Monday 22 October 2012

I went to my high school reunion, and all I got was this lousy pen


Hmm. My head is a swirl of thoughts. Catching up with my girlfriend was super-awesome, meeting her husband was great, and eating good food with her while we chatted and chatted and chatted was really refreshing. We squeezed important information into all those chats - the whole Chloe story, the stories of how we met our husbands, the story of how I ended up leaving the state in the first place. We also discussed our mutual angst about the reunion, and why we were going, when neither of us really wanted to.
 You probably saw my post yesterday about why I blog. By not going to the reunion, I would have been leaving a vital piece of my story out. And my story is hard enough to tell without photos and happy memories, so I needed to keep that long-ago promise to myself to return for the twenty year reunion. And I vow not to go again until at least forty, maybe fifty years.


Most things never change, even when it feels as if they do. Or maybe that's slightly disingenuous - when you're thrown back into a place-of-origin, you revert to those behaviours that saw you make it out the other end alive. It's why so many families find Christmas with their nuclear family stressful, because everyone reverts to past behaviour.

 And this reunion was no different. The school bitch still looked down at me (the exact comment was "nice hair"); there was lots of "how do you do it?" comments (have 4 children); and my friend, who is 40 weeks pregnant and due today, was constantly asked "is it your first?" or "and you're here?"
But, as we reassessed this morning, the people that mattered spent time talking to us (although not one single one of them understood blogging, or Blog Power Events, or scrapbooking). The highlight for me was walking around the school grounds, seeing how much has changed. And realising that even if I still lived in Melbourne, I wouldn't send my girls to the school, because I don't like the changes. (A friend of mine is actually sending her daughter there. It is such a small school that I was excited to find someone who knew about it.)
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I wrote this while waiting for the plane to come home. My head is still spinning a little, but it was definitely an adventure (that I'll repeat again in another twenty years) 

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4 comments

  1. Reunions are nerve inducing. We ued to play you guys in sport. (I'm ex Tintern). It was strange for us coming in to your campus, everything in there always seemed so squashed together.

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    1. if you thought it was bad twenty years ago, you should see it now! they have classrooms in basements, and they're going up to five stories! totally lost the appeal of a small school hidden in the inner city!

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  2. I went to my 20 re-union a couple of years back. It was a surreal experience. In some ways it was like being in a room of strangers. I was acquainted with the people but I didn't really know them. The school bitch looked completely fabulous! So not fair.

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    1. oh, yes, she looked fabulous, and was full of stories of finishing her masters in law and something-else-that-sounded-like-she-had-her-head-up-her-arse-and-no-life

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