jmgoyder

My husband, Anthony, was in hospital having his kidney removed. Cancer. I was back at the farm with our two-year-old son, Ming, waiting for a baby-sitter I’d never met. Ming was having his second asthma attack. The first had happened in the hospital, when Anthony was admitted.

Now I was grappling with the nebulizer, a distressed child and my husband’s predicament, the shock trapped in my throat.

I returned from the hospital that evening and paid the baby-sitter. Ming was asleep. Out on the front verandah, I sat down. It was the first time I’d ever been home without Anthony.

A little later, Ming toddled out, rubbing his eyes. He looked up at the half moon and said, seriously, “Moon bwoken.” Then he brushed his soft little face against mine. “Daddy can fixded it”’ he asked. I nodded and hugged him.

Two weeks later, Anthony was home. Ming wanted to wrestle him, so I swung our little boy onto my hip and took him outside. It was a dark night and there was a full moon.

Ming looked up and I felt his heartbeat quicken against mine. “Daddy fixded the moon, Mummy. Look!”

We went back inside and Ming climbed onto Anthony’s lap.

“Fankyou, Daddy”’ he said, “You’re a good boy.”

Yes, I know I haven’t filled in the details of the wedding and all that but I will eventually!

Exactly 9 months after Anthony and I got married, Ming was born. It was a dreadfully painful 500million-hour labour, but finally at 1am on January 5th, 1995, he emerged.

It was a pretty weird moment because all of the nurses and the doctor had rushed away from me into the next door room to attend to a woman who punctuated every second of her child’s birth with screams that sounded like she was being tortured whereas I did most of the suffering in silence.

Anthony wanted a son so much, so much, so much and, even though I know he would have loved a daughter just as much, he just wanted Ming and so did I, and I thought I knew Ming would be a boy because of my dreamchild thoughts before we were married. It was always a boy.

As Ming emerged, Anthony quickly called the nurses and doctor back and our scrawny little alien was delivered without any further drama except for Anthony exclaiming with undisguised joy: ‘It’s a boy!’ I remember feeling very relieved because I didn’t want to go through that again!

Then, just after the following picture was taken, Anthony said he was exhausted and had to go home to bed. You gotta laugh!

I got my nails done (I got one false nail glued to my bitten down ring finger);

I got my hair done (I brushed it);

I had a party (I chose to stay by myself in my ma’s new house);

I prepared my outfit (I put my blue silk suit onto a bed so it wouldn’t get creased and wished I could just wear jeans);

I slept fitfully because I had a recurring nightmare (that Anthony would evaporate);

I said thank you to the air.

Oh what a lovely sunny day it was. We parked in Anthony’s favourite carpark in Perth and walked down to the antique jewellery shop where he had picked out an antique ring for me. We’d been there before of course and I had said which ring I liked, being very careful to choose something above $500 but below $5,000 – ha!

So he forked out a big wad of cash, put the ring in his pocket and we walked (well I kind of skipped) to the closest restaurant, ordered a drink and a meal and then he got the ring out of his pocket and took it out of its box and put it on my finger.

Just as our meals arrived, he mentioned that his brother thought it might be a good idea to get a pre-nuptual agreement so I very calmly took the ring off, gave it back to him, stood up, abandoning my meal, and walked back to the car.

We had taken a taxi to the ‘Rent-a-Bomb’ place so that I could drive the car/bomb back to my place where Anthony could get into his commodore and drive back to the farm, knowing he had made this magnificent gesture and I would be able to drive a car, not a scooter, to work for a few days.

Halfway back to my place, the little rentabomb spluttered and died.

Now I do cry quite easily, and sometimes unexpectedly. My eyes seem to have a leaking tap condition, a bit like the taps in our kitchen, laundry and everywhere else at the moment, but that’s beside the point because I didn’t always cry so easily.

But when that stupid, rotten bomb of a car broke down, I let it roll to the side of the road and I broke down too, quite dramatically.

Anthony had never seen me cry like that – never! And it was in that moment, at the side of a strange road, in a crap car, that he finally realized the error of his ways and declared his love.

Then we got the towtruck.

I know I’m skipping back and forth a bit in terms of this story and I have quite a few missing pieces to fill in but I am in the mood to write about the funny incidents, so bear with me.

Okay, so Ants and I finally got married on March 27, 28 or 29th (I can never remember which and we both always forget our wedding anniversary) in 1993. We honeymooned in Broome because it was cheap at that time of year and Anthony has always been very careful with money. In Broome, we soon discovered why it was so cheap – it was an extremely hot and unbearably humid time of year.

Nevertheless it was a lovely resort right near the beach (if you wanted to wilt and fry), but luckily the rooms were air-conditioned. Anyway, we had a great time overall and came back to the farm a week later … to discover that I was pregnant.

Mmmmm. A little soon perhaps, oh well. At the time, though, apart from feeling an overpowering sense of joy, I also felt extremely embarrassed and hoped that the the local gossips wouldn’t assume that the confirmed middle-aged bachelor had married the ‘girl’ in a shotgunny way. Unfortunately, by June it had become obvious because I had become rather Dolly Parton-ish, so, yes, the small town rumours spread.

I became so self-conscious of this that when people asked me when I was due, instead of simply saying next January, I would stutter and stammer about how it probably happened around March 27, 28 or 29th because I wanted to make it clear that I got pregnant after we got married and not before, because I didn’t want everyone to think Anthony had been forced into marriage.

One day, after my usual response to the ‘when are you due?’ question, an elderly woman, having overheard me, whispered in my ear, “They don’t want to know about the date of conception, dearie, just the date you are due to give birth.”

Oh!

Just before our courtship years, the love of my life came to Perth one weekend and, seeing that I was still relying on a scooter to get me to work and back, and, seeing that the scooter was on its deathbead, he very generously offered to hire a car for me for a few days.

I was quite excited about his newfound generosity and imagined he would be taking me to a lovely Rollsrocey place. Instead he took me to the outskirts of Perth to a place called ‘Rent a Bomb Car Hire’.

Needless to say, our courtship was put on hold for a little while.