I know that being famous doesn’t mean you’re rich, and that being rich doesn’t mean you are famous.

But I do know one thing.

When I am rich and famous (or just rich), I have no intention of keeping it real.

I see your interviews where you talk about keeping it real in your billion dollar mansion where you still do all your own cleaning and take your kids to school.

I see pictures of you in your designer sneakers shopping at the supermarket before you go home and make your own meals.

I see you holding hands with your kids on the ferris wheel or snuggling into their cute faces as the paparazzi shamelessly invade your personal space on a family holiday so that magazines sell.

I see you spruik your movies or your songs or your designs and I know that isn’t necessarily the real you. I know that you make your money selling stuff and that you have to walk the walk, and talk the talk, so we give you money.

I know that being in the public eye isn’t easy. But I make this solemn vow right now. If I am ever as rich and famous (or just rich) as you, I’m not going to keep it real.  I’m going to make it UNREAL.

I am going to pay somebody to cook my food and put away my clothes and clean my house. Sure, I’ll be happy to make popcorn occasionally, and I’m happy to give away gazillions to charity. But there is a small part of me, an insanely selfish part of me, that would gladly pay for someone to do all the stuff I don’t like to do. Like cook and clean or shop. That’s right, if I can also afford to have somebody go and buy my jeans and sneakers – I’d outsource that too.

I’ll be happy to hang out with my family and do all the ferris wheels and smooching bits. I’ll keep that real – because that’s the unreal part of MY real. Even now, when my bank accounts are as empty as a politicians promise.

But you will never see me quoted in a magazine or anywhere talking about how I like to keep things real.  Never. You can totally quote me on that.

    

A quick historical recap to start. As you know, teenagers were only invented in the post depression era, coming into their own post-WWII and were of course, they were American to start with.  The evolution of the teenager as we know them today, is almost 80 years in the making – resulting in psychologists, fashion designers and movie makers making an absolute motza of dosh over the years. 

As time has passed, and we have learned to treat children as humans (a relatively recent phenomena you have to agree), the teenager has become better understood – all that pesky hormones and developing brain stuff. No less frustrating of course. In fact they tend to be down right infuriating but we know enough to know that ‘this too shall pass’.

Of course, my children are not yet teenagers, not even tweenagers, and are perfect, so this is all hypothetical to me. But I was the best parent EVER before I actually had children, so I’m definitely able to help you now.

I admit to being somewhat in awe of the modern teenager.  When I in my early teens, for some reason I can’t remember, I took two $50 notes out of my mothers purse and hid them by taping to the wall behind my dresser.  Of course I was busted, my mother furious and I consequently spent some time in the salt mines.

Compare that with the lad that stole his parents credit card, took himself to Bali, stayed in a hotel and lived it up for a while, until they had to fly over and collect him. His mother SOLD the story to the media, and just calmly said “He doesn’t like the word No” and “I don’t think he’ll do it again.” No salt mines for him. Just Current Affair thank you very much and probably shit loads of kudos at school.

I mean that kid – he took teenage rebellion to a whole new level. I just hope he was brought up as Catholic as I was and is still feeling guilty thirty years later. Somehow though, I doubt it.

On the whole I love the chutzpah of teenagers today though. While some of them are skiving off and going to Bali, there are the ones like American Emma González who stands up to Drumpf and is an advocate for gun control, There is our own Rooan Al Kalmashi who uses her experience to advocate for refugee rights and encourages young people to become active citizens, or the delightful Bassam Maliki who set up Ubelonghere, an a project that fosters a culture of welcoming and inclusiveness around Australia and raises funds to support homeless youth and asylum seekers. 

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It’s just that sometimes hate is spewed at us in so many different ways, from the mouths of our politicians, from gutless national policies, from institutionalised misogyny, from defensive religious institutions, from the back seat of an Uber, from the headline of a newspaper, from lazy TV commentators, from professional xenophobes with newspaper columns, from the social feeds of angry, anonymous men whose privilege is being threatened by progress.

We think that the world is getting more unsafe, when the opposite is true. We think that nothing is changing, but yet so much is.

So much is.

And it’s happening at a molecular level. It’s happening when people stop using racist language to describe their taxi driver, it’s when seven year olds know about Malala, it’s when 10 year olds are appalled by notions of slavery, it’s when 15 year olds can’t imagine a world where a woman had to resign from her job if she got married, it is when 80 year olds are marching in pride rallies to support their grand children, it’s when schools are actively celebrating harmony days and children can’t imagine a world where you grew up knowing only how to say ‘hello’ in your own language because classrooms were not a place of diversity.

It’s happening globally too. World Vision over the last 5 years have seen over 90% of the children they treat for malnourishment make a full recovery and are reaching one person every ten seconds with clean water.  Men in India are actively taking a stand against child marriage that has tarnished the future of young girls for centuries. The amount of people living in extreme poverty (under $1.90 a day) has dropped by over one billion. The number of children dying due to poverty over the last twenty years has dropped from over 30,000 per day to under 16,000.

At the same time as first worlders are banging on about how detrimental innovation and technology are to the lives of themselves and their families, families in developing countries are benefitting from pilot programs like Last Mile Mobile Solution (LMMS). Started by World Vision and used by them and a bunch of other organisations now, it ensures that in times of crisis or at ‘The ‘last mile’ (the critical stage of humanitarian aid delivery) that essential supplies reach the people most affected by disasters. Aid recipients are accurately tracked. Rations and supplies are calculated and distributed with precision. That’s something like 4.5 million beneficiaries in over 29 countries supported by a dozen different humanitarian agencies.

Bloody technology.

All the small acts of kindness, the monthly donations, the time given to causes and projects, the letters written, the petitions signed, the marches marched, the sharing of information, the miles walked or jogged to raise funds, the sausages sizzled, the fetes held, the volunteers volunteering…. all of it is making a change.

The world is full of Yassmins and Magdas and Behrouzs. But it’s also full of Janes and Mohammeds and Simons and Wolfgangs and Svetlanas and Chucks and Brads and Kates and Imanis and Ashas and Richards and…. well, I think you get the picture.

The world is full of good people. Doing good things. Changing the world for the better. One little bit at the time.

Seek them out. Be one.

     

It wasn’t something we suggested. She’d been thinking about it for a while before she asked to do it. She chose a style she’d seen on Emma Watson who is her all time favourite actress and feminist, who she has been reading about in ‘Good night stories for Rebel Girls’ and googling to find out more. It’s a parenting win as far as we are concerned.

Plus it’s just hair. Her hair. She wants it cut she can have it cut. She wants to grow it. She can grow it.

What has totally blown my mind is how cutting her hair made her stand out in the playground.

Little girls from other years were coming up to me in the playground asking why she’d cut her hair. And when I said she wanted to, they kept asking “but why? she is a girl”. Parents were asking if she was sick or had cut it accidentally. Another girl said she loved it – but she would never do something that made her look different. A couple of girls in her class were snarky jerks about her looking like a boy, and while I was tempted to go all Samuel Jackson in Pulp Fiction on them, I said nothing.

And looking around the playground I saw that she was unusual.  There was no short, short hair cuts on girls to be seen on any of the other heads running about.  Here I was occasionally despairing that the uniform code didn’t allow the girls to wear pants, but I hadn’t realised that gender conformity was so strong in in so many more ways across the playground.

In fact, looking around the playground, the girls were a sea of ‘same, same’. It is the boys and boys alone that were expressing their individuality in their haircuts. Long hair, short hair, fades, undercuts, buzz cuts, mini mohawks – you name it – it was there.  If you were male.

I do not think that in order to be a strong woman you need to deny your femininity by lopping off locks and burning bras.  But I do think that if we look around our playgrounds and see nothing but conformity in the ‘look’ of our female students and diversity in the male students we need to be having a good hard look at ourselves.

I completely accept that had my daughter not chosen to cut her hair, I would probably not have noticed. But now that I have, I’m going to be more mindful of celebrating other demonstrations of individuality when I see them in my daughters or their friends. I’m going to remember how if one small girl cutting her hair short can temporarily throw a playground into a spin, how hard it must be for children who follow their own paths in other ways every single day.

Those that have been following along at home for a while know that I think that the sun rises and sets in my children’s bottoms. I love them with a fierceness I never knew possible. But I can tell that I am feeling so proud of my eldest daughter right now that I could pop.

Because she was aware that her haircut would not be loved by all. She told me on Friday after she got her haircut that she thought some people would make fun of her.  But she did it anyway. Because she wanted to do it. And she followed her own path in her own small way.

Is there anything more badass?

     

But the fact is, death is a fact of life. We don’t know whether we are going to live until we are 101 or die tomorrow. No matter what we do to look after ourselves, no matter how well we eat or how often we exercise, there is nothing that protects us from the random events that take people we love away in an instant.

And then there is old age.  That stage of life where people can appear to be a homogenous blend of high pants, white hair and wrinkles. Where in fact, there are people that have lived these extraordinary lives through wars and spouses and innovation and change that has been unparalleled in the centuries before. 

Yesterday we went to the funeral of my favourite great-aunt. The last of her generation. Her name was Betty and in my life time she was a fierce, sassy, no bullshit broad. And I understand that she was like that long before my lifetime. She smoked way longer than she should of, she’d driven trucks during the war, been a nurse, played golf, was part of the RSL, and the Red Cross, outlived two husbands, raised a strong and open minded daughter and she loved her family openly and vocally.  She could be curmudgeonly when the mood took her, but having known her siblings (my grandfather included), I’m pretty sure that was genetics. 

But the side of Aunty Betty that we got to see most as her grand-nieces and nephews was her mischievous side. She was the Aunt that would let you have ginger beer and lemon squash every time you visited. Or ice-cream before dinner. She would encourage us in small acts of defiance and she gave the kind of hugs that only people who didn’t give a shit what other people thought could give.

Source: AIPP Reflections Project 2015

She enjoyed having a natter and a good argument. I still remember a spirited discussion between her and my mother when I was quite young, in which she told my mother she was ‘just plain wrong’ – a concept so alien to me at that age that I was convinced she’d disappear in a puff of smoke. Despite realising in later years that she and I were at opposite ends of the political spectrum, she was the one that told me that if I believed in something I should say it out loud even if nobody else agreed with me. She said a lot of things quite emphatically. I liked that about her.

I was pleased my daughters got to meet her. Their great-great-Aunt. In the way of small people, they understood that she enjoyed their company even as her mind wandered.  It was only a few short years ago that she played tag with Tully even though she couldn’t move that fast and was going blind. She just loved the simplicity of seeing a small person shoot past her giggling. I remember it from visiting her when I was small, and I remember seeing her like that with her own beloved grandchildren. I want to be that kind of old – the kind that actively enjoyed the company of people of all ages. 

A post is not enough to capture all of the feelings I have about Aunty Betty. At the very least she lived a life which deserves a book in which I am nought but an extremely peripheral player. But I know this for sure – like all of us, Aunty Betty was a complex, imperfect individual. Like all masterpieces, her beauty was in the layers and the extraordinary strokes that marked her. Like all masterpieces, everybody that looked at her or knew her, saw her value in different ways.

But I think all of us agree, she was priceless, she was loved and she is irreplaceable. 

Go well Aunty Betty.

     

Fine. They don’t drink juice because they don’t like it. WHATEVER. So picky aren’t you?

Anyway, my friend asked, “Wondering about your perspective on this ‘mum moment’. Do you tell them they let the other side win or do you tell your kids that the better team won on the day. I’m for the latter but have been known to encourage my child (if the situation required it) to encourage rather than compete – mostly to avoid conflict. Thoughts?”

I think we should start by clarifying that the chances of me ever taking my children to watch a sporting game of any kind is VERY unlikely. Mainly because watching sports is dead boring – even if your dad happens to be a really good player. I mean my husband is splendid at his job too but I wouldn’t be interested in watching him do it either. Let alone inflict such madness on my children.

But I digress.

I think Giselle nailed it on this occasion. Even if the woman that wrote it mocked her English speaking skills for some reason I can’t work out.  Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And congratulating the other side for winning should be the thing they teach every kid that plays sports.  If they can’t do it – they don’t have what it takes to be on a team.

Because life is fecking unfair sometimes. I mean Steven Bradbury wasn’t meant to win the Short Speed Track in 2002. But everybody else crashed and he sailed into the history books as the first Australian to win a Winter Olympic Gold Medal.  Sucks to be the other guys sure, but he still won and he’s still probably the only Winter Olympian I could name – even under torture.

Don’t get me wrong, I get why the kids were heartbroken that Daddy didn’t win. The great thing about small people is that they think the sun shines out of your butt. They think you are the best at everything all of the time.  That’s why you have kids – they give you the only years of your life where you are revered as a god.

But Daddy’s team played the best they could. And the other team played their best. And on the day, their best was better. That’s life.

It’s like when my youngest gets a blind Lego bag and ends up with Superman’s Dad. Sure she’s disappointed. VERY disappointed. She immediately wants what her sister has, but the same rules apply as to Bradbury’s competitors or Tom Brady.. sucks to be you today. It doesn’t matter how much you want something, no matter how often the odds go your way, sometimes they don’t and you just have to hope the outcome is different next time.

In the meantime, you have to be happy for your sister that got Harley Quinn even though you got Superman’s Dad. I get that it’s disappointing for you, but it’s not all about you. Which is totally unfair I get it, but that’s life. And life can be a complete arse no matter how well you play it.

I’m not a fan of disappointment.  I don’t know anybody that is. But if you let your disappointment take away from the joy of somebody else, than you’re a dick.

Basically, I’m with the supermodel on this one – it is never ever ever too early to teach your kids, that no matter what goes down in life, don’t be a dick.