Although I tried my hardest to shut Frank out and not to worry about the way my body was changing, not to worry about the weight I was putting on, I must be honest and say that given my back-story, I didn’t find being pregnant ‘easy’. Mine was not one of those ‘I’ve never felt so well in my life!’ type pregnancies. I didn’t like the waiting bit—I just wanted to meet this kid. I wanted to get on with the show! Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, Frank would show up, loud as ever with his terrible stories about how, if I got any fatter, my kid would be ashamed of me, and Marty would probably leave me, and my music career would be over before it had even begun.
I now knew better than to keep these stories to myself. I knew that even if my fears sounded stupid, it was always wiser to share them rather than let them circle, unchecked, in the zoo of my mind. So that’s what I did—I spoke my fears, either in my diary, or to a therapist, or with friends who I knew could handle the truth. Speaking my fears always made them shrink.
Many of the fears I was carrying were about my career, and how the hell I was going to find the courage to do what I knew needed to be done in order to make a living making music. Frank, of course, yabbered quite often at me about how you can’t be fat and successful as a female musician in Australia—for reasons never quite made explicit, it just wasn’t done, I would have to lose the weight first and blah blah blah.
So when the local newspaper, The Leader, called to say they wanted to do a story on Marty and me winning the Arts Victoria grant, that they wanted to take some photos of us, I was not so much excited as terrified. Panicked. Of course, I was well aware that, in theory, being a musician would at some point mean having one’s photo taken, but the thought of it actually happening, right now—the thought of people I didn’t know recognising me, judging me—was well beyond my processing capacity. Although as a child I had desperately craved and jostled rather hard for attention, as an adult in my ‘post-breakthrough’ life, I really didn’t want it. I was still scared, I suppose, that one day if, by some miracle, I did become a famous musician, people or the media would find out about Frank, and what had happened, and I would be called crazy, and I would be given no right of reply. Social media was still just a twinkle in the eye of the internet.
What also concerned me about the idea of ‘potential fame’ was that I liked being anonymous. I liked being able to slip in and out of cafe’s and public transport and school yards without anyone recognising me. I didn’t want to be watched. I wanted to be free to watch them. As a storyteller, this was one of my greatest strengths—the ability to listen and observe without being noticed. I hated the idea of losing that, even just a little bit.
This was one of Frank’s favourite tricks—to make me aware of my fear, and then to call me an idiot for feeling afraid. Even though Frank told me I was a dickhead for getting so worked up over nothing, I decided that in the spirit of honestly, I would take these fears to my now music manager, Marty. So I did. I told him everything—my fears about it working out, and fears about it not working out; fears about what it would mean to be a woman, let alone a mother, in a tough workplace like the ‘Australian rock’n’roll scene’; fears of playing to an empty room; fears that the reason I didn’t hear voices like mine on the radio was because I didn’t have a place there, I didn’t belong, and I’d never belong. I was also really scared of what I thought of as the ‘fame machine’, scared of being part of an industry that—so the stories seemed to indicate—told women like me how they should look and act and then judged them and dumped them when they didn’t conform. I told him how I just wasn’t made for this kind of career. I felt too shy and self-conscious to have photos taken of my face, front on. I didn’t feel pretty enough, or thin enough, and I wasn’t ready for that kind of pressure yet. One by one, we worked through these fears, starting with the one right in front of us. Marty said it didn’t matter that I didn’t want to show my face yet. Whatever. Might even work in your favour, he said. Might add to my mystique.
‘Your “enigmahhh”,’ he said.
Huh! What a laugh. There was nothing mysterious or enigmatic about me or my body right about then—I had outgrown all my clothes and my belly stuck out like a basketball. Fat again—that’s how I felt. He wasn’t having any of that. He reminded me again and again that all I needed to do was keep writing songs, and singing songs, and playing guitar, and growing our baby. That was it. He’d take care of the other stuff for now. And this is how we muddled our way through—one small step at a time.
In the end, for the photo for The Leader, we worked out that even though I didn’t want to be recognised, I was probably okay with them taking a profile shot. Now, of course, when it comes to the media, the truth is that it’s their prerogative to use any photo they like, but I didn’t know that then, and this conversation with Marty, this modicum of assumed control over my own face and where it appeared, did allow me to feel safe enough to get started. If you look at my early posters, you will see
