Then, some days, it all goes fine and he kisses me seven times and say’s “I love you Mummy” as he joyfully chomps really plain cereal and gets dressed by himself. The house is clean. The fridge is full of healthy snacks and he even lets me play a CD that is not LOUDHEAVYFASTROCKANDROLL (his phrase). In the last two weeks I admit to having two really bad burn outs. Days when the claustrophobia, repetition, exhaustion and stress of parenting got me down. On those days he eats dorritos in the living room while I cry in the bath and I feel like Saturday morning comes too soon. But there is always perspective. We are two. Naomi Edison is alone with her four boys. And studying psychology! Maree Oaten is at home mothering three babies under three. Those girls earn their good times! And these are the battle front years, when its all about getting adequate calories into your young while answering their questions magically enough to feed their souls.

Marcello knows when I switch off. And intensifies his demands accordingly. His little inner clock expects certain topics of conversation at different geographic points of our daily journey. On the sweaty mad down hill jaunt to the ferry we talk about cars and the way people drive them (this involves some bad words). On the ferry we point to various harbour islands and make up magical names for mythical creatures. The snagglegrots who live on Snooklepink Island are a favorite. On the bus from the ferry to the preschool he likes stories and on the run down the hill we look at the boats and discuss their contents. It’s funny, if I skip a step, he drags me back. So it pays not to miss a step. And it pays not to grow caustic about the rituals we made up together. I love the snagglegrots. I am used to the whining, even that has its own cycles and subtle levels of intensity and importance. And I have become a master of distraction. When I run out of ideas all I need to do is tickle him, or tackle him or pull out the finger puppet that has an exposed green rubber brain and an elephant’s trunk and stick it right in his little face. Y’see it aint that hard! Just some days, some days…..

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA

A yummy mummy is yummy at every age. Lately though there has been a growing implication that a mature yummy is actually a MILF and a MILF is actually a cougar and all of this adds up to older women with kids wearing way too much eye makeup for the school run.

On my own school run down through the center of Sydney everyday I see a giant poster. It features Courtney Cox in tight jeans and a t-shirt that says ‘40 is the new 20’. The strapline is something like “For Steph life has just begun…” I look, stunned, at the stiff volume of her hair; The airbrushed looking makeup; The gritty determination on her hollow dieted face. And then I catch my own face in the reflection of a store window: freckled, eye-bagged, cheerful but much more canine than beast of prey. And I look at many women walking down the street. Women in crippling heels. Women with brutally tight pony tails. Women in suits that cleave into their tensed buttocks and business shirts starched into sharp angles. Women of all ages fairly intent on looking groomed, fierce and in control. Cougarish. I guess.

I admit I haven’t even seen the program. I object to the fact that TV shows ask for an investment of time and such a regular commitment. I don’t think I watched “Sex and the City” for the first five years it existed. But Cougar Town might take even longer. Because, what really is the comedic point of sale or controversy here? That older women are still hot? That older divorced women still stand a chance in a dimly lit bar? Or, more pointedly, that older divorced women are a specialty for certain younger men. Fold this fetish in with the single mother factor and my skin starts to really crawl. Nobody wants to be part of a demographic that is subtly demeaning. Actually, let’s be honest, downright demeaning.

My objection to the very idea of a cougar is that women have to compete at all: twenty vs forty, married vs single, cougar vs cub. Or, to be more historically truthful, that all women compete. All the time. Well, that’s a sad fact isn’t it? When I was twenty seven I had very few close female friends. Women my age were so busy going for everything (jobs, men, babies) they seemed to have very little time for each other and women older than me dismissed me on sight. Some years later I feel incredibly relieved NOT to be in my physical prime. Because I feel I have a lot more to offer than the firmness of my thighs or the condition of my face. I’m formed now, crumbly in several places, but fully formed. For better or worse. If I looked as good as Courtney Cox in a pair of jeans maybe I’d feel empowered but probably not if I had to go hungry night after night. With the denial of age comes the struggle to slow its hand. So I wouldn’t want to be in Demi Moore’s satin slippers for a minute either. Imagine bending over and having your ass posted on twitter by your young husband? Imagine how it feels to kiss his spongey elastic skin first thing in the morning when your eye makeup is a smudgy remnant and the claw of gravity is cleaving at your jawline. What does Madonna do with her boy-lover Jesus between dawn and pilates? I assume she has blinds made of peach tinted silk. Or hash cookies. Gluten free hash cookies.

I am not that sensitive about my age but I am sensitive about the cultural perceptions that surround it. That line by Rod Stewart at the start of “Maggie May” by Rod Stewart is a real stinger. “The morning sun when it’s in your face really shows your age” I mentioned this to an ex-lover the other day and he said “Yes and that song was written about a woman much younger than you.” Ouch. “You’re forty six” I snapped back does that make you a mature Lion in good condition or a sleazy Puma on the skids? He didn’t reply. He still loves the same super models he found hot in high school, but the issue with Claudia and Elle is that they don’t age like other women. They just wear more hair around their face. Or should that be manes?

Occasionally, I might still want to wear high heels and jeans and smoky eye makeup but now I think I may retire that look forever. In the hands of Cougar Town it’s become a ghastly cliché. Style wise the image of the Cougar Town poster is of a frozen identity: a character from Friends who hasn’t changed her leather jacket and eyeliner for 13 years. Perhaps that is why Cox was chosen, to carry the demographic from Friends  well into their forties and maybe beyond. But I am sorry to say NO THANKS and simply NO. Forty is actually not the new twenty. You can’t erase two decades and frankly I am not hiding mine. But then again I am not on the prowl. Desire is not making an animal out of me. And my desire is neither a dirty little secret nor a secret weapon. It’s just a fact, like a wrinkle or a sun spot, and it really does seem to grow more intense with every passing year. The prowess of a woman coincides with the gradual decline in a man, maybe that is why a group of middle aged men made a comedy about it. So they can deal!

But can someone wake up and smell the Chanel no.5? I want to tell Hollywood that they got this one badly wrong. That, yes, women’s libido’s do radically ripen with age but so does our sense of irony. And taste. I am not about to knock some twenty one year old girl off her bar stool with a flick of my blow dried hair anytime soon while sinking my acrylic nails into her date. Because most clever creatures of a certain vintage know that seduction rarely happens on a Friday night and you can’t properly stalk prey in heels. Bare feet and broad sunlight works better for me. And so does picking on someone my own size.

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA

There is no shame in saying you are reading a book because you saw the movie first. Before seeing ‘Bright Star’, the film about John Keats by Jane Campion, I had read possibly three of his most famous poems. Back in high school and barely concentrating. I don’t believe I am alone and whether you love the film or found it, as many men have commented, too ponderous and slow, it may have you reading Keats again. And with pleasure.

Two recent editions are a great current introduction to the poet. The shorter is ‘John Keats, Poems selected by Andrew Motion’ (faber poetry) and the second (with Campion’s film still on the front) is ‘Bright Star: The Complete Poems and Selected Letters’ (Vintage). Perhaps because I didn’t want to look like a novice or a romantic wannabe on the bus, so I began with the faber volume of selected poems. Unlike a lot of poetry books it was not scary thick. The introduction was only two pages long, this is teasingly short but written concisely enough to re-establish Keats as a bold contemporary mind of his time and not the feeble sickly tragic that the Victorians painted. Keats, you see, died young and stayed pretty. Famished in Rome on a diet of one anchovy and a slice of bread per day proscribed by a doctor who believed he merely had a bad stomach, the poet died of both starvation and consumption at the age of twenty five in a room with daisies painted on the ceiling. It was a raw deal for English literature for who knows what the genius could have composed if he had lived, and loved, a little longer.

The dramatic axis of ‘Bright Star’ (the film) is Keats’ stifled passion for the teenage Fanny Brawne. He wrote her thirty two letters and (perhaps) five poems, but in the space of his two year romance also wrote some of his finest sonnets and elegies. The film tempts us to believe that Keats was an emotional and sensual virgin before Fanny. A poseur on a couch, thinking about love without grappling with its physical pain or raw truths. But the joy of actually reading his collected work is that we find a young man under full steam before, during and after finding his great muse. Keats was always on fire and his imagery, his language is so often suffused in sensual humidity; the scent of human breath and sheen of molten flesh, as well as all those flower petals fit to burst their buds. Modern readers don’t expect this sort of heat from a man of Austen’s stuffy age. I didn’t. Yet many of his poems put contemporary erotica on the back burner. His nymphs and heroes are dew soaked and shaking like rain drenched trees:

‘he feels the moisture on his cheek, and blesses,

with lips that tremble, and with glistening eye,

All that soft luxury

That nestled in his arms.’ from Calidore

Stealing from nature all the secrecy and shadow his lovers don’t just kiss they pollinate:

She felt the warmth, her eyelids opened bland,

And, like new flowers at morning song of bees,

Bloomed and gave up her honey to the bees.

From Lamia

And, just when it all gets too soggy and fraught, Keats wit cuts through the fog with a biting salty gust. When it comes to the false morality of seduction he’s no shrinking violet and freely shows his bawdy side:

‘There’s a blush for won’t, and a blush for shan’t,

And a blush for having done it;

There’s a blush for thought and a blush for naught,

And a blush for just begun it.’

from Oh blush not so!

Biographers have noted the love Keats had for Shakespeare and, like the bard, the poet can spin a pot boiling yarn (lover’s exhuming graves and planting skulls in basil pots) or bang on about Roman banquets and serpents morphing into women, yet rarely does his imagery seem kitsch. His language is just too layered and too brilliantly faceted. And even when so many of his classical references are lost on the modern reader, the joy of the sound of his words makes ample time for finding out what they actually mean, later. Of course he spoke a very different English and a large proportion of his lexicon has passed from current usage. “What the hell is a ‘Lucent fan’ or a ‘Morphean fount’?” I mumbled as I plundered through the complete poems and google wasn’t much help as words depend on context for meaning. But just like a schoolgirl it pays to simply circle the boggling bits with a faint pencil line and press on. If you are not a scholar of nineteenth century poetry then you are in broad company. Keats’ ambitious, dense and double fisted lyrical style was confronting even for the readers of his time.

In ‘Bright Star’ the actress playing Fanny is open in her confusion about the truth of poetry and in the centuries that have intervened poetic verse has slipped further and further from daily life. Jane Campion was canny to have her heroine ask the question every generation asks of poets; “How can I read you? And what do you mean?” In the film the poet and his muse eventually reach complicity and understanding through their senses. The words become the emotions, the gesture fuses to the truth, love conquers art. But what great materials were at hand for Keats in 1820 and what a limited palette we have to paint with today. Imagine a poem beginning with the words “I am just so into you!” and you get my point. Young modern lovers quote film lines instead of sonnets and send epistles in the abbreviated slang of texts. OMFG and so on. We are now on a very distant shore from any sort of man who might fire off a breakfast email to his lady with the words:

‘Fresh morning gusts have blown away all fear

From my glad bosom…’

In word and in action this romantic poet was the anti-thesis of the commitment-phobe or the calculating cynic. He attacks emotion from every angle, and every dimension, bold, frail, heroic, timid, historically grand or rustic and raw. And then, to give it all an edge, there is death. The death he speaks of in his beautifully lucid letters (fully aware of his declining health), the death he addresses as a poetic symbol and the untimely death that threatened and ultimately obliterated both his greatest love and his art.

I didn’t cry watching ‘Bright Star’. Perhaps because I knew the grim outcome, our hero’s death came more as a relief than a blow. But when I read Keats, and re-read him, tasting his feverish energy, grasping how much he wanted to say, and noting his dry awareness of his own rapidly approaching end, then I cried. A little for his heart; so courageous and full to bursting. A little for his friends; who must have grieved the loss of his letters, and his fidelity. And a little for Fanny who never saw him live to deliver the burning promise of his desires. But mostly for the English language which seems to have been dying ever since.

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA

Patti Smith was at the height of her fame in 1979 on the crest of her cult album ‘Easter”, when she moved to Detroit with Fred “Sonic” Smith and raised two children. She took out ten years and I always wonder about them. I wonder what she looked like at the supermarket with a bag of oranges or pregnant in a pair of black jeans. I wonder how she kept her revolutionary zeal simmering when doing the normal quiet things of mothering. Some of my curiosity has been satisfied by recent interviews online to promote her book. In one she described her working life at home in an all too familiar terms of planning and stealth:

“I feel that I really learned to be a writer in Michigan,” she says. “I couldn’t sit around smoking pot waiting for the muse to visit. I had to get up when Fred and the children were asleep. I’d write from 5 to 8, then get the kids up and ready for school. I had to choose my moments and use them well. That discipline, which wasn’t so easy at first, became a point of pride after a while. I worked harder in that period than I ever had before. Fred and I wrote many, many songs that have yet to be recorded. Among all kinds of writing I did, there are four other books of prose that I imagine will eventually be published. So we were very prolific, just not publicly.”

Now, today, her daughter is an accomplished musician and her grown son, Jackson tours with her playing in her band, and perhaps she see’s the cycle of advance and retreat between public and private life collapsed. Or maybe, for a woman as original as she is, mothering was every bit as creative and raw and important as playing rock and roll. Some days I try to take that approach. Would would Patti do?

Yesterday it rained really hard and we walked home from the ferry soaked to the skin. “Rain is gonna make the flowers grow” said my son and he didn’t complain, because he knew fluffy dry towels were waiting for him. We stood at the base of a giant tree whose limbs looked strong and erotic shining with water. “It’s a wet elephant!” I yelled. “It will dry in the sun, but now it’s drinking!” said Marcello. When we got home we played some early Bowie. Marcello always complains about ballads. “Faster! Louder! Rocker!” This is his current mantra even though we both know Rocker is not a verb. So we spin out together. Him in his polyester Zorro cape and me in the bathroom, drawing a love heart in lipstick on the mirror, cutting myself a fringe with a pair of nail scissors and listening to “Easter” full blast. He doesn’t listen to the lyrics. A song will either be electric for him, or totally meaningless. When I look at him dancing and declaring “Look at my kung fu moves” I wonder what he’ll be like ten years from now: is he going to come home with a lightning bolt tattoed on his shoulder or refuse to speak, locked in his room listening to Joy Division? Will he be too cool to rock with Mummy?

Patti Smith, when you see her website (http://www.pattismith.net/news.html) see her  sing live (she sings “In my Blakean Year” on her website from a recent book signing and is EPIC) or read her interviews always hammers home the same message: the experience is NOW, the chance and the joy are also right now. In the Vogue piece she said “I tell people don’t romanticize CBGBs. Make your own. It was just a place. All punk rock meant to me was freedom. Punk rock is not sacred It belongs to anyone who wants to embrace it, just as I embraced French symbolism.” Now none of this matters one little bit to the mothers in my neighbourhood. They are not going to be cutting their own hair or going bra-less in the rain anytime soon, but they could…If they got talking to me or if Marcello took his own music to playdates!

In my eyes Patti’s message to the mothers of this world is to abandon cool and embrace an authentic experience. To ignite a sense of freedom in the ritual of living and keep it burning. If we all woke up everyday with that imperative then I think much of the normal strain and repetition of parenting (and relationships) would take on quite a different hue. Some days when I take off my sandals to race our half broken stroller across the cricket pitch to the ferry, and keep them off. Or when we have knotted hair and sweaty grass stained bodies entering the lobby of a great museum. Or when I stop to swear out loud at a car skidding through the school zone…Well, I feel a bit ragged and wildly unsuited to the sedate role of custodian. Mothering ought to tighten my grip on decorum when actually it just unravels it. These last few months any thought of being “together” with cello in tow has dissolved. We are always moving so we are always sweating and become so quickly scruffy. But after so many days lived on the edge of losing it or having lost it and not really caring and I wonder when the appropriate behaviour is going to set in. Um, probably never.  And it’s not actually a matter of immaturity or wishful thinking, it’s a matter of choice. Between good sense and a good rain storm, between discipline or dancing in public, between putting on a bra and eyeliner or us making the ferry in my pajama top with a grin. I look at Patti Smith and clearly imagine her priorities. She’s nonchalant in the very best way. A woman raised in the fifties who has dressed like a boy her whole life, a woman who may possibly never have owned a tube of lipstick, a woman who raised her son to seriously rock. And a woman who changed my life and is still changing it. At the scruffy start of the day or the raggedy end it’s all a matter of freedom. When you taste it you just don’t want anything else.

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA

“How old are you?” he asks me as if I have been living under a mushroom in a fairytale just waiting to play with him. And “will we stay young forever?” “Only if we brush our teeth” I reply too swiftly.

But his words goad me a little. For him I want to be vital. To run and lift him and stop saying “God I am tired.” So I gave up all alcohol nine days ago and had a facial I couldn’t afford and am eating stupid amounts of produce to be a bit more like a ferociously healthy four year old. Some nights I go to sleep at nine pm just so I know I’ll have edge and humour and not shake him like a rag doll when I am hysterical with exhaustion the next day. Being even tempered is more important than having marathon strength as a single mother. In fact the emotions ARE the marathon.

So, this year, I say goodbye to certain dreams (a second blooming pregnancy) a measure of vanity (the lines are here to stay) and I embrace the compelling challenge. I need to be fit and really emotionally strong for life with Marcello to be happy. It’s not about looking good for my age anymore, it’s simply about enjoying his pace, and keeping it. There’s no denial in this revelation: a hangover at forty four with a small kid is HELL. So to hell with hangovers and extra schlumpy weight and feeling so-so. I live around the corner from a health food store. The local produce shop near the train station is pretty cheap.

When faced with a velvety cruising escalator and stairs I tackle those steps. And then little miracles start I can race him and sing the soundtrack from Rocky and not collapse. I can lift heavy furniture without a man on the other end. I can swing that boy off the earth at 90 degrees and feel the blood surging in my arms. I don’t look any different. The facial didn’t remove the sun damage or the distinct disappointed look my eyes took on and never lost, but I’ve got a Godly amount of grunt…for my age. And this birthday feels like a special one. If you are turning another year older soon I hope you feel the same way. Excited by the chance for another cycle of transformation. Inspired by your kids to be healthy and alive in the moment. And above all cherishing another good year hanging out and growing up with the people you love best.

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA

I am not one to gossip. Much. But I thought I better let it be known that the mystery man, known as “birdman”, who sometimes inhabits the Double Bay ferry and wears olive green silk t-shirts… Well, he’s not free. I saw him for a fourth time on Friday evening. I was wearing my Monica Belucci uber-bosom white rayon sundress and Marcello was asleep on my lap. That was an Italian movie moment. The jetty was rocking softly as we waited for the seven pm final service home and Birdman came bounding through. He bounds he doesn’t walk. I beckoned him forth and he stood in front of me shifting from one sandaled foot to another. On the ferry I sat down the back and watched him bound on. Holding hands. With a woman who looked just like him, but ten years older than him. I like him even more now. IT was a scenario like a black and white film where small things happen that resonate more deeply. And I break life down into stills to help the repetition disintegrate and let the characters I see bleed into each other’s lives with more fluidity than the usual social roles allow. And in a puff of ferry petrol that little dream went drifting out over the sea wake and I reflected on the larger victories of the week. Marcello went to his first outdoor rock concert on Thursday night. Wrapped in a garbage bag and a sarong and hiding inside his stroller we waited in the pouring rain for the music to begin for more than an hour. ROGUE’S GALLERY was an album of sea shanties sung by a motley bunch of artists from Tim Robbins. Marianne Faithfull and Sting to Gavin Friday of the Virgin Prunes. The live concert promised that eccentric melange, plus the unlikely romance of being on Sydney’s waterfront in a full force wind. I felt for Cello. Just because we got free tickets didn’t mean he had to get soaked to the bone. But he’s a trouper. “Where’s the pirates? Where’s the rock?” is all he kept chanting as the water soaked our flesh. he was the only four year old in the mosh pit and when the music started he was on my shoulders, little fists in the air. He loved Peaches and I thanked Goddess he couldn’t really understand her lyrics. The intitial guilt of keeping my boy out and up for so long dissolved as the violins and guitars filled the air I forgot about my broken plastic poncho and Cello’s tiny wet feet. We were laughing and swaying and living. We stayed the distance till ten pm and went for sticky lime sherbet. By the end of the concert the rain stopped falling and a great big ocean liner left the harbour bellowing her horns. Magic. In bed, warm and dry we read pirate stories and felt like we had been at sea. “Don’t tell Granny” I whispered to him as I towelled his hair “But let’s tell Daddy everything!” “Yes Mum” he said sleepily “When is the next rock concert?” Soon, I thought to myself, very, very soon.

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA

OK, so I have this idea for a T-shirt. And it says “LIFE IS NOT A FRENCH MOVIE” on the front. And “WHAT A SHAME” on the back. But secretly and of late my life has actually become a French movie. Because I moved to a neighbourhood that looks like a suburban mutation of “Under the Cherry Moon” meets St.Tropez. Because I keep running into a man on the ferry who looks like Jean Paul Belmondo and because I wear floral dresses and red lipstick everyday on purpose and my son wears stripey t-shirts. Also on purpose. It’s still summer in Sydney and the long lonely Brooklyn winters feel so far away. I moved into an apartment with a very ugly but cute chocolate brown and canary yellow kitchen and every day feels like a holiday. Maybe because my rent is not due for another two weeks and Marcello enjoys baking cakes with me on Sunday mornings. Let me explain Double Bay, Sydney. No one groovy wants to live here because blonde women with small dogs and gold sneakers are not cool. The mums who bring their kids to the local primary school here are thin on the ground because the area is so rich that everyone is cossetted off from birth to a private school. So, in a very weird twist of fate, I get to live in one of Sydney’s poshest areas for a cheap rent because the locals all own their houses and the renters are all living somewhere else more groovy. And so the streets are empty and treelined, like in a French movie. And old men with Italian sunglasses sit at cafe tables, as in a French movie and Marcello and I catch the ferry to preschool everyday and I pull all sorts of French movie moves. Like: letting my dress plow up on purpose in front of the office workers, and wrapping one long Indian skarf around both our necks,….and flirting with the handsome man who catches the 6.15pm. It’s a bit sad. he doesn’t really know he’s in my script. “I’m sorry” he said yesterday, looming above me with his distracting hardened nipples under his olive green silk t-shirt “Do I know you?” BEIN SUR I wanted to declare but replied “Sure, everytime I see you you almost knock me to the ground as you come galloping across the street on the way to the ferry…” And just like a French movie he looked at me as if someone had fudged the subtitles. I didn’t care. the sun was shining. The imaginary soundtrack music (Tindersticks) was blaring in my mind and the wind was catching Cello’s hair. Romance really is a state of mind and right now, before the summers ends, I feel like Godard is directing. Pity he never made a black and white film about a single mother. Maybe I better get writing.

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA

P.S. OK, so this all sounds a bit too simple. I still have rent, and bills, and anxiety about Cello’s sugar consumption. And stress. But I am here to tell all mothers that after a divorce. And after a big move. And after many sleepless numbingly lonely nights. There are good bits. And this, for me, is one of them.

Well, I guess it had to happen. We finally went to emergency. Four years on earth and not even a scratch and then I had to go and get all acrobatic and twist Cello’s foot in a forward roll and then ponder the eternal question; sprain or fracture? After seven hours in emergency we got the eternal answer: maybe both! And now Cello is stumping around with a plaster splint and loving what he calls his peg leg.

He hates the hospital. He yells at anyone who touches him “No doctoring!”, and, a bit like airports, I feel the same powerful phobia. In Sydney, Australia there are two main pediatric hospitals, servicing a massive metropolitan sprawl but the one we attended (Randwick) was clean, upbeat and professional. And somewhere between 3pm and midnight I bonded with a father of three whose toddler had burnt hands and a mother of three who little muppet had a deeply split lip. Sharing chocolate, crayons and gossip, we were in a room called “FAST TRACK WAITING” for about four hours. It was cool. We argued about voluntary vascectomy for married fathers (very fashionable in Sydney it seems) and the right for parents of three to have annual sex holidays with their spouses. Well, I was dead against the first and right onto the second and yet felt strangely unqualified on all fronts.

One child. To parents of three that is a lifelong holiday! And I was so impressed with their beatific resilient attitudes. Then of course the penny dropped. “This is rare -if stressed- one on one time with my daughter” said Mummy of three. “This is respite from the sound of my boys fighting” said Dad of three. And I just sat there feeling a bit decadent and odd. Mummy of three had a ten month old baby to go home to sometime much later that night. Her husband bounced in with pajamas and blankets and hugs all round. Then he went home to warm up some formula. I was keenly aware that our kids were not badly injured and the time we were sacrificing (stretching into the night) may have been literally saving lives. Next door in ambulatory care there were severe traumas, badly broken legs and small infants struggling to breathe. The intensity of that collective pain was at odds with the bright collages of elephants and butterflies on the walls and the medical staff, rushing and exhausted, were so lovely with each child. Our doctor took off his stethoscope and put it round Cello’s neck saying “You be the doctor!” and the X-ray machinist was super patient as Cello proceeded to have a fit that equalled the destruction of seven hotel rooms by Sid Vicious. To convince him the X-ray machine was not going to eat his foot we watched a 12 year old boy with a severely broken fibia brave the machine. His mother gave Cello a hug. Her heart was that big. These small kindnesses mean everything in the suspended reality of trying to fix up your kid and I tried to imagine the raw vulnerability (and occasional rage) of mothers and families whose children have chronic conditions, repeated surgeries or intensive care.  We got off with a half splint cast and a stop at the deli for a strawberry lollipop. When I look at my son asleep tonight he looks like a bandaged teddy bear and I feel an enormous gratitude for the power of young bodies to heal and for the strange lessons in love I encounter every day. To raise a child you can’t wrap them in cotton wool. But it’s nice to know there are helping hands and collective wisdom for them when they fall.

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA

P.S. My next blog is in honor of Lisa Babli a very special yummy mummy now expecting twins. I will be interviewing some twin mothers on the pregnancy, birthing and mothering experience of twins. Reader comments and stories are warmly welcomed.

Not so long ago I saw a man in Tshirt that said I HEART HOT MUMS. My heart went all fluttery. I wanted to take it as a personal homage and compliment but then paused to note the plural. Yeah, we’re hot, thanks….from, um, ALL of us. I don’t particularly HEART HOT DADS, but that’s just because I’m too busy studying their form, and stealing their football chucking secrets and a statement like that would look socially disruptive brandished on the chest of a woman. Dads are taboo because they belong to other mothers.  Plus, the playground is a somewhat uninspiring environment for flirting. Latte breath. Exhaustion. Interruption. Pitiless daylight.

I am a mother and I am single. I never stop to consider the subversive possibilities or the supposed drama of this  until I am drifting along on the magazine racks at the supermarket on a Friday night looking at Jennifer Anniston’s anguished face (headline: DUMPED AGAIN!)  or am at a dinner party where  some fervent married parents are giving me some hyper moralistic advice about sex, or the mere whiff of its possibility outside the temple gates of wedlock. “Don’t bring just ANYONE home” a concerned father of three crowed down the phone “I have heard horror stories about one night stands and their impact on children….” I got a choking feeling at the back of my throat. I think it was rage. Sex and the single mother. It’s always presented as something closely related to child abuse. Or at its very root: neglect. Recall Sandra Oh in SIDEWAYS, ignoring her small daughter while she drank wine with a sleazebag. Letting her daughter bond with the sleazebag in question, then after the penny dropped, whacking the sleazebag over the head with a motorcycle helmut. OK, let it be said that this is NOT my current line of action or future plan.

My best friend Karen has a three year old son and is very uncomfortable with the label “single mum”. I found her thoughts on the subject illuminating because she has had several social encounters where she was treated as a predatory threat, rather than the very lovely person that she is. “I hated being branded as single long before I had a child and I especially hate it now! I’m am myself, an individual, I’m Karen and no, just because I am the only single woman in this room, I do NOT want your husband.” Now see why I HEART HOT DAD’S wouldn’t cut it at the playground? Un-partnered women with children exist in a partnered world with subtle lines, social rules and prejudice. But honestly it’s not as if we are all out there snapping our garter belts at cocktail bars, most nights I’d rather listen to my son breathing gently while I slip into a short novel.

On a very banal and fiscal level dating involves childcare. And the simple fact is that time alone is expensive. I have to really like someone to invest ninety bucks worth of babysitting on the sheer right to be with them. And, I’m bloody proud as well.  In some ways being a single mum takes all the worst gender biases about prone womanhood and magnifies them. Instead of imagining a fantastic gutsy role model like Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovitch, with a baby on one hip and a revolutionary grenade on the other, I have read so many doleful domestic abuse stories about single mums shacking up with convicted criminals, stalkers and worse. Must be the marriage police again, stressing how safe that institution is for women, and for families. Ahem. But hey, sorry for getting all heavy. I am more amused than stressed by this terrain.

I think the potential for comedy in this situation is far greater than tragedy. At my favorite toddler recreation center today a beautiful dancer (and mother of three) suggested I go to a Latin nightclub. Oh, sure. The last time I went to an tango bar in Surry Hills, Sydney, a complete stranger thrust his leg so deeply between mine that I was hoisted across the floor like a human broom. Not the most romantic gesture. Other friends, ever helpful, like to physically point to men who seem interested, and  then, make wild hand gestures if I fail to register their message. On Tuesday night I went to a pub and was subjected to a loud and drunken plea from a girlfriend. “See that guy on the couch? The big one? He wants your number, he wants it now!!!”  Well,   thanks for the invoice but do I get to choose as well? When you have been married for a long time you simply forget what all this is like. Perhaps you WANT to forget. The ancient Romans had a place for the emotional and social untouchables of society. They were put in a place called a feelly box (OK, the latin was somewhat more elegant) and basically left to grope for their future partners in the dignity of darkness. Is that next??? At the toddler recreation center I jokingly told the dancer mum that I could sense a whiff of dissent in the air and dangerous thoughts were bubbling through the regimented haze of my days. “Bring on the carpenters!” I cried out loud. “The band?” asked the dancer in confusion. “No, not the band, God I detest The Carpenters. But I must say wood workers smell like cedar and sweat and claim to be able to build a whole shed over the course of a weekend.”

Life has been busy lately and I’m not given to a great deal of fantasy but maybe it is high time to lash out with my own message t-shirt for the slightly less married men of this world. Because truth be told I HEART HOT CARPENTERS, and yes, plural is fine.

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA

Image Caption: “After these pizza’s are done Im’ goin’ dancing!”

If the man who photographs The Satorialist blog spot came to my playground who would he shoot? These are the sort of idle questions I ask myself when one hour melts Dali-like into another and the boredom begins to harden. On the whole parents dress horribly and my sisters in motherhood are painted with the same brush. The mummy uniform in Sydney at this minute is  a tight high pony-tail, jeans, a long sleeved jersey and a jogging style fleeced hoody. Oh, and a plastic lidded coffee cup welded to one hand. The footwear is deliberately ugly as well: thick soled running shoes, platform flip flops and, just occasionally, Crocs. “So what?” I hear you cry up in unison “Who’s watching?”. Well I am. But more out of curiosity than spite.

Last Tuesday my Mother tried to give me a pair of black stretchy kung-fu pants with a thick waistband and a chunky placket over the zip. They looked like the trousers used to skillfully conceal a paunch or a pair of adult diapers (or both) and she added sweetly “You know, for the playground”. It’s true that a sandpit and a climbing frame and a sandstone castle pose questions of fiber flexibility but I can do all that goof ball play in a dress and tights just as well as a pair of Russell Crowe’s track pants. And so I deliberately wear things that are a bit “off” when we trek to the seven circles of hell that are heaven for my son. Yesterday I rocked an Indian print dress, five silver bangles, blood orange colored tights and a pair of high heel boots. When the weather gets warm I rather love the idea of a full length satin evening dress, crumpled and a bit grass stained as if I’d just tripped home from a four day rock festival . That and a pair of violet haviana flip-flops. Just to shake the monkey tree. Especially on a Sunday to wake up the dads doing their fatherly strut. And essentially to compete with a mother I refer respectfully to as Lady J.

Lady J made my day last week as she rose pheonix like out of the sand in a pair of towering heeled boots, flaring high rise jeans (gripping her thighs without shame) and a skin tight gingham blouse that evoked the sexiest country singer you can imagine from Robert Altman’s ‘Nashville’. All that and cascading glamour girl auburn hair, teasingly flicked over one eye and tumbling down her back. Her son, in turn, was dressed as Superman. “Listen” Lady J said to me bluntly “I could dress like a sack of shit as a mother but I don’t choose to.” My neck jerked round like lightning to absorb the modest mums dressed in earth colored fleece, their  pitiless scraped back pony tails exposing shameless levels of sexual apathy and habitual exhaustion. Lady J’s get-up was like a gauntlet, but the response was uniformly passive aggressive. The mamans ordinaire seemed to form tighter clumps, and use mock whispers, nothing more hostile than that. “It only takes a few more minutes in the morning…” Women who are five foot ten with smokey topaz eyes always say that but I nodded respectfully and gazed at her three inch heels. Formidable! Flipping fabulous. But futile to emulate.

Granted, this deliberately alienated glamour mama was not rolling in the sandpit or lunging for toys. But none of the mothers were. One of the splendid ironies of really ugly active leisure wear is that so few people actually run in running gear or need truly need their stealthy mountaineer layers. Most Mums I see barely move. They shout instead. I’m the same, except for a bit of flitting through the artfully planted gum trees and a pot of climbing, so I figure I can wear whatever I love and practicality be damned.

Shopping in the neighbourhood boutique I reached for a tangerine floral print wiggle dress in stretch cotton. Before I could seize it another manicured hand swiftly whipped it off the racks. “AHA!” Lady J declared in glee “I’ve had my eye on that dress for ages, well a week!” “Fine” I said “I dare you wear it to the playground.” And I am ashamed to admit I am wearing it now. With chocolate brown discount store high heels and a chignon. I’m only heading out for milk but you never know who might be at the supermarket. Lady J has standards. I before I run out the door in my really deeply beloved sheepskin ugg-let boots, hot pink fleece pajamas strewn with hearts and cherries and a raincoat, I imagine Lady J’s lips pursing slightly, and I pull my chic together. Many a sage has said that women dress for each other and not for men at all. When it comes to mothers the adage does not apply. Some sort of anti-fashion puritan backlash holds siege over the playground, “who needs fashion?” the plainer ones humph “I’m MOTHERING!”. Well, I need fashion, and not to compete with a glamazon vixen but to differentiate one day from the next and, importantly, to amuse my son. “Wear the Princess dress with the train!” he yelled at me tonight before story time. So I did and then I thought to sleep in it then wear it out again tomorrow at seven am. To buy more milk and search the aisles for Lady J.

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA

Image Caption: “high heels in the playground, after all all I do is sit on royal behind!”