For Sartori, who asked.

Daughters.

Let me tell you about my daughters. I allude to them a lot, refer to them as 'pesky';'irritating' and generally more trouble than they are worth. And to be frank,  a lot of the times, they are ALL of those things. But I never seem to write about the fun times, the times when "holy-shit-this-is-worth it" HITS.

So here they are.

Mouse

My oldest daughter, intense in the womb and intense outside of it. Mouse's birth story is somewhere on here somewhere, and I won't rehash it - but it was rough. And mostly, it's been a very very steep learning curve to get where I am today.
Mouse races through her life, zipping here and there, fanatical about one thing one week, detesting it the next. Mouse exasperates. Mouse challenges. There's always a 'yes' somewhere for Mouse. And she succeeds more often than I care to admit.
She can make your heart break when she cuddles her little sister after a big spill. Especially when you've yelled at her over and over again for deliberately tripping that fat little pest.
Mouse stares at you with these long lashed intelligent eyes, and pours her whole heart into every conversation you have with her - so that you end up wondering just who's learning from who. She climbs into bed with me every night. I have tried to break her of this, honest, but she just looks at me with those fucking eyes and little beestung lips and tells me that 'it makes her feel better'. Or 'because I love you and I want a cuddle'. Argh. I been played. And secretly - I don't care. She'll hate me soon enough.
Mouse has wild curly fine hair, that twirls itself into fantastic sculptures every morning. Mouse must wear this wild wispy hair in 'scrunchies' that have to pull up the curls into a fountain of corkscrews. It's both the best and the worst hair I've ever seen.
Mouse likes to pretend and imagine and tell stories. Her imaginary friend pops up frequently, a little girl who by all accounts, seem like a perfectly nice little girl. Only Mouse could have an imaginary friend that she takes the blame for. Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?
Mouse can be terribly unkind. She can reduce little girls to tears. And then she can turnaround and tell another little soul that 'it's okay to be crying, it will get the sad out.'
Mouse will be an actress, a writer, a lawyer or a politician. That's what I think.

Alex

I used to think of Alex as the complete opposite of Mouse: dark where she is fair, straight hair instead of curls; green eyes instead of blue, and grounded as opposed to flighty. That  defined her, really - even her birth was straightforward and relatively uncomplicated.  But that's not true anymore. Alex is an imp, poking fun at the boundaries. And yet, she can instantly stop crying when I get sharp about her tantrums. She will mostly do as she's asked (or told. ahem.)
Alex loves to dance, she loves twirly skirts and dress up shoes. The sight of those tripled-barrelled legs stumping along under a flouncy skirt is to know the meaning of the words 'strangling laughter'. (She is obsessed with flouncy skirts lately). 
Alex is happy both in and outside the company of others. She'll play happily alone for at least half an hour, pouring water from bucket to bucket and singing to the dog.
She loves books - she can sit with books for hours.  She prefers Maisy lately, and I am thinking it is because the drawings are linear - in other words, it's the art, not the moronic story. It must be the art -- she has scribbled over every wall in my house, despite me going incendiary and cannot be trusted with any kind of writing implement.  She finds this grossly unfair.
Alex is amenable but stubborn and will worry away at an issue until a solution has been reached (good = cookie; bad=shouting) and then cuddle you no matter which way the solution went. She loves to kiss you and cuddle, and yet if it's not on her terms, she holds out and you can beg and plead for naught.
So I have no idea what this child might be. She might paint; she might parent; she might do something I can't imagine yet - but I think it will be essentially solitary. That's odd to think.

Whore.

I have become an ebay whore. We are tight for cash (when aren't we?) due to my hub's inability to realise that:

• a)he's supporting a wife and two kids on whatever he earns;


• b)he sometimes has to do jobs that pay better that he doesn't like (oh boo-hoo) because of a) above


• c) his tendency to raid the bank account for high priced lattes and sarnies for lunch ($12 for a coffee and a tuna sandwich, are you kidding me? That's two outings for the kids!!)  and


• d) taking clients out for lunch and then 'forgetting' to tell me or budget for it.

So then we (meaning me and the kids who are budgetting to within an inch of our lives) have no cash to do anything. And then the enforced boredom turns my children feral and me into a slathering mess. There's only so many fun crafts to do with egg cartons and pipe cleaners, ya know. Especially if you are a mum like me, who's only doing this shit because the kids like it. When they stop liking it, it's time to hit the pay-as-you go entertainment.

Argh.

So last week, I'd had enough. It had rained all week, the kids were a nanosecond from being locked in the closet with rats and spiders like Carrie.

I raided every closet and every box in the garage for things to flog. And wow... what people will pay for stuff I don't want anymore. Okay, there's been a few tears, especially over little eeny weeny baby clothes but tears won't put dinner on the table. Or fund Mrs. Paxil.

And so here I sit, obsessively refreshing my browser over and over again, to see how much moolah I am making. Getting pissed at people who won't even bid on my lovely stuff. Don't they recognise a bargain? Don't they realise I wept real tears over those little pink overalls? Whassamatter with them?

However, I found the best solution is to write the descriptions after a snootful and half of cheap Aussie plonk. (After last week, I drink my wine from a beer stein, believe me). You'd be surprised at what sheer bluntness does to whet a buyer's appetite. Telling them that if they don't like it, they can email me and bitch - works wonders.

But there is a  bad side to all this whoredom.

 I am a packrat and a sentimentalist (who me?) and keep everything my children have ever worn, and written, or drawn or played with. I keep old love letters, watches that don't work because I had a romance with the boy that gave them to me, postcards from old lovers, manky old thread bracelets from Simon the would be poet,  rock tshirts from concerts that I don't remember because I was so blitzed I had to buy the t-shirt to convince myself I went... you get the picture. And then I trip over something one too many times, or can't find a particular item because it's lost in the midden of memorabilia and then I get ugly.

I mean, why the hell am I keeping a silver pair of celtic cross earrings when I think they are naff? Just because I bought them in Ireland? Or a pair of tiny baby shoes were worn once at a christening? I hate them, I only bought them because it was church.

Everything becomes a candidate for removal. I am ruthless - winnowing out things with nary a glance. Posting ebay listings like a fiend.

Ka-ching, ka-ching.

And then I find myself browsing items and thinking 'wow, that's so lovely' and realising it's MINE. And praying frantically that the said morons who don't bid, won't bid and I can wrap it back up in tissue paper and not look at it again for another couple of years.

I am an idiot. A soon to be cashed up ebay whore, but an idiot nonetheless.

Ps. own a piece of me. go on, go bid on some of my crap. Tear my heart from out of my chest. Better still, don't.