I am now known in friendship circles, and some Weight Watchers meetings, as “the Comedian of People’s Hearts” or “the Puller of Heartstrings.”
So, if you would like to join this group of name-callers, have a little think back to what you might have been doing on August 21, 2007, around lunchtime.
9 Buela is what my friends call my mum. For those who don’t know it, The Comedy Company was a sketch comedy show in Australia in the ’90s, and there were two characters on there called Neville and Buela, and they would always talk about their geriatric sex lives and how they always loved to do everything naked. Since my dad’s name is Neville, from the moment that sketch appeared my mates called my mum Buela. She loves it.
The One about My Breasts
During my pregnancy with Lou, the doctors and midwives suggested I call Dr. Timberlake and ask for any additional information on my heart, in case I had missed anything during my morphine phase. I thought while I had the busy surgeon on the phone I would ask about the breastfeeding situation, if there was a situation to be asking about.
I was told that during the surgery, when my skin was peeled up over my chest plate (spew face emoji), my milk ducts were cut—not all of them but most of them—so I might be able to breastfeed, but the only way to find out was to “suck it and see.” I remembered hearing a few mums and midwives saying that the birth isn’t anywhere as full-on and challenging as the weeks and months that follow. Of course I didn’t believe it, because if Kourtney Kardashian didn’t experience hardships as a new mum, then none of us should. She’s the spokesperson for everyday women, right?
But the three months following Lou’s birth were some of the most difficult of my life. I wanted to breastfeed so bad. But I just couldn’t.
Here’s the thing: my body showed no signs of not wanting to feed. All my milk came in, so I looked like a nice dairy cow. I looked like I was good to go. All the milk was filling up my bad boys nicely; only it didn’t then move on to my son. So when he took to my nipples with a chain saw and vinegar, it was a whole new level of pain that I wouldn’t wish on my least favorite Real Housewife.
On the Mid North Coast, where we were living at the time, not only did the midwives believe the idea that Breast Is Best, but they thought that breast was the only option. There were posters all through the hospitals—women breastfeeding six-year-olds in parks, women breastfeeding newborns on roller coasters—and I was told by a number of women that an ideal day with a newborn is lying in bed while they just “suckle at your bosom, and your partner feeds you.”
Not. On. Your. Life. I’m pro breastfeeding, but I’m also pro not trying to kill yourself and ruin your newborn’s life because you can’t cope with the pressures that other women put on you regarding your boobs. Taylor Swift says we all need to support each other, so back the fuck up.
I spent ten full days breastfeeding my son blood mixed with a little breast milk. He cried and cried and cried, he was so hungry (God, that’s hard to type without getting upset).
After the ninth day, I didn’t know what to do. I was beside myself. I was trying to feed Lou, but it was still the same stabbing pain, and he was still crying and crying and crying.
My sister was visiting, and she saw how terrified and in pain I was. She quietly whispered in my ear, “It’s not always going to be like this, I promise.”
I burst into tears. This was exactly what I needed to hear. I couldn’t believe how horrible the whole experience was, and I was panicking, thinking that this was how my life would be now: I’d always be exhausted, scared, and in pain. I know I’m not the only mother to feel this. Trust me.
As tears ran down my face, Api, who was sitting next to me the whole time, decided he was over it. He stood up and said he was going to the pharmacist to get formula. He couldn’t watch me go through this pain when the breastfeeding was clearly not working for me or Lou.
“We aren’t doing this, babe. You’re beside yourself, Lou is starving, this is bullshit.” And with that he left for the chemist. He saved me that day.
My mum was there too. She reminded me that I was Lou’s mum, and whatever I decided to do was the right thing. So I decided to put Lou on formula, or at least “top him up” until my nipples sorted themselves out.
Api came back from the pharmacy with every conceivable brand of formula for newborns, along with bottles, nipples for the tops of bottles, a sterilizing machine to clean the bottles, and a cleaning machine that cleans the sterilizing machine. We were set.
On this same day, I was expecting a home visit from the midwife, Karen. She was due to come around lunchtime. Lou was meant to have a feed at the same time, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to try him on a bottle of formula, thinking I would have extra support from her.
When Karen arrived, I asked my sister to please put the kettle on so I could get a bottle ready.
Karen wasn’t having this. “What’s the kettle going on for?”
I froze, like I had been caught stealing chewing gum from the gas station. “Um, I’m having a really rough time with feeding, so I was going to try and see if he will take a bottle.”
I was shaking. I could tell she wasn’t going to like it, and I wasn’t strong enough to back myself.
“No, no, turn the kettle off. We are going to get this baby on your boob.”
Fuck, OK, sure. I didn’t want to, but she was the expert and this was obviously what was best for my baby. Why else would she be telling me to do it when she saw how exhausted and helpless I was?
I told my sister to turn the kettle off, and I braced myself. I lifted my shirt up and prepared the war zone as best as I could. As she grabbed my restless, hungry baby, I felt my shoulders tense and my toes curl under. She leaned forward and shoved him onto my boob so hard that we, my baby and I, gasped in pain and shock. Then he went to it, chewing on my nipple like it was tobacco and he was at a ball game. I was crying, my mum was crying, my baby was crying, and Api and my sister were pacing. They were pissed off.
The midwife held Lou on my nipple for what felt like forty-five minutes. He was wriggling and chewing, I was wriggling and crying, and she just held him there, not letting either of us move. “Everyone finds it hard, love; you’ve just got to keep at it.”
This was it—this was the guilt that was forcing me to do something I couldn’t do, the guilt that was making me feel like if I didn’t breastfeed my son, then I might as well put vodka in his bottle and inject meth into his veins.
After she had finished manhandling me and my son, she packed up her things and said that when she came back in a week she really wanted to see me breastfeeding, exclusively.
I wanted to breastfeed so much, I really did, but my body just wasn’t letting me. I had to trust that putting my son on formula wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
As soon as Karen left, I changed midwives, and for six months Lou was fed exclusively on formula. It turned out to be the best decision I had made since becoming a mum.
Ladies, trust yourselves, and if you are too sleep deprived to even pull your pants up after going to the toilet and you’re scared of making any big decisions, then trust someone who loves you. Someone who knows you, not someone who is paid to push an agenda, or someone who has nipples of steel and was upset that she had to stop breastfeeding her ninth child at the age of eleven because it was getting weird.
We are all different, and even though my boobs look really nice, thanks to emergency open-heart surgery they are bloody useless. But never fear—I’m sure there’s room for our steel nipples and useless boobs in Taylor’s Squad.
Dear Hangover
Why?
Why do you have to be such an arsehole?
At 5:00 a.m., why do you need to sit behind my left eyebrow and just kick at me?
Kick, kick, kick.
It’s not dehydration; it’s not alcohol poisoning. It’s a few glasses of wine, and you’re being a douche about it.
Sunday morning after a long night of some
celebratory champagnes, then on to copious cocktails at the local gay bar followed by a red wine nightcap—yep, you are well within your rights to dress in your favorite and most expensive suit and go to town on my head.
But Wednesday morning after a night of sitting on the couch, watching reruns of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars with two glasses of white wine, is not a party you are invited to.
Also, while I have you, I have one request: when the kids aren’t around, can you please, PLEASE fuck off.
I know what you’re trying to do. It’s so obvious—you’re trying to put a wedge between me and Wine, trying to make me regret spending time with him. But you can’t. You won’t.
What Wine and I have is special, and you just need to deal with it.
Thanks for your consideration, but get fucked.
Celeste
The One about My Mum
Mum had a pretty tough time growing up. Her parents split when she was young, and she fast became one of those kids who would sit on the front step of the pub for hours waiting for her dad every other Saturday when he had her.
My mum is the youngest of three. Her big brother, Bill, is twelve years older than her, and her sister, Christine, is in the middle and six years older. Mum is the baby and the most resilient of all of them.
After her parents split, life became hard for my nana, and she would struggle to keep a job, as my pop would cause a bit of shit around her workplace and she would have to keep changing jobs. “She never got fired,” my mum is quick to remind me, a fact that I know she is proud of. “She just had to keep moving around, because being a woman in any kind of industry in the early ’60s was hard enough, let alone with your ex-husband trying to cause shit for you.”
When mum was ten, Nana got a job as a housekeeper and moved from Sydney to Walcha, a small town just outside Tamworth in the northeast of New South Wales. Billy and Christine had moved out, and Nana couldn’t take Mum with her, so Mum was sent to live with her uncle Colin and aunt Irene and her two cousins Collette and Donna in Sylvania in Sydney’s south.
Because of the move, Mum had to change schools. She was taken out of Brigidine in Randwick and enrolled into Our Lady of Fatima in Caringbah. Even though Mum attended that school for nearly two years with Donna, she was never bought the new school uniform. For the whole time she was living with her uncle, aunt, and two cousins, she was going to a school where she was wearing a different uniform from everyone else.
Mum lived with Aunt and Uncle for eighteen months, sharing a room with Donna for the entire period.
One morning before school, Mum and Donna were having a fight over breakfast when Donna said, “Well, it doesn’t matter anyway. You’re going to boarding school, so we don’t need to share with you anymore.”
With that Mum got up, grabbed Donna by her long red ponytail, and whipped her head around, screaming: “NO, I’M NOT. SHUT UP, DONNA! I’M NOT GOING TO BOARDING SCHOOL!”
Neither had any idea what boarding school was. Mum just knew she wasn’t going.
Two months later, Nana picked Mum up and they were off to boarding school. The school was in the same area as Nana’s job in Walcha, so Mum was excited to be close to her mum again.
Whenever I ask Mum about how this felt, she is always so kind and understanding toward her mum. “She just did what she had to do.”
Mum shared a bed with Nana up until going to live with Aunt and Uncle at age eight; then when she moved to Aunt and Uncle’s she slept on the bottom bunk in Collette’s room and her clothes were stored in Donna’s. This was the living arrangement for two years before she went to boarding school, where she shared a room with eighteen other girls.
My mum loves company; I get this from her. We aren’t fans of big crowds or “events,” but we like having our people around. Whenever I see my mum, we will sit on the couch across from one another, either on our phones or flicking through the glossy mags.
I’ll look at her and ask, “Do you want to do anything?”
To which she will usually reply, “Not really. It’s just nice having company.”
The day before the first day of boarding school, Nana took Mum to the local men’s barber, where she insisted all of her hair be cut off. “This is what the school requires, Kathryn—all the girls will be the same,” Nana said to Mum, and of course Mum trusted her.
Mum walked out of that barber with hair no more than an inch long all over her head, a style she refers to as “the Mia Farrow.”
That afternoon Nana dropped Mum at boarding school a day earlier than anyone else. At the age of twelve she was alone in a new place, staying on her own in the boarding school.
The next morning, the official first day of school in a new town, where she knew no one, with new, shitty short hair, Mum took one look at all the other girls and froze.
All of them had their hair in ponytails. Long ponytails. “Some had navy-blue ribbons in their hair; others needed headbands to hold back the masses of locks from falling onto their faces,” Mum will say when she retells this story. “Some had ponytails on the crowns of their heads, and their hair was so long that it went all the way down to their bums.”
The new school was Saint Dominica’s, or Saint Dom’s, as Mum calls it. SIDEBAR: My mum is Queen of Nicknames; everything can either be shortened or lengthened depending on what she’s working with, and because my mum LOVES an audience, she will constantly repeat the nickname to cement her street cred. Mum went to school with a girl called Sipple, so she is instantly “Sip,” or when Mum is talking about surfing, something she knows nothing about, she will say, “I remember going to the Malfunction Competition with my brother Bill.” Most people who talk about such comps have been surfing for at least 5,674,983 years and refer to them as Mal Comps, but not Kath Hemmings, the little girl from Saint Dom’s in Tamworth. To her they were the Malfunction Competitions (the MAL-function Competitions).
My uncle Bill had moved to the Gold Coast with his wife, and they had just had a baby. My cousin was born with a number of health issues, so my uncle summoned my nana to go up there and help look after their sick newborn, leaving Mum alone again at boarding school.
During the weekends and school holidays at Saint Dom’s, most of the boarders would go home and visit family. Not my mum. Because Nana had moved away to raise her firstborn grandchild, Mum was left alone in Tamworth.
More often than not she was left alone at the boarding school on weekends and holidays. Just her and the nuns.
There was a lovely local girl, Merrilyn Wall (Aunty Mam), who also went to Saint Dom’s but wasn’t a boarder; she was just a day pup. After a few too many weekends and holidays when Mum was left alone like this, Aunty Mam wasn’t having a bar of it anymore and started taking Mum home with her for family get-togethers.
This started a lifelong friendship. Mum and Aunty Mam have been friends so long they even look the same. Aunty Mam and Uncle Ray (who looks like my dad—it’s all very weird) are my family’s lifeline. Their four kids, Sheeree, Anna, Joel, and DJ, are my brothers and sisters from other misters and mums (I’m pretty sure that’s how the saying goes), and I love every red and strawberry blond hair on their perfectly shaped heads.
After boarding school, Mum moved up to the Gold Coast to live with Nana again. On her final day in Tamworth, she got on a bus at 6:00 a.m., on her own, waved goodbye to her boarding family, hugged Aunty Mam until they both cried so hard they snorted, a tradition that they have held on to for the past fifty-one years, and headed north.
When Mum arrived on the Gold Coast she didn’t know anyone, just her mum and Father Hoade, the priest from a Catholic church just over the New South Wales border. I met Father Hoade when I went to Saint Joseph’s College; he was the kind of man who was born one hundred years old and stayed that age until he died. The only time I would see him was during school Mass, when we would all get buses to the local church. I thank him for the hour-long naps I had in church.
On December 17, 1971 (Kath Barber LOVES a date and time r
ecall), Mum’s cousin Collette was up visiting so they went to a party nearby at Tugun with the crew from the local youth club. And didn’t they go all out!
Mum wore a long burgundy paisley cheesecloth off-the-shoulder dress (obviously), and Aunty Collette, the cool uni student from Sydney, who is all arms and legs, wore a white skort (Is it a skirt? Is it shorts? No, my friend, it’s a skort.), a yellow knit top with blue and orange stripes, and matching striped over-the-knee socks with white clogs, because why wouldn’t you?
This is where they met my dad, Neville William Barber. Dad was there with some of his mates when Mum and Aunty Collette walked in. Mum thought that Dad was interested in Collette, but then Kath Hemmings came along and, like all the other good female role models in my life, she shut that shit down.
From the day they met, they saw each other every day. Dad would go around to Mum’s place each afternoon after his traineeship as a cabinetmaker. If my nana was still alive, she wouldn’t say he was there every day, she’d say he was there EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.
“Doesn’t he have a home to go to?” Nana would ask Mum.
“Nup,” Mum would say with a smile and a hushed voice, as Dad was no doubt in the next room.
My mum and dad have been together for forty-six years and married for forty-three. When Mum tells me stories of her childhood and growing up, I can’t wait to get to the part where she met Dad.
My parents look after each other like no one else can. They get each other, love each other, respect each other, and would happily gang up on me and my sister anytime.
The One about Jo and How I Got in Trouble at Yoga
I met Jo on All Saints and, from the moment I met her, I wanted to wrap her and her energy up in a ball, put her in my back pocket, and carry her around with me EVERYWHERE. She was the bee’s knees, the duck’s nuts, the cat’s pajamas, the dolphin’s earrings. She was always happy and cheeky and perfect. She was a makeup artist, and All Saints was her first big gig.
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