6 New Year Resolutions I will not be making

In previous, younger years, I made new year resolutions with gusto. Of course they were virtuous and admirable and ridiculous. Now that I’m older and the number of fucks I give has hit an all-time low I am very happy to announce that I will not be making any of these, previously broken, new year resolutions.

1. I will not drink so much

Well that’s utter bullshit. If this year is anything last year I will drink just as much. If not more. I may aim for more than one alcohol free day a week… or maybe a fortnight. Oh who am I kidding? I am writing this on New Year’s Day, sitting by the pool drinking a Rosso Antico on ice. Life is too short and stressful for AFDs and I’m certainly not going to start the year with one.

2. I will exercise more

Ummm… I know I should be doing this. I know. But I have actually made and broken that resolution every year for the last two decades. I’m not so much well-intentioned than just a flat-out liar. If exercise means I will spend more time window-shopping and increasing my typing fitness then maybe.

3. I will not swear so much

Fuck. That. Shit

4. I will cut down on caffeine

Bitch please. I did that twice in my life. And both times I was growing a person in my guts. Ever since I pushed those people out I’ve been exhausted so I think I have done my caffeine-free time.

5. I will quit sugar

No I won’t. I will not quit sugar. Not this year, not any year. I simply can’t quit sugar. It’s in my wine which I’m not giving up and I like my coffee strong and sweet – just how I like my men BTW.

6. I will lose weight

Hello? Have you read a word I’ve written? I’m not going to exercise, I like my daily coffees sweet and my wine plentiful. Unless I have another body part removed, I can’t see me reducing weight any time soon.

I tell you what I will do. I will continue to not give a fuck. I will continue to write. I will continue to be the best friend, wife, mother, daughter and sister I can be. I will continue to find contentment in the smallest things [because I’m too lazy to search for something more]. I will continue to feel good things about myself and the decisions I’ve made. I will continue to follow my [expanding!] gut. I will continue.

So Happy New Year. 

Have you made any resolutions that you’re planning to break?

Fuck Luck

I live a good life. 

Though not for everyone, I recognise that it’s an enviable life for many and that many people think that I am lucky. I know this because I’m told, often. Like it’s a compliment. But it’s not.

I am a first generation Australian. I was born to two European immigrants. My French father and my Dutch-Indonesian mother met in a migrant hostel in South Australia, fell in love and something, something… had two healthy, smart and able kids.

So I AM lucky to be born in Australia. Lucky and grateful. I am lucky to be born healthy, of mind, body and spirit. Lucky and grateful. I am lucky that I was born to a family that held ‘family’ in high regard so that I was raised with love. I’m lucky that the role models in my life were good and strong. I am lucky that my mum is the woman she is and therefore the parent she is. I am lucky that the next man she chose to be her husband would turn out to be the perfect step-father.

I am also lucky that I made it to womanhood, largely unscathed and now have two healthy, smart and able sons. I thank the universe for that good fortune every day.

I do feel lucky for all these incredibly positive things in my life because I had no impact on them. They were bestowed upon me thanks to genetics and thanks to the decisions and choices of my parents, their parents and the generations before them.

What I am not lucky for is everything else that people see in my life today. And be fucked if I’m going to smile and ‘yes, you’re right’ when someone suggests that I am.

Especially about the following ‘compliments’.

You’re so lucky you have a good husband.

My husband is a great partner. He is kind and loyal and reliable. He is loving and respectful. He is generous and supportive. He is strong and present and generally shares the same values as I do. He encourages me to follow my dreams and stands strong whenever I need to weather a personal storm.

But it is not an accident that we are together. Our marriage wasn’t arranged by a third party. At the time of meeting my [now] husband I was dating several other blokes… with an indecent amount of ex-boyfriends in my wake. I was trying before I did any buying. In the time that we have known each other we have dated each other, lived together, broken up, dated other people and got back together. When I said ‘yes’ to his proposal, I already KNEW he would be a good husband. That’s WHY I said ‘yes’. In the fifteen years that we have been married we have struggled, grown, aged, argued, weathered hard times and very nearly and irrevocably separated. Luck has not kept us together. Hard work has.

When we brought our first baby home we were CLUELESS. So we carved out a plan for how we wanted our family’s life to look and we stuck to the plan together. Accountable to each other and encouraging of each other. We headed in the same direction, side by side. He decided he wanted to be the best father he could be and I wanted to be the best mother I could be. So I spend every day doing what I can to achieve that goal. He does the same. He CHOOSES to be present and engaged and invested in his sons. We fuck up a lot but we hold each other accountable to those aspirations every day. 

No luck. No accident. No magic.

You’re so lucky you live in a beautiful home.

I have a beautiful home. It’s GORGEOUS. I am illogically and unreasonably emotionally attached to it. I actually love my home. With real feelings in my heart. It’s what I call my ‘forever home’ and if I had my way I would spend the rest of my days here. After renting for years, the last home I had I built with my husband. We worked crazy hard to build it for as little as possible so we could sell it making the maximum, honest profit… which we then used as a deposit on my ‘forever home’ which we substantially renovated.

We have sacrificed holidays, new cars and extravagant life choices to live in this house. There are many days when we reevaluate and question whether it’s worth it. My answer, every time, is “it is.” Those choices are not for everyone, we know, and we have many friends who prioritise other things like international travel with their family higher than a massive real estate commitment… and we have both been envious of each other’s choices at various times of our lives. Are they lucky to be able to travel regularly? Or have they engineered their life’s decisions around their priorities?

You’re lucky you can stay home with your kids and not have to work.

When I was ‘surprised’ by the arrival of a new life in my womb I had my own menswear boutique where I sold my own-label, imported men’s shirts ties and cufflinks. Before then I had worked full-time since the age of sixteen.

Once we got over the shock of being pregnant we had many candid talks about what we thought our family would look like and we both agreed that we didn’t want our child/children to go into childcare. One of us had to stay home with them and I chose to be the one. Which meant that I had to close my business and give up earning an income to do so.

My husband also has his own business selling wine [now online] that he started when we were first together. We have both worked hard to support each other in our professional lives.

If you’ve ever run your own business you’ll know that it is incredibly taxing and I’m not just talking about tax. It takes an enormous level of commitment, sacrifice and lean living. It also takes tenacity. In business, especially, you make your own luck. When you run your own business it becomes part of the family and though I no longer have my own business, I spend many hours every week with my head in my husband’s business.

Contrary to popular belief, I’m not the good little woman at home lucky to have a man bring home the bacon. My man brings home the bacon because he doesn’t have to worry about cooking it. He also doesn’t have to worry about school commitments, sick children, grocery shopping, clean sheets on the bed or jocks in his drawer.

Of course, becoming a single-income household was not without its challenges and it meant that we had to tighten our belts.

We don’t go to stage shows that are touring or attend concerts of any artists other than our kids. We haven’t been to all the new restaurants in town [or even many of the old ones]. We don’t often go to the movies and we usually choose to have our coffee at home instead of in a café. We do A LOT of entertaining at home. In our gorgeous house. We’re prepared to sacrifice lifestyle but we will always invest in our friends and family. And there’s no point in having such a big, beautiful home if you’re not going to fill it, often, with people you love.

You’re lucky that you have such good friends.

You know now that I think about it, I think I only ever hear that from my friends :)

But I’m not alone. I hear people say ‘you’re so lucky’ to women particularly ALL.THE.TIME. And I hear good, strong and capable women take it on the chin far too often. I’ve heard people say ludicrous fucking statements like “Oh you’re LUCKY that you have a husband/partner to BABYSIT your kids” NO. One does not ‘babysit’ one’s own offspring. One parents them. And there’s nothing lucky about that. I know women who have had to defend their ‘fortunate’ lives as though they somehow don’t deserve them. My friends are sick of being called lucky for their life’s choices too. Lucky that they have such a good job, lucky that they drive such a nice car, lucky that they have such a nice partner, lucky that they have a happy family, lucky that they have a good life.

Calling someone ‘lucky’ robs people from owning their decisions. It devalues their own strategic plan and their hard work. It’s condescending and many times demeaning. It’s like the common misconception that new musical artists in the industry are ‘overnight successes’. As if the decade of training and auditions and failures prior to their emergence didn’t exist.

As with many people, the role that luck has played in my life so far is part of the picture.

But the truth is hundreds of little decisions every day and a few really momentous ones are the reasons that I live such a lucky life.

Where do you go to my lovely?

"Where do you go to my lovely?
When you're alone in your bed
Tell me the thoughts that surround you
I want to look inside your head, yes I do"

When I was in my early twenties I worked for Apple. They were some of the greatest days of my life for many, many reasons not the least being that I was in my early twenties. I have memories that make me smile every time I think of them even decades later but there is one that still amazes me as much as it did when it actually happened all those years ago.

I was at one of their national conferences in Sydney and out for the evening with all my newly connected colleagues from head office and the branches around Australia. The early 90s was pre Fringe Benefits Tax so EVERYTHING went on the Apple tab. EVERY.THING. So much fun. Lots of drinking and lots of late night talking. And on this particular night I was talking to a relatively new exec at Apple called Lorraine. She was older than me [I WAS young after all, everyone was bloody older than I was] but we ‘clicked’ and sat chatting in the bar for hours about all things.

I can’t remember how or why but I do remember talking to her quite openly and nostalgically about my recently departed dad. Perhaps it was just that he was recently departed or perhaps there was another catalyst but whatever the reason, I felt inspired to share.

I told her about my parents’ great, young love and romanticised their demise. I spoke of the inherent ‘coolness’ of having young parents who loved each other in the 70s and I told her of ‘their song’. You know how all our relationships [good and bad] have ‘the song’? The one that you hear today, even decades later that will remind you of that time and that love? Well their song was ‘Where do you go to my lovely?” by Peter Sarstedt. In my circles of friends it was a little-known, old song. But I knew it word for word because I had heard it so many times.

So I tell my new found friend Lorraine of this song except instead of telling her the song, I sing it to her because no-one ever knows the song when I mention it by title. And as I sing, paying no mind to the bar we were sitting in, I cry a little bit because I’d been drinking and I was young and my dad’s death was fresh on my heart.

And I watched her face change as I sang it and saw the tears well up in her eyes too and I remember thinking very briefly that she was moved by my story and by the lyric. She waits until I have finished the chorus and says to me :

“Peter Sarstedt is my brother”

Accascuse me?? [of course I didn’t say that because the genius of Pitch Perfect hadn’t been invented yet but my 20 something self would definitely have rolled that one out if I had known about it then]

I can’t even tell you what I thought in that exact moment. But I do remember thinking she must be bullshitting me. No-one I knew had even heard of the song, let alone the artist and here was this woman, that I had just met who for some bizarre reason I felt compelled to share such an emotional part of myself with telling me that she was this artist’s sister.

And then she told me things. Many things about her and her relationships and her family and how she never tells anyone who her brother is. She told me that hearing how something her brother had done was so special to a family on the other side of the world, made her feel proud and connected to him. That shared moment of vulnerability was extraordinary and will be forever imprinted on my life’s tapestry. When I got home I told my mum, who COULD NOT BELIEVE IT until a copy of the cassette [it was the 90s people] signed by Peter himself arrived for her. Very, very special.

It was never a story I thought to share until just last week a friend of mine posted a link to that song on her Facebook page. And the memory hit me, full-force, in the gut. And I told her that story and she loved it and it was her that highlighted the value of vulnerability and where sharing can take us all.

So here I am, sharing.

"I know where you go to my lovely,

When you're alone in your bed

I know the thoughts that surround you

'Cause I can look inside your head"

So long 2014...

So it’s the end of another year and the new one is looming. This one’s been a big one, but then they all are. My boys turned 7 and 9 blitzed it at school. I raised a lot of money for cancer research and welcomed a new God-daughter to my family. My little sister turned 21, I had breakfast with Mark Bouris, I spent more than I earned, I danced, I laughed and I yelled. Oh, and my mother-in-law moved in with us. Let’s not speak of that. 

I returned to part-time work in earnest and seem to have found my happy place but it has taken my time away from personal blogging quite a bit. Still, I managed to belt out a few and I thought I’d put a list of the most read together for you to read over your holidays.

The one about loving someone who is depressed

The one where I declare there's nothing wrong with an ordinary life

The one where Stefan vomited all over the floor

The one where I come up with as many reasons as possible that women want to have sex

The one about Fakebook

The one about what it's like to love a 9 year old boy

The one about my missing pelvic floor

Thank you for sticking with me. I know I haven't been around much lately but I still love this gig and you too, faithful reader. I hope you have a sensational new year and I promise to write more!!

Happy New Year Seventies Babies.

Love Tan xx