I’m not an alcoholic

I’m 380 days into not drinking. The longest I’ve ever gone without drinking in my adult life before was two nine-month stints of pregnancy, so this is… a while without a drink. I haven’t quit because I lost my job from vomiting drunkly in a garden bed, and I haven’t quit because I’ve been served divorce papers, and I haven’t even quit because I had a problem but I have quit, so let’s chat it out. For my whole life, a drink after a stressful day has been the salve to all. A drink has been the go-to celebration for everything. And a special new cocktail or bottle of sparkling shiraz has been the best and only way to end the week. So it’s not a surprise that not drinking for a year has, I don’t want to say “changed my life” like I’m some sort of weiner, but it’s made me think about a lot of shit, be very introspective, and yielded some unexpected outcomes. 

But whyyyyyyyyyyyy I hear you whine, well. Every year, I make these super hard and fast New Year’s resolutions that I seem to have the inability to break. Whatever I decide on January 1st genuinely directs my life for a year. Honestly, I never even put that much thought into them I just go “Ahhhhh… Better posture. Run forever! BOOKS!” and off we go. And last year, it was 365 days of sobriety for me. This married beautifully with the books and the running, and it’s made me feel pretty spectacular inside; like my sobriety is some closely held treasure that I never want taken from me and I keep it deep in a cave with my running shoes and a copy of The High Mountains of Portugal by Yann Martel and I hope no one can ever find it and take it from me.

Of course, this decision about my body that I made myself hasn’t gone unnoticed, in fact, many days I wished I were just coming out as a lesbian instead because surely that would be easier than telling people you want to be… *shudder* SOBER. The number one reaction to saying you aren’t drinking is offense. People are super offended. It hurts their feelings. I’ve had people ask “But won’t you at least drink to celebrate X occasion with us?” *incredibly hurt face*, “That’s a ridiculous decision” *angry face* and “I hope you don’t expect me to stop drinking” *disgusted face*. The thing is darling world, what I choose to put into my body (or not put into my body) has nothing to do with you. I haven’t stopped drinking because I think you have a problematic relationship with alcohol, to disparage your celebration or as some sort of protest, I’m trying to do what’s best for me. I didn’t have a problem with alcohol. I loved booze, and by all accounts, we had the best times together. I loved the energy it gave me, the propensity to be the life of the party, to dance all night and talk to strangers. In my life of being boozed, I’d finagled my way into Big Day Out afterparties. I've danced with Paraguayan boys until the sun rose at harvest festivals. I’ve taken some stacks downstairs that should have killed me and survived purely (I assumed) from how loosey-goosey I was from like, 19 vodka sunrises. But at the moment, it isn’t for me. But it’s still for you, and that’s ok too, boo. 

Let it be noted too, that not drinking is a total thing now. All the cool kids are doing it. Did you know considering not drinking even has an adorable little name; sober curious. And this is how it feels. I don’t know if I've had my last sip of alcohol forever, but I’m curious about what that would look like. Every morning I wake up and feel fine. Every weekend day when I run and don’t feel dusty, where I haven’t woken up heaps thirsty in the middle of the night, every time I go to bed clearheaded and get a good night’s rest, my resolve strengthens that I don’t want to drink again. The non-alcoholic alcohol sector is booming, mocktails are all the rage and I like being able to call myself straight-edge like I’m a 15-year-old going to a local battle of the bands' competition with an X on the back of my hand. I am also obsessed with any content where people get horrendously drunk. Think Geordie Shore, Housewives, clips of The Valleys (the drunkest people ever on TV - young Welsh kids!) They all serve to reinforce how I look when I drink, and these shows allow me to astral project into the body of other mumbling vomiters and remind myself that I want to feel in control of my body, always. And maybe all the time I was chasing that buzzy joy I thought alcohol could give me, I was wrong. Because perhaps that's a joy-feeling that can only be found with a blood alcohol content of zero.

Of course like anything, there are downsides to not drinking. And the number one downside is that I am far more boring than I thought. With the not drinking, comes the realization that the bravado and sassiness that drinking gave me, do not exist in a sober Maz. I am not nighttime adventurous. I am scared of crowds of people when I’m tired. I don’t want to go out. But do you know what I really want to do now that I’ve never done so regularly before? I want to get in bed at 8 pm, light candles, and read a book. I want to sip a sleepy-time tea while I watch classic kids' movies with Max (ET, Neverending Story, Drop Dead Fred) and stroke his hair until we go to bed at the same time. I want to put on a mediation, roll on a little essential oil dealy, and hold a crystal. I want to sit in my feelings when things feel sad or hard and feel them until I find peace. I want to pack some noodles and run until I find a river and sit by it, all alone, listening until I hear it burble my name.I haven’t cried at work in a long time. I’ve become better organized at doing the shopping and washing and cleaning on a weekend. I’ve run 2100 kilometres and found joy in literally every one of those footsteps. I am starting to be able to say no to the things I don’t want to do. And it feels like these things are all connected. Like cutting out the alcohol cut out some of the fun, but it also cut out a lot of the bad bits that I wasn’t proud of.

Look babe, sobriety doesn’t have to follow on from addiction, and I don’t think I was an addict, but I understand that’s why people want to know about everyone else’s sobriety. So they can gauge their drinking against your drinking and make sure that their drinks are less than your drinks and then they’re not an alcoholic. Booze maths! Well, if it helps, I drank probably 10 standard drinks a week? 15? I’d have a couple of weekdays not drinking and maybe have four or five standard drinks on a weekend night. Maybe I’d drink a bottle of wine over three nights and then I’d be like, “I’m drinking ‘normally’”. What’s normally? I don’t know. If it helps too, when I was younger, I’d drink so much I’d pass out in unsafe places. I’ve definitely flashed my boobs. I’ve absolutely spent money drunk and regretted it. I've been bundled into a car and taken home after promising my best friend I’d be her surrogate if she couldn’t have kids (omg do you remember that Tazzy? At the Manning Bar?).  And when I would drink there was this thought I would have every time the alcohol hit my bloodstream and it was “I’m going under”. This is how drinking felt. Like slipping smoothly under the surface of a blood temperature, glassy lake. One moment you’re on land, the next, there’s a wibbly wobbly barrier between you and the world. This was starting to feel concerning to me because I clearly can’t do things in moderation. I’m all or nothing. Run every day, read every spare minute, drink every drink, or drink none at all. So even if I were drinking moderately, it felt dangerous. Even one drink sometimes feels like far too much.

So in the end, for me, it feels as if there is no “safe” or “good” amount of alcohol. It makes my body hurt, it makes me dumber and sadder. Sure I’m fun as fuck when I’m drunk, I’ve given rappers gum and once I did the running man in Lupe Fiasco’s face, but it’s a poison that FOR ME RIGHT NOW the bad outweighs the good. And I hope this answers all your burning questions on my sobriety. But please note this caveat: if I start drinking again, leave me alone, I’ll do what I want and delete this blog and tell you to shut up. 

Boobs

We are mammals. And mammals are called mammals because we have mammary glands; so we are very literally defined as an animal by our titties. I’m on my second (and last) breastfed kid and he’s two and a half, which is quite old to be breastfed I suppose, and am trying hard to wean him at the moment. “About time!” those of you who don’t seem to understand that my body is mine to do with what I want and it’s none of your business, may say. And that’s the weird thing about breastfeeding, it is such a primal and important thing, but people don’t seem to know very much about it. So, I just want to tell you all some boob things you may not have known, in honour of the amazing time I’ve had boobing some guys to nourish them, boobing some guys into silence when I want to watch tv and boobing some guys because I don’t know how else to get babies to sleep, for the last five years.

Breast milk can be blue. When I was pumping milk at work, I used to store it in clear little baggies on the top shelf of the work fridge. I’d march through the depot with my pouch of boob juice, brandishing it in the face of any man I passed, exclaiming “Look! It’s blue!” I’ve seen my breastmilk be anything from creamy white to yellow to green to blue. It seems to be blue when it’s full of antibodies if either myself or my kiddo, are sick. Did you know that when a baby latches onto your boob, your nip analyses their spit and then makes the milk up with whatever they’re lacking? Dehydrated? It adds some water. A little coldy? Add antibodies. Not enough vitamin C? Throw that shit in there. Boobs are amazing and that’s why cow’s milk isn’t a substitute for what we’re packing in our titties.

People send their milk off to have jewelry made from it. This isn’t my bag, but I respect those who do it. Did you know that as a testament to this fucking awesome thing we manage to do with our bodies, you can send off a sachet of milk and have it turned into a calcified statue or pendant? That might seem weird, and it sort of is, but I’m here for it if you want to wear a pendant made of your own bodily excretions around your neck for the world to see (as long as it doesn’t smell).

You can leak milk if you see a hot dude. It’s all hormones, but mate, weird shit happens to you when you breastfeed. Firstly, when your baby latches on and your milk lets down (rushes into, and fills, your boob) you feel this amazing rush of love and warmth. That’s the oxytocin you get from breastfeeding, which literally bathes your brain in love. Oxytocin is the love and attraction hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter. It’s what sets off labour, is released when you have sexy time with someone, and causes you to bond with others, and sometimes if you see a hot dude you might start leaking milk. And look, I’ve tried to say this to other mums like, “Lol. How weird is it when you think someone’s hot and then you leak milk? Like, is your body trying to feed them?” and no one really responds that well to that, even other breastfeeding mothers, so sorry if I’ve made you feel uncomfortable at some point.

Breastmilk is worth $3.6 billion dollars a year. This is calculated by how many babies are born, how much they eat, and how regularly they eat it. If Australia were to produce the amount of breastmilk consumed in a year, that’s how much it would cost. Yeah, that’s what they mean when they say “shake your money makers*”. 

*I don’t know if this is actually said and who says it, and I think in reality shaking your moneymaker is referring to your butt, but let’s co-opt it and use it for boobs instead because it makes more sense. Unless you’re a butt model who is making all that sweet butt cash, then keep shaking your money-making asshole. 

Expressing milk requires a form of what I term “cute masturbation”. When you pump milk, at least when I do, it’s not just a matter of put the little sucking beastie on and letting it go, causing a bunch of milk to rapidly squirt out your tit. I need to get out photos of my kids where they look cute and think about how much I love them in order for the milk to flow, so I’m usually hunched over the machine as it buzzes away, rewatching the cutest bits of my kid videos somewhere in a warm, dark place when I express milk. Remind you of anything? 

Breastfeeding can make you break bones. Breastfeeding can literally suck the calcium from your bones if you aren’t consuming enough calcium to give to your little person. Breastfeeding is very underrated, hard work. It may look like we are just chilling or that we are lucky enough to have a way to quiet our kids, but it is to the detriment of our bodies when we do it. I was far too skinny seven months after I had George because he was consuming my stores of calories faster than I could replace them. Breastfeeding also comes with this weird, constant external pressure from people to wean your kid or give them another mammal’s milk that wasn’t even made specifically for them instead (yeah, makes sense), it makes you thirsty as hell, causes all your hair to fall out and you get hella hormonal and weepy. So if you see a breastfeeding mum, feel free to give her cash and a cuddle. 

You can look at women when they breastfeed. Shocking, I know. Before I was a boobing mum, I had no idea where to look when someone was breastfeeding, like do you look right at it? Do you leave? What do you do?! Well, guys, this is what boobs are literally for, so the best way to handle it is to keep talking and making eye contact, and being normal. Because I feel so little shame about anything in life, if you know me, you will have seen me breastfeeding during a workout in the middle of a gym class, as I’m buying cheese at the deli at coles, while I’m making dinner with my kid standing on a chair, while in the pool, leaning over a kid still strapped in a child seat breastfeeding them in a traffic jam etc etc into infinity.

Milk can get stuck in your boob. Your nipple isn’t just one little hole from which milk escapes. It’s like, hundreds of holes. And sometimes these little ducts get blocked and the milk builds up and builds up and builds up in there. Once I had a blocked duct and I could feel, in my boob, a kinder surprise egg-sized lump of milk. The suggestions to ease this are generally hot showers and then breastfeeding on all fours like a cow and letting gravity unblock the duct. This solution didn’t work and I waited for some life-threatening infection to set in when, at dusk, what looked like a pimple appeared on my nipple. I went to the mirror and squeezed it, and it was like the pimple was full of milk, and sure enough about 90mls of milk squirted forth onto the mirror and the blockage was released. I wish I had filmed it so badly because it was one of the best moments of my life, I still shudder when I think of that sweet relief.

You may end up with only one boob that does the milk. I have one boob that provides milk. Somewhere along the way my left boob slacked off and stopped making milk and just sits there all lazy and pointless while the milky right boob does all the work. Anyway, as a result, I have one B cup boob and one D cup boob which I like to show my girlfriends as a party trick when I’m in the bathroom at the pub.

For my final boob-knowledge point I just want to tell you this breastfeeding story, in which I breastfed a room full of adults I’d never met before. I have been to very few house parties in the last six or so years, mostly because my bedtime is 8 pm because I’m tired from spending my day shoe-horning tiny terrorists into and out of food and snot-covered clothes. But when one of your worst-influence friends turns thirty, sometimes you just have to break out of the rut you’re in and go and be the ratbag you’re occasionally called to be. As was the case when I abandoned my family to ferry two six-packs of passionfruit UDLs hours away from my mountain home, to the Hunter Valley. 

I arrived at a beautiful property, lush and green with a glass-tree-house-bungalow-only-rich-young-childless-professionals-could-afford-to-rent gracing its slopes. It looked like something out of a classy fucking horror film. As I trundled up the driveway in my gross mum car fresh from a morning of dealing with other peoples’ shit and screeching, the rest of the party stumbled up the path, returning from a winery suitably merry. Despite knowing all of two people, hugs and kisses were in abundance as I introduced myself. I clamoured to drink my teenage premixes to catch up with the rest of the group and was swept up in the joy of a cohort of people who haven’t already heard all your best stories and aren’t bored to death by you yet. At the perfect level of drunkenness, I was asked to give a speech, which is definitely one of the most horrific things you can ever be asked to do in front of a group of strangers, half-cut on passionfruit vodka, particularly when all the notes you’ve kept in your google docs diary weren’t available because there was no internet. But I forged ahead because I love you, Nicole. And you know I made that speech all about myself and the time I pooed my pants at a truck stop because at my core, I am a huge narcissist and gore is my go-to icebreaker. The night wore on and, as a breastfeeding mother, there came a point when my one really big, milky boob needed to be relieved. 

And so the rallying cry went up, “Maz has to pump milk! Come!” And that’s how I found myself in a dormitory, surrounded by no less than seven girls, enthralled by the process of where human milk comes from. I mean, they were intrigued. And as a total attention whore, I reveled in being the focus of a whole room. One girl was almost crying she was so into how cool the human body is and oh man, do I fucking love girls who are interested in this shit but have no clue about it all so I can impart on them my brand of wisdom and hope they carry it with them into motherhood (the wisdom nugget of that particular day being that it is fine to leave your nine-month-old baby at home in order to go get hammered with strangers). You know where this is going, right? Oh, you don’t? Because it’s going to that place where my milk is passed around enthusiastically in its little plastic sachet and tasted by all the girls in the same way they’d been tasting fine wines, mere hours earlier. The verdict was that my milk tastes sort of like coconut milk. I am, as suspected, delicious. Suffice to say, this event bonded me and my new milk sister gang firmly and I spent the rest of the night feeling like I was partying in the company of my closest friends. I never saw half of them again, but it’s nice to know that borderline cannibalism is one boundary that, when pushed, opens a doorway into the hearts, minds, and guts of girls you don’t know. 

So there you have it, all the boob info you never knew you needed. And if anyone who doesn’t lactate wants to buy some of my milk to make into their own jewelry, please let me know and I’ll cut you a sweet deal.

The first time I ever boobed  on Narrow Neck

Dips and tits

The beauty and grace of breast feeding a toddler 

I thought this was my last time breastfeeding. Two years later I am lolling at my naivety, this shit will never end. 

The breastfeeding hover

Places and Platitudes

The department in which I work calls themselves “placemakers”, which is an interesting turn of phrase. I liked it at first because I felt that yes, being a horticulturalist does mean you are very literally making places. You are making places by planting things in which ants will colonise. You are creating paths wending through rock-studded earth. You are nourishing the soil with compost and you are watering it all until you’ve transformed some trees into a woodland or a forgotten corner into a garden. But recently I’ve come to put a question mark after it in my mind. Placemaker? For the longest time, I thought this idea of placemaking was one of the reasons I was so connected to the land up here because I was a special breed of person, I was a creator as well as an inhabitor of this place. But the 2019/2020 bushfire season took a wrench to my perspective, adjusting it a little, and I now see the hubris of that idea. Because what I’ve come to realise of late is that no one makes places, it’s places that make us. 

Telling myself for so long that I was some sort of omnipotent being, that I was crafting landscapes, I was always Icarus headed for a fall. If you have grown up in the Australian expanse, be it the oceans that stretch out to the horizon, the red, sand dune mounded centre, or the ancient and echoey mountains, you are constantly reminded that you are just a tiny dot in a huge expanse. It’s this expansiveness that (should) develop in you an inherent humility because you are reminded everyday of how insignificant you truly are. When you’ve been tossed around by the ocean until salt water is coming out your nose or stuck in a snow flurry ten kilometres from your car with only one glove to shield your rapidly blue-ing hands, you are reminded that her beauty and her terror will always come for you. And yowzers was I reminded last fire season when she blazed and smouldered and zoomed me out until I was that little speck on the horizon again.

I have had fierce writers’ block for a year and unable to articulate anything in its entirety apart from fragments of things and short poems, so here I go, writing my halting love letter into the void of how these mountains have made me into the things I feel define me; a runner, a writer, a mother and a gardener. 

Place and being wild

I have dedicated a good chunk of my life to the notion of being wild. This sounds like absolute white girl tripe I know, and largely it is, but also I think being wild is an innately human and maybe very Australian thing. When I say “being wild”, I mean doing things that I feel driven by my instincts to do. Being wild is why I run so much. Like a shark that dies if it stops moving, I need to move to feel alive. I need to get dirty, I need to feel scared and alone. I need to pee on the ground and scream into the wind. I like to do base things. I am in every sense of the millennial phrase, a basic bitch. And I think the main driver of this desire is this big place I inhabit. 

Living in the mountains and existing in the places there; specifically, places like Narrow Neck and Mount Banks, the sense of depth and breadth is actually unfathomable. Have you ever noticed how echo-ey Men At Work’s I Come From A Land Down Under is? Like that flute is just tooting off into a fucking canyon and reverberating into eternity? That is no mistake, friends, that is straight up the best auditory allusion to our country’s literal greatness that I know. And that’s how it is where I live, expansive, nothing-y and alone-y (but never lonely). But it’s also ever-changing, like a magic eye keeping your eyes fighting to maintain focus. Some days, you can look out into the distance and think “oh yeah, that's a long way away. There are lots of trees there, and for sure at least seven yowies” but there are also days where I swear I feel like I’m going to swing my foot off the edge of Mount Banks and step straight onto the ledge of a cliff kilometres away because those distances feel so tiny. This is especially apparent in that Heidelberg light at the tipping point of winter where it starts thinking about being spring soon. The sandstone cliffs on the other side of the world look like you could touch them, like sedimentary rock sirens calling you to them. And it is in infinite places like this that I can really feel wild, free and like I am the actual, real Maz hidden beneath the everyday-use Maz veneer. 

I also have this very strong urge to run beneath full moons. I know this sounds like hippy-dippy mountain stuff (it is) and like I am a lunatic (I am). In actual fact, the word lunatic has the word “luna” (the moon) at its base, so that is very literally what I am, drawn to the moon like a moth. There is something so cleansing about running beneath a full moon. The first full moon under which I had a chance to run after the fires, set at 6 am followed by sunrise at 6.30 am. I hit the damp, dark and spooky trail at 4 am, cold, alone, and a little afraid. But beneath that full, luminescent sphere setting on one side and the burning sun rising dutifully on the other, I felt so safe and relieved, encircled by those same orbs which have touched every human in existence. And it was after that run all alone with my beloved Narrow Neck in the muted dawn light, seeing her healing from the fires, that I started to feel alright again. 

Place and my actual, physical body

And while the mountains regularly influence how I feel emotionally, they also affect how I physically look. The places which are dear to me have shaped my actual corporeality. Like a mother growing a child in her womb and birthing it into the world, the molecules of food she consumed and the air she breathed literally rearranged in her uterus to shape an actual human, so too does the earth on which we tread physically build our bodies. You know when you’re a kid and you learn about gravity and they tell you that gravity is pushing down on you from above, but also that the road beneath your feet is exerting that same force back upwards too? That’s what places do. While our footprints, dragged sticks and tire marks leave a trace on them, those tracks and trails physically influence us as well.

Recently I visited the little string of waterholes that runs along the Grose River at the bottom of Victoria Falls. I had the day to myself and it was warm. The last time I had run down into this salubrious refuge the canopy had been dense and the light mottled in that perfect way that neither makes you squint nor leaves you cold when you emerge sodden from a sand-bottomed pool. And I forgot that this canopy had been turned into so much ash. So of course, I got sunburnt. The shelter I took for granted was gone and this place had turned me a blush pink which has now faded to a light tan, meaning that the exact shade of my shoulders now, is attributed to a two and a half kilometre stretch of sandstone and gums.

Running on trails as opposed to a road or a treadmill informs my body’s shape in a specific way, too. Trails are uneven, they’re undulating, rock-ridden, you spend time leaping away from what you think is a snake but is, in actual fact ALWAYS JUST BARK. There are Hakeas which scratch you, Xanthoreas which tempt you off the path and into thickets of blackened wood which draw, like a child, on your shins. And it is because of the geography of those trails that my calf muscles have a particular shape, solid and sinewy,  that they would not have were I to run on a flat road, or never at all. My core muscles wouldn’t be near as firm if not for their need to constantly stabilise my little body hurtling along an uneven trajectory. My feet would not be so callused and thick bottomed if it weren’t for the teeny rocks that sting me through my shoes. My legs not constantly marked with new scratches and scarred with old ones and my rump not so big, if not for the hills that force my glutes to engage for hours on end. Sometimes, when I look at myself in the mirror, I feel that I look like the mountains.

Place, my mind, and my words

There is a legacy of way-too-long sentences and rambling poems and prose, that are due directly to the places I love. There is something about rhythmic footfalls, isolation, sandstone scents, and wet foliage that banish all writer’s block and have me writing like a fiend in my head. Pretty much everything I’ve written, from descriptions of vases or blogs about dividend yields, to my very best poems, has come from the trails around my home. 

If I died tomorrow, all that would be left of my personality would be a digital footprint and all the words that I’ve put down on paper. So largely, what would be left of my soul would be words about the best places I know. And I love that the trails are able to conjure up imagery in me, that flows out my fingers and onto the page, and someone on the other side of the world will know about these places. I am their conduit and they are singing to you from across roads, gorges, mountain ranges and oceans. It’s very pleasing that Nellie’s Glen’s cool, fairy-dell feel for example, can seep out of the pixels on the screen and into those who read this blog, until you can hear that water trickling beside the stairs in the stream after rain. Until you can smell that damp, rotten wood and mossy stench that is a little yuck and a little comforting. Until you can hear the call and response of whip birds, such a short delay between the two, you would think it’s one bird somehow calling from both sides of your head.

I haven’t written something for myself in a while, and I can hear the music playing trying to get me off the stage, but I don’t really remember how to wrap this stuff up. Except to just quickly expand on the writers’ block I mentioned at the start of this essay. As much as my writing, running, body and soul are linked to, and made by, the places I adore when those places are damaged, I physically and spiritually suffer. In the Blue Mountains, we are still reminded daily of the devastation 2019’s fires wrought. The drive to work is still a requiem to what was (though the epicormic growth on the Eucalypts is looking rather festive in its green and red glory). The trails and tracks that shaped my routine are either still closed or were only just reopening now, as the floods came through. One bed of the garden which I tended at work is completely gone, slated to be cut down and chipped. I saw no snakes on a run the other day, which up until now, has been the snakiest run I’ve known. And to compound this damage, the floods of two weeks ago have separated me from one of my core places, indefinitely. Due to a landslide on Bells Line Of Road, for the past two weeks I’ve been unable to reach the garden, and the plants and people therein, who I love more than I love myself. But it’s given me the time and reason to write all this. And I’m sorry it was long, but I needed to rationalise to myself who and what I am without these places currently in my life, and writing this has helped. 

TLDR shortcut to reading this entire thing; I made an artwork which is basically a four and a half minute visual and poetic embodiment of this blog’s vibe. Unfortunately, it is currently running silently on a loop where no one can see it at work, but you can watch it below. And may I run on these trails again soon, be back in the garden shortly and in the arms of that Mother Earth who makes me who I am; fierce, strong and oozing emotion all over the place. 

Trails and Tribulations: Life Inside an Inferno

On Sunday night, two weeks ago, I sat at the lookout 290m from my back door and watched the world as I know it burn. In my arms I cradled my two small sons, all of us wrapped up in a hoodie because it was unseasonably cold. It was the first day of summer. While other onlookers bustled around all excited energy and unnerving smiles, I couldn’t keep the tears from streaming down my face. I wasn’t afraid of my house burning to the ground, though of course that was a serious concern, nor was I particularly worried about the safety of my boys, sure that we were all just a car ride away from safer climes. I don’t know why it seems like a weird thing to say, but I was devastated to see Narrow Neck going up in flames, the place I feel the most free and at peace in the entire world. Narrow Neck plateau is a windy spur of land two streets away from my home in South Katoomba, that snakes its way between the Megalong and Jamison valleys towards Kanangra. And some very primal and important part of me is wrapped up in that piece of land and bush and sky and soil and I’m going to try my best to explain here, what that is. 

Running

I know that a lot of you are like, “Yuck! Running! You do running for fun? Yuck. Running.” Which you are totally entitled to think and I don’t even care when you say it to me, because running is my passion and it doesn’t have to be yours too. I think my adoration for running is best described by the Jason Isbell song, “Something To Love” which expounds the virtues of having something that you love that gets you through life. Much more articulate than I am, Isbell sings

I hope you find something to love
Something to do when you feel like giving up
A song to sing or a tale to tell
Something to love, it'll serve you well

For me, that is running. Of course when I started, it was hard. I’d run a few steps, stop and splutter, walk, hate that I was getting further from home, turn around intent on going back and then begrudgingly run a few more steps. But when I started running on trails, I knew I’d found my “something to love”. Finding my feet as a new mum, not too sure who I was anymore, this person bearing a huge burden of responsibility, I started running on trails near my home. With every step, the heaviness left my shoulders and as I found a rhythm, my feet pounded all my worries methodically into the dirt. As I went, the views opened up, the endorphins kicked in and I really knew life was worth living. Running in the bush in particular, is meditative for me. There is something about the ever-changing but static environment of my favourite trails, punctuated by my rhythmic footsteps, that sends me to a very calm and happy place. I set reminders in my phone to do certain runs at certain times to see certain things; the Waratahs near Mount Solitary in early spring, the Comesperma and Pomaderris on the path to Hanging Rock in October, the crazy array of fungi along any moist stairs in autumn, the glow worms littering the walls of canyons on summer nights, the water holes and rivers replete with water dragons and blissful refreshment for my sweaty skin in summer. While the landscape is constantly evolving, flowers cease blooming and new ones take their place, trees fall across trails and landslides claim paths, the bones of it all are always the same and I’ve come to rely upon their consistency to anchor me in rougher times. 

Narrow Neck

I started running on Narrow Neck about three years ago. I’d driven past the dirt road that led to the locked gate that marks its beginning so many times, and once I started trail running it was the first place I thought to go. I started out slow, like I was courting the trail, wanting to establish the good foundation of a lasting relationship. I eased into her baked sand path and iron-seamed rocks. The first time I parked at the locked gate at the top of her winding dirt road, I ran just three kilometres. The next time five and then six and seven. I felt like such an explorer, every run taking me around another bend and to a vista I’d never seen before. I wanted to savour the discovery of it. The first time I ran there, I made it to the stand of perfectly protected Eucalyptus oreades. Their bark was hanging down in ribbons, like slack cheerleader pom poms, refusing to cheer me on as I expended my energy, red in the face. The next time I made it down the steep hill and around the narrow bend, it was windy and I imagined falling down the escarpment. I perched on a rock and looked back at Katoomba, feeling like the world was mine. When I made it to the fire tower, it’s toilet and scrubby bush full of wailing black cockatoos I felt like a fucking warrior (and I got to pee in a toilet on a run, what a civilised experience). Like a good book, I couldn’t stand the thought of reaching the end, so I parceled it out to myself, only going occasionally, only going one or two kilometres further each time. When I passed the fire tower, knowing this was my penultimate exploratory run, the mist was so thick that there was no view, just Waratahs and Persoonias looming out of the fog like vivid red and green channel markers on a wide, dark river. And the first time I ran to the very end, I was listening to the audiobook of Dracula. I summitted the final rise, revealing the whole new world of the Wild Dog Ranges and Kanangra Boyd as Van Helsing was confronting Dracula. As they battled, my feet tumbled down the path towards my own destiny and I felt like I had come home, this place I had never been, already so familiar. 

Between that first run to the end and the next, I had grown and birthed another baby. A year and a half had elapsed and I felt like I was a different human to the one who ran it last time, but my evolution was inversely proportional to Narrow Neck’s same-ness. I was in a bit of a grumpy mood, having wanted to run naked under the full harvest moon, the night before. What a beautiful, earthy thing to do. But Nick had poo-pooed the notion deeming it “unsafe”. I don’t want to ever put an emoji in one of my blogs, but I’d insert the eye roll one here if I did. It was early morning when I finally ran, and I’d made it the ten kilometres to the end of the trail, before 8am. I was all alone, kilometres from anyone in the beautiful stillness of the morning, just me and the mountains. And there, lying on the path was the freshly dismembered leg and tail of a swamp wallaby. It didn’t even have flies on it yet, it was so new. I begrudgingly accepted that maybe Nick had been right about not running here naked and alone, due to the werewolves that were apparently out slaughtering wildlife under the full moon. 

And so sitting, watching this island of land, which has been the stage of my independence, where I run to cure the blues, to pour out my anger, to banish this ennui which settles on me unexpectedly, where I run to celebrate wins, or to bolster my happiest days, going up in smoke, was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. Seeing those same leaves, who opened their stomata daily to turn my local carbon dioxide into beautiful clean oxygen, being incinerated, somehow magicking themselves into a poisonous smoke which made my children cough, was horrific.

Narrow Neck burnt for two weeks. Not one day passing without the sound of choppers overhead, the Huey’s making it feel particularly visceral, sounding like doom and Vietnam. Her trails still aren’t open, and won’t be for I don’t know how long, and I just wanted to tell you all out there in the ether that I love and miss her. That is all. Thank you for listening to my love letter to a pile of rocks and dirt, I hope you have something non-sentient in your life to love as much as I do her. 

My Favourite Porn

We all spend our lives trying to feel out the limits of “normal” and then do our best to live within those limits. But there are times when we realise that what we thought was normal, is in fact, really fucking weird. For example, when I was a kid every day without fail my dad would wake me up and tell me that while I was asleep he put me on the road and put yoghurt on my face and a truck ran over me. And every morning I would get upset at my nocturnal misadventure while my dad would chuckle to himself like the evil genius he is. Years later, of course, I realised that this is not only weird, but kind of fucked up. And since the moment I realised that not everyone’s dad woke them up with strange psychotic lies, I’m always trying to check myself before I wreck myself, my internal monologue constantly tapping me on the internal shoulder and whispering fretfully, “is this normal?!” And here is something that my internal voice has been flagging as “potentially odd” lately. Crying porn. So, there’s normal porn that gives you a sexy release and then I have laughing porn which is that thing where my friends fall over and I file it away in my non-sexual spank bank for later when I need a laugh, and then there’s crying porn. Crying porn is all the things I read, watch or file away for when I need the sweet release of a good cry. Don’t get weird about this though, it’s not crying in a sad way; just in a cathartic, in-touch-with-my-emotions, recreational sort of way. I know you came here to read something smutty, but SUCKED IN, this is a blog about tears and snot, suckerrrrrr. Anyway, please don’t leave.

Things I Watch

My favourite episodes of anything are the episodes where people die. I never watched Grey’s Anatomy but you better believe I watched that episode where that lady with the weird teeth stopped her boyfriend’s heart so he’d win a free heart and he accidentally died and they carry her in a ball gown through the hospital (that’s a weird show btw). I didn’t know who patrick was or what Offspring was but you’d also better believe I watched the episode where he died. And let’s not get started on The Walking Dead etc etc death episodes into eternity. Unfortunately, I’m not able to stop there at the faux death, and now this is going to get real dark, real fast and I’m sorry for it, but not sorry enough to stop writing. My first pregnancy ended in miscarriage which meant that my subsequent pregnancies were riddled with the fear of pregnancy loss. So after I had both my respective kids safe in my arms, I sat down and YouTubed lots of videos of stillbirths. There was one particular vlogger who had been documenting her pregnancy from conception onwards and late in her pregnancy began documenting a trip to the hospital to check on diminished movements in utero. Devastatingly, her baby had passed away and she and her husband filmed his birth and their time with him before they laid him to rest. Why in the holy hell I’d want to watch this, I have no idea, but it made me feel safe and I cried a lot and so there’s one of my weird deep, dark secrets. Judge me if you must. 

Things I’ve Done

Have you ever cried so hard that you can’t breathe, you have incurable hiccups and long strings of snot course out of your nose and onto your shirt? I have. And strangely enough, when I hark back to any memory of doing this, it brings me to tears again, I have so much empathy for my past self. Think of this as me ruminating on an intimate memory and getting a crying boner about it. I had a bad day at work once. Like, a really bad day, which ended in me sitting alone in the car park with my forehead on the steering wheel, racked with sobs. Luckily, one of my friends appeared, concerned. Everyone else had gone home and I was just alone, bawling my eyes out in my car, a little bit pregnant and a lot devastated. While our friendship had always been one of those friendships where you’re more inclined to shake hands than hug or cheek-kiss as a greeting, I was so relieved to see him I managed to hiccup between wails “HOLD. ME.” He nodded bemused consent and I half fell out of the car to enter an awkward embrace. I sobbed snot all over him with reckless abandon, he just stood there and maybe he patted my head, I’m really not sure, such was my mental state. Eventually I released him from my vice-like Maz hysteria grip and went home, but every time I think of clinging to him in that moment of pure sorrow, I cry again. 

Things I’ve Read

I know that it is incredibly trite for a thirty-something year old mum with post natal depression to quote Sylvia Plath, but I’m going to do it anyway. In the Bell Jar, Plath talks about the notion of the fig tree, with a juicy fig on each branch, each fig representing an alternate life, all equally as appetising. From being a famous poet, to having a beautiful family, to travelling the world, “but choosing one meant losing all the rest”.  And this is the crux of my heartbreak. I love everything I have, but I will always wonder if there was something else in store for me which I would have loved more? Perhaps a little girl who looked just like me, who would love me as much as I love my mum. Or a solitary life living somewhere entirely different like rural Portugal, never tethered to anyone or anything. Maybe a partner who I could have loved above and beyond anyone I’ve ever met or dated before, that fairytale notion of a soulmate, with whom domesticity and petty arguments never crept into the relationship. This gets me every time, because this sort of impasse is at the core of who I am, always wanting something different, something better, even if I have the very best of everything. If I need to cry, this thought is like crying crack because I start crying at the people and things I’ll never experience and then continue the cry for being such a fucking asshole that I’m unhappy with my lot in life. 

So that’s my big bag of boohoos, friends. And if you have tried all these tricks and still can’t inspire yourself into floods of tears so you can admire how beautiful you are when you’re melancholy in the mirror (wait, what?! I don’t do that…) then try pulling a hair out of the inside of your nose. That works every time. 

Highway To Discomfort Zone

The last few weeks I’ve been languishing inside a pretty brutal bubble of anxiety. I’ve never experienced this feeling so intensely before and let me tell you, it’s not great. It feels like anything and everything I could possibly stress about, I’ve been gathering up and squirrelling away to ruminate on when everyone’s asleep and world is quiet. And it’s building into a huge pimple inside my soul, full of a fetid, anxious pus. But listen closely, because I’m about to pop that sucker and release all the things making me feel squirmy and uncomfortable into the world. Best put your anxiety pus raincoat on, kids.

My Body

I've recently lost some weight. I don’t think I look any different but I’ve been getting a lot of comments and WOAH does it make me uncomfortable. Comments about how I look seem to be falling into two categories; kind, and vaguely hostile. Now, it’s not that I don’t LOVE getting compliments, I’m here for compliments. My favourites being, in no particular order, that I’m smart, that I’m funny and that I’m mean, because all my life I’ve worked at these things and so I’m pleased when people notice. It’s just that compliments about my body and the way I look are new, and I have no idea what response I’m supposed to give. Do I self deprecate and say I don’t know how it’s happened or that it’s the result of breastfeeding? Or try and pass it off as how I looked before I had a baby (not the case because I was recently told at a wedding that the old “chubby Maz” we all grew up with has been replaced with a smaller version)? Or do I admit that I work out up to seven times a week and eat two disgusting cups of spinach for breakfast every day? And because of this confusion I end up giving all these answers and more in garbled and awkward exchanges, and thoroughly flustering the other person who just anticipated me saying “thanks”. Really, the truth is, I’ve suffered from a touch of post natal depression after having George, because having two kids means I am forever an adult now, and I’m having an issue dealing with that. One of the few things that makes me feel okay is absolutely smashing the shit out of myself at the gym, goading the fitness instructor in my parents’ exercise class into screaming in my face until I collapse with exhaustion, or running long distances alone in these here hills. I look at my body every morning and every night and in my mind I think “Oh look, my depression body is looking stronger!” but this isn’t something you can straight up say to people, and when I tried once it garnered a more awkward reaction than the self deprecation/workout regime/mumble list.

The other type of comment I keep getting is a sort of snarky observation about the weight I’ve lost, like I’ve done something wrong to my body. One time a woman I barely know said something to the effect of I shouldn’t have lost so much weight but also, how had I done it? And I just deadpanned to her “I’m having an affair” so I could watch her squirm. I was impressed with that comment and how clearly it illustrates that my sense of humour is mostly informed by Mad Magazine’s “Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions” but also, shut up and stop making me feel uncomfortable, weirdo.

Gardening

I am an all or nothing girl. I want to be the best, the most loved, the funniest, the fastest blah blah blah and if I can’t win those accolades, I will literally walk away and not try. Once, when I was a teenager playing in the finals of a basketball competition, it became apparent in the first quarter that we were outmatched and inevitably going to lose the game by a large margin. So I just stood down the offensive end of the court, letting them win. Sure, they could have their victory, but it’d be hollow as hell. And so goes the rest of my life, I have matured very little from 17. And at the moment, the thing I’m terrified of failing at is my job, gardening. Despite my mum’s best efforts, gently prodding me to start the garden at my new house, buying me the David Austin climbing rose I wanted so badly last year along with an endless parade of prayer plants and ferns for the house, I just watch them wither and die, because right now, I can’t engage in gardening. I’m so scared I’ll go back to work and not know what the fuck I’m doing, exposing to everyone that I’m a fraud. This fear is followed by the overwhelming feeling that I need to quit before I get hurt. I’m scared to get my feelings hurt by plants. Man, I’m lame. I literally keep deleting and reinstalling my instagram because photos of gardens instil such a cold dread in me that I keep totally melting down and throwing my phone across the room, the bile rising in my throat and my heart racing.

Douchebags

I’m a feminist. I want equality, I want to be afforded the same rights, and pants, as men. I sure as hell want to be able to speak more than 15% of the time without men thinking I’m speaking half the time (that’s an actual stat, friends. If women in a mixed-gender conversation speak 15% of the time, men perceive the gender contribution to be equal. If women speak 30% of the time, they are perceived as “dominating the discussion”, fucking women *eyeroll emoji*).  But anyway, I digress. I recently attended a feminist debate at Town Hall (it was terrible, I don’t want to go into it, luckily there was a Hungry Jacks and a conversational equal to escape to). And just before I left unimpressed, when the topic of college rape was being discussed, the woman in front of me turned around and seemingly addressing me, yelled “teach your sons not to rape!“ Uh, ok, THANKS LADY! As the mother of two sons I’ll start reining in the specific rape training I’ve been giving them. I’ll call Toys’R’Us and put a hold on that “Where In The World Is Carmen San Diego (So I Can Rape Her)?” board game I bought and I’ll throw out the copy of Goodnight Moon which, unlike the version you all know and love, is a rohypnol promotional item extolling the virtues of the drug to small children. The thing is, I’m pretty sure the dudes who commit these transgressions against women know what they’re doing is wrong, but do it anyway, because they just don’t give a shit. So maybe we’d be better off calling out the people who are deserving of such malice instead of the mothers of boys (and also, why is rape the mother’s fault?!) In particular, there is one type of guy who makes my skin crawl and in my current stressed state, I can spot them a mile off and am unable to conceal the look of disgust I get when I’m around them. I think of them as a “gropers”.

A groper is a specific type of guy who will constantly tell you how much he cares for the safety and wellbeing of women, he will say things like “I don’t even know HOW someone could EVER treat a woman badly, women are way better/more special/smarter than us men”. When in fact, they have no respect whatsoever for women and are just trying to sneak under the radar. I have met more incarnations of this dude than I have fingers and toes and let me tell you, while they proselytise the merits of feminism, when you pass out at a party they will put their hand down your top. You don’t even need to be passed out. Once I was in Rome and chatting to a guy in a hostel, telling him how much I missed my boyfriend back home. We were face to face, sitting on a balcony when his little creep hand began creeping under the front of my jumper. He got to my stomach when I whacked my hand on top of his, the fabric of my jumper separating us, trapping his hand against the skin of my belly. I shook his hand out from inside my clothes like a damn spider, looked witheringly at him and went to bed. I can also think of three people on my friends list who have, when I’ve been asleep somewhere, put their hands inside my clothes. I’m not sure what about my lifeless little body implied consent to them, but I can tell you these people weren’t weird, creepo strangers, they were my friends. Every time this has happened I’ve just played possum and pretended it wasn’t happening, and for whatever reason, I still feel incredibly ashamed of it. Like I’d done something wrong to encourage it. So if you’re reading this, and you’ve done this to me, firstly, please never mention it because it will MORTIFY me and you owe it to me to keep, at the very least, your words to yourself. But also, FUCK YOU YOU FUCKING FUCKHEAD GO EAT A DICK I HOPE YOU GET HEAD LICE.

I’m generally a problem solver and usually if I wrote this sort of list of issues, I would pose solutions to them. But today I have no solutions, just anxiety, and this was just a brain dump to try and make it go away. But thank you to all my friends who have sat patiently on their birthdays, on their lunch breaks, into the late hours on their phones listening to me go on and on and those of you who just read this now. Your comfort is invaluable and I love you. And also, to anyone else out there who is being kept up at night, haunted by the the sight of neatly hedged photonias on your street, you’re not alone and I’m here if you need to chat.

The Lies I've Told Lately

I lie a lot, it’s how I get by. Once I lied to rail guards about my cat dying, telling them instead I was sobbing because my brother had just passed away. When I was a teenager I lied for a year about sponsoring a child, creating a name, identity and even making up a country from whence he came. It’s not like I lie about big things, just weird little lies that make life more exciting or get people off my case about shit. And here is a random sampling of the lies I’ve been telling lately.

That I’ve read that book/seen that show/listened to the lame podcast you recommended. Look, I know this is a popular meme, but I often lie about having read things. And seen things. And listened to things. There is this thing I like to think of as “friend homework”. It is when your friends recommend things to you like books and movies and shows and music, and unless you’re one of the very select few who’s taste matches mine, I’m going to hate whatever you recommend. But as a good friend I will persist and watch/listen/read it to placate you and demonstrate my love for you. But sometimes I run out of time to do all my friend homework as I’m, you know, living my fucking life, so I just pretend I’ve done it. This constantly results in me lying to your face and laughing along as you quote things. But look closely and you’ll see a glint of terror in my eyes as I wait to be found out. One time, I actually asked for a sci-fi book recommendation from a friend (I asked for it, how dumb am I?!) and he literally did me a choose-your-own-adventure chart which would lead me to the perfect book recommendation. And readers, let me tell you that this ended up with me buying and attempting to read literally THE WORST BOOK EVER. I don’t want to name it in case that friend reads this and I hurt his little heart, but it was a book about South African Neo-Nazis going back in time to the American Civil War and helping the South win by supplying their armies with Uzis. Fuck me dead. I tried so hard to read it but ended up just googling the ending and then had to do basically an hour long book club on it. I’ve never wanted to die more and have literally avoided that friend ever since, such was the awkwardness.

That I follow mostly sharks and nudibranchs on Instagram. This is just not true. I told a friend once that I follow heaps of sharks on Instagram because I wanted to seem eclectic and interesting when they were slagging off people following mostly celebrities which, hello, is me thoroughly. I go to bed to Kylie Jenner’s instagram and wake up to the cast of Vanderpump Rules because I am basic AF. Unfortunately, they pushed for more info about which specific accounts are the best. So I had to research the best shark accounts and now I legitimately follow a vast amount of shark accounts and actually am quite into them, so that worked out quite well in the end. But having not learnt my lesson I told the exact same lie again recently. While away on holiday, sitting in the creek at Crescent Head, the most amazing amount of nudibranchs just started floating down the stream. If you don’t know what a nudibranch is, look them up. They’re a group of soft-bodied, marine gastropod molluscs which shed their shells after their larval stage and come in a crazy array of colours. Anyway, everyone in the creek was like “oh! Look at these things” and I, forever wanting to be smarter than everyone else, was trying to convey that they were, in fact, nudibranchs. When asked how I knew, I said I mostly follow nudibranchs on Instagram. I don’t know why I thought this would give my knowledge credence when I literally hold a degree in biology, but same goes, and now I regularly look up and like nudibranch photos (there aren’t that many straight up nudibranch accounts, I don’t know why).

That I put my hair in the bin. When you’re pregnant you pretty much don’t shed any hair for the entirety of your pregnancy. This is why pregnant women often sport glorious manes of hair. But, about three months after your kid is born, all of that extra hair falls out. Practically an entire year of hair fall happens in about a month and it is gross and annoying. My family has been wrapped up in my hair for weeks now. If I ever go missing you will only have to follow the trail of hair and you’ll find me easily. And I’m always getting in trouble for it. Sure, no one wants a fine layer of hair gracing every surface of their house but I can’t help that. I keep getting told that when it falls out can I please put it in the bin. “Of course!” I reply passively aggressively, “What else would I be doing with it?!” But you better believe that there is a fucking HAIR MOUNTAIN living behind my couch. Because the bin is too far when I’ve already sat down and it’s not like I’m putting a ball of hair in my pocket for later.

That I wasn’t going to drug my child. Max hasn’t been sleeping well. Blah blah blah you know I hate talking about parenting, so cut to me googling how to sedate your kid. And it turns out Phenergan is your golden ticket, my friends. So in I trotted into the chemist and of course Phenergan isn’t on the shelves and of course you have to ask for it. After five minutes of mum and I standing there awkwardly with a back and forth, “I’ll ask” “No, I’ll ask” “No it’s ok, I’ll ask”, I eventually asked. With a very cynical look, the chemist asked me if my child had allergies, had I tried Zyrtec, what else had I tried? I managed to fumble through an array of lies about Max’s made up hives that wouldn’t go away and he was so itchy the poor little thing and nodded like it was interesting new news to me that it could make your three year old drowsy before snatching it from her hand and rapidly vacating the chemist. I haven’t used it yet, but it’s sitting on my kitchen counter like a souvenir I got at Lie Land.

So I’m sorry if I lied to you this week, or any week, but take comfort in the knowledge I do it to loved ones and strangers alike. But also please stop making my life hard and telling me to watch animated shows and read books whose titles begin with the words “The Girl...” because they suck massive balls. I’m sorry, but they do.

Love = Cholera?

If I know one thing about life, it’s that people who whinge all the time are boring. I was reminded of this recently by a friend who, in response to my own continual whining, wasn’t overly encouraging but instead told me that no one wants to hear depressing shit all the time and she is correct AF. Generally, I have a rule in friendships of 70/30. I need 70% of my interactions with my friends to be fun and light and laughing and enjoying ourselves. The other 30% of the time, sure, you can complain and cry and I will give you solace, but any more than that and I am BORED. It literally doesn’t matter how legitimate the reason is, constant sadness is lame. I once had a friend who would call me at 3AM TO TALK ABOUT HER BOYFRIEND’S SMOKING AND HOW IT BOTHERED HER and I am terrified of becoming her, so myopic in my own pain that I disregard everyone else. So just quickly, to make sure I’m not becoming too self absorbed; if it’s your birthday today or tomorrow or yesterday, happy birthday, if you’ve just had a baby, well done, if you got a promotion, go you, and if you do feel sad, I hope you feel better soon. And continuing in my new tradition I started just then of not being overly negative and focusing on others, I want to bring in 2019 ruminating on the happiest thing I can think of, which is love. I’ve been reading the (little bit depressing) Love In The Time Of Cholera and reflecting on all the love affairs I’ve had in my own life and, without the permission of the people who are the other half of these love affairs, would like to share some of the intimate details of a few of the loves which changed me.

Nicole

I think we often overlook the love affairs we have with our friends, but female friendship to me is the elixir of life, so let me regale you with the tale of one of my best ones. When I was 25, living in the inner west, I joined a local basketball team. And while I spent more time on the bench than on the court, I found one of those rare friendships that probably come along only once or twice in your life (if you’re lucky).

Nicole and I locked eyes across a crowded basketball court during training, behind the back of the furiously screaming coach who didn’t seem to understand that this was a social league and not the WNBA. And oh, it was love at first smirk. Beyond the very angry man yelling at us, and between punishment push ups, we bonded over the fact we both had incredibly long hair. This may be all fierce and sassy in life, but in basketball it means your ponytail whips around and ends up stuck beneath your sweaty armpit, jerking your head onto your shoulder as you run. When it comes to basketball I look permanently furious and Nicole looks all lanky and leapy, so the addition of the side-cocked heads truly made us look like pros.

I don’t know how it progressed so quickly, but we fell into friendship lust hard and fast. Maybe it was because I told her I used to do magic (ie. I used to, and maybe still do, cast magic spells to manifest the things I want) and she incorrectly believed that I once had a career as a magician. Whatever it was that did it, out relationship progressed so quickly that before we’d even spent a day alone together, we were off on a romantic getaway to Darwin and Bali, just the two of us. We frollicked in waterfalls, we told each other our deepest secrets, we snuck up on each other in the pool pretending to be crocodiles, we went and got couples massages, during one of which Nicole, timidly, asked me “Uh, Maz? Are they massaging your boobs”? “No, how come?” “Because they’re massaging mine very gently” And I was delighted at her sexual assault at the hands of a 14 year old Balinese girl. One day we ventured out to a super rough beach, completely unpatroled, where I got dumped worse than I’ve ever been dumped in my life. I was thrown around in the shallow surf until I was sure I’d drown, eventually washing up onshore sitting upright, facing up the beach, my hair sandy, hanging in my face like I was some sort of deep sea monster. Nicole laughed so hard at me I thought she might choke, without any attempt to check I was ok and make sure I was neither traumatised nor a potential victim of dry drowning. And I knew then that I loved her.

Nicole is that friend I could literally call and tell her I had murdered someone in cold blood, with no motive and she would help me dispose of the body and compliment me on what a good murderer I am. I can (and do) call her anytime, sobbing, asking why anyone would ever love me and she will remind me that it’s because I may not be a better person than most people, but I am funny. To this day, any time I poo my pants, I can’t wait to call Nicole and tell her. Very early in my pregnancy with George, I woke up on a day we were meant to go to a BBQ at a friend’s house and couldn’t. Stop. Vomiting. “This is it,” I thought “I have hyperemesis gravidardum”, the condition where you vomit day and night throughout your pregnancy. Because I was convinced it was pregnancy related spewing and nothing more, we went to the BBQ where I lay on the couch and alternately slept and spewed until it was time to go home. At the halfway point home, the urge to vomit up my guts came again, and I made Nick pull over at a truck stop. Luckily I got out of the car, because as I did two things became apparent, this wasn’t hyperemesis, this was gastro, and I was most definitely about to shit my pants. As my stomach muscles clenched to eject the can of coke in my belly, I also pooped my pants worse than anyone has ever pooped their pants before. An old man was standing by his car metres away and I screamed at him to get back in his car. Nick tried to get out to help me and I screamed at him too, to get back in the fucking car. He threw me a raincoat to replace the dress I’d been wearing, and I had to leave my undies and shoes in a pile by the road. And the whole time, all I could think was that I couldn’t wait to tell Nicole. I’m publishing this anecdote here because I know public admissions of shitting oneself will bring her joy.

Nicole is one of the only friends I will always answer the phone to, and never hang up without telling her I love her. What would a girl be without a ratbag of a friend to tell her most fucked up thoughts and stories to? If that’s not true love, I don’t know what is.

George

I found out I was pregnant with George on a Wednesday. I was bored and did a cheap pregnancy test out of the bulk lot of 50 I’d bought on eBay. It was way too early to test, I’d been pregnant for less than two weeks, but up came that second line. “Oh fuck, I hope it’s not twins” was my only thought. Why was the line so strong when I was barely even pregnant? Why did it feel so much less exciting than last time I’d been pregnant? Why had this happened so fast and I hadn’t even properly appreciated my last alcoholic beverage for the better part of the year? I rushed to tell Nick, who looked as underwhelmed as I felt. And so began my conflicted pregnancy. Physically it was a great, low maintenance pregnancy, but emotionally I actively regretted being pregnant again almost immediately, as the realisation of what it actually mean dawned on me. Juggling children, sleepless nights, resenting my husband’s very existence...

Maybe I had a little bit of postnatal anxiety with my first kid, or maybe it’s something no one talks about so I didn’t anticipate it, but I was scared of Max when he was born and I didn’t properly love until he was talking. But George. Oh, George. Because of George I’m going to do something I rarely do, and that’s talk publicly about loving my kids.

The second George was born, I loved him fiercely. The midwife placed him on my chest as a new day dawned after a night of labouring, and he was just so little, existing in a bubble of his own light, and it felt like I’d been waiting for him forever. I’d dreaded his birth, horrified by the thought of all the things that could go wrong. I even stopped mid-push while delivering him to ask if I was tearing (I was, but they basically just told me to shut up and keep going), but George turned out to be my little soul mate. I can’t bear to be apart from him for more than five minutes. My arms ache to hold him when he’s asleep or being held by another family member or friend. I love his fat belly and how soft his skin is. And I love how much he needs me. The thing that I’ve always wanted more than anything in the world, that threads itself through practically everything I do, is the need to be loved and adored. And a baby fulfils this need to a phenomenal extent. They literally need you to live.

I love that George’s two innocuous first names, when put together, make a hilarious and ridiculous name, “George Michael” (of either Wham! or Arrested Development fame, depending on your generation) and I call him this more than I call him anything else. It’s so weird and delightful to say out loud to a small human. My little baby George Michael. I love when people say he’s cute because, yeah mate, of course he’s cute, he’s like a tiny little version of me. When I fantasize about leaving my family, I always take George with me. This love was a shock to me, but it’s like a delicious little nut (a pistachio, not a hazelnut, because they’re disgusting) that I keep in my pocket everywhere I go, happy in the knowledge I’m privy to something special.

Marion 

You know before when I said that I didn’t want to be myopic and wanted to acknowledge those around me? Well, I’ve done that bit now, so prepare for some A grade myopia in this run down of how much I love me some me. Is it possible to have self esteem that’s too high? Well, I think that’s me. I’ve always had horrible amounts of faith in myself and been my own biggest cheerleader. I was raised just to do the things you want to do and don’t think about it, blindly believing it’ll always work out. It’s why I do weird things that seem unrealistic, always sure I’ll succeed. It’s how I ended up working in television with only a science degree and no experience, because I thought “I like TV. I should work in TV” and pursued it doggedly, knowing that they’d be lucky to have me. My unbridled confidence is probably also why I’ve never been interviewed for a job I haven’t got. It’s also, mortifyingly, why I used to send anonymous letters to people I had crushes on, feeling like they needed to know that they were lucky enough to have my attention (even if they didn’t know specifically who I was). Throughout high school my best friend and I would talk, secretly, about how we were for sure the most attractive people we knew. Even now, I hope to god that I’m just unphotogenic, because I look in the mirror before I go out and tell myself “Damn, girl! You looking good. Especially for having a baby 14 weeks ago. You’re killing it!” And then, someone takes a candid shot of me, and I am horrified at how imperfect I am. am also pretty fucking hilarious. If I want to lift my spirits I will literally read my own writing. I know that’s the worst, but I get my own sense of humour more than anyone in the world, so why wouldn’t I find me the funniest person I know? There are a couple of little comedy nuggets which I’ve come up with and have only ever said to like, one or two people (and they haven’t found them funny) but I almost piss myself when I think about them. For example, I have been waiting for years for someone to ask me what my favourite animal is, so I can deadpan that it’s flies. I literally think that I could drop the mike after saying that. I could shuffle off this mortal coil and be totally ok with it, because that is GOLD. 

Anyway, I’ve just reread the above and am mildly horrified at my narcissism, but will leave it there because 2019 is the year of self love and I figure you, reader, either love me and feel me enough to have read this far, or you gave up two paragraphs ago, rendering that whole brain dump void anyway.

Reflecting on these loves I realise that the course of true love definitely never ran smoothly, more likely to be peppered with bouts of diarrhoea and mild feelings of horror. Gabriel García Márquez was completely correct when he wrote “the symptoms of love were the same as those of cholera”, but I wouldn’t swap that feverish, dehydrated, crapping yourself, stomach achey feeling for anything.