Talking contraception with my teenage daughter

So this piece I wrote based on how I broached the subject of contraception with my teenage daughter was posted on Mamamia today.

Some interesting reactions, to be sure.

And just for the record, my daughter was OK with the piece being published.

A Guide to the Brisbane Writers Festival

This appeared in the BrisbaneTimes.com.au - It's just a bit of 'go-to' guide to the Brisbane Writers Festival. Please take with a sizable grain of the world's favourite seasoning (in shouldn't have to be said, but some people...sigh.)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Review of QTC/Black Swan Production Aug 18 - Sept 4

Amongst amateur theatre companies Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is something of a staple – the Brisbane Arts Theatre, for example, staged two productions within 10 years of each other. And with good reason, the roles – by virtue Tennessee William’s exquisite writing – are virtually actor proof (providing the southern accent is mastered) and it is considered a perfect example a classic three act play. With the professionals – QTC and WA’s Black Swan State Theatre Co. – taking it on as a co-production you would hope for a lift in quality, particularly in the production values, if not the performances and, thankfully, this production delivers on both fronts.

Setting the tone is Bruce McKinven’s design – it’s fresh, concept driven and delicious on the eye, as befitting a modern main stage production, but the reverence for time and place – William’s atmospheric 1950s Mississippi Delta plantation – is all pervasive. McKinven pays homage to the iconic 1958 version with some carefully handpicked elements – Maggie’s dress design, for example, and Big Daddy’s cashmere robe – but he was not visually enslaved to it, either. Aficionados of the film will spot the markers, but hopefully appreciate the differences – Maggie’s dress, while modelled on the version Elizabeth Taylor wore, is dark green and it’s s winning change. McKinven’s use of colour -- greys, dark blues and greens – plays to the darker themes in the play, with his use of Spanish Moss an inspired touch.

For the actors, the spectre of the film is arguably harder to discard. Audiences don’t want imitation, but there’s only so much room for deviation when characters are so deeply ingrained in a collective psyche. The casting of Cheree Cassidy as Maggie the Cat – coming via television’s Underbelly: The Golden Mile and Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo – has been well-publicised and, no doubt, Cassidy felt the weight most keenly. Elizabeth Taylor may have made the most indelible mark on this career highlight of a role, but it’s also been played by such luminaries as Ashley Judd on Broadway and Francis O’Connor in London’s West End.

Cassidy opened the play in battle mode. She tackled the first act – essentially a monologue delivered to her unresponsive husband, Brick – with all the right lines and actions, but you could see the rehearsal process. Conceding opening night nerves, she wasn’t quite there to begin with. Her accent was too restrained, as though she feared drawling out her vowels in case of exaggeration. She needn’t have worried, when dropped in and relaxed – about twenty minutes in – the hard working actress disappeared and a convincing, sympathetic and enchanting Maggie emerged.

As Brick Pollitt – the dissolute ex-footballer, drunk and younger son of plantation owner, Big Daddy – Tom O’Sullivan (Cassidy’s fellow Underbelly: The Golden Mile alumni) serves the role well. Playing a disengaged character is difficult – while Brick is indifferent to his wife’s emotional and sexual needs and everybody else around him, the actor must still be engaged with the ensemble and the audience. O’Sullivan managed this dichotomy nicely, delivering his best moments in his lengthy scene with John Stanton as Big Daddy.

Stanton’s Big Daddy hit all the right notes, so it seems picky to point out his lack of’ stature’, however, it was hard to dislodge the feeling that he wasn’t ‘big’ enough to play a character called Big Daddy. Perhaps it’s the very large shadow of Burl Ives, but silver fox Stanton looked altogether too trim and healthy to be a man on the verge of death as the result of his appetites.

It’s a minor gripe in other wise perfectly cast play. All the support roles were well cast with the actors easily finding the cadence and lyricism of William’s dialogue. Hugh Parker and Caitlin Beresford-Ord portrayals as Gooper and his wife Mae, respectively – whether intentionally or not – were very close to the film version, but they worked, never-the-less. Likewise their four no-necked monsters – they didn’t have a lot to do, but it’s important to the play’s continuity that the children are convincing, which they were.

Carol Burns as Big Mama, however, was the standout. All the usual superlatives apply to what was a flawless performance by this veteran of the stage. Maybe unfairly, but not surprisingly, she received the loudest round of applause at curtain call.

For film and theatre buffs, the plot of Cat needs little elaboration. It is a play relished for its characters and themes, not for cathartic resolution or an unmasking of who dunnit. However, for those who are only familiar with the film version, the stage version can be a revelation. The references to homosexuality – namely Brick and Skipper’s ‘friendship’ – are far more overt in the play, whereas the film is so obscure about the issue it’s easy to miss what the problem at the heart of Maggie and Brick’s marital discord actually is, such was censorship in the 50s. Ironically, it’s this very censorship that contextualises how taboo talking about homosexuality was at that time and which aids understanding of Brick’s self-destructive behaviour.

Ultimately, Cat is a play that demands fidelity to its setting and the time in which was written. Like performing Shakespeare, embracing the language of the play is paramount. On all levels this production is faithful enough to please purists – especially lovers of the film version – without kowtowing to a preconceived idea of how it should be. Director Kate Cherry’s reverence for this play and Williams’ writing is evident, but it’s her intimacy with its characters and her ability to nurture the relationships between them that make this a must-see for lovers of Tennessee Williams’ plays.

If Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is already one of your favourites, you will have every reason to enjoy – and relish – this production. For younger generations who may be unfamiliar with Williams’ seminal play, there will be no better introduction. QTC/Black Swan’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is quality theatre which has landed on its feet running.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof runs from 15 August – 3 Sept. Tickets are available through QPAC.

Getting Personal

My intention for this blog has always been to keep the 'personal stuff' out and to only post polished pieces of writing -- published or unpublished -- but due to the lack of movement and activity here at This Poison Apple (which is due for the most part to my own lack of movement and activity on the writing front, full stop), I've had a bit of rethink about what should and shouldn't be allowed here. So, I've decided that some personal stuff should be allowed to make it's way on here, providing it has some kind of point to it and fits in with the ambiance of the place.

If any of you fair readers have had the displeasure of reading my other (all but defunct) blog, Blakkat Ruminations back in its hey day, then you'd be aware that it largely featured my adventures as a 30-something singleton living in Sydney. Well times have changed -- I'm not single, I'm a baby's gestation or two away from 40 and I don't live in Sydney any more. As one half of a happy and conventional defacto couple living in suburban Brisbane, my love life would, frankly, bore you into a good night's sleep. But we wouldn't want that, so I'll keep my love life out of it this time.

This other reason for this change of heart, is that I have a bona fide professional website now -- Blakkopykat --which is essentially a portfolio for my published features and what-not, so what you'll probably get here now is the odd book review, some opinion pieces with my trademark wit (even if she says so herself), some funny stuff and a bit of guff, if I feel like. I think you'll like it and I think I'll probably keep up appearances a lot more. It's a win-win for all us, really.

Natural Disaster Watching

A rarity of late, it’s a nice Brisbane day – temperate conditions and mostly sunny skies – and from where I’m sitting, in the now dry suburb of Stafford, you’d really have no idea that a grand scale natural disaster was unfolding only 10km away. Except for the non-stop television coverage, that is. After two days of continuous Karl, Leila, Anna, Julia, Campbell and all those perky-faced young women reporting from various scenes of the wet or the newsroom, cabin fever did take hold and I jumped at the chance to get out and tag along with my partner who, as a press photographer for Fairfax, was on flood paparazzi duties.

A flood paparazzo for the Financial Review

We headed first to the safe vantage of Kangaroo Point. The rising torrent of the Brisbane River was certainly a spectacle, but what intrigued me more was the sheer number of people, with cameras in hand, who were out to witness it wreck havoc on the city. This is not a judgement, merely an observation, and while Queensland Premier Anna Bligh may be on the record as saying, “This incident is not a tourist attraction – this is a deeply serious natural disaster”, I think these pictures prove that the first half of that statement is patently false.

Flood tourism flourishes at Kangaroo Point. The media has set up camp overlooking the Brisbane River beside Lick Café (below), which was swamped with customers, not water.

There’s a great view of the Brisbane River from Kangaroo Point.

Of course, Kangaroo Point wasn’t the only place people – or rubber-neckers as they’re known to crowd control professionals – were gathering to witness this once-in-a-generation natural disaster. Closer to the action, down by the base of the Story Bridge, you could get up close and personal with the swollen river as it lapped onto the grass of a popular outdoor park.

Police tape is not an effective barrier to stop the serious flood spectator.

Yes, you see correctly. They’ve brought along an Esky full of beer and an iPod dock.

In the CBD, it was a similar story. Cafés, restaurants, shops, banks and offices were all closed for business, but the city was far from being a ghost town. People gathered down by the Eagle Street Pier, or as close to it as police would let them, to take in the novelty of water creeping towards the doorstep of big business (see below).

This was Alice Street the day before the river was set to peak. Turning 180 degrees from where this photo was taken, you could be greeted by this welcoming sign, below.

Natural disaster watching, when you are not personally affected (and I don’t think a one carton limit on milk/customer at the local IGA really counts as ‘affected’) is very closely related to that other voyeuristic past time – slowing down to a snail’s pace at the site of car accident. I always like to pretend that I’m not the one deliberately holding up the traffic so I can have a gawk, but as we all know it’s very difficult to look away, even if you do zoom off after you can’t strain your neck anymore from looking over your shoulder.

Whether you sat glued to your box or ventured out for a front row/in-the-flesh experience, the reason is the same – you did it because natural disasters are fascinating, especially when they’re in your own backyard. Yes, they are devastating, destructive and heart-breaking – that goes without saying, really. But who among us, even if loved ones and friends were in the flood’s sight, can say they weren’t just a little bit fascinated, flabbergasted and, dare I say it, entertained by the spectacle? I’m not suggesting this is a case Schadenfreude on the part of the high and dry populace of Brisbane, not for a moment – and I think any decent person would be appalled by the idea that anyone would take delight in the terrible misfortune this flood has wrecked – but it’s difficult to deny that we – the rest of Brisbane and Australia – haven’t been willing and transfixed spectators to the theatre of this event. It doesn’t make us less human and, hopefully, all this voyeurism will stir enough compassion within us to compel us to donate money or volunteer our time to help the people who have been affected and, in some cases, literally gutted by this flood (and probably haven’t found it quite as entertaining to watch).

Personally, I’m very grateful my 16-year-old daughter, who was stuck out at Ipswich at her father’s place, is safe and their house made it through with nothing more trying than having the power cut off. I am now waiting patiently until the Centenary Highway and Ipswich Motorway are open again so I can go and get her and give her a very, very long hug.

Feature Article - Coastal Assassins Roller Derby

I should probably come clean about this feature – yes, I did write it and yes it was published legitimately – but I am a member of the Coastal Assassins Roller Derby league and I’m also their marketing officer, so I did have something of an ulterior motive for writing it. Never-the-less, this is the full version of the one that was published in the Sunshine Coast Daily on Sunday November 28^th, in the lead up to CARD’s inaugural bout on the Sunshine Coast – ‘Deck the Halls with Blood and Glory’ – which they are co-hosting with the Brisbane City Rollers on December 4^th, 2010 and which I am officially bouting in for the first time myself. The feature itself is a profile piece on our league’s president – Cecilia ‘Dee-Dee Dainja’ Morton. My derby name, btw, is Scarlett Scr’apple – which probably won’t surprise you.

Cecilia 'Dee-Dee Dainja' Morton - President of the Coastal Assassins Roller Derby league

Totally original, it’s that rare sort of tattoo that arouses your interest and makes you want to ask its owner what it is all about. And like its owner, Cecilia Moreton – aka ‘Dee-Dee Dainja’ – there’s more to it than meets the eye. An arresting night sky envelopes her entire upper right arm, replete with Jupiter, Saturn, all the other planets and a smattering of five point stars. But it’s the scroll with a passage written in ancient Greek-like symbols that I ask her about.

“It’s something my mum wrote on my tenth birthday.” Moreton explains she found the passage years later when she dug out an old autograph book – of the sort that was popular in the ’80s – from storage. Translated it reads, ‘I shall pass through this life but once, therefore whatever good I may do let me do it now for I shall not pass this way again’. At the time it was written Moreton asked what it meant, to which her mother replied, “One day you’ll understand.”

Moreton well understands now and as a guiding motto it prompted her six months ago, along with two friends, to start a roller derby league on the Sunshine Coast. By unanimous decision, Moreton was nominated to be president. “They picked me because I was the one who ‘did’ things. I’m the make things happen person,” Moreton shrugs. She’s not boasting, just stating the way things are and like most of her answers it comes with a self-deprecating laugh. Of the other two, Leigh ‘Buzza’ Barham serves as the league’s secretary while Sam ‘Slam von Carnage’ Ryan is currently on a leave of absence as treasurer. What started as three is now the Coastal Assassins Roller Derby League, affectionately known as CARD, which has almost 40 skating members and is set to host, in conjunction with the Brisbane City Rollers, ‘Deck the Halls with Blood and Glory’ – the first modern all-girl flat track roller derby bout to hit the Coast on Saturday December 4.

Roller derby, in case the bandwagon going left of centre has passed you by or you missed Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut Whip It in 2009, is, some claim, the fastest growing women’s sport in the world. Australia alone has over 30 leagues in various stages of development and there are no signs of the roller girl train slowing yet. Often fast and brutal, each team sports five players – a jammer and four blockers who all skate anticlockwise on a standard oblong track. The jammer’s job is get past the opposing team’s blockers and score points. The blockers are out to stop her. While booty blocks, whips and spectacular falls might keep the crowd entertained, the game, Moreton assures, is about strategy as much anything.

Strategically, joining an established league and working towards playing on a team is one thing, starting your own league, however, is quite another and is an enterprise that requires gumption, drive and the love of a challenge to make it happen. Moreton would add naivety to that list. With over 800 jumps to her credit as a skydiver, however, there is something about Moreton that seems right for the role. That her moniker – all girls choose a unique name as part of their derby personas – is Dee-Dee Dainja is fitting, however, Moreton is surprisingly mild mannered and considered in contrast to her derby ego.

Demonstrating a blocking drill for the ‘Queens’ – the league’s more advanced skater –Moreton reprimands a couple of girls who are talking, but is faintly apologetic demanding everyone’s attention. She is nice to the core but knows nothing will happen without dedication and hard work. In addition to two scheduled training sessions a week, Moreton spends up to 15 hours a week ‘doing derby stuff’. “I think everyone is sick of my emails,” she laughs, but Dee-Dee has ambitions for CARD.

Beyond being a competitive league, which requires having two teams that are good enough to bout each other, Moreton hopes for CARD to compete nationally – the Great Southern Slam held this June in Adelaide was a huge success – within two years. Long term, her vision is to see CARD sport a team internationally and be associated with the Women’s Flat Track Roller Derby Association (WFTDA) – the sport’s official governing body.

Then there was the matter of which charity to sponsor. Set up as non-profit organisations with their DIY grassroots ethic and community-minded spirit, most leagues consider giving back in the form of sponsoring a local charity to be an integral part of their operation. Moreton wanted to sponsor a group that specifically helped women.

It was the league’s ties to Burnside High School as their Wednesday night training venue and one member’s involvement as a mentor that led to the decision to sponsor STEMM – Supporting Teenagers with Education, Mothering and Mentoring – the unique school-based program designed to assist young mothers reengage with education. “After all,” Moreton says, “derby is about empowering women.”

With their reputation for knocking each other flat to the floor adorned in tattoos, thick eyeliner and fishnets, derby girls are – not without cause – known for their feistiness and attitude, but Moreton believes it’s more than that.

“Derby attracts all kinds of women,” she points out. “We have students, doctors, teachers, nurses, single mums, lawyers, everything.” She credits its appeal to being a contact team sport that ‘ticks all the boxes’ in terms of fitness, fun, stamina and skills. It has the “hard core aspects of male dominated sports with a feminist twist,” Moreton adds, “and women can really excel at it.” The body image message is, “hugely positive”, she says, because “it’s for women of all shapes and sizes”.

By day, Moreton is a clinical coder herself – she codes patient information for hospital costings – and massage therapist and an exemplary example of derby girl duality. Further investigation of her night sky panorama reveals two fairies. The red one represents her good side, ‘the healer’; the blue one, perched on sky surfboard, her mischievous side. Whether CARD makes the tattoo roll call depends on its success in becoming a solid league.

Moreton’s mother – not a fan of permanent ink – upon been shown the inscription on her daughter’s arm, remarked, “You should have told me you like that passage. I would have made you a tapestry.” One can’t help thinking a tapestry lacks the sort of commitment necessary for Cecilia.

'Wheel Women Play Tough on Derby Days'
Sunshine Coast Daily 28th November, 2010

Motherhood

This is a personal essay I wrote as an assessment piece for a subject on non-fiction writing (Reality Bites: An Exploration of Non-fiction). I received a high distinction and the only feedback from my lecturer (the wonderful and brilliant Clare Archer-Lean) was 'A near perfect personal essay, Mel'. Naturally, I was pretty chuffed. I've vacillated (for sometime) about posting it here, not because it doesn't fit the tone of this blog, but because it reveals an aspect of myself that some people will find confronting and it opens the door for criticism of personal my choices. I've decided, however, that I'm OK with that. I'm a writer and that's part of the gig, isn't it? The essay is modelled on the style of Adrienne Rich (part of our assessment brief was to model our 'creative exploration of genre' on a master essay writer) and I have used her as a source reference, as well. I don't want to say much more about it, because I think it speaks for itself.

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I can’t pretend this essay will be easy to write. It requires brutal honesty and the condensation of many thoughts I’ve had on motherhood over the years; for I have been a mother for over 15 years now — most of my adult life. Yet, ambivalence towards being a mother has never left me.

When I was 30, I relinquished majority-care of my then 9-year-old daughter to her father. I was certainly not declared unfit for the role and no formal parenting agreement was ever made to enforce the change: it was simply a triumvirate of conditions — financial, circumstantial and my own ambition — that led me to agree it was “her father’s turn to have her”. A year later, the circumstantial took a stronger position and I found myself living in a different state to my daughter. Four years on, I was forced to take circumstances into my own hands — I moved interstate to bring some proximity back into my relationship with my now teenage daughter. As far as mother and teenage-daughter relationships go, ours is one to envy and I find myself relating to this near adult creature better than I ever did when she was a child.

As for how unusual it is for a woman to be the “non-custodial parent”, the Child Support Agency* claims, “In about 8 per cent of cases the receiving parent is female and in 12 per cent they are male”. The implication is that approximately 12 per cent of women do not have majority care of their children. I do not know any other women who fall into this 12 per cent. What I do know is, even the briefest inquiries by complete strangers into my personal life brings out a compulsive need to explain in exacting detail why my daughter lives with her father. It’s nobody’s business, of course, so it stands to reason why I should examine this need to explain myself with such tedious attention to particulars. By way of a neatly packaged answer, Margot Cairnes† — a mother who left her two children in their father’s care for a year — says, “Society judges mothers far more harshly than it does fathers. ‘Good’ mothers are not supposed to leave their children”.

If ‘good’ mothers do not leave their children, I must either choose to identify with the ‘bad’ mother persona or question what it is about the expectations of motherhood, generally, that I have come to feel so alienated from.

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*Child Support Agency: Facts and Figures 08-09 PDF document, Commonwealth of Australia, 2009; p. 35

†Ita Buttrose & Dr Penny Adams, Mother Guilt: Australian women reveal their true feelings about motherhood, Viking, 2005; p. 265

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Feminism, and in particular, the assertion that women are entitled to carve out an identity independent of motherhood has afforded me some comfort with my choices. As far back The Second Sex*, Beauvoir offered these encouraging words for women who found the traditional expectations of motherhood to be problematic:

“… the woman who works — farmer, chemist or writer — is the one who undergoes pregnancy most easily because she is not absorbed in her own person; the woman who enjoys the richest individual life will have the most to give her children and will demand the least from them; she who acquires in effort and struggle a sense of true human values will be best able to bring them up properly.”

Whatever comforting truths can be extracted from Beauvoir, however, modern feminist debate around motherhood is still firmly fixated on notions of “having it all”, that is, family and a stellar career or the insistence of “choice” for women who want it one way or the other. By choice or contraceptive failure, however, a woman is still either a mother or she is not. The choice itself becomes a kind of identifier, which once it is made you cannot simply change because it no longer suits you like blond highlights. Motherhood — rightly or wrongly — imposes identity the way race, gender and sexuality do, so to choose motherhood is to take on centuries of expectation, ideology and myth.

In the words of Adrienne Rich…

Like most other platitudes, those on motherhood largely go unquestioned. French novelist and playwright, Honore de Balzac said, “A mother who is really a mother is never free”. Contrary to personal reality, there are times when I forget altogether that I am a mother. Can I admonish myself for not really being a mother then? I’ve never heard another woman make this cool admission. I do not refer to the fundamentals: I have never forgotten to pick my daughter up from somewhere or administer to her basic needs, but when it comes to declaring the make-up of my identity it does not always cross my mind to “mention” I’m a mother. In private, this amounts to my thoughts being entirely my own and they do not always concern my daughter’s welfare or even an awareness of her existence. There is no question of my love for my daughter, but I struggle to identify with the sentiment expressed by the actress Sophia Loren that, “When you are a mother, you are never really alone in your thoughts. A mother always has to think twice, once for herself and once for her child.” I am often alone in my thoughts.

In regards to my mothering, my own mother has told me that I was often “distracted”; not fully present, absent. Perhaps it was because I was young and wanted to do the things other young women do who are not mothers in their early 20s; but honesty compels me to admit, rather, truly involved motherhood bored me. It was a chore to commit to game of hide and seek or to take her to the park. I did it these things reluctantly, but the games were short and I always took a book to the park. Over the years I have rigorously pursued my own intellectual and social interests, at the expense of spending time with my daughter.

Now — as her need to play childish games is gone and she is more inclined to intimate, stimulating conversation — I relish any time spent with her. She is funny, articulate and offbeat; her conversation is almost like that which I would have with a close friend. Being in my mid-30s, some retrospective gratitude has crept into my attitude toward being a mother. There is a sense of relief that I got it “out of the way”; the aching desperation of the “empty womb” felt by close single friends my own age compels me to be grateful that I will never know — what they experience as — the sickening possibility of childlessness. But to claim I share in their longing, for second child, would be disingenuous. I feel no such thing and I expressed this sentiment as part of a piece I wrote a few years ago*:

“I do realise the fact that having had a child, I haven't actually had to entertain the thought that I may miss out on this experience entirely. But even if I hadn't, I am not a particularly maternal person and the whole child rearing epic leaves me a bit numb. Babies don't make my womb do somersaults and toddlers give me the heebie-jeebies, quite frankly, with their snot and their tantrums and their shit and their limited vocab. And yes, I'm well aware that it's different when it's your own — I had one upon’ce a time, I remember (and she was so cute I could have eaten her with a spoon). But no — and I say this looking out my bedroom window and watching a playgroup in action in the grounds of the Scout hall below — very no, thank you. I would wither from boredom if forced watch toddlers eat sand and talk with under stimulated mothers with insular lives about quantities of teeth cut, toilet training regimes and how to make mushrooms palatable to a two year old.”

As part confession, part feminist discourse and even part memoir, there is no real conclusion to this essay. Despite what feminism has told me, as a mother, I will continue to seek reconciliation with the ideal of motherhood. My continuing ambivalence and feelings of inadequacy as a mother may even be considered quaint and out-of-date in the early part of the 21st century, yet, they still linger, so what of that? The final judge will be my daughter, who, once equipped with the hindsight of adulthood will be able to reflect on what sort of mother I was and deliver her own verdict — the only verdict that really matters.