Deborah Hill Cone: Happy-family script interrupted

Here is a sample conversation from Room 3, the new entrants' class, at Stanley Bay School in Devonport. Girl one: "My daddy goes to work and gives people money." Me: "What does your mummy do?" Answer: "She makes the dinner." Girl two: "My daddy helps people. He's a lawyer." "What does your mummy do?" "My mummy makes the dinner."

Is Devonport the suburb that feminism forgot? I have been wondering about that since my marriage split up. I seem to be the only solo parent in this suburb of shiny, happy people. Certainly I'm the only one who lets her kids draw on the walls with impunity and considers Banana Up & Go a vegetable. I have always felt simpatico with Devonport but now I am not in a pristine nuclear family I feel a bit of a freak. I didn't realise separation still had such a stigma.

Certainly Devonport's famous reputation as an enclave of bohemians, artists, liberals and rackety types - well, we do have the Michael King Writers' Centre - is looking a little threadbare. The typical Devonport dweller is more likely to be a middle-class English immigrant who likes the suburb's twee villagey atmosphere and the fact that you can buy HobNobs in the main street. Some others seem to be modelling themselves on Don and Betty Draper from Mad Men - the typical 1950s pre-Germaine Greer family complete with starched teatowels and repressed anger. These days the yummy mummies wear lycra bike shorts rather than those torpedo-shaped bras and do pilates when they feel the urge for a fag, but the worship of family values seems little changed.

I fully accept I may simply be jealous of those whose lives are still following the happy family script. Bitter, much? Me? And I admire women who are full-time stay-at-home mothers - SAHMs - but I couldn't do it. And isn't feminism supposed to have embraced motherhood again? A true member of the sisterhood stays home, tends her vege garden and makes organic muffins. But that is certainly not me. It may be time for me to embrace my true nature - come back Gina Hardface Bitch.

There may be a message in the fact that I recently bought a leather skirt and a black lipstick. It made me look like the world's oldest and mumsiest goth. I guess this is what a midlife crisis feels like. I am lucky because when I feel otherworldly and weird as all hell I have great friends - some of them in Devonport - to piece me back together. Most men in my situation are not so lucky. When their marriages split up they tend to be in apartments at the Viaduct dating botox babes. You know the male stereotype: drive a BMW, live in the Eastern Suburbs, wear a loud Hawaiian shirt on the weekend, have lots of acquaintances you can watch the rugby with but have no friends. It's amazing how many men don't really talk to each other.

But forget the blokes, this is all about me. I hasten to add that although the Stanley Bay kids are adorable, their views on gender stereotyping are not to be taken seriously. What do kids really know about their parents' jobs? When my friend, journalist and former MP Deborah Coddington was working full-time at North & South magazine and her youngest was about 6, she was asked what her mother did and she said, "folds towels".

Another former female MP's child said her mother "worked at the airport". And a friend of mine who is in politics confessed her daughter thinks she works for the National Party. "Kinda true, but she thinks it is a real party with balloons and a bouncy castle." Still, beats making dinner.

* dhc@deborahhillcone.com