My Nephew Got into My Knickers

Two positions became available in the pool late in 1986 when I was aged 11, and my instructors at the talent school suggested I audition. I did just this as I loved the show and to my amazement - and delight - I got in and made my debut in the first episode of 1987. My parents were proud and thrilled as was my brother and the rest of the family, but if I thought that my sister was jealous when I was a regular theatre kid attending talent classes and doing recitals, concerts and sometimes plays, now I was on TV and getting paid for it (albeit not a great deal of money given the show didn't exactly have a large budget) it was a whole other ballgame of resentment and bad feeling.

And going on to high school only made things worse. While we had all gone to the same primary school, I got a scholarship to a high school that had a performing arts program, and Paul got a scholarship to another high school that had a great Australian football development program. In contrast, Rhonda had to attend the uninspiring local high school.

I tried my best to ignore the negative vibes from Rhonda at home and concentrate on school and working on the show, which I loved. It was the best time of my life. The hosts Phil and Jenny were great, and I made lots of lifelong friends. It was hard at times balancing school work, chores at home and rehearsal and filming commitments for the show but I was dedicated and always made it work. I never wanted it to end, but sadly for me it did just that in mid-1991 at age 15.

The show had been very popular in the 1970s and 1980s, but now it was the 1990s and times had changed and the market for variety shows was declining. Ratings fell drastically in 1990, went down even further in 1991 and were so dire by winter that the network axed the show, replacing it with American cartoons. We filmed our final show in July 1991 to much sadness - I got through half a box of tissues crying so much in the car on the way home after the last show - and then we all went our separate ways. However, I was still friends with a number of kids from the show, such as my two best friends Jess and Holly with who I attended high school and two boys who were also in the performing arts program at school, plus I had so many wonderful memories and experiences that I felt privileged to have been a part of. Nobody could take that away from me.

I thought maybe Rhonda might be less resentful given that the show was cancelled and my part time job now was at my old talent school helping to teach younger students dance, but the fact that I had been on television at all still qualified me for resentment. Plus I was still in the performing arts program at high school and therefore in Eisteddfods, musicals and concerts, so as long as I was singing, dancing or acting it equaled jealousy from my sister. I also did some commercials and Rhonda would always leave the room when one came on TV, unable to conceal her envy.

Rhonda was also jealous at Paul's increasingly impressive junior football career and he was now playing an elite junior football development league. When he went to Perth and Adelaide for representative games she was not happy, nor did she utter one word of congratulations when Paul kicked 7 goals in a win for Victoria over the Australian Capital Territory in Canberra.

Sometimes Rhonda would note things in a closely guarded journal. Paul and I never knew what was in it, but speculated that perhaps she was making notes for a novel to be written later. The novel would be about a lonely, plain, overweight and downtrodden girl with no talents growing up with a pretty princess-like theater kid younger sister who got to be on TV and a brother who was a star footballer. The parents would be a narcissistic stage mother and a sports obsessed father, who lived vicariously through their younger kids and who ignored the older girl.

While such a novel would have been inaccurate - Mum of course was involved in my performing arts career but never was a stage mother - nor was Dad an 'ugly parent' at the sports field and Paul and I had our feet firmly on the ground and never had big egos - perhaps it would have been better if Rhonda had indeed written this novel rather than what really transpired.

In the later years of high school, Rhonda finally found some new friends and a niche - social issues and the correction thereof, plus left wing politics. Nowadays, Rhonda and her new friends would have been part of the 'Woke Brigade' or 'Social Justice Warriors' but these terms were not around in the early 1990s, they were largely termed 'do-gooders' way back then.

After graduating high school Rhonda trained as a social worker - a field where she seemingly met a lot of people who shared her increasingly left wing political views - and became more and more sanctimonious and egocentric and while she never said it aloud one could tell that she took pleasure in the failure of Paul and I to take the final steps to stardom.

Getting my VCE and graduating high school at the end of 1993, I continued on the path that I hoped would lead me to be a professional entertainer. I got some roles in local musical theater in Melbourne in the ensemble cast, did another commercial for an insurance company playing a scatter-brained girl who was a terrible driver and forgot to do things like turn off the iron or lock up the house, was an extra a couple of times in several TV shows filmed around Melbourne and continued to teach dance at the talent school. Around this time the garage band of some of my cousins was starting to develop and they invited me to be their lead singer, which I gladly did. We played gigs around Melbourne and in regional Victoria and at pubs and community events and once we got the chance to cut a demo, but no music company signed us up and the band kind of fizzled out in the end.

My best friends Jess and Holly had similar experiences after leaving school. Jess was very musical, and she and her younger brother formed a far more professional band than the one I was part of, and they were actually signed by a record label and did get into the charts. However, success was fleeting and towards the end of the 1990s the band broke up. Jess got out of the music industry all together, becoming a flight attendant.

Holly was always more of an actress, and like me did some commercials then got a role on the Australian soap opera 'Sea Breeze' in 1993 and 1994, but when her character was axed she also found her acting career dissipate and ended up working in a completely different field as a travel agent. Holly currently works as the manager of a travel agency in Oakleigh, and she helped me book the holiday to South Australia last year.

All the while I was a part time performer/actress, dance instructor and lead singer of a local band as well as working shifts as an attendant in a sandwich shop at the local shopping mall, I was studying at university to get a qualification that was very different from the performing arts, and that was accounting. I knew how hard it was to make it in the entertainment business so knew I needed to have another career, and accountancy came naturally to me. This was fortunate, as nobody was interested in me as an actress, singer or dancer but were very keen to employ me as an accountant when I got my degree and this of course meant a regular, stable income.

Now my career consists of debits and credits, balance sheets and budgets, profit and loss and cash flows, reconciliations and returns and I'm really happy in my job, but occasionally my old life comes creeping into my new one. I enjoy doing group fitness classes at a fitness center, and some instructors who were teaching a new release commented how easily I could pick up choreography and routines and asked if I ever considered becoming a group fitness instructor, them obviously not knowing my background. Then at the office Christmas party we had a karaoke competition which I won easily, younger staff amazed at how the red-haired, middle aged accountant could sing so well.

Paul like me didn't quite make it to football stardom and ultimately did not get drafted to play in the national competition and be a professional footballer. However, he did go on to play over 200 games in Victoria's high standard semi-professional state competition, winning three premierships from four grand finals in his career and now coaches junior football in the Geelong area while working as an engineer. Like me, he is happy with how things turned out.

As for Rhonda, despite her gloomy outlook on life and all the perceived social injustices in the world, there was only one true dark cloud in her life at the moment and that reason sat in my living room before me - her son Cody.

Cody looked at me. "So, did Mum tell you what I did this time to get myself banished from the house?'

I nodded. "Yes, she did but how about you tell me so I can hear things from your perspective Cody?"

Cody smiled, shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. "I insulted Mum and Dad's house guests from Sydney who are staying with us. They arrived this morning, this woke couple who make Mum and Dad look like conservatives along with their two sons. Well, their younger son has been raised gender neutral and he was wearing pink jeans and a gay pride tee-shirt, and their older son identifies as female and was wearing a dress, had longish hair and make-up, clearly a boy in drag. They were going on and on about how gender is fluid and how many different genders there are, Mum and Dad and Tamara were agreeing with them and fawning all over them, and I finally lost patience and said there were only two genders male and female. I was told to apologize. I said no and that people who thought that they were a different gender to their biological sex were no different from people who went around all day thinking they were a famous historical figure, a fictional character or an animal and needed some form of therapy, and now here I am. Not that I mind Aunty Emily, I like spending time with you. I don't want to be with those creepy freaks staying with Mum and Dad."

I regarded my nephew with sympathy agreeing with his sentiments. People born with two X chromosomes were female and those born with an XY chromosome pattern were male and that was that. Maybe I wasn't paying attention in biology at high school when they taught us about all these other genders? At the same time as always I was bewildered how Cody turned out the way he did. Sometimes I thought that my sister must have had an affair in the year 2000 that resulted in Cody being born, as there was no similarity between Cody and his father Sven and zero emotional connection either.

Calling Sven, a small statured, skinny sanctimonious left wing soy-drinking vegan male feminist with a man bun who worked as a university lecturer in the humanities department a Beta male was not accurate. Beta males would have beaten him up, stolen and eaten his lunch, used him as a spittoon and finally flushed his head down the toilet. He probably wasn't even a Gamma, Delta or Epsilon male. Aside from enjoying football and cricket I was always more a girly-girl than a tomboy growing up but I probably had more testosterone in my body than Sven did in his, even when I was on my period.

And how Sven could even have fathered children was beyond me. We were at Brighton Beach one day and Sven emerged from beside one of the historic bathing boxes wearing speedo bathers, which usually reveal too much about a man's anatomy. But in Sven's case, when I looked at his groin I saw only the slightest hint of a penis and testicles. How did he ever get my sister pregnant with such a tiny penis? Perhaps they conceived the kids using artificial insemination? I didn't want to know.

Regardless of Cody's parentage, he should have grown up into a left wing, woke, social justice warrior, as the house was something like a left-wing indoctrination camp. I was glad the kids were born in the early 2000s when gender neutral parenting and anti-vaccination weren't such a thing, as Rhonda and Sven had raised their kids as per their genders, gave them normal names and had them vaccinated.

Now, they were staunch advocates of gender neutral parenting and firm opponents of vaccination, this just one of increasingly loony left-wing ideas Rhonda and Sven had picked up on as the 2000s changed into the 2010s and the world became weirder. Name any left wing cause, and my sister and brother-in-law were sure to support it no matter how ridiculous it was, and made it their life goal to implement strict adherence to political correctness, climate change dogma and veganism.

Yet somehow, Cody stood firm and proved impossible to indoctrinate. He called his parents out on their bullshit and refused to go to their left wing rallies. He flat out refused to become vegan like the rest of the family, and played sports against their wishes. They might have supported sports if there were no winners and no losers, everyone got a trophy and nobody kept score, ideas which Cody told them were complete crap. Maybe Cody was one of those kids who just did the opposite of their parents and family? If my sister and her husband were conservatives who ate meat with every meal and had a 'winning is everything' mentality to sports, maybe he would have become an anti-sport, left wing vegan SJW? But whatever it was, he was certainly immune to getting indoctrinated and I at times felt he had been born in the wrong era. He probably would have been better being born in the 1970s, 1980s or even the early 1990s rather than in the new millennium.

"So, I guess Tamara won't be upsetting your Mum and Dad's houseguests and coming to join us here?" I asked.

Cody laughed and rolled his eyes. "Don't tempt fate. Although I would highly doubt it. Tamara is being the perfect, left-wing little SJW angel as always. Although I'd better not say angel, it might be considered exclusive of those who aren't religious and therefore a micro aggression."

I couldn't help but laugh and think about Cody's younger sister. If Cody scored zero percent in his parents' left-wing indoctrination attempts, then the insufferable Tamara scored 100 percent and was a fully-fledged and completely indoctrinated woke SJW special snowflake sheep. Looks wise Cody and Tamara were nothing alike, Cody sharing the dark hair, dark eyes and tall stature of many males in the family including Dad, Paul, my own son and Paul's son so somehow these genes had come through from my sister. Tamara was definitely Rhonda's daughter, they shared the same plain, pudding-like faces and blonde hair, but Tamara was skinny and small in stature like her father, while Rhonda had always been chubby since childhood and was still overweight now in her 40s. So much for eating vegan!

And if Sven ever went to bed worrying that he was raising another man's son in Cody, he would have no such worries about his daughter. Tamara was his daughter through and through, in looks, stature and personality.

"I'll never forget the time Tamara lectured you about voting wrong," laughed Cody.

"Oh, definitely remember that," I said.

One time during the federal election, Tamara had asked me who I had voted for. It of course was none of her business who I voted for, but I didn't say that and told her the truth that it was a candidate from the Liberal Party, the equivalent of the Conservatives in England or Republicans in America. She was absolutely horrified that I didn't vote for the extreme left wing candidate she and her parents favored, and lectured me incessantly about how wrong I was and how old people like me promoted racism, homophobia, climate change and the patriarchy and were destroying the planet for young people like her not to mention minorities and black people, all this with her parents standing right there and nodding in silent agreement rather than reprimanding their daughter for speaking to her aunty like that.

I simply smiled and said, "Well the truth is Tamara I'm a grown-up who gets to vote for whom she chooses and you're a child who doesn't until she turns 18. Now be a good little girl and go play." With that I left the room and took much pleasure in her furious expression, but not as much pleasure as when a certain American election result in November 2016 didn't go the way she and her parents wanted, Tamara getting herself in such a state that she had to have a week off school on stress leave. One could have sworn that the Earth tipped over on its axis so that Antarctica was now at the North Pole and the planet began spinning west to east.

Political views were just one personal thing Tamara found the need to insert herself into in other people's lives, and I found out one Saturday that she didn't really have any sense of appropriate boundaries when it came to her beliefs and forcing them upon others. Cody was out playing football, and with Rhonda and Sven at some political function for a left wing politician (no doubt with a vegan buffet for lunch) I agreed to watch Tamara. My own kids were out for the day, so I took Tamara to the shopping center with me to do the grocery shopping.

Trailing me around the supermarket, I could see Tamara's disapproval and eye-roll at every non-vegan item that went into the trolley, but the best was reserved for when we got home and she began to lecture me about two terrible environmental choices I had made doing the shopping.

The products in question were the toilet paper and sanitary pads I had purchased. According to Tamara using extra soft three-ply toilet tissue was destroying millions of trees, and adding not only to global warming but to the profits of multi-national companies and increasing the wealth of the white patriarchy who were the shareholders of these companies. As for my sanitary pads, they would take thousands of years to decompose in landfill and therefore it made me an environmental vandal; as bad as those people who dispose of toxic waste in rivers and wetlands. What terrible sins and how selfish of me, wanting some soft and absorbent toilet paper to wipe my bottom and to wear feminine hygiene products when I was menstruating to prevent my period blood going everywhere in my panties making them look like a crime scene before running down my legs!

According to Tamara, what I should be using was a single ply recycled toilet paper, and as for managing my periods I should be inserting a moon cup or wearing reusable cloth pads which I would then rinse out after each cycle. That recycled toilet paper was about as useless and uncomfortable as the loo paper they used to put in the girls' toilets at our high school. As for a moon cup there was one thing for sure and that was that such a contraption was not going anywhere near my vagina. And washing cloth pads filled with my menses after each cycle? Um, no thank you.

Given my purchases, I was due for a period on Monday and had PMS as a result, but wasn't rude and didn't tell Tamara to mind her own business. Actually, I was more shocked that even Tamara thought it was her place to lecture me - her aunt 28 years older than her - about my toilet habits and how I managed my periods. Instead, I took a different tactic and I happily volunteered the information that when I went to the toilet I always folded my toilet paper when I wiped myself, that menstruation adversely affected my bowels causing me to visit the toilet more frequently and go through heaps of toilet paper whenever it was my time of the month, and that I got my first period on my twelfth birthday.

Tamara's response was to roll her eyes, regard me with her most sanctimonious expression and say, "Ugh, too much information Aunty Emily, why would I want to know any of that?"

"You tell me Tamara," I had responded. "I thought you wanted to have a girls' conversation about periods so I was just obliging you."