Is This My Beautiful Life?

by Jessica Rowe

  Why was I justifying my decisions to my seven-year-old daughter? Didn’t I get any bonus points for all the years I was here when my girls were teeny babies, all day every day?

  ‘Allegra, you’re so lucky. Your daddy takes you to school every morning. How many girls have their daddy to do that? How many dads do canteen duty?’

  ‘But I want you to.’

  ‘But Mummy picks you up every afternoon. Not all mummies can do that. And Mummy is lucky because I am doing a job that I love to do.’

  Peter works longer hours than I do and he doesn’t get daddy guilt! Is there such a thing? How do I make up for this hole? Too often I try to rub away the guilt by being the ultimate Yes Mummy. Yes, we can have sushi, yes, we can have a movie night, yes, have chocolate for breakfast …

  My guilt is not going to go away. Unfortunately for me, I still put too much pressure on myself to have everything just right. It’s an occupational hazard of being a mum. I was also learning that I could have it all, but not at the same time. Yes, I could be a good wife, a good mother, a good daughter, have a career, be ever-present in my children’s lives, have close friends—I could have these things, but not every part of my complex life would be perfectly balanced all the time. Priorities would ebb and flow, depending on what stage we were at as a family. Some things would take time, regardless of how much I wanted them right now.

  ‘Mummy, I hate you and your dresses are disgusting.’ Ouch, Giselle sure knew how to hurt me. Once my youngest daughter started targeting my favourite leopard-print frock, I knew we were on shaky ground. Some days her words are harder to brush off than others. Today I am sleep-deprived and cranky; even the waterproof glue on my false eyelashes is starting to wilt under the pressure. And again I’m ready to say ‘yes’ to fill that guilt gap.

  ‘Mummy, will you pick me up early from preschool tomorrow?’ Giselle asked.

  ‘Sure thing. I’ll get you just before your afternoon tea and we can have some special time before we pick up Allegra from school.’

  Bolting from work and a record-breaking trip around the supermarket, I made it to the preschool gates just as the kids were sitting down on miniature plastic chairs to start their afternoon tea of cheese, crackers and cut-up watermelon. I crouched down next to my cherubic child.

  ‘I’m not ready to go yet!’ Giselle almost growls.

  ‘But … but you wanted me to pick you up early, didn’t you?’

  ‘This is my favourite part of the day—I’m not going yet.’

  I pulled up one of the spare weeny plastic chairs and squished down next to my indignant daughter, waiting for her to be ready to leave. All the time I was thinking, I’m a bad mother—she would rather be here than spending time with me.

  Why did I do this to myself? I even sought the wisdom of Ita Buttrose, who had forged an extraordinary career and raised her family at a time when most women stayed at home. I was lucky to sit next to her every day.

  ‘Jessica, guilt means you’ve done something wrong. You haven’t done anything wrong.’

  She was right. It might not be for everyone, but I knew it was so right for me: paid, satisfying work had helped me get my sparkle back. And that meant I was going to be the best mummy I could possibly be for Allegra and Giselle because I was happy.

  EPILOGUE

  Vibrant splashes of purple are appearing in my neighbourhood, the bloom of the jacaranda trees shouting out that summer is on the way. My daughters and I hop over the fallen lilac leafs, careful not to slip on the damp petals.

  ‘Look, Mummy, look!’

  ‘Come on, we need to go!’ I’m grumpy, desperate to get home and wipe off my television make-up. The padded underwire bra that I’ve been wearing all day is digging into my back. I’m busting to rip it off and get changed into my daggy cat-patterned pyjamas. The white plastic shopping bags are starting to slip from my sweaty fingers, packed full of the familiar dinner ingredients of pre-crumbed chicken schnitzel, corn and potatoes. Dinner, bath and bed. It’s a moment that I don’t want to be in and a moment that I get stuck in every afternoon.

  ‘Oh, it goes in the blink of an eye! Make sure you enjoy every moment,’ is a refrain I have often heard from well-meaning older relatives and kind strangers. But I’m still not enjoying every moment, I don’t want to be dragged back to the beautiful tree. I want to go home, unpack the shopping bags, and see if I can hide in the toilet for a few minutes of peace.

  ‘I don’t like it, I’m not eating it!’ says my youngest daughter.

  ‘What do you mean you don’t like it? The only thing you eat is schnitzel and mash, and you told me you wanted it for dinner tonight!’ I can’t hide my exasperation. ‘Hey, stop it, don’t hit your sister. I don’t care who started it. Someone will lose an eye, put that Barbie plane down right now!’

  ‘Mummy, why can’t I get my ears pierced?’ Allegra begins her evening interrogation. ‘Can we have dinner in front of television? Why do I have to go to school? I’m sick, and you shouldn’t send a sick child to school. Anyway, I don’t need to go to school if I’m going to open my own florist shop!’

  ‘But Mummy,’ interjects Giselle, ‘I don’t want to have legs. I want to be a mermaid.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a mermaid, I want to be a boy, so I can marry a princess …’

  One way of trying to appreciate the little things has been to deliberately lose my mobile once I get home with my girls. It removes the temptation to escape into a parallel universe, even if Peter has to ring me twenty times before I can find it and talk to him. The realisation that I had to kick my phone habit hit me when Allegra told me to get off Twitter one night and play with her.

  However, hiding my phone hasn’t been enough. More and more I draw on ‘mindfulness’, a term I had originally discarded as being too hippy because it jarred with my prejudice towards science over the spiritual and ‘new age’. I am still a big fan of my antidepressants and taking them each morning, but I’ve also developed other strategies to help me manage the hurly-burly of my life. I have also learnt there is oodles of science to explain mindfulness, I just had to be prodded in the right direction by my counsellor. Essentially, our clever brains can retrain and rewire themselves to throw out the damaging thoughts that hold us back. For me, I still keep taking those slow deep breaths and focus on either what I can see, feel or taste as a way of short-circuiting those destructive thoughts. And these thoughts that I am not good enough are not true: they are only feelings, not fact.

  Taking deep breaths helps bring me into the present more and more.

  A small warm hand drags me back to the sandstone fence under the jacaranda tree. My youngest daughter points out a silver lizard that was frozen in the shadow on top of the fence. As we get closer it disappears down the sliver of a crack between the bricks. Suddenly I notice flicker of movement: there is a family of lizards living on this fence. I make a conscious effort to stop, to be here, to be in the right now. And for that moment in time, the present, I am filled with joy.

  That same little warm hand takes mine again and again. I can feel the heat and lifeblood radiating up my arm, along my shoulder, down my chest and straight to my heart. Her cat-shaped eyes squint up at me as the warmth of the sun filters through the red bottlebrush trees. I look down at her round, trusting face and feel lighter. It has been a good day.

  ‘Look up through those branches,’ I say.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say …’ Giselle begins.

  ‘Oh, come on, you know how much Mummy likes to have a chat. See those two—’

  ‘Birds, I know.’

  ‘I think it must be a mummy and her daughter.’

  The rainbow lorikeets squawk loudly to each other.

  ‘See, they like having a chat too.’

  As the smaller bird starts dropping crimson seeds onto the footpath, their squawking becomes louder. We can still hear them as we walk slowly down the hill side by side. My long fingers enclose Giselle’s hot little hand and I give it a gentle sque
eze.

  I sing to my baby girl about the sunshine and how much I love her, trying to remember most of the words from ‘You Are the Sunshine of my Life’. Giselle sings back to me. It is our song, the song I sang when she was growing inside of me. This time she doesn’t tell me to stop singing.

  Allegra also wanted to meet the cheeky lorikeets after she gets home from school. We’ve started leaving out birdseed and cut-up apple to entice them into our backyard. The iridescent orange fur hat almost covers Allegra’s blue eyes as she squints up into the tall eucalyptus trees, trying to spot the pair of lorikeets that she and her sister have nicknamed Rainbow and Colourful. Suddenly there is a screech and flash of technicolour feathers and then the two birds perch on her wrist. We laugh into the cool, clear morning air as the lorikeets try to nudge one another out of the way to eat the quarters of green apple in Allegra’s outstretched hand.

  Allegra again outstretches her hand, this time to lead her grandmother to our spare bedroom. My eldest daughter has already decorated it with flowers (nicked from a vase of ivory roses in the kitchen) and propped them in plastic cups placed haphazardly around the room. A cup of tea she made especially for her grandmother an hour before sits cold on the bedside table. The final touch is Allegra’s pink hot water bottle resting on the pillow, placed there after she had decided it was important for her Marmi to stay cosy at night.

  ‘We’re here to take your sadness away,’ Allegra says to her grandmother, who is shakily trying to unpack her bag.

  ‘My darling, that is such a beautiful thought. We’re all here together to help, aren’t we?’ I say. I can hear a whisper in my heart that says, ‘And it’s not just your job, Jessica. You are enough, you are good enough.’

  We tuck Mum into bed, and I take my daughters to their rooms. Giselle had taken to sleeping on the little mattress on the floor next to her big girl’s bed. It used to be her cot mattress, and for a year it has been shoved under her big sister’s bed gathering dust. I stroke her light brown hair as she asks for another song.

  ‘Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any woooool …’

  ‘Not that one, another one.’

  ‘Mary had a little lamb, little lamb …’

  ‘Another one.’

  ‘Ummm …’

  Giselle begins to sing in a clear, gentle voice. ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are.’

  ‘Now it’s time for Mummy to lie with Allegra.’

  ‘You always lie with her for longer.’

  ‘I’ll be back to give you a kiss.’

  Snuggling against my eldest daughter, I marvel at how tall she has become. Just an hour before I had wrapped her up tightly in the red mermaid bath towel and carried her into the bedroom, the pair of us spinning around and laughing until we couldn’t bear it any longer.

  Allegra reaches her hand across to me. ‘Mummy …’

  ‘Mummy’s here, darling, Mummy’s here.’ Half of my body is now off the bed as I kneel on the floor and keep stroking her hair while she goes off to sleep. As her breathing deepens I stand up, ready to sneak out, then trip over a tangle of teddy bears in the doorway of the bedroom. I smile, knowing this is my beautiful, messy, wonderful life. And there is nowhere I would rather be.

  Me, aged 1. Already a cat lover.

  Aged 3 and ready to help.

  A budding ballerina! Aged 9, 1979.

  Harriet (left), Claudia (right), Mum and me (middle) in 1979 just before Mum’s first breakdown.

  Sisters. Claudia, Harriet and me in 1980 soon after our parents separated.

  A naughty teenager.

  With Mum at my farewell dinner on the eve of going to uni, 1989.

  My first day at uni in Bathurst.

  I did it! With Mum on my graduation day, 1993.

  Working at Prime TV, Canberra, 1993. With Melissa Doyle.

  Visiting Phillip Island and homesick in 1994.

  On the Channel Ten News set, 1997.

  Paris, 2002. I was sure Peter would propose here, but he didn’t.

  Our engagement party, Clovelly, 2003.

  Going crazy with my sisters on the morning of my wedding, 12 January 2004.

  Mum and my mother-in-law Charlotte Overton at our wedding.

  My dad and step-mum, John and Lesley Rowe, at our wedding.

  Our cat wedding cake! Audrey is on the top and Alfie is climbing up the side.

  The happy couple, the day after our wedding.

  Allegra arrives, 18 January 2007.

  Allegra comes home.

  Still struggling to breast feed.

  Back at work, December 2007. Allegra watches on.

  Allegra’s first birthday.

  Welcome to the world Giselle, 9 April 2009.

  Allegra meets her baby sister Giselle.

  With Mum, Harriet and all the kids.

  Giselle and Allegra keeping my dad busy.

  Giselle and Allegra give my gown the thumbs up.

  Allegra and Giselle.

  Special times with Peter.

  Our gorgeous family.

  With the Studio 10 crew … Joe Hildebrand, Ita Buttrose and Sarah Harris.

  Giselle and Allegra on suitcase watch and keeping their dad at home.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thank you Patti Miller for giving me the confidence to write from the heart. I wouldn’t have had the courage to keep peeling back the layers without you and the glorious group of fellow writers in our Faber Memoir writing course. Big love and gratitude to Annette Barlow, publisher extraordinaire, who has held my hand for years, gently nudging me to get more and more down on the page. Thanks to Anthony Reeder who nursed my manuscript through it’s rough and racy early stages. Rebecca Kaiser who patiently and painstakingly has made sure my book makes sense! Andy Palmer for getting my story to the wider world. And to my family and friends, you are what matters most of all. I know that without you I am nothing. Xx