Voices of years past came flooding back as I swam to the deep end of the pool, it must have been more than 20 years since I had been swimming at Waverley pool, now Monash, highly modernized from the last time I was there and twenty cents in a turn style was long out of fashion. Wave pools and training pools the order of the day. I am pleased to say that the 50 meter out door pool remains relatively unchanged. How life changes in 20 years marriages divorce a daughter. A lost brother, the brother whose voice and laughter I could hear under that water as thou it was yesterday!
I was at the pool on a hot balmy night with my almost ten year old daughter Samantha, as I got deeper and deeper it was like going back in time to another world, it was like a life time flashing before my eyes almost eerie
A world that was much less complicated thou it may not have seemed so at the time. 13 years old freckles red hair over weight the target of teasing, thou Robert and I stuck together. We had been asked if we were twins
We had just moved from New Zealand so things were unsettled for a teenage girl who was going thru puberty.
Mum and dad were working shifts, dad on days and mum on afternoons, we would get the bus along Blackburn road and then walk down Waverley road to the pool. We could not get there quick enough from memory. All too soon it would be time to go home Dad would pick us up in the blue gallant. That car took us to Tathra on holidays it became legend at auto barn due to the work dad did on it.
We would scrape together some money for musk sticks before we left a chitery bite is what mum called it, something we had needed when leaving the ocean in Wellington. Things were not cold when we left the pool in an Australian summer, far from it.
One can only begin to imagine what goes thru the mind of your brother that you have not seen for almost 6 years. That is more than 2 3rds of his only niece's life.
I often wonder what I could have done differently in my relationship with Robert; could I have been a better person could I have teased him less??
Why does someone tease?? Low self esteem more than likely and I have to say that stage of my life I had extremely low self esteem. I had been over weight as a child and put on the first of many diets at the age of 7. Looking back this was highly damaging to me both in a physical but more possibly more importantly an emotional way
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