Talking to Teenagers: How I Turned My Relationship With My Daughter Around: Parenting Reflection #2
In a blog post last year, I said I’d write a post about my second daughter and how, through her, I learnt to be a better mother. That was easier said than done, believe me. Once kids reach a certain age, it’s difficult to write about them...
On Not Shaming Kids: Parenting Reflection #1
This isn’t the post I intended for this week, but the original one has turned into an unwieldy epic and I’m still working on it. Our second daughter finished school last year and will turn eighteen next month. This means both of...
The Story Behind the Story
ON WRITING ‘THE SISTERS’ SONG’ My novel, ‘The Sisters’ Song’, has evolved and that’s the only way to describe how it came into being. It’s nothing at all like what I set out to write, and this draft, Final Draft 3.0, is very different to...
Midweek Moment #14
Please indulge me this week, as there’s a story attached to my photo … As I wrote in a recent blog post, lately I’ve had cause to think about the things in our house that I cherish. I don’t have much that’s been passed down...
For Fathers’ Day
I wrote this piece a couple of years’ ago. It’s some of my early writing so please forgive the errors and simplicity! It was one of the first pieces I wrote in my own ‘voice’ and was published in the OOTA anthology, ‘Jukebox’,...
Rewriting Mothers’ Day
I wrote and published Monday’s Mothers’ Day post in record time—it was done and dusted in under thirty minutes. I wrote the thoughts as they came and published it with little editing. I knew it was raw, but I knew if I thought about it too long, I...
(Un)Happy Mothers’ Day
What do you do when you dread ‘Mothers’ Day’ coming around each year? When those words cause your insides to shrivel because all they do is remind you of the Mothers’ Days of your childhood, when you hid in your bedroom, while your mother stood...
Camping at Lucky Bay, WA
We’ve just returned from our family holiday. This year, we camped at Lucky Bay in Cape Le Grand National Park, about 800 km southeast of Perth. We’re experienced campers now, and I’ve come home recharged and refreshed. There’s also a few more...
Why I Chose to Be Motherless—Part 6
This is the final instalment in this series. The first post, which is about my childhood, can be found here. You can click the links at the end of each post to follow the series to here. It seems that September is my month for writing about the...
Why I Chose to be Motherless – Part 5
If you’ve landed here, you might want to read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 first. In Western Australia My mother packed up their house in Tasmania, and in February 2011, my husband flew over and brought both of my parents back with...