The Sperm Donor

'Well, look who I ran into,'crowed Coincidence.
'Please,'flirted Fate, 'this was meant to be.'
― Joseph Gordon-Levitt, The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, Vol. 1

There were only sixteen of us in the group, even so, I knew there was no way I going to remember everyone’s name. Yes, we had each labeled our chest with a sticky tag upon arrival, but some people had used a plain blue biro that I couldn’t see from the other side of the table, while another had the sort of hand-writing that made it almost impossible to tell an a from and e, or whether that was double-r or an m.

I don’t know about you, but I reckon there’s something a bit creepy about a stranger surreptitiously peering at your left breast while you’re speaking to them. And let’s face it, those sticky tags have a habit of losing their stick pretty damn quickly. The seminar is rarely half over before Hadley the coffee cup joins the crowd by the sink, and someone’s right loafer has picked up Galatea.

Tell us something memorable about yourself. Perhaps choose something you’re proud of, something unique or funny, something you’re happy for us to remember you by.

It was almost my turn.  Two more introductions, then me.

The bitch inside my head slammed words against my skull like a squash ball thudding on the grubby court walls: dull, plain, old, trite, drab, sad, tame, bland—forgettable. You’re eminently forgettable…

Still, somehow, the voice of the quietly spoken young woman to my right began to plink through the echoing fog haze of my panic. Right after she’d explained that she worked in a highly specific and, frankly, to me quite intimidating field, she added something like this:

 And… well… I was donor conceived, and my search for the man who is my biological father has been quite public. Some of you might have seen the documentary about it.  And…well… actually… it turns out that my paternal grandfather is a rather famous Australian academic …

As she named him, I began to see the likeness. Not to the famous academic. To his son.

To the guy I’d known at uni.
To an anonymous student who gave sperm in exchange for money.

To the smiling bearded guy with the unnervingly blue eyes who’d shared a house with one of my friends and who, for several years, I’d thought was kind of gorgeous.

To her biological father.

I guess it shouldn’t have felt weird. But it did.

It felt like one of those life-imitating-art moments.

I was swallowed by images of nights sharing lentil and vegie mash in mismatched bowls. Secondhand chairs around a rickety table. Energetic, idealistic, expansive conversations fuelled by our passion for our studies. And cheap wine.

 
Anything was possible.

Everything was unknown.

I was not who I am now.

Not who I am now, but no more memorable then than now.

He wouldn’t remember me.

I will have left no impression.

No sticky tag on his memory.

Tell us something memorable about yourself… something you’re happy for us to remember you by…

All hail Isabel of Ararat...

On this mild Monday, I just want to write a short but heartfelt shout-out to 91-year-old Isabel Mackenzie of Ararat who, as I type, has chained herself to a huge and magnificent River Red Gum in protest at the destruction of such ancient beauties for the widening of the highway. Isabel, you rock. 

1924, the year Isabel was born, was a good one. Clarence Birdseye invented frozen food, people here in Victoria heard a local radio station for the first time, and George Gershwin gave us Rhapsody in Blue. Now, while the advent of snap frozen vegetables can undoubtedly be said to be a boon to all housewives wealthy enough to have a freezer from that time forth, that's pretty much what most women either were, or aspired to being ... a housewife with a freezer. I'm tipping that political protest wasn't part of the landscape of a country woman's lifestyle in 1924.

Isabel was six the year that Phar Lap won the Melbourne Cup and Amy Johnson became the first woman to fly solo from England to Australia, and she was 13 the year that Amelia Earhart disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. 1945, the year Isabel turned 21, signaled the end of WW2. It was also the year women in France won the right to vote. Four years later, Simone de Beauvoir penned The Second Sex.

Half Isabel’s life-time ago, in 1969, the fearless and fearsome Zelda D’Aprano chained herself to the doors of the Melbourne Arbitration Court when a case for equal pay for women in the Meatworkers’ Union failed to produce anything more than a token increase. She refused to accept powerlessness.

I don't know Isabel Mackenzie, but I feel pretty safe in saying that a woman of 91 has seen a great deal of change. She's watched the city spread its toxic breath over the countryside and the back roads grow into highways. And over those years, she's witnessed injustices and atrocities against nature that have finally led her to take a stand:

"These trees are hundreds of years old and I was hoping maybe something would be left for the next few generations to see."

Good for you, Isabel. You're a role model and a wake-up call and a pick-me-up tonic and a shiny grey-haired example of refusing to be invisible. You're a humanist and an activist and a warrior for good.

All hail, Isabel of Ararat.
I salute you. 

10 Mothering Things I'm a Bit Shit At

The first time anyone told me I was fail as a mother was back when the man-child was only in Year Six. My crime was the patent child-abuse of not allowing him to have a computer or a gaming console in his bedroom. Truly. It’s a wonder there weren’t social workers beating our door down.

Nonetheless, a huge amount of angst was created when his peers declared me a fail tightarse, assuring him that they would totally own him in no time. Nice boys they were. And every one of them from a very non-fail family. Indeed, one of them was blessed with a mother who was so NOT fail that she was unfazed by the nudie pics he had chosen to plaster his room with,  because…well.. you know… boys will be boys.

But as the kids get older, I’m fail a lot more. A whole lot more.

Yesterday I was fail after devoting the day to repurposing odds and sods into one of Andie’s ‘volcanic ensembles’ from Pretty in Pink . (Today’s fundraiser at school is ‘Come as your favourite movie character or actor.’)

The day before that I was fail because the sport uniform that had not been put in the laundry was still dirty.

And the day before that I was fail because nobody else really felt like smoked chicken and spinach pasta for dinner.

So in an attempt to remind myself that there are ways I can avoid being epic fail all the time, or at everything, I thought I might just make a quick list of ten things I need to remember I’m a little bit crap at. So here goes.

I’m just a bit shit at:

1.     mind reading

2.     being in three places at once

3.     caring if the exact item of clothing required at any given second has been  ironed

4.     not getting annoyed when the dog decorates the house with slobbery fragments of the leftover lunches — both foodstuffs and wrappings—it found under the bed/in the bottom of a school bag/in the overflowing bin of someone’s bedroom

5.     realising that we have run out of a metric fuckton of things that nobody put on the shopping list

6.     remembering everyone else’s daily timetable

7.     whipping up cordon bleu meals every night

8.     having the car radio on the right station

9.     comprehending how the world can turn simultaneously around each and every teenager in the universe

10. being invisible on demand.

I’m sure there's plenty more I could add, but I reckon that will give me enough to work on for now. Wish me luck!

Brown Eyes Blue Eyes

For the past 24 hours, the English-speaking world has been ablaze with the mystery of the blue/black/white/gold dress.  What colour is it really? Is the whole thing a click-bait scam? Who sees what? It’s been one of those Internet phenomena that verify what a small planet this is, how close we all are and yet how different. And how many of us are willing to be completely and utterly diverted by trivia. It came during a week in which perspective and disparity in how we see the world has weighed heavily on me.

When Manchild was only in Grade 2, his world shifted seismically. Mr Inquisitive, a chattering cheerful junior scientist couldn’t resist the temptation to look at everything with his fingers. He skipped through life with an infectious smile, filling each day with a running commentary of all that he saw and heard and thought and felt and wondered. Then it all stopped. It didn’t just begin to diminish as he grew older and more self-conscious. It stopped. 

 'Mummy, she doesn’t like my face. She smiles at the boys with yellow hair. She never smiles at me.'

He was talking about his Grade 2 teacher. A tall, powerfully built woman, older than the teachers he was used to, but that wasn’t the problem. She was as old as me. I was 41 by the time his adoption was finalised. She was tall and fair-haired and strict. That wasn’t the problem either. I’m tall and fair-haired and strict.

No. The problem was something he sensed every day. Something he couldn’t understand or name. It was something unspoken and almost invisible and evil. Something I couldn’t quantify to approach the school about. Something that happened when I wasn’t there to protect him.  Something I couldn’t fix.

 

A few years later, when he was subjected to persistent harassment and bullying at his next school —including having an image of a beautiful Asian woman left in his locker accompanied by a note to ask if he’d started saving for his sex change yet— I went to the school to report it.

Kids will be kids, I was told. The boy responsible had no idea he was being offensive. He thought he was being funny. He’s just a child. You’re being over-sensitive.

And then the boy’s mother spread the word to the other parents to stay away from us: “Be careful of that family. If anything happens that they don’t like, they play the racist card.”

The authorities told me the same thing at yet another school when Miss 14 was only in Grade 6 and one of her peers began to regularly chant at her:

“Ching-Chong China

 She has a big vagina.”

We were assured that the taunter had no idea this was offensive.

My daughter was forced to explain to the other child why it upset her.

She has never bothered to report further instances of racism to the school since.

She is tired of having to be the living example for the lesson of the day about how families differ, about adopted kids and their real families. She’s sick of hearing how she and her brother look so alike when they don’t. They don’t look even remotely similar.  Except that they’re both Korean-Australians. 

 

It’s now more than 45 years since Jane Elliott stirred up uncomfortable controversy with her Blue Eyes Brown Eyes exercise after the murder of Martin Luther King Jnr affected her so deeply that she was moved to take action against bigotry and racism. That act of hate motivated Jane Elliott to commit her life’s work to making young people see how deeply programmed and emotionally charged our world-views are. And to open their eyes to how hurtful and damaging that can be. Even if it made them uncomfortable. Even if people hated her for it.

And all these years later, videos of her work still circulate on sites like Upworthy  and their power has not dissipated. They still divide, surprise and inflame. 

I shared the video below recently with Miss 14 when she was upset about yet another ‘innocent’ reference to her ‘exotic’ appearance. And a particular moment resonated very deeply with her. And me too.

Often, people believe they are demonstrating how open-minded and accepting they are when they say to my adopted Korean children: ‘But I don’t see you as Asian or adopted.”

Why not?

Being Korean and adopted is integral to who my children are, critical to their identity.

What those well-meaning people do not understand is that they are, in effect, saying: “ I don’t see you as Korean, I see you as Caucasian Australian – just like me.”

I don’t know how that sounds to you, but to me, and to Jane Elliott, it sounds like entrenched racism. The sort that’s so far beneath the surface of best intentions and good will that the only people who see it are the ones who feel it as a constant ache. A hurt that some would label over-sensitivity.

Perspective.

How we see things.

Colourblindness.

Blind spots.

They’ve been on my mind this week.
What about you?
 Did anything change the way you see?

( ... almost 10 minutes in you'll find the conversation that resonated)

Roadkill

You know you’re not living in the city anymore when your daughter comes home and tells you about how one of her peers rode over a rabbit in bike ed today and the teacher had to break its neck to put it out of its misery. 

To be fair to the rabbit, its demise probably wasn’t just due to its failure to take proper care when crossing the bike path; it may very well have been paying very careful attention the day its mother reminded all seventy-three of her kids to look both ways before hopping onto a carriageway. No, I’m tipping it was feeling pretty ordinary before Ingrid’s tyre tracks were imprinted on its tummy.

Rabbits and foxes are the devil’s spawn here on The Rock.  Feral cats follow a close third. Never should they be viewed as cute furry friends, for they are evil environment destroying wrong-doers. I’m starting to become accustomed to that thinking. A little bit.

The rangers routinely bait sections of the foreshore, and last week three very very unhoppy bleary-eyed bunnies wobbled across my path in the area where the kids were riding. I understand the science behind it, and I tried to see it as a positive step forward for the native flora and fauna, but the sight of wonky poisoned little fluffy things still makes me feel a bit queasy and uncomfortable.

 

I blame Thomas Austin Esquire for the whole uncomfortable situation. That dim-witted aristocrat with an over-inflated sense of entitlement has a great deal to answer for. Back in October of 1861, the numb-knuckle proudly imported twenty-four wild English rabbits with the wish that they would breed on his 29,000-acre property just outside of Melbourne so that he and his starch-collared associates could enjoy a spot of hunting. Didn’t need a genie to make that wish come true. Before long he was bragging that there were thousands of the blighters for his shooting pleasure. Doofus.

Mr A was an esteemed paid-up life member of the incongruously named Acclimatisation Society. These knobs imported — amongst other things — sparrows, blackbirds, hares, thrushes, partridges, foxes and pheasants. They did this for the joint purposes of making Australia feel more like their homeland… and killing them for fun. WTF? 

And what do you imagine they thought they were acclimatising? British animals? Native flora and fauna? The whole of Australia?

Anyway, if Thomas and his stuffed-shirt mates hadn’t had more money than sense, I wouldn’t have to feel bad about wobbly bunnies and Ingrid wouldn’t have run over one of those said wobbly bunnies and Mr P wouldn’t have had to break its neck to put it out of its misery. Acclimatisation Society be damned.

But the upside of the wholesale massacre of bunnies and foxes is that the locals really are benefitting. When he moved down here, there were no Purple Swamp Hens in this area. Now, despite their being the worst parents in the bird universe, there are five or six resident families that run frantically in any direction as a car or human or dog approaches calling loudly ‘Everybody panic!’

 

Seriously, these things are so stoopid that one walked into the tennis court through one of the two open gates and then ran up and down the length of the court in a frenzy for a full five minutes trying to work out how to get out again before it remembered it had wings.

 

Native roadkill still hurts my heart, though. Without foxes, our wallabies and possums have no predators. Except cars. 

The rangers claim there is probably only one fox left on the island. Apparently females are too cautious to cross the bridge, so it’s likely to be one rogue male who may even cross back over to his harem on the mainland after he’s had a feed. But we know there are none around us, because poor unfortunates such as this fellow lie untouched wherever they have expired until they are reduced to sunbleached bones. Once they would have been dragged off as soon as night fell.

So I'm not totally acclimatised to life on The Rock yet. But from time to time I do catch myself humming this:

The ultimate grudge match: Friday 13th meets Valentines Day.

Tonight is surely the perfect time for every confidence-sucking ego-driven narcissist to sharpen their claws and polish their fangs in preparation for their ideal hollyday. No. That’s not a typo or a spelling error. It’s a portmanteau word of which I’m sure Lewis Carroll, maybe even The Bard himself, would have approved. 

In my own personal non-urban dictionary you would find it defined thusly:

hollyday n. a festive or celebration day cultivated and sustained by movies made in Hollywood, often with a commercial or fiscal motivation; a day on which people are supposed to act in a predetermined manner that usually involves buying something, acting the fool, or inadvertently making others feel like crap.

This 21^st century coinage was created by the fusion of two distinct morphemes: holly is derived from Hollywood; day, as in a period of 24 hours, is both a complete word and a lexical reference to holiday by virtue of both its visible and audible connections.

I hate Valentines Day. Not because I’m a bitter lonely old loon, although that is probably part of it, but mostly because I don’t see the point of Valentines Day. Except maybe that it means florists can up their prices and restaurants can anticipate bums on seats.

I don’t understand how a Roman priest who was purportedly beaten to death with sticks and then beheaded one lovely February 14 by Claudius II and his cronies for marrying couples when that was a major no-no represents romance and roses and chocolates. He wasn’t marrying them because they couldn’t be together any other way, either. Living together was all cool with Claudius. Hell, even polygamy was smiled upon. Claudius just had a thing about marriage. A slightly different thing from the thing the Christian church had about marriage.

Hey, they voted this Valentinus dude the patron saint of beekeepers and epilepsy for God’s sake (pun intended). How romantic is that?

And I’m almost certain the guy didn’t get himself martyred so that people could spend a day feeling like crap because nobody is expressing love to them. Not even with a rose made out of that yukky fatty-tasting chocolate or a super-cheesy anonymous card.

And I’m fairly confident in saying that he wouldn’t have been thrilled to be associated with smug self-satisfied beeatches who flaunt their love-heart necklaces and count the petals on their bouquets as if those things prove they’re more worthy of love than others.

I’m pretty sure that’s not what he died for.

 

So, happy hollyday to you all. I hope the ghosts of Friday 13th protect you from having your head beaten with sticks.

Except if you’re one of those sharp-clawed polished-teeth beeatches who makes other people feel bad. If you’re one of those, I hope you’re love heart gets caught in your zipper. 

'Parenting Strategies for Teenage Success'

Parenting Strategies for Teenage Success. That was the name of the seminar that the school invited all Year 12 parents to attend last week. And when I say 'invited' what I mean is that we all understood the vice-principal and the Year 12 coordinator would be there taking careful notes about which committed and loving parents were prepared to rearrange the universe in order to take advantage of this fantastic opportunity to learn progressive new ways to help their already-stressed final-year students achieve their full potential, and which of us couldn't really be arsed going out on a stinking hot Tuesday night.

I had already determined that I was not in the target audience from the subtitle of the evening's presentation:  Helping ordinary people achieve extraordinary results. But I went anyway.  Sometimes I have to at least feign ordinary.

The presenter had spent the afternoon with the kids, motivating them to commit to success. They thought he was cool. They all loved him... he was clear about that. Hey, he'd had a DJ provide a funky soundtrack to the advice he was giving and the tasks he'd had the kids do. And heck gee, one of the activities was a 'selfie-challenge', so it was clear to us parents that this guy was hip to the way to get 17 and 18-year-olds to detach themselves from their devices, forget about their social lives, and dedicate themselves to study, revision and more study for the next eight months.

I tried to remain positive and open-minded as I collected my A4 booklet and pencil. I really did. I'm pretty sure I was smiling while I avoided eye contact with everyone else to prevent my cynicism from leaking out in a snarky comment or a snarly facial expression. I even went and sat on an aisle seat, just a few rows from the front. Close enough to have to participate. But when I opened the booklet to browse through what was in store for me, it all went to shit. Every second sentence had empty spaces for us to fill in... you know, to make sure we were paying attention.

And there were five pages headed Positive Process Praise. Five pages. Two of them chock-full of fill-the-gap sentences like: You were very ...... when you ...(action taken). Hat's off to you!'  Gosh, I do love a good apostrophe error in a printed hand-out from an expert on how to help students succeed. And Hat's off to you! is a spiffing little one-liner to make any almost-adult feel sufficiently proud of themselves to keep their chins up and soldier on through the sludge.

One key sentence confused me a little (I knew it was key because it was in red): Lavishly praise the strategy. The only strategy I could lavishly praise in my resident Year 12 student is avoidance strategy. He's genius at that. Apparently, I should say something like (please fill the gap as you see appropriate): You used your ........ to get around that. Very good!

Disappointingly, we didn't get the DJ. We got a PowerPoint presentation with slides so heavy on the text that even when every person in the audience had reached into their pocket/handbag/briefcase for their glasses, nobody could read them. Which didn't really matter. Because he read them to us. Well, that's not exactly true. He didn't read all of them. Some of them he flipped through at breakneck speed because he'd devoted so much time to his extremely fascinating and relevant anecdotes about how his techniques had proven invaluable in turning around his 6-year-old daughter's attitude to maths and about how he'd become a vegetarian and how he'd given up a career as an accountant in a prestigious firm to become an expert in motivation, that he didn't have time to fit in the stuff about how you actually manage to motivate a near-adult who's been so regularly battered and demoralised by the schooling system that he is paralysed by fear of failure.

 But we did get to turn to the person beside us and tell them they had lovely eyes. And we did get to flap our booklets over our heads to prove we weren't writing on them. And best of all, we got to do lots of 'Repeat after me...'. 

Apparently, my Year 12 student will get extraordinary results if I feed him a healthy meal at 6:00 pm every night. And if said six-foot-one son should arrive home hungry after a day at school, soccer at lunchtime and the walk from the bus stop, I should allow him a glass of water and a handful of nuts and dried fruits or carrot sticks served with a tablespoon of tzatziki and tell him to wait till dinner. I'm quite happy about that. It means we won't run out of bread or milk or peanut butter nearly so often.

He is, however, going to be using more than his fair share of the household's available drinking water in order to keep up with his specified 2.75 litres  to help wash down both heaped platefuls of leafy greens every day before popping off to bed for his 9.2 hours of sleep.  If he should have trouble dropping off, I'm to put on a dim light in his bedroom and provide him with a cup of warm milk. I've been assured he will nod off in no time. Who knew?

Other realistic and helpful advice about how to help my man-child be motivated to succeed in his final year of secondary school included:

• take his phone away from him as soon as he arrives home from school 
• prevent him from having contact with any of his peers who are not top scholars
• disallow any and all gaming.

It's just that easy. **

Last but certainly not least, to ensure that he studies in a premium state of relaxed alertness and increase his recall performance by a guaranteed minimum of 25 per cent, he is, of course, to listen to string orchestras performing baroque pieces in largo tempo.

But he won't be able to download it to listen via Bluetooth from his phone, because I will have taken that away from him.

So there you have it. Parenting strategies for teenage success.
Snarky?
Snarly?
Me....
A little bit.

But I did get my name ticked off the roll.

** I have it from a reliable source that none of these simple fixes were presented to the accompaniment of a funky beat at the student session. Can't imagine why not.