Do you ever remember ‘us girls’ addressing ourselves like this title a few years back?

It was only twenty five odd years ago, at the tender age of eight or so, when I was hanging upside down showing my knickers, playing with knives or giving someone the finger, which was totally acceptable for the boys in my peer group, that I was told this or that was unladylike.

I was not allowed to play soccer because I was too small and might hurt my ‘female parts’. I was in Year Two and the year was 1988. This was the same year a lot of the ‘ladies’ I know that now leading successful businesses, being artists and mothers or all of the above were born.

I was encouraged to do gymnastics instead, so I could learn to catapult and bend my way out of dangerous athletic situations that might hurt my ovaries. I watched my brother play every Saturday with the growing fury of a never-to- be-Nadia Comenici in these pre-Bend it like Beckham days. It was unladylike to get dirty, to be good at anything athletic that didn’t involve calnesthenics and to play rough with the boys.

Thank God for MTV. Between Madonna gyrating on a gondola in a very unvirgin-like manner, and Salt-n-Pepa growling about ‘pushin’ it’, (which at the time, I believed was about the rigours of childbirth until I was otherwise educated), the penny sort of dropped.

Fuck being a lady.

It seems that women have adopted this term with the same pernicious air of entitled irony that we have crafts, cupcakes and knitting.

Is this the subervision of the domestic? Are we killing the angel in the house or actually culturally rewinding, with the retro accessories to match?

Wear a skull and cross bones apron while baking scones and you’re not being a house frau- you’re actually hardcore.

Is it the Little Britain irony that’s so appealing to women? Oh…I’m a laaady! Watch me pee in an alley after drinking my mates under the table and telling an irritating gentleman caller ‘eat me.’ It’s tongue-in-cheek to act like ‘lads’ sometimes when we are being ‘ladies’.

Or is that the point?

I’ve been to as many fancy restaurants as I can count on both hands and I’m always uncomfortable when the waitperson defers, swooping down to push back my seat or refill my water. The stagey formality, the fact that yes, I cannot actually eat with a knife and fork with ease (I actually had lessons at age 28 with a chef friend of mine) are just a few of the reasons. I am so uncomfortable with being ‘waited upon” I pile the plates and cutlery and over-thank the staff obsequiously.

My brother and I used to go to friends’ places and do the dishes – sometimes we’d vacuum. It’s in our blood. Working class Irish mother, father’s family from rural Ireland, my grandmother would try to do the dishes trick on the rare occasion that she was ever out for a meal. I’ve inherited my love of cooking and feeding people, baking bread and basically dominating the kitchen.

Service is the illusion of control. When you serve/wait upon, you are in power.

My boyfriend and I toyed with the notion that we were servants in a royal kitchen in our past life. The first days of our romance was spent preparing and cooking food together while consuming huge quantities of rotgut red wine. We swooned and kissed all over the kitchen and shared the washing up. It was weirdly domestic, our passion. He chopped and cleaned beautifully. It was his humbleness and skill with the knife that won me.

We’ve never been out to a fancy restaurant.

As a lifelong scruff (my assignments were grubby and school dress smeared with paint, now I spill my morning coffee all over myself and wipe my hands on myself. Elegance is something I aspire to and imagined I’d grow into- in the same way I thought I’d wake up as an adult and have a fancy signature and be able to drive a car. But my nail polish is always chipped and my nails black underneath, I’m bound to have some sauce on my clothes and tobacco all through my bag. I don’t even smoke anymore.

So … I find myself at a café where the waiter drapes himself all over my table. He seats himself, calls me babe, dude, buddy, interchangeably. I find myself feeling haughty and indignant, pulling up my imaginary customer pants. Where is the deference? Does this make me a classist pig? What would my Mum or Trotsky say?

He’s crossed an invisible line; he’s flaunting his power/powerlessness over me.

Its something I avoid- the bad reggae, the cheers bro’s! the swallow tatts and general affections of cafés of this kind, which is meant to be an oasis to me, a place of refuge, to write and think and order very little with good manners and hope not to be booted out.

But I keep going back. Because in my endless drudge, feeding and clothing myself and taking care of others, getting sauce and coffee all over myself- sometimes I just want to be served.

I admit to making flow charts and collages. Hell, despite the fact I think Oprah W is the epitome of facile, self-help evil, I’d even do a vision board. Okay, I did. I might even have read a few self help books- whatever gets you through the night, I say.

As of last year I vowed to finish my first draft of my novel. I failed. I planned to get my license – yep, failed. Meditate daily. Become a yogi. Book of poems published. Failed.

Even my cat pissed on my vision board. Right on, Stevie.

Recently I retrieved a suitcase of diaries I kept throughout the last fifteen years (on of the bittersweet parts of moving, those painfully nostalgic ambles down memory lane) and gulped at the lists I had been making as a sixteen/seventeen year old. Practice tai chi, take up yoga, my sixteen year old self vowed. Stop being shy- be more confident! Secure a job. Get a learners permit.  Focus on your work. learn a language. Get a real relationship (?!) and then, singing lessons. Learn bass.

It made me feel curiously tender towards my fucked up younger self.

See, music has long been a little bit of everything to me. I grew up in Irish pubs and weekend- long parties with music, dancing, drinking reigned.  Thus my love of wine and song.

My dad played guitar semi professionally and as an Irish musician, I had learnt every Irish ballad and 60s song before Year 3. Although I inhaled books, I really wanted to be a performer. Actually I wanted to own a warehouse and be Jennifer Beals in Flashdance, but that was another story (ongoing list item: take dance lessons).

However, I wavered in confidence so badly, I sabotaged every adult musical project I entered into.

I made excuses like: I can’t read music, I’m untrained, I’ve learnt by ear, my hands are too small, I’m not as good as Aretha Franklin, my voice is too low, my range sucks, I can’t sing past my break. Etc. I blamed my parents for lack of said lessons and parental nurturing of budding music talent.

I had to be sedated before I performed. No amount of tequila and Bach’s rescue remedy actually made the anxiety any better. Worse still, I actually hated being on stage in front of an audience so much I couldn’t figure out why I was subjecting myself to the whole excruciating process.

I wanted to sing with my back to the crowd. I wanted to be like Jim Morrison. I feared the audience so much I actually loathed them. Punters are like dogs, they can smell fear, you know?

My songs, my voice, they were just so ME, I couldn’t bear it. I slunk into a ten-year slump of total frustrated and thwarted ambition. It got to the point I couldn’t review music anymore, because I felt so embittered. Why be a wannabe? Why be, really at all?

Creatively, I was dead on one side of my body. That’s a pretty terrible feeling.

So last year I made a resolution. I went back to singing lessons. I felt so revived; it was like I’d been given a blood transfusion. All the songs that were circling around my consciousness became possibilities, instead of potentially embarrassing phantoms.

I laid them down, I laid myself bare.

I allowed myself, for the first time in my life, permission to learn something.

In one of my earliest list item attempts, I started adult ballet. I found it exquisitely beautiful and so much more compelling than the humiliating and graceless exertions of contemporary Les Mills’s classes- the booty-shaking zumbas, the disc- slipping body pumps. I quit after three classes because I didn’t seem to be very good at it and it was embarrassing. I told one of my best friends about it and she pointed out something rather obvious: you go to classes so you can learn something- not because you are already an expert.

Another very long term friend of mine just got her license at age 33 and burst into guttural sobs as the nice man at Vic Roads uttered the words “Congratulations.” We talked about the profound and life-changing effect that achieving these enormous and perhaps very delayed milestones can have on a person.

For me it was singing in public recently and enjoying the hell out of it and making the room move with me. Feeling my power as a performer and embracing it. Writing and recording at home without fear. Not comparing myself so much. Being vulnerable and allowing the arrows the fly at me: they didn’t.

I’m not upset anymore about my ten-year self-imposed exile from something I really love either. I can see that I needed to be able to move around in my own skin, to exorcise those old ghosts of self-loathing, so that the art could come alive.

To all the late bloomers out there, I commend you. Some people never become self-possessed and some bloom wild and bright and burn out quickly.

Lets go for the slow burn.