I first became aware of photographer Ulyana Protassow through her True Beauty project last year. Some of my beloved fellow bloggers took part in the project and I could see how amazing their transformations were and how the photos released the individuality of their spirits. What had been beautiful anyway became sublime. I wanted photos that looked like that.

Because everyone loves a Before and After

As someone looking in from the outside, I’ve never been a lover of glamour shoots. To me they’ve always felt too contrived, too posed, too not me. But Ulyana’s photos are remarkable. My friend Louisa (who was involved in the True Beauty project) had warned me that the whole process of the shoot felt a little weird and staged so I was prepared for that.

What I wasn’t prepared for was a 3 hour pilates session.

Ulyana knows what she is doing and I knew the photos would be amazing (we’ll find out in a few weeks as Ulyana only shoots on film, so old-school but oh so brilliant), but the poses felt so strange and unnatural – like being contorted into animatronic Catwoman poses. Man, I got rolls in the way. I exercised muscles in my neck and stomach that I didn’t even think I had (and would prefer not to know about, quite frankly).

Ulyana and her wonderful makeup and hair stylist Jodie, were a perfect duo. They made me feel at ease. Special. The whole afternoon felt like having a laugh with old friends. I have always considered myself attractive, even though I have a black-belt in self-deprecation. Sure there are bits of my body I wished would be chewed up and spat out (fat gut, I’m looking at you), but when I look at myself in the mirror I like most of what I see. Ulyana and Jodie have the knack of tapping into that and making you feel even more beautiful. I think it takes a really special person to work out what it is that makes you come alive and capture that in a photo.

Something I did struggle with though, was the “relax your face and smile through your eyes” thing. I get what it’s meant to look like, but I’m a whole-face smiler. I find lots of sh*t funny, amusing, so I smile readily, but I smile with my lips, my eyes, my eyebrows (particularly my eyebrows). To isolate only your eyes is bloody difficult, particularly when you also have your bum sticking out to the side, elbows back, shoulder forward, chin forward and down and hovering above the ground in a kneeling position using only core stomach muscles that disappeared with the birth of your second child.

I wouldn’t be a professional model for sh*t.

So I laughed and giggled my way through the session. I couldn’t help it. I’m not a serious person. I am a buffoon. If I didn’t hate clowns so much, I’d probably be in the circus. It probably didn’t help that I’d been on steroids for a few days and was bouncing off the walls. Literally at one point. My bum was simply not meant to hover against a studio wall.

I trust Ulyana and her amazing talent implicitly and I can’t wait to see the photos in a couple of weeks (WATCH THIS SPACE!). I just hope she and Jodie have recovered from my irrepressibility.

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This photo shoot was sponsored by my wonderful husband, who gave me a glam photo session with Ulyana for Christmas last year. 

Last week taught me that I need to watch less American TV. Except perhaps for “Supernatural”, but I don’t exactly watch that for the touching and pithy life lessons.

I had a big afternoon on Thursday. Two contract-job interviews, one of which was a behavioural interview (I HATE behavioural interviews – I reckon I’ve conducted hundreds, but when it comes to being on the other side of the table, I SUCK. Big time); I suffered a bunch of clusterfuckaches all afternoon, dovetailing into my interviews (awesome) and had no time for a wee nanna nap before picking up the kids from care (first world problem, yes it is).

I collected Scout from after-care and discovered I’d failed Parenting 101 – she complained that her long-sleeved shirt only had 3/4 sleeves and on further investigation we realised she had worn a size 3 shirt to school photos and I hadn’t even noticed. She hadn’t really noticed either and simply thought she was rocking a tight-fitting number with a trendy arm-length.

Rocking the skin-tight look

We collected Inky from creche and I stopped outside the kinder room to chat to a friend whilst Scout went in to tackle Inky. And I mean tackle Inky. Scout is a very affectionate, tactile kid and has a habit of picking up little kids she loves and swinging them around in greeting. The little kids adore it apparently (?!?!?) but she gets told off by me every single time. My mother’s rhetoric bounces around in my brain as I remonstrate, “Please be careful, love – one day someone’s going to lose an eye!” Yes.

I say goodbye to my friend and hear a blood-curdling shriek. Followed by dramatic sobbing. Scout had picked up her little sister, swung her around, and dropped her. I didn’t think much of it at the time, signing her out and giving her a cuddle. But Inky continued sobbing all the way out of creche and in the car (you know the sob, heartbreakingly desperate, interspersed with fractured breaths as they struggle for air). As I pulled up at home and let the girls out, she stood gingerly on the nature strip, her left leg bent slightly, these tragic wet tears welling up in her eyes.

“Come one sweetie!” I say. But she refused to move.

“OMG, can you not walk?” I said with horror (although I actually said “Oh my God”, not “OMG”). She started sobbing again.

My child was lame! Maybe not as lame as her mum, but lame nonetheless. If she didn’t try to walk on her left leg, she wasn’t in any pain, so I decided to see how she was the following morning. I was a bit of an emotional wreck – the anxiety of potentially starting a work contract in one week, a tonne of study left to do, random clusterfuckaches that I hadn’t had time to have diagnosed, a lame child kicked in. I didn’t sleep well that night.

The next morning Inky still couldn’t walk so we hotfooted it to the Children’s. She was so patient with the whole “adventure”, charming nursing staff and crawling excitedly toward the aquarium (which was such a pathetically sad sight in itself, I felt like crying all over again). So suffice to say I was not hitting my motherhood peak that morning.

The reception staff registered her and said:

“Oh! She’s been hear recently!”

“Ummmmmm, no? Maybe, ummmm, 18 months ago?” But in my head I was saying, “What do you mean recently? How recently is significant? Is coming in for a high fever 18 months ago a pattern?” I felt paranoid and defensive. I thought that she was insinuating some kind of pattern – a pattern that might suggest I had possibly caused Inky’s broken bone?

I wanted to yell, “I didn’t cause this! There are WITNESSES that can attest same!”

I sat down in the waiting room. Emotional. Drained. Why did I have such a guilty conscience when I had nothing to feel guilty about?

At least the aquarium and the uber-sized takeaway babycino entertained her

I looked down at the stroller’s storage compartment and spied a plastic champagne glass from a recent trip to the park with some sparkling red dregs swishing around in the bottom.

I wanted to yell to the waiting room, “I’M NOT AN ALCOHOLIC! THIS IS FROM LAST WEEK!”

I sniffed in. Inky had done a jaw-droppingly pungent poo. I checked my bag. No nappies (of course). I could have bought some from the concourse upstairs but I didn’t want to lose my spot in the queue. So she crawled about the waiting room leaving a trail of noxious whiff behind her.

I wanted to yell, “I AM A GOOD MUM! I JUST DON’T WANT TO LOSE OUR PLACE IN THE QUEUE! HER HEALTH IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN YOUR OLFACTORY GLANDS!”

I had a vision of Coop calling Child Welfare to investigate me based on a broken bone, a suspected alcohol problem and feculent negligence. It was ridiculous.

Several people that morning asked, “How did (the leg injury) happen?” I responded, but wondered “Did I answer too quickly? Did I give too much information?” I felt like I was being judged, but it was my own self-adminstered perception of being judged – the hospital staff were probably not even batting an eyelid. Damn you, Private Practice.

Inky had an x-ray and the doctor couldn’t find any noticeable breaks, although suspected a tiny fracture would probably show up on a bone scan. He likened her injury to a “bone bruise” and said she’d probably be up and about in a week or two.

On the upside, I assumed that my job interview MUST have gone well as the client indicated they wanted someone to start in one week, which would thoroughly f*ck up my timings being at home with a lame child whilst my husband was in Sydney.

I fully believe that parents with kids who have a pattern of broken bones need further investigation. In most cases, it will just be an accident prone child (or in our case, an overly passionate elder sibling) but I think protecting kids with abusive parents is critical. It’s interesting, though, that many parents (like me) still feel guilty when there’s nothing to feel guilty about.

A dear friend of mine has a little boy who, a couple of years ago, got a black eye. He was even chosen for the front page of our local rag about the dangers of one of the nearby kindergarten playgrounds, based on this very injury. It was highly visible and she felt incredibly judged by people who didn’t know her – random strangers in the street, shop attendants. She knew she’d done nothing wrong, but there was no escaping the judgement she felt.

It’s human nature perhaps, for many parents to be concerned about what something “looks like” to the outside world. It reminds me of a particularly disliked saying that a particularly disliked (by me) ex-manager of mine used to spout when rabbiting on about my apparent negative work “attitude” - “Perception is Reality”. Except it’s not. Not by a long shot.

For now, I’m stepping away from the remote control.

For at least a week.

And I got the contract job. They want me to start in two weeks.

Do you have a guilty conscience when there’s NOTHING to feel guilty about?

Disclaimer: This post is NOT a random sunshine-grab for you to tell me how I haven’t changed AT ALL in 20 years. It’s not. No. Not at all.

I don’t generally bang on about how old I am. I’m not bothered by my age at all, or feel oppressed by it, even when I secretly envy the youth of Justin Bieber’s backup “dancers”. My age simply doesn’t define me. Sonia from Life Love Hiccups wrote a fabulous post last week about looking down the barrel of 40 and not feeling her age, and that really resonated with me. At work, I used to struggle coaching and managing my stable of graduates because “I’m not old enough to be in this position. What would they learn from me anyway. I’m a FRAUD”. Then I kick myself the arse, get a little attitude defrag and all becomes right with the world again.

Every now and then I look at the double chin starting to form and the bags under my eyes and I realise I’m not 20 anymore, but I reckon that’s motherhood, and life, having her wicked way with me more than age (delusion is clearly not in my dictionary).

20 years old. Before I’d discovered brow tweezers and when fairies and red lipstick were a way of life.

Sonia also posted a photo of herself from 20 years ago, which I am compelled to do. If you wondered whether I’d jump off a cliff because someone I respected did it, the answer is probably yes.

Assuming I had a parachute. And some Ventolin because you can bet your ass old photos sure pack a mighty dust-mite punch.

So I won’t tell you how old I’m turning today, but I’ll give you a cryptic clue. It gives me a perverse pleasure that the geeks and nerds of this world will probably get it in a second. It’s the answer to life, the universe and everything. EVERYTHING. Batten down the hatches Dan Murphy, I’m feeling fine.

Click on the image for the video

In Year 9, I was a Kate Bush freak. I had actually had a serious girlcrush on Kate from age 13 until my early 20s, but when I was 15 I learnt the “Wuthering Heights” “going over green fields in a red dress” dance (don’t tell me you don’t know it) and I used to roll it out at parties (that, cough, may or may not have included alcohol). The dance involved much back contorting and leg kicks and may (or may not) have been responsible for a sprained groin at one point. My girlfriends loved it and it made me feel all ethereal and shit. Kate was girly and floaty and very very weird. Which was me on a plate in 1987.

I loved that song for years and years AND YEARS. My mum thought it was just a “phase” but as we all know, serving that up to a 15 year old girl with a “teenagers-are-soooooooo-tiresome-and-faddish” eye-roll, assured an extra couple of years of KB obsession. I was a serious book buff at the time and the Kate Bush-ness got whipped up with my obsession with Emily Bronte’s book (and a side serve of Laurence Olivier infatuation) and coughed up an awkwardly eccentric teen with a penchant for spraining groins, wearing long flowing red dresses and knocking on windows. Come to think of it, I probably didn’t look unlike Sadako from The Ring.

But ahem, where was I? Oh yes.

I watched the “Wuthering Heights” video last week and I must confess I squirmed a bit. I had been such a dramatic, theatrical child and when I think of that kid I don’t see myself at all anymore. Which is probably just as well, as my own kids would probably run and hide every time they saw me coming (come to think of it, they do anyway). It made me cringe and it also made me sad. I can never go back to that kid. I can never indulge my imagination as freely as I did when I was 16. I can claw pieces of it back if I wanted to, but I’m here now. I love me now, but I also get melancholy for the old me then.

But let’s face it, if I tried to do a splendid high-kick like Kate did in that video now, my boobs would probably ricochet off my face. And we can’t have that. I’m a parent now. Word.

Linking up with My Mummy Daze for Stories of Me and With Some Grace for Flog Yo Blog Friday.