Reader Dani commented on the Rules of Life post I did a while back and pointed me to Marion Winik’s “Rules for the Unruly”.

Rule #5: be gentle with your parents.

A reminder of much worth, I think. Our parents need our gentleness and we need the full, whole feeling that we get when we give it to them.

Part of the reason I can be rough and impatient with mine: I find it difficult watching my parents get older…and slower. It coincides with life speeding up beyond what most of us can deal with.  For their kids, the two paces – ours and theirs – often grate. When I see my parents I have to consciously slip into third gear. Otherwise I might just self-combust as they ask me again for directions to my house. Or bicker about who’s fault it was that mum’s glasses were left in the car.

It’s also…what’s the right word…. dispiriting (?) a reminder of our mortality (?) to see our parents become the vulnerable ones. They were always the authority. They knew shit. It’s hard to swap the roles. But the passing of the baton is really significant. I’ve been able to be far more gentle with mine since I’ve picked up the baton.

PS in the pic above Dad can’t follow the card game and does the same dumb move over and over. Or something like that.

PPS the pic below…when M and D were in their teens…D trying some dumb move on M.

This week I’m (still) quitting sugar

Again, a quick note for readers of this blog who’ve been following my “I quit sugar” posts, this might seem like I’m repeating myself…I kinda did for my Sunday Life column readers. For those of you playing catch up on this topic, you can read other “I quit sugar” posts, like  my interview with David Gillespie here, the reasons why sugar makes us fat here, how I quit sugar here and some breakfast ideas here.

I quit sugar a few weeks back, to see if it made me a nicer, less cranky, agitated person, and wrote about it here in this column. I got a lot of feedback asking how I actually did it, so I thought I’d do a follow-up . I’m now able to report back from the sugar-free frontline that I’m doing OK. Many studies say it takes 21 days to overcome a habit. I’m over the hump. And the subsequent dip. And off the cranky, saccharin addicted rollercoaster for good, I reckon.

In the process, though, I’ve had to be really careful I didn’t become one of those bores who reads nutritional labels before accepting a potato crisp and who quotes guilt-inducing food factoids at dinner parties. As a colleague Nicole said, “I’d rather sit next to a funeral director than someone on a diet”. I don’t know, the last time I sat next to a dieter at a dinner I got to eat her leftover cheesy potatoes and the parson’s nose from her chicken (anyone else share my salivatory obsession with parson’s noses? No…?).

That said I couldn’t help myself and have been spurting startling “did you knows” all week. How about I share some of them with you now?

Did you know a glass of apple juice contains as much sugar as a glass of coke (about 10 teaspoons)? And did you know there’s more sugar in barbeque sauce (55 per cent sugar) than in chocolate topping?

“Write the book that pulls you out of bed every night like a secret friend, waiting to be met.”

I post this by way of follow-up from my previous post. It’s  from Australian author Louisa Deasey.

Louisa – whose book Love and Other -Turns came out a few months back; I haven’t read it but I reckon many of you would’ve – posted this thought on one of my blog posts a while back. It was kind of her at the time. It’s fitting just now.

What a lofty contribution to make! To produce something that sits there quietly, ready for when others need to have a part of themselves reflected back at them, to be met with recognition and the hug of common experience. All creative contributions are just that – expressions not of the author/artist but of the collective. Art or books simply say, “don’t you reckon”? and “don’t worry, you’ve been seen” and “you’re not alone in that thought”.

It’s a lofty aim. But nice to reach for.

Thank you to everyone who shared their questions and answers over the past few days. I’m heartened and  just so friggen touched (I hovered for a less cheesy word, I promise I did) by the way we humans reach out to each other. We walk around with impressive, clean masks. But mostly we want to get messy with what lies behind. Thanks for giving me an insight into what’s behind your masks…and for showing me what you see when I scratch away the veneer of mine!