Posts by Isabel Hitchings
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My initial reaction was complete denial - it was just a big aftershock, those bricks on the ground were just from roofs and facades and we'd all be back to normal in a week or two. There were moments when panic rose (when the police were unaware of the existence of the school, the cathedral spire, our flooded street) but I squished them right down until the next morning when I spent two hours alternately throwing up and shaking uncontollably on my in-laws' sofa.
My main coping mechanism was staying on top of the information. Once I had a computer I spent a lot of time flicking between the council website, civil defence and twitter. If I knew which streets could flush, which supermarkets had loo paper in stock or how big that last shake was, I felt like I was n control.
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My younger son's class spent Tuesday afternoon making flowers to put in the cones and it felt good to go down and beautify the cones round the hole on our corner (we took hydrangeas from the garden too) and to see what other people had added. The school run this morning was wonderful and surprisingly affecting.
I spent today at school with my kids like I did last year except it was completely different with school at a new venue and so many faces missing. It felt like the right thing to do but there was definitely an emptiness at the heart.
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Hope the moving process continues to go smoothly.
Our garage has also been a mysterious survivor. Even before any shakiness it was so rickety that we didn't like going in there so I'd half hoped it would fall down in a quake (as my kids have informed every single EQC and Fletchers person who has visited). It went a bit wonky after February so we had some hopes but in the end the builders, who have just finished here, put a rope around it and pulled it straight (it may have been more complex than that. It that's how they described it). It's still bothersomely rickety.
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Thank you for your kind words. I am very sad but I find this grief easier to deal with than the anxiety and anticipation of sorrow that the last few days held. The sadness at the end is worth it for all the comfort, joy and sheer entertainment they give us the rest of their lives.
The past week or so has been incredibly difficult for more than one reason but, throughout, people have been absolutely lovely.
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The beautiful Boadecia, whose picture I posted earlier, never managed to recover. Last night we made the hardest decision and she's resting in the garden forever more. She and her sister arrived in our family fourteen years ago, only eight months into our couple hood, so it doesn't feel like home without her here.
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Capture: Cats Love Cameras, in reply to Jackie Clark,
I'm not just singing the song, I'm picturing Raymond B at the form 2 disco doing tuck-jumps in time to the chorus.
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We may be small but we make up for it in closeness and honesty. My partner is frequently boggled b the way I can volubly enumerate all the ways my parents are wrong and we're still all ok with eachother afterwards.
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The guiding principle my mother lives by (and which she has successfully passed on) is to never, ever let the truth get in the way of a good story.
My family is tiny - there's just my parents and I in New Zealand. I've met a fair few of the foreign rellies (not that there are or ever were that many of them) but not many of them more than once or twice. My partner has a larger extended family in NZ but he has very little to do with them. He had a sister but she died childless a couple of years back so, apart from a couple of step cousins, my two kids are all there are in their generation.
My parents have done a great job of finding NewZealand family and I grew up surrounded by interesting people and scurrilous stories. I fear I'm not doing as well for my kids - I don't have many friends of long standing and those I do have I tend to see on rare nights out without my family. I think they need to hear those stories that show that their parents once had lives that were separate from them.
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This is Boadecia sitting on my knee last night. She's 14 and diabetic. On Sunday night she had a low blood sugar episode and almost died. She's spending most of her time at the vet getting her dosage adjusted but was allowed home for a visit last night.
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Hard News: Nobody wanted #EQNZ for Christmas, in reply to Lilith __,
We briefly looked at the logistics of moving elsewhere. We listed the places where my partner (our main income earner) would be likely to find work and came up with Auckland, Wellington, and San Francisco. After that it didn't seem logical to include seismic stability in our life-planning.
