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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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The Rookie Stepmother’s Guide to the Nacho Method

Skulk around Facebook Stepmother groups for long enough and you’ll likely encounter a very simple hashtag, usually in response to a very complex stepfamily scenario.

#nacho

It’s not about the soothing balm of corn chips awash in salsa and mozzarella in the face of a life challenge. Much as this concoction might have served you well as the perfect couch-snack in the face of heartache, buoyed by its natural life-partner Tequila, Stepmotherly nacho has nothing to do with a convenient Tex-Mex treat.

Simply put, the philosophy is ‘Nacho Kids. Nacho Problem’.

Underlying principles include:

Reminding everyone involved that this is not actually your child

This allows you to extract yourself from some of the more onerous responsibilities including:

  • Finding AWOL sports uniform components in the last 10 minutes before commencement of said sport
  • Taking responsibility for the craft project the night before the craft project is due when you are in fact the least crafty person you know
  • Trying to patrol gaming hours and screen time
  • Adjusting your entire household’s dietary patterns when the child decides to be a pescetarian

This also means you can treat the stepchild as if they were the child of a friend, or of a sibling. This allows you to dabble at will in their lives, taking them to movies you are keen on, on spinny rides at an amusement park or filling them with simple sugars then relinquishing all subsequent responsibilities.

Refraining from expressing criticism about the stepchild

Stepping back in this fashion involves being less invested in expressing your suggestions about how this child might behave in order to best position themselves as a valued contributor to society. This is useful in two ways:

  • Your suggestions are very unlikely to ever be acknowledged. In a world already full of frustrations like ineffective public transport, talentless social media influencers who earn four times what you do and those people who block your access to the deli number dispenser by taking their ticket and not moving, you hardly need to expend energy on an opinion that will be ignored by a child.
  • If you, as I do, often lack an appropriate level of filtering when it comes to expressing your opinion to a loved one about their first-born child, it will be useful to retrain yourself to say nothing. I’ve learned that comments such as ‘I feel like you are just facilitating his path to mediocrity’ or ‘don’t let him end up being the person I’d put on a Performance Improvement Plan’ in retrospect would have been better left as ‘inside thoughts’ rather than those that came out aloud.

Understand your triggers, and don’t engage

As the ultimate nerd-child who was driven to academic pursuits, my head wants to actually explode at the concept that a child would not complete their homework and hand it in.

As the daughter of a nurse who only accepted projectile vomiting and / or febrile seizures as a reason to stay home from school, I’m sorely triggered by someone who expects to stay home from school due to a sore stomach (which seems suspiciously proximate to eating 500g of Cheetos)

The Nacho method involves understanding that this is not about you and your triggers.

Step back from the chaos

Unless there has been an unseemly tiny period between your partner disconnecting with their ex and your coupling, they’ve been perfectly able to manage all the twin-household carnage without you. Patterns have been established. Boundaries, regardless of how porous, exist. Feeding, housing, educating and most of Maslow’s priorities were maintained before you rocked up.

Even if you have, as almost every rookie does, inserted yourself enthusiastically in the everyday of this fractured household in an earnest attempt to make everyone feel whole, if you now take a stiletto-step back, no one is going to keel over.

If you are writhing in angst over unfair distribution of household tasks, if the hashtag of your life has become #ididntsignupforthis, it’s not too late to politely retreat a little.

Have no involvement with your partner’s ex

Enough said.

Whether its a 1am snack to soak up a tummy full of sauv blanc or a legit strategy for stepfamily sanity, its always OK to embrace the nacho.

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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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Sharing All the Tips – Stepmom Magazine

I love being a contributor to Stepmom Magazine. Every month is packed with articles – from rookies like me through to family relationship specialists, all coming from a place of love and support.

Check out my last articles on https://www.stepmommag.com/

Here’s a list:

Are you a Stepmom Warrior or Diplomat? November 2019 issue.

Stepmother Taboos: Things You Can’t Say or Do – In Mixed Company. October 2019 issue.

Stepfamily Logistics: Strategies for Staying Sane in Split Households. September 2019 issue.

Stepmom Secrets: 6 Important Things No-one Told You. January 2019 issue.

From Corporate to Cupcakes: 5 Career Lessons for New Stepmoms. Feature article, December 2018 issue.

The Rookie Stepmom: 4 Things I Wish I Knew From the Start, November 2018 issue.

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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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Dear Grandad. Re: the rats.

Rats! They fought the dogs and killed the cats,
And bit the babies in the cradles,
And ate the cheeses out of the vats,
And licked the soup from the cooks’ own ladles,
Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men’s Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women’s chats
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.

The Pied Piper of Hamelin – Robert Browning

Dear Grandad,

There’s a family of rats living in the branches of a tropical fern-like plant in our garden. Had I been blessed with a greater interest in matters horticultural I would have been able to specify for you the plant in question, but as I’m shamefully agriculturally-ignorant I’m unable to elaborate.

A burst of unexpected warmth and torrential rain on rampantly fertile bayside soil has seen this tree sprout branches and foliage that just apparently screamed ‘multi-storey coastal living’ through whatever real estate network supports the rat community. A rat family of five has moved in, unperturbed by the proximity to a couple of retirement-age Australian Terriers who relinquished the chasey-terrier part of their nature some time back and are now embracing more of the Aussie bean-bag lifestyle and an inclination to simply observe.

I’ve been contemplating ways to have these rats removed from my backyard locale. Tomorrow, a chap who has oriented his career towards relieving hapless office folks from the need to tend gardens is coming to raze unkempt trees, trim untamed shrubs and remove all evidence of unfettered gall wasp on a beloved lemon tree. He’s not had the presence of a rat family in the ferny tree specifically outlined, but he’s been advised of the need to cut that sucker back, hopefully prompting the rat family to move elsewhere.

Much as I hate rats, as my running buddy will attest, having been shoved sacrificially into a drain as a protective instinct when I unexpected encountered one in a morning training session, I don’t want to actually poison them with chemicals that will Chernobyl their insides.

I’d like a softer exit for my rodent family. I’d like them to somewhat-voluntarily relocate. Preferably to Hampton.

This humdrum conundrum was just another reminder of you Grandad. It never stops. Although you’ve been gone for eight years, you are still present.

I’d made it habit to send you a post card each time I travelled to a new country. Last month, I was in India for the first time. Habit made me pick up a post card to send to you.  I put it down again, but sent you a mental message to say hi.

When I was small enough that I was still sharing a room with my sister, which left a spare room that was yours and Grandma’s when you made the 350km visit to our family home, I vividly recall being tucked up on a Sunday morning, with you telling me the tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. You were able to recite, verbatim, the 2000-odd words of Browning’s poem.  Only now do I realise how amazing this was. At the time, I was struck by the skills of the piper, his command over the rats, the concept of guilders as currency and the cautionary tale about the local government shafting the rat-removal contractor and losing all the town kiddos in the process.

I didn’t comprehend the love of words and embrace of poetry that led you to memorise Browning’s words.

Now I do.

I’ve learned so much from you.

I’ll keep you posted on the rat family relocation.

Love Kylie

xx

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Greetings from Heidelberg

I’m in Heidelberg. Not Melbourne’s Heidelberg, home of The Greenery which taunts me on every long run along the Yarra Flats and whose fence I became entangled in when I was resting an knee injury by substituting some inexpertly executed cycling for running. They say you never forget how to ride a bike. I’m here to tell you that you can. 

No, the German Heidelberg.

A work trip deposited me in the home of sausage and strudel. It was an uneventful trip, blessed as I was to enjoy the hospitality of Emirates business class. In these times, where zealots can turn even your most luxurious flat-bed, Bulgari-in-flight-accessorised aircraft into a weapon of destruction, there are several moments of relief to be enjoyed.

1 – when your plane lands safely.

2- when your luggage has made it through the myriad possible points of failure and arrives on the baggage carousel.

3 – when the person who is picking you up after a 24-hour journey is there with his little sign.

Clearly, I breathed out too deeply, too early. I’d not travelled on a German Autobahn since my 1993 Contiki tour, and for reasons not confined to the passage of time I don’t remember one moment of that.

My driver relished the left lane and applied himself to winning the autobahn with all the verve of vintage Schumacher. I’m routinely predisposed to passing unsolicited advisory commentary on my husband’s driving when I feel like he’s applying himself more aggressively than required on Nepean Highway on the way home from Sunday golf, notwithstanding we are barely peaking 70kmh.

I’ll never do that again.

Seated as I am in the Euro back-passenger-side I’m unfortunately in prime position to observe my driver’s intent to maintain an average autobahn speed of 170kmh.  Now these are excellent roads with wide lanes and very focused drivers. My driver is in his 60s, which suggests he’s been navigating these roads skilfully and safely almost to retirement age (unless he’s a high powered financier who is indulging a late in life career change) I do feel like he is pretty loose with his calculations on the braking distance required when one travels at 170kmh, but who am I to argue. I’m in a large German-built car, whose every anti-skid-braking, side-airbag, crumple-zone molecule would surely strain towards keeping its passenger safe, purely from the perspective of nationalistic pride. Nevertheless, I Google the road toll stats.

I make it to the hotel, more woozy from the white-knuckle-clenching that has re-distributed my bloodflow in abnormal patterns than I was as a result of travelling more than 16,000 kilometres and numerous time zones in 24 hours.

From there it gets better and I invest my Sunday recovery time ahead of the working week in exploring the lovely town of Heidelberg, and lovely it is.

I exercise off some jet lag and in-flight Veuve Cliquot with a stroll on the Philosophenweg which apparently back in the day was the path trod by students and philosophers in the backblocks behind Heidelberg’s universities. Today it is the path trod by Instagrammers who have seen this trail in the top 10 must-do’s on Trip Advisor. It’s also popular with serious runners who are using the fairly epic hill to do the training I SHOULD be doing in preparation for an imminent half-marathon but seems a little out of reach given my jet lag and a solid winter of over-indulgence.

From the top of the hill are epic views of the old bridge and old town, which in my case are best enjoyed by standing still instead of trying to simultaneously sight-see and navigate cobblestones downwards in leisure shoes that lack suitable grip, imperiled as I am by motor skills that have let me down since high school.

I then embarked on a tour of Heidelberg Castle. I love a castle, and given Australia lacks anything castle-ish beyond about 100 years old, I’m all over a European Castle tour like white on rice. This may have been triggered by my parents’ early efforts to instil a sense of history into my interests, hampered as they were by the only local offering being Kryal Castle. Looking back now, it’s fine if you want your castle constructed in Western Districts’ bluestone, positioned ready to aggressively defend vulnerable sheep paddocks near Ballarat, with staff wearing loosely accurate historical garb, relishing the opportunity to use the term ‘wench’ at will. But it’s got nothing on Heidelberg Castle, sporting as it does an impressive gallery of statues of former rulers, vintage ballrooms, solid staircases – and the highlight – a wine barrel capable of holding 220,000 litres of vino. Despite no shortage of real estate, the top of the wine barrel does double duty by providing a large dance floor space which appeals to that part of me that will never hit a dancefloor without some proximity to alcohol. It was built to hold the tax collected from local winegrowers who paid in the currency of wine, but somewhat loses its cachet when you realise they co-mingled the wine regardless of grape variety, colour or vintage, resulting an almost undrinkable brew that just reinforces everything I’ve always believed about cask wine.

Having ticked the key Trip Advisor boxes, I strolled the delightful old-town precinct. I managed to walk on past take-away joint Mr Currywurst despite the obvious charms of a corporation that had the creativity to put curry sauce on German sausages.

I settled into a café in a quiet corner of the old town for some traditional European café people watching. 

Here’s a rapid-fire list of my observations:

Wine is cheap and good. I will eternally cherish any geography that serves up a very nice chardonnay for the equivalent of $6. Best chance of a similar price point at home is the subsidised bar at the local kids’ footy club and even then for that money you are probably going to be drinking Yellow Tail.

Dogs are stylish. Dogs of all shapes and sizes happily stroll the streets in bandanas, coats and ponchos. Even Bondy, the most metrosexual of my pair of Australian Terriers, and who always gains a little extra swagger when venturing out in a new item of apparel would probably come over a little sheepish if he took to the streets in a dog poncho.

Americans have still not moved on from Seinfeld. Look I’m all about comfort when it comes to being a tourist out for a big day of walking in a new town. But sneakers with jeans are just not OK and could NEVER EVER be OK anywhere in Europe. By comparison, a chap looking a lot more local strolls past in a linen jacket and crisp white shirt toting a pink notebook, a citrus gelato and a scooter.

Boots on cobblestones. Having made several references in this blog to my challenged motor skills and general co-ordination, you’d be unsurprised to find me in rapt admiration of a lady who is commanding the cobblestones in spiky heeled boots of impressive height. Every part of me wants to rush over and express this admiration with all the fervour of those late night bestie ‘Oi Love Yous’ that are generally sparked by overconsumption of Ouzo. I resist.

Smoking is still a thing. Having not been in Europe for a few years I had forgotten about the proportion of Europeans that still love a cigarette. From the smoking room at the airport through to the cigarette-company ashtray on my table, its clear that its still a thing.

RHOH There should totally be a Real Housewives of Heidelberg. I could have cast it from my café table in the space of two hours. Boots-on-cobblestones lady would be first on the list. Second on the list is a 60-ish year old lady who appears to be an uncanny merger of one of my close friends and I, fast-forwarded by a decade or so. I’ve long maintained my position that I won’t be cutting my long hair short in any kind of deference to older age until Elle MacPherson does (long hair and an obsession with aviator sunglasses being the ONLY area where our worlds collide)  My close friend has an equally fierce commitment to an animal print. This lady was rocking both long locks and a leopard-print. Had there been any way to do it surreptitiously I would have taken a pic and ‘grammed it for keeps.

European street entertainment is serene. Somewhere nearby, a violin was quietly serenading the courtyard with classical music. If this were Southbank in Melbourne, the peace would be interrupted by parkour enthusiasts and that rowdy fire-eater with an obsession for crowd participation.

Violin and chardonnay on cobblestone streets – a perfect antidote to jetlag and autobahn angst.