The Lovely Lady returns.

I’m a very happy lady today, twirling in anticipation’s good arms. Tomorrow night I’ll be out at the airport eagerly looking for my mother’s face amongst the crowd. She’ll emerge, like magic, with the others who have been transported through the air from Mumbai to Melbourne.

Her face is the easiest face for me to find, her movements second nature to me. The way her skinny little legs jerk at the knee as she walks, how her child-sized hands unthinkingly pat where her handbag should be and mostly the way her white teeth dance and her bright eyes flash on her dark skin. Her eyes are always in motion, scanning each scene. On neighbourhood walks she will often stop mid sentence and launch a thin arm into the thick of a suburban garden and pull a sweetly scented flower to my nose. A hidden flower that would never call for my attention.

She’s bringing me duty-free perfume. I asked for Happy by Clinique and she rings me a few days later to confirm the name after visiting the department stores of Mumbai asking for ‘Happy clinic’ perfume. I giggle stupidly at the other end of the line at a life time of hilarious miscommunication.

I used to hate my mother when I was a teenager. Even now those words, ‘hate’ and ‘my mother’ in the very same sentence terrify me. I want to lessen that feeling I held against her as a teen; I want to use the word ‘resent’ or ‘dislike’ instead, but I would be lying. Back then as a teenage girl so pumped full of a confusion that rode the wave of rage, I had such a strong desire to completely sever the connection between her and I and I tried everything I could. I stopped talking to her, I stopped eating the food she cooked, I stopped wanting to know about her culture. I hated the saris she gave me to wear, I hated the history that was woven into the silk. I reacted against everything I thought she liked. I cut my long dark hair off like a boys one night in my room with a pair of blunt scissors. I pierced my nose but she thought it looked pretty, so I took it out and had my tongue pierced instead. She did not think this was pretty, this made me happy.

Earlier this year, my mother reminded me of what she considers to be one of the most awful moments of her life. One school afternoon she walked past my 15 year-old friends and I in the shopping centre in the town where I grew up. She saw me with this group of school kids and proudly came over and said ‘hello’. I with my summer school dress hitched up my soft girl-thighs, took a drag of a cigarette, blew smoke in her face and muttered ‘bitch’ under my breath as she turned away realising that I was not going to publicly acknowledge her.

This story actually makes me feel shame right down to the pit of my stomach, even now as I write this.

I never budged an inch in my anger towards her. And perhaps the really terrible part of this memory is that I have no recollection of this moment that had so obviously devastated her identity as a mother. I don’t remember this moment, it has wasted beneath my other teenage near-misses and disasters. I don’t remember because I never considered her at this time in my life.

My mother used to tell me this story when I was growing up about how she had wanted a little girl so much that every Tuesday she would go to church and look at the stained glass window of Mother Mary and pray for a daughter. Like a good Hindu and a product of the world’s most secular nation, she decided it was not enough to stick to one god or one religion. She tried everything, she asked Mary, Jesus, God, Vishnu, Shiva and all the goddesses to help her to conceive a girl. She already had two boys but she wanted a girl as well. She took a risk, she was three months short of her 43^rd birthday when she had me.

This story used to make me uncomfortable when she would tell it in my teenage years, at birthdays or on my ‘good’ days when I was behaving myself for some overseas and unsuspecting visitor. There was the part of me that resented her sense of want and what this story represented. It made the stakes of my existence bigger than anything I thought I was capable of giving to her, so it was easier for me to destroy it all than to live within the parameters of what I thought I was supposed to fulfil. But there was also a part of me that always loved to hear that story. It made my rash teenage flirtations with danger safe because I knew there was a place that had been created just for me, which I could return to no matter how fragile or tiny or jagged my ego became.

I have puzzled over why I had this fraught relationship with my mother because she offered me nothing but the most stable love I have ever known in my life. Only questions arise, moments of insight. I grew up in a fairly racially conservative part of Victoria, did I hate her for the skin colour she gave me? Or for marrying a European and blurring the boundaries of cultural identity? Or was I playing power games with her and my father, setting them off against each other? Siding with the one who struggled to adapt to the power dynamics of the family? I don’t know. Maybe I just had enough teenage self-loathing to hate the one person that reminded me most of myself. Maybe it was all of these things, like lost threads rolled together to create one ball of useless, unconnected snippets to entertain my frantic teenage hands. But I sigh now and think so much wasted energy fighting. I want to go back as my wiser-older self and shake me, the teenager, until all the rage that was in me falls on the ground, powdered and sweet, like icing sugar.

But instead I’ll drive out to the airport tomorrow, humbled by a mother’s love. I’ll be thankful that there were those events and family crises that shook me out of my self-indulgent reverie. I’ll find her amongst the crowd and she’ll take my hand and I will feel so little, yet so changed, so grown up.In the morning I’ll spray myself happy with the ‘Happy clinic’ perfume as I laugh and settle her back home.

P.S. Anyone who had a similar mother-daughter experience may be interested in The Birth of Pleasure, by Carol Gilligan. It shed a lot of light on my teenage years.

P.P.S. Thanks for all your comments on my last blog. There was no lunch, just a week full of sighs and messages from the universe like 'it's okay to fuck - and it's okay to fuck up'. Thanks Audrey apple of my heart!

A mermaid moment, Jennifer Love Hewitt and the official “Fat Whore” stamp.

There’s nothing quite like a little domestic cleansing to get that man out of your mind. I just made cumquat marmalade and swept the floor singing “I’m gonna wash that man right outta my hair” into the broom handle. Simple satisfaction.

The reason for all this washing, singing and cleaning goes something like this:

Last Saturday saw me at the lake with the new man. (I shall call him Gayef, in honour of his Russian connection and in fitting reference to Chekhov’s character in The Cherry Orchard.) Gayef is that particular kind of man that every good lady has stored away like a pair of broken down knickers, gracelessly thrown to the back of the lingerie draw. Loose elastic at the waist, faded, moth eaten holes in the crotch, saved for those special times of the month, or for a particularly sad day at the office when the all the dirty pretty undies are eyeing you off from a heaped pile in the corner your bedroom.

In times of great physical need Gayef waltzes right back into my life, on cue, with the same great haircut and his desperate woman radar completely tuned to perfection. How does he know? I’m sure his daddy taught him, just like his daddy’s daddy taught his pa before him.

Gayef is rather a sad chap in that he is constantly bored with his own existence, gets his thrills out of pushing people’s buttons and the boundaries of social conventions, and basically staggers through life making enemies and womanising. Just the kind of a-hole I seem to have a well developed palate for.

So into the water we go. Gayef is not a particularly generous character, in any sense of the word, so we have a few awkward moments clambering down some slippery rocks holding hands out of necessity and not affection. We spend a good hour in the water enjoying each other’s velvety limbs and some rather nice kisses. Gayef tells me the water is very becoming to me and I look like a beautiful mermaid. I, like an idiot, get suckered into his one grand moment of creative kindness and convince myself that I have finally melted a little hole onto his thawing heart. We leave the lake, looking slightly less like hitch-hiking buddies and more like Brad and Angelina baby shopping in Cambodia.

You can feel the love, right?

Anyway, to the credit of my eager stupidity, I got a week long kick out of the weekend romancing with the Russian, which continued long into the balmy summer night. This very cheap thrill (did I mention he was tight around the purse strings as well?) gets me through to Tuesday when two news worthy incidents thankfully re-directed my interest back to the world.

Firstly, the release of Mission Australia’s National Youth Survey revealing that out of the 29,000 young people surveyed between the ages of 11-24, their top concern was body image. And secondly, I will admit the headline ‘Jenifer Love Hewitt hits back’ did grab my attention, after images of her holidaying in a bikini were ridiculed on the internet with comments such as, “We know what you ate this summer, Love – everything!”.

Now I’m no Jennifer fan, but I am a well trained tabloid monkey whose eyes are immediately directed to this kind of misogynistic headline. The article infuriated me, Love Hewitt is quoted as saying,

"I've sat by in silence for a long time now about the way women's bodies are constantly scrutinised. To set the record straight, I'm not upset for me, but for all the girls out there that are struggling with their body image. To all girls with butts, boobs, hips and a waist put on a bikini - put it on and stay strong."

Hewitt also wrote on her web site that she is a size 2, is not fat and that a size 0 doesn’t make you beautiful.

Yes, I was riled...

Of course Hewitt has “sat by in silence”. Very few women actually have the strength to stand up for the rest of our sex out of fear that they themselves will come under the watchful eye that scrutinises women’s bodies and women’s actions. It’s easier to just sit there, smile pretty and be thankful that some other less fortunate lady is taking your share of female abuse. And why are we still justifying our bodies according to numerics? Size 2 means you’re safe, but size 14 or 16 throws you into the dangerous territory that makes you susceptible to female ridicule? Have I got the equation right? As for the comment “put on a bikini and stay strong”, I think it speaks for itself really. Didn’t the feminist sisterhood used to call for a hammer to bring the patriarch down, not a bikini?

Well, I must say I was a little cross but perhaps it’s easy to feel this way until it happens to you.

Yes, this is the part where the anti-hero Gayef re-enters this happy scene.

Some mid week romancing takes place, in which after a rather intimate moment, I voice my concerns that “little old me is just gonna end up sad and lonely.” To which the reply comes “Little? You?”, then he grabs my bare buttock, gives it a good shake the way a butcher handles a fine cut of pork and laughs merrily, “how much do you weigh?” And continues with “are you worried that you’re going to be alone because you are such a whore?”

Yep, it’s been approved. I now have the official stamp of “Fat Whore” branded on my brain, stored away for a rainy day of self loathing.

But what I want to know is where do they get these lines? Is there a secret male book entitled “Standard insults to knock ‘em down: how to use female insecurity to get what you want”? I don’t want to group all men together by any means, there are definitely some great men out there that I have had the pleasure of knowing, but then there are those whose only means of interaction with a woman is through humiliation. When are we as a progressive and privileged society going to move away from this negative male-female dynamic?

So, the Russian succeeded in making me feel awful, right down to my curves and bones. To combat this feeling of shit-house-ness I adorned myself in my finest wares, hit the town for some serious eating with a lovely lady friend and took Jen’s advice to heart.

I put on that mini skirt and STAYED STRONG!

Now all that's left to consider is how to behave at the next lunch date with the Russian, scheduled for this week. Perhaps I should order the lobster?