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!”

My son turns four next month. Blink and you are designing a new birthday cake. Last year Marcello had no say. This year he makes me go to the cake shop once a week to leaf through the ugly album full of brutally ugly ice cream cakes for the party he wants NOWWWWWW. The boy has dramatic flair. When he does really dreadful things like roaring in my face like a lion, I laugh so hard, then realize I am meant to be a paragon of etiquette. Like me, he has two life codes…what one does at school and what one does at home.

At home he is usually nude and roaring like a lion and eating ice cream for breakfast. Sounds a bit like university life really. Anyway, very soon, he turns four and I love the developing four year old mind so much. Most of his questions relate to the workings of the body and what animals share in kin. Do fish have blood? How does the blood stay inside the skin?  Why did Daddy cut his hand and how did he stop the blood coming out everywhere? Is my head a bone or a skull? Can I sleep under your dress? Can I go back into your belly like a baby then come out again?

All this but he still hasn’t asked me why the sky is blue and I keep wanting to write the answer on a piece of paper for my handbag just in case… I googled the question and found a website www.whyistheskyblue.com…and this brief summation which I don’t even fully grasp…But I’m time starved so here goes nothing:

“The blue color of the sky is due to Rayleigh scattering. As light moves through the atmosphere, most of the longer wavelengths pass straight through. Little of the red, orange and yellow light is affected by the air.

However, much of the shorter wavelength light is absorbed by the gas molecules. The absorbed blue light is then radiated in different directions. It gets scattered all around the sky. Whichever direction you look, some of this scattered blue light reaches you. Since you see the blue light from everywhere overhead, the sky looks blue.”

OK, how do I translate THAT into four year old? God has a lot of rainbow ribbons and the longest one is blue. The ribbons are wrapped around the sun which the heavens drag around the earth like a cat pulling  a ball of wool and as the sun sets we get to see all the shorter ribbons, the pink, the violet, the orange and the red. When the sun goes down all the ribbons of light start to slide away and we get to see the blanket of night where the light from other stars and planets pierce through the darkness like light through the holes of a sweater.

Mummmmm!..that makes no sense

OK, sorry, OK imagine that the earth is an orange covered in a layer of cloud fluff called atmosphere and light is all different lines of color and when the color enters the fluffy stuff it all melts and bounces around  like a frozen blueberry in a milkshake maker and the colors melt and make blue sky. If the fluff is too thick the sky gets dark and if there are no clouds the sky gets super blue…..Now go to sleep.

I see how these creation myths started in all cultures, children asked for them and everyone wanted the children to be quiet for a bit. So they worked fast.

I failed science in high school by one point. 49 percent. I cried in the toilet with the shaming report card in my hands and tried to lobby for that arbitrary distinction that kept me from being accepted by a subject I loved but could rarely decipher. But I can ace it now. I will take the bone that is my skull (actually a bunch of bones) and fill it with the stuff I have managed to ignore and slide through life without and my son will also teach me, properly, about the natural world. His questions wake me up very day and even though I am a very silly person by nature I take his questions seriously and respect his need for the facts as well as the fun. Marcello is very nearly four and they say that four year olds ask too many questions. This is only of course that we have too few answers or a very preposterous idea that we are grown and hence already  know and name many things. I find myself doing homework now. Reading simple grade school level science books and quizzing myself on dinosaur names so I can keep the pace. For pleasure. For light in the dreary tunnels of my mind. But mostly for love.

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA

Before I had my baby I read Mothering Magazine religiously. I planned to put lavender oil in his playdough and campaign for gender equality in pre-schools. I was going to a damn super mama. Year four. I burnt the pizza. Again.   We are late for school. Again. I am buying the sixth swimming cap because the others have been eaten by aliens. Yes, again. And when I look at other mothers who use calm measured tones at all times but especially in crowded public areas I  assume they are on meds. 

Mediocrity is not something we aspire to, but sometimes we are forced to capitulate to its force. My strengths in mothering are not explicit and maybe not even be that socially valuable. One the upside: I can handle massive repetition. I can watch Sponge Bob many times and still laugh. I prefer groups of screaming primal boys to winsome polite girls. I can sneak grated vegetables and garlic into his food, everyday. I can blow respectable sized spit bubbles. I could, if really bored, dance topless with body paint clown faces daubed on my boobs, for a laugh. I bake amazing sugar free apple pie but my son doesn’t eat it. Every night I really love to read his children’s books with the dramatic intensity of Bette Davis and the comic timing of Danny Kaye, but I miss a lot of other details. Like working a small nail brush. Like matching socks. And the two BIG ones: routine and regimental discipline. My son eats here and there. But he eats. So, given the roving carrot munching, I avoid going on play dates in households where structure is huge. It just ends up in tears. And profuse apologies and getting the hell out of there fast. 

Often mothering style (and rules) are more of an issue between mothers than between children themselves. Kids get on. They compete for the real stuff- like toys and turf. I love to yell “Play nice” and leave them to it. Leaning down, whispering into their little faces like a chid psychologist. It gives me the creeps. And it’s popular. Even expected. But live and let live, or live and let scream, as the case may be.  

Everyday I try and pick up the game a bit and the results are so comic/tragic. I’ll organize a trip to a science based toddler activity center only to witness a bolt-from-the-blue melt down.  I’ll pack a mega-lunch on the one day he’s not hungry. I love the idea of baking and wearing aprons but my son rejects my muffins almost every time. So, I have come to live with the Zen of crap motherhood and know that I give my all and that it’s never really ever going to be enough anyway. Because the minutea of mothering outweighs the whole. Literally because we get so absorbed in the details that faults are far easier to spot than triumphs. I feel so accomplished when the house is clean and the fridge is full but I know (with a sinking heart) that these glories of tedium are just the bare basics. 

And then, oh dear, childhood comes in such dreadfully distinct developmental stages, so that just when you find your groove for one stage - Hah finger paint!- your new accomplishments become so last week. And then there is the sheer fact of hours: being physically together almost all the time becomes more like a mini-marriage and less like a mission. At six months old I watched him like a hawk, every breath, every mouthful, every move. Now, at three and a half he seems to have his own apartment/art studio and I drop in with meals, new books and fashion options.

I am not writing in defense of complacent parenting but I’d like to raise a hand for more self forgiveness and a certain acceptance of the strengths we might all have as mothers that are subtle or silly or outside the cup cake tin. If you sat down and listed all you did in one day minute by minute you might just be astounded at the detail and the strength involved. Keeping a level head and a kind steady voice, THAT is the job beating beneath the job. And it’s a hard core effort. Being gentle is more challenging than being right. 

Today in a noisy middle eastern restaurant Cello was hungry and  over-tired. He cried and writhed and screamed while a placid boy his age looked on. I held him and stroked his face and rocked him like a baby until he calmed down and behaved like a little boy. He was comforted, he eat his lunch. It could have gone so differently if I had wanted my son to behave like another child or if I had wanted to make an example of him to some prim watchful family I’d never met before. But I felt happy in that moment with choosing the instinct for sweetness over force. Choose your battles. Ignore who’s watching. Be as soft as you wanna be.

Currently, in this house, I am staging an anti DVD stance. Cello had the flu so he was nursed by the screen. Now his chest is clearing and he wants the same slothful routine, wrapped in a blanket, working the remote. Yes, it’s going to be confronting, it’s going to involve food bribes and maybe, just maybe, it might also take some topless dancing. Anything to break the routine!

Till next time, KEEPING IT YUMMY.

XXX ANNA 

OK, it isn’t always abject. But pushing a stroller that has lost its suspension, through the rain with one hand and holding an umbrella in the other, balancing a bag of doughnuts from one handlebar feels a bit like a scene from a movie I am not yet ready to star in. Things have changed readers. I am a freshly separated (single) mother now and have been since September or so. Sorry, I haven’t written a blog since then, it’s been a deep and consuming adjustment and so much of what has happened is outside the realm of the book I wrote. That glamour girl on the cover is not pushing with one hand!

Single mother: wasn’t that a term I used to be a little cynical about in the media? Madonna, Angelina and Kate Hudson…single mothers. I always went UMPH and YEAH SURE! And now, well, I don’t care who you are or how many nannies you have, a single mother is a special kind of person facing special challenges. She’s got, in the words of an infamously crass song by AC/DC, balls. Cos’ she needs them. Not more cajones than a partnered mama but a very particular kind of responsibility. Most of the time, well, it’s just down to you. At first this feels really enormous. When properly living alone for the first time, my son and I got really sick. Perhaps it was just bad planning but with no immediate family and Cello’s dad away working for months, I felt like the earth was swallowing us whole. It was miserable and I became hyper-vigilant. There was no room for clumsiness, illness, mistakes, accidents or even the odd hangover. Once again, just like when Marcello was newborn, my body became the mother ship. And with these changes, of course, came guilt. Massive, sweeping and tidal. Motherhood is anxious enough without feeling like you have placed a chasm in front of your child’s feet. 

Guilt and also loneliness. You feel alone because, suddenly, you feel very different. You only learn what your ideals for married life were when you leave it burning and smoked out behind you. One month after the break up having to attend parent teacher night was galling. No-one knew my situation but I felt, skinless, naked in public and weirdly shamed. Happy couples, married parents with newborns, men and women that looked like they were embalmed in honey, half smiles fixed on their faces and me…in a low cut Issa dress, going outside to pretend I was having a cigarette when I really was just leaking tears. Not tears of self pity but of loss and grief. My mother and father have been married since 1963. I looked up to them, I knew compromise inside out, and I didn’t plan on breaking the mould. Of giving my son the dis-jointed dance that is co-parenting. Mummy House. Daddy house. Both your houses, love, both yours.

Right now I am grateful that time is a swift healer. Because as spring approaches, life is congealing back together. Limping into step. I try to take any potential for moody introspection (Friday night alone with son at supermarket, IKEA etc..) and turn it into some sort of adventure. When it’s not a boisterous Daddy night I try to wrestle more and not wimp out with flimsy lazy mummy moves. Last night Marcello almost knocked my front tooth out. It’s hard to be a five foot four bear on all fours but here’s to macho motherhood! That son will make a man out of me yet. 

And, in a beautiful twist, I connect even more deeply with the close girlfriends of mine who have been doing this solo mama act since their kids were born and have especial respect for lovely Naomi, raising four boys alone in an Australian country town, with such wit, invention and gusto. Clearly I share a quarter of her stress. When things get tight I ask myself “What would Naomi do?” But fear not this isn’t about to become the newly separated mother blog.  I just felt I ought to share what’s going on NOW and to create a space for your single motherhood stories. Good, bad and even ugly…Tell me where you are challenged mamas, we have a lot to share. And Kate Hudson if you are reading this, right on.

HAPPY SPRING

XXX ANNA