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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