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.

My son the vegetarian

Feel free to write to me if you have a simple but tasty vegetarian recipe you'd like to share.

Throw a vegetarian in with a bunch of meat eaters and you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s the lone vegetarian who needs to adjust to the needs of the many meat eaters. If you did think it, you would be wrong.

My son the card carrying vegetarian caused quite a commotion when he confessed that he had converted. One day he was tucking into the Sunday roast, the next he was talking earnestly about being kind to cows and ridding the world of their flatulence. I was ignorant about vegans at the time or it would have completely unnerved me. Vegans are even stricter about what they eat. My partner and I are unashamed meat eaters. Vegetarian boy’s child, his brother and his children are all meat eaters. Don’t fix it if it ain’t broke is our family philosophy. Why fiddle around with beans and lentils when a slab of meat and a side of veggies will do the trick?

When I recovered from my panic, I remembered that my son no longer lived with me. I’d only have to consider his needs once a week when he came to dinner. Sensing there was more to it than serving up a batch of steamed broccoli I asked vegetarian boy (VB) for help. He thought he was being obliging when he assured me that he would eat whatever came his way as long as it wasn’t meat. But you can’t expect a hardened meat eater to slap together a meatless meal at a moment’s notice.

Heard of tofu? I had. I just didn’t know what it was, what it looked like or what it did. I had been quite happy in my ignorant bliss, now I was forced to take a crash course. There are two basic types – silken for dessert and firm for everything else. Tofu is the chameleon of the vegetarian world. It has no personality of its own so it absorbs the flavour of anything it comes into contact with. You can stir fry tofu, dip it in egg and bread crumbs to make a schnitzel alternative, crumble it and mix it with an egg, to add bulk. I tested the dishes out on my partner. He obliged for the sake of the VB but didn’t like the taste or the texture.

I used to think that pulses were what throbbed in your neck when you were angry. They turned out to be a fibre fix and an alternative source of protein. I cooked up a storm and served up chick pea stew, fennel and beans and cabbage soup minus the ham hocks and streaky bacon. My partner ate it all then tucked the napkin tighter round his neck and waited patiently for the meat course.

There was no meat course. And there seemed no obvious way to please everyone, so most of us adjusted to the weekly routine. Once a week VB gets the soup and lentils, the casseroles, the stir fries, my partner and I and all who share our table get to shred meat into our personal bowls. It has been a couple of years and I have collected a neat little repertoire of recipes. Along the way I have learned to like pulses and enjoy the occasional tofu burger but no amount of cajoling will convince me to toss a soy sausage on the barbie.

Thumb sucking

Every little edge counts when you're busy raising children. Only it becomes a two edged sword if your child sucks his thumb. It seems a blessing at first. But try separating a child from his / her thumb and see how far you get.

Twelve might be the witching hour for some people but for me it was time to haul out of a warm bed and take off to the hospital. I was about to give birth to my second child. This time round I had a pit stop to make. I had to deliver a toddler to his grandparents before I could deliver myself of his brother. I went through a mental check list ending with one child, a giant bag of jelly beans and a well sucked thumb. Luckily the latter was firmly planted in my son’s mouth. I was grateful for that thumb. If it had been a favourite pacifier Murphy’s Law would have dictated I would have had trouble finding it.

It was David’s first ever sleepover and both the jelly beans and the thumb were going to ensure the experience was a success. The jelly beans were a onetime treat, but David’s thumb was his constant companion. He communicated around it, soothed himself to sleep with it and if it fell out of his mouth he would shove it right back without the need of an intermediary. I didn’t have to sterilise David’s thumb or pick it up off the floor and suck it clean. And I didn’t have to frantically backtrack through my day to find his favourite well gummed soother.

It seemed like a great break to a harried young mum until four year old David put his thumb to one side like a hitchhiker so that the portrait photographer could capture the moment. It hit me then that his pacifier sucking contemporaries had kicked their habit cold turkey two years earlier. One day David’s friends were drawing on their soothers as if their lives depended on it and the next it was conveniently lost. My child was sucking on unchecked. Try confiscating a thumb.

I tried. I pulled at it. It came out with a resounding pop then found its way back. I straightened the arm and smoothed it down by his side then watched it moving slowly back into place like the creaking hinge of a closing door. The more I tried, the less I succeeded. My son was going to be a sissy-boy on the first day at school. I knew it. His reputation would follow him through high school and university. He would never rid himself of the label. First impressions are lasting impressions. I panicked.

Friends and family handed out well meaning advice: nail polish the offending digit, sprinkle it with pepper or band aid it.

If he had been younger I might have considered it. But I thought that I’d have a better chance of succeeding with a four year old if I took the path of reason and distraction. I gave David the ‘big boys don’t’ speech; he took the thumb out for a while. It hovered nearby in case of an emergency and was back in place once I’d finished my speech.

While David watched Sesame Street, I peeled an apple, sliced it and placed a plate in his hand. We constructed brick towers and put together countless puzzles. Keeping things positive, I tried to tread the fine line between praise and discourse, between distraction and bribe. I’m all for bribes in small doses and in a good cause. A trip to Luna Park, Dave, if you can keep your thumb dry for the afternoon. An extra scoop of ice cream, Dave, with sprinkles on top? Sometimes it worked, sometimes it almost worked. By the time the school year loomed we had almost got it down to the evenings.

On the morning of the day David began school he had lapsed. I didn’t think a last minute lecture was going to be helpful. I said nothing.

When I came to pick David up from school he had a best friend and I’m thankful to report that it wasn’t the thumb. After that first day, it was an on again off again affair for a few months, but only at home and usually when he was tired.

My mother says that the first child is like a guinea pig. The first time mum is on a learning curve. She makes and learns from her mistakes hoping that they aren’t going to be irreversible. I hadn’t yet understood the danger that a thumb represented. Had I done so I would have gladly inserted a pacifier between my second child’s pink gums the moment his thumb started twitching. Had it twitched. Luckily for both of us a soothing tone and a gentle pat on the back did the trick every time, then as now, making the agony of separation unnecessary.