Throwing the Bat

Perfectionism, rage-quitting, and the slow, bloody persistence of learning. Plus, what I’m eating and reading in March.

Hey friend,

My son, Henry, threw the cricket bat on the lawn, tears streaming down his face. He stomped away shouting, “I can’t do it! I’m not good enough!”

Even though I know the best way for Henry to work through his hurt feelings is to let the tornado rage, I interrupted his tirade with truth bombs from the washing line, “You can’t do it yet baby. The only way to get good at something is to practice. You’ve gotta be willing to be bad at something so you can get good at it.”

Henry threw his head back and howled. 

My heart recoiled seeing itself reflected in the flesh of my firstborn son. 

Photo by Alessandro Bogliari on Unsplash.

It was 2021 and I asked my husband’s cousin, Ana, to teach me to quilt. She had made my boys stunning patchwork baby blankets. Her Instagram page brimmed with handmade bucket hats, blankets, and dresses. Despite three children under the age of five, she carved out time to sew as her creative outlet. My mother-in-law has a long history of making clothes, and just the other week, she had picked up a jumper from an op shop with the intention of turning it into a skirt. I was hooked. 

The noise in my home reached a previously unknown pitch as five children under the age of five, Ana’s three and my two, clattered through my small 3x1, occasionally encircling the jarrah table where Ana and I had set up our supplies. In the centre of the chaos was an imposing black sewing machine I borrowed from my mother. It was so fancy, I did not know how to turn it on. 

In my enthusiasm, I had purchased swatches of fabric, batting, an unpicking hook, and pins. Ana gently moved these aside and started explaining the basics. Like how to thread the bobbin into the black monster and how to stitch two pieces of fabric together. The only other time I used a sewing machine was during Home Ec in high school. I broke two needles then. But I wanted what Ana had now. If I can just become a woman who quilts, I will be peaceful and creative. 

Instead, in a gruelling hour and a half, punctuated by nappy changes, requests for snacks, and dispute mediation, I stitched together a small bag with Ana’s help. After a brief moment of relief, I discovered I had sewn the handles onto the bag wrong. I threw my head back in frustration. This is harder than I thought. This is taking longer than I thought. When will I be able to quilt if I can’t even make a stupid bag?!

I swallowed my anger and thanked Ana profusely for her time. I promised to practise. As soon as she left, I boxed the black beast and all the supplies away in the shed. I shelved quilting in my heart, the same as all the other hobbies I had started and thrown down over the years: ballet, gymnastics, netball, hockey, piano, drama, calligraphy, drawing, knitting, tennis, running, and dancing. I kicked myself for even trying. I can’t do it! I’m not good enough!

My husband learned how to play cricket on a patch of red dirt with black gym mats lined up in front of a set of rusted wickets and a wooden fence covered in vines. He doesn’t remember when, exactly, he started playing, but at the start he mostly tagged along after his Dad and his brother, who is four years older than him. Tagged along to training, games, and when he was old enough to hold a bat, joined them out in the front yard to learn about pool shots, drives, sixes, and fours. 

Zac has played cricket year in and year out for thirty years. Every summer, he dons his whites, takes his giant bag of gear down to the local oval, and stands out in blistering forty degree heat all afternoon. Occasionally, I go down to watch.

There are moments in a marriage where you watch your spouse do something that they have done long before you were around. I know nothing about sports, but I watched Zac stand ready at the wickets, the bowler running towards him. He considered the ball and with fluid muscle memory, sent the ball exactly where it needed to go. He did not flail furiously at the air or swirl on the spot. He exerted no more energy than he needed to, like a surgeon with a scalpel, and drove the ball with the same calm he brings to our household. It was like seeing him anew. The same man who woke up next to me in the morning was the same man running to the wickets. 

It takes a long time to be good at something. 

A woman recently paid me a high compliment. She said, “Your writing looks effortless.” While I thanked her, I also hurried to correct her assumption. The writing might look effortless, but it takes a tremendous amount of work. It is hard to make something easy to read. I’ve spent my entire life reading and writing, some for work, but mostly for pleasure.

It’s writing in a journal by hand, every single day, pages and pages and pages that no one will ever see. It is observing my life and stowing away anecdotes, images, and metaphors on the page for use later. It is reading sixty books a year, being intentional in reading good words, so this will pour out into my own words. It is drenching my mind in Scripture. It is hammering out ideas in therapy and supervision and Bible study groups and over voice texts and in my living room. It is summoning the courage to get terrible, terrible, very bad words down for a first draft, and then gathering courage to submit those words for edits.

Writing is a craft. It takes time to grow in the craft.  

A gift of my thirties is a growing understanding, and acceptance, of what I am actually good at and what I am not. My gifts are writing, teaching, and counselling. And by the world’s standards, I can’t even really say I am good at those. I am still a Clinical Psychologist Registrar, inching slowly, hour by hour, towards the halfway point of my three thousand hours of supervised practice period for my specialist endorsement. I teach a small group of women the Bible. It’s not paid, I just do it because I like it. I write for a small audience on The Snuggle. It is not paid, I just do it because I like it. I have exactly one published article to my name anywhere apart from my own website. 

When I was 21 years old, I attended a staff meeting at Providence City Church (which at that time was St Matt’s UniChurch). I remember the pastor, Rory Shiner, praying for me, “It may take Bec twenty years to learn to counsel in a way that glorifies you Lord, but we pray that you would teach her.” I was mortified he thought it would take me that long to be good at it, but fifteen years into this gig, he is so very right. 

The more I learn, the more I realise I do not know. I am growing in awareness of exactly how long it takes to be good at anything. I am going to be thirty-five this year, and while that is still relatively young, I don’t have the time I once had. I cannot be good at everything. And anything I want to be good at requires an incredible amount of work. 

There is something beautifully anti-algorithmic about the grit, the pure bloody persistence in learning a skill. It is in sharp juxtaposition to hustle culture, artificial intelligence, internet hacks, and instant gratification. Craftsmanship cannot be delivered to your door. 

I desperately want my son to learn these acts of analogue resistance, along with me, in a world that tells him he can have anything he wants right now. So after Henry raged and stomped for a while, I crouched down next to him, and said, “Learning new things is hard. You’re angry. I get it. It takes a lot of work to learn something. Should we give it another go?” 

He wiped his cheeks with the back of his arm and picked up the bat. Together we walked back to the black gym mats in front of the big blue shed. 

I hope Henry spends another ten thousand hours batting. I hope he spends ten thousand hours learning to be a good conversationalist, ten thousand hours finding meaningful ways to be kind to others, and ten thousand hours learning to be hospitable. 

What skills might we commit to learning with our limited lives? 

How can we steward and grow what God has given? 

I’m Loving

“As broken as we were, we were still pieces of one once-whole thing.”

Britt B

sent me this. Raw and stunningly written insight into a very hard part of a marriage.

Similarly, “They say you should never go to bed angry with your spouse, which in theory is all well and good and something we tried hard to practice in our early marriage years, except I’m (occasionally) a passive-aggressive Enneagram 9 who waits too long to get in the first word, so that by the time I start telling Maile how angry I am about something, she’s asleep. Reality is often where good advice goes to die.”

I’m probably the last person on earth to subscribe to

Freya India

but so glad I did. Wow. The Gen Z perspective on the impact of the internet and social media on women is fascinating. Start with Stop Opening Up About Your Mental Health Online and then binge everything else.

I’ve been in a reading slump but this month, I inhaled each of these in a day: Yellowface, I’m Glad My Mom Died, and Leaving Blackwood. The latter is a Perth author, Khaiah Thomson. She reminded me why I love the YA/paranormal/urban fantasy genre after a long string of disappointments and cliches. The final installment of the trilogy is out in July. I can’t wait.

I’ve read this ten times in the preparation for postpartum. Encouraging and starkly honest. Thanks

Annelise Roberts

Also helping me feel less like I’m going to blink my eyes and this baby will be here: this handy app that helps you and your partner match on baby names and these low prep freezer meal recipes (thanks Meredith Aguero!)

I most frequently freeze Chinese Five Spice Chicken Marinade from Salt Acid Fat Heat on chicken drumettes. It’s the easiest dinner. Defrost, traybake, serve with rice and greens. Drizzle all the delicious pan juices over your rice. Top with a fried egg if you’re feeling fancy.

If you think you don’t like plain jasmine rice, try this: put a cup of rice in a sieve and rinse it under cold water until the water runs clear. Drizzle oil in a pot and toast the rice until it looks a bit translucent. Add two cups of chicken stock and salt. Bring it to boil then simmer with the lid on until it is done (you’ll know it is done because you’ll hear it sticking to the pot). Turn the heat off and let it absorb all the water while you finish making dinner. I dare you to not eat it out of the pot.

I made coleslaw from RecipeTin Eats the other day and filed it away for all future coleslaw callings. I served it with leftover pulled brisket on toasted Turkish bread with garlic rubbed on it. I felt so fancy even though I served sandwiches for dinner.

In case you missed it, Issue 10 is in the world. There is More to Life Than Grey is my poem 💛

Issue 10

Tell me in the comments:

1. What have you persisted in learning?

2. What are your biggest barriers to sticking with learning a skill?