How do you know if you’ve made it?

IT TURNS out I’m a failure. With a capital F. Because I don’t have a hot tub, a home gym, a wine cellar, a golf membership or a driveway longer than 200 metres.

Angela Mollard

I’M A sucker for a quiz.

Honestly, few things make me more smug than knowing what a bongo is (an antelope), and in which Shakespearean play Rosalind was the heroine (As You Like It). I fudge my way through “boy stats” by always answering with the number “three”– “How many players kept wicket to Shane Warne during the spinner’s 145-test career?” and “How many premierships have the Lions won since moving to Brisbane?” - and I excel at rare diseases, Beatles songs and 80s TV shows. Anything I don’t know I blame on those few weeks I had glandular fever and couldn’t go to school – basically geography, the periodic table and US Presidents.

So when I stumbled across a quiz called “Fifty Things That Prove You’ve MADE IT” I was eyeball deep quicker than you can list cities beginning with “M” that’ve hosted the Olympics.*

I appreciate that “making it” is subjective and one woman’s Porsche is another’s herb garden. But I’m a reasonably evolved person. Surely I’d blitz the thing as confidently as I knock off the New Year’s Day bumper quiz.

Do not pass Go.

Well, it turns out I’m a failure. With a capital F. I scored 4 out of 50. Yes, four!!! Because I don’t have a hot tub, a home gym, a wine cellar, a golf membership, a driveway longer than 200 metres, a sit-on mower, his and hers sinks, 400 thread count sheets, a pedigree dog, a gilet (whatever that it), shopping trips overseas, children at private schools, an annual ski trip, a home cinema or a “car just for weekends” (why?), I have not MADE IT. And not only have I not MADE IT but I’ve crashed spectacularly. It’s one thing to not have an electric garage door but I don’t even have a garage door. Or, sob, a garage.

It seems my only signs of success are a cleaner (fortnightly), a fridge with an ice dispenser (malfunctioning), a picnic hamper (in the loft – surely a loft is a sign of success?) and more than 2,000 Twitter followers (4,480 as it happens - Happy New Year to you all). That’s it. No pony lessons. No lobster lunches. And, gasp, just the one television.

Yet as any seasoned quiz lover will tell you, the key is not just in knowing the answers, but in pulling off the sort of distraction which will: a) showcase your cleverness/wit/talent in other fields; or b) allow you to cheat.

Journalist Angela Mollard says her kids are “alive, laughing, and learning that life continues after a crisis”.

So, here’s a list of my year’s successes. Let me know if you think I’ve MADE IT.

1. Scoring five goals in a single hockey match. Only two were for the opposition.

2. Exemplary text communication with fellow parents so I turned up precisely three minutes before my daughter made her star turn at the district cross country, thus ensuring an additional four hours of productive work time.

3. Stitching up the hem on a school uniform instead of using Sellotape.

4. Getting my recalcitrant teen to agree to come on a World Expeditions trek up Mt Rinjani next July.

5. Committing only three malapropisms on national television. (last year it was five).

6. Chancing upon the most fabulous vintage hippy belt for $10 in a market and wearing it with everything.

7. Likewise, the perfect eyeshadow (MAC Woodwinked)

8. Lodging my GST on time for all four quarters.

9. Willing and succeeding in getting our pet rat to die three months before the usual life expectancy.

10. Refraining from wishing a similar fate upon the replacement kitten even though she’s a whining, weeing little menace.

11. Swimming in the ocean in June. In NSW no less.

12. Reading poetry again for the first time in years.

13. Compiling a playlist so depressing that friends leave directly after dessert.

14. Getting my column mentioned on the front page by writing about … sex.

15. Publishing my first book.

16. Convincing my eldest to give up drums for guitar.

How do you know when you’ve made it? Tell us in the comments below.

17. Attending two gorgeous weddings. And no funerals.

18. Holding a newborn baby and for the first time in a decade not yearning for another.

19. Taking my daughters to a Justin Beiber concert so they will always have a measure of how bad a concert can be.

19. Warming to Christopher Pyne.

20. Dancing at a rave party for four hours solid.

21. Having the good sense to wear comfortable shoes to the rave party.

22. Racking up two decades on the most precious of my friendships. But also being surprised by new ones.

23. Seeing whales breaching and fighter jets skimming the ocean and the shininess of the human heart – all in one day.

24. Scraping off the cynicism and joylessness that so often barnacles itself to middle age and flicking it in the bin.

25. Separating from my husband. No, not everyone’s idea of success but he will forever be my friend and of that I am proud. Our kids are alive, laughing, and learning that life continues after a crisis. We are not broken, just a different shape of whole and in the context of the year, ours is just a little sorrow. Besides, he’s excellent – on geography and the periodic table.

* Montreal, Melbourne, Munich, Moscow.

Originally published as How do you know if you’ve made it?