Is It Just Me?

by Chrissie Swan

  Hmm … I know! Why don’t we go into the chapel, where, in one corner, much to the delight of me and my teenaged friends, we discovered a life-size plaster version of Jesus’s head? Sadly, that was gone, too.

  We tried several different locations, but all to no avail. The secret air vent where we would sneak up to whisper demonic messages to the bewildered class below was shut off. The timber box built to house an air conditioner, but which doubled as an excellent place for fourteen breathless seventeen-year-olds to cram in and hide, had been removed. The Year 12 common room that we had eventually been banned from for too much smoking and a rat infestation had become a tasteful breakout area for what I imagine are much better-behaved girls than we ever were.

  Eventually, I settled for a shot in front of the wall on which we used to play handball when we were nine years old. One of the only memories I had of school, apparently, that didn’t involve breaking the rules!

  “You were pretty naughty,” the photographer said as location after location fell flat. I’d always thought I was a good student. I had a ball at school, but I had no idea I was so damned badly behaved. No wonder I didn’t get the marks I needed for law! I was clearly too busy plotting mischief and thinking of new ways to crack up my friends. Shame on me.

  But maybe this is the sign of a truly remarkable school – I never felt like the bad kid. I was never defined by my naughtiness. Perhaps those nuns and teachers recognised that sometimes kids like me needed to be allowed to be a bit of a larrikin in order to survive in the world.

  I hope that my school, and others like it, aren’t extinguishing the fires in feisty girls these days. Because being a buttoned-down lawyer or commodities trader is well and good and lucrative, sure, but sometimes girls are better suited to a life behind the mic, or in front of a camera sporting lycra and a tight blonde perm saying, “Look at moyyy.” Or indeed, as my careers counsellor suggested, pursuing a life under the Big Top. Follow your bliss, girls, no matter how long you have to spend on that squeaky Chesterfield.

  4th November 2012

  The M-word

  Misogyny is the buzzword of the moment and it seems every­thing and anything from politicians to entire cultures are being accused of it, while new articles every week blow the cover of one industry or another and the lady-haters who work within them.

  I think it’s great. Apart from making really juicy reading, it’s important that such candid dialogue has been initiated by women about the sometimes outrageous conditions they’ve had to put up with over their lives.

  What I am enjoying most about it is the memory lane it is encouraging women to walk down. For many years I have experienced situations that have made me feel worthless and I’ve never had an accurate word to file them away under. Well, now I do.

  It’s been great to know that those awful self-esteem-eroding moments are not mine alone; that women all over the country, for decades, have been living through them, too. That’s not to say our lives are a wall-to-wall festival of judgmental and degrading conversations, but occasionally they occur and, man (pardon the pun), are they hard to forget!

  One time, early in my radio career, I was told by a male boss that my role was specifically to “be fun, but never funny”. The funny bits would be covered by the man I was working with. At the time I was so hurt by this. And also so angry. But I said nothing. Well, technically I did say something, but the conversation was one way, two hours after the meeting, in the car alone, and so filled with expletives it would have made my sugar-cane farmer grandfather blush.

  I wanted to tell this guy that in my real life, with my family and friends, I was the funny one. It was so insulting for me, who loved nothing more than making people laugh, to be told that, as a woman, my role was merely to support the man in the show, to laugh at his jokes, but never to “steal his thunder” in the humour department. I was incensed.

  Later in my tenure at that job, and after having my first child, I was harassed in my hospital room by phone by the same man.

  I didn’t want to do a live cross the day after my C-section. I’d haemorrhaged quite badly and gone into shock soon after the birth of my baby, and was riddled with guilt for choosing not to breastfeed. I was in a darkened room with a brand-new baby and frankly trying to process the enormous joy and terror of it all – the baby, the surgery, becoming a parent, and the raging hormones that made me cry ALL THE TIME.

  Call me crazy, but I didn’t really want to talk about it. Not right then. And yet the calls kept coming. And coming. “The listeners deserve the payoff,” he said. “They’ve invested in your journey,” he said. “This is part of the deal,” he said. I couldn’t articulate the reasons why I wasn’t in the mood, so I did nothing but cry and feel hunted.

  Eventually, when I’d been at home for two days, still walking gingerly and changing the dressing on my wound every two hours, I acquiesced and took a call from the fill-in breakfast team, consisting of a former pop star from the ’70s and an Olympic athlete and model I’d never met. I stood in my courtyard, so as not to wake my baby, and cried, mobile phone in hand, waiting for the studio to call me for a live cross after the 7.30am news.

  With a sniffly voice I answered incredibly personal questions delivered by an impossibly insensitive guest host that included, “How quickly did you start breastfeeding?” (“Ummm … I haven’t”) and “How painful was the natural birth?” (“Errr … actually I had a caesarean”). My partner watched helplessly and angrily from inside. I was deeply and irrevocably humiliated, and we actually never spoke again about this moment.

  There are many more examples of times in my working life when I have driven home screaming the lyrics to Moving Pictures’ “What About Me” in floods of snot and tears. We all have them, don’t we? Is this misogyny? Or is it just gender-non-specific nastiness? Would a male radio host have been put under the same pressure to do a live cross after major abdominal surgery? And if he was, and wasn’t up for it, could he have just said, “Nah, mate, don’t feel like it,” and would that have been the end of it?

  I would absolutely have the courage to do that now, but, sadly, sexism preys on the insecure. When I was starting out I would have done anything to keep a job. And that included putting up with the kind of cruelty that would have me charging to the principal’s or boss’s office if it ever happened to my children at school or at a weekend job.

  The saddest thing about all of this is that those women who speak up, particularly at the time of the insult, are labelled “difficult” and are whispered about in boardrooms as candidates for the list of “dames who’ll never work in this business again”. Because, hey, no one likes a woman who sticks up for herself. Particularly when the attack is fresh.

  Thankfully there are now outlets where we can share our terrible episodes and help other women identify that hideous moment when they felt their soul and self-worth was evaporating before their very eyes.

  Our work ethic, determination and ability to focus on all the other wonderful men and women we work with makes us all carry on regardless – even if we have to limp for a while. Power to us!

  11th November 2012

  What DO women want?

  I have been stewing over the question: what do women want? For weeks. And I’ve achieved many things in the lead-up to writing this piece: namely, my house has been cleaned four times, my iPad screen disinfected and polished, two spaghetti sauces have been made from scratch, three bunches of lilies have been trimmed and re-vased, and fourteen loads of little-boy clothes have been neatly folded into piles that rival the sale tables at Seed for neatness and cuteness. I have even invented a brown-rice salad recipe. INVENTED ONE.

  All to avoid sitting here, as I do now, and contemplating what it is exactly that women want. I don’t want to disappoint anyone here – but, hell, I know many of you will be shocked to realise that this fairly ordinary advertising copywriter turned radio announ
cer turned TV host, who is currently also a gestating mother of two, does not have the answer.

  So stumped was I that I did what any self-respecting researcher would do. I put it out there on Twitter. Now, Roy Morgan I ain’t, but the answers I received from other women had a common theme. Grab your highlighter because I’m about to share my findings. And you’re not going to want to miss a thing.

  In no particular order, what women want is: chocolate and Ryan Gosling. And shoes. And to be able to do a wee without a toddler watching. One woman has a seemingly simple request: for the Offspring actor who plays Dr Patrick, Matt Le Nevez, to hunt a bear and then write her a poem about how sad it made him. That can’t be too hard, can it? They study bear poetry at NIDA, don’t they?

  So actors, Mars Bars and bears. Oh my! And here we were thinking this was a complex question that somehow involved equal rights, respect and the frustratingly popular notion of “having it all”. How wrong we were!

  Is there anything really wrong in believing that a heady combo of confectionery and brooding actors (and bears) is the key to happiness? Does the answer even have to be so cerebral? Most of the women who responded to my question said they actually couldn’t possibly answer it. “Too hard,” they said. “Changes every day,” they said. “When you figure it out, let me know,” they said.

  A few men even had a crack. Mostly they were of the “who-the-bloody-hell-knows” opinion, but I did have a perplexing exchange with one guy called Jaxzen.

  Me: “SO Twitter! What do women want?”

  Jaxzen: “It kinda depends on what it is that they want.”

  Me: “Umm … yep. That’s the question. But thanks for playing, Jaxzen.”

  Then the real responses came flooding in. Words like “respect” and “love” were pretty popular. “Appreciation” was also big. The more I read, the more I realised that there can never possibly be only one answer.

  One woman said what women want is security: not material things, just to be secure in the knowledge that the people in their lives will be there for them.

  I liked that.

  And these: to be loved and respected.

  To do something that matters to someone. To give back and help. And to occasionally be surprised. The crazy lady within me also identified with this: women want both love and space at the same time and a number of other contradictions that make no sense to anyone else but them.

  Is anyone confused? And you thought Jaxzen was a worry.

  I was lost in a Twittersphere of Louboutins and lollies, kilojoule-free cakes and Christian Grey when I realised there is actually one answer: happiness. That’s the goal … What makes women happy is so utterly subjective, but the goal is the same. And surprisingly simple. Women want happiness. But how we all achieve that is up to us.

  For some, being able to gorge on chocolate cake and never put on weight will bring the holy grail of happiness. For others, it’s all about justice at work and home. Each to their own. Scott on Twitter thinks the answer is “Chicken Dance”. Whatever that means.

  You know what I want?

  I want to be able to have fun wherever I am.

  I want to be able to cook with beautiful ingredients always.

  I want to laugh. All. The. Time.

  I want to have one holiday every year with my family where we have no plans and nowhere else to be.

  I want to watch less television and read more books.

  I want to be able to whinge about never being able to be alone any more, then, after someone organises a hotel room voucher for me, I want to spend the evening eating chips (that I don’t like) from a cylinder and missing my children to the point of tears.

  I know that last one doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, but I just got the devil in me there … and I blame Jaxzen.

  18th November 2012

  Taking stock of the kitchen cupboards

  So we are on the move. We sold our house a few months ago, have bought a new one and the removalists have slotted us into their schedules. That sentence rolled off my fingers and onto the keyboard in such an easy fashion it could almost be assumed that the last four months have not been an unmitigated hell. Oh, they have! But they are behind us and we’re on our way.

  We had most of our life in storage already, but the bits and pieces still in our house had to be moved by someone (that is, me) and frankly I was overwhelmed by the task. The smallest things filled me with anxiety. For example, peering into the fruit bowl, I noticed the contents were: one wizened lime, three bread tags, a toy, twenty-five cents in change, a tube of cold-sore cream, a pacifier (out of action for a year) and two sachets of artificial sweetener.

  Not so different from what you’d find in any house, I’m sure. BUT HOW DO YOU PACK THESE THINGS? It made me almost nauseous to realise I had to touch all this … stuff. All of it. Every piece. I had to touch it and wrap it in something and put it in a box and classify it in some way with a texta word and then move on and touch some more … stuff. And repeat this exercise until there was no more stuff in the house. Coffee was needed.

  Instead, I hatched a plan: I’d go on a throwing-out frenzy. And, given it was garbage night and I had the room to spare in the wheelie bin AND my baby was snoozing, I decided to tackle the pantry first.

  Bottom shelf was cans. I gave them a cursory glance and threw out the evaporated milk. I did this because I have recently become friends with some really Italian Italians. They’re the real deal. And I’m sorry, but YOU tell them I’ve toyed with the idea of using evaporated milk in my once-a-year carbonara to save seven grams of fat. And while you’re at it, make room in your bed for a horse’s head. So tinned milk = gone.

  On to the other four shelves, which had been a hotchpotch of categories for the past year or so. It drove my partner mad, but I just couldn’t keep any order in there. Even after buying a label writer and 4000 containers with lids, it still looked like something from the TV show Hoarders. The first thing I saw were packets of unopened gluten-free crackers and I started to smile. I never expected it but what started as a massive cull ended as a nice walk down memory lane. The gluten-free stage!

  Into the green garbage bag went gluten-free crackers, weird yellow penne and a bag of self-raising flour/concrete. I clearly remember buying all that stuff (and more) after reading an article about wheat being evil and making us all fat. Seems the key to staying thin was stocking up on gluten-free food. Because it was inedible. And if you couldn’t actually eat your dinner, chances were you were going to come in under your daily kilojoule limit. But, ah, the memories!

  Let’s move on to the authentic Asian cooking phase, shall we? Healthy! Flavoursome! Hell, there’s no reason a chubby white woman couldn’t turn out the same food as a seasoned Asian chef! Tucked away at the back of the pantry, I found a significant stash of products that I had originally had to drive a long way to find. Not only that, I had to buy them from people who didn’t understand me nor care for my custom. Here was someone who’d watched a doco on Vietnamese street food and thought she was the next Luke Nguyen.

  They were right, too. After spending $75 on exotic ingredients, I took sixteen hours to create two bowls of pho. Still smarting, I scowled the next week when I saw someone happily exiting a shop swinging a takeaway bag FULL OF BUCKETS OF PHO for $8. So I opened that garbage bag for the leftover star anise, rock sugar, cassia bark and little squares of muslin. From now on I’d get my pho in a bowl made by someone who had a clue.

  Added to that bag were two unopened packets of fried shallots, some Chinese chilli oil (like applying a salve of battery acid and bee venom to my tongue) and a half-used bottle of shao hsing wine (a must-have if you were to recreate MasterChef Alvin’s drunken chicken – don’t pretend you didn’t try it, too).

  My favourite thing I found was a hexagonal jar of pureed chestnuts and a matching bag of chestnut flour. I decided, as
you do, that a chestnut layer cake would be my “thing”. And I did make it. Twice. It took four hours each time, and it was unbelievably delicious. The ingredients were so special I could only buy them online direct from the farm that grew the chestnuts. The effort!

  Really, this cake was the equivalent of an IVF baby. It was planned. It was wanted. There’d be no mistakes with a chestnut layer cake. And as I took stock of my life – busy busy busy now and busy busy busy on the horizon – I thought, “I’m never going to have the time to spend four hours on a chestnut layer cake ever again.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to bin the pureed chestnut, so I put it back in the pantry. It’s now my “aspirational pureed chestnut”. I know that when that jar is gone, I will have found either some sanity … or a single friend with the time to make me that chestnut layer cake.

  25th November 2012

  The mistakes of Christmas past

  Ah, Christmas! There are less than twenty-three days to go and I’m getting a bit excited. I’ve not done any shopping, nor do I have any actual ideas, but I’m pumped. I actually feel like a seasoned veteran now … and I will use the experiences I’ve gained over the past thirty-nine years to make sure that every Christmas from now on is memorable, if not lovely.

  We all learn from our mistakes, and when it comes to Christmas, thankfully, we learn from the mistakes of others, too. Sometimes you have to experience those Yuletide lowlights to really make sure you don’t repeat them.

  For example, the orange and onion salad that appeared front and centre on the trestle table at my great-aunt’s Christmas do was the great culinary disaster of 1988. Admittedly, this dish was not made by anyone related to me, by blood or otherwise, and I take some solace in that. An interloper brought it, probably after a conversation that went like this: