Abi pushed back her chair, scraping the tiles. She went into the pantry.
‘What are you doing, babe?’ Grace asked.
‘Looking for wine.’ Every now and then someone would bring a bottle for dinner and it would get stashed away.
‘Abi. Come on…’
‘I have a feeling that Marg’s about to drop the other shoe. I want to be prepared.’ She came out waving a dusty bottle of organic chardonnay. Bingo.
Marg pushed on. ‘So, the second thing.’
Abi slammed three mugs down on the table with the bottle. ‘Who’s with me?’
‘No, thanks, Abi,’ said Marg. ‘So… We’ve had an email from the Blog-ahhs. They are concerned by the negative attention that the blog has been getting. They’re reviewing your eligibility for the award.’
‘Fuck. Them.’ Abi filled her mug to the brim, took a big swig. ‘Ahhh. I remember that.’
Grace picked up the bottle and poured herself an inch—Abi appreciated this show of solidarity. ‘Well, that’s okay. I feel like we need to pull back from everything anyway. Let’s just shift focus to real life, Abi. You know, all this hoo-ha, it only matters if we let it.’
‘If we let it? Grace. I am not getting thrown out of that competition. Can you imagine Elle’s crowing? The humiliation?’ ‘Who cares, Abi? All that matters is here under our roof, right now.’
Marg looked at Grace, looked at Abi. ‘It’s true, Abi. This doesn’t have to be a big deal if we just back away. Bow out of the award. Leave the blog for a while. Let things die down.’
Abi took another mouthful of wine. ‘Nope. You know what you’re both forgetting?’
‘What?’ Grace tried to take the mug from Abi’s hand, but she pulled it back.
‘I have an army. A fucking army. We are focusing on the negatives here, on all the people who are pissed off with me. But thousands of people love what we stand for and will defend my right to say it: the Green Divas. I am not going to abandon them. I am going to fucking mobilise them. We are not backing down. We are digging in.’
For the first time in two weeks, Abi’s stomach didn’t feel queasy. Her throat felt clear. Her head was swimming—sure, from the first drop of booze that had passed her lips in a year—but through the warm haze, she could see a plan forming. It was suddenly clear that no one else knew what was best for her and her people.
‘If we are in trouble, I am going on the attack.’ Abi stood, picked up the wine bottle and her mug, and walked to the kitchen door.
Behind her, Grace said, ‘Jesus, Abi. Sometimes…’
As she opened the door, she heard Marg whisper, ‘What do
you do with this?’
‘Nothing, absolutely nothing. Just let her go.’
Abi went to her shed, sat down at the big desktop computer, and fired it up. She took a gulp of the warm white wine, launched her Facebook page and wrote:
Hey GDs.
Missed me? Oh, how I have missed you. People have been telling me that the best way to deal with being attacked is to lie low and take cover. I listened. And I have been miserable. I need to speak.
Some of the shit that people have thrown at me in the last few weeks is fair enough. But, come on. I do not believe it is ‘natural selection’ that kids who eat ham should die. OF COURSE I don’t think that.
Ham is full of carcinogens, and the bread ought to be sprouted, but I digress…
Do I stand here to speak the truth about all of the unhealthy bullshit we are all too comfortable swallowing? Yes, I do. I truly do.
We should all be able to challenge the epic Group Think that’s all around us without fear.
You know it. I know it. But I am not a monster.
There are some enemies worth fighting and they don’t all come with ugly words and threats.
Enemies like this woman—The Stylish Mumma. She does not speak the truth, GDs. She represents a life you can never live up to. She is constantly trying to sell you shit that you don’t need. Your marriage will not be perfect if you buy a $250 juicer. Your husband’s cancer will not be cured because you are wearing $380 shoes while they shove a chemo needle into his arm. Your kids will not love and respect you because you dress them up in designer clothes and make them pose like tiny supermodels.
None of this shit is important.
Go to her page now. Tell her what you think of the materialistic bullshit that is being forced down your throat every day.
Let’s show the world that women, and mothers, are smarter than that.
We stand for authenticity, for a raw life that matters. And we will not be silenced.
So if you are with me: Like, Share, Comment. Let’s build this baby back up, and tear down the bullshit while we’re at it.
I’m at your side, GDs—are you at mine?
Onwards. Your QGD xx
Abi hit publish. She refilled the mug. She left the barn and walked back into the kitchen.
Grace and Marg were still at the table, talking in hushed voices. One of Marg’s little tousle-headed kids was curled up on her knee. Otto was loitering near the stove.
Grace looked up at Abi. ‘What did you do?’
‘I fought back,’ said Abi. ‘And I did not attack Shannon Smart. Look at your phones.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LEISEL
‘You’re not part of this, are you?’ Leisel’s boss, Zac, put an iPad in front of her face as she came out of a meeting room.
MUMMY BLOGGERS AT WAR! yelled the headline on the homepage.
Leisel shuddered. ‘No. Of course not. I’m not a “mummy blogger”—what a patronising term.’
Leisel kept walking. Zac kept walking with her. ‘But that’s what you are, right? That TV show you were on, the stories we’ve been running…’
‘I’m a woman who writes about parenthood online, Zac.’
‘Yes. A mummy blogger.’
‘Jesus.’ Leisel was not so afraid to talk back to her patronising boss these days: her stock was up. ‘If you say so.’
‘So, what’s going on here? Do you know these people?’
It was a complicated question. Although Abi was a member of her family, Leisel wouldn’t say she knew her. Elle, of course, she’d never met.
But in just a few weeks, that was supposed to change. They were all meant to be on Breakfast! together before the Blog-ahhs. Given the way that things were going, the idea made her itch.
‘I don’t know, Zac. Really, it has nothing to do with me. Listen, I need to talk to you about Just for Her’s cover. It’s not working, Jayne wants to push the deadline and—’
‘You women have been taking up a lot of oxygen lately,’ Zac said, still looking at the iPad.
You women?
‘It’s like you’re the new soap stars or something.’
The squabble between Abi and Elle had captured the tabloid imagination. Abi had ‘sent her followers’ to attack Elle, and Elle had posted about how it felt to be stung by a swarm of ‘hairy, hemp-wearing, feminist wasps’. An internet feud was born.
What amazed Leisel—and, if she was honest, made her a bit sad about the current state of tabloid reporting—was that no one had yet dug up the common thread between these two women: Adrian. Tabloid reporters never left Facebook, obviously.
‘Everyone’s just desperate for content, Zac, you know that,’ Leisel said, and picked up her pace to her desk.
The worst things that can happen to you are the ones people online like the best, Leisel now knew first-hand. She was proof that your lowest moments could translate into something that looked like success—if you were willing to share it.
As her arm had healed and the story of the ‘troll attack’ spread, The Working Mum had been receiving more traffic than ever. She was talking commercial offers with brands that wanted to ‘connect with the busy, working woman’. A mentoring organisation had asked her to give a talk on resilience to a group of young women who’d survived violence. And she had clocked over a hundred thousand Facebook follo
wers. She was interviewing interns—which made her laugh out loud—and the site was being redesigned in Vietnam into a slick, hipster dream for less than she paid in childcare each week.
She’d even been about to ask Zac if she could cut back to four days a week in the office.
Maybe not today.
• • •
When Leisel had come back from After Breakfast! that day, shaking, Mark had been home with Harri.
He met her at the door, looked at her once and folded her into a hug. He helped her to bed. He tucked her in and lay down beside her, stroking her head, saying nothing.
Finally, Leisel said, ‘She lost a baby.’
Mark didn’t ask who.
After what seemed like a really long time, he said, ‘I don’t care.’
Leisel looked at him. ‘How can you say that?’
‘There are a finite number of things I can care about, Leisel.’
She stayed in bed for the next two days. Mark wrangled the kids, keeping them away when she needed peace and bringing them close when she needed to feel them. He brought her food she didn’t eat, changed her dressing. He dealt with her phone, and her work, and her mother.
And on the third day, she rolled out of bed, picked up her laptop and saw thousands of messages blinking at her—messages of support and healing. People she’d never met wished her a speedy recovery, praising her bravery. Media offers overflowed from her inbox.
Leisel wrote something:
Friends—I know I told you before that I was ‘back’.
I was wrong. I was still in the middle of trying to understand what had just happened. I still am. I might not be ‘back’ for a while. But I am here now. And being here now is just fine.
Now, I need to tell you about someone.
I write about Wonder Dad on this blog all the time. Often, I write about him to complain that he’s not doing a good enough job. Or that he’s doing too good a job. Sometimes, I suggest my life would be better if I was with some other sort of man. Less of a Wonder Dad, perhaps. More of a Super Man.
Today I need to write to tell you that the man I call WD is really called Mark. And that he has saved my life.
Literally, yes, but that’s not the half of it. He saves me in a million different ways, every day. He saves me from disappearing into a mess of chaos and confusion and self-loathing. He saves me from being eaten alive by mother guilt, because every ball I drop, he catches before it concusses anyone on the way to the floor. He saves me from poisoning our children with my terrible cooking. He saves me from being the most boring, baby-obsessed woman on the planet. He saves me from loneliness. From boredom. From thinking that there are ‘no good men’.
So yes, he did save my life, but not only once, and not only from a troubled woman with a knife.
He kind of saves it every day.
If you are very lucky, as I am very lucky, there might be someone like that in your life.
Someone who makes the shitty things bearable. Who you often don’t notice, except to criticise, but without whom you would be completely at sea.
Without you even realising it, this is the person who helps to reconstruct your frazzled pieces at the end of every day. And you are the one who helps them see that their broken bits are beautiful.
Mark is my partner in chaos.
And if you are lucky enough to have one of those, please look at them today and say Thank you. Thank you. I love you. I’m sorry I don’t say that every day.
I’m on my way back.
L x
And she did something that she had never done before: she posted a photo of Mark and the kids.
The post had a thousand shares while she was in the shower. A thousand more while she was getting dressed. Women were tagging their partners and friends in the comments. They were telling Leisel how happy they were that she was back and safe and happy. They were talking about how much they wished they had a Mark, or pining for the Marks they’d loved and lost.
Leisel found herself literally basking in the love—lying on her bed, laptop on her tummy, watching the Shares and Likes and complimentary comments roll in. There was no feeling like it. It was like millions of tiny warm hands all over her. Like she was lighting up with energy from her toes to her tummy.
Suddenly, Leisel was starving.
And then Mark walked into the bedroom with his own old, battered iPhone in his hand. ‘I want that down, now,’ he told her.
‘But Mark, I wrote it for you! And people LOVE it!’
‘I know you’re not feeling yourself right now, but you must have a head injury as well as a fucked arm if you think now is a good time to start sharing personal information and pictures of our children online, Leisel.’
She opened her mouth to disagree.
‘A crazy woman came to our door, Lee.’
‘Okay, okay.’ Leisel took the photo off the post. She removed Mark’s name. She went back to the WD initials. ‘A lot of people are interested in the blog right now,’ she snapped.
‘You mean since it almost got you killed?’
Leisel brooded at him. Incredible, she thought, how your feelings for your significant other can go from adoration to fury in a matter of minutes.
That was the end of the conversation.
• • •
Mark’s reaction had presented Leisel with the problem she was now wrestling with at her cubicle while her colleagues worked silently, headphones in, around her. The Women’s Daily had asked her to do a survivor’s shoot—with the family. A brand of children’s clothes was launching a range for ‘feisty girls’, and they had asked her if she and Maggie would like to front it. She was hyper-aware of the Likes Elle got on every post that featured her boys. Leisel wasn’t proud of it, but she thought: My kids are cuter than that.
Some bloggers were happy to share pictures of their children, some weren’t. Some had a ‘no faces’ policy, posting the backs of heads or artfully blurred motion shots. Some used old baby pictures, even if their kids were now teens. Leisel had never done it, aside from that once. She and Mark hadn’t even discussed it—she knew he would think it was the most crass invasion of their privacy. And her first instincts were to agree with him.
But now, she saw that something wonderful could come out of the awful, violent thing that had happened to her family. She could harness the positive energy that surrounded her in cyberspace and build something that she—and the Blog-ahhs—could be proud of.
But could she do all that without sharing more of herself and her family? The messages flooding her inboxes were from women overcoming their own traumas—and they were so personal, they were difficult to read. These people felt like they knew her, along with her kids and Mark, even though she only wrote about them with initials.
Imagine, she let herself think, if we really could make a living out of TWM. Mark could go back to work slowly, maybe start his own picture-framing business like he’d been talking about since they got back together. She could write. Maybe they could move out of town. Life could be less stressful. There might be some room to breathe.
Some days it was difficult to be at home, where they had all once felt so safe. Some days it was difficult to answer the children’s questions about what had happened to Mummy. That night had been terrifying for all of them.
At her desk, Leisel put her head in her hands. That’s it, she thought, I’m going to make sure none of this is in vain. Let Abi and Elle roll around in the shit. I’ll go high. I’ll go high—and I’m going to change our lives.
Leisel googled ‘survivors of violence charity’ and clicked around for a few moments before opening her email and typing:
Hello—My name is Leisel Adams, and I am the survivor of a vicious, violent attack on my family. You can read about it here [she inserted the link to one of the many stories about her attack]. I am also an editor, blogger and writer with a substantial social media profile.
Would you be interested in me representing The Jasmine Foundation and helping you to
do some fundraising? I have some media opportunities coming up that I think we could do some very interesting things with.
Let me know—Leisel Adams—The Working Mum.
She hit send and got back to work, willing the hours to pass until she could be home with her family, where she would tell Mark about her plan to make it all okay.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
ELLE
‘Babe, we need to decide how your treatment’s going.’ Elle was packing a bag on the big white bed.
Adrian was in the ensuite, staring at himself in the mirror again. He looked convincing, and he’d told Elle that he felt like shit. He had orange-brown smudges under his eyes, he’d cropped his hair close to his head—‘You might do that if you thought you were about to lose it,’ Elle had suggested—and he was probably thinner than he’d been since puberty.
‘By the looks of me,’ he said, ‘it’s going terribly.’
‘No, darling, by the looks of you, it’s working.’ Elle came into the ensuite and kissed him on his bare shoulder. ‘You are doing so much for us. I am so proud of you.’
Adrian grunted. Elle picked up her toothbrush and went back to her bag. She was packing for a journey that she couldn’t believe she was taking—back to her hometown. And she was meeting a film crew there.
The Sunday Evening team were doing an episode about successful bloggers. They had wanted to sit down with Elle and Adrian for an interview about his cancer, but he hadn’t changed his mind. So Elle and Cate had offered them something just as exciting: a bittersweet rags-to-riches tale that would air before the Blog-ahhs. They’d cooked it up over a work-out session on the deck, and the producers at SE had needed little convincing.
Everything looks perfect in Elle Campbell’s world. Her home, her beautiful boys, the success of her glamorous lifestyle blog. But privately, she’s helping her husband take on the fight of his life. Now her story is inspiring others who face losing a loved one. Was it her true-blue upbringing—as one of five children raised by a widower in an outback town—that gave her the grit to become #cancerwife?
The SE crew had already spent a day filming at the glass-and-white house. They’d captured Elle feeding her stylish boys organic kale at the kitchen bench while they sipped their Abbott’s smoothies. Elle walking up the floating staircase with Freddie in her arms. Elle in her dressing-room, showing off her shoe collection. Elle doing her drills in the lap-pool on the deck. Elle at her crystal-cased laptop, typing away, serious face.
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