Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Once upon a time there was a crazy fabulous wild and wonderful woman. Her hair was a maze of curls and colour and she was dressed always in the fashion of the day which was lace and satin, girdles and bustiers. She was from the late 1800s. She was not a puritan or a good woman of means looking for a comfortable marriage.

 She was an actor and a poet, a burlesque queen who mesmerised the minds of men escaping women they had married who were the opposite of her. Her name was synonymous with Trash and Treasure, in the heady days of the Empire of Kings and Queens and the Aristocracy.

They ruled the day with fashion, food, wine and debauchery carried out in mansions, dance halls, horse drawn carriages and some had the latest modes of transport called automobiles.

Our lady was a Burlesque Queen. She danced in golden halls and rode in carriages cloaked by night with men of reputation. Their wives at home surreptitiously cavorting with the staff in an effort to assuage the knowledge of their duplicitous husbands. Cobbled streets and smatterings of rain created a certain echo of horse drawn carriages as they trotted their cargoes home to pillared homes and grandiose mansions. She was left behind to find her way back from where she came.

As she awoke one morning, fully dressed with her hair billowing unbridled on the stained feathered pillow, she felt as if she was drowning in an aching loneliness which had finally enveloped her like a cancerous disease.

She stood in front of the long extravagant gilded mirror to face herself for the first time naked in her despair. She saw the image of herself wailing back at her. She saw her face contorted in an ugly cry, her heaving and dishevelled shoulders shaking her voluptuous breasts.

This image was one of a woman in torment knowing her life was over. She was too old. The Empire no longer would want or need her charms. Her feet hurt, her girth was thick and the lines on her face were etched so deeply, no sleep or amount of war paint could help her regain her youth.

 Because of that it was as if overnight, she knew her raisin d’être had been extinguished.

She was dead to herself. She was no ones treasure and she had become her own trash.

She knew it was time to wash herself, feed herself and redress herself. Call for the carriage and go to work. As she stepped into her worn satin shoes, she looked up and the daylight was brazen in its criticism of her. The light was cold and bare and excruciatingly accurate that no make up or smile could erase the vision of herself caught in the window.

This was the moment to step into the old world or step out all together. Such thoughts were paralysing until now….

A cataclysmic thought attacked her and she knew what to do.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

If you were to chuck me in a time machine and send me to my happy place of choice, 70s Australia is it.
There was a naïveté and innocence then that I really miss, life was simple, free and happy.
My parents worked extremely hard. There was only ever enough money to make ends meet. Dad drove earth moving equipment in the beating sun and howling rain. Mum worked as whatever she could, at one point in a wool factory, scouring filthy bales of wool and sorting them to be cleaned.
Looking back I feel bad for the moments where we didn’t appreciate this as kids. I’d beg to be taken out to the movies or the drive in, or to the beach on a hot day and couldn’t understand why one or both would scream in exasperation to “go and jump over the fucking sprinkler to cool down”. We would and we enjoyed it because there was nothing else to do.

Summers in Perth are stinking and maddeningly hot. We didn’t have an air conditioner in our car so trips to the beach after school or on the weekends usually meant a burning bottom on the vinyl backseat of the Kingswood , with the windows down and the hot air searing our skin like a hairdryer. We would song along to Kenny Rogers, Bob Marley or the eurythmics on the tape deck and were occasionally allowed to have a Giant Sandwich ice cream as a special treat. It would be a race to cram as much in to our mouths whilst cold without freezing our brains, and licking the sticky melting rivers that ran down our salty hands. The measure of a good day at the beach would be the size of the pile of sand that fell out of our bather bottoms as we stripped off in the bathroom. Mum would have to sweep up half of Coogee Beach by the time we finished showering.

We didn’t have enough money to have family holidays, so days out were activities like fishing. I couldn’t stand it, I was happier inside reading or riding my bike til the sunset. We would go to South Mole or Robs Jetty, neither of which turned me on. The smell of Robs Jetty was unmistakeable on the approach. Meaty, rancid and metallic. The jetty was next to an abattoir , which made it a great fishing spot. The fish were attracted to the blood that tinted the Indian Ocean red until the tide went out, and the odour hung in the in air and stuck in my throat. Little wonder I chose to be a vegetarian for nearly 30 years.

Our house didn’t have an air conditioner  either and there was a daily dance of courting and spurning the breeze. Closing the curtains and windows in the late morning to keep the hot easterly desert breeze out, and opening everything up in the late afternoon to let the Fremantle Doctor in, the sea breeze that brought relief from the heat.
During a heatwave my brother and I would have to sleep on towels on the floor of my parents bedroom under the single  lazy and squeaky ceiling fan for relief. He had ADHD so it was never very relaxing being in such close proximity.

There was always a love of music in our house and I didn’t appreciate how cool my parents were until my 30s.  They had me very young, at 19, and we cut our teeth on bowie, the stones, bobs Dylan and Marley, Fleetwood Mac and AC/dc. I was an awkward and shy kid, and would die inside when I brought friends home after school if I could hear the music pounding out of the house when we were at the end of the driveway. The windows would practically bow from the volume and the bass.
My friends would exclaim they wished their mums were as cool as mine. She would dance, head bang, air guitar and crank the volume up another notch whilst yelling “this is good shit man”.

It was impossible to take yourself too seriously in our house. Any loving of oneself sick would invariably lead to a taking down of a peg or two. My choice to become vegetarian was seen as imperiousness , and ridiculous. To prove this, one evening I was served one of my mums incredible soups. She’s famous for them in our family. After I polished off my bowl and sat there full and happy with my rotund belly she took great delight in telling me I had enjoyed it because she had puréed the meat. To this day her outrageous and shifty audacity, as wrong as it was, fills me with admiration. I shouldn’t admit it but I aspire to her levels of great, cunning shiftiness.

My most treasured memories are those from simple, suburban Australia. It kills me that I’ll never have to work hard to replay a song I love again, rewinding the tape deck, doing the frustrating stop, start, false start, rewind some more. Or siting with my cassette player, waiting for songs I loved to come on the radio so I could record them. That I’ll never again have the vinyl backseat dance, moving from  (bum) cheek to cheek to alleviate the burning and that it’s unlikely that I’ll ever cool down by spending hours hopping back and forth over the sprinkler in the front yard. I know that technically I could, but it would be a community service not to.
To me there is nothing lovelier and more endearing than daggy suburban Australia.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Once upon a time there was a tractor with ten wheels. Some of the wheels were straight and some of the wheels were wonky. It had been around as long as anyone could remember—big hunka junk in the ramshackle shed along the M52 highway. Bruce Wilder owned it. Drove it everywhere. No road was too pot-holed or too wet or too slippery. He gave kids rides on it. Charged them a dollar. Bloody dangerous, the parents said. Because it was rough as one of those mechanical bull things people rode in America.

Once, Billie, son of William Williams, the village doctor, fell right off it. Suffered a severe concussion and was never quite the same afterwards. Secretly, Mary—the village sweetheart—worried she’d broken her hymen riding it. And every day, Bruce fractured a bone as he drove it. First it was his coccyx. Next it was his pelvis. Once it was his big toe when he got it caught in a gap between the tyre and the chassis. Finally Doctor William Williams forbade Bruce from driving it. Diagnosed him with osteoporosis. Said he should be at home, watching TV, in his dressing gown. But Bruce refused to stop. Even when he broke both arms he begged Tim, the village mechanic, to hoist him into it. Threatened suicide if Tim didn’t. Which was ironic. Because that was Bruce’s last ever tractor ride. Half a mile down the road he fell and smashed his skull into a hundred pieces. But Tim the mechanic never forgot the old man’s last words to him. ‘Mate, remember to always fail while daring greatly.”’ He winked and waved his plastered arm, “The chicks love it.”

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Twitter: @mslcheng

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

Frank’s hands shook as he raised the glass to his lips and his body gave an involuntary sudden jolt, shaking loose the walking stick that had been precariously, thoughtlessly placed on a slight angle on the edge of the table, which made an almighty clatter as it hit the floor. This was just something that happened many times a day, a moment of Parkinson’s-related clumsiness that ended in noise, so he didn’t think much of the event itself. But he did notice how the people around him noticed. There was the attractive waitress at the café, who seemed nervous that he might drop something more or make more noise, causing more disruption to her perfectly manicured workplace; the young mother in the nearby booth, with her two preschoolers, who looked like she was worried that he was intoxicated or medicated, or perhaps insane, that he might do something uncomfortable that she would have to explain to her children; the businessman who didn’t actually seem to take in anything around him, but had glanced in Frank’s direction, who seemed inconvenienced in some way by the disturbance.

And yet, in all likelihood, these were not the thoughts going through the minds of those around him. The waitress was likely just trying to remember the order of the businessman, who looked as though he was stuck in his own preoccupations, but who would pounce on any slight mistake that was made on his order, requiring perfection in everyone around him. The mother of two was more than likely more concerned about whether her two energetic boys would make a scene in the time it took for her to drink her much-needed morning coffee, like the little time bombs that she always felt that they were, and whether they would get to their weekly music class in time, and whether they’d manage to get bread on the way home before the little one got too tired to be manageable in a crowded supermarket filled with shiny, colourful things to want and need. In all likelihood, nobody was taking any more notice of him than they were anyone else. Everyone trapped in their own microcosm, too consumed to worry about insignificant happenings around them.

Who would know.

And yet, Frank often wondered. He often felt conspicuous. Watched. Judged. Misunderstood. Pitied. He often felt like he had to explain himself to people, explain his unexplained lurching movements, his apparent clumsiness. Explain that he wasn’t always like this.

Perhaps he wanted to be noticed, to feel part of society again, to feel noticed. Was this the reason Frank persisted in making the often-monumental effort to venture out of the house every day, getting away from those four walls that were so comfortable, so secure, so familiar, and yet so very lonely, so very restrictive, so very different from the life that he had known? The life prior to Parkinson’s disease, when he still had full control over his body, a sense of control he never truly appreciated until it was lost.

Frank rose slowly from the uncomfortable wooden chair, suddenly cautious, moving with exaggerated care, trying to overcome the shuffling that otherwise took over. As he got up, smiled at the waitress and paid for his coffee, he felt energized. He was ready to navigate the short trip back home, suddenly thankful for life’s small mercies.

At least he had this walk.

At least he could still look forward to feeling the sun shining on his bare forearms.

At least he had his thoughts to sift through, clear and plentiful. Giving at least some sense of control.

Another brilliant piece from a GUNNAS WRITING MASTERCLASS writer.

SuperMum. She is that lady in the daytime ads for paper towels and other household products. Her home is immaculate,

her hair always done,

her kids are neat,

and when little Timmy comes in caked in mud she simply tilts her head to the side and smiles, hands on hips. Ah, Timmy. She sits on her sparkly white couch in her white pants  (a sure sign of a meticulously kept calendar) drinking tea and swapping organic baby food recipes with her SuperMum friends. You know her well, perhaps you even aspire to be her, but you know what? That bitch ain’t even real.

In the western world, we are fed this idea of motherhood. That a good mother is someone who willingly gives up her life and sacrifices her own wants and desires to be in service to her family. Mums who go back to work “early” or getaway on long vacations sans kids are often labelled as selfish. But if you can work from home, and tend to the kids, and keep a clean house for guests while serving up home-baked goods – all with a smile – then, congrats, you have reached SuperMum status. All praise be to SuperMum.

Seriously, have we even moved on from that painfully idyllic depiction of the 1940s housewife? The truth is, no one is SuperMum.

This is an image we see blaring at us from every television ad, every billboard, every magazine. Even if we ignore the SuperMum image she lives in our peripherals and influences our perception of motherhood. If you want a closer look at such depictions check out the hilarious It’s Like They Know Us. You won’t regret it.

So what is wrong with aspiring to perfection? Well, for one it is an unattainable goal. So many mums struggle with the drastic changes that becoming a parent brings to the everyday; to sleep, to your body, to your role in society, your life goals, your finances, to your very purpose in life. There is enough changes to stress you out without this pristine SuperMum image reminding us of how parenting life should look and how ours completely does not.

At the least this causes exhaustion and stress trying to keep up, at worst it causes depression. The next thing you know we are perpetuating the sickeningly sweet language that accompanies such imagery, talking about every smile being a miracle, and how life has never been better when in reality parenting is so often messy, tiring, and thankless. Not that there aren’t moments of joy, but there are also moments of despair. A realistic depiction of parenthood is desperately needed.

Having SuperMum around doesn’t leave room for the rich diversity of real motherhood experiences. Instead we find ourselves all putting on airs, trying to play at perfection while sweeping our struggles beneath the rug.

Dammit, let’s kill SuperMum. Let’s gather together with our torches and pitchforks and bury that ridiculous image of female perfection. We don’t need her. We don’t need any idyllic goal for inspiration. All we need is a mirror held up to the realities of motherhood: the chaos, the mess, the joy, the fun. The fuck-it-I’m-sure-it-will-all-work-out-eventually nature of parenthood in general. The more we share our honest stories of motherhood, the more SuperMum melts. Oh, what a world, what a world! Good riddance.