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Random Purchases: The Shakti Mat

There’s been an astonishing degree of diversity amongst the parcels that have arrived on my doorstep in the last 9 months courtesy of Covid-triggered lockdown ennui and a now possibly-permanent fear of physical shopping centres.  Having now worked from home since March 2020, I’ve been skulking around the house in trainers and a ‘capsule wardrobe’ that is nothing more complicated than an inventory of black jeans and T-shirts in direct proportion to my laconic approach to laundry. Some of the budget that would normally be invested in high heels and other office swag, along with parking, tolls, fuel, gym fees and eating out NEEDED TO GO SOMEWHERE at the risk of otherwise bringing the Australian economy to its knees.

Beyond the early covid knee-jerk purchasing of hoarder-level quantities of toiletries, pet-food and sauvignon blanc that appear to be universal across the western world, my purchasing became ever more diverse, bordering on eccentric.

Lovely Royal Doulton mugs, since there was now so much at-home  tea-drinking to be done, which made it necessary to finally kick the first-home cheap Ikea coffee mugs to the curb (or at least to a box in the garage where they now leer at me with Scandinavian surliness)

A flat-pack chest of drawers which just served to reinforce my already-acknowledged lack of DIY skill. It would have been less heart-rending to simply throw away the quantity of clothes for which this drawer capacity was purchased and bypass the need to build more storage.

A pallet of geranium and lavender seedlings during that period when we were in the tight grip of a 5km radius limit and an 8pm-5am curfew, a period that made me momentarily and falsely believe that I was interested in gardening.  Preposterous.

Hot on the heels of the investment in activewear which in no way triggered the hoped-for increase in activity, a more recent arrival was another loosely aligned to my quest for wellbeing.

A Shakti mat.

For the uninitiated, which I was until very recently, this is a mat that allows you a modern version of the ancient wellbeing/torture device known as a bed of nails. Far from its ancient predecessors that conjure up images of dripping dungeons and the bedding of believers hand-stitched from the teeth of tigers or sharpened shivs, the Shakti mat is an acupressure mat crafted from thousands of sharp plastic spikes attached to a slightly cushioned mat.

Shakti mat

The first time the Shakti mat piqued my interest was during my annual health retreat a couple of years ago. A seasoned health-retreater, I’m now fully aware that most of the purchases triggered by the state of mind I experience at a health retreat don’t translate well when removed from a serene, stress-free location into my actual life. Guided journals that remain stoically blank years later. A Theraband that was going to the bedrock of my new daily stretching routine, but instead appears to have found its niche holding the letterbox together until I can get to Bunnings. Tea that on-retreat tasted like the jewels of the herbal universe hydrated with the morning mist collected by a sacred tribe of angels….. that when transported home taste like a wet version of your cat’s cremated remains.

So the Shakti mat remained swirling in my mind for a couple of years until for some reason, perhaps given my new, loose foray into the purchase of aromatherapy oils, the Facebook gods presented it to me in a sponsored ad.

In the spirit of ‘hey, I haven’t purchased anything since that PVC cat tunnel in November’ and the philosophy that there CANNOT exist a more painful form of torture since that which I experienced in my 14 day trial of Bikram yoga, in a matter of days, I was the owner of an orange Shakti mat. 5000 years of ancient wisdom can’t be dismissed can it? The French have been making wine since 6 BC and I fully believe in that, right?  When it comes to acupressure, who among us, as humans in the 90s, didn’t have a pair of Maseur sandals?

I left it neatly folded on top of the DIY chest of drawers, until early in the new year when I found myself woefully short of resolutions. Having already given up alcohol in May 2020 and not quite ready to let go of my substitute addiction to raspberry-flavoured Kooka’s Country Cookies, I had no obvious vices to offer up, so taking up a new wellbeing ritual appeared to be a natural choice. So like the girly-swot I am I read the instructions in readiness for giving it a whirl.

There are very few instructions. There’s the get out of jail card that allows you, as a Shakti rookie, to place a sheet or T-shirt between you and the plastic spikes but my all-or-nothing personality doesn’t allow for such concessions. Go hard or go home.

The prevailing advice suggests that in the first 10-20 seconds ‘the skin feels uncomfortable and the body wants to resist.’  Too right it wants to resist. Laying on the thousands of tiny spikes with bare skin makes any normal human being instinctively resist. As someone with low pain tolerance, having fainted when having my ears pierced, remained desperately afraid of tattoos and never having subjected my body to the rigours of childbirth, only the shame of failing on day one of a resolution kept me prone on the prickles.

I’d decided that it was a good idea to listen to a 20 minute guided meditation track at the same time to a) potentially amplify the benefits and b) stop me staring at my phone timer with the desperation last seen at the gym when doing 1 minute planks. Breathing deeply, VERY deeply, and listening to a nice man talking me through a bedtime meditation was almost enough to distract me through that first phase while I waited for the next phase. This was the period where the body ‘directs the blood supply to the area and the skin feels warm.’  On the first go round, all I really wanted to know was that my skin wasn’t actually going to puncture and leak out all that redirected blood supply.  I didn’t want to feel any warmth from anything oozing out of holes in my skin. I was wondering how far beyond the purview of responsible authorities like the Therapeutic Goods Administration the Shakti mats lived and whether I’d have to explain to my loved ones or the ER how I hurt myself lying on a mat.

The Holy Grail was the 6+ minute mark, ‘where feel-good hormones start to take over, muscles start to relax and tension eases.’ As a long-distance runner over many years I am VERY MUCH a fan of feel-good hormones in the form of the runners high that comes from exercise-triggered endorphins. There was definite appeal in the concept of experiencing such feel good hormones in something shorter than a half-marathon, even if it meant laying on nasty spikes.

To my surprise, it did feel better having gritted my way through that first 6 minutes of unfathomable pain. I did actually feel a level of relaxation and reduction of tension. I still had to breathe very heavily and listen to the nice meditation man to distract me from the stingy-ness and the persistent fear that I was going to experience haemorrhaging puncture wounds. The tension returned once I turned my mind to how to get off the mat once 20 minutes was up. Basic physics would suggest that leaning in any direction would place additional pressure and weight upon the spikes and I needed to employ what I can only described as an ‘un-peeling’ manoeuvre to exit the experience.

The benefits do extend beyond those experienced when you are on the mat. If, as advised, you take your newly Shakti-d skin straight to bed afterwards, laying your bare skin on a bed that isn’t riddled with nails is a blissful experience.  Whether you are resting on high thread-count pure Egyptian cotton or your pilly Spotlight budget sheets that probably should have been ditched a year ago, you will feel like you are reclining into a bed of liquid silk.

I then slept the sleep of angels. Whether it was the result of my body’s sheer relief in no longer being pressed against thousands of miniature thorns or my entry into a cohort that shares the understanding of acupressure gleaned over of 5000 years, I’m not too fussed.

Decent sleep? Priceless. Side-benefit? Kept me asleep during the 3am witching hour where most of my online ordering takes place, which means I’m yet to succumb to the near-mandatory covid-period-purchase of sourdough starter.

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Exercising in the era of COVID-19

In recent weeks, our COVID19 new normal has seen our opportunities to indulge in fitness-related activities dwindle faster than my early enthusiasm for a low-carb diet.

Unsurprisingly, gyms were the first to close, representing as they did a unique petri-dish of warm bodily secretions and bare hands that would rotate their way through equipment made of hard surfaces that are scientifically proven to keep the coronavirus alive for days. Notwithstanding the clear medical guidance not to touch anything above your neck, something about setting foot in a gym makes it fine to lay a small towel over the handlebars of an infrequently disinfected spin bike then use it to wipe your face.

Our running group was also eventually dismantled. One of the pillars of running group was the social aspect of sharing stories about inept colleagues, family fallouts and disastrous date nights – and shouting these pleasantries the requisite 1.5m didn’t  have the same ‘what’s shared in run group stays in run group’ vibe.  Everyone had forgotten about my regularly-exhibited exercise-induced-asthma that results in a hacky cough reminiscent of a two-pack-a-day smoker and I started to look conspicuously-covid in cool-down.

Personal training outside was gradually reduced from small groups to 1:1 training until it wasn’t OK, becoming on par with eating a kebab on a park bench.

Golf was cancelled, triggering my husband to dust off the Wii-fit and tackle the conundrum that is connecting up another tech device while our only techno-knowledgable teenager was sheltering in place with his mother, and challenge me to shots off a virtual driving range.

The interwebs are awash with new options to exercise whilst social distancing. I was not immune to the urgency to find alternatives. About one minute after I had finished hoarding toilet-paper, sauvignon blanc and pet supplies, I hit up Sportsmart for a clutch of kettlebells, dumbbells, an exercise mat and a bench, creating a makeshift indoor gym in my study. Mentally trawling the vast investment I’ve made in personal training over the years, I smugly documented a series of snappy little routines that could be safely executed in-house, without co-mingling with covid.  After overcoming the initial terror presented by a flat-pack bench that required me to wield both an allan-key and a spanner, my little haven for resistance training has been used exactly twice in the last three weeks of home detention and its most enthusiastic patron has been Lily the cat who has added the cushioned part of the weight bench to her collection of personal cat-scratching posts.

But I am not coming into this period unprepared.

Even before the current-era zoom yoga classes and subscription-based wellness programs, I was well-primed for exercising at home.

This goes WAY WAY WAY  back to the period when I was remotely-leveraging-lycra, crucifying quads and hammering hamstrings before social distancing was even a thing.

May I present:

Aerobics Oz-Style.

I’m personally sad for anyone who didn’t get a chance to rock fat socks, high top sneakers, nude tights and high-cut fluoro.

Fast forward to the current era where you may, like me, be battling a declining metabolism, an increasing interest in day-drinking on weekends and a passion for carbs.

Here is my unsponsored, non-affiliated view of a few of the fitness apps that I’ve trialled.

Myfitnesspal

My love affair with myfitnesspal was red-hot.

Track your exercise. Check.

Link in with your exercising pals. Check.

Scare the crap out of your overindulgent eating by making you fess up to everything that went in your mouth. Check.

The sheer efficiently of scanning the barcodes of the stuff that you are eating. Check.

What you don’t want is to incur the wrath of a scorned myfitnesspal. It has every gaslighting, snarky, scorned-Tinder-guy vitriol that you don’t need in your life.

Leave your myfitnesspal unattended for a bit it gets really resentful about your lack of response and you will get this:

No one needs that kind of negativity.

Strava

I can’t help it, but I associate Strava with Lycra-clad middle aged cycling dudes who are usually interrupting my Beach Road runs with their unexpected shouty-ness, their non-compliance with traffic lights and their obsession with coffee shops en-route.  

When our running group was forced to go virtual, we all agreed to converge on Strava as our app to co-mingle.

When I rustled up my logon, I found that I had last used Strava on our honeymoon in 2015. I think my Garmin had packed it in back then, so in an attempt to try to track calories-out vs the high cocktail-calories-in undertaking that is a honeymoon peppered by mojitos and wedding-cake-as-breakfast-dessert I’d hooked up with Strava.

As it turns out, my outdoor activity was terminated abruptly by a category 3 cyclone that hit the idyllic marina-fronted resort that I’d chosen as our honeymoon escape and caused us to bunker down in a dodgy concrete walled 3-star motel. No power, the freight-train sound of an impending cyclone, muddy water pouring in through the air conditioner and instructions to huddle in a festy bathroom away from the windows.

Between category-3 cyclones and covid19, unfortunately Strava has become my calamity app.

Dietbet

Dietbet is an intoxicating thing. You bet on your ability to lose 4% of your body weight in a 4 week period. Everyone coughs up an agreed dollar figure into the pool to start. If you win, you share in the pool that is subsidised by the losers. You weigh in initially, knowing that the more that your co-contestants fail, the greater the pool you share in if you win. It appeals to every slightly unpleasant part of my nature – my desire to beat people I don’t even know, my love of the punt, my drive to be a winner.

Unfortunately , my timing is off.  I didn’t bet on my ability to lose weight in the period where I joined a ‘lose 9kgs in 6 weeks’ cult and actually freaking nailed it due to the existential angst I felt about being fat and turning 50. Instead I signed up in March, one week before a period where I’d be confined by a virus to home-cooked meals and the kind of scared-carb-scarfing that results from feeling nudged into an age bracket with higher covid19 mortality than the 40-49s.

My takeout?

I can still run, even if it means staying away from my favourite beach trails that seem awash with people who could be aerolising their covid19.

I’m now running uninspired laps of a suburban airport.

And I secretly know, that if I run without my watch, Strava need never know if I’m having an off day.

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3 Things You Shouldn’t Say to a Stepmother

You don’t go through a divorce at 40 years old, the fearsome learning curve of online dating or the challenges of dating a dad whilst lacking a shred of maternal instinct without some bits that really sting.  Dividing up household belongings, furnishing an apartment with rental furniture that exudes all the cosy vibe of a supermarket coolroom and the hearbreak that is divvying up half of your elderly cat’s ashes (because shared cat custody in life extends to shared custody in the afterlife) are just some of the blows that land hard.

Like me, you will survive all of that, propped up in my case by plenty of sauv-blanc-fuelled couch time and rock-solid best friends. You’ll emerge eventually, with a new sense of resilience and potentially a new wardrobe, depending on how heavily you subscribed to the divorce diet.  After a while, your heart will move on from the listless malaise of heartbreak and the depressive impact wrought by consumption of white spirits, and open up to the concept of a new emerging relationship.

If you have wound your way through the ghosters, players and no-limit baggage-toters of later-in-life singledom, you may feel that the little stabby moments of heartbreak are behind you. However if you marry a Dad and set up camp in the suburbs with some fully-formed miniature humans, be prepared for some verbal barbs that feel like undiluted apple cider vinegar on an open vein.

They come in the form of things people say to a stepmother.

Google the combo of ‘say’ and ‘stepmother’ and the interwebs will present you exactly 9.6 octodecillion helpful tips about what a stepmother shouldn’t say. Camouflaged about 9.5 octodecillion records in are the almost-mute protests of a camp of stepmothers who politely try to offer up suggestions about what you should not say to THEM.

Here are a few.

‘You knew what you were getting into’

It’s worth getting this one out the way early – if there was nation-wide census of the phrase most often heard by any step-parent, regardless of gender, it’s this one. If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard this one I would have a dedicated shoe-room, my mid-life crisis second car (a Mustang GT, which is a nod to my ability to love a non-age-appropriate bogan vehicle which began in my owning a 70s Torana as my first ride) and a scratch golf handicap.

Despite the sheer number of stepmothers who are nodding at this, fortified as we so often are on a Sunday by a chilled beverage, if we were to band together and protest this statement in the streets with Canva-crafted placards, we’d be run out of town with the last of the climate change deniers.

Fact: we didn’t know what we were getting into.

There is no Stepmum-prep 101. A distinct lack of Netflix documentary material. If only there was a clan of wise elder Stepmothers that would whisper truths to you in Primary School in the same way you get ‘The Talk’ when you approach a certain age. But there isn’t. The term ‘Stepmommy blogger’ is not common parlance.  Even if every stepmother wrote online about every experience, our musings would be buried well beneath pinterest vision-boards featuring ideas for school lunches that are now apparently only palatable if served in bento boxes.

So we didn’t know.

‘You aren’t their mother’

 Well, throw on a cape and call yourself Captain Obvious.

I know I am not their mother. Everything about my unblemished womb, unresolved tendency to lapse into hyperventilation in the proximity of bulk baby supply stores and festering feelings of resentment at their being no concept of ‘pawternity leave’ is testament to my never having borne a child.

However in my years as a stepmother, I have been called upon to execute on a range of duties that are fair and square the domain of a mother. I have made cake for a bake sale – even if it involved decanting a supermarket loaf cake onto a paper plate and giving it a blatant bedazzling with the leftover sugar flowers from our wedding cake. I’ve done school pickup – pushing bravely through the fear that is contemplating dozens of identically-clad children without the innate ability to identify a child through a longstanding observance of their distinguishing traits. I’ve laundered countless garments and suffered the pilfering of my favourite sports socks once a tweenager’s feet approximated the size of my own. I’ve made countless meals that were scorned with all the vehement protests that biological mothers suffer.

I’m not their mother, nor do I need to be. I don’t need to share DNA to share the responsibility of preventing a child from running into traffic or ingesting poison.

So far, so good.

‘When are you having kids of your own?’

This is one that everyone in the sisterhood, not just the stepmotherhood, can get behind. There’ll be barely a woman that hasn’t been asked at some point when they are going to do their duty to the perpetuation of the human race by issuing some progeny. In the early years of my first married go-round, if I felt particularly ill-favoured towards the enquirer, a favoured response would be ‘It’s not in God’s plan’ with an appropriately downcast expression. Shuts it right down.

As the years go on, this question has fallen by the wayside. This is likely due to the fact that despite hefty investment in anti-ageing creams, its clearly becoming obvious that with the passage of time, my reproductive organs are likely to be in about as good nick as my 1975 Torana.

By definition, Stepmothers are hardy souls. We wouldn’t be navigating child support arrangements, shared-household logistics and the management of children that aren’t our own without a little resilience.

But spare us some of these questions.

If in doubt, there is one that’s always acceptable:

‘Would you like a glass of red or white with that?’

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Podcast Episode: Dating a Dad

My first podcast! I was delighted to have a chat to Sami Lukis about the crazy world of dating a dad – when you’ve never wanted kids of your own!

https://www.podcastoneaustralia.com.au/podcasts/romantically-challenged/dating-a-dad

About Sami and the Podcast:

Sami Lukis has established herself as one of Australia’s most accomplished and versatile media personalities, notching up a successful career spanning more than 20 years, as a Television Presenter, Radio Host, Author,  Podcaster, Journalist, Red Carpet Reporter, Professional MC, Columnist and Media Commentator.

In 2018, Sami published her first book “Romantically Challenged”  through Penguin Random House and she also launched the spin-off podcast “Romantically Challenged” on PodcastOne, which was nominated for Best Original Podcast at the 2019 Australian Commercial Radio Awards.


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The Rookie Stepmother’s Guide to Gaming

In the period somewhere beyond your stepchild’s read-and-write phase, and definitely prior to their leaving home, brace yourself for the onset of something even more pervasive than this child’s disdain for your cooking.

The world of gaming.

My experience of childhood gaming was gained at the joystick of a Hanimex game console. Right up there with the gut-wrenching deprivation associated with never having a clutch of legit Barbies was the ignominy of being deprived of the #1 console of the 1970s – the Atari. My request to Santa that year had clearly been light on specifics and instead of receiving the now-iconic console with its nearly-real woodgrain that contrasted stylishly with its hulking black cover, robust joystick and options managed by six schmicky switches, our household was gifted with its less-salubrious cousin, the Hanimex 1292.

We stifled our disappointment in this brand-name fail and then enthusiastically devoted countless hours to conquering rows of alien creatures from a single warlike token (crafted long before the term ‘avatar’ even existed), constrained as it was to only moving horizontally, with diminishing cover from eminently-penetrable blocks that served as barracks. Standard also with the console was the ‘Olympics’ which delivered further games that were variations on the theme of a geometric shape addressing a moving object.

However, you might be unsurprised to know that a misspent youth involving a 1978 Hanimex, toting its 32 colours and whopping 43 bytes of data memory is in no way adequate preparation for modern-era gaming.

Having embraced that learning curve, here’s what I found:

It’s how kids play together today

If your childhood, like mine, consisted of in-person social activities, where you’d cycle helmet-less a couple of streets over to a mates house to play make-believe games, you’d be staggered to find that today’s teen need not be in the same house or even the same continent to play together.

Instead they are all decked out in headsets that allow them to communicate with all the other player with all the swagger of the (first-generation, 1980s) Maverick in Top Gun. Despite the chasm of several decades, the focus on elaborate call signs, inexplicable lingo and the ability for escalation into shouty-ness seems uncannily common to both Top Gun and Fortnite.

In some ways, the social aspect is vaguely reassuring. It would appear that gaming is now not reserved for those geeky, loner kids you observed honing their first-person shooter skills in Doom, handwriting their manifesto in a jotter pad and, if they were in the US, lurching worryingly close to taking their skills into the classroom.

The expense

In today’s gaming universe, there is no concept of buying a console and expecting this to be a comprehensive package of everything that is required to keep a kid entertained. It’s like the next-level mismatch in expectations that came with your Barbie Treehouse if you didn’t read the fine-print that said *accessories not included.

If you would like your stepchild to be spared the status of social pariah, they will also need:

  • A PC with the level of grunt that only two years ago would have been sufficient to run a major financial institution’s data centre.
  • A mouse that cost more than your favourite pair of wedges
  • A gaming keyboard that you can be assured will NEVER feature in the back-to-school specials at Officeworks.

And this my friends, is only the hardware.

In-game purchases are required to keep a child’s head above the competitive-gaming water. Beyond the almost-logical idea of purchasing useful weapons and tools rather than having to fight other children for them in the actual game is the inexplicable concept of paying money for clothing for your avatar. Clothing. Full outfits. Accessories.

While I’m all about the joy of augmenting your wardrobe via online purchases, I feel like an essential element of this experience is the arrival of a package, containing something that you can actually wear in real-life. If the purchase had taken place under the influence of a few too many sauvignon blancs on a Friday night, there’s the added element of surprise.

If I was inclined to tote up these things, I’d be certain that our household’s expenditure on gaming-related paraphernalia in the last two years is on par with the investment in my first car. Admittedly, the purchase of a 1975 Torana in the late 80s is probably modest by today’s standards, but if that brown-and-beige beast were still around today it would fetch a tidy price amongst the Holden aficionados. By contrast, our last two X-Boxes serve no apparent purpose other than their annual role as props for the one wonky leg of the Christmas tree.

Investment of time

I know that it’s easy to lose yourself in the world of gaming. Even the modest functionality offered by the 1970s Hanimex was a time-suck. The makers of the first generation Donkey Kong underestimated the attention span of a child, providing a scoreboard with one less digit than was necessary to thwart the user’s relentless quest to ‘clock’ the game – so we all just kept going.

Current gaming goes way beyond this. Infinite numbers of levels within a game. The ability to simply offer a new version digitally, with a dizzying array of new features, without the need for anyone to schlepp into the local games shop and buy a new version.  Today’s gaming creators would scoff at rookie tactics like the lights and sounds of pokies and clock-free / window-less casinos as temptation to lose hours of your time (and possibly custody of your children if you left them in the car in the casino car park.) They’ve discovered artful ways to target the neural centres of the brain that govern reward systems and ways to fiddle with your dopamine.

All this means your stepchild is not going to want to leave their extortionately-priced gaming chair anytime soon.  If your household is prone to the somewhat elastic boundaries that are a common feature of the Disney Dad, the general philosophy of ‘what’s the harm?’ may prevail. The upside of this is that you are free to see a movie, indulge at the day spa or get through an entire paperback without the guilt of dodging real-life, outdoorsy kid activities that if you are in the earnest early years of stepmother-hood you might feel otherwise compelled to join.  

The upside

Today’s games do apparently contribute some benefits. There is clear link to the development of hand-eye co-ordination, visual-spatial ability and reaction time. When, in an attempt at relevance, I tried to dabble in Fortnite, I quickly discovered these traits distinctly lacking, to the extent that I managed to architect my own demise, not at the hands of one of my 99 armed foes, but by falling off a building. It’s unclear whether this is the result of inadequate stimulation in my youth at the hands of our simplistic Hanimex or a more recent gradual erosion of brain cells due to a long love affair with a chilled glass of white wine.

So your stepchild will acquire some life skills, whether they are the fine motor skills that may signal success as a surgeon or the ability to accumulate power, wealth and weapons in preparation for the role of dictator of a small country.

On the other hand, if you want to stimulate some old-school 1970s resilience, try presenting them with last-year’s console that you got for free on e-Bay and see how long it takes before there are tears. 

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Four Things To Ask When You’re Dating A Dad

If this is not your first go round on the singles-scene rodeo, you might find that you have snuck into an entirely new dating demographic. It’s one where a tiny checkbox on a website is going to redirect your dating destiny if you give it a click. The one which sends out a flare out that you are ok with accepting a partner with kids.

Click consciously.

If you’ve found yourself childless and single somewhere north of your thirties, you’re statistically unlikely to find someone else with the same status. Being ok with someone with a tot or two in tow means that you don’t risk ruling out some perfectly well-adjusted bachelors who just happen to not have found forever with their baby mama. You will open up a pool of single men who once cared for a woman so much that they co-mingled some genes and created another small human.

If you are headed down this path, there are some key questions that demand asking. The kind of questions that might ordinarily seem like early-relationship suicide, but if asked and answered give you a whole lot of direction about where things might be headed.

How would you describe your relationship with your child’s mother?

Talking about exes in your early dating days is a red flag. A glowing, lava-like, blistering-inferno-coloured flag. On one hand, discussing exes is just asking to unearth the decomposing stench of a relationship that has festered and died. On the other hand you might simply expose a relationship that has suffered the same fate as an accidentally neglected indoor house plant, that with a shortage of sunlight and water, has simply failed to thrive.

There’s one reason to address this elephant in the room. If you and the dad make it then you need to have the lowdown on this lady as she’s legit going to be an ongoing part of your life.  The baby mama could be anything from your long-lost soul sister who you’d willing share tequila shots and Netflix binges right through to someone who will paint you as the most evil stepmother this side of Disney.

Best to know where she falls on that spectrum.

Do you want more kids?

By definition a dad’s done this parenting thing. He either loves being a parent with every molecule of his being or he’s come up a bit gun-shy after the experience. It’s not a first-date question, but one to casually canvass once you aren’t too far in. Regardless of whether your ovaries are screeching for offspring or are cowering in fear somewhere behind your pancreas, you need this answer. The beauty of it is that he has a realistic, full-bodily-fluids, unromantic view of what childbirth and child-rearing entails and if he’s up for that again, then you have a serious dad on your hands. He gets it.

If you are a bit meh when it comes to kids, and he’s not up for another go-round, then you have the perfect union – something likely to be punctuated with the conveniently scheduled insertion of offspring in your life, with known, planned, kid-free periods.

What do you expect from me?

This is a question for the advanced players on the dad-dating spectrum. The answer is often to be found in the detail of the custody arrangements. If this is the standard every-other-weekend paternal arrangement then you can look forward to fortnightly freedom – date nights, Sunday sleep-ins and control of the TV remote. If you have weak and intermittent maternal urges, this is everything you could ever want. An excuse to stock the fridge, guilt-free, with chicken nuggets and cookies’n’cream ice cream. A living, breathing reason to go to amusement parks, sink your choppers into a toffee apple and buy oversized popcorn.

If the baby-mama is not in a place, chemically or mentally, that permits responsible parenting, you might find there’s a lot less of the theme park and a lot more of school lunches and the relentless focus on laundry and balanced meals. Still, this might mean you’ve snared a maternal-esque experience without the inconvenience of childbirth and stretchmarks.

How often do you see your children?

This one is a minefield.

If your date never sees their kids, there’s a potential red flag:

  • They’ve potentially created small humans that they no longer wish to deal with, which, if you have a single caring bone in your body, you’ll probably find staggering. You’d also want to pause for a moment if you are mentally fast-forwarding to a place where the two of you are committed and potentially considering kids of your own. Even if your dating radar never searches that far ahead, a guy who can bail out on his actual children wouldn’t hesitate to ghost you, in a heartbeat.
  • They may have some fairly fundamental character-flaws or seriously poor life choices that have failed to stand up to the scrutiny of the Family Law enforcers. A dad has to have some pretty serious issues to be denied custody of his children and if he has those kinds of issues, you probably want to give him a miss.

Alternately, there could be a really sad story here.  A story of a manipulative, narcissistic ex who has managed to create a work of fiction that has the authorities fooled and has blocked access to the kids. These women are out there. Behind every one of those is a dad yearning to be a dad, but being denied the opportunity.

Best to find out where he fits on this continuum.

Being open to dating a Dad opens your world to men that have the propensity for unconditional love. The good ones will entertain your tough questions. Ask them.

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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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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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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.