Sterilising Parents?

I’ve always believed that parenting should be a privilege not a right. I believe that possessing the prerequisite organs to produce children or having access to invitro fertilisation should not give people automatic right to breed. That's my right in a democracy. Unfortunatel democracy works for everyone, even bad parents. Two women in France suffocated their new born babies (several between them). One of them was quoted to have said that two children was enough. Women in this country have dumped babies in cardboard boxes and left them to die. The sympathy is less for the babies and more for the state of mind of these women. Some men are violent to their children or violate them or throw them off bridges. Despite the myths and the emotive issues surrounding parenting, not everyone is suited to it.

That’s why I understood Norman Geschke’s outburst. Geschke is a former Victorian ombudsman who believes that parents who consistently abuse their children should be sterilised. He wrote ‘several scathing reports on child-protection services [or lack of them]. As this was between 1980 and 1994 I assume that he doesn't believe much has changed since that time. Greschke said that 'keeping children with abusive parents is "sentencing" vulnerable kids to a life without proper care.’ My first instinct when I read that he wanted absusive parents sterilised was to want to shout hooray from the rooftops. It was a wonderful fantasy for the two seconds that it lasted. Then I thought it through and I was forced, reluctantly, to disagree.

Love it or hate it, what you get in a Democracy is governments that you can toss out if they do the wrong thing by you and a powerful lobby group called people power. Whenever an issue comes up experts are hauled out to respond with quotes but seem to let it all sink into back into the subconscious once the furore is over. Victoria's Child Safety Commissioner Bernie Geary ‘savaged the concept [of sterilisation] as inhumane.' Stating what’s obvious to the rest of us is one thing, but the public expects more from a Child Safety Commissioner. How much more impressed I would have been had he followed up that statement with an idea for a workable solution on protecting children.

I know about Joe Tucci the Australian Childhood Foundation's chief executive. because he is not only constantly called out for an opinion, but because he is constantly proactively championing for children's rights and pushing for change whether asked for an opinion or not. Tucci doesn’t believe in sterilising abusive parents either, he believes in harsher rules for parents who have a history of abuse. And he wants the rules about terminating rights to be clearer than they currently are. Sounds simple doesn't it?

Here’s an idea. Instead of getting emotive about sterilisation, why don't the experts push for stronger laws that will not hesitate in taking vulnerable children from their abusive parents? No second chances, for heaven’s sake. We jail people who steal money but give abusive parents second chances. How inconsistent is that? Despite the neo-think and neo-babble coming from some quarters, children are not better off with such parents. I suspect part of the problem is that there's not much of an infrastructure in place for those children, which makes it even more reprehensible.

There is a 'paid' and voluntary system of sterilisation in the US, but our democratic rights don't allow for compulsory sterilisation. Sorry Mr Geschke, it’s not going to happen. So now that we have parents' rights all sorted out, why not focus on children. Immediate action without the usual pitty-pattying around political correctness. Surely that’s what most of us want. Why not push for hefty jail sentences? I’m sure the civil libertarians will be up in arms about it all, but let's give them a swift clip across the ears, they will be the first to tell you it didn’t hurt and just maybe it will jog their collective consciences and remind them that the vulnerable are also worthy of their attention.

As I said, it was a nice dream while it lasted, Mr Geschke, but sterilisation is barbaric, it's uncivilised. And for those who disagree, think of this – once you curtail one freedom there’s always going to be some power mad politician taking things a step further. That’s how things get changed, one little step at a time so you don’t realise the intended and or even indirect consequences till it’s too late. Pretty soon, just like Hitler’s Germany, nobody but the blue eyed blonds will be acceptable. And they had better watch out that they don’t get old and grey, because eugenics would be a bright idea waiting to happen just around the corner.

Letting go

I have deleted the original and totally re-written 'When do you let go.' This the great thing about a blog. Once you send your piece off for somebody else to publish, it's no longer your call what happens to it or how it's edited. Hope you like this version better.

When do you let go? It’s a question every mother since the dawn of time has asked herself. As far as I know, no one has come up with the definitive answer yet. Neither had I one Monday morning many years ago. Or maybe it was a Tuesday. When one day merges into the other it’s hard to tell. Whatever the day, my routine was set in stone. I would have been busy counting, changing and soaking nappies. After that I’d feed my child, play with him, clean up after him and prepare his evening meal. The conclusion I came to when a stray thought interrupted my busy routine, was that it was no time to philosophise, there was a seemingly endless vista of years ahead of me, lots of time to work things out. I put off the question, till I could give it my full consideration.

No time to do that on my first child’s first day at kinder. I was too busy dealing with my stressed child. David cried and clutched my hand. I gently disengaged it with some soothing words about our meeting again soon. I did some weeping myself on the way home and wondered why I couldn’t take a leaf out of our cat’s book. We had found a home for her kittens. In only a matter of weeks Toffee had no trouble at all turning a disinterested back on her frolicking children. Given a couple of months more and she wouldn’t have known them had they had passed her in the street. I wiped away the tears and went home to clear up the chaos and get ready for the next round. I didn’t have time for self pity.

There was excitement at the local primary school on David’s first day. We were surrounded by mothers and by hyperactive children. Others, first timers, stood around quietly watching as the veterans gathered in little groups talking and their children who obviously also knew each other played chasey. Not knowing or caring that there was an etiquette to these things, David tried to extricate himself from my grip. He was raring to go and meet these children. He wanted to make friends, and he instinctively knew that hand holding wasn’t what a school boy did. Anyhow why was I keeping him from that big adventure that his dad and I had been preparing him for? I looked at the well scrubbed young man; his usually unruly curls were damped, his crisp white shirt already needed tucking in, grey shorts exposed two skinny little legs, a scabby knee and several bruises. It was obvious that David was ready for school, but was I?

I pushed that thought back into the subconscious void where all uncomfortable thoughts go. My husband and I thought we had prepared for it all, but we hadn’t counted on our own reactions when David came home chattering about the best little teacher in the world. From that time on it was, Miss Smith said, Mr Brown said all the way through primary school. David continued to consult us, but we became increasingly aware that we had competition. Our son’s horizons had expanded and a host of Miss Smiths were going to be vying for our boy’s attention.

Occasionally parents could still be useful, helping out with homework, ironing uniforms and moonlighting as chauffeurs. And what did I think of this or that girl, David wanted to know. He felt a bit awkward and unsure. I took it to mean that I had a mandate to express my thoughts and did it, constantly. But one day he stopped asking or listening. In fact he discouraged any sort of dialogue on the matter. David was making up his own mind about girls and life and the universe. It was devastating to be demoted from a proactive parent to a figurehead, devastating but not sudden. The indicators that my son had become independent of us had been there if I had chosen to take notice.

I'm much wiser after the event. I know now that parenting is a series of letting go. Children know it instinctively, but it’s such a slow process that it takes parents a lot longer to pick up on it. When you begin with vulnerable and reliant children and have committed you life to them for years or even decades, it's hard to notice when they have finally stopped needing us. When they finally distance themselves from us and our windmill arms it's only natural that we are left bereft. I know now that if we play our cards right and constantly remind ourselves that our children are on loan to us only, we could have a life after they have left us. Well, we could have a life till they haul us out of retirement for babysitting duties, but that’s another story.

Quitting

I woke up one morning to find both nicotine and oxygen jockeying for first place in my affections and the nicotine was winning hands down. It wasn’t unexpected the indicators had been creeping up on me for years: coughing up phlegm, developing a gravelly voice and coughing fits when laughing, no laughing matter, but I had ignored them. That morning had been a scary one, I had finally reached what gamblers and alcoholics call ‘rock bottom.’ My lungs seemed to have packed it in and there was nowhere left for me to go. That was the day that I went cold turkey and stopped smoking for good.

I had tried every other trick in the book, that’s why I knew it had to be cold turkey. I slept in thinking that a later start would drive some of that nicotine out of my system. I sat in my arm chair and knitted or read or watched TV and kept myself distracted as long as possible. I once had an idea that if I took half the cigs out of my daily packet I could decrease my intake till I was down to none.

Those ideas were bound to fail. I hadn’t been able to make a move without those cigarettes for four decades. Whatever the occasion, I had to have something in my mouth. My pals and I, together, first thing in the morning out in the garden, last thing at night we were inseparable enjoying the sunset, and all those other occasions in between. From first puff to last gasp. There wasn’t a thought or an action without my constant companions along for company. Something more drastic than feeble ideas based on desperation was expected. I knew what I needed to do but I was in denial and not ready to do it.

There were no patches back then, but they wouldn’t have helped. Like gamblers and alcoholics and like overeaters, I had a compulsive personality and would just have got hooked on the patches. I was that good girl who cleaned her plate at dinner; I ate all the chips then worked my finger round the pack to find the crumbs and salt hiding down the bottom, I finished all that I started. It was impossible to leave a cigarette unsmoked, I had to suck up every leaf of tobacco and would have inhaled the butt if I could.

Even though not another cig has passed my lips in over a decade since that day I can’t say I was an overnight success. It took a forty year journey of stops and starts to get me to that place and two determined years before, to paraphrase other compulsives, I ‘let go’ of those cigs.

Fear for my life had stopped me cold and anger was what kept me going until all that nicotine was flushed out of my system. I used to hear what those chemicals were doing to me but this was the first time I was experiencing them first hand. It must be different for everyone because my mother stopped smoking and was cranky for a whole week, then it was over. She never looked back. It took me a couple of years. Getting rid of the nicotine was painful. My chest constricted, a cartload of spiky heels did their daily cha cha up and down my body. I was determined to eject that nicotine.

A recent Cancer Council advertisement tells people not to give up giving up. It's positive and encouraging. Each smoker has to reach the rock bottom stage and decide for him or herself what it will take to quit. There isn't a universal panacea but like the Cancer Council, I think that anyone can do it if they keep on keeping on.

A girl's worst friend

Cooking and ironing are a girl’s worst friend. At least they were mid last century when we were bound to the indispensable ironing board and to quote an advert for kitchens the ‘focal point of much food preparation’. Thankfully today we are liberated mums making our mark in the workforce, carving out careers. No time to cook or to iron.

While it’s true that in more recent times we have been lured back into the kitchen the focus these days is more on nourishing our creative urges than a yearning for the return to the daily and thankless grind. I can’t see women giving ironing a second chance when they can give themselves some extra ‘me time’. Why should we when for the measly price of a salad roll and a cup of coffee somebody else can do it for us. I have taken a straw poll amongst friends and family and I am pleased to say that the only women who still speak fondly of those good old days are women of my mother’s generation. My theory is that their rosy coloured memories have more to do with remembering what it was like to feel useful than a love for manual labour. These wives and mothers not only juggled a routine that would fell an ox, but also managed to find time to iron hankies, bed sheets, pyjamas and shirts. In fact, any item that got in the way was grist to their ironing mill.

I’m not made of such stern stuff. I refused point blank to iron hankies. But I raised two sons and began ironing their cute little shirts when they were five. I kept it up till the shirts were adult size and not so cute. Imagine working your way through mountains of shorts and shirts each week and not being able to complain because everybody else was doing the same.

My partner in life still wears shirts; he hasn’t cottoned on to casual wear yet, but ten years ago I discovered that ironing was bad for my health. I was forced to give ironing up. Coincidentally it was around the same time that I had accidentally dropped my iron to the ground from a great height. Neither it nor I have been the same since. I went down the road to my local shopping centre and bought a bunch of polyester cotton shirts that could drip dry if they were hung the right way. I replaced my bed sheets and pillow slips and replaced cotton hankies with disposable Kleenex (much more hygienic). Everything else goes to the dry cleaners.

Every now and again a salesperson stops me in my tracks at my local department store and offers me a demonstration of her whiz bang iron, a snap at three hundred dollars. Granted that it’s shiny and streamlined with lots of mysterious buttons to press, but in the end it’s only a slicker version of my old one. My response to the sales pitch is to ask a pertinent question: will it iron without my assistance. Until the day I get an answer in the affirmative I intend to walk on by with a sneer on my face.

On Rejections

Every writer gets rejected at one time or another, even seasoned writers. They are the first to complain that being known is no protection from rejection. Admittedly they are less prone to it than those of us aspiring to success are but those are the vagaries of the publishing business. Once you send off that submission it’s a waiting game even for working writers. I have a friendly editor who knows my work but I still have to wait two to three months to hear whether or not my work has been accepted.

Even that friendly editor decided that a piece I wrote about my grandson wasn’t right for his magazine. That’s the thing – if you’re aiming for a particular publication you need to study your market. Ask for their guidelines, see what they say about who gets in and who doesn’t. Sometimes your piece is terrific but you’ve failed to check out the magazine you’re aiming your article at. Pick a magazine that has the sort of articles you yourself feel able to write, then go through it then buy several issues so you are familiar with the format and the issues.
Even once you’ve done all that you have to expect the occasional rejection. And you’ll have to work out for yourself why it’s been rejected. Editors are usually quite busy and don’t like to be asked. Also, they rightly feel that if they explain it leaves you a loophole for argument.

There are lots of reasons why, even though you have written something terrific, the piece has boomeranged. Of course sometimes it isn’t as terrific as you think it is which is why it’s a good thing to give yourself some distance from your article and get back to it at a later date. (Although with newspaper submissions that are current topic related there is only a 4 day window of opportunity.)
The thing not to do is to give up, either on faith in your writing or confidence in your pieces. Revisit a piece when you’ve had some time to cool off and re-write and re-send it to the same place. Be sure you know it’s a better product. If it’s more of the same then you will have lost the chance at having something else published by that magazine.

Sometimes it’s better to find another place for your piece. Once you have revised it to suit another market, or have decided it’s just fine as it is, send it off. When I wrote a piece about my grandson, Eden, my friendly editor, who usually doesn’t make comments said that if he accepted every article written by doting grandmothers he’d have no room for anything else. It’s a successful magazine, but I think that there’s no room for complacency. It could do with a grandma section. Needless to say, I didn’t jeopardise my relationship with this editor. What I did do, was find another market for Eden. And I’m pleased to report that his story is on a talking book now and giving much pleasure to blind people in Yorkshire.

The Sunday Roast

I’d like to reinstate the tradition of the Sunday roast. For those who have never experienced the custom, it was a ritual passed down the generations from father to son. The father regaled his boys with past glories, of family get togethers and of roasted vegetables and chunks of meat smothered in gravy. His eyes glazed over as he talked about the best cook in the world. I spent hours in the kitchen trying to live up to the fable, peeling, cooking, basting and trying to keep the family tradition alive until my son's girlfriends and other people’s dinner tables saved me.

It’s been a couple of decades since I basted a leg and mashed my last parsnip, but after watching Jamie Oliver and Nigella I find myself, against all natural inclination, longing to do it all over again. Along with thousands of others, I’m yearning to deglaze a pan and smother some Kipfler potatoes in olive oil and garlic. And I want to casually create truffle tarts with raspberries for dessert or something equally decadent. In other words I want to exhaust myself on the altar of haute cuisine. It’s a sacrilegious thought I haven’t had since I cut the shackles that kept me barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen several decades ago.

But I can't help myself. There’s been a resurgence of cooking shows and their spin off DVDs and cookbooks. I can’t walk past a kitchen shop without dropping in to lust after a Kyocera Ceramic knife or to finger a scanpan. It’s all I can do to resist a Mezzaluna or pestle and mortar to help me pound my herbs. I confessed my fantasy to a friend, who admitted she was also hooked.

She’s thinking of starting a campaign to have the kitchen replace the theatre room as the centre of the family home. Maybe she and her mob will have a family cook in.

I blame Jamie and Nigella for making it all look easy. Three course meals are completed in a half hour session. One minute they’re peeling a veggie, the next some complex dish is bubbling nicely on the stove. And no matter how many saucepans have gone into the preparation of one dish the bench is always spotless and not a squashed minty pea in sight. I want to know their secret.

We've been lured back into the kitchen, but it's not just the daily grind this time round and it's not just us. My sons handle a spatula with confidence and my son the vegetarian can whip up a gourmet meatless meal before you can say tofu doesn't cause greenhouse gases.

If I close my eyes the memories come thick and fast. I see us all as we were in those heady days. Dad at the head of the table, carving, the boys chattering like monkeys as they set the table, mum trotting in and out of the kitchen bringing on the minty peas and glazed carrots. Just the four of us, my partner and me and the two teenage boys getting stuck into the traditional lamb roast, veggies and conversation.

Pocket Money

When I was ten, my dad gave me a shilling a week pocket money. That’s ten cents to those of you who aren’t familiar with pre-decimal currency. It wasn’t a fortune but given that a tram ride into the city cost three pence at the time (3 cents) it wasn’t too shabby either. You could get a lot of Lemon Drops with that money, Bulls Eyes, Bullets, Milk Bottles and a Choo Choo Bar, and I did. Then I ran out of funds and had to hang out for the next pay packet.

It wasn’t a very satisfactory situation, but given my inability to plan ahead the state of affairs remained the same until I was old enough to get casual work to afford my vices. By then I’d swapped sweets for books. I read all the classics I could get my hands on at one shilling and sixpence a pop (15 cents) and moved on to Science Fiction, three shillings (thirty cents). By the time my tastes had changed again, crime fiction, books were four and six pence, that’s forty five cents. They were still more affordable than they would be today for a child who tended to suck books up like they were bulls eyes; which was lucky for me, because I was no better about saving in my teens than I was when I got my first shilling.

So was there a lesson in there? I didn’t learn how to save (I don’t think it’s in my genes) and I didn’t learn to moderate my spending. But I enjoyed the self-determination that pocket money gave me. And I understood that if I wanted to buy more than my pocket money could provide, it was my responsibility to supply the shortfall and to do that I had to work. I liked working and enjoyed the freedom to buy what I wanted (within reason) without having to ask permission or begging for it. There is something demeaning about being beholden to someone for favours.

At the same time I was equally happy with the no strings attached pocket money situation at home. I wasn’t subtly or overtly blackmailed into earning my pay. It wasn’t a prid quo pro system at our place. (That’s Latin for something for something.) I just took it for granted that my parents did what they did and if children washed a dish or made a bed to help a family unit function then it was a family thing and not to be confused with what was expected of you in the outside world.

Some parents ask themselves and each other, what possible good pocket is money is if it can’t be used to control children. Others believe children should wait till they can get casual work and learn something about the real world. Should I? Shouldn’t I? How much? Every young parent agonises about it. I don’t think there’s a wrong answer; in the end every parent usually makes a decision that is based on his or her personal experience. What I think is that pocket money buys hair ties or lollies or those small toys beloved of little children that fit into tiny hands. While they are spending we can fit in a maths lesson about how much an item is worth, how much (if any) change they would get and how much money they need to save for the more expensive items they crave.

Our children live in an adult world where it is parents who set the ground rules about what to do or not do, what to touch, what to eat and when to sleep. Pocket money allows them some control. It’s up to the parents what sort of lesson they would like their children to learn, but whatever it is they need to bear in mind that their children will return the favour with interest, one day, when the tables are turned.