Is It Just Me?

by Chrissie Swan

  I have a friend who is fleshy and Dutch. She’d be a tulip. That’s a no-brainer. But what kind of flower represents the infectious hilarity of my friend who calls his mouth the “foodhole” and took my old corgi cross out for a nightcap? Or the sassiness of one gal pal who, in her newly single twenties, would lay back in her bed after she’d finished with her prey and point a languid finger to a Post-it note with the number of a taxi service on it (no words, just that languid finger)?

  And what of my best friend, to whom no flower could ever do justice? There’s just not a floral equivalent of her loyalty, quirkiness and empathy.

  Sure, my friends come in all sorts of colours and often arrive at my place in bunches, but that’s where the similarity to flowers ends.

  I’m not proud to confess that, as my life has become fuller, my gang of friends has become smaller. Wilted. I never wanted this to happen. I just sort of looked up one day and they’d shuffled away. I have a small clutch of stayers – friends who still want to talk to me about my vegie patch/penchant for burnt-fig ice-cream/need for enormous handbags, but the truth is, I’m kinda boring. I probably would’ve stopped answering my calls, too. I spend all my time at the radio station, at home (I like to call it “The Compound”) with my kids or doing important stuff like driving to strangers’ houses in suburbs I’ve never heard of to pick up bouncinettes, ExerSaucers and vintage school desks from eBay that are “pick-up only”. You know, all the important things.

  I actually used to be a really top-notch friend. Ten years ago BC (before children), my ground-floor apartment in a groovy inner city cul-de-sac was home to great parties, generous home-cooked feeds and smoky all-night gabfests. I liked to lay it all on – so much that I had to cut back from bottles to casks … you know, so I could make the rent. My friends were beloved. And I saw so much of them! A few times a week we’d meet to tear strips off a reality TV show together or spin the lazy Susan at our local Chinese restaurant. These days I’m lucky to tap out a text once a week. And I’m actually okay with that.

  I mean, sure, I miss the no-holds-barred fun I used to have with my old friends. But the fact is, the person I was ten years ago would have nothing in common with the person I am today, and the same probably applies to those friends who have moved on from me for more interesting pastures. The 28-year-old Chrissie would be bored stiff with my current chatter about variable interest rates and Leo calling his little Casio piano keyboard his “punano”. I’m bored just thinking about it. I’m drooping. Someone please cut my stem and empty one of those sachets in my water.

  No. Friends are not like flowers. Friends are, I have come to the conclusion, more like diners. And my life is the restaurant.

  When my social life was new and shiny and freshly open for business, you could get a table without a booking and just walk in off the street. I was cheap and cheerful and definitely BYO. Sure! Bring your friends, I’ll squeeze them in. Over the years the restaurant has certainly become busier. Getting a table is much harder now. Some days the blinds stay shut. All. Day. Long.

  I have regular customers who eat here every single day. My family. And their tables are just not up for grabs. Ever. But still, there are the good tables by the window and they’re reserved for the small group of smiley diners who’ve been around since opening night. For some reason they keep coming back to my restaurant, even though the service is hit-and-miss and the food is often uninspired (or burnt, or made by the clever Indian fellow down the road and passed off as my own).

  Yep. And still they come, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the bonkers maître d’ has a Farex-encrusted cardigan and doesn’t stop banging on about her vegie patch and burnt-fig ice-cream and her need for enormous handbags.

  8th April 2012

  Logies vs Lego

  On Logies night I will be swapping my usual Sunday-evening attire of a leopard-print Snuggie and mismatched sports socks for a shiny navy gown. I’ve scored an invitation to the Logies – TV’s “night of nights” – and, truth be told, it’s a gorgeous evening, so it’s nice to have “an airing”, as Gran used to say.

  As you can imagine, the transition from a Sunday night spent watching 60 Minutes and trawling Coles Online to trundling up a red carpet in borrowed jewels and a pinchy wedge heel is not the easiest thing to pull off with two tiny children and two jobs.

  A little while ago I was approached to be in a glossy magazine article about my Logies prep. They imagined a four-page spread highlighting the treatments, pills and potions I invest in weeks before the ceremony. Much to their disappointment, I told them they could probably fit this exposé on the contents page, as my preparation involves roughly three steps: get a dress; put it on; go to Logies.

  Actually, that’s a lie. I do squeeze in a nice bouncy blow wave, too. Best $50 a gal can spend and I do like big hair – it goes with the rest of me. The glossy went with Jessica Marais in the end, I think. Wise choice all round.

  In 2011 I got in super-early with a Logies frock I’d bought online for $39.95. Simple. Black. Some lace. I think there was a satin bow in there somewhere. It was a little bit Miss Piggy meets The Godfather, which was, quite frankly, exactly the look I was after. But then I was nominated for three individual awards and one for The Circle and things got nuts. Really nuts. A dressmaker was flown from interstate to measure me up and I ended up with an amazing dress with more feathers and bones than a gaggle of geese. You don’t remember it? There’s a Google search in it for you.

  I won the Most Popular New Female Talent award, which made me feel very young. And also very proud. It is an enormous honour to think that thousands of people voted for little old me. I still look at the Logie a few times a week (it’s on my mantelpiece out of the reach of my three-year-old after the time I found it in the garden buried up to its neck) and get a little rush. Its glorious presence more than makes up for the crushing disappointment I felt when I didn’t make prefect and came fifteenth in the 1987 Westpac Mathematics Competition.

  This year I am nominated again for a silver statuette, which came as a complete surprise but certainly a pleasant one. When I left The Circle in 2011 to spend more time with my two little boys, a part of me mourned the loss of showbiz and all its shininess. That job was a dream come true. In saying “yes” to more time chiselling hardened Play-Doh off my kitchen floor, I said “no” to daily guffaws with my on-air girlfriends, permanently killer hair and an abundance of free stuff. Could there be a greater luxury than someone quietly placing a strong flat white at your elbow while you type your notes into an autocue?

  The decision to leave was tough but something had to give. I returned to full-time work eight weeks after my second child was born in August 2011, and during the last few months of that year I somehow managed to keep a newborn breastfed baby alive, herd a toddler and, along with my beautiful and supportive co-hosts, churn out more live TV than any other show on Network Ten. I’d done it with one kid but doing it with two was a different ball game. I actually barely remember that time. I do remember, though, that some days I had to consciously stop and focus all my concentration just to remember how to put the car in drive. When I started thinking I should have had fewer children, I knew I was out of balance. And possibly out of my mind.

  I have always loved to work. But then I had children and nothing could have prepared me for how much I love being their mother. I’ve heard people say parenting is the hardest job in the world but to me it is pure joy. But it does take time – something I just didn’t have. Luckily the choice was there for me to switch to breakfast radio, which sees me home before my three-year-old, Leo, is tucking into his morning-tea blueberries. And to afford those, I sell homemade lemonade from my driveway on weekends – have you seen the price of those things? I’m surprised they’re not delivered from the market in an Armaguard van, just like the winning Logies envelopes.

  Tonight I’m getting a hairdo, whacking on a shiny new frock an
d sharing some laughs with my friends Gorgi Coghlan, Yumi Stynes, Denise Drysdale and Pam Barnes. I’ll be the one in navy, thrilled to bits to be on the red carpet. And instead of all the worry associated with borrowing thousands of dollars worth of diamonds, I’ll stick two new-season blueberries on my earlobes. I’ll be sure to wave.

  15th April 2012

  Not the loneliest number

  Yesterday I had lunch with a big gang of my old colleagues. They’re a groovy and sunny bunch of twenty-somethings. One of my favourites, Xavier, told me that since we’d last seen each other he’d moved from an inner-city share house to his own seventh-floor beachside apartment. By his own admission, the rent was so high he couldn’t afford to eat but, he said, it was worth it. I got a faraway look in my eye. Imagining Xavier. In his apartment. Alone. Doing nothing.

  And I got nostalgic for aloneness. I have about fifteen minutes a day where I am truly alone, and that is when I’m in the car on the way to work at 5am. I really miss being alone. I miss time. I can’t even go to the bathroom uninterrupted. In fact, as I write this piece, one of my “housemates” has taken a break from collecting keys in his trike basket and is prodding my foot every five seconds or so with a pair of kid-safe scissors. It may come as no surprise that this is supremely annoying. This never happened in the good old days when I happily ticked the “spinster” category on the census form.

  More Australians than ever before are living alone, and before you’re quick to conjure images of overweight, bearded ladies with cats, eating out of open cans on the ironing board, consider the figure of almost one in four. Yep. A whole quarter of the population are returning home to find the kitchen exactly as they left it.

  So why do we feel so sorry for them? People who live alone say they often feel marginalised and looked upon with pity as they have yet to hit the conventional “life jackpot” of partner/kids/someone to steer the Winnebago with. My gran lived to be eighty-six and never remarried after her husband passed away when she was only fifty-one. That’s thirty-five years of meals for one. When I asked her why she never hooked up again, she said, “Why the hell would I want to do that?”

  Living alone seems to be the ultimate in thumbing your nose at society. To live your own life and be accountable only to yourself is to shirk the responsibility of becoming a wife/mother or husband/father. What happens to people who don’t want these titles?

  Ten years ago, I was living alone with two cats and loving it. If my nearest and dearest were worried, they never said anything to me about it but, then again, I was probably too busy arranging my CDs in alphabetical order or high-fiving my gran to notice. I have always loved living alone. As soon as I could, I moved into my own place. I’d cook and organise and nap and read the newspaper cover to cover. I fell completely in love with who I was.

  I also liked how being alone allowed me to truly be myself. Who could be mad at the wet towels on the bathroom floor? Or dinners consisting only of brown rice and tuna? Or watching back-to-back episodes of Survivor? No one, that’s who. Bliss! I spent many a cask wine–fuelled evening in the then-revolutionary “chat rooms”, just to see what was doing.

  I was mad for it. It didn’t matter that a simple conversation consisting of “Hi, how are you? What do you do for a living?” took about forty-five minutes via dial-up modem, being in the midst of it let me feel as if I was at Central Perk from Friends, without even having to put a bra on.

  I worry that if I hadn’t been plucked from my singular existence, it would only have been a matter of time before emergency crews were fighting through stacks of newspapers and stockpiled tins of chickpeas, before realising that the only way to get me out was via cherry picker. If you are lucky enough to enjoy your own company, living alone can be a slippery slope to Hermitville, population: you. Having no one to answer to and be responsible for can be as addictive as crack cocaine and, as anyone footing the rent for a one-bedroom inner-city apartment will attest, just as expensive.

  Living with people (my partner and two little ones) means I have to keep myself nice and live like a normal person. But sometimes I crave the good old days and I get jealous of those who have a little flat somewhere and a car with no baby seats in it. Those living that life right now should enjoy every minute because chances are it won’t last.

  One day, like me, you’ll find yourself begging your tiny housemate for some privacy, with aforementioned housemate alleviating your distress with questions like, “Will a laser beam help?”

  22nd April 2012

  The other woman

  Most of us are good, most of the time. Apart from the person who invented the Milk & Cookies Milky Bar, who is inherently evil.

  I like to believe that people are generally wonderful. But sometimes good people do bad things. Like me, for example. When I was in my late twenties, I was the other woman. Now, before you tear up this book and strike me off your Christmas-card list, please consider that it was a total accident.

  I had met a charming lawyer – let’s call him Matt – at a barbecue and we had hit it off like a Weber on fire over a few sausages-in-bread and a nifty pasta salad. Matt lived in the country, which was great for me as I wasn’t up for a full-on relationship that involved spending nights on the couch in trackies watching Hey Hey It’s Saturday. I didn’t want boring and I certainly didn’t get it.

  Things progressed quickly and, between my job as an advertising copywriter and my fabulous single life I enjoyed with my naughty friends, we’d meet at my flat, which resembled a two-storey garage, for clandestine grease-and-oil changes. It was, to say the least, exciting. But it never occurred to me to ask why he’d always answer my calls (only ever to his mobile – alarm bell number one: no home phone) within the first ring and there was never a chance to leave a voicemail message. Ever. He didn’t have the option (alarm bell number two: no voicemail). It would just ring out.

  One night I was at a friend’s party and I had a missed call from a private number, which I knew would be him (alarm bell number three: silent numbers). I excused myself from the third round of Midori Shakers and called him back from outside the pub – only to be surprised when a voicemail message kicked in. “Hi! You’ve called Dave … and Clare.* If you have an inquiry about your tax return something something something …” I didn’t hear the end of the MessageBank greeting because I’d passed out in the gutter. Or maybe it was the sound like a kettle whistling on my eardrum that muffled the end of it.

  He was married. His name wasn’t Matt. He was an accountant. The single lawyer called Matt I’d been seeing for a few months was actually a married accountant called Dave. Ten minutes later, he called me back after having seen two missed calls from me. Clearly oblivious to the fact he’d activated his identity-revealing voicemail greeting, the conversation started cheerily enough.

  Matt/Dave: “Hey, gorgeous! Are you having a good night?”

  Chrissie/Idiot: “Yeah. It’s all right … but not as exciting as hanging out with a married accountant called Dave.”

  Matt/Dave: Click.

  He must have hit a weird reception patch or gone through a tunnel. At home. Because his phone immediately dropped out. And I never called again. I really wanted to. Because I wanted the nitty-gritty. I was sleepless with questions. How did he decide to do this? Had he done it before? Was I a moron? How many others had been hoodwinked? Did his wife know? Could he do me a good deal on my tax return?

  I’d have vivid dreams where I’d confront him and abuse him with clever arguments for which he had no answers. The lack of closure sent me mad. Armed with his true identity, profession and the town he lived in (the only piece of his story that checked out), I was able to track him down and see where he lived and worked. And I drove there.

  Before you start calling Glenn Close’s management and asking her to play me in a biopic, consider that I really had no clue as to why I was in the car with the street directory opened
on a page with lots of white and green bits leading me down a highway I’d never been on to a place I’d never heard of. I think I just wanted to see something real.

  I got to his street and drove past his house, where a pretty blonde was helping two kids out of a car. So there were kids, too. I didn’t see that coming. It made me so sad for them. What sort of a man was this? I contemplated doing a U-turn and telling her to run. That her husband was a liar and a narcissist and perhaps her whole life was a lie. But it wasn’t really my place, was it? I drove away.

  To this day I wonder if that was the right thing. Would I want to know if my husband had been up to this? I care deeply about the sisterhood and would do nothing to make a woman and mother question what she believed was true and real in her life. But does keeping her husband’s secret make me complicit? Or should I have told her and watched what meant nothing to me and nothing to anyone, in the scheme of things, destroy the lives of many?

  29th April 2012

  I need help

  Last week my friend called me out on something I’ve been doing for about three years. I thought no one had noticed my hoodwinking habit, but I was wrong, apparently. I’m blushing now as I write this, as I undoubtedly did then, when she said, “Why do you call your nanny your babysitter?”

  “Do I? Really? I don’t. Do I? Really? Do I?”

  “Yeah, you do. You always have. It’s fine … but I was just wondering … why?”

  Again I said I wasn’t even aware I did it. But I was aware. Am aware. I’ve been doing it on purpose so people don’t get the wrong idea about the way I live and start to assume I’m clapping my hands twice to clear the table when I’ve finished my caviar and complaining to Raoul about the leaves in the pool.