Posted in arguments with your partner, book review, fatherhood, feminism, motherhood, motherhood bliss, motherhood sux, preschoolers, school kids, sex of the icky parental kind, single parenthood, thinking, this moment, writing on January 12, 2015 | 7 Comments »
I was very flattered to be a guest writer for Meanjin this week for their series on writers reading. I was told to be very reflective on my year and.. I was that. Eek.
There’s a small child in the bed with us. I hold the sheet over me and reach down blindly to find clothes on the floor. Under the sheet I slip my underwear and t-shirt back on. So, this is dating now.
Posted in art, classism, economics, fatherhood, feminism, GLBTI, politics, pop culture, race/anti-racism, school kids on December 1, 2014 | 1 Comment »
Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.
Right. It’s ridiculous.
So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.
It’s about white people adjusting to a new reality?
Owning their actions. Not even their actions. The actions of your dad. Yeah, it’s unfair that you can get judged by something you didn’t do, but it’s also unfair that you can inherit money that you didn’t work for.
From an interview with Chris Rock by Frank Rich in Vulture.
Posted in cormac, home, motherhood, motherhood bliss, school kids, slow parenting, this moment on November 30, 2014 | 9 Comments »
Picnic lunch watching my brother-in-law play cricket. He’s the one batting below.
(Note the black armbands all the players are wearing in memory of the dead cricketer, Phillip Hughes).
In my garden.
Baby asparagus shoot.
Cormac, aged 5.
So many eggs.
This weekend:
I felt contented, for the first time in a long time.
I mended a broken door, all by myself like it was no big deal and these things don’t completely baffle and/or terrify me.
I cooked. Rosemary and lemon roast. Spinach quesadilla. Tomato and basil risotto.
I took the kids for a bike ride first thing in the morning.
I bought them advent calendars, the old-fashioned cardboard ones with windows. I let them open a window early because they go to their dad’s tomorrow night.
I laughed at text messages.
I watched Boyhood.
Posted in art, motherhood bliss, school kids on November 26, 2014 | 2 Comments »
Posted in cormac, motherhood, motherhood bliss, pop culture, school kids on September 7, 2014 | 1 Comment »
What do you do if you’re 5 and your computer time is up for the weekend and now you want to sneak back on for some watching of favourite youtube clips while your mother is off reading in bed but you can’t spell much? You ask your mother, very innocently, if she can write the phrase “Lord of the Rings, War in the North” on a piece of paper cos no reason, really.
Posted in cormac, fatherhood, feminism, feminist motherhood, i like walking, lauca, motherhood, motherhood bliss, pop culture, school kids, single parenthood, slow parenting, work and family (im)balance, your guide to perfect play dates on July 27, 2014 | 4 Comments »
This weekend we had a child to stay for a sleep-over and I am really a bit worn out and I wondered what we could offer in the way of fun things to do at our house. Because I can’t even get movies to play on the TV at the moment. And I don’t have the spare energy to figure it out nor the spare cash to pay someone else to figure it out.
But it was Anne Lamott who said something like you play to your strengths as a parent and this is what I’m good at… pulling unusual ideas out of my arse. So, I remembered an abandoned house I’d noticed on my morning walks and I asked the kids if they wanted to explore a haunted house and … bingo!
Doesn’t it look like something out of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road?
“Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other’s world entire.”
Back at my home..
I have exceptional taste, yes. I bought the arse tea cosy here.
Last month my father came back to Australia and stayed with me for a week. He was exhausted on the first night and after he went to bed I stayed up and wrote my column at the kitchen table. The next night I was incredibly tired and he stayed up alone for the very sad task of writing his mother’s obituary.
He read that obituary at the funeral the following morning. His writing was beautiful. It was all about how accomplished and yet unappreciated his mother had been for her domestic talents. My column about being accountable one day to my children’s future therapist was published that same day, and in a way, I realised my father and I had both written about feminist motherhood.
Every time I look at my kitchen table now I remember how we both sat and wrote our words there, one night after the other.
A doctor friend collects these little empty bottles from his surgery and gives them to me to use as tiny vases. Morphine and Ketamine can be the name of our hipster home decorating shop.
Posted in fatherhood, motherhood, motherhood bliss, school kids on May 12, 2014 | 2 Comments »
Jay says there are positive consequences of swearing that are largely disregarded. He is working to develop the social, cognitive science of swearing, which affronts the major perception of cursing as an immoral use of language.
“A lot of times you don’t get to the argument about the positive uses of these [words],” Jay says. “Their use in humor, their use in bonding, their use as a relief from pain or venting or frustration — I look at this as an evolutionary advantage. Why would we have this language? It must do something for us.”
