Is This My Beautiful Life? Read online

  OTHER BOOKS BY JESSICA ROWE

  The Best of Times, the Worst of Times: Our family’s journey with bipolar (with Penelope Rowe)

  Love. Wisdom. Motherhood: Conversations with inspiring women

  First published in 2015

  Copyright © Jessica Rowe 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: [email protected]

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 74331 836 2

  eISBN 978 1 92526 803 4

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  For my mother and my girls for showing me how to love

  ‘The only normal people are the ones you don’t know very well.’

  Alfred Adler

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  ‘Have you retired?’ asks the bossy woman checking my parking ticket as I waited to drive out of the car park.

  ‘Umm, no, I haven’t.’ I feel a little stunned to be put on the scrap heap so soon. ‘I’m working part-time as a news presenter on Weekend Sunrise for Channel Seven. I’m also doing some public speaking, charity work and writing …’

  ‘Who was that, Mummy?’ asks my eldest daughter, Allegra, as the parking barrier lifts up.

  Her little sister, Giselle, is busy squishing her favourite ball between her palms. She loves the glittery water inside, and the harder she squeezes it, the closer the orange clownfish goes to the plastic edges. She really wants to get Nemo out of his claustrophobic home. I spy what she is doing in the rear-vision mirror.

  ‘If you keep doing that it will break. Then there will be no more sparkly water.’

  She ignores me.

  ‘Mummy, Mummy, who was that lady?’ Allegra asks again.

  ‘Oh, just the car park lady.’ But as I say it, I think, wait a second – who is that? Why am I justifying, or feeling like I have to justify, my current situation to someone I didn’t even know? That has been happening a lot. I often find myself giving my updated CV to the woman at the supermarket check-out, the pharmacist, the newsagent, the butcher, or anyone who asks.

  And when I do so, I struggle to find a new title for myself. I am a crap cook, a sloppy housekeeper and a mother who still has her L-plates on. I deliberately let the clean clothes pile up in the laundry basket until they start to tumble out onto the wooden floorboards in the kitchen. Once that happens it is time to shift the basket behind the closed door of the ‘study’ that is really just a junk room. Only when there are no clean undies left do I finally start folding and putting the clothes away, stuffing them into the jam-packed drawers. This laundry procrastination is my personal protest over the domestic drudgery that takes up too many hours of my day.

  My brain feels like it has turned into the playdough that I begrudgingly attempt to pick up when my little girls are in bed. I am sick of scrubbing the white Ikea highchair clean of banana, avocado and endless other pureed members of the five food groups that gather in every crevice. Do you know that you can puree spaghetti bolognese? I am jealous that other girlfriends with kids have flourished in their careers at the same time that I feel like I am going backwards. What am I doing wrong? I am a failure, and I am bored.

  I am a mother. I love being a mother, but I also hate it sometimes. I don’t hate my children, of course; I just hate what has happened to my life. I don’t like being resentful, restless and stuck in a world of interrupted conversations, cold coffee and disrupted sleep. I am embarrassed to tell others I am a stay-at-home mum and proclaim that my children are the centre of my life. Weren’t they? Sure, I am with them most of the time, but I also do part-time work. Being middle class with First World worries, I have enough money to pay for a nanny a couple of days a week. Our extended family also help to lighten the child-minding load on occasion. I know I am lucky to have a choice and that I should be grateful and happy.

  Why am I so miserable, then? I loved my two daughters so much it hurt and cannot imagine my life without them. But no one told me it would be so hard. Am I the only one struggling? I see smiling, calm mums at the park, supermarket and school gate who seem happy to organise play dates and catch-ups at the park. Am I the only mother who hates play dates? It is hard enough keeping my two girls entertained, let alone supervising someone else’s children, especially when they start fighting over whose turn it is with fashion fairytale Barbie.

  My sister is one of those glorious mums who can run the house, chair the Parents and Citizens Association meeting at her sons’ school and have meals organised each night. Why didn’t we both inherit that organiser gene? It would have made my life much easier. Baked beans, pasta with Dolmio sauce and ten different ways with mince are my go-to meals. Am I the only fraud pretending everything is wonderful, and that I like nothing better than watching my girls on the trampoline when I’d rather be inside inhaling the entire season of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills on the television?

  In my pre-children and pre-husband years, I never imagined this would be my happy ending. I am proud to call myself a feminist, but am I really one when I look at the reality of my daily routine? The fairytale I have dreamt up sees me still blazing ahead with my career, sharing the cooking and cleaning duties with my husband, and having neat, tidy, brilliant and well-behaved children with beautifully brushed hair. But that is not my life.

  My god, what had I done?

  CHAPTER ONE

  I first met my eldest daughter when she was a three-day-old cell. A smudgy, inky spot on a Petri dish.

  ‘Is that your name on the bottom of the slide?’ called the scientist through the door.

  ‘Yes, it is,’ I replied.

  ‘Is that your husband’s name?’

  ‘Yes,’ Peter said.

  The sound of Peter’s blue plastic chair dragging across the clean floor set my teeth on edge as we both gazed up at the grey, blurry outline being displayed on the wall-mounted television screen. I couldn’t believe that this blur might grow into a baby, but I wasn’t going to get too far ahead of myself this time.

  Moments later, all that remained on the screen were spots of water as the scientist sucked up my ‘three celler’ into a pipette and brought it into the room, wisps of red hair escaping from her white surgical cap. As she checked our personal details again I nervously stumbled through our address and forgot our home phone number. We then had to identify our names on the pipette that was now safely holding our precious cells. That was something I coul
d manage at least! I held my breath as the scientist carefully passed the pipette over to the doctor. Lying back slightly in the obstetrics chair, my feet were propped up in padded stirrups and a fine catheter had already been inserted through my cervix. As Peter squeezed my hand, I closed my eyes and said another prayer as Dr Tierney, our IVF specialist, transferred the microscopic contents through the catheter and into my uterus. It took sixty seconds. The watery potion was not yet an embryo, as the cells had to keep multiplying to get closer to becoming a new life.

  ‘Is it alright to stand up?’ I asked Dr Tierney, resting back on the green surgical chair. ‘Or should I sit here a little longer?’

  ‘You can get up—nothing will drop out!’

  ‘Do I need to lie down when I get home? Do I need to stay in bed for the next two weeks before I get the blood test to see if I’m pregnant? Should I still stay off the coffee? Should I eat plenty of spinach? Should I—’

  Dr Tierney gently interrupted my nervous blather. ‘Jessica, try not to worry. Just keep doing what you have been doing. You don’t need to stay in bed, but try not to put yourself under any more pressure.’

  Peter helped me up and enfolded me and Dr Tierney in a hug.

  ‘Thank you, thank you,’ we said in unison. Peter and I clutched each other as we walked out of the tiny room and left the IVF clinic down the back stairs. It was the third time we had taken this walk together. Each cycle of treatment took around six weeks, from the first round of blood tests to the final embryo transplant. Initially I had believed modern medicine could guarantee me a baby, but it had now been over a year and I had forgotten how many prayers I’d whispered, pledging all types of promises if the IVF worked.

  I had wanted to have a family for so long. My middle sister, Harriet, was already married to a fine man and they had a Botticelli baby boy called Chester. As the eldest sibling, I was panicked that time was running out for me. I too wanted that magical life, a handsome husband and cherubic children. Perhaps part of my yearning for a perfect life stemmed from the fact that the fantasy was far removed from my own upbringing. My parents divorced when I was young and I had seen my mother struggle to fill the fridge with food each week. Mum had her first breakdown when I was ten years old and was diagnosed with bipolar disorder when I was a teenager. Our family was far from normal, so I was determined to fashion a beautiful life for myself, the kind of life that I had read about in books and seen on American sitcoms, a life with a white picket fence. Even if that picket fence was going to be bedazzled with Swarovski crystals. Peter was the man for me: he was decent, dependable, kind and good-hearted. The sort of man I would have steered clear of in my twenties. Bad boys, playboys and deadbeats were top of the list while I partied the eighties away at Sydney nightclubs like the Cauldron, Kinsella’s and Rogues.

  As a seventeen-year-old I remember cranking up the boom box in my bedroom, singing along to the Cat Stevens classic about the big wide world I was desperate to leap into. The music would be super loud to drown out the traffic noise outside my window in our small flat, which was built right next to a busy road that had four lanes of traffic constantly charging up and down the hill. My thin bamboo blinds didn’t block out the bright street light that illuminated my room all night. Those cheap blinds also weren’t much good at muffling the sounds of the buses that stopped below my window, pumping their brakes, every thirty minutes.

  In a polka-dotted midriff top that Mum had sewn for me, glossy cherry red lipstick and a short black ruffled skirt that spun out from my waist, I twirled dizzily until I fell over onto the prickly seagrass matting floor. The lyrics had become an anthem of sorts for me as I dreamed of escaping my narrow, small life. I was no longer a virgin and thought I knew it all, figuring I could get by with just a smile.

  I had finished my last year of high school and despite studying hard I didn’t get the marks I needed to study journalism at the University of Technology in Sydney. In the typically dramatic way of a teenager I felt like my brilliant career was over well before it had even begun. I decided a break from my routine would help me work out what I should do with my life. So I fled, although only down the road to a waitressing job in a fancy cafe. The equally fancy ladies who lunched there had no idea we were making their cappuccinos with one heaped teaspoon of Nescafé, a blast of boiling water and frothy milk sprinkled with cocoa. The milk steamer was the only thing that worked on the espresso machine, and it was obviously cheaper for the owner to stick with instant coffee than get it fixed. The short blacks must have tasted vile, three teaspoons of instant coffee that almost filled the tiny white cups. But that didn’t stop them being popular—I guess some of the customers thought it made them look sophisticated, even if they couldn’t drink them! I was quickly banished to the takeaway counter after I repeatedly muddled up coffee orders and dropped too many chicken caesar salads. And it was there that I met the ticket out of my boring life. He was over six feet tall, had a deep, raspy voice and ordered a mixed salad and a banana smoothie.

  John also happened to be twenty years older than me, but I thought dating him would make me super sophisticated and sexy. Mr 37 was handsome, but he did have a saggy bottom. However, he owned a nightclub, a plane and a yacht. My mum banned me from seeing him, claiming he was a drug dealer and a sleaze. Of course I raged against her, yelling that she didn’t understand and that I was in love. Then I did what all proper teenagers do: I ignored her demands and kept seeing my cradle-snatcher in secret. By then I had become good at subterfuge, organising to stay over with ‘girlfriends’ for the weekend when I was really meeting John at his nightclub and dancing the night away to Bryan Ferry.

  My foolproof plan came undone when Mum discovered a bunch of photos (all G-rated). This was long before the era of selfies and sex tapes, but it did show me and Mr 37 on a weekend getaway. She was furious that I had deceived her, but even more concerned that the light plane we were travelling in (and John was flying) could have fallen out of the sky. In the bulletproof, arrogant style of a teenager, I told her not to be ridiculous. I knew what I was doing.

  Mum realised she couldn’t compete with my massive self-will so she stood aside, very unhappily, while I continued my inappropriate love affair with a much older man. Surprisingly, my dad and stepmother weren’t as outwardly concerned, seeming to take the approach that it was better the devil you knew. A couple of times they came to dinner with us at the nightclub, me drinking Midori and lemonade while they stuck with wine, and we talked about scuba diving. Although it sounds terrifying to a parent, the actual experience was all rather mild and vanilla. I felt like an adult even though I still went home to sleep in my single bed most nights well before midnight. I never saw any drugs and was up early the next day to hit the gym with Mr 37. He was a health nut, so if we weren’t training together we were mountain biking, water skiing or sailing.

  I had taken a year off from studying, but after a while I knew it was time to knuckle down again and start at university. Although I had missed out on a place at UTS in Sydney, I had been accepted to study communications at Mitchell College in Bathurst. Moving to a country town a three hour drive west of the Blue Mountains was an enormous change for a city girl like me.

  Not surprisingly, my new student life in the country wasn’t a turn-on for my lover. He did fly there a couple of times, but I heard from friends that he was entertaining Swedish models on his yacht in my absence. Soon after that our affair ended and I was heartbroken, but not for long.

  University was enough to distract me. I was majoring in broadcast journalism, and determined to become a star foreign correspondent. It was an ambition I had held since high school, and my new life, hundreds of kilometres from home with like-minded souls, was the first leap into the unknown that later became a pattern for my personal and professional life.

  Towards the end of my studies I decided to take a year off and travel through Europe, funding my travels with a less than glamorous stint as an overseas catalogue model. Well before the internet, shopping
by mail order was very popular, particularly in parts of Germany. These phone booked sized catalogues were full of cheesy looking photos of blonde models wearing fleecy sports tops and shiny, nylon leisure wear. The opportunity to star in these catalogues came up during the end of a long summer holiday from university. I was on the books of a Sydney modelling agency and a model scout was on her annual trip to Australia to find models suited to work in Germany. She gave me a return ticket and an advance to cover four weeks rent for an apartment in Munich. All I had to do was turn up on the right date, start working and pay the agency back once I started earning Deutschmarks.

  Originally I had planned to stay a month but once I walked into the modelling agency with my backpack and heard the different accents of the other newly arrived handsome young men and confident young women I knew I couldn’t rush back home.

  My wide world suddenly felt small again when I returned to Australia and university after a year overseas. The club escapades, snow-capped mountains and ancient cities I had managed to cram into those twelve months jarred with my draughty and grotty shared house in Bathurst. The piles of porridge-encrusted dishes that constantly filled the kitchen sink and mouldy tiles in a stinky bathroom that nobody ever cleaned were already getting me down. I wanted to run away again but Mum urged me to stay, explaining that most prisoners escaped from jail just as their parole was coming up, and I only had a year to go with my studies.

  Once I graduated it wasn’t long before I was on the move again, returning briefly to Sydney where I worked as a receptionist for the Wide World of Sports show on Channel Nine. A few months later I landed a job as a weather girl and reporter for Prime television in Canberra. I loved that job, learning about presenting and crafting a news story. However, after three years at Prime I was on the move again, this time to Melbourne where I worked as a journalist for Nine News. I lasted there for a year and six weeks until loneliness and homesickness finally dampened my wanderlust.