Memoir

Fuck. How do I put my life, my journey or whatever the fuck you would call it into words?  Disaster is the first word that comes to mind, accidental the second but the third lucky. I am one of the few "lucky" people who have survived, shit and come out breathing. Of course if you wanted to be like Freddy Prince you could have come out dead, not me I survived and all I have to show for it is a few scars, a foggy memory and a story. A story so irrelevant to people today that part of it can be related to.

My life one of major controversy, it took my mother surgery along with other complications for her to have me. The doctors said magical, my mother said "sheer dumb luck" and my dad said "my little ray of sunshine". I was a stubborn thing, I waited for the opportune moment to enter the world, my dad had been sober for months when his brother, my uncle pip came into town for the night, so dad got pissed as a nit, I decided to pop my head out and say HEY! Perfect timing right, it didn't take me long, less than four hours or so, my mother writing down everything so she would remind herself to never go through the pain a second time.  Me eager as hell to enter the world it would seem, but then I wanted to get straight back to the warm safe womb. The matron was holding me once the mucus and sliming, gooey shit was removed, when  my dad ran in still drunk/tipsy sees me and says "gorgeous, a boxer". The matron slapped him, when dad regained consciousness, he ran beside mum I was born just in time to see my first sunrise and as a newly formed trio together we seamed unstoppable.  Proud parents, what goes wrong, what tips them over?

Mum the most beautiful, stubborn, irritatingly correct women, always finding new things to do, she was an air hostess, a model, a barmaid and crap loads more. I think her best achievement was me, it sounds cocky but mum always a little OCD really does care about me, no matter how many times I thought she was the devil.  I always had fun with mum. For the first 16 years of my life, dad was there enough for me to think him a hero, but not enough for me to think him a friend. My mum and I were closer then peas in a small….really small pod. I grew up in a big old Queenslander, HUGE and beautiful it wouldn't seem as big now but there are so many memories in that house, good and bad.

We had two dogs, loads of fish, three frogs, one budgie, five guinea pigs and a rabbit. There was this one time I could remember, a typical mum joke, really fucking typical. She called me up from the garden one day, and I thought she wanted me to do something so I dawdled…I was an excellent dawdler, but I wasn't fast enough so mum called Pete, out staffy, lab cross, short fat and stumpy and his knick name "Hoover", Pete goes flying up the stairs, I'm still at the bottom of them, I look up and there Pete is eating MY ice-cream. The moral of the story was come when you're called, I did come really fast too for about three years until I devised some other rotten plan to throw mum off. The best thing I think was that she always made it difficult, she always made me think. We lived one house away from my grandparents, nanny and poppy. This was always hard for mum because nanny was always inspecting to see I was brought up the right way.

Always under the microscope.

The frogs were my favorite pets, I still don't know what happened to them, I have no memory of them dying or being let go. But I do have a memory of them with my dad. We had two little speckled brown wetland frogs and one big fat green tree frog, the two little speckles names were Mickie and Minnie, and the big green was Fred. Fred was the master of escape, and one morning in particular he had found his way into dads work boots, I don't think I had ever seen something so hilarious, if you can imagine an elephant dancing, that was my dad however surprisingly dainty. He shrieked and yelled, "CHERYL!!!!" (my mum's name), mum just laughed grabbed the frog that was flapping around on the floor and put it in the tank, and after the ordeal we all just sat and laughed, in a family way. I like that memory.

It is memories like those that make you really think hard about what went wrong, and how you ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Apparently life is like a roller coaster, if that's so well I must be stuck in the loop, my life has only just begun and I've already hit a million walls. Seems to always Make me wonder if it gets easier.