Fedler - Secret mothers business : one night, eight women, no kids, no holding back

secret mothers business

Joanne Fedler is a full-time mother and writer, former law lecturer and advocate for womens rights. She is the author of six books and the co-founder of Moonstone Media. She grew up in Johannesburg and now lives with her husband and two children in Sydney.

secret mothers business
one night, eight women, no kids, no holding back

Joanne Fedler

First published in 2006

Copyright Joanne Fedler 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

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National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

Fedler, Joanne.

Secret mothers business: one night, eight women, no kids, no holding back.

ISBN 1 74114 715 8.

1. Motherhood. 2. Mothers. 3. Female friendship. 4.
Women - Family relationships. I. Title.

306.8743

Set in 10.75/15 pt Adobe Caslon Pro by Bookhouse, Sydney
Printed in Australia by McPhersons Printing Group

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is dedicated to all mothers everywhere.
Whenever you feel like a bad mother,
and utterly aloneyoure not.
Youre not.

contents

I n June 2003, I was working on an article about Andrea Yates, an American woman who drowned her five children in the bath. During the course of my research, the horror that had compelled me to start writing shifted, making way for a reluctant empathy. I was ashamed of my compassion, uncertain as to how my outrage could sit together with this unlikely companion.

While I was battling with my response, Kathleen Folbigg exploded, through the media, into the Australian psycheanother mother who had killed her own children, four of them over a period of ten years. Nauseated, I was drawn into the tabloid gossip about the diaries she had kept, in which she wrote about how self-annihilating motherhood felt to her. I was startled by her confessions. Partly because they so closely resembled those I had penned during some gruelling times when my children were little.

My article, which appeared in the Good Weekend magazine of the Sydney Morning Herald, ended with the sentence, Perhaps if hell exists, Folbigg will burn for what she has done. But thankfully, I am not the one who will be judging her.

To tell you the truth, I was nervous about how people would respond. I anticipated condemnation. But apart from the odd outraged letter from more elderly readers, I was met with a quiet concession from other mothers that none of us would welcome a jurys scrutiny of our own mothering. Mothers everywhere identified with the point of my articlethat though the actions of mothers who kill their children are unimaginable, their desperation and loneliness are not uniquewhich could so easily have been misunderstood.

Some months later, I got together with a group of my female friends for a sleepover. Over a sumptuous feastand too many daiquiriswe began revealing the stories of our lives as mothers, wives, working women and the individuals we were before we became parents. There were revelations and confessions, lots of laughter, wine, foot massages and excruciatingly bad DVDs.

At the urging of my friend and agent Jane Ogilvie, I was spurred to write a book about that island of time, a sacred space of sharing. Secret Mothers Business emerged from that gathering and maps the events and emotions of a single evening in which eight women spend a night together, alone, husband- and child-free.

All the conversations between these covers are based on true conversations with real women. I know, because I am one of them.

The narrator is me. I have not altered any of the facts of my own life, other than the names of my husband and children and a few details to protect people I love (although in real life Im less of a bitch, honestly!). All the other women are fictionalisedI have merged characteristics of several friends into one character and invented scenarios that are not necessarily true to the lives of the particular women who were there that night. This is to protect the identities of the women involved. It is also to safeguard my precious friendships with these women, and to honour the trust that allowed these conversations to happen.

I wrote this book because I have faith in the power of truthtelling and I believe in the endurance of womens friendships. I did it because motherhood is undervalued, over-romanticised and a hell of a ride, and if youre in it, you know exactly what I mean.

Finally, I wrote this book to honour my children, my greatest teachers about my worst imperfections. I did it because I love them, and I have undertaken to be ruthlessly honest with them about life so that they can make informed choices in their lives.

No narrative can be enjoyed on an empty stomach, and so this one is dotted with a constellation of courses, to invoke the creativity and sensual delight that women derive from a beautiful plate of food, lovingly prepared. Like me, Ill bet you too have shared tearful and uproarious conversations with women friends around kitchen tables, between mouthfuls of homemade cooking and that blessed glass of wine...

All of the stories presented in the following pages are truethey either happened to me or someone, somewhere, told them to me. But all writing is an alloy of truth-telling, imagination and exaggeration. If this book makes you uncomfortable, it was just a story. If there is relief or comfort to be found, well then, enjoy.

Joanne Fedler

The narrator (a.k.a Me)

Age: 37 (same age as Marianne Faithfulls Lucy Jordan when it dawned on her that riding through Paris in a sports car with the warm wind in her hair was just never gonna happen... sigh).

Marital Status: Recently married Frank, father of my children, after eight years together.

Kids: Jamie (7) and Aaron (4).

Occupation: Writer (once law teacher and womens rights activist).

Issues: Will our kids forgive us for robbing them of grandparents and cousins who we left in South Africa four years ago? After Bali, is Australia safe? Aaron recently identified as a bully by his preschool teacher; Atkins or Weight Watchers? Oh, and sun damage to the cleavage.

Fantasies: To write like Amy Tan or Toni Morrison and become a world-famous novelist; to own my own home in Sydney in the next decade; failing these, anything involving Robbie Williams without a shirt on.

Dont Mention: Writers under thirty with bestsellers. Estate agents and landlords. Cancer of anything.

Hidden Alliances: I know it sounds very high school-ish, but Hels my best friend. Among all these Aussies, I sometimes feel culturally marginalised.

Three Self-descriptive Adjectives: Mother, writer, immigrant.

Helen (a.k.a Hel)

Age: 43

Marital Status: