This gem appeared on
my Bookface feed this morning.
It’s a
quote from Jane Austin’s Northanger Abbey.
It was posted by my dear friend Lady Howmany, an inspiring mother of four very
fine young women. She shared it hours
after she deposited her two 15 year old daughters on a plane bound for my village on The Other Side
Of The World. The twins, or RaLa, will
spend the next two weeks at the little known (because it didn’t exist before
today) Low Down Dutch Finishing School in Amsterdam, of which I am, apparently,
the Principal.
Lady Howmany and I know a
bit about villages and their value. We lived
around the corner from each other in the “village” of Sydney. During that time, she taught me the truth of
the oft-quoted adage that “it takes a village to raise a child”. She certainly helped raise mine.
I met her in the
school playground a decade or so ago. She
was gloriously competent, confident and self-assured. The sight of Her Ladyship effortlessly wrangling
four feisty girls and a couple of extra playmates, all under six years of age, into
a small bus was a sight to behold. The
realisation that she could do that while simultaneously conducting a phone call
with her boss, triumphantly extracting a long-lost library book from a school
bag, expertly applying a bandaid to a scraped knee and calmly completing the
overdue netball registration form convinced me that she was unlikely to ever
want to be friends with someone like me.
Until I saw her in action I truly thought that my emerging ability to
get a four and a six year old boy into a car and have their seat belts done up
in less than fifteen minutes was admirable.
However, we did become
friends, for which I must say I take full credit. I make that claim because I believe that we bonded over
my somewhat pretentious use of one of the few words in the English language
that m'lady didn’t know the definition of.
If I recall correctly, she was telling several of us how busy she had
been that day, and I casually remarked that she was suffering from “the curse
of the fecund”. The
irony of a mother of four asking what “fecund” meant still makes me chuckle.
Before the day was
done the friendship was cemented not only by a shared love of words and an
equally irreverent sense of humour, but also by a mutually recognised
opportunity to redress the gender imbalance in our respective families. We set out on an ambitious and blatantly
contrived social engineering scheme to constructively expose our offspring to
the opposite sex. When “boys’ germs” and
“girls’ germs” were rife in the school playground that our six children shared,
our respective houses appeared to give them all immunity. At school they barely acknowledged each other.
But in each other’s houses they jumped on trampolines together and built cubby
houses together. When it got too dark to do that anymore they lolled
on sofas together, alternating between movies about princesses and movies about
action heroes (hopefully realising that the storyline in both was
identical). They squabbled together, they
ganged up against each other, and then before we knew it they had
regrouped and were giggling together during one of countless shared meals. They were so comfortable in their inter-familial
gang, flipping effortlessly between their inter-familial houses and travelling
in their inter-familial cars that Lady Howmany and I decided they were “framily”;
more than friends but not quite family.
A decade later, her four girls are still referred to in our house as
“the fristers”; more than friends but not quite sisters.
In a few hours, two of the
fristers will once again be sitting in our living room. From there we'll set out together to discover my Amsterdam village and places further afield. Before too long I expect they'll be squabbling with their frothers and then giggling with them once again around our shared table. And so, I hope, The Low Down Dutch Finishing School will take us all right back to that beautifully happy place where our framily started a decade ago. Now that's what I call an adventure.
