Choices

A huge part of adulthood and one of the key things we look forward to as children is the chance to make our own choices. One of the first words we say is “No!” and I learned early on as a mother that if you wanted your toddler to wear pants don’t ask them to put on pants, ask them if they want to wear the green ones or the blue ones. 

Mr 11 at age 1, the most decisive kid on the planet.

The small decisions we make as kids prepare us for the more important ones we have to make as we grow older. Choice gives us a sense of control in a crazy world. What teenager hasn’t gotten frustrated with their parents for saying ‘no’ when they are making what they believe is a good choice? 

The word “No” is usually met by all the traditional stages of grief from denial to bargaining while the final acceptance stage may look more like your frustrated teenager daughter screaming “UGH You are the WORST mother in the world!” And the sound of a door slamming as she stomps up the corridor to her bedroom.

You see, to the teenage mind not yet familiar with the intricacies of adulting, the word ‘no’ is a simple choice, a choice to let your child be happy or have “the worst day in their entire life OMG”. Where as to the parent “No” is a layered answer based of carefully weighed up pro’s and con’s factoring in other family members, safety, time frame, logistics and potential future consequences. 

Okay, I admit occasionally parents do say no without a really good ‘genuine’ reason – in my case this is often related to laziness. A “no” to “Can I go to Billy’s house for a sleep over?” is possibly because Billy lives 40 minutes away and I don’t feel like getting dressed and driving rather than because I am concerned that Billy’s parents are secretly smoking crack.  

But sometimes there are genuine concerns for safety, take my son Mr 13, who is more honest than most teenagers because well frankly he has never really mastered the art of lying. I am particularly thankful for that given the company he has a habit of keeping. He will tell me how his best friend ever is taking drugs and getting beaten by his alcoholic father and then in the next breath he will ask if he can go over there for a sleep over tomorrow. Um… yeah, no.  

In situations like this I have to be ultra-careful to use an unrelated excuse for why he can’t stay there this weekend and then wait a few days to have the appropriate “safety” talk, this way he doesn’t connect that the fact he was honest with me has actually caused the “no”.

Mr 11 and Mr 15 on the other hand are far more versed in the subject of lying or at the very least omitting facts they feel might influence my decisions. In their cases, there is far more detective work involved but they are also more self-confident than Mr 13 and less likely to bow to peer pressure. Mr 11 has been very confident about his own decision making since birth. The best way of finding out if they are up to no good is quizzing Mr 13 about it!

So sometimes, okay most of the time, being a mother makes me feel like a total hypocrite. I made a lot of bad choices as a teenager – a bad teenage choice is how I became a mother in the first place! I’m just bloody lucky that things have turned out alright for me on the whole but I still find myself making bad choices, particularly with my health. 

Having mental health issues and being suicidal most of my life meant that things like going to the dentist or having a pap smear were simply not done because, well they are unpleasant and frankly you aren’t all that concerned about long term consequences when you feel the chances are that you won’t be around to suffer them anyway.

Even at the best of times depression can turn choices like whether to wear the red jumper or the blue one feel like life and death decisions that we simply haven’t got the authority to make. My parents both have serious issues with decision making, Mum always has and Dads Alzheimer’s has affected his skills in that department, so something as simple as choosing where to go for coffee when I’m also depressed can take forever. 

I also have a tendency to decide when to listen to my doctors based on my wants at the time, if medication is suggested when I am depressed then I’m all for it because I want to feel better, but if its suggested when I am euphorically manic and need to come down then I’m going to take a lot more convincing.

When I’m hypomanic and teetering on the edges of mania is probably when my decision skills are at their poorest, back to the teenage ‘have fun now and to hell with the consequences’ mentality I am more likely to take drugs (other than those prescribed), spend ridiculous amounts of money, stay up all night for days, swear inappropriately, act impulsively, drive dangerously, get into arguments, ditch my self -care routines and generally misbehave. 

Not helpful 8 ball, not helpful!

I caught up with an old friend the other day, she has been diagnosed with Bipolar in the last 12 months but in hindsight has had it for decades, we were discussing that pivotal point in hypomania when you still have the insight to know you need intervention even though you are having fun and how hard it can be to make that right decision to go to the doctor. 

Ultimately life is full of decisions, sometimes we are going to make the wrong ones but recognizing and learning from them is what will help us grow, and if all else fails I do have a magic 8 ball.

Do you have trouble with decisions?

  

Cooking, Why??

Dinner of Champions

Cooking. Most people either passionately love it or passionately hate it, but unless we are squillionaires with personal chef’s out the wazoo or unlimited take away budgets then at some point we will get sick of raman noodles and jam sandwiches and simply have to learn how to cook with actual food in order to survive. 

I remember my food tech teacher in high school telling us to keep our recipe books at the end of year 9 as ‘statistically at least one of you will leave home in the next two years and you just might need them”. “Ha!” I thought as I threw mine ceremoniously into the bin and “Damn!” I thought when I left home 12 months later. 

You can probably guess from the negative energy surrounding that paragraph that I don’t exactly fall into the Martha Stuartesque passionate wannabe chef category. 

Generally if we meet someone special then we like to pretend that we know our way around a kitchen at least a little bit, alas hubby was a flatmate before he was a boyfriend so he knew my passionate distaste for the culinary arts long before I could fool him. Infact when we were renovating our old house, my beloved (who is a Joiner by trade) suggested rather than building me a new kitchen he should simply give me a giant phone so that I could order take away. Pah! 

Sadly the take-away option was itself taken away from me when we decided to move out to a one pub town in the bush an hours drive from anything resembling fast food.  That’s not entirely fair, we do have a servo that doubles as a shop (and a post office… and a mechanic workshop) if you want to pay $5 for a soggy reheated pie or sausage roll (+70c for sauce). 

The food at the old pub is ok, but it’s gold plated and dine in option only, but since the publicans aren’t big on kids and I have four of them we eat there about once every 5 years.

If like some of my friends you have a partner who simply loves whipping up ‘cordon bleu’, ‘beef bourguignon’ or some other fancy foreign sounding delicacy for you every night or hell, even once a week then fuck you! put a ring on it immediately! 

In my household despite my misgivings I am sadly still the cook, unfortunately when I procreated the law obliged me to feed my spawn more nutritious meals than I was used to making and I wasn’t happy about it.  I think the main issue is that I completely suck at it, like burn water suck at it. You know that joke that says you know dinner’s ready because the smoke alarm goes off? Well I eventually had to pull the smoke alarms right out of my ceiling. Another dinner, another kitchen fire…

When you are forced to do something you suck at every. Single. Day. And simply don’t get any better at it, well it’s not exactly a recipe (pardon the pun) for happiness. In fact my lack of enthusiasm rivals that of Lunch Lady Doris from the Simpsons but with less cigarette ash to add the flavour that my dishes are apparently severely lacking.

You see, in my defence, I don’t eat 99% of what I cook for the family due to that pesky eating disorder of mine so I don’t really know how much salt/pepper/turmeric/eye of newt I need to add to make it less “tomatoey” or give it some “zhang” and the stuff I am willing to sample myself is usually flatly refused by my offspring.

Anything that could contain a vegetable or a derivative of a vegetable gets scrutinized within an inch of its life by Miss 8 (she can’t find her shoes but will spot a 1mm piece of onion in anything!) Mr 15 hates spicy stuff, Mr 14 hates textures (like all of them) and Mr 11 HATES mushrooms and accuses me of putting them in everything!

But aside from the constant complaints and mushroom paranoia, the thing that irks me the most – and prompted the writing of this post/rant today is that my beloved Hubby is ONLY EVER LATE HOME on days when I have actually pulled my finger out and created something more culinarily delightful than pouring a jar over some frozen vegetables and half cooked pasta.

This means that on the odd occasion I finally do dish up perfectly cooked steak with smooth ‘Diane’ sauce and fresh vegetables steamed ‘just right’, by the time he comes home and has re-heated it in the microwave he gets rubbery steak, lumpy sauce and soggy broccolini.

It drives me freaking crazy and does nothing for the motivation! 

At the frustration of all my friends I now have a really big nice ‘chef’s’ kitchen, with three ovens, huge walk in butlers pantry, Lazy Susan’s in my corner cupboards to neatly place my pots and pans which is completely wasted on me. I did get into the cooking thing once, I was rather manic and as such had recently purchased a Thermomix. I spent about 6 continuous weeks baking up a storm, profiteroles, layer cakes, quiches and risottos all from scratch. Feel like lemon meringue pie at 3am? 

No worries!

Sadly as soon as that mania ended so did my new found *amazing ability and my desire to create, but at least I got my **Thermomix out of it, they might cost a bomb but they are great for lazy people who get distracted easily and want to make a risotto but don’t want to stand there and stir it. I have honestly used it every single day since I got it 7 years ago.

Cooking up a storm in the kitchen also comes at a price for the family, in our household the kids have to pitch in with the clean up, the tears and tantrums associated with washing 1,000,000 pots, pans and utensils you never knew you had can make you question just how important vegetables are for growing bodies – and we own a dishwasher!  

So for now my Thermomix curries and heat up pre-packaged frozen goods might not be the most exciting meals, but they keep everybody fed. Although, now that Mr 15 has started doing cooking classes at school and likes to brag about what an “AMAZING” cook he is “MUCH better than Mum” I might just have to start making him prove himself at home, say dinner every Monday night darling?

* My ‘Amazing ability’ may have purely been delusions of grandeur…

** This post is not sponsored by Thermomix, however if they want to throw a freebie my way…

Do you LOVE or HATE cooking?

How on earth DO you stop things being too ‘tomatoey’?

Dear Ryan

So I wrote a letter to a radio DJ named Ryan Jon who does the breakfast show in a nearby city, but since he’s a public figure, I have no idea of how to contact him directly and don’t want to be too stalkery so thought I’d just blog it and then send him a link via Twitter! 

I had the pleasure of briefly meeting Ryan last week during a promo the radio station was doing visiting small towns around the edge of the city, I happened to be passing through one of the towns and popped out to say g’day scoring myself a fabulous tea towel and a selfie with the hosts for my troubles. 

When I got home I looked up Ryan on Twitter and noticed he had a podcast about his struggles with having a partner that is very ready for kids and his own fear of becoming a parent.

The podcast is called: “Am I ready To Be A Father” here is the iTunes LINK or you will find it on Spotify or wherever non Apple people go to find their favourite podcasts! 

Recommended listening for anyone with kids, thinking about having kids or was once a kid, it’s a deep insight into the personal life and struggles of this fun-loving always-a-joker-DJ, he is only three episodes in and has already interviewed two amazing people – his gorgeous girlfriend Brigitte and the one and only Jimmy Barnes. (ahh the perks of being a breakfast radio host!)

Anyways, on with the letter:

Dear Ryan,

Apologies in advance for the novel here, living on ‘the rim’, I have no radio reception and can only listen to the breakfast show in the car when I go to town so had missed a lot of the baby/no baby conversations you have had on air. I discovered your podcast yesterday and wanted to write a short response but got a little bit carried away!

I had a plan for my life too, I didn’t want kids, certainly not until I was in my 30’s. I wanted to go and travel the world, go to university and get an awesome job in something medical sciency where I could go to different countries helping and meeting people. But instead life had other plans, I quit school, left home, fell in love with a roommate and got knocked up. 

I remember sitting on the toilet having just turned 17 years old, holding the positive pregnancy test in my hands and not knowing what the hell I was going to do next. It was of course less than ideal, I wasn’t even legally allowed to drink yet, I didn’t have my driver’s licence, we had barely any money and I had just enrolled to go back to school and get my year 12 certificate.

Luckily I think I already knew I was living with the love of my life, he was my boyfriend and my best friend and while we had only been together for 6 months I didn’t doubt my love for him but I was still terrified, did HE want this commitment with me? Would we end up breaking up like so many teenage parents? Would we have to live on Centrelink for the rest of our lives? What about all the things we would miss out on?

We considered an abortion, talked about adoption and eventually decided to ignore societies stereotypes and let go of that inner fear telling that we wouldn’t be good enough and decided to have and raise our child together. 

My point here is life doesn’t always go the way you plan it to, if my fears would have stopped me back then I wouldn’t have Liam, my now 15yr old sweet, funny son who is somehow already nearly the age I was when he was born even though it feels like yesterday. If I had known I would develop a mental illness I likely wouldn’t have had his two brothers and his sister either, that’s four amazing little people that have already made their mark on this world that wouldn’t even exist right now if I had let my fears stand in my way.

 You have already lived an amazing life Ryan, you have travelled the globe, lived in various cities, worked fun and interesting jobs and now you have found the love of your life, someone that completes you and loves you enough to want to make and raise miniature versions of you!  

From the tone of your voice it sounds like you really do want kids, the warmth in which you describe having that biological connection brings tears to my eyes, so the overthinking and anxiety disguised as logic holds you back. It is ok to be scared, fear is normal and healthy, but not something that should stop you from moving forward through your life, you will be ok, I promise! Like you said yourself, there is no such thing as a perfect time to have children! You didn’t have a prominent father figure in your life but you still had a childhood – and from growing up with your mum you would have learned the things you do want and don’t want for your own kids. 

Think of the stories you will be able to tell your children as they grow, think of their smiling faces as they look up at you with admiration thinking ‘wow, my Dad has done so much with his life, I want to be just like him!’ From the way you talk to and about each other, Brigitte comes across clearly as your perfect partner and therefor the perfect person for you to share this next chapter of your life with.

Being the best parent in the world won’t guarantee that your relationship will stay strong or your child wont eventually become a drug addict, have a mental illness or be involved in an accident. You can’t prevent life from happening to your children and you wouldn’t want to, it’s part of the beauty of raising a free thinking little human being. 

When it all comes down to it you can only do the best you can with what you have available to you at the time. You can’t control the way things turn out for your children in the end, you can only influence it. Besides, there is no such thing as the perfect parent –  in fact most of us are making it up as we go along and it’s working out fine! Just go to the bookstore and take a look in the parenting section if you don’t believe me, there are hundreds of books; if there was only one right way to parent a child there would only need to be one book. Different things work for different families and different kids in the same families, if I can offer you any advice there it’s to try out what feels right for you and if it doesn’t work let it go and try something else, it’s all a learning curve – we grow with our children.

So don’t look at fatherhood as a sacrifice or the end of that spontaneous fun-  you don’t have to stop doing fun things just because you have a family, your priorities will change naturally and you will start to want to do different types of fun things. You will have to find a new work/life balance, but that will be ok, you will welcome the change and you will embrace it! 

Yes, ok I admit that there are times when you feel like you don’t know what the hell you are doing and you will definitely get less sleep, particularly in the first year, but you actually get used to it surprisingly quickly and then one day you blink and they are teenagers that you have to spray with a water bottle just to get out of bed in the mornings… 

Ryan, the fact that you are talking about this subject so publicly is awesome, it’s a great forum to start a conversation and its proof that you truly care, it is that caring that will make you a fantastic Dad!

Love,

Kate