Honeycomb Diaries— Siblings and fiction.

Writing happens in one of four-ish ways for me.

1. I have a message or a ‘piece’ that is in me roaring and ready to go. I sit down to type and it comes out as effortlessly as a slinky making its way downstairs. One go. Minimal editing needed.

2. I have a message or a ‘piece’ that is roaring and *sort of* ready to go. I sit down to work on it, but it takes four or five goes to massage it correctly. It happens this way often with big or sensitive topics that need a particular tone.

3. I have a message that I really want to share but after thumping it out with emotional fingers I realise it’s actually meant for private processing, and rather than being acceptably spicy like cayenne pepper, it’s actually abrasive like pepper spray. Scrap!

4. I just show up to write and see what’s going to come out. I start with ‘what’s going on right now’ and a piece forms itself, often to my surprise.

When I title a piece ‘diaries’, it’s number 4. It’s me sitting down, in whatever moments I can grab in a full week of home life, and just writing. See what comes out.

This is how I always used to do it when my Substack was titled ‘Pk Diaries’. My entries were always just whatever was going on during the week. They’d start with conversational style chats about the current goings on of my life and then end up with a nice rounded message. I like writing like this, especially when there isn’t a big iconic piece inside. Let’s face it, this is most of the time.

So, I’m setting a timer for an hour and we’ll see what comes out. Snuggle in.

I’m in a season right now where I have so many unfinished entries, as well as unfinished books. There’s a restlessness there but mostly a peace at the stage of life I’m in (little kids!) and how quickly I know it will go.

Figgy turned four months the other day! What? The kids made her a card each and threw her a little party.

Siblings, my heart.

To Figgy, happy four month bday! Love Sol.

To Figgy, happy four month bday! Love Pax.

Figgy, a now four month old, is in one of my favourite phases— chunky koala phase. I love the chunky baby phase so much. She’s not a little newborn anymore but she’s not yet crawling— she’s a chunky koala bear who smiles all the time, focusses intently on holding objects in her hands (Spoons! Kookaburra rattle! Dolphin toy!), rolls around the lounge room like Pat Mullins from ‘We Can Be Heroes’ and is so, so snuggly. She’s cracked a few laughs but isn’t laughing consistently at any one thing yet— so it’s like gold when she does. And…. she’s now able to be carried on my hip! A hip baby! I love when my babies reach this chunky koala hip baby stage. I especially love when this stage coincides with winter— there’s nothing like a chubby bubba snuggled up in winter clothes.

I can leave my older kids with her while I faff around the house and they’re so good at playing with her— especially Sol, who’s at full babysitter level already. I told her the other day jokingly ‘I might leave you with Figgy and pop to the cafe.’ She said ‘you could!’. I said ‘I wouldn’t do that, I’d just go and have a bath.’

Yesterday driving home from an outing, Sol put Figgy to sleep in her car seat— a miracle, considering how much all of my kids have typically disliked the car and require Broadway style entertainment to keep from cracking it. Sol is a natural. She changes nappies without being asked to, kinda natural.

I remember one night in Italy where she was just four years old and she put Pax to sleep. We were in Positano, which is just a drive from our home there in rural Italy. Erik and I went out for a meal and Sol and Pax stayed with our then helper, Costanza. Very, very rarely has anyone put our kids to bed aside from us and my mum, their Nanna— if we go out for dinner, it’s usually a 5pm thing, but 5pm dinners don’t exist in Europe. On this evening, we were having a nice brief summer dinner close by and I got a text from Costanza— ‘Pax is upset’. She was a very competent babysitter but also knew that I’d want her to text if he was having a tough time. We paid the bill, got up and power walked back to our accommodation— me at the front charging of course, leaning on my old race walking abilities to get there in record time.

We got to the door and Costanza opened it with tears in her eyes. “Sol just settled Pax to sleep”, she said. “She rubbed his back, ’shushed’ him, and sang him that song that you sing him.”

Siblings.

My husband says he never knew what he missed out on as an only child until he saw our kids together. I was one of four and we lived in very close quarters (my three sisters and I all shared a little room before I moved into the garage). Siblings teach so much in the way of character building, conflict resolution, consideration, chocolate milk stealing, diplomacy and of course, street fighting.

The other day, Sol lost another tooth. It had been wobbly for many months and frustrating her, especially when she bit into an apple. Finally, over the weekend, she ran into me with it proudly in her hand “Mum!!! Look!!” She was so stoked that she carried it with her everywhere in a tissue, including onto the trampoline. Moments after bouncing with Pax, I hear a scream. At first I thought one of them had fly kicked the other on the tramp, but it wasn’t that. “MY TOOTH FELL DOWN THERE!!!”. It had fallen down the wooden slats on the porch. Needless to say, we wouldn’t be getting it out.

She was beside herself, despite my best reassurance that it would always be safe under our house, and that she’d still be getting a little surprise under her pillow. We only partially entertain the tooth fairy (‘She’s a character’) but I needed something so I said ‘The tooth fairy will still come, let’s leave her a note. She can fly down in between these slats.’

“THE TOOTH FAIRY ISN’T EVEN REAL MUM”, she came back with. Not wanting to tell a bold faced lie, I said ‘Well, then your faith is in me and I always do what I say I’ll do. Trust me, I think you’ll get a little extra this time because it felt down the slats.’

Pax ran inside, desperate to help Sol feel better. He got his textas out and did what any four year old does best in a time of crisis— draw. He drew a picture of him and Sol, with him holding the tooth and giving it to her. He ran to her like he was running a piece of paper with the exact location to 150 ounces of gold written on it…. It was like he knew his little act of love would be balm for his big sister.

It was. She smiled.

Siblings.

Pax’s drawing for Sol. See the tooth?

I just finished reading my first fiction novel since having Figgy and the unique love of siblings was a big theme. You might have read it— Boy Swallows Universe, by Trent Dalton. If you haven’t, I recommend it. It’s Australian, and details life in the outer suburbs of Brisbane for a family caught in the underworld drug scene. It’s brilliant and has won so many awards. ‘An Aussie classic’, it’s been called. I read the big beefy novel in just four nights once the kids were asleep. I laughed at so many points throughout it because although I didn’t grow up in an underground drug scene, I did grow up in a rough area of the Perth suburbs and some of his stories and hilarious details (like Fruity Lexia and Sale Of The Century), were so nostalgic. I recognised myself in his character— a bright kid who noticed absolutely everything, growing up in a poor rough suburb, adoring my mum, becoming very street smart, a lot going on upstairs, ferociously loyal. It reminded me of the beauty of fiction— it doesn’t give you the message or lesson in a big bold heading like like self help books do, rather it lets the story go to work on your heart in a very personal way.

I’ve written two non-fiction books (I no longer publish them because I wrote them before God gave me a full on makeover of the heart/world view so I cringe a little or a lot at them now), and I’ve read I’d say 80% non-fiction in relation to fiction. But I’ve always been moved by a good novel. I especially love old English literature. But I wanna get stuck into some good ol’ Aussie underbelly stuff now (or other). You know of any good ones?

Reading this one this last week encouraged me to think about writing fiction. It encouraged me to think about writing my own story, but as a novel— characters renamed, details changed slightly, but giving a voice to the perspectives that are my own, and perhaps not best told through a pre-packaged ‘message’. It’d be like writing a memoir, but with some more rogue freedom and also the ability to protect certain people by changing names and details.

I’m filing this one under ‘dreamy creations to be made, but not rushed’ (HA HA says the part of me that is bored if something isn’t complete 4 minutes after the idea hits me). Also on this list is a book of ‘Mum and Sol’s favourite cafe’s and bookstores around the world’, Mum and Sol’s actual cafe and bookstore, and my frothy hot tonic line.

My hour is up. Gotta pick my big girl up from her home school hybrid. She’s become somewhat of a chess master and no doubt she’ll want to play as soon as she gets home. It’s amazing how patient she is with her dad and me who aren’t as nifty as she is with the chessboard. I’m getting my eyebrows done while dinner’s in the oven so, dad and I will have to tag out as chess losers this afternoon. 

Lotsa love,

PK XX