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First Trip in an Ambulance. Check.

Have you ever seen those Facebook memes that prompt you to check off the things you’ve done in your lifetime? 

The list, presumably someone’s perception of the good, the bad and the ugly that would constitute a life well lived, usually consists of things like being married (check),  been expelled (nope), travelled overseas (check), skydived out of a plane (nope) through to macabre offerings like ‘seen a dead person’ (nope, thankfully)  Although I’ll never completely fill the criteria given my fear of pain rules out getting a tattoo, I recently upped my percentage of life event coverage by checking off an often-featured item – riding in an ambulance.

There are very few scenarios where travelling in an ambulance is a desirable outcome. You are presumably accompanying a very unwell loved one or you are the unwell. Short of being fast-tracked to hospital to deliver a baby, getting to ride with lights and sirens as research for a feature article or having paramedicine as your chosen career, no one really wants to be in one.

This event was brought on by some sudden-onset chest pain in Sydney cab between the CBD and the airport, headed home to Melbourne after a work trip. No one really wants to have a conversation with a cab driver about the potential need to pull over and summon emergency services whilst on a major arterial in the Sydney peak so I breathed heavily and sought Google’s advice about how many minutes it would take to get to the airport.

My normal airport arrival process generally involves making a very rapid beeline to the check-in kiosk. Most who know me are aware that my #1 obsessive trait by a country mile is my determination to get to the airport absurdly early for any flight. Even having arrived early, I’m never satisfied until I’ve checked in and cleared security in case some administrative snafu consumes my contingency. This time my sights were set on an impressively chic Qantas customer service officer, to whom I somewhat sheepishly suggested I needed a first aid officer or a medical centre. She summoned a first aid attendant and a bench seat near the perimeter of the departure hall, just a tad too close to a coffee outlet.

The moment that a larger-than-life first aid officer appears and starts to unpack a surprisingly capacious bag of first-aid tricks you start to morph from a person quietly feeling unwell to a focus of interest for easily distracted travellers and high-vis-clad airport staff on a coffee break. At this point it was only ad-hoc attention as I tried to look like all I needed was a band-aid for blister after a day in a pair of ill-advised stilettos. His patter about ‘people of our age’ and the saga of his own rampant diabetes, was likely aimed at distracting me from the chisel in my chest but failed in its quest. What was also evident is that no one trains a first aid officer in discretion when their patient almost blows up the blood pressure monitor.

“yeah, well it normally reads high, but NOT THAT HIGH”

At this point an ambulance was summoned, the nice Qantas lady obtained me a glass of water and told me not to worry about my flight as there’s one every  the half hour until 10pm so I’d still likely get out that night. The first aid chap, having dug out an aspirin that proved incapable in solving the issue was still tapping at his BP monitor screen as if to Morse-Code it into providing a more reasonable response.

Ambulance officers have an effortless look of utter competence. I don’t know how they pull it off but it’s universal. Mixing it with members of our emergency services is a pretty foreign experience for me. I’ve been a innocent customer of a roadside random breath test many times, but they still leave me instinctively guilt-ridden even if I’m three weeks into Dry July. The closest I’ve ever been to a firefighter is the view of a 2018 calendar in Auntie Lorraine’s spare bathroom. I was last in the hands of St John ambulance staff as a teenager, after some projectile vomiting that resulted from my reckless attempt to prove I’d grown out of genetically-gifted motion sickness by taking on a spinny amusement ride.

A bit of chit chat and then I’m horizontal on a stretcher in a moment that is now right up there on my ‘most mortifying’ list – a corporately dressed woman being wheeled out of Sydney airport in full view of airline peak commuters on a Wednesday afternoon, with my carry-on bag tagging along. I can only imagine the thoughts of the spectators….too many chardonnays in the Qantas Club? The new face of the Opioid crisis?

I’m currently in my Julia Gillard phase when it comes to wardrobe; as well as a commitment to being ‘ deliberately barren ‘ we share an obsession for white jackets designed to distract the gaze upwards, strictly accompanied by a dark colour from the waist down. Despite a long history of coveting Louboutin shoes, I always felt that the signature red soles were a wasted flourish, destined to be face down on the pavement for the bulk of their service to womankind.

Not if you are horizontal on a stretcher.

The inside of an ambulance is abnormally well-lit and features compartments labelled and organised to a standard that would make Marie Kondo weep with joy. A quick ECG that suggests I’m probably not having a heart attack but apparently isn’t definitive and the nice ambulance chap asks me if I need to call someone? I figure it is time to call my husband and when asking for some details (like which hospital I was headed to) nice ambulance chap gave me his #1 tip.

“Best not to lead with I’m calling from an ambulance”

En-route to the hospital we were held up by a traffic accident, at which point I was feeling a bit fraudulent given if I was having an actual heart attack I’d probably be dead by now, and quite open to offering up my spot if there was a curb-side pedestrian bleeding from a gaping head wound. But there wasn’t, so I was shortly deposited in the backroom of a hospital which was busier than Sunday 1am at Swanston St Maccas  and exhibiting a similar demographic.

I was taken to a room that seemed nothing like any episode of ER that I’ve ever seen and was also disappointingly devoid of any scrub-clad George Clooney types. My ECG chest stickers got another run. I went in for a chest X-ray. Apparently something more definitive thatn ‘pfft’ is required as an answer to the ‘could you be pregnant?’ question which is a precursor to being blasted with X-rays. The attendant was clearly unable to hear my ovaries laughing out loud at the concept.

On the offchance that what was ailing me was gastric in nature, the doc handed me what they call in the biz a ‘Pink Lady’. This was some kind of pink liquid antacid, dosed with a local anaesthetic. If this shut down the pain it would mean that this whole palaver was nothing more than a dose of dodgy over-chilli’d ramen which would really be next-level embarrassing.

Following on from the grand tradition of my interactions with coloured drinks with cocktail names, it wasn’t helpful.

After all of this at the hands of a very young doctor, they rolled in the big guns – a very distinguished older gentleman who looked like his career began well before Dr Google, with plenty of runs on the board.

He looked at my chart and declared that we were the same age and things like this simply started to go wrong once we hit ‘our demographic’. Clearly I’m losing touch with how I’m ageing.

He decided to do an ultrasound of my heart, with a swoosh or two over my other organs to rule out gallstones or other such incursions. I really wanted to ask how my liver was looking given it had been subject to some battering over the journey but for fear of the answer being ‘a lovely shade of Rosé’ I remained mute.

It was determined to possibly be a thing called costochondritis which is rat-cunning in its ability to mimic heart attack symptoms but is treatable with OTC painkillers.

Although I’d been in the hospital for about eight hours, my discharge was at odds with Sydney airport’s runway curfew and I had to kill about four hours before flights resumed the next day. Here’s a tip – classy airport hotels don’t take 2am booking requests from slightly groggy sounding women very seriously.

‘Fully booked ma-am.’ Times four.

The budget version of an already three-star chain (yes, this is a thing) was able to honour my request. I was advised that the regular $99 rate wouldn’t be available to me and I’d be stumping up $129 – presumably a $30 premium to offset the side effects of accommodating a female who’d possibly had one too many espresso martinis and might be toting a rowdy sidekick after a big night out in Paddington.

But it was just me, a woman still covered in ECG stickers, with nothing more potent than a non-alcoholic Pink Lady and a couple of ibuprofen on board.

They don’t put that one on the Facebook bucket list.

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Hiking and camping.

I’m fine with hiking. Day hiking, The kind where you need only schlepp some water, snacks that you are blissfully ignorant constitute more than double the calories you will burn in a day hike and the Wet Ones that you have carried as a precaution ever since a hiking mate suffered a bowel blowout on the Masons Falls trail in 2015. I’m also fine with camping, however it tends to err on the glamping side and is somewhat dicey given I lumber around like a graceless yak in confined spaces. Hiking and camping?

Nope.

A friend had suggested a two day hike to Beeripmo in the Mount Cole State Forest – a 22ish km hike in and out of a bush camp.

Inaccessible by road means carrying all food and lodgings on your back. If I wanted to do that I’d be a turtle.

However I was in a state of physical breakdown and somehow thought that a day or two of fresh air and bush scenery would blow out some cobwebs. A floating skerrick of meniscus freeballing  around my kneecap had slowed down my running training to a distance and pace that was less than a six year old would clock at school during morning recess. Some kind of weird virus had been rolling through my body for several days unleashing alternating bouts of sweats and chills. Somehow I thought that operating at this sub-par level was the ideal foundation for a fairly brutal two day hike.

So next minute we’re arriving in Beaufort which I last remember as a breakfast stop on a road trip to the Barossa Valley in those heady early days of a new relationship. I suspected that nothing in the next 36 hours would resemble anything like that trip. We found ourselves hoe-ing into a steak, bacon and cheese pie at the bakery, having made a pact before we’d even cleared the West Gate bridge that nothing short of a country baked pie would do as prep for this shindig. A charming older chap on a bowls club excursion looked a little askance at our breakfast until I pointed at my fresh-off-the-shelf Kathmandu hiking pants and justified this pastry indulgence as the LAST SUPPER before two days in the bush.

The most blessed thing about this whole arrangement was that we were going with a guided group. A guided group that would loan you the back-pack, tent and sleeping mat, to avoid me investing in ANOTHER bunch of gear. Gear that would likely prove short-lived and result in more expensive stuff joining my 1990s ski gear (used one season), my 2000s wet suit (used one water skiing weekend)  and the obsolete hiking backpack (used for one weekend) back in the era where backpacks had clunky aluminium stabilising parts. When it comes to outdoor activities, I’m the ultimate Tinder-style commitment-phobe – short term invested, long term uninterested.

We met our guide Sarah (not her real name) in a Beaufort car park where I surveyed the loaned gear and sized up the ability of a rucksack already packing a tent and sleeping mat to accommodate my other stuff. I was IMMENSELY proud of how lightly I’d packed. Bare minimum clothing layers. Bamboo eating utensils I’d swiped from a lunch venue the day before. Only one mobile phone. A bottle of Rose that had been decanted into a lightweight plastic bottle. 340 grams of Jaffas. My only issue was my sleeping bag. Sometime, many years ago, in that age of over-investing in outdoor activities, my innate fear of cold had prompted me to purchase a sleeping bag that would hold its own in the Antarctic, but had not seen the benefit of modern day research into more lightweight thermal components. It was not a hiking sleeping bag, but it was my only option. From the moment I tried to get it into the backpack, it was dubbed ‘The Wombat’ as it appeared to behave exactly like a robust struggling marsupial when trying to be inserted into a confined space.

With The Wombat eventually wrangled into submission, we drove to the Richards campsite and car park which is the starting point for the Beeripmo walk. Clever people had elected to go no further and were happily relaxing in campsites within strolling distance of their vehicles and within 20 minutes of the pie shop.

Apparently we were not those people.

I don’t know how to describe the first day of hiking, except to say it was uphill. Relentlessly uphill.  Zig-zagging because only mountain goats could go straight-up, uphill. Meniscus-searing, sweat into your hairline, trudgingly uphill. Sarah encouraged all of us to take moments to stop to observe the stunning forest scenery which was the most beautiful code for ‘if you think you might cry about the uphill-ness, just stop and look at the ferns’

Of course, views are GREAT when you go uphill. Uphill also means that unless you are departing by helicopter, there will at some point be some downhill.

Just when I’d lost the will to live, a sign signalling ‘Beeripmo Camp – 500m’ came into view.

At this point I want to digress into how flagrantly loose this whole hiking gig is when it comes to distances. As a long distance runner, I worship at the altar of Garmin.  The Garmin boffins and their investment in satellites mean that I always know how far I’ve travelled and how fast. Knowing that a half marathon is 21.1km and a marathon 42.2km means there’s a really good sense of how much more torture is in store before it’s over. After each year’s Melbourne Marathon there is an outcry from a certain percentage of marathon participants who declare loudly on social media that ‘The Course Was Long’ because their Garmins clocked up 110 metres further than the regulation distance. The people in charge of hiking distances do not care for such accuracy. I guess they assume that if you’ve hiked relentlessly uphill, telling you that there’s 500m to camp when it could be more like 750 is just a matter of rounding.

Anyhow, 500 metres plus or minus (ie plus) 250m we were at camp. My friend with way more outdoors experience, coached me through the straightforward process of erecting a lightweight hiking tent. Amazingly, it was simpler, and there were fewer moving parts than operating my food processor. It was super-super cold and I piled on every layer I’d carted up the stupid hills, only wondering for a moment whether it was acceptable to romp around camp wearing The Wombat as an oversized poncho. Next priority was finding wood for the campfire. I operated at ‘kindling’ level, with some of camp-mates doing a far better job by venturing further afield and gathering actual logs.

At this point, Sarah the guide started to produce actual miracles from her backpack. She operates at ‘Magic Faraway Tree Land of Goodies’ level. .

This included two litres of red wine – at which point I felt inclined to applaud. On top of a cheese platter, sticky date pudding with caramel sauce, a vegie curry with cous-cous and S’Mores made of marshmallows wedged between chocolate wheatens pre-wrapped in foil for ease of campfire toasting,  I would have sold my first born child in appreciation (if I had one) to be able to keep Sarah on staff at my house.

I can’t go past this point without mentioning the gluten-free vegans. A husband and wife on our trek had declared themselves gluten-free vegans. I’m in awe of those whose beliefs are strong enough to endure a life without cheese. I’m genuinely sorrowful for those whose gut health denies them the joy of warm sourdough. However these two had beliefs and digestive systems that were apparently entirely discretionary based on how they relaxed their restrictions on this trip, devouring oozy brie, canned tuna and wraps rampantly riddled with gluten. Their box-ticking at the start of the trip meant that we collectively carted a slab of gluten free bread, a packet of gluten-cookies and an inordinate amount of chickpeas up that hill and back down again, a sad collective of ingredients that were about as desirable as my 2000s water-skiing wetsuit.

Night fell. The campfire was all out of fuel by 7:48pm which meant we all retired to our tents. I was incredibly fearful of being cold, but my investment in layers, my Antarctic-grade sleeping bag and my peri-menopausal body meant I was beyond toasty. When it comes to a vast-amount of tent-time before Sunday departure, my more experienced friend had invested in two things that, as a rookie, I had not. 1. A lightweight, yet suitably distracting Mills and Boons novel. 2. A miracle device you can use to charge your phone without power. This meant that while she had adequate distraction in the witching hours between sunrise and when everyone emerges from tents, I had nothing to look at except my sleeping bag washing instructions.

Sunday morning. We were subject to oppressive mist and the inefficiency of newbie hiker-campers who don’t understand that Sunday is about express consumption of muesli and getting the hell off the mountain.

My ‘what goes up must go down’ wish came true except for a short side trip to a lookout over Mt Langhi Ghiran. I knew all about Mt Langhi Ghiran, not geographically but via exposure to its rather excellent wine label.

Day two was boringly downhill. One of my 1990s hiking boots suffered the kind of blowout that keeps Daniel Riccardo off the podium.

The front sole unexpectedly dislocated itself and got so flappy that I had to walk like a pensioner with a hip replacement to keep the uncontrolled front bit from tripping me. Given I’m an inexpert hiker at best, I was eminently grateful to survive this equipment failure. Last time I was so challenged on a trail I fell, destroying a beautiful pair of Michael Kors sunglasses and enduring nine stitches to my forehead inserted under local anesthetic in an outback health clinic.

Thankfully, I was shortly back in the Richards car park, smugly marinating in hiking endorphins and drafting a triumphant Facebook post.

I want to declare that I will do this again, but the fact it took me till Wednesday to navigate stairs means maybe I won’t.

Post script: Made it down the mountain without damage, Followed those closely studied sleeping bag washing instructions. Whilst trying to hand-wash The Wombat in the bath, my forehead had a high-impact encounter with the bath tap, resulting in bruising, bleeding and loss of skin  – a nice little reminder of the risks of outdoor endeavours.

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What A Rookie Stepmother Can Learn From Maria Von Trapp

If you are inclined to take on life lessons from movies, you’ve learned all the key traits of a governess from Mary Poppins, the innate elegance of a little black dress from Breakfast at Tiffanys, and all the moves you ever needed from Dirty Dancing.

One of the most enduring movies about stepmothers of the non-wicked genre is The Sound of Music – where we are enticed to adore a pious yet lovable curtain-trasher.

Here’s what we learned from this classic.

Your life’s purpose can be subject to random revision

One would assume that there would be a fairly deep level of soul searching involved in the decision to dedicate a life to poverty, celibacy, charity and the wearing of unattractive shoes. Whether triggered by a major life event or driven by deep-seated faith, ticking the ‘nun’ box after consultation with your high school career counselor has taken some thought.

With the childlessness that is an obvious extension of this whole celibacy gig, its fair to say that launching yourself into step-parenthood after a mere dabble in some childminding work experience outside the abbey is a variation on what fate intended.

Don’t underestimate the value of a showtune

Maria won over the Von Trapp children by recognising the areas where the brood were bereft of love, where they lacked a recognition of the joys of art and culture. Given the handy availability of a guitar, Maria chose to convey both love and life lessons in song. We won’t all feel like our life’s purpose has been fulfilled by bestowing children with the ability to string together a do-re-mi. We won’t all feel compelled to help small humans understand simple joys via a melodious exploration of brown paper packages tied up with string.

The modern day childless stepmother equivalent is karaoke. In the same way Maria made a simple yet multi lingual ‘good night’ wonderfully lyrical, you can embed within a child everything from a serious understanding of deep south sentiment via ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ through to how a simple dancefloor hedonism can co-exist with chart-topping success via ‘Dancing Queen’

These are all valuable learnings.

Re-worked soft furnishings might need a re-do

There are degrees in the spectrum of adequately clothing children.

As a child of financially circumspect parents, clothes that were handed down from close relatives or family were embraced with almost the same degree of enthusiasm as a puppy. If you had a single pair of jeans that needed to stay with you while your growth spurt converted them from full length jeans to a ¾ length pant, you’d be well pleased to inherit jeans from a slightly taller relative.

For the Von Trapp kiddies, presented as they were in his’n’hers outfits that were a special kind of sailor with a large dose of daggy, they were more than content to go next level with outfits constructed from handy and expendable curtain fabric.

Today’s redo? Its going to take way more than recycled window furnishings to win over a stepkid. Cash up your Visa sister, this is a war to be won at Westfield.

There will be a battle against an incumbent

Whether previously childless or not, the path to step-parenting is varied. Whether you have employed some Disney-stepmother-like plotting to dislodge a biological mother or you simply step into the void left by death, divorce or despair, it’s a personal journey. By definition, there is an incumbent of some flavour.

Maria had two.

Firstly – a biological mother who had the fortitude to withstand the rigours of birthing seven children but somewhat recklessly succumbed to scarlet fever. This is possibly the most insurmountable type of incumbent. No matter the state of the relationship or deep-seated character flaws of the biological mother, an untimely death means that they will assume the status of a combination of Mother Teresa and Princess Diana. The only upside of marrying a widower is that you are spared a living-breathing-child-support-absorbing human who will remain a fixture in your stratosphere.

Secondly – a glamorous baroness with a current role in the widower’s life. Granted most of us will not battle a Princess Grace lookalike but there are many modern day equivalents that would be fairly daunting. You might be battling the rebound relationship he had with a gym junkie with an obsession for competing in on-stage bikini figure competitions. Perhaps a  Gwyneth style earth-mother who seems born to assume parenting duties for stepchildren, with abundant spare time funded by a website hawking popular yet unproven herbal remedies. An Angelina Jolie type who has some spare positions in her rainbow family.

No matter what, there’ll be a third party of some kind.

There may be external challenges

Poor Maria. If it wasn’t enough for her to ditch her vow to a capital-S Sisterhood, convert the affections of seven children through song and stave off both a deceased and living female opponent, her desire for ongoing happiness is further threatened by the spectre of the Third Reich. Thankfully her nun-buddies play a part in sheltering the children before they all make a break across the mountains for neutral-as-ever Switzerland.

If you’ve battled with a biological mother,  a deep-seated internal ambivalence to parenthood and a full on tribe of bonus kids with needs you can never anticipate, you hardly need the brute force of a new world order to make this whole gig harder.

Just bear in mind that, unlike Maria, you are not dodging militants pushing guns, gas chambers and genocide. It’s the local PTA that restricts mother’s day stall gift-giving to purely the blood-mothers that will do you in.

Thankfully though, we know that Maria makes it over domestic, metaphorical and actual mountains to safety and a happily ever after. If unsure, google the real -life story and you’ll find that the ending was even easier – the family left openly, safely and unimpeded by Gestapo, with no assistance from any member of any Nun-derground railway, via train to Italy.

This gig could be easier than you thought.

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The Rookie Stepmother – How Schools Work


Assuming you haven’t come into step parenting at a very young age, you are going to find there are vast differences in the way that schools work compared to your own tender experience as a child. If you are inserted into step parenthood via a child that is already some way into their school years, you’ll find the learning curve staggering. Here is the rookie’s guide to navigating the minefield that is primary school.


Everything is on an app

Without wanting to reveal my age, I have to declare that school communications to my parents involved photocopies of something typed in the font that we know today as courier, which was in fact the only font that you could belt out on an old-school manual typewriter. Mrs Bryan in the principal’s office constructed all the notices which were duly carted home, often adhered to a loose cheese sandwich which had been scorned during the lunch break.  This is how you knew of Father’s Day Stalls and how you received excursion consent forms (without nearly enough fine print as today’s litigious world would demand)

Now it’s an app. This is goodness in that you are aren’t subjected to the inherent inadequacy of single-copy paper-based comms where your child switches between two households. You need not delve a hand into a school bag, risking the shock that comes from sliding a hand over a long-ignored pear that has started to reduce itself to liquid. The downside? This app is the ‘Facebook of Shame’ in that it will convey to you every extra-curricular activity that you are failing to support and every thankless volunteer activity that you are leaving to that tired but dedicated group of super mums who care more than you. It has a Facebook like feed function, but denies you a like button so you can’t relieve your stepmum guilt by simply showing thumbs up support about something to do with the next trivia night. 

The canteen is different

Ordering a bought lunch was a rare treat in my primary school years. The canteen menu was free of any guilt-inducing count of calories, fat grams or healthy food star ratings. It contained a glorious array of junk food and you were at no risk of censure or removal into child services protection if you ordered the combo of sausage roll, pineapple donut AND chocolate milk.

Entrée into this olden-day world of lunch orders demanded nothing more from an overworked mother than the order written on a paper bag and inclusion of the appropriate collection of coins.

These days, again, it’s on an app. Pies and donuts don’t feature on the list. Losing a first tooth in a sausage roll half way through primary school is apparently a milestone that will be denied our current generation. The equivalent will be a tooth gouged out by a canteen-baked, guaranteed nut-free, organic oat cookie. Soft drinks are replaced by fruit tinged bubbly water and smoothies. It feels inevitable that the app will shortly include a tab that presents you with purely paleo options.

The order is charged to your credit card and there’s a neat little ‘recurring’ button if you want an intervention-free delivery of a standing lunch order, assuming your stepchild is conveniently lodged in a food rut. Just remember to turn it off once they graduate.

Traditions are reworked

Mother’s and Father’s Days are universally a big topic for kids schools. Twenty years ago this involved some concentrated craft effort in producing picture frames, hand-made chocolates and glittery cards. Now it involves a serious supply chain logistics effort in diverting cheap Chinese made products of dubious quality to local school kids.

The school app has educated me that the female champions that require honouring on mother’s day are confined to very traditional roles:  ‘Bring your mum, your nanna, your grandma!’  (stepmamas don’t get a guernsey)

Sadly, it appears that getting a male role model into a father’s day breakfast is much harder and achieving a respectable level of attendance necessitates casting a far wider net. The school app will breezily convey that it the ‘Father’s and Special Fellas’ day stall and invites ‘Dads, Grandpas, Stepdads, Uncles, Neighbours, Friends and Brothers’ and only just stops short of inviting your local Jim’s mowing guy.

Digital delivery of guilt

Social media already provides several channels to provoke feelings of complete inadequacy. There is already an amazing ability to poke at your most vulnerable bits. The sparkling blue seas around a Facebook Bora Bora honeymoon overwater bungalow pic will gouge away at that item on your un-ticked bucket list.  The Pinterest post of a pantry impeccably herded into stacked and labelled Tupperware will compare unfavourably with your food anarchy that plays host to an infestation of pantry moths and make you question everything about your ability as an organised woman.

The school app is going to grind away at your guilt levels in the same way that seawater carves out cliffs. Here are some examples

  • A call for volunteers in the kid’s canteen. A desperate call for volunteers in the kid’s canteen. A sombre announcement that the kid’s canteen is closing. The auctioning off of bulk ingredients left unused after the closure of the kid’s canteen
  • The call to send a dollar with your kid for icy pole day, noted  by you three days after icypole day
  • The call for helpers on gelato day, asking that you BYO and apron and scoop which only serves to reinforce your domestic disgrace in owning neither an apron nor an ice-cream scoop. 

A twist on fundraising concepts

There’s a wine drive.

We had a snowball drive in my day. Thousands of marshmallows gave up their lives to coalesce with faux chocolate and desiccated coconut and evolve into a mountain of half-dozen snowball packs. You had to sell them to neighbours, colleagues and family to raise money to fund school projects.

When I saw ‘wine drive’ I applauded the evolution of the snowball drive. I imagined a carefully curated collection of award-winning whites and reds, pre-bundled for you and representing the perfect emergency stash for unexpected guests. The backup/disaster recovery equivalent that will save you calling an Uber in the event of a late night wine drought. The perfect combination of a fund-raising package that benefits the school and boosts your wine stash. I’d pay over the odds for that.

No. They are actually calling on you to donate your unwanted wine to be auctioned off at trivia night.

They lost me at unwanted wine.

The upshot?

You just need to become accustomed to how your life has changed. Five years ago you would have woken up to a bunch of email notifications triggered by a late-night wine-fuelled placement of your profile on a dating website. Today you will wake up to a notification that there’s a kid to be picked up after school camp at 2:15pm.

It’s different. Try to breathe.

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Three Traits You Need As A Rookie Stepmother

Given the stubborn failure of even a skerrick of maternal instinct to kick in at any stage during my child-bearing years, the prospect of inheriting a child as the steak knives of shacking up with a Dad caused me to wonder what essential life experience I lacked as a result of not having brought one of my own into the world.

Thankfully, the role of stepmother has less breadth than full-blown parenthood. Even more thankfully, most of the essential attributes for the rookie stepmother were actually part of my experience, despite not having gained them through bio-kid-rearing. Here are the top three:

Care of a small being

I may not have a great track record when it comes to the care of living things. I had a regrettable experience with the baby lovebird for which I had custody as part of a high school science assignment. To be fair, the bird required four-hourly hand feeding and my only misstep was to sleep through what must have been one of the more pivotal ones timed in the wee hours. The back-room post mortem performed by my biology teacher confirmed neglect as the cause of death and although I was able to rescue my grades by pairing up with a more responsible student, it probably contributed to the perception that I lacked the requisite skills to shepherd a child successfully from foetus to functioning adult.

Apart from this rookie error, I do in fact have a fairly consistent history of caring for small beings. Herbie the guinea pig thrived in my care, kept as he was in frequently cleaned housing, dining on balanced diet of fresh carrots and a an assortment of grains, and patiently enduring dress-ups. To be perfectly honest, his ability to thrive was probably based on the rampant amount of procreating he did with his soul-mate Fluffy, producing litter after litter of babies and cementing his lineage in suburban domestic rodent history.

I’ve also proven adept at ensuring the long life of more than one domestic cat – one of ordinary moggy breeding and even temperament and one pedigreed
tortoiseshell Persian . The latter lived for nearly eighteen years off the joy of terrorising all visitors and shedding long fur that clung very persistently to every carpeted surface and taunted those with sensitive nasal passages. Although I yearned for her affection, Sophie only loved one person in her life and it was not me.

So I did not need a small human to teach me the importance of feeding and nurturing. Fruitless pursuit of affection from a distant feline was perfectly adequate as to train me in the harsh reality of living with a stepchild not genetically obligated to return my affection.

Patience

I was not initially known for my innate patience. Midway through my career the universe recognised that this was not going to be resolved for me by the birthing and raising of small children and sought instead to gift me with a long stint working in Japan. Many will visualise Tokyo as an insanely overpopulated city that appears to vomit neon and is in a perpetually trembling state perched as it is on the combo of a subterranean network of rumbling trains and a major seismic fault-line. In reality it is driven by both ancient customs and modern norms that SLOW EVERYTHING DOWN. You only need to observe the tortuous process by which Mr Miyagi trains a young Daniel in the nuances of martial arts or the languorous coma-like procession of events in the movie Lost In Translation.

Being sent to a country to untangle complicated computer system implementations that appeared to have stalled a long way away from realising a single logon was the ultimate exercise in teaching patience. With a Japanese vocab that leaned more towards Midori and Sushi than the concepts required to unwind the actions of large project teams, the entire trouble-shooting exercise was conducted through an overwrought interpreter.  I could count the heartbeats of my draining lifeforce while a large committee conducted robust and lengthy dialog, accompanied by vigorous gesticulation before allowing my interpreter to respond back to my question with a simple ‘No.’

So I am generally unblinking in the face of the inordinate amount of time it takes to leave the house as a family, the torture involved in locating an elusive pair of shoes or the unfathomable need to perpetually find a bike pump given every item of inflatable sporting equipment appears to defiantly deflate when it enters our household.

Diplomacy

A corporate consulting career that involved trying to help companies navigate their way out of an IT environment laid waste by neglect or through a business process transformation that is far more ambitious than its current level of capability, is built on providing advice cloaked in a level of diplomacy. There’s a subtle art to helping a corporation move on from a lack of foresight or some clunky decision making and focus on the future. You may feel like an entire middle level of management needs to be sat down and given a good-and-shouty verbal shellacking but you will be required to provide advice couched in terms of ‘evolving the culture’ and ‘making step-change’. It’s only appropriate to suppress the instinctive level of outright scorn that demands to be leveled at corporation run by a rampant dictator or whose entire decision making capability hangs off a sketchy web of excel spreadsheets only understood by one person in the joint.

So step-life diplomacy was just another day in the office. It was initially challenging to find a way to respect ill-defined, porous boundaries when it came to my role in parenting, to remain unblinking in the face of new norms that appeared to defy all tenets of civilised behaviour and to navigate blatantly illogical arguments when they came from the other side of the custodial parent divide. The strategies of 1) never responding out loud with the first reaction that came to mind and 2) liberal use of wine as an aid to reflection on the day’s events proved as useful in stepmother life as they did among corporate mayhem.

Hang in there, you’ve already got all the skills.

You don’t have to have borne kids of your own to nail this.

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I’m sorry Marie Kondo….

Thanks to Marie Kondo, our nature strips are groaning under the weight of tottering Pisa-esque towers of unwanted garage detritus.

Charity bins are engorged with now-reviled excess clothing.

Op shop volunteers are keeling over with fatigue as they attempt to deal with the output of Netflix watchers that grew a little tired of Ozark’s relentless violence and turned to what they thought was some light-hearted Japanese-inspired housekeeping.

E-Bay is awash with desperate attempts to gain some coin from last season’s barely worn frivolous purchases that no longer spark joy.

Every part of my being that has been ruled by the floordrobe, clothes-chair and the act of ‘shovage’ -which involves cramming everything into a cupboard then pushing it closed before the contents can fall out again – WANTS to believe in KonMari. Like every addict that clings to a new guru that promises a simple path to sobriety, I want to believe.

But I can’t even.

Here’s why:

I’m not sure she’s actually real

When Kondo was a mere child, her parents actually called a moratorium on her decluttering.

Today? There is no parent alive that thinks that their child is overindulging in decluttering.

She apparently got herself into such a spin about the state of her teenage bedroom and her inability to satisfy the decluttering demon within that she actually passed out when contemplating her clutter and remained unconsciously prone on her shag-pile for two hours. Today’s reality? Any teen that passes out in their bedroom has underestimated their ability to metabolise either a cannabis-derived product or the fumes of a long-neglected lunchbox.

She also wrote her thesis on decluttering.

Her methods are unsustainable

A festive break from work, the energy accumulated from several days of naps, a shift to cooler weather and the duress imposed by new years’ resolutions sparked a relentless quest on my part to transform my spare room. It needed to move on from a cluster of wicker baskets drooling with activewear, a queen bed whose only function was to provide refuge to a cubic metre of clutter and undetected cat vomit, and a shoe rack that lacked the spine to hold up a selection of my favourite shoes and perpetually slanted sideways.

I lost my temper, 2 kilos of sweat and 14 potential nap hours gutting this room. I invested a month’s  worth of grocery budget into throw rugs, cushions and soft furnishings aimed at making it a sanctuary. Items that were layered like recklessly unsupervised lasagne went vertical and partitioned under Kondo rule.

Like that half hour window where your newly-zshushed black car scoots around all shiny before it rains or is subjected to a gentle dust shimmer, it looked temporarily amazing.

Three days later, I’d done a weeks-worth of laundry and found myself totally disinclined to sort that stuff vertically in keeping with the Kondo-faith. All bets were off.

Books

I can forgive Marie Kondo for setting a standard for tidying that involves actually fainting on the job.

I think I can subscribe to a view that you ditch things that you don’t love.

But EVERY SINGLE MOLECULE of my being totally rejects her concept that you should retain no more than 30 books.

Ms Kondo – despite my awe at your shiny hair, your Netiflix-goddessness, your faith in your convictions, I have to declare that on the basis of that last statement, you are dead to me.

I’m assuming that you think that one book of the thirty is yours which leaves me a scant twenty-nine to contain my forty-plus years of love and devotion to everything bookish from Enid Blyton to Lee Child.

No go darl.

My view is that if you’ve invested in the appropriate amount of cheapo Swedish flat pack furniture to house all your books then you are totally entitled to keep as many as you like.

I’m sorry Marie.

I’ve gotta let you go.

You don’t spark joy.

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Managing Blended Family Finances (ie hands off my shoe budget!)

Dollar Sign isolated on white background. 3D render

If food fights and first sleepovers weren’t enough, the freight train of stepmother firsts is about to bring a new flavour of normal your way.

Finances.

Specifically, shared finances. Melded finances started off simple back in the day where all you were trying to do was merge funds as a kid-free couple in your early 20s. This era probably felt very straightforward if you had refrained from diving into a mortgage or cultivating a care factor over retirement funds.

Fast forward a bunch of years and if you’ve still maintained a budget that is not impeded by the need to keep any small humans alive, you’ve probably become nicely settled into being the queen of your financial domain. If you want to pay half the GDP of a small nation to spend some quality time at a silent yoga retreat to eat and sleep like a peasant and refrain from all verbal interactions then there’s no one around to judge you.

If you shack up with a stepdad, you are buying into a complex financial world – one where all the might of the family law court, the child support agency and the tax office are king. Get used to it, the elephant in the room that is the child support calculation and it’s minions that manage the collection of school fees, books and uniforms are going to be putting their grubby feet on your furniture for as many years as it takes to marry this guy’s kids off.

Even if you get a handle on what these grabby chaps are going to shave off your shoe budget, there’s a bunch of sneaky little overheads inherent in managing a family of kidlets. Like food. Like clothing.

To top it all off, if there’s child support involved, and there almost always is unless the ex is no longer of this world, or is in jail, then you are going to watch dollars that ordinarily would have greased the wheels of your household head over to hers. Repeatedly. 

These financial shenanigans are going to surround you for a while, so you need to understand this whole get-up and have a strategy to deal. Here’s some advice.

Kids are expensive

If you are a parent already, you know all this, so skip to the next section so you can preserve some energy to dwell darkly on how child support is spent. If not, read on and know this:

Food. Kids prefer highly processed foods. This means you are not just paying for whatever original food item may have existed in the general area of a fruit roll-up, but all the rolling, extracting and packaging equipment that has been involved since, not to mention the R&D spend on genetic modification that may be secreted deeply in its past. A simple plate of pear quadrants whilst cheaper and more recognisable to Mother Nature, is excruciatingly unpalatable to a 4-year-old.

Clothes. Kids relentlessly grow out of their wardrobes and are immune to any conversation about buying cheap versions based on the solid formula of cost-per-wear that you’ve personally used to justify ‘classic’ and ‘vintage’ purchases for about the last twenty years. Those swooshy Nikes are going to be on that kid for about seven outings, but don’t even suggest that they be clad in Dunlop Volleys till their feet stop growing. If they don’t grow out of them, they’ll lose them. Losing elements of a school uniform is a special kid art form. I’ve developed a dark conspiracy that the lost property office at a primary school is a complete myth and, under cover of darkness, they secretly launder (literally and figuratively) items back into the local suburban uniform store where you’ll buy them again to replace the lost item.

If they are not lost at school they’ll be lost in that Bermuda Triangle that always exists between split parent households where neither party’s willingness to admit culpability means the most Mexican of standoffs will result when it comes to replacement.

Don’t think about how the child support is being spent

Watching child support dollars flow like unstoppable lava into another household is relentlessly disconcerting, and something you’ll be ill-prepared for unless you’ve had the experience of investing in 1980s timeshare holidays or early 2000s agribusiness.

My friends, in this case, you need to make like Elsa and just let it go.

Do not try to determine what child support is intended to cover, in an effort to see if it absolves your household income from items such as school fees or uniforms. You will lose what remains of your Netflix-binge-ravaged eyesight if you try to find guidelines on this topic on any government website.

Do not internally or overtly make any observation on how your household’s contribution to the child’s mother appears to be funding her expensive high maintenance balayage hair colour, intricate tattoo collection or new boyfriend’s desire to make his garage band the next Nirvana. Nothing good can come of you comparing your now-budget summer holiday in a wonky floored, grease-and-despair scented cabin in a caravan park awash with grubby 10 year olds to her newly subsidised trips to Hawaii complete with infinity pool and kids club. For every mother who seems to be rorting the child support system there are ten others that need every last dollar that your household is providing.

Just let the funds go forth with good grace (and the knowledge that child support law makes it non-negotiable anyway) and know that one day this too will pass.

Maybe help get the kid a job at Maccas so that day that it passes might come sooner.

An option – contribute nothing except your own share.

This would appear to be a perfectly valid strategy for several reasons. Let’s start with the obvious –  this crazy little village had its own functioning financial eco-system before you existed and it survived just fine.  It was feeding, housing and clothing itself as either a single unit or a split household well before you came on the scene. Through some terrified 3am research in one of those early dad-dating days I established that (at least in my jurisdiction) the child support overlords don’t look at the new chick on the block as a contributor either.

It does get a tiny bit tough though if you are spreadsheeting within an inch of your life just to prove that your contribution is entirely fair based on your personal consumption of utilities, fridge space and internet data. If this means that your partner’s income dissipates to a level that leaves him drinking instant coffee and taking homebrand ramen to work for lunch while you drink $60 bottles of rose and engage a personal Pilates instructor then you might have missed the whole point of a true domestic partnership.

You might want to strike a balance where you’ll possibly contribute more to the household than you would if no children existed in it, but allows for greater human dignity and equality (and perhaps a greater likelihood that occasions might be marked by little sparkly trinkets from your partner from time to time)

Above all? Its only money. This whole shindig is likely to cost you less than the single-girl-sauvignon blanc savaging of your liver that was the status quo before you dated a dad.

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Tips for the First Stepfamily Vacay

If you’ve taken the gradual approach to offspring introductions and are party to the regulation alternate weekend structure of step-parenting, you may not have experienced the very special kind of immersion that is the school holidays.

As a non-maternal type, you will have rigorously avoided holidaying in school term breaks – smugly dodging inflated air fares and shuddering outwardly at the concept of theme parks overrun with children recklessly toting multi-coloured ice-creams near your white linen pants.  Inevitably, you WILL holiday as a newly blended family, high-season tariffs be-damned. This relentless period of consecutive exposure to a new stepchild will be a learning experience on both sides. Here’s a guide to planning for this momentous event.

Carefully select the venue

Your holiday venue selection criteria to date may have involved:

  • High expectations regarding the thread count of bedroom linen
  • A need to be walking distance to a local restaurant or within the range of Uber eats so that your afternoon drinks aren’t dampened by needing to pilot a vehicle to get fed
  • An in-house day spa
  • Proximity to wineries

None of these apply to the first accompanied-by-stepchild holiday.

The single most important factor? Activities. Lots of them. For avoidance of doubt, this does not mean guided wine flights, cheese tasting tours or the 3-hour spa indulgence package. It means distinctly different things like trampolines, an outdoor pool awash with like-minded ten year olds, a games room and proximity to any joint that serves nachos.

On holidays, kids expect a ridiculous amount of entertainment. During school terms, they know how their day pans out  – wake up, protest about having a shower, do six hours or seven hours of school, eat everything in sight, reject dinner, protest about bedtime and sleep. On holidays, a new timetable applies and it needs to be filled, and it needs to be understood. 

An actual conversation on my first step-vacay:

“after breakfast, after we go to the beach, then you get your coffee, then we ride the bikes, then we have lunch, then we go to the pool THEN WHAT WILL WE DO???”

Be aware that if you answer that question with a proposed activity, you are bound by it. If you fail to deliver on that, you are guaranteed to hear this

“BUT YOU SAID!?”

Ensure you pick a venue that is a veritable Disneyland of extracurricular activities unless you want to be subjected to a lot of a whining and even more Monopoly.

Pack wine

You will likely already know that a certain amount of wine creates a very lovely temporary shroud that will protect you all from all kinds of reality in the form of heartbreak, work stress and the guilt of a carb binge. Mothers know, that once past that pesky period involving breastfeeding, wine will also take the edge off dealing with toddler tantrums, primary school dramas, endless laundry and hair washing battles.

Your first step-holiday might sound like the perfect opportunity to abstain from drinking, to insert a bonus detox event into your calendar given that you should probably stay upright and alert whilst partially responsible for a dependent human.

No. Wrong.

Firstly, this is not your child. If someone needs to retain their ability to drive a child to an emergency room following a cycling accident, it certainly need not be you.

Secondly, you are going to need SOMETHING grown-up to look forward to after a relentless day of child-centred activity.

Be prepared for the intensity

Family holidays are intense. As pre-work, binge-watch all variations of the Griswold movies. Then try to imagine them without humour.

Be reminded that this involves MULTIPLE consecutive days of unfolding stepchild experiences with the added spice of

  • No intermission. You are three hours from home. You can’t take a day off part way through the event. The best you can do is head out to ‘get a coffee and the newspaper’ and try to stretch that to an hour. 
  • No personal space. If you make the rookie mistake of re-creating what you loved when you were a kid and booked a cabin in a family caravan park, you are going to be confined to an area smaller than a shoebox and filled with cheap furnishings.  You will be huddling around a 32 inch LED TV. You will not be able to sneak in a nana nap mid afternoon while some kind of robust father-son wrestling and screaming ensues on the other side of a wafer-thin wall. Although I’m going to now avidly lobby for its universal acceptance, it is currently unheard of to book an extra cabin across the other side of the park to allow you to read crime novels in peace accompanied by home-made espresso martinis.

Control the duration

As a new couple, luxuriously lengthy breaks in amazing locations will always adhere to the principle that more time is better than less.

For your first step-holiday, try to consider the way in which children start kindergarten. Gradually. They go for a couple of hours each day. They do a day here and there. Only after a carefully planned time do they try to string together five consecutive days. It’s very gradual. In the holiday scenario, its you that needs to be ever-so-slowly immersed.

Don’t lock yourself into a ten day break, regardless of your previous principle that amortising the airfare over a longer holiday duration makes everything more economical.

My empirical research suggests this:

  • If you are in a location that has a long documented history of excellent weather and a procession of theme parks use the formula of number of theme parks plus one day.
  • If there is any chance of rain, a three night maximum is best.

An even more-evolved strategy, which I feel I should almost stamp with a personal patent, is the blended holiday. The blended family holidays together for the first portion of the break, with you returning to work at the halfway point. Nearly genius, this allows some father-child bonding time and an opportunity for you to return to your couch and your cat. Not recommended for the first holiday, this an advanced strategy to be implemented when you are three or four years in.

This is about planning,  people. Fail to plan, plan to fail.