Here’s why I’ve gone to pot

Here’s why I’ve gone to pot
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday September 22, 2012
Section: Opinion

I have crossed to the dark side. A puddle of shame is staring up at me with eyes like saucers.

Actually it is a saucer, because I have given up coffee for tea.

I am well aware that as I sit with my lovely china cup, I am dangerously close to being cast out as a  pariah, that fraternizing in coffee shops and ordering a cup of Earl Grey may require a spell in the solitary confinement of a table for one. In Perth apparently, tea cannot match its leaf to the bean.

As the New York Times already knew in 1949, coffee is the ultimate ‘social binder, a warmer of tongues, a soberer of minds, a stimulant of wit, a foiler of sleep if you want it so’. For many, tea is just a scalding hot drink, weak in artistry and watery in disposition, requiring pursed lips and too much milling around waiting for the brew to brew.

Coffee however, is intoxicating , rich and exotic and entices lovers to swoon over its heady aroma . It tastes glorious in the hands of a handsome barista, or equally, a seductive bariste (one who by repetition alone, has perfected the art of a good pull.) Espresso is a notoriously persnickety drink. It demands to be coaxed from the bean at precise temperatures, with air and water in particular measure. Its charm, with deftness of touch, is sublime, and with 6-fingered clumsiness, an acrid slop.

I know the great divide in Perth is not between north and south, or the hills and the beaches, it’s between  those who drink coffee and those who partake of tea. And I know the gulf exists because I see it everywhere. In my frequent travels with pram and small child, I have realized that tea and coffee drinkers inhabit different time zones.

On a Saturday morning when the Tour de Freo arrives back in the ‘burbs in a cloud of sweat and caffeine desperation, the pavements outside my favorite cafes are littered with an expensive tangle of bike bling.

Cleats and carbon cast aside, you don’t want to get in the way of a peloton of middle-aged lycra converging on the coffee counter to order gallons of flat whites or short blacks. I wonder if they need it as vocal lubricant after long rides, because cup after cup, they mill about gasbagging for hours like old ladies at bridge. (Personally, I stay clear of cyclist queues because once I got jammed up against a gentleman in a codpiece so tight I got an eyeful of his frank and beans before he’d ordered any.)

In my experience, coffee drinkers are always desperate in the morning while tea drinkers, though equally needy, are unusually calm. At that early hour, they wouldn’t be seen dead riding anything but side saddle. Tea drinkers have husbands who bring them a cup of the Queen’s best in bed and have pretty cups and mugs and plates of hot buttered toast. I have two lifelong girlfriends who meet me most Friday mornings to discuss the Syrian crisis and how much we weigh, and we wouldn’t dream of having coffee – it’s tea that fills the space on our plates recently vacated by cake.

And that’s another thing – I note from my observations of café culture that coffee drinkers don’t eat. I suppose they get enough of a kick out of caffeine without needing a chocolate muffin to boot up the day’s endorphins. Perhaps it’s our Antipodean sensibilities that have demanded we throw off the shackles of penal servitude and dismiss the Blighty’s English breakfast variety in favour of the dark continentals?

Italian espresso machines only arrived in the colonies in the 1980s – who would have guessed we would soon have to move our children out of home to make space for them. That said, if you’ve bought one recently you’d know they cost as much as Guatemala. Ours is a hissing giant on the kitchen bench. Loved to distraction by the caffeine addict in the house, he spent more time researching which one to get than he did on names for his offspring. Either by laziness or design, it leaves a trail of coffee grounds and hot puddles on the bench, presumably to frighten unwitting tea drinkers into giving it a wide berth.

In search of the God shot, namely the perfect espresso, I’ve had to give up valuable tea-making space. Hence I have eschewed the pot and can no longer bear witness to the ‘agony of the leaves’. Aficionadostell me this refers to the unfurling of the tea leaf during steeping and can be quite a dramatic and mesmerizing process. I thought the agony of the leaves was having too many deciduous trees in the garden.

Lately, the gossip brimming in tea circles on the internet is that the lowly tea bag rarely contains more than floor sweepings, in fact, is usually a bag of dust. Dust! I live in denial.

There never used to be this rivalry did there? Did coffee always rule in café hierarchy? And since when did becoming a barista become a career?

My first job was at the once trendy North Cott café making cappuccinos on its new fangled machine, At 17 years old, I boiled the milk to within an inch of its life and prided myself on a layer of foam so thick you could stand a surfboard in it.

Later, living in Sydney and working a frenetic pace in television, coffee became a way to live permanently on adrenalin, which all went swimmingly until I was struck down by chest pains. I carted myself off to hospital thinking I was mid-coronary, only to be sternly reprimanded for the heart palpitations brought on by a caffeine overload.

After that I swore off strong coffee and had to drink lattes. Still getting the heart thumps, I returned to Perth in my 30s and resigned myself to drinking decaf, much to the consternation of coffee house bartenders who couldn’t be bothered with such pretence. Even then, it was considered inhumane to force people who had a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind ponces like me who apparently viewed the morning’s heart starter as some kind of recreational activity – a decaf skim milk latte, please, extra hot, in a mug, not a cup. I was a coffee toffee, and the laughing stock. So it became tea for me.

I always thought I’d postpone the stately pleasures of the leaf until I too, was an old lady having a tea break at bingo or sitting down to high tea in stiff whites after lawn bowls. But I can admit here and now, I am an early convert. It’s just the thing when the chips are down, and it’s always prescribed amidst a scandal. It was the drink that kept the Titanic temporarily afloat, was heavily rationed in World War Two as being vital to public morale and it’s what Her Majesty ordered with some urgency after being patted on the rear by the Honorable Paul Keating, PM.

So I have decided to be out and proud, and have bought a collection of colorful teacups and saucers to prove this is not a passing fancy. And now I will summon the nerve to rejoin the queue at my favorite corner café. I’ll shuffle up the line commenting blithely on the weather and if, when it’s my turn and I politely request  my cup of hot water and dustbag, I hear sniggers or sighs, I will turn to the waiting crowd, stand my ground and declare to all: ‘Yes, I’m drinking tea now.’ And then I’ll add: ‘Doctor’s orders.’

A footy widow’s lament

A footy widow’s lament
Ros Thomas
The West Australian
Published: Saturday, September 15, 2012
Section: Opinion

I am the Yoko Ono of footy widows. It’s been a hard day’s night, the festival of the boot in full swing, the man of the house psyched on the sofa, a love-in between him and his beloved AFL.

Actually maybe I’m the Eleanor Rigby of footy widows:  ‘waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door.’ That’d be my lonely face waiting patiently for this year’s season to draw to a close so that family life can resume and weekends can return to some semblance of ordinary. In particular, I look forward to being able to have a conversation with my husband anytime after 12.10pm on a Saturday or Sunday other than at quarter time, half time, or during my 30-second allotment during the ad break after a goal. If the ball’s back in the centre and I dare interject with an impertinent question like ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I get a complicated sequence of sign language which involves him motioning at the telly and signalling ‘eyes forward’, followed by index finger pressed against lips, the international code for ‘shush’, and a firm shake of the head. Surely it’d be quicker to say ‘No’.

If this is a lament for lonely September wives, I hope those women out there who love their football appreciate the togetherness the game gives them and their partners  – the dual barracking, the combined insults yelled at the box when the ump makes a howler, weekends planned out in advance so there’s no clash with fixtures, the exhilarating highs and crushing lows of the final result. I can scarcely score a single point with my abysmal knowledge of the Australian code, a testament to being raised in a family made up almost entirely of women.

That said, my mother, in her retirement, is one of the most loyal Eagles fans ever to walk the 100m from West Leederville train station to Subi Oval. She has barely missed a home game, sits happily by herself at the shady end, and at 76, is usually hoarse at the final siren from shouting and the cold. She was teaching her grandsons how to kick a footy up the park before my husband had a chance. She is also a (ladylike) force to be reckoned with during a post-mortem, and is to be given a wide berth for several hours after a West Coast loss, especially if she considers they ‘didn’t try hard enough’. I’m too scared to tell her that her  5-year old grandson prefers the Dockers because ‘I like that giant called Garran Sandyhands.’ He’s also quite a fan of ‘Pork Power.’

I admire Aussie Rules, but I’ve never sought to indoctrinate myself into the myth and legend of a game that has been 150 years in the making. I wish I had. It’s when you have children that sports like footy come into their own: a bond to keep families tethered to teenage sons, a common link between generations, and a conduit for social gatherings, round the telly get-togethers and half time barbecues. A grand final, moreover, can unite fans and heathens alike. It’s almost impossible not to soak up the buzz and fervor of an exuberant crowd even if you’re naïve about the rules and particulars of the paddock.

Football is a universal leveler. It is the fulcrum from which any conversation with a stranger can start – it cuts across the boundaries between blue collar worker and white, smoothes the divide between north of the river and south. It has been an icebreaker for me when the ranger threatens a parking ticket (‘How ‘bout them Eagles?’) and when I’ve called the electrical shop three times to fix the new lights that continue to blow. (How good is Pav?)

I make sure I know just enough about the weekend’s results to fire up some banter about injury or tactics, and away they go. It makes me friend, not foe, and I like to listen to people whose passion for the game gives them the authority to be assistant coach from under my leaking sink.

The footy follows me everywhere. It’s required listening on the radio when my husband slides into the driver’s seat. Sunday mornings are for tea and toast and the post Saturday carve-up before the afternoon rounds start. On Thursday nights, woe betide me if I’m settling in to watch Law and Order at 9.30 – it’s dramatis interruptus if the Footy Show is about to start. Even my 5-year-old is obsessed, though it’s tough keeping track of all 800 players in the AFL.  He was beside himself with glee watching the Dockers at training one night, and then waited in the kid’s queue for an autograph. When the giant ruckman Sandilands finally towered over him and said ‘OK mate, hand me your fan book,’  my pint-sized rover looked up unimpressed and said ‘You’re not Garran Sandyhands – on my footy card he’s wearing a cap.’

Now that I have to feign genuine interest in the game for the sake of my boys, I wonder what would life be like if Mrs Cometti and Mrs McAvaney didn’t love the code? I hope Mrs Cometti lives for all the games her husband has called: ‘Cousins runs away from Carr, not the first time we’ve seen that this season!’  I bet Den was waiting all season for a play like that, his crackerjack line ready and waiting in his back pocket. I hope Mrs C is ensconced at the game, or settled in at home, brimming with pride that her husband has that rare and beautiful attribute called ‘the common touch.’

Footy families are as fascinating as they are peculiar. I have a girlfriend whose Dockers-mad husband (politely) demands she and the kids  watch the game on the upstair’s telly, lest they distract him from a second of play, or worse, jinx the outcome by asking dumb questions or sitting in his ‘special spot’ on the sofa. (He’s good enough to text her when she’s allowed to come downstairs.)

My card-carrying Roos fanatic likes to watch the game in relative silence. He’ll spit out some pithy remark if his team’s on the nose (‘you log!’) but he’s not the leaping, flailing kind when North are soaring. I try to please him. I’m reliably informed the perfect footy wife takes the kids out of the house,  leaving behind a beer, a home-made pie and plenty of sauce.

Watching an Eagles away game with my mother is entertainment in itself. There is constant commentary: plaudits for brave tackles, clapping for good passes, but if the tide turns, so does she. She’s on her feet, gesticulating wildly at some unfortunate player who’s letting his team down, or when ‘the whole lot of them have no idea what they’re doing!’  She never gets stuck into the umpires, that would be bad manners (‘he can’t have eyes in the back of his head’) and a ‘good fight’ cancels out any criticism over a loss (‘they gave it their best shot, that’s all I ask.’)

Mick Malthouse is ‘lovely’ and John Worsfold ‘knows what he’s doing’. Ross Lyon has been ‘a gift’ to Freo, but the Eagles are the sons she never had. (All 22 of them, except that Nic Natanui – ‘he needs a haircut.’)

If the finals have sounded the deathblow for anything resembling a weekend relationship in your house, then you’re in fine company. Anytime this September you need a sidekick for shopping, an escort for a long walk, or a two-way conversation during afternoon tea, I’m your gal. Otherwise, like Eleanor Rigby, I’ll be waiting patiently by the window. For the cricket season to start.

Spooked by a little snip

Spooked by a little snip
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday September 8, 2012
Byline: Ros Thomas
Section: Opinion

The man of the house won’t get a vasectomy. He says he doesn’t have the balls.

I know he’s been traumatised because years ago in Queensland, not three days after his sister gave birth to her second baby, he took his brother-in-law to get the snip. For some reason, they decided to ride their bikes to the clinic. Only one of them managed to ride the whole way home.

Mention the idea of vasectomy and plenty of men will wave you away with a casual “Oh, it was nothing, really.” Plenty of others, however, will clutch their crotches as their eyes dart about in fear of the prospect. My better half is one of the scared stiffs. He maintains his body is a temple and it would be sacrilegious to interfere with perfection. (If you knew him you’d know how funny that is!)

The irony here is that I spent 13 years trying to get pregnant, and the past two years hyperventilating at the thought of accidentally falling pregnant. I am 44 after all. I’ve broached the subject quite a few times, thinking he’ll soften up. But it’s like suggesting to a prize-winning bull that he might like to lay his big swinging grass-grazers on the block just to put some cow in the back paddock at ease.

A bullock willingly giving up his bollocks? Snort!

 And therein lies the great conundrum of our modern, sexually liberated lives — what to do with our bits when we’ve finished using them — take pot luck, take drugs, tie them up or get the snip?

In Georgia, the Democrats (of all people) have introduced a Bill to make vasectomy illegal unless it was carried out to save a man from serious injury or death. (Or the constant nagging of his wife? No amendment for that.)

The Bill, now before the House of Representatives, reads: “It is patently unfair that men avoid the rewards of unwanted fatherhood by presuming that their judgment over such matters is more valid than the judgment of the General Assembly.”

The most remarkable thing about this Bill is that it was introduced by a woman. And that she’d like to impose the will of government over the will of adult men.

What is she talking about? “It’s unfair that men avoid the rewards of unwanted fatherhood?” Tell that to a teenage boy who has accidentally knocked up his girlfriend. What rewards? For either of them? While you’ve got to admire the kids who stand up to their responsibilities and join the hard grind of fatherhood, there are many more who vanish leaving yet another young girl dependent on family or the perpetual cycle of social welfare.

The Bill goes on: “If we legislate women’s bodies, it’s only fair that we legislate men’s. Why are you (men) under the skirts of women? I’m sure there are better places to be.”

I was always under the impression that birth control was supposed to be about giving men and women options, not taking them away. Certainly, I don’t think it’s my place to tell a man what to do with his body — I just hope he likes my suggestion for family planning.

I know what you’re thinking: Why doesn’t she deal with it? If she’s so worried about it, what’s she doing about it?

I’m afraid I’m doing nothing, because after years of fertility drugs and artificial hormones, not to mention my own (unpredictable) ones, I’d prefer not add oral contraceptives or invasive devices to the mix.

My body needs a rest after the rough ride of three children. And to be frank, it’s time he stepped up to the plate. He won’t be sent to an early grave by the chaos of more siblings. As one girlfriend pointed out “the snip” sounds almost comforting — like what you do with a loose thread. And hey! there’d be a whole lot more nookie in the middle of the month. How much more incentive does he need?

 A lot apparently. Perhaps the vas deferens between us is that he was once a cave man, genetically predetermined to spread his seed as far and wide as possible to ensure the survival of his species. And despite quite an effort at evolution, modern man is still not programmed for sexual precaution, nor to willingly give up his twig and berries to a bloke holding a scalpel.

Perhaps we should take a holiday to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I read a urologist there is offering free pizza to anyone who gets a vasectomy in his clinic. I can almost guarantee my bloke would go for that — a one-stop shop for a super supreme (hold the salami) and sterilisation. That doctor sounds like he’d have the bedside manner to do the snip and then trot out a joke: “Well, we’re all done now and we managed to save your testicles. They’re under your pillow.”

I tell my long-standing lover all would not be lost in the surgery — he might end up the lucky one in 200,000 men for whom the procedure fails. Just ask the former school rector we know who got an unexpected delivery nine months and three weeks after his vasectomy. Being a new-fangled vicar, he declared himself ‘super sperm’ while his wife gestated surprise baby number four.

Birth control has always been the most fraught of subjects. Especially when it fails. I’m not looking forward to the day I have to discuss the subject with my teenagers. It will be a tough one to negotiate — will I be encouraging promiscuity if I give them the option of birth control or will I risk being negligent by not taking charge of the possibilities?

Of course, the issue of contraception carries just as much weight in a committed adult relationship. First and foremost, who is going to be responsible for it? Which brings me back to my dilemma. The man sitting next to me watching the footy maintains that fear is a non-negotiable reason to call a halt to any talk of snippage. Maybe it’s because he knows vasectomy didn’t start out as a lifestyle choice. In the early 1900s in Indiana, it was meted out to punish criminals, rapists and imbeciles. By the 1920s, however, it was thought to promote mental and physical rejuvenation and Sigmund Freud had one in his 60s, just to try it out. So did the poet W.B. Yeats. “It revived my creative power” wrote Yeats in 1937, at the respectable age of 69. Stupidly, I recounted this fact to the father of my children, who with some glee retorted, “Great! I’ll wait til I’m 69 then.” (That’ll be the last time he gets one of those.)

I fear there will be a lot more below-the-navel gazing in our house as I seek out new persuasions for vasectomy, and my potential recipient finds new ways to sidestep the issue. I’ll let you know if he capitulates and books in for the interruption of his fecundity. I’ve heard that time is a good anaesthetic for traumatic memory so I’ll do him a favour and get his bike out of the garage in readiness. I might even pump up the tyres for him and fix the tear in the seat. That should cushion the blow for the ride home.

Lament for fatherhood lost

Reconciled with daughter Ros after abandoning her as a toddler, Tony Thomas shares her column to mark Father’s Day. They hope their stories will resonate with other fractured families.

Lament for fatherhood lost
Ros Thomas
The West Australian
Published: Saturday September 1, 2012
Section: Opinion

A great gulf of loneliness stands between me and my father. And it comes from not knowing. Not knowing who he is, or which parts of me are him. Of not knowing his face and voice by heart. I often catch myself watching my children and their besotted father at their funny games, reliving my childhood vicariously through them. Wistful thinking. I never had a dad. He is a mythical creature in my life.

There is not a single photo of the two of us together. No teary pride with newborn bundle in the delivery suite. No small girl shoulder rides. Nowhere high from where to view the world.

Actually, there was one dog-eared snap of us, lost now, but it was only of his hand steadying mine as a laughing toddler in the bath. (I held that photo so many times as a kid, I thought if I looked hard enough, I would see love in that hand.)

It never really mattered to me as a child. My mum was my whole world. But there were always the awkward moments at other people’s houses when someone would ask “Where’s your dad?” and I would have to answer stupidly “I don’t know” and by the look on my face, they wouldn’t push further.
There were the odd fleeting visits from him, a strange man at the door, whisking me away to an unfamiliar house with new smells and foreign voices. Of another family that was mine, but with no history, for either of us. Studying his face for reflections of my own and finding none. A terrible sense of disconnectedness. The loaded silence on the drive home. An awkward kiss on the cheek on the way out the car door. Floods of tears once safely inside.
Funnily enough, I never pined for him on birthdays or at Christmas, there was always too much other excitement. I don’t think I ever looked at friends’ fathers with awe or envy either. I just wanted one of my own. A keepsake.

It was the quiet times, playing alone, when I reflected begrudgingly on how different I thought I was, and why it had to be me who had a half missing.
By high school it was my great shame. A reason to feel somehow inferior in the crowd. When the stigma of divorce was an impediment to fitting in. I hated him for it.

By the time I was interested in boys, I already had a thing for men. I was a walking stereotype. There were lovely boyfriends with fatherly kindnesses and affections, but they were somehow too simple. I needed the angst-filled, heaving burden of unrequited love. I found it at university in the great novels I studied and buried myself deep in Oedipus and Electra and became as father-fixated as ever.

How many other fatherless children are out there? How do we reconcile the disappointment of growing up feeling tainted by absent dads, or present ones who can’t live up to their responsibilities? Or expectations? Maybe they thought we’d be better off? Maybe we were. And how do we make a happy life for ourselves despite rough starts? Blame won’t help. Nor will anger. Or casting yourself as victim. I decided to take the part of heroine instead and strained to live up to it.

Now in my 40s and a mother, my great hurdle is how to break the cycle of abandonment that is now two generations in the making, and was very nearly a third. I feel intense, sometimes overwhelming pressure to ensure my second marriage is a happy union of parenthood and compatability. Because I cannot fail at delivering my children the unconditional presence of a father.

As a late bloomer, one who didn’t really hit her stride until her mid-20s, I have reconciled myself as the abandoned child made good, saved by the love of a mother and later, husband, friends and children. And I now recognise, and more importantly embrace in myself, the fears and self-doubts of a fatherless daughter. For few of us are gifted the perfect childhood.

Mea culpa for the sins of the dad who wasn’t there
Tony Thomas

My father returned from the war to find himself supplanted. He flew to Brisbane, for good. The drone of any plane had me rushing out to wave him a six-year-old’s welcome home. Who would think, after that, that I too would fail as a father? I reported for The West Australian for 12 years. Ros, you were three when I left my marriage and job in 1970 for Melbourne and then the Canberra press gallery. This was for my own good, not yours. On my last night at home, I sat and watched you for hours, asleep in your cot. I marvelled that I could be so selfish.

The following year was the turmoil of marriage separation and break-up and a new wife and plenty of career stress. About a third of my then-modest pay went on maintenance payments to Perth. I could just afford to build a house in Canberra. It was Struggle Street for both estranged families.

I seldom flew back to Perth for access. What is a father meant to do on an afternoon with a daughter who is now a stranger? There is only “activity”. One time we ran around happily, both of us at eight-year-old level. But as you got older, visits became clumsy affairs. After one visit, I howled with grief.
Each gap seemed to lead to a longer gap. When you were about 14, you wrote me a newsy letter about your life and your dog. It was a chance to start building bridges but nothing came of it.

My second marriage had also failed and this time, now in Melbourne, I was determined that I wouldn’t lose my son and daughter in Canberra. This issue involved counsellors, barristers and a court. I kept up fatherhood, at least with my toddler son.

But I didn’t have emotional energy left for an uphill campaign to generate a fatherly relationship with an adolescent daughter in Perth, who I assumed was busy sorting out local issues.

Maintenance to Perth became less onerous through wage inflation. It is sad that this outflow was the only nexus between our two families, accompanied by its mutual vexations. Divorces are an expensive pastime.

I know this is ridiculous, but next I felt that if I suddenly renewed contact you would interpret it as my wanting to share in your success in radio and television, to which I had contributed zilch.

I eventually became a bit more mature. I had married again and we raised two daughters, happily. I decided to do my damnedest to become some sort of belated father to you, the toddler I left when I was 29. You were suspicious and angry about my decades of absence. I did my best to talk honestly and diplomatically, and not to get discouraged by setbacks. Grandchildren gave me the chance to play a fun role as grandpa, minus baggage. Over the past decade we’ve finally got to know a bit about each other. I find it hard to express my emotions but I love our odd new relationship.

To other absentee fathers: “Stay in touch, come what may. Keep showing your face. If you’re in another city, it’s harder to keep up the contact. Man up and do your best anyway. Don’t be a quitter, like I was.”

Being too kind can be cruel

Being too kind can be cruel
The West Australian
Ros Thomas
Published: Saturday August 24, 2012
Section: Opinion

Birthdays often end in tears in our house. Usually mine. That’s how you know the party’s been a good one.  I’ve disintegrated from exhaustion.

But the last thing I expected was a birthday that started with tears. Two sleeps out from the big day, I sat my almost 12year old down to deliver some unpleasant news: He was not going to become the owner of his much coveted PlayStation 3, kingmaker amongst boys.

There was a moment’s silence as the news sank in, but I was not prepared for the sudden wave of grief that swept over the dinner table and ran in rivulets through the peas and corn on his dinner plate. My son was crushed: “I’ve been counting down the days, now no-one will ever come to my house again!” And he took himself off to bed puffy-eyed  and inconsolable at 7.30pm instead of 9. (At least that was a nice change.)

He wasn’t angry, just devastated. And I felt awful. I realised I had cost him currency in the playground. Already his peer group was jostling for elbow room, and exclusive membership required all the necessary gadgetry.

 That night I wavered on my stance not to allow any teenage anaesthetic  into our house: no PlayStation, no Xbox, no gaming consoles. My husband lent me enough of his testosterone to stiffen my resolve. By next morning, eldest child had bounced back and accepted his fate. His birthday was a triumph (and I didn’t cry.) In fact, with new headphones and a funky iPod cover, I overheard him telling a mate ‘it was a cool birthday anyway.’

I’m afraid it was a hard lesson for me. As a mother, my nurturing instincts often tell me to clear the obstacles and smooth the road for my progeny, and here I was deliberately installing a speed hump. It got me thinking that maybe son number one felt he deserved a Playstation and that his assumption had grown into hope, then into anticipation and finally into expectation, encouraged by my silence on the subject.

Perhaps the problem with kids today is their parents? My husband says I spoil mine. Spoil them how? With too much home cooking, lifts to school in the rain, unconditional love? Or does he mean spoilt with new shoes every six months and a $20 haircut four times a year? Or rooms of their own and family holidays in rented beach houses?

Sociologists are reporting that today’s parents will do anything to see their kids succeed. Why? For bragging rights?  Or so they can be admired, or one better, envied, for having reared such high achievers?

”Never before have parents been so (mistakenly) convinced that their every move has a ripple effect into their children’s future success.” So says Madeline Levine, a San Francisco psychologist specializing in young adults.

I see her point. I’ve been known to continue glueing and pasting a school papier-mache project long after my budding artist has lost interest. Are we prepared to stand back and allow our kids to fail, fall over and miss the bus?  But am I one of those parents who can’t say no? That’s not me, I know that.

But perhaps I lean too far towards leniency. I give too many warnings and not enough punishments. I don’t reward bad behaviour but I go overboard praising good. I try to be a spontaneous fun-loving mum rather than a cranky dragon. And that’s the crux of it, isn’t it – we’re all trying to do a good job of raising our children. None of us is deliberately cocking it up. Often, all we have to go on is how our parents raised us and what we learn by osmosis from others.

My mum, in contrast, has the kind of authority over my children I wish I had.  She’s always consistent and her standards are demanding. All three of them love her fiercely and take turns behaving impeccably at her place. I watch, sometimes with awe, how she can head off an encroaching tantrum with quietness and patience until it dissolves into a fit of giggles. I can be clever like that too. But not after three months of crawling out of bed at 5am to a juiced up toddler, negotiating with a middle child who has made an art form out of crying wolf and managing a 12 year old who thinks he’s twenty. 

Life gets in the way of good parenting. I do my worst on school mornings, scrambled by the chaos of burning toast and missing socks , when shoes are calmly emptied of their sandpit on the lounge, and overdue permission slips are suddenly discovered at the bottom of bags.  I rant and huff (apparently) and on occasion, do my lolly.

Everywhere I go, I feel the watchful eyes of other parents, and nannas and grandpas, and worse, those not yet with children. Most of them look upon me with benevolence (and often amusement) but try disciplining a wayward two year old in the supermarket. I never know whether to feel proud of drawing the line, or ashamed of losing my cool. Usually I feel both.

So are we as good at parenting as our folks were? Or better?  Factor in the different challenges we face – children with endless choices and pre-occupations:  an overly connected world of play dates and catch ups, hockey practice, on line gaming and text tag.  There’s no reason to be bored yet I still hear the whines. I spent half my childhood on a bed reading, or building cubbies in untidy gardens or riding my bike tirelessly round and round the block. It was a simpler existence. Boredom made me creative.

Go back a third generation, that of our grandparents, and there were even more pressing concerns: would there be enough for a roast for Sunday lunch? Would they grow old enough to see their children into adulthood?

Maybe I’m in danger of being kiddie-whipped. I’m at home, doing endless housework, trying to write, and my 5 year old, drawing on the floor, says “Can you bring me a yellow texta?” I forget to say “Sorry honey, I’m busy right now, you get it” and instead ask him to say “Please?”

I know why I put the rubbish out and unpack the dishwasher. Because I gave those jobs to a 12 year old boy who left the lid open so often we had a plague of ants and who doesn’t bother to check if the dishes he’s putting away are still dirty. I can save enough time for an episode of Desperate Housewives just by doing it myself.

Hence the great conundrum of our serialized lives. We want to raise good people, who know the value of hard work, tenacity, generosity and kindness. But we’re too quick to make it too easy for them, and perhaps they’re leveraging that willingness and over-zealous investment. As one socially observant writer puts it: We’ve created ‘a broad savannah of entitlement that we’ve watered, landscaped and hired gardeners to maintain’ but we’d be better off ‘letting the grasslands revert to forest.’  (I’ve torn that out of the New Yorker magazine and stuck it on the fridge.)

For the good of my children then, I am going to let my house turn into the local dump. Beds will be lumpy and unmade, the cat will be starving and no one will know where their clean uniforms are. I will stand back and allow my offspring to learn for themselves how to be on time for school and what really happens when they skip breakfast. And I’ll lie back on the sofa and read the paper while I do my nails. Knowing I’m being a model mother.

The (Loveable) Cult of Food

The (Loveable) Cult of Food
The West Australian
Ros Thomas
Published: Saturday August 18, 2012
Section: Opinion

The Chinese have got it all wrong. 2012 is not the Year of the Dragon, it’s the Year of the Bean. Top billing on menus  everywhere – beans.  A puree of Italian cannellini, New Mexican black beans,  a Moroccan tagine of beans. For breakfast.

I think 2011 was the year of the duck:  crispy-skinned, Peking, confit, smoked. Some might argue 2010 was the year of the duck too, but I say it was the year of the pig:  shredded, pulled, sticky, slow-roasted, gorgeously soft belly.  (Mine).

What is going on with food these days? It’s a loveable cult. I am just as happy to go to bed with Delicious magazine as I am with delicious man. I have a recipe drawer stuffed to Christmas with cuttings ripped from cooking journals and recipes I’ve printed excitedly from the internet. If there’s nothing on telly I surf Nigella.

Our house is finely divided into two camps – the one that can’t get enough of that voluptuous pomme (de terre) Nigella Lawson with her gastroporn voice and her elegant fingers licking and poking  (me) and the camp which thinks she’s an overblown heifer with a lardy rear and even lardier recipes. (Two guesses.) And yet my lifelong dinner companion loves his food to distraction. He just doesn’t want to seduce it. Or be seduced by it. Or cook it for that matter.

Even the smaller members of the house are enjoying their five star taste of haute cuisine. Spaghetti bolognaise is now ragu, cauliflower cheese is au gratin. A loaf of white bread is pane di casa – even our five year old knows that. Next we Michelin-rated housewives will be attempting pomegranate foams and foraging for edible toadstools and salad weeds in the empty block up the road. It’s a cordon bleu revival, a blue ribbon renaissance in the culinary arts.

Food has gone a bit silly hasn’t it? Or is it just me? I blame ‘Masterchef’. It was as addictive as a packet of chips. Universally more-ish. Even with those annoying ad breaks that sliced right into the middle of judging. But Masterchef’s sweet genius was that it brought families round the television once again. Not since The Two Ronnies have I known so many kids and parents coming together to watch the box .

Food TV has been cleverly basting our appetites for meals we used to go out for – five hour lamb, home made pasta, most things foreign. In the last year, I have cooked Sicilian apple cake (to thunderous applause) and Asian dumplings (to stunned silence).

I’ve started visiting farmers’ markets, and see all the neighbours there. And my gym instructor. (Who caught me hand-to-mouth with a croissant.) Those Saturday markets are friendly places. No one jostles you or jumps the coffee queue. Nobody is cranky or rude, and everyone lolls around in the winter sun, chatty and mellow. I bought the best tasting strawberries I’ve had in ages, and watched with satisfaction as my two smallest ones worked their way through the entire punnet as they scootered home.

I’m trying to be a bit agrarian at home too. I like the idea of being more self sufficient. I now give my salad trimmings to a friend who has chooks. I’ve start making jam from the Italian mamma’s fig tree up the road. I make cumquat chutney from my own.

And I’m  feeding my children dirt. Not the lettuce suffocated in plastic from the supermarket, but the still gritty one a farmer cut from its stalk yesterday. And whatever the rain splashed up on my herb patch. And the newly fallen apple I collected on a visit to a straggly orchard and wiped clean on my shirt.

I  want to feed them more of nature, in all its irregular-shaped, less-than-shiny diversity. I hope it helps make them more robust and less homogenized. I’m not falling for advertisers who tell me my house is a bomb shelter for germs and I need their arsenal of anti-bacterials. Soap and water will do fine. I don’t think I’m grubby enough for hospital grade disinfectant.

As the first of the processed food generation, (polony, peanut paste anyone?) I have come full circle and decided I would like to control what my children are eating.  And now, well into the crustless cut and thrust of school lunches, and because I am at home, I am able to indulge in the whims and comforts of a spot of home cooking.

I get inspiration from loitering outside my local French patisserie, drinking  in the window display with its drift of icing sugar and warm bread smells curling in the air. Or planting carrots so the kids can delight in the ritual of choosing which one is ready for life above ground. Or picking vivid handfuls of parsley from the pots by the front door. (Only for parsley does total neglect pays handsome dividends.)

A girlfriend’s husband is so eager to reduce his carbon footprint he’s dug up his front lawn and replaced it with an impressive vegetable garden at considerable expense. Having never grown anything but a bald patch, his Herculean efforts have produced exactly two heads of lettuce. Undeterred, he hired a gardener from Mandurah to drive to Perth and back once a week to tend it for him.

No wonder a small voice in the back of my head is feeding me a middle class reproach – is this all just self-indulgence? Who are we kidding that the home food revival is helping anyone but ourselves? That with our veggie patches and a bag of farm oranges from the Saturday market, we stand together in defiance against the supermarket goliaths, and they’re shaking with fear under the neon lights at their checkouts?

I bet they couldn’t give a jot that they’re losing two bucks a week from some suburban mum who’s proudly growing her own parsley. Because I seem to find myself in the local supermarket every single day regardless. It’s cheap and it’s close and it’s open on a Monday. I’d like to buy organic milk, but at half the price, the three-dollar one is kinder to my back pocket. And my bottom line rules my world.

I’m not sure where our food revival is headed, no doubt into stranger and more exciting territories: where quinoa trumps rice as the world’s greatest living carbohydrate, and ceviche hooks itself a dedicated fan club. (I’m going to take some convincing that raw white fish in a lemon bath is anything but unappetising.) Perhaps it’s food theatre that will keep us glued to the box at night, watching that mouthful of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall  (Hugh Fearlessly-Eat-It-all) making a career honeypot out of his farm produce in ‘River Cottage’. Or Jamie Oliver turning boarding school cooks with tuckshop arms into bastions of healthy eating.

I’ll happily spend a little bit more to go back to basics. Just not a whole lot more. And if that’s not enough to make a difference to farmers, am I just being selfish? Am I deluding myself to think changing the way I eat rewards anyone but me? (One lovely friend suggests it’s all about mental health anyway.)

Obviously it’s more time-consuming cooking from scratch. But hey – isn’t that what being at home with small children is about? Small pleasures filtered from their excitement at licking the beaters and the greedy thrill of a half scraped bowl. A window into how food memories grow from seed, and become cherished links to childhood later on. Peace of mind knowing I am feeding them from my own hand.

If only I can stop my eldest from begging for a sausage roll from the school canteen. That really takes the cake.

Erotic Fiction Finds Its G spot

Erotic Fiction Finds Its G spot
The West Australian
Ros Thomas
Published: Saturday August 11, 2012
Section: Opinion

Who would have thought? Even the would-be Prime Minister has admitted reading Fifty Shades of Grey. (I hope Margaret Abbott gave him a good spanking for that!) In under  four months, one book of women’s erotica has gained such broad appeal, even the conservatives have dumped their inhibitions.

Sadly, I’m not sure I can talk dirty enough to explain this literary phenomenon. (Ok, I’ll try.) This novel is titillating in a lumpish kind of way. British housewife, E L James, real name Erika Mitchell might have the imagination of a deviant nymphomaniac, but her clumsiness ruined the sex for me.

I bet you blokes out there are tired of such excuses:  you already know this book comes with fringe benefits. I have a friend in London who works in banking and she says half the husbands on her trading floor are exhausted. Not from the GFC mind you, but from steamed up wives who’ve beaten them into horizontal submission. They can barely stay awake long enough to notch up an acquisition, at the same time nursing the carpet burns from too many mergers at home.

And I keep hearing the same stories here:  giggling footy mums telling wicked stories about the book that has revitalized their marriages. Rosy-cheeked nannas springing up and down the aisles at the supermarket while their husbands show up to golf unusually blasé about keeping score. This book has hit a hole in one.

No woman is ashamed to be reading erotic fiction anymore, or, more to the point, a novel containing really graphic sado masochistic sex. E L James, middle class former TV executive mother of two, was wise to insist on a nondescript cover for 50 Shades of Grey. That sober necktie on the front means you can be reading it nonchalantly on the bus ride home while secretly electrified at your heroine getting serviced in the back seat of her new Audi. (Might I add that the author not only rang a London garage to check sex in an Audi R8 was possible, but went and sat in one in the showroom to make sure.)

I happened to buy my copy several months ago in a lovely old Subiaco bookshop. I’d overheard two well-to-do sixty somethings in furious discussion at the counter with the equally animated book seller : ‘Why is it flying off the shelves?’ To which the book seller replied : ‘Because it’s about re-living the fantasy of first love’.

That was the kiss of hope. But I don’t think too many of us were deflowered in a dungeon by a megalomaniac fixated on bondage? Perhaps we should have aimed lower.

I don’t mind telling you I’ve read some porn in my time, for research purposes, of course, and most of it is rubbish. Melodramatic, overwrought and unintentionally funny. A bit like this book. (Hopefully not a bit like this column.) What fascinates me is why E L James has become a literary prodigy to rival Dickens – she has written the fastest selling paperback of all time.

So let’s take a little knee trembler through the annals of romance literature. Barbara Cartland, that froth of pancake makeup and tulle, was no less a sensation – as a young gossip columnist in the 1920’s, she was tickled pink (literally) to have her risqué society thriller published to acclaim at age 21. She went on to write 722 more runaway successes. No one ever admits to having read her, but she often claimed to be the world’s greatest writer of romantic confection. Perhaps she was.

For all her mascara and Pekingese, Barbara Cartland knew a thing or two about romance and she was adamant her leading ladies remained career virgins. E L James’ heroine Anastasia Steele is a virgin too, but unlike Ms Cartland, who set most of her stories in the 19th century, E L James is writing for now. Why then, does she choose for her virgin an alpha male autocratic predator who uses money and power to seduce her with his ‘red room of pain?’ And if we love that storyline so much, does that suggest liberated women today secretly want to be controlled, gagged, and dominated? Surely not? (Yes, yes, I know it’s consensual but let’s not forget this virgin doesn’t have the experience to know what she’s consenting to.)

Okay, so it’s about the sex then.  Erotic toyshops are suddenly sell outs and say they can’t keep up with the demand for handcuffs and shackles and any other rust-proof apparatus that needs a grease and oil change to keep it purring. Perhaps women are prepared to push their ‘soft limits’ after reading this book? Maybe we haven’t experimented enough?

If half the English speaking world is obsessing about this book, what was missing from our lives before the handsome bad boy Christian Grey came along? I think erotic fiction has finally found its G-spot. G for genre, a niche of its own. My mother’s generation had their bosom-heaving Mills and Boon’s, those now in middle age had Danielle Steele’s schmaltzy melodrama.  Generation X – me – and those growing up behind us? Until now, a dry spell. (Coincidentally, Mills and Boon was criticized in the 70’s for promoting the sexual submission of women to men, the very same formula at the heart of Fifty Shades of Grey).

Given the readership of this book is almost exclusively female, why aren’t men feeling left out? Because this story reaffirms the missionary position. Men on top. They have nothing to fear from any sudden renaissance in women’s erotica either, because in this case at least, it’s not about equal power in the bedroom. It’s about that ingrained female fantasy of ‘being taken’, of yielding to a dominant male, by virtue of being irresistible. Our heroine here has no ambition to crash through the glass ceiling, she spends most of her encounters flat on her back looking up at it. Her lover might be kinky, but he’s a slave to her satisfaction. No wonder womens’ libidos are quickening.

E L James has earned her notoriety from exploiting  a gap in the market, just as JK Rowling did with magic and Harry Potter. But unlike most 21st century fictional role models, the book’s heroine, Anastasia Steele, is no femme fatale, no James Bond-style Pussy Galore. She might be intelligent, but she’s also naïve and insecure and too willing to being taken for a ride. Shackled to a bondage swing.

It’s still true that few of us would want to be seen dead reading a romance novel, but if you insert a fetish or some S & M, it has suddenly become acceptable, if not cool, to stretch the bounds of literary escapism with a medieval rack and some rope.

Smart women don’t feel pathetic discussing this novel either – the porn gives it an edge, but deep down it’s really just a love story twisted to suit modern tastes, just as the Twilight series gave paranormal  romance a shot in the arm, with lovers masquerading as vampires.

So are men reading this book? Apart from Tony Abbott? None of the ones I know are, they’re just grinning smugly that their wives are keen to try a spot of method acting.

So, in the spirit of second honeymoons, I have fished out my crumpled nurses uniform from the bottom drawer and rifled through my lover’s wardrobe. I’ve found his old school tie, some horsey chaps and a riding crop from the garage and I’ve hidden them under my pillow. He’s in for a big surprise tonight. Let’s hope that wipes the smile off his face.

In Pursuit of Contentment

In Pursuit of Contentment
The West Australian
Ros Thomas
Published: Saturday August 4, 2012
Section: Opinion

What makes a contented life?

Almost everywhere I turn these days, I feel brainwashed into thinking I ought to be cheesed off with my lot. That I’m somehow entitled to a better life, that I deserve it because I’m worth it. L’Oreal style.

We are living in the age of entitlement, where the expectations of a luxury existence have filtered down from the uber-rich to the people next door until even a couple of teenage newlyweds expect a home theatre and a two car garage.

Am I so antiquated at 44 that I can remember saving up for things? That I’ve (finally) learnt that more often than not, my needs are usually just wants? That my instant gratification gene (handed down through generations of women) does not need to be instantly satiated. That waiting for the prize intensifies the pleasure of finally acquiring it.

It takes a concerted effort to examine our state of contentedness – we’re so switched on these days, there’s no pause button for reflection, no down time. If you’re not being pounded by emails and text messages, you’re being ear bashed by the phone. Surfing the internet means drowning in the bottomless deep of information and Facebook wants your wall papered with your every waking thought. No wonder our kids have trouble getting to sleep. The art of winding down after dinner with a good book or some music has been lost amongst the loungeroom invaders of television and home movies and the ever present news. (It takes a determined trigger finger to turn off the remote in our house.)

It’s not until you go on holiday that you reacquaint yourself with the small pleasures of quietness, of not pushing into the corners of every silence with comment or conversation. You don’t have to talk as much as you think. (Out loud. Or in the chambers of your mind.)

I blame the interweb for blurring the boundaries between the haves and the have nots, for spreading at warp speed the objects of desire until even my 11-year-old takes for granted he’s getting a Playstation 3 for his twelfth birthday. (He isn’t.) With the big day approaching, I feel some trepidation at knowing his disappointment will be hard to assuage, and when all his friends have one, I don’t blame him for feeling entitled to one as well. Unfortunately for him, his mother enjoys walking the tightrope of expectation and reward. And she thinks a Playstation is an instrument for future malcontent. (And to be quite frank, he and I don’t need any more electronic sources of conflict.)

I wonder if part of the problem is that for a good twenty years now, we’ve been constantly telling our kids they are special, and now they’re living the label and won’t have a bar of anyone who says otherwise. I hear stories of Generation Y and the younger Generation X’s, now in their 20’s and 30’s, expecting to climb their career ladders faster than anyone else, earn more than their mentors and oust their parents from their holiday houses on long weekends.

But does it make them happy knowing they are the most catered for generation in history? I doubt it. Perhaps all we’ve done is unwittingly create a breed of chronic malcontents, who can’t stand criticism and disappointment, and whose overinflated egos can’t handle the ugly realities of life. Like waiting until you’re 30 to get a BMW. From your parents.

Am I sounding too harsh? Oh dear. I too, tell my children they’re extraordinary. (Usually in the cherished sense.) But I’ve put the question of ‘what makes a contented life’ to a number of the more sensible members of our community, my mother’s generation, who, in their late 60’s and 70’s, have their arthritic fingers firmly on the pulse of what really matters. And from those whose somewhat impending denouement gives them clarity of mind and memory, comes the slice of wisdom that the fierce work ethic of their day has been overtaken by the relentless pursuit of self fulfillment.

Showing off your collected fixtures and fittings would have been bad manners in our grandparent’s day. War and the depression, poverty, unemployment, rations and later, the memories of it, left no room for discontent when luxuries were well out of reach. Perhaps then, happiness was as simple as a roast chicken on Sunday.

Today’s epidemic of narcissism is being studied by a research team from Kennesaw State University in Georgia, which has been examining the results of an annual survey of high school students dating back to 1975. They have concluded that the younger generations want maximum income and maximum time off, two seemingly incompatible pursuits.

Surely one comes at the expense of the other? But trying to have it all is pointless and for most, it doesn’t work. It just causes burnout. Not contentedness.

The older generation also knows the gift of self-sacrifice is undervalued these days. I think fewer young people today think of giving of themselves without expecting some reward in return. They don’t call it the ‘me’ generation for nothing : blinded by the accumulation of material possessions, the outward trappings of a so-called successful life, it’s about what’s on show, not what’s been achieved privately without public acknowledgement. I think giving something for nothing is a lovely recipe for content.

My better half gives me plenty of stick and gets nothing in return. Just my stony-faced silence. Which he quite likes. (The silence part.) He has a rule-of-relationships that you mustn’t bicker over trifles, and you can’t sulk about them either. You need to get your grievances out in one hit, without shouting, agree with his point of view, apologise for yours and move on. He is infuriating but one of the most contented people I have ever met. Is he onto something? Not sweating the small stuff and always being right? I try in vain.

Sometimes, when the dishes aren’t pressing, and dinner is in the oven, I sit outside and watch my children at play. In that brief window before tea time when they’re happily going about their business with a watering can or two rocks and a leaf, I feel content. Content with the healthy little family I have produced, content that I am able to stop still and watch a fleeting vignette of childhood, content that they are absentmindedly content.

And then drifting over the smell of roses comes the smell of burning casserole, and I awake from my Madonna and child torpor to the reality of domestic discontentedness. It pierces the air with its high-pitched shrieks of sibling rivalry as middle child yells ‘What’s for dinner?’ And I proudly yell back that I’ve cooked a beef bourgignon to remind us all of our once-in-a-lifetime trip to France. And he looks at me and says ‘ugh’. Content indeed.

Sex is a Dangerous Business

Sex is a Dangerous Business
The West Australian
Ros Thomas
Published: Saturday July 28, 2012
Section: Opinion

My 11-year-old son knows what a rubber is. He’s seen me wearing one. We’d gone to the local pool so he and his best friend could let off some steam and I could do some laps.Fighting the uncooperative elastic of a white swimming cap, I was trying to force the last of my hair inside it when son number one said “Mum, you look like a rubber” and then he and his mate fell about laughing.

Sex education is a dangerous business.

I couldn’t think of a fast rejoinder. So I laughed too. And then swam up and down the pool with my rubbered head submerged in a sea of questions — does he really know what a rubber is? Does he know what’s it for? And why? And how?

I didn’t envy his teacher ploughing into the sex education curriculum at the end of last term. All that sniggering and stifled giggling. A little birdy told me in one class, the teacher had the kids yelling “Penis!” and “Vagina!” until they lost their indignity. I might try that at home. Mine’s still quite undignified.

We learnt about sex the old-fashioned way. Behind the toilet block in the school playground. Where girls tittered about how gross it would be and which one of the cool gang had already let a boy get to No. 2. (No. 1 was a kiss, four and five were unthinkable.)

By the time we were 13, sex education was a black mark on Friday’s calendar. The teacher who took it was awkward and humourless, much like those first fumbling entanglements would be. From her drawings of the male anatomy in both its incarnations, I had a handle on the mechanics (there was an apprentice I quite liked too!) but I’d heard not one word about love itself — infatuation, desire, what led to sex in the first place, and I knew from the besotted and lovestruck poets on the school reading list that I was only getting half the story.

Our mothers’ Cleo magazines threw up more questions than they answered. Cleo was a leap too far but the centrefolds had us in stitches. Right around the staples.

The Playboy stash under a girlfriend’s house filled all the gaps we could imagine. And there we’d sit, poring over the pictures (no one reads the stories) after school until we got a chance at a real life encounter, or her big brother came home.

After we left school we shared everything in infinitesimal detail. No young man’s performance was ever going to escape the huddled scrutiny of a clutch of young women chattering at warp speed about the ins and outs of last night’s liaison.

Perhaps that’s how we learnt how to behave sexually. We taught ourselves and each other about the unreliable and shifting rules of the mating game, the dangers of lust and inappropriate flirtations, the heaving burden of unrequited love, what felt right and what didn’t. Some of us found Mr Right and had the happy endings, others we know met with tragedy, crushed by heartbreak or infidelity, and many are still dating, like a never ending story.

So whose job is it to teach my son about love and sex? Yes, his teacher’s. If he’s concentrating hard enough and not distracted trying to impress the girls. Maybe his father, or his step-father, probably not me, if his withering look when I circle the subject is anything is to go by.

I will tell him everything I know about men and sex from a woman’s perspective. That should take about three minutes. Then I’ll give him my beautifully rehearsed and effusive speech on the importance of following your heart and what falling in love feels like and bore him witless until he begs for mercy.

No, he’s going to learn most of it by osmosis from his mates, as have generations of teenagers before him.

He’s about to turn 12 and I know he’s already being bombarded with confusing messages about his sexuality from the great mass of modern media that stalks his every move: Computer games with leather-bound women so tough you can beat them up and they’ll happily come back for more. Video clips that show women laid flat out like dogs begging to be used up and sent packing, with or without a bone. Magazines full of pop stars and actresses proudly telling anyone and everyone how they bump and grind and like to change partners on a Tuesday. Music that shouts angry misogyny into your earphones. Does modern male culture think it needs to reassert its wounded superiority by resorting to the age old business of insulting young women as hoes and hookers and easy game? God knows girl(ish) celebrities make it easy for them – have you seen Rihanna lately? She might be the highest-selling digital artist in US history, but she sure knows how to look cheap.

All the dads I know are going to great pains to teach their boys the right way to treat girls, leading by example. But they’re up against it when their teenagers are turning to their iPods for guidance on these matters. And what do mum and dad know anyway? The new world is awash with music and videos and games that not only justify, but glorify the exploitation and the objectification of women.

And half the time, those mixed messages are being drip fed through headphones attached to boys who take gangsta rappers at their every word, and whose parents, hearing only silence, live unwittingly in compliance.

Is feminism to blame for spawning this cult of misguided masculinity? And how do we correct it for boys coming of age? Sex education hasn’t got a hope. It’s still in the dark ages. And how on earth are young girls (and their parents, no less) going to navigate this mire of mixed messaging?

Fashion doesn’t help. Neither does our great obsession with celebrity. All that does is make teens feel inadequate and desperate to rise above the crowd as though being famous is a destination for who you are, not what you do.

I don’t know the answer, and my generation certainly hasn’t provided any adaptations for the renewed symbiosis of the sexes. Talk to any woman in her 30s or 40s and you’ll hear the familiar complaint that men and women are still poles apart.

And the pole is part of the problem. It’s a self-centred, narcissistic, fickle, unpredictable organ and women don’t understand it. That’s the nub of the problem. Women are every bit as fickle and unpredictable, and most of the time, none of us have the balls to speak openly and honestly about why we don’t get it.

Or give it. So there we lie, adolescence a distant memory, each of us on our side of the bed with this great gulf of misunderstanding breathing heavily between us.

For my eldest son (and the smaller one growing up alongside him), I hope he experiences all the rapturous highs and crushing lows that come with the search for acceptance and contentment.

Which is often what love and sex are about. I hope he cherishes the girls who will pass through his life. Above all, I want him to treat them with respect, no matter what happens.

And I hope somewhere along the line, someone perhaps older and wiser than him, will earn his respect by telling him the whole intoxicating story of sex, with all its knobs and buttons.

In case he ever has to wear a swimming cap.

Gone but not forgotten

Gone but not forgotten
The West Australian
Ros Thomas
Published: Saturday July 21
Section: Opinion

I am haunted by the babies that never were. I have three children squabbling over their dinners in front of me and six positive pregnancy sticks in the freezer. I keep them there as markers of respect for who they would have been. Blue crosses in white windows, frozen in time.

This is not a column I ever wanted to write. Or thought I needed to. But the idea was planted in my head by my editor, and since then it has been growing little fingers prodding memories of a time when all I thought of and all I wanted to be, was pregnant.

Those pregnancy tests are some of my most precious possessions, small windows of wonder at my ability to procreate. For a woman who had such trouble falling pregnant, they are reminders of the sheer elation I felt at discovering I was really, truly with child, after so many crushing disappointments and the floods of tears that accompanied them.

I know some of you will think I’m mad. Or morbid. But those three babies that didn’t make it gave me nothing to hold. Nothing but the emptiness of knowing they were no longer there. A mirage.  Babies who hardly had a chance to announce their arrival before they returned to the place they came from. And so those pregnancy tests are the only proof they were fleetingly on board.

At those times, I would see the heavily pregnant women smoking outside the hospitals and want to scream at them ‘Don’t you know how lucky you are?’ How could they be so wantonly destructive? But that’s the thing about babies – they can be sturdy little souls or the most delicate of creatures and their gift is their unpredictability. They come to people who’ve lost hope, lost count or lost interest.   Fecundity is a double edged sword.

I have only ever talked about miscarriage in the most superficial of terms – just the bare necessities to give enough of an answer to a question: ‘Yes I had one before my first son was born’. ‘Yes, I had two more in my early 40’s’. I don’t think we’ve yet given ourselves permission to dive down and grind through the gut wrenching hurt and disappointment those miscarriages gave us.  For me, I struggled to think of them in any terms but failure. Yet another failure. Even after the euphoria of delivering two healthy babies, 6 years apart, two subsequent miscarriages carried the weight of even bigger, dashed expectations.

I couldn’t believe I was here again. And now racing against time. That ticking clock I was so tired of hearing. It was probably just as tired of me. I tried to think of them as success instead of failure. Success with the promise of more to come, when those babies were ready to come. But the looks on the faces of those women sitting opposite me in the fertility clinics told me all I needed to know. We were all becoming increasingly desperate.

The worst thing you can tell a woman trying in vain to have a baby, is to ‘relax’. It’s like a kick in the stomach every time. Good luck trying to relax after years of trying to conceive and months of frantic early morning blood tests and injections on the way to work. There’s nothing relaxing about it. It’s a diabolical way to get pregnant.

My last miscarriage, just into my second trimester, was the nail in the coffin. The coffin of my uterus that simply could no longer sustain life. I crashed from shock, to disbelief, acceptance into despair. And anger. Mistrust. Of my body and what it couldn’t do.  Looking back I’m sure I had a bout of depression, but I was neither sufficiently self-aware nor emotionally programmed to recognize it. After all, I had a small child and a toddler to care for. And I was so darned lucky to have them, how could I possibly be ungrateful? And what was this driving force telling me I HAD to have another? That I just -wasn’t – finished.

Are men as rocked by miscarriage as women? I’m sure they are, but their steadfastness and the pressure they must feel to support their partner through the awful physicality of the experience means they often keep their emotions in check. Certainly that’s what happened with us. He was the rock. I crumbled.

How often do I think of them, those babies who vanished into the ether? Only rarely. I open the freezer several times a day and there’s not a flicker of sadness. But there are moments out of nowhere that prick tiny pinholes into a sea of grief. Driving past the clinic where I stumbled out of the ultrasound room trying to hold it together until the bill was paid. Remembering  all the pregnant women (whose turn was after mine) scanning my face intently for signs of life, and seeing instantly that there was none. I couldn’t meet their eyes – they all knew anyway.

To all those childless women who so wanted to be mothers, I apologise for sounding greedy. I can only speak of what I know, and I knew number three was going to complete me and complete our family, and being a painfully tenacious person, I was not giving up. I wanted no regrets. Friends would say ‘You’ll know when you’re done having babies.’ I would nod and say ‘maybe I am?’ But I knew I wasn’t. So when the doctors told us that we had done almost everything we could to artificially encourage a pregnancy, we decided we had to walk away. Walk away and consult the pillow night after night about what mattered. In hindsight, it was my husband who realised my tunnel-vision had to end. Because it would come at the expense of the family we already had.

Those first few weeks of ‘not’ trying were like having no purpose. I needed a new obsession and I needed it fast. And it came just a month later in the shape of a cross on a pregnancy stick. A baby who knew her time had come. And who wanted me as her mother.