Pretty in Pink Taffeta

                                               Pinky and Sam discussing issues.

I’ve been married twice. I don’t think that exactly puts me in the same classification as Elizabeth Taylor. It riles me a bit when people say things like,
“So how many times have you been married again?” or
“So which marriage are you talking about now Zsa Zsa?”

The first time I was married it was to the father of my five children and the second (and last) time, to Scotto. 

I was never going to be a ‘Bridezilla’ type and I put this down to a deep-seated laziness for finer detail. A ‘half-assed approach’ has been the catch-cry of pretty much everything I’ve attempted and coming second place is the story of my life. 

Planning my first wedding was fairly relaxed as at the time I was working as a sales executive at a four star hotel that just so happened to be a particularly popular wedding reception venue. 
I was also good mates with the banquet manager… discount!... and I’d even invited my boss the General Manager so I just knew the service would be impeccable.
Everything went gradually pear-shaped in the lead up to the big day. 

My mother went on a shopping spree and bought two ‘Mother of the Bride’ dresses for me to inspect and then vote on my favourite. 
One dress was black lace and the other was a pale cream lace number. Not wanting her to front up to my wedding looking like she was attending a funeral I selected the cream. Snap! Wouldn’t you know it…I too was wearing an off-white lace dress. 

Why did this abjuration of wedding protocol not faze me? 

Well... predominantly because I fell pregnant with Thaddeus four weeks before the wedding and was too nauseous with morning sickness and generally apathetic to care one iota.

The day of the wedding arrived and the black clouds overhead augured a miserable day. 

The female portion of the wedding party spent the morning at the hairdressers being primped and preened whilst guzzling Champagne. All except for the fractious and pallid bride who was up the duff and wasn’t allowed alcohol.

Sitting in the car on the way home to get dressed, I listened quietly to my sister Sam, bitterly carping on about the bouffant style hairdo the hairdresser had inflicted on her. 

When I had first asked Sam to be my bridesmaid she joked, 

“I will… as long as you don’t force me to wear pink taffeta.” 

As an aficionado of the colour pink, I had chosen a hot magenta, taffeta bridesmaid’s gown for her. Sam was a tad peevish about this flagrant abuse of trust and the beehive coiffure did nothing to lift her defrauded frame of mind.

After donning the hastily bought (first one I had tried on) bridal gown in the sticky, humid, February weather and emerging from the bedroom; I heard the shower running. It was my sister Sam, in the shower washing her hair. 

Too queasy to care and sensing an impending migraine, I went to phone the incompetent florist who had taken the flowers to the wrong hotel.

We finally arrived at the church and as I followed my sister down the aisle I perused her noticeably wet hair. The trickle of water down the nape of her neck gave me something to focus on whilst trying my hardest not to vomit on the congregation.

Managing not to faint during the ceremony was a massive relief then it was on to the reception where everyone, bar the bride, was encouraged to eat drink and be merry.

My dear old Dad put the icing on the proverbial cake when he gave his ‘Father of the Bride’ speech. Always the perennial comedian he complimented and thanked the waiters at our reception for doing a wonderful job.

“And I don’t think they get paid much either,” he quipped merrily, “I saw them all out the back sharing a cigarette a few moments ago.”

The look on my General Manager’s face was priceless.

"Hop on Top of Pop" by Dr Suss.

Long distance relationships can be difficult.

During the months apart before Scotto transferred to Townsville, we pledged to each other that we would write an email every single night without fail. 
Keeping this promise was often a very arduous challenge.

Firstly, it was frequently difficult to come up with something even vaguely interesting to say night after night. There are only so many ways to say things like,

“Picked the kids up from school today and they had a fight all the way home in the car. Lulu has head lice again and Thaddeus has done something funny to the computer so that when Jonah types his name in, it comes up as ‘dickhead’ and I don’t know how to fix it.”


My days just weren’t very exciting.

Secondly, access to the one ineffectual, dial-up computer in the house was a rigorously defended commodity; with Herr Jonah and Herr Thaddeus acting as if they were the Gestapo guarding the barbed wire fence at Auschwitz. 

My strategy for surmounting the second problem was scrupulous attention to timing. At about six-thirty each evening I would shout out that dinner was on the table. That presented me with about fifteen precious minutes to sprint upstairs, log on, and hastily type out an email with one finger before the wails of protest began.

The only way to shake things up in regards to the first problem was to be inventive. After one of Scotto’s weekend visits, when the kids had been staying at their father’s ( nudge, nudge, wink, wink), I looked to Dr. Seuss for inspiration.

By replacing nouns with Dr. Seuss words I realized what a truly filthy man Dr. Seuss actually was.


(Please be aware that this is NOT a love letter or a reflection on the weekend. It was only a joke!)

Hello my Chief Yookeroo! (I wrote)

I just wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed working on your Palooski on the weekend, and I just loved the way you worked on my Hinkle-Horn Honkers. 

You are such an energetic Long-Legged Kwong and I just adore your Flummox so much…especially your Itch-a-pods… mmmmm!

I know we were worried we wouldn’t be able to Jibboo, but it was great that we managed it, and that Gertrude McFuzz got her act together. 
I must say, my Floob-Boober-Bab-Boober-Buds are a bit sore but probably not as sore as your Zlock! 

Anyway my adorable cute little Drum Tummied Snumm, your precious Plain-Belly Snetch has to do some real work.

Love and kisses, Foona Lagoona Baboona.

P.S. I hope your Nooth Grush is not stinging too much!

We went for a picnic and bush-walking okay!!!!!

Reposted and linked up to Weekend Rewind with Sonia from Life Love and Hiccups!

The Unpossible

 I feel it is imperative to elucidate how Scotto auspiciously came in to this disorderly, unruly modern day version of ‘Ma Kelly and her Gang’.
With five undisciplined kids under the age of fourteen presiding over the household I thought it was improbable I would ever manage to strike up any type of romantic liaison for a long time. 

Boredom after yet another Saturday night sitting alone motivated me to enlist on one of the many internet dating sites.

I didn’t want to actually meet anyone in the flesh mind you, merely someone who lived in another town with whom I could engage in some adult conversation with on lonely nights.
Using a fake name, falsifying my age, setting up a phony email account, failing to reveal the presence of any children in my life and using the most outrageously flattering photograph I could find, I joined the site and hoped I would meet a decent, sincere, truthful and normal man.

There were plenty of the anticipated creeps on the site with names like “Sir Fukalot” and “Rotten_crotch69”, but I ploughed on through the profiles, and serendipitously found ‘Scotto’ on the first night. 

We began emailing each other and during our correspondence he let it be known that he worked at a particular southern newspaper.

Not wanting to be deceived by someone using a bogus identity I applied my detective expertise and engaged a journalist friend at the local rag in my home town to do a background check on him. He came up clean.

About two months later I flew down to Brisvegas with a girlfriend, Babette (acting as a safety net) and we met up with Scotto at what we later found out was a gay bar. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but it meant slim pickings for Babette. 

When Scotto and I had been emailing each other I had admitted to being the mother of one child only, Lulu (eight years old). Scotto had a three year old daughter so it seemed we had so much in common. 

On our first meeting I cagily confessed to also having two boys, Padraic (nine years) and Hagar (eleven years). I had to be very vigilant with numbers because at this stage poor Scotto was still under the impression that I was seven years younger than my actual age and I didn’t want to tangle myself up in my own delicate web of deceit.

That was fine with him and we parted at the airport as only star struck lovers can, promising to email each other every night.

On the plane trip back I was suddenly riddled with guilt at my heinous duplicity. Imagine lying to this lovely man who thought he’d cracked on to a youthful thirty-seven year old with a mere three young children. 

I rushed upstairs as soon as I got home, logged on and began,

“My Dear Scotto,
I have a dreadful confession to make…blah, blah, blah.”
Anyway he forgave me, transferred up here after a few months and we were married two years later. 

Poor bastard.