If you want to change the world, go home and love your family
Former Australian netball captain Laura Geitz reflects on the lessons her parents taught her, and how mothers today need to pause and embrace the simpler things in life
Laura Geitz is on the phone to Medicare, and the person on the other end of the call is asking for her children’s names and dates of birth. The former netball champion and Queensland Firebirds captain starts off well, confidently listing the details for her eldest two – sons Barney, 7, and Franky, 4 – but then her voice wavers.
“I kept getting Billie and Pippa’s birth dates mixed up and eventually the lady said ‘Do you want me to call you back?’,” laughs Geitz, 36. For the record, daughters Billie and Pippa are three and one respectively, but it’s no wonder Geitz – the 185cm netballer who once struck terror into opponents’ hearts just by strolling on to a court – couldn’t recall all the information.
As she says, having four children in seven years is “a lot”. “It’s been seven years of either being pregnant, breastfeeding or being in the post-partum stage, so I can get a bit of brain fog,” Geitz says. But she and husband Mark Gilbride, 42, a property specialist, are happy with their life that perhaps would be best described as beautiful chaos.
The family live in a 110-year-old Queenslander perched on acreage at Brookfield, a lush belt of undulating hills and pony clubs on the outskirts of Brisbane.
The couple swapped their inner-city Bulimba home for the Brookfield property in 2018, a prescient move considering their growing brood and Geitz’s desire to give her kids the sort of childhood she experienced.
Geitz, along with her older sister Carla, grew up under a Darling Downs sun on the property of parents Ross and Juanita at Allora, about
150km southwest of Brisbane. Described by locals as “the best little town on the Downs”, at Allora the sisters enjoyed a free-range upbringing, with days spent helping out on the farm, riding bikes over rippled cattle grids and feeding poddy calves, and nights toasting marshmallows under the stars.
“I really loved my childhood and the one thing I wanted to give our children was that space to run around in, so when Barney was 18 months old, we moved out to Brookie (the name locals call their slice of outer Brisbane heaven), and I feel so grateful we did,” Geitz says. “The kids come home from school or kindy, have afternoon tea, go outside, run down to the creek and come home when they’re hungry, and they’re always hungry.”
It’s a particularly picturesque property, but behind its lacy wraparound verandas, for Geitz – like many mothers – it’s a life of early mornings, sleep-deprived nights, school runs, kindy lunches, uniform ironing, game playing and Bluey watching.
“I’m very, very fortunate in that my mum helps us so much,” Geitz says. “I said to her the other day when she was coming to take care of Pippa, ‘Strap yourself in for the next two-and-ahalf hours, Mum; she’s a wild one’.”
The one year old “never stops moving, she’s drinking the dogs’ water, she’s causing havoc – she’s great”.
For Geitz, being a mother of four is more exhausting than anything she faced on the netball court.
“Oh my gosh, nothing prepares you for this,” she says. “When I was playing, we’d be pushing our bodies to the extreme, but it didn’t even come close to the mental, emotional and physical load that motherhood carries.
“The load is phenomenal. No matter what you’ve done during the day, you go to bed at night thinking, ‘Right, who needs to be where tomorrow?’.”
For me, I know the most important thing I can do as a mother is to be very present
On the eve of Mother’s Day, Geitz is happy to
share her own reflections on living in the “motherhood”, and her firm belief there is no correct way to parent – no “one size fits all”.
“Everyone does it differently, and mothers everywhere just do the best they can, given their own circumstances,” she says.
For Geitz that meant walking away from netball in 2018, after captaining Australia to victory at the 2014 Commonwealth Games and the 2015 World Cup, playing 169 national league games and 71 Tests, and making a stunning comeback a year after Barney’s birth to compete at the 2018 Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast.
“I would love to tell you that, seven years later, I’ve got this whole parenting thing in the bag, but I haven’t,” Geitz says. “I have all the same questions and guilt some days if I’ve been working away, and that same reluctance lots of women have to do anything for themselves; that whole ‘put your own oxygen mask on first’ advice, but it’s hard to actually do that sometimes. I think I’m getting a little better at that now.”
It’s quite the juggle. When she is not splashing around in the creek with her kids, cooking dinner or cleaning muddy gumboots, Geitz works on several long-term brand ambassadorships and partnerships. This includes regular work and appearances for the Queensland Country Health Fund; Suncorp’s
Team Girls, which encourages teenage girls to play sport; the Mater Hospital’s Mater Prize Home campaigns, raising money for neonatal and oncology care; Chemist Warehouse, appearing in the company’s “Healthy Break” television segments; AV Jennings; and Tribal Sport. And if that also sounds like “a lot”, it is. “I’m exceptionally lucky in my professional life with people who have stayed with me,” Geitz says. “It blows me away, to be honest, because there are times when I do have to say, ‘I can’t come’, if the kids are sick or they need me. I have learnt to say that while I am grateful for every opportunity, I have a different capacity now.
“What I have learnt is that if I go away and work and be professional, but be tired and cranky at home, if the people I love are getting the worst of me, and the people I might not even know very well are getting the best of me, I’ve got the equation wrong.”
Geitz exhales in Allora. It is the place she feels
most relaxed, the family property etched beneath her skin. Surrounded by fields of sunflowers, it is a 610ha working sheep and cattle farm, now run by her sister Carla, husband Jim and their children Ellie, 10, and Harry, 12. And when the Geitz-gilbride clan show up – as they do regularly – everyone pitches in.
“Ellie and Harry are living that farm life: they’re on their motorbikes, they’re lighting bonfires, Ellie has eight orphaned lambs she’s bottle feeding,” Geitz says. “Growing up on a farm teaches children the biggest life lessons.”
But as beautiful as it is, it’s not quite the same for Geitz without the familiar figure of her father, Ross, waving to her at the gate. He died in 2013 after a farming accident on the property. The farmer was a beloved local identity, and Geitz says she was always “Dad’s little shadow”.
“I would just follow him around doing jobs; I was always outside with him,” she says. “I laugh with Carla all the time that she ended up on the farm. She was the one inside doing art and craft, I was the tomboy in the machinery shed. But netball took me in another direction.
“When I was about 10, I remember having this conversation with Dad and I said, ‘Just so you know, I will never marry someone who isn’t a farmer’. And Dad said, “Oh, Laur, you can’t help who you fall in love with, mate’.”
Gilbride most definitely isn’t a farmer. He and business partner Michael Callow own CG Property, specialising in industrial and commercial real estate. But Gilbride now also loves escaping to Allora, and Geitz is grateful her father gave the union his blessing before he died. “I’ll always miss Dad, but I am fortunate to have had the best father for 25 years of my life,” she says. Geitz is grateful, too, for mum Juanita, calling her the family’s rock.
“On the days that I’m not home, Mum is my tower of strength,” she says. “She is ever reliable, and the kids adore her. I will come home and she will have made curried sausages, thrown on a load of laundry – she draws the line at folding, though.
“She now lives in a beautiful retirement community and sometimes I’ll say ‘Hey, Mum, I’ll go there and you can stay here’, and she says ‘That’s not going to happen’,” Geitz laughs. “I don’t blame her.”
It’s almost time for Geitz to do the school run.
It’s been a long day, up at 5am to get some exercise in, then what she calls “the morning ferret”, getting the kids ready for the day.
Every mother knows the drill. The beauty of it. The utter exhaustion of it. How the small wins like shoes on the correct feet can make you feel like you’ve won the netball world cup, and the small losses like an uneaten lunch can make you weep.
Unseen, unheard and mostly unsung, motherhood is not for the faint-hearted. For Geitz, mothering four children is all those things. It is complicated, and multi-layered, not to mention multi-tasking. But she tries to distil it down to its most simple application, the one her parents taught her: to show up.
“My favourite quote is: If you want to change the world, go home and love your family,” Geitz says.