Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS WRITER.
What do I think?
What do I think?
Who wants to know what I think?
I’m just a nearly forty mum of two from the outer suburbs. I couldn’t possibly have something to say.
I have a dog. And a cat, seven chickens and a husband.
I’m on the grants committee on the school council.
I have a renovated house, and a car. I do yoga, with an enthusiastic, spiritual young teacher with the energy of a puppy and many tattoos.
I have safe-length blonde hair, and now I get highlights put in regularly, by my friend, who is a hairdresser.
I eat ethically sourced meat, and I take the kids to the beach in summer.
Most days I try to pretend that I don’t think.
That I don’t think about how much I’ve let motherhood crush creativity, about the life that could have been mine if I’d followed my own agenda and not married, not bred.
That I don’t think about the what-ifs and the whyfores of choices – mine, other people’s, and why we choose the same things over again and again and again.
That I don’t think about whether a suburban life of work, tv, kids and weekend lawn mowing is all that there is, and why so many people settle for that and teach their kids that that is all there is too.
That I don’t think about the happy accident of my existence. Of how my Baba, my mother’s mother, was displaced by the second world war, and only found her brothers again fifty years later, living in the village that the Germans took her from, but who never saw her own mother again.
That I don’t think about how I won’t get to live in other places long enough to become a local in each one, to put down roots, to be able to say, “Back when I lived in Tobago…” (or Taiwan, or Tierra del Fuego.)
That I don’t think about who I used to be, before I somehow settled without noticing for the life I have now.
I put a photo of me from 1999 on the fridge a couple of months ago. It’s a photo of myself and two friends, camping for New Year’s Eve at the turn of the millennium. I’m wearing sparkly green pants, a petticoat dyed green, a top made from a pair of black stockings, and my head’s shaved, the stubble dyed fluoro orange. I’m smiling, I’m independent. I know who I am.
I made money life modelling for artists, dancing in a floorshow and, at the point this photo was taken, was going to work at Earthcore for the biggest New Year’s eve of the century.
It took my kids more than a week to notice the photo, and more than three to ask who it was on there, and why it was on the fridge.
Neither of them recognised me.
The kicker is that I still feel like that me, on the inside.
And I look at my mum, and know that she feels like her younger self inside too, without the arthritic hands and hip replacement pirate walk that she has now. Inside, she’s bright young thing, making her parents proud and going to university, the first one in her family, and sneaking off with good Russian boys in sports cars on dates.
So the kids didn’t recognise me, and neither did I, but in reverse.
I don’t recognise the me that I am now.
Inside, I’m still the activist feminist ballet dancing, life modelling, idealistic radical showgirl in the photo.
I have a station wagon family car.
I have a veggie patch with weeds in it, and unkempt lawns.
I walk the dog through the safe little suburb where I live, and I take the kids to their activities.
I teach my son about feelings, and about consent. My daughter about boundaries and “no”.
I rail about feminism and despair that it’s STILL got a huge way to go.
I publicise gender pay gap day, and explain endlessly why it’s important.
I support causes and volunteer sometimes.
And I think, “What would that me in the photo do?”
And some days I do that.