Mum: Is that your new top?

Me: Yep. Like it?

Mum: It has horizontal stripes.

Me: Yeah, so?

Mum: You should wear vertical stripes, darling. They’re more slimming.

Me: Oh good, you’re home. The phone rang, but I didn’t answer it.

Mum: How helpful.

Me: You know I get phone-phobia.

Mum: You answer the phone for a living.

Me: If you worked at Subway, I wouldn’t ask you to make me sandwiches at home.

Mum: Sometimes your selfishness astounds me.

Me: Actually, I am a little hungry…

The risk of asking someone to eat you out.

One of my favourite things to do is to walk around the house and pick out the pieces of furniture I wish to inherit when my parents die.

“I’ll take the dressers from the lounge room,” I tell my mother, “and all of the art. Except for the Aboriginal paintings, Chris can have those. Obviously I’ll be keeping the piano and all of Dad’s music as well.”

“Do you want the dining set too?” Mum says, “You might as well take it, seeing as you hacked your initials into all the chairs with scissors.”

“I don’t really care for the finish…” I confess, running my hand over the table top, “but I’m sure I can sell it. I imagine all your cash and investments will be split 60:40 between me and Chris respectively, seeing as I’ve proven myself to be the smarter and better looking child?”

“I don’t know about that,” Mum says, “Your brother was a lot easier to handle as a teenager. You were such a whiney bitch.”

“Well maybe if you weren’t such a shitty parent, I wouldn’t have needed so much therapy?” I suggest.

“Therapy?” Mum says, her voice rising, “Don’t talk to ME about therapy. I’ve been having therapy since the day you were born!”

“That’s a coincidence,” I tell her. “Now, what do you want to do about your jewellery? I should probably just take half now, you’ve outgrown most of it.”

I returned home after a leisurely afternoon at the pub to find my parents midway through a dinner party with some Christian missionaries who were visiting their church. My mother was wrapping up a rather touching story about a woman who went camping alone in the jungle and woke during the night to find her tent surrounded by hungry lions.

“So the woman prayed,” Mum said quietly, “She prayed for hours and hours. And then she felt calm and went back to sleep. When she woke again in the morning, the lions were all gone, and there was an elephant sitting outside her tent, watching over her.”

As my mother’s guests smiled with glistening eyes and shook their heads in wonder at the mysterious ways of the Lord, I leaned over the table and grabbed a baked potato from the serving dish.

“Maybe the elephant was just passing through?” I suggested. “Or maybe this woman is going to murder all her children in five years? Maybe God sent the lions to get rid of her before she smothered her babies, except then the elephant came along and mucked up the plan? I don’t really think you can draw any definitive conclusions here. Correlation does not imply causation. I learned that in statistics. At uni. When I went to uni.”

“You failed uni,” Mum reminded everybody.

“No, sweetheart, uni failed you,” Dad reassured me.

“I’m drunk,” I announced and went back out.

The scene: my family is out for dinner at a cosy Italian restaurant for my brother’s 25th birthday. His new girlfriend is present. I have been forced to cancel my plans to watch Weeds under my doona in order to attend. I am bored. I have had 3 glasses of wine and I want to stir somebody’s pot. I actually like my brother’s new girlfriend, so I refrain from picking on her as I normally would. I know that I should also be nice to my brother, seeing as it is his birthday and I did not get him a present. And I leave my father alone, because he is my favourite person in the world. That leaves my mother.

Mum: So has anybody seen much of the Walkers lately?

Me: Yeah, I see Tim around the city every now and then, when he’s not hiding in his closet.

Mum: Oh, Annik...

Me: What? That kid’s more camp than a row of tents. Last week I saw two guys having sex in Hyde Park, and that was less gay than Tim Walker’s haircut.

Mum: The problem for Tim and other boys like him is that their faith is so important to them. They want to get married and have families like everyone else at church. But that conflicts with their involuntary desires to, you know…

Me: Fuck other men?

Mum: Yes.

Me: So if God intended for Man to be with Woman, and the Bible specifically states that homosexual practice is a sin, and the church frowns upon gays, then why did God create particular humans with these same-sex desires?

Mum: That’s one of the great mysteries of the Christian faith.

Me: No it’s not. It’s proof that the Bible is a load of horse shit, and every time you people can’t explain something properly, you just use some wanky cop-out excuse like “we can’t understand heavenly matters.” How can you add disclaimers to the entire human race’s ability to differentiate between possibility and impossibility like that? It’s a complete crock. You all disgust me.

Dad: Does anybody want dessert?

My mother has this tendency to try and talk to me whenever I am walking out the door, blow-drying my hair, on the toilet, asleep in bed or otherwise engaged.

Last Monday night, she waited until I was brushing my teeth before asking me if I had a good physio appointment. I gave a thumbs up.

“And did Elizabeth get my message?”

I shrugged.

“Did you have some dinner?”

I shook my head.

“Are you going to work tomorrow?”

I nodded.

“Well you’re just full of information tonight, aren’t you?”

“Woman,” I spat in the sink, “I am brushing my teeth.”

“Okay, no need to be such a cow. Did you know I gave birth to you without any anesthetic? I pushed out your selfish head without so much as a goddamn epidural. And this is the thanks I get.”

My mother corners me in the kitchen and says “You’ll never believe what just happened!”

Certain that she is right as my imagination could never conjure up something as spectacularly mudane as what she’s about to share, I smile politely.

“So I was emailing Kerry, and thinking about calling her, but I thought I’d wait until after lunch. But then the phone rang and, no shit, it was Kerry! We were just chatting, then after a while, she said ‘Why did you call me?’ and I said ‘Kerry, you called me.‘ And she said ‘No, I didn’t,’ and I said, ‘Yes, you did!’ Anyway, we finally figured out that while Kerry was cooking, she got a message on her answering machine that sounded just like me, and that’s why she was asking why I had called her!”

Silence.

“Because she got a voice message on her answering machine!”

Crickets.

“Because it sounded just like me!”

By which point, I’ve usually left the room to slit my wrists.

When I was a kid, my family lived on 5 acres of bushland out north-west of Sydney. We had neighbouring properties on either side, but they were invisible to us and separated by thick scrub. One day, my uncle, who was staying with us, was alone in our house and accidentally set off the burglar alarm. Within minutes, the neighbours from each side came running down the driveway, one with a cricket bat, the other with an axe. It was awkward for my uncle, but my parents marveled at the speedy and protective response from our neighbours.

Now we live in suburbia. Recently my mother was at home during the day, watching television, when our next door neighbour’s alarm started going off because they were, in fact, being robbed. Annoyed at the noise, my mother turned up the TV and continued watching. A few hours later, one of the neighbours came over to say that their house had been burgled, and were we all ok?

“You’re a bad person,” I told Mum that night over dinner, “You’re going straight to hell when you die, and they’ll put you in the Lazy & Selfish cell block.”

“Well I didn’t know they were actually being robbed,” she replied, “Besides, they have a dog.”

“He’s a pet, not a home security system.”

“Whatever,” she said, pouring herself a glass of wine, “If anybody asks, you tell them I was out shopping.”

Somewhere around my fifteenth year, I sat at the kitchen table one evening, doing my homework and eating a frozen piece of banana cake. My mother entered the room and looked from the cake to me.

“What?” I asked her.

“It’s not that you’re fat, darling,” she explained, “You’re just…flabby.”

My mother is generally oblivious to anything I do, say, wear or inhale, so she is constantly endangering her heart’s health by noticing my tattoos, piercings and the like up to 12 months after their advent.

Last night she picked me up from the airport and immediately exclaimed, “Annik! You’ve shrunk!”

Pleased that she had noticed my new sleek figure, I proceeded to explain my recently tweaked workout regime and how I have been hauling arse out of bed at 5:30am every morning to exercise, but it has obviously been worth it because now I am thinner and hot.

“No,” she interrupted, “I think you’ve gotten shorter. Are you slouching even more than usual?”