PRACTISING SIMPLICITY
The theatre was dimly lit, the quiet punctuated by protesting toddlers who had no intention of sitting in their seats. We were one of many sets of bedraggled parents who had spent the afternoon preparing their children for a school performance at witching hour; dinner was early, the baby was unsettled and we had misplaced two pairs of shoes. Together we arrived in a cloud of hairspray and frazzle, calming nerves and mustering enthusiasm for the two-hour performance ahead of us. Our son’s class was dressed in a hodgepodge of costumes pulled from the backs of wardrobes, but together they told a unified story. One by one they recited lines from legendary Australian children’s author Alison Lester’s picture book Are We There Yet?, the true story of her family’s three-month road trip around Australia in a camper trailer. We had owned the book for many years and often read it at bedtime, its pages now crumpled and worn and well-loved. As I watched my firstborn on the stage, my fourth baby was nestled in a sling on my chest, her pout particularly pronounced as
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she dozed. I had spent the first three months of her life purposefully soaking her in, memorising the details of her face and her milk guzzle, fiercely inhaling her breath and newness because I knew it was all so fleeting. She would be on the stage in a few short years and I would be the proud, nostalgic mother, in awe of her growth and simultaneously grieving for the years that were behind us, her littleness etched into photos and videos and the pieces of my mind that I had filed away for safekeeping. The story on the stage took us from the coast to the desert, where the sun beat down on the family who travelled on freeways and red dirt roads and into all kinds of adventures. They sat around campfires laughing at bad jokes, gazed out the window on long driving days and spent every waking and dreaming moment together, in all sorts of places all over Australia.
‘We could do that,’ whispered my partner Daniel, eyebrows raised and hopeful. ‘We could go on a road trip around Australia.’
