I have never been one to sing to my children at bedtime. For a start I can’t sing and the whole exercise would be counter-productive; more Van Halen than Von Trapp. However, if I was going to sing, it wouldn’t be “I’m sexy and I know it and I’m not afraid to show it…”

This was Secundo’s musical contribution to bedtime last night. Except that he has a mild speech impediment so his version came out “I’m shekshy and I know it and I’m not afraid to shhow it…” making him sound like a six year old Sean Connery.

Apparently the children at school are singing this and many other songs from the current musical era. Inevitably he asked me “Mummy, what does shekshy mean? Is it a rude word?”

According to The Internet (does anyone actually use a real dictionary anymore?), sexy is defined as:

sex·y/ˈseksē/ (adj.)

Sexually attractive or exciting; Sexually aroused.

Exactly. There was no way I was having that conversation with my son and whilst I frantically scrolled through my mental thesaurus (which appears to have been deleted along with several other parts of my mind) I simply could not find a less controversial (or a less sexy) synonym for sexy.

I want my children to love music and whilst I secretly suspect (and am mildly alarmed) that my older sons (aged 6 and 3) want to dance to the Michael Jackson Wii game because it gives them a more legitimate excuse to clutch their privates in public, I love how music, singing and dancing has opened them up.

Prima recently told her father that her favourite singers were Taylor Swift, Kesha and Katy Perry despite the fact that:

(a)    I don’t know who these people are (yes, in 1993 I was culturally cryogenically frozen and will be defrosted when A-Ha makes a global comeback – still being in the charts in Tokyo and Oslo doesn’t really count);

(b)   we don’t listen to the radio in the house or in the car because Harvey Norman advertisements give me radio rage;

(c)    I make the children listen to Bruce Springsteen, the Indigo Girls and A-Ha’s Greatest Hits; and

(d)   Husband makes the children listen to The Rolling Stones and Frank Sinatra.

I am guessing that my poor culturally deprived children binge on today’s pop music the moment they go on a play date. Prima’s latest song fixation is Maroon 5’s Moves like Jagger which she recently asked if she could watch on Youtube. Unable to find a G-rated (or even a PG-rated) clip of the song, I resorted to a version which just showed the lyrics. This was fine until Prima and I read the lyrics and my sweet little 8 year old started singing “Take me by the tongue and I know you’ll kiss me ‘til you’re drunk…” Hmmm.

I don’t mean to make the children Amish (not that there is anything wrong with that, thanks to Harrison Ford, I love the Amish) and I know I won’t do them (the children, not the Amish) any favours by raising them in a vacuum. I also know that when Prima sings “I’ve got the moves like Jagger, I’ve got the mooooves like Jagger” she has no idea about sex or being sexy. Despite Husband’s best efforts, she’s got no idea about Jagger either. She’s just dancing and singing and coming out of her shell that little bit more.

So for now, she’s got the moves like Jagger and after further internet research, we’ve got the Alvin and the Chipmunks version on Youtube.

My parents are in the process of retiring, downsizing and moving from Canberra to Sydney.  So last week, my brother and I went back to our childhood home to help them hold a garage sale.

An informal inventory of the house revealed that my mother has enough saris to clothe a small nation and my father, enough carvings of Hindu deities to furnish his own temple (or a few). Who would have thought my mother had time to use all of that Pyrex or my father time to read all of those books. Important philosophical questions were raised such as: why did they have years of Gourmet Traveller magazines in the garage (and if they had a subscription, why did we eat rice and curry every single night for dinner?)

They have acquired and hoarded as people do, and watching them let go was telling. For example, my mother took most of my father’s possessions to the garage and thought “they” were done. My father asked her if she would like to sell him too. She smiled but didn’t answer.

In my mother’s pantry I found tinned food that expired in 2001. Prying it away from her (as she shouted, “I can still cook with that”) I remembered how every morning she would prepare dinner, cutting vegetables with the precision and elegance of a surgeon. I found the old diaries that she used to note down recipes. Apparently there’s an iphone app for storing recipes now but it won’t have the fragile texture of an ancient manuscript or the smell of roasted cumin. My mother rarely says “I love you” but every time she visits me in Sydney she brings me food.

In my father’s office we found something that looked like a Commodore 64 and teaching videos. He seems to have been collecting tongue depressors, medical swabs and surgical gloves – because you never know when you might need to dig your way out of all those patient files with a tongue depressor, clean your paper cut wounds with a swab and then fashion your surgical gloves into entertaining balloon animals for your grandchildren. My father rarely says “I love you” but every time he sees me he wants to tell me about a book he thinks I’d like (and give me a tongue depressor).

And then there were the things my brother and I wanted to keep for ourselves and for our children. We wanted:

• my father’s first microscope glasses. My parents’ career defined us. It took courage to leave Sri Lanka, to migrate to a country that could still remember the White Australia policy, and to build that practice. It took courage, drive and determination and we grew up fluctuating between wanting to be like them and not wanting to be like them. Now I hope we are like them;
• the sign on my father’s surgery door that bears the name of both my parents. Both are doctors but my mother supported my father’s career, putting hers third and making us her first. I grew up thinking that that choice (or necessity) was not for me. Now I realise it is and hope I can do it as well as she did;
• a book about the travels of Marco Polo that my father won in 1953. I like to think of him, a runt of a village boy in ill-fitting hand me downs, reading that book and imagining the world he would one day conquer; and
• my mother’s recipe diaries, finally revealing the secrets of Aunty Nagi’s coffee trifle pudding and the pathway to Love By Cholesterol.

Most telling were the things that were not sold, recycled or thrown: a lifetime of photos, every letter and postcard my brother and I sent them, every school report and merit award, a selection of books,  a 1977 Breville jaffle-maker and a whole lot of saris.

If any one needs a carving of a Hindu deity (or several), let me know.

So this morning my cousin took Newborn out so I could:

(a) take a break from Newborn’s marathon of whingeing (with intermittent 100m whinge sprints) – surely Nature could have refined the teething process?; and

(b) send more pieces of writing to Mamamia in a desperate attempt to “be a writer when I grow up”.

This reminded me that I have not added my last Mamamia publication to my blog. By “last” I mean my most recent one, and possibly my last one….

So here it is: Mamamia (Part 2)

Please ignore me as you’ve probably already read it as Everyone’s a Winner Baby, that’s the Truth.

x

In the playground recently, whilst waiting for our children, a mummy (hereafter referred to as “Working Mummy”) asked me how my work was going. I explained that I don’t work and she said, “Oh, but you have a babysitter don’t you?”

There was something about her tone that made me respond with a “Since having my fourth baby and moving country, I haven’t gone back to work. My fourth child (did I mention I have four children) is still a baby. When I used to work part time, I was working a full time load in fewer (and longer days) for lesser pay. The family and I are just not ready for that yet.”

She responded with a “Yes, my job was like that but you quickly learn to…” At which point our children came running out and thankfully prevented her from presumably teaching me how to manage my work-life balance. Her son launched himself into her arms and would not stop hugging her. My son, Secundo, has been playing it cool lately and acknowledged me for long enough to hand me his bag – moving me down what felt like a Mummy Hierarchy from “Mummy Who Stays At Home and Still Needs Help” to “Mummy Whose Children Are Not Interested In Her” which I think is somewhere above “Deadbeat Mummy” and “Criminally Negligent Mummy” but apparently still way below “Working Mummy”.

I used to be Working Mummy and my life, like many parents who work part time (or any time) involved:  

• carrying trainers in my handbag so I could run to meetings, often sprinting down the corridor past a friend who would hold out a coffee for me to grab as I would rush to the next meeting (this was my own version of the London Marathon);
• drinking too much industrial strength coffee, not having time to wee and subsequently having to drink industrial strength cranberry juice;
• reading and responding to my Blackberry on the toilet;
• eating Mars Bars for lunch because I could chew them faster than Snickers (it’s the nuts that slow you down) between meetings;
• starting work at 7am and leaving work at 5pm sharp (I would just pick up my stuff in the middle of a meeting, give a jaunty, highly caffeinated wave and walk out) so I could see my children, read with them, put them to bed and then log on to work from home; and
• waking up at 5am with a rush of adrenaline remembering all the things I could not possibly do in a 3 – 4 day week.

It also involved picking up the “spillover” on my days “off”.

Last week Working Mummy needed help with a pick up so I offered to bring her son home. When she arrived after work we chatted and I said that I would be happy to help her if she was ever in a bind as we were often home. To which she said, “That’s right, you don’t work do you?”

What happened next wasn’t pretty. I basically name dropped my professional CV in 45 seconds. I used words like human rights, justice and systemic social change, prefacing everything with global and international. I don’t actually know what any of those words mean any more. I just felt – for the first time in 8 years of being a mummy and 13 years of being a lawyer – that I needed to justify my current (non) work choice (and privilege) by setting out the credentials of my past working achievements.

In retrospect, I am ashamed that I needed to boast about a vocation that I have only ever felt fortunate and humble to be a part of. And I wonder why I felt compelled to name drop my professional CV instead of my personal one. My personal CV would cite key competencies such as:

• strong strategic thinker – capable of hiding grated zucchini in any curry (that’s so that Husband eats his vegetables);
• preternatural endurance and stamina – able to withstand considerable whingeing and sleep deprivation before breaking down and crying like a baby;
• physically agile – able to convert my body into a human vibrating baby chair by rhythmically pulsating my one remaining abdominal muscle (I have 4 speeds);
• deeply intuitive (possibly psychic) – able to locate Tercero’s blue Bakugan at any time of the day or night; and
• persuasive communicator – able to mediate irrational arguments, lie to loved ones on my feet and silence small children with a “If you don’t stop fighting I’m going to give that Wii to charity.”

It just didn’t feel like enough but it should be.

Prima recently asked me when I had to go back to work. Secundo, ever logical answered for me and said “When we run out of money.” Prima responded with a “Mummy, I wish you had ten children, so you could never go back to work. You could stay at home with us forever.” 

And suddenly, I felt like I’d been promoted.

This post was recently published by Mamamia – click here to read that version.

“Good job darling!” I yell, with my face arranged into the Encouraging and Affirming Mummy Pose. Both my thumbs (not just one) are raised and simultaneously punctuating my prose as I shout “Great work!” and “Good try sweetheart!” whilst smiling so hard my ears hurt. Or maybe it’s the chorus of other netball mothers, out-encouraging their daughters, that’s causing the pain.

The truth is that Prima is shaping up to be as athletically challenged as I am.  I have to say, I am very proud of her values – every week she bravely gets out there on the court, when the ball comes towards her she stoically doesn’t flinch, her concentration is palpable. She’s no One Miss Wonder, my Prima – with her little arms waving wildly, she consistently misses the ball. My childhood friends will remember that scene well (except that I was never brave and I still do flinch).

I love the effort Prima puts into missing the ball and the goofy smile she gives me when it sails right past her. It makes me want to run onto the court, scoop her up and say “You’re the best darling!”. I know she’s not, and when the ball comes towards her, I am flinching on the inside and praying for contact. When the inevitable outcome occurs, I don’t know what comes over me but I have this uncontrollable impulse to raise both my thumbs and smile encouragingly like an idiot.

At the end of the season we proudly attended the netball gala at which every child is presented with a trophy. Quite rightly, at this young age, the emphasis is on participation and teamwork, rather than individual skill (or lack thereof).  In the sausage sizzle that followed, one of the netball mothers hesitantly and quietly asked the following question: at what stage do we stop giving every child a trophy and start teaching them that some people are more skilled than others; that if you want life’s trophies, you might have to work harder.

I nearly choked on my organic, free range, happily raised and humanely executed snag (it’s that kind of neighbourhood). Was she seditiously suggesting that perhaps it might be ok for the children to learn that sometimes they weren’t winners (if indeed they were not) and develop the tools required to deal with that – including the emotional resilience to maintain their self-esteem, the determination to keep improving and the enthusiasm to keep playing?

I thought back to my own upbringing. My parents never told me I was doing a good job if I wasn’t. They told me I could do better if they thought I could. They told me I was kind, clever and funny and that this would make up for my abject lack of hand-to-eye co-ordination. Maybe they too were exaggerating in an attempt at encouragement and affirmation.

To me, Prima’s every act is the epitome of perfection, even though I know she sucks at netball. Perhaps I need to do more than simply praise, smile hard and arrange my thumbs in a ridiculous pose, so she is better prepared for when she does not get chosen to play for Australia (or the school…or her class). Over the next few months, before netball trials start, I will ponder life’s trophies and the lessons we learn from getting them and not getting them. And, I will be sending poor little Prima to netball bootcamp.