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

Fakebook vs The Full Catastrophe

Imagine we’re friends and I’ve invited you to my place for dinner. Because I don’t want to appear fake and life-shame you somehow, the dinner table conversation plays out like this:

“Here’s some snags and some bread. We’ve run out of butter but just put some sauce on it and it should be fine. I was going to buy steak, but we had a really high electricity bill this quarter so we can’t afford it. Excuse my pjs. I’m having a shit day and couldn’t be arsed getting dressed. I know that you won’t mind though – no airs and graces for you! Just keeping it real. Isn’t your son so well behaved? I’d love for him to be able to play with my sons but they’re both in a time-out in their bedroom ‘cause they refused to pick their toys up off the lawn and are now refusing to talk because they hate their family. Oh and my husband was planning to be here but we had a fight this morning and he doesn’t really like you much anyway so he’s gone to Bunnings. Pardon? You’d like to use the toilet? Of course! But don’t sit on the seat. I haven’t had a chance to wipe the piss off.”

When you invite people over for dinner, don’t you clean the house? Don’t you wear something nice and cook something delicious? Do you serve it on a lovely, set table with some matching [or purposely mismatched] serviettes? Haven’t we always shared our ‘highlight reel’?

I’m so tired of hearing people complain about other people only ever sharing their ‘highlight reel’ on social media. What is so wrong with it and why do they care?

Seriously people. Our whole fucking life is a highlight reel. It’s called manners. And discretion. There are only a handful people that see the whole catastrophe of my family life. I have 300 friends on Facebook. I don’t bullshit to them but I also don’t tell them about every shitty part of my life. Nor would I tell someone that I hardly know if I caught up with them at a party. “So nice to see you again Tania! It’s been ages – how are things?” “Oh y’know – pretty shit. Motherhood does my head in. We don’t have enough money to do anything. My kids have got attitude. My husband is stressed all the time and I’ve put on 8 kilos in the last 12 months. But enough about me - how about you?”

I’ve shared before that I, happily, live a very ordinary life. I think that’s cool and I’m authentic in all my online antics but there’s also some stuff that’s not just mine to share. I’m married and, believe it or not, we have our challenges. But whilst I’m a chronic over-sharer, my husband is the complete antithesis. It’s not up to me to air our sometimes dirty laundry to all and sundry in an attempt to share my life ‘warts and all’.  My kids throw tantrums. I argue with my mum. My house is often in disarray which often matches my hair. Sometimes the frypan that I cooked dinner in on Monday is still sitting, dirty on the stove top on Thursday. Sometimes I cook wholesome, organic, from-scratch family meals and sometimes I wipe that dirty fry pan and whip up a sausage sizzle for dinner.

I’m normal. Just like you are. But I’m not obligated to share every ‘normal’ part of my life with everyone I’m connected to, to avoid some sort of social media misconception. I am not responsible for your feelings of guilt. Just as you [or anyone] is responsible for mine. This whole business of people feeling worse about themselves because of the ‘highlight reels’ their social media friends dare to share online drives me nuts. Would these same people be pissed off if every time they were invited to someone’s house that the kids were on their best behavior and the house was tidy and the host couple seemed to genuinely enjoy each other’s company in their new outfits? Would they leave that house believing that their host’s intention was to prove to them how much better they were at ‘life’ than their guests. Would they leave feeling shamed and offended that their hosts had dared to be so ‘fake’?

There just seems to be someone pissed off about someone else’s use of social media every fucking day. What does anybody care? If I only ever show myself looking gorgeous with my gifted and talented children while my flawless husband is off hunting and gathering when he’s not cooking the perfect bbq – who cares? Do they need to see behind the scenes? What makes people think any of that is about them? What makes people think that me showing only the awesome bits of my life is shaming their life? Maybe all us hateful fakebookers are sharing the ‘highlight reel’ as an exercise in gratitude. You know, that there are positive parts of our otherwise normal, boring, messy lives. Or maybe it just doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else at all.

You know what shits me? Breakfast updates and some trending awareness campaign that shows up a million times in my newsfeed and pictures of cats and stupid passive aggressive vague updates and any story about the Kardashians. But do I care?

Nope. I just scroll past and get on with my sometimes awesome life.

And I think that’s what we all should do.

There's nothing wrong with an ordinary life

I loved this video when I saw it. And when I watched it again, I still thought it was good but I’m a little bit over the implication that we must all be doing something more with our lives. I'm over my newsfeed being flooded with non-inspirational quotes like:

What is wrong with living an ordinary life?

There is nothing extraordinary about my life. If I go by family history I’m almost exactly middle-aged. I’m married to a nice man with whom I have had two healthy children who share a bedroom and walk to school. We eat home almost every night. We live in a beautiful home which we owe a mortgage on so have very little spare cash to travel which means our holidays are almost always local. We own two average cars, quarrel with our extended family and have at least one piece of Ikea in every room of the house. We raise money for charity, we recycle, we grow our own veggies and we never have enough sleep. 

At least once a month I despair that I have nothing to wear and my husband threatens to give away the kids toys that they’ve left outside overnight. We rarely go to concerts or new restaurants but have friends over regularly. We aim for a couple of alcohol-free days a week and I choose to accept my body for what it is rather than hit the workout circuit. My boys exclaim ‘that’s not fair!’ about something totally fair almost every day and still struggle to aim into the toilet bowl without pissing on the floor. I wash my hair on Wednesdays and make spaghetti Bolognese at least once a week. I get unreasonably annoyed when the television channels randomly change the days and times of my favourite shows [currently Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy] and have put my hand up to be the class parent rep for the 4^th year in a row. My boys still hug and kiss me every day and if my husband is at work, he’ll call at least once to ‘check in’ on our day.

Seizing the day for me often means making a good, strong cup of coffee, changing the sheets on the beds and cooking up a few meals for the freezer. I’m not sure that’s very ‘carpe diem’ but that’s what an ordinary life is. And what is so wrong with that? The constant message to live a greater life is a crazy amount of pressure. If you’re not using your jellybeans wisely, you’re wasting your days. Wasting your days. What the fuck does that actually mean? And who’s going to measure the waste? Me?? I don’t really feel like I’m wasting anything. But then there’ll be another article about living an extraordinary life that makes me think – fuck, I’m doing this wrong. If I don’t have a desire for a greater life, am I just lazy? I should be doing things. Having adventures. Impacting the world. Leaving a legacy.

Wait... what? Isn’t that what I’m doing? 

Some days my sons do something so impressive that I feel I am part of an extraordinary journey. I teach them things. And they learn right before my eyes. Their brain fills up with things I tell them. We go to the zoo and I see it through their eyes and it’s a wonderful adventure. I get dragged through the nocturnal section which has never interested me and delight in seeing the baby bilby and my boys and I whisper so we don’t scare it and it’s so exciting. I tell them stories of their grandparents. Stories that are so foreign and removed from life today that they seem like fairytales. They ask for more and I realise I am my family’s memory and the tapestry of my family lives in me and that is extraordinary. I reach out to my gorgeous sons and hold them to me and I feel their heart, that I MADE, beat against my own chest. I made people. And now I’m growing people. And that is fucking extraordinary.