Is It Just Me? (2 page)

I am overweight and happy. It hasn't always been this way. I mean, I've always been “happy”, but I've lived with the dream of a “goal weight” hanging in front of me like a carrot (cake) since I was about eleven years old.

I recently found a diary entry from when I was twelve: “I'm going on holiday and I hope to lose weight but I'm not telling anyone so it'll be a surprise.” At that time I was cutting the crusts off my Bornhoffen toast (half the calories of toast are in the crust) and spreading it with whipped margarine (whipped with air – no calories in air). How miserable.

As I grew older I believed if I arrived at this fabled “goal weight”, then my life would be better. I'd be the sort of person who laughed loud during long lunches with beautiful friends. I'd have a string of handsome suitors and go on great road trips.

In the meantime I'd wait and starve and count calories. I was permanently on hold. I had boyfriends and flings but none were any good. I blamed my weight. If I was at my “goal weight” I'd find someone amazing and we'd drive to places for weekends away and listen to Nick Drake. Instead, I was heavy and this was why, as my friend so aptly put it, I was a “turd magnet”. Thin people had great boyfriends, didn't everyone know that?

When I met my partner I was wearing a size-20 dress and I was at a pub. It was summer and after three weeks of dating he made me a mixtape and track three was by Nick Drake. We quickly organised a spur-of-the-moment week in New Zealand. Hold on … isn't this the sort of beautiful life reserved only for people at their goal weight?

Then I had babies. Confidence and respect for my body soared. This body, so imperfect and so far from its “goal weight”, had created human beings. These human beings loved my body. My body was needed. What's more, I realised it was a perfectly good body.

About two years ago I decided I was tired of waiting to live. What if I never got to my “goal weight”? I would have spent my whole life waiting. What a waste.

So I like the idea of living the kind of life you want … right now. I started putting my runners in the car so I could go for a walk whenever I wanted. This is the sort of thing I thought Goal Weight Chrissie would do. Goal Weight Chrissie would go to the beach with her kids and build sandcastles. So that's what I do. Goal Weight Chrissie would eat big bowls of fresh salad and small bowls of delicious cheese. So that's what I do.

Being overweight is not easy. Normal-sized people like to talk about statistics so diabolical it's a wonder we even see any chubby people at all: we should all have exploded from some cardiac-related disease years ago.

Do-gooders look at us with concerned eyes and talk about blood pressure, circulation, difficulty conceiving … the list goes on. I can only talk for myself and say that yes, I am overweight, but my blood pressure is normal (to low), my circulation is great, I am not pre-diabetic (or pre-anything) and I conceived two children (one while I was on the Pill and the other after four days of thinking “Hmm, maybe a second baby would be nice …”).

There's no doubt overweight people can have problems conceiving. But so does my size-10 friend. No body, fat or thin, is without its issues. It's more about the type of life you're living. I eat well, grow a lot of my own food and cook 99 per cent of the food I eat. Processed food and creepy ingredients aren't good for you, no matter what size you are.

Life as an overweight woman is an exercise in apology. You always feel like you have to say sorry for your presence. That's what those sad eyes on the awkward size-18 waitress are saying: “Sorry you have to see me.”

If you eat in public, you leave yourself open to screaming voices from cars. It doesn't matter if you're eating a salad roll on the way to a meeting, and God help you if it's a Chiko roll. If you must go to a drive-thru, to make sure the attendants realise you're ordering for a group and don't think the four burgers are just for you, you end up saying things like, “Let me see … Sam wanted a Big Mac meal, didn't he?” (I'm cringing writing this because I'm guilty of it all.)

Ordering a full-cream flat white is often met with judgmental eyes, yet people at their “goal weight” do it every day of the week. So I do it, too. I'm not ashamed any more. It's satisfying to tuck into a California roll in full view of strangers.

I'm tired of maligning my size. So while I come to terms with my super-disobedient body that refuses to get thin despite pictures of Kate Winslet on my vision board, I refuse to put joy on hold for a time that may never come. I'm ordering that flat white and enjoying it. You should, too. Your Goal Weight Self would want it that way.

 

1st April 2012

When I was growing up Catholic the nuns used to make us sing a song called “Friends Are like Flowers”. It seemed sweet enough, posing questions like, “Are you a daisy, a rose or a dandelion?”

Incidentally, I don't think I'd like to be any of those floral examples. Daisy: boring. Rose: pretty, but nasty. Dandelion: hollow and likely to skedaddle in a thousand directions at the first sign of trouble.

I have a friend who is fleshy and Dutch. She'd be a tulip. That's a no-brainer. But what kind of flower represents the infectious hilarity of my friend who calls his mouth the “foodhole” and took my old corgi cross out for a nightcap? Or the sassiness of one gal pal who, in her newly single twenties, would lay back in her bed after she'd finished with her prey and point a languid finger to a Post-it note with the number of a taxi service on it (no words, just that languid finger)?

And what of my best friend, to whom no flower could ever do justice? There's just not a floral equivalent of her loyalty, quirkiness and empathy.

Sure, my friends come in all sorts of colours and often arrive at my place in bunches, but that's where the similarity to flowers ends.

I'm not proud to confess that, as my life has become fuller, my gang of friends has become smaller. Wilted. I never wanted this to happen. I just sort of looked up one day and they'd shuffled away. I have a small clutch of stayers – friends who still want to talk to me about my vegie patch/penchant for burnt-fig ice-cream/need for enormous handbags, but the truth is, I'm kinda boring. I probably would've stopped answering my calls, too. I spend all my time at the radio station, at home (I like to call it “The Compound”) with my kids or doing important stuff like driving to strangers' houses in suburbs I've never heard of to pick up bouncinettes, ExerSaucers and vintage school desks from eBay that are “pick-up only”. You know, all the important things.

I actually used to be a really top-notch friend. Ten years ago BC (before children), my ground-floor apartment in a groovy inner city cul-de-sac was home to great parties, generous home-cooked feeds and smoky all-night gabfests. I liked to lay it all on – so much that I had to cut back from bottles to casks … you know, so I could make the rent. My friends were beloved. And I saw so much of them! A few times a week we'd meet to tear strips off a reality TV show together or spin the lazy Susan at our local Chinese restaurant. These days I'm lucky to tap out a text once a week. And I'm actually okay with that.

I mean, sure, I miss the no-holds-barred fun I used to have with my old friends. But the fact is, the person I was ten years ago would have nothing in common with the person I am today, and the same probably applies to those friends who have moved on from me for more interesting pastures. The 28-year-old Chrissie would be bored stiff with my current chatter about variable interest rates and Leo calling his little Casio piano keyboard his “punano”. I'm bored just thinking about it. I'm drooping. Someone please cut my stem and empty one of those sachets in my water.

No. Friends are not like flowers. Friends are, I have come to the conclusion, more like diners. And my life is the restaurant.

When my social life was new and shiny and freshly open for business, you could get a table without a booking and just walk in off the street. I was cheap and cheerful and definitely BYO. Sure! Bring your friends, I'll squeeze them in. Over the years the restaurant has certainly become busier. Getting a table is much harder now. Some days the blinds stay shut. All. Day. Long.

I have regular customers who eat here every single day. My family. And their tables are just not up for grabs. Ever. But still, there are the good tables by the window and they're reserved for the small group of smiley diners who've been around since opening night. For some reason they keep coming back to my restaurant, even though the service is hit-and-miss and the food is often uninspired (or burnt, or made by the clever Indian fellow down the road and passed off as my own).

Yep. And still they come, seemingly oblivious to the fact that the bonkers maître d' has a Farex-encrusted cardigan and doesn't stop banging on about her vegie patch and burnt-fig ice-cream and her need for enormous handbags.

 

8th April 2012

On Logies night I will be swapping my usual Sunday-evening attire of a leopard-print Snuggie and mismatched sports socks for a shiny navy gown. I've scored an invitation to the Logies – TV's “night of nights” – and, truth be told, it's a gorgeous evening, so it's nice to have “an airing”, as Gran used to say.

As you can imagine, the transition from a Sunday night spent watching
60 Minutes
and trawling Coles Online to trundling up a red carpet in borrowed jewels and a pinchy wedge heel is not the easiest thing to pull off with two tiny children and two jobs.

A little while ago I was approached to be in a glossy magazine article about my Logies prep. They imagined a four-page spread highlighting the treatments, pills and potions I invest in weeks before the ceremony. Much to their disappointment, I told them they could probably fit this exposé on the contents page, as my preparation involves roughly three steps: get a dress; put it on; go to Logies.

Actually, that's a lie. I do squeeze in a nice bouncy blow wave, too. Best $50 a gal can spend and I do like big hair – it goes with the rest of me. The glossy went with Jessica Marais in the end, I think. Wise choice all round.

In 2011 I got in super-early with a Logies frock I'd bought online for $39.95. Simple. Black. Some lace. I think there was a satin bow in there somewhere. It was a little bit Miss Piggy meets
The Godfather
, which was, quite frankly, exactly the look I was after. But then I was nominated for three individual awards and one for
The Circle
and things got nuts. Really nuts. A dressmaker was flown from interstate to measure me up and I ended up with an amazing dress with more feathers and bones than a gaggle of geese. You don't remember it? There's a Google search in it for you.

I won the Most Popular New Female Talent award, which made me feel very young. And also very proud. It is an enormous honour to think that thousands of people voted for little old me. I still look at the Logie a few times a week (it's on my mantelpiece out of the reach of my three-year-old after the time I found it in the garden buried up to its neck) and get a little rush. Its glorious presence more than makes up for the crushing disappointment I felt when I didn't make prefect and came fifteenth in the 1987 Westpac Mathematics Competition.

This year I am nominated again for a silver statuette, which came as a complete surprise but certainly a pleasant one. When I left
The Circle
in 2011 to spend more time with my two little boys, a part of me mourned the loss of showbiz and all its shininess. That job was a dream come true. In saying “yes” to more time chiselling hardened Play-Doh off my kitchen floor, I said “no” to daily guffaws with my on-air girlfriends, permanently killer hair and an abundance of free stuff. Could there be a greater luxury than someone quietly placing a strong flat white at your elbow while you type your notes into an autocue?

The decision to leave was tough but something had to give. I returned to full-time work eight weeks after my second child was born in August 2011, and during the last few months of that year I somehow managed to keep a newborn breastfed baby alive, herd a toddler and, along with my beautiful and supportive co-hosts, churn out more live TV than any other show on Network Ten. I'd done it with one kid but doing it with two was a different ball game. I actually barely remember that time. I do remember, though, that some days I had to consciously stop and focus all my concentration just to remember how to put the car in drive. When I started thinking I should have had fewer children, I knew I was out of balance. And possibly out of my mind.

I have always loved to work. But then I had children and nothing could have prepared me for how much I love being their mother. I've heard people say parenting is the hardest job in the world but to me it is pure joy. But it does take time – something I just didn't have. Luckily the choice was there for me to switch to breakfast radio, which sees me home before my three-year-old, Leo, is tucking into his morning-tea blueberries. And to afford those, I sell homemade lemonade from my driveway on weekends – have you seen the price of those things? I'm surprised they're not delivered from the market in an Armaguard van, just like the winning Logies envelopes.

Tonight I'm getting a hairdo, whacking on a shiny new frock and sharing some laughs with my friends Gorgi Coghlan, Yumi Stynes, Denise Drysdale and Pam Barnes. I'll be the one in navy, thrilled to bits to be on the red carpet. And instead of all the worry associated with borrowing thousands of dollars worth of diamonds, I'll stick two new-season blueberries on my earlobes. I'll be sure to wave.

 

15th April 2012

Yesterday I had lunch with a big gang of my old colleagues. They're a groovy and sunny bunch of twenty-somethings. One of my favourites, Xavier, told me that since we'd last seen each other he'd moved from an inner-city share house to his own seventh-floor beachside apartment. By his own admission, the rent was so high he couldn't afford to eat but, he said, it was worth it. I got a faraway look in my eye. Imagining Xavier. In his apartment. Alone. Doing nothing.

And I got nostalgic for aloneness. I have about fifteen minutes a day where I am truly alone, and that is when I'm in the car on the way to work at 5am. I really miss being alone. I miss time. I can't even go to the bathroom uninterrupted. In fact, as I write this piece, one of my “housemates” has taken a break from collecting keys in his trike basket and is prodding my foot every five seconds or so with a pair of kid-safe scissors. It may come as no surprise that this is supremely annoying. This never happened in the good old days when I happily ticked the “spinster” category on the census form.

More Australians than ever before are living alone, and before you're quick to conjure images of overweight, bearded ladies with cats, eating out of open cans on the ironing board, consider the figure of almost one in four. Yep. A whole quarter of the population are returning home to find the kitchen exactly as they left it.

So why do we feel so sorry for them? People who live alone say they often feel marginalised and looked upon with pity as they have yet to hit the conventional “life jackpot” of partner/kids/someone to steer the Winnebago with. My gran lived to be eighty-six and never remarried after her husband passed away when she was only fifty-one. That's thirty-five years of meals for one. When I asked her why she never hooked up again, she said, “Why the hell would I want to do that?”

Living alone seems to be the ultimate in thumbing your nose at society. To live your own life and be accountable only to yourself is to shirk the responsibility of becoming a wife/mother or husband/father. What happens to people who don't want these titles?

Ten years ago, I was living alone with two cats and loving it. If my nearest and dearest were worried, they never said anything to me about it but, then again, I was probably too busy arranging my CDs in alphabetical order or high-fiving my gran to notice. I have always loved living alone. As soon as I could, I moved into my own place. I'd cook and organise and nap and read the newspaper cover to cover. I fell completely in love with who I was.

I also liked how being alone allowed me to truly be myself. Who could be mad at the wet towels on the bathroom floor? Or dinners consisting only of brown rice and tuna? Or watching back-to-back episodes of
Survivor
? No one, that's who. Bliss! I spent many a cask wine–fuelled evening in the then-revolutionary “chat rooms”, just to see what was doing.

I was mad for it. It didn't matter that a simple conversation consisting of “Hi, how are you? What do you do for a living?” took about forty-five minutes via dial-up modem, being in the midst of it let me feel as if I was at Central Perk from
Friends
, without even having to put a bra on.

I worry that if I hadn't been plucked from my singular existence, it would only have been a matter of time before emergency crews were fighting through stacks of newspapers and stockpiled tins of chickpeas, before realising that the only way to get me out was via cherry picker. If you are lucky enough to enjoy your own company, living alone can be a slippery slope to Hermitville, population: you. Having no one to answer to and be responsible for can be as addictive as crack cocaine and, as anyone footing the rent for a one-bedroom inner-city apartment will attest, just as expensive.

Living with people (my partner and two little ones) means I have to keep myself nice and live like a normal person. But sometimes I crave the good old days and I get jealous of those who have a little flat somewhere and a car with no baby seats in it. Those living that life right now should enjoy every minute because chances are it won't last.

One day, like me, you'll find yourself begging your tiny housemate for some privacy, with aforementioned housemate alleviating your distress with questions like, “Will a laser beam help?”

 

22nd April 2012