Gratitude

When you're home all day with two small children it can be easy to lose sight of the big picture. Especially when your three year old is pulling all the utensils out of the kitchen drawers and naming them "Love" and "Oven", while the six month old…well okay, he's pretty perfect. But he needs caring for while all the utensil naming is going on. Meanwhile you're bored, and lonely, and would quite like to be having a wine somewhere glamorous with adult people.

So you wish for some time alone and some time out. And maybe feel a little sorry for yourself, because you're stupid like that.

At the beginning of the month, disaster struck our little suburb. A fire lit up a shop and the apartments above, and three people died - a 27 year old man and his neighbours, a 31 year old mother and her 12 month old baby boy.

This was just a few hundred metres from my house, and has affected me and our community greatly. Not a single person here has been untouched by it - people are talking about it everywhere you go, and meanwhile there is a gaping hole where three buildings are missing on the main street. Even J, who is less emotional and current affairs obsessed than I, was compulsively watching the news and thinking about it for days, imagining being that father left behind.

It's difficult to watch the community that's so embraced and welcomed us struggle - this is the kind of place where you can make a great friend by simply chatting to someone at the playground, the coffee shop. You talk to your neighbours. You know all the business owners, many of whom have been shut down for weeks.

Today was the funeral of the woman and baby who died. We were running errands up the road and I wondered at the amount of people, the news cameras, the black…and then I realised. I felt so sick. That baby…that mother. Were they scared? I hope not. Tonight, I read about it online. Mother and baby, buried in the casket together. Where they were happiest.

And I cried, and cried, and cried.

Every day we get to spend with the people we love is an absolute blessing. The days can be long, but the weeks are short and painfully finite. So I am reminded to be so, so grateful. And tomorrow, I will sit on the kitchen floor and name utensils, while I can.

Z xx