If I’m honest those boys meant virtually nothing to me back then. It would take time for me to grow close to them and to see them as the wonderful men I care about today. At the time I didn’t know who they were, other than the children of the woman their father had secretly cheated on with me.
They were three and five when I moved from Mildura to join their ‘single’ dad in Melbourne. For some reason he was always at me to kiss them goodnight whenever they stayed over with us, but I thought it weird: kissing strange kids. They weren’t part of my life as far as I was concerned – they were just these boys who’d turn up every now and again, and I hated being forced to do things. I had no idea about getting into a relationship with a married man with children, or what the expectations were. I soon learned what his were.
One night quite early in the piece, the boys were staying with us when one of them threw up all over his bed in the spare room. Instinctively I plucked him out of the mess and brought him into our bed. His father was furious. ‘If he’s thrown up in his own bed, then he’ll throw up in this bed as well!’ he barked.
I raised my voice in return and bit back with a smart-arsed remark. I can’t recall exactly what he said but I can still feel his angry reaction like it was yesterday. It left me stunned and my brain struggling to process.
‘W-what the fuck was that?’ I finally stammered.
My crime had been yelling at him in front of his boys. A big no-no apparently. But what followed was an incredible outpouring of love, tenderness and remorse. ‘Oh babe, please forgive me,’ he cooed, wrapping me in his arms. ‘If only you could understand that these are my sons. Oh God, I’m so sorry.’ I found out later this kind of behaviour was called ‘the princess syndrome’. Whatever they labelled it, it certainly worked on me; from the get-go I started thinking any issues with the boys had to be my fault. I wasn’t understanding enough. I wasn’t being nice enough. I see it differently nowadays, but at the time I was thinking, ‘I will be better. I will learn how to look after the kids when they’re here. That’s what a normal, good person would do.’
Another option, in hindsight, would have been to walk away from the guy, but I went ahead and married him anyway. When things were good between us it could be great, so I concentrated on the good stuff. I could always tell his mood by listening to the sound his feet made when he walked along the concrete, or crunched up the gravel path outside our home and know whether I’d have to walk on eggshells or not. He had his happy feet on the day he proposed to me – the very same day his divorce came through from his first wife. He presented me with a ring and said, ‘Will you marry me?’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘No problem.’
Given the harbingers of our relationship to that point it’s needless to say the wedding was a complete disaster – mostly thanks to me. From the outset I was fixated on outdoing his ex-wife. If she’d had a fleet of white Ford Fairlanes, I had to have gleaming white Jaguars. He once remarked that her wedding dress had cost $800 so I made sure mine cost $1200. She’d had one bridesmaid so I had two. She had a flower girl so I had a flower girl and a ring-bearer. I was the Bridezilla of all Bridezillas.
I took control of everything: I booked the venue, an exclusive little German-themed place in Lilydale that had a chapel and glockenspiel bells. I chose the date, the Friday of the Australia Day long weekend in 1990 – not realising I had messed up the dates so we were in fact getting married on Australia Day. Oh yeah, and it was 43 degrees in the shade. My $1200 dress weighed twenty kilos, the beer was hot, and Mum was pissed and staggering all over the place as we were about to go down the aisle. At the last minute I asked my older brother to please walk me down the aisle instead of Mum.
‘What are you asking me for?’ he responded.
‘Because Mum’s pissed and she can’t do it!’ I hissed as the embarrassed guests waited politely in the pews while we discussed it at the chapel door. It was just chaos. Somehow we managed to exchange vows, but as the boiling beer and warm wine flowed into the evening, the family arguments escalated. I was actually glad to be called Tucker and not Larkin anymore. As far as weddings go, mine was the absolute worst I have ever been to. If I’d booked Little River Band they would have cancelled on me to play onboard some P&O cruise instead.
Not content with just an ill-suited marriage, after the wedding my husband and I decided to work together. We ran a number of hotels and ended up managing the Lake Hume Resort in Albury–Wodonga near the NSW–Victoria border.
Over the years I had forged a decent career out of working in and co-managing hotels, motels and little resorts along the highways and byways of rural New South Wales and Victoria. It wasn’t what I had planned on. As a little girl I’d always wanted to be a vet. When I realised I didn’t really like animals all that much I thought I could be a police officer instead. I even travelled down to Melbourne after I’d quit school and met with the police recruiters, but I was either two inches too short or five kilos too heavy to qualify for whatever the minimum physical standard was back in the day. Their loss.
So, after a series of small jobs and false starts, I found myself settling into the travel accommodation industry. Over several years I helped run businesses in Mildura, Healesville, Yarrawonga, Wagga Wagga and Albury–Wodonga. I liked the work – it was busy, consistent, stable – and I had racked up some funny stories along the way, like when I was quite young and naive and decided to mail to a regular guest the red lingerie his wife had accidentally left behind in his room.
‘You did what?’ my boss at the time said, clamping his hands to the sides of his head.
‘Trust me, his wife will be glad to get it back,’ I assured him. ‘It’s really nice quality lingerie.’
‘It may well be – but it doesn’t belong to his wife!’
‘Ohhh …’
Now, here I was, working with my husband. He’d thrown in his plumbing career to toil alongside me. We worked hard and promoted and grew the businesses, and managed to save enough to buy a house in Healesville, a lovely little town in the Yarra Valley. Between that mortgage, day-today living and his child support payments, every cent counted. And then the impossible happened – in 1994 I fell pregnant, something I’d been told was scientifically and medically out of the question.
I was already five months gone when I found out. My weight constantly fluctuated and I usually only had two to three periods a year so it had been easy to miss. Besides, I was ‘infertile’ so pregnancy never entered my mind. I didn’t feel grown up enough to have a baby. My marriage was a volatile tangled mess, I didn’t think my husband would want to have another child, and – most of all – I didn’t want to run the slightest risk of growing a boy inside me. His sons had unwittingly governed my life since I first took up with their father and I feared another boy would simply lead to more of the same. I picked a senseless fight in order to tell him I was pregnant later that day, and he was so excited he nearly did a backflip. All of a sudden I thought, ‘Maybe this will give me a good life. Maybe this has changed things?’ For the first time in my life I started to pray. I begged whatever god was up there to please, please, please let me be pregnant with a little girl.
Perhaps because my teenage pregnancy and colossally awful abortion had been heavily loaded with shame and pain I was terrified of the idea of giving birth. I fixated on one antenatal video that showed a glamorous-looking mother puff about three times before her bub came out. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘I’ll have one of those.’ I was induced at Albury–Wodonga Hospital and wheeled into the new-age birthing suites. The place had scented candles burning and whale music playing. ‘Not on your life!’ I told the midwives. ‘I want to be in a fully equipped operating theatre!’
At that moment I started to go into labour. ‘Do you want an epidural?’ a midwife asked.
‘Oh God, yes. Just do what you’ve got to do. I don’t want to be part of this.’
The delivery went really badly. It was a country hospital, and the epidural had worn off when they decided they were going to do an emergency Caesarean. It was almost too late but they started cutting into me anyway. All of the anaesthetic had worn off and ‘Arrrggghhh!’ It was diabolical. Finally the baby was born naturally. She was a little girl we named Shannyn. I was so sick and depressed afterwards that I was almost pissed off when they handed me a kid who was the spitting image of Bert Newton: big head, round face, no hair. But quite quickly Shannyn – my glorious dark-haired beauty – grew to be the spitting image of me, complete with the wise-cracking attitude and fiery temperament.
My husband was ecstatic about having a little girl. He idolised Shannyn from the beginning and he proved to be a great father who took a hands-on approach while I slowly recovered from the trauma of her birth. To be fair, despite the other stuff, he could be a fantastic partner on his day; he was extremely charming and had a great sense of humour and – as I had seen with his boys – he was nothing if not a dedicated parent. He even seemed to step that up a notch after Shannyn was born. He treasured her. We treasured her.
The arrival of Shannyn heralded the happiest time I could remember. During the first twelve months of her life I felt untouchable. Later we moved to our home in Healesville to nest. I was a clucky mum who fussed over Shannyn’s every need and I loved every second of it. Bath time, bedtime, cuddle time, nappy change time, feeding time and lolling-on-the-bed-staring-smiling-and-laughing-at-each-other time. Motherhood, it turned out, suited me just fine. I loved the toys, the little plastic plates and spoons, the tiny nighties and pyjamas. She was such a strikingly beautiful baby and toddler that it’s hard to believe she started life a kooky, Gold Logie–winning old man.
In 1996 I fell pregnant again only to be gripped by the familiar dread that it might be a boy. I had a scan as soon as I could and almost collapsed with relief and joy when they said it was another little girl. If I’m to be completely honest, had that scan come back the other way, there was every chance I might have had an abortion behind my husband’s back. Considering the horror of my teenage abortion, it spoke volumes for my frame of mind relating to the toxic role his sons played in our marriage. Not the boys personally, after all they were just little guys who never chose the situation either. But their presence – whether they were physically with us or not – had huge consequences for me.
The arrival of Sarah – blonde, beautiful, calm and gentle – was as dramatic as a scene from a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. I’d been employed as a bookkeeper for a medium-sized logging firm for a couple of years and I worked until 4pm that day. Half an hour after I got home to Healesville my waters broke. We rang the Mitcham Hospital forty kilometres away in Melbourne but my contractions were already two minutes apart. They told my husband to prepare to deliver the baby on the roadside.
‘Not a chance,’ I said with a withering look.
We piled into the car and had only made it a few hundred metres down the road when we got stuck behind a traffic accident, with blue and red lights flashing everywhere. When we drew nearer, it looked like the guy who’d crashed his motorbike was quite OK. ‘Stop the car!’ I shrieked, frantically motioning to my husband to pull over behind the ambulance that was on the scene. ‘I’m getting in there!’ A police officer drove the ambulance while the paramedics sat in the back with me. My husband followed in convoy in our car.
‘If we have to deliver en route we’ll have to pull over,’ one of the paramedics told me. Each suburb we passed through I wondered what location I was going to put on the birth certificate. With sirens wailing and lights flashing, we pulled up at Emergency in Mitcham literally with a minute to spare. Sarah was born sixty seconds later on a gurney in the doorway of the hospital. No drugs. Nothing. Just boom, and there she was. Despite her blockbuster entry to the world, Sarah was an extremely funny, happy little bub who just kind of rolled out of me and said, ‘Hiya Mummy!’ She was a very pink, very big baby girl. There were a few premature bubs being looked after at Mitcham at the time and they were all in the two- to three-pound (around a kilo) range. Poor little dears. Sarah was nine thundering pounds (four kilos). I’d walk past the premmie babies squeaking like little mice and then I’d hear Sarah bellowing, ‘Bring me my milk!’
I said to a nurse, ‘I think she might have to ride a bike home!’
From the very start Sarah was strong and resilient in her nature. Pretty soon she would need to be. Both my girls would – more than they could have ever known.