My month of yes
Totally pumped for October
My friend Cynthia turns things down in November. The reason, she says, is right there in the name.
“It’s NOvember,” she told me, in a conversation that made me feel silly as a kitten with possibility. “Like Movember is for men, but instead of growing facial hair, we just say no to shit.”
Can you imagine how liberating this would feel? When November is, as we all know, the beginning of the sharp end of the New Zealand calendar, when a year’s worth of events and obligations are crammed into the meagre span of six weeks?
Need I remind you what these obligations are?
From November 1 (heck, from October 31) there’ll be school plays and special assemblies to attend; music, drama and dance recitals, and prizegivings which go on seemingly forever. There’ll be Christmas services in cathedrals. If you’re wildly unlucky there’ll be a school gala, and you’ll be splitting hot dog buns in a windswept playground for six hours.
There’ll be club lunches and team dinners, Scouting trips to outer boroughs. There’ll be bake sales and Christmas pudding raffles. There may even be picnics, optimistic as that sounds. There’ll be end-of-year office drinks and client functions which, if you’re wildly unlucky, will mean an hour at an axe-throwing bar and then an oddly solemn beer-tasting experience, led by somebody who oils their beard, probably in a former garment factory off Ghuznee Street.
In addition, you’ll have the Christmas shopping to start and finish, including finding gifts for people who’ve helped you cope this year (this list will run into double figures, as you’ve called in quite a few favours).
There’ll be the tree to put up. Lamb, ham or salmon to order, depending on your budget. Presents to wrap and deliver. The usual psychodrama over the Christmas menu (tinned-fruit trifle versus townie tiramisu). There’ll be holiday plans to confirm before the nation shuts down for the summer; medicines to stock up on, house-sits to arrange, pets to lodge, mail to stop, essentials and comestibles to pack, alarms to rig on departure. The tree to pull down before you drive away, or you might as well hand keys over to burglars.
You’ll arrive at your holiday rental gaunt and spent. It will be a solid week before you can even look at a jigsaw or a paperback. You’ll be seeing stars for days. You’ll be dehydrated or delirious, having Christmas flashbacks at night (DID YOU BUY CHERRIES FOR THE STAFFROOM?). You’ll regret the life choices that brought you this point, of somehow bearing responsibility for it all — a burden which has aged you in dog years. If it had been up to you, you’d rather have ripened slowly. Like a cheddar.
Wouldn’t it be wonderful, then, to take Cynthia’s advice and shut up shop to latecomers this November?
Say no to baking cupcakes for the fundraiser!
No to hosting the book club!
No to helping clean up the local stream! No to driving for Meals on Wheels! Don’t they recognise that at this most Christian time of year, you’re no longer a decent human being? Ignore the carol singers at the mall! Tell charity doorknockers you already gave, and slam the door in their faces! This isn’t a fib, actually. Between KidsCan and Médecins Sans Frontières, there’s nothing left in the biscuit tin for the yellow-eyed penguin.
Say no to joining school camp as a parent helper!
(In my view, school camp is your child’s opportunity to get away from you and do something bloodcurdling, like free-climb a rockface and spend all night throwing themselves from bunk to bunk, tweaked off their norks on smuggled sweets.
Camp is also your opportunity to taste what life will someday be like without a minor child at home. It’s a rare chance to do something unusual with 48 free hours, like going out for dinner, a gig and then cocktails; or just lying on the sofa in the unusual silence of an empty home, feeling wonderful and desolate at the same time.)
Of course, this whole November plan has a fatal flaw.
It means October is your month of saying yes.
The gates to October have flown open and I’m already trotting down the track. Can’t you see my vanishing rump?
In anticipation of warmer weather which hasn’t yet arrived, I’ve had my nails painted (butter yellow, a mistake). Everything has burst into blossom, certainly, but the petals are being blown off the branches or pelted by rain. They’re hanging in wet and heavy clusters, looking sulky.
Each year I keep a record of the date our cherry tree begins flowering. Last spring it began on September 16. On the sixteenth this year I went out in sub-par conditions, reached up, and squeezed the buds. They were hard as nuts and dripped ice water.
Only this week I walked the dog in a frigid six degrees. In October! Your Honour, I object! (And so did the dog. He hurried inside and not long after, deposited a dry packet in a bedroom.)
The tree has since flowered into lovely blowsy puffs. But it was solidly behind schedule, as am I. The house is a riot of useless things, despite a decent clean-out during the last holidays. We’ve a new office swivel chair, but there’s all the packaging and the ratty old one to dispose of. Ditto the broken microwave. George is outgrowing trackpants faster than I can buy them. He needs swim goggles for term four, guitar strings, and socks. Don’t get me started on Maddie.
Before the year ends I must schedule eye checks, dental visits, a meet-the-Dean encounter at George’s new college. Personally, I could use a north-to-south, east-to-west waxing, having become a danger to shipping, but who has the time? If there’s a spare moment I’ve tyres to inflate and oil to check, the dog and cat to worm, paid jobs to finish, kids to ferry about, meals (endless meals) to make, and a laundry mountain reaching into the upper atmosphere.
If only the sun would show up, I could finally peg out my pants!
Still, help is at hand in the form of pump-action prescription oestrogen. You wipe the gel up your inner arms and wait to feel a difference in your mood and personality. I mean I haven’t noticed this yet, but it’s only been a week, so I’m hanging on for that seesaw feeling. A sensation of lift, to be clear, rather than a sinking to the weighty bottom. Because I’m down there already and have been for a while.
It would be nice, for a change, to feel wind beneath my wings, an invisible hand on the small of my back. I’d quite like to live up to the cheerful, buttery colour on my nails. I’d like to laugh until I cough. Presently I’m given only to smiling.
Still, I’ve a few wins under my belt, this October. I’ve ordered the cheesecloth cobwebs and wheeled twelve kilos of Halloween sweets out of Moore Wilson’s bulk & dry department. As I’ve four weeks left in the year to be a community-minded person, I volunteered at the local book fair and helped box the ones that didn’t sell (Soviet Military Hardware; Queen Margaret College: a history).
And despite a school holiday marred by a really sticky family cold, we made it to the cinema to see the Jacinda Ardern documentary, Prime Minister. The kids didn’t want to, but I insisted. George dragged himself around that morning like a man condemned. Honestly, he showed more enthusiasm for his flu jab at the chemist.
“This is recent New Zealand history,” I argued in the car, reminding them of Covid lockdowns and the weeks-long protest at Parliament. “We lived through this.” They gazed glumly out the windows but cheered up when we got to the ice cream counter. There were barely ten of us in the cinema, surprisingly, and most of us were women, unsurprisingly. The kids and I sat in the back row.
Afterwards, they admitted the film had been “pretty good”. I was quiet driving home. What had it all been for, the brief flare of light of her leadership? Difficult to see any of it as a triumph of kindness, or an advance for New Zealand women in politics. Now based in Boston, preaching to the converted among Harvard’s genteel, redbrick squares, Ardern is a political exile, far from the death threats and the rancour, flogging her books and smiling for selfies but choking up privately when speaking of home. How do you explain this to children?
It feels like a tragic outcome. Tragic for her, being so unreasonably despised, and tragic for we who still live here — stumbling forwards in a depressed, low wage economy rumbling with new discontents, but without a government hopeful enough to appeal to our imaginations and better selves.
“Jacinda was Luke Skywalker,” remarked George, snapping me out of it, “and the protestors were stormtroopers.” I considered this and decided I agreed.
October is, after all, a month of cooperation, charity, and saying yes. The force remained with us if we wanted it to, and we sped past the Beehive for home.
Just realised my mum would have been responsible for buying everyone's presents, cooking Christmas dinner, and then packing up everything we needed for a four week holiday so we could leave Crofton Downs on Boxing Day and drive (in the Cortina) to Ōpōtiki, maybe via a night in Taupō, and my dad would have done NOTHING! I am ashamed I never thanked her
Loved the bit on Prime Minister. I enjoyed it but found it all a bit overwhelming and sad, despite (& because of) the strained upbeat ending. Good move, taking the kids. Must take ours, too.