Now I am in the Autumn of my life, or as the late Dr Wayne Dyer would say ‘the afternoon of my life’, I am increasingly hearing of the passing of someone I know. Loss is a fact of life. We all lose loved ones. By the time we get to middle-age many of us are ‘orphans.’ I think about all the people throughout the world, who daily lose loved ones, sometime losing entire families. How do they cope? I don’t…..
A year ago I was travelling in Europe with an old friend. To get there I had to let go of my fear of flying and my fear of locking toilet doors. You may think that is a strange phobia to have, to be afraid to lock the toilet door. I wonder if it has a name? When I was about four years old, we visited our grandmother. She lived in an apartment block. This was in the fifties and…..
There is an old song called Smile Though Your Heart is Breaking. People who suffer from depression often hide their feelings with a smile and that was what I did. I just smiled at everyone and they thought I was okay. I wasn’t. My heart was broken, because I had to give up a baby for adoption in 1966. In those days if you entered a maternity hospital as an unmarried woman, you were considered unfit to be a mother. The…..
Another memoir, this book was originally just going to be a record of psychic happenings in my life, written for my grandchildren. By the time I was half way through I realised it was going to be another book. I was ridiculed as a young child so then learned not to tell people about things that happened to me. It was my secret and it is only in the last eighteen months that I have started coming out of the psychic closet. The…..
My brother Neville and I went to Ostend Primary School on Waiheke Island. The headmistress, Miss Ponsonby was a middle-aged spinster with permed hair and a sour face. I never saw her smile. She strutted around abusing and accusing. She used sarcasm and a heavy leather strap to keep the children in line. My brother was always being accused of doing things he had not done and would get ‘six of the best’ although he protested his innocence. One day,…..
For all of my childhood I lived at Onetangi Beach, on Waiheke Island, New Zealand. When my brother was fourteen he went out with a local fisher for the day. My brother dived and caught four good sized crayfish. When he arrived back at the beach, the local man said to him, “See you later.” “Wait, don’t I get my crayfish?” asked Neville. “No, I am going to sell them.” Neville went home and told Dad he had caught four crayfish……
When I moved to my new home near Pomona, after a few weeks, I had a few Kookaburras visiting me and then the number grew to seven. However I started to notice that one Kookaburra seemed to be an outcast. It never ate when the others ate, but sat in a nearby tree. After they had all flown away it would come and sit on the veranda railing and in a few days it let me feed it little bits…..
Everyone is talking about Australian Pro-surfer Mick Fanning and his shark encounter. Now today a recreational scallop diver has been killed by what is understood to be a great white shark, off Tasmania’s east coast. Horrific for his daughter who was with him. Years ago, when my youngest son Lee was a teenager, we were staying at Coolum Beach on the Sunshine Coast. It was early morning and my husband and I sat in our car watching our son surf. Suddenly my husband…..
When my husband died in June, 2012, I rang the daughter I had to relinquish in 1966, to tell her that her birth father had passed. Straight away she started saying, “Why did you adopt me out? Why did you have two more children and keep them?” I had told her my story many times in the twenty years we had been reunited, but I had not told her every detail. It was embarrassing to say ‘Your father was a…..
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