The Ordinary Life....

Today we had our first Choral Society concert of 2015, and as the scholarship winner I got to sing my first ever solo in concert :) My debut went off pretty well, not without its issues (my low notes cracked in places which made me wince!) but in general, the reception and support I recieved was really nice :) I now have two weeks to get my act together before the Eisteddfod, my ultimate opportunity to make a splash, maybe win a category or two, and then compete in the open championships for a trophy and 500 smackeroonies which might I say would come in handy for some jobs around the house!

Walking out of the performing arts centre, an elderly lady complimented me on my singing, and said "you'll go far my dear" - funny, people always say that. It got me thinking about the trajectory of my life. When I was younger, in primary school and early high school people would say that to me all the time. Have you ever noticed how every young person who shows genuine talent for singing, or playing music, or acting, or art, or basically anything is automatically according to those around them destined for great things - broadway, west end, the big leagues, the silver screen etc.....?

Well, I'm now 32 years old, and despite the myriad of compliments I received about being bound for greatness I am now no closer to broadway or west end than I was at the tender age of 16. Now don't get me wrong, I wouldn't change a thing about my life. Things have happened precisely as they should have, and if I had it all to do again I wouldn't change a thing. But it did get me wondering where all those hopes and aspirations that others placed upon my young head will go now that my young head is no longer young? Does the fact that I chose a life, a husband, a house and a simple existence mean that somewhere out there there is a part in some musical gone begging that would have been perfect for me? Have I somehow missed some grand moment of realised potential, some multi million dollar recording contract, some divergent path that I should have taken and never did? And at the end of my life will those around me bemoan the untapped potential of my voice, or celebrate the local concerts I entertained others with?

There's something quiet and unspoken about the ordinary life. When you're "one of the crowd" especially someone without children, no one really celebrates any of your life decisions (other than marriage if you're lucky like me!). There's no album launches, no opening nights, no wrap parties or award nights.

I think a lot about my friend Joseph, who by ANYONE'S standards had one of the most extraordinary male voices I have ever come across both amateur or professional - and who sadly committed suicide a couple of years ago. A great voice silenced without the world knowing its worth, and for what? Now all there is left is speculation of where he MIGHT have gone had he lived. There's nothing else.

Maybe the point of having a gift, any gift, is not that you reach the highest eschalons of that field, but rather that you keep on doing it no matter what and share it with as many people as you possibly can for as long as you can. I'm sure my friend Joseph would have loved to sing one more mass, one more wedding, and not because of the money (when there was money) or for some kind of fame but rather because that's what he loved to do. That's what he was MADE to do. I get it, because that's what I was made to do too. I might win the championship, I might not, in a month's time it won't really matter - at the hour of my death it certainly wont matter. What will matter is the joy I can bring to people by taking any opportunity I can to use my gift. That's why I was given it in the first place.

Until next time,

*Rant Alert* Think Before You Speak...

As you guys would know, there are quite a few things in this world that make my blood boil. Injustice is one of the biggies - it makes me FURIOUS. But there's fast approaching something else that also REALLY gets my goat.

It goes by a few different phrases, but the message is the same.

"Suck it up Princess"
"Take a teaspoon of cement and harden up"
"Build a bridge and get over it"

Ever been told that? I have. Recently in fact. Very recently. And let me tell you, not only does it NOT help, it's actually really hurtful. Let me tell you why.

Perception is reality. Unfortunately this is just the way it is. What is happening both internally and externally for someone is what is happening. YOUR perspective, while it may be valuable to you, means nothing to them in that moment because their perception is THEIR reality. I someone is sitting across from you in tears, even if its over something that you think is trivial and not worth getting upset over, for them it IS worth getting upset over. If it wasn't, they wouldn't be upset. In that moment, that person is in distress. What they need, more than anything, is validation and compassion.

Compassion is a really interesting word. I started looking up bible verses on compassion and I noticed something - often times, when Jesus is faced with people either individually or in a crowd, the bible uses the same phrase  - "and he had compassion on them". Jesus didn't tell them to "suck it up" and heaven knows he could have. After all, Jesus could see where humanity was headed, Jesus could see into the corruption of people's hearts - if there was ANYONE who could have told them to "suck it up" and been qualified to do so, it was Him!! Jesus did get exasperated at times with people as a whole, He did grow tired of the constant pressure upon him to help others, but He never once told people to "suck it up" or "get over it" because Jesus had compassion for what was happening for that person in that moment. 

What is it about telling people to "suck it up" that is so appealing??? Why do we feel we need to adopt an air of superiority and kick someone when they're down?? When did we lose our ability to empathise with others? To an extent, in the work I do at the moment, I can understand that empathy does wane at times - if we empathised with every single person we come in contact with in my job we'd seriously go insane. There's too much suffering, too much pain, too much corruption and its hard not to become overwhelmed! But I would challenge you reading this, or anyone, that perhaps its time we employ a little bit of compassion for those in distress. In that moment, whether you agree with what they're saying or not, they just need someone to look at them in the face and say "it's ok to feel the way you do". Just that validation can start the process of healing. 

It's time to resurrect a little sensitivity to the human condition - we all bleed the same colour after all! It doesn't matter how superior you feel to someone else, it doesn't matter how little you value their situation or how little you identify with their pain, it's THEIR pain not yours. You do not have the right to dismiss someone else's feelings. You do not have the right to grind them into the dirt in that moment. There are other, more constructive ways to help someone see the positives of their situation but first, just employ a little kindness and BE with them in that moment. The truth is, you don't know what else is going on in that person's life. You could be the one person who stands WITH that person in their distress rather than standing over them. The time for bullying people into "pulling themselves up by their bootstraps" is over. There's just too much hardness in this world without needing to add to it. 

And the next time someone tells me to "suck it up princess" - I'll be saying so. It's time to stand up to this attitude and if it has to start with me, then so be it. 

Until next time, 

Me 2.0

I had the most beautiful day today! I slept in til when I naturally woke up, I basically fluffed around this morning then got dressed and was picked up for lunch with a most beautiful friend :) :) we had a lovely day, shopping, and eating, and drinking coffee, and catching up on all the goss :)

One thing that happened to me today really struck me - as we were talking, my mobile phone rang. I looked down, took note of who it was, and something changed in me....I realised that I was having too much fun to interrupt it by answering the phone. So I didn't. And it turns out it was just as well I didn't. It felt good to take control over my time, and invest in people worth investing in.

Later today I also had the opportunity to put in some boundaries around my personal life vs my working life. And it felt really really really good :) :)

Then I was given a lovely compliment about work, and I felt even better...

Today I just felt really proud of who I am. I really like who I am when I am around the friend I spent time with today :) It's like I'm funny, and relaxed, and comfortable, and more MYSELF than I am around other people I know. I can be totally honest and confident that she's not going to take stuff the wrong way. I don't second guess myself when we're hanging out. I want more of THOSE kinds of friends - though I know they're rare! I think I can count the friends that truly make me feel like that on one hand!

Plus I feel proud of how far I've come. I have my ups and downs, and lately I've had more downs than ups, and I've lost a few people on the way which has blindsided me at times - but through it all I've learnt how to recognize good relationships from the not so good relationships, and I've realised that instead of opening myself up to everyone I come across, I can be selective with who I spend my time on, and how. I can say no and be ok. I can put boundaries in place and be ok - and if people don't like that, then they're not worth me knowing anyways.

I've learnt to really LISTEN to myself and to others. I've all of a sudden realised that people I thought were friends are really more interested in themselves than in anyone else. I've noticed that the equal give and take is just not there with some people. It's like, as soon as they've run out of things to say about themselves all of a sudden they gotta go.....yeah....right!

I've dissected my recently failed friendships and I've come to realise that at some point along the way I've seen red flags and felt a "kick" in my gut that should have told me that things were not right. I haven't listened to that, and as a result I've had my heart ripped out a couple of times. I could have saved myself a fair bit of heartache if I had listened to myself, so I'm committed to not having that happen to me again.

I haven't finished this journey yet, I've still got a LONG way to go, and I certainly haven't learnt how to really keep my emotions in check....but I do feel like I've grown a bit lately. I feel good knowing that I'm good at my job and I'm starting to rebuild myself into a more confident, healthier and more mentally harmonious person :)


Until next time!!

Between the stroke and the slap.....

Last night I was watching a documentary done by Louis Theroux where he was talking to paroled sex offenders in Los Angeles. These are people I read about every single day - deviant, deceptive people who prey on the young and innocent to gratify themselves with little or no regard for what their actions might do to others.

They're scum. Absolutely no doubt about it. How can I think anything else?

But one thing one of them said really struck me. He described his father as a "piece of shit" and his mother an "angel" and described being slapped on one side of his face and stroked upon the other. He broke down in tears, and in total anguish said " I'm tired of making decisions. I'm tired or not knowing which one's a stroke and which one's a slap."

It was one moment of total and complete honesty that really hit me, because in that moment I completely and totally understood what this man was talking about. He was describing my life.

Now dont get me wrong, there is NO excuse for this man's actions. None. Nada. Zip.

What I do identify with is this sense of complete and total confusion, uncertainty, bliss and pain. This was my childhood. On the one hand, I had a really lovely relationship with my grandparents, and lived a very privaledged existence in a way - I always had food on the table, a roof over my head, clothes, went to private school, and really had a very sheltered upbringing picking flowers and drawing rainbows.

And on the other hand, I had an alcoholic abusive father who beat up my mother verbally and physically, and after she left turned on me. As a child, I lived in constant fear, exacerbated even further by the persistent secret keeping between my parents and my grandparents - there was so many things I had to keep from my grandparents and vice versa, and any time I let slip something I shouldn't have said I would either dissolve into panic, or walk around with a sick, heavy, burning pain in my gut that sooner or later word would get back to the other and I'd be yelled at, belittled, slapped or hit. I was literally living between the stroke and the slap. I never knew what was coming next, I never knew what kind of mood my father and mother would be in.

As I got older and the abuse actively turned on me, this fear and panic deepened as the consequences got more serious and the violence became more frequent. I lived in a very lonely prison, and I was definitely not my own best friend.

I have come a LONG way since then, but every once in a while that panic and fear sets back in. And in little things too.....little worries, little fears. The other morning I accidentally broke a glass on the floor at work and just like I did when I was five I started apologising profusely and panicked a little...i pulled myself together, but it really took me straight back into that place. Sometimes I feel like I'm a world away from where I used to be, but in moments like that it's right there.

So what's my point? Well, I guess the point is that we abhor physical and sexual abuse, we are disgusted with violence against children. We condemn those who perpetrate bruises, broken bones, scratches, welts, sprains....I just wish that the same disgust could be shown for the true horror that is emotional, mental and spiritual abuse that is perpetrated upon children every single day through sheer uncertainty and instability in the home. I wish I could adequately describe for others the profound impact this kind of environment can have on a child, then on the pre teen, the teen, the young adult, the adult, the middle aged person, the old person. Children are sponges, they absorb the emotional life of their parents - when you take out your frustrations, pains, hurts onto your children, or ask them to keep secrets, you are creating permanent scars that no one can see. For you, it's one bad day. For them, it's a lifetime of confusion.

Sometimes it's not the stroke OR the slap that causes us pain - sometimes its having to live in between them both.

Oh Mother Where Art Thou?

As a married woman of nearly 11 years with no children, motherhood is something that still mystifies me a little bit. Of course, being my age and having been married a while I've long since been through the inevitable "so....when will you start a family?" "Are you thinking about it?" "if you are, what time line?" "Will you do IVF if you can't?" "What about fostering?" "Will you adopt?" - the list is endless!

A beautiful friend of mine posted something on Facebook the other day about time, and I noticed immediately someone else posted about not having any time because they have children - this got me thinking about how defensive we as women can become about motherhood and whether we have time or not. Most women who haven't had children would argue that their time is already pretty stretched, and I would definitely fall into that category - it always feels as if while I'm devoting time to one thing I'm neglecting something else. Kind of a like a juggler who has one more ball in the air then they can handle - you have to drop one, or you risk dropping them all!

Now, if you talk to women who HAVE had one or more children, they of course would argue that as a childless woman they had HEAPS more time then they do with children. And of course I have no doubt that it seems that way - though I'd argue that perhaps its more about a priority SHIFT rather than the addition of more time sucking activities! The defense of our right to choose whether we have children or not is so wrapped up in our identity of being a woman that it's really hard to comfortably sit with either choice. On the one hand you have women who have children. They talk endlessly about first words, first steps, behaviour management, stain removal, craft projects, car pools and soccer games. They wear joggers and sweats and pull their hair back in ponytails and barely manage a touch of lip gloss. They swap recipes, and have a role in society that is easily categorised and accepted. They are the pictures of love, and patience, and have some kind of innate patience that childless women cannot understand. They swirl for me in an aura of importance - in a mist of mothers instinct that somehow they got impregnated with the moment they gave birth - an instinct that I for some unknown reason have never possessed. They know true pain. They are the warriors who worry, pray, clean and cook their way through life and who have to give up certain things in order to pay attention to their children and thereby are left with the vacume of the life unlived - the balls that have to drop.....

Hobbies....plop.......self care......plop......date nights......plop......coffee with friends (dare I say especially with friends who DONT have children).....plop......sense of identity outside of being a mother....plop.....careers......plop......

Then there's the rest of us, those that for whatever reason have not shed the 'fruits of our loins' (ha ha!). We disenfranchised few who hover at the edges of womanhood...even if you're married its impossible to escape the endless questions and the pitying head nods and blanched smiles at the quiet "no, no children" that inevitably follows. Those with children envy our project rooms, our craft activities, our scrapbooking, singing, rehearsals, yoga classes, gym sessions, coffee dates and late night dinners. Our time is, in some contexts, viewed as less valuable than those with blossoming families - after all, a woman with children asking for time off to deal with a sick child, or to spend Christmas with her thriving clan has all the legitimacy in the world.....but take a woman with no children needing time off to tend to a sick friend or spend Christmas with their parents and somehow that is slightly less powerful. More than once I've been at work and have heard someone or other being nominated to go out on a late night job because they dont have children, and it always makes my blood boil just a little. Not because I necessarily disagree that tending to your children should take precedence - I don't - not even a little bit. What I do object to however is the idea of putting someone up for the job JUST because they don't have kids. After all, time is time, whether you have children or not, and we all don't have enough. And, just like women who HAVE children, we have our own balls that drop......

Playdates with friends who DO have kids.....plop.......the laughter and fulfilment that comes with children....plop.....societal expectations.......plop.......mother's groups.......plop......passing on your legacy to the next generation......plop.....preconcieved ideas of the role of a woman.....plop......the unconditional love of a child......plop

It's powerful stuff to think of a life without children. I don't see one or the other choice as better or worse than each other, just really different. Both carry their own regrets, their own sense of loss, their own pros and cons. The reality is I don't know whether I can have children or not. I may not be able to. The jury is still well and truly out - I can't even try for children for another 8+ months. I don't know what set of balls I have to drop yet, and I don't know whether I want to drop either. But inevitably I cannot keep all the balls in the air - either I'll grow too old to have children, or my body will reach a weight where I do fall pregnant, or I'll find out at some point in the future that motherhood will not happen for me.

The only thing I know for sure is that time, like many things, is relative,  and this morning while a saucepan of milk on the stove boiled over while I was trying to make coffee and I was moving my puking cat from the carpet to the tiles and then consequently clean up cat puke from my floor I was reminded yet again that even without children sometimes we just don't have the ability to keep the balls in the air.

So I cleaned up the cat puke, and the boiled over milk, I took a moment to thank God for the fact that I DON'T yet have children, and I accepted the notion that sometimes the balls have to drop. The most important thing is not whether you let things drop, but whether you pick them back up and carry on!

Top 100 Books Everyone Should Read

Tonight I sat down with my husband to watch a movie called the Equalizer and in it Denzel's character talks about his wife working her way through the Top 100 Books to Read Before You Die list.....and I thought, what a great idea!

So, in an effort to expand my mind and improve myself, I thought I'd do the same. Finding a definitive list was hard, and the movie doesn't state a source (of course, it's a movie!) so I went hunting and finally settled on a list called "100 Novels Everyone Should Read" posted by the Telegraph in the UK. So, to begin, I'm posting the list so you can follow along with me - I'll blog at least once on every book (or at least try to!). Here we go:

1. Middlemarch by George Eliot
2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
4. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
6. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
8. Disgrace by JM Coetzee
9. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
10. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cevantes
11. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
12. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
13. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
14. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
15. The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
16. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
17. Tess of the D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
18. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
19. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
20. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
21. 1984 by George Orwell
22. A Passage to India by EM Forster
23. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
24. Ulysses by James Joyce
25. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
26. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
27. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
28. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
29, Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
30. Atonement by Ian McEwan
31. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
32. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
33. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
34. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
35. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
36. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
37. The Warden by Anthony Trollope
38. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
39. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
40. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
41. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
42. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
43. The Rabbit Books by John Updike
44. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
45. The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
46. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
47. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
48. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
49. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
50. Beloved by Toni Morrison
51. Underworld by Don DeLillo
52. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
53. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
54. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
55. Austerlitz by WG Sebald
56. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
57. The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
58. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
59. London Fields by Martin Amis
60. One HUndred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
62. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
63. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
64. The Cairo Trology by Naguib Mahfouz
65. Dr Zhivago by Boris Pastermak
66. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
67. The Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
68. Crash by JG Ballard
69. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
70. The Leopard by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
71. The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
72. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
73. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
74. Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
75. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
76. The Trial by Franz Kafka
77. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
78. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll
79. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
80. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
81. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
82. The Stranger by Albert Camus
83. Germinal by Emile Zola
84. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
85. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
86. Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac
87. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
88. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
89. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
90. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
91. The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
92. Cold Comfort by Stella Gibbons
93. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre
94. Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie
95. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
96. One Thousand and One Nights Anonymous
97. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
98. The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
99. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
100. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein

I am under no illusions that this won't be a monumental task, taking me years - however I feel like there are so many books that I should have read that I haven't, it's about time I change that! Also, the other rule I'm putting in place is that even if I have read it before I'm reading it again - I want to be able to blog on them anyways, and it's about really digesting the stories.... I've put in bold the few books that I already own, and these will be the "back ups" for when I haven't been to the library. I thought I might start with Pride and Prejudice, partially because its a favourite and partially because I have it readily available to start tonight :) I'll update on my progress every once in a while - feel free to copy my list and start your own literary adventures! Happy reading!!!

Til next time.....

How Beautiful, How Blessed....

I had the most incredible weekend last weekend - hung out with friends and met some new people, had a really great time laughing and giggling :) I came home Monday and was looking forward to the week ahead knowing that it would be a full on week!

And, I was right!!! It's been very full on! Yesterday I had a number of appointments and went to see a band with my mate Cheryl and one of her friends and that was heaps fun :) I walked around the festival for a bit, just soaking it all in. Today I was downtown just after 7am for coffee with the lovely Jeanette and one of her friends, and then we went to Diggers to see the Bob Corbett band and then generally walk around and again soak it all up :) we walked basically the whole length of peel street, stopping to listen to buskers along the way or look at items in the stalls that lined the streets. It was a beautiful hot summer's day and we got to see heaps of very cool stuff that you pretty much wont see anywhere else in the country other than Tamworth :)

I feel very blessed to live here. I know locals whinge and moan and groan about the festival, but the truth is I live in a beautiful quiet regional city that comes alive every January with the most glorious cacophony of noises, sights and smells. It's busker against busker, amplifier against amplifier, street performer against street performer where every gimmick that can be pulled out to draw in the crowds is paraded down peel street. I noticed that quite a few buskers this year bring their own dancers - kind of like spruikers who try and get the crowd watching to clap, dance and hopefully part with their cash. Today I saw both good and bad examples of buskers, including a rather pushy and frankly, a little rude, bloke with a kelpie that was doing tricks (he was singling out people who left before the end of the show, saying that they were rude for not thanking him or, better yet, giving him money. He was even telling them how MUCH he thought his show was worth and basically bullying people into giving him money...puhlease....).


It can be irritating, the amount of cars and people that fill the city, but there's something really special about it. It's the only festival I've been to where every single person who comes can participate equally, and where everyone is accepted. There's a complete cross section of society there every day, and everyone's united by one thing - wanting to hear good music and loving the festival :) Everyone's pretty friendly, and considering how packed the city becomes most of them are pretty easy to get along with. There's a whole heap of "characters" who come to the festival to sell their wares or just perform their songs, and that includes a bunch of kids who come to busk in the streets. I really love it, I love hearing the undiscovered talent lining the streets (of course, some more talented than others!!). Today in the space of 15 minutes I saw a performing cattle dog, a whip cracking stockman, a celtic fiddling band complete with their own dancer, a slim dusty "sound a like" and the McClymonts (an internationally renowned country music act) and I didn't pay a cent for the privilege. Tomorrow I will take my fold up chair and a couple of drinks and head down to bicentennial park where I will see the grand final of the starmaker competition, a bunch of other acts and my childhood idol Lee Kernaghan and again, I will not pay a cent to do so......and at the end of it I won't be camping out somewhere, I'll head home to my own bed! How can I possibly complain about that??? I spent the better part of my childhood fantasizing about the day I got to go to the country music festival just ONCE - I've been every year since 2013 :) I get to LIVE here :) :) Not bad considering how long we dreamed of moving to Tamworth and buying a house and settling down :) :)

It's good to remind myself of my blessings - after all sometimes it's easy to forget in the minutia of life that there's so much more out there for me than the gloominess I get caught up in. I'm blessed with beautiful friends, a beautiful city, and frankly a beautiful life :) and I'll hold on to this gratitude as long as I can :)


Until next time!