Mummy’s Boy

I woke up this Mother’s Day not to breakfast in bed nor fresh flowers on my bedside table.

No, I woke up this Mother’s Day with Tiddle McGee’s hands firmly clenched around my windpipe.

While not alarmed per se, I was mildly philosophical about it. After all, it’s part of an emerging theme.

Why, just the day beforehand, I’d been walking around with my infant nephew doing my usual thing to entertain fractious babies (which, for the record, generally involves taking their small hands and making them slap me on the forehead). I had been holding him for ten, maybe fifteen, minutes, when Tiddles McGee approached me with a look on his face not entirely unlike Jack Nicholson’s in The Shining.

“I want YOU to carry ME,” he said in a hoarse whisper.

I was so scared, I virtually dropped the baby on the spot.

And then later on Mother’s Day, he presented me with a card with this picture in it, which somewhat scarily evokes that famous ‘shower scene’ from Psycho…

Yep. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Norman Bates was definitely a third child.

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This NDM Lite™ post is a direct result of celebrating Mother’s Day with a seven-and-a-half hour journey door-to-door with my husband and three children. If you have any complaints, you should talk to the hand – namely, the hand that plans to be holding a G&T for most of today.

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A Tangled Web

Okay, okay, so I’m the jealous type. It would seem that one of my ‘faithful’ readers MM is not only reading but commenting on Another Woman’s Blog. I discovered his infedilities when I stopped by this Other blog the other day and found myself scrolling through amusing comment after amusing comment he’d left in response to her (admittedly) hilarious writing. It was like that scene in “The Shining” when Shelly Duvall stops to read her (screen) husband’s manuscript – except that a) MM and I are not married on-screen or off and b) I didn’t go on to hit MM over the head with a baseball bat. Instead I sent him an accusatory email, to which he promptly responded thus:

I’m sorry, it’s not you it’s me.

I just need some…. space to express myself…there were emails and…one thing led to another and the next thing I know I was writing comments. It doesn’t mean anything.

etc

[MM]

Later that same day, I found myself at the zoo with MM, his wife KC (still determinedly unaffiliated with the Sunshine Band) and their son Master D. It was one of *those* zoo visits: my kids went for the “scatter” approach and kept running in different directions; I’d forgotten Tiddles’ nappy bag at home and lived in fear he’d do a backslider and I’d have to beg a nappy off a stranger (“Spare a nappy, guvnor?”); The Pixie fell into a puddle of someone else’s sick in the Butterfly House; and I ended up having to tie the back door of the Tarago shut with a length of rope in order to drive home. But overriding all of this was the growing realisation that both MM and KC both were just a little enamoured of this Other Blogger. Look, even I’ve got myself a big old girl-crush on this Other Blogger but that’s not the point. It’s just I thought I was the only blogger in MM and KC’s lives. Well, no, actually, I knew already about MM’s long-standing relationship with David Cairn’s “Shadow Play” but I thought I was the only Darker-Side-of-Mommy-Blogging Blogger in their lives. 

But why should I be? The internet is a big place. WordPress alone boasts 4,566,500 blogs. There are blogs out there that get as many comments on one post as I get readers in a week. I’m small fry, baby. A teeny weeny fish in a BigPond (a little Australian-specific joke there… big pond, BigPond, get it? huh? huh?? Aw, come on…). So with all that competition out there, I should just give up on any idea of keeping my readers all to myself (“my preciouses, my preciouses“), and get into the spirit of the Swingin’ World of Bloggin’ where everyone’s reading everyone else and leaving comments here there and everywhere like so many used condom wrappers. 

But, as is often the case with Open Relationships, there’s one person who’s just a little less into the Open part and is just pretending to keep the other partner happy. I guess I wasn’t prepared for how blogging would leave me feeling so exposed. I mean, you’re putting yourself ‘out there’, exposing the inner machinations of your psyche to the internet at large. I often have Lost Days where I spend every five minutes hitting the Blog Stats link to see if anyone is reading my mad ramblings. “Where are you people?” I say to the screen angrily. And then, somewhat pathetically: “Was it something I said?” Followed by a fearful “Maybe, uh, I’ve really truly jumped the shark, uh, and nobody is brave enough to tell me…” (But surely with little gems like that BigPond gag, there’s no waaayyyy I’ve jumped that shark, baby. If anything, that big old shark’s jumping me… hang on, does that work?). I think at the end of the day that a lot of bloggers are like a lot of actors and door bitches – on the surface, it’s all bravado and “look at me, look at me” self-importance, but on the inside they just want people to like them and say that they’re the best. Okay, maybe not so much the door bitches. 

In any case, I certainly hope it’s not lost on people that I’m focusing on Me and My Little Neuroses on this day of all days: Melbourne Cup Day (oh, and there’s that little old election that America, too). It takes a very special person to be able to do that, don’t you think?

So listen up: in the spirit of Free Love on the Internet, here is a link to my favourite US election commentary blog “Margaret and Helen“, purportedly written by two old ladies whose friendship has spanned 60 years and who aren’t afraid to use words like “whack job”, “bullshit” and “Sarah Palin is a bitch”. And for the record, I think “The Bearded Iris” rocks. Read her stuff, she’s good – very very naughty, but good. But, hey, don’t be a stranger – make sure you swing by my little old blog once in a while, eh?

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