Because it just plain needs to be said:

I am a Pisces. (Also known as "Fish") My Horroscope starts like this:
" A Pisces cannot live without lies and treachery. They often get so wrapped up in their own tall tales that they can easily forget which of their stories are true and which are not. " (Read more | )

Crapulous.

I've done nothing today that I didn't want to. The house is a pigsty. I've spent hours online and ignored pretty much every other person in this house, including the kids -- except for about an hour before bedtime.

I've been pleasant to the hub, firm but non-engaging with the kids, and it feels... evil, wicked, and good. Today I didn't give a rats bum about anyone but me. I slept in till 9am, made my own coffee, chatted with the kids and then just... absented myself.

I've been writing (nothing I'd put out here, oh crapulous-spoutings-of-my-burnt-out-mind) and downloading music. I know - the rest of the world has discovered downloading music simply ages ago - but up until about a week ago (pre Hub losing his job, I point out) I bought a new computer. The first in 10 years. How embarassing. And doubly embarassing that since I built said old computer myself - I hadn't bothered with a sound card. I can be a bit of a puritan, you know. So downloading music, watching videos - I never did it. Ever. I couldn't burn a CD to save my life.

But ho ho ho... now I have Limeware - a really good little program that basically lets you download anything you fancy. Got a hankering to see silly English commercials - just search. Wanna see Paris Hilton's infamous sex vid? Click a button.

So being the Luddite I am, I am merely using it to download music. And absolutely NOT cool music - this is music listened to by people who still re-live the horror of being left alone at a high school dance when your friend went off and danced, music for people who kissed the tail end of the 60's and realised it tasted like Alice Cooper.

Seriously forlorn stuff. So far, I've downloaded Iggy Pop, CCR, Tom Petty , Nina Simone, Billy Holiday, Peter Gabriel, Laura Nero, Bob Dylan, Jimmy Bufffett, The Band, The Four Tops, Robert Palmer, Talking Heads, The Jam, Bodeans, Stevie Ray Vaughan, John Hiatt,  Mahalia Jackson, Elvis Costello, The Cure, Depeche Mode, The Cars and er.. The Partridge Family ("I Think I Love You" if you really must know).

I managed to stop myself before I downloaded The Monkees "Steppin' Stone", sweet jeebus be praised!!!

Anyway, I've always loved music and it's so damn expensive here in Oz. CDs are close to $30 a pop due to import taxes. So it has to be pretty special for me to buy it. The last CD I bought in this country might have been some Neil Young thing, but truth is, I am not sure.

I am not necessarily the person whom that list above implies. I like all sorts of stuff and some of it is retro and some of it is new and most of it sits comfortably inbetween. I wouldn't say I have great taste in music, but I don't think it's bad. There's no Backstreet Boys, Yanni, and Enya in my collection. There is Metallica, Lenny Kravitz and Frank Sinatra, however. Sue me.

On the other hand, I do have Kings of Leon, Nine Inch Nails, Scissor Sisters and Good Charlotte so I am not completely out to pasture. No matter what thatdownload list makes out. It's pretty humbling acutally - to look at that list and think 'oh my gawd I am so completely and utterly uncool'. I was once pretty damn cool ya know. Now I am the sort of lamebrain who actually keeps a Korn CD in my collection so I look cool. Well, cool-ish. Well, interesting for my age, anyway. Well... probably a sad try-hard to the 20 year olds next door. I do know this in a secret part of my brain, honest I do.

Tell me what music you download and why.

Help me expand my horizons. Before my kids grow up and realise they are doomed to play The Byrds when their friends come over.

PS. It's too late to stop me downloading William Shatner's definitive version of 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds'. It is so awesomely bad, so outlandishly freakish that it will reduce you to tears. It's the entire title of this post.

Ass clown.

(Just let me preface this to say, that I do still love the guy (more's the pity!) and he has some redeeming qualities. Or I'd have left him waay before now.)

So it's Saturday, right? So I get up late (because it's my turn to sleep late this Saturday) and I've slept badly. I have been worrying myself sick about money and finances, and at 4am I came to a resolution. I am going back to work. No, I don't like it, yes, I think it's shortchanging my youngest (she's two) and holy fuck - do I hate him for it. But the bottom line is, I don't have to be slammed on the head with a two-by-four to get it.

My husband is lazy, self centred and infantile. He's lots of other good things, but the plain truth of the matter is - these are the faults that will sink us, if I let it. Note I said 'I'. As in me, my, mine. As in 'all about me', 'my worries', 'my reaction', 'those kids are mine'.

I've tried to change the way he looks at things. Tried to force him to grow up, to take responsibility and to just suck it up. He can't. His will is stronger than mine. His capacity for selfishness is greater. And I can't sit back and watch this family go through yet more money worries that leave us sniping at each other, the kids needy and clingy and our house like a battle zone.

So I am going to take control. I will get a full time job. Not a high power one - I owe my kids more than an 80 hour a week mum - a job where I get to the office at 8:30 and leave at 5:30. No prospects, no challenges but just a little job that keeps us ticking over while the hub takes forever to grow up. He can get the same.

He will assume more responsibility for things around the home - he can learn to fucking cook and he can bloody well serve dinner before 10pm even if he is tired, he can learn what it's like to parent lovingly on 4 hours sleep and he can make my damn lunches(as well as his own)  and dinners for half the week. He can iron half the clothes which includes his damn shirts. I will do the other half. Because it's his existential angst - he can sort out childcare. He can be prepared that I will want to go out with my friends and cut loose, and he can stay at home and "babysit". (Let's see if he thinks it's babysitting when it's part of what he does all day). He can look after the kids for an entire day on the weekend from breakfast to bedtimes. In turn, I will do the same.

Let's see if the man who breaks down and screams at the kids 'that he just wants 5 minutes to himself' after he's looked after them for the morning can hack having to do both that AND work outside the home.

Remember folks: This is the man who has noticed I am updating my resume, has figured out that I am barely speaking to him, has been told that I am mightily pissed at him but 'will get over it', has had to cook dinner twice this week (bacon and eggs and tuna sandwiches. Humph.), and has heard me say that I am looking for a job --- and still has yet to talk to me about what is going on with us. Has yet to discuss what his being jobless means, or how we are going to manage, and has fielded frantic phone calls from his mother about the direness of the situation because I just won't.

Hasn't asked me yet how I feel about this, him and what's happening. Except to nervously ask me about 20 times a day if I am 'all right'. Which is about 19.875 more times than normal.

This is gonna be interesting, don't you think?

I feel all tingly with anticipation. My life might actually be better.

Woe.

(sorry, this blog was intermittently interrupted by screaming 4 year old who had badly stubbed her toe and bleeding all over the floor while the hub is still tootling with his remote control car in the garage.)

So the boy gets home last week and gleefully tells me he's been fired. Fired for looking for another job while he's currently employed. "It's okay", he assures me - the people he was talking to are definitely, positively, abso-fucking-loot-lee interested in hiring him for much much more money then he was making. Don't make it a big deal, don't get on his back, just chill and think positive.

Yeah.

So it's a week later - no phone call, several appointments that mysteriously got cancelled, and here I sit. My hub is playing with his remote control car in the garage instead of fucking out there getting some money.

A word to any males who read this: Don't fuck with a woman's security. Especially a woman who gave up a six-figure income to mother her kids until they were five. Especially a woman who had real responsibility, worked till 2am some nights and juggled a staff of 8. I am that woman, and you bleating about how you hate the industry you are in and how you can't handle the commute and how you only did it for me and the kids.

Fuck. Right. Off.

Listen. You could have jumped careers any time you wanted before kids. It would have just been us two, sailing along on our raft of pot and booze and clubs and expensive meals and live music and art galleries with a brioche and a cappuccino on Sunday mornings over the paper. I told you many times to take a risk, take that jump off the cliff into the unknown.

You didn't.

So fuck off you big baby. Fuck your moaning about how your life is over and you don't want it to be over. IT IS FUCKING OVER. It's about the kids now. You and I are mired in a sea of school uniforms, mortgage payments, crayon scribbles, half chewed bananas on the $5000 couch and disapproving teachers. So get over yourself. Get over your lost youth, missed opportunites and ships in the night. No one cares anymore. Especially me.

I just spent entire day consumed by others. My breakfast was a lecture from the kindergarten teacher, my lunch an expedition to the Toy Store in track of washable crayons and my dinner has just been gobbled up by  concern, kisses, bandaids and reassurances. Where do you get off thinking there is a 'you' anymore? Why are you entitled to that and I not?

If we both think like that, we shouldn't have had children. And I couldn't bear to think that my children wouldn't be around. They consume me and they define this part of my life. I know this all fleeting, why don't you?

Trust me, it's a lot more bearable when you start enjoying the responsibility.

Get your arse off that seat and get a job, you bore me.

Secret.

I have been asked to keep a secret. Now, believe it or not (given the fact that I like to spew on public websites),  I am actually pretty good at keeping secrets.

I am best at keeping secrets when I am absolutely, unequivocally convinced that no good will be served by telling.

So I am in a real flutter over this request. I gave my word, and I will keep it but oh dear jesus it will be hard. Hard because the asker is someone who is one of the few people on the planet that I would unhestitatingly give my life for, and yet I think this is a terrible mistake. A mistake because despite the short-term consequences of telling, the long-term consequences of not telling could be far worse. And because she needs someone who lives in the same fucking city to hold her and help her, and the only person who can do this right now lives on the other side of the fucking world.

Her reasons for not telling are valid. Pain, hurt, distress, health issues.... they hit all the right buttons. Can't argue with a single one of them. And the only reason for telling that I can think of -- is to get support. Support that will come anyway - just not as fast.

So I don't know why I am writing this. Perhaps she'll read this and decide to take my advice. Perhaps all I needed was to see the flaccidity of my reasoning in black and white. Perhaps I needed to write down my promise to keep my word. Maybe all these words all lead to one unescapable conclusion - it's not my life, it's not my decision and all I can do is stand back and pick up the pieces.

At least she knows I love her.

(Someone bought me Premium. Whoever you are, wherever you are - thank you. It's always MY luxuries that seem to get sacrificed when we are doing it tough.

And Phoebe, I miss writing here too. Thank you for  your email.)

Alone.

So Miss Mouse started Kindergarten last week, uniform pressed, shoes shined, hair in a 'big girl' scrunchy. She seemed to go from being my baby to being someone else in a nanosecond. A stranger. She primped and preened and adjusted her hat and rolled down her socks so she 'didn't look dorky' and chattered happily about 'big school' until I thought my heart would snap in two. She held my hand only until the school gate, then cheerfully dumped her book bag at my feet, yanked off her hat and ran to join her friends in a game of chase. I was left standing there, feeling wholly redundant. Thank god for Cherub, who came over to give me a cuddle and then waddled off to tag along with her big sister.

I just stood there. Frozen with embarassment and fear and longing.

I don't know the mummies from school - because this is my first time. I don't really understand the educational system here, having never experienced it first hand, and I do not belong to the various mummy cliques that seem to whirl and swarm around the community like some sort of underground sorority. I am just me, big and gawky still at 40+, older than most mothers waving their kids goodbye for the first time, and younger than mothers who are ushering their last child through the gates of the educational system. And let's face it - any time I wander into a school yard, I am instantly transported back to my painfully shy childhood.

Mousey doesn't have those sort of issues though. She's happy and confident in her place in the world. She's only  moved once in her short life, and has lived here long enough that there are loads of familiar faces in her kindy class. She's found her gang, and will most likely stick with them until high school. She's everything I wanted to be as a kid. So I must have done a half decent job in the first 4.375 years of her life. That's a validation.

She's taken to school like a duck to water. Apart from some tears at the beginning of the day, when I leave. She gets a bit clingy then, as if she knows that the days we spent hassling each other affectionately, the times we cuddled up and told each other ridiculous stories, the nights we drank cocoa at 3am and told each other we loved each other 'to the sky'... are fast fading into the fuzzy memories of early childhood. Soon she won't even remember them. Soon she won't need me to kiss booboos or fix her hair, or put Barbie's head back on or listen to her version of the latest pop song. Her friends will do all that for her. Not her mum.

Cherub is at preschool for the first time ever today. The first time she has ever been without me. Like her sister, she took it all in stride. Proudly stowed her Cat in the Hat backpack and her Disney Princess lunchbox, put Fimble in her locker for sleeptime (not playtime, oh no never!) and settled down to pour sand all over herself in the sandbox. She's a quiet kid, a thinker. Her big sister races everywhere at 100 miles an hour, while Cherub watches and waits for the crash. She's twice as cuddly which worries me a bit - since you only know something is wrong when she wanders up for a hug. Anyway, I left her there, she who couldn't be distracted from her sandcastle long enough to give me a kiss good bye, and wandered off into the sunset. I hope she gets enough hugs today.

And now, here I am. 5 whole hours of 'me time'. The 'me time' that I have been moaning and bitching about for what seems like forever - but has only been five years. I don't remember the last time I had more than an hour to myself. I keep picking things up and putting them down. I can't seem to settle into one of the many excellent novels I am reading. The Sims are boring me to the extent I've put them all into concrete houses with no windows and doors, and am watching them go crazy.

I could clean the house, it sure needs it. But there's something about the mess left by two little girls that I want to keep today. Today I am going to step over Polly Pocket dolls (why do none of them have pants on?), trip over the Little People (why are there so many piled into one school bus? Must ask Cherub when she gets home), and pick up and touch all the detritus of two little lives.

They are growing up. Their lives are moving away and apart and forward and I can't bear to clean up what they've left behind just yet.