STILL musing, and I’ve decided I am just feeling a bit flat, maybe a bit tired.

Daylight slaving does get to me. I rise early and that one-hour earlier knocks me about. I’m working hard to keep creative juices flowing, but it’s hard. You know how it is - I’m not complaining, just sayin’. In putting all my energies to one thing, other things have to slip. So the creative cooking, running, swimming and gardening have fallen behind. I’m up there in the staples of working and family life, but I’d like to say I was better at juggling all the things hanging a little lower down the priority list. They’re there to make the heart sing, right? Well my heart’s singing a funeral dirge at the moment.

I did have a good crack at lifting myself from the slump last week and knocked up a pearl barley and mushroom risotto from this book. It looked great, smelled pretty good, but tasted, well, like pearl barley. The family was not keen.

The harvest hummus from fresh365 was better, for me at least. The recipe is here, but given the tahini was well past its use-by date I snuck in some peanut butter and a splosh of sesame oil. I also used only one 400g tin of chickpeas and instead of cilantro and red pepper flakes, I substituted a good splosh of Tabasco. The carrots were, of course, my own. All good.

PS: This post is dedicated to Pip and her grief-stricken culinary prowess.

OUR tree is up. Each year I give the children a decoration that, in theory, they’ll take with them when they leave home, hang on their tree and carry the tradition on. The thing is, of the three we have raised to adulthood, only one has left home and the eldest of the remaining two has taken it upon herself to dictate how the tree should be decorated. She pretty much ditched, or bitched, about the old decorations – favouring a shopping mall-style themed tree. Some of the old decorations have appeared on the tree at others insistence, but it’s left me feeling a bit, well weird.

On one hand I feel the tree my partner and I have dragged out year after year, put up and put down and slaved to put gifts under should carry the old decorations. Each decoration has a story – even the boxes that housed the decorations have stories. One box is recycled from the kettle I bought my partner when we were poor, poor, poor and struggling to exist as a new couple with all these broken hearts and a broken family. A kettle, for a cuppa, was where we put pennies that probably should have been spent on a bill, or food.

On the other hand, the children bring their respective boyfriends and girlfriend to the tree decorating and even though they will all eventually have trees of their own, and one already does, this family ritual is clearly important to them. So that’s good. Right?

Hmmm, I’ll have to muse on this some more. Maybe it was the effort my partner and I put into the tree-dressing extravaganza early on Saturday while the children – 15, 18 and 20 – slept. Hmmm. They did say thank you. (But that was after our eldest said thanks, offered to help and took a turn in the kitchen, and after their clearly more polite partners said thank you. Does it count if you’re shamed into it?) Hmmm.

PS: The painted soldiers were this year’s decoration. One for each of our mob and their plus-ones.

AFTER 12 years of preparing children to return to school I was feeling pretty cocky when choosing the adhesive book coverings. Quite clearly I am not ready for the metallic adhesives. One hopes teachers don’t judge school books by their covers.

A FRIEND of mine believes books fall into her hands at times they’re to be read. They contain for her a teeny tiny pearl of wisdom, a message or thread that sends her off on a wider path of discovery. I feel Rachel Power’s book The Divided Heart is that for me.

Now, stick with me, because I have a convoluted thought process going on here.

I stumbled upon Power’s book here. Natalie was close to finishing the book when I started reading her blog. The fact she was reading it in snatches while busy with family, work and life, resonated with me.

We all read blogs that resonate with us but I have been wondering who my blog resonates with, if anyone. Essentially it has to resonate with me, but it’s not the blog I imagined creating when I started it earlier this year, and that’s got me thinking.

I’ve been thinking about the blog, what does resonate with me, why what resonates with me doesn’t seem to be making its way to my blog, what I am doing in real life that plays havoc with what I’d like to happen in real life and what I should be doing to make stuff happen. You following?

Readers of The Divided Heart, and many other smart cookies out there, will see where this is going. Fulltime parent, fulltime work, what feels like fulltime volunteering and fulltime creative soul. Hmmm. That’s a lot of full and not a lot of time.

My difficulty is that I am only an intro and one interview into The Divided Heart and already feel a fraud. You may have noted I carefully dodged the words “fulltime mother”. I am not the mother of the four children I have helped raise. They already have one of those – my partner as it so happens.

Now, this is where it gets trickier because people are ready to offer you medals and life memberships to parenting clubs when they learn you are raising children you did not give birth to. Step-parents are so very common but so marginalised. Society assumes "steps" take a back seat to "real" parents. You’re wicked and meddling – dangerously so – or you shouldn't have a say. People really struggle with the idea of taking responsibility for children not your own.

And for me, once the matter of residential status is cleared up the conversation then goes something like this.

Them: Oh Lordy, you mean the children live with you?

Me: Yes, all four of them. (Well, there's three now. I killed one off ... No, she's all grown up and moved out of home.)

Them: But where is their mother. (Place emphasis on the word mother.)

Me (choice one): Their mother is actually my partner. (Now, I never mean to shock or rub my choices in people’s faces and the tone of this statement is always carefully selected for the audience.)

Them: Either stunned silence or too-cool-for-school, fiddlin’ and fumblin’ to cover up the fact they hadn’t guessed that, or thought they’d guessed it, but didn’t want to say.

FADE OUT.

Me (choice two): The children have very close contact with their mother, in fact, they have four very loving and caring parents and we consider ourselves to be a knock-out parenting team. (White lies can sometimes be a safe option, not only for me, but for the children. My partner and I have gone to great lengths to ease them into a very unforgiving, at times, society.)

FADE OUT.

Either way, once it’s known the children’s mother, my partner, is on the scene, I’m written off as superfluous.

To illustrate, I had a colleague ask me a couple of years ago whether I was involved in choosing Christmas gifts for the kids. As my partner is considering a blog about moss and lichens, I think it can safely be said I’m the arbiter of all matters style and good taste in my household. So der, mate, whaddya reckon?

It’s not an uncommon assumption, though. To add to the murky waters my family I am also 11 years younger than my partner. People imagine I get home after a days work and swan about doing whatever I like while my partner does the - excuse the pun - mother load.

It’s a tricky one, made all the more so because I do not wish to diminish the hard yakka, patience and endurance of my partner. She has her own battles with motherhood and I marvel at her ability to manoeuvre through - in a blended, extended, left-of-field family - a minefield of human frailty and emotion.

That minefield becomes particularly difficult to navigate at Christmas.

Lisa, at The Red Thread, posted this week about how she’s had to step up to the role her mother left in her passing and create a Christmas full of meaning for her own family. It’s the missing members of a family, alive and dead or separated by distance or divorce, that are elephants in the room at this time of year. I imagine, each year, how I’ll make Christmas special and as the date looms I feel the pressure of that responsibility.

Each and every year my expectations for that one day dwindle in size and grandeur as it draws closer and I tell myself to be calm and go with the flow. Like the women in Power’s book, I struggle to make the vision match the reality. As a child Christmas was a time of creativity and careful planning. Now, dare-I-say-it, as a working mother it’s a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants, arms flailing, crazy, crazy day which is often wedged between two working days because newspaper people, as my partner and I are, don’t get public holidays.

I’m hoping this Christmas for answers, time and direction. There’s a big wide world out there and I’m in it, well and truly. I don’t wish to complain or grumble and hope people don’t read this as such. I’m, like so many parents and oh so many mothers, putting my hand up to say “I hear you sista”. I am reading your blogs and am gobsmacked by the sheer talent and enthusiasm you have for your families, your art, your craft, your work, your gardens, your wardrobes and your friends.

I still feel a bit the new girl and if you don’t mind, I’ll just hang back a bit this month until I can work out where I fit. In fact, if you don’t mind, I’m the one in the corner with her nose stuck in a book and while I’m not known for being shy, today I’d like it if you said hi first. I’m sure we’ve got lots in common and I’m an OK listener – not great, but OK.

TWO days down, five more to go and the first week of the school holidays will be done and dusted. Thank goodness. Gasp. What? Yeap. You read it right. After just two days I am sick of driving teens here, there and everywhere and trying to juggle housework in the miniscule amount of time between pickups or drop offs. I’d just driven one teen 30 minutes to work yesterday, got all the way home (picking up a few things left off the weekly grocery shop on my way) when another phoned in to be collected from a point half an hour in another direction.

I am trying to placate myself by cooking up huge family meals the like we never see with both parents working full time. Needless to say, we’re eating huge quantities and rather than be thanked for the delicious new taste sensations on the table – along with delicious mid-winter desserts – everyone is complaining there’s too much food. A week before they were complaining it was the same old, same old and there was never any left for seconds. Didn’t I know they were starved of good quality, hearty, stick-to-your-ribs meals? Brandon’s mum makes this, Carly’s mum makes that. My only saving grace is we’ve had one of the children’s friends over nearly every night since Friday night and I am hoping and praying they’re rushing home to tell their parents of the fabulous fare at our house. I'm pretty sure the creamy lemon squares, spotted here, and home made meringues were a hit with one.

I am also sick of picking up soggy, sandy towels, wetsuits, and today, ug boots – apparently the 14-year-old forgot he had them on when dropped at the beach – from bedroom, bathroom and lounge room floors. I am even more fed up with the battle to get them back to do it themselves.

And the drone of duelling CD players is too much to take. They get louder and louder as each tries to drown out the sound of another’s music. Thankfully we are a one television, one computer household so it doesn’t take me long to whip around pulling out electrical cords when I have had enough.

Go on, it’s true isn’t it? There was some novelty value in the first 24 hours, but it’s worn off hasn’t it?