200 The Australian Women’s Weekly | MAY 2019
A
utumnis slowlydissolvingintowinter
and with it, my capacity to handle
things beyond mere survival. I am
done, friends. If I manage to order
Uber Eats for the kids’ evening meal,
I high-five myself and take the rest of the night
off. I think my 16-year-old ate a box of TV Snax
for dinner tonight, and I am unsure when my son
last properly brushed his teeth. This is where I am
as a mother, dear reader. I am good at other things.
The year, having steadily picked up the moss of
additional tasks and demands with each passing day, rolls
over me. The jolly frivolity of summer is long passed, with
its warm holidays and expansive daylight savings.
Now there’s just the encroaching darkness of dirty
washing, unending work meetings, broken appliances and
school forms that always want me to do something: bring
a plate, attend an event, send a donation, join a committee.
I just sign the forms and put them straight back in their
school bags, because life is hard enough. And it’s not just
me who is Officially Over Everything by this time of year.
It’s so many of us – a fact that needs to be acknowledged
by the UN, and given its own international day.
So, it’s funny, in the way head lice is funny, that just at the
time of year it’s all too much and we’re all beyond capacity, we
have so many big events in our family. In the space of just this
month, it’s Mother’s Day, Ramadan, both children’s birthdays,
and my birthday (this year 40!). It could possibly be my
husband’s birthday in there too, but I can’t be sure because
I’m not the Dalai Lama and I can only take on so much.
On the one hand, I know. I know. These are the events
that make a life! We must cherish tender memories. We
must mark precious milestones. But why does marking said
precious milestones always require so much work? Thoughtful
gifts and tasteful decorations and fancy meals and darling
invitations are quite the added burden when the printer
needs ink and the tax office is sending stern letters.
I find myself fantasising that if I could just attend to all
my work and life administrative tasks first, then I could
really embrace the happiness and festivity of birthdays and
holy months.
I’d calmly ice beautiful cakes in a relaxed afternoon,
instead of a panicked and increasingly shouty attempt at11.55pm the night before my son’s
birthday. I would, in a deliberative
fashion, select Mother’s Day gifts
weeks before the event, instead of
the “that’ll have to do” online
effort two days before with extra
charges for express shipping. And
I’d become the Muslim Martha
Stewart for Ramadan, marrying
sophisticated decorative aesthetic and serene spirituality,
instead of madly putting up tattered garlands dragged
from holidays past, hissing at my children through
clenched teeth not to make a mess before the first guests
arrive in this blessed and holy month.
But as I dream about this mythical day when every task
and job is finally done and I’m then allowed to enjoy the
happy matter of living a meaningful life, I realise that day
will never come. There will always be a work presentation
to complete, a shirt to be ironed, a yard to be raked. If we
breathe, the mental load exists. And those boring or annoying
or hard tasks are just as much a part of living a good life as
Mother’s Day lunches, Ramadan hugs and birthday candles.
To wait for all of that to end before I actually allow
myself to enjoy my life is not only pointless, it is wishing
away my life. Things are as they should be: overdue library
books and surprise parties exist together.
If I can accept the reality of this, I will float along with
the river of life, instead of trying to keep the tide back with
my bare hands (and yelling my frustration at my poor,
confused husband more often than a Married At First
Sight bride). And if I can embrace this, then I won’t need
birthdays or anniversaries or Ramadan to reach an
unattainable ideal that only exists in my mind.
So this May, I am going to do my best to accept that life
is not “getting in the way” of the important things – that
is, in fact, life.
And kids, this may mean the birthday cake is wonky or
the Ramadan decorations are ugly or the presents are
lacklustre or the meals are amateur. Mama tried. AWWDr Susan Carland is a lecturer at Monash University,
host of SBS’s Child Genius and author of Fighting Islam:
Women, Faith and Sexism.Open mi
WITH Dr Susan Carland
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