Bite Your Tongue

Bite Your Tongue
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday December 6, 2014

It was the first roadhouse I’d seen in forty-five minutes and I needed coffee and petrol. In that order. I swung off the Brand highway and pulled up at the pump, feeling dwarfed by the half a dozen road trains stretched out across the carpark.

At the counter, I stood beside a truckie who made me feel petite.

“A coupla cheese sausages and a pie n’ sauce,” he said.

In the bain-marie, two shrivelled sausages with wrinkly red hides lay sweating behind the glass.

“How’d they get the cheese in?” I said, thinking out loud.

“Beats me,” said the truckie, “but they’re bloody good,” and he slapped a ten dollar note on the counter and gathered up his two paper bags.

While the waitress made my coffee, I tried guessing what was inside the crumbed and battered shapes glowing under the warmer. The square ones were likely hash browns, I decided. The yellow rings would be squid. Or maybe onion? I could tell the crabsticks by their customary pink stripe .

My late step-father, Stan, refused to call them crabsticks. “They don’t put an ounce of crab in them!” he’d snort. He called them Sea Legs instead. (Stan was convinced “they” were also responsible for eighteen minutes of missing Watergate tape, the disappearance of Harold Holt and the refusal of a brand new Victa lawn mower to start on the first pull.)

Growing up in the 70s, the arrival of convenience food gave the Watsonia polony knob cult status in our kitchen. “At last!” my Nan’d say admiringly, as she sawed through the rubbery tube with a bread knife. “Someone’s making life easier.”

The polony knob was always served cold from the fridge, sliced into thick discs and sandwiched between buttered slices of cob loaf. Nan called it luncheon meat, and marvelled at its durability. Polony knobs lasted for a fortnight. They never dried out and retained their lovely rosy shade until the very last slice (which was puckered, obscenely, where the metal catch pinched closed the tube.)

For a while there, ‘polony pink’ was my favourite colour. But Nan said polony was actually ‘Baker-Miller pink.’ “That’s the colour they’re painting asylums these days,” she explained, pointing to the little pile of polony slices on my open sandwich. “I read in the Reader’s Digest that a psychologist called Mr Baker, and his colleague Mr Miller, discovered a shade of pink that keeps patients calm and compliant.”

As a child with excitable tendencies, I always calmed down after lunch, which, according to Nan, only enhanced polony’s reputation as a superfood. I was never convinced the Watsonia polony knob tasted like meat, but it didn’t taste like broccoli either, which was all that mattered.

Usually a Nan’s polony sandwich came with a side serving of Kraft processed cheese. We called it ‘plastic cheese’ as a compliment. It, too, appeared indestructible. Plastic cheese came cocooned in Alfoil inside a small silver and blue cardboard box. I recycled those cheese boxes as coffins for pet snails who inexplicably expired on their diet of grass clippings and polony crumbs.

No matter how high Nan cranked the griller, plastic cheese never melted like normal cheese. It sat on my toast like a doormat. Even if the bread was cremated, plastic cheese would only ever develop a black blister. Poked with a knife, the blister would shatter into a fine layer of ash.

By the time I was a teenager, Mum had discovered French Onion dip. She made it from scratch by tipping two sachets of Continental French Onion Soup Mix into half a litre of sour cream. Even now, I can’t understand how a dish so high in calories didn’t make me a fattie. Perhaps because it was too repulsive to eat. French Onion dip couldn’t be saved even by Ritz crackers.

Mum’s coleslaw however, was a triumph of convenience cuisine. It contained the usual shredded cabbage and carrot, but she added a tin of Golden Circle crushed pineapple and a handful of sultanas to give it a tropical edge. Then she took the edge off with a whole jar of Miracle Whip mayonnaise. It was the perfect accompaniment to a mob of lamb chops with fatty tails and a scoop of Deb instant mashed potato.

Back at the roadhouse, I paid for my coffee and contemplated a chocolate bar, casting my eye over the sea of shiny wrappers. Some were new to me with names I didn’t recognise – Crispello, Pods, Bubbly. “Whatever happened to the Polly Waffle?” I said to the young waitress.

“The what?” she said, giving me a guarded look.

“The Polly Waffle!” I repeated. “You know – that chocolate log-thing with the tube of white marshmallow inside!”

“Never heard of it,” she said. “But it sounds gross.”

Dressing Down

Dressing Down
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 29, 2014

I thought I’d arrived early, but to my dismay I was unfashionably late. A warehouse frock sale waits for no woman. The hall opened at 9. It was now 20 past and the building was heaving with bargain hunters.

I’m normally a prudent shopper, but my commonsense turns to compulsiveness when my favourite brand is discounted by 70-percent. I paused in the doorway to absorb the arresting sight of a hundred women on a shopping assault. A flock of twenty-somethings swooped past me and descended on a table of $20 jeans like seagulls on fish ‘n chips. I scampered over to join them.

A gaggle of trendy mothers, trailing their toddlers, kept up a running commentary as they rifled through a rack of embroidered shirts. “It doesn’t matter if we buy the same one,” called one. “Just ring me before you wear it!” Beside me, two middle-aged women were grousing about the lack of bigger sizes.

Finishing up at the jeans table, I elbowed through the throng and squeezed in beside a leggy exotic-looking woman who was sifting through a rack crammed with silky tops and dresses. In the presence of such lithesome beauty, I felt like a pelican in the company of a flamingo. “Swap?” she said.

I looked at her blankly.

“Swap?” she repeated with a hint of annoyance. I realised she was impatient to exchange places so she could examine the rest of the rack. Feeling stupid, I feigned nonchalance as we side-stepped around each other. She resumed her intense inspection of price tags.

I bent down to pick up a crumpled cream smock, which had slipped from its hanger. I held the dainty thing against me: could it fit?

“Are you going to try that?” said the flamingo, eyeing off my prize.

“I’m not sure. Is it a shirt or a dress?”

“On you, a dress.”

“Oh,” I replied, defeated. “My mini-dress days are over. You try it.”

“Thanks,” she said and added it to the collection of hangers already dangling from a slender hand.

After ten minutes, I’d exhausted my search but a peach-coloured cardigan, some grey jeans and a pastel top were showing promise. I picked my way towards the makeshift changeroom at the back of the hall.

Communal dressing rooms unnerve me. This one had a crude curtain barely shielding us from public view. I staked my claim to a square foot of floorboards, and attempted to undress gracefully. Strangers, stripped to bras and knickers, fussed with zips and buttons.

No-one made eye contact. I tried to avert my gaze from the nudity on parade but short of shutting my eyes, it was impossible. Hopping to remove the pair of cheap but too-tight jeans, I reflected on our different bodies: the taut tummy to my left, the pot-bellied one in front, the one now puckered from pregnancy. I sucked mine in and tried on the cardigan.

Knickered bottoms ranged from scrawny to wobbly, ample to pert. I compared my despised muscly calves with the slender legs attached to the girl beside me. None of us said a word as we wriggled into shirts and dresses and tops and pants. Some fitted. Some felt like tourniquets.

I reached for the pastel top. Lifting my arms, I slipped it over my head. Half way down it jammed around my forehead. I tried to ease the fabric past my ears, but it refused to dilate. Blindsided, I clumsily felt around the neck-hole to locate the button I’d missed. There wasn’t one. Squirming to free myself, I hoisted the shirt off my head and flushed with embarrassment.

“I can’t get my head through the hole!” I wailed.

The girl with the ballerina legs snorted. And with that, we dishevelled women dropped our guard and began to chat.

“Give it to me!” said a petite lady to my right. She looped the shirt over her head where it stuck fast across her eyebrows. I leaned over and helped her tug it free.

“Thank goodness it’s not just me!” I said.

“Nope,” she replied. “I must have a fat head too!”

“How ridiculous!” said the tall woman in the corner as we passed the offending shirt around for inspection. “Now our heads are too big for fashion?!”

“What do you think?” asked the leggy girl. Trying on a lacy dress, she was analysing her reflection in the mirror.

“I’m not sure about this bit,” I said truthfully, pointing to where the fabric billowed around her narrow hips.

“I’m built like a boy!” she moaned, twisting to frown at her rear view. And right there, I realised few women are ever happy with what they’ve got.

But the peach-coloured cardigan made me feel good. It was a steal at 40-bucks. I bought it as compensation for my giant head.

Wooden it be nice?

Wooden it be nice
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 22, 2014

I was mother to two sons before I became mother to a daughter. A mother of sons knows that Stegosaurus had a brain the size of a walnut. She knows buttons in lifts are for pressing, all at once, so passengers can appreciate the identical landings on every floor. And she knows it’s impossible to pass by a construction site without stopping to gawp.

But when I visited a school fete last weekend, it was my four-year-old daughter who spotted the carpentry tent first. “Hammers!” she shouted to her brother, and the pair of them darted off into the crowd.

I dutifully followed, lugging a bag of second-hand books, a tomato seedling and two half-eaten clouds of fairy floss wrapped around grimy sticks. “The Joy of Wood,” said the sandwich board propped at the tent-front. “$2 per child. No experience required.”

That’s lucky, I thought, as my daughter grabbed a hammer from one of the workbenches and swung it over her head. The dad behind her dodged sideways. “Not so high!” I cried. I whispered “Sorry!” to the dad. He flashed me a grin.

I glanced around to locate 7-year-old son. He’d discovered the sawing station and was trying to hack through a chunk of pine with a hand saw, his legs splayed, frowning with concentration.

A man wearing a well-hung tool belt and a name-tag ‘Greg’ upended a hessian sack of wood scraps into a plastic clam shell on the grass. Kids dropped to their knees and rummaged through the heap. Two small boys grappled over a triangular piece peppered with drill holes. The loser zig-zagged away sobbing to find his mum.

My youngster was still engrossed at the sawing station. Greg showed him how to fix an offcut into a vice. “Measure twice. Cut once,” I heard Greg say. “Hold the saw gently. Elbows in. That’s it!” Boy and tool became acquainted and began to work seamlessly.

“Let’s make a treasure box, hey?” I suggested to my daughter, noticing all the dads were making bigger boxes. I sifted through plywood and pine, searching for rectangles of similar size. But every piece was a different thickness. Unwisely, I gave my 4-year-old the power of veto over slabs she didn’t like. She used it indiscriminately, rejecting the only matching pair I dug out. “I don’t like the colour,” she said, inspecting one offcut. “And it’s got a rough bit. See?”

“That’s a knot,” I informed her. “That’s where a branch grew out of the tree.” She shrugged and threw the piece back on top of the pile. The victor from the tug-of-war dived across me to grab it.

Under the tarpaulin, the pounding of twenty hammers was hurting my ears. We claimed a workbench in the sun and got to work on our box project.

At first I felt clumsy. I’d forgotten how hard it is to bang a nail in straight. I struggled to keep my timber steady. My right angles ranged from 85 to 95 degrees. I spent more time ripping out duds with the pincer than using the hammer. Daughter sighed as she collected my bent nails from the grass. “They look like worms!” she said.

But as my confidence grew, the hammer began to feel at home in my hand. Lining up hammer head to nail head, I swapped blind faith for belief, then certainty. I no longer worried about smashing my thumb. The nails drove straight in. I banged them flush with half a dozen easy knocks.

My daughter was a navvy in a previous life. She didn’t flinch when I pinched her thumb to free a splinter. She got her hands dirty. She carefully selected my next nail from the container and held the pincer at the ready. In under an hour, we produced a box. It had a makeshift lid anchored to one corner by a long nail, allowing it to swivel open.

I put her in charge of quality testing while I cleaned up our mess. She yanked the lid sideways, left and right, but it didn’t give way. She scrounged under a nearby Eucalyptus and filled her treasure box with two gumnuts and a gold bottle top, then swung the lid closed. I don’t know who was prouder of our handiwork. Me, I decided.

Greg wandered over and pointed out my son, who was still sawing away, a growing pile of wood scraps at his feet. “There’s always one!” Greg said, chuckling. “All they want to do is saw. No building, no hammering. Just sawing. Boy discovers the mystical pleasures of manual labour!”

I nodded. “That was the best fun I’ve had in ages. Why does woodwork feel so satisfying?”

“It just does,” said Greg. “It’s good for the soul.”

Forget Me Not

Forget Me Not
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 15, 2014

Something about her was different. She looked smaller than I remembered. The hunch of her shoulders had become more pronounced. Gone was her trademark copper rinse, her hair now blowsy and grey. “Auntie G!” I called, spotting her several trolley lengths away in Coles. She was holding open a freezer door, studying a shelf of frozen peas, but didn’t react. I parallel parked my trolley and leaned over. “Auntie G!” I repeated, touching her lightly on the shoulder.

She jerked around and stared at me. “It’s Rosi,” I said, sensing her confusion. Perhaps I’d frightened her? She gave me a wan smile but no glimmer of recognition. I began to feel uncomfortable. What should I do next?

“Do you need a hand?”

“I can’t find the icecream.”

“Oh, that’s on the other side. I can never find it either.” She brightened and nodded when I said “I’ll show you where it is, shall I?”

Cupping her elbow, I gently steered her round the corner, stopping beside the icecream cabinet. She looked relieved.

I’d always had a soft spot for Auntie G because she’d produced my favourite girl cousin, Elizabeth, who was 36 days younger than me.

Sleeping over at Lizzie’s house, I found the noise of her riotous family overwhelming. As an only child, I was secretly thrilled (and occasionally terrified) to witness Auntie G berating her disobedient tribe.

Their house had a backyard swimming pool, a glamorous addition to any 1970s childhood. On a summer afternoon, we kids played Marco Polo and Pool Ponies and practiced our underwater handstands until our fingertips puckered and the soles of our feet pruned. Auntie G leant over the balcony and dropped down a couple of fraying towels. We lay on them, tummies down, dry-roasting on the hot bricks. She’d send out a plate of her coconut macaroons, left over from a dinner party the night before.

Now, aged 78, my Aunty G has dementia. She’s newly diagnosed and still in denial. Her family struggles to manage her decline. She defends her memory lapses with angry outbursts, slipping into the personality of someone else. But Auntie G is not yet in need of care. The good days still outnumber the bad.

Two years ago, I came across Auntie G in the centre of a busy road in West Leederville. She’d abandoned her cream Camry in the middle of an intersection and was standing aimlessly beside it. Drivers were dog-legging around her, windows wound down to sticky-beak at this surburban oddity. I pulled over and got out of my car.

“Oh! Thank goodness you found me!” she said anxiously. “I can’t seem to find Lizzie’s house.”

“You can see it from here,” I said, pointing back down the hill. I wondered how my aunt could have driven past it.

She thanked me and climbed back into her car, swung it around and coasted down the hill. I watched her park outside her daughter’s house. I drove home feeling alarmed.

It was not my first glimpse into mental frailty. My uncle Don, Mum’s only sibling, succumbed to dementia after a career as a concert pianist, academic and mathematician.

The tragedy of his retirement was the swift unravelling of his mind. First he lost the ability to pick left from right, distinguish between cup and kettle and recognise a dollar coin in his wallet. Then it erased his encyclopaedic memory of Schubert sonatas and Brahms concertos until he could no longer play two- finger Chopsticks or sing along to Three Blind Mice.

To watch him, at 76, regress to a childlike state was frightening, but there were lovely moments. His disease bonded him to my two youngest children. He never tired of their knock-knock jokes, cackling at their made-up punchlines. He gleefully joined in their games of hide and seek, bolting for the same empty wardrobe every time. Like them, he startled at loud noises and needed help cutting up his dinner.

The end came quickly and cruelly, four months after a traumatic move into a nursing home.

On occasion, I contemplate my own future. What if my genes, too, are predisposed to intellectual decay? I remind myself it’s normal to be constantly searching for your specs. As I stand in the laundry (what was it I came in here for?) I feel uneasy. Is this how it starts? The foggy brain? Conversations that falter as I try to force an elusive word to crystallise in my mind. The embarrassing pause as I yet again forget the new soccer coach’s name.

Last Monday, as I dashed around the supermarket, I spotted Auntie G again. She was filling a paper bag with potatoes. She waved at me across the fruit crates. “The mangos look nice!” she called. I bought two on her say-so.

Under the skin

Under the skin
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 8, 2014

We’ve become an unlikely pair of confidantes, the icecream shop lady and I. But regularity breeds familiarity. And small children are good conduits for conversations with strangers.

Her name is Paula. In a hot-pink polo shirt, she’s a splash of colour against the stainless steel coffee machine. Her ice-cream parlour is tucked into a Fremantle laneway. Opposite her shop, a terracotta Neptune mounted to a wall dribbles water from his lips into a tiered pond. My kids beg for coins to drop in the wishing well.

Paula is always chirpy and energetic. We swap stories as my two connoisseurs paw her glass cabinet, arguing the merits of Chocolate over Bubblegum. I tell Paula about my first job as an ice-cream scooper and how my arms would ache. She tells me about growing up in Mount Magnet in the 60s; how her dad became shift boss for the Hill 50 gold mine. How her ex-husband, father of their daughter, had been a proof-reader for The West Australian.

“Cup or cone, my darling?” Paula says to my son. She slyly glances at me over the counter. “Cup,” I mouth. She gives me a little nod – two mothers colluding against ice-cream drippage.

“Cone!” my boy protests, sensing defeat.

“But I can get more in a cup!” promises Paula, and she scoops a thick ribbon of chocolate ice-cream into a fat ball.

My 4-year-old hugs the counter and blurts: “Paula? What happened to your face?”

I cringe but Paula flashes me a wink and props her elbows on the counter. “Well,” she replies gently. “I got burnt when I was a little girl. See?” She turns her right cheek, stretching the patchwork of skin grafts that criss-cross her face and neck.

“When I was five, my dad was pouring petrol into his truck and a spark from the engine ignited the can. He flung the burning can over his shoulder just as I walked around the side of the truck. The petrol fire went all over me – burnt off my hair, melted my ear, went down my face, neck, shoulder, arm.”

She lifts a lock of her hair to reveal the stub of her right ear. My daughter, for once, is silent.

“Mum said she’d never seen Dad move so fast. He scooped me up and threw me in the water trough. I spent the next two years in the Mount Magnet hospital. Had free run of the place. Had breakfast every morning with the doctor and his wife. Mum and Dad came afternoons. But seeing my Dad gave me flashbacks. I’d start screaming and I couldn’t stop. I wouldn’t let him anywhere near me. But every day after work, he’d sit outside my room. He’d sit there, on a chair in the corridor, for hours. And then he’d go home.”

My four-year-old has all the information she needs. She hands me her empty cup and darts off to join her brother, now splashing in the fountain.

Paula mops the counter: “From the age of seven until I was sixteen, every school holidays, Mum drove me to Perth for skin grafts. And every three months, I outgrew one of them. All the skin on my right arm, they grafted onto my left. The doctors took bits from all over me. But I such a scrawny kid, they ran out of skin.”

She strokes the luminously pale side of her neck: “They used a piece of my stomach lining to patch here.” She laughs at my shocked face, saying, “Mum always told me, ‘You’re no different to anyone else.’ I believed her. Hospital was an adventure. The pain never scared me.”

A dad with an excited toddler tugging at his arm, steps up to order a waffle.

“I stopped having grafts when I was 22,” Paula resumes quietly when they depart. “By then, I was a barmaid in Kambalda. And you know what? No-one gave me a hard time. But after that last lot of plastic surgery, when I needed six weeks off work, Mum thought I better talk to Centrelink. When I got to the front of the queue, this government fella says ‘Sorry. Wrong queue. The handicapped counter’s over there.’”

“I said, ‘How dare you! I’m not handicapped!’ I stormed out in tears. That was the only day anyone ever got to me.”

It’s time to head home. I collect damp socks and four wet shoes and we wave goodbye. But all week, Paula’s story crowds my thoughts.

‘The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.’

That quote by Hemingway suits her.

Farewell, my friend

Farewell, my friend
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday November 1, 2014

I’m not one for living in the past. But the death of a long-ago friend has marked me in strange ways. Our friendship blossomed during a summer of waitressing in 1985, the year I turned 18. We shared the breakfast shift at the North Cott cafe, overlooking the beach. Her name was Jan. Her name-tag said so.

She was twelve years older, fit and tanned, a single mum to two girls. I’d pull up to the cafe at 6am and see her dilapidated Volvo 240 parked skew-whiff out front, windows open and a pack of Sterling Ultra Milds on the front seat.

By 6.30, the easterly dropped and left the cafe blinds in peace. The first swimmers shuffled up the concrete steps, salted by the ocean, hungry for breakfast. I’d never seen such a smorgasbord of near-naked bodies up close. Jan would elbow me as she folded a mound of serviettes. My eyes followed hers to some swarthy athlete who’d hitched up his red sluggos to display two meaty buttocks. A collection of old boys who swam daily, all-weathers, stood chatting in saggy bathers, drying off their wrinkly brown hides. Girls in bikinis paraded perkiness.

Behind the coffee machine, I admired Jan working the outdoor tables, a model of waitressing efficiency. She could stack three greasy plates along one forearm yet still wriggle free from the bloke who liked to pat her bottom as she took his order. Swatting his arm with her free hand, she weaved back to me. She’d dumped her plates and cutlery so they clattered on the bench and every head turned towards her. “One cappuccino for The Octopus!” she’d announce, grinning.

A virgin at waitressing, I was intimidated by the hulking coffee machine. The frothing proboscis dribbled boiling water on my hand or spat steam at my face if I lost concentration. Customers flustered me by huffing when their lattes took too long. I boiled the milk into a frenzy and served up flat whites with slimy skins that stuck grotesquely to upper lips. My new friend Jan was always encouraging: “You’re getting the hang of it. See? Do table four’s next – they’ve only been waiting for ten minutes.”

Now accustomed to dawn risings, Jan and I started meeting at the beach to exercise on days off. I wore a tie-dyed singlet and my favourite white shorts with elasticated lacy hems. Sometimes I wore a g-string leotard over the white shorts because I was all class in the 80’s. Jan had a bright purple leotard and black micro-shorts. We power-walked along the footpath that hugged Marine Parade from Swanbourne to Leighton beach. Engrossed in conversation, we ignored the smirks from middle-aged couples in sensible tracksuits.

We dissected our relationships – her new squeeze, my over-familiar one. We itemised their shortcomings, justified our own. We raked over our childhoods, volunteered deep secrets. Nothing was too personal or too painful for a verbal autopsy. I marvelled at her insights. She could solve any of my problems.

On the weekends her girls went to their father, we warred at the tennis net. Line calls were disputed with McEnroe histrionics. The sore loser copped the bill for lunch. We counted calories, invented new diet regimes, wondered if this would be the year we’d be thin enough (and brave enough) to wear a bikini.

And then I got sacked from the cafe. The boss caught me hiding in the coolroom, scoffing a slab of his prized hummingbird cake. Jan constructed an elaborate defence, but my coffee failures had caught up with me, and now I was also a cake thief.

I went off to Psych 101 at Uni, she had a baby with the new boyfriend. We still walked along the ocean once a week, then once a month, then not at all. We caught up on the phone, as delighted with each other as ever, but the gaps in our friendship grew longer until I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her.

And then one morning last year, I spotted her at the shops. She looked gaunt, her collar bones sharp against her oddly pale skin. I was shocked, but made a pretence.

“All right,” I said as we hugged. “You win. You’re thinner!”

“No. You win,” she said. “I’ve got cancer.”

I burst into tears.

I hardly knew anyone at her crowded funeral. A few faces were vaguely familiar, old friends of hers I’d met once or twice. Jan’s girls had slyly grown into women. I spotted three small grandsons. I was now a middle-aged relic from her past. I stood against the chapel wall and my mind drifted to the year we met, when the beach beckoned to sun-tans and summer romances. I longed for her company, for our shared confidences, for my younger self. But she is gone now, my friend Jan. Part of me went with her.

Flushed with Romance

Flushed with Romance
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 25, 2014

My husband fancies himself as a romantic. He likes to remind me that before we met, he was lauded as a ladykiller. He says this with a straight face while reclined on the sofa with his knee rug and the cat. I want to query whether he’s being facetious or ironic, but I hold my tongue, because he’s on a roll. “Empathy,” he announces. “That’s what women want. George Clooney and I know this. A man who listens to a woman is a rare and miraculous thing.”

I stifle a snort but he’s not finished.

“We’re quite alike, you know, George and I.”

“You mean apart from the tummy?”

But he’s not listening. His homily over, he’s re-engrossed in the sports pages.

I can’t decide whether to be annoyed or amused. Instead, I sidle over to the sofa. “No-one ignores me the way you do,” I say, and wait for his reaction. He noisily turns the page. I sigh and retreat to the kitchen.

I remember a divorce lawyer once telling me at a party: “Men need to be admired. Women need to be appreciated.”

“It can’t be that simple,” I replied.

“Well, that’s what I’ve learnt after 20 years of dealing with other peoples’ misery.”

I felt a bit miserable myself after that exchange, but I’ve been admiring my man ever since.

On Tuesday night, my praise was appreciated with flowers. My Don Juan walked in the door with three droopy yellow tulips and a sprig of baby’s breath strangled by a tourniquet of red cellophane. ”Servo flowers are underrated,” he said, and plonked my bouquet on the kitchen bench. One tulip surrendered its petals on impact.

I gave him a squeeze of thanks, untangled the plastic and trimmed the slimy stems.

On Thursday night, when he arrived home and suggested a date night, I was delighted. And suspicious. I scrambled for the shower anyway. I shaved my legs. Put on a face and a silky dress. High-heels. I emerged in record time, excited.

There in the doorway, stood my date wearing a pair of fawn desert boots; at the other end was a lime-green beanie masking his forehead. Over his office shirt, he’d thrown a black fleecy vest and zipped it up to his chin. I was speechless. “What?” he said, goading me. “We’re walking. My head gets cold.”

I bravely said nothing and kissed the children goodnight. Teenage son smirked as I shut the front door.

We strolled through the darkening park, holding hands. I remembered how it felt to say nothing together. The lamplight pooled on the path. A soft breeze rustled the Norfolk Pines.

We should do this more often, I decided. It’s marriage that interferes with romance. There’s always another load of washing, a son to be ferried to soccer, another stirfry to create.

I caress his hand and he smiles at me. “Let’s stop off at Bunnings on the way. The dunny seat’s busted again. I want to see what they’ve got.”

“Are you kidding?”

“It’ll just take a minute.”

We cross the road and I follow him into Bunnings, my stilettos clip-clopping loudly on the concrete. He salutes the old fella at the paint counter: “Toilet seats, mate?” and we’re waved towards Aisle 4.

A dozen shiny ovals parade along the rear wall. “How d’ya like your seat, Blossom? Honey oak, deep jarrah, red cedar?” he calls.

He points to a see-through lid masquerading as an aquarium, three rubber dolphins frozen mid-frolic above a plastic coral reef. “How much would the kids love that?” I try to look uninterested.

“Righto, the Caroma Uniseat with Germguard looks like us,” he pronounces, unhooking a moulded ensemble in cling wrap.

“We’re not getting it now, surely?” I plead, tripping behind as he heads for the counter. He hands two fifties to the checkout boy and tucks our new seat under his arm.

Around the corner, the restaurant is crowded with raucous diners. I spot an empty table next to a woman with a pearl at her throat the size of a Malteser.

The maitre d’ sweeps towards us with clipboard and winning smile. “Table for two?” says my husband. “And can you find a home for this?” He proffers the toilet seat, plastic flapping from one hinge. The maitre d’ casts me a sideways glance. I roll my eyes, hoping we can be allies. “I’m so sorry,” says the waiter, appearing crestfallen. “We’re booked out tonight.” My husband shrugs and ushers me into the street.

“There’s another restaurant I’d like to take you to, but I found out they deliver so let’s go home.”

He pulls me close. “Don’t be disappointed, Blossom,” he says, seeing the look on my face. “After I’ve fixed the toilet you can treat me like a sex object.”

Good Enough

Good Enough
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 18, 2014

Everyone I know tells lies about motherhood. On bad days, we lie about how rewarding it is. On good days, we lie about how burdensome it is. We lie to ourselves that we know what we’re doing. We lie to each other because we don’t want to be judged as second-rate. And we constantly compare ourselves with other mothers, praying we measure up.

When my first son was a baby, I couldn’t reconcile my zen-mother fantasies with the shambolic woman I faced in the mirror at 5am. That first year, I existed in a Neverland of wakefulness. I would slump on the floor beside his cot, my right arm wedged between the slats, trying to lull him to sleep. I patted my baby’s rear through a mound of nappy until my shoulder ached and my shins were numb from kneeling on the floorboards.

At last, my baby’s eyelids would droop closed. My euphoria would quickly invert to dread as I prepared to exit. Nervously, I slackened my patting rhythm, ears pricked for any change in his breathy sighs. My eyes, tuned to the darkness, were fixed on his face, alert for any flicker of wakefulness.

One last pat and I’d rest the full weight of my hand on his little bottom and count to ten. Lifting my fingers one at a time, I’d retract my arm from his cot in slow motion. My weary limb would be reunited with rightful owner. Many a time I crawled out of that room on my hands and knees, desperate for my freedom. That first baby upended my world. But how quickly the maternal brain forgets.

Baby number 3 slept even less than Baby number 1. My confidence evaporated. Four-month-old daughter was a constant and demanding appendage. I stayed in my nightie and socks until lunchtime. But at school, when the competitive mums at school sidled over to see how I was coping, I tried to look composed, cheery even. “Oh! I’m fine. Really! She hardly ever cries!” When my friends rang to check on me, I’d burst into tears and plead to be rescued from this sleepless insanity. (The last great taboo for women is admitting that motherhood might not be the ultimate fulfilment).

The tracksuit years, as a girlfriend dubbed them, are well behind me now. I’m less tired but just as uncertain. I lurch from one parenting quandary to the next. Should I allow my 7-year-old son walk the 100 metres to school alone? (Not yet, I’ve decided, despite his wails of protest). Does four-year-old daughter need speech therapy for her lisp? (Not unless her pre-primary teacher next year is Mith Thimpthon).

I’m constantly filtering the parental do’s and don’ts proffered by others. One afternoon last week at the swings, another mum looked on as I cut up a sticky bun I’d bought at Bakers Delight: “How’ll they go when the sugar kicks in?!”

“Oh fine!” I said. “We’re here for a while. They’ll run it off.”

“Good luck!” she said with a smirk, lifting the lid on her artfully arranged platter of fruit. Outgunned, I considered launching a defence. But it was pointless. She wanted to feel superior. So I let her.

Why do we perpetuate the myth of the perfect mother? She doesn’t exist. In public she brags about how her three-year-old counts to 100 but fails to mention the same child won’t sleep without a dummy in each hand. Perhaps we need the lies of motherhood for our sanity – to excuse our failings.

I’m writing now from a coffee shop where a toddler is shrieking for his mother’s attention. His wails are jolting customers from their conversations. I can’t concentrate. The youngster’s mother is oblivious. She’s fixated on her phone, thumbs darting over the keypad. Pinned by his stroller straps, small boy kicks wildly and upends the sugar bowl, raining a shower of crystals onto to the floor. The manager emerges with a strained smile and a dustpan.

If my mother was here, a doyenne of society politesse, she’d make her annoyance felt with a huff or a meaningful stare. (Grandmothers are the self-appointed vigilantes of cafe etiquette). But I can only imagine how many times a child of mine has squawked in a cafe, and I’ve been too withered by tiredness to notice my detractors.

The best ally a mother can have is another mum who’ll make her a cup of tea at a kitchen bench scattered with crumbs. A mum whose floor is shiny with spilled glitter and sticky with glue, whose family room is festooned with washing still too damp to put away. I want to hug mothers who confess to ranting about missing sneakers and forgotten homework, who screech about festering sandwiches discovered in sweaty schoolbags. Because they’re the mothers who’ve stopped worrying about being bad or good, who’ve recognized that they’re both, and neither.

In Another Life

In Another Life
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 11, 2014

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to be anymore,” said a woman’s voice. I swivelled to take in the two 50-something suburbanites at the next table. A busty redhead was resplendent in purple. Her friend, a diminutive blonde, was listening attentively. The cafe buzzed with the mid-morning coffee crowd.

“I don’t know whether to be a walk-over or a ball-breaker,” I heard the redhead say. And then she caught my eye and harrumphed: “Now there’s a topic for your article!”

I was startled to be recognised, preferring to be an incognito columnist. But the redhead smiled and shuffled her chair towards me. “You know what?” she said. “I’m 51. Divorced. Worked all my life, own my own place. And the single men I meet? They want a maid. A hooker. Or their mothers!”

Her blonde friend trumped her: “My husband moved in with his mother when we split up. Then he took up with a much younger woman and is bringing up step-children. I just don’t get it. He wasn’t that interested in his family the first time round.”

I nodded. “The divorces are just starting in our crowd,” I replied. “Some of them come out the blue. And then you find out they’ve been miserable for years.”

The redhead snorted. “I never thought I’d say it, but I’m happier alone.”

It was an odd conversation to have with strangers. But I admired this pair of straight-shooters for sharing their marriage autopsies. The fairytales were over. Divorce was finally losing it sting. Warily, these two friends were improvising new lifestyles.

I too, thought I could choreograph my life. I’d skip easily into marriage and motherhood. If I worked hard, my career would go exactly to plan. I’d engineer good luck, circumvent bad.

In my twenties, I mapped out my television ambitions with the same precision that I applied mascara and blow-dried my 80s bouffant. As a current affairs reporter working in Sydney, I fantasised about Kerry Packer pegging me to succeed Jana Wendt.

The one time I saw him in the Channel Nine corridors, he was barrelling towards me with an entourage of suits in tow. I flattened myself against the wall and squeaked ‘Morning Mr Packer!’ as he passed. For a second, I saw his slitted eyes flick in my direction. (Later, I decided he must’ve been eyeballing the poster of Ray Martin behind me).

Aged 25, I made prophecies about Mr Right and how I’d have two kids, two years apart. I’d take motherhood in my stride, keep a nice house, win the Pulitzer prize.

I remember a girls’ lunch on the back veranda of our rented cottage in Shenton Park. I was married, aged 30. The first of our babies had arrived but I was still staring at blank windows on pregnancy sticks. I gazed longingly at a friend’s newborn. Then someone piped up: “So, if one in three marriages ends in divorce, one of us will be separated before we’re 40. Who’s it going to be?”

We cast sideways glances at each other, mentally calculating whose union we envied most, whose marriage would sag under strain. I thought: “Well, it ain’t gonna be me.”

Five years later my marriage was over. People gossiped. I’d become a conspicuous failure.

Working full-time and with a 3-year-old, I learnt resilience. I signed the divorce papers, hung onto the house. I scrimped to pay the mortgage, worked punishing hours. Only once did I miss a kindy concert.

But on those nights my little boy stayed with his dad, I lay in bed – bereft – and re-imagined where I went wrong. Guilt would tunnel through sleep, and I’d wake feeling queasy and drained.

Somehow, I’d followed the path of the one man I’d vowed never to emulate. My father was a serial groom: five children by three marriages. The fallout from his two divorces littered three states. His own nervous breakdown was amongst the wreckage. No-one plans such heartache.

In the cafe, my new acquaintances had waved their goodbyes. I surveyed the customers queueing at the coffee machine. Who was contentedly partnered? Who was lonely? Who thought they’d found ‘the one’ and now lived with disappointment.

My first marriage feels like a pale version of a previous life. Our treasured small boy is suddenly a gangly teenager. He has a kid brother and sister. A step-father who adores him. Will I tell my lad I planned it that way? Or that everything happens by chance. Or, if you’re lucky, with perseverance.

Last night, I took a moment to admire the pragmatist I met by happenstance at the pub ten years ago. Sprawled on the sofa, he was absorbed in the Grand Prix, but I interrupted him anyway. “Has your life turned out the way you planned it?”

“Too early to tell,” he said. “You’re blocking the telly.”

Old School Ties

Old School Ties
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday October 4, 2014

She weaved through the crowd towards me. I grinned and waved. I hadn’t seen her since I was 17 and now I was 46. Yet here we were at our thirty year high school reunion and she’d hardly changed. She looked softer than I remembered. Her hair was shorter. It suited her.

She squeezed in beside me at the bar. As I puckered up to greet her, I saw her eyes dart down to my name badge and back up to meet mine. In that instant, I realised she had no idea who I was.

My school-mate tried to recover her composure. “Ros!” she said brightly, but my ego had already collapsed. Our conversation lurched into a catalogue of our offspring and then we floundered. I made a lame excuse about needing the bathroom and fled.

The ladies’ loo is the only sanctuary at a school reunion. Re-applying my lipstick, I examined my reflection. Was it so surprising she hadn’t recognised me? I no longer had a centre part and camel-brown plaits. She and I were never close at school. We had no classes in common. To her, I was just another girl in the corridor in a broccoli-green blazer and drab pleated skirt.

And yet her memory lapse rattled me. Was I so forgettable? How could she have failed to notice my magnetic personality and sparkling wit? What was I like at high school? Twenty minutes into our reunion and my old insecurities, so long buried, swarmed to the surface.

I was the girl desperate to fit in but afraid of standing out. Always self-conscious. I remembered the hours spent preening, the bouts of self-loathing. “Better to be a late bloomer, I reckon,” said a friend’s dad. I still don’t know if he meant it as a compliment or a put-down.

Aged 15, I wanted a name like Jenny or Sally or Lizzy or Tracy because then I could reinvent myself as a Jen or a Sal, or Liz or Trace. I wanted a Reef Oil tan. I started drinking cola to look sophisticated. I blew a week’s waitressing money on a red string bikini like the one Elle McPherson wore in the TAB ads. (I mustered the courage to wear that bikini just the once – from my bedroom wardrobe to the bathroom mirror and smartly back again).

I feigned self-assuredness at school and wallowed in my inferiority complex at home. I was desperate to own a pair of white Starfire rollerskates because my friend Jane pirouetted effortlessly in hers. I wanted a boyfriend called Brent, or Shane, or Troy, preferably driving a V8 Falcon with a racing stripe down the side. I ended up with a boyfriend who drove a Ford Escort with a smashed tail-light. His name was Andy. Close enough, I decided.

I couldn’t bear to be parted from my posse of girlfriends. These were trusted friends who warned me that soaking my ponytail in lemon juice would make my hair go brassy, then brittle, then snap off. But they still went with me to the emergency hairdresser’s appointment afterwards. (Mum had already counselled me against do-it-yourself colorants. She disparaged hair dye the way she disparaged Gough Whitlam).

The door to the loos at the reunion hall banged open and in barrelled an old classmate. I snapped out of my teenaged angst as she shouted in mock anger: “I still don’t get why they made Jane the tennis captain! It should’ve been me! They made her bloody captain of everything!

I snorted.

“Trace,” I said, “does anyone, ever, get over high school!”

“Nup. Never.”

Back in the function room, the champagne was settling nerves and dissolving inhibitions. We shouted to make ourselves heard. I took a few moments to register some faces, but remarkably, our voices had stayed the same. One by one, we reconnected, exchanged life stories, surprised each other.

I recalled our previous reunion a decade ago. Then aged 36, I’d felt uncomfortable amid the jockeying that night. Who had their dream job? Who’d snaffled the perfect husband? Who looked good, better, different, old? Who was making a tit of themselves on the dance floor?

I’d arrived at my 30th reunion expecting more of the same. But actually, we’d finished gloating and posing. I admired the air traffic controller, the flamenco dancer, the opthalmologist, the mother of five. I heard about sick children. I swapped stories about ageing parents, friends who’d died. I listened to tales of crumbling marriages and cheating husbands. In middle age, most of us had shed our envy and were arriving at humility.

We all thought we’d grown out of our childish ways. Yet really, we’d just consolidated our personalities. The extroverts were still extroverts. The shy girls were still shy. And everyone said I was exactly the same. The same how? I don’t know what they meant. A giggly drunk? Hope not.