Days between the years

Sunday Blog 215 – 28th December 2025

I would be a liar if I said I didn’t like this time of year. The days between the years – between Christmas and New Year – are all about the goals. Reviewing the goals. Setting the goals. Talking about goals. And I’m all about the goals. Weekly goals. Monthly goals. And I love me a New Year’s Resolution.

Days between the years - image of a jar where a woman is writing memories on bits of paper and putting them in the jar

I’ve tried all sorts of ways to deaden the blade of my ego-driven goal setting. Setting process goals (developing a writing practice) rather than outcome goals (finishing the damn book). Desire-based goals where I focus on how I want to feel and make sure I do more things that make me feel those feelings. Like a sexy process goal I suppose. But however I try and game my own tendencies, I’m wired to make goals. And vision boards. And crack open the new planner to dream up a whole new year’s worth of goals.

But first, there’s the navel gaze of 2025. Generally, I’m very happy with how I’ve shown up. The most important thing, finishing the damn manuscript has been achieved. Having two women to review goals each month has been just as transformative as my 2025 planner said it would be;

People with written goals are 42% more likely to achieve them than people without written goals. Telling a friend increases this rate to 78%.

MiGoals 2025 Diary, in the Goal Setting 101 section.

But even with all that stationery and motivation and monthly goal check-ins, that still leaves a 22% chance that goals won’t be achieved.

So there is one little ache as I finish up my 2025 navel gazing. I tried to set up a weekly jar of good moments. But something about this felt tender and vulnerable and perhaps a bit stoopid. Mostly my beloveds were not inclined to commit happy moments to the little square bits of paper I left next to the memory jar. I tried encouragement and maybe a little coercing in the first few months of the year but I gave up. So only a handful of weekly memories have been committed to paper, folded and put into the jug I left on the hearth. Looking through the few of them still gives me a warm, glowy feeling. Should I try it again in 2026?

2025 Good Moments

What would my life have been like if I’d been sporty?

And similar days-between-the-years questions

Sunday Blog 214 – 21st December 2025

“I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d been sporty,” I found myself asking my very sporty husband recently.

Ours is a union of very different people. For me to have ended up with a sporty non-drinker is as unlikely as Trump deciding that perhaps he is not the expert in, well, anything. Yet here we are.

I’m not sure what prompted my sporty what-if question. Some possible influences;

  1. I’m listening to Brene Brown’s latest book, Strong Ground. It has a lot of sports and coaching metaphors. I mean, a lot. If it’s important to Brene, it’s important to me.
  2. My social media feed is full of images of the stretching exercises I need to do in order to finally achieve the suppleness I dream of. It’s all in the ankles, apparently.
  3. Meanwhile, thirty years into a regular yoga practice without achieving the perfect forward bend, nose pressed to knees, I’m thinking maybe my run is just too late.

Hence my question.

A couple of years ago, my social media feed was full of knee stretches. I began to incorporate daily knee manoeuvres into my daily routine. As I was holidaying with others, we all began to embrace our heavily accented tutor as he took us through the sequences of exercises. But that didn’t last. I found an abandoned video on my desktop entitled “Chanje Legs” because that’s exactly how he pronounced it.

Whether the secret is knee stretches, or ankle stretches, is there just a cut-off point in your youth when if you are not sporty you lose the flexibility option forever?

Dodging sport in 1970s Perth was actually quite strenuous. Choosing not to play netball made me just as big a schoolyard freak as my lack of access to commercial TV shows. There was so much in the playground I couldn’t follow. Because our family culture was all about education and marks. While other families (like my husbands) went to the beach and surfed for hours, our most energetic workouts were mental. The marathon of mental dexterity we would subject ourselves to in order to come up with the best next line in the latest “sung to the tune of” song. You could hear our brains whirring with the effort to think of a rhyming lyric with the right amount of mockery. Or we might vie to be the first to have read the full works of Jane Austen, including Love and Freindship (sic) and Sandition.

Another action shot of me reading in bed in the 1990s, to match the picture of me reading Jane Austen at Versailles

“How do you think your life would have been different?” darling husband asked.

“Maybe I would be more flexible. And I would have been more confident.”

So many awkward 1980s and 1990s moments came from my almost total physical ineptitude and green inexperience. Trying to board a yacht and losing my footing, dropping a shoe in the Swan River. Feeling panic if someone asked me if I wanted a game of tennis. A decade living in Europe avoiding any kind of holiday invitation that might include skiing.

“I would have been more embodied, less in my head,” I continued.

But he’s moved on to other things, and I’m left to finish the thought for myself. So I decide to be grateful that I found yoga 30 years ago and be happy with my rickety knees and that even though I can’t always touch my toes, I can be more embodied in my third act in life. I can still do yoga every day.

Almost the end of the year

Sunday Blog 213 – 14th December 2025

As promised, I’m back on the planning horse for 2026. The year hasn’t even finished, there are still goals I’m hoping to achieve before New Year’s Eve rolls around, and already, the 2025 year’s post-mortem is racing down the track, leaving my quieter, introspective self choking in its dust.

It’s been a huge year. Carmel, California. Bali. Italy. France. Greece. And that was just the writing retreats. There was also and incredible, unforgettable Ireland family holiday.

There was also Mum’s first deathiversary (I was in Derry, Ireland that day) which was nowhere near as hard as Mum’s first birthday since she’s been gone. The death date is one I have to think about to recall it, whereas the birthday was a well-worn date in our family calendar and rituals. (Bleeping over her 1979 birthday when we were travelling in Europe, we were all sick and forgot. For the whole day.)

A picture of Malvern Hills in the UK in 1979, when we were busy forgetting Mum's 53rd birthday.
Malvern Hills, 1979, view from the window where we were busy forgetting Mum’s 53rd birthday

But back to goals. Aside from over-performing in my travel goals, my first inspection it looked like the only goals that I hadn’t achieved were those not in my control. Note to self: only include goals that I can carry out.

But on closer inspection, the healthy weight goal is within my control but hasn’t quite eventuated.

Well, there’s always next year. And a new planner. And new stickers. And. And And.

Walk in Jarvis Park

Sunday Blog 212 – 7 December 2025

I’m sticking close to home this weekend. After last week’s big effort running a neighbourhood event, I’m trying on “being in the moment” for size.

On an evening walk this week, I allowed myself to notice what I saw, heard and felt at a local park, called Jarvis Park.

  • The crunch of the caps from the wattle tree on path, like popping bubble wrap. 
  • The sticks on the path that threaten to trip. 
  • The path bubbling up from the tree root beneath. 
  • The sky bathed in red with a beautiful sunset we can’t fully see. 
  • The head of a crow under a tree, the rest ingested presumably by a cat. 
  • Another crow flies about looking nonchalant as if their brethren isn’t lying under the tree, just a head. 

Fear not, my 2026 planner has arrived in the post today and the normal programming of non-stop goals, visions, mission statements and milestones will resume next week.

Big Events, Small Moments

Sunday Blog 211 – 30 November 2025

Since last week, when I outed myself for signing Tomorrow Me up for all the things Today Me wouldn’t want to do, progress has been, well, complicated.

For one thing, one of my major volunteer events took place yesterday. Cooby Fest. It’s a local community event where we put on free entertainment, invite market and food stalls along and hope that everything goes OK. Let’s just say there were a lot of jobs on this week, and a huge day yesterday.

What I noticed was the little things – the chance to bathe myself in eucalyptus smoke during the Welcome to Country, moments where the music took me over, or the conversation with a neighbour landed with the satisfaction of slotting in the last jigsaw piece.

What I tried to learn about neighbourhood building this year was that it’s the getting together that counts. What I spent most of my time working on was the technical issues of funding and meetings and project plans, my ladder up the wrong wall.

So next year, I’m looking forward to more small moments with community. But now, it’s time for a lil’ rest.

Tomorrow Me

Sunday Blog 210 – 23 November 2025

Tomorrow Me Never Comes on a post it note against a wood grain background

Let me introduce you to Tomorrow Me. Like Today Me, only better. Tomorrow Me is definitely going to enjoy doing all the things Today Me signed it up to do. Also, Tomorrow Me will smash these tasks in a twentieth of the time Today Me would take to do them. In addition. Tomorrow Me is not going to curse, not even once while fulfilling those commitments, Tomorrow Me is definitely not going to shout the “c” word and shake a fist in the face of the quavering computer while finishing all that work.

Tomorrow Me is as real as Trump’s honesty, generosity and selflessness.

A snippet of a recent Martha Beck podcast episode entitled ‘Give “Tomorrow You” A Break’ delivered me this essential direction.

if you wouldn’t want to do something today, don’t condemn [“Tomorrow”] You to that thing.

I’m trying this on as the thousandth attempt to say no more often, insert a powerful pause between a request to do something and my response.

The difficulty for me is that I’m time blind and I see a task already done as soon as a request falls from someone’s lips or enters my mind as the next brilliant idea. I bleep over the track of endless hurdles I will have to lumber over to get to the end. The joy of having the thing done sweeps me up into its false embrace and waltzes me all the way to overwhelm.

But Martha Beck assures me Tomorrow Me will never come. And I believe her.

Will this help me turn my yeses to nos? Today and Tomorrow Me are trying it on for size.

Notes from our past selves

Sunday Blog 209 – 16th November 2025

Last week I noted that my mother was a diarist. She also obsessively catalogued her photos. Even, or perhaps especially the unflattering ones. Aesthetics were not her jam; it was all about capturing the moment. I have ended up with the floor to just-about-ceiling bookshelf stuffed with her photo albums.

Often, she wrote on the back of her photos. Important details of who was in it, where it was taken, the auspiciousness of the occasion. But in the thinner, early album of her youth, before the crush of we six children arriving in her life, there are a couple of events she has written up in and put in to their own pocket. As if there should be a photo but there isn’t. Like this one on today’s blog.

Like so many young people of her generation, Mum had to leave school early, even though she loved learning and was very bright. At fourteen, she entered the workforce doing administrative work at the State Government Insurance Office-SGIO.

But the Second World War brought other opportunities, and she had the chance to finish her education, and then to train as a teacher. But she hesitated a moment, feeling the pull of duty. What would happen at SGIO to the people she left behind? Would she would be letting the management down? She must have shared her conundrum with a work friend.

‘Don’t you be minding them, because they won’t be minding you,’ this senior colleague advised her.

I picture him (because, no photo) as a kindly, avuncular man who saw a smart young woman wasting her talents in her job. He wanted her to know that SGIO was not worth turning down this life-changing offer of qualifying as a teacher. It was advice she may not have found anywhere else among her people, and she took it. She remembered it enough to write it down, to share the story with us.

She went on to qualify as a teacher and eventually met and married my father when they were working at the same school.

Betty and Gerard Brennan on a date in the 1950s
Mum and Dad on a date in the 1950s

I love this little written note, a reminder that the advice we give out can turn the course of people’s lives.

Family threads

Sunday Blog 208 – 9th November 2025

My mother was a diarist. At the end of the day she sat at the kitchen table or perhaps on her comfortable armchair with her meal tray as a desk. She’d write about the intricate doings of each day in her week-to-a-page diary. What letters had arrived, phone calls given and received, trips to the shop, items of note purchased, sewing and craft projects undertaken, progressed or finished.

‘I’ve just got to write the exciting story of my life,’ she would quip at night. The joke was that her diaries were never meant to be exciting. In fact, when a drama did occur, it too would be folded into the minutiae of the day, its sting or power suffocated in the anodyne crush of everyday events.

Mum died in 2024, just a few months short of her ninety-eighth birthday. Like many women of her generation, she sewed and knitted many of our clothes to save money. Back in the day, before clothing became pitiably cheap.

This November she would have been 99. To honour her birthday, one of my sisters, Gay Taylor has put together an exhibition called Family Threads. The work that women like our Mum did is so often overlooked and forgotten. This exhibition honours her life and work, the exciting story of her life which wrapped so many of us up with kindness, love and stability. It includes handmade garments, household linens and heirloom textiles crafted by women across generations but with a particular focus on our beautiful Mum.

For those of you in Perth, the exhibition will be open from Monday 10th-Saturday 15th November from 10am until 4pm at Osborne Park Uniting Church, 164 Edward Street Osborne Park. Just drop in during those hours.

Having a say

Sunday Blog 207 – 2nd November 2025

This Sunday Blog comes with a trigger warning. I’m going to talk about sexual assault so if that is not the right topic for you today, please scroll on.

This week I had a major breakthrough with a stale writing goal. The kind that gets written out in long hand, month after month in my diary, my goals book, my to-do list. And I fail over and again to start the wretched thing. And then this week, not only did I start it, I finished it. A shitty first draft anyway. I’m talking about a book proposal, because now my manuscript is kind of done-ish, I can’t slacken. The difficult path of finding a publisher is ahead of me, hypnotic in its dizzying peak.

My completed-ish manuscript intertwines my memoir debriefing the home invasion and assault I survived on 10th May 2002, with imagined scenes of the same events through the (unknown) perpetrator’s perspective.

A book proposal forces you, among many things, to consider other titles which may be similar to yours, or would be shelved next to your book. Know My Name was one of those suggested on a google search, and I accordingly included it in the draft proposal. Then I reflected I should actually read the book rather than just borrow its plumes to fluff out my document.

And so, I’ve been glued to Know My Name all weekend. It’s a gripping, well-written memoir by Chanel Miller. You may recall her case in the US, very unusual in that there were two witnesses, two guardian angel men who discovered an unconscious Chanel being sexually assaulted by Brock Turner. Brock was a promising swimmer on campus, but these men saw him for what he was. They chased him, tackled him and held him until police arrived and therefore, he was brought him to justice. Without them rescuing Chanel, the assault no doubt would have been worse, and she would have had no chance of progressing a case through the court system

Chanel anonymously published her 7,000 word victim impact statement at the time of Brock’s meagre sentencing, and she ignited a public outcry. She has since written the powerful memoir which I’m half way through. There are many terrible moments, and yet what made me sob this morning was this;

It had never occurred to me that the system itself could be wrong, could be changed or improved. Victims could ask for more. We could be treated better.

Know My Name, Chanel Miller, page 139

From the very moment I became a victim, I had a say. Within seventy-two hours, I’d sent a three page letter of feedback about the process of undergoing a forensic examination. I gave feedback to the police, the the DPP. Over time, I joined in state and national reform initiatives. It never occurred to me that I didn’t have a voice.

Sure, I was 36-years-old, not in my twenties when it happened to me. But something about Chanel’s silencing got to me.

How very precious it is to have a voice. How we must all nurture and amplify our voices. Life will never be perfect, but improvement in how we treat each other is always an option. Always.

27 Years Ago Today

(Almost) Sunday Blog 206 – 27th October 2025

I delayed the Sunday Blog to 27th October so I could marinade in all the twenty-sevens. Because twenty-seven years ago today in 1998 I was in labour in a birthing pool. And now, darling daughter is twenty-seven. (Or she will be tomorrow, because labour can take a while…)

Also, because I attended a recent conference, Strength to Progress, for people wanting to see change in the birth world. In a moving, thought-provoking documentary, “Five decades of water birth in WA,” I was the poster girl for water birth in the 1990s, contributing two of the images above. The film was put together by a couple of powerhouses; Lisa from Simply Birth and Cath from Nurture and Bloom.

Top left photo was the birthing pool I hired – that’s what we used in Perth before Simply Birth began importing the blow up ones in 2006. Back in 1998 I’d had to hire the octagonal wooden monster from the midwives running Perth’s home birth program. Heavy wooden panelling no pregnant woman could safely lift. Mattresses. Tarpaulin. Cover sheet. Giant ockey straps. This contraption was delivered by long-suffering relatives to Swan Districts Hospital where I was due to have my baby at the family birth centre.

‘Those mattresses look like someone has died on them,’ my sister said.

Cruel, but fair. However, once the mattresses were covered up it was quite respectable, even inviting, as hopefully shown in the middle photo.

Just imagine how wondrous a boon it was to Perth (and indeed all of Australia) when Simply Birth pools became available in 2006. They could be brought along to hospital in a small box and blown up in five minutes. But back in 1998 there wasn’t even a water birth policy. If I’d been having a baby in Sydney in 1998, it all would have been very straightforward. In conservative Perth, it was not.

In 2025 there have been many advances and improvements for women and babies. But. Strength to Progress keynote speaker Dr Bashi Kumar-Hazard highlighted what to me is the core of the ongoing issue, and not just in maternity care. Models of care. The invisible web of pre-determined choices that the everyday, non-clinical person will be completely oblivious to. How can we provide informed consent, when we don’t understand the options?

It’s like turning up to a chess tournament with a working knowledge of how to play Solitaire. You’re screwed. When a woman comes into hospital with a birthing plan, she will usually be unaware that the hospital has their own birthing plan. Their model of care that she will need to comply with.

And for every health intervention in a hospital, there will be a model of care that’s nearly always completely opaque to the patient. From that information asymmetry can flow unnecessary suffering and harm.

And so, twenty-seven years after giving birth to my daughter and emerging as a health advocate, I am still passionate about people being able to make informed health choices. My work might look very different today, as I now focus on digital health, but the underlying challenge remains the same.

Give us information so that we can make the right choices for ourselves, our bodies, our health, our lives.