Justine Cullen - SEMI-GLOSS: Magazines, Motherhood and Misadventures in Having it All

LIKE A CAT, Ive lived nine lives. Actually, its probably more and Id be a fool to assume thats even the final number. One of the only things I know to be absolutely true in this life is that everything is temporary. Anyone who had one of those fringes that you teased into a birds nest using the palm of your hand and a ten-second-straight stream of Elnett knows that thats a good thing. But its also why tattoos are problematic, and sometimes marriages.

Joan Didion wrote that she had already lost touch with a couple of people she used to be. Sadly, Ive not only lost touch with but have completely forgotten most of mine. Theyve faded from my brain, like high school trigonometry and the words to Debbie Gibson songs. This sometimes makes me regret that I havent been the kind of person who was committed enough to keep a journal throughout the more interesting times of my life, but then Ill find a lone non-starter of a diary entry in an otherwise empty notebook, or pick up an old, melodrama-infused letter I wrote to someone years ago and Im so relieved that I never had the follow-through. Sometimes I could die of mortification just reading the caption on a two-year-old Instagram post. Some versions of you and your choice in filters are best left unremembered.

Most of my personas have been born out of my romantic relationships, which used to embarrass me. Surely it had to be anti-feminist how much history showed that my wardrobe, interests and sometimes even my opinions evolved constantly to match those of whoever I thought I was in love with at any particular time? Now I know theres no way to avoid being influenced in that way when youre still really working out who you are. Youre only human, not Michelle Obama. Plus, I think Ive left most of my boyfriends in a better state sartorially speaking than I found them, so at least its been an equal opportunity kind of morphing.

Over the years, Ive been a Surfer Chick and a Russian Mafia Moll (not the dangerous kind, just a Bondi version), Ive lived out all my Almost Famous fantasies on tour with a musician and his band, bored myself to distraction playing Corporate Wife across dinner tables with guys who were pushing forty and still asked new people they met where they went to high school, and I had my English soccer WAG days, where my metamorphosis also included picking up a strong London accent that Hayden and the boys once heard in a home VHS tape and rejoice in teasing me about relentlessly to this day. I dont think any of these were completely false personalitiesthey were more like tiny little latent parts of me (some more tiny than others) that for a brief period I pretended were the whole.

Even within relationships, we take on different parts that can change over time. We often start out as the Cool Girl, chill and easygoing. You take ex-girlfriends and boys nights in your stride. You go with him to never-ending footy games and do shots in the pub with his mates afterwards. Youre fun! You fit in! Youre a keeper! Its of course almost guaranteed that at some point in the future, Cool Girl will become a Nag, shooting dark daggers when he walks in the door late, having dared to go to the gym after work when youve been home with a baby all day. Its a scarily swift progression.

Or maybe once upon a time youre the Sex Kitten, getting ready to see him like youre preparing for war, spending a small fortune on waxing and facials and blow-dries and spray tans and pedicures, slathering yourself in coconut body butter and delicate, expensive hair oils, and applying make-up that took fourteen products and three YouTube tutorials to make you look like youre not wearing any so he thinks this aesthetically and sensorially pleasing-to-the-last-centimetre version of you is how you are naturally, straight out of the box. And suddenly its eight years and two babies later and you literally could not care less when he walks in on you while youre doing a poo. Its going to happen. Life moves, relationships change, people evolve.

These shifting roles happen in your career too. For the longest time, I was the wunderkind at work, the youngest in the room, the single advantage of never having gone to uni. I cant tell you the exact moment when that version of me was no longer, but at some point I looked around and found myself a bona fide elder statesman. Often in a meeting it will hit me that I could be the mother of everyone I work with. And I dont mean that as an exaggeration, I mean that I was sexually active the year they were born. I could have literally birthed all my colleagues.

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Lots of people seem to think that we become a different person every seven years. Philosopher Rudolf Steiner believed in a theory of human development based on seven-year cycles. Astrologists subscribe to continual seven-month growth phases relating to the twelve signs of the zodiac, with a complete cycle, or lesson, taking seven years. Theres even a theory that every cell in our bodies is completely regenerated over that time span, which would make us, essentially, a whole new us every seven years.

My own life at the applicable ages does seem to correspond neatly with some fairly super-significant life shifts. Admittedly, Im highly susceptible to finding truth in this kind of thing. Not that I believe in astrology, but I am such a Cancerian.

When I was aged seven, we moved to the suburbs, a place that would redefine how I saw myself, and would have reverberations for years to come. At fourteen, I discovered boys and magazinesand it was pretty much just all boys and magazines for the next seven years. (Its still all boys and magazines to this day, actually, except now the boys are those Ive given birth to rather than ones I met at the Caringbah under-18s nightclub, Munchkins.) At twenty-one, I landed in Portugal from London which ended up bringing my misguided footballers wife phase to an end in favour of the next full cycle, the freedom years, a time when I considered six tempura oysters and three Kir Royales a night a complete and life-sustaining diet. At twenty-eight, I became a mother, then quickly did it again. At thirty-five, I got married, something that went as well as can be expected when you make a life-altering decision of the heart based on sensible criteria like would never cheat on me and my nanna loves him.

And suddenly I found myself in my forty-second yearthe start of my most recent seven-year cyclegetting married to the great love of my life, pregnant with a new baby and about to start a brand-new job. My cells made me do it.

Of course, its not altogether true that all our cells regenerate every seven years. Some special cells in our bodies are with us from birth to death: the inner lens cells of the eye, the neurones in our cerebral cortexwhich is the part of the brain that makes us human, determining personality and intelligence as well as thinking and perceptionand the muscle cells of the heart. Our eyes, our brain and our hearts: the parts of us where we carry the wisdom of age, the memories of who we once were and the clarity of who weve become.

I TRIED TO get out of writing this book many times. I tried resisting and back-pedalling. I tried making excuses and pleading my case. I tried to just not write it at all. Many of these times I was pulled back in by Claire Kingston, whose idea this excessively long editors letter was in the first place. Thank you, Claire. Sorry I was such a pain in the arse. And thanks to Kelly Fagan, Courtney Lick and everyone else at Allen & Unwin for helping to massage this book into existence, however reluctantly it happened. Special love to CT for spending her sleeping hours hunting down that perfect Pantone pink for her cover design, and to Georges Antoni for taking the only pictures of my head that dont plunge me into an existential crisis.