Sitting In the Silence

A day of rest and reflection for Bindi and I. And a day for her to have a bath.

Bindi and I are having a quiet one today. Well, as quiet as it can be. It is also bath day for the dogs. I can't say it's their favourite day but they are good kids and tolerate it well, ha ha ha.

Just as an FYI, I have 3 Golden Retrievers. The other two are Rowan and Flossy, and I will grace this entry with their photo so you can see their gorgeous faces as well. They are both nine and a half-ish. Rowan is slightly older than Floss by about four months. They will come into the stories more later as they are also a huge part of my life, but in different ways than Bindi. I love them no less.

Bindi is weary today. We went for a walk with our friends yesterday and had some super yummy doggy pancakes. Well, Bindi did, not me. I had the human kind. Anyway, she insisted she walk all the way from the park to the shops with her two much younger male friends, as if to say "I may be old, but I ain't out yet" She was in for a shock on the return trip however, as I was the more determined of the two of us, and she was put in her chariot, (her dog pram) and pushed back to the car alongside her handsome counterparts. Mind you, she would glance over at them from time to time while enjoying her little luxury as if to say, "Look at you two suckers, having to walk back in the heat, while I am being chauffeured" Middle toe raised, and nose stuck up in the air like the Queen she is. My girl has never been short of sass. However, today her bones are a bit weary, and the hydrobath water felt so very good. So now, we are just chilling. She is reflecting on her day, and I on days past.

I was born in the mid-70s and brought up in what, at the time, was a very traditional household. Mum stayed at home as the housewife slash mum, while Dad went off to work to take care of his family.
My husband-to-be also grew up in the same traditional family arrangement.

Going through school, it was still a time of older values, even though they were changing, where the girls were pushed more towards the good old secretarial job or becoming a teacher, and the boys were given a wider opportunity. I honestly thought I would end up being a teacher. That was my plan. Well, no, if I'm completely honest, I wanted to be a nurse. However, that soon became a non-starter when I first clapped eyes on a decent amount of blood, on myself and promptly fainted. I have been the same ever since.

Oh dear, the chilling has reached next level. The head is down, and the snoring has started in earnest. To explain Bindi's snoring is certainly not as good as experiencing it. I am sure the neighbours, who live a good 100 meters away, could hear her over their television set.

I digress. I did not become a teacher either; instead, that is my hubby. And after thirty years and a huge change in many, many ways, he cannot wait to get out.

I became his wife. I became, in a lot of ways, my mother. Minus the child. I never wanted to be a mother; I knew it from the time I was ten years old. Of course, everyone scoffed and said I would change my mind. Oh, how they did not know me. I became a housewife. We married, and out country we went. Teachers here in Australia are encouraged to do a minimum of three years of country service, and hubby wanted to get those over and done with straight up, and he wanted me with him. So, we married, and out we went. Heaven forbid we live in sin.

To tell the tale of country service would be a whole different story and one I don't really want to write about at this point. What I loved about it was it gave the hubs and I time to start our life away from family influence and work out who we were on our own, together. And that was great. What it also did for me was plunge me into the depths of darkness. The days out there for me were so long. The only place I would be able to get a job would be in one of the five pubs pulling beers and listening to the locals' woes. Hubby did not want that for me, and I, truth be told, did not want that for me either. Eventually, I ended up volunteering at the school as a teacher's aide across a wide variety of grades. I did love it, but the darkness by this stage had taken its toll, and it was really only when I was busy at school that I was able to keep it at bay for a time.

We ended up doing four years of country service. We wanted to save to build our own home, and if we could eke out another year, it would make our life so much easier in this regard. I don't know how I did it, but I did.

I thought once we were home, living in our very own gorgeous home, back with old friends and family, that the darkness would retreat. That the tide would pull out and never come back in. That wasn't the case.

It took time to reconnect with those friends. They now had their own lives, and some of them just didn't marry up with ours. Hubby and I had changed as well, so the parents on both sides took some time adjusting to the fact that we were not the same people that left four years ago, and we had a different way of wanting to do things now. Our way.

And I went back to long, lonely days. There's only so much shopping one can do, and with our very limited budget, not much point in even going.
I went back to volunteering at Hubs new school as a teacher aide and hated it. The city kids are not like the country kids. I loved those country kids. Tough little buggers who made you work for it, but so rewarding once you had them in the palm of your hand. Hub and I became parents in a way to a lot of them. Most of their actual parents spent their time drinking at the pub, kids be damned.

I really was at a loss, and if I thought the darkness was a monster out in the country, it was about to show me a whole new level of terrorism.

Then we lost our little man. Our little Australian Silky terrier. He was seventeen and a half when I had to make that most horrible of decisions. It broke me, shattered my world, as he was our everything. And that poor little angel lived with my permanent foe, the monster of darkness, right along with me. At times, it wasn't fair to him or pleasant. But he was always there and loved me regardless.

After two years of really putting myself out there, well, in some ways, to find myself, that's when my world shifted. That's when Hub put that newspaper in front of me and said, "I think it's time. He's been gone for two years now, and we are ready for another dog. And you have always said you would like to try this. They are calling out for puppy raisers. Go to the info session, see how you feel."

And literally, just as I typed those last words, "see how you feel", Bindi let out the loudest of snores beside me, and the most content of sighs.

If only I had known what opportunities were about to open for me. If only I had known about it when I was in school, way back then. If this were an option I could have taken, I would have been there long before.

But then maybe, I wouldn't have had Bindi. Maybe she wouldn't be snoring up a storm on the floor beside me right now. Maybe, for whatever insane reason, I was meant to wait. The timing had to be right. Or could it have saved me years ago from enduring my foe, for fighting the monster and everything that comes with that?

That is a question I will never have the answer to.