When Daddy met Mummy.

An unplanned pregnancy for a ‘messy maiden’ is always approached with trepidation and remorse. There is the grief of leaving maiden hood behind and the realisation that vodka and cigarettes are not the ‘breakfast of champions.’ There are superficial concerns such as; will she be able to fit back into her size ten bikini, will her breasts still be her best feature and can she take ‘Bubba’ to that heavy-metal-concert-scheduled-six-weeks-after-the-birth? However, the main dilemma a knocked up ‘messy maiden’ really needs to face is, will that child survive her and her world?

It’s not looking good. Boy meets girl and at the end of a gig follows her home. He stays there. They wake up and get drunk with his friends at a grungy bar. He again follows her home to sleep, work, study, and lie in bed. She takes him to a party, to get drunk and to meet her friends, they don’t like him. He takes her to his cottage in the middle of the forest with walls lined with timber shelves holding the most incredible books.... She falls in love with Isabelle Allende .

He falls in love mostly with her cleverness. She passes his best-friend-test in a pleasant afternoon of tequila shots at the Elgin Pub discussing poetry, art and sexual perversions. She charms his many jealous-fuck-buddies with shared tales of his obvious defects. She is easy with crowds and confident with strangers. Yet, unfortunately, perhaps due to a brutal hangover, she is snappy and fails her first meeting with his parents. It doesn’t go too well at subsequent gatherings either as his family are strangely proper. It has already gone pear shaped.

Her friends try to help. At her birthday, Holly (a lovely stripper) tells his father about the special services he can expect to receive from some of the maids in Cambodia. At his birthday, her old boyfriend Tim (an installation artist) turns up at the end of an ‘intimate family roast’ on a way to a party. He is wearing: rubbish, a hand painted sign begging for money and peanut butter and rice bubbles plastered over his face as a tribute to herpes. Tim is polite and subtly retrieves the acid stored in her freezer. His parents smile and wait.

Where have all the interesting women gone?

Counting kilos, comparing kids, canvassing kindergartens and not a freak flag to be seen flying in the wind. If 30% of the Australian female population are of childbearing age and have children, what happened to their pasts?

What happened to the chicks that you shared a smoking stick of gum-root with before you could afford cigarettes? Where is the legend that caught my drunken vomit in a fry pan and fed it to her cheating boyfriend? I mean we are generation X, we were badly behaved ladies that had low expectations of making it to 40...am I the only disgrace that made it as a mummy?

I see glimmers of these former women in my child’s playground, but they are not telling. Is it because they are scared of being shunned from play dates? I cannot go onto the threshold of turning 40 pretending right now was planned. I would love it if a mummy said: “I love my little darling, I just wish I knew their father a bit better better and I was less wasted before I trusted him with putting on the condom.” Instead they call it love to make it respectable.