I have always had trouble believing that God isn’t at worst angry, at best disappointed in me. I find it excruciatingly difficult to accept that God loves me no matter what.

There are all sorts of reasons for this; one of them the fact that when I was growing up, God was generally referred to in metaphors that were not only male, but intimidating.

‘Lord’, ‘King’ and ‘Judge’ were three of the favourites. And even the more benign ‘Father’ wasn’t always helpful for a generation where even the good dads weren’t around much.

As a young woman who was either pregnant or breastfeeding for almost ten years solid, I was thrilled to discover some feminine images of God, even in the ancient, fiercely patriarchal Bible. You have to really go looking for these, but the fact that they are there at all is remarkable.

One of the most beautiful is Isaiah 49, verse 15. ‘Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. See, I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.’ There was no way I was going to forget my kids. And God loved me, and all of us, more than this.

Among other Biblical images was this one from Acts 17, verse 28 that I dwelled upon through four pregnancies. ‘”For in God we live and move and have our being,” as even some of your own poets have said. “For we too are his offspring.”’ 

That description is surely that of a foetus in the womb – surrounded, protected, nurtured and supported by its mother, whether or not it knows it.

Or from Psalm 131: ‘But I have calmed and quieted my soul, like a weaned child with its mother.’

Then there are the words ascribed to Jesus in Matthew 23, verse 37. ‘”Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings.”’

One Sunday I sat in church, breastfeeding my third baby as communion was offered to me with the words, ‘This is my body, broken for you.’ I was struck by the fact that my baby was feeding on me, and in a mysterious way, I was feeding on Christ. 

In the communion service we talk of broken body and shed blood that gives life – something very familiar to any woman who has given birth.

Weaving these images of God through my life as a mother over quarter of a century, I begin to learn, little by little, that God loves me, and everybody, better than the best parent.

This last week I have worked long hours and have regularly become completely overwhelmed by what needs to be completed before an utterly inflexible and very public deadline. At times I am so beset by all there is to do that I become immobilised and do nothing, or flit from task to task, never quite completing anything, scatter-brained and ineffective. One night I came home in tears of exhaustion and self-pity. The next ten days feel like a long dark tunnel that I will never get through.

This past week I have had to re-learn several things.

One: at times like these I realise I’m completely unambitious in terms of my day job. I never want to have one of those all-absorbing careers that you take home and eat, sleep and breathe. Living like that for a few weeks every 18 months is fine, but that’s enough. I am grateful to have a day job that I enjoy and that, although it takes the lion’s share of my time, doesn’t take over my head.

Two: that wisdom that grown-ups are meant to know and that despite my five and a half decades, I forget again and again – that this too shall pass. One way or another, in ten days this will all be over and my life will open out again with that delicious sense of spacious time I associate with the ending of exams. And, given past experience, the conference itself is unlikely to be an unmitigated disaster.

Most importantly, the lesson of perspective. Friday’s paper carried the horrific story of hundreds of workers killed in Bangladesh when their crumbling factory collapsed. These victims had baulked at entering the dangerous building and had been forced to do so with threats and even violence.

Not only do I have a job that won’t kill me, life is full of other wonders too. The various vines that swamp our back verandah are every autumn shade from lemon to gold to burnt orange to burgundy and shiraz. Walk in our front door and your eye is drawn down the long passageway straight to the French doors framing this fiery wonder. It is quite breath-takingly beautiful. Last night we went to a 49^th birthday party that turned out to be the surprise wedding of two dear friends. And yesterday we had the rare occurrence of four of our six kids-and-partners around our meal table. Life's good.

After I threw out half my clothes recently my husband took pity on me and, together with our older daughter, invested in a birthday gift of two very fine frocks from a shop I had often walked past wistfully and never dared to enter. I was reminded all over again of why I love this garment.

In summer, nothing is as cool (in both senses of the word) as a frock. There’s always something special about frocks, something that says fun, even if it’s a daggy old raggy old thing. 

For years, my frock of choice, especially for a working day, has been a classic shift – straight up and down which suited a straight up and down shape. I’ve had a silvery grey Country Road shift that I got second hand fifteen years ago, and I still dust it off every spring. One favourite navy linen shift that I found at an op shop lasted about a decade until it rotted and ripped at the back, one hot, sweaty day. Just as well it was lined.

I’ve never been one for your classic fifties-style shirt-waister, although they can look great and remind me of mum who looked elegant in such garments. I’m not averse to a floral occasionally, and I’ve recently got into those wonderful dresses that are extendable by having a tie at the back.

As a kid, my sister and I mostly wore hand-me-downs from other missionary kids and things mum made us which was fine until I went to boarding school when I was seven. There, apart from a bunch of locals who were daygirls, most of our peers were extremely wealthy, and got about in the coolest gear. We lived alongside stunning Parsi girls from Bombay, lustrous dark-haired beauties from Madras and, among others, the twin daughters of Oberoi who started the hotel chain.

It was the second half of the sixties and they would appear nonchalantly in mini skirts or bell-bottoms, with Jackie Onassis sunnies and, what made me most envious of all, what we used to call ‘Go-go watches’ – big, colourful time pieces with wide straps and bright colours, with outsize faces that were sometimes the shape of a flower. It was like being in San Francisco in the summer of love and being the only one in a tweed skirt and twin set and a lady like little wristwatch. It was torment. 

There was an occasion, and only one, however, when I turned heads, and I’ve never forgotten it. For craft one term we did dress making, and I created (sewing by hand, the only sewing machine in the school was an old treadle Singer that belonged to the school tailor) what felt like the height of sophistication – an ‘A-line’ dress that was the bright pink and hot yellow of the go-go watches I coveted so desperately. My frock was a sixties swirl of these colours, daringly short with wide sleeves. That week, when I changed out of my uniform every evening and donned my new creation, I garnered more compliments than I’d ever had in my life.

I remember thinking to myself – I was all of eleven – that it was almost worth living in the dull chrysalis of daggy missionary-kid gear for five years, just to get that much reaction when the butterfly me finally emerged. 

School in Australia was more of the same – on a scholarship at a private school alongside rich girls with up to the minute everything sartorial. But you get creative if you love clothes and don’t have much money. I and all our kids are op shop geniuses. You develop a kind of sixth sense for sales and for cheaper end department stores that have some surprisingly good stuff. 

I seldom buy clothes in what I think of as ‘real shops’ – shops that aren’t either second-hand or Target. But I am more than happy to accept a gift from a shop that is not only real, but even well, classy. 

My two birthday frocks are really a bit too good to wear to work, but I did anyway, to show them off. It was worth it too – it took me back to that wonderful episode when I was eleven and swanned around for an entire week in an A-line frock of bright pink and yellow.

I’ve not often thought of seventies buildings as attractive, but this one works. Sure, there’s a lot of brown brick, but there’s also good use of light, well-planned spaces, and for our girl (lucky enough to move out with two guys, who don’t seem to care where they sleep) the biggest bedroom with her own balcony looking through the branches of a tree to the quiet street beyond.

After her first night there, we arrived at the door fresh from the supermarket, bearing gifts: a plastic laundry basket laden with cleaning tools and products – stuff for washing clothes and toilets and dishes and floors, Panadol and band-aids, tomato sauce and apples and green tea bags and a big bright coffee mug, along with admonitions that the cleaning gear was not for the exclusive use of the only female in the establishment.

Over the next few days, I watched in amazement as our grotty teenager with the room where we haven’t seen the carpet in years, set up a home. Her bedroom was instantly pretty with artfully placed books and fairy lights and photos. The bathroom gleamed, the kitchen was homey with colourful canisters and candles and lamps, cushions and a low table, the little smoking area in the back courtyard was charming with its folding chairs and table made of milk crates.

Providentially, it was hard rubbish collection in the City of Moreland the week she moved out, and the kids set up their place largely courtesy of other people’s rubbish. A dated but perfectly serviceable sofa and two arm chairs, a brand new mop I found on our street, a complete seventies brown and orange dinner set from the mum of a friend. All week I scoured the pavements for chucked out milk crates with which, I’ve learned, you can make a bed base or a set of drawers.

One of the things I’ve most enjoyed about parenting grown kids is watching them move out and set up for themselves. I love visiting them on their territory, seeing how they arrange things and manage their lives, how they have somehow emerged from our did-our-best parenting into decent human beings who are very much themselves. 

Setting our girl up and sharing her excitement, also takes me back to the thrill of moving out of home ourselves. My bloke and I moved out of home to get married, so there was the added frisson of romance (we were kids of the seventies, we didn’t live together first) to the whole heady mix of new independence and setting up a nest. Wedding presents meant something back then, they were a dire necessity; we had nothing. We moved into our seriously ugly flat with a double mattress, a card table, some posters for the walls and a gorgeous old camphorwood chest that is still one of my favourite possessions. 

The flat was as ordinary as they come, but we thought we were Christmas. Like our daughter, we revelled in being grown-up, in paying rent and bills and having to fork up for every morsel on our card table, every roll of toilet paper.

My husband has been a lot more emotional than me about the emptying nest – he’s always been a big softie. Part of the thrill of moving kids out for me is the sheer revelling in more physical and psychological space, less chores to do, more time to read and write and be still and silent.

That’s part of the story. But the day after she moved, when we called round to drop off some stuff, I simply had to walk back to our house, timing exactly how long it took. Twenty-seven minutes. Perfect: close enough to drop by often, far enough to have our own space.

Much as I love this next stage of having more time and energy for the things other than mothering that I feel deeply called to, if I’m honest, I would like all my kids to move out to a maximum of 2.7 ks from our place. Perhaps her siblings, who have moved to Beechworth, London and the Isle of Mull could take note.

I shuck my clothes off and plunge in, there’s a minute of breath-gasping chill, and then it’s bliss for however long I choose to stay.

At first I swim hard upstream, making little headway against the current, till the shock of the cold has worn off. Then I strike over to the far bank and nose around there for a bit, before cruising back down with the flow and starting all over again, the water all around me like cool, liquid silk. 

We first exist surrounded by fluid in the womb, so it’s natural that we feel at home in that element. And it’s small wonder that rivers have always been special. They can deal death, but mostly they are life giving; throughout human history, settlements have been built along them, and they feature prominently in mythology and religion.

For the ancient Greeks, the River Styx formed the boundary between earth and Hades. In the country where I was born, bathing in the Ganges guarantees instant salvation, and liberation from the endless round of re-birth. 

In the Christian story, John baptised people in the Jordan River; even Jesus requested this rite of immersion representing repentance. Numerous soul-stirring gospel songs tell of crossing the river Jordan (death) to get to eternal life on the other side.

River Jordan is chilly and cold, hallelujah

Chills the body but not the soul, hallelujah.

The Jordan features in the Hebrew Scriptures with the wonderful story of Naaman  - a powerful military commander of the King of Syria, who suffered from leprosy. His wife’s Jewish slave girl said that his disease could be cured if he would just visit a prophet in her home country. When he did, the prophet Elisha told him he would be healed if he bathed seven times in the Jordan. The mighty Naaman was disdainful about this muddy creek – don’t we have gorgeous wide, glistening rivers at home? His servants told him to get over himself and just do what the man said and when he emerged from the murky waters ‘his flesh was restored like the flesh of a little child’, the story goes.

The Mitchell this year is somewhat Jordanesque. There has been recent rain and the water looks like strong milky tea. We lug it up to the campsite in buckets and, after it has sat for a while, a sludge of mud lines the bottom and, cavalierly, several of us drink from the top, ending up with crook tummies on our last day. 

Swimming in a bush river is when I have the most powerful sense of being one with the universe. I move at the river’s pace, silently. I am deeply embedded in the bush, but without any crashing around, as happens when I am walking. I see the duck, the water monitor, the swiftly flickering fish. The escarpment on the opposite bank, out of whose rock trees grow, looks benignly down on me. The tops of the hills are bathed in sunlight long before the river itself is – early morning there is whispy mist rising eerily off the water. 

For Hindus, moving water is considered purifying, as it is believed to both absorb and remove impurities. When I swim in a wild river, rather than moral impurities, the river seems to carry my troubles and anxieties away, buoying me up, reminding me of the eternal and surrounding me with a sense of my small, grateful place in the scheme of things.

Not to mention Jesus himself. If Jesus were genuinely human, he wouldn’t have known that it was all going to come out right in the end. He had a profound faith in God, and a sense that if he was true to his calling that was all that mattered, but I doubt Jesus went to his brutal betrayal and agonizing death thinking, ‘I just have to wait three days and it’ll be fine’. Being human, he would have felt confused and despairing. He wasn’t simply acting out a charade of death. He died.

To those who speak of God as some heartless, manipulative puppeteer, I want to paint a picture of an incarnate God who was born in poverty, a refugee before he was two, misunderstood and betrayed by his friends, persecuted by the political and religious authorities, and eventually tortured to death, feeling abandoned by the God he had endeavoured to follow.

I find this picture of Jesus more helpful than any glorious Jesus, golden and raised up and self-assured. When I read the daily litany of wars and natural disasters, apathy and self-interest, this is the God I want to worship. A deity who isn’t up in the sky, benignly or indifferently looking down, but whose heart is the first to break when human beings are wounded, bewildered or afraid.

When people in my community are knocked sideways by an early death, the sundering of a marriage, chronic depression, the mental illness or drug addiction of a teenage child, I want to share with them this wounded, vulnerable God who has experienced some of the depths of human pain.

So, we need Good Friday. But we need Easter Sunday too. Jesus’ resurrection isn’t simply a continuation of the beautiful and miraculous cycle of life we see every time there is a bush fire – with the new little pale green shoots bursting out of the charred wood of eucalypts.

Easter is a radical break with the life cycle. It is God saying not simply that life in some form will continue, but that God is stronger than death itself. That even if we destroy this planet for good and all, God will still be there, somehow bringing it all together in God’s love.

Clearly God does not reach down and stop a toppling building, halt a runaway train, or pluck one person out of the path of a tsunami. But I do believe that in the end, God will bring it all in, drying every tear, healing every hurt, making us whole, enabling us, at last, to be completely loving.

For me, the message of Good Friday is that God is there with us in the worst that the world can dish up. The message of Easter is that God, who seems so powerless in the day to day tragedies of human life, is ultimately the end point of every life, every striving, every suffering and every human heart.

 This piece was published in the April 2013 edition of Crosslight

In my days as a young mum, I was blessed with the friendship of some very special older women. There were several including one fabulous woman who didn’t like me at all and told me so, which was perhaps the quickest road to growing up I encountered in those years. But that’s another story.

In Portland there was Erica Meredith, a strikingly beautiful woman who lived with her husband Maurice, right on the shore of incomparable Bridgewater Lakes in the cottage her family had owned for generations. When life in a church house in the centre of a small town became too much for me, I would head for Bridgey and sit in Erica’s cottage garden, surrounded by tumbling nasturtiums and bold, bright, unpretentious geraniums and drink in her calm and sense of perspective along with cup after cup of tea. 

Once she popped in on me at our place where I was going into melt down trying to organise four little kids to get to a kinder session on time. She put an arm around me, held me close and said quietly, ‘You know what Clare? It doesn’t matter’.

Other times she and Maurice would pack a picnic and row the whole family over to the other side of the lake where we would swim and explore and boil the billy and our children would re-live the enchantment of Erica’s childhood in that lovely place. To be with them was to shed the pressures – real and self-imposed – of my day-to-day existence.

Another older woman that stands out was Barb Hindson. When Barb and her husband Graeme moved up to tiny Mount Beauty, where we had our first two kids, we quickly became close. I was in awe of her toughness, her wisdom, her sense of humour. She hadn’t had it easy. One of their four children was killed in an accident when he was eight. Her disabled brother died in the years we were closest.

Barb was way ahead of me on the road. About a quarter of a century older chronologically, she was grown up in a way that only comes from years of rich living and from suffering. She could be irreverent and straight with people in a manner that completely eluded the twenty-something me, insecure and hooked into being nice as I was. She was deep and funny, a woman of faith who gave me hope that maybe, just maybe with a bit of luck and a lot of hard work, I would emerge from young womanhood and the fog of child-rearing with a few of her qualities. 

When I was at my wits end, both these women showed me by example the wonderful truth that ‘this too will pass’. These days, I would probably call them mentors.

Unfortunately, of course, the good things pass too. Barb died of cancer when she was 54.  She had had melanoma before we got to know her, was in remission and hoping for cure, but it got her in the end.

Because of her death, 54 has always seemed a highly significant age to me. After 54, every year feels like a bonus. And by 54, I thought I might be, well, a tiny bit as wise as Barb.

Saturday was my 54^th birthday and, although I do feel a different person in many ways, I’m still waiting for wisdom which I suspect may never come to quite the extent I hoped when I was 27. What has come, among other good things, is an even more profound sense of gratitude for the remarkable older women with whom I’ve shared seasons of my life. And the appreciation of the last lesson Barb taught me – that after 54, every day is a bonus.

Pregnancies aside, I’ve been roughly the same size and shape since puberty. But now I’ve reached that time in every woman’s life (unless she’s Quentin Bryce, Jerry Hall, or suffering from malnutrition) when she realises she is never going to get back into the size 10 clothes that have fitted her perfectly well since she turned 14.

I am trying hard to be zen about this, and not succeeding. I hate it. My entire wardrobe suits someone with a boyish figure. Being trim is part of my identity. I know I’m not overweight but I can’t accept, not what I see in the mirror so much as what I feel around my chest and thickening waist and thighs. Suddenly there is a belly there that is nonretractable. In the past, a modest belly waxed and waned with the time of the month and whatever I’d been eating, but if the occasion or outfit required, it could be hauled smartly back into place. Not any more. 

I hate that I am so preoccupied with this. I’ve always enjoyed the different sizes and shapes of human bodies, male and female. It’s not that I feel fat. It’s just that I don’t feel me. And I can’t fit into any of my clothes. 

At work, I have been reduced to five frocks (my old pants and skirts are out of the question) four of which are black and one grey. They go on circulation every damn week, and as the hot weather goes on and on, I am becoming heartily sick of them.

No doubt the lovely colleague who shares an office with me is too. She is a few years older than me and gave me some sage advice when I told her about the multitude of too-tight garments in my clothes cupboard. ‘Get rid of them, Clare,’ she advised. ‘Give them away, throw them out. Otherwise, they’ll just hang there reproachfully, making you feel bad.’

Pondering what she said was a bit of a turning point. Despite being a pretty good purger of possessions, for years I’ve kept clothes on the off chance that I might just wear them again some day. Now I am starting to accept that that is unlikely I will ever fit into them, I might as well get them out of the house.

I have begun wholesale chucking out. My wardrobe has long been full of second hand or cheap clothes that never quite worked, others that have yellowing underarms, thin elbows or saggy bottoms. My daughters get to have a pick through and then they are bagged up for the op shop.

I can’t believe how liberating this is. The pile of rejects grows and grows and my cupboard looks spare and organised and unburdened.

Best of all, I now have the perfect excuse to buy something new! This weekend, I stumble upon a small shop ten minutes walk from my house. I am lured in by the rack of $10 clothes on the pavement. Then I go inside and I see, marked down for the end of summer, a row of dresses and skirts that are what I’ve been looking for all over Melbourne. Clothes that look okay on middle-aged bodies without being matronly.

I have a lovely time trying them on with help from the sweet, un-pushy young woman behind the counter and end up buying more items than I have every bought in one hit in my life.

I come back and try them on again, half suspecting that they might have shrunk on the walk home, but they still fit and still look fresh and comfortable. I hang them in the empty space in my wardrobe and they are bright and cheery and help me realise that although I may have gone up a dress size, I’m still me. 

‘She’s picking up fish and chips,’ he replied, and hastened to add that this was his own request. Which was very sweet of him, but he and I both know that, much as he adores fish and chips, he made that request partly because he knows how hard I find it to cook.

It had been a big week, both in our family and at my work, and I was exhausted and flat, but still, not cooking something yummy for your partner’s birthday? Any other happily coupled person would have made the effort. Me? I was only too eager to be let off the hook.

I’ve never been much of a chef. When we were kids, my older sister and I worked well together because she liked to cook and I preferred to clean up afterwards.

I remember my father-in-law, the dearest but least domesticated of men, saying to me as he watched me juggle a new born and a bunch of little kids with getting a cheap, nutritious meal on the table, ‘It must be so relentless, having to think of something to eat every night, and then producing it.’ Ain’t that the truth.

I’ve never had to cook every night, as my bloke has always, since childhood, positively enjoyed the culinary arts. He experiments with new recipes all the time, or invents his own; I’m lucky to have four or five standards that I can churn out week after week. We had a couple of years not so long ago, where we had six adults living at our place and we catered one night each, which was heaven.

Having always struggled in the kitchen, 27 years of cooking for a family killed stone cold dead any interest I might have had. I am, quite simply, over it. These days, I positively loathe cooking. The very thought of creating something to eat makes me feel physically ill.  I can just about manage big, hearty soups, and over the last few years when there was mainly just me and one daughter at home, that was what we lived on. Corn thins, soup, and salads.

Several of our kids are keen cooks, our oldest is so in love with cooking that despite being ill at the moment and consequently unable to eat much at all, she still relaxes by cooking for other people. It makes her happy just preparing the food and watching others enjoy it. 

Truth to tell, I am not much good at most of the traditional wifely arts. I don’t sew. I barely garden. I don’t do craft. The one domestic chore I do love is cleaning – anything from toilets (which I find particularly satisfying) to carpets, dishes to clothes. I especially enjoy hanging washing on the line.

I’ve always loved bringing in a wage, although I stayed home for a dozen years or more when the kids were little. I’ve never been that good with kids in general, but I made a reasonable fist of raising my own – mainly by spending hours with them doing the things I loved best – reading and walking.

So, we have muddled along over the years. These days, I am more accepting of my limitations in general. I know I have to cook from time to time, but I have stopped beating myself up about the fact that I don’t enjoy it. 

As for my husband, the one who doesn’t get something special cooked for him on his birthday, he treats my inadequacies with affection and good humour, thank goodness. Maybe he concentrates on being grateful that there are things I am happy to do, and do well. Like cleaning the toilet.

As a devout Jew, Jesus would have been steeped in the idea of meal as both powerful ritual and the heart of family and tribe. And the meal stories about Jesus illustrate all sorts of things. He invited himself back to Zaccheus’ house showing that the despised tax collector was forgiven, healed and once again part of the community. At a wedding he attended with his mum, Jesus changed water into wine for the guests, averting social disgrace. He regularly shared food and conversation with his close friends Martha, Mary and Lazarus.

Jesus was further criticized because he had meals with the dodgiest people: ‘He eats with tax collectors and sinners,’ his enemies said. He hung out with lepers and harlots too, not to mention less isolated but equally powerless groups such as women and children.

At the swanky dinner party of a powerful man, he advised him to invite not his friends and social equals, but ‘the poor, the crippled, the lame and the blind’. At another high end nosh up he shocked his host by welcoming a prostitute who poured expensive perfume on his feet and wiped them dry with her hair.

There is the beautiful story of the time Jesus somehow, mysteriously, satisfied the hunger of a crowd of thousands who had come to hear him speak, starting with one small packed lunch. A parable suggesting that with God’s blessing, our meager resources can become an abundance.

In a post-resurrection story, two of Jesus friends are walking along the road to Emmaus, devastated and fearful, when a stranger joins them. He converses with them about the bewildering events that have swept them up. It isn’t until they stop for the night, however, and the stranger is breaking bread, that they recognize Jesus – as though this was one of his most distinctive actions.

One of the last things he did before his death was share a Passover meal with his followers, and it is no accident that one of the sacraments Christians around the world celebrate 2000 years later is a meal, the reenactment of this ‘Last Supper’. Eucharist, the Lord’s Supper, Communion, Mass, whatever the label, is what Christians gather around, what forges them into community, what feeds them on the journey of faith and fills them with God’s presence and love.

In one communion liturgy, the Eucharist is referred to as ‘a foretaste of the heavenly banquet’. Sometimes I picture ‘heaven’, whatever that is, as a vast meal with God, where all are welcome and equal and satisfied and where God is the host, watching God’s loved children like a mother at the family table.