Fifty_To_Fifty

 Bernd is my original German penfriend.

 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...

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 ...

I can't remember how we met Panda but he was connected to Mark and I through two ways; he worked at Snob's Creek Fish Hatchery, a government funded aquaculture research organisation, and he also played tennis. Panda ended up playing in my B grade tennis team. I was appointed captain and he was my alternating number 1 or 2 male player in mixed tennis. He alternated with Mark who only had every second weekend off. Panda was left-handed so always played on the backhand side as his forehand. Our team won the finals three years in a row. For ages we mostly saw him through tennis or at Anni and Wil's house,  at the fish farm downstream from us. I never saw Panda with a steady girlfriend. He seemed to me, to prefer to flirt with women who were already in relationships with other men. He also never drank alcohol, preferring soft drinks. I still find this a bit of a mystery and whether these two facts are related. When he moved to Melbourne, he sometimes joined us out for dinner and...

 Anna E was my colleague at Mars. One day I was made to feel offended because my boss Gavin called her Young Anna and me Old Anna and then someone in the team reminded him that he shouldn't be calling me old. I was 36. I didn't feel old but I was definitely older than Anna in her late 20s. Anna was great for me. She got me out socialising, going to Karaoke at the pubs in Ballarat, parties at her place or at Lisa's and always full of useful information about where to find things and what to buy etc.

 Fiona has been my friend since we moved to Ballarat. She was a mature mum in her mid forties who had two girls and my husband met her first at St Peter's playgroup while I was working for Mars. She used to arrive late to playgroup with her eldest, Emma, with unbrushed hair, and baby Phoebe who was born a fortnight later than my daughter. We got along really well. Fiona was very vivacious, loved a chat, would chat with anyone. She used to be an Art curator and had an Art History degree so we had a common study connecting us. Her husband Robert was a Russian teacher at Melbourne Uni but he also wanted to study again and move into the IT field so he was picking my brain about how I ended up working in IT after doing an Arts degree. We had some lovely moments having picnics together in Ballarat Botanic gardens, playdates at the amazing citadel of a timber playground by the lake. Lovely cups of tea in Fiona's sunny, north facing kitchen in Webster St. Bags of hand me down clothes s...

 Cecilia and her husband Charlie were our landlords when Mark and I got back from our working holiday overseas. We had no money so we rented a one bedroom bedsit at the back of Charlie and Cecilia's Camberwell home just off Burke Road on Broadway. We slept on an air mattress, God, for a good couple of months until we bought a second hand bed in the Trading Post. Cecilia and Charlie were Filipino. Cecilia was very outgoing and Charlie, the opposite. Cecilia told us Charlie had a high paying job in the Phillipines and was a qualified engineer, but when they migrated to Australia, the only work he could get was labouring so he travelled long hours every day to get to different work sites around Melbourne. Cecilia was very generous. She was always knocking on the sliding door at the back of our bedsit, offering us all kinds of things she had cooked up. One day it was "porridge", except it wasn't the porridge that we were used to, it was a savoury porridge, oats, cabbage, ...

 I met Heather at uni. She was the first person I knew who had an openly gay sibling. Heather was the youngest in her family and her older sister, a nutritionist, was living with a woman. We all met this woman at Heather's 21st and I distinctly recall Wendy asking her about horseriding, because they were both horse mad, and how on earth did this lady ride a horse with no bra on. Isn't it uncomfortable, she inquired. Heather was accident prone. Particularly in vehicles. She wrote off two brand new vehicles, Holden Barinas, one of which, had passengers in it at the time, and I remember getting a letter while I was overseas from a friend who said, "we had time to say, 'Hey Heather, I think you're going to hit that pole'" Heather's mum was an amazing baker and every semester sent Heather back to uni with the hugest container of home made biscuits, utterly delicious. I kept in touch with Heather, every Christmas and every birthday, we'd send each other ...

Danny was a kid I used to sit next to on the bus to go to Shepp High. Both of us should have been going to Mooroopna High because it was the closest high school to our home but his sister had been allowed to enrol at Shepp High so he was also able to study there. There were only three of us attending Shepp High, the rest were Notre Dame Catholic College students, dirty-minded boys of Italian descent and stuck up girls. Danny was just a genuinely nice boy. Freckle faced, floppy fringe, clean cut. He was a year younger than me so we only interacted on the bus and during school holidays. When the school holidays rocked around we would ring each other up and plan extremely long bike rides down up and down the highway we lived on and head off into the bush by the river, kilometres and kilometres, just on pushbikes not fancy bikes. Danny's dad had a different view of life and did not believe in borrowing money so the family of four had lived in a tiny two-bedroom cottage on a corner bloc...

 Ruben is my first born. He is very special of course but also because he took such a long time to conceive. Mark and I tried for over four years to have him.  I had all manner of invasive tests which concluded in a diagnosis of "unexplained infertility" and even delved into naturopathic remedies to try to improve my chances of having a baby. My cycles were regular, I didn't have any known issues, my husband's sperm count was great; no one could explain why we we couldn't have children .  Eventually we went to see a fertility expert in Melbourne and he suggested I start what is known as a controlled cycle where hormones are injected (I had to do this myself as my husband has a phobia of needles) and then they took an ultrasound of my ovaries and predicted when I would ovulate and we made a date to see the specialist for artificial insemination with my husband's sperm. Normally this procedure has a very poor success rate and the specialist insisted that we didn...

In first year uni I met the very exuberant Melissa O'Sullivan. She was enrolled as a "mature age" student but she really didn't have many years on us 18 year olds. She was in my Italian class and also studying English Lit. She had quite a bit of sass and really made the Italian teacher work hard with a constant line of questioning about rules and expressions. She loved to learn and Italian would eventually be the language she taught a decade later after a hiatus working for a publishing firm and also becoming a mother when she moved to Queensland.  She came from a big and I later discovered, quite famous Mallee family, famous enough to be on Australian Story, harking from Patchewollock. She had three sisters and a brother and over the course of time I met all of them. When I moved to Queensland, Melissa wasn't living there, but she put me in touch with two of her sisters. One was her baby sister Kate and the other was a middle sister Clare. Clare was an exotic dan...

 Michael Fitzgerald was a mature student in my French class. He was in his thirties and the majority of the second year students were in their twenties and I can honestly say all of us had a massive crush on him. He had film star looks. He looked very similar to Daniel Day-Lewis and we were all smitten.  He lived at the same college residence as me but in a different tower, higher up the hill. I remember one time being on a pay phone call near the admin office, I was probably on the phone to Liesl, and he swaggered by (yes he really did swagger as he was quite tall and long-limbed) and turned around and winked at me as he went past and said, "Que tu es belle!". I nearly died and that day I admit I probably did draw attention with my hair up in a ponytail, a clingy, scoop neck top on and tight pants. Later that year we had a college function. I can't remember whether it was a ball or just a social occasion and my French friend Nathalie, one of the native speakers from Fren...

 Irini worked in the system support team with me at Monash. She was in charge of training faculty staff on how to use the student database. She was very extrovert, had a very loud laugh that used to travel the entire sea of cubefarm (partitioned offices) that we worked in and was absolutely stunning to look at: like a leggy Madonna (the singer just to clarify). She had a great rapport with Chris because of his grecophilia.  Her parents were born in Greece, migrated to Australia, had worked their entire life in a factory and had saved a small fortune. They tried really hard to instil a sense of discipline and commitment in Irini but she rebelled. During the course of the time that we worked together she ditched the ideal My Big Fat Greek Wedding boyfriend, an excellent soccer player to boot and traded him for a long haired blonde surfer called Anthony. She eventually rebelled against her nice, secure job at Monash too. I remember her crying out from her desk, "I am SO bored! I ...

Chris P or CP2 is one of the sharpest men I have ever known. The son of Italian immigrants he was raised in Port Melbourne and then lived in the eastern suburbs in Surrey Hills not far from Mark and I in Camberwell. When Mark and I got back from overseas in our late 20s I got a job at Monash Uni working on the student systems support team. I didn't actually have any true IT talent but I'd had some experience creating and using a database, a small amount of time overseas working for Realtek (a hugely successful Scottish startup) and had just started studying my Grad Dip in Computing at RMIT plus I had an awesome reference from Peter and some written ones (those were the days!) from La Trobe university. Chris wasn't in our team, I can't even remember the name of the team he worked on but it was nested in amongst Finance and he was responsible for setting the exam timetabling for all of the students at Monash Uni and making sure there were no clashes across all campuses. H...

 Liesl was a fun friend, initially. We met in first year, in French class. She was South African, brown skin, a mass of long dark curly hair, a round face with a button nose and a cheeky look in her eyes. She loved to dance, sing and act. She was travelling in from Melton every day to get to Uni then she found out that I lived off campus with a British-French couple and they had a spare room so she ended up boarding with me. This is all went really well until our landlords moved out to care for troubled kids in a halfway home and left us in charge of the running of the house. Then we added in a new stressor; we decided to work together in a call centre. So now all of a sudden we were living together, studying together, working together and playing together. We ended up having a massive fight in the middle of this and our landlady had to come home to resolve it. It was over something stupid, like me not standing outside watching over Liesl while she hung out the washing at night. I'...

 Julie was a close friend in high school. This is when I went to Mooroopna High before I switched to Shepparton. She was a very bright and diligent student in my class of all girls. Two out of the six or seven year level classes were all girl classes and every year I was always in one of those classes; 7A or 8B etc. They were the nerdy girls and probably the classes most teachers looked forward to teaching. Julie was a big framed girl. Tall and apple shaped body. She never wore pants or cords like me, only ever skirts or dresses. She had short hair and despite her dresses there was something butch about her. She said she was Swedish origin and her surname was certainly that but she was also born into a Jehovah's Witness family. She said her dad used to beat them with a hose if they were naughty. She had a younger sister who used to hang out with us sometimes. Julie had a massive crush on the Dutch PE teacher and every school holidays I would get an envelope jam packed with news and...

 Tricia was my mother-in-law. She was the butt of my sisters-in-law's jokes whenever we went away. Always in respect to all of her countless unorthodox parenting or grandparenting methods. When Mark and I were childless I used to sit with a drink in my hand in the Sydney or Melbourne penthouse apartment we had rented for the weekend away and listen in horror as these women would systematically indulge in taking her down wondering what on earth Trish had done to deserve such harsh criticism. She was the matriarch of a family of four boys and with each of their wives it was always a big table of ten for brunch and then soon there were babies and toddlers for everyone except Mark and I and that's when I learnt of Trish leaving her granddaughter to play by herself in a shopping centre playground while Trish tried on clothes in a nearby boutique or my nephews being driven to the local shops on Nanny and Poppy's laps and with respect to my sister-in-law Cathy, I actually never he...

Roger was president of the Part Time Evening and Mature Student Organisation (PEMSO) when I was employed as their secretary through the student union. He was very gregarious. He wore op shop clothes, had white hair and big beard. He talked about how he used to work for the government in export and drive a fancy car and then all of a sudden he rejected that entire lifestyle and became a greenie. After committee meetings or newsletter production, he sometimes took us up behind the uni to a nature walk where kangaroos roamed. At the end of the year, before I headed off the Queensland he threw a big breakup party at his property in King Lake. I remember driving there from Bundoora and climbing and climbing up the hillside from Whittlesea and then driving down a road that was more like a track until I finally arrived at his house. His house was a mud brick yurt and I remember being quite put off by the smell of composting toilet wafting into the living area of the home. He was married to an...