by Louise Duggan
With my three girls all at school and the year traveling by at such a pace, there’s a nagging question preying on my mind “What have I done with my life and what am I going to do with the rest of it?” Now that it’s in my head, it seems to follow me around like a bad smell and I can’t seem to shift it!
With my three girls all at school and the year traveling by at such a pace, there’s a nagging question preying on my mind “What have I done with my life and what am I going to do with the rest of it?” Now that it’s in my head, it seems to follow me around like a bad smell and I can’t seem to shift it! Take the other day, I was shopping for yet another child’s birthday card (a full time vocation in itself with three kids’ social calendars to juggle) and I picked up a card which said “Show me where to stand and I will move the earth”. Well, obviously moving the earth might be setting my sights a little high, I thought, but even if someone could help me work out where to start standing, I’d certainly consider raising my bottom off the couch and my mind away from the devastation that is day-time television.
I think for me the desire to be something ‘more’ stems from two things. The first being, that I am now almost certain that it was always God’s intention for me to be born a man. I must have taken a wrong turn at the pearly gates because how he ever thought cleaning, ironing, school runs and attending endless birthday parties was the right job for me, I’ll never know! Granted, morning teas spent chatting to girlfriends are my forte, but that’s because it’s the only light relief I get!
The second and most constant, is guilt. Justifying our own existence seems to be a curse amongst women. I don’t know why I don’t rate my prowess as a multi¬tasking super mum as the highest of accolades. I think it’s because it just wasn’t top of my list of aspirations when growing up. It occurred to me recently that before having kids I was a fountain of knowledge, an academic whose main ambition at 20 was to ‘take over the world’. Instead, I fell in love and got married and, since having my first child at 24 years old, my brain has had little opportunity to expand in any direction other than the seemingly obligatory swallowing of the dictionary of motherhood.
Determined not to allow my brain to vegetate any longer, I rushed out and bought two new reading books Speeches that changed the world and Women of the Outback. Proud of my determination to further myself, I told everyone who would listen about my latest acquisition, secretly hoping I would be, from that day forward, considered an intellectual dark horse! Three months later and despite my early resolve, I just couldn’t stop falling asleep reading them and as a result, didn’t make it past the first few pages of either.
I frantically ran to the book shop and stocked up on a year’s worth of ‘chick-lit’. As I hid them under the bed I whispered to myself “After all Lou, the only person you’re trying to prove something to is Lou and frankly, she’s too smart to have the wool pulled over her eyes!” Smiling wistfully, I carefully wiped the dust from the cover of Speeches that changed the world and moved my bookmark on a chapter or two, just in case.
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