Saturday. I’m on the Met Line. Somewhere between
Those people across from me must think I’m a lunatic. Especially if they could see what I was reading. Because it isn’t Uncle Tom’s Cabin (one of the few works of fiction to produce significant tears), it isn’t about death or illness or injustice. It’s a - I’m shamed to admit it, but in my defence, its research – self help book, a life coaching book. A book on happiness.
Happiness. And there I am crying like a big fat thing that cries a lot.
Were it not for a writing project I’ve taken on, I would not be reading this book. I don’t think its really my thing, and besides, I don’t think I’m the target demographic. I presumed it may have something useful to say to me, but why was What Happy Working Mothers Know[i] making me cry?
Sure I’m childless and I haven’t worked a full time regular hours type job in four years. But I still have various commitments in my life that all require my time, I have friends and family who deserve a decent relationship with me. Surely, even if this book wasn’t immediately relevant I could still glean some insight from these happy mothers. I’m willing to be inspired as to how best balance work and relationship pressures, how to lead a happy and fulfilling life, how to follow my dreams, and achieve them. Oh wait, right. There it is. Achieve. My angst. My lack of achievement.
I recall being in yr 6 and asked in some stupid subject to identify my goals and finding this a vaguely off putting concept. Yes, there might be things that I wanted. But I wasn’t a goal setter. In much the same way my concept of what a feminist is skewed by some horror of my own inability to be a successful person (it would follow that if I became that I’d also be a successful woman, but dealings with my angst over the F word are for another day), I had a distain for being a “goal-setter”. A goal setter was a competitive, selfish, ambitious thing, who probably played a lot of sport and nothing in common with me, so in my 12 yr old wisdom I developed an aversion to goal setting. Again, when I was at TAFE we had to identify two short term and long term goals, and man, did I struggle. I don’t remember what I wrote. Perhaps something like finishing my apprenticeship. I know that one of my long term goals was to build meaningful relationships with the people I had met leading beach mission at South West Rocks and to see people in that area come to know Christ. Ambitious? In one sense, yes, very, though probably not at all what a career advisor would be looking for.
So somehow I just never really thought about what I wanted. When I was five I wanted to be a children’s book illustrator and writer (I called myself Jo Katar. Katar was an imminent writer of junior fiction. My mother has all the first editions). When I was a teenager I wanted to be a model and I sang into my hairbrush just like so many other girls, because I would join the spice girls now that Geri had quit. But the one small dream I had, to be recognised, to sing, was a dream and a dream alone and I left it locked in, drifting around my purple adolescent bedroom, because as far as I was concerned no one ever became a singer. I never voiced this. Never wrote it down. Never really realised it was what I wanted. It was just this thing that was. That floated about through my teenage and adult existence. What is the point I told myself in chasing a dream. Better off actually doing something, learning something, being useful, making money. I didn’t really see myself as settling for less, but of being grounded and realistic. I have a big fear of one day waking up and being sixty and thinking gosh, I spent my life chasing something that wasn’t mine to have. I had to insure against this. In so doing, was I not being sensible. Was, I not perhaps even being moral, because I was working and earning money and buying a car and paying off the loan and paying my rent. I was leading a youth group and a bible study and a beach mission. And that was me, and my identity and my happiness.
But page 24, said “Ask yourself the following questions; listen to your inner coach, be positive with yourself; and help yourself see how you can achieve the dream”. And I fell apart, then and there, on the Met Line, because I felt so powerless to do any of the things this happiness book suggested. I found myself wondering if I actually knew anything about anything.
[i] Greenberg, C & Avigdor, B (2009). What Happy Working Mothers Know, John Wiley and Sons,
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