The Bachelor

One bloke.

He’s looking for something – a new direction. He’s ready to put himself out there, ready for a new future.

Dates. So many dates. Due dates, term dates, prac dates.

Can he remain committed? Cue self-doubt, deep and meaningful conversations, pep talks. 

More dates. One after the other. Some in groups. They never end well.

Then the plot twist no-one saw coming. Cancer. Honestly, where’s the fucking romance in that?

More dates, now for surgery, treatment, more surgery, more treatment, bit more surgery. Starting to think previous sorts of dates were kind of a breeze.

Eventually, he’s back in the game. Re-focus.

See that on the horizon? That’s the finish line and the future all rolled into one. And isn’t she a beautiful creature?

Final date. The big one. Today, Friday, 4 September 2015. 

Introducing The Bachelor of Education:

  
 

Moving On

The weekend I found out I was pregnant with Hugh, way back in August 2007, we bought a new car. We’d only been married a few months, and together only a bit longer than that, and the car was our first joint purchase. We ventured out on a Saturday morning, with the intent of getting something bigger than my Corolla hatchback, and more able to carry three people than Dave’s beloved Subaru Brumby. This was to be a sensible purchase, something solid and steady, that would serve us well through baby and toddler years. We test drove a bunch of different makes and models, got increasingly caught up in the excitement of buying a big, new, shiny reflection of our impending family-hood, and ended up with a top of the range SUV, with leather seats, fancy parcel racks and a sunroof. Because what everyone with a new baby needs is the ability to have the Queensland sun beating down onto their baby’s pale, fragile skin, all the while burning their little retinas to a crisp. And babies that grow into toddlers need leather seats to spill the contents of their sippy cup all over. And toddlers that grow into seven-year old boys need special parcel racks to hurl their stinky school bag onto, subsequent to them wiping their filthy shoes all over the back of the leather seats because getting in one door and crawling all over the seats to sit on the other side of the car is apparently a cool thing to do. Every.single.time.

Eight years on, and we decided that it was time to say goodbye to that now not-so-luxury SUV, with its dings and scratches and dodgy clutch and hilariously outdated six stacker CD player. So we ventured out last Saturday morning, with the intention of getting something smaller than the SUV, to be the second car to Dave’s big twin-cab ute. This was to be a sensible purchase, something small and zippy, that would serve us well for the school/work run. We test drove a bunch of different makes and models, and got increasingly caught up in the excitement … You can see where this is going, right?

Ladies and gentlemen of the Internet, I present to you Exhibit B (for this is the second in a series, with Exhibit A now sitting in a used car lot):

Audi

At this point, I regret absolutely nothing. Sure, it’s no second-hand Hyundai Getz with low kilometres and a neat interior, but it’s special, and I’m all up for special.

When I was a kid, my family actually didn’t own a car until I was 18, and when we did eventually buy one it was an ageing Falcon station wagon with dull white paint and disintegrating red decal pinstripes up the side. I was never actually allowed to drive the Falcon, because it was so precious, but once when my Dad was in hospital and my Mum was at work, I reversed it out of the carport with the intention of driving to McDonald’s, but my reversing skills were shit (still are) and I veered so badly off to one side that I managed to put a metre long scratch in the driver’s door. After a fairly massive panic, I remembered it was the 80s and I was a uni student doing 3000 word essays on a typewriter, and was thus in possession of a goodly-sized stash of Tippex correction fluid – commonly known back then as liquid paper, which was the same colour and texture as the dodgy duco on the Falcon. I’m not sure if it was fear or the fact that I was high on liquid paper fumes, but my touch up job on that panel was so good that my father never, ever noticed.

In eight years time, when bluetooth stereos are so passe, Dave and I will probably venture out on a Saturday morning, with the intention of getting something with enough grunt to haul around our caravan, and come away with something that the other grey nomads will smirk at behind their hands. In the meantime, if you hear of any jobs going for auto artistes, let me know – I have experience and I need the money.

The Little-Known Blogger Award, That I’d Never Heard of Before Now, Goes to ….

Me!!

I found out yesterday that Boob in a Box has been chosen to be the recipient of a Liebster Award.

liebster-award

I’d never heard of a Liebster Award until now, but a bit of Googling tells me that it’s like a Logie Award for Most Popular New Talent, except that it’s for people with little-known blogs and is awarded by another blogger rather than the readers of TV Week. I am also unlikely to get a contract with Home and Away as a result of receiving the award, which is probably a good thing, given that the sight of me in a bikini in Summer Bay would probably give Alf a flamin’ heart attack.

I was awarded the Liebster by another blogger called Felicity, but her blog tagline Bringing joy to others through the sweetness of a cupcake speaks to my heart and my soul, and connects with me deep down where I live. Thank you Felicity for choosing me for this Award, and for spreading the joy of cakeage throughout the world.

cake 5

I’ll lick to that!

Over the coming week I’m going to pass on the love by nominating other bloggers for a Liebster, so stay tuned. In the meantime, as part of the Liebster Award, I have to answer a set of questions Felicity has posed for me. I’m sure this is to make me feel even more like a celebrity – stone the crows Alf, it’s only a matter of time!

What is your favourite quote?

My favourite quote is from the American poet Emily Dickinson, who wrote that ‘Forever is composed of nows’. I actually wrote a whole blog post about this quote in June last year.

Who would you have lunch with (dead or alive) and why?

My beautiful boys and a collection of my wonderful friends – because they’re my boys and my friends and they’re wonderful.

What is your favourite dessert?

I never met a sweet that I didn’t like, so my favourite dessert is whichever one I ate last.  At the moment that would be one called ‘The Bombe’ which I had at Stokehouse in Brisbane. It’s frozen white chocolate parfait, strawberry sorbet, toasted meringue –  I’ve stolen this photo of it from their website, but hopefully this plug on my hugely successful blog will be enough to prevent them from suing me for breach of copyright.

bombe stokehouse

What is something you want to achieve in the next 12 months?

Continued remission. Easy peasy.

What is one piece of advice you would give new bloggers that you wish someone had told you at the start?

Seriously, who wants advice from me – I haven’t got a bloody clue! Sometimes I spend days crafting a post, only for it to get pretty much no response. Then I wrote, literally in ten minutes, a post about my son and his best friend, and it went viral, notching up more than 250,000 Facebook shares over a couple of days. Maybe my advice should be – expect it when you least expect it.

Summer or winter?

In summer I’d say winter, and in winter I’d say summer. Spring really is the queen of seasons.

Why did you start blogging?

For years I’ve followed a blog called Woogsworld. Mrs Woog put a call out to her readers for guest posts, I submitted one about how having cancer can be funny, she loved it and published it, and told me I should start my own blog. So I did. I am nothing if not suggestible.

What is your favourite social media platform and why?

I’d say Facebook, mainly because it’s the only one I actually use. Actually, I am on Twitter too, but that seems to be dying a slow death. So definitely Facebook, because I actually have zero interest in, or motivation to find out about, anything else like Instagram or Pinterest.

What is the hardest thing/biggest obstacle you have achieved in life?

I used to find these type of questions difficult to answer, until I got cancer. Then cancer became the answer.

The hardest thing I’ve ever done was sit quiet and still and listen to an oncologist tell me that I had a 50/50 chance of still being alive in five years time (October 2017 for those playing along at home). I didn’t scream or faint or wail, I sat in my chair and nodded. I still have no idea how I did that, or how I go about my life, day in, day out, happy and fulfilled, with that statistic still sitting like a great big steaming pile of shit in the middle of everything.

What is your favourite book and why?

My Brilliant Career, which was written by Miles Franklin in 1909. I first read it in high school and was just blown away by the story of a bright, feisty young woman born into a life of sameness and drudgery. What particularly took me about this book was that there was no happy ending – the main character Sybylla (such a fabulous name), both in spite of and because of her own choices – seems destined to never live the life she wants. I’ve re-read this book many times over the years, and each time I’m taken aback by the harshness of her reality, interspersed with her deep understanding of human relationships.

Our greatest heart-treasure is a knowledge that there is in creation an individual to whom our existence is necessary – some one who is part of our life as we are part of theirs, some one in whose life we feel assured our death would leave a gap for a day or two. Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career

If you weren’t blogging, what would you be doing?

Paying for a therapist.

Bingo

When I was a child, I spent a lot of time with my paternal grandmother. My parents both worked full-time, and Grandma was a widow who lived in the next street over, so most of my primary school holidays were spent at Grandma’s house. I could write reams about Grandma, and one day I probably will. She was born in 1903, married at 16 and had five children. She went through wars and the depression and was a working class woman who lived in the same house her whole entire life. She outlived four of her children, losing one to cot death, one to drowning, one to a car accident, and one to early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. She also outlived her husband, who died of a heart attack on Boxing Day. That she kept going, lived her life, found joy in the small things into old age is a testament to the determination of the human spirit. She was no saint of course, having purposely miss-spelled my mother’s name on birthday and Christmas cards for 28 years. There really aren’t many ways you can spell Shirley.

I have so many memories of the years I spent hanging out with Grandma. One of them is washing day, which was always a Monday, when she would run her step-ins, stockings, petticoats and brassieres through the mangle. I cannot begin to describe the level of fascination I had for that mangle, which looked something like this, and would SQUASH YOUR HANDS FLAT LIKE A PANCAKE IF YOU GET ANYWHERE NEAR IT, DON’T TOUCH IT JULIE!! I remember standing, transfixed as Grandma fed her mysterious underthings through the rollers, desperately tempted to stick my hand in and see if it really would come out the other side cartoon-character flat.

manglejpg

Most days for lunch, Grandma would make me a grilled cheese sandwich in the Sunbeam electric fry pan. She’d fry a knob of butter in the pan until it was golden brown, then add the sandwich and fry it gently on each side, using a spatula to flatten it out and make sure the cheese melted. Other days, as a special treat we’d have corn meat fritters – also cooked in the Sunbeam – fried golden patties of battered deliciousness, served with a ridiculous amount of tomato sauce. Grandma never questioned how much tomato sauce I plopped out onto my plate.

Once each week, we would go into town, which involved walking to the corner and catching the bus, which was driven by Mr Teakle. We’d go into the locally-owned department store, where Grandma would go to the food hall to buy beef tongue for her sandwiches and ox tail to make soup, and maybe some kidneys for a pie. She’d buy an unsliced, high-top loaf of white bread, and put her paper-wrapped parcels into her string bag, and then we’d head off to the in-store restaurant for a toasted sandwich each and a milkshake for me and a pot of tea for Grandma, before catching the bus home again.

On Fridays, we’d again take the bus into town, for Friday was bingo day, the greatest day of the school holiday week. Bingo was held at a couple of different venues, and which one we went to depended on who had the biggest jackpot on offer. It mattered not to me where we went, all that mattered was my own card to play in each round, my specially chosen felt pen from Grandma’s pack, and Fantales that Grandma would pull, with a big smile, from her special bingo bag. I still vividly, as if it was yesterday, remember winning the $50 jackpot one day – yelling out bingo in an hysterically high voice, having my card checked, and then receiving two twenties and a ten. I would say they were crisp, but those were the days of paper money, so they were actually well-worn and limp. Grandma allowed me to put the money into my little snap-top purse with the beaded orange flower on the side, which was quite the leap of faith considering that in the late 1970s, $50 was a small fortune, but the $50 made it all the way home, where I breathlessly recounted the glorious win to my family. I honestly don’t remember what happened to the $50 – given how much money it was and how little my parents had, I suspect I was given a bit to spend and the rest went into the family budget. But the excitement wasn’t about the money, it was about being at bingo with Grandma and getting a full house and yelling bingo and winning! I won!

My beloved Grandma died in 1987, the day before my 18th birthday. She was 84 (but told everyone she was 82) and dropped dead from heart failure in her bedroom, after returning home from a morning spent at bingo. She must’ve had a win that day, because there was a little wad of cash in her purse, more than she would usually carry. She would have been delighted to die the way she did – quickly, at home, in her good going out frock, a winner.

As a tribute to Grandma, I took my boy to play bingo at the local hall last night. We went with our friend Duane, who has very similar bingo memories to me, and we were adopted by the lovely older couple next to us, who helped us work out which game we were meant to be on, and kept us supplied with Minties. They were desperate for Hugh to have a win, and everyone – especially Hugh – was sad when he didn’t, but it was dead-set one of the best nights I’ve had in a long time. There is something almost meditative about methodically marking numbers on a card with no time to look up or chat because the next number is already being called. The process of gradually watching your numbers get called builds a beautiful, simple excitement, the tension of which is only broken by the sigh of the crowd when some lucky bugger yells bingo.

Grandma, thanks for bingo. I’ve been told I look a lot like you, so I probably should also thank you for bitchy bingo face. The genes run strong, because apparently they’ve been passed on to Hugh as well. He didn’t really like not winning, but I told him that if we keep going, one day we will. You taught me that, in so many ways.

bitchy bingo face

Moolabia

Moolabia is how you spell Mooloolaba if you are typing too fast when you’re messaging your husband whilst talking on the phone. I shall of course never been allowed to forget my error which brings about unfortunate mental images of a cow’s nether regions, so for now and always, the glorious holiday destination on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast will be known to my family as Moolabia.

Moolabia was in all its glory last week. Stop thinking of cow’s bits. The sun shone the entire time, and the daytime temperature sat at around 23 degrees. We swam in the indoor pool, and the boys even had a crack stop thinking about cow’s bits in the outdoor pool.  We didn’t swim in the ocean, but spent hours playing in the rock pools and digging in the sand, the winter sun warm on our backs, and our pasty white skin lighting the way for passing ships.

dave and hugh at mooloolaba

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was somewhat anxious about going to Moolabia, because the previous time we’d been there, I was in the middle of chemo and all my hair fell out and I wasn’t allowed to swim or go in the sun or have a cocktail or a massage or pretty much do anything any normal person would do on a beach holiday, because cancer had fucked me over well and truly eeuuww stop thinking about cow’s bits. But pretty much as soon as we got there I felt the weight shift, as I let that particular piece of baggage float out to sea.

julie at mooloolaba 2

We ate some glorious food, went to Aussie World (highly recommended), and spent inordinate amounts of time playing air hockey and pinball. We reset ourselves before the start of a new term of school for Hugh and the start of a brand new career for Dave. And I remembered that cancer doesn’t own me, or Moolabia. The only thing cancer owns is my right breast, which was unceremoniously dumped in the hospital waste two years and nine months ago. Everything else is mine.

As well as having beautiful beaches, Moolabia has some fabulous shops, and given that it was mid-year sale time, I was in my element. I got some bargains, including a gorgeous grey top with a digital print of an orchid on the front. It was only when I tried it on to show Dave later that night, that it became apparent that I’d unwittingly purchased myself a wearable Moolabia souvenir.

Moolabia

Digital print of an orchid, or a vagina? You decide.

It really doesn’t bear thinking about what sort of subliminal souvenir I’d purchase if we ever holiday in Cockburn.

Tired

I am tired of cancer. Tired of, for now, being a survivor, tired of wondering if I am actually going to be a survivor in the longer term, tired of talking about it, tired of being conscious of not always talking about it, tired of being so physically tired that I spend much of my free time during the day fantasising about how early I’ll get to bed that night. Tired of living my life in six month bursts, in between the check-ups. Tired of wondering if the pain in my knee at night in bed is cancer in my bones. Tired of being resilient, being remarkable, being that funny girl who gave the speech at the high tea, she’s so brave. Tired of living with the stinking remnants of my fear and terror, tired of being worried about going on holidays to Mooloolaba because that’s where I was when my hair fell out during chemo and Dave had to shave my head with his razor while I sat on our apartment balcony, watching bits of me drop to the ground and willing myself not to cry. Tired of two and a half years later, still crying when I type that story out – how did any of this stuff actually happen?

The irony is that the last couple of weeks have been intensely good, and happy, and wonderful for us as a family. After five years of study – a four-year degree extended by my cancer (the ultimate studious interruptus) – my amazing husband completed his degree and will soon graduate. Before he’d even finished, he already had a job offer, and will start work in his new profession in the coming weeks. When he started this degree, I couldn’t imagine what it’d be like when he finished because four years is such a long time, and three years later when I was diagnosed, I thought I wouldn’t live to see him finish. On his last day of uni we went out to dinner to celebrate, and he admitted that when I got sick he thought he wouldn’t finish, because either I would die, or I would live, but life would change so much that the dream would remain unrealised. But we picked ourselves up, brushed ourselves off, shoved our fake titty into our bra (well, that was just me) and here we are. Living the actual dream.

Except for the tired. I feel like I’ll never escape cancer’s clutches. That even if I live on, past that magic five-year mark, I’ll still be hauling bastard cancer along with me, the ugliest, tattiest, most travel-worn baggage you can imagine. Zippers broken and stuff spilling out, wheels fallen off so it has to be alternately dragged and pushed, handles repaired with gaffer tape, the sticky bits of which have picked up disgusting bits of dirt and detritus along the way. No need for name tags on my baggage, or a natty pink ribbon tied to it so I can recognise it on the carousel. No-one in their right mind would ever mistake it for theirs, and no matter how fucking hard I try, I cannot seem to lose it.

There’s no poor me in this story, for it is what it is. With the good comes the bad. With the joy comes the sorrow. With the living comes the tiredness. The ebb and flow of life rocks my boat; sometimes gently, so I can trail my fingers through the water and feel the sun on my face, and sometimes in crashing waves that see me bailing water like a crazy woman and pining with every fibre of my being for dry land.

Tomorrow there will be both water and dry land, as we make the trip to Mooloolaba. I won’t be leaving my hair there this time, but if you’re in the region and you see a tatty overnight bag bulging at the seams with dirty laundry floating in the surf, don’t try to drag it back in. Hopefully, by the end of our stay, it’ll be well on its way to the bottom of the ocean.

Just Keep Walking

Yesterday, I had my 6 monthly check-up with my oncologist. When it came time to leave for the appointment, my feet didn’t want to move. Here they are under my desk at work.

feet before

They didn’t want to move because, at work, there’s no cancer. There’s only busy and decisions and normal. Safety.

I eventually got them to take me out to the car, and push the pedals so I could drive to the Cancer Centre. The centre of all things cancer, the place where the worst news is delivered, then the awful, poisoning chemo is delivered, then the burning, burning, burning of radiation is delivered, then monthly, three monthly, six monthly, yearly the physical exams, the mammograms and the ultrasounds are done and more news, so far, so good, is delivered. My feet pushed those pedals, but in the car park, they didn’t want to get out of the car.

feet in car

Eventually, my brain won the battle with my feet and they walked me in. I stood at the door, my back feeling the warm sun and my feet not wanting to cross that shadowy threshold.

feet walking in

I went up the stairs, I made my feet take them rather than the lift because when I was having chemo I would prove to myself that I was still ok, still hanging in there, still alive by walking up those stairs, every time. I then sat, and waited. Always with the waiting. One foot swung like a pendulum set to the time of my pounding heart while the other kept me in contact with the ground. Contact with the ground is always essential when dealing with cancer.

feet waiting

At last, my name and my feet have no choice but to move into the consulting room. The oncologist comments on my weight loss, but in a good way, and then it’s up to my hands to take over from my feet, as off comes my jacket, my top and my bra, and the physical begins. I actually stare at my feet as I lie on the hospital bed as the doctor’s hands feel across my scar, my collarbone, my neck, my armpits and my remaining breast. Slowly, carefully, silently. Then the ‘all good’, a pat on my arm and I breathe for the first time in minutes, and my feet are suddenly, extraordinarily eager to move. I am dressed and out of the office, my bill is paid (yes, I pay for this torture) and like Speedy Gonzalez on speed, my feet are racing me out the door, over the unwelcoming mat and back to the car.

feet leaving

I then have an hour to kill (in a totally non-cancer sort of way) before picking my boy up from school, so my feet take me to a cafe, where I sit myself down, take the load off my feet, and relax so much that I order a bowl of chips, not remembering that chips are one of The Reflux triggers. For a few seconds there, I forgot I got cancer, forgot the cancer drugs gave me reflux, forgot I wasn’t just a normal school mum wiling away a few minutes before the bell rings.

chips

I ate a couple, and then my feet then walked me to the school gate – actually there may have almost been a skip involved.

happy feet

Happy feet.

What The Boob Taught Me

Because someone nominated me for the Kidspot Voices of 2015, I was given the opportunity to attend the related blogging event in Melbourne in June. For someone like me – a blogger so new and part-time that if I was working in hospitality, I’d make the pimply faced kid running the McDonald’s drive through look positively sophisticated – it’s wildly exciting to be given such opportunities.

Nominees for Voices (that’s what we in the biz like to call it … or maybe that’s just me …) are given the opportunity to make a pitch to be in the running give a five-minute presentation at the big event. I so badly want to make a pitch, and to speak at the event. SO BADLY. I love public speaking (I blame lack of attention as a child). I am fiercely passionate about the topics about which I blog (cancer, food, equality – not necessarily in that order – have you seen the size of my arse?). I am secretly very competitive (cue people who know me well falling about with laughter at my use of the word secretly).

I’ve put a huge amount of thought into my pitch over the past couple of weeks. The pitch requires ten point summary and a one minute, candid video. The topic is ‘how things work’, applied to something we are passionate or knowledgeable about. Food? Equality? Cancer? I’ve brainstormed, re-read all 86 of my blog posts, drafted my pitch, thought long and hard, redrafted, reworked that … Then I had a massive hissy fit because it was all so try-hard and needy and pick me, pick me, so I deleted it and sat down with a piece of paper and a pen and came up with this.

HOW LIFE WORKS – WHAT THE BOOB TAUGHT ME

Ten points:

  1. 1.5kgs of lost weight can be life changing.
  2. Sometimes the smallest things can make the biggest difference.
  3. It’s not only cards that some people keep close to their chest.
  4. You can’t judge a book, or a boob, by its cover.
  5. You’re only as perky as the supports you have in place enable you to be.
  6. Sometimes your greatest achievement is being able to blend in with the crowd.
  7. Poke me as much as you like, I can’t feel it.
  8. I am as soft as butter and as strong as steel.
  9. I am ok with you being curious about me, just not morbidly so.
  10. The day you stop thinking about me is the day I fall out of your tankini in a public swimming pool.

And then there’s the one minute candid video that makes up the second part of my pitch. I decided I needed to be brutally honest, to pull no punches, and to tell it like it is. This video shows how life works when you’re in remission – how every morning there’s a reminder of the damage that has been done by cancer. Warning: graphic content.

 

I am so proud of myself – proud that I am a nominee, proud that I’ve had this opportunity, and proud that I came up with what I think is a cracking pitch and a video which is … well … nothing, if not candid.

But the realities of geography and life mean that even if my pitch was successful, the 1,600 km journey for an event which would require me taking time off work from my actual job that pays the actual bills, and which coincides with several key family events, is simply not going to happen. As much as I’d love to be in Melbourne, telling people about the Boob, in reality it doesn’t matter, because I write on the Internet, which after all, is all about communicating and making a community with people not sitting around in the same room. If you’re reading this, my pitch was for you – I want to continue to tell you about what the Boob has taught me, and continues to teach me, and I want to do it now, because there is no time like the present.

As for the Boob, well it can’t be tied down to anybody or anything – a true free spirit of the prosthetic world – and as such is about to embark on a trip around Australia, first stop Daydream Island. Strap yourself in, people, for whilst I might be limited by geography right now, the Boob is on the move.

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Wedded Bliss

Dave and I got married one year and five days after we first met on a blind date. I had felt a sense of something – comfort, rightness, fit – the day we met, and as it turned out, so had he, and we were engaged within months and married soon after that. When we got married, we’d never actually lived together officially, and were maintaining separate households, although we rarely spent much time apart. I changed my name in the week after we married, when we also combined our finances, and I moved my things into his house, which became our first marital home, as husband and wife.

It all sounds so picture perfect, so story-book, until the details are filled in. His family were virtual strangers to me – I met his parents for the first time when I was Dave’s girlfriend of six weeks, and for the second time when I was his wife of six days. He’d been married before. We’d already had one pregnancy and one miscarriage before our wedding day. We had four witnesses at our registry wedding, but within a matter of a few years, we’d lost contact with all but one of them.

Our first year of marriage was tough. I was (and am) strong-willed and incredibly bossy, and didn’t want to compromise on anything. We were renovating a house, trying to have a baby, and butting heads with great regularity. We fought a lot, talked of separation several times, and both, separately and silently, wondered what the fuck we’d been thinking when we’d decided to get married.

But the fact is, we were married, and that meant something – a great deal actually – to both of us, so we soldiered on, working hard at making things less like hard work. We grew together, leaned on each other, came to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and realised we were far better individuals when we had the team of us to rely on. Finally, in our third year of marriage, after flooding rivers of tears and angst and pain, we got our baby, and we became married parents, husband and wife, mummy and daddy, a united force in the face of the cyclone of change that a child brings.

Funnily enough, what we thought were the hard years turned out just to be the warm up. Early on, our marriage was all about a struggle for ascendancy; the storming before the norming. Most of our marital angst was self-perpetuating because it was all about ego, which diminished every time we made the decision to stick it out rather than walk away. Then, seemingly the moment we got to situation normal, all hell broke loose. In a litany of disasters that would have Alf from Home and Away wishing he was as stoned as the crows, in a five-year period I had a miscarriage, we tried and failed at IVF , fell naturally pregnant in a total surprise and then had another miscarriage, our house was extensively damaged in a flood which we then had to fight to have the insurer cough up for, Dave’s grandmother died, I got cancer and then my Dad died.

If I wasn’t married to the person I am, I cannot imagine how I would have survived any of these things, let alone all of them. That’s not to say that I am, as an individual, somehow a lesser person because I’m married, or that someone who isn’t married is a lesser person than I. But I was allowed to choose to be married, allowed to choose who I married, and have chosen to stay married, and that freedom to choose to define who I love and how we live has given me the ability to find the wherewithal to survive and thrive. Being bound, by my choice, to the person I love has empowered me in ways that I cannot explain, but that are demonstrated in the way we live our lives, as a partnership and as individuals, on a daily basis.

The man I chose to marry is of Irish extraction, and I chose to swap my family’s very Scottish surname for his family’s very Irish one. And in Ireland over the weekend, a referendum resulted in a resounding vote in support of same-sex marriage, so now in that country, as in many others around the world, every adult, regardless of sexual orientation has the right to choose to marry. In Australia, that isn’t the case, and I have yet to hear a single, logical, sensible argument as to why. Just as the choice of a heterosexual couple to marry, or never marry, or marry five times or for five months or for a television show has no impact on my marriage, neither would the choice of a same-sex couple to marry. I’m not interested in anyone else’s marriage. All my thoughts, effort, love and focus is on my own, because it’s the only one that matters to me, that keeps me afloat, that raises me up.

According to the polls, the majority of Australians are in favour of marriage equality, yet neither the previous nor the current government will move to a cross-party conscience vote in federal parliament on the issue. We – you and me, those of us who have the right to marry, whether we chose to or not – are the ones who must push for this. We must contact our local federal members, and let them know where we stand on the issue, and we need to show our support to organisations like Australian Marriage Equality.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined together to strengthen each other in all labour, to minister to each other in all sorrow, to share with each other in all gladness, to be one with each other in the silent unspoken memories? – George Eliot

it-would-affect-me-as-much-as-it-would-affect-you

Pat a Cake

ABMT

When I was going through treatment for breast cancer, I let a lot of things slide because I simply didn’t have the energy or the inclination. I didn’t do any housework, I didn’t ready any books, and I was mostly unable to sustain my attention for long enough to watch an entire movie. But the one thing I held on to was my love of cooking. Cooking, especially for the people closest to me, brings a sense of happiness and fulfilment quite unlike anything else. The first time I ever attempted to make creme brulee I was in the middle of chemo, but I was determined to master it, and I did, serving it for dessert on Valentine’s Day for my two boys.

Now that I’m in remission, and life is fully in the new normal mode, cooking remains a great source of joy for me. I’m also passionate about raising funds to support people with cancer, and to find a cure for this bastard disease, so when I was asked to participate in Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea, I didn’t have to think too long or hard before I said yes. Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea (or ABMT to those of us in the biz) is being held for the 22nd year this year. The official date is Thursday 28 May, but you can host an event any time during May or June. Taking part is easy – you simply register as a host here, set a date and invite your friends or work colleagues for morning tea. If you’re like me, you’ll ask them to bring something yummy to share, because the more cakes the merrier in my experience. In return for being invited to attend your exclusive event, your guests will make a donation to the Cancer Council, so we can help support life-saving research, prevention and support programs.

Fortunately for me I work with a group of like-minded cake lovers and cancer haters, so we are going to have a bit of a nosh-up in the coming weeks. I’ll be sure to post pictures of that event, complete with me doing my special fund-raising jazz hands. And if you end up hosting a morning tea – go on, you know you want to! – then send me some photos and I’ll put them up here and you and your friends and work mates will be totes famous.

In preparation for the event, I’ve done a bit of baking as a warm-up, making a Carrot and Pineapple Cake for my friend Pat’s birthday – the recipe comes originally from here. Pat is a young, handsome bloke who’s blissfully married to my gorgeous friend Sam, but that doesn’t mean he’s not susceptible to the enticement of a cake made by a middle-aged, chestically-challenged baker.

Pat a cake, Pat a cake, baker’s one-boobed lady
Bake me a cake, for my birthday on Friday
Pat it and shape it and mark it with P
And put in the oven for my beautiful wife and me.

It is a moist cake, which is full of fruit and therefore reasonably healthy, as far as cakes go. It works well with gluten-free flour too (White Wings is the best). The recipe calls for a shitload of icing, which you could probably quite easily halve and still have enough. But this cake was for the birthday of someone who otherwise lives an exceptionally healthy life, so there was going to be no halving of icing.

If you want to give it a try, here’s what you’ll need:

Cake
2 cups plain flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1.5 teaspoons bicarb soda
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
200ml sunflower oil
2 cups finely grated carrot
400g can crushed pineapple, drained
1.5 cups golden caster sugar
.5 cup chopped walnuts

Icing
250g unsalted butter, softened
250g cream cheese, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
5 cups (yes FIVE cups) icing sugar

And here’s how you make it:

1. Preheat oven to 170 celcius. Don’t use the fan-forced setting, as it will dry the cake out. Grease a 23cm springform pan and line the base with baking paper.

2. Sift the flour, baking powder, baking soda, cinnamon and salt into a bowl. Add the eggs, oil, carrot, pineapple and sugar. Stir to combine (a wooden spoon is best for this job), then add in walnuts and stir a bit more to combine.

cake 1cake 2
3. Pour into the pan and cook for 50 minutes, or until a skewer stuck into the middle comes out clean. Leave in the pan to cool for 5 minutes, then turn out onto a wire baking rack. At this point it will probably have sunk in the middle, but don’t panic, because you’ll have plenty of icing spakfilla to sort it out.

cake 6

4. Allow the cake to cool completely before you attempt icing it. If it’s even slightly warm, the icing will slide off and it’ll be an unmitigated disaster. (Ask me how I know).

5. Place the butter, cream cheese and vanilla in a bowl and beat with an electric mixer until light and soft.

6. Add the sifted icing sugar and beat until it’s totally smooth and fluffy looking. This may take a while – it took me more than ten minutes because the weather is cold here at the moment and the butter and cream cheese take longer to meld. Persist, as you really need the icing to be totally smooth and creamy.

cake 4
7. Cover the top and sides of the cake with icing, regularly sampling some from the bowl with your finger just to check that it tastes ok. This is a very important step and should not be left out, or the whole thing will have been pointless. I personally undertake it repeatedly, just to be sure.

cake 5
8. Present cake to birthday boy’s wife, but don’t sing her the creepy song you made up. Because that’d be … well, creepy.

cake 8

9. Receive this photo via text, and get an enormous amount of pleasure from the fact that you made someone happy with cake, for you indeed are a feeder who gets immense joy from cooking for others.

Pat cake

In the spirit of full disclosure, I think this is what they call in the business a ‘sponsored post’. I wasn’t paid to do it – because seriously who would take payment to plug a fundraising event – but I was asked by the Cancer Council to write about Australia’s Biggest Morning Tea. Considering the amount of support I, and so many other people like me, get from the Cancer Council, it’s my absolute pleasure to plug this event. Now go to the website and find out how you can get involved.