Fifty_To_Fifty

 Jared is my youngest. He was born in a terrible hurry. Textbook waters breaking, amazing plug in the bed (that I wished in hindsight I had photographed), ducking round the corner to leave the other two kids with a friend overnight and then a trip to the hospital. When we got to the maternity ward they put in a very large room and told me I was fully dilated. I told them I wanted an epidural because that is what I had had with the other two babies and the midwife said to me, "it's too late for that now love, you have to push". I was very shocked.  Jared was also the most anxiety inducing baby. He was mobile from 9 months, walking climbing and touching all manner of dangerous objects. I needed to see a counsellor who ended up telling me, "everything is possible Anna but you need to ask yourself, is it probable?". He also seemed to have no pain threshold. He very rarely cried when he hurt himself. Just got up and kept going.

 Deb was my best friend at Shepp High. She was a twin sister to Judy, non-identical, Deb was blonde and Judy had mousey brown hair. They were both a year younger than most of us because in Deb's words her mum had her hands full and wanted to pack them off to school as soon as possible. Debbie was very gentle and naturally beautiful. I remember Mum commenting about how happy she was I was hanging out with Debbie because I stopped wearing makeup. Debbie and I loved Art except Debbie was fantastic at it. In Year 12, there weren't enough students in our cohort doing art so they sent us to Wanganui High instead. The teacher wasn't very engaging so Deb and I used to catch the bus across and then sometimes nick off to the fish and chip shop and get some chips and head into the International Village for the entire double period. Deb chose painting as her preferred medium for Year 12 Art and did a whole series of canvases of washing being thrown in the air. She won some acclaim for

H was one of my many bosses at Scottish Opera when I was on a working holiday visa. H was an odd looking man. Kind of half boy half man and a bit hobbit like with hair a bit like Mozart. I worked for him and Jenny and another lady (very rarely) when her secretary was away. Mark was away working at Tayinloan on salmon farm. H invited me out for lunch one day to a fancy restaurant in Glasgow. I didn't think anything of it at the time. Just a business lunch. He knew I was travelling with a boyfriend. Then about a month later I got invited to his house because he had some Australian friends he wanted to introduce me to. Also didn't think much of this. Just an after work social occasion. He had set me up with a room to stay in overnight and checked in on me to see how I was. Then he tried to pin me against the wall and kiss me which caused me to push him away and also call a cab to go home. Another month later I got two free tickets to the opera and special green room access for Mar

 Lucinda or Cindy is my second child. We had moved to Ballarat and I had forecast it was going to take some time to conceive her, just as it had done for her brother. We went to see the local IVF clinic to ask about artificial insemination again. He was hellbent on me having IVF (probably because it meant more income) and I had to insist that I only wanted low grade fertility treatment. At the same time I had been reading about a product called PreSeed, which was a sperm friendly lubricant created for couples trying to conceive. I ordered some and it arrived just as I put the vials of hormone in our fridge waiting for the next cycle. I never needed to use those vials, the PreSeed worked straight away and I knew almost immediately because I had to race out the back door and be violently morning sick in front of a stunned dog. Lucinda grew inside me while I was working at Mars. Every month my womb measured bigger than I should have been for the stage I was supposed to be in. My GP, a bla

John was my line manager at OEG. I remember the day he started and I was asked to set him up with a computer. We had terrible computers back then so I may have intentionally given him one of the worst performing computers in the fleet. That year I managed to push through a proposal for a complete network upgrade and disposal of the old computers including his. John had a massively hairy beard and big thick Italian spectacles. He was tall with a bit of a stooped walk and he loved to hang shit on Chrissi in reception, daily. He was a notorious mumbler. You had to listen hard sometimes. He was a workaholic which had a lot of appeal to the CEO, of a similar vein, and they did some amazing projects together, long nights building offices in NSW as well as all the things he was employed to do as a business manager which included sacking people. John was unfortunately the hatchet man and he had to dispatch of some popular but underperforming managers at OEG. He's never lost that stigma. He

 Thelma was the older sister of both my grandma and my great aunt Jean. There's a lovely biography of her online talking about her career successes and everything she did for the advancement and education of women. Before I found this biography, I knew her as one of those relatives for whom Mum would always insist we have impeccable manners. Aunty Thelma would arrive with her brother Uncle Fred and they would bring us very odd gifts. Found objects, for example one of those high bounce balls that a dog had chewed a piece off.  Aunty Thelma had a very posh voice, a glorious beehive bun atop her head à la Bronwyn Bishop and great big hips.  I remember one time we visited their home in Auburn and Aunty Thelma cooked up an amazing batch of scones on the spot and we watched her and Uncle Fred cheer on the cricketers on TV. She definitely did believe in the advancement of women because when she died she left my sister Rebecca and I each $10,000 in her will. This little nest egg came in ve