Better than nothing

Better than nothing
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 9, 2013

I am currently experiencing the unrest of family life. My husband is working overseas. The unrest begins at 5am. I hear three-year-old daughter padding down the hallway. No matter the hour, she wants to celebrate her dry nappy with a trampoline party in our bed. Eventually, she drifts back to sleep but by then, I’ve grudgingly accepted that my day has begun.

I plod into the kitchen and squint around for a teabag, then seize the chance to write in the stillness. Six-year-old son wakes at first light because I forgot to close his blinds: “Can we play Snap?” I silently curse the ABC for not showing Sesame Street at 5.30am. I then feel ashamed for wishing this child had stayed asleep so I could work. Does ‘having it all’ mean always feeling guilty about something?

I start being a columnist when I stop being a mother – at 8pm when I’ve scraped the last plate. That’s when my six-year-old finishes his homework and I give up nagging my 13-year-old son to start. It’s when small daughter nods off just as Beatrix Potter’s bunnies flee Mr McGregor’s garden with their pockets full of radishes.

I lug her to bed. I call into the laundry, that showcase of my domestic shortcomings. I shield my eyes from the grotesquerie of baskets overflowing with sheets to be folded and shove a load of towels into the machine. I’m desperate to flop on the couch. Instead, I fire up my laptop and coax my brain into paid employment.

Maybe ‘having it all’ means striving for perfection and arriving at mediocrity. Maybe it’s just some platitude designed to make me feel incompetent. (It’s working). Men aren’t trying to ‘have it all’ are they? They’re being told to find their ‘work-life balance’, which is the same thing – the pursuit of an impossibly perfect life.  

I thought I ‘had it all’ for a few manic years in my early 30’s. I’d had my first baby and scored my dream job in television. When Kerry Packer wanted a story, I didn’t dare disappoint. One Saturday afternoon, my boss shouted down the phone from Sydney: “You’ve got half an hour to get to the airport! Some clown’s missing in the desert!“

My husband was jogging. I couldn’t get hold of mum. No time to ring anyone else. I packed a bag for my toddler and we hared off to the airport.

A charter plane sat on the tarmac with my impatient camera crew. Two-year-old boy squealed his approval. Half way to Wiluna, I turned to see black smoke pluming from one engine. Feigning calm, I sang ditties to my son as the pilot dipped towards a makeshift runway amid an olive sea of scrub. He flared the Piper and we thumped onto a tractor-levelled strip in a deserted paddock.

We waited three hours for the rescue plane. I entertained my toddler making gravel piles by torchlight. We ate the shortbread from the ration kit and traced the arc of a passing satellite with our fingers.

After that aborted trip, I began having panic attacks. I thought I was thriving on adrenalin but I was unravelling from exhaustion and stress. How could I excel at my job and still be an A-class mother? What if I was exposed as less competent than my childless colleagues? ‘Having it all’ turned out to be no fun at all.

I’d like to meet the woman who’s actually having it all. (I’d like to meet her husband, her nanny, and her housekeeper). ‘Having it all’ now sounds like some decadent fantasy. The mothers I know who work full-time are too tired to care.    

I still yearn for the profile of a journalistic career. But anytime I now bemoan my lot, my husband cries: “Hands up if you have a martyr complex!”  

I care much less about perfection. I cut corners. I’ve set my body clock to Play School. At 9.30 and 4.30, I jam in an hour’s work while my small ones watch Big Ted goggle-eyed from the sofa. We eat boiled eggs and soldiers for tea while I picture their father ordering Peking Duck at the Manila Hilton. What if I’m now content to ‘have it all’ just sometimes? Sort of. Here and there.

I like to reflect on those rare occasions when I’ve generated a flash of mothering brilliance. That morning when I ignored my deadline, the gritty floor and my tax chaos and made gingerbread with my children.

Six-year-old was fighting his sister for the snowflake cookie cutter, but I calmly headed off two tantrums by finding the six-pointed Star of David one. “Look!” I whispered to my daughter. “It’s two triangles made into a hexagram – that’s better than a snowflake!” She chose the monkey stamp instead.   

That night, I sat pecking at my keyboard until 1am making up for the lost morning of literary excellence. The most satisfying morning I’d had in weeks. To hell with having it all. I’m aiming for half way.