About Book Two

Book Two: Motherhood in My 40s

Preface

We are all masters of our own destiny.

I believe we do best to discover and honour our own dance and sing our own tunes in life.

Encouraged by the heartfelt response to my first book where I invited readers to dance with me to the first three tunes in my life on my childhood, corporate, and community adventures, I now joyfully release my second book to share the exciting music of a new tune in my life.

This book, Some Dance Different Tune Book 2: Motherhood in my 40s, is the first interlude of my current tune that started to build softly with soul searching in 2009 and culminated in the birth of our daughter Bianca in September 2010.

The privilege of becoming a mother at any age is a blessing. Having my first child in in my early 40s is an awesome gift that leaves my heart overflowing with gratitude.

Despite the twists and turns along the journey to motherhood, nothing in the multitude of blessings that make up my eventful life compares to the privilege of creating and bringing up a child of my own.

Many incidents in my life have influenced my decision to become a mother when I did. In this book, I would like to share how I embraced motherhood my own way in partnership with my loving husband, so that women and couples out there may be encouraged to embark on this fantastic journey your own way, too.

I hope to inspire more women to honour their own authenticity and follow their own time lines. When you are considering when the right time would be for you to embark on the adventure of motherhood, acknowledge that there are social norms and expectations, yet do it only when you are ready, at a time that is right for you.

Be true to yourself and follow your heart: Same dance, your tune.

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Foreword

As I read Trish’s book about her life choices and the journey which brought her to the point when she was ready to choose motherhood when she was 42, I reflected on how different and how privileged Trish and I have been to live at a time and in a society where women have these kinds of choices.

Those choices were not there for my great grandmother, my grandmother, or my mother. They were certainly not there for Trish’s mother who, like my great grandmother, also raised a large family of eight in a tiny house in the country with no amenities while facing the added challenge of being a migrant to this country who had to learn a new language and a very different way of life.

The life paths of those women were shaped for them by the norms of the society in which they were born and in which they lived.

Those who have read Trish’s first book will be familiar with the story of Trish’s childhood which was one of great material hardship but also one of great love within the traditional Italian commitment to family.

That book describes how those experiences forged a determination in Trish to succeed in life, motivated her to study and attain formal qualifications, and sharpened her focus on career.

Those childhood experiences also doubtless shaped Trish’s decision not to take the expected path of motherhood after her marriage in her early twenties to her ‘soul mate’ Angelo.

Instead, she continued to focus on her increasingly successful career, to cultivate a wide circle of friends, to have a rewarding social and recreational life of dancing and tennis amongst many other pursuits, to contribute actively and generously of time and money to the community, and to have time for her relationship with Angelo and for their shared spiritual life.

I first met Trish in December 2002 when she came to work at Lotterywest in a senior position on our marketing team. As with everyone at Lotterywest, I was immediately impressed with her energy, her work ethic, her competence and her generosity of spirit.

She was admired and respected, by all she came into contact with at Lotterywest and in the course of her work by people outside Lotterywest, especially for her focus on the positive in everyone—she was always sending messages either in person or via email to express gratitude and acknowledgment to members of her team and others for their work or something they had done.

Trish is one of those rare people in whose company you always feel better about yourself.

I had always assumed ever since Trish came to join the Lotterywest team, although she had never said as much to me and I would not have dreamed of asking, that children were not part of her life plan. I understood that her life was fulfilled in all the ways I have described above.

As time went on during her time at Lotterywest, I was sure my assumption that she and Angelo had chosen not to have children of their own was correct. I knew Trish doted on her many nephews and assumed that her relationship with them and the time which she devoted to them was enough to satisfy any needs she might feel to nurture children.

After seven years with Lotterywest, as Trish describes in her book, she took long service leave for six months with the plan to spend more time with her family including her widowed mother-in-law to whom she is very close, and to do more voluntary work in the community. I was glad to approve the additional leave she requested to do that.

I admired and respected the choice Trish had made to put a greater balance in her life after so many busy years working so hard and to make even more of her time available to contribute to the community.

So it is an understatement to say I was stunned when Trish’s line manager told me just before Trish was due back from her leave that she had given her the news of her pregnancy and the baby’s birth was expected in only a few short weeks.

Once I recovered from my great surprise, I was delighted at the news particularly when I saw Trish’s obvious happiness when she returned to work for a month before she left to take up her maternity leave.

Trish explained to me when we had the opportunity to talk together that she always knew she would have a child, ‘God willing’, when the time was right. She knew, after the fulfillment of so many of her other goals, that this time was right for her and Angelo.

She did not share with me at the time that she had also experienced a time of deep sadness which she writes about in her book, but simply shared her happiness in the joyful anticipation of the birth of the child she and Angelo were now ready to have in their lives.

Trish’s book describes with great frankness the process which took her and Angelo to this time. She writes of the range of emotions she experienced, the way that she sought to make sense of them and to allow them to guide her in making the decision to move into the next phase of her life.

It is a story with which many women will identify. The story of the choices which we all make in our lives, the experiences which influence those choices, and the joys and the very real regrets and sorrows which can come to many of us in the choices we make.

Life does not always have the happy endings we hope for, yet Trish has shown in this book and in her first book that it is possible to ride through the rough times with hope and grace, and that perseverance truly pays off when she focuses on the fulfillment of her dreams.

In reading Trish’s moving story, I think it is important to recognize that, for many women, leaving the choice to have a child to one’s late 30s as I did, and even to one’s 40s as Trish did, may be leaving it too late.

We know fertility falls very quickly past the age of 35 and, for many women, the story of their attempts to have a child is one of heartache and not of fulfillment as it was for Trish and me. And we also need to recognize that for some women their life circumstances, even without the fertility question, give them very little choice.

I know that Trish and I were among the lucky ones. Trish, with her deep faith describes herself as being ‘blessed’ with the gift of a child.

Women in our society today have many choices—choices unavailable to the women of my mother’s generation and the generations before hers.

We have reaped the benefit of the struggle of women like my mother who insisted I have the education denied her, and of the struggle of the many women who fought for ‘women’s liberation’ and for ‘equal opportunity’ in the late 60s and 70s.

It was an era I lived through as a young woman although I am not sure I fully appreciated, until recently, what a time of significant change it was and how much that tumultuous time has shaped my life.

Now that so many barriers for woman have been removed, many of us now try to ‘have it all’. Some of us manage to achieve that but for most of us, if we are truthful, ‘having it all’ can come with considerable costs as well as benefits, and for some women the path to fulfillment may not include the choice of motherhood.

It is important also to recognize that for many women in our world, there are no choices. The lives of women in some societies are dictated by cultural expectations, the absence of educational opportunities and by sheer poverty.

The freedom of choice—to have a career outside the home, to have children or not, to marry or not, as enjoyed by women such as Trish, me and others like us—is beyond the dreams of women in some foreign countries as well as many women in our own communities.

Those of us privileged to have such choices need to do all we can to support other women so they can have the same opportunities as we have.

Trish has written an authentic, moving and inspirational account of her life’s journey to arrive at the point of joyously embracing motherhood.

I congratulate her for writing this next chapter of her life’s journey and on her first book Same Dance Different Tune: Lessons of a Barefoot Childhood which describes the first part of her journey about her childhood, striving for career success and service to the community.

I was glad to hear from Trish that she is now working on the third chapter of her life which will tell the story of actually ‘being’ a mother and raising her child. I am sure that book will be as moving and inspirational as the first book and this one.

It is by sharing the stories of our lives that we can all reflect on what is common and what is different among us. It is by reflecting on the choices we make and the consequences of those choices that we learn and grow.

I thank Trish for the honour of inviting me to write this foreword to her second book and for her courage and honesty in sharing her story with us.

Jan Stewart, PSM
CEO, Lotterywest

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Introduction

The summer of my life has turned into spring.

Holding Bianca in my arms for the first time, I feel a surreal sense of time hurtling me back to my beginnings, to my family, to my childhood, and curiously propelling me forward at the same time, into the newness and excitement of first-time motherhood, heralding infinite possibilities.

How the pendulum has swung!

It is ironic that I, who left my family behind at the age of 18 to break free from what I thought were the bonds of poverty, who spent my adult years not prioritising family matters, would choose to start my own family at age 43.

Si, madre, yes, mother, after 25 years, I think I have truly come home.

Through the new eyes of motherhood, my gritty black-and-white memories of childhood are transformed into a kaleidoscope of character-building moments, wholesome flavours from the kitchen, music from nature’s orchestra, tactile experiences on our organic farm and orchard, and fresh scents from earth to sky.

I now appreciate that my childhood experiences in Bindoon honed the resilience, strength, tenacity and capacity for hard work on which my success in the corporate world and in community service was built.

Clear to me, too, is the comforting thought that I can also rely on these traits, like faithful old friends, to nourish and nurture me in my upcoming parenting adventure.

Parenthood will be the fourth tune in my dance of life, following the first three tunes of childhood, corporate, and community experiences captured in my first book.

And I won’t be embarking on the adventure alone.

I was fortunate to find my soul mate during my early 20s in sweet Angelo, who literally danced into my life and has been here to share my exhilarating journey through my corporate and community years.

How did I know Angelo was my soul mate? I could be completely myself when I was with him, and he with me.

Following the highs of a heady romance, love, respect and communication began to flow effortlessly between us, and they still do to this day. I like who I am when I am with him. I feel that I am a better person and my life is richer because of him.

I guess one could have multiple soul mates at various stages of our lives, both romantic and non-romantic, yet to me there is no one like Angelo. I am extremely grateful to have him in my life.

There is no one else with whom I’d want to start a family. He was integral to the emotional epiphany which came to me in a very unusual place, as you will learn later in this book.

I initially thought that things had come full circle when I looked back at my life at the age of 40 to realise that the childhood hardships I wanted to leave behind had built the pillars of my life’s achievements.

The circle of life grew larger when several incidents led Angelo and me to switch our focus from serving the community to starting our family, and to experience insights into why emotional wealth gave deeper meaning to our existence.

As I stand poised to take on this new family-centric chapter in my life, I am filled with gratitude for my family heritage. My parents’ greatest gift to me is their living legacy of love, significance and connection, which will find fresh new expression in Bianca’s generation.

But Bianca almost never happened.

Here is where my journey began.

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Sample Chapter

Excerpt from Chapter 3

Things started innocently enough when I flew to Japan with two Lotterywest colleagues to attend a conference. I had failed to convince Angelo to come along for a few extra days of sightseeing.

At the conference, I had an amazing time networking with people from around the world, but didn’t extend my trip as Angelo was not with me. I had always gotten a huge buzz from going on work trips, yet strangely, I did not feel it as much this time. Despite being grateful for the privilege to travel for work, I felt dull and listless.

I missed Angelo.

On the first leg of the journey home, I sat beside a pleasant 18-year-old boy and we soon struck up a warm conversation. He lived in Japan and was going to visit his girlfriend studying in Hong Kong. That would have been the second time in three years that he saw her, but they were very much in love and the relationship was strong.

I really felt sorry for his situation, and asked how he coped with the long absence. He said he had gotten used to it. Then, I started telling him how I had been apart from my soul mate and husband for only eight days, but was already missing him and could not wait to get home to him.

One emotionally-charged thought triggered another, and in a matter of minutes I had burst into tears!

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