How a Domestic Goddess Invents Time Travel ... backwards

By Kim Aubrey

"The word ‘Willpower’ kept being screamed into my mind by that ‘mutton dressed as lamb’ Conscience Fairy perched on my shoulder.
What would she know? I’ll bet she’s never had a decent chocolate in her life.
She started battering me with her wand and abusing me with her one word vocabulary “Willpower, willpower, WILLPOWER!!”
I swatted my shoulder and wiped my hand on the passenger seat. That bitch had to die, she deserved it."

A woman wakes up on her 52nd birthday and suddenly realises the world is going just a little too fast.

She decides to invent Time Travel.. backwards to her 40th birthday.

Along the way she tries every trick in the book to regain her fast fading youth, and eventually finds the secret.

Prepare to laugh off every hot flush, calorie and stress wrinkle your body has as you go along for the ride with this Australian author.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kim Aubrey
• Release date: Mar 5, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458091345

Kim Aubrey

Kim Aubrey is an Australian writer who has recently ventured into children's literature after years of technical writing.

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How a Domestic Goddess Invents Time Travel … backwards

© 2010 by Kim Aubrey

Published by Kim Aubrey at Smashwords

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only.

This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy.

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

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Dedicated to all middle aged women who are sick of being told to change the way they live

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PLAN 1: 6 Decades and counting

Dear Diary,

Hello, My name is Kim. Pleased to meet you. I’m a 51 and a bit years old Domestic Goddess. Just over a year ago I found myself in middle age quite by accident. I woke up one day and the clock had ticked over and bang, there I was, 50 years old. It’s quite a momentous day when you turn 50. Suddenly you see your own mortality. You look back on the past half a century and wonder where it went. You look forward to the next half a century and wonder if you will remember any of it when you hit 100. I remember the day quite vividly. I woke up in my bed, looked at He Who Lives With Me sleeping on his side and I stared at the ceiling fan while listening to his snores. I was practicing in my mind saying I’m 50 years old. or Hello, I’m Kim and I’m 50 years old. I couldn’t do it. It sounded so wrong. It was impossible for my brain to comprehend that figure. I couldn’t be 50! 50 was for old people! It was only last year I was turning 30 – wasn’t it? Please tell me it was. My mind screamed for someone somewhere to pinch me and make me wake up and realize that it was all a bad dream.

The longer I laid there staring at the ceiling fan, the deeper my fear became. 50 years old. What a horrifying number. How much longer do I have to live? I haven’t got to see all my children have children of their own yet. I want to see their children have their children and their children have their own children. I want to be a great great great great grandmother before I die. I haven’t even learnt to make a proper choux pastry yet and here I am, bloody 50 years old. 50. That’s not even just 5 decades. If you stop and figure it out, you are going into your sixth decade when you hit 50. I didn’t want to be 50. I really didn’t want to have to get a bowel cancer screening kit and free mammogram birthday card from the government for my graduation into middle age.

By the time He Who Lives With Me woke up, rolled over and said Happy Birthday I just burst into tears and pulled the covers up over my head and cried into my pillow. Typically, He Who Lives With Me didn’t understand the anguish I felt and said something totally stupid while showing genuine concern like What’s wrong? A fresh flood of tears at that question had him bounding out of bed to run and get my birthday present to ease my pain. It was a gold and diamond ring engraved to commemorate my 50th birthday. For those of you who have already turned 50 you will understand that I wanted to cram that ring and its engraving fair up his date. How could he do something like that?!?! I was 50 and therefore I didn’t want to be old enough for commemorations even if every other birthday of my life I have wanted a gold and diamond ring! You commemorate Anzac Day or the wedding of inbred royalty! You don’t commemorate becoming ancient!! Men!!

But then, quite unexpectedly, after the tears had subsided, a complete calm came over me and out of the blue my mind exploded with a giant halo of light. I suddenly could see clearly and all the pent up wisdom I had suppressed over the past 50 years began to spew forth into my soul. The secret of being 50 had chosen to arrive about an hour too late to stop the tears, but like a middle aged woman trying to read a map, amidst the chaos it had eventually got me to the place I needed to be. Clarity arrived in a giant blast of reason in my brain and the wonder of middle age became evident.

When you turn 50, you can say and do whatever you damn well like.

No more political correctness.

No more Mrs. Happy Days.

No more worrying what others think.

At 50, you are classed as being over the hill, so while you start sliding down the other side, you might as well tell everyone back there trying to get up the hill to your age or teetering on the brink of the hill, just how it all should be. It’s time to start teaching them all the rules.

The tale you are about to read is just a small excerpt from my Post-50 life. 90 days to be exact. I’ve had a little medical crisis which has bought me to a new phase in my existence. It’s time for me to try and roll back the years a bit and catch up on the things I missed out on and along the way, possibly regain a little lost health.

You are coming with me. Yes, you. I can see you sitting there reading this. You are middle aged or you wouldn’t have bought this book. Let’s face it, I wouldn’t have mentioned the age factor in the title if it wasn’t to get your attention. What are you up to? The fifth or the sixth decade of your life? Or have you got even further along the food chain? It’s all going a little too fast now isn’t it? Don’t shake your head, you’d be a liar if you said that time doesn’t go faster the older you get. It’s a proven Domestic Goddess fact that once you hit 50 and you blink, it’s next Christmas already and you still haven’t bought the brandy for the pudding. I want to slow time down just a tad but after all these years of gaining untold wisdom, I know it’s not going to happen overnight so I’m keeping a diary and you are going to be allowed to read it each day to check on my progress.

I used to keep a dairy when I was just a little girl. I would write a few short lines in it each day for a couple of years and when I look back on it now, it’s a great source of entertainment. In some small way, keeping a dairy now that I’m not such a little girl anymore is a way of turning back the clock. I’m sure this will be a source of amusement to my grandchildren when they hit their middle ages and start pondering how to turn back time as well. Possibly, if I do this properly, I’ll still be around to see them smile and pass on their wisdom to the world too.

I don’t know where this will lead me but I’m looking at it like a Choose Your Own Adventure story. The path will constantly change depending on which choice I make. You will probably disagree with me along the way and if you do, I’ll not hold back my thoughts. I’m 50. I can say and do whatever I please now. I hope we can laugh about a few things along the way and maybe, just maybe, if we do this together, both of us might get something out of it.

Are you comfortable? Do you have a cuppa with you? Have another chocolate biscuit. Bugger the diet. It’s time you took a bit of time for yourself.

Onward now ...

Kim

May 2010

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PLAN 2: Dr Useless the Idiot and the Wonder Pills

Dear Diary,

Today I had to go to the doctors because my blood pressure prescription had run out. You may wonder why I have high blood pressure. So do most so-called medical experts that I go to. I think it’s a combination of menomongrel and menopause which, in Domestic Goddess language is a history of stress during my marriage coupled with hormones having their last fling before retirement.

My hormones hate me. They always have. As a teenager both Mum and Dad had their own methods of dealing with my hormonal issues. Mum’s answer was to put methylated spirits on my pimples and make me sit in the sun to dry them out. Holes burnt into my flesh then just toughened me up for the skin cancers to come in later life. Dad, on the other hand, found it easier to take The Sydney Morning Herald to the front seat of the Chrysler Valiant, lie across the seat with his feet crossed and hanging out the passenger window, put the newspaper across his face, and sleep it all off out of harms way.

During my breeding years the hormones cycled between good and evil and I tried everything known to medical science to control them. Nothing worked and so I gave up and went with the homicidal tendencies whenever they came around. Here I am now in my sixth decade on earth and they are still giving me grief. When God gets around to redesigning men and women I think he should do away with hormones altogether. Life would be so much simpler.

It was around Xmas 2008 that I got quite sick with high blood pressure which resulted from menopause and menomongrel and I was put onto a wondrous medication that controlled the fluctuations. Nothing controlled the causes of the high blood pressure but after a lot of fiddle-farting around with types and strengths of pills eventually I was led to one particular drug which seems to do the trick and get me back to a livable level.

It was quite amazing really to feel myself suddenly get less tense and to actually FEEL the bed when I laid in it, or feel like I could sit, do nothing, and not get fretful. I like those pills. They make me reasonably calm.

Well, apparently they did, until now. Lately I’ve been feeling a little, shall we say ‘tense’? In the back of my mind I hear He Who Lives With Me yelling out the words ‘rabid’, ‘maniacal’, ‘crazy as a 2 bob watch’, ‘it was justifiable homicide Your Honour’ and various other things but, as usual, I’m ignoring that noise until it learns not to bother me again.

So, I made an appointment with a local doctor, who, (just for the record), is an idiot. All doctors are idiots when you are a Domestic Goddess. I don’t care how many books they’ve read, or how many courses they’ve done, until they live through childbirth, child rearing and menopause, they know nothing. They are useful for handing out prescriptions when a Domestic Goddess tells them what they should prescribe, but after that - useless.

So Dr Useless the Idiot is one and a half hours late to take me in to his shabby and could-do-with-a-shave-and-some-soap-and-water-himself style office-come-renovated-toilet-with-a-bed-that-needs-the-sheet-straightened and asks what he can do for me. I politely refrained from pointing out his obvious cleaning inabilities and told him to just write me a script for my wonder pills please.

Dr Useless the Idiot then says he had better take my blood pressure and so I oblige this fool and allow him to wrap a tourniquet around my upper arm and pump and squeeze it like he’s Crocodile Dundee squeezing the leg of a tribesman from the jaws of a 27 foot crocodile. I, not wanting him to see my pain as we of the stronger sex are prone to do, stared at him and imagined him spread-eagled on a birthing bed whilst my arm swelled to the size of the Hindenburg and I continued my inane conversation about the traffic congestion problems around the surgery … LIKE I CARE YOU STUPID EXCUSE FOR A MEDICAL PRACTITIONER - and then he said – Hmmm - that’s a very high reading. I told you he was an idiot.

WELL DUH!!!!!!!!!!! I’ve raced around like a blue arsed fly all day dealing with students who don’t speak English and who don’t want to study, driven home just breaking the sound barrier to get to this appointment on time, end up waiting for over an hour and a half in a waiting room with people wearing masks and kids screaming and fighting and old men hawking up snot and THEN YOU SQUEEZE THE BEJESUS OUT OF MY ARM AND YOU WONDER WHY MY BLOOD PRESSURE IS UP???!!!

Listen to the sound of my sighs. Sigh.

So he changed my medication, wrote me a referral for blood and urine tests and sent me on my merry way. I’m not having his stupid tests. Trying to take aim into those little containers when you are my age isn’t logistically possible. If I could strap one to my nether regions when I’m sneezing or laughing it might work, but it’s not what they want and I’m not going to do it.

The chemist charged me $48 for the pills. Oh I did buy a little make up concealer when I was there too but what else can one do when standing in a chemist shop waiting for a prescription other than buy some makeup? That’s a life necessity and must be paid for. The pills on the other hand cost too much.

I then looked at the box; there are only 30 pills in it. So that’s going to work out to just under $50 every month!!! Bugger that!!!

So - I came home, spoke on the phone to He Who Lives With Me who is currently working interstate and neglected to mention what is going through my mind because he just wouldn’t understand and then I decided to invent Time Travel. I’m going to become 40 years old again.

It will be cheaper than paying for those pills and I might even get a little healthier along the way. I’m trying to enlist the help of at least one daughter who lives near me but she’s a little tied up with rearing her own child and working her way towards Goddess Domesticity, so she may not be able to be part of this great invention very often.

I’ll start inventing Time Travel - tomorrow.

In the morning, I will awake refreshed, re-energised, determined, and with knowledge of how to achieve this great modern medical miracle that I glean from my dreams tonight. I’ll then head off to work with renewed vigour in my step and a wooden spoon strapped to my inside leg to stop any backchat I get from detractors to my quest.

Tonight, while He Who Lives With Me is away, I’m going to eat ice-cream and banana for tea, leave the fire on ALL night even if I don’t need it just because I can, stretch out like a starfish in the bed, and generally put myself into a vegetative state to meditate on how the hell I’m going to do this.

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PLAN 3: The Murray Darling Basin is going to be OK

Dear Diary,

I’m sitting in front of a class of adult students who have absolutely no idea their teacher is about to become world famous for inventing time travel backwards. They think she’s just there for their pain and suffering. How little they know of what is about to become a reality. Right now I have them all working hard on a little project which gives me time to jot down a small experience I’m having this early in the morning.

I teach International Students who come to Australia on a student visa for various reasons. It’s not an easy job but I try not to whinge too loudly about it. What I do enjoy about the job is being able to espouse my middle aged wisdom on every subject relating to Australia that I can. From the convicts to the politicians, from the girt to the dirt, from Vegemite to BBQ’s, I tell them all about it.

Australia, the land I love, the land I call home, the land that allowed me to punch out other teenage girls who thought Sherbet were better than Skyhooks way back in the 70’s, the land of perpetual drought and increasing water costs for it’s every increasing flood of new students and residents.

Our current cats-bum mouthed Prime Minister of this once great land has really been in deep doodoo trying to fix the Murray Darling Basin Wetlands-Drylands-Citylands-Docklands-Environmental-Catastrophes numbers 762 to 967 caused by whatever excuse anyone makes up to increase water costs for the average person - until now.

I’m taking a short break from my Time Travel invention to inform the wider viewing public that at least one of Prime Ministers’ problems is solved. And it’s all thanks to Dr Useless the Idiot’s new Wonder Pills.

You see, they contain a diuretic. Just a very very very mild one the useless doctor informed me. I took one of these very very very mild diuretics at 6am this morning. It’s now 9.30am and I have deposited enough water into our system to solve that particular environmental catastrophe. As I type I can hear flocks of migrating herons, albatross and pterodactyls flying overhead and heading southwards. There is the faint sound of rushing waterfalls and torrential rivers with kayakers doing daredevil whitewater rafting outside my window.

By lunchtime I should have fixed the Murrumbidgee too.

All in a days work.

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PLAN 4: Just how long is a piece of string?

Dear Diary,

How long is a piece of string? I’ve always liked that saying because I can never answer the question and so if I can’t answer it, I’m guessing no one else can, and there are so many people that have never heard it before so it makes me look all wise and intelligent when I use it in a rhetorical way. I like looking wise and intelligent. It’s such a change from feeling dumb and confused.

I say it because today, I started on my Time Travel Invention Quest by buying some equipment to build ‘The Transportation Device’. I bought a piece of string. It cost me $1.50 and it comes in a lovely retractable case. It’s red and it has a key chain attached to it. It’s got all these little numbers along its retractable tail and look ... he’s smiling. He knows what an important little piece of string he’s going to be in this quest. Cute little bugger.

He’s going to measure various body parts of mine and during the quest for the invention of time travel, he’s going to keep measuring until he, with the aid of some serious scientific work, is going to force some of those body parts to shrink. We’ve got to have a small transportation device.

So - what to measure? Hmmm.

As a woman gets older she notices there are a few areas of growth that didn’t seem to be there when she was younger. Do I measure those areas or if I’m trying to travel back in time, do I ignore them and only worry about the ones that will be there when I finally reach 40 again?

You know the ones I’m talking about - THOSE bits.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s handy to have them and I sometimes wonder what I did without them back in the old days.

My boobs, whilst no competition for Pamela Anderson, always used to sit up and point magnetic north by themselves. Now they seem to have a serious preoccupation with conserving Emperor Penguins in Antarctica as they constantly head south - but they were there when I was 40, they just had fewer environmental concerns then so they must be measured.

It’s that bit UNDER the boobs that I’m wondering about. Whilst I slept one night Arthur the Additional-Fat-Around-the-Midsection-Fairy pranced in to my bed waving his puce feather boa around and saying something like - "Boobs! Stand at ease! Here, dears, rest on this little lounge suite and you won’t get so tired trying to stand up by yourselves all the time’. And