Schizo..Fucking..Phrenic...

My Mother likes reading, rich chocolatey desserts and potato scallops- and not necessarily in that particular order...

She's left-handed, which makes her signature difficult- but not impossible- to forge. She also has the uncanny knack of making me feel guilty about the way I live my life- from how I raise my children and what time I wake up in the morning, to how many cigarettes I smoke each day.

Aren't reformed smokers' the absolute worst kinds of critics?

I can visualise my Mother blinking back the tears reading this story, thinking that I am going to try and blame her for my rotten life or something. I'm not. That would be like blaming a god for my wasted life. I'm the creator of my own shitty life- not god, not my Mother. I did all of this to Myself. And if she ever manages to lay her eyes on this, then She's in luck because I'm in the mood for Disclosure- and as she's been wanting to know all of this shit that goes on in my head for years, I may as well let her know some of the truth. It can be her little reward.

So here goes nothing...

I am home from school This day, as I have tricked my Mother into thinking I am sick by shaking talcum powder over a clump of wet pink toilet paper. I tell her it is vomit, but She doesn't really have a good look at it, she is in too much of a rush to get all the others off to school, so she tells me that if I am sick I had better go back to bed. I am always pretending- about everything- to everybody.

So I go back to bed, with my fake abdominal pains and ice-cream container, and wait until they all leave for work and school. After they've gone I tip-toe around the house, checking the rooms to make sure that everyone's really gone. And then the fun begins.

I search through my Sister's things. I try on bras and put their make-up on- and then reprimand Myself for wanting to look pretty like all the other girls before scrubbing it off roughly with a wet towel. I read the instructions from my Mother's tampon boxes and worry that I'll never be able to insert one properly. I sneak cigarettes from the second-to-last packet in my Mother's carton of Peter Stuyvesants and hope she doesn't notice; to this day just the smell from that brand still gives me a headache- and then vigourously brush my tongue and teeth to rid the smell of smoke from my breath.

I don't breathe the smoke in yet- I blow rather than suck. I don't remember how old I am but I'm guessing I'm about eleven and in fifth class. My teacher's name is Cecily, which belies the fact that she's hard-nosed and tough and drives an olive-coloured Volvo. She wants our class to look up the Mariana's Trench in the Pacific Ocean. I look it up in our Encyclopedia, a single thick blue tome, and find out that it is the deepest spot in all of the oceans and about eleven kilometres deep; like an upside-down Mount Everest. Then I watch Days of Our Lives on Tv, and eagerly search for my Father's one and only Emmanuelle video to watch, and make Myself an egg and lettuce sandwich with one of the leftover boiled eggs out of the fridge.

My Mother sometimes makes them for My school luches, but she is always busy in the mornings- so most of the time we have to make our own cold canned Spaghetti or Baked Bean sandwich, to squish into the square yellow lunch boxes that leak bean juice throughout my brown school port and all over my books- but at least that's a little less bean juice that gets to soak into the bread of my sandwich. I practically have to drink it out of the container as I can no longer pick the bread up, it is so soggy. Why the hell did Veruca Salt want a Bean Feast- that's what I want to know...

It was always my dream to get Devon-and-tomato-sauce-sandwiches for my lunch but I never did- and I always envied the Monkey-Bar Kids because they always seemed to have them. These days; I'll sometimes make them for Myself. Just because they're yum.

And it's no wonder that I have scoliosis of the spine after dragging my heavy school bag up the hill every morning. I can almost see Myself now, walking along with one arm stuck almost straight up in the air; and my bag is like the friendless person sitting all alone on a see-saw, a dead weight on a fulcrum. I begin to know what that Leunig cartoon is all about all of a sudden; the one in particular that my Mother likes, where the woman is grating her fingers, like cheese, and her finger-flakes lie in a pool of her own blood; and she is oblivious as she daydreams about riding a swan that is losing it's feathers as it flies along...

I guess this is how all women feel sometimes. I know I often do- as I am mechanically emptying a shit out of the potty, changing the toilet roll and recycling the used one and simultaneously washing my hands and grabbing a cigarette and the small pair of Spiderman undies that have found their way beneath my fridge. I don't know that women are such great Multi-taskers; maybe we are all just a little bit Schizo-Fucking-Phrenic and merely allot jobs out to each of our Personalities at the beginning of each new day.

That's how I must manage anyway.