Is It Just Me?

by Chrissie Swan

  The fact is, I work in breakfast radio, which means I have to skulk out of the house like a one-night stand before dawn every day. I’ve exited this way for more than five years. My partner also works and has to be on site with his little blue Esky of Yoplait tubs and ham sangas by 7am. Like clockwork, at 6.20am three mornings a week, Kirsty arrives at our house in a cloud of Clinique, happy to love my children while we’re out earning enough money to keep a roof over all of our heads. She has been coming for nearly three years. In our absence, she cuddles our children and calls them gorgeous and doesn’t seem to mind the world’s biggest three-year-old crashing into her like a cheesy AWF wrestler.

  Kirsty is, and has been for a while, a nanny. But I have always referred to her as a babysitter because everyone knows that nannies are for rich people who are too busy playing tennis and having long and late liquid lunches to be bothered raising their own children. To have a babysitter is far more egalitarian. And a lot less up yourself.

  My life, as a working mother of two small boys, is busy. I simply can’t pull it all off without help. To assume that anyone can is completely bonkers. So why are we lying about getting help? I lie because I get the distinct vibe that I am perceived as being selfish for working; that work is somehow a luxury I have chosen over raising my children, and I am fist-pumping the air every time I pull out of the driveway, screaming, “See ya later, suckers!” over my shoulder. Which, on occasion, I have done. But usually I am quietly frowning and trying to distract myself from the memory of my warm, curly-headed babies all chubby in their beds as I swoosh through green lights listening to the 4.30am news.

  There is also the perception that if I’m going to be bold enough to work, I should bloody well do all the housework myself, at the very least. Well, I don’t. I’m outing myself. I have a cleaner, Rita. She comes for two hours on a Monday and it is the highlight of my week. For about an hour, before Leo gets home from kindergarten, my house is shining. As opposed to The Shining, which is more like it is when Leo gets home. I can’t mop my floors with two kids running, riding or crawling all over it all the time! Why do I feel bad about getting someone to do it in the only two hours in a week when there’s no one in the house? Why am I even justifying it now to you?

  I’m justifying it because we are supposed to be doing it all and doing it easily. If we have put our careers on hold to raise our kids at home, we’d better have a great sex life, nutritious meals on the table every night and a house so clean and stylish it could have been torn from the pages of Vogue Living. If we’re working, we’d better not let that affect our ability to rival Samantha from ’60s sitcom Bewitched in the wife/mother/housekeeper stakes.

  What a load of tosh. I’m here to tell you it’s okay to ask for help. And it’s okay to pay for it, too. Whether you’re working or not. The fact that you have a nanny or a cleaner doesn’t mean you’re living high on the hog. It doesn’t mean your life is easy.

  And it doesn’t mean you’re up yourself, either. It simply means you like clean floors and would prefer your kids weren’t left at home alone to turn your place into something from Lord of the Flies.

  Today I’ve outed myself as having a nanny and a cleaner. I think I’m on a roll! You know what else? I have my milk delivered (free!) every Friday. I use Coles Online so I can do the weekly shopping in front of The Voice AND I don’t have to carry it up the front steps. And what about this? Clem at my fruit shop has generously offered free delivery of our weekly fresh bits. I’ve accepted. Finally, here’s the big one. The biggest shortcut. The greatest up-yourself extravagance in my entire life. Instead of dishwashing powder, I. Buy. Finish. Powerballs. Gee, that feels good!

  6th May 2012

  Road trip

  Aaahhhh! Holidays. Is there anything more exciting than that trip up the freeway to the long-term car park at the airport? The delicious panic of wondering if you’ve packed an extra camera battery and the feverish checking that your passport is still safe in its purpose-bought bag you hunted down at the travel shop?

  I have had a few such holidays in my time. First, I went to Tokyo to teach English when I was eighteen. It was a working holiday and my first trip overseas on my own. Upon my arrival at Narita airport, if you listened closely, you could hear the popping of new pathways being blown in my brain. The smells, people – even the cabs – were worlds away from what I had been accustomed to: namely the comfort of eating spag bol in my mother’s mission-brown kitchen and weekends spent watching Countdown Revolution.

  In Tokyo, as a young lass, I met a fellow expat. In hindsight, he looked not dissimilar to Elton John, but to my teenage eyes he was laconic and handsome and older. He barely knew I existed and after a few months of my desperate flirting, he introduced me to his lithe Japanese girlfriend.

  More than ten years later, I took another working holiday, this time to Jakarta for just over a year. I accepted a position as creative director of an ad agency in the bustling capital. I was lured by the promise of a salary in US dollars and the inclusion of a driver and a maid. What I learnt was that no amount of perceived luxury can replace the ability to walk down to your local for a flat white or enjoy a drink in a hotel bar without the risk of being blown up. I also missed taking in big lungfuls of air without getting two black rings of motorbike-exhaust residue around my nostrils. I couldn’t get home fast enough.

  In 2007, the year before we started our family, my man, The Chippie, and I visited a little town called Waitomo, which is about 200 kilometres south of Auckland. It is where you’ll find a hotel that is three parts Fawlty Towers and one part the Overlook Hotel from The Shining. The natty fellow who checked us in also carried our luggage, turned down the beds, delivered room service and served our chowder in the dining room. I think I also saw him driving a golf buggy and pruning shrubs. He may or may not have been the ghost who allegedly haunted the bell tower.

  Aside from hosting the world’s spookiest hotel, Waitomo is also home to glow-worm caves. To see them you have to get on a boat like one from Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory, and glide silently on an icy underground river. In the echoey blackness, you look up and there are billions of flickering glow-worms.

  I’d never seen anything like it, and when I did, I wept hot little tears of joy. The sight was breathtaking, but more than that, there was something about being newly in love and overseas, knowing I was loved in return and experiencing life at its simplest and best, that made that moment unforgettable.

  Later, when we’d had our first baby, we took off for a week to Tasmania. It was the winter of 2009 and Leo was about eight months. We took the boat across so we could bring our car and the roughly seventeen tonnes of kid stuff we required for the seven-day trip. We took a full-size infant bath. And a bottle steriliser the size of a Volkswagen. We also packed about 45,000 nappies because, Lord knows, there are no nappies in Tassie.

  We trundled from scenic lookout to bric-a-brac stall to the twenty-eighth colonial jail in a four-kilometre radius, and I sat in a gutter outside Hobart’s Salamanca Market feeding Leo from a jar of something while he sat in his car seat. It might not sound like much, but it was a brilliant shake-up from our usual structured mealtimes and home-made organic food.

  On that holiday, Leo decided he was over his dummy and learnt to sleep unswaddled. There is something about being away from familiar routines that forces fabulous things to occur, and everyone benefits. Even babies.

  In fact, all sorts of magic happens on holidays. Travel is life-changing and when you build memories, you enrich your life. And it doesn’t seem to matter if your pilgrimage is to Floriade or fancy Florence – as long as you’re on the road, it feels as if you’re really living. Your bed may be akin to an oversize phone book and the food might nearly kill you, but isn’t it great?

  But right now I’m feeling that what would enrich my life is a week poolside in Bali with magazines and a do-not-disturb doorknob tag. Two questions
: 1. How much would the excess baggage be for a trike, ExerSaucer and Jolly Jumper? And 2. Does anyone know somewhere with a good kids’ club?

  20th May 2012

  Work for that dream job

  Last month, I was lucky enough to interview my foodie hero, Heston Blumenthal. He has a restaurant just west of London called The Fat Duck, which serves up tricky meals such as desserts that look like fried eggs and cakes that are actually chicken liver pâté. He’s a clever fellow and his TV show gets a good going over at Chez Chrissie.

  I’ve always liked the cut of his jib, and even more so after doing a little research and finding out that not only is he self-taught and one of only three Britons to achieve Michelin three-star status, he also did his fair share of crappy jobs – including that of a photocopier salesman and debt collector. It cemented my belief that terrible jobs are good for you.

  At thirty-eight, I have achieved a kind of career nirvana. I work in radio, which works well with my maternal commitments and allows me to talk at length about issues ranging from The Voice to breastfeeding. I adore it. I also work in TV, which means I get to have fun and a free hairdo. But these jobs were a long time coming. Before I got so lucky, I submitted my tax file number to a number of positions, ranging from less than desirable to downright dehumanising. And I’d do them all again. Because they were good for me.

  When I was nineteen, I deferred from uni and worked full-time in a supermarket deli. Among other things, this involved defrosting boxes of frozen chickens, removing their necks (secreted within the carcass) and rodding them up on giant skewers to be roasted. Rivulets of pale-pink liquid would run down my inner arm and into my undergarments, heating up over the course of my shift and threatening to produce some kind of salmonella stock. The upside of this job was that, to this day, I really know my presswurst from my pariser; the downside was that I feel enormous guilt when I ask for thinly sliced anything. Such a hassle.

  I’ve also been a manager of a clothes shop. I loved the 30 per cent off everything in-store, but wasn’t such a fan of the constant sweeping of mountains of fluff out of changing rooms fogged in foot odour.

  I’ve also arrived at a smoky office block (back when you could smoke at work) and settled in with a dial-up phone to cold-call strangers, selling them window treatments that turned perfectly good houses into soundproof yet inescapable prisons. Now that was a tough gig. I have also been a call-centre rep for a New Zealand electricity company, a mobile DJ and a showground ice-cream seller.

  It wasn’t until I worked for free, though, that I started achieving my career dreams. While I was studying advertising at uni, the staff made an entire class out of warning us about how hard it was to get a job in the profession we were sinking ourselves into HECS debt to become qualified for. We’d be lucky to get work in a suburban agency writing copy for instruction manuals, let alone an amazing gig with a corner office working on blue-chip accounts, like Darrin’s on Bewitched.

  With a vast history of ordinary jobs, I had only one thing left to do. I contacted a groovy inner-city ad agency and offered my services for free. They accepted and I found myself scooting into the agency between lectures and tutes to write press ads for a department store. The first ad I ever wrote was five words saying that a new store had opened. I still have it. And it still gives me a thrill.

  I was so enamoured with the industry that I started skipping class so I could talk layouts and fonts and deadlines. Eventually, I quit uni and started a proper paid job as a copywriter for another outfit – but what got me the role was the experience I’d gained at that groovy inner-city agency. I am eternally grateful to whoever it was that gave a friendly 24-year-old with a bad moustache a go. And, wherever possible, I try to return the favour by giving work-experience kids the time of day and considering the whole person, not just the qualification, for a position.

  Today’s workplaces are so busy and often understaffed. The sad fact is that sometimes it is disruptive to the routine to make room for a young person who just wants a chance. The temptation to throw applications for work experience or internships straight into the bin without even opening them is great.

  We might think that there wouldn’t be a person alive who’d want to hang out in our office, do the lunch run and photocopy those proposals. But we’d be wrong. My bet is there are loads of twenty-somethings who’d be hanging out just to see what your tea room looks like.

  And if you’re one of those twenty-somethings wondering how you’re going to break into your dream job, wax up your mo and write that letter. Who knows where it will lead you?

  27th May 2012

  Weighing up children

  My three-year-old is seven kilos overweight. This might not sound like much, but for a preschooler, this is a big deal. I’d noticed he’d started getting larger in the past twelve months. Looking at photos of him taken this time last year showed a huge difference in appearance.

  Sure, he’d grown taller. He’d had his first proper haircut where his cherubic blond curls had been snipped away to reveal a very serious and surprisingly dark businessman’s hairdo. But his baby softness had gone, too. In its place was a little boy who was just too heavy. I denied and denied. Then I started to panic. Then I went straight to Google.

  Immediately, juice was banned. No juice. Not even diluted. He reacted to this new rule not unlike a possessed child being splashed with holy water. He writhed. He screamed. I think I actually saw his head rotate 360 degrees. But the no-juice rule stayed.

  But the chub was still there.

  I was put on my first diet at the age of eleven. This involved turning up to group meetings with grown women in a church hall, slipping off my shoes and being publicly weighed.

  I was counting kilojoules and whipping skim milk into fluff, as a snack, before I had left primary school. I didn’t want anything like this for my son. But in my desire to avoid the demonisation of food and the low self-esteem it inevitably creates, I had unwittingly set my beautiful son on a rocky path.

  It wasn’t until I took him to his first day of creche that I saw how different he was. The other kids seemed so small compared with my little sweetheart, whose shoes and pants were at least two sizes bigger. Mild panic set in. What happens if someone is mean to him? What happens when, after three years of being told he is magnificent, someone tells him otherwise, based on his weight? I could barely breathe.

  Last month, he had his check-up with the maternal health nurse, and that was when the news of his extra seven kilos was broken. The nurse was wonderful about it, and I’m certain it’s not an easy conversation to have. Mercifully, my concern was palpable. She knew I was out of my depth and gently suggested I go to see a paediatric dietitian.

  This sent me into a spiral. For as long as I can remember, eating disorders and an obsession with weight have been a girls-only domain. Girls I knew in the ’80s were eating only a packet of chicken-noodle soup and a green apple for the entire day. And they were thirteen. I was one of them. Sadly, statistics show that boys are not immune to this madness.

  I imagined turning up to a clinical office, my baby being stripped and weighed.

  I imagined this as the day his self-loathing would be born. I called the dietitian and asked if it was necessary for her to sight my son, as I was paranoid about him being made to feel that he was anything less than perfect. She assured me it was necessary to see him, but it would be okay.

  I knew she would ask me what a typical day of food entailed for him and I thought she would think I was lying. But this is a child who doesn’t know chicken nuggets. He’s never had a fish finger. He hates cream. Sure, he loses his mind and acts like a kelpie off a leash at a party with cake, but don’t all kids?

  I told her what he eats. Fruit. Lots of fruit. Cheese. Toast. Chicken breast. No other meat. He will eat around the meat in a spaghetti bolognaise, which is quite a skill. She listened intently for twenty mi
nutes while I expressed my bafflement. Then she helped me.

  My three-year-old eats too much good stuff. Turns out that four bananas a day, if you’re only one metre tall, will make you fat. And if you throw in three mandarins, a punnet of strawberries and four Cheestiks, you’re in a pair of size-6 elasticised jeans before you can say, “Is it creche today?”

  My shame for getting him into this mess has turned to relief. He’s now eating all the things he knows and loves, just far less of them … and not every day!

  But we are the lucky ones. We can afford to see a professional who will probably change our lives. We are also a family who know about good food, grow vegetables and always have a bowl of fruit on the table (or up high in the pantry now, to stop the daily disappearance of five kiwi fruit). What happens to the kids whose families have no idea about nutrition, and no money to talk to someone about it? I am an educated woman with a wealth of knowledge about food, and even I stuffed up badly. It’s all very well to bleat on about the obesity epidemic, but until we make education about basic nutrition accessible for everyone, it will just get worse.

  3rd June 2012

  A very adult toy story

  My magazine editor casually mentioned to me over email that the next issue’s cover story would be about vibrators and sex toys and if I could just explore that topic a bit … it might be nice … a little tie-in. I quickly tapped out an email saying that I couldn’t possibly write about that as I found the whole concept to be a bit “icky”. That’s the exact word I used. Icky.

  Then I thought, why do I find it, as I so intellectually put it, icky? What’s wrong with it? And if every woman is harbouring a plastic gherkin with an on/off switch in her knickers drawer, then why can’t I?