Snoskred - Life in the Country

Out Of Her Niche today is fellow Australian blogger Tiffany from Three Ring Circus

I usually write about my children. Today, I’m ’stepping out of my niche’ for Snoskred, to talk about where I live…

What can I tell you about where I live?

It’s different.

From anything I have known before.

I was born and grew up in a suburb of Sydney. It was a community where I often felt that our family did not belong. It was a fairly large suburb, with three and then eventually, four schools. I went to the nearest public school, which I hated. I was the resident ‘fat girl’ who was the constant target of teasing and abuse. I felt… friendless and often alone. I guess I was a bit of a loner because I wanted to avoid being hurt. Not alot changed through high school, although I did find a nice group of girls to sit with eventually.

When I married David we moved around a fair bit. We initially stayed in the Sydney area but never in one place long enough to get to know many people. We eventually built our first home on the Central Coast in NSW. The suburb was huge. We settled in and started to find our way in a new area but we were not really part of the crowd before we chose to shift areas again.

The move to The Hunter Valley was a reluctant one but at the time, we had three girls of our own and had taken on my sister’s two boys. In a matter of weeks we had outgrown our four bedroom house. It became clear that our temporary custody of the boys was anything but temporary, so we moved to a six bedroom house, on a large block of land, in a tiny, little, country town. At the time I was newly pregnant with our forth baby. My friend declared us mad and in the first few weeks, I certainly felt that way. I knew nobody, there was very little to do. Our main street consisted of a corner store, the pub and further down the road… another pub. Town was fifteen minutes away and that was not much better. For kicks, you could go to Coles and when you really wanted some excitement, there was Woolworths!

Ok, it wasn’t as bad as that but coming from a place that had a Westfield Shopping ‘experience’ within walking distance from home it seemed as though I had landed myself in the world’s biggest hole in the ground. David was still working in Sydney so the days that the kids were at school and I wasn’t working, seemed long to say the least.

When we arrived in the boonies the first thing we had to do was enrol up at the school. The administrative staff had other ideas, however, as they would not even consider placing the children in classes until we could show official proof that we had a residence in the town. As we walked out of the school grounds, one of the ‘gate mums’ introduced herself but before we could reciprocate, she was sprouting our introduction for us. She knew that we had moved into the old Miller house and that we had come from the coast. She knew that the girls were into dancing and that the eldest boy liked soccer. With that she produced the name and number of the local soccer team’s president and ordered us to contact him!

We were absolutely floored that someone we had never clapped eyes on before could know so much about us already! We soon found that most people knew of our coming weeks before we actually arrived. In fact most people knew about what was going on in our lives long before we did!

On this day, as we moved on from our first (bizarre) experience with the people of the town, the same mother yelled over her shoulder not to worry, we would get used to it and it would only take ten years before we would be considered local! Ten years! Our track record for staying in one place indicated that we would never be considered local!

We were pretty reclusive. That was (is) our way. The kids made friends though and I started to get to know some of the ‘gate mothers’ by name and would wave if we passed in the street. As my pregnancy progressed I made a couple of friends and we would go up to school assembly together.

Our life in our home though seemed completely separate to the life of the town. We did not have a lot in common with the people. We did not knock off work early on Friday and go down to the local pub for dinner and a beerfest with sixty of our neighbours. Our idea of fun was a couple of DVDs, a nice dinner with the kids, an outing to the movies or something equally…sensible. These country folk enjoyed drinking themselves into oblivion before jumping on the back of a bull and calling the bucking, jostling, often bloody mess between drunken man and angry beast a rodeo.

Perhaps if we had taken part we would have been welcomed into the fold and considered one of their own.

The truth is, I hated it. I felt isolated, bored and alone. We didn’t fit in at all.

I know we didn’t join in but in my mind that was to avoid the inevitable pain I would feel when the locals shunned us (me) because we were different .

In the April of 2004, approximately eight months after we moved into the tiny country town, our son William was born and died five days later. Our whole world was turned upside down. After a week away, coming back to our home seemed very surreal. Arriving in the sleepy town, it seemed as though nothing had changed, except us. William’s funeral was still a week away as it was Easter and his body had to be transferred from Westmead Children’s hospital to the local funeral home.

The afternoon that we arrived we received a phone call from the funeral director. He just wanted to let us know that William had ‘come home’ and was safe with them now. We were also invited to go any time we wanted, over the following days, if we wanted to see him again. For me it was as though this man on the phone was the first person to treat my baby as a human being. When he spoke, his voice was respectful. Something that we had not encountered in Sydney.

The days passed and the funeral loomed closer. People came and went, family mostly. I don’t remember much of that time. What I do recall though and what stays with me now is his angel day. We decided that we would bury our son in the local cemetary and that the service would be in the small church down the road. As we arrived I remember seeing cars for as far as my eyes could see. In my grief I did not realise that those cars were all parked for us. All of our friends and family were there but also much of the town had stepped out to show their respect for a little boy they would never know and for the people who were only half a year into their initiation to become locals.

I walked into the church and I saw the gate mums to my right. I saw the teachers of my children and the principal representing the school. Out the front, near William’s tiny coffin, were hand crafted butterflies, cut and coloured in by every single one of the children at the school. Messages of love and sadness reached out to me through the innocent handwritten condolences of the students, for our family. I was truly touched. For the first time in over a week, I felt something. It was a sense of community.

There were tears and hugs and casseroles, letters, plants, heartfelt gifts and offers for the children to have time away from the grieving household.

That day, the way I felt about ‘the boonies’ changed. I accepted what it was… a tiny outback town… with a huge heart.

There was not much to look at, not much to do but the people made it rich and textured. They pulled together and supported each other…and us.

Like I said, the place I live in is different from anything I have ever known. That’s because it’s a place that I feel that we belong, even though we are different.

We are part of the community.

Things have pretty much gone back to normal now. We still keep to ourselves and four years into our residency of the old Miller house we are still considered newcomers but we are accepted and comfortable.

My daughter commented today that we have stayed here longer than we have in any other place.
I said; It must be time to move.
She said, No, it must mean that it’s home.

This post from Tiffany made me homesick for my “heart home” - which at this stage I still consider to be Tamworth. I think where we live now has a chance of replacing it in my heart but it does take time for that to happen. People reaching out to you can speed up the process, too.

Sometimes life takes us on a journey we were not expecting - a journey we would not have chosen ourselves yet a journey we needed to go on without our knowing it. I’m glad your family has found home, Tiff.

You can read more from Tiffany at her blog - Three Ring Circus and remember, you can get out of your niche too!