Never a Cross Word

Sunday Blog 218 – 18th January 2026

Like many teachers, my parents married in January. On an excruciatingly hot January day they embarked on more than six decades of wedded bliss adventure.

The in-joke each anniversary was like a nervous tick “X number of years and Never a Cross Word.” For their fiftieth wedding anniversary in 2009, I immortalised this verbal tic into icing on a cake for them. (Top image, cake on right, Mum and Dad on the left.)

This celebration was less than a week before my wedding. Somehow I’d convinced Mum it was a great idea for my wedding to be held at their house. Dad needed no convincing and had spent months preparing the house for the wedding with his big energy. Their fiftieth wedding anniversary almost slid under the radar of the fuss of my wedding, during a week where Mum was always on the verge of a “why, oh why, oh why did I agree to host a wedding at my house?” meltdown.

The gap between the trope of fairytale wedding endings and reality is wide. Children have a ringside seat to the grinding reality of their parent’s marriage. Perhaps this is why we so enjoyed the tired “Never A Cross Word” joke. The chasm between the hope and experience could possibly be encapsulated by one of Mum’s quips a couple of years into her four-year widowhood. “I’m missing Dad so much I almost long for one of his homophobic rants.”

Dad died in 2020, Mum in 2024. January 2026 marked 67 years since they married as a mature couple (for that time, being 29 and 30 when they married was OLD.) They had chosen each other with the vulnerable hope of older adults and they made it work.

Feeling maudlin I slipped down to their graves with a bunch of flowers for their anniversary. Someone else had been to visit them, had left a small posy.(See small photo below Mum and Dad’s 50th anniversary pic).

This year was my 17th anniversary of getting married under Mum and Dad’s mulberry tree (bottom left, and there’s a wistful shot of me in 2024 looking up at the mulberry tree just before the sale of their house settled).

There have been cross words in those seventeen years. It took me at least fourteen years to work out that conflict in itself is not the problem. In fact, as the Gottman Institute for relationships and families states, 69% of conflict can never be resolved. It can only be managed. It’s how you repair afterwards, whether you feel closer or further away at the end of a conflict cycle that counts.

And that is perhaps the punch line. There will be cross words. And that’s OK.

To Dawnie, With Love

Sunday Blog 217 – 11th January 2025

Can it be two years since you left us Dawn? When I checked the date of my last post about you it was indeed written two years ago. I’d attended your funeral that very week, and was trying to sum up how I felt about you as a human.

Life has a way of flowing on, and flowing on, and here we are. Two years after your death, a retrospective exhibition of your work spearheaded by your son is on all until 26th January for those of us lucky enough to live in Perth.

Image of girl in white clothing flying with two birds. Dawn Meader art exhibition at Moore and Moores Fremantle Perth from 10 to 26 Jan 2026

There was an Opening Night crush. Of course there was. We lined up waiting for the door to open, the queue slowly growing outside Moore and Moores. Then we filed in to see your artwork.

Just past the reception desk there was a big white board where we were invited to write about what gave us joy.

I accepted the invitation and scrawled that writing, being creative, and loving people gave me joy. I cried a little. Walked about the exhibitions. Looked close at your pencil marks and brush strokes and images and words.

To see all your artwork in one room was overwhelming. And not just your works large and small, sketchbooks and drawings. Your old post box you painted, and the plants you nurtured in your East Fremantle garden. I felt you every where.

So many of the images are friends from calendars or prints or art classes or visits to your home. There were real-life friends from your courses, workshops and retreats, and we hugged and some of us cried. (Well, especially me.)

Today I went back in the quiet after Opening Night and before long I was crying again. At once so much artwork and not enough. Because you gave so much of your time to teaching people like me, and that cut into your time to create artworks.

Around 2012 I first went to one of your classes seeking permission to be creative. Actually, I thought I was signing up for an art class. Turns out, you were there to help me wriggle through the fence of self-doubt and learn to gallop through the endless paddock of creativity.

Dawnie, you always brought so much joy and fun to your classes. And your artworks are sublime. Thank you again. You were a one-off.

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This is a pastiche of some of the artworks I created with Dawn in her art classes. Top left was the first one I ever did. Bottom left is my favourite. Top right was one of the vision boards I did with her, and bottom right was gold woman.

Memory Jar

Sunday Blog 216 – 4th January 2026

Last week I tantalised with a picture of the contents from my 2025 memory jar; this week I thought I would write them out like pearls. Here goes.

  • Flowers from darling husband for our 16th wedding anniversary
  • Dinner with my daughter at Ode to Sirens – a new(ish) Greek restaurant in Fremantle
  • Having a gorgeous time at Jackson’s 30th – good to see familiar faces (that was one I didn’t write)
  • My writing breakthrough at Carmel, California
  • Movie night with my daughter starting with wine and cheese. We saw A Complete Unknown.
  • Susie’s birthday afternoon tea with the friends and cousins and sisters
  • Dinner under our new gazebo with the fam (another one I didn’t write)
  • Singing happy birthday to my nephew for his birthday party I hosted
  • Red Tent Easter Sunday brunch with the Sisters – food, talk and ceremony. (darling husband was away for all the witchery)
  • Sleepover with my daughter that night and re-doing the Easter Ritual together, writing our rebirth intentions and burning them in the caldron (yes, there really was a caldron)
  • Yoga, poached egg and witchy Easter business with Mum (another one I didn’t write)
  • Wagging the Digital Health Festival afternoon sessions to see the Van Gogh Lume and Virtual Reality show. Bliss.
  • Kalgoorlie trip with darling husband in July
  • Meeting Helen Garner in July

This is such an incomplete list of 2025 highlights. It cuts out before the August and September trip to Ireland, Italy, France and Greece, for example.

But still. It got me to thinking. Where does the Memory Jar concept come from, other than from Instagram? After a bit of AI slop I found this article which highlights how writing out and re-reading memories can make us happy.

I reckon I’m going to have another go at a Memory Jar in 2026. Aim for at least 52 memories, one a week.

Days between the years

Sunday Blog 215 – 28th December 2025

I would be a liar if I said I didn’t like this time of year. The days between the years – between Christmas and New Year – are all about the goals. Reviewing the goals. Setting the goals. Talking about goals. And I’m all about the goals. Weekly goals. Monthly goals. And I love me a New Year’s Resolution.

Days between the years - image of a jar where a woman is writing memories on bits of paper and putting them in the jar

I’ve tried all sorts of ways to deaden the blade of my ego-driven goal setting. Setting process goals (developing a writing practice) rather than outcome goals (finishing the damn book). Desire-based goals where I focus on how I want to feel and make sure I do more things that make me feel those feelings. Like a sexy process goal I suppose. But however I try and game my own tendencies, I’m wired to make goals. And vision boards. And crack open the new planner to dream up a whole new year’s worth of goals.

But first, there’s the navel gaze of 2025. Generally, I’m very happy with how I’ve shown up. The most important thing, finishing the damn manuscript has been achieved. Having two women to review goals each month has been just as transformative as my 2025 planner said it would be;

People with written goals are 42% more likely to achieve them than people without written goals. Telling a friend increases this rate to 78%.

MiGoals 2025 Diary, in the Goal Setting 101 section.

But even with all that stationery and motivation and monthly goal check-ins, that still leaves a 22% chance that goals won’t be achieved.

So there is one little ache as I finish up my 2025 navel gazing. I tried to set up a weekly jar of good moments. But something about this felt tender and vulnerable and perhaps a bit stoopid. Mostly my beloveds were not inclined to commit happy moments to the little square bits of paper I left next to the memory jar. I tried encouragement and maybe a little coercing in the first few months of the year but I gave up. So only a handful of weekly memories have been committed to paper, folded and put into the jug I left on the hearth. Looking through the few of them still gives me a warm, glowy feeling. Should I try it again in 2026?

2025 Good Moments

What would my life have been like if I’d been sporty?

And similar days-between-the-years questions

Sunday Blog 214 – 21st December 2025

“I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d been sporty,” I found myself asking my very sporty husband recently.

Ours is a union of very different people. For me to have ended up with a sporty non-drinker is as unlikely as Trump deciding that perhaps he is not the expert in, well, anything. Yet here we are.

I’m not sure what prompted my sporty what-if question. Some possible influences;

  1. I’m listening to Brene Brown’s latest book, Strong Ground. It has a lot of sports and coaching metaphors. I mean, a lot. If it’s important to Brene, it’s important to me.
  2. My social media feed is full of images of the stretching exercises I need to do in order to finally achieve the suppleness I dream of. It’s all in the ankles, apparently.
  3. Meanwhile, thirty years into a regular yoga practice without achieving the perfect forward bend, nose pressed to knees, I’m thinking maybe my run is just too late.

Hence my question.

A couple of years ago, my social media feed was full of knee stretches. I began to incorporate daily knee manoeuvres into my daily routine. As I was holidaying with others, we all began to embrace our heavily accented tutor as he took us through the sequences of exercises. But that didn’t last. I found an abandoned video on my desktop entitled “Chanje Legs” because that’s exactly how he pronounced it.

Whether the secret is knee stretches, or ankle stretches, is there just a cut-off point in your youth when if you are not sporty you lose the flexibility option forever?

Dodging sport in 1970s Perth was actually quite strenuous. Choosing not to play netball made me just as big a schoolyard freak as my lack of access to commercial TV shows. There was so much in the playground I couldn’t follow. Because our family culture was all about education and marks. While other families (like my husbands) went to the beach and surfed for hours, our most energetic workouts were mental. The marathon of mental dexterity we would subject ourselves to in order to come up with the best next line in the latest “sung to the tune of” song. You could hear our brains whirring with the effort to think of a rhyming lyric with the right amount of mockery. Or we might vie to be the first to have read the full works of Jane Austen, including Love and Freindship (sic) and Sandition.

Another action shot of me reading in bed in the 1990s, to match the picture of me reading Jane Austen at Versailles

“How do you think your life would have been different?” darling husband asked.

“Maybe I would be more flexible. And I would have been more confident.”

So many awkward 1980s and 1990s moments came from my almost total physical ineptitude and green inexperience. Trying to board a yacht and losing my footing, dropping a shoe in the Swan River. Feeling panic if someone asked me if I wanted a game of tennis. A decade living in Europe avoiding any kind of holiday invitation that might include skiing.

“I would have been more embodied, less in my head,” I continued.

But he’s moved on to other things, and I’m left to finish the thought for myself. So I decide to be grateful that I found yoga 30 years ago and be happy with my rickety knees and that even though I can’t always touch my toes, I can be more embodied in my third act in life. I can still do yoga every day.

Almost the end of the year

Sunday Blog 213 – 14th December 2025

As promised, I’m back on the planning horse for 2026. The year hasn’t even finished, there are still goals I’m hoping to achieve before New Year’s Eve rolls around, and already, the 2025 year’s post-mortem is racing down the track, leaving my quieter, introspective self choking in its dust.

It’s been a huge year. Carmel, California. Bali. Italy. France. Greece. And that was just the writing retreats. There was also and incredible, unforgettable Ireland family holiday.

There was also Mum’s first deathiversary (I was in Derry, Ireland that day) which was nowhere near as hard as Mum’s first birthday since she’s been gone. The death date is one I have to think about to recall it, whereas the birthday was a well-worn date in our family calendar and rituals. (Bleeping over her 1979 birthday when we were travelling in Europe, we were all sick and forgot. For the whole day.)

A picture of Malvern Hills in the UK in 1979, when we were busy forgetting Mum's 53rd birthday.
Malvern Hills, 1979, view from the window where we were busy forgetting Mum’s 53rd birthday

But back to goals. Aside from over-performing in my travel goals, my first inspection it looked like the only goals that I hadn’t achieved were those not in my control. Note to self: only include goals that I can carry out.

But on closer inspection, the healthy weight goal is within my control but hasn’t quite eventuated.

Well, there’s always next year. And a new planner. And new stickers. And. And And.

Walk in Jarvis Park

Sunday Blog 212 – 7 December 2025

I’m sticking close to home this weekend. After last week’s big effort running a neighbourhood event, I’m trying on “being in the moment” for size.

On an evening walk this week, I allowed myself to notice what I saw, heard and felt at a local park, called Jarvis Park.

  • The crunch of the caps from the wattle tree on path, like popping bubble wrap. 
  • The sticks on the path that threaten to trip. 
  • The path bubbling up from the tree root beneath. 
  • The sky bathed in red with a beautiful sunset we can’t fully see. 
  • The head of a crow under a tree, the rest ingested presumably by a cat. 
  • Another crow flies about looking nonchalant as if their brethren isn’t lying under the tree, just a head. 

Fear not, my 2026 planner has arrived in the post today and the normal programming of non-stop goals, visions, mission statements and milestones will resume next week.

Big Events, Small Moments

Sunday Blog 211 – 30 November 2025

Since last week, when I outed myself for signing Tomorrow Me up for all the things Today Me wouldn’t want to do, progress has been, well, complicated.

For one thing, one of my major volunteer events took place yesterday. Cooby Fest. It’s a local community event where we put on free entertainment, invite market and food stalls along and hope that everything goes OK. Let’s just say there were a lot of jobs on this week, and a huge day yesterday.

What I noticed was the little things – the chance to bathe myself in eucalyptus smoke during the Welcome to Country, moments where the music took me over, or the conversation with a neighbour landed with the satisfaction of slotting in the last jigsaw piece.

What I tried to learn about neighbourhood building this year was that it’s the getting together that counts. What I spent most of my time working on was the technical issues of funding and meetings and project plans, my ladder up the wrong wall.

So next year, I’m looking forward to more small moments with community. But now, it’s time for a lil’ rest.

Tomorrow Me

Sunday Blog 210 – 23 November 2025

Tomorrow Me Never Comes on a post it note against a wood grain background

Let me introduce you to Tomorrow Me. Like Today Me, only better. Tomorrow Me is definitely going to enjoy doing all the things Today Me signed it up to do. Also, Tomorrow Me will smash these tasks in a twentieth of the time Today Me would take to do them. In addition. Tomorrow Me is not going to curse, not even once while fulfilling those commitments, Tomorrow Me is definitely not going to shout the “c” word and shake a fist in the face of the quavering computer while finishing all that work.

Tomorrow Me is as real as Trump’s honesty, generosity and selflessness.

A snippet of a recent Martha Beck podcast episode entitled ‘Give “Tomorrow You” A Break’ delivered me this essential direction.

if you wouldn’t want to do something today, don’t condemn [“Tomorrow”] You to that thing.

I’m trying this on as the thousandth attempt to say no more often, insert a powerful pause between a request to do something and my response.

The difficulty for me is that I’m time blind and I see a task already done as soon as a request falls from someone’s lips or enters my mind as the next brilliant idea. I bleep over the track of endless hurdles I will have to lumber over to get to the end. The joy of having the thing done sweeps me up into its false embrace and waltzes me all the way to overwhelm.

But Martha Beck assures me Tomorrow Me will never come. And I believe her.

Will this help me turn my yeses to nos? Today and Tomorrow Me are trying it on for size.

Notes from our past selves

Sunday Blog 209 – 16th November 2025

Last week I noted that my mother was a diarist. She also obsessively catalogued her photos. Even, or perhaps especially the unflattering ones. Aesthetics were not her jam; it was all about capturing the moment. I have ended up with the floor to just-about-ceiling bookshelf stuffed with her photo albums.

Often, she wrote on the back of her photos. Important details of who was in it, where it was taken, the auspiciousness of the occasion. But in the thinner, early album of her youth, before the crush of we six children arriving in her life, there are a couple of events she has written up in and put in to their own pocket. As if there should be a photo but there isn’t. Like this one on today’s blog.

Like so many young people of her generation, Mum had to leave school early, even though she loved learning and was very bright. At fourteen, she entered the workforce doing administrative work at the State Government Insurance Office-SGIO.

But the Second World War brought other opportunities, and she had the chance to finish her education, and then to train as a teacher. But she hesitated a moment, feeling the pull of duty. What would happen at SGIO to the people she left behind? Would she would be letting the management down? She must have shared her conundrum with a work friend.

‘Don’t you be minding them, because they won’t be minding you,’ this senior colleague advised her.

I picture him (because, no photo) as a kindly, avuncular man who saw a smart young woman wasting her talents in her job. He wanted her to know that SGIO was not worth turning down this life-changing offer of qualifying as a teacher. It was advice she may not have found anywhere else among her people, and she took it. She remembered it enough to write it down, to share the story with us.

She went on to qualify as a teacher and eventually met and married my father when they were working at the same school.

Betty and Gerard Brennan on a date in the 1950s
Mum and Dad on a date in the 1950s

I love this little written note, a reminder that the advice we give out can turn the course of people’s lives.