Eating Heaven: Spirituality at the Table

I may be biased, but my friend Simon wrote a terrific book last year, Eating Heaven. And I loved it. I read it very slowly and savoured every bite.

Each chapter focusses on one table: the kitchen table, the backyard table, the café table, the restaurant table, right up to the table of communion. And each chapter has stories, interviews, history and reflections on that table: eating with mum and dad in the kitchen, sharing a meal with marginalised men and women at a free lunch, having a coffee with a chef between shifts, and so on. Each chapter then ends with a recipe reflecting the type of eating that happens at that particular table.

The book is layered and rich, reflecting Simon’s background as trained chef, sociologist, theologian, and Baptist minister. It also reflects his love of Melbourne in the descriptions of laneway cafés and linen-topped restaurant tables; the juxtaposition of social inclusion and fancy pastries at one downtown church; and the transformative power of eating together in a multicultural city. Whether reminiscing over crowded kitchen tables or backyard barbecues, or savouring the perfect café latte or fancy restaurant dinner, Simon is always thoughtful. In a culture of empty food porn, his voice nourishes and refreshes. He not only enjoys the food, but also contemplates how poverty and wealth, hospitality and exclusiveness, celebration and mourning, and many other issues play out when we sit down at the table. His gentle questions and tentative suggestions are always thought-provoking.

More, they have an effect. Eating together is central to being human; and Eating Heaven reminds us of this gift. In my own household, reading it has triggered a couple of changes. For one, we have returned to a more intentional saying of grace. Despite trying various things over the years, grace had become a rushed magic formula that one or another kid would gabble as they reached for the serving spoon. It was worse than if we had not said it at all. But after reading this book, I have asked that we return to saying grace properly. Now we move between a candle and a responsive prayer; a minute’s silence before the meal; or held hands and a song depending on the mood – and we are loving this grateful pause at the end of the day, this moment of being together before we eat our dinner.

Eating Heaven has also recalled us to simple acts of hospitality, which we largely left behind in the maelstrom of having a third child. A few years on, we’re again able to make time for a coffee with friends, or invite others to eat with us in our home; and Eating Heaven has been a catalyst for thinking about why we eat together and how to do it well.

The stories, reflections and very good questions make this a book to savour, and slowly digest. Thank you, Simon.

Kith: The riddle of the childscape

When was the last time you encountered the word ‘tatterdemalion’? I have just read one of the most playful, exuberant, relishing encounters with language that I have ever come across: Kith: The Riddle of the Childscape, by Jay Griffiths. The author loves language and odd words; she plays with meanings and roots and etymologies; she relishes alliteration and other musical tricks; and the cadence of her writing is positively lyrical. Or, as she writes (in relation to the metaphors we have for feeling and knowing, but which equally pertains to her modes of expression), ‘Language…, a beautiful partisan, waits with rifle and song to ambush us into remembering what we used to know as children.’

Yes, the writing is beautiful, drawing the reader in; but the point of the book is not language. Instead, in the course of writing her last book, Wild, Griffiths visited many indigenous tribes and found herself wondering why the indigenous kids she observed were so cheerfully grounded, while the Western kids she knew were so unhappy by comparison. Kith is her attempt to answer that question.

Her answer is long, opinionated, and unabashedly Romantic. In brief, she argues that kids in the West rarely get what they really need: secure early attachment followed by extreme freedom; a relationship with the woods and the wild, including wildlife; a big tribe of kids and adults; stories packed with metaphor which allow for the expression of a child’s emerging sense of self; lots of free time; rites of passage into adulthood; freedom from consumerism; a rich, responsive education; and so on.

Instead, what they get is ‘controlled’ crying and the physical isolation of cots, prams and car seats, followed by helicopter parenting and little nuclear families; constant surveillance; highly structured schedules; media outlets and politicians which portray them in a constantly negative light; stop and search laws, curfews and dispersal orders for the crime of being young; lives trapped indoors; hollow stories; no rites of passage; and industrial-style, heavily politicised education.

None of these observations are particularly original. In recent years, Skenazy encouraged parents to let their kids be more independent; Louv urged kids into the great outdoors; Hodgkinson called for tribes and freedom and faerie stories; Robinson advocated for an education which drew out the unique gifts of each child; and many, many writers begged us chilly Westerners to be more physically affectionate with our babies and toddlers. It’s obvious stuff.

What sets Griffiths’ book apart is the way she brings these themes together under the umbrella of Romanticism. She compares the childhood experiences of Romantic poets – Wordsworth, Blake, Clare, Whitman – with indigenous practices of childcare, arguing that they have much in common; and goes on to suggest that these approaches will lead to happier children. Further, she argues, we lack (but need) a Western philosophical framework to describe our parenting practices; Romanticism fits the bill.

I love her writing; I agree with many of her observations regarding how kids could be better raised; and I find many of her arguments regarding Romantic and indigenous ways of raising children reasonable. However, this book is so passionately one-eyed, and so flawed, that Griffiths fails to convince overall – and this is a pity.

To begin with, despite identifying what Western kids lack – such as secure attachment, a big tribe, and rites of passage – Griffiths offers few practical suggestions as how to get these things into kids’ lives. How do we make parenting easier so that parents have the emotional capacity to forge deep strong attachments to their children? How do we balance the needs of parents with the needs of children? How do we widen people’s perceptions of their role in the lives of other people’s kids, so that parents aren’t required to fulfil all the adult roles in a child’s life? In a post-church society, who develops and conducts rites of passage? And so on. These questions are all raised by the text; yet Griffiths offers no solutions, and it is simply not helpful to identify what is needed (and indeed to criticise harshly how we parents, of which Griffiths does not appear to be one, do it wrong), but to offer no suggestions for change. It is left to the reader to imagine what could be and then put it into place – and yet many of the necessary structures are almost impossible to tackle family by family: they require cultural change.

For example, to take the example of a tribe, it took nine years of talking and parenting before we found a family who was genuinely interested in and able to live in the same street as us, and, more than that, willing to get involved in our kids’ lives in ways that eased the pressure on our child-parent relationship. Griffiths writes rather breathlessly that, in one tribe, parents never discipline their own children; that is left to others so that the affection of the parent-child relationship is never damaged. That sounds bloody wonderful, but it would require a seismic shift in how we as a society take responsibility for other people’s children for it to be even remotely possible here.

Another weakness of the book is how Griffiths glosses over the hardships of life for indigenous children. Sure, traditional ways of childhood sound great for those who survive, especially boys: roaming, hunting, fishing, and untold freedom for kids. But traditional ways also involve high infant mortality, infanticide when the rains don’t come or too many girls have been born, the ‘betrayal’ (as it’s described in the book by a young victim) of female genital mutilation, the sexual trade of young girls to forge connections or strengthen associations between tribes, social controls which require high levels of conformity, even child sacrifice for religious purposes. In over 350 pages of praising indigenous childcare practices and criticising ours, Giffiths devotes a scant couple of pages to listing some of the downsides of being an indigenous kid, and offers no explanation or justification for these less than happy practices. This is deeply unsatisfactory, and feels unfair. At least kids in the West get to live when the rains don’t come; most Western girls don’t have their genitals hacked off with rusty razor blades; and the sexual trade in young girls is looked upon as an aberration and a crime. For these aspects of the Western approach to childhood, I am grateful.

Because I have never lived with an indigenous tribe, I find it hard to judge the veracity of Griffiths’ account of indigenous lives. Even so, I found myself questioning it. For example, in one place Griffiths writes that after spending an afternoon with over a hundred indigenous kids, she realised that she hadn’t once heard a kid cry, and that she couldn’t imagine the same situation with Western kids. Having just spent three weeks of the school holidays with two different tribes of kids, aged between 6 months and 15 years, I can vouch that even Western kids rarely cry when they’re running around in a pack. They get busy, and work things out; and so I’m not convinced that this lack of crying is a unique feature of indigenous life.

To the contrary, in fact. One of my friends lived for two years in an indigenous village in Papua New Guinea. When she returned, she told me that one thing she will always remember is the crying. It formed the constant soundscape; she said she could not remember a time when she couldn’t hear a child crying, and that coming back to Australia was a great relief from this point of view. Was this village, eight hours’ travel by small boat from Rabaul, ‘less indigenous’ than the people visited by Griffiths? Or, in her visits with indigenous people, did Griffiths excise weeping children from her experience and hear only what she wanted to hear? I have no way of knowing, but I am sceptical that the lives of indigenous children following traditional ways of life are always so blissful. (As for the lives of indigenous kids whose traditional ways of life are being torn to shreds, that is, most of them, I weep.)

This blanket enthusiasm for indigenous practices coupled with a blanket criticism of Western practices grates; and it also leads to ridiculous inconsistencies. Griffiths is scathing of the way Western children are penned up indoors, locked away from the wild spaces that they need for their development. Yet in a chapter devoted to the importance of imagination and metaphor, Griffiths writes positively about the Kogi people in Colombia, who identify a boy as a future spiritual leader. This infant is taken from his mother, and shut in a dim cave for the first nine years of his life; his only exposure to the wider world is through the stories told to him. After nine years, he emerges as a spiritual leader (or, I suspect, completely mad). Of this practice, Griffiths admits only that some Westerners may feel ‘ambivalence’. Horror is more like it. One is left with the impression that it’s not okay for Western kids to be inside playing the piano, learning to cook, reading faerie stories, building cubbies, or playing hide-and-seek; but an indigenous kid can be locked away in a dark cave for nine years. Oh, please! Clearly, this is absurd; yet Griffiths seems cheerfully oblivious to both the brutality of some indigenous practices and the inconsistencies within her text which lead her to condemn in the West that which she extols in other cultures.

Griffiths also suffers from the hopeless sentimentality towards children that one sees in non-parents from time to time. As a parent, I do find it helpful to be reminded to let my kids take risks, to get them outside, to let them have their privacy and secret spaces and special dens. I like being a little breathless about the idea of childhood, and I know that when we relax our family culture, everyone is happier and more cheerful. But I also know just how much of childhood is about shit and sex and fighting and greed and fear, not only in my own children or the children I spend time with, but in my memories of childhood; and it seems that there is little room in Griffiths’ worldview for such normal kids. Not all kids are large-spirited hearty adventurers or passionate artists. Griffiths seems to be unaware of the variations in personality which are found, I suspect, across all cultural styles.

Her one-eyed view also means that Griffiths fails to see the opportunities for wildness and secret places that city children find: on the subway, up the fire stairs, under the stoop, in a cubby, or in the branches of a tree at the local park. Not every wild space or secret den needs to be a rural idyll. She seems to miss the ways city kids lose and construct themselves, and make little nets of privacy, not just in folk tales but in music and dance and sport, and dreaming in the back seat of the car. Her unabashed primitivism lacks subtlety; and there is so much good about being a Western kid that I find it hard to perceive the crisis of childhood to which she constantly alludes.

So I have lots of issues with the book; still, I recommend it. Griffiths’ observations about what makes kids thrive are good sense, overall; and the great exuberant eloquence of her writing is such a delight, such a gift, that I am prepared to forgive very many of the flaws. Cat-shadows in beetroot patches will win me over, every time.

‘Obedience is deadly, will is divine and the vital wildness of the human spirit is purring, over there, like a cat-shadow in the beetroot patch.’

***

PS: If you’re not really up for a long, loquacious, one-eyed, deeply flawed rant – though why not, I can’t imagine! – but you still want to think about how to parent generously, I’d recommend Hodgkinson’s utilitarian The Idle Parent. My longer response to it is here, but, in short, it advocates freedom and choice; is packed with suggestions for ways to maximise love and affection and minimise the rage and frustration of parenting; and urges parents to seek ways of making family life fun. It’s intelligent, enjoyable, good-humoured and opinionated, and lacks only cat-shadows and beetroot patches. And who has a beetroot patch, anyway?

The Idle Parent

The kids and I were at the local pool, playing ring-a-rosy. I was having a ball pulling them underwater; judging from their giggles and shrieks, they were having a ball too. Behind us some older kids were fooling around, aged maybe nine, ten and eleven. Above us strode an anxious lined middle class mother, watching them like a hawk and shouting an instruction every few seconds. ‘Stop that! Leave him alone! Go left! Watch out! Be careful! Move to the right!’. On and on and on it went.

I felt myself cringing at her, and then at myself as I rebuked my six-year-old for launching herself into a group of toddlers. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I wanted to shout – both at her and myself – , ‘leave them alone!’

How can kids enjoy themselves when their every move is noticed and critiqued? How can parents enjoy themselves when they are convinced that every move their kids make will result in disaster? And yet that is the tone of so much middle-class parenting, and so much parenting material. For the most part I avoid parenting books. Sanctimonious and puritanical things, I want nothing of them. But at right angles to the essay section of my local bookshop is the parenting shelf; and catching my eye the other week was The Idle Parent.

What a title! It sang out to me. I have three kids, aged nine, six and four, and I just can’t be bothered being a proper energetically hovering middle class parent like the woman at the pool. As all the other mums rush their kids off to karate / jazz ballet / Chinese / drawing / whatever, I certainly do feel idle; even so, I don’t have the energy or interest to do likewise. The thought of watching some six-year-old learn a dance move makes me want to scream with boredom; worse, standing over them as they leap about the local swimming pool makes me want to slit my throat. I want to fool around in the pool myself, or I want to read a book; either way, moderating their fun is not my idea of a good time. So I picked up The Idle Parent, and devoured it overnight.

The book’s thesis is simple: Leave them alone! We are not kids, and kids are not adults. Our interests only sometimes overlap. So, suggests the author, the simplest recipe for a healthy happy family life is to give your kids the freedom to do their thing while you go and do your thing. Be there when they need you, but don’t hover. Just let them be. His ideal parenting situation is a large field, many kids romping at one end and many parents drinking beer at the other. Everyone’s safe, and everyone’s happy!

Such a scenario brought a big smile to my face, because I have often thought that my ideal parenting situation is a house party, with twenty kids running around and twenty adults drinking wine and talking their heads off. My kids tend to agree, which is why they beg for such events. Who are you inviting over? they ask most Saturdays, There must be someone!

(For that matter, our other favourite parenting environment is a large field at a friend’s block, as long as we have a couple of extra kids with us. The kids run down the hill and over the next ridge, and we can talk, enjoy the view and inspect the new growth while they’re gone. Last time the horde came charging back up the hill, screeching and laughing themselves silly, dangling leeches from the ends of their fingers and waggling them about. It was hilarious.)

By now any non-parents must be rolling their eyes; do we really need a book to be told to leave the kids alone, even if it is to get sucked by leeches? But those among us with children know just how hard it is. Our culture highly values present and attentive parents, lest little Johnny have his fragile ego squashed because Mummy is more interested in a book than in him, or lest little Cindy have her hopes of being a professional ballerina dashed because Mummy couldn’t be bothered with dancing lessons. Even the author of one of the more interesting recent books about child raising, Last Child in the Woods, which is about the urgent need to get children back in touch with the natural world, admits that he never lets his sons out of sight when they’re hiking. (When I read that, I didn’t know whether to throw the book across the room, or cry.)

In that light, I am a wicked mummy. I have friends and interests that have nothing to do with my kids; I remind the kids about snakes then let them roam through field and forest; and so it is a great relief to read a book which backs up my more carefree approach.

Of course, Hodkingson doesn’t advocate absolute freedom. He has strong ideas about what is and is not helpful as kids explore the world. Television gets the thumbs down, as do plastic toys and having too much stuff; inside isn’t the best place; and neat clean tidy places aren’t ideal, either. He argues kids need space to roam, lots of access to trees, bushes and wild spaces, and things to make stuff with. Good books, wrestling on the floor, a bit of dirt and mess... it all sounds about right to me. The result of such an approach is resilient, creative, competent children (and parents) who are resistant to the lies of consumerism.

The book draws from a broad range of thinkers, from John Locke, Rousseau and DH Lawrence to AS Neill (Summerhill School); ideas from more recent authors, including Skenazy (Free Range Kids) and Louv also surface. The synthesis is cheerful, intelligent and convincing. Above all, I appreciate that it is not just about kids (and therefore about what parents should do (and fail to do) in raising them); instead, The Idle Parent is really about families. Hodgkinson asks good questions about what parents want from life, and encourages the reader to critique his or her own approach, and to recognise and critique the at times suffocating limitations of the dominant culture.

For example, he asks what is enough – do both parents need to work full time or could they both be home with kids more? Why do we live where we do: could we live elsewhere and pay less rent or mortgage? Could we live in a smaller house closer to work and spend less time commuting? What do we spend our money on, and why – do kids really need or want manicured houses, expensive holidays, amusement parks and fancy toys, or are they consumerist furphies? What do we enjoy doing as a family, and what do we hate doing together? Do we enjoy holidaying together, or are there times when separate vacations would be more restorative? Do we need more adults around to contribute to family life, and if so, who can we call on: friends, family, paid employees? In short, he questions how we adults constrain our lives (particularly with regards to happiness) and how we might liberate ourselves, using a refreshingly utilitarian approach.

It’s a lovely book and terrifically opinionated. It opens with a manifesto ‘We pledge to leave our children alone / We reject the rampant consumerism that invades our children’s lives from the moment they are born / We drink alcohol without guilt / We reject the inner Puritan...’, and follows with chapters including ‘Seek not Perfection’, ‘The Myth of Toys’, ‘Down with School’, and ‘Let Us Sleep’, familiar territory for most parents. Best of all, he offers no one-size-fits-all solution, but encourages each family to find what works – or, in the words of the Manifesto, ‘There are many paths’. Hodgkinson has strong opinions about what doesn’t work – long hours at work, large mortgages, too many toys and bits of plastic, guilt – and many suggestions about what could.

I happened to go on a family holiday right after reading the book. I was going to spend the first week largely alone with my girls in a beach house twenty minutes’ walk from town, with no car. It had the potential to be fantastic, which is why I had organised it so; but it also had the potential to collapse into nightmare. I’m not overly fond of the beach. I’ve had little kids for so long that it feels like I spend my whole time hovering there. I don’t get to sit, and I don’t get to swim; and I don’t like building sand castles or helping anyone else do so, either. But this time, I was determined it would be different. The kids are a bit older, the beach was on a shallow bay, and I was going to be Idle. The holiday wasn’t going to be just for my kids – I was going to have a holiday too.

Day One. Resolve and book firmly in hand I sat in the sand, ignored my girls, and read while they built sandcastles and splashed in the shallows. Nobody drowned. I was so relaxed that after fifty pages I shut my book and went and dreamily dug a moat out of pleasure, not duty. My girls were delighted. We went home for lunch, then I taught them how to do the dishes, explaining that I would do the cooking and the dinner dishes and this was a fair division of labour. When they kicked up, I pointed out I would take them back to the beach after the dishes were done, then walked out. I lay on my bed and read my novel; and after a while I heard the sounds of them washing, drying and putting things away. I also heard them make up a dishes song that lasted them through every batch of dishes for the entire two week holiday. And then I heard them each find a book and a quiet corner and read too, for an hour. Bliss.

So each day went. They did stuff they wanted to do; they did a bit of housework; I did stuff I wanted to do; I did a bit of housework; and sometimes we overlapped. I didn’t shout at them or watch over them closely; and because I was reading and dozing and feeling relaxed, when I did spend time with them it wasn’t a duty but a pleasure – and so it was fun.

And this, I think, is Hodgkinson’s point. We are born free, and everywhere we are in chains. Parenting is a prime example of this; it sometimes feels impossible to have a conversation about parenting without whinging or listening to others whinge. But Hodgkinson reminds us that we in the Western world are free. We choose to partner and we choose to have children; we choose where we live and how we work; and so on. As free adults we should take responsibility for our choices, stop whining about them, and start finding ways to enjoy ourselves while we and the kids co-exist. And if we do so, we will all find ourselves having a lot more fun.

With his words (‘I am free! We are all free! I am being Idle!!’) ringing in my ears I found many ways to enjoy myself that holiday. I read a dozen books, and we all caught up on a heap of Japanese anime. My legs lost their ghostly winter pallor. The kids learned French cricket and how to dig for crabs, catch, cook and eat a fish, and wash the dishes afterwards. There was very little yelling by anyone. I came home renewed and ready to step even further back as a parent. It mostly works, and that’s good enough. Oh idle me!

Response: Stuart Brown's Play

I have long noticed that when I am flat I become obsessed by Getting Things Done. The dishes, the floors and the dinners become important and difficult and time consuming and I find it hard to enjoy my children or anything else. The old adage suggests that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy – but they are not in opposition. I find that when I regularly engage in play, I work better and life goes rather more swimmingly. The jobs get done quickly, my kids are delightful, and I find the time to play even more. I recently read a book which, rather gratifyingly, supports my observations: Stuart Brown’s Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul suggests that the opposite of play is not work, but depression.

The triggers for depression, of course, are another thing. Our society’s frenzied and selfish pursuit of financial success and personal happiness is a major trigger; so are the self-help books which encourage these twin and very tedious foci, and Play toes the party line. According to the blurb, ‘our ability to play through life is the single most important factor in determining our success and happiness’, which suggests to me that Play is designed to be picked up at the airport and read on the plane by middle management. As a result, many claims in the book are justified by the suggestion that they might increase one’s marketability, profit margin and, of course, happiness – whatever that is.

It would irritate me more but for my many crappy experiences of work which suggest that middle management has much to learn about how to set up interesting, rewarding and effective workplaces, and if Play will help them with that task, then it has my blessing. In any case, being pitched at middle management makes it a quick and easy read. Meanwhile, those of us not in middle management who are willing to overlook the success-and-happiness formula (and a few gross generalisations, such as which are playful thus creative countries) will find many interesting and salutary points.

Brown has studied play for many decades, and this book outlines his understanding of the nature of play, its necessity to human health and development, and the benefits of a playful approach to the whole of one’s life. An activity not just for children, Brown defines play as a state of mind: ‘an absorbing, apparently purposeless activity that provides enjoyment and a suspension of self-consciousness and sense of time’. Thus it might range from filling in the cryptic crossword to kicking a ball to going for an aimless wander. Play is vital because it is in this unconscious absorption we tune into the world and are freed from our limitations; and it provides an outlet for our deepest most creative selves.

As a result, Brown claims that people who play are more creative, energetic and insightful; they are better at solving problems and negotiating difficulties and conflicts; and they continue to grow intellectually and emotionally.

Of course this is good for the workplace, but it is also good for everything else, and Brown writes convincingly about the importance of play in child development, parenting, marriage and old age, as well as in education and vocational discernment. When so many of us are bogged down in the rat race, it is helpful to be reminded just how invigorating it can be to step out of the rut and play with one’s kids, one’s spouse, one’s friends, one’s neighbours, or even, shock horror, alone.

Brown does not specifically mention meditation, but as I read I found myself reflecting on the relationship between it and play. They are, to me, two sides of a coin, as good play, particularly solitary play, often precipitates in me a meditative stance. For example, letting the busy part of my mind wander through the cryptic crossword can provide the space for deeper insights than simple anagrams.

Much of what Brown says is common sense: of course your marriage is more interesting if you have a playful approach to it; of course playful people are better at solving problems. But sometimes common sense is not so obvious, and our natural desire to play is often suffocated by societal pressures to act ‘grown up’, as if being adult requires that one become stultifyingly dull. Therefore, despite my reservations about the success/happiness paradigm and my dislike of a few generalisations, I recommend Play to you, along with a good game of Scrabble, an evening of parlour games, or a thrilling round of hide and seek.

The 100-Mile Diet

Very belatedly for one who is interested in local food, I have finally picked up The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating by Alisa Smith and JB McKinnon (published in the US under the title, Plenty). I admit I avoided it for a long time. I had already read a book on similar themes, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: Our Year of Seasonal Eating by Barbara Kingsolver; the thought of a whole book about what a couple ate for a year seemed too boring for words; and anyway, I know the theory of why we should eat locally and didn't see the need to be told all over again. Of course, my assumptions were completely wrong; this is a fine book. Richer than a food diary and more engaging than a polemic – and much funnier than Kingsolver – here is an intimate portrait of a Vancouver couple. The story is structured around the year they ate only food grown within 100 miles of their home, but it is much more than a story about dinner.

The book certainly has aspects of a food log, telling where and how they found local produce. They write nicely of the satisfaction of a successful run to the farmer's market, or finding an unexpected farm gate. They learn the intricacies of honey and squash; gorge on blueberries; pick strawberries; meet local fishermen; and learn how to cook, preserve and eat all sorts of new things.

It is also a fascinating history of a local area, charting the shifts in agriculture over the last few centuries. From an abundant food region for the Salish and other coastal tribes, to a self-sufficient colony feeding itself and exporting crops, to an area which imports most of its food while shipping out monocrops, the use of the land has changed dramatically. In that time, the stocks of wild foods, particularly fish, have also plummeted, so that an area which was once unimaginably abundant with seafood now enforces fishing controls to try and preserve what is left. Most sad are the devastating effects industrial accidents have had on the area; during their year of eating locally, half a million river fish were killed by a caustic soda spill. In the face of such devastation, however, the authors refuse to despair; instead, they choose to live responsibly and orient themselves towards hope.

These stories of shopping, eating and growing are interesting. Even more engaging, however, is Alisa's story. Alisa and James wrote alternate chapters, interweaving their views into one story. James's chapters are more finessed, but Alisa's are more personal; and I found her writing moving. She has suffered from cyclical depression since childhood, and although she doesn't dwell on the depression, it certainly has an impact on their year. She writes of what is, to me, a very familiar way of life, that is, living with one eye always on the alternatives, obsessing about real estate, other places, other houses, other lives, and that which might have been. The key to the book, and what is for me the key to local eating, is found in the pages where Alisa argues that eating locally has helped ground her into her particular existence, her particular time and place, in a way that is deeply and psychically healing; so much so that once the year was up, she (and they) decided to maintain, in large part, the diet.

I resonate very deeply with this part of the story, recognising myself in her description of living with one eye always fixed on the alternatives. I don't really know why I feel this way. It may be the curse of colonialism: I am the descendant of colonists; I live two thousand miles from the city of my grandparents; I have no long family history which links me to this place. It may be the curse of third culture kids: I lived in a couple different countries as a child, and all and none of them feel like home. It may just be a pervasive sense of saudade.

Whatever it is, I find this rootlessness and its corresponding restlessness corrosive. It's exhausting; I long for somewhere to relax and belong. I look at other cities, other houses, other lives, with the illusion that somewhere I may find my rest; but deep down I know that the answer does not lie elsewhere. Wherever I live, I will soon feel the same way.

Instead, what matters is that I work towards making whichever place I am in home. This takes learning: learning the seasons, learning the weather patterns, learning the annual changes of particular trees and the visits of particular birds. It's noticing small things: our May visitor, the thrush, which turns up for a week or two every year; the almond, which always blossoms in July.

And a crucial aspect of this project of rooting myself to this place is to learn the food – the people who grow it, the places it is grown, the seasons when it is ripe. Food is so primal, and so intimately linked to the land and our bodies, that it has the potential to locate us firmly in the present.

My family is by no means fully committed to local eating. By the time we factor in our family's multiple food allergies, intolerances and ethical choices, we'd just about starve eating solely local foods; and anyway, I'm not cooking potatoes for breakfast. However, over the last few years, as I have made an effort to source and feed my family with as much local food as reasonably manageable, I have found myself feeling correspondingly more grounded. The delight I take in knowing that in Koo Wee Rup, asparagus is growing its way towards spring; that fresh potatoes from Gembrook have skins so thin they are translucent; that Brunswick honey is at the base of my lip gloss is profound, more than just pleasure: it's the deep slow rooting of my life to the here and now.

The authors of The 100-Mile Diet, with their insights into place and belonging, clearly articulate what I have been fumbling towards on the other side of the world. They do this in between simple recipes for often overlooked foods; hilarious stories of separating grain from mouse poop with a credit card; and rollcalls of species and varieties that are now but a memory: the fish, the wheat, the potatoes, the apples that once stocked the region around Vancouver.

It is an engaging book, clear and well written, gentle and self-mocking even as it is inspiring. We might not all be freelance writers with the time to cook every meal, even breakfast, for a year; but in telling their story, the authors encourage us to think about how we might reconnect with our own locality and give us reasons beyond ethics. In short, in their view and mine, eating local food feeds more than the stomach: it is deeply grounding nourishment for the soul.

'We felt like pioneers setting foot on a strange place called home.' (James, on eating an indigenous camas bulb for the first time).

Riding the Bus with my Sister

Just up the street from me live some 80 people in supported accommodation. Their problems range from intellectual disabilities to schizophrenia to frontal lobe damage caused by stroke or other injuries. Some of these neighbours are easy to get along with; we lean against our garden wall and chat about the weather or the footy. Some are just familiar-looking strangers we pass by on the street. And several are more difficult: paranoid, verbally abusive, erratic and even, at times, physically threatening.

Each person is, of course, an individual, and their problems are only one facet of their personality; but there are certainly times when I lack patience with some of them: those who chat one day and treat me as a stranger the next; those who scream abuse; those who shout and sing just in front of our house when I'm trying to settle a baby.

Meanwhile one of the crossing ladies at school is well and truly on the autism scale, and to my shame there are days I find it difficult to greet her cheerfully yet again as she obsessively calls out everyone's name, holds the same short conversation as yesterday and the day before and every day for three years before that, and refuses to believe that a young child could be terrified as she shoves her large face into the pram.

So it was with great interest that I read Riding the Bus with My Sister, by Rachel Simon. Simon's sister Beth has mental retardation (Simon's phrase). Beth is able to live by herself in a form of supported accommodation, but she does not, and possibly cannot, work. Instead, she spends her days riding buses. Every morning, she rises early and heads to one bus stop or another, then criss-crosses town meeting up with her favourite drivers. On the bus she sits in 'her' seat, cattycorner to the driver, plays music on her portable radio, and makes loud observations about life, the bus drivers, fellow passengers and whatever else excites her attention. One year, Beth exacted a promise from Simon to spend twelve months riding the buses with her whenever possible, and the book is the result of that year.

Simon uses the book to tell several stories. The first is, of course, the story of riding the buses with Beth, who is spirited, belligerent, defensive, large, loud, opinionated, bossy and unforgiving. Simon charts a year of early starts and sisterly conflict; bus drivers and health professionals; and mad dashes to public bathrooms at timing points. Some of the bus drivers are particularly charming. Among their ranks are story tellers, philosophers and comedians, and their hospitality towards Beth far exceeds their duty as drivers; these stories alone are worth the read.

The book also documents the relationship between the sisters. Before the year, Simon and Beth lived in different cities and had grown apart. Simon writes quite honestly of her discomfort with Beth's issues, both historical (having the sister in the 'slow' class at school) and current. Beth sounds exasperating, and Simon struggles through the year to come to terms with who Beth is now, rather than with who she wishes Beth might be. She investigates how much of Beth's personality may be an expression of her disability, and gains some new insights into why her sister is the way she is. Despite her ongoing ambiguous feelings about some aspects of Beth's personality, Simon documents a growing respect for her resourcefulness and a much gentler love for her.

Her year with Beth was also an opportunity for Simon to reflect on her own emotional state. Her significant relationship had fallen to pieces; she was working insanely long hours and was deeply lonely. Slowing down and spending time with Beth, as well as the more philosophical, pastoral or compassionate bus drivers, helped her reflect on what she had prioritised in life, and enabled her to make some different choices.

The final part of the story is their shared history, told in flashbacks through the book. Their parents split up, and their mother fell into a pattern of abusive relationships which ended in the abrupt abandonment of her children.

Simon's slight tendency to make everything neat is more than compensated for by the dynamic people in this book: Beth, her long term boyfriend Jessie, the bus drivers, even Simon herself. It is a pleasure to read. But what makes Riding the Bus really valuable are the questions it raises. What is it like to have a sister who is largely oblivious to one's own needs and the needs of others? How do you talk with someone like this? Who is responsible to care for such a person, and what supports need to be in place? What are the emotional and relational costs of caring for such a child? How liberating is self determination if the person making decisions is constantly self-destructive? What are the ethics of sterilisation when someone is sexually active and loves small children, yet is incapable of caring for a baby? How can someone express hospitality through their work, and what are the limits? Over the course of the book, Simon grapples with these and other difficult questions from a very personal vantage point.

It's a book which makes me think carefully about how I treat my neighbours, my crossing lady, or anyone else with a mental illness or disability. There are certainly times when I want to shun one or another because, quite frankly, they are a pain in the butt. Other times I am tired and grumpy and lack the patience to have yet another boring conversation about the weather. Riding the Bus with My Sister is a great gift because it shows how one such person is a dynamic whole person, embedded in a community. It reminds the reader of the obvious but easily forgotten point that people with mental disabilities have families, histories, stories, secrets and desires, just like everyone else; and, like everyone else, they come bearing gifts. Whether or not we take the time to recognise and receive those gifts is up to us.

Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother

Many of you have, no doubt, read the extract from Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother that made so many people so hot under the collar. In it, Chua detailed what appeared to be her absolutely brutal methods for driving her children to technical excellence in school and music. Like so much we read in the newspaper, the extract was designed to polarise and it did so perfectly. It created an absolute furore, a wealth of free publicity which led to mega sales of the book. I certainly found Chua's article appalling; however, I recently sat down and read her book, wherein I discovered a more complex story.

Battle Hymn opens with Chua's claim that she, and all good Chinese (read: strict immigrant) mothers, know how to raise their children properly. They are dominant and controlling, and commit themselves utterly to driving their children to excellence. Growing up, Chua's two daughters had no play dates, no sleepovers, no school camps, no television, and no extracurricular activities except music. Thus they had plenty of time to work hard, get perfect grades, and master an instrument. Satisfaction, claims Chua, is to be found in mastery of something, and mastery doesn't come easily. So her daughters practiced their musical instruments for more than an hour every day, and three to five hours if a performance was looming; and when they were unwilling to rehearse Chua stood over them screaming, threatening to destroy their soft toys and even withholding food and water until they had completed their practice.

This is pretty much where the article stopped and, of course, it was ghastly. We were left with the picture of a psychotic mother brutally dominating her children as they attempted to master the instruments of her choice. This is not an entirely inaccurate impression, but it omits the good humour, the self-deprecating tone, and the way Chua's methods fell to pieces with her second daughter, which are all detailed in the book.

Daughter one, Sophia, was willing to get with the program. She went along with the rules and the practice, and calmly excelled at everything. Lulu, however, was different. Lulu just said no. The battles grew more and more heated until, despite her natural gifts, years of accomplishment and a love of playing, Lulu flat out refused to pick up the violin. The book details how mother and daughter interacted and how Chua eventually admitted defeat, allowing Lulu, at thirteen, to make some of her own choices about how to spend her time. Lulu now sets much of her own agenda and, shock horror, wastes time playing tennis.

Chua relates her ambitions and her methods as well as her rages at Lulu and where she went wrong, and freely admits the things they missed when both of them obstinately refused to give way. The girls continued to practice when travelling with the family; and there were times when the whole family missed one thing or another because Lulu refused to practice and Chua refused to leave the hotel until the practice had been completed. At one level, this is crazy; at another, I have some sympathy for Chua – unlike so many of us with our children, at least she stood her ground.

Battle Hymn is more than a parenting story, however. It is also the classic immigrant tale. The daughter of migrants, Chua had limited opportunities and was determined to be successful in a measurable way. Now that she has made good, Chua is absolutely determined that her own children will have every opportunity made available to them. Utterly predictably, her oldest child has taken up the mantle and excels, while the second child has adapted to the dominant culture and rebels against the strict cultural mores of her mother.

The book is also about family and Chua writes simply and well about her parents and their shift from China to America; the illness and death of Florence, Chua's mother-in-law; and the terrible leukaemia of Katrin, Chua's sister.

Overall, the book is candid, moving and very funny, and Chua has a nice self-deprecating tone. She is an odd mix of extremely sharp and charmingly naive, brutal and fragile, and I found myself loving to loathe her.

On a more personal level, Chua's book raises serious questions for me as a parent. While I will never be the sort of mother who will stand over her children for hours of music practice or drive them all over creation to see particular teachers, I often wonder whether I don't demand enough from or for them. I'm not sure how to balance the needs of childhood – for play, daydreaming and exploration, which my kids excel at – with the fact that they don't seem to be learning as much as I would hope.

At home, my husband and I have focussed on relational demands: respect, obedience, graciousness and kindness; but I wonder if we should be demanding more intellectually. One of our daughters is constantly bored at school; the school fails to stretch her academically. A parent like Chua would be in there, devising curricula and making it happen, while I sit at home, fretting and naively trusting that the school will actually do what it promises. I don't want to compensate for the school's lack by filling my daughter's hours at home with academic challenges – surely that is what the hours at school are for – but I am afraid of her becoming lazy and stupid just through sheer lack of exercising her thinking muscles.

And yet, like most concerns I have for my children, these issues are really about me. Chua writes that letting most kids follow their passion leads to ten hours a day on Facebook as they lack the discipline to become really good at what they love; they need parents to provide the drive. In fact, she goes on, most people really suck at what they love because they are too lazy to practice enough to become good.

Her comment stings. I was bored out of my skull for most of my schooling and doodled around at home, and now I'm an adult who is often not quite sure what I'm doing or why. Were I slightly different or had I more drive, I would have written books or be working on a newspaper or doing something else professional rather than sweeping the floor, wiping snotty noses and making notes on a blog from time to time. In Chua's eyes, I am certainly an underachiever, but I don't know where her drive comes from or how to get it.

On the other hand, I'm not sure that people with great drive are always settled in themselves, or even kind. And there's the nub – what is success? Chua is very focused on measurable success: learning things quickly; being top of the class; earning the praise of well-regarded people; having a prestigious career at a famous institution. But the kind of success Chua dreams of often comes at great cost. Chua's daughters had a nanny (Mandarin speaking so that they would grow up bilingual, of course); and Chua details the many years that she and the girls lived in one city and her husband in another as their careers took them in different geographical directions. Meanwhile, Chua spent her girls' childhoods racing from work to school to home to music lessons and back to work again, desperate to fill every minute with useful activity, which is the sort of behaviour I associate with a certain emptiness in oneself. I can't imagine running on that sort of treadmill, or paying that sort of price, to gain the conventional markers of success. What is life if it is not about raising one's own infants, or spending evenings with one's own husband, or just sitting listening to the silence?

As for the hours her daughters spent practicing their instruments when others would be throwing snowballs or hanging out with their girlfriends – it's hard to know what really matters in this life. It might be rather thrilling to be a musical virtuoso; it might be rather satisfying to be sought after by prestigious institutions; but then again, I have had most of my life-giving experiences when I'm just doing nothing. Reading Chua's book raises the all-important question, what does it mean to live life to the fullest? Is it to cram every moment full of work and family, or is there more? Battle Hymn doesn't claim to answer these questions; in fact, it ends with these questions, and the answers, of course, differ from person to person and shift and change for an individual over time.

As for my parenting style, I can't dismiss Chua's methods all-out. I know far too many kids who seem to spend their lives in front of a screen, and have so little real attention paid to their gifts, interests and development that it is hard to imagine them growing into anything much other than consumers. There is merit in a strict, disciplined and intentional upbringing; and it is great for kids to become so good at something that they are brimming with a sense of accomplishment and pride.

Chua tells a story in which she tore up the birthday cards her daughters had made her. They had been slapped together in five minutes, and she rejected the lack of care they had put into the cards, demanding more from her daughters. The bloggerati was horrified, yet I think Chua was right. We constantly praise our kids for drivel, but it hardly encourages them to stretch out and discover what they are capable of; instead, it tells them that a lazy mediocrity is just fine. And perhaps such a mediocrity is enough in a society in which a major university has plastered billboards with slogans of 'Relax' and 'It's all good' – but it hardly encourages excellence.

As a parent myself of daughters who sometimes make beautiful things and other times churn out horrible slop, I found myself cheering Chua – and when the next piece of crap came my way, I gently raised an eyebrow. I asked whether it was really the best my kid could do, and talked about how presentation and effort communicate a great deal about love and care or lack thereof. I didn't yell and tear the piece up, but it disappeared and something decent took its place.

Chua's methods and goals are extreme; but if they give our parenting a nudge, so that we kindly and gently ask our children to do a little better, then we might just be surprised at what our kids are capable of; and our kids might have the privilege, too, of being delighted by their own strengths and abilities.

The Zoo in You

 

“Years ago, I decided to pay attention to God’s feathered friends as one metaphor for God’s presence, and in doing so, I have discovered this: that the Holy Spirit is heard in the kookaburra, who laughs at our pretensions and wrestles with the snake;... she’s found in the white-faced heron on our neighbour’s roof; she’s recalled by little finches at my grandfather’s funeral. When I'm soulsick and sinking, she calls out my name; of Cornish ancestry, I hear her in the language of my heart, which leaps at the crying of the gulls.”

Yep, another piece is being published, this time in The Zoo in You, a book exploring the animal imagery of faith. If you can cope with a bit of God in your reading, you should love this book. Each reflection is grouped with a prayer and a poem by Cameron Semmens, and is illustrated by Hamish McWilliam. My reflection can be found in Hope with a Cockatiel.

The Zoo in You is now available for pre-order for $19.95 plus postage here. Orders will be shipped from 2 December, and should arrive in good time for Christmas.

If the God stuff's not your thing, no matter – just wait 'til the next book!

Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl

'Hi, I'm Fred.' Really? Well, I'm Alison, and I have a wicked temper and slightly depressive tendencies; I'm allergic to this, that and the other; and I have a weird and pathological fear of looking beautiful, thus the extremely short hair, the lack of makeup and jewellery, and a wardrobe almost completely devoid of skirts.

Fred is edging towards the exit by now, as well he should be: such an opening is hardly the path to a little light conversation, let alone the beginnings of a beautiful friendship. And yet it is common. I certainly have been guilty at times of identifying myself primarily by my weaknesses: Little Miss Asthma, Lady Mother Dying, The Homesick Chick. But now I prefer my primary identification to be something other than my neediness, so I prefer my vulnerabilities to be largely invisible in social contexts. I prefer it to be mostly invisible in others, too.

One thing I like to be invisible about is allergies (except, obviously, in this post). Before we talk more, we need to clean up what allergies are. The word 'allergy' is often used carelessly; I hear people say that are allergic to wheat, meaning that they get a bit windy when they eat a sandwich. What they suffer is an intolerance; this is not the same as an allergy.

Bundling allergies in with intolerances risks linking them with food fads and Hollywood diets; and this, I reckon, is part of what leads people to think that allergies are kind of funny, certainly annoying, even imaginary. Yet if people don't take them seriously, and then have anything to do with the food we eat, people with allergies get more than a bit of wind; they get a full blown reaction as their immune system goes berserk trying to rid their body of the allergen. I'm allergic to a few things, and by allergic I mean that I react to eating them by wheezing, vomiting, and, occasionally, going into anaphylactic shock.

Of course, trying to act nonchalant as a young teenager when everyone else is stuffing their face with prawn crackers – and I grew up with a crowd of south east Asians – is not easy. I have vivid memories of eating those crackers in full knowledge that they would make me sick, but hoping so much that this time it would be okay. I just wanted to fit in, but of course the dry mouth, thick tongue, itchy throat and major stomach cramps hardly helped with that little project.

As a young adult, one birthday was particularly memorable: someone bought me a Drambuie, a hitherto untried drink. I took one sip, and felt that telltale tickle – the beginnings of anaphylaxis – at the back of my throat. But I didn't want to mention it, or be rude. So I took another sip and, of course, immediately started hawking and coughing and spluttering as my throat closed up and I could no longer breathe. Not cool, Alison.

Many allergy sufferers could tell similar stories of risking their health if not their life for the sake of trying to appear normal; and I am sure many allergy sufferers would have made the same decision as me time and again, of not using or even carrying the dreaded EpiPen and risking the hubbub, the nausea and the trip to the emergency room that follows. Instead we try to flush out our systems with water and Benadryl, and hope for the best.

So it was with a mixture of trepidation and interest that I picked up Don't Kill the Birthday Girl, a memoir about living with allergies. I was afraid it might be an annoying whingeathon by someone who identifies herself primarily as 'Allergy Girl', but I was pleasantly surprised.

Sandra Beasley is allergic to many things, making it very difficult to navigate eating out in any context in a culture where eating out is the norm. But to my great relief she opens with the statement that "those with food allergies aren't victims. We're people who – for better or worse – experience the world in a slightly different way", and that attitude carries, more or less, through the book.

Beasley mixes up personal anecdote with social observations and a great deal of information. I learned how the body forms an allergic reaction; why a friend's son had a second, stronger, reaction to peanut oil hours after his first reaction; why the American food landscape is so infested by soy; how food labelling laws are the result of allergy lobbyists; and what it's like to be an allergic mother to children who are allergic to different things. She dispels some of the myths surrounding the current explosion in allergies, and uses her experience as an entry point to explore many aspects of American food culture. Much of what she says is interesting, and she is up front with how her personal agenda is sometimes rattled by what she learns.

Beasley asks some particularly good questions about ritual, especially communion. Communion is the high point of the Christian religious service and involves, in one way or another, the sharing of bread and wine. At my church, we have wine and water available (the latter for those who are allergic to grapes and for recovering alcoholics); and wheat bread with a rye embellishment (the rye is for those who are allergic to wheat). Many congregations have similar practices. But some, notably those Catholics who follow the explicit directives issued by Ratzinger, are forbidden from using any alternative to the Papal-sanctioned wheaten wafers, thus excluding many congregants from communion.

She is not a churchgoer, but she raises important questions about the nature and purpose of ritual, asking "Is it inclusiveness that makes rituals valuable? Or is it maintaining the ritual's integrity that matters, even if that leaves someone out?" She writes about being the child who never got a birthday cupcake when they were handed out at school, and being the young adult who could never accept a slice of wedding cake, or shake hands with or kiss anyone who had, and how painful those exclusions were.

In the same way, it is intensely painful for Christians to be excluded from communion, and Beasley's observations on communion and church policies are helpful for the general reader. (I will add that it is clear to me if not the Holy Father that, since the greatest commandment is to love, what the communion wafers are made of doesn't matter one iota; what matters is welcoming people in.)

She also asks good questions about the current hysteria surrounding keeping children safe. Is it really necessary, she asks, for entire schools to go nut free? Surely children must learn to manage their food allergies and use a little common sense. She cites idiotic news stories, such as the evacuation of a school bus because a peanut was rolling around on the floor (apparently a threat, even though no one was planning to pick it up and eat it), and asks whether it really takes a whole village to protect a child from a peanut.

Don't Kill the Birthday Girl is sensible, thought provoking, and also darkly funny in its tales of anaphylaxis at the most inconvenient times. One thinks of people with allergies as being so terribly, terribly earnest, but Beasley has a refreshingly self-mocking stance.

The book wobbles a little as it navigates between personal anecdote and more general information – I would have preferred the information to be less bound up in Beasley's personal experience – but overall it is a good read. What I found especially valuable was the normalisation of my experience: stories of anaphylaxis and its aftermath; and stories of not managing one's allergies well because of peer pressure and the desire to join in.

More than anything, however, I valued Beasley's stance that our weaknesses – whether allergies or, and I'm extrapolating here, other health and wellbeing problems – are only one part of our lives, and they are far from the most interesting part; nor do they warrant special attention. They need be mentioned only when necessary and can otherwise stay in the background. Don't Kill the Birthday Girl is a call to understand the particular problem of allergies, then move on.

As Beasley writes, "Not every page is meant to tell your story. You are not the focal point of every canvas. This town is busy... My job is to center on staying safe in this world, but my job is also never to assume the world should revolve around keeping me safe. We have more important things to worry about. Don't kill the birthday girl. The gifts are wrapped and the piñata waiting. We have a party to get to." Hear, hear.

Zero History, and other style notes

I am lolling on the couch in my favourite denim, a heavy right hand twill, but not, I'm afraid, selvedge. Nor is it slubby, unlike my partner's long sleeve t-shirt, an irresistibly slubby item.

I know all about slubby thanks to William Gibson's latest novel, Zero History, which has as its major (ahem) thread the search for the maker of a secret brand of jeans, Gabriel Hounds – and no doubt like every other slightly obsessive William Gibson fan, I now find myself googling slubby denim and wondering where I can get me a pair of those mythical Hounds.

Which is fascinating. I am not one of those women who usually spends a great deal of time thinking about clothes. I have my uniform – black or blue jeans; black or blue scoop neck top with or without subtle horizontal stripes; grey or blue jacket; coordinating scarves and sleevies for chillier days – which I almost always wear. These clothes are rarely from the high street or the mall; instead, I buy them second hand, fair trade, or from local makers. I'm hardly the stereotypical fashionista.

Yet I do have fantastically strong opinions about what I will and will not wear. I hate it when clothes fall apart or stretch out of shape; and I loathe the way garment makers are so often treated as slave labour, rather than as skilled workers. Too, I must admit that when my clothes are well made and suit me, I feel good; and when they aren't and don't, I feel self-effacing and grumpy.

So I spend time searching out clothes that are sturdy and timeless; and when I can't find or afford them – which is usually – I look for quality second hand. Then, of course, I often give up and head to the mall; but I dream of finding clothes which are made to last.

In his magnificent book Local Wonders, Ted Kooser writes about the experience of putting on a shirt his mother made for him when he was 14. Sixty years later, it still fits and still has wear in it, unimaginable to this child of the throwaway generation. It is, however, imaginable to the maker of Hounds, who is fascinated by the clothes that once were commonplace in America: 20 oz selvedge denim, and shirts and jackets so sturdy that they endured for decades; these are the clothes she is re-inventing.

Zero History is about the power of this secret brand, which has as its only advertisement the quality of each garment. It is also about the hunger of an advertising agency to find the genius behind such a simple yet powerful marketing tool; and the way even this brand is taken on board, in the end, by the fashion mavens. Concurrent themes include the way US military style has so deeply informed street wear; the phenomenon of pop up shops; and the cross over between the worlds of music, art and fashion. Just to keep it all ticking along, there are also eccentric private hotels, a few high speed chases, corruption in high places, and a performance art skydiver.

William Gibson's last three novels have investigated in one way or another the influence of branding on our lives and the infiltration of the military on general society, and while Zero History is perhaps not quite up to Pattern Recognition, the first of the three, it is still a thought provoking read and a terrific romp.

I must say, too, that it gave me quite a fillip when one of the characters revealed that he had bought his Hounds at the Rose Street Market in Fitzroy; I have bought a heap of clothing, bags and notebooks there over the years. Nice to know that one of my locals gets a mention in a novel set in London, although it gave me a jolt to realise I may be very slightly cooler than I thought.

On another fashion note, I had a weird moment this week. Having just read Zero History, I was trying to work out why some outfits make me feel terrific a la Hounds and others make me slope around. I was thinking, too, about how I almost always wear the uniform mentioned above, and so I found myself flipping through Secrets of Style at my cousin's house, To my astonishment, I discovered that the editors of In Style magazine think a uniform is good, and that it is better to have a few quality items in one's wardrobe than a mountain of ordinary clothes. They also recommend buying up big when an item suits one well, and I puffed up in pride at the thought of my three identical t-shirts and three identical black singlets sitting in the wardrobe.

The main difference between their wardrobe and mine appears to be sticky fingers and budget. Thus I wear not cashmere turtlenecks, but wool; not tailored pants, but denim; and not low heels, but amusing flat shoes. But it was an odd moment when I realised the editors of a style magazine were on the same track as William Gibson and his imaginary maker of Hounds, and me.

It was especially surprising given the astonishing waste of an industry which has as its focus the generation of desire, which leads to our insatiable and destructive hunger for the new. But once I recovered from my astonishment, and my general embarrassment at reading a style guide, I must admit Secrets of Style was very helpful, not least for giving me permission to stick to my grey, black and blue wardrobe of things which are not particularly fashionable. It was full of good tips, too, on which cuts suit which features, and what to look for when buying clothes (fabric, shape, length, stitching, seam width, and more).

Spring is here, and if you're like me you'll have just discovered you have about three things to wear. My modest tips, diffidently proffered given the lamentable state of my own wardrobe, are to read Zero History and have a think about fashion (anyway, it's great fun); flick through the style guide, which will help you send all the clothes that make you feel awful to the op shop, and understand which clothes may suit you; scroll through the ethical shopping guide I put together here; then forgive yourself for anything you have to buy new from a sweatshop reliant chain store. Just buy the best quality you can afford, so you only have to buy it once.

And look out for something slubby.

Composing a Life

I was sitting at one end of the kitchen table reading Composing a Life by Mary Catherine Bateson, which investigates how women trace threads of meaning through their frequently interrupted lives. In one of those weird art-meets-life moments, I was halfway through the chapter which looks at how a woman is always mummy when the kids are sick, no matter her employment, and must drop what she is doing to attend, when my two year old, sitting at the other end of the table, announced that she had inserted a bead up her nose.

You can tell this is my third child, because instead of screaming and calling emergency services, I calmly inserted a bookmark, put my book down, and sent for my fabulous neighbour, a retired nurse. We then spent 45 minutes on my kitchen floor with a torch, a rolled up towel to prop my kid's head back, white pepper to induce sneezing, a lubricated straw to create suction, and – don't try this at home – a 100 year old crochet hook to flick the bead out the last millimetre. Then my lovely neighbour went back across the road, cheerful as ever; I threw together dinner; and life went on. So much for reading.

But after the kids were in bed, I went back to the book (in fact, I retrieved it from the shelf above the bin where my husband had placed it in superstitious horror when I had recounted to him the synchronicity of the book and the bead); and I finished it.

Composing a Life should be most thought-provoking. It addresses how women find meaning in the midst of lives constantly interrupted and redirected by the demands of relationship change, career shifts and children. Bateson's premise is that, for all the apparent discontinuities – a move for a spouse's employment, long term leave to raise children, a time of rediscovery and retraining – there are threads of continuity that can be traced through all the elements of one's life, and it is in these threads that we find meaning.

She argues, too, that this way of understanding our lives, which has historically been a woman's skill as it is women who usually adapt or put things on hold when family circumstances change, is helpful for men, too, now that the single career trajectory is all but extinct.

The premise is good, but the rest of the book is a disappointment. Bateson has crafted her book around the stories of five women; herself, and four friends. They are all professionals, and the book has an incredible aura of privilege. Bateson is not writing about ordinary people's lives here. These extraordinary women profiled are all upper middle class with enviable careers, yet Bateson writes as if their levels of achievement are unremarkable. One is a college president; one is a high-achieving medico; one is a brilliant engineer and technofreak with business nous; one is a writer and pioneering academic; and one is a working artist.

The author explicitly protests (too much?) that they are not superwomen, but if they are not, then I don't know who is. None of them has just a job. Instead, each of them has a profession which is their consuming passion; Bateson herself apparently thinks nothing of working a ten or twelve hour day even with a young child at home. These women are also all wealthy, whether by birth or by professional remuneration; if nothing else, most of them maintain, or have maintained, two residences. For example, when Bateson needs to write she moves to a separate apartment for several months, away from the distractions of husband and daughter. It is very hard to relate this existence to my world!

Of these lives, Bateson writes that they (we) can't have it all. Yet these women maintain significant relationships, successful careers, solid incomes, incredible social freedoms and all but one have children. It may not be French champagne and caviar every evening, but it is certainly far more than most people in this world. This seeming unawareness of their quality of life grates, especially in a book which spends a great deal of time investigating one woman's work with the homeless.

We may not be able to have it all (hah!); but we can, according to Bateson, have more. She argues that just as more sex rarely exhausts one's sexual drive, but instead leads to even more sex, so too more work which is creative and satisfying leads not to exhaustion, but to even more productivity. That, apparently, is how her subjects have all done so much. Sex and hard work.

At some level, this has been my experience, too. I had sex; I got pregnant; and I am certainly far more productive now that I have three children than I was before: I get through mountains of housework, and also find myself pouring energy into volunteer work, writing and all sorts of other activities.

But that's not what Bateson means, of course. She's writing out of a position of far more than full time work. For her sake, I'm glad she and her friends feel so spritely after 70, 80 and 90 hour weeks on top of family commitments; but the people I know who work such hours in their beloved and chosen professions aren't like this at all. They're just plain tired. For that matter, I grew up with a mother who worked like Bateson, and she was so exhausted that life was a train wreck. Bateson does acknowledge that there is a cost to all this endeavour, but she never really details what this might be. One of Bateson's subjects left her three sons, the youngest still at high school, in one city so she could pursue a professional opportunity in another. I don't judge the decision, but I do wonder what the cost was, exactly, for that family. For myself, the cost of having a driven mother seemed to be that we screamed at each other for about a decade. Then she died. She had multiple sclerosis, which is one of those weird diseases not uncommon among highly stressed professionals. Was this the price she, and we, had to pay for her professional endeavours? I really don't know.

There are other problems with the book, not least that the author uses it to let off steam about a difficult workplace situation which is so clearly about personalities that it is largely irrelevant. However, it is enough to say that all of these problems with the book are a great pity, because what Bateson says should be thought-provoking. We do need models of meaning-making that are far more encompassing of life in its richness and variety than a career trajectory. Yet Composing a Life fails to live up to its promise. Bateson ultimately identifies each person with their professional skills rather than their personal qualities, in the end tracing only how 'a writer' or 'a dancer' continues to be so when the writing or dancing are put on the back burner by life's other demands.

It would have been a far more interesting book had Bateson widened her scope so that, on the one hand, she investigated a range of individuals across the social spectrum; and on the other, she separated meaning making from the professional calling which is the hallmark of the upper middle class.

As for my own meaning making, well, the bead episode was a reminder that most of the time I am a mother; sometimes, I write. And for now, that is enough for me.

One Magic Square

Late last year, I found myself thinking about horta; and in thinking about horta, I remembered an interview on Gardening Australia. An organic gardener was asked what happens when insects attack the leafy greens. 'Then you get holes,' replied the gardener, smiling, 'and you can eat holes.'

I was so charmed that I looked up the interview. The gardener was Lolo Houbein, author of One Magic Square. My husband bought me the book for Christmas and, now I've read it from cover to cover, I am more enchanted than ever. In her book, Lolo talks about vegetable gardening in a way that is generous and sustainable, pitched to the imperfect Australian backyard gardener ie me. Her tone is lovely throughout: thoughtful, encouraging, and full of good humour.

Lolo suggests that most veggie gardens fail because we start too big. Instead, she says, start with a single square, one metre by one metre. This is an achievable size to weed, water and maintain – and it is also as much space as many of us have in these days of tiny backyards.

To make the most of this square, Lolo recommends dense plantings of mixed crops. Early crops shade successive crops, and the gardener gains much satisfaction from the little garden. The book includes schemes for planting the square, with names such as the Aztec plot, the Salad Plot, and the Soup Plot; each scheme is followed by a few casual recipes. The schemes are not overly grand, and projects are listed in steps so that you can do a small job each day. When the job is finished, Lolo suggests, come inside, have a cup of tea and feel good about yourself. Any food you grow is a bonus. Don't try to do everything at once, she says. Don't get discouraged. Instead, relish what you can manage and celebrate it.

Her friendly approach extends to garden nuisances. Lolo lets weeds grow to shade the soil until other plants take over, pulling them out only when they are about to flower. Rather than trying to eradicate all pests, she recommends planting pest attractors a distance from the veggies. Let the snails munch on agapanthus, and they won't bother with the lettuces. If one plant is being attacked by bugs, leave it. It's a runt, and it's preferable that the pests attack it rather than move on to the second-worst plant. This is non-confrontational gardening, with a companionable approach to other forms of life.

Her practical advice reflects my experience of gardening in Australia. For example, Lolo uses broken umbrellas to shade seedlings; and I can vouch that after a recent 40 degree day, all our veggies thus shaded still looked fresh at sundown. She recommends growing some plants in basins, to keep them cool; and crowding many different plants together so that pests become confused and move on.

The photos in the book are of normal gardens, edged by water bottles and shaded by last year's parasols. Seedlings are grown in toilet rolls, which stand in old margarine containers. It may not be glamorous, but the gardens are bursting with life. This is real gardening, for real people: the sort of thing I can manage.

Lolo points out that gardening is not onerous and should not be regarded as such. Instead, take a few minutes each morning or evening in the garden, watering and doing one small job. This activity becomes a regular meditation, a time to oneself to reflect on the day. It can also be one's exercise, in the gentle bending and stretching and lifting that gardening entails.

I've felt so encouraged that, since Christmas, I've built a new compost heap; sown a bike basket sized square of horta and another of salad; started work on a new garden bed; and moved seedling eggplant and peppers much closer together. They have taken off, perhaps because together they form a moist microclimate – but I prefer Lolo's explanation, that plants are companionable and like to be near one another.

Already I can see some changes in the garden, and, perhaps more important, some small changes in me. I am the sort of person who expects too much from herself; and I am perpetually disappointed in what I cannot do. But Lolo reminds us to treat ourselves with gentleness: to accept what we can manage, and to recognise it as enough. I find myself walking the garden feeling less frustrated at myself, and more grateful for what is growing well. With her words whispering in my ear, I'm celebrating what I have: a healthy tree of white peaches, a regular supply of zucchini and basil.

Gardens are lively creative places, ripe for experimentation and bursting with life. Our approach should be commensurate with this: playful, intelligent, kind. With a gentle soul like Lolo at our side, such an approach becomes easy.

Dibs in Search of Self

A year or two back, one of my daughters was obsessed with playing 'grandma'. Both of her grandmothers had died before she was born, and she was acutely aware of the deficit in her life. So day after day, for months on end, she'd announce me that I was grandma and ask me to tie a scarf on my head; then she'd provide the script: 'Now you say, 'hello darling, would you like some cake?'', and I'd dutifully parrot the words, holding a plate, while she worked out her next move. That play was incredibly important as she processed a grief she couldn't otherwise articulate, and I thought of it recently as I re-acquainted myself with Dibs.

I first read the story of Dibs while I was in high school, and he touched my heart. While he never quite left me, it's only this year that I found my own copy of the book. It was wonderful to re-read it now I'm an adult with her own young children.

Dibs was an almost wholly uncommunicative little boy. He did not play with other children in his pre-school; he would not communicate with his teachers or his parents except by way of tantrums. He refused to do anything for himself; he sat passively under tables or on the outskirts of the group, ignoring everything that went on; he did not speak. Some, including his parents, feared he was intellectually impaired; others suspected he was intellectual capable, but stuck in an emotional quagmire.

So Dibs was sent to play therapy. The book is the non-fiction account of his time there, drawn directly from transcripts and the observations of his play therapist, Virginia Axline. Dibs visited the play room weekly, and at each visit teased out a little more of emotions which suffocated him. As he became relaxed in the room, his imaginary world unfolded: he buried a father doll, locked up the mother and sister doll, and developed a great imaginary city in which he acted out his experiences, worked out how he felt about them, and developed his sense of self.

While Dibs worked, the therapist sat with him quietly reflecting back to Dibs his comments in a non-committal way. This makes the book a little stilted at times: 'I did it!' said Dibs. 'You did it,' remarked the therapist. It looks rather idiotic when transcribed; and yet it is clearly liberating and affirming for the young boy to have his comments and actions noticed but not judged.

The book suffers a little from over-explanation. When Dibs buries the father doll, it is pretty clear what is going on; we really don't need the symbolism explained. But this stylistic quibble aside, it's a tremendously moving experience to travel with Dibs as he slowly names his grief and rage; decides who he is and what he can do; and finds ways to transcend and even transform the family structures that have led to his emotional asphyxiation.

As a teenager, I found Dibs captivating. In the safety of the playroom, he revealed himself to be a very capable, articulate and resourceful boy; I only wished I could understand myself so well! Now I'm a parent, I'm still captivated; but I also found the book enlightening as I think about how I parent. While I'm not my children's therapist, the book makes it clear that there are modes of interaction that are more or less helpful in a child's self-development.

For one thing, it was good to realise that the simple reflection of a child's comment is often enough. I have noticed that many of my daughters' statements seek no further questioning or clarification from me; a comment such as 'I did it!' only needs me to reflect back, 'you did it yourself, huh?' for my child to nod with a satisfied smile, and move on to something else. Nothing more is required; in fact, further commentary is often brushed off as intrusive or unnecessary. But sometimes I feel a little silly merely reflecting back what my child says; it is helpful to see how empowering it was for Dibs, and to realise that my instinct to reflect here is good.

For another, the story affirms the time young children spend in free play – a rarity in this over-structured era. What may look like mucking about or daydreaming to us is actually their work. Watching Dibs use play to understand and forgive his family and work out his role within it helps me notice how much my own children inhabit a rich imaginative world in which they go about much serious work every day. It also makes clear just how imperative this play is for a child to develop a means to understand the world around them and develop a strong sense of self within that world. Kids need simple toys (sand, boxes, blocks, dolls, cars, trees, tea sets: things that reflect, or can be made to reflect, the world they inhabit), as well as opportunities to use paint, play with water and make a mess, in order to do their work. The simpler these toys are, the more their imaginations can use them. As parents, we have a responsibility to enable that work by providing the tools and, just as important, the time and space for it to happen.

Given the opportunity simply to be: that is, given the chance to work out what they want to do and how they want to go about it, then, like Dibs, our children will develop a profound sense of self, and find surprising solutions to the difficulties they are presented with.

Such a child is an absolute delight to be around. Even more, such a child becomes a powerful agent in the world: as we see in Dibs, and as I have observed in my own household, they can challenge adult behaviours and revolutionise family, even community, dynamics. And while living with an empowered child may be somewhat uncomfortable at times, overall I have found that providing the space for a child to become deeply grounded, and sharing my life with such a child, is one of the great privileges of parenthood.