Chronicles of a Trailing Spouse...

An edited version of this column appeared in the May 2014 edition of Good Taste Magazine (Dubai). I’ve noticed that I rarely mention the middle child in this column. Unfortunately I think an occupational hazard of being a middle child is that you tend to go unnoticed quite a lot – especially in the middle of five - so today this column is devoted to the often overlooked but never undervalued child in the middle. The middle child in this family is nine, his name is Jude (yes, after the song), and he is my invisible child. According to the experts, birth order and sibling relations have a powerful impact on personality traits, self-esteem and even ambition – where we come in the family can quite literally determine what sort of person we turn into. For example, world leaders are overwhelmingly first born children. First-borns are trailblazers, receive most of the attention and identify strongly with power - certainly my eldest child has a very domineering personality an...

I haven't properly blogged in quite a while. I'm not entirely sure why this is, but I think outback living has awakened an inner gravity I always suspected I possessed but never properly explored. My sense of the ridiculous has fled, the scrapes I get into are few and far between these days. Writing my light-hearted monthly parenting column has become a struggle. In addition, in the isolation of my little kitchen a thousand miles away from the world, I've become weighed down by stories, preoccupied by the news - ebola, is it a plot to exterminate us? Gaza - what hope is there? Flight MH17 who did it? Putin a force for good or evil? American propaganda, when will the world wake up? Flight MH370 where did it go? Will they ever investigate the fall of Tower 7? Every morning I read the news all the way to the bottom of the page and the words make me heavier. All the while the question of my life in Australia growing all the more urgent. I turned 41 last birthday and it fel...