it extremely difficult to work and care for kids and have clean clothes and deal with pregnancy exhaustion. Both have a sinking feeling that we cant cope with a third baby and without domestic help.
- Enjoy winter in England, hanging out with Jasons family, getting to know the village. Also very stressful time between Jason and I. See out the end of the year on a road trip to Cornwall
