finding family

Oh, what a week, full of confusion as past buried issues have been bought to the surface when my half brother contacted me out of the blue. This year I turn 40, so it’s been a long time that these skeletons have been banging around in the closet. I’m still reeling from the experience if I’m honest and lets face it, I generally am honest, I try hard to be that way and fundamentally, that forms my character, it’s how I want to be seen and it means I can live with a certain amount of comfort without looking over my shoulder. But what shocks me about the meeting with my long, lost half-brother (I always had the notion there maybe one or two or three or four perhaps floating about…) is the amount of information, personal details and private thoughts and feelings that I told this guy, who pops up with his own past, history, biases and nuances and a few dishonesties to boot. These dishonesties have been going through my mind and have rattled me substantially. The guy, I will call him that as the reference suits him, wants to find out every iota of information about our biological “father’s” family and it’s a family connection that I have lost touch with over the years and it’s a family that he has not grown up with or met previously. Our father abandoned both sets of families when we were small babies and our family (the first) have not heard from him since. The guy has kept in contact periodically with him and had a stint of living with him as a teenager. But our father never once supported us financially or emotionally and left my very young mother financially desperate when he walked out on us all those years ago (39 to be precise).  So speaking with him is interesting as lots of holes are filled but there are a few facts that have been skewered in the interpretation, which is understandable perhaps. There are three things that I’ve pulled him up on and each time he proclaims that miscommunication has happened but it’s the information that came out late at night as both our tolerance levels were starting to wane. This guy has an interest in NLP (neuro linguistic programming) and has used it in a fraudulent way. He was telling me how he first builds trust and then puts in some anchors and then the manipulation (not his word) begins, his pleasure was derived from seeing if he could ‘pull-it-off’ and not, he tells me, from the financial gain…(I kid you not), financial gain was just a consequence. I can’t believe he’s telling me this on our first meeting and further more I can’t believe I’ve just divulged so much about myself and my family in such a short period of time. Am I his next pawn? Is he conducting a new experiment? Is he researching for his ultimate deception? I hope not. But the amount of digging and internet research and interviews he’s conducted is phenomenal. I hope he can be trusted, but trust takes time to build and he’s not allowed the space for this. He’s run in with all systems ablaze, questions firing and loaded with stories of deception. Intense and inquisitive are how I would describe him as I sit here and wonder what are his motivations. He told me he wanted a better relationship with his dad. Maybe this is his truth and if it is, good luck to him. Perhaps the fault is that he has had no one to guide him, but that belittles the role of his mother and I don’t want to do that. In truth, I have no idea but our encounter has left me slightly unsettled.

Driving Culture

It’s the new year and happy new year to everybody reading these posts and going by the comments left, it’s mostly my mum! Well this year saw us knee deep in sand as we camped on Moreton Island. Which I must add was divine, the campsite was positioned perfectly on the beach front and we basically camped under trees on the sand a one minute stroll from the waters edge. It couldn’t be any more perfect BUT the catch is about to come. Getting there! We are novice 4wdrivers (it’s not even the right way to write it, but there you go, as I said, novice). We also decided to go with our camper-van to make everything a little more comfortable, our home away from home. But, little did we know that we would be towing our beloved van through the sand via the interior route of the island and away from ‘the terra-firma’ sand of the beach. Also we had to factor in tide times, now I did this, I actually printed out the weeks times before heading off. What I didn’t know, however, was that the ferry would be departing late and therefore arriving at the peak of high tide and in the dark! We have two toddlers with us don’t forget and my trusty little Nissan X-trail, which did wonderfully towing the trailer on the road just didn’t have the gusto to pull us through the sand. It did fine driving on obscure tracks without the van but occasionally bottomed out, as I’ve discovered is the terminology, it has a low clearance and as the ranger told us is really an all wheel drive meant for the city. It’s actually a 4WD but once the notion is in people’s mind it’s hard to convince them otherwise. What struck us was the culture of 4WD’ing. It’s a lifestyle choice, as is camping or fishing or boating. If you want to enter into the fray you have to be up with not only the lingo but have all the material stuff and KNOW-how to use it. It helps if you can tinker with your car and ‘know how’ to baton down fly away tarpaulins at a moments notice with the best of them, because, anyone who has gone camping knows that EVERYONE in your immediate surroundings is watching your every move. This can be un-nerving if you’re not use to it. If you haven’t been camping before you would not realise the loss of personal space you experience. You live life outside basically and that means in the company of complete strangers. We were very lucky there were others there with small children and our children mixed well and got on well with sharing toys etc. So this saved us those ‘I’m bored’ moments and besides the people watching that inevitably goes on living in the nature always offers something of interest. Our boys love ants, crabs and sand which is just as well as it was all throughout our camper van continually; all day long. Fortunately for us we also came prepared with our toilet tent and portable loo, this made life so much more comfortable and meant that when it got really busy at the camp site, and it did, we didn’t have to be inventive about where we squatted in the ‘wee’ hours of the morning or at night when most were gathered around their campfires. Most folk were nice about helping us novices out of a sticky situation but some were just plain aggressive. One young guy told us to get back on the ferry and go back from whence we came if we were stupid enough to come with a car like that wanting to tow a camper van. We obviously ignored him and had ourselves one of the most amazing holidays of our lives. We had a combination of beach, surf and lagoon conditions, nature and harmony and family unity and best of all we had loads of adventure and who doesn’t like a good adventure to make a holiday worth remembering. We are now in the market for a 2nd hand 4wd with enough grunt and ground clearance to make us the ones offering to tow those poor bogged out buffoons on our next visit to Moreton.