Mama Mia
Page 32
I believe every mother has a Smug List and a Crap List. On these lists are all the things you feel certain you’ve done absolutely right and absolutely wrong as a parent.
On your Smug List go the mothering acts of which you are most proud. All the things you feel are worthy of a medal. Pat-yourself-on-the-back things. These things will often have been achieved at considerable personal sacrifice—the more you sacrifice, the smugger you can be.
You keep your Smug List in a small corner of your brain (in my case, I only need a small corner because it is a very small list) and refer to it when you’re feeling like a particularly bad mother and need to reassure yourself that you’re not. Well, not always.
Every mother also has a Crap List. I need more mental storage for this list because it is long and bubble-wrapped in guilt. On your Crap List go all your mothering failings. Print it out and set it aside to give to your child’s therapist later in life.
In a perfect world, these lists would cancel each other out and we’d all just walk around Getting On With It instead of judging each other and ourselves. But then we would be called ‘men’.
For what it’s worth, here is my Smug List:
I breastfed Luca for thirteen months.
I only spent two nights apart from Coco (not in a row—extra smug points) until she was almost two and a half. I have spent a total of five nights apart from her in her life.
I breastfed Coco until she was eight months old despite having mastitis seven times.
None of my kids have TVs in their rooms. Yet.
Luca has beautiful manners and is a great cook. Coco is very kind. Remy smiles a lot.
I told you it was a short list. I’m actually not even sure if that third point should be on the Smug List or the Crap List because it can’t have been good for Coco to have ingested all those second-hand antibiotics. For the sake of fairness, I will put it on both lists. And before you assume that I am saying breast is better than bottle, I’m not. I don’t judge any woman who uses formula (other than myself). I’m just grasping at straws because my list is so pathetically short. And I am still tossing up whether I can attribute Remy’s Zen-like calmness to my superb mothering skills.
In the spirit of full disclosure, here is my Crap List. It continues to grow at an alarming rate, but this is an excerpt at the time of publication.
In the space of six months while I was at Nine, I forgot to pick Luca up from after-school care on two separate occasions. (Disclaimer: he was in the care of responsible adults and untraumatised both times, gulp).
I sometimes feed my children cereal for dinner. Hey, Weetbix with banana and milk covers most food groups. Maybe this should go on my Smug List.
I dislike playing any kind of children’s games, including cars, tea parties, puzzles, blocks, hide and seek, dress-ups, craft and singing nursery rhymes.
I breastfed Coco through seven bouts of mastitis and seventy days worth of antibiotics.
I eat my children’s Easter eggs and birthday party lolly bags when they are asleep.
I constantly steal—I mean borrow—birthday money from Luca’s wallet to pay the cleaner or the Thai takeaway man because I’ve forgotten to go to the bank. His wallet is full of hastily scrawled notes saying: ‘IOU $50. Love Mummy xx.’
I always try to choose the book with the least number of words when it’s time for bedtime stories. I hide the books I can’t bear to read One More Time.
I hate playgrounds and will do virtually anything to avoid taking my children to them.
I think my kids look better with a slight tan. I call it ‘a bit of colour’. Others would call it ‘sun damage’.
I’ve managed to convince my daughter that eating tuna or baked beans directly out of a can is a ‘special treat’.
I bite my nails and hence my two eldest children bite theirs too. Frequently, I must remove my own fingers from my mouth in order to bark at them, ‘Stop biting your nails!’
Sometimes, at the end of the day, Coco calls me by our nanny’s name.
My husband is a better parent than I am. He’ll do the hard yards of discipline and boundaries when I’m more likely to say, ‘I know! Let’s eat biscuits!’
My children don’t have specific amounts of time they’re allowed to watch TV. They ‘self-regulate’.
I have discovered that it is possible to read aloud to your child while thinking about other things. I do this frequently.
I often listen to FM music stations that play songs with inappropriate lyrics while my children are in the car. Sometimes I sing along.
I wish more women would disclose their Crap Lists. I love hearing them because they always make me feel better. Far better than reading yet another interview with a celebrity who insists she only feeds her child organic meals and that they’ve never tasted sugar or white flour, they’ve never had antibiotics and they were breastfed until they were three. Naturally, her body just ‘bounced back’ within hours of the birth and her baby has slept through the night since coming home from hospital.
When I read these kinds of stories, I am overcome by the uncontrollable urge to poke said mother in the eye with my pinky finger. If we could all be more truthful and less competitive about mothering, the world would be a happier and less guilty place.
Still, we all need our own Smug List in which to seek some solace sometimes, a Smug List to neutralise the recriminations our Crap Lists hurl at us. There’s certainly no danger of us becoming over-confident. As soon as our children are old enough to talk, they begin to pass judgement.
Before I had kids, I had no idea how brutally honest they could be. Now I know; I’ve learned through experience. Kids can get away with saying things to you no one else can. Like the time after dinner when I bent down to give Coco a goodnight kiss. ‘Ooooh, yuck! You stink!’ she shrieked and began retching. Coco has a sensitive gag reflex and an acute sense of smell, a combination that was particularly challenging when it was time for a nappy change. Or, it seems, kissing Mummy after she’s eaten pasta with garlic in it.
A few nights later, heavily pregnant with Remy, I was on my way out to launch my friend Zoë’s book. To feel a little less frump-like and to celebrate getting out of my trackies, I’d gone to the hairdresser and issued her with the following instructions: ‘I want my hair to look kind of wavy and messy and sexy.’ She’d obliged, and I was quite pleased with the result.
Or so I thought. ‘Oh my God, what happened to your hair?’ were Luca’s first words when he came home from soccer training to find me ready to go out.
‘It’s meant to look this way!’ I protested. ‘I went to the hairdresser! It cost money!’
If someone else had dissed my hair, I might have been annoyed…But somehow, when it’s your child, they manage to dismantle your defences, and defensiveness, and inspire a totally different reaction. I looked in the mirror and saw myself through Luca’s eyes, and laughed.
‘Also, your skirt is too short,’ he added, now plainly on a roll. I was wearing one of my favourite Ginger & Smart frocks, kind of a loose shirt-dress that I wore a lot before I was pregnant. As one of the few things I owned that could still fit over my stomach, it was my only option.
Admittedly, my bump made it a bit shorter than usual but it was still longer than mid-thigh. But the combination of winter and pregnancy meant that no one had seen my bare legs in months, so that probably contributed to his alarm.
He wasn’t finished. ‘And your eye make-up is all smudgy.’
‘That’s the look I’m going for,’ I explained patiently. ‘It’s called A SMOKY EYE.’
‘Oh.’ Pause. ‘It just looks like you made a mistake.’
‘Thanks, darling, I’m feeling great now! Ready to hide under the doona!’
‘Sorry,’ he said with a slightly contrite pat of my arm.
I laughed, and pretended to hit him.
Because they call it how they see it, without tact or diplomacy the words of our children can penetrate. And not just about fashion.
He looked at me and said, ‘Sometimes it seems like you love magazines more than you love me.’
Ouch. Arrow to the heart.
Of course it wasn’t true and deep down he knew it wasn’t true (please let him know it wasn’t true), but in that moment, when he was trying to communicate with me and I was far away and distracted, it was one hundred per cent true FOR HIM.
And the simple, honest way in which he was able to express himself made me reassess the amount of time I was spending on work when I got home.
Sometimes the truth hurts, other times it’s just funny. But when it’s delivered by your children, it’s a short-cut past all your defences. And that’s a good thing. Children are the greatest arbiters of the truth, and the best moderators of every parent’s internal Crap List and Smug List. It is the achievement of my life to be the mother of three such direct and entirely unique people, and I’m forever grateful for their ability to cut through all the noise and remind me of what’s important. And it’s not a smoky eye.
EPILOGUE
I’m standing on the set of ‘Today’, trying not to vomit. Eighteen years after I first sat down opposite Lisa Wilkinson for an interview, I’m about to do it again. Except today it will be live on national television.
The last time I was here at Channel Nine, I was painfully thin, horribly anxious and deeply miserable. Two years later, I am neither thin nor miserable. In fact, I’m all post-baby curves and extremely happy. But I am anxious. So. Very. Anxious.
Trying to hold it together, I focus on Lisa’s warm, smiling face to keep me calm. She waves when she sees me across the studio and comes over during a commercial break to give me a hug. Lisa knows how nervous I am, how reluctant I’ve been to venture back here after my brief, humiliating fling with TV.
I’ve come to be interviewed about body image after recently being appointed chair of the federal government’s National Body Image Advisory Group. It’s ironic then that I am wearing fat-sucking undies. It’s been several years since I’ve been on TV and almost that long since I’ve had to wear proper pants.
Working from home, combined with pregnancy and its aftermath, has been a welcome get-out-of-fashion-jail-free card and I’ve been letting it all hang out. Quite literally. However, I’ve recently been introduced to the concept of fat-sucking undies by friends and mamamia.com.au readers, who all, it seems, swear by them. I thought they were just for nannas and Bridget Jones. Who knew?
Certainly, my impressive post-baby muffin can do with all the help it can get. Tired of tucking my stomach into my jeans LIKE A SHIRT, I bolted to Kmart and picked up some of those magic knickers, and today I’m using my first media foray as the body image group’s chair to take them for a spin. A bundle of contradictions? Oh yes.
I stifle a yawn. My day began early. Or did my night finish late? In fact, I think the two just collided at ungodly o’clock when The Middle of the Night somehow became The Crack of Dawn.
Coco had woken for some ridiculous reason at one-thirty, three and then again at 4 am. Something about it being ‘too dark’ and ‘grasshoppers’. At the third wake, I lost it. ‘I’m not getting up again,’ I hissed to Jason with that rising feeling of panic I get when my allotted window for sleep is closing fast. ‘I can’t stand it! We’re doing controlled crying!’ If that’s even possible with a three-year-old.
When the whingeing started up again ten minutes later, I angrily huffed out of bed, marched into her room and shout-whispered, ‘Coco! Go back to sleep! This is ridiculous! It’s night-time!’ before marching back into our room and stubbing my toe on Remy’s cot, waking him up. Again.
I’d already breastfed him at 2 am and, to be fair, Jason had got up for Coco the first two times. Hello, delirium. Nights weren’t usually this bad. Ever since the Sleep Whisperer came and worked her magic when Coco was nearly six months old, she’d been a terrific sleeper. But there were aberrations very occasionally and this night was one of them. Why not torture Mummy in the hours before she has to go on TV for the first time in two years, huh? HUH?
I was coping with Remy’s night feeds because he usually went straight back to sleep afterwards and I knew the Sleep Whisperer would be coming to fix him too in a few weeks, but four times awake in one night with both kids had pushed me over the edge and into shouty-shrew territory. I was not match fit.
As I rubbed my toe and swore like an angry pirate, Jason mumbled, ‘I think it’s called controlled crying because the adults are meant to be in control.’
Instantly, my exasperation evaporated and I smiled in the dark. As always, Jason had managed to gently hold up a mirror when my head was flying off, enabling me to see the humour in the situation while making a salient point. My God I love that man.
Back at ‘Today’, the audio guy attaches my microphone and hurries me to the interview chair. Suddenly my throat goes dry. ‘Water! Help!’ I gasp as the floor manager counts down the five seconds before we go live. This has never happened to me before. Must be all that Rescue Remedy I needed so I could drive back through the network gates without having a panic attack. Someone thrusts a glass in my hand and I take a quick gulp, spilling it down my top.
The next few minutes pass in a fuzzy and slightly soggy blur. It’s surreal sitting here discussing body image with Lisa but it also feels entirely natural and surprisingly comfortable. Towards the end of the interview, she asks the curly question: ‘What would you say to those who claim it’s people like you and me—having worked in women’s magazines—who have contributed to the problem of poor body image in the first place?’
I take a breath. I’m not nervous any more. ‘I think that’s a really fair point. Women’s magazines have to take responsibility for the images they publish and the effect they can have on all women, but particularly on young people. I like to think I did a lot of things right when I was an editor but I’m the first to admit I also did a lot of things wrong, things like retouching. I’m not proud of that. Magazines have taken a strong leadership role in the past and helped change attitudes towards smoking and sunbaking so we know it IS possible.
‘Lisa, I really hope more editors will start to take a similarly responsible approach about how they portray women. We need more diversity. Of size, of age and of skin colour. And not just from magazines but from all media.’
And then it’s over. Another quick hug from Lisa and a few former colleagues and I’m back in my car driving out of the Channel Nine gates. No skid marks this time. I’ve actually enjoyed myself and slain a few of my demons at the same time. Who cares if I wasn’t cut out to be a TV executive? Not me; not any more. At least now I have conclusive proof that I don’t want to play with the high-flying big boys. There are no hard feelings. The fit was just completely wrong. But if I hadn’t learned this the hard way, I’d have never found the courage to press eject on my own high-flying career. I would have stayed resolutely on my managerial goat-track and I might never have discovered how happy I am on a much, much smaller scale. Working for myself, creatively, on my own terms.
I dash back home to finish writing my Sunday column and to post on my website for the first of half a dozen times today. In the car on the way, my phone beeps with a text message. ‘It’s a girl! Rosie. Born at 6.35 am. We are over the moon…’ My eyes briefly prickle with tears as they always do when I hear news of a baby being born to someone I love. Like so many others, this girlfriend had been through some very dark times over the past few years while trying to fall pregnant. We’d had many conversations about it. She’d shed so many tears. I pull into the driveway at home but before I go inside, I take a moment to text my reply. ‘Oh what beautiful news! You know all those endless years when you were desperate
to be pregnant? When you were heartbroken and couldn’t understand why it was taking so long? This is why. You were waiting for Rosie. Only you didn’t know that until today.’
That’s how I feel about Coco. Each of my children is special and extraordinary and different to me. Luca and I will always be incredibly connected because he was my first and only child for eight years. Our intense bond is something I find hard to explain or even understand sometimes, but I’m grateful for it. Coco is the reason I endured the deep pain and grief of losing the baby girl Jason and I never got to meet. Not for a moment did it ever occur to me that the soul of our lost baby returned in Coco. Oh no. Coco is utterly individual and has a very different energy to the one I feel around the baby who died. But still, Coco healed many deep wounds. Hers was the only birth at which I shed a tear—for all that went before she arrived and with an enormous sense of relief that she’d finally turned up. It has all been for a reason. For my beautiful girl. And Remy? He’s just sunshine. Pure and uncomplicated. My gorgeous littlest guy.
My head and my heart are full of all these thoughts and emotions as I walk back into the house and the warm, manic energy of my family. Luca is about to leave for school and he wants to know if he can cook dinner tonight. I pretend to think about it for a moment before I agree. He’s chuffed. My big boy wants to be a chef and he takes it very seriously. His specialties are linguine vongole and chocolate self-saucing pudding. Since his mother’s specialties are tuna-out-of-a-can and cereal-for-dinner, this is a most welcome development.
Surrounded by kids and chaos already, I say a silent thank you to the universe that I’m fortunate enough to work from home and able to dip in and out with the kids during the day instead of just those twenty ‘quality’ minutes I used to snatch with them each evening when I was an executive. I can’t imagine going back to that life. It seems as if it belonged to someone else. Someone far better dressed and far more stressed than I want to be. Sure, it would be nice to still have her exec salary, but, on balance, the other stuff just isn’t worth it. Not for me. Not right now.