Love in the Time of Lego

Love in the Time of Lego
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday July 6, 2013

Six is a splendid age for puppy love. At dinner, I asked my small son why 5-year-old Violet had taken his fancy over all the other girls in his class: “Because she’s the only one with a round head.” His older brother stifled a guffaw. But I knew what he meant, having a round head myself, unlike my children’s father, who has an annoyingly square head.

My 6-year-old was smitten. I watched him as he deliberated over whether to write her a love letter using red crayon or orange crayon. He settled on blue. Then he drew an elaborate aeroplane with two wings and two wheels and two little faces peering out from two windows in business class. “To Violet” he wrote carefully and drew a box with a love heart.

“Is she so pretty?” I asked him as we walked to school. He had his letter in hand, ready for hiding in Violet’s bag. “She’s as pretty as Pinocchio!” he declared proudly. I didn’t have the heart to tell him Pinocchio had a really big nose and came with strings attached.  

Violet asked to come to our house to play. My lad waited by the window to see what colour car she had: “White!” he yelled to me, “It’s bright white!”

I made a fuss and baked his favourite brownies. They sat nervously together at the kitchen bench, legs dangling, until he showed her how to swivel on her stool to make it squeak. In return, she demonstrated how she could lick the end of her nose with her tongue. He snorted and blew a cloud of icing sugar off his plate. Encouraged by her giggles, he took off his shoes and skidded across the loungeroom floor in his socks, crashing noisily into the French doors. She looked to me, alarmed. (Violet only has sisters). I gave her a wink and her little baby-face relaxed into a smile. The two of them raced upstairs to play Lego.

My own taste of puppy love was carnal by comparison. In Year 4, I sat side by side with a boy called John. Our teacher, Mrs Gray, barked at us like Cornelia Frances on The Weakest Link. While Mrs Gray’s back was turned, 8-year-old John turned to me and whispered: “Give us a look, then!” Never one to put risk before risqué, I gave him an eyeful of my regulation Bonds cottontails size 6 under the desk. I arrived at school next morning to discover he’d moved his things and was sitting at another desk with the new girl, a mystery brunette.

Puppy love can bite back. Last week, on the walk home from school through the park, my small son burst into tears. “Everyone says I have a girlfriend,” he choked. “The boys say I’m stupid.”

I hugged him and he wiped his runny nose down my sleeve. “Maybe those boys prefer footy,” I said, but his sobs came harder and faster.

At dinner that night I decided a family discussion was in order. I nudged my eldest son: “Your little brother has a problem – what do you think he should do?” “Get over it,” he mumbled. Dissatisfied with his disinterest, I pressed on, elbowing his father to bring to bear his lifetime of wisdom. “Pass the peas, champ,” was all he offered.

Undeterred, I described to my child what jealousy was, and how it turned people into green-eyed monsters and how everyone says mean things when they’re a green-eyed monster. “But you have green eyes all the time, Mum,” he said, looking confused. So I began explaining  about eye-colour and genetics, but then everyone started talking over the top of me about whether Josh Kennedy can kick 60 goals this season.

Later that night, after the children were in bed, my life-long crush took my hand and sat me down on the sofa. “Here comes dessert!” I thought, but all I got was a dressing down: “Back off blossom” he began, “He’s six, for goodness sake – big deal if he cops it for being friends with a girl? It’s a non-issue.”

I felt miffed, then patronised, then guilty. Had I become one of those parents I rail against: the ones who stage manage their offspring? Call them what you want: helicopter parents, hot-house parents, over-parenting parents. Had my solicitude made my son all the more anxious? And was I teaching him to be resilient, to stand up for himself?

Maybe all he needed that Friday afternoon was a pat on the back: “It’ll be all right kiddo – hey! Let’s go to the park.” That’s what his father would have said.

In the car yesterday, on the way to the dentist, I asked after Violet: “Would you like her to come over again honey?” “Sure, Mum” came the reply, “you can make cupcakes with her while I go to Jake’s house and play Spiderman.”

Down Memory Lame

Down Memory Lame
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 29, 2013

I have been cursed with forgetting. I forget new names and old acquaintances. I forget what people do and who they’re doing it with. I have sudden panics at the supermarket when a face I know (attached to a name I don’t) stops me at the fish counter: “How are you? It’s been ages! Have you seen any of the gang lately?”

Gang? With rising panic, I point to the seafood display and launch headlong into an embarrassing non sequitur: “No, I haven’t seen the gang lately, but hey! Have you ever seen such sad little prawns, I bet they got bullied at school for being shrimps!” Good grief! – I keep up this moronic prattle whilst simultaneously pleading with my brain to please, please deliver the name of this person. Then at least I can spare her (and me) the agony of my tediously inane small talk.

Suddenly the penny drops and I blurt out: “So, Penny! How are the girls at Pilates?” Gotcha! The relief is instant. For the next thirty seconds I say Penny’s name in every sentence. Our conversation becomes the festival of Penny from Pilates. She seems pleased. Penny and I part ways with a girly kiss and I promise to go to class more than once a month. As I walk back to the car, I begin a mantra of repeating her name over and over in my head. I pray ‘Penny from Pilates’ sticks firmly in there somewhere for next time.

I’ve always been conversationally absent-minded. But I’m getting worse after four decades of meeting people. What if my forgetting is laziness? What if I am just not paying enough attention to what people tell me?

Would it be less awkward to admit: “I’m really sorry, but who are you and how do you fit into my life?” But then I realise I’m not ready to be a social pariah.  

I have the same problem with reading. My book collection is a vast catalogue of forgetting. I was enthralled by “Cloudstreet” yet retained virtually nothing of the experience. I can give you a line about the plot, (neighbours) and the locale (West Leederville, wasn’t it?). Maybe a character’s name if I’m lucky (Rose Pickles?). But my affection for Cloudstreet is nothing more memorable than a warm feeling. Ask me about books I’ve devoured and all I can give you is a vague idea of a story “liked”, “loved” or “hated.”

Forgetting has consequences for my vanity, too. Deep in conversation with someone cleverer than me, I’m holding my own nicely when suddenly, I’m unable to pluck the word I need from the left side of my head. Inwardly cursing, outwardly stammering, my unfinished sentence hangs in the air. My listener kindly tries to fill the awkward silence by changing the subject, but our conversation has lost its momentum and lurches to an uncomfortable end. We make our excuses, and I slink away, mortified.

Yet I can reel off reams of useless trivia, without even trying. I can recall watching a documentary that said Charlie Chaplin once entered himself in a look-alike competition and came third. I can tell you that no matter how high you throw an egg, it will never break if it lands on grass. (We just tried it at the park). I can remember my school project from year 5 revealing cows have no front teeth.  And I know no-one can lick their elbow. 

But can I remember to dress my 6-year-old lad in a beret and moustache for school French day? Nope. And that’s after reading the note from his teacher a fortnight ago and writing a reminder in big red letters in my diary. Let’s just say I forgot to check my diary. A small boy rolled up to school in his regulation blue shorts and white shirt to be met by a crowd of petits enfants oozing Gallic charm. I made a mad dash home to fetch sobbing child a stripey Breton shirt and a jaunty knotted scarf and missed my Pilates class with Penny.

Lately I seem to be unable to picture my children as babies. This frustration is particularly acute with my eldest. As a toddler, I knew every dimple and freckle on his little face by heart. I thought I would never forget the sight of him crawling commando down the hallway. Or how at age five, he would slurp jelly through the two-finger gap in his teeth. Now I can only summon the 13 years of memories by consulting photographs or watching old home movies. My mind will not reproduce even the things dearest to me.

Is there a remedy for forgetfulness? I’m yet to find it, though I know paragons of memory who swear by Sudoko and crosswords. And bridge. The closest I’ve come to mentally stimulating card games is Strip Jack Poker. Come to think of it, I’ve never forgotten anyone I played that with.

Piggery Pokery

Piggery Pokery
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 22, 2013

Gertie is my new creature of fascination at the family farm. I’ve never stood nose to snout with a 200-kilo pregnant pig before. Even her head is twice the size of mine. I couldn’t work out how her enormous girth didn’t topple those four spindly trotters.

I noticed how her giant belly jiggled and rippled as she scratched her bristly thigh against the metal grill of the trailer. I knew then we’d be friends because she made me feel petite. Really, the only attractive thing about her were the patterns in the veins of her ears, backlit in the afternoon sun. But I felt strangely maternal towards her  – she was huffing and snorting, much like I did when heavily pregnant. I couldn’t believe this gargantuan lump of pork was herself only nine months old.

Gertie had been bought from an out-of-town piggery and the hour long ride in the back of a trailer was clearly not her idea of fun. Her loud grunts rang out over the front paddock as she arrived, causing much muddlement amongst the three free-range pigs who already call the farm home.

Bruce, Doris and Evelyn, at 6 months old, are swine teenagers – featherweights at 150 kilos apiece. Doris and Evelyn are best friends and adore their boar, Bruce. I can see why, as he sports a pair of testicles the size of rockmelons. But here was a new piece of tail to tempt Bruce. As the first whiff of the aromatic Gertie sailed downwind across the pig paddock, Bruce began pacing the fence, frothing at the snout.

My brother-in-law reversed the ute up to the yard and wrenched open the trailer gate. Gertie stumbled down the ramp. Bruce, squealing and grunting through his foaming beard, jammed his snout firmly in Gertie’s rump. Doris, in a jealous rage, rounded on Gertie, trying to sink her teeth into her rival’s hind leg.

Gertie took off round the yard trying to escape the fury of two envious sows and the lecherous boar. Sensing we might be in for some R-rated violence and/or sex scenes, I herded my 6-year-old son and his little sister into the ute: “Quick!” I yelled, “Hop in where it’s safe.” The cacophony of pig squeals almost drowned out the chorus of complaints from the back seat: “Mum! Mum! We can’t see!”

Gertie then made a snap decision.

She gave herself a good run-up and barged across the yard as fast as those gristly trotters would allow. The next thing I knew, she was hurling herself over the steel fence like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape. Front legs clear, her low slung belly caught the top rail. I winced, thinking of the embedded piglets, but she had just enough momentum to drag her hind legs up and over. Gertie landed clumsily on the freedom side of the fence. From inside their paddock, Bruce, Doris and Evelyn were struck mute as Gertie cantered off down the hill towards the dam.

Heading back to Perth that night, and with Gertie still on the run, we pleaded for regular updates on the escapee. Pigs are nothing new for my brother-in-law, who manages the farm. His father was once a butcher in Collie, renowned for his “Ding” sausages. The recipe was secret but those bangers earned folklore status in a town where snags are one of the five food groups. 

Five days later the phone rang: “Gertie’s back! I went up to feed Bruce and the girls and there she was, snuffling around the yard like nothing happened!”

I suggested Gertie was suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, and had decided she was better off befriending the swines who tried to attack her than going it alone in the bush. 

A month later, and Gertie has farrowed. She is mother to three little pigs.

The kids and I save our vegetable peelings and burnt toast for her. We wade through the long grass in the old orchard collecting the apples felled by birds or chewed by possums. As Gertie hears the quad bike approach, she charges out of her half tank, upending her sleeping piglets.

I am revolted by her table manners, which remind me of dinners at home. Pig gluttony is grotesque but mesmerising. Gertie suctions up half a bucket of pellets and a large bowl of scraps, then she’s shoving her piglets out the way to see if I brought dessert.

The farm is harmonious once again: Bruce has gone off the boil now the piglets are permanently attached to Gertie’s pink bosoms. Doris and Evelyn are no longer green-eyed. We’re all basking in the glow of porcine motherhood. The kids and I hang around the pig pen watching Gertie tolerate the antics of her piglets. Her parental indifference is contagious: I barely react when my 3-year-old feeds Gertie a large slice of Quiche Lorraine.

I hope the children remember Gertie’s great escape. Few kids are lucky enough to witness 200 kilos of pork sailing over a metre high fence. Who says pigs can’t fly!  

Playing it cool

Playing it cool
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 15, 2013

You have to be cool to know cool. I have no such expertise. By the time I’ve noticed the trendy young mothers at school are wearing Birkenstock orthopaedic sandals, that foot fetish is over. My decision to shell out $130 for a pair of cork clogs is the tipping point that declares them passé.

Proudly wearing my new Birkies outside class, I spot several willowy mums having their tetes-a-tetes in their new season zebra-print ballet flats. I flinch, but this is nothing new. I have spent a lifetime trotting at the heels of trend-setters.

Of course by next summer, cork thongs will be ‘in’ again, but I’m a laggard. Cool people know when to deviate from the manual. I don’t.

Over the years, I have tried to be cool. But the very act of trying is a guarantee of failure. Only once did I succeed – age 26 – by accident. After moving to Sydney in the midst of a steamy summer, I began taking long walks around my new city wearing ankle-grazing floral sundresses and Blundstone boots. I rode the crest of Bohemian cool for an entire weekend.

 I have often fantasised about parting a sea of admirers with my ‘indefinable something,’ and hearing people whisper in my wake: “Look at that! She’s got it!” Instead, I clumsily part crowds with a stroller festooned with lumpish bags of groceries. My darting toddler has only two speeds: accelerating and flat out. My scooterised 6-year-old gives chase, as pedestrians scatter for safety. Twelve-year-old son walks three paces behind hoping no-one will guess he belongs to this vagabond family.

My eldest son and I used to be inseparable. He idolised me, and I was captivated by his boyish charms. Now he’s like a boyfriend I’ve grown tired of, but feel obligated to keep. We have rare moments of the old magic, but mostly I can’t remember what I saw in him. He now maintains a veneer of cheesed-off indifference, and I scrabble to keep him connected to the family flock.

 I have tried pointing out to him that every generation thinks it’s cooler than the one before. “Yeah right!” he grunts. I’ve even suggested that he become a trailblazer at school by resurrecting the 80’s exclamation Mint! with his mates. I tell him: “It’s such a great word honey! It even feels cool saying it…. Mint! And you know what? When everyone’s saying Mint! you can start saying Mintox! That’s for things beyond Mint!” He sighs and shakes his head: “Yep Mum, that’s a fully sick idea, one of your best.” Then he adds: “Please don’t come to Assembly this week. I can’t stand the embarrassment.”

If I had street cred, everyone would want to talk like me and that would be Mint!  Lacking street cred, I pretend to be hip on Facebook instead.

Social media has done cool people a disservice – it levels the playing field by allowing everyone to appear at their best. Facebook is an illusion – it encourages users to showcase only their prettiest, wittiest side. On Facebook, we can all be sophisticates posting our snappiest thoughts and most flattering photos. My cool friends say Facebook has had its day.

And so has Twitter, says my 14-year-old God-daughter: “Who does Twitter anymore?” she scowls, “It’s so, like, dumb.” Then she rolls her eyes at me: “Don’t you get it? When the Mums start doing it, it’s so, like – over.” 

My bookclub, however, is still avant-garde after thirteen years. Twelve of us meet every six weeks to escape the twenty-seven offspring we have outputted since our club started. (We gave up reading the designated book years ago – Bridget Jones’ Diary had became an annoying distraction to the more fascinating minutiae of each others’ lives).

In 2007, when I was pregnant, I discovered that one book club girlfriend was on Twitter before I even knew what Twitter was. It sounded like a cult but I could tell it was cool. She could tell me fascinating insider stories about how Apple almost called the iPhone the TelePod. The only fascinating thing I could think to tell her was that I had a crush on my obstetrician. “No way!” she said. “Yes way!” I continued, “And I think he’s secretly in love with me too. When I’m on the examination table, he always catches my eye and smiles down at me through the gaps in the stirrups.””You dope,” she said, “He bats for the other side,” and sashayed off to fill her glass. I felt decidedly uncool.

I’ve decided the essence of cool, is indifference. And I am never indifferent. Instead, I made sure I married a man so laid back that at least my offspring have a 50-percent chance of being cool. And if the gene pool fails them, I’ll tell them to be proud of a mother who was uncool before uncool was cool.

In a cat flap

In a cat flap
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 8, 2013

I’ve always been a cat person. I don’t like to admit it because cat people are snooty and aloof and picky about their food. Dog people, on the other hand, are irrepressibly gleeful and outdoorsy and are always excited to see you.

I have tried to become a dog person, because dog people are universally liked. They don’t know meanness or envy or discontent. But it’s their dogs I don’t like: dogs who press their wet noses, like cold liver, into my crotch. Dogs with big teeth and drippy tongues who clumsily paw at me in greeting (and not in the nice way my husband does it). Or dogs with stumpy legs who’ve tuned their bark into a shrill yap-yap-yap that makes me wince.I see dog people in clumps at the park in the evenings and feel jealous. I catch a drift of their doggy conversations as I dig holes in the sandpit and fetch balls for my children: “What a lovely shiny coat! What do you feed her?” I hear one fellow say to a cocker spaniel owner. (I try to avoid shiny coats – they add three kilos). “What breed is he?” asks another. I want to yell out: “I’d like to see your pedigree, you mongrel!” but I have too much breeding.

Dog people live their lives on display. They’re always promenading around our park looking relaxed and contented as this frazzled mother herds her children across the oval to the school gate. On the way home, I feel obliged to stop and coo over the neighbourhood’s Tibetan spaniel the way I gush over babies in prams.

I like to laugh at dogs hanging out of car windows as much as the next person. I just don’t want to drive with one barking at nothing in my ear as I try to change lanes on the freeway. For me, getting a dog would be like taking on another child, and I’m still trying to train the three I’ve got. A cat is all I have time for. Cat owners don’t meet in the park every evening. They have no such camaraderie. They think being labelled a social recluse is a compliment.

So the kids and I troop off to the Cat’s Refuge Home – half a dozen sheds full of deserted moggies. It’s quiet and clean and all the pussycats are curled up in their cages napping, or being aloof and arrogant – knowing they’re too beautiful to be homeless for long. I ask the sour-puss attendant if the kids and I can go in and pat them: “You’ll need to gown up first.” Like (incompetent) surgeons we try to sterilise our hands with pink pump-action goop, wrapped in our crunchy plastic aprons. The kids are competing to make the most noise by crackling their gowns. The attendant frowns at us, then stalks out of the shed. We four are left alone with a clowder of cats.  

And then we spot Alfie. He is the smallest and pounciest of a litter of abandoned kittens, a piebald mop of fluff. Above his little white mouth is a two-finger black moustache just like Hitler’s.

I immediately feel sorry for him – how could the kitty gene pool be so unkind? I pick him up and give him a cuddle. I I tell him that it was Charlie Chaplin who first sported the toothbrush moustache in 1914, well before Hitler. Alfie breaks into a tiny purr.

Then smallest child trips over her scrubs, and Alfie – startled – wriggles free from my arms and performs a forward somersault in the pike position before landing lightly on the ground. We all agree he’s talented enough to come home with us.

At the counter, I buy a $150 kitten, $64 worth of kitty litter and $40 worth of vet-recommended biscuits. Sourpuss attendant, all smiles now, says Alfie will also need an identity chip fitted under his skin in case he gets lost. I book him in for next week: “If I bring my 3-year-old along, can you fit one in her as well?”  

Now we are a family of five plus a cat. Alfie is loved by everyone in the house which is just as well, because within a week I’ve had it up to pussy’s bow with his kitty litter scattered like gravel all over the laundry floor.

And the pet shop – who knew? There are two-storey cat houses with carpet on the mezzanine. There is a $140 four-post cat scratcher made of seagrass. And there are cat jumpers (small and medium – tough luck if you’re a fat cat). Collars can have diamonds or sequins, or scary-looking studs (for bikies’ cats).

I went there to find a cheap cane basket for Alfie to sleep in, but all the cat beds on display had Posturepedic mattresses and (fake) fur doonas. With no cane baskets in sight, I choose the cheapest bed in the shop: black igloo-style with white paws stamped all over it. I was embarrassed walking back to the car with my $50 pet igloo but a couple I passed gave me a wink and a smile. They must have been dog owners.

The Next Best Thing

The Next Best Thing
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 1, 2013

Here’s my conspiracy theory: today’s gadgets are made to fail. And here’s my evidence: both the vacuum cleaner and my mobile phone have carked it just weeks out of warranty.

Last Sunday, the vacuum cleaner, my trusty servant, stopped dead. The two of us were having a lovely time sucking up all the bits of Lego left lying on the loungeroom floor. (We often play games, the vacuum cleaner and I, ferreting about under the sofa with the suction at warp speed. We try to guess from the rattle – rattle – clunk! what mystery object has shot up the hose.)

Always noisy and frolicsome, my appliance was suddenly still. All I could hear was a faint ticking. I rolled its body into the recovery position, ripped open the lid and shook the bag resting limply inside. I smacked the machine shut hoping to restore its noisy breath. Nothing. I squinted up the hose to see if its airway was blocked but I had an interrupted view of the front door. I emptied the dust filter and pumped the on/off switch with a firm but steady rhythm but by now its body was cold.

I had just enough time to race to the electrical shop before it closed. I burst through the door, my expensive Italian clutched in my arms, dribbling fine grey dust from its back end. The bloke behind the counter took one look and said: “We’ll have a crack, luv, but now that it’s out of warranty, the drop-off fee is $85 and we charge $65 an hour labour which doesn’t cover parts so it might be cheaper to buy a new one.”

I got the feeling he knew something I didn’t: my two-year-old vacuum cleaner was built notto last. It had what Choice Magazine calls “planned obsolescence.” I felt like a chump. Here I was thinking my vacuum and I had a future together, and it was secretly planning career suicide. I forgave the betrayal and begged the electrician: “I need to know what went wrong, if you can’t fix it, I want an autopsy.”

The very next day, my mobile phone crashed in sympathy. An inky blank screen stared back at me. Somewhere inside it were the phone numbers of everyone I know. I went to the Apple store, a place so technologically advanced the geeky staff look uber-cool in their coke-bottle glasses and identical blue polo shirts. Customers, depending on their age, look either confused or euphoric at the smorgasbord of technology laid out before them. At the door, the maitre d’Apple fiddled around with my phone for a minute then suggested: “Time for an upgrade?” I tried to look euphoric but he sensed my confusion.

“Did you back it up ma’am?” He already knew the answer so I replied guiltily: “Please tell me you can restore it? My social life lives inside that  phone.”

 “Well, if it can be fixed, it’ll take a couple of weeks. But your screen is cracked  and iPhone 4s are pretty outdated now….”

“Okay, okay” I interrupt, “I get your drift.”

Mobile phones aren’t meant to be repaired, they’re meant to be upgraded. Superseded by something a little thinner or a little longer so that the charger and the three covers you have at home no longer fit.

I can’t get used to the idea that TVs and computers and cameras that are working just fine should be replaced simply because a newer version comes along. It makes me feel gluttonous.

My mother had her Hecla toaster for nearly 30 years. It had doors that flipped down and it never complained no matter how thick the toast we stuffed in it. In Mum’s day, broken things were fixed by a generation of menders and make-doers with tweezers and soldering irons. My eldest, 12, is a whizz at building contraptions, but already, he loves to trade up his gear. How many pairs of headphones are enough? Will Playstation 3 be embarrassing once Playstation 4 arrives?  

There was nothing terribly wrong with my vacuum cleaner, as it happens, it just had a worn belt. The repair cost me $160 but we are reunited. Now  I know my two-year-old Italian is past its prime. 

My new phone, however, has been greeted with much excitement by the small members of the house. It’d be even more exciting if I knew the phone number of someone to call, but for now, the phone and I are just a lonely little twosome with lots of fancy icons. My iPhone 5 is so advanced it has a genie inside it called “Siri” who listens, comments and does whatever I say. “Call Chelsea Pizza” I demand, and she finds the number and dials it. “Siri, are you my friend”, I ask her, as the kids guffaw.

“I am not just your friend” she replies in her husky robotic voice, “I am your new “B-F-F.” The kids are now hysterical. I quietly explain to Siri that the vacuum cleaner and I were once “Best Friends Forever”, but we fell out over some Lego.

The Naked Truth

The Naked Truth
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 25, 2013

My days as a nudist are numbered. Last week, in the mad rush to get my brood to school on time, I streaked past my husband on the way to the laundry to collect some knickers from the drier. Normally I’d have covered up with a towel, but I was feeling frisky, so I thought I’d give him an eyeful and set him up for his day at the office.

He was sitting on a kitchen stool eating Weetbix, absorbed in the newspaper. He glanced up as I sashayed past. I remembered the deportment coach from school telling us that a woman’s derriere is mesmerising to a man. I now get what she was on about – all that roundness and pertness, the curve of the waist giving way to the swell of the hips. So I floated by the kitchen bench on tiptoes knowing this would make my width taller and my cheeks cheekier. With a toss of my head, I shot him a wink over my shoulder.

He frowned at me and grunted: “Charming!” (This from a man with a milk moustache on his top lip.)

Deflated, I dressed as a hessian sack and slouched with the kids to school. Pushing my pram-borne 3-year-old home through the park, I deliberated: Is 45 too old to be getting around in the nick? Surely a naked wife at breakfast is more titillating than the finance pages? And if I’m now too dilapidated for household displays of nakedness, then maybe I’m too old for public displays of leopard print? Or leather? Was it time for my mid-life crisis?

In pursuit of enlightenment, I detoured to the shops. While small daughter dived into an icecream, I propped on a bench and sat back to appreciate middle-aged women dressing their age.

Women land in frock shops like homing pigeons. They coo to each other over the new season’s black and white, strutting with happiness to be in familiar territory. But the first squall of winter had willowy shop girls dressing their windows with Native American flavours – Cherokee-print cardigans, woolly and oversized and flattering only to long-legged teenagers called Pocahontas. If chunky cable knits are “in” (borrowed by the fashionable set from their boyfriends’ wardrobes), how will I look like in husband’s stick-brown number with elbow patches and a shawl collar? Five kilos heavier is my guess.

But there they were queuing up for the change-rooms, champion birds in their late 40’s, flushed from the gym and trying on those dangly cardigans with  jeans so tight I winced.  

Then gliding towards me came a 60-something fashionista. She was vacuum-packed into black leather skirt with studs down the seams and a plunging silk blouse that exposed a valley of leathery cleavage. Two teenagers did a double take and smirked. As she passed by, I noticed that she had the golden tan of the well-rested and gnarled toes from several decades of pointy shoes.

It takes supreme confidence to pull off a look that has other women mouthing “Mutton!” behind your back. But she walked with the aristocratic air of a dame who has (married) money. I admired her for the audacity of her fashion hope.

I’ve no such daring. I won’t risk short skirts for fear of drawing attention to my callused knees. That also rules out hot-pants and dresses slit to the thigh like Sonia McMahon’s. But skinny trousers make my legs look like strangled sausages, so they’re out too. What’s left? Aprons, overalls and peasant skirts. “Peasant” is one thing, but I don’t want to be mistaken for some wench harvesting a field of potatoes.

Up top, I have more problems. Middle-age spread is migrating from my dinner plate to my upper arms. My chest requires a pair of hammocks rigged with hawsers and struts, and the remains of my washboard stomach need to be disciplined with industrial underwear.

Then there’s middle-aged cleavage: too much is cheap, but I’m not ready for a wardrobe full of turtle necks. And don’t get me started on my neck, I’m praying middle-age doesn’t adorn me with a pouch like a pelican.

I no longer understand the fashion pages in Vogue, but the Women’s Weekly insists on dividing women into fruit shapes –  we’re either top-heavy apples  or bottom-heavy pears. I am an apple, but I’m only one Devonshire tea away from a pear.

Why aren’t men subjected to this fashion drivel? Men are either short, or tall. Fit, fat or thin. Or average. Average is a compliment. An average woman isn’t trying hard enough.

So we left the mall, my oval-shaped daughter and I, and mooched home. And that evening, I looked up the latest winter trends and discovered I should be wearing a metallic bomber jacket, a snakeskin print scarf and Frankie pants, which look like the world’s tightest tracky-daks . On a 45-year-old mother-of-three, that’s the kind of ensemble that gets muffled snorts at Coles. Until I find out who Frankie is, and whether she’s an apple or a pear, I’m sticking with my peasant skirt.

Hello Stranger

Hello Stranger
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 18, 2013

Moving neighbourhoods is a test of my social skills. I knew the shift would be a wrench: How could we replace our favourite family across the road? Three brothers under nine who shimmy like monkeys up their wrought iron fence and hang on the crossbars yelling: “Hello! Hello! Can you come and play?”  

Our three would send back an equally ear-splitting chorus of greetings (whilst taking turns to ride the gate off its hinges). We two mothers would leave surprises at each other’s doors – a bunch of parsley, or my latest attempt at low-fat brownies. (why bother, we decided). On chaotic mornings, I could signal a mayday from the porch and she would walk my boys to school.

Two doors up, the mum of another trio of boys would share with me her recipe for lemon cupcakes and raising 12-year-olds. Her bags of hand-me downs outfitted my eldest son for years.

Further along was the Italian nonna who gushed over my babies and leant on her rake explaining to me the old ways of bottling home-made tomato sauce and how to stop basil going to seed. On weekends, the kids would flash past her on their bikes bellowing: ‘Ciao Ciao Pina!’ Or they’d call up to her as she dusted the Doric columns of her Juliette balcony: “Can we practice our scooter tricks on your driveway?” (She has a spotless expanse of concrete.)

I don’t like putting barriers around my family. They should feel safe by instinct. I want my children to have the same freedoms I had growing up in the 70’s, when we knew almost everyone in the street by name and the neighbourhood kids roamed as a motley tribe. I don’t want my children being fearful of strangers. I like it when people stop at our fence to ask my 5 year-old: “Was that your big boy’s bed arriving this morning? How’d they get it through your door?”   

We have been in our new house for four months now, and our old suburb is becoming a faded postcard. Now I need to memorise another footpath for potholes and jutting pavers that could tip up a scooter or skin the knees of a budding skateboarder.

Diagonally opposite our century-old cottage, there’s another wrought iron fence and three little faces curious to see who has moved in. I feel the throb of awkwardness and insecurity as I make the first tentative offers of friendship. But the kids hit it off and we are away! – Within a fortnight small children are madly swapping houses – and we two mums discover we have a girlfriend in common.  

I’m heartened by the elderly couple who cross the road to say to tell me: “You’ll love it here.” The neighbours on the west side say: “It’s so good to hear children in the backyard again.”

Uprooting forces me to be resilient. The kids dream up the idea of walks after tea in their pyjamas. I make a point of smiling and talking to everyone we meet. I would never have had such confidence before motherhood. But a gregarious small daughter and two excitable boys make conversation-starters easy: “Why are you wearing that funny hat?” asks my small daughter of an elderly lady sweeping her path. The lovely old dear replies: You know what? It hides my funny hair.”  

After a weekend of work at the family farm, we bring home a load of fallen apples and juicy Meyer lemons. The kids want to make the “deliveries” they enjoyed in the previous suburb. They laboriously count out a dozen Fuji’s, still with leaves attached, and add a couple of lemons to each bag. Five-year-old son proudly draws a tree dotted with red splodges and writes: “Wood you lik some fresh appels from our farm? XX from us”

We leave our surprise bags at front doors. without being spotted. Within the week we have several handwritten thank-you’s in the letter box. The kids are delighted.

There are shopkeepers to befriend too. We five become Dave the Icecream Man’s best customers. While the small ones deliberate over cups or cones, Dave and I discover we once lived in the same street.

I feel at home. The kids are settled, the neighbourhood is becoming familiar – apart from one decrepit old fella who makes two round trips past our house each day. Is he shuffling to the shops? He always returns empty-handed. No hello, just a grunt. And then one lunchtime, he takes a tumble at our gate. Blood is dripping from his papery hand. We bundle him home to number 39 in the car. Without a word, he lurches inside, leaving his startled wife to make apologies.

The next morning he stops at our gate as I’m unloading the car. He extends a bandaged right hand: “I’m Milton” he says gruffly. “Had one too many at the bowling club yesterday.”

The kids now yell out “Hi Milton!” If he hears them, he raises his hand but his eyes remain firmly on the pavement. Neighbourhoods embrace all types.

Enough about me

Enough about me
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 11, 2013

A conversation is not just a rudimentary exchange of information or a conduit for drinking with friends. It has winners and losers. It can be life changing. I know this because a conversation in a pub landed me my husband.

Back then, I didn’t know fate had arranged for me to be leaning against the back bar of the Subi hotel with a man wearing Ronnie Barker glasses. He was comfortably stout, like a prized footballer gone to pot, and I noticed his manly hands (I have a thing about extremities). He was charming, disarming and attentive but it was the way he spoke to me that made me skittish, like Bambi. Here was a man who was warming up for a conversational joust. I set out to beguile him with my verbal prowess.

I failed to allow for the first glass of champagne on my empty stomach. It sent my mouth galloping ahead of my brain. Halfway through the second glass, I was babbling and gushing. Sentences I should have filtered for tedium and stupidity dropped straight onto my tongue and became clumsy word spillage. I was all single-entendre, my brilliant wit sabotaged by a bad case of love jitters.

On this night, I thought it best to attempt being a coquette, rather than try to outfox this razor-sharp raconteur when I’d gone all goosy. And anyway, he was asking too many Mensa questions: “So, being an only child, what have you learnt about other people?”

How to respond? I squirmed. He leaned back and propped his elbows on the bar while a lively silence throbbed between us. My brain darted about in search of a penetrating reply but all I could come up with was: “the big question for me is why none of my yoga pants have ever been to yoga?”

He grinned – I took it as a compliment. And then he leaned in close, brushed an eye-lash off my cheek and whispered “Make a wish.” I giggled in falsetto.

I secretly asked the champagne fairy for three wishes – I wished this man would take me home and hang his bad tie in my closet, I wished to grow old and grey with him and I wished for thinner arms. The good fairy granted two wishes, and I’m resigned to wearing sleeves.

That is the G-rated version of the night I met my man on a late summer’s night. Our eighth anniversary has just passed (un-remarked), but he remains a challenging conversationalist.

Conversation is an art form. We all admire those who have mastered the serve and volley of lingual ping-pong.   

But some acquaintances suck the oxygen out of the air by talking incessantly. Self-obsession asphyxiates friendships. If I’m button-holed by a bloke who doesn’t draw breath for two minutes, I hightail it to the dessert buffet.

Interrupters also infuriate: my children have perfected the technique. But it’s adult interjectors who should be gagged – those people who leap in and ruin my punchlines, or smother me with their preoccupations. I murmur to myself: “Sorry I was talking while you were interrupting.”

Why can’t bores recognise themselves? Some even refer to themselves in the third person, just so we can appreciate them from yet another angle: “And then the nice girl in Country Road said to me – Barbara Blackwood – you look amazing in that colour. Barbara, that dress goes so well with your tattoo. Barbara, we should name that dress after you – we’ll call it…. The Barbara!”

I, too, used to think my stories were riveting. At 20, I landed my first job in commercial radio: a chick among peacocks. I answered the phones with try-hard sophistication: “96FM , we will rock you!” Teetering in my white stilettos I would carry cups of International Roast to celebrity disc jockeys with velvet tonsils. On Friday nights I would regale my friends: “And then he asked me to be the barrel-girl! Me! He told me to giggle and rustle the entry forms so they made crunchy paper noises, it was sooo cool…”

Before long I caught two girlfriends rolling their eyes at each other across the table. My ego collapsed. These days I tell my stories while keeping my third eye roving for audience boredom.  

Some people like to take over a conversation – they interject about their famous second cousin the soapie extra, or launch into the intricacies of their colonoscopy (scraping the bowels of social convention). Some people feel compelled to convince me that daddy long legs are poisonous but their mouths aren’t big enough to bite people, and if I disagree, they become strident.

At my home in Utopia, my conversational skills are sagging. My 12-year-old cancels me out with his noise-cancelling headphones. Husband is riveted by The Footy Show and can’t be distracted so my three-year-old and I compete for each other’s attention.

Sometimes, when I want to ask my beloved about the state of our relationship, I’ll sidle up to him and say: “Honey, do you remember that night we met in that pub?” And he’ll smile and say: “Yes, blossom, that’s the night you thought talking about yourself constituted a conversation.”

A Lost Opportunity

A Lost Opportunity
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday May 4, 2013

In our house, I am the finder of lost things. Except if the lost thing is the repair kit for the coffee machine. Sealed in a plastic bag, these are special tools: a weird-looking tube and a yellow brush, a metal thingy with a hole punctured at one end and a perforated paper cone.

They are also implements so vital to the espresso-making process that I’ve never seen them before. My husband says otherwise, seeing as it’s me who has lost them.

Three weeks ago, as I was making beds, our Breville coffee machine began gurgling uncomfortably. As it choked down the last of the Costa Rican Arabicas, my newly woken (de-caffeinated) husband yelped from the kitchen. I ran to his side. We stood by the coffee machine, helpless. It shook uncontrollably, then exhaled a weak steamy breath and was still. I thought I heard a faint death rattle in its metal throat, then silence. With no trace of emotion my husband turned to me: “Quick – get the cleaning bag, the coffee machine’s croaked.”

The bag wasn’t hiding in the big red bowl on the kitchen bench kept precisely for mystery objects. Nor was it at the bottom of the pantry, or in the garage (you never know). For three days in a row, my husband drove at sunrise the 200m to the corner café to satisfy his craving. On his return, only slightly less agitated, he demanded: “Find the damn repair kit, blossom.” And so my hunt began anew.

Clearly my powers of encyclopedic placement had let me down. All that memorizing of the precise whereabouts of each item belonging to five people in one house had come to nothing. Suddenly one see-through zip-lock bag was as lost as 18 minutes of Watergate tape.

However, I did find the allen key for dismantling the spare bed, the commemorative gold coin we got sucked into buying at the Bell Tower and an unclaimed Medicare receipt from 2011.

In our family, there are two types of searches for lost things:  there is a “boy look” and a “girl look.” When the man of the house misplaces the keys to his ute, he swivels his head from left to right before announcing: “Nup, they’re not here.”

This constitutes a “boy look.” It does not involve looking under or behind things or anywhere above or below eye level.. 

My bloke, when desperate, will ramp up a “boy look” by taking one step in each direction from the kitchen bench before accusing: “What have you done with my keys!”

That’s when I can swoop in for a “girl look.” I shift sheaths of unpaid Telstra bills to their rightful file and drawer and put magazines with Ray Martin on the cover into the recycling at last. I clear my husband’s desk of stretched out paper clips, discarded envelopes and a pagoda of Post-it notes. Along the way I also find eldest son’s missing pocket knife and joy! – the plug for the bath.

Eventually I discover the ute’s keys chilling on the third shelf of the fridge: “Oooh, that’s right!” he says “I put them on that six-pack so I wouldn’t forget the beers.”

 “Girl looks” are imperative when living with teenage boys. My man-child can’t remember what day it is, let alone where he put his lunch box: actually nowhere. It’s still in his school bag on the porch, lid off, with a few crusts and a whiffy yoghurt container signposting a free meal for passing vermin.

Sometimes it’s me that feels like the lost thing – picking my way through the jumble of other peoples’ stuff trying to restore order – no place for me. My carefree days are behind me, but I’m not yet old enough to need taking care of. Instead, I am sitting uncomfortably in the embrace of middle age – needed instantly when tummies are hungry or sock drawers need a refill. Why can’t I be wanted as much as needed?

I like to pretend I know where everything is. Even the children. And if something is too important to lose, I put it in the only place I’m guaranteed to find it: in my bra. Recently, while having a (womanly) check up, my doctor said: “Pop up here on the bed and take off your bra and we’ll be done in no time.” So I unsnapped my bra and a train ticket, two one-dollar coins and the lens cap for my camera dropped onto the floor. (Best to take photos dressed in something with pockets.)

So now a month has passed and a new repair kit has been delivered: $68.95. The coffee machine has spluttered back to life and the household is re-caffeinated by 7am.

But last night I had a dream, a dream so real I woke up and my brain was instantly alert. Suddenly, I remembered where I’d put that indispensable zip-lock bag with all the coffee parts: in the bin. The same place I put all useless-looking tubes, metal-thingys and strange paper cones. But that’s a guilty secret best left between you and me.