Farts are Funny

My new book ‘Donald The Magic Farty Bum’ is a story about how the world got its colours. It’s set in a time when the only only colours are grey and mission brown and everything is boring. With the help of a little boy and his magic farts, colour and joy begin to spread to the world.

I wrote this story about 8 years ago when I was living the good life in QLD. In fact, I wrote it in a teepee with a couple of girlfriends and we were having side- splitting belly- shaking laughing fits all night.

It’s only recently that I’ve been thinking about its significance. Yeah, I know it’s just a cute fart book, but maybe it’s not? I’ve experienced depression over the last few years and It literally feels like the colour has been drained out of the world. I haven’t been talking about it much lately, because I’ve learnt that my darkness turns off people.

In my experience, the most healing things for my heart and my anxiety are tears and laughter. I cry a lot and I laugh a lot. One thing about myself I admire is my ability to laugh at how ridiculous, ironic, overwhelming, and plain old fucked life can be. If I took it all seriously all the time, I’d be done for! Sometimes you just have to shake your head and laugh. When your 5 year old is having an indignant rant and you’ve run out of rhyme and reason to retaliate with, when something (else) goes wrong with your car, when you wake up with yet another sore throat, when you run out of money again, when you haven’t had a moment to yourself for weeks and you think you might break, when loneliness and grief and sadness sink their teeth into your heart and don’t want to let go. When life. Sometimes all I can do is laugh, or smile, and the humor brings with it a little splash of colour, a glimmer of hope and understanding that this moment will pass.

My new book may just be a fart story, not deep and meaningful like Little She-Wolf was. But farts are funny!!! My kids roar with laughter daily at their own farts, which infectiously has me laughing, sometimes despite my outrage, which somehow makes it even funnier!

So I bravely declare my upcoming book, Donald The Magic Farty Bum, a very important work of literature!

As my 5 year old just stated for no apparent reason “Fuck It!” I guess sometimes you just have to say it?

May you always find the colour, wherever and whenever it can be found. Laugh lots and fart more.

A bag of dicks list

I recently saw a fabulous service on Facebook where one can buy and 
anonymously send a bag of edible dicks. So I've made a little list of the where I 
would most love to send said Bag of Dicks to.

Daylight savings gets a bag of dicks. It was bad enough when my son woke up at 
5am to climb into my bed, wriggling and whispering and ensuring sleep time was 
over. But it's now 4am and I've got a bucket load of worms because the birds aren't up for another 3 hours and are sleeping in their birdy beds (or wherever the hell 
birds sleep!) Getting up at the asscrack of dawn doth not a go- getter make. More 
like a cranky sleep deprived mumma banshi. I seriously do not get daylight savings and I'm now convinced it was created purely to fuck with my head. 

Camping over easter can expect a delivery of a giant bag of dicks. It was all going 
great until we got in our fully loaded car to leave home and then my four year old 
proceeded to whinge and crack the shits the entire 3 hour drive. I thought 'surely 
once we're there he will chill out'. Nope, afraid not. Also about an hour from our 
destination my five year old felt ill. I figured it was travel sickness and that it 
would pass. Nope, the first moment we stepped onto the beach she spewed her 
little heart out and didn't stop all arvo or evening. 
I joined in around dinnertime, puking my way around a family friendly campsite 
like the annoying neighbour who drank all their wine stash on the first day. I was 
completely useless. Between the whining boy and the vomit i was in over my 
experienced camping head. By morning the sickness had mostly passed and we 
could of washed our spewy bedding and clothes and pulled up our hiking boots, 
but the whining started up again at 5am and i just couldn't do it. We loaded the car back up and left. I was utterly disappointed. So that's why Easter family camping gets a bag of dicks.

The owner of my rental house who wont fix my heater gets a nice big juicy bag of
 dicks. I bet HE doesn't have to get up at fuck O' Clock in Melbourne's freezing 
Autumn early mornings and turn on HIS oven with the door open to stay warm. 
It's a lot more charming and rustic in the movies. They're usually not electric 
ovens either. We're cold!!

My internet provider gets a bag of the fat ones for not knowing why my internet 
has gone out and now my phone data has gone $50 over.

Single parenting gets about 5 bags of dicks. Never an opportunity to say "ok i've 
had enough, it's your turn now" and walk away for a breather. nobody to bitch 
about daylight savings to, or get up for me at 4am occasionally. Nobody to tell me 
I'm not crazy and maybe that I'm doing a good job and to share the endless, 
relentless, overwhelming task of being responsible for two whole precious 
humans. Nobody to share those moments of hilarity and joy when something 
awesome or ridiculous happens, because I don' need to do an Alex Supertramp to know that life is most valuable when shared.

School holidays can kind of eat a bag of dicks. My house has become an episode of Play school with arts and crafts trailed all over the place. We've watched umpteen episodes of Dora the Explorer and gone to the park, the beach, the park, catching 
up with friends, the park. Did i mention the park? It's as relentless as parenting 
can be. Wouldn't be so bad if my children could get along for more than two 
minutes without trying to murder each other.

There are many other people and things i would love to send a bag of dicks to, but I just don't have the time to write them all down. These are the main ones that 
were on my mind at 4am on a cold, Autumn Easter Monday Melbourne morning. 
And if this is written badly it's because I typed it with my wireless bluetooth 
keyboard onto my 'notes' utility on my Iphone. 
Bag of dicks to that too.

Bumbling bee me

 

I’ve spontaneously found myself having another one of those rare date nights. Alone. The kids have gone to their dads for the night.

So here I am again, awkwardly pottering about my little cottage, flitting from one thing to the next like a bumblebee to its flowers. I say bumble because I really do bumble rather than flitter. My breasts alone exclude me from any flittering motions.

I moved the coffee table out of the lounge room and put on some music. I danced around a bit, hoping that nobody would see me through the window and then stopped when my neighbor did.

I let my bunny inside and then spent half an hour trying to coax him out from under my bed. I gave up. He’s still there.

I sniffed my armpit and decided I would have a bath. Later.

My mind began to wander to those bigger, important thoughts again. At a million miles an hour my brain attempted to piece my life together into some kind of semblance of sense and meaning.

I’m 32 and I still don’t quite know what I’m going to be when I grow up.

My son is 4 and in 3 years I will be booted of the parenting payments I depend on and the florescent light of responsibility will be blinding.

I have a degree that’s no good to me without adding a Masters to it. I have a shiatsu diploma that I’m not doing much with and I’m scrubbing other people’s fancy toilets and dusting their family portraits to pay my bills.

There must be more!

I think it’s time I faced a few truths.

Truth 1. I will never be a professional dancer. I should have started about 30 years ago and the glimpses I’ve caught of my booty shaking in the mirror lately have looked depressingly ‘mum- like’.

Truth 2. I will probably never get rich and famous from my music. I love singing and playing guitar and writing songs, but, well, I’m really just mediocre. It goes into my ‘hobbies’ list.

Truth 3. I’ve already had my two children and been married AND divorced, so I’m way ahead of most people my age! There’s still plenty of time to find my niche in the world.

It’s easy to give myself a hard time that I’m not a professional this or that. It’s easy to feel envious of the family’s whose homes I often find myself in (I just break into people’s houses and hang out sometimes (I’m joking! Geeze settle down!))

You know what though? I’m doing ok. I mean, I haven’t murdered anyone for a start. I have these two really gorgeous, happy kids who drive me nuts but I couldn’t imagine my life without. I haven’t given up on myself, I try and try and then I fail and I try again.

Sure, I don’t have a thermomix or savings for a holiday to Bali(what’s with everyone I know going to Bali these days?)

Sure, my car’s floor is indistinguishable from the ground outside the car (it’s camouflage).

Sure, my clean washing pile moves from my bed to the floor to my bed to the floor morning and night for weeks before I fold it and put it away.

But I’m one woman doing the work of at least two, if not a tribe.

As eager as I am to make my mark and be about 50 times more productive and successful, I am what I am and I do what I can with what I’ve got.

I’m a mum, a lounge room dancer, a campfire singer, a passionate writer and children’s book author, a shiatsu therapist, a dedicated conscious cook, a comedian (my kids think I’m pretty funny anyway), a deep thinker and a lover of all things human (not in a pervy way, in a psychological Jungian-type analytical what makes us tick-way).

So what does one do with this mish mash of humanity? What’s the best way to stir the pot and alchemically create the most kick ass version of Chloe that ever existed? That is the task at hand.

I won’t lie, it’s taken me a while to stop feeling like I’ve been handed the shitty end of the stick in life these last few years and I certainly still have my ‘everything is fucked’ days. But they’re less frequent.

And thank goodness to that I say.

A day to myself

A day to myself. A whole weekend in fact! Two days where I don’t have to assist negotiations of who gets the grey booster seat. Two nights where I don’t have to stretch my brain- power to think of creative ways to make my 4 year old feel like it was HIS idea to put his pull- up on. Two mornings where I don’t hear a little voice calling out through the dark of 5.30 am “Can I get up now, Mummy?” Or the ‘CLOMP’ of feet hitting the floorboards and the pitter- patter of those feet to my room and then those feet standing by my bed waiting for the covers to be lifted for mummy snuggles.

 

And you know what? I have no idea what to do with myself. I already spent an afternoon overdosing on back to back episodes of ‘Parenthood’, crying and flapping my arms like a dolphin at the sappy bits.

But today, I want to make my time count. I want to feel like I’ve really achieved something.

My mind runs through lists of all the ways this could happen. I could go for a bush walk. I could clean my house. I could come up with a new system of parenting strategies so I’m well prepared for the kids return, armed with clever and loving responses to any challenging situation!

 

Instead, I find myself walking around in circles cradling a second cup of coffee, starting to panic a little because it’s nearly 11am and I haven’t done anything awesome!

 

The truth I’ve been realizing of late is that being a parent involves a lot of contradicting feelings. The Phrase ‘you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t’ has been on my mind a lot lately.

I need a break and then I miss the kids. I need my own space and then I have no idea what to do with it. I want to be the most awesome self- resourceful version of my shining self I can possibly be, yet I don’t know where to start.

 

I can hear my alter ego, the rational one, saying “Chloe, you’re too hard on yourself”. Maybe that’s true, maybe there’s no harm in spending my free weekend mimicking a sloth-mumma and just enjoying the total peace. Perhaps I’ll make another coffee and do a few more laps of the house before I embark on my mission to be more awesome.

I am after all, pretty awesome already.