Confessions of a Bondi Blonde

Today, for the first time in a long time I was a successful, slick business babe. I was in the zone and the big occasion was a meeting with a potential client. He had the capacity to pay me major shoe, food and handbag vouchers for months to come and he’d increase the list of clients at my PR boutique by 100%; my only client at the moment being a internet based provider of Russian wives, but that’s another story.

The dishevelled Bondi blonde was shuffled off in a pile of overstretched Lycra just after the 8:45 a.m. school drop off. By 10 a.m. an ironed and blow dried me was talking the talk I had last had seven years before. I was even walking the walk in new shiny patent shoes I had bought for the meeting, just a half sized too big but a steal at $150 at the David Jones sale. My suit was vintage – well, old – and I had updated it with a cream frilly shirt from Dotti. 100 nylons had been euthanized to make it, but the whole look didn’t look too bad, especially on a winter’s day when any lurking BO smells were easily masked by a spray of the Charlie whiff juice that the kids had bought for eight bucks at the last school Mother’s Day stall.

The big handshake-of-yes was getting closer with every clever suggestion I made. I was loving myself almost as much as I was being loved in return. Client-guy was Gen-Y cute and was as glossy as my shoes; being something big in built environment. Maybe, I thought, almost orgasmically as the almost-client agreed with me yet again, if I sealed the deal, I could promote his awarded erections in a way guaranteed to excite.

Then my head itched in a way that needed attention.

Scratch. Scratch. Scratch.

I extended my newly varnished fingernails from my head and had a surreptitious look. A varmint interloper waved at me from under my nail, fat and happy.

A nit.

The bloody little sucker dropped onto the marble boardroom table and sprinted on his six little legs towards Built Environment Guy (BEG), seeking refuge in the forest of his hairy forearm. Carpe Diem! I seized the day and squashed the nit. The quick kill (one skill that isn’t mentioned on my resume) saved BEG from certain infestation. Unfortunately my little interloper also killed the deal and the blood was mine. I could feel the desire to do business with me ebb away as quickly as the blood dried on BEG’s Free Trade hemp paper notebook where the cootie had met his end.

In the smooth lift ride down to the cold street, I did a quick rethink. That morning I had hugged my children tightly before I pushed them out of my car and onto the pavement to face their school day. The nit probably was transferred to me from my youngest during his daily slurp goodbye. My lacquered scone was a tasty new address for the nit invader who certainly knew how to make an entrance as well as an exit.

I have for a goodly while been a parent first and a provider second. But, considering the pressing need to pay for frivolities like Vegemite, a win today had been vital to up the income and down the mortgage. The life time cost of a first child is $385,000, according to a recent report by the Federal Government’s Productivity Commission. I have two kids and we live in Sydney where everything is more expensive than the national average. So I figure raising my two until they migrated out of the nest could easily cost me the best part of $1 million. I get the family taxation benefit from the Federal Government and the $200 dollars a week helps a little, but I need to brush up and polish my long dormant professional skills pronto if I am to keep my post-nuclear family in the manner to which we had obliviously become accustomed to while living off the fat of the land and my ex-husband’s finance industry income.

Frankly, I just don’t know how I’ll do it and as I caught the 380 bus back to Bondi, my too big for me shoes rubbing my heels into blisters, I began to regret my decision made eight years before to leave the career track for the mummy track. I have never for a second regretted having my kids. But if I knew that marriage was a word, not a life sentence, maybe I would have returned to work when my maternity leave finished, rather than exiting the career for child rearing. If I had stayed at work my divorce would have had a less of a train smash effect on my life and my economics.

Scratching idly away as the bus idled at the Bondi Junction interchange, I paused, considering the decisions I had made and the difficulty of single parenting. I have reduced confidence, musty skills and little recent experience. I used to fly business class between meetings with high flying clients who showed me the money with scant regard to the zeros charged per hour. Today’s debacle confirmed that I couldn’t get a gig charging cut rates. These days my Mercedes Benz transport, complete with RTA chauffeur, had to be shared with 60 or so others.

As the bus chugged along the Bondi Road and I did a quick check of the mummy contingent heading with me for their afternoon at the beach with their little ones. There were six mums and toddlers on the bus. It looked to me that many mothers chose the path that I had and were forgoing the upward trajectory of career to raise their children. But as one in two marriages splinter, leaving the bulk of the childcare responsibilities with single parents, often mothers, the decision to stay away from the paid work force looks even more dangerous in terms of economic and resultant emotional security of the next generation.

Making a decision on whether to return after maternity leave is never an easy one. And when people like children’s author Mem Fox berate women who chose to return to work, placing their kids into child care, I want to kick her sorry ass. Economic stability makes stable, happy parents. If a woman can reassure herself and her kids that that she can put the food on the table, the roof over their heads and manage just about everything else, surely that is more important in the long run to a child than who wipes their noses or kisses them better when they fall over in the playground.

Last week a Spiderman torch was put to use after lights out as my boys did canyoning activities in the dark up each other’s posteriors. They were happier than when Indiana Jones uncovered the crystal skull when they found the magic tapeworms peeking out of their butts. Yum! Combantrim chocolate flavoured worm medicine all round. It’s actually quite tasty and we all fought for the last piece.

I was there for this great event. Like I am there for the school sports carnival, tuck shop duty and the paraphernalia of family life. Many full time working mums miss out on the questionable joys of these events. I don’t envy these women their harassed, always a little late lives. But they can provide economic security that’s simply out of my reach at this point in my life. Neither groups – the stay at homes or the go back to works have it all and in my school a gang of each support each other – the stay at homes email their working friends with things too important to miss (like class music presentations) and the working mums pass on information of job opportunities for those looking away from the playground towards the workforce. We are working together to keep it together and the sisterhood is intact and doing it, in the end, for ourselves and our children.

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Pssst.

Want to know a secret?

Well, that’s the bloody problem isn’t it? I can’t keep a secret.

I’ve told so many people about my supposed “anonymous” blog that anything that I write, fact or fiction is going come back and bite me right on my size six bottom in my real life. That’s my very pert and very cute bottom, by the way.

I knew from the beginning that being “anonymous” was a very good theory to have though not to hold for too long. My first whispers of my alter ego were done with secret handshakes and vows of secrecy on pain of death. With my closest thirty friends. After nights out with bleary eyed (and that was at the beginning of the night) frenemies and acquaintances I usually had told bar rooms of people about my exciting new life as a self published tart.

No-one has been safe from my relentless self-promotion.

“Hey Mr Lollypop man, have you seen my blog?”

“Really officer, only two little drinkies and a glug of Listerine for the minty breath effect. I’ll blow in the bag if you give me a pen for something you’re just gonna love…sheerioulsy gonna love.”

And so on.

So. That means that if I write shite about my real-ish life, I’m in danger of exploding the glossy future that I am trying to build for me and the biters – ankles and each other.

Maybe I should only write stuff that shows me to be a world leader type in training, like Nelson Mandela but female, younger and hotter. Or J’aime King from Summer Heights High. But a female and hotter.

Might as well have a go.

Today, after feeding some huddled masses outside Westfield Bondi Junction with Wonder White bread and tins of dolphin friendly tuna I ran to Bondi Beach in 8 minutes, beating my previous best time by .05 seconds. Luckily I arrived in time to save two Japanese tourists from a nasty rip. I swam out, grabbed one by the throat and the other by the camera strap and headed back to shore, kicking a lurking great white shark out of the way. Oops, sorry Greg Norman (actually not sorry at all). After performing CPR on the two tourists, saving them from the Bondi Rescue TV crew, I ran home. Then I baked a kosher cake from scratch for my neighbour’s son’s Bar Mitzvah, wrote to my sixteen World Vision kids and did cartwheels to school in time to mentor a child who needed some special help from a concerned, involved parent. That’d be me.
Note to self: After kids have eaten their vegetable based healthy dinner, meditated and sung themselves to slumber tonight, convert the Volvo to run on cooking oil from local restaurants.

That sounds good. And plausible. Doesn’t it? Oh that’s right; I don’t have a kosher kitchen.

The thing is that I need to be anonymous. There are a few people that are best kept in the dark about all the fun I have been having while writing if not living this self-published stuff. They would be mightily annoyed if they knew that I was having a hoot in my new improved life rather than wearing the sack cloth and ashes they keep on telling me I should be encased in.

One friend was really concerned that somehow writing this would land me in jail. Go figure. Anyway I asked my lawyer and she delicately replied:

WITHOUT PREJUDICE:

“You want to pay me $450 an hour to read this crap? You really must be desperate for readers. Tap away, lady. It reads a bit like a chimp on a typewriter but you’re doing no harm to anyone in particular, only the world literary community in general.”

Cheers for that, you pompous wig wearer in training.

Also, I don’t mind embarrassing myself if there’s a laugh in it. I am a happy little birdie most of the time these days and laughter has been my best medicine. Only around 25% of it has been hysterical, but my friends have bitch-slapped me out of it on those, getting rarer, occasions.

So, all those in the know, I’m probably going to keep on writing stuff that does not paint me in the gentlest of lights. It keeps me giggling and you too, I hope. Just don’t think that it’s all true. I am really a soft and feminine woman who is gentle and loving and kind. And a great driver. You can stop with the giggling now.

Just for the heck of it I’ll try two versions of the same scenario, one as a kinder, sexier, better in every way real blonde and the other as the original Bondi blonde.

Version One – the better blonde.

Today, after cleaning the house and weeding the neighbour’s garden, I rang my father to wish him Happy Father’s Day and asked him if he had received the present that I had sent last Monday. Sure enough, it had arrived on Thursday. He loves the socks I knitted him and the presents the boys and I made as craft over the past three weeks. After going to church for the 6:00 p.m. Father’s Day service, I went to dinner at a wonderful friend’s house, bringing dessert. It was nothing much, just a sherry trifle I had started to make yesterday. I think that it’s always a good idea to start a trifle the day before, so the sherry can soak into the sponge cake, which I always like to make myself. I had bought a really good red wine at the local specialist wine merchant the day before. My friend loved New Zealand Pinot Noir and I had asked the merchant to keep a bottle of his best for me. We had a lovely night. I didn’t drink more than one glass (I was so glad that my friend had kept the pinot for himself and gave me a lovely Shiraz that went beautifully with the meal) and dropped off three other people on the way home.

Version Two – the Bondi blonde.

11: 00 a.m. Shit. It’s Father’s Day. Christ. Better call the old bastard and wish him the best.

11:30 p.m. Great night. I love playing Celebrity Head. But I couldn’t agree that Brendan Nelson is a celebrity. He’s not even a politician. The food was great and they thought that the wine and chocolate combo I brought along was “satiric”. Good. I think that they meant cheap, but were too polite to say. Didn’t drive home. Not that stupid. Got a lift with someone who lives in Vaucluse, only 10 minutes out of their way. Somehow I’ve got to get the car back from the boonies by 8:00 a.m., tomorrow. Bus, train, bus. That’ll be fun.

Think I’ll stick to version 2. There goes my future!

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