Knit is a Four-Letter Word

I spent the vast majority of my life being some form of unhappy with my smile; tricky to find a good photo of me, let alone one smiling – the discomfort shone through and the lens captured that.

In 2011 my life changed dramatically. After nearly 15 years in the US, the marriage I was in fell apart shockingly and suddenly. I dropped 60 lbs and 6 dress sizes in 6 months. My teeth, which had been teetering on the edge of disaster due to a chronic fear of the dentist also fell apart. (Ironically, thanks to the marriage breakup, there were funds available to do the first part of fixing my teeth.) Photos of me from around 2011 show a person who was thinner than she’d ever been, but starting to get comfortable with showing her teeth, although the sadness showed up around her eyes.

In 2012, I moved back to Australia – the marriage was done in all but name, and I needed the safety net that I could have due to my lucky accident of an Australian birth. I’d been back about 3 months and due to this safety net, I’d been to see doctors, starting to have the standard checkups that are part of an ongoing commitment to a healthy populace. They found something, they thought it was a fast moving cancer, and you haven’t experienced speed until you’ve been in the hands of the cancer specialist professionals. From the first test to the day I had surgery was not much more than a couple of weeks.

It turned out not to be cancer, and it turned out to be one of the reasons I was so tired and so cold all of the time. It turned out to be something else that I needed – a goal and something to focus on, rather than being unemployed, living with my parents and without a car. (Or frankly the ability to safely drive one ; 15 years of driving on the opposite side of the road, your brain starts to rewire those neurons. 3 months of being back hadn’t changed that ongoing sense of being constantly startled by turns and all of the now-weird angles.)

I started to date again, via an online dating website because after 15 years of being in a relationship, I needed to practice this. Online was my choice, because I could talk to someone in email before meeting them, I could get a sense of who they were, before diving into the in-the-flesh, in-the-real meet and greet deal. My friend Di is an excellent photographer, who took one look at my selfie on the dating site, and took me in hand for an afternoon. These photos from 2012 are still some of the best ever taken of me. Ever.

In 2013, all the things I didn’t have in 2012 came to me. It felt like every time I thought of something, it arrived. Job – here’s a part-time gig. Career and study – here’s a MYOB course that revealed to me that I really, really, Really like learning about accounting, and that I’m actually quite good at it, and for the first time in my life, I was doing homework without resenting it, enjoying it, and living up to the potential that every high-school report card told me I had and wasn’t. House – here’s a little house up in the hills where the realtor accepted my cats and my crazy patchwork income structure. Car – here’s a 1998 Honda Civic on Gumtree that fits into my budget perfectly and has been treated so well in the past that it’s in a fabulous condition.

Relationship? Ah yes, that happened too. The online dating thing worked so well, I’ve been seeing someone for the past 11 months, and it just keeps getting better. I went to his works Christmas party this past Saturday, held on a horse farm, and he introduced me to these people that he works with as “the love of his life”. And I beamed and I smiled the way I’ve been beaming and smiling since we met in January. The horse farm adjists horses, and as part of the party fun, any of us who wanted to got to take a Christmas card shot.

This is Benji, and I’m smiling like a fool.

There’s a joke you see, about the eternal optimist. She was put to the test, and presented with, instead of a room filled with toys, a room filled with manure. She beamed and immediately started to laugh and dig. When asked what she was doing, she said “with all of this manure, there must be a pony here somewhere!”

I found the pony.