Can Publish, Can’t Advertise

About the author

I was the Head of English at a prestigious private school in a capital city in Australia. I have been a teacher all my working life but took an early retirement at fifty. I have one son and two daughters. My son and one of my daughters are happily married and my younger daughter is in a stable relationship with her girlfriend following several temporary ones over the past few years. I have grandchildren.

My children think I am boring. I think my students admired me, perhaps some of them even loved me. They thought I was unadventurous.

My fellow teachers thought I was safe, dependable and conservative. Possibly sexless.

I am none of these things. I have done so much that my children, my students and my co-workers could not possibly imagine me capable of. I look at my children and think what safe, boring lives you have had. I cannot tell them what their mother has done with her life, but I don’t want to die with no record of it, as if it had never happened.

Sometimes I think I’m like that old lady in Titanic. You know, the one who turns out to have been Kate Winslett when she was young.

This is my story.