Extraordinarily Ordinary Suburban Life & Authentic Living This Week
An ode to ordinary suburban life paired with gratitude, memories, learnings and more
Hello Friends!
Here's what you'll find in today’s newsletter:
A Piece of Life in Focus This Week
Extraordinarily Ordinary Suburban Life: a poem about lower middle-class suburban Australia in a cost-of-living crisis
Authentic Living This Week
Gratitude Corner - Pre-kindy dropout, food and good friends
Making Memories - Brunch, ball pits and feeding ducks
Learning Something New - Substack hack, authenticity and the hero’s journey
Reality Check - Bye-bye kindy, mobile snacking & fiction writing
Inspiring Finds - Wonderful Substacks to read
Welcome to My Substack! My Name is Tania.
I invite you to join me on a journey of embracing authentic living. Through honest stories, personal insights, and reflections on authenticity, I seek to find the extraordinary in the ordinary. Subscribe for free & tap the ❤️ if you enjoy this post!
Life in Focus This Week
Hey friends!
So I wrote a little something. An ode to the ordinary. A reflection of suburban life and community in middle-class Australia, particularly during a cost of living crisis. I would love to know if any of these words resonate with your life or the lives of anyone you know.
Extraordinarily Ordinary Suburban Life
To be ordinary. Positively average.
The simple pleasures of life are somehow simpler
While lavish luxuries are just out of reach.
We don’t fly to far-flung exotic locations.
We drive to the next town to pitch a tent in a national park.
A three-bedroom, two-bathroom, single-story brick house
Smack-bang in the middle of the suburbs.
The neighbours behind us bicker over breakfast,
The ones next door party every weekend,
And I can see their Rottweiler through the fence palings.
Lawns mowed. Hedges trimmed.
Garden beds mulched. Bins on the curb.
Leaky gutters. Peeling paint.
Cracked pavement. Ants in the letterbox.
Sounds of birds meld with hooning cars,
Grunting lawnmowers, and barking dogs.
Every payment tracked.
Every receipt saved.
Every purchase noted.
Keep track of your spending.
Buy within your means.
Budget or bust.
Deeper in debt you go.
Along with everyone you know.
Kmart and Temu.
Crocs and socks.
Maccas or KFC.
I revel in the ordinary.
Embrace it wholeheartedly.
Where mundane mediocrity
Means more than money.
The extraordinarily ordinary suburban life.
Authentic Living This Week
This Substack series is devoted to everything that I feel adds authenticity and realness to my life and I hope it helps you focus on the authentic joy you can create and experience in your day-to-day lives too.
Gratitude Corner: Finding Appreciation in the Everyday
Taking time to find things to be grateful for in everyday moments is a great way to stay grounded and remind yourself of the things that really matter.
This week I’m grateful for:
Deciding to pull my 3-year-old son out of pre-kindy. I reached out to a Facebook mum of boys group asking for advice and solidarity after pulling my son out of pre-kindy and deciding to try again next year. Most responses were incredibly supportive and helpful and made me feel more content with our choice to pull him out. Hearing other relatable stories made me feel less alone. Our loved ones were supportive of the decision too. A weight has been lifted off all our shoulders after making this decision.
My parents make breakfast, lunch and dinner for myself and the kids the two days a week I work from their house. Two days I don’t need to worry about feeding us and it is always appreciated. Making sure I eat enough is something I struggle with on the days I’m at home with the boys, but I certainly make up for it at my parent’s house.
Having friends I’ve known since school who genuinely care about me and my family. They know me in a way others never will, simply because we have been in each other’s lives for so long. One of my good friends even sent me a text message the other day wishing me a happy wedding anniversary. My husband and I had forgotten. Such is life with toddlers and work priorities. Oh well, hopefully we will celebrate it next year.
What are you grateful for this week?
Making Memories: Cherished Moments & Milestones
Making memories and recording them has always been incredibly important to me. Our memories tend to fail us, so keeping a record of precious moments enhances our memory-keeping abilities.
Caught up with some old high school friends for brunch on Saturday who I hadn't seen in a year. It was so nice to get time away from the kids to have a quality catch-up with them. But what do you think we talked about most of the time? Yeah, our kids!
Our favourite indoor play centre is a regularly requested outing. Of course, we went again this week. Interactive ball drop mazes, ball pits and barrels of fun.
Enjoyed a brisk autumn Sunday morning as a family wandering through the local park and reserve. We fed ducks stale crusty bread loaf ends, tossed a bright blue wiggles ball up and down the cement slopes of an empty skate park, collected pine cones in a rocky culvert, and ate grapes, water crackers and cheds on the grass in the shade while dodging thieving magpies.
What memories have you made this week?
What has inspired you this week?
Learning Something New
Learning something new keeps our minds active and alive. It can also broaden our minds and help us become better human beings.
Here’s what I learnt this week:
Did you know that you can change the settings in the Substack app so that the accounts you subscribe to only show up in the app and not your email inbox? I've subscribed to so many more people because of it because I no longer need to worry about clogging up my inbox.
I wrote a piece about authenticity and why we can sometimes see it as a cringy word. I came to a lot of interesting realisations writing that piece about authenticity in my life and in the world around me.
I was listening to a podcast talking through the hero's journey, which is a common format found in many fiction stories such as Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. In the hero's journey, there is a lie about the world or main character that needs to be overcome in the story and a secret ingredient usually helps them overcome the obstacle when they think all is lost. It made me think, that this kind of format can work in nonfiction too. Take my 'cluttered life' article as an example. The lie I told myself was that I should be ashamed of clutter. The secret ingredients to overcome this shame included changing my perspective and finding positive ways to embrace the right types of clutter. Anyway, I like this perspective. I might write a dedicated article about this at some point if anyone is interested.
What’s something new you learnt this week?
Reality Check: Navigating Life’s Challenges
I find venting about struggles I face in life just as therapeutic as embracing joy. Writing about or vocalising the tougher moments in life helps us process them and knowing we're not alone in these struggles is helpful too.
Here are some struggles I’d like to vent about this week:
Deciding to pull my 3-year-old out of pre-kindy was a tough decision. We had already paid for the full term and he was only there for a month and a half. As you can tell from the anguished poem in a previous post, drop-off had been a disaster. He was getting more and more distressed each time he had to go. He didn't have to be there, and despite the money we paid, we pulled him out and will try again with full kindy next year. I think we made the right decision.
I have a terrible habit of handing my toddlers food throughout the day that they then walk around eating while leaving crumb trails on the floor that I need to clean up. I know this is a mess of my own creation but in my mind, the positive of them eating outweighs the negative, slightly. Get them to eat it at the table you say? A logical choice, but I've found my children tend to eat more with far less fuss while on the move. More food in the bellies = less hangry too.
I want to focus on my fiction writing more, but now that I’m writing on Substack, which I enjoy, my focus is pulled further away from it, particularly with other life commitments. I also have so many fiction stories half-written, all in different genres, that I don’t even know what direction I would go in or what story to focus on. I keep getting lost in research and changing my mind, so I will type out these thoughts and feelings on Substack instead!
What do you feel like venting about this week? This is your safe space! No judgment here.
Inspiring Finds: Great Substack Reads
How good is Substack? I’ve just been burying myself in amazing content on this platform. Here are a few inspiring Substack posts I enjoyed reading this week:
Well that’s a wrap! I’d like to leave you with a few positive reminders:
Treat others the way you wish to be treated.
Practice makes perfect.
Treat yourself with kindness.
Please let me know what you think of my posts by leaving a comment below or reaching out to me in the app. If you enjoy reading this newsletter consider hitting subscribe. Have a wonderful day!
Love the poem, Tania! That was my life exactly while raising our kids. It was beautiful. Now we are (still pretty young) empty nesters living in a downtown condo. Turns out that's really great too. :)
Highschool friends are a special kind of connection, aren't they? I'm two decades out of school, but still catch up with my core group a couple of times a year and at milestone events.
I hope you're enjoying a calmer pace of life now you don't have to worry about kindy.