I thought that I could win the Memoir Competition and I did. I thought I could make the cross country team and I did. I thought I could play third grade piano pieces while in preliminary and I can. But could I really make it into an OC class ... with just a little will-power?

It was a Thursday morning earlier this year. Mum was busy with the house work when the phone rang. It was Matthew's mother ringing to tell Mum about an OC class which was starting up at a nearby school. Mum hung up the phone and it rang again. It was Joseph's mother also ringing to tell Mum about the OC class.

On the Thursday afternoon Mum picked me up from my music lesson and said, "I have to ask you a favour." She told me about the OC class.

"Guess what!" I squealed to my brother and sisters. "I'm going to a new school."

The next day at school I wrote in my diary:

Dear Diary,

Yesterday Mum told me about an OC class at STAG Public School. Some time next week I will be taking a test to see if I can go there. If I pass the first test I will have to take another test and if I pass that I will get in. I hope I get in even though I will miss St Elizabeths.

When I got my diary back from the teacher, he had written: "We'll miss you too, but good luck, its a great opportunity."

"A great opportunity," he had written. I knew I could make it.

As time dragged on, I kept waiting for news of the test. I knew that there would be two tests. One would be reading and comprehension. I was glad because reading is my best subject, not to mention my favourite. The other test would be an IQ test. I didn't know what that one would be like. I didn't even know what the subject would be.

Finally I got the news that the test was to be early the next week. I was so excited. In my diary I wrote:

Dear Diary,

Yesterday afternoon Mum met us at the bus stop. Earlier she had received a phone call that the tests would be early next week. I can't wait.

But 'early next week' had passed and I still hadn't had the tests. I was disappointed. One morning Mum and I spoke to the principal of STAG Public School. We found out that the tests would definitely be the next Monday.

Monday arrived. That morning I started off very snappy because I was so nervous. We had to be there at 9.30. When I got there I met Joseph and Matthew. They were also in my class at St Elizabeths. About forty people were there. We went into a room and the teacher told us about the IQ test. I had butterflies in my stomach, but I knew I could make it.

The test was very hard. There were seventy two questions and there were only forty minutes to answer them. I started off very fluttery. My mind kept wandering when I couldn't think of an answer instantly. I found myself thinking "Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!" when I couldn't get an answer about some chickens. Gradually I calmed down and found the work a little easier. Soon it was "Time up" and I hadn't finished all of the questions. My trouble is that I am a perfectionist. I was so anxious to get every question I did correct that I double checked every answer. I wasn't worried though, since I had done my best and that was all I could do. I wasn't sure if the others had finished. In fact, I saw quite a lot of people either quickly finish the question they were on, or groan and put their pencils down.

Matthew, Joseph and I went out to recess. Unlike everyone else we still hadn't done the comprehension test. After the IQ test everyone went home with eager parents but we stayed back and played handball with another girl. She was very good (I was hopeless).

After recess we went back into the classroom. I had expected to be nervous again but the butterflies had disappeared. Instead, I was confident. I knew that reading was and still is my best subject. I had very high hopes. The test was quite easy, although I ended up reading the passages two or three times to get all the answers. I finished the test long before "Time up".

On the Thursday of that week I was meant to get the results. I ran home from the bus stop. "What did I get?" I yelled. "I haven't got the results yet," Mum replied. "They're always late!" I exploded.

On Friday I was finally told that I would get the results that day. "Call me at school with the good news," I begged Mum.

In class that day the teacher's phone rang. "It must be Mum," I thought. "Christopher, your mother said that you have to take the bus home," said the teacher. It wasn't Mum. I began to think that she must have thought it would be better to actually tell me at home. Well, I could understand that.

At the end of the day I rushed outside, eager to get home quickly. To my surprise, I saw Dad. I ran to him. "All day I've been waiting but Mum never called the school!" I exclaimed breathlessly.

"Libby, Mum called me at work. You didn't make it," he said. "Why?" I thought. Then Dad added, "You have to have an IQ of at least 120. Since you didn't finish the questions, the ones you missed were counted as wrong. Only eighteen people got in."

Then all the hopes and expectations I'd had came crashing down around me. I felt like a big load had been put on my shoulders and I couldn't shake it off.

Mum met us in the garage at home. She hugged me. "Oh well," she sighed, "you're on the same level as us now. Dad and I never even got to try out for an Opportunity Class. You're a very special girl." I burst into tears.

A while later I was sitting on my bed. I was thinking that I had always learnt some people had lots of gifts and some people didn't have as much. I also knew that if you used your gifts God would reward you. I had used my gifts as much as possible. It wasn't fair.

"So I was slow," I thought. "Who cares? They call it an Opportunity Class. Well, what was the BIG opportunity if only the super-advanced students could get in? And who needs it anyway?"

Matthew and Joseph did get into the OC class. I have been writing to Matthew and he has been telling me about the things that he is doing in the OC class.

I have thought a lot about that day. Not getting into the OC class has taught me that not everything can be yours. I'd tried my hardest but I know now that I can't always succeed. I learned that the hard way. If I had succeeded I wouldn't have learned it properly. I know that however big that opportunity was to be, there will be many more opportunities to come. At my own school I am in the debating team, I am learning the descant recorder and soon to learn the treble recorder and hopefully be part of the Year 6 band, my school is entering Tournament of the Mind so I will try to get into the team, I will continue to enter writing competitions. Opportunities!!!

Libby Hyett (10)

In life there often occur things that change one's life forever and that leave its victims asking "why? why did this have to happen to me?" Such a thing happened to my family and me (well, it actually happened to my father) when I was but four years old.

I'll start from the beginning. Mum and Dad, as a young couple, bought a small house in Parkerville, a suburb in the hills at Perth. Together they planned to build onto and improve their house, sharing their dreams and wishes. Dad travelled to Fremantle every day to work very hard as an accountant. He was becoming very successful. Then something happened that brought their happy nine year marriage, their dreams and wishes and Dad's successful accounting to a halt.

When I was four, I remember Dad going to hospital for a period of five days. I was confused for I didn't know what was happening. I noticed Mum was a bit anxious and unhappy but I ignored it. My young brain couldn't work anything out. This was the year Dad was diagnosed with Motor Neurone Disease (MND), a disease that, I think, gradually weakens the muscles.

Faintly in my memory I can see Dad on his crutches. I took Dad on his crutches almost blindly, I didn't really think about it at all. Whenever I think of Dad on crutches, I think of the time he slipped on the cement and cut his head just above his eyebrow.

After a short while, Dad's crutches changed to a wheelchair. Even at this time I didn't know the name of Dad's disease, nor did I understand it. I can see me pushing Dad's wheelchair and Dad wheeling beside the computer and telling me how to do a few things like playing music on the computer. That was real fun.

By the time we moved to a small country town called Kondinin, which was when I was six and a half, Dad was in an electric wheelchair. I don't remember much of Dad's crutches or 'push' wheelchair, but I have lots of memories of Dad being in an electric wheelchair. When I was seven, I became more aware of Dad's position. I learned the name of his disease and I made myself a definition of it, which is the one I gave earlier on. I think the reason that I thought more about Motor Neurone Disease when I was seven was that everyone in the school asked me questions about Dad. "Why's your Dad in a wheelchair? Was your Dad in an accident?" they asked. I remember the anger I felt when people said to me, "your Dad's lucky to be in an electric wheelchair."

Now all through this I've been talking about Dad. But all MND victims need a carer. And Dad's carer is Mum. People dismiss and don't think about carers too easily. Picture this: you are at home twenty four hours a day, unable to work as your job is a carer. You are responsible for every detail of your patient's life. You often sleep restless nights as every night you have to wake up simply because your patient needs to roll over. That's the life of a carer.

Although I was aware of MND and Dad at the age of seven, it wasn't until I was eight that the jigsaw pieces of Mum and Dad's life began to form a picture. Whenever I saw Mum working really hard or 'stressed out' and Dad sitting limp in his chair it triggered a feeling of pain in my heart. It was also this year that something happened which changed my opinion of MND completely.

We were driving home from town. I was getting a little bored so I started to fiddle. I picked up a bunch of papers stapled together. It was a magazine about MND. I started to read it. I wasn't really paying any attention to it until one sentence caught my eye. "This fatal disease..." it read. "Wait a minute," I thought, "this can't be right. I know MND gets worse and worse but it doesn't lead to death ... does it?" I read the paragraph again, then again, then once more. For a while I just sat there, staring at the paper. Then I asked Mum quietly, "Mum, is Motor Neurone Disease fatal?" "Yes," Mum replied, "some people die after two years, sometimes, like Stephen Hawking (Stephen Hawking is a famous scientist who has had MND for twenty five years) they live for much longer." The rest of the drive home was silent.

Another thing that happened to me when I was eight happened after Mum played in the grand final of netball in Narembeen. There was a man in a bus who started making rude and nasty comments about Dad being in a wheelchair. After telling him what she thought of him, Mum tearfully left that terrible person and went back to our car. I felt bad just being in the car with Mum on the way home.

Not all my memories of Dad's electric wheelchair are negative. I remember Dad giving my friends rides on the back of his wheelchair at home and school, and the smile on Dad's face as he did a wheely, my friend gripping onto the handles.

When I was nine, I understood more and more how Mum and Dad felt. I became more conscious of the times Mum becomes upset. At these times I want to comfort her, but my mouth can't seem to talk to her and my legs won't move towards her. Instead I either cower to my room or escape to the refuge of the bush. I always say to myself, "next time I'll put my arm around Mum and tell her everything will be fine, next time, I will."

A few weeks ago, we dropped Dad off at the hospital because we were going to Perth and we didn't want to put Dad through the discomfort of the bumpy road on the way to Perth, just so he could sit around when we got there. At the room he stayed in, there was a guy who wouldn't stop talking about his disability and an old man who looked very grim and resigned to the world. When we left the hospital, I had a lump in my throat so big a bulldozer wouldn't be able to remove it.

Nobody would really understand what Mum and Dad went through unless they were with them twenty four hours a day. People don't realise Dad can't do even the simple things in life you wouldn't think twice about.

I am now ten and the subject of MND crosses my mind almost every day. I don't properly know about it, for it is difficult to ask questions. It is six years since Dad was diagnosed with MND and he is steadily losing the use of his electric wheelchair.

Many people ask me how I feel about Dad. I always simply say to them, "I'm used to it." Well, here's your real answer. Dad is DAD, a Dad who is always there and one I couldn't want any more from. And nothing in the world makes me feel better than to see Dad, and also Mum, laugh or smile.

Leissa Pegrum (age 10)

There are some things that happen in your life that change you forever. It is a time when three words could have changed a life, so many people's lives, and a time that, regardless of how successfully you can move on from, always manages to come back to haunt you, over and over again.

Some friendships are made without haste. Two people are drawn to one another by some unusual twist of fate and a bond is formed that possesses a depth that neither you, nor they can fully understand, or begin to express. So was the forming of my friendship with 'David' [name changed]. Words, it seemed, were not even necessary for our heart-felt communication. There were things that he didn't ever tell me, nor did he have to, they were just things that I always seemed to know.

When you look back on the past, there always seems that there was so much more that you could have done back then, but for some unknown reason you didn't do any of it. There were words you could have said, a friendly ear you could have offered, to sound out the internal sadness that your friend was experiencing. But, regardless of how much you long to be able to turn back time, it is still, as of yet, not humanly possible.

There are some things for which you can never be prepared, and in my life, it was when a friend of mine hated life so much that he decided that it simply was no longer worth living.

David had never told me verbally that he wanted to die, it was something I had known, something that I felt deep inside. Perhaps I should have listened more, said the right words to help get his life back on track, or maybe, just maybe, even have said to him, "Don't do it, Dave, just don't do it."

I didn't ever tell David not to do it. I often wonder if I had said those words, if I had given him a reason not to take his life, that he may still even be alive today.

On the second of May, 1991, a friend of mine, David Kevin T., took his life. With a sawn-off shot-gun, he blew himself into oblivion. I saw him just moments before he died, saw the two cartridges that most probably ended his life, and the last three words that he said to me will be etched into my memory forever. "Get the gun," no goodbyes, no words of distress or pain. I was stupid enough not to say three very important words back to him. Maybe if I had said, "Don't do it," he wouldn't have, and maybe his, mine, his friends' and family's lives wouldn't have been changed, and in some respects destroyed, for ever.

You see, it isn't until it is too late that you see the light of hope, the moments when you could have literally changed history, and made the world a better place for someone to live. Too many people keep on telling themselves that "there is always tomorrow" ... sometimes there isn't. Sometimes that very person that you had meant to tell how much they had meant to you, that you loved them, and that they make a difference in your life, doesn't make it through to see another day. For some people 'tomorrow' ceases to exist.

You learn a lot when someone you love dies. David was a person that had the ability to make people laugh. What so many of those people didn't realise was that his smile was only a mask for a growing sadness. I'd like to be able to say that I think that suicide is stupid - suicide does hurt so many people, but it was David's suicide that has eventually given me a reason to keep on living. It took me a year-and-a-half to cope with the grief, and it was only then that I was able to find a positive aspect from the experience, that would make me a better person.

There are people out there that need me - my friends, my family, and though you may not realise it when your depression hits an all time low, maybe, if you let it, 'tomorrow' can be a new day. Maybe tomorrow things may take a turn for the better. For, though it may not feel like it sometimes, life does go on.

Wendy Bray (age 17)

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This page updated: 23 January 2006 Webmaker: Howard Smith. hsmith4@une.edu.au