Too Much “TMI”

“My poo was a bit dribbly yesterday,” The Pixie announced casually at dinner. “Today it was like a treasure. There were lots of bits like a big soup.”

And then she lifted her fork to her mouth and kept on eating. What’s more, so did I.

Now, I have previously blogged my theory that I crossed an invisible line the moment I was put in stirrups during my labour with Mr Justice. Or perhaps it was during my first internal examination during that pregnancy. Doesn’t matter. Pretty much from the moment Mr Justice was born, there seemed to be no such thing as Too Much Information for me and I always thought it was something about becoming a parent. 

Except, well, I always knew my husband didn’t quite make the journey across that line. He’s still incredibly squeamish when it comes to bodily fluids. Just yesterday, he shouted out from a toilet trip with our daughter: “We’ve got an emergency situation here!!!”. Turns out there was a bit of wee on the floor and The Pixie’s bottom wasn’t entirely wiped clean. I don’t know about anybody else but them’s a dream toilet run in my books.

But then a chance conversation with my friend MM got me thinking that maybe it was only the mums that had “crossed over”. When I told him (a loving hands-on father to a five-year-old boy) that I was planning to write a blog post about my children’s individual vomiting styles – for example, Tiddles McGee is “The Perculator” who gurgles for a few minutes before finally delivering the goods – MM went very quiet and perhaps a little pale. “I’ll really look forward to reading that,” he mumbled in a way that made me think he rather hoped someone would burst in and make him eat his own hand instead. 

And then a recent reunion with two of my longest serving friends J9 and Ay-Kay put a complete end to my whole line-crossing theory. 

After a downing a few cocktails with my dear friends, I found myself speaking quite openly about my lack of bladder control. Which was followed by the kind of uncomfortable silence where you could hear even a driblet of urine drop. 

Then, the very next morning, Ay-Kay told me she’d found a pair of my underpants in the car. Now, before anybody starts getting any ideas, they had fallen out of my luggage, people. Out of my luggage!

My first thought was not “How embarrassing!” but “Please don’t let them be the Granny Pants”.

Luckily they were the nice frilly black pair. Ay-Kay even said she was almost impressed until she realised that there was a big hole in them (near the top elastic, people, not the crotch! Sheesh…). And she handed them back to me, not even asking how the hole had got there or even why I’d packed a pair of holey undies on an interstate trip. At first I thought “Aw, she knows me so well she doesn’t even need to ask…” but then, remembering my admissions the previous night and her reaction, I suddenly realised “Oh!…. She just doesn’t want to know…“.

And that’s when I realised the truth. You see, my friend Ay-Kay is a war-weary mother of four, who must have seen most things parenting small children can throw your way. And so that truth is this: there is a line you cross over when you become a parent that allows you to deal proficiently with your children’s snot, chuck and shit. And then there is another line further on that only I seem to have crossed where too much information is never too much.Which is probably why I blog so cheerfully about dribbly poo, menstrual accidents and vegetable porn stars.

Just a theory.

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Keeping Up Appearances

You can mostly tell the mums who are still at home with small children on the school pick up: they are the ones with cookie dough smeared down the front of their tracksuit pants. Or they have “flowers” painted on their cheeks with poster paints by a four year old that make them look like an extra in The Dawn of The Dead. Or they’re wearing a maternity top three years after they last were pregnant. Or they’ve got an apron tied backwards around their neck because they’ve been playing “Super Heros”.

Or maybe that’s just me.  

As I walked to the school the other day, with a large partially-rotten hibiscus tucked firmly behind my ear at the The Pixie’s insistence, I thought to myself: At some point in my labour with Mr Justice one too many people examined me while I was in stirrups and I crossed over some invisible line into a land where there was No Shame. And there was no return from that point. No return at all.

But no sooner had I thought that, I then found myself agonising over which ear I should be wearing that rotten flower behind. From what I could remember of the Hawaiian tradition, a flower behind one ear denotes you’re married, and behind the other that you’re single.

And then I woke up to myself. I realised that it Just Didn’t Matter because I was pushing the Valco Mobile Home down the road to the school, with my hair resembling a fright wig and wearing “The Berocca Grin” from a hastily drunk glass of that Magic Orange Potion which made me look like I’d just been pashing a jar of Orange Tang.

Clearly, I told myself, nobody was going to be checking out which ear I had put the flower behind in case I was “available”. Nobody. Not even my own husband. 

I then recalled with great clarity how, when I was in my 20s, I used to look at women who said they were dressing “just for themselves” and I would think “Yeh, but you also want to get laid, right?”

Now, with three children, the last thing I want to do is to get laid. Hell, no! But (I thought to myself) I still dress for other people to a certain extent. I dress so that my children won’t be too embarrassed to be seen with me in public. I dress so that my friends still invite me places and buy me lots of drinks. I dress so that my husband won’t suddenly shout “What the hell is That Thing in the kitchen and what has it done with the girl I married?”.

And then I concluded this inner-monologue with the following truth: if I was really going to dress “just for me”, I’d probably never get out of my pyjamas because most days everything else just requires Too Much Effort.

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