In sickness and in guilt

In sickness and in guilt
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday April 27, 2013

Being house-bound makes me queasy. So when our family of five was sidelined with gastro for thirty-six hours straight, I was positively bilious. No sooner did one of us emerge from the fug of sickness, than another would vanish into a darkened bedroom with bucket and towels.  

That virus was so potent it took down grown man and small child with equal ease. But its curse was also a blessing, because that bug set me free from all domestic chores for an entire weekend. I did no cooking because no-one could stand the sight of food. I did no tidying up, no washing or folding because everyone else was too ill to care. But by Monday, I was post-viral and suffering a motherload of guilt.

Here I was, ignoring the mounting pile of sweaty sheets and dry cracker crumbs, sitting cross-legged on the floor doing jigsaw puzzles with my youngest. She was the first to recover, and I was the only adult still functioning. We spent two hours threading buttons onto string necklaces and making cut-out paper daisies with her pinking shears. I loved our craft afternoon even more than she did.

And then I ruined my maternal pride by feeling guilty: guilty that I don’t do this with her all the time. Why can’t I ignore the dishes, the bills and the dirty floor and play Snakes and Ladders with my daughter? After all, I closed the door on my career to stay home with baby number three. I was the one who opted for a few precious years minding the nest. And yet I resent the endless loop of housework that now keeps me from my 3-year-old.

The six hours between school drop off and pick up are the equivalent of a domestic nanosecond. That’s why a dozen tea-chests are still waiting to be unpacked three months after we moved house. Meaningless chores like cleaning up the breakfast dishes and making beds take twice as long with a small helper and her funny little distractions.

Most mornings we traipse to the supermarket like explorers tracking the source of the Nile. We admire the bob-cat machine three doors down as it loads house rubble into the tip-truck. Then, as we cross the park, we begin our search for cockatoo feathers to add to our collection. Feather-hunting is thirsty work, so we stop for a drink at the tap and talk to the black pup who’s licking up the splashes. The supermarket is still a sub-continent away. Some days I just want to nip to Coles and get bread and milk.

 Am I being a carefree, accommodating mother, or a feckless, frazzled wife? Mums can’t win: we over-indulge our children, or we’re too pushy. Or not pushy enough. We are suffocatingly present or dismissively absent.

Here’s my stand on mother-guilt: I am not tirelessly dedicated to my children. In the midst of a screaming tantrum (theirs not mine), I view child-rearing as hard work and would escape to the office in an instant, if I had one.

Am I supposed to think of mothering as a gloriously female biological function? I did once, but that was before I had children. Now I lurch from one parenting no-no to the next. Ranting is my latest imperfection. It turns relations between sleep-deprived mother and mouthy 12-year-old into a powder keg. Sometimes, the unflappable father intervenes to restore peace and I get sent to the naughty corner: ‘Blossom, settle down, go and take some deep breaths somewhere.”

I see classier mums and wish I could be more like them. Do they smile indulgently when their 5 year old eggs his little sister into breaking open a packet of biscuits at the shops? I do my lolly in public and feel mortified. For that reason, I can enjoy watching other peoples’ children behaving appallingly, because for once, they’re not mine.

Do men feel father-guilt? The guilt of absence or indolence? In our house, the perfect dad weekend involves him sleeping, reading the papers and watching the footy. All done from the left arm of the sofa, with the kids using him as a trampoline to the next armchair. I don’t think my husband feels any pressure to be anything other than what he is: a kind, fun and loving dad.

My mothering report card won’t arrive until my children have craftily turned into adults. I hope they blank out those ugly school mornings. The ones when my fury curdled the milk on my eldest’s Weetbix: “What do you mean, that project is due today? What do you mean, you FORGOT?!”

Please let them remember how many Women’s Weekly train cakes I laboured over, not the time I dumped their dinners in the bin when they whinged once too often about tuna pie.

I’d like to be remembered as the fun-mum, the one who took them on pyjama walks in the dark, who rode the train just for kicks and didn’t nag about unmade beds. I might be deluded, but I’ll think back fondly to that awful gastro weekend, when in sickness, I did my best work.

Quite a mouthful

Quite a mouthful
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday April 20, 2013

The scariest teeth I’ve known belonged to a Grade 7 teacher called Mr Campbell. They dominated his face in the same way as Mister Ed’s – horsey and over-sized. In fearsome combination with his gravelly baritone, (which exploded like a sonic boom when angry), choirmaster Campbell and his big choppers are all I remember about singing lessons.

To my four-foot nothing, his six-foot something appeared gargantuan. He strode around the music room on his leg-stilts with his head cocked to one side, straining to indentify which one of us was out of tune. My thin soprano would peter out to a squeak as soon as Mr Campbell leaned over and put his ear to my mouth. Unimpressed, he would restore himself to his full height and grimace before moving on to find the owner of the flat notes.

Memories of his gritted teeth came flooding back last week as the kids and I were shedding our beach sand under the open air shower at North Cott .

There they sat: the top row of a set of dentures, sunning themselves on the retaining wall. My two-year-old daughter pounced on them thinking they were an exotic shell to put in her bucket. Five year old son was more cautious: “Mum, did that thing really come from the sea?” Twelve year old son’s disgust turned to horror when his sister shouted: “Can the teef come home with us?” and jammed those dentures sideways into her mouth, using both her hands to try to make them fit.

“Spit them out!” I yelled.

She did, and they landed upside down in the shower, the plastic palate filling up with a little puddle.  

I gingerly collected those disembodied cuspids, washed them off and set them back in their sunny spot on the retaining wall to await their owner. But after ten minutes, it was clear no-one was missing their front teeth enough to consider them lost.

That encounter with the contents of someone else’s mouth got me thinking about my husband’s grandfather, (unforgettably named Fred Smith). He was the dentist in Collie for forty years. His pet hate was going to parties and having guests whip out their wet dentures to show him where they were chafing. He got his own back pinning patients to the dentist’s chair with his famously giant belly and they got to hear the gurglings of what he’d had for lunch.

Fred Smith flung all the rotten teeth he extracted out the back door of his surgery into his vegie patch. Aunty Lin, Fred’s youngest daughter, delighted in digging them up and playing knucklebones with her gruesome treasures.

It’s rare to see shocking teeth these days. Modern dentistry has given us whiteners and veneers, braces, crowns and caps – all kinds of costumes to disguise the ugliness within our mouths. But historians are fascinated with bad teeth. Josephine Bonaparte’s smile was said to resemble a ‘mouthful of cloves.’ One scholar reported her teeth ‘looked like an oyster lease at low tide.’  

Queen Elizabeth I was renowned for her blackened teeth – being addicted to sweets and fearful of the primitive dentistry of the day. For centuries, portraits of the nobility only showed a tight smile: it was left to the lower classes to display their poor breeding with a cheerfully jagged grin. By the 1800’s, the Georgians had realised a ‘fine set of snappers’ was needed for genteel-sounding speech and to show off the ‘ornaments of the mouth.’ A well-kept toothy smile was obvious proof of prosperity.

In our house, 5 year old son is currently milking the gap in his pegs for all it’s worth. A few weekends back on a blustery day, his boogie board flipped up and smacked him in the mouth, dislodging his prized front tooth in a pool of blood on the sand. The tooth fairy left a comforting, over-generous fiver and a note: “You got off lightly little man, your dad had his front teeth knocked out at Uni when a young Troy Buswell unintentionally slammed a door in his face.”  

My mother was a stickler for my six-monthly dental visits when I was a child. Our dentist, Mr Hodby, had scary implements but gentle hands. I spent hours of my childhood staring at his ceiling, my body rigid with fear, hands clenched in my lap. I can still picture the swirly patterns of the fibrous cement panels overhead. Like a proper lady on honeymoon, that ceiling is all I remember.

Thanks to Mum, my teeth are still my best feature. In my late 20’s, as I was set free from Mr Hodby’s chair one day and was walking back to my car, my old music teacher Mr Campbell came striding towards me. He’d shrunk – his legs were no longer stilts. As we passed each other, I wondered “What about those scarily big teeth?” So I flashed him a confident smile in the hope he’d remember me from choir 1979, front row, squeaky soprano. He smiled back at me, politely, not a hint of recognition, revealing a row of neat white teeth, no bigger than mine. Quite a nice smile, actually. And away he went.

Our man of note

Our man of note
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday April 13, 2013

Jack Harrison was eating oysters in the sunshine four days before he died. New to hospital life, he tipped his hat at the palliative care nurses and asked if he might enjoy the gift of a dozen molluscs in the garden. He wasn’t the Messiah, but he did reduce his last supper to a rubble of briny shells on Easter Thursday afternoon.

All week, the corridor outside room 29 was thick with his visitors. They took turns finding a space around his bed and huddled in twos and threes in the corridor. In the waiting room, more friends and family gathered – bewildered at the news Jack’s demise was imminent. At 81, the indomitable head of one of Australia’s musical families was mortal after all.

His two sons and daughter took turns at the bedside vigil. Accomplished musicians themselves, they propped against a chair a giant poster of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra, their father’s other family for a record-breaking 42 years.

Only five weeks ago, Jack Harrison and my mother were babysitting our three children. We two parents arrived home from dinner to find Jack and Mum bookended on the sofa, breathing quietly in time. Jack’s sparse canopy of hair had gone wild, ruffled by sleep. My mother’s hair was a halo of white against the grey suede cushion. I made a secret wish for my husband and I to be such a picture of contentment at 76 and 81.

Only months earlier, Jack was perched on another sofa, this one at Mum’s house. Blowing and drawing on his harmonica, he crooned ‘Moon River’ to my small daughter. We had our own private concert as the orchestral accompaniment swelled from the speakers behind him. Our two-year-old, sitting beside her ‘Jackpa,’ was mesmerised. Jack’s sweet vibrato floated over us as I filmed the two of them on my phone – performer and pint-sized devotee  – eight decades apart. Was that Jack’s swansong?  “…dream-maker, you heart-breaker, wherever you’re going I’m going your way.”

Our Huckleberry Jack was one of the family; by mum’s side at every gathering and party. I would detect him fumbling in his pocket as the cake arrived. With ever-perfect timing, he and his mouth organ would strike up a jaunty “Happy birthday to you” urging on toddlers’ efforts to blow out the candles. How will we now have happy birthdays without him?

He was musical royalty in Perth. Even in 1941, when the country was fixated on the grim news overseas, Jack Harrison’s talent drew families around their Astors at 8pm on a Thursday. That programme was Australia’s Amateur Hour. Jack was hailed a boy wonder, aged 10, taking out the national competition with his mouth-organ.

At 12, his dad Bill suggested the clarinet. Jack, with his twin sister and elder brother became Jack Harrison’s Dance Band. After national radio exposure, pop-star status was theirs at dance halls everywhere. By the time the twins were 15, the quartet was earning so much money, Jack’s dad pulled him out of Scotch College. He’d been a ratbag there anyway: “They called me king of the cuts,” he recalled with pride.

At 19, Jack joined the WA Symphony Orchestra. Later, as principal clarinettist, his great set of pipes and rakish wit earned him notoriety and admiration. Never one to create a scene, he nonetheless had a gift for “a few short yet piquant words delivered with perfect timing at exactly the right volume.” The visiting Austrian conductor Henry Krips once asked him:  “Please, I want it again, Mr Harrison, I want a more peasant tone.”

Jack: “Sorry to disappoint – I think I left my peasant mouth at home.”

He was well known for waving a post-modernist score over his head and demanding the “asbestos test” when the jarring music made him grit his teeth.

Baffled conductor: “The asbestos test?”  

“Yes, let’s set it on fire and see if it burns.”

Jack was a sucker for his mum Edna’s speciality: crumbed brains in parsley sauce… In 1973, he donned a hard hat, lifted his clarinet and honked out the first note heard in the newly completed Perth Concert Hall… And his death reduced to tears the postie, Rob, who’d been stocking his letterbox in Claremont for five years.

Like so many others, I sat briefly by his gurney in the days before he died and held his hand. I left behind a hand-drawn card from my middle son: “To Ackpa, get well soon” – with three newly-mastered love-hearts. Jack’s body betrayed only subtle signs of his consuming illness: the constant tiredness, a cough, a temperature. For us, there was barely time for the shock to settle. How will we resume our lives now he is gone?

During one of his last lucid moments I whispered: “What will Mum do without you?” He squeezed my hand and with his eyes still closed, he replied: “I’m afraid I will have to do without her.”

Jack Harrison: 1931-2013.  

Writing on the wall

Writing on the wall
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday April 6, 2013

Memory has a mind of its own.  At random, it chooses what to keep. My grandmother’s handwriting is writ large in my memory. I remember her ringing me on her black Bakelite phone: “I’ve posted you a surprise, darling.” She knew my little legs would be dashing to the front  gate every five minutes to see if the postie was a speck up the road.  

I could pick out my nan’s penmanship in an instant, even before the perfumed envelope gave it away. Her capitals had graceful loops and flourishes – an artistic hand that also embroidered daisies on dresses for my doll. I watched mesmerised as the same hand whisked eggs into a blur to make dainty sponges.

It was there, in my nan’s kitchen, that she wrote me her shopping lists: long columns of her handwriting showing off her beautiful curlicue C for corned beef – 1 lb. Potatoes with a flouncy P, a firm downstroke for the B in Bovril, an exaggerated T for treacle and Sago – the o with a hook that swept the next word ‘Pudding’ into brackets – so I’d know what Sago was for. Such foreign-sounding things she wanted. I tucked her list into my koala purse and pedalled to the shop. First hurdle: deciphering her script. Second hurdle: matching the groceries to the strange words on the list. Then I’d ride home with bulging string bags hanging from my handlebars, banging on my knees or swinging dangerously into the spokes.

Even now, her writing goes hand-in-hand with how I remember her: graceful and neat. She left behind that permanent imprint of her 90 years on the planet. My nan’s lovely cursive resides on the backs of family photos. It lives inside the letters we keep as treasures under the lid of the piano stool at mum’s house. The seat of our family.

My own handwriting is as erratic as a chicken scratch. I’m so out of practice I can barely jot down half a page without writer’s cramp. I used to write my television stories long-hand on spiral notebooks, a welter of script. I sweated on the fire escape stairs outside the newsroom, scribbling away as deadline approached. Sentences that didn’t sound right when spoken aloud were roughly scrubbed out in favour of rhythmic ones. Sudden brainwaves would force themselves onto the pad, squeezed into margins  – a scrawl legible only to me. It was always a race to see whether inspired thoughts would vaporise before I could get them on paper.

No such trouble now. My laptop and I are intimates. My fingers fly over the keys – brain and hands finally in unison. Typing fast feels masterly. With such mechanical clarity, should I ever bother with pens?

My children won’t remember life before the internet. Their ideas will be pressed onto paper by the clicking of keys rather than the scratching of biros. For them, postcards will be quaint reminders of holidays before Facebook.

In high school French I decided my number 7 needed the European sophistication of a cross bar. I was a maths dunce but with one horizontal stroke, I became numerically glamorous – those 7’s of mine were so continental they could have been smoking Gauloises and eating croissants. Smitten, I have written my 7’s with a bar ever since: seventh heaven!

As classmates, we took great pains to graffiti our fanciest handiwork all over each others’ diaries. We changed our writing styles as often as the hems on our pleated beige dresses. Even now, I can instantly picture the cursive of my closest school friends: all those birthday cards and books gifted with their funny, affectionate inscriptions.

Curious, I don’t know the handwriting of newer friends. We talk and text and email, but don’t pen notes. Will their writing be bold or slap-dash or in beautiful italics? Are they right-handed or mollydooker? I’d like to know.

My husband hides a handwritten note each time he creeps out of the house at dawn for the airport. I wake up in our bed and feel less empty for the small thrill of finding his letter. Usually it’s tucked under my laptop or in the Cornflakes box. Silly I know, but it’s comforting to see the essence of him on paper, a billet-doux tiding me over until his return. I return the favour by planting an even more effusive love letter in his suitcase. (I usually wrap it around nasty household bills, each one annotated with a love heart in the hope he’ll pay them and leave me flush with cash.)

Now I’m mourning a graceful skill that has had its day. Handwriting is an art because expressing ourselves in ink is an exercise in restraint. Even a rude letter starts with ‘Dear…’ before roasting the recipient. How many times have I dashed off an email forgetting my hasty reply might be mistaken for bluntness – I’m always embarrassed at sounding impolite. Perhaps I need to slow down and reacquaint myself with the gentleness of handwriting. If I concentrate, I might even be able to make it legible.

Pay your moody dues

Pay your moody dues
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday March 30, 2013

Apparently PMS doesn’t exist. Any woman claiming a monthly permit to grumpiness, gloominess and general wretchedness has had her licence revoked. Period.

So says a team of Canadian scientists who’ve decided Pre-Menstrual Syndrome is not a syndrome at all, but a convenient excuse for 80-percent of the world’s women to pay out on their partners once a month. Clearly those scientists haven’t met my husband – a man who consistently gets my goat one week in four.

Just because Canadians invented the foghorn and peanut paste doesn’t mean they understand women. I like to do the right thing and gift my man his independence during ‘that time of the month’: “Feel free to say and do as you please honey, because this weekend I’m going to bite your head off regardless.”

So how did the best Canadian minds determine that women are faking their Preposterous Mood Swings every month? And why was the research team all women? (Because no man was brave enough to volunteer?)

Based on a mere forty-one case studies, the scientists concluded that only six women could prove an emotional link between the end of their cycles and having more personalities than Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. The other 35 respondents must have shredded their questionnaires in a fit of rage after their husbands left yet another Kleenex in a trouser pocket on washing day.

Canadian husbands must be agreeable all the time because I never hear of Canadian wives doing their block about a load of washing ruined by a blizzard of man-tissue.

Ever since I became a maidservant, I have been socially conditioned to blame PMS for doing my lolly once a month. I am sweet and docile by nature, but around the 24th of each month my husband goes from being a calm, considerate friend and partner to a demanding, unreasonable oaf. I give him my raised eyebrow of doom and growl: “What did you say?” It’s not because I didn’t hear him, it’s because I’m giving him three seconds to improve on what he said.

Really, women wouldn’t need to manage their monthly anger if their partners could manage their stupidity. PMS was invented so women could have five days off from being nice to incompetents and idiots. Please don’t take that week away from us!

The research team at the University of Toronto kindly left womankind with one sliver of credibility. It found women weren’t imagining the physical symptoms of PMS: the cramps, the headaches, the bloating and the tiredness – they’re legitimate – we can enjoy those. But now we can’t blame hormones for any of the emotional baggage that piles up when our shop’s shut for maintenance.

I’m sorry, I’m different. Twelve times a year, I speak three languages – English, sarcasm and profanity. When my bloke asks: “What’s up Blossom?” he can measure the speed and gruffness of my: “Nothing!” to calculate just how much marital turbulence is heading his way.

My husband has the solution. He’s inventing a mobile phone app which will warn him when I am about to become all three witches of Eastwick. It will plot my cycle and give him a heads-up one week out from impending domestic catastrophe. That’s enough notice for him to plan a business trip out of town, or meetings to keep him working late in the office – any legitimate reason to be somewhere other than home. He’s going to call his invention the Grief-o-meter.

All men should consult their Grief-O-Meter before making plans with the wife for the week when pessimism is better than sex:  

‘Hey Blossom, let’s go see that Les Miserables flick?’

‘Nah, way too depressing.’

‘Why? The plot? Social injustice? An impoverished woman ruined by prejudice who dies emaciated and alone?  

‘No. I can’t stand a thin heroine.’

I say men are the missing ingredient in PMS – has anyone bothered to research whether the poor buggers actually deserve to be punished? My husband is not necessarily the innocent victim of a foul-tempered harridan who cries during cheesy Qantas ads.  

Having an unusually calm and rational temperament, I am pushed over the edge by floors decorated with dirty socks and a man who turns the pages of his newspaper so loudly I can’t hear Maggie Smith’s acidic one-liners in Downton Abbey. Those Canadians may claim women have lost the excuse of PMS, but they’ve have given us some much needed freedom. Now we can stop blaming our cycles and pinpoint the true cause of our anger – husbands.

I’m going to look on the bright side. If PMS no longer exists, then there’s no need to confine my grumpiness to the last five days of the month. I can spread the grief around any time I like. How exciting! Next time you see me, best you give way to my broomstick.

They made my day

They made my day
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday March 23, 2013

The kindness of strangers is never wasted on me. Especially when I’m naive enough to believe small children can be good in a sofa shop after a lemonade icy-pole. It wasn’t the sticky hands or clothes that was the problem – I’d mopped up and they were spotless and un-sticky. Perhaps I underestimated the sugar-rush, but they were already euphoric from a swim at the local pool.

This was a day when two strangers showed me their capacity for tolerance and good humour. My children, who had been giggling hysterically in the car, wanted to go to the park. Instead, I took them to an expensive leather furniture playground.

It started out well. They were rolling around in a shag pile rug as though it was long grass. (Price: $1799, on sale.) They chose a replica Eames armchair each, counted to ten and madly swapped seats. (Price: $1950. Each)

Then while I was flipping through the fabric samples (inwardly cursing the prices) with the immaculately groomed sales lady, my 2-year-old decided to strip off her nappy and dress and leap all over a white leather sofa in the buff. (Sale price: $4050.) Her brother, impressed, threw off his shirt and shoes and ran half a lap of the cavernous showroom shrieking for his sister to chase him.

I made a mental note of the exits and then met the sales lady’s eye: “I’m so sorry, they’ve gone completely mad. Give me one second to round them up and we’ll be out of here.” Without a hint of annoyance, she said: “Oh they’re fine, this is floor stock you know  – you’re allowed to try out the furniture.” I could have kissed her.

With quote in hand, and daughter reacquainted with nappy, I decided to tempt fate by calling in at a gourmet supermarket on the way home. Already, toddler daughter was tired, and small boy was coming undone. This time, they really cut loose.

At the deli counter they went to town on the free olives on toothpicks until I lifted the whole tray out of reach and stood there like an idiot waiting for some staff member to relieve me of it.

Next my daughter decided to stack the sausages in the open fridge into towers while 5-year-old attempted chin-ups on the butcher’s rail. In the middle of this circus, I was trying to order mince for meatballs. And all the while, I was grabbing for one rascal’s arm as he whisked past me on the way to the free crackers, while I tried to convince his sister to ride in the trolley so I could manacle her to it.

A couple of bystanders awaited the results as I warned my children: “This is your last chance, I’m counting to three!” I got to three (and even tried “Four!”) but the rampage continued. I moved up a gear and threatened to withdraw all future ice creams after swimming lessons: “No , Mum no!” That seemed to work quite nicely. 

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an older woman approaching me and mentally prepared for a dressing down. She stopped and leaned in so no- one else could hear: “You’re doing a sterling job of disciplining those little monkeys. I’m a teacher of 30 years and I know a good mum when I see one. You’re going to get lovely adults out of them one day.”

I was astonished. I didn’t know what to say so I told her the truth: “I thought you were going to give me a lecture about my terrible parenting  – the kids are completely nuts today and the third one’s not even here!” She patted me on the shoulder: “Enjoy, you’re doing fine.” Then she was gone.

All day I thought about those two women. Two strangers who had given my desperate mothering their stamp of approval. In one hour, those two ladies did more for my self esteem than all the parenting books I’ve slaved over.

Most days I question my child-rearing abilities and they come up short. Am I spoiling the little one by bribing her with a jellybean for every wee in the toilet? How hard I should come down on the big one? His 12-year-old insolence would have earned me the whack of the wooden spoon when I was his age. Am I strict enough for society’s liking? Do I care too much what other people think?

With stares and frowns, society likes to judge women on their mothering, but rarely have I seen a dad chastised in public for his fathering. I notice people act indulgently towards dads and unruly kids. They’re off limits, earning credits for effort. Mothers are fair game. Why? When I see a tantrum in the lolly aisle at the supermarket I give the mum a wink and grin: “Having fun yet?” just so she knows I’m on her side.

Perhaps that’s why a stranger’s acceptance and encouragement is such an unexpected gift. Even more reason to say to two women who clearly remembered the trials of motherhood: Thank you. 

Making scents of life

Making scents of life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday March 16, 2013

We were trapped. Sealed in a lift that was ripe with the stench of unwashed human. That malodorous cloud was a parting gift from the previous occupant. We spluttered out at the 9th floor. ‘What was that stink?’ asked my 12-year-old. ‘That,’ I said, ‘was some serious B-O.’

I can bring to mind a handful of occasions, (mostly in aeroplanes) when I have flinched at the smell of another human being. Yet the faint milky sweetness of a baby’s head is intoxicating. I want to drink it in, inhale the newness and neediness of life. The musky scent of my husband is the smell of belonging – me to him – comforting and arousing at the same time.

At my supermarket, it’s frustrating trying to sniff out a new season’s peach when peachiness has been turned frigid by cold storage. I see why people are embracing farmers markets as an open-air feast for the senses. A home grown tomato smells of the sun. It’s a revelation after shop-bought tomatoes whose scent has been all but snuffed out.

Sometimes it takes a conscious effort to be reacquainted with the persuasive power of scent. Coming home minus kids from school this morning I stopped in the park, underneath the Norfolk Island pines. What does the wind smell like? I’d never considered it before. My nose could detect something familiar and then, with a rush, I realised what it was: I was smelling the heat rising off grass sprinkled with needles. Warm currents of air on their way to 39 degrees that had sucked up the scent of pine and grass clippings. I could distil the essence of that February morning far more by the smell of the wind than by the sight of the big pines or the familiar screeches of the white cockatoos. I tried all morning to recall the scent of that warm breeze, but the memory faded as the day wore on.

Smells are the easiest and hardest things to remember. My grandmother’s white Morris 1100 retained its new car bouquet for 20 years. Try as I might, I cannot bring to mind that favourite scent. My brain offers me visual reminders instead – the cherry-red of the vinyl  bench seats and my nanna at the wheel with her pink powdered cheeks and a harlequin-print polyester dress. Perhaps smell doesn’t like to work alone. Perhaps memories of smells erode with time or are muddied by subsequent layers of living.

The 20th century French writer Marcel Proust believed some memories are imprinted more firmly than others by their smell. He wrote of a man overwhelmed by his sudden ability to recall, in vivid detail, the madeleine cakes he once dipped in his tea as a child. My grandmother’s Morris is my Proustian biscuit. Except I’ve never quite managed to capture the essence of that delicious scent.

The internet and smart phones have eroded my senses.The Net has changed the way I shop for a birthday cake and how I order the frangipani for the back  garden. Where once I was driving to the patisserie and swooning over the thick buttery fumes of so much cake, or gliding around a nursery exhilarated by the perfume of so many blossoms, now I am pressing keys on a computer with my sense of smell in hibernation. No need for it: at my desk I am scentless. (‘Senseless more like it’, suggests the cynic from the sofa.) I tell you, technology smells of nothing. It is sterile.

Unlike junk e-mail, odours cannot be fended off with a delete button. They don’t wait to be invited and they like to hang about. (Bad smells have no manners.) Prawn heads in the sun, too much fresh paint, big Jersey cows trampling their manure at the Royal Show. As a child, I wished the reek of so much animal wouldn’t overpower the delicate waft of spun sugar from the fairy floss stand.

I’m fussy about smells so it’s just as well I’m woman, not dog. If the sniffing power of a beagle is one hundred thousand times greater than mine, no wonder he loves to jam his snout against the rear of every dog he meets. That must be the same kind of rush I’d get riding the Magic Mountain at Disneyland. (Only a canine lover can stand the smell of wet dog.)

For me, the most perplexing smell comes as I open my front door after holidays away from home. In those first few seconds of walking inside I suddenly register what my home-life must smell like. It’s as though my nose needs reminding which house it belongs to. For a split second, I am a stranger to my own scent. And then it vanishes, replaced by the familiar sound of my footsteps down the hall.

There are scents I could drown in, float away on, never tire of: the smell of a child’s warm breath as you carry him asleep from the car to his bed, the nape of my daughter’s neck after her bath. Gingerbread baking before Christmas. Peeling oranges, the fragrance of my mum’s Oil of Olay as she braided my hair before school. These are the smells precious to a life. Perhaps memory has designed these smells to be recalled piecemeal, never whole. I can think of no finer way to protect their potency.

For love or money

For love or money
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday March 9, 2013

Money is a delicate subject in our house. So delicate my husband likes to refer to me as Paris Hilton. I take offence because Paris Hilton is a vacuous party princess and I’m a down to earth toilet-scrubbing kind of princess with calluses on her knees.

The laws of marriage demand we define ourselves as either Scrooge or Squanderer. Rarely are we on the same team. Agreeing on whose label is whose is a barney in itself.

Some spouses grudgingly accept they’re a Scrooge because they imagine they are sensible with money. They also know a teabag can make three consecutive cups of tea if it’s wrapped in plastic and kept in the fridge.

Others leap the trench and proudly embrace the title Squanderer.The Squanderer’s catchcry is: ‘Keep the change!’ or ‘I’ll take one in every colour.’ They understand they may die tomorrow and never again take delight in a David Jones sale. That’s how a Squanderer justifies buying three pairs of basket-weave platform sandals in buff, nude and sand.  

My husband is a tightwad but doesn’t know it. Secretly he loves me for being lavish and reckless. I might be a compulsive spender but that doesn’t mean I’m not good with money. I run the house, the children and my wardrobe. Our phone has only been cut off once in the past year. If I forget to pay the gas bill, I just use the electric oven.

When I bought four stools for the kitchen bench, the man of the house said ‘Blossom, you do know we only have three children?’ (Doesn’t he realise I like to sit down while I’m counting out his peas for dinner?)

It’s a mystery to me why my Scrooge’s wallet is always bulging with fifties. I like to relieve him of a few because my purse is always empty and his wallet needs clean lines. In return, he tells people: ‘She’s light-fingered.’ Then he lectures me about how annoying it is that I never have cash, and how a Squanderer should love visiting the automatic teller: ‘You won’t believe it Blossom, money comes out of those things like magic!’

A girlfriend gets around her own Scrooge by telling her husband everything she buys costs 20-bucks: ‘It’s 20-bucks to have my hair done’; ‘I got these shoes for 20-bucks!’. She’s getting divorced now, but her bloke still thinks a girl’s lunch costs 20-bucks.

My husband happily pays the mortgage (he calls it a ‘co-habitation tax’). He buys me Lindt chocolates for our anniversary (the ‘spousal levy’). Yet he can blow big sums of cash when the mood strikes him. Six years ago he paid some serious dosh for a dinghy we’ve only sat in three times. He bought a kayak that has seen rapids just the once, (from the roof of the car), and shelled out for a top-of- the-range electric mower that snips six square metres of grass owned by the Council.

My snarky Scrooge is also a forensic accountant who knows how to bust me when I try to cover up a spending spree. I come unstuck when I forget to shred receipts or he trips over the shopping bags I’ve left in the hallway. It’s even more embarrassing when he catches me out on my bad arithmetic. Last week I blithely waved in the direction of the new ottoman:

‘Oh that thing? It was 25-percent off, virtually cost price.’

‘So what was the discount?’

Me (dumbstruck): ‘Um, 35-bucks?’

Then I take the blasted ottoman back to the shop and ask for my $200 back.

I know that money goes off if you leave it on the kitchen bench. Idle cash needs to be exchanged for something new, like another juicer. Or other shiny things.

For five years, we’ve had an ongoing tiff about the prized soccer table I bought at auction. You remember how much fun it is flicking balls past rows of little soccer men? Well, my husband doesn’t.

But the auction house was selling off the contents of the Old Raffles Hotel and I was excited. It was like being back at school and knowing the answer to everything. I repeatedly shot my hand up in the air until even the swarthy men with the big gold watches stopped bidding:

‘Do I have $400? Once? Twice? SOLD! to the young lady in the tracksuit with the crying baby.’

My husband delights in telling people: ‘Yes, she went to town on a crappy piece of pub history – now a soccer table is parked in the garage and my car is parked on the road.’ He claims the kids have played with it ten times in five years: ‘Blossom, I’m telling you for the last time – sell it!’

I suspect an ulterior motive. Yesterday, I spotted some papers in the study that look a lot like ads for second-hand caravans. He wants me to become a trailer park wife. That, or he’s planning to be a ginger nomad. Either way, the soccer table’s coming with us. The kids and I can have our 11th game while he’s loading up the dinghy, the kayak and the electric mower.

PS. Ros has agreed to sell the soccer table when her husband agrees to get a vasectomy. Fair trade.

Our Family Tree

Our Family Tree
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday March 2, 2013

How wonderful to find a fig tree growing wild, the tips of its branches sagging under the weight of dozens of fat purple figs.

Sixty-six years ago my mum discovered a giant fig tree jutting out from the banks of the Swan River. To reach its uppermost branches where the ripest figs were sunning themselves, she would climb barefoot up the rocky cliff and shimmy out along the sturdiest branches. She could only pick as many as she could hold in one hand without falling off her perch. And there she would sit, scarlet juice running down her chin while her brother shouted up from the beach: ‘Drop some down to me Sis! C’mon! It’s not fair!’  (A fear of heights and pianist’s hands meant climbing trees was not his forte.)

My mum likes to think of that particular tree as ‘hers’. It has stood beside three generations of her family, tolerating the multi-million dollar mansions that have sprung up around it. No-one has dared fire up a chainsaw despite that tree hogging the best of waterfront views. Every year my mother makes a pilgrimage, green bucket in hand, to ‘her’ tree. She won’t tell fig-loving friends where it is, and her secrecy has become a running joke: ‘Hey Joanie, have you put the coordinates of that tree in your will yet?’ Most years her clandestine operation is sabotaged, not by informers, but by the dozens of Ringneck parrots that get a toe-hold in the canopy before she does and gorge themselves on the best fruit.

My mother’s lust for wild figs is as curious as her unorthodox manner of eating them. She tears the fig in half and mashes the two pieces together until the red flesh spills over the skin and she eats the resulting mess in raptures. (I don’t understand why either.)  

Every summer I look forward to the day mum calls to say: ‘Time we went down to my tree’, and the kids and I pile into the car: ‘Fig-hunt!’

Expeditions to that secluded bend in the river have become a rite of passage in our family. Members are allocated their responsibilities according to sprightliness and fervour. The little ones are the ‘fig spotters’, the more agile are ‘climbers’ and those who’d rather man the bucket are ‘catchers.’

My normally rebellious 12-year-old revels in the best climbing adventure of the year. He yells down through the branches: ‘Hey Nan, there are loads up here!’ It’s a rare thing for a child born this century to share a slice of his grandmother’s Huck Finn heritage, still there for the taking. Summers have come and gone but the big brown jellyfish still beach themselves on the river’s  edge, and the water in February is always briny and warm. We now carry a plastic bucket instead of a tin pail. The older I get, the more determined I am to keep this ceremony alive. I picture myself as a doting nanna telling my grandkids not to worry when the milky sap from the fig-stalks itches their skin: ‘It’s not poisonous poppet. Have a dip in the river and you’ll be right as rain.’

I want to impress on my children the value of belonging. I want each of them  imprinted with this family ritual for when they need to remember where they came from. I savour that a new generation of sturdy little bodies is just as adept at finding treasure in the tree.

After an hour by the river, mum’s bucket contains enough figs for a dozen jars of jam and chutney but the branches are still laden. She and I like to amuse ourselves by having alibis at the ready for the odd dog-walker who wanders past: ‘Did you see the possum up there?’ Mum looks forward to the day she can stand her ground before an inquisitor and declare: “The tree’s mine. I planted it.” (Exaggeration is a dominate gene in our family.)

Mum’s tree, of course, is everyone’s tree. Like the huge mulberry we found as kids when the house up the road got demolished and the backyard was indecently exposed. On Sunday afternoons, half the neighbourhood kids were stained crimson and we were too full of juice to eat tea. Back then, every house had a loquat or a plum or an almond tree, a passionfruit or a muscatel grape. Harvests were shared around for jams and preserves and came back in re-cycled pickle jars wearing gingham hats cut with pinking shears. Rear laneways were common ground for cricket games and cubbies and family histories intertwined over side fences like the tendrils of vines reaching for new strongholds.

My wish is for my mother’s secret tree to still be there when my children have slyly turned into adults. When their childhoods can be recaptured in an instant by that bark under their feet or the coarse leaves in their hands. The tree won’t look as big to them as it once did. But I hope it will loom large when they reminisce about the innocent adventures of a bunch of kids and their prowess as a clan.

Racking up the years

Racking up the years
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West Magazine
Published Saturday February 23, 2013

My first bra came from Jayne Mansfield’s closet. At least it felt like it did. It was pale pink satin and doubled as a bullet-proof vest. The label said ‘Action’ bra but that was the last thing I was going to get in it. The hooks at the back were large enough to catch herring, there was not a skerrick of elastic for comfort and I needed to be Houdini to get in or out of it. Houdini, or a locksmith.

That bra came from the bottom of mum’s drawer of antiquity and I’m pretty sure the cups hadn’t seen breasts since 1953. But I was 13 and desperate. It was Thursday night, there was school on Friday and late night shopping hadn’t been invented. My breasts and I could not face another round of heckling from the leering boys who hung on the fence watching our school softball.

That afternoon, my bra-less dash round the bases clinched the game – but my breasts must have sailed over the home plate before I did, because those boys started cheering: ‘Hey yer headlights ‘r on! Yer blinding us with yer high beams!’

I was deflated. And humiliated. So that night, mum dug through her cupboard and unearthed her heirloom bra. I thought I was going to be swallowed in it, but if it kept my particulars under wraps, I was prepared to wear it. And so began a complicated relationship with my breasts.

For 30 years, I have re-played that bra-less home run as my Bo Derek moment. Me: nubile gazelle-woman, running in slow motion, nothing jiggling, just a gentle swaying up front, spectators mesmerised. That was until I took up jogging last year and the man of the house watched me stumble in through the gate: ‘Hey blossom, Dudley Moore would have been proud of that running style. Even sober.’

Having worn a bra since 1980, I’ve grown accustomed to constriction. (Breasts that don’t move are my objective now.) But women are never happy with what they’ve got. Breasts are always too small, too pointy, too cumbersome or just too big: those boobs so outspoken they take all the male attention off your face: ‘Hey soldier – eyes up and front!’

Why are men still fixated on breasts when half the population has them? And why are there so many names for them? In the 50’s there are photos of my mum in bras so pointy they could take your eye out: “Look at the lungs on that sheila!”. By the 60’s bosoms were ‘Bristol cities’ and winging it freestyle. In the 70’s,  ‘A Clockwork Orange’ called them ‘Groodies’ and then foxy mammas went disco: ‘Check out the rack on that chick!’ In 1982, Jane Fonda dressed her Pointer Sisters in lycra and aerobics took over the gym. By the time I was at school we were comparing ‘hooters’ and girls with ‘bodacious ta-ta’s’ were flaunting their assets every chance they got.   

Now I notice two types of women: those who dress for the breast and those who don’t – women are either offence or defence. Some breasts are so properly controlled they’re standoffish. Others aren’t shy enough – they’re in your face everywhere  – spilling out of the waitress’ uniform as she takes your order, or blindsiding you in the supermarket aisle.

I pity men confronted with a pair of barely contained breasts. Cleavage a woman can hide her keys in is like a car crash – no man can look away. I can’t either.

Fashionable women disguise their breasts in wonder-bras and push-ups, minimisers, firmers and separaters. Breasts can be made to look bigger, higher, friskier. It’s not until we get them home that they can really be themselves and relax. (Some relax better than others.)

The breast connoisseur I live with says bosoms quicken his pulse. That’s because until he’s allowed to unwrap them, he doesn’t know what he’s going to get: ‘I’ve never been disappointed. I’m just thrilled to see them in the wild at all.’

My breasts have served me well. They’ve done their hard work putting fat cheeks on three babies,they’ve not complained about getting up in the middle of the night or the endless dawn starts.

For that, breasts deserve some respect. Good manners dictate men don’t ogle women whose breasts are feeding babies. Or breasts that fall out of bathers while their owner gets dumped in the City Beach surf.

Maybe my breasts need to reclaim their charisma. Now I’ve finished with the business of procreation and my breasts can go back to being just for fun, I  have to juggle them into support mechanisms because they’re tired and can’t stay up late anymore.

Sometimes the sight of an impossibly pert pair of breasts makes me pine for those days when I didn’t realise how good mine were. Breasts start out in life as star-gazers and end up as path-finders, but all breasts get their quality time. I’m okay with what I’ve got. I think we’ve finally got the hang of each other.