Champagne and Socks

I had this bittersweet moment today – staring into my daughter’s face and listening to her tiny contented sighs as she lay there next to me with a clean nappy and a full belly, wanting for nothing. I was a little envious of her, watching her have everything she needed in the world and not really knowing yet about wanting.

Nobody’s told her yet that girls wear pink and boys wear blue. That girls can’t do maths or write science fiction or play football. She doesn’t know about war and famine. Of hating someone just because they are different to you. No one’s told her to be quiet, to not be so demanding just for speaking up and voicing her needs. No one’s told her to feel embarrassed for farting loudly, or wanting to hug her mummy or that she should be a size 8. She isn’t on a bell curve yet or measured against the population to see if she’s too smart or not smart enough. Right now, she has no labels at all. No performance reviews. No deadlines. No expectations placed upon her (well almost none!)

And I’m really sad that one day I’m going to explain all that shit to her.

I had some unexpected good news this morning. It had me reflecting back on this year which really was full of awesome for me. I have this weird/screwed up mindset where I think that if it wasn’t hard work, then it’s not something I value having and yet pretty much all my life, the things that have really worked out for me have been the things that I fell into or just happened along and the things I refused to quit on and kept trying to push into making work out, never really did. (Maybe one of my lessons was learning when to quit).

Anyway – I had good news today! And it made me realise that this year has been an exceptionally good one for me. And that my year in review would be a pretty happy one. Which reminded me that I’ve not posted very much this year – unusual for me. What happened was we didn’t get our wedding photos until last week. It’s been this long, drawn out, upsetting and disappointing thing that I didn’t really want to talk much about. Not having them hung above my head like a dark cloud and I didn’t want to talk about the rest of the stuff around our wedding and our honeymoon. Then it felt weird to talk about other things out of step with that. I guess I’m pretty chronological. At the same time, I felt bad for feeling bad because the photos were the only dark, negative thing associated with our wedding, and really, if that was the only disappointing aspect, that’s not really so bad, in the scheme of things. But we finally got out proofs last week and whilst I haven’t had the headspace to sit down and work through the next steps for that (picking the photos for the album etc), I do feel a sense of close to closure on it.

Like I might be able to start blogging about my year in review, maybe.

Especially since my year started in Paris – not a bad place to start! Maybe tomorrow. With photos.

I’m watching a LOT of TV right now. Since I brought this little person home two weeks ago now.

Soooo much TV. I kinda hate it in that, I still can’t craft as my carpal tunnel has not gone – it’s eased a lot but my right hand is still half numb. Typing is still a pain in the arse but at least I can hack away at that and correct as I go. Other than that, it turns out baby’s take a LOT OF TIME. I didn’t realise! I’m on that feed, change nappy, sleep cycle until we hit the witching hour (which bullshit about it being only one hour, one hour would be freaking doable!) which can end up taking a whole work day of time. It turns out that bubby likes to be held, by me. She will at a pinch, when whinging, go to her dad but mostly he does the shift when I’m like totally done for the day and he has more patience with crying at the top of her lungs baby than I do (as long as he takes her down the other end of the house because OMG that crying is like a stab through my heart!).

Which all means, I spend a lot of time with a baby koala curled up on my chest sleeping. I have managed to perfect the art of balancing a laptop below said koala to get a bit of work done but mostly we are watching a lot of Foxtel. Luckily I seem to have prerecorded a whole heap of stuff.

So it might be that, for a while, this blog is filled with TV reviews. I want to post a bit about, you know, all the stuff that came before we brought this little being home with us. But wow – when you finally get some free time, it’s amazing how much more appealling sleep is! (I should note, I’m getting more sleep than I was in the third trimester so mostly I am not complaining, just the tiredness it is ongoing.) or trying to catch up on emails and other bits and pieces.

So.

I found the Oprah channel, or at least the channel that streams a good deal of her content from the OWN network (Oprah Winfrey Network in the US). I’ve been watching her Master Class series and also the Behind the Scenes of Season 25 of the Oprah Winfrey Show which was her final season. Both are really interesting to me – the behind the scenes stuff shows you bits and pieces of planning and producing some of the episodes that made up that final season. I really love watching production – I think it’s what appealled to me about Smash (especially after season 1). I love watching how successful people pull off their work and also how they go about problem solving, troubleshooting and navigating towards success. What’s particularly interesting about Oprah’s producers is almost all of them appear to be (white) women. And it’s quite interesting watching their interactions with Oprah. I really enjoyed one scene where one of the producers totally fucked up (ended up over booking her episode by 20 mins) and when Oprah sat down with her afterwards to discuss it (because at Harpo they say “feedback is your Friend”) she told her that this was a learning moment for her (the producer) that offered her the “opportunity to learn and grow”. And then she was harsh but fair with the feedback.

The Master Class episodes are pretty interesting too. So far they’ve been given by successful women in Hollywood – Jane Fonda and Goldie Hawn – and Oprah herself. And they are pretty simple, the interviewee speaking for about an hour, reflecting on their life and what they’ve learned, the paths they ended up on that took them to success, and failures, and really grounded in a sense of deep reflection and reconciled peace with their lives and how they turned out. The kind of soundbytes of “advice” or “lessons” are not that groundbreaking – preserve your integrity, be a good person, seize opportunities, don’t try and be perfect or someone else but rather be the best you etc. But it’s pretty fascinating to hear successful people talk about the key moments of their lives that led them to their success and to hear about their own learning moments. And cause all so far have been women, hearing about the different incidents of sexual harassment, racism and sexism that they encountered and had to overcome. All pretty interesting and empowering stuff.

But something that Goldie Hawn said in last week’s episode really struck a chord with me. Just after she had her break out moment and her career was taking off, she was hit by depression because even though she was getting success, her life was suddenly heading off in a direction she had not planned. And in her reflection of that period of her life, she said that she had been so concretised (not sure that’s an actual word) in her life and what it would look like (what her job would be, who she would marry, how many children she’d have etc) that she left no room in her life for chance and for potentiality. That you can’t preplan and script out your life because then you have no room for serendipity and letting that take you to whatever. And I was sitting there, in Rockingham, nursing my baby and processing book orders for my small press and I just thought “Wow – she’s right”. Because this was never what I imagined my life to be. And yet here I am, happier than I think I’ve ever been in my life. Your imagination might just not be able to dream big enough for what you truly need and what may in fact be possible.