by Mia Freedman
And then it was time. I kissed my innocently smiling daughter goodnight with the sense that I was sending her into battle. And after twenty minutes of screaming, the first report from the frontline was not good. ‘Your daughter has one of the more extreme dummy addictions I’ve ever seen,’ Elizabeth announced gravely.
Super. Almost six months old and battling her first addiction. Does that make me her dealer? I first gave her a dummy at four weeks. Bad mother? It was the only thing that would shut her up. I was the one who had encouraged her descent down the slippery slope from casual dummy user to hardcore addict. The instant comfort (hers) and the quiet peace (mine) the dummy brought to our lives was sublime. Soon, the mere act of buying dummies would cheer me up, calm me. They’d replaced shoes as the object of my retail therapy. But on this night, I struggled to recall why I’d bought that first one as Coco’s dummy-less cries began to split my head in two.
Through the crying, Elizabeth would go in at various intervals and kindly whisper, ‘Shhhh, Coco. Time for sleep.’ Then she’d retuck the sheets firmly and leave without picking her up or giving her a bottle. Often she wouldn’t actually leave but simply hide in the darkness and observe, making sure Coco didn’t get into any serious difficulty.
Jason and I retreated nervously to the lounge room with a bottle of wine and turned the TV up loud. Thirty-five minutes after Coco had been put to bed, the first hurdle was cleared. Asleep! High five! But while Elizabeth was pleased, she warned us that Coco hadn’t really learned anything, she was simply exhausted. The night wakes would be tougher, she cautioned.
At 10.30 pm, we went to bed ourselves. We were nervous but relieved that Coco was in the capable hands of a professional and that we didn’t have to make any judgement calls. As promised, the middle of the night was worse. Almost two hours of screaming. With complete faith in Elizabeth, I was reasonably calm but still tortured. I didn’t cry and I didn’t interfere. Lifelong gift. Lifelong gift.
As Elizabeth had suggested at the beginning of the night, I stayed in bed, switched on the TV and distracted myself with ‘True Hollywood Stories: The Cast of American Pie’. As I watched Tara Reid’s tragic journey from starlet to punchline, Jason made sleepy protests at the sound of the TV, so I hit him on the head with a pillow.
Finally, all was quiet. The next thing I remember was hearing Elizabeth letting herself out at 6 am, followed forty-five minutes later by Coco waking up for the day. When I picked her up, I half expected to see betrayal in her eyes, as if to say, ‘So where the hell were you last night, bitch?’ But her face was as open and as delighted to see me as ever. She appeared undamaged. Lifelong gift.
Night two was better. Sticking carefully to Elizabeth’s instructions, I put Coco down in her cot myself at 6.30 pm, prop-free, and after some low-level crying she was asleep in under ten minutes. Could this be the beginning of a new life for us? One with sleep in it?
Elizabeth arrived at 10 pm and we had a cup of tea together. As we chatted, I realised that she truly loved her work. The lifelong-gift stuff wasn’t a platitude; she resolutely believed that every baby deserved to learn how to put themself to sleep, and every family deserved the knock-on benefits.
Coco’s second night with Elizabeth was a vast improvement on the first. Forty minutes of crying at 2 am but not nearly the intensity of the night before. What was most encouraging was that she woke briefly again at 4 am and put herself back to sleep within a couple of minutes.
Night three she slept through. For the first time in six months, I didn’t leave my bed from 10 pm to 6.30 am. It felt like a miracle. Coco was definitely happier during the day. And me? I was doing wild victory laps around my house.
Elizabeth, deciding we were now able to cope without her, left us strict instructions. It was vital that Coco had her proper naps during the day so as not to become over-tired—a classic obstruction to sleep. Dummies were now a distant memory and we weren’t to use them ever again, day or night. Most importantly, we must remember this: now that Coco had endured an undeniably tough few nights, it wasn’t fair to her if we undid everything she’d learned with ‘just one bottle’ or ‘just one cuddle’. Hold firm. Be strong.
And we were. I texted Elizabeth daily for the first week or two with many, many questions and she gave me strength, encouragement and advice. Don’t waver. Don’t be discouraged if she slips back a little and begins waking occasionally. Have faith that she’ll get herself back to sleep eventually. Stick to the rules. Listen and interpret. Comfort and leave. If she gets sick, all bets are off. But when she’s well again, it’s back to the rules.
For the first few weeks after Elizabeth’s visits, every morning felt like a miracle. Like Christmas. But slowly, imperceptibly, the unimaginable happened: I began to take my sleep for granted again. I went to bed without dread and with the expectation of a full night’s sleep. And I got it.
CATAPULTED OUT OF MY COMFORT ZONE
SMS to the nanny from me:
‘Sorry. Stuck in traffic. Going to be late. Please try to keep Coco awake until I get home!’
On day two of my new job at Channel Nine, I decided I wanted to quit. I knew with absolute certainty I’d made a terrible mistake. My appointment had not been well received. Outside the network, many people were curious. What exactly would I be doing? Inside the network, many were cynical and disparaging. What exactly would I be doing? I was too young, too inexperienced and too female. Three strikes.
My job title was broad and ambiguous: Creative Services Director, and my purpose was to inject some female perspective into the network’s male-dominated management team. I understood some of the hostility towards me—most of it was expressed covertly, of course, but I could see what was going on.
The network had gone through several CEOs in the previous eighteen months and each one had imposed his own strong ideas and made his own appointments. By the time I moved into my dark, poky office, some of the people who’d weathered the seemingly endless management storms were battle weary to say the least.
It’s virtually impossible for an outsider to fully appreciate the stresses inherent in commercial television. I certainly didn’t before I arrived. And at Channel Nine, that stress was to the power of a hundred. The media klieg lights shone blindingly on Nine, much as they always have. Much of it is tied up in the mythology of the Packer family.
While Kerry Packer was alive, there had been some grudging respect and fear that kept media coverage from getting too nasty. But after he died, it was suddenly gloves off and game on. There was certainly a lot for the media to write about. How inspired of me to choose to go to Channel Nine at this particular point.
And then there are the opinions. Everyone who owns a TV thinks this entitles them to be a critic. Before working at Nine, I was guilty of this myself. I’d often lobbed unsolicited opinions on some of the Nine executives I met at Publishing and Broadcasting Limited (PBL) conferences when the disparate worlds of magazines, TV, online and casinos would come together under one roof over a weekend to talk business, establish working relationships and identify cross-platform synergies. Everyone wanted more ‘synergies’. Even if no one knew exactly what they were.
As soon as my appointment was announced, I was bombarded with ‘constructive criticism’ about Nine. This was a new experience. In all the years I’d worked in magazines, people rarely ventured an opinion about what went in them. Apart from the obvious debates about magazines containing too much sex or too many skinny models, no one really thought to nit-pick over the content. Perhaps the fact you have to pay for a magazine means a benevolent audience is self-selected.
But with TV? Oh man. When something is freely available, people have a LOT to say. And ninety-eight per cent of it is negative. From the moment anyone found out I worked at Nine, I’d find myself subjected to a long and detailed list of complaints.
These invariably included criticisms about which programs were on, which weren’t on and should be, why programs were on at the wrong time or hosted by th
e wrong person. Then there was my personal favourite: Why Does [insert name of presenter here] Wear Such Shocking Clothes And That Hair Of Hers Is A Bloody Disgrace.
Cab drivers, waiters, relatives, former magazine colleagues, friends, strangers—no one was ever short of an opinion or twenty about Channel Nine and no one was ever shy about expressing them to me. At length.
I believe this is called karma. Payback for all the times I’d voiced similar complaints to friends and colleagues who worked at Nine. Now? It was my turn.
Given that I had no power to do anything about any of it and given that commercial TV networks are generally run for the masses, not an individual who wants to watch ‘The Sopranos’ at 7.30 pm on a Sunday night, it became frustrating and exhausting almost immediately. We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto.
And I could see how for those who had worked in TV for years and who’d had to listen to an endless daily barrage of unsolicited opinion and criticism…well, I could see how that would do your head in. No wonder nobody was interested in hearing what I had to say.
Rumours of a partial sale of PBL, the Packer-controlled company whose media assets included Nine and ACP magazines, didn’t help. Frenzied gossip circulated, inside and outside the network. Everything was on hold as lawyers and accountants crunched the numbers and due diligence began. To say the atmosphere at Nine during this period was intense is a bit like saying the equator is kinda warm.
There were virtually no women on the executive team. My arrival had doubled the quota, in fact. The other woman was the head of drama, and while she was warm and welcoming, drama is a separate department and our paths rarely crossed.
The fact that I had two kids at home separated me further from my male colleagues. And it’s safe to say that no one else in management was breastfeeding. Twice a day, I’d have to pull the shades in my tiny glass office and whip out my breast pump before stashing breast milk in the boardroom fridge among the beer, wine and soft drinks.
I also had to dash out the door at quarter to six so I could make it home by six-thirty to breastfeed Coco before she went to bed. This was awkward. No one else left before…well, I didn’t know when they left because I’d already gone. Apart from all the offices being glass, turning the executive floor into a fishbowl, the walk from my office to the lift was a long one. I’m not the first mother to have to do the Afternoon Walk of Shame—dashing out the door to begin the day’s second shift at home—and I won’t be the last.
Maybe no one cared. Maybe no one noticed. Certainly nothing was ever said to me. Everyone appeared kind and understanding. But every day as I bolted for the lift, I felt horribly conspicuous. Invariably, I’d bump into someone along the way and, with my handbag over my shoulder and my jacket on, there was only one possible place I could be going. The fact that I’d log on at home and keep working for a few hours after I’d put the kids to bed was irrelevant because it was invisible. I feared that leaving work before my colleagues was, in their eyes, akin to wearing a sandwich board screaming, ‘I don’t care about my job as much as you do and I’m a big fat slacker. Have a good night!’ I’d grow tense even thinking about it as 6 pm approached.
Eventually, I came up with a pathetic strategy. At lunchtime, I’d go and put my handbag and jacket in my car and stash my keys in the glove box. Then, at half-past five, I’d casually saunter to the lift while pretending to talk into my mobile as if I was on my way to a meeting in another part of the building. ‘Talking’ on the phone ensured no one would engage me in conversation or ask where I was going. When I hit the car park, I’d furtively sneak into my car and drive off very fast, praying no one had seen me leave.
What a degrading, ridiculous waste of energy. And it’s not like there was a great pay-off once I got home an hour later. Jo and Karen had returned to work at around the same time as me, and sometimes we’d speak on our mobiles while driving home to see our babies before they went to bed. To debrief, to vent, to bolster each other’s spirits in the face of working-mother guilt, doubt, angst and stress. One day, as Jo pulled up in front of her house, she said drily, ‘Right, I’m just going inside to spend twenty quality minutes with the children.’
And what an enriching twenty minutes they were. Not. The shift in gears between work and home was impossible for me to execute smoothly. Often, it was more like the grinding clunk that you hear when learner drivers struggle to master a manual gearstick.
At work, I had to be so well defended, so bullet-proof, so…alpha. That didn’t cut it at home where my children needed a softer, slower, more nurturing energy. Like many women, I had bits of both in my character, but switching from one mode to other and back again several times a day gave me emotional whiplash. Even then, the results weren’t always successful. My wise father gave me some excellent advice. ‘When you get to work, take a moment in the car park to close your eyes and take a few deep breaths. Leave home behind and put yourself into work mode. Then do the same in reverse when you get home.’
Problem was, by the time I screeched into the car park every morning, I was usually running late and didn’t have a moment to take any breaths because I was already hyperventilating. By the time I got home, same thing. I was so desperate to see my baby—the hunger for her was physical—and spend time with Luca, I couldn’t bear to waste even a second. I was usually halfway out of the car before I’d even turned off the engine.
The result of all this was that I always felt inadequate. At work, I felt like a useless mother. At home, I felt hopeless at my job. And when I was making the transition from one to the other, I felt panicked, stressed, anxious and a failure at everything.
Are we having fun yet?
In the morning, the fact I arrived at work by quarter past eight was unremarkable—except to me. After over a decade spent clocking on after 9 am because magazines never start early, it was another shock to my system to have to have my shit together to bolt out the door every day at 7.30 in the morning. But this earned me no cred because by the time I arrived all my male colleagues were already there.
Not only were the long hours seemingly standard, but the entire focus of every day in TV is at 8.30 am, when the previous day’s ratings are released.
I quickly learned that this is the big head-fuck of TV. In any other job, you might have one performance review per year. This will be conducted privately and discreetly with just you and your boss in attendance. But in television, you have a performance review every day at 8.30 am, seven days a week.
And this daily review of your performance? It’s conducted publicly. If a decision you’ve made or a program you’re involved in isn’t doing so well, the happy news of your failure is broadcast to the entire industry every morning at 8.30. The media can then share this information with the world while your colleagues are free to sympathise or gloat over your plight. Invariably, gloat. Even if they work at the same network. Schadenfreude makes the TV world go round.
After fifteen years snuggled securely in the same building, working on the same magazines, with many of the same supportive people, I’d come via the milky bubble of maternity leave into a new industry and a new working environment with new colleagues. The fact that they were all highly competitive men was a big change.
When I first started at Nine, every media interview I did wanted to focus on how I dealt with the ‘blokiness factor’. It was too early for me to have a sense of that so I joked my way around the question by pointing out that, on the upside, there were no queues for the women’s toilets, but, on the downside, there was far less chocolate available.
In truth, I found the gender change refreshing—at first. Men were upfront. They said what they thought and they were direct. Mostly. I didn’t mind a bit of blokiness. It made a change from the unrelenting girliness of my previous work life. But I quickly came to miss the female energy. I’m very much a girl’s girl. Sporting analogies (which, bizarrely, I began to use without even really understanding what they meant) are not my first language. I missed empathy and nurturi
ng.
Another thing that was different was the press attention I was receiving. As an editor and a newspaper columnist, I’d had a fairly public profile for most of my career. But even though the media sometimes wrote about me and regularly called me for social commentary on various news stories, the coverage had almost always been positive or neutral. I’m not sure if it was the Nine factor or that I’d dared to stick my neck beyond the safe world of women’s magazines, but suddenly I was a target and everything written about me was negative. Some of it was cruel, much of it was bitchy. And I hadn’t even done anything yet.
One week there was something printed in a gossip column about an email I’d sent to a colleague. Another time, something about where my car was parked. This was no doubt riveting to absolutely nobody. I was baffled as to what my name was doing in newspapers whose readers didn’t know or care who the hell I was, let alone where my car was parked. Surely the general public was far more interested in the antics of actual celebrities like Bec Hewitt and Megan Gale than some D-list media person like me. But it continued and I didn’t have a clue how to handle it. It seemed churlish and childish to respond to the things that were written so I didn’t. But they stung. Not to mention making me paranoid since there were grains of truth in the items that could only have come from inside the network.
So there I was, a few months in, reeling. I was boxing at shadows, watching my back, trying to win over my colleagues, unsure about what exactly I was meant to be doing, and feeling sickeningly guilty about taking so much toxicity with me home to my family.
Thank God for Fran, our nanny. With work so stressful, I felt incredibly lucky that she had become part of the family. As we sat down to the delicious meals that Fran cooked on the days she came, Jason and I would marvel at how our home lives had improved. For me, with the extra help it felt like I had a wife. A proper one. One far better at cooking than me. It didn’t erase my guilt about leaving Coco so I could work, but it reduced it somewhat because Coco seemed happy.