There’s a lot to be said for changing your own self narrative.

Most people have an internal voice. A conscious, a narrator, ‘The Thinker’ as Charlie the shrink likes to say. Writers– bloggers in particular– we’re good at what we do because we have a rich, loud, vocal self–narrative.

We tell stories to ourselves, all day.

It’s that inner story that is the voice that’s predominant in your thoughts most of the time– because that voice is your thoughts. It’s a speaker for your emotions, your subconscious, and pretty much all the other stuff that clutters up people’s brains, minds and psyches. It’s got a lot of crap to sort through. It’s no wonder that what’s it saying isn’t always correct.

Thoughts can be wrong.

It took me years to get this– just because the voice was saying it, didn’t mean it was truth. Some days the Voice was just as scared or pissed off or tired as it was. It wasn’t all of me. What it said didn’t always define me. It was just a part of me, and sometimes it told lies.


Lately, it’s been telling more.

You can slip to place, without even realizing it, where the voice in your head tells you so many lies that you begin to internalize them. You begin to believe them– it’s no longer just a voice that’s speaking your thoughts. Those negative phrases become part of your own core belief system.

Phrases like “I killed my husband.” Or “No one will ever love me again”. Or “I’m worthless and useless and nothing except a mother to my children, not a real person at all.”

That’s the kind of thing the voice in my head has been telling me lately. I know that’s not true. And I know how to fix this, how to shut the voice up. I’ve done it before. I think a lot of us have had to, when our self esteem slips.

It’s just a matter of speaking to yourself in a voice that’s louder, clearer. It feels hollow and fake, a fallacy at first– it is a fallacy at first, simple hollow words with nothing behind them. But you have to be your own cheersquad.

I’m replacing “I’m fucked” with “I’m awesome”. I’m replacing “I’m unlovable” with “There are a stack of people who love me, and there was a man who thought I was amazing.”

Replacing “I’m worthless” with “I’m Lori.”

It’s not easy (who ever said it would be easy…?) and it takes time– but only a matter of weeks, compared to living with a voice in my head that hates me for the rest of my life.

It took me most of my early twenties to learn to separate that voice in my head from who I actually am. I think it’s harder when you are a natural story teller– you narrate stories about yourself… and you believe them. But I also believe in self fulfilling prophecies. If those internal stories are negative enough… life will follow suit.

I am not my self narrative. It’s part of me, not all of me– it’s a product of me. It is the product of my core, my experiences, my past, my future. And it feeds back into all of those things as well.

But it’s malleable and changeable. And it has to start being… just kinder to me. I need to be kinder to myself.

I need to speak softly, nicely to myself. There’s no one else here who can.

To my darling, wonderful, handsome, sexy Man,

i would really like a new phone. You keep telling me there is nothing wrong with my old one, and i suppose you are right. Except for the fact that the battery is screwed, the screen is popping off, the internet is useless and the keypad is actually bigger than the screen. imagine! We are not living in the dark ages here, you know. Keypads are so, like, 2006.

So, if you could find it in your heart to one day in the very near future purchase me a new phone, i would muchly appreciate it. One on a capped plan, remember, we really don’t want a repeat of the episode a few years back where i racked up a $900 phone bill in one month.

To make things interesting, i‘m not even going to tell you what kind of phone i would like. i really do think i have made it quite obvious.

Thanking you in advance for your consideration,
Signed,
Your loving wife, mother of your children, washer of your clothes, cooker (sometimes) of your food, fetcher of your takeaway, goddess of your bedroom. Get the picture?

P.S. A pink one would be awesome, thanks.

Hi all,

Inspired by Sarah over at Just Me, today’s game is called “What’s In Your bag?”. Plenty self explanatory, really. It’s an opportunity to show the blogosphere how incredible organised you are (Sarah) or how disgustingly chaotic your life actually is (me).

Let’s start at the beginning- a very good place to start.

This is my bag. A BratPack. I love it. I don’t love that I left it sitting under a window for six weeks before Bump was born, and the silk has faded irreparably. Dammit.

This is the contents of my bag. And the Chop is there too, he spotted food. I swear I didn’t realise how much crap was in there till I took it all out.

We have, in no particular order…

* Purse, sunnies, phone, cigarettes *ahem*, keys.
*Lip gloss, lip balm, quartz crystal in it’s little bag, Swiss army knife in pouch.
*Sunhats and beanies for both kids (you just never know what the weather will be like).
*Three pairs of socks for Bump, plus a jumpsuit, and a pair of pants a size too small. Spare shirt for the Chop.
*Spare muslin, purple spew rag.
*Nappies, wipes, talc, plastic container with bags and a change mat.
*Change mat that came with the bag. Note the colour difference.
*Snap lock bag with Sudocream (on closer inspection, it’s actually empty)., sunscreen, anti–bac hand gel.
*2 different deodorants, hand cream, Panadol, 2010 diary that I haven’t opened yet (comforting to know it’s there, though).
*Drink and snacks for the Chop.
*Blue mini bag with dummies. Dummy chain. Bottle of bubbles (what the?).
*Toys- 1 Thomas, 5 cars, 2 books, a small teddy bear.

I think that about covers it. Wow- and I thought Sarah had a Mary Poppins style carpet bag!!

As an added bonus, here are the things that shouldn’t have actually been in the bag, and have now been removed. The bottle of bubbles probably belongs here as well, but I decided that one was a keeper.

*Various bits of rubbish.
*A battery (disturbingly, this was in the pocket with the toys).
*The Bump’s pretty headband thingie.
* My USB drive (so that’s where that went).

And we’re done. Who else wants to play??

Hey y’all,


Because I am a giving, loving, sharing, peace-and-hippy-love kinda chick, I am doing you all a massive community service today by bringing you a guest post from one of my absolute favorite bloggers. His name is the SuperDaddy (Not his real name. Probably.) As we know, I love a good daddy blogger. And I love anyone with a Twitter addiction. And I love bloggers who are keeping it real, putting parenthood and all it’s icky bits out there for the world to see. The SuperDaddy checks all those boxes.
OK. Enough of my waffle. I’m not even supposed to be here here today. Introducing.. the SuperDaddy!!

“I’m not even suppose to be here today!”

Years ago, I had a decent job, by decent I mean paid well, the job actually sucked. It did not matter if I liked my job or not, I put every fiber of my being into that job. I was hiding from my life and from myself, so I worked all the time. I spent some of my days off on the job location doing things. I would work for people just so I would not be alone. I even, for one particular holiday, worked over twenty-four hours straight, so I would not have to think about myself, my life or anyone else. I was responsible for something and damn it, I was going to see it through to the end.

A year into this spiral decent into selling my soul to a company I loathed, I stood in the middle of the building one day and looked up, looked right, looked left, behind me and in front of me. It was then I realized I had successfully boxed myself in and I did not know what was going on in the world. I did not watch TV or read the newspaper; I still cannot tell you what or if anything happened in the world that year. I became the antithesis of everything I dreamed of becoming. I don’t want to get all cheesy and say I and an epiphany, but I do believe I muttered the line from Clerks that Dante repeats over and over in the movie, “I’m not even suppose to be here today!”

It‘s been ten years since I left that job. Many things have happened in my life between then and now. For starters, I got married.

When Rebecca and I got married, we said that we were too selfish with our time to have kids. Well, life has a way of teaching you lessons. Not only did we find out that we were indeed selfless people, but we enjoyed having kids.

However, once again I find myself boxed in. Boxed in among the four walls of my home with two kids that I think sometimes have it out for me. I have been trying to finish out my college degree, but my GPA went from a 4.0 to a 3.8 last semester and then there is this semester. I just have not had the time for homework and my GPA this semester has suffered. I haven’t had time to paint for over a year, I haven’t written anything creative for over a year (excluding the blog). I just have not had much time for me. I get maybe an hour in the afternoon when the kids are napping to be alone and maybe two hours after they go to bed for the night and before I go to bed.

I love my kids and I love taking care of them and I am proud to be the at home parent. However, I feel that I am loosing myself in the hustle of child rearing. It has started to fester inside me and I snapped the other night.

I went off the handle and made an ass of myself. I need to learn to let go when Rebecca comes home from work. I need to learn that the household will not fall apart if I decide to leave for a few hours. I need to learn to let Rebecca do her parental job. I need to get involved in some out-of-the-house activities. As a stay at home parent, I don’t get to say, “I’m not even suppose to be here today”, but we should be able to say, “Honey, I’m glad you’re home. I’ve missed you and I love you, but I’m leaving for a couple hours to be by myself, so I can rejuvenate my body and mind.”

This post is more of a confession. A confession of, I am not very super. I’m just a guy that makes mistakes everyday, some big and some small. Most days my mistakes go unnoticed, and then there are days when my mistakes seem to take the breath out of me. It is on those days when, we stay at home parents, need a day off. The working world gets two days off from their jobs, away from their co-workers and clients/customers. Stay at home parents really do not get that time away, not even when their spouse comes home. We still hear the fights, the whining; “I don’t like”, “I need”, when the spouse comes home it usually means that there is just an extra person to clean up after, just one more person that wants my attention, one more person that won’t leave me alone unless I go to the bathroom…and that’s what I get. I get ten minutes alone in the bathroom. My confession is; I am jealous of people who have it together.

How much of who we are, is where we come from?

I grew up in small town. A seaside town, on the picture perfect New South Wales south coast. A town that had a population of two and half thousand people in winter, and swelled in size to five thousand, bloated with tourists and holiday makers during the summer.

So much of me, comes from there.

The town I grew up in, sometimes I feel it is responsible for my naivety and my innocence. And I say that in the nicest possible way.

In the way that small towns usually are, everyone knew everyone in the place where I grew up. I can see those of you also grew up in tiny, familiar localities smiling ruefully at the bitter sweetness of this. Because there is comfort, is there not, in the suffocation of familiarity? Your children are safe, and you know where they are playing, what they are doing- if not from them, then from the townspeople. If someone is in need, no one hesitates to respond- the community pulls together over tragedies and hardships, car accidents and illnesses.

And then there is the reverse of that comfort- the churning, foaming sea of discontent that comes with gossip, small mindfulness and a lack of entertainment bar other people’s soap operatics. Rumors, truths and untruths, opinions and stories spread through small towns like bushfire through scrub. It’s easy enough, to talk about others, to perpetuate the grapevine, when the cast of the drama is small enough to intertwine old details with new ones, to repeat the same story to ten different people, all of whom can recognise the central characters.

Stranger danger was foreign, to the children of my seaside home. We knew of it, as a concept, but it had no bearing on our lives, where everyone was someone, and if you didn’t know a person directly, you know their mum or their dad or which shop on the main street they worked in.

My family owned a small business, in this tiny, seaside town, a disjointed Frankenstein of three even smaller businesses- a TAB agency in one half of the shop, where patrons could bet on horses, dogs, annd anything else that ran and ate money; and a combined fishing tackle and video store in the other half. The business faltered and spluttered through winter, but sang through summer when the tourists were in town. Family men who fancied themselves amateur fisherman purchased hand spools, rods, bait and burley in the fine weather, and bored mothers with restless children bought paperback novels and hired videos on rainy days. The gambling addicts,hard core rock fisherman, and locals in search of light entertainment kept the business afloat during winter. Just barely.

Managing our piecemeal business, in the very center of the main street, the epi-centre of the town, everyone knew my father. My mother was a teacher at the local primary school. As a kindergarten student at that school, with a backpack almost as big as myself and socks pulled up to my skinny knees, there was a total of 92 other students spread across 7 grades. I vividly remember, one day when I was five or six years old, the school principal taking the entire student body out to play a game of Dead Lions. The object of this game is simply to lay very, very still, not making a sound, for as long as possible. I can only imagine how much teachers must love it.

We played in the middle of the road, at the front of the school.

I’m not even joking.

There was a teacher at each end of the field of sleeping students, and if a car came along, they would stop and wait while we all got up and moved. I think that only happened once. And the driver of the car was more than happy to sit and wave to his grandchildren as they filed off the road with other students, then drive on through.

The beauty of small towns.

The things I remember best from my small town childhood are these- the wooden shed of a cinema, that showed Jurassic Park for two years running and opened only in school holidays.

Kangaroos lazing in the heat, dominant over the shabby greens of a nine hole golf course.

The weathered wood of a jetty beneath my feet.

A magnificent 50 foot sand hill, steep and smooth with a lip at the bottom that flung you into the sparkling blue water, known to local children as the Big S.

Twilight barbecues at at a family members caravan park with my cousins, running and fighting and playing and laughing.

Beating through scratchy, eucalyptus scented scrub, aware but unafraid of snakes and spiders and strangers.
 And the one thing I remember, with crystal clarity, a tableaux washed on my mind in the hues of a water color sunset?

The beach. Not the surf, so much, not the sand, but the beach as whole, right on dusk.

Viewing a whale through my fathers binoculars, her calf tucked close beside her, as they made a regal journey to colder waters. Sitting on sand dunes, snuggled into my mother’s lap, watching Hailey’s Comet streak the sky, the sight unimpeded by city lights, with other families in quiet mounds of warm clothes and laughter, dotted along the beach, looking to the sky. Running, with my brother, chasing seagulls, with cold water biting at our ankles as the waves slapped in.Walking, with my mother, in the cold early morning light, and making important inquiries of her as to whether the Easter Bunny was real (and I knew, didn’t I, even before she told me truth, yet it was still a shock, and I remember the dull throb as the last star of childhood hope waned within my soul).

The grittiness of cold sand. The salty, wet smell of ocean spray. The dry grass of the dunes, the calls of seagulls. The silhouettes of fisherman, rods bending into the ebbing waves.

The intrepid, cosseting warmth and vicious gossip of my interlinked, interwoven town, where you are not a local till you have lived there 20 years, and one mistake can be the undoing of your reputation. A small town, where people look out for each, and if they know your family, they know you.

There in only one road in to the town where I lived. This road is 10 kilometers long, sparse houses and thick Australian bushland on either side. Every 10 years or so, a bushfire roars through here. The natural cleanser and re-birther of the Australian scrub, the bringer of green shoots and rejuvenation. Life as it is intended, destruction for those silly enough to build in it’s path. When the long road in to my home town is cut off by bushfire, the only way out is by boat.

I love this un-curbed stretch of bitumen. For it’s beauty, the muted browns and reds and the thousand different shades of green that make up the bush. I love it for the fact that as my husband drives, with me s
itting shotgun, looking out the window and soaking in the scenery that I know so well, but have not seen for so long; I feel myself relax, lighten, the years slip away.

My small seaside tourist town. So much of who I am, I take from there.

Returning there, looking out the window at the bush scrub as I did as child….

It feels like coming home.

Femininity is subjective.

I don’t know why having short hair challenges it so much. I think part of it not having hair to flick around, to hide behind, to use as a fan in front of flirting eyes.

I’ve taken to wear bigger earring, chunkier necklaces, more makeup. I pay more attention to what I’m wearing now, it’s not as acceptable to just run to the shops in my track suit pants and slippers. It’s not anyone elses reactions to me– it’s the way I feel about it, the way I see myself in my mind.

Everyone has a mental image of themselves, the way they see themselves. Their self image. I’m still adjusting to seeing myself with short hair. When I’m not a bit dressed up I feel… well… a bit masculine. I don’t even like admitting that, it feels like another one of those anti–feminisms. But it’s truth.

Faux glasses and red lippie makes me feel… a bit arty.

It certainly has its benefits. It makes me pay more attention to my general appearance, even the bits and pieces that no one else pays any attention but me. I shave my legs, do my bikini line, pluck stray hairs from my brows on a much more regular basis than I used to. With the increased focus on dressing in way that’s flattering and feminine, and choosing different jewelry to wear each day; it’s works subtlety on my self esteem. I find myself more confident, without hair to hide behind. I’m more certain of what I’m wearing, that it looks good, because i took a few extra minutes to choose it. I even pay more attention to my hair than I usually did when it was long– as matter of course I would throw it back in a messy ponytail, add some bobby pins to keep it out of my eyes. Now I wax it with care and am the Imelda of hats, scarves and hair bands. Ironically, it now takes me ten minutes to do my hair instead of two, because I wax it and press it down, focus on strands of it and exactly where they sit.

The image of me that rests in my head varies wildly between pretty and sparkly and spunky, to dull and chunky and masculine. Some days I feel bigger than I am, my cheeks feel over blown and chipmunk–full. But the sparkly me becomes more and more frequent as that confidence grows, flamed by the increased focus on how I look and what I’m wearing, of how much body maintenance I’ve done, and how that all adds up to effect how I feel.

It’s so easy to be inherently feminine when my hair is long and flowing. This, struggling with it, simply makes me more aware of it. It’s another bonus of that skin shedding that came with the pixie cut… the emancipation of Lori.