Blog I Karen Brooks

Well, what a year 2010 has turned out to be.

Firstly, I feel I have to apologise for being so tardy about my website. What started with a wonderful launch mid year and a terrific response from everyone, and great intentions from me, soon dwindled until I think my last blog was a few months ago. Oops! I will explain why below – yes, there is a valid reason. My genuine commitment for 2011 is to blog more often. Does that make it a New year’s Resolution? Well, I guess it does.

In the meantime, I have been keeping up to date on my FaceBook Fan Page. If you would like to join, please feel free to come and be part of what has been a terrific way of keeping everyone up to date and sharing thoughts and views on all things popular culture as well as my columns and novels. You can join by clicking here.

For those of you who are interested, below are the highs and lows of 2010:

1. I finished Votive in May and sent it to the publisher in time. The structural and copy edit has now been done. It’s 177,000 words. There’s a completely new cover concept being done and it’s gorgeous and exciting and I can’t wait to show it to you.

2. Tallow not only went into reprint, but received an Highly Commended in the Prime Ministers Literary Awards. I was thrilled – as you can imagine!

not only went into reprint, but received an Highly Commended in the Prime Ministers Literary Awards.

3. I have endured a terrible and ongoing health replaspe which has made me very sick – I face further surgery next year. Hence no blogging! (sorry!).

4. My father died in July. He’d been having bad health for a long time – diabetes and the had a series of small strokes. In the end, it was too much for him. He was a grumpy old thing, but we all miss him in our own way. I will blog about his life one day – it’s fascinating.

Me and my father in 1963

5. My dog, Dante died in September. He had a tick. He survived for five, long days and Stephen nursed him lovingly the whole way through (I was in Sydney for tests). He was the sweetest, funniest pup and we still miss him. Vale Dante – he wasn’t even three.:(

6. Stephen, my husband, returned to psychiatric nursing after a 2 1/2 year break – and he doesn’t mind it half as badly as he thought he would!

7. We bought another dog, a puppy, we also called Dante – Dante Piccolo – from the same breeder, Tyrrken Kennels in Kingaroy. He brought smiles back into our life and is such a character. He talks, just like the other Dante and is still surprised to hear his own voice.

Dante Piccolo

8. Heartbreakingly, my dearest friend, Sara’s, cancer returned… I don’t know what to say about that. Life is so unfair at times.

9. Spent a lovely two days in Tasmania seeing Sara and eating, laughing, crying – but mostly laughing, and hugging and making her head ring.

Sara and Stephen

10. My dear friend, Greggie, the most lovely, moral man with a gorgeous wife, Alison, who have been our friends for years, was diagnosed with Prostate cancer. Greg and I are now officially, ‘bum buddies’ and decided we’re too young for this shit.

It has been a year of such highs and lows, of love, laughter and too many tears and fears. It has been a time where I have really had to learn to slow down, but I have also enjoyed my writing and my family and friends more than I ever have in my life before. Thank you to each and everyone of you.  I have also enjoyed reading – I have rediscovered and found some wonderful authors – many of them Australian – including some of the following: Sara Douglass, Nathan Burrage, Kimberley Freeman, Kate Morton, Stephen King (The Stand – Oh my, what a book – thank you Sara!), Charleine Harris, Juliet Marillier, Katherine Howell, Michael MacConnell, Anthony Eaton, Simon Higgins, James Roy, Richard Harland, Robin Hobb, Tomasi Lampedusa, Katherine Ashenburg, Lisa Scottiline, and many, many more. I must blog on some of these one day too – but I do review books on Good Reads – but only those I really like –  if anyone is interested. I should add, I also began a love affair with my iPad this year… I use it as an eReader and for a whole range of other purposes and have become hopelessly addicted to Scrabble…

Thank you for sticking with me through all of this. I promise to be a better blogger and communicator next year – well, at least I will try.

Now I am going to upload a Christmas column I wrote a few years ago – a poem. It had a good response then, I hope it does now.

Merry Christmas to all fofyou and my warmest and loving wishes for a healthy, happy and all round magical 2011.

Karen

xxxx

Hi everyone!

After some deliberation and a great deal of procrastination, I decided to also launch a FaceBook ‘fan’ page (thank you for all your help, Sara!) as a complement to the website. That way, I can chat with you all with greater ease and you can talk to each other as well. I have already uploaded some what I hope are interesting snippets of information regarding my books and my newspaper columns as well as pictures. I have also started a discussion topic about Votive and I really hope that you’ll join in – both here and on Facebook.

Now, the link to the FaceBook page is:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Karen-Brooks-Official-Fan-Page/123788197661107?ref=sgm

Just press ‘like’ if you wish to join. I would love you to!

See you in the cyberverse!

Karen

xxx

Ever since having Cancer, I have become acutely aware of not only how many others are struck with this awful disease, and the differences and similarities between sufferers, survivors and their struggles as well as the reactions of loved ones and the community, but my own mortality as well. There are very few people I share my thoughts and fears with, but one very special person is Sara – many of you may know her as the writer, Sara Douglass. Sara also has Cancer. We discuss many things and share much laughter and tears (and about a huge range of things – believe me!) but one thing we have talked about is what Sara calls the ‘silence of the dying’ – it’s not that those dying or with real reasons to be afraid of death (through chronic illness or some other cause) can’t articulate their fears, it’s that there is no legitimate space for them to do so in contemporary society. They are ‘silenced’.

Well, Sara wrote the most amazing blog about this, examining the reasons and causes for this huge vacuum, and I have asked her permission to share it with you. It’s also going to be published, I believe, in a Perth newspaper.

I urge you to discuss what she writes among your family and friends. It’s beautiful, personal, heartfelt but also a wonderful social and historical observation that captures the zeitgeist – contemporary attitudes to death and dying and illness – perfectly. Thank you, Sara, for writing this.

http://nonsuchkitchengardens.com/wordpress/?p=606

Farewelling my Aunt - that's my mother, holding me in her arms

I don’t know when or how I realised, but I noticed that I didn’t include any photos of my mother, my biological mother, in my photo gallery. When I discovered this, I felt a bit like someone who sends out the wedding invites only to realise too late that they’ve left a really important person from the guest list. Only, this was my mother, how bad am I?
Well, in some ways really awful, but her absence – unconscious – really – is a reflection of our complicated relationship. It was simply love/hate. Were my mother alive, she would be terribly hurt that I’d omitted her, but also laugh and pretend to understand. Then she’d bitch about me to my sister and grandmother. You have to laugh. That’s how it was.

So, I want to make up a little for my dreadful oversight and write about my mother, my Ima, Edna Ruth Rosenthal, who died on August 30, 2006, the same week as Steve Irwin – I know, because I wrote the equivalent of a eulogy for him (for the Courier Mail) the same day I wrote the one for my mother. That was a tough day.

In summary, my mother was a five foot tall, red-haired, blue-eyed, Israeli immigrant whom I lived with for my first 12 ½ years as well as an ex-soldier (medic in the Israeli army), and an ex- wife. Why do I mention that? After all, so many people are exes these days. Well, like most things my mother did, she didn’t do it by halves. My mother was married eight times. Yes, you read that correctly – eight – 8 – times. Marriages that spanned three continents and some very different men – an Israeli officer, Australians (including my dad), we think an Austrian, an American, and a New Zealander. There were religious men, abusive men, kind ones, nasty ones, patient and dishonest ones. She broke some hearts and had hers broken as well. She also had relationships with a couple of women – but they were over and above her marriages. I liked having two mums very much. She was also a shop-a-holic.

As her eldest daughter, I can admit I didn’t know her as well as I would have liked. That was partly due to my mother herself and partly because of the dreadful circumstances that drove us apart and kept us that way for far too many years. That, and the fact she migrated to the USA for the last 16 years of her life.

I didn’t speak to my mother for long periods as I struggled to understand some of the decisions she made around me, my sister and family. It was only as I grew older, wiser and probably more tolerant that I started to see what made my Ima tick – and I found I liked it – not enough to emulate it, but it helped me understand the woman she was. But it took me a long, long time.

Every person she encountered, she had a slightly different relationship with and that meant that each person knew something distinct about her. She was the master of reinvention – she would simply leave out parts of herself that made her uncomfortable or uneasy. She lived in the now. Sometimes, that omission involved me – hence my some of my problems with her. But, what I have also learned is that this tendency to elide or remove parts of her life make it so hard to draw a coherent portrait of my mother: the woman known variously as Edna Ruth Brotzen, Nadler, Adams, Davenport, Woitasec, Pettit (insert two names here- I don’t know them) and, finally, Rosenthal. But I am going to try…
Ima was a young mother – even when she was close to death, and aged by her cancer, she remained young in her heart and mind. Not in any immature way – but in that deliberate way that some people foster to always see life as a glass half-full, no matter what was meted out: divorce, loss of children, pets or husbands. That was Ima. She embraced life and she embraced change with a youthful enthusiasm that was so contagious. This was something my younger sister, Jenny, and I adored about her.

Ima and my son, Adam, 1986

Some of my earliest and happiest memories were tapping into her fountain of youth. I remember as kids, Jenny and I, lounging on Ima’s bed, giggling and eating; watching her get ready to go out somewhere with a boyfriend, her long eyelashes fluttering at us in the mirror while her shoulder-length auburn hair bounced across her shoulders. Our friends all thought our mother was a movie star (keeping in mind, Australia was very parochial in the sixties). She was certainly exotic, different and she had an accent.
It wouldn’t be right not to talk about Ima’s voice. It was so sharp, it could cut through frozen butter. Tending to get shrill when she didn’t get her own way, Ima could dig her heels in and be as stubborn as, well, a contended cat. For Jenny and me, our childhood is accompanied by the soundtrack of our mother’s voice and yes, like any mother, she could nag like a broken record.

I don’t think it’s my place to talk about our mother’s chequered past or what I have patched together through half-stories, rumours and hearsay. Needlesstosay, our mother’s life until she met her last husband, Gary, is more colourful than the beads she could string together and the lurid shirts she’d wear with flair: and that’s saying something. What I can reveal is she met Gary by answering an advertisement in a newspaper in the USA. It was not a classified ad either. There, I have said too much! Let your mind boggle, you won’t even come close!
Jenny and I both had very different relationships with our mother: Jenny and Ima were closer, but that’s as much my fault as Ima’s and do I have regrets about that?

Jenny, Ima and me - Red Rock Canyon, USA 2005

Yes, of course I do. But I’m not convinced that, considering how our lives panned out, it could have been any other way. But Jenny and I (like Ima), never got caught up in petty or silly jealousies over what was simply a fact of our relationship. We both loved Ima in our own way and were loved by her in return.
Ima always valued friends. Like the damned thousands of Boyd Bears (ceramic and soft), she would collect never to discard, even if they gathered some dust of neglect, she’d find her friends again and give the relationship a shine. Not always able to express in words or in emotions she was comfortable with how she felt, she would instead shower friends with gifts. She would purchase them to give as though they were a part of her in ways that others share secrets. I used to think it was a signifier of shallowness. I was so wrong. It was a sign of someone who learned, through her own life circumstances (abandoned by her mother – as she saw it – in Israel at the age of four, with her twin), a different and safer way of communicating. Recipients of gifts, no matter how they really feel about you, will generally show gratitude. She loved receiving that – and thanks: of basking in the glow of appreciation. Gifts (and re-gifting!) were the manifestation of her feelings. In some way, this was more lasting to her than memories, which fade or become warped with time and retelling (or omission!). So, whereas I once discarded her gifts, I now treasure the few I kept, no matter how easily they were given or how often – she meant them as signs of real affection.

I cannot write about my mother without mentioning the word shopping. Our mother pathologised the notion of retail therapy. She was the most wonderful shopping companion who turned what for me is a boring chore into a fun experience. I loved shopping with Ima – so did Jenny – and it will be hard when we’re next in Las Vegas (where she moved from New York) to shop without her. I think we’ll have to visit Ross’s the way pilgrims visit shrines.

Some of my mother's Boyd Bears

I’m sure her spirit is there – or in Walmart – scooping up specials and keeping an eye out for a bargain. For some reason, I imagined her last day on earth as one where she would be shopping in Ross’s and suddenly collapse – a case of shop till she drops. Sadly, that wasn’t to be.
Instead, our mother died at home, with her husband, Gary, not by her side, but on the computer where he usually was. Her cats were there, all her collectibles and, most importantly, her friends who also came and shared time with her – as it turned out, precious time.

My mother had a life that was harder than I think even I can begin to imagine – such loss and denial and such betrayal. Unfortunately, some of that was inherited by the next generation. But, she managed to rise above all that – partly because she never looked back and she refused to ever be a victim.

That’s how I choose to remember my mother; that’s how Jenny chooses to remember her too. Not as a woman with faults, but as a beacon of strength and courage, of endless humour and instant goodwill. She was a fighter and a friend; a wife, a mother and a good listener. As a fashion plate that reinvented the word style every season. She was a great cook (I didn’t know that until I was in my twenties) and a consummate shopper.
My memories are conflicted, but they’re rich and passionate. And so was our mother – rich in what’s important: family, friends, pets, two children that loved her for what in the end we

realised she was; a step-brother, Peter, who adored her,

Ima and Peter - she died just over a month later...

a half-brother, Gideon – still in Israel, a twin, Hannah (Peggy) who also grew to love her and eight husbands who, I’m sure have very different recollections of the woman who made their life heaven and hell on earth.
My mother is no longer with us in the corporeal sense, but her indomitable spirit lives on: in the aisles of Walmart, among the racks of Ross’s, they would be in her various collections, only her last husband sold them so perhaps they’re in what remains of her feisty, beautiful cats, but most of all, she’s in our hearts.
Shalom, my little Ima. I’m sorry about the photo gallery!

Ima and me in her backyard Las Vegas

This blog was inspired by a beautiful blog written by Josephine Penicott on the subject of mothers. See: www.talepeddler.blogspot.com/2010/02/chit-chat-wednesday-and-invisible

(with due and proper acknowledgement to Andy Griffiths from whom I stole the title).

The day the doctor said to me, ‘you have cancer,’ was a day I will not forget in a hurry.

Instead of reliving that moment, I will now insert the column I wrote in the Courier Mail that talked about my diagnosis and subsequent fallout. Please, read it if you wish…

http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,26267299-5012471,00.html

This post, however, is about what came after. What came after the quite public admission of bowel cancer, two horrible operations (an ultra low anterior resection with reverse loop ileostomy followed by, five and a half weeks later, the reversal of the ileostomy), and what comes while on the long road to recovery.

This is about metamorphosing from being a cancer sufferer to cancer survivor.

I should be grateful; I should be leaping around for joy and smelling the roses and thanking whoever it is you thank for being given a second chance.
Believe me, I am grateful and I want to thank the surgeon, the gods etc. I have, I do and I would keep doing it if I could… and herein lies the problem. I can’t do much. But I can write and sort of think. Here’s what I have been thinking:

While you’re in the cancer stage – before, between operations and immediately after, everyone wants to know how you are, what the prognosis is, what you’ve been through, how you feel, look and what are your plans for the future. There’s also a hell of a lot of paperwork – but that’s another story.

Unfortunately, it’s during that time, when you’re reeling and trying to come to terms with everything, that you don’t want to talk about it. You don’t want to articulate how frail you feel psychologically; physically; how having a bag attached to you is difficult, even if it is temporary (I have such respect for those who live with a bag permanently). How talking about the most negative experience in your life to date is the last thing in the world you want to do. It’s like a bad dream, a nightmare from which you awoke but the memory and sensations linger… you want them gone, not to relive them with every phone call and email.

Yet, even though you feel desperately ill – in body and mind – you oblige and you talk. Sparingly, inadequately (because there sometimes aren’t any words) and deliberately upbeat… You see, though some people ask as if they want to know how you are, they don’t really. Well, they don’t want you to whinge. They don’t want to hear that your self-confidence has been shattered into a million pieces, that you’re afraid the old energetic self will never return; that your mind has gone to mush and the skills that you relied upon to get you to where you are in life have vanished; that you’ll never again feel like a sexual, sensual human being. That’s just too much.

And how would you respond anyway? I wouldn’t know what to say to someone baring his or her soul to me like that!

People want to hear that you’re doing well – after all, you survived. They ripped that cancer out of you and you don’t even have to have chemo! Lucky you – how good is that, hey! They expect you to express your gratitude over and over. So, you do. To them. You talk, you laugh, you hide your real tears and fears. Part of the reason for this is because you know that the day will come when you are ready to talk about all of this, from the perspective of distance, and you want them to come back. I know I didn’t want to be survivor who was also a Nigel No-Friends.

Only, many don’t come back – despite your efforts.

My chemist said to me the other day, as I was filling a script for very strong painkillers – narcotics, actually, which I take twice a day along with other meds to control the pain, ‘I’ll bet you don’t get much sympathy after all you’ve been through.’

I was quite taken aback.

‘Why’s that? I asked.

‘Because you look too good.’

And there’s the rub. I don’t look too bad at all. Please don’t think I am being conceited. I have lost weight and am quite gaunt, but I don’t look like I’ve suffered enough. I don’t look like either a cancer sufferer or survivor. How funny and, in a sense unfair, is that? You have to laugh.

Shit. I’ve had bowel cancer. Grade 3, highly aggressive and lost parts of my body that most of us don’t mention. I can’t return to academic work, I can’t go out except in short stints and I can’t eat before ‘enjoying’ those short stints. My bum has gone psycho, leaving me chained to the house and, in fact the smallest room in the house, often for hours on end as I endure gut-wrenching cramps and terrible pain as my body readjusts. As I have already said, I am going through psychological hell as well as physical… but I look good. LOL!

I guess I should be grateful for that.

I am, I suppose. No, I’m vain. I am glad.

But the thing I am most grateful for is the unending support and love of my kids, and my family and beautiful, amazing friends – including on Facebook. That is, those of you who came back! Also, the readers of my column who have maintained contact with me. Those of you who understand the façade – and not just the accidental physical one I am perpetrating!

Thank you so much for letting me ‘whinge’, be bleak and sad and for not expecting me to shout my survival from the highest hills.

When Channel Seven Sunrise asked me to appear a few weeks ago to talk about John Singleton’s confronting ad campaign about bowel cancer, I really wanted to do it – I believe in it. I think Singo’s done the right thing. But, I couldn’t. I wasn’t ready to face the world. I am now (in tiny doses) and I want to discuss the aftermath of surviving bowel cancer – not just the diagnosis and operation. And that’s partly because there are two people particularly who have allowed me to speak openly and frankly without cringing at my whinging: Stephen, my beautiful hubby whose love and support has been endless, and my darling friend, Sara Warneke whom many know as the fantasy (and non-fiction) writer, Sara Douglass. She also wrote so eloquently about her own experience with cancer in such a frank and moving way. I want to share (with Sara’s permission) this with you as well:

http://nonsuchkitchengardens.com/wordpress/?p=505

Thank you so much, Sara and Stephen, you have been such rocks – and Sara at a time when she needs one, such is her generosity, love and compassion.

OK. Enough said. My bum is still psycho, but it’s mine. I will learn to control it… eventually.