How life’s trials highlight what’s really important ... and that’s not just margaritas.
IDON’T mean to brag, but I am the woman who has it all. I have a wonderful husband, two great kids, a lovely home and a satisfying career.
Also: massive amounts of laundry still to be done, multiple arguments to be refereed, an ever-growing mortgage to be serviced and a wage that’s not built for heavy lifting.
My daily mantra consists wholly and solely of the fword. I wake up like Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral … I look at the alarm: f-word. I think about what needs to be done that day: fword. I let the dog in and he eats the kids’ toast on the table: f-word.
And yet, I love it. I am so lucky.
Having it all, to me, simply means having choices. My fortune comes not in the juggle of kids/spouse/job but in the freedom to set my own parameters. My wage isn’t huge because I choose not to work full-time.
Having it all means having enough.
Still, it’s hard not to compare myself to others. There’s always someone who does more and does it better. Their kids win all the awards, they win a huge salary or they’re my age but with enough Insta followers to masquerade as a 19-year-old influencer.
Obviously, my standards of comparison are not always high.
But then I think of someone like Michelle Guthrie, head of the ABC, mother of two kids, married to an international chef, and I feel like a legitimate underachiever.
And then she gets sacked and I realise I want neither the high of her highs, nor the low of her lows.
Having enough is enough. And believe me, sometimes I definitely have had enough.
Just last weekend I was feeling like an absolute superstar, spending the day networking with peers at a conference, rocking a leopardprint playsuit (I should really consider ‘having enough ageappropriate clothing’ as a new mantra) and enjoying a few champagnes at lunch.
And then the phone rang. It was my mother – she’d gone grocery shopping, returned to her car and realised somewhere along the way she’d lost her keys. Did I know where she might have left them?
I repeated my f-word mantra in my head, while advising her that I was neither physically present, nor psychically able to locate misplaced keys. I could, however, advise her to phone my husband who could bring her the spare set she had at home.
Crisis averted. Back to champagne.
About 90 minutes later, the phone rang again.
It was the husband. Daddy day care had opted to take the kids bowling and rewarded them for good behaviour with a Red Skin (digression: are those lollies really still called that? I know they took the Native American off the logo, but c’mon. We changed Fags to Fads, can’t we call them Red Sticks?) Anyway, the racist lolly then pulled my son’s tooth out … which is attached to braces. So my husband calls with son spurting blood out of his mouth, tooth dangling from his jaw, asking who he should call.
I, by this stage, am a little tipsy. And so begins hours of drunk-dialling every dentist in town, trying to find someone who is open on a Saturday afternoon.
Meanwhile, my husband is attempting to do the same – sober but with a crying boy by his side, outside a bowling alley.
My daughter continues to bowl another game, taking everyone else’s turn … but ensuring their balls go into the gutter so that she can win. Against her self. My husband rounds up the kids only for my daughter to explode at him that this was meant to be a ‘device-free afternoon’. Sure, he was organising medical care, but apparently a deal’s a deal.
Finally I managed to arrange an emergency appointment with our own orthodontist who comes in for free in her own time (thank you, Medland).
By this time, I had relocated from Robina to Broadbeach and was able to celebrate my multi-tasking with a wellearned margarita.
My husband soon after managed to secure a babysitter and grabbed an Uber to come join me.
And there we sat, gazing out at the ocean from Nineteen at the Star. Drinks in hand, someone else putting our kids to bed, my mother safely at home (though still sans keys), and friends around us.
If that’s all, it’s more than enough for me.
Read Ann Wason Moore every Tuesday and Saturday in the