Reflections on a Small Town (Part 3) in Days of My Destiny

Part 3 - The Birthday Party

We attend my friend’s 40th. It was a dress-up party, with the theme “Dress up as something starting with the letter F.” The birthday girl is Fiona from Shrek. There’s Ned Flanders and Freddie Mercury. There’s a fried egg, a facebook logo, a flamenco dancer and a flamingo. There are many more people not dressed up. I forgot it was dress-up until the last minute before the road trip, so I packed a flowery dress and if anybody asked, I was going to say I was a flowery garden. Boring, I know, but it was better than no effort at all.

I wonder around the backyard, looking around to see familiar faces. I only really know the birthday girl and her friend who organised this party. I decide that, as reluctant as I am to do so, I need to sit down and get to know some people. My more-than-mild disinterest in doing this comes as no surprise to me. When we left this town, there were only two families we didn’t want to say goodbye to. One of them is not at the party (they are on their own holiday), and the other is the birthday girl and her children. By the time we left this town five years ago, I was at a point of burnout. I had been so homesick, and so lonely, for so long, that it was not hard to see this town disappear from view in the rearview mirror. Yet here I am, making conversation with some new faces. When we ask each other how we know the birthday girl, we realise that we are at a crossroads. I am from The Time Before they met her. They came after me. We chat about the dress-ups, the weather, their children. Then there’s nowhere else to go from there. Some people at the party seem ready to let loose like nothing else, while others of us are sitting awkwardly. I watch the birthday girl walk around the backyard, drinking beer after beer. I personally don’t see the value in this. I don’t see why at 40, anybody needs to get as wasted as they did when they were 20. But I haven’t lived her life, and I am not from a small town, so I really can’t comment – even to myself – and I really shouldn’t judge. I conclude that, as much fun as she may be having, it’s not something I came for, and not something I will be joining in with.

I walk around some more and notice some familiar faces. Sonya, who I used to chat with at church. Our chats were never anything grand but I’m happy to see her all the same. I greet her, and she greets me in the same way she did five years ago: mechanically, as though she saw me just last week. I ask how she is, she says she’s good, how am I, I tell her I’m good, and that’s that. I move on. I say hi to her bestie, who used to look after my youngest at childcare and the conversation goes much the same way. I go and talk to the flamenco dancer. She is a woman in her fifties who is originally from Sydney, who used to work on cruise ships in her younger days, who loved partying and dancing, who talks about everything like it’s nothing (and I mean everything), who has really good legs especially for a lady her age, and who, in costume, is proudly showing off her toned back and stomach. She is wondering around with a drink in her hand. She tells me that she now has 3 young sons, that she was going crazy with them especially after her partner left her, but that she’s doing much better now that she’s working again, and that she’s seeing someone who is really ugly but she’s learning to look beyond that for the first time in her life. She also tells me she drinks about a litre of alcohol everyday. I wonder around after that, a little helplessly, when I see the old church minster and his wife and family arrive. They left this town shortly after we did, although for entirely different reasons – being in the ministry, they simply move to where they are told to go every four years or so. They are all dressed in Hawaiian shirts and they are representing Fiji. I have a polite chat with them. The minister tells me about the adjustment it was for him and his family to move to a much bigger town and how hard it is to remember everyone’s names when there are so many more names to remember; the wife tells me she loves seeing my posts on Instagram and that she really enjoys them, and their oldest daughter tells me what an adjustment her whole school life has been, going from place to place and always being the mysterious new kid. I tell her some of my own high school experiences around that and we bond a little. I take a photo of them all in their Hawaiian shirts and that’s the end of that interaction.

I look around and see a gorgeous looking woman and recognise her instantly. She is Leah, a lady I worked closely with for ten weeks. She was a farmer’s wife and I was a miner’s wife at the time. I was president of a committee we’d both joined, and she was vice president. Both of us were new to these roles and to committees altogether, and we were trying to navigate the meetings and dysfunction and hostility at a time when it seemed things were at boiling point between the members. It was difficult, to say the least, and we bonded over this difficult situation. We’d give each other lifts to the meetings, and on the way home we’d vent our frustrations about the meetings to one another. We’d laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. She’d tell me about Queensland and how much she loved it. She was actually a Queensland girl! I see her now, at the party, standing so confidently, with straightened blonde hair, earrings, a gorgeous black singlet, jeans and high heels, smiling that gorgeous, radiant smile I used to love. I beeline towards her and when she sees me, she gives me the biggest hug. She asks how I’ve been and for the first time all afternoon, I feel seen. We reminisce over those crazy ten weeks and how wonderful it was to go through that horridness together. We talk about motherhood and what a journey it is, and how when we were both new mums we compared ourselves so much to other mothers, until we found our confidence and came into our own with it. She tells me her husband left her three years ago, and she was left to raise her two children and run the farm on her own.

The afternoon breeze turns into a gale force wind all of a sudden and we both grab onto the post of the gazebo we are standing under. As I reach to grab it, I spill my drink on her jeans and high heels. She looks at me in shock and then cracks up laughing with such abandon that I have no choice but to join her. Soon she has to leave, as she had another party to attend. We wish each other the absolute best, then exchange numbers so we can keep in touch. She is beautiful, and I wish we’d been in each other’s lives for longer back then. She would’ve been my tribe, not like the circumstantial friendship that formed with the birthday girl.

I look around for the birthday girl. I see her guzzling more beer, singing along with a group of others to really loud country music. She lives with her mum, who is elderly and grumpy. While that sounds bad, she really isn’t a nice person and never has been. She treats her daughter like rubbish, as well as her own grandchildren. A chain smoker with a dog, she sits at her computer all day. Currently she is hiding inside the house. When I saw her earlier she had rolled her eyes at the party, and later, she does not emerge for cake time, which we all know includes the singing of the birthday song to the birthday girl, who specifically asks where her mother is, and disappointedly shrugs her shoulders when told she is drinking a coffee inside the house.

Afterwards, I am at the table of food, trying to choose what to eat because there’s nothing else to do, when Jen approaches the table. Jen is a lady who works for the local council. She’s fit and when I lived here, we played football together. Despite not being very sporty and never having had played in a sports team, I actually gave the women’s football team a chance, in order to be somewhat in community with others, and to learn something new, and to get exercise. I never fit in with those women and they never made an effort to even talk to me, so who cares. But Jen and I also had one night of fun and laughter once. We danced amongst the same circle of women one night at a breast cancer fundraiser. We also used to cross paths all the time, in the way you do with people when you’re in a small town with ten streets in its centre. Now, Jen is at this table, grabbing food, and does not make even the tiniest bit of eye contact, despite the fact that we’ve been catching glances all night. I decide I’m going to be the bigger person here, because even though there was never a friendship, the decent thing is to say hello at a food table, surely. I say, “Hello, Jen,” and she says, “Oh, hello,” smiles, and walks away quickly. I decide this party sucks, this whole thing sucks. These people suck, and I can think this without feeling guilt or frustration. It is a simple fact, and I have relief in my heart to know that I left this damn place with its damn people when I did. Nobody actually cares. This place feels hopeless and helpless, with everyone having nothing to do but drink at a birthday party when they’re not even friends with the birthday girl. It is all ridiculous. It is now nearing 9pm and I can’t wait to leave. I sit at a chair with no desire to make an effort with anyone else. I can’t leave, however, because earlier in the afternoon, I met another lady who is staying at the same motel as us, and she wants us to leave together because she is a single mum and doesn’t want to push the pram back to the motel all on her own later on. So here I am, sitting and biding my time. There is a couple that tries to engage in decent conversation with my husband and I, but the music is so loud that it is inconvenient to talk, and we are all too lazy to sit elsewhere, because they’re leaving the town tomorrow and so are we, so who cares.

Despite the lameness of the party, the next morning it is time to leave and I feel like this short trip wasn’t really about the party but about my journey and evolving as a person and mother. Who was I while we lived here? What was my purpose? We originally moved here for the opportunity to gain some financial stability. That was our sole purpose. We weren’t aware at the time that we were on the wrong side of a system that exploits whatever it can, wherever it can, however it can for financial gain. We were only aware that this could be a fun adventure that could also set us up for life (it didn’t). While here, we got involved with the local committees and SES. We shopped local as often as we could and dined at the local pubs (pubs aren’t even my thing!). We attended the local events. I even performed at the Christmas Carols at The Park, two years in a row! We volunteered and helped out at the annual town event that brought money into the town. I fixed the old cash register that nobody else could figure out for this event, and I typed up a manual for it once I’d figured out the troubleshooting tips, photos included. I also typed up the daily schedule for this annual event. Our kids went to the local preschool and schools. We attended the local church. I feel like I really tried here. Throughout this process, I met so many people, but didn’t really get to know anybody. But it didn’t matter because, as a whole, people were friendly and generous. For example, one time my car broke down and a local that I barely knew offered me her car, just like that. Another time I didn’t have quite the right amount of coins for something I was buying at the local shop, and the attendant told me not to worry about it. I couldn’t believe it but she meant it. Another time we were invited to a couple’s home for lunch after church, even if they lived about 50kms away from that church. They fed us that day like it was Christmas. When I think of these things, my heart warms again. It warms at the humanity in us all, the vulnerability of us all. I learned that this town, with all its juxtapositions – its generosity and close-mindedness, its opportunities and limitations, its friendliness and its guardedness, its highs and its lows – had a lot to offer that was actually never on the cards for us. Once you made the effort to show yourself, the town really lived up to its name of being “the little town with the big heart.” While there may be some individuals here that weren’t worth my time and energy, as a whole, the town welcomed us as best as a town can when two cluless city slickers show up with their children. All in all, it was a place of unlikely friendships and laughter. It was a place of making memories in the simplest of ways. And for me, it was a time of growth and a place of healing. It was a place of change. For the changes in this town since we left here are so subtle, yet so obvious when you take the time to notice – just like the changes within us.