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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.

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The (Stepmother) Princess Diaries

Having ‘Stepmother’ set up as a Google alert presents an endless array of fodder. More often than not it’s a fairly relentless reinforcement of the Disney villain style stepmother stories – women implicated in acts of casual violence, wilful neglect and harsh vengeance. Every now and then though, there’s a shiny little nugget nesting in the Google swamp. This week it was this headline.

Princess Beatrice could become a STEPMOTHER.

Note: I did not add the CAPS. The article had the CAPS, suggesting Princess Bea’s destiny was as astonishing as if she were to become an ASTRONAUT, PLAYBOY BUNNY or the NEXT PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. Had this publication unearthed the potential for her to become a scientologist, JayZ’s next wife or the host of American idol I feel they’d be less likely to lean on the caps lock.

I am inexplicably pleased at the ability to consider a young princess becoming a stepmother. Neither of these two fates were those that I’d considered a possibility as I contemplated my life plan. One of them did eventuate and it’s not the one that involves diamond tiaras, summer country estates and a brace of corgis.

Could the rocky road to stepmotherhood be less nuts and more pillowy marshmallows if you were a princess?  I think yes. Here’s why.

You are a princess

If you are a princess, dating a man with a little girl, surely you have hit the jackpot. Every little girl wants to be a princess. Very few little girls have a mama, even a faux-mama, who has hived off a portion of the crown jewels, has Phillip Treacy on speed-dial, and has a grandma who happens to be a reigning monarch. Surely it’s easier to impress a new step-girl if you are able to let her parade around the house in actual tiara that’s probably worth more than her actual mama’s house.

Note:  Princess Beatrice’s new boyfriend’s offspring only comprises a son which is just another example of the universe failing to cut a stepmother a break.

You have privileges – the child will pick up on this

Although the new royals are refreshingly modern and are at times spotted doing their actual own grocery shopping, they do generally operate in a cosy cushion of privilege.

As a royal, you don’t catch the bus. You are generally schlepped about in a black Range Rover.

Even if you are too low on the royal rungs to fly private, there is still no fear of being relegated to an egg and bacon burger in an airport Hungry Jacks. The doors of the highest status airport lounge will literally fling themselves open and welcome you in.

The kid’s Instagram is going to be next level.

Surely you can’t fear the bio mum

Stepmothers are innately prone to regarding themselves unfavourably in any comparison to a biological mother. Even on your best day, your most confident day, where all your pros far outweigh the cons, you are still reminded that your new partner had a flesh-and-blood child with this woman.

Princess Beatrice, on her darker days, might feel any of those feelings that she’s not smarter, prettier, or has fewer bad hair days than the child’s actual mother.

But darl, you’re still an actual princess. This is right up there with having actually spawned the child.

 

No financial fears

As a princess, the monarchy has been funding every frivolity you’ve ever engaged in since you emerged from the womb, no matter how many other heirs stand in front of you ascending a throne. Your mama’s pricey pram, the upmarket education, your time out to do good works and those sparkly earrings you flounced about in at your 21st.

NOWHERE in your future are you likely to experience any of the financial challenges that litter your regulation stepmother’s universe – trying to agree a fair split of school books and uniforms, rationing the extracurricular activities, figuring out who pays for the first passport.

Nor are you going to be subject to any of the vagaries of child support arrangements. You are part of the infrastructure that oversees the child support agency. No one married to a royal ever got garnisheed.

You are very likely to simply shut up the ex by leaping all the waiting lists and swiftly ensconcing your new stepchild in an upmarket, strictly blue-blood school whereupon all financial discussions will just drift away.

Good luck Princess Beatrice, hopefully you’ll pave the way so that the next royal stepmother doesn’t suffer the ALL-CAPS.

 

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Musings: 2018 Spring Racing Carnival

I’m a lover of horseracing. I’m not a lover of attending in person the famed Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival as it’s about almost everything except horseracing. Entirely lacking ownership of a quality racehorse or an acquaintance that could schlepp me into a decent marquee, my preference is to spend quality time with the TV coverage, my online betting account and wine that costs about the same per bottle as you’d pay per glass at the races.

All without the whiff of Portaloo.

Every year brings new revelations. Here are my observations of Derby Day 2018:

Fake tan goals

Huzzah to the female attendees who seem to have finally nailed the art of the fake tan.

From that  moment in the 80s that we realised that slathering our skin in baby oil (or at best, SPF4 Reef Oil) and then subjecting it to the potent radiation of an Australian sun unconstrained by an ozone layer, we sought another solution.

Fake tans were a roguish line-up of smelly, streaky potions that loved nothing more than to immediately leach off skin onto light coloured fabrics. With distinctly Anglo-Saxon skin courtesy of ancestors transported to Australia by boat, most of the 80s and 90s were spent applying chemical concoctions in an effort to make my skin slightly less translucent.  I cannot conjure up the product name but the smell of it is something embedded in my memory at a molecular level.

After years of observing female racegoers that were only one green hairstyle away from Oompa Loompa, it seems that either technology or fake tan finesse is finally now producing something a little more natural.

Well done gals.

Tiny gloves

My glove-love is immutably dedicated to those made immortal by Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffanys. Long, elegant, black gloves with the tiniest hint of shimmer.

I’m still angry at Madonna for the lace glove era.

I remain baffled at the concept of fingerless gloves for their undeniable failure to warm the most obviously vulnerable elements of the hand.

This year, glove puzzlement has gone next level. Tiny gloves. They are essentially just fingers, linked by the merest connecting fabric.

These.

For the uninitiated, these are called Half Palm Gloves and don’t you even be thinking about entering Fashions On The Field unless you are wearing them.

To me, they look like those pesky low cut socks that lack enough fabric to grip an ankle and are always disappearing below sneaker level.

They are also undoubtedly ineffective at keeping skinny wrists warm and simply MUST be an encumbrance in using an iphone.

Elle Macpherson

Elle is our original Aussie supermodel and it still baffles me that she didn’t get a gig in that George Michael film clip. She rocked a red bikini advertising a Tier Two Cola, survived the high cut swimmers era, holds the record for cover appearances on Sports Illustrated and became known as The Body, which of course is every living woman’s secret dream.

Aged 54, she rocked the races, with her trademark awesome hair and an outfit that was a secret nod to every one of us that knows about a mullet.

She refused paparazzi requests to remove her sunglasses which just made me feel better about every single time I’ve insisted on donning my aviators when I was involved in a pic that was destined for social media.

I’ve always maintained that while Elle Macpherson is not too old for long hair, I’m not too old for long hair (despite being misaligned to Ms Macpherson in any other element other than demographic)

#teamElle

Francesca Cumani

Francesca Cumani has serious racing pedigree. Her dad is an Italian thoroughbred racing trainer yet she has a voice resonant of the Best British Boarding Schools. She’s totally how I imagine Enid Blyton would speak.

She’s now a British-Italian horse racing expert who divides her time as a racing commentator between the United Kingdom and Australia. She’s racing royalty, and by my calculations it’s just bad luck and bad timing that she isn’t married to an actual British royal.

With a family apprenticeship that involved mucking out stables (read: a Dad version of slave labour) she’s risen from steaming stable straw to stylish industry insider.

She’s unafraid to parade a pale fabric in the mounting yard, striding confidently alongside snorting, sweating, shedding horseflesh.  She’s smart enough to give open toe shoes a swerve, knowing that an errant thoroughbred sidestep could take off a toenail or nuke a good pedicure.

On Derby Day she wore a neck-high top straight out of a Jane Austen novel with more layers than Streets Vienetta. On anyone else it would be 100% crusty spinster librarian.

On ‘Cesca it was pure fabulousness.

 

Three days till Melbourne Cup Day!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The Real Stepmothers Of 2018

This one needs to start with a confession.

After a long period of resistance to every geographical flavour of the franchise, this year I succumbed to the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. It’s easy to see how this happened. Take a solitary Saturday afternoon, a glass of wine, the reaching of my limit for the inexplicable obsession that I have for the trainwreck that is My 600lb Life and I’ve clicked ‘play’ on the RHOBH. From that moment I was entranced by all the things I don’t have – endless wealth, cough lozenge-sized diamonds, garage-sized shoe rooms and an entourage of household staff. Although I’ve managed to kick the habit, after being relentlessly worn down by these ladies’ ability to fight with each other for no reason, it’s left a fairly pleasant legacy in my new love of Rosé, having discovered that it has evolved somewhat from daggy 80s Mateus.

With the relentless mental search for my next blog topic keeping stepmother-life as front of mind as my love of carbs and cheese, the concepts melded into a question. If you created a gaggle of all the famous stepmothers in history, miked them up, fooffed up their hair and gave them some first world problems in an Real Housewives setting, how would they fare?

But firstly, let me introduce the participants:

  • Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother. This lady was up against it, married as she was to a widowed woodcutter. She’d be endlessly compared to a tragic dead mother, times were tough in the woodcutting economy and forest life was no picnic.  She decides that her stepchildren were superfluous mouths to feed and exerts a honeymoon-period hold over her new husband to persuade him to abandon the kiddos in the forest. The children run into another bad woman who wants to eat them, despite the fact her entire house is made of cake.
  • Cinderella’s stepmother. Again, inclined to rampantly favour her bio kids over her stepchild, this lady enslaves her stepdaughter to a relentless regime of domestic duties and dull outfits. Cinderella defies all odds to be the chosen one at a ball where a  handsome prince auditions new wives in something that is uncannily similar to today’s ‘The Bachelor’.  She misses a pumpkin-inflicted curfew, loses a shoe but still gains a prince.  The stepmother is left sans one housekeeper and still managing a gaggle of lazy and homely offspring.
  • The Queen in Snow White. This lady has some issues. She starts down the well-worn path of subjecting Snow White to all the household chores and, disturbingly, seeks daily advice from a talking mirror. Once the talking mirror lets on that Snow White is the new goddess of the household, she orders her huntsman (because we all have one of those on staff?) to take her out in the forest and kill her.
  • Such is Stepmother lore, it turns out that we have one lovable, kind stepmother for every three incarnations of pure evil. The last to join the cast of the real stepmothers of 2018 is The Sound of Music heroine, Maria Von Trapp from The Sound of Music. However unlikely we might regard the journey from the nunnery, to whiskers on kittens, to marriage into Austrian aristocracy, this is a lady we can totally cheer for. She not only has to take on the legacy of a dead wife, but a living breathing competitor for the affections of Captain Georg Von Trapp in the form of someone who is a dead-ringer for Grace Kelly. Still, she nails it.

Throw these chicks into a Real Housewives framework and here are some highlights of the first season.

  • Hansel and Gretel’s stepmother and Snow White’s stepmother form an early alliance. They were inseparable once they discovered their shared appreciation of the value of good men – those who will accept a command to dispose of innocent children deep in the forest.
  • Cinderella’s stepmother attributes Cinderella’s success, and her bio-daughters’ unrelenting spinsterhood, to the ability to fit into a very specific glass slipper. Her Real Housewife commentary relentlessly returns to shoe discussions, yet she’s not quite Adrienne Maloof enough in the RH franchise  to launch her own shoe line.  She  lobbies the producers to get Sarah-Jessica Parker to make a guest appearance on the show. She has the hang of online shopping and develops an unhealthy obsession for the purchase of Jimmy Choos in three sizes. The other gals stage an intervention in her lounge room amidst towers and towers of shoe boxes. Cinderella’s stepmother signs on for a guest role in Hoarders.
  • Maria Von Trapp schools Hansel and Gretel’s mother with two great reasons why she didn’t need to kick her stepkids out into the forest and subject them to the woman in a house built of carbs:
    • Yes, they are a couple of extra mouths to feed, but the savings inherent in recycling curtains into outfits will go a long way towards covering the food bill.
    • Finding a marketable skill (in her case the Von Trapp Singers) opens up countless opportunities to monetise your offspring. Maria alludes very subtly to the modern day version – Kris Jenner pimping Kim Kardashian’s early video work.
  • Snow White’s stepmama is initially buoyed by the successful launch of her new raw food restaurant, devilishly named ‘The Poisoned Apple’, with a quirkily ironic red-carpet appearance by Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter and an organic Rosé-fountain.  Now single,  she struggles with Tinder due to trust issues engendered by the huntsman not doing his duty way back when.  She also suffers from Imposter Syndrome and feels she has betrayed the wicked stepmother sisterhood based on her inability to kill Snow White with any of a suffocating bodice, poisoned comb or tainted apple.

In a get-together fuelled by Margaritas these gals lock in another season and vote in Stepmama#5.

Leann Rimes.

 

 

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The Deal With The Biological Bond

Having never had children, you will be unable to comprehend the apparently limitless love, that allegedly heart-expanding level of consciousness that a biological mother has for her child. It seems to be something more epic than James Cameron’s version of the Titanic, an indescribable thing espoused by generations of women oozing maternal contentment. It has spawned a million hashtags, not the least of which is the execrable #blessed.

I’ve had some of my most simply sublime moments watching Netflix with a sauv blanc and a snoozy cat  – yet these are apparently not on par with the emotion between mother and child.

This blissful bond is the payoff offered by Mother Nature for the ordeal that is represented by pregnancy and birth. The payoff NEEDS to be sublime. To be prepared to have your own child is to knowingly go into a scenario where you will have a blood–and-scuzz-covered infant extracted either:

  1. Through a gaping scalpel wound that will render you virtually immobile for several weeks and possibly unwilling to ever wear a bikini or contemplate a plank position at the gym, or
  2. In a manner which has been successfully negotiated for thousands of years but still seems frankly barbaric, and will likely involve stitches where stitches should never be.

Biological mothers prove themselves willing to go through this ordeal and many other unmentionable symptoms:

  • Daily projectile vomiting that you can’t comprehend without recalling that late-teen experimental phase fuelled by cheap wine coolers.
  • Helplessly observing bulging silvery stretch marks etch themselves permanently on a previously taut stomach.
  • The indignity of wearing elasticised everything.

Even celebs who appear genetically blessed with talent or gorgeousness suffer along with the mere mortals:

“I just started calling myself ‘Swamp Ass.’ Like, I have swamp ass right now. I had major swamp ass because I was wearing these Spanx to hold in my gut … It’s like the bayou up in that region” – Jessica Simpson

Although the connection between this and Spanx is brow-furrowing at best, it’s fair to say that no-one has ever celebrated a moist, swampy, inner bayou.

“When I got pregnant, I had so much testosterone in me that I grew a beard. I only cropped it last night. It’s actually true. I’m not telling a joke. I actually have a beard, but I’m proud of it. I call it Larry.” – Adele

As if we are not already obsessed about hair removal.

“When I was pregnant, I just wanted to get lots and lots of animals, for some reason. We talked about cats but David said absolutely not” – Victoria Beckham

I venture to say that Victoria would have been a more cheerful woman if she’d been successful in getting all the cats.

‘The pregnancy, I wouldn’t really wish that upon anyone. Anyone. It’s all worth it in the end, so I would definitely suffer through that, but pregnancy was not a good experience for me. At all.’ – Kim Kardashian.

About as real as you can get from a Kardashian.

The only one that appeared to breeze through it?

‘I sometimes forget I am pregnant’ – Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge

Spoken by someone whose pregnant belly looks like nothing more than me after a reckless night of beer and bolognaise.

All this, and more, means that women who give birth totally deserve the hormonal payoff that appears to be generated as soon as they lay eyes on the squalling infant.

The reverse is also true. If you are unwilling to go through all of the above to generate your own child and merely acquire one as a result of dating a dad, you simply cannot expect to feel the biological bond that results from sharing a large chunk of DNA with another miniature person.

The only thing that you did to deserve having a child thrust into your life was to fail to declare offspring as a deal-breaker on your online dating profile.

So the fact that you have not created this small human through blood, sweat, tears and the sacrifice of your pelvic floor means you don’t earn the biological bond. The sooner you realise this the better.

What you need to know is that regardless of any investment in swamp-ass, you have the potential to regard with extreme fondness this youngster who shares some DNA with someone you are actually crazy about.

 

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Camping. Another stepfamily adventure

Recently I chalked up another chapter in the #dontrecognisemylife story of my new blended family.

Camping.

Before every person that knows me rejects this as an elaborate and completely preposterous fabrication dreamed up to plug a rather large void between blog posts, let me clarify that it was GLAMPING. A spacious tent, erected by those who actually possess the required expertise. Quality manchester. Soft furnishings. Carefully curated decorative touches. Hot water bottles snugly encased in something hand-knitted. Sufficient power to support hair appliances, multi-device charging, bedside lamps and HEATING!

It’s taken a long time for creative entrepreneurs to carve out a niche variation on standard canvas-based hospitality that is sufficiently evolved to tempt me back into camping life. My last foray into this world was three decades ago, where I joined like-minded 18 year old friends, newly emancipated from our parents by virtue of freshly-issued drivers licences and ready to spend supermarket-checkout-wages on a cheap campsite. The concept of a share-economy was decades away from becoming a thing, but we were all well aware of the outrageous value represented by a flagon of Para Port when divided between a gaggle of inexperienced drinkers. Fueled by abundant, cheap fortified spirits and Midnight Oil albums on repeat, memories were made.

And now we have glamping.

Just as I learned in the 80s the limitations of an inexperienced liver at the hands of an unconstrained flow of cheap booze, I’ve now learned that communing with nature protected by only a thin veneer of canvas can continue to be a source  of life-lessons. Throw an energetic twelve year old stepchild into your tent and there’s an unexpected layer of nuance in the learnings. Here are a few of those lessons.

I am unsuited to confined spaces

I have a fairly lengthy list of life-skill limitations. These have compounded as I’ve matured. It began with a lack of control of my intestinal contents on fairground spinny rides and the inevitability of fairy floss attaching to my hair. Early career limitations involved an inability to speak to superiors without blushing, becoming unpredictably inarticulate or spraying them with incidental spittle.  For all the investment and earnest advice from Australia’s finest hardware stores I’ve remained inept at the most basic of DIY home-maintenance tasks. There were lessons gleaned from an emergency room visit and eight weeks in plaster  after I fell on the basketball court, not at the hands of a hard-tackling opponent, but by inexplicably falling while running down the sidelines without the ball or another human within twenty metres. The purchase of a wooden-based bed with merciless corners six years ago has still not trained me in the agility to avoid, on average, a bi-weekly new shin bruise.

Spending time in a tent, however,  has reaffirmed that in a confined space I operate with all the finesse of a graceless yak.

My first act, crushing a wineglass stem into forlorn shards with an errant ugg boot was something anyone could have done. I’m convinced glass breakage is something that the glamping purveyors fully expect and routinely budget for.

Something a little more advanced on the scale of camping carnage was my careless hand gesture that emptied a flower vase of water into the central powerboard and shut down the entire tent’s electricals.

You need low-fi games

I can’t explain how many different ways I tried to contingency-plan my way through the lack of wi-fi in a tent. Step-parenthood is similar to parenthood in that it teaches you the sheer horror that can result from a bored tween who is severed from their technology.

I did explain that tents don’t have wi-fi. That the people around you are rarely likely to offer up hackable private wi-fi. That even the combined efforts of our family mobile data usage plans would wither under the weight of what is required for a pre-teen to compete in whatever it is that they do in a bout of Fortnite. And also, there was no TV.

Having managed all expectations, we employed the best of low-data-usage apps to navigate those literally dark hours between sunset and a reasonable bedtime.

Strangely enough, entertainment can still ensue from traditional games like charades, even if the charade topic is now delivered by a $0.99 app rather than a cheeky little box of cards.

My skill level at such games is still entry-level. I was halfway to the answer –  knowing that the back end of the answer was ‘shark’. I regarded closely the stepchild vigorously pointing to a white chrysanthemum (now laying parched in its jar after all the water was drained in the powerboard spillage incident).

He was subtly trying to convey that the full answer was the Great White.

I responded confidently with that slightly less ubiquitous, yet equally fearsome creature of the sea – the Flower Shark.

Catering works differently

If you were embarking on a lengthy glamping stay, you’d either need a fairly limitless eating-out budget or some serious planning around camping-compatible meals.

For the sake of one night, I felt disinclined to invest in keeping Esky ice up to anything more perishable than a bottle of Rose. Given our proximity to Melbourne winter, I was also naturally averse to committing time in an outdoor BBQ and camp kitchen to conjure up dinner. Instead I determined that all meals would be outsourced. Whilst husband and stepchild huddled over an iPhone, trying to watch a soccer league final that I’d failed to factor into the entertainment contingency planning, I was relegated to hunter/gatherer status when it came to the evening meal.

My life skills failed me when it came to home delivery in the context of a specific camp site. I valiantly pushed past my menu app’s failure to recognise my current location and apply very persistent efforts to deliver me pizza from my regular local outlet some 150km away. I pondered whether the caravan park would enforce the rigorous algorithms I was used to in my CBD carparking world and fail to deal with letting another vehicle in with our access pin without our vehicle with that same access pin having exited and leaving us trapped with the delivery guy, huddled collectively around shared pizza on campsite 180 until daybreak.

So I stood, nonchalantly leaning against the caravan park reception veranda pillar, clad in camping-appropriate  hoodie and inside-tent Uggs, awaiting the pizza delivery guy. I was  on the verge of holding up an airport style sign saying ‘La Porchetta’ lest I be mistaken for a shoddily clad lady of the night trawling for camper rough trade.

Boys in tents

My last learning, which is not news to anyone who cohabitates closely with near-teen boys, is their prolific ability to transform pizza and Pepsi into toxic gaseous fumes that can easily engulf an unaccustomed stepmother. Having been blessed with a house with adequate ventilation and only populated by a child on an every-other-weekend basis, I was not accustomed to such concentrated fumes.

Having now been indoctrinated, I feel compelled to defend every methane-emitting bovine accused of being at the heart of global warming and advise them that they should lawyer up and start singing like a canary about their human teenage toxin-emitting accomplices.

Glamping. Just another source of (overly fragrant) blended family experiences.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Mother’s Day Survival Tips for the Childless Stepmother

If your ovaries have never fired up, not even when Ryan Gosling was looking to spawn offspring, then Mother’s Day means nothing other than a day to avoid eating out and being financially slaughtered by a sentimentally festive mark-up.

For the first year or two of being a step-parent, given your complete lack of parenting awareness, you won’t register anything on Mother’s Day other than the already-well-ingrained desire to honour your own mother.

After a while though, the cumulative effort you’ve invested in cooking, cleaning, driving your step-child to a million things, finding band-aids in emergencies and dealing with relentless laundry may trigger a prickle of annoyance at not receiving any skerrick of recognition on Mother’s Day.  It’s possible that you may feel a teensy bit overlooked (notwithstanding your immense gratitude at not having been through that whole childbirth process).

Here are some of the insights into Mother’s Day from actual Mamas to help you understand what you are really missing out on (or not).

The Breakfast

If you wanted cold toast, undrinkable coffee and eggs more rubbery than politician campaign promises, there is no need to yearn for a Mother’s day breakfast, you might simply take the Monday 6am on a domestic airline.

Every biological mother knows that, good intentions aside, the domestic ineptitude of a small child knows no bounds and that the chaos wrought in the kitchen on Mother’s Day is no way compensated by the delivery of a lukewarm meal to your bedside. Someone will undoubtedly fail to turn off the gas underneath the frypan after use, rendering egg-remnants into industrial grade concrete which can never be removed. You can only hope they didn’t use your Le Creuset.

The lack of fine motor skills renders most youngsters unable to control a two litre bottle of OJ, leaving a sticky lake on the kitchen bench.

The void of observational skill or general interest in your wellbeing on the part of a child means they won’t realise you gave up all caffeinated drinks five years ago and will result in your being served up dodgy Earl Grey tea from bags encrusted with pantry-crud and long past any reasonable expiry date.

The gifts

Mother’s Day gifts are a domestic version of the office Kris Kringle, in that they seem to be gifts chosen by someone who does not really know you.

When the children are at an age where they can only source their gifts from the school mother’s day stall, the haul is going to be constrained to cheap $2 gifts that have arrived in container-loads from mainland China.  But then, who doesn’t want:

  • A fridge-magnet-enabled shopping list so that you can be reminded of your overwhelming domestic responsibilities every time you do some hopeful foraging for wine or cheese
  • A miniature sewing kit which is just like every version that comes free in any reputable hotel room. Given busy women are likely to have a tendency to deal with fallen hems with double sided sticky tape or the application of a snappy little staple, they already know that life is too short to actually do mending.
  • A torch for your handbag
  • Tea-towels as substantial as filo pastry
  • Lavender sachets to place in your sock drawer to ensure your feet smell like Nana.

No Day off from being a mother

Notwithstanding the potential for breakfast in bed, there is no get-out-of-jail-free card for women on Mother’s Day.  Mothers know they are still going to be surrounded by humans and pets that need to be fed. If you are a working woman, Sunday remains one of the few days where there is a chance to make inroads into laundry or ironing.

Notwithstanding the event, Baby Mamas gain no relief from the Sunday night ritual of trying to find school clothes for the next day and dealing with Friday’s forgotten lunchbox remnants.

So, even though you might feel the stirrings of annoyance at doing a lot of the work of being a mother without all the Mother’s day glory, be reassured that you are not necessarily missing out on anything.

Survival tips

If, as a Stepmother with no kids of your own, you are feeling vaguely slighted by lack of recognition on Mother’s Day, here are some tips:

  1. By definition, the stepchildren are likely to be at their mother’s house, so pour yourself a glass of wine, rejoice in the absence of any school week prep and watch all the reality TV shows without having to share the remote.
  2. Eat whatever you want for breakfast, in bed, without the risk of stray egg yolk on your Egyptian cotton.
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Prepping for NaNoWriMo

I’m prepping for NaNoWriMo, a frenetic month of non-stop writing aimed at producing no less than 50,000 words within the month of November. Having had a crack at this about ten years ago and being rewarded with caffeine shakes, a manuscript that has remained a bottom-drawer artefact and a vague sense of satisfaction, I’m up for it again.  There are several reasons why this appeals:

It justifies an investment in stationery and procrastination

Given November is all about writing at a pace of 1,667 words per day, clearly I need to hold all of my actual writing until then, leaving these last few days of October filled with delightful procrastination  planning. I’ve been drawn into the new era of the Bullet Journal, having invested in a nice notebook and vast amounts of time on Pinterest and Instagram perusing how others fill nice notebooks with plans, ‘spreads’ and charming calligraphy.  My long-held respect for nice notebooks has seen me amass many and use very few given the impossibly high bar set for the quality of ideas and notes before I would allow them to mark the pages of a nice notebook. So I’m working with a second-tier notebook and only when I’m really comfortable do I write anything in the nice notebook. Very similar to the sentiment that rendered ‘formal dining rooms’ redundant as we all chowed down on meals that were only worth of the kitchen table rather than the ‘good room’.

There’s self-imposed stress

My academic and career life has consistently demonstrated the need for stress and deadlines in order for me to work hard. Given a deadline that feels achievable, I will somehow work very hard to avoid nailing it with time to spare and instead invest time in unrelated activities until the deadline becomes near-unachievable. The stress hormone cortisol appears to be my go-to chemical and my indulgence in stress-generating practices have kept the hypertension department of Big Pharma well-funded. So something about trying to triple the word count that I’ve accumulated over a period of about 6 months in a period of 30 days appears to be a challenge that was created with exactly my psyche in mind.

There are tools

When I first did NaNoWriMo I recall there was a simply internet-based check in that you could complete to log your word count. Now there are forums, hashtags, write-ins and all manner of new distractions from the task of actually getting the work done. I stand ready to indulge in all of these.

I’ve pre-joined Facebook groups. I have a sticker that hails me as a participant which will add to my stress levels via the fear of failure to achieve a publicly declared goal.

It’s the right month for it

I have a seven day jaunt to a health retreat booked, planned well prior to the notion of being involved in NaNoWriMo. Without needing to feed myself or anyone else and absolved of my fulltime job and all household chores I feel confident of using the time between Tai Chi and Tricep dips to churn out words. Melbourne also has our annual November holiday in our worship of a horse race, which falls on a Tuesday. This means virtually every self-respecting Aussie will take the Monday off to craft a four day weekend.

As will I.

So only half of November will involve actual working days which feels like it might be easier to nail this thing.

Given the guiding principles of quality over quantity during the phase, and armed with a second tier notebook crammed with ideas, I will give it a crack.

Stay tuned.

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The Gems in the Suburban Showbag

My parents, now comfortably ensconced in retirement, are gradually acquiring new hobbies. One admirable pastime is decluttering. The sheer volume of possessions inside the walls of the family home where they’ve spent their entire married life suggests that this will be a long term quest. A by-product of this decluttering is that every time I drop over for a visit, I leave with a mandatory bag or box stuffed with paraphernalia. This began boldly with the request that I re-house my childhood piano, which had been left forlornly unused since that moment in the 80s where it became very obvious that I had no natural musical talent and that all the private tutoring available would be useless in exposing even a glimmer of skill. There were bags of childhood dolls, photo albums, school reports and ribbons – awarded back in the days where there was some element of victory rather than simply participation.  Given the lack of spare room in a modest suburban home that is already at capacity given a rampant obsession with shoes, books and clothes, many of these keepsakes are now permanent residents of the boot of my car and ride aimlessly around with me year upon year.

A recent find in what I have begun to refer to as the surbuban showbag pressed upon me in the driveway upon departure is an early attempt on my part at expressing literary creativity. A faded cardboard cover, bound by string and self-illustrated with worn-out markers, it was titled ‘The Family’.  The children appear front and centre. Tom and Harry are dark-haired scamps, clad in high-neck skivvies some thirty years before the Wiggles made it a thing. Jane and Suzanne sport lush blonde hair, matching pink dresses and stick legs of a kind only found on a current era catwalk.

The production quality is a little sketchy despite what appears to have been tremendous effort devoted to illustrations that are a whimsical mix of cut-and-pasted coloured paper and marker drawings. It likely now remains one of the few artifacts typed up on a manual typewriter in some ancestor of Courier and for that reason alone appeared worthy of the transition from my car to a bedside drawer. Without the re-drafting capability of modern day word processing, typing errors have been simply corrected in pen.  The writing style is flagrant Enid Blyton mimicry with phrases such as ‘Mother was very angry’, ‘they got an awful fright.’  The text carbon dates itself as something only slightly post-Jurassic with its description of ‘spilt ink’.

 

Tom and Harry bear all the textbook hallmarks of serial-killers in the making. Their casual vandalism, injury of household pets and dismembering of their siblings’ dolls would make it straight into episode one of any modern-day true crime podcast. In the face of ongoing damage and wilful violence and pre the days of widespread administration of Ritalin or availability of self-help literature, the parents resorted to grounding the twins, experiencing repeat behaviour and grounding them again.  A shockingly taboo use of smacking also failed the tame the twins. At this point, although a scant missive at a mere seven pages, the plot becomes bogged down and could do with a savage structural edit. Eventually, previously conspicuously absent grandparents write to the family, offering to house and rehabilitate the twins for an undefined period ‘to make them good again’.  The tome ends on a cliffhanger hope of rehabilitation and screams out for a sequel.

We wait to see if volume two appears in a future suburban showbag.