gardenvale

My kids come to live with me in the second half of 1984. Their mother is not able (or fit) to parent them, says so herself, though not in so few words. I work at a program for unemployed kids in Moorabbin. I find a place to rent in Gardenvale. These are the south-eastern suburbs where I grew up. It feels familiar.

My one-year old daughter spends her days at family day care. My three year-old son is at kinder in the mornings round the corner from my work, then I shuffle him off to day care with his sister. Their day carer is Jeannique, South African migrant, her husband a numismatist working from home in the front room. The kids are happy in her care; Gemma thrives. I’m happy too.

Our house is a pleasant brick Californian bungalow in St James Parade. The kids share a room, bunk beds. Soon they are two and four. On Wednesday evenings I attend a writing and editing class at Chisholm in Caulfield. Sometimes their mother, who seems better, comes to babysit them.

Although the kids are dropped off, picked up, moved around each day, they are clean, fed well, like our daily routine, know where they are in the world after being rootless so long. I love being their father, caring for their early childhood needs, spending quantity time with them instead of odd days making up things to do together.

I can’t pretend that it’s not tough, working full-time, bringing up little kids, our peripatetic existence between home, work, classes, kinder, day care. I have no time for anything else, sport, women. I ask out a lovely red-headed sessional worker named Lucy; it’s a one-off meeting, comes to nothing.

Work is tough: four young unemployed men with schizophrenia, about which I know little, attend my program. I start to wonder if I’d be better off not working, moving to the hills, the Dandenongs, where my mother and sister live at Menzies Creek. I start looking for somewhere to live, this time to buy and not rent.

I have little money, buy a crummy place at Avonsleigh, cancel the purchase before the ten-day cooling off period ends. Someone tells me they know a woman who owns a house in Menzies Creek. I make contact, ask if she’d consider selling.

Three months later, unemployed and $38.5k lighter, I pick up the keys late one afternoon from an estate agent in Tecoma. My kids and I move to a tumbledown cottage on an acre of prime land and mountain ash in Menzies Road.   

Rock on.