Since I’ve arrived in Melbourne, I feel like I have been inundated by meeting after meeting that has included babies. Most of Chris’s friends are married and have children, so I guess I can’t really avoid the presence of babies. It’s not that I don’t like babies; I actually love seeing their faces with their fat little cheeks, and playing with them is always fun and makes me reminisce about simpler times. It’s more that I get really bored listening to baby talk. It’s as though I need to pretend I am interested in every tiny detail in every child’s life – what his first word was, where it happened, and when; what he likes and doesn’t like to eat; what his favorite toys or cartoon characters are; what his sleeping schedule is like and how easy he is when being put to sleep.

Once people have children, their lives tend to revolve around them, and their sense of individuality tends to go away because their main priority is their child. I can’t really blame them for that because your children should be your priority, but where is the balance between being a parent and being a real person with interests of one’s own? I never want to be the parent whose children completely consume her life, and I wouldn’t be able to talk about myself and my own desires and feelings about life.

Maybe one day, I will be the parent who decides that my career isn’t that important (likely because I may be fed up by corporate life and the inane expectations that men hold of working women, and worse, that other women hold of working women balancing motherhood) and reduce my hours to part-time, or just give up working in the corporate world in general. I never really “believed” in this before, but because I am getting closer to an age where children are a tangible reality, I am more empathetic of women who put their children before their career. Or maybe one day, I will learn to fully balance a full-time, rewarding career with raising my children; I’m honestly not sure yet. But one thing I know that I will strive to do is to retain my individuality and not become that mother who is just a mother. I still want to be all the other things I am – a wife, lover, daughter, niece, sister (I am still Ed’s sister even if he isn’t in our form), friend, colleague, helper, writer, photographer, card-maker, scrapbooker, organizer, cook, baker, and everything else I can’t remember right now.

Ed came to visit again. I guess it’s like a monthly thing for him now to pay me a visit when I least expect it and when I am not consciously asking.

In the first dream, he has said that he decided not to die. He was taking it upon himself to improve and build a better life for himself. He was planning on opening a business of some sort, either a restaurant or a store, and wanted me to be happy for him.

In the second dream, I know he is dead. When I walk into my parents’ sun room, actually filled with lots of sunlight for once, I see him there, standing and facing me. I burst into tears and run up to him to hold him, and he initially gets squeamish and tries to avoid me, but finally gives in because he knows I won’t take no for an answer. I am sobbing, telling him how much I miss him and wish he could be one of us again. I tell him I’m not sure I can be happy. He chuckles and tells me to stop being so dramatic.

And then I wake myself up crying. This is really exhausting. Is this going to be a regular way that I wake up for the rest of my life?

When significant people in my life and the lives of loved ones pass, I always tend to spend time wondering what we are all really living for. Everyone has reasons for the choices they make – why they chose their school or profession, why they like vanilla more than strawberry, or why they chose one shirt over another in the morning. But how often is it that we actually stop and ask ourselves what we are really living for? For the people in our lives who make us miserable, why do we continue to associate with them? For the jobs that work us like slaves and give us little benefits, why do we not exert the short term efforts of finding a new one for a long term gain?

Uncle Bob made a lot of choices that I told him I thought were odd. Why stay in a loveless, hate-filled marriage and continue to see that person every day and partly support them? Why spend all day and night caring for your terminally ill mother when you don’t get any pleasure from it, and you see it as a true hindrance to living a real life, and you know there are many options that could better care for her than you as a single person could? Maybe some of us are programmed to be such creature of habits that we just seem to accept misery and pain as a necessary and even integral part of our lives, even something that we oddly subconsciously crave because we are so used to it.

I’m in New Zealand, arguably the most beautiful country in the world right now. Uncle Bob loved travel but never got the chance to visit Australia or New Zealand. He did say he wanted to see it someday, but now that someday will never happen. I’m sure he would have loved this. In the midst of all this beauty, I feel sad and silent thinking about the fact that he will never have the opportunity to come here in this human form. At least Ed via Bart gets to visit New Zealand. Who will allow Bob to vicariously live through themselves to experience more earthly life than he was allowed in his own flesh and blood?

Tomorrow, we’re leaving for New Zealand , the land of kiwi fruit and kiwi birds, endless green, turquoise bodies of water, and Lord of the Rings fame. Chris among others have called this the most beautiful country on earth, so I have very high expectations when we arrive that will need to be met.

Ed probably never thought I would take him to New Zealand. I suppose he was never really that curious about the world, so maybe he was one of those people who may not even know where New Zealand was on a map. We are planning to go canyon swinging, and Chris is planning to keep him in his zipped up pocket during the fall and swing. Queenstown is one of the adventure capitals of the world, and though Ed may have hated it when he was in our form, he has no choice but to jump with us now.

I had my first bout of allergies in my life when I came to Melbourne last December. In the last 27 years of my life, I’d never sneezed or wheezed or coughed no matter where I was due to pollen or flowers or grass. That was just a misfortune that my parents and Ed always had to grapple with that I did not. When they were sneezing and blowing their noses and battling watery blearly eyes, I was clear-eyed and clear-nosed (if that’s a word). So when I got here and immediately felt cold symptoms – runny and stuffy nose, coughing, phlegm – I just thought it was a cold and treated it as such.

So now, I am back in Melbourne for Christmas, and after spending a nice few hours outside for lunch in Chris’s friends’ backyard, I am a bit stuffy and runny, taking Telfast to soothe my little nose. My mom, being the mom she always is, warned me over the phone yesterday to bring a sweater or jacket everywhere I go, “because you don’t want to get sick again like you did last year!” I responded that it wasn’t a cold and that it was actually allergies. She had me on speaker phone, so in the background, my dad heard this and mumbles, “It’s not allergies. She’s never had allergies before!”

Yes, I’ve never had allergies before in San Francisco or Boston or New York or virtually any other place I’ve traveled to before. But Melbourne is a different place in a different hemisphere in a different part of the world. I’d never been here before and discovered something new about myself. And maybe if my dad decided to make the trip out here and were exposed to the pollen of the Australian northerly winds, he wouldn’t be saying that his little daughter having allergies would be an impossibility.

I guess that’s what happens. The more you travel, the more you learn about the world – and yourself. And when you don’t, in many ways, you are closed off from that world and the inner parts of yourself.