Sturmfrei
Meaning the freedom of being alone, the ability to do what you want (German words: 'storm free')
Dear Reader
This is a watercolour I painted of a photograph my late Grandfather took of me and my kids. I love the photo simply for being an observation of my mothering from someone other than our little unit. The trouble with being in a failing relationship, and then, being a single mother during most of your early mothering experiences, is that there are relatively few family photos of you in there. I have since remarried, but early motherhood is behind me.
I am very much still learning but I am loving messing around with watercolour. It forces me not to overthink things.
Since I last wrote to you the season has changed and I feel so much better. I knew I would, but gosh, it felt like forever coming.
I might be the only person in the world who didn’t like Baby Reindeer. Don’t hate me. It was captivating and touching, but I don’t think he has processed his experiences enough to tell the story.
It reminded me of when women’s media, like xoJane, specialised in these very raw stories where young women wrote exciting confessionals in particularly vulnerable ways. (Remember "Should I bring my 10-year-old [daughter] to a sex shop?"?). Because the stories were interesting, they invariably went viral,1 and because they were often attached to shame, they were automatically seen as important2.
But, the writers came off badly. They, or those close to them, were often humiliated recklessly in the stories, in fact the self-loathing was sometimes the attraction, and the stories seemed to invite the audience to make big, dumb judgements about it all. Sometimes, the stories felt harassing for readers. Why am I being asked to have an opinion about something so personal without context or comparable experience? And, if this does relate to my own experience, then am I now forced to be part of the big, crazy conversation you’ve started about the topic? When the dust settled, the feminist writing sphere began to wonder if this was exploitative rather than empowering, and this style of writing went out of fashion for women. Maybe it is only beginning for men.
Anyway, in terms of Baby Reindeer, I am really glad that male victim stories are being told, but I am not surprised this has turned into a wild ride for the author and his real life. Last year I spoke on a panel with Shannon Molloy at a writers’ festival. He was there to talk about his book, You Made Me This Way, which is about his and other men’s experiences of surviving sexual abuse. Molloy has really interrogated his experience and his response to it. He is prepared, and because he is, you feel safe as an audience with him.
So, there’s a nice controversial take for a newsletter introduction. I didn’t manage to quite get this April newsletter out in April, forgive me. I am determined to do better with my May one.
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Look, I am more scared than I let on, but also full of love sometimes joy and mostly just unsure of what to do and look, I do believe in grief, and grief as aperture, and aperture as how we see ourselves see each other and it's late and getting later. There's that too.
- Abigail Parry
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Good Mood
Curtis Harding really does these retro sounds so well. This song is an instant uplift.
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Notes From My Journal
I read that study that everyone else read, too. How men who are married live longer than men who are not. Men who kiss their wife goodbye each day live four years longer than men who do not.
Apparently, women don’t gain any advantage from being married; in fact they may lose years of their life. Or worse.
Marriage is vampiric. You can love him, desire him, be held by him, make babies, combine finances, but he lives off you.
What to do if you want to marry him, anyway? You have to keep some close friends, it seems. I read it is women friends who extend the woman’s life.
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You have to sit with that vulnerability, my friend says. That is your work in this process.
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In a way, maybe he found me more attractive for being vulnerable. Maybe I found him more attractive for being unsafe.
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My friend looks at the time and tells me she must leave in time to make it to a show. She is going with another long-time friend to support that friend’s now adult daughter in her first burlesque show. This might be the most 90s girl moment I have seen. You mean, I say, we used to watch our friends doing nudey shows and now we are going to be watching our daughters doing them? I can’t imagine it, she says. Lucky we did all that public breastfeeding when they were young, I think.
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You’re an overachiever, the woman says to my daughter. That’s funny, my daughter replies, because I might really be an underachiever.
(Just as an overachiever would say, I think).
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The thing that happened in middle-age that I did not expect was that both of us became really ambitious and our careers got serious. It was easier to see each other when our lives were overflowing with babies and small children.
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My husband and I spend Sunday morning cleaning up the kitchen. I take a break to text my adult daughter - You are officially banned from baking at our house.
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The olive tree growing in the big terracotta pot will always remind me that I pulled the car over and asked my daughter to rescue that pot when I saw it abandoned on the side of the road. It is so heavy, she said, puffing, when she got back into the car.
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My fifteen-year-old son and the girl who introduced him to 1970s Japanese jazz are lying on his bed together, with their knees up, heads on one another’s shoulders, whispering. I only allow myself the very occasional glance at them.
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My son found himself a part-time job. He works for an Iranian family running a restaurant. What are they like, I ask. He says they are two mothers in the kitchen who speak very little English and who call him Darling. On the shift before his birthday they sing to him at the end of the night.
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I bought you two of those tiny style t-shirts you like, I text my nineteen-year-old daughter. Mouse size, I say.
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I wish my daughter had accepted the safer car gift from me, instead of the broken car from her father. I know why she didn’t, but I wish she had.
I am always offering for her to take my car on her errands, especially if those errands involve my son - to be on the safe side. She plays at declining, telling me she doesn’t like the window tinting. I don’t bite back. I know how to stay quiet and wait. She takes my car keys on her way out the door and I stay perfectly still.
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Sadness
I think a lot of women have convinced themselves they’re sad when they’re actually furious.
- Christina Tucker
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My Heart
I have belonged to you in a way you haven’t to me.
- Anaïs Nin
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Reminder: Your Shitty Love Affairs as a Young Woman Were Good Practice for Becoming a Mother
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Good Enough Parenting
My husband and his colleagues are always reminding me there is no perfection in parenting, and that the research shows kids only really need ‘good enough’ parenting to get there.
So, did you read enough bedtime stories to them? Probably.
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Co-Sleeping
Our bed is the place where our teenage kids like to hang, too. Even the one that has moved out of home.
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Watch Out
Watch out for intellect
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.
- Anne Sexton
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On Art
We have art in order not to die from the truth.
- Nietzsche
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Also, on Art
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The Digital World of Avoidance
But for me, for now, the friction is what I’m looking for. I am grateful — genuinely — for what Google and Apple and others did to make digital life easy over the past two decades. But too much ease carries a cost. I was lulled into the belief that I didn’t have to make decisions. Now my digital life is a series of monuments to the cost of combining maximal storage with minimal intention.
I have thousands of photos of my children but few that I’ve set aside to revisit. I have records of virtually every text I’ve sent since I was in college but no idea how to find the ones that meant something. I spent years blasting my thoughts to millions of people on X and Facebook even as I fell behind on correspondence with dear friends. I have stored everything and saved nothing.
I do not blame anyone but myself for this. This is not something the corporations did to me. This is something I did to myself. But I am looking now for software that insists I make choices rather than whispers that none are needed. I don’t want my digital life to be one shame closet after another. A new metaphor has taken hold for me: I want it to be a garden I tend, snipping back the weeds and nourishing the plants.
- From Ezra Klein’s “Happy 20th Anniversary, Gmail. I’m Sorry I’m Leaving You” in The New York Times.
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Just Being a Woman is Enough
Just being a woman is enough for my wings to fall off - St. Teresa of Ávila, (1515 – 1582).
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Love
Courtney Love is doing a series on records of significance to her for BBC Radio. Episodes here. She is a chatty presenter with wonderful little stories, and it’s very pleasant background listening while you drive or fold the washing. Also, I love that she included Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman in the first episode.
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I’d Like to Be at a Dinner Party with These Two
Isaac Mizrahi talking to Pamela Adlon on his podcast here. I am always looking for another fix of Better Things. But, this was also interesting to hear Adlon talking about never really feeling particularly feminine growing up and then reaching an age now where she very much feels like she is a woman. It’s an interesting discussion about discomfort in one’s skin and the way in which getting older can settle that for some.
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On the Ethics of Travel Food Writing
“This has all contributed to why I’ve stopped doing restaurant- and travel-oriented writing. I don’t feel like there’s a place for me to do so in an honest way, or in the right way. A city deserves critics who have deep historical and cultural context; a city deserves well-paid and thoughtful critics who can tell the truth. The work must be done for the sake of making sense of food in said city, for its people. Yet how many cities have the critics they deserve? Recommendations and lists from boosters, tourism boards, and visitors are what the local and macro economic situation has allowed in their place”.
By the always thought-provoking Alicia Kennedy.
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Garden Nooks
I don’t particularly respond to luxury homeware designers because I honestly feel people’s design ideas are better when faced with some parameters, like budget and space, but bloody hell, Abigail Ahern knows how to make a nice garden room or two.
Like, here.
Here.
And here.
(She’s as obsessed with decorative grasses as I am).
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Beauty in Your Home
You need an Australian with a mullet to tell you how much you really want beauty in your home. James Howe is very opinionated, so he is not for everyone, but I really appreciate the way he loves beauty for beauty’s sake in suburbia.
Jame Howe on beauty and the impact it has on your life.
And here he is in praise of fibro shacks.
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By the Way
Beach shacks of Australia. Love these houses. And look at this little baby.
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Lie Down Somewhere Nice and Put This on Your Headphones 4
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Recommend
I just really like these laundry detergent sheets.
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Finally
How can I describe my life to you? I think a lot, listen to music, I’m fond of flowers.
- Susan Sontag
What a nice reminder to keep it simple.
Clickbait?
Some of them were genuinely important. And, even gross-out personal stories can play a role in radical demystification, but the line can also be very close to internalised misogyny.
My teenage son is very communicative, but I appreciate this observation about motherhood all the same.
Cheaper and better for the environment, too.
I’m always so happy to see your newsletter in my inbox!
Really beautiful watercolour