
sneak peek of my 3D illustrated novel
Gigantic Pendulous Girls
My first maternity bra made me cry. I was 7 months ‘bling’ (Bali slang for pregnant, all the balinese girls sang it to me as I waddled past the street stalls and cafes with my beachball belly unabashedly protruding from beneath my too small bikini top. “Aaah bling” “aah bling”).
I was in a department store in Denpasar with my mum and my aunty and they had convinced me (demanded I let them buy me) feeding bras to properly contain my then ample and still growing milk filled mammaries. I awkwardly squished my enormous body into the change room and wrangled my boobs into a lusciously soft cotton, underwire free, wide strapped beige over shoulder boulder holder in a D cup. It looked horrifying but felt absolutely divine in comparison to the B cup balconette with push ups and spaghetti straps I was still attempting to wear. I massaged the deep red crevices on my shoulders that marked where my B cup in cohort with my mammoth boobs had been performing their torture on my body and with my free hand I snapped open the little flap on the front of the feeding bra. My swollen purple nipple concertinaed out like a trick spring snake in a can. I stood there staring at it in the full length mirror in this place where I’d felt so beautiful in the past, (Bali, not the fitting room) when I was skinny (sigh) and sun kissed with sand on my toes, proportionate tits and not a care in the world. What I saw looking back at me aside from the nipple was something I didn’t recognise. Don’t misunderstand, I adored my pregnant belly. I still felt the ample breast that came with pregnancy like a free set of steak knives was a pleasant symptom and I was completely oblivious to the idea that my body might not shrink back to my pre pregnant 53kg and B cup boobs after giving birth.
What I saw that brought me to tears was my own eyes filled with anxiety, something I had never really experienced. It was the start of what became my personal hell from then until now and beyond.
It has been 21ish years since that day and now I’m in a GG. When I was a perfect B cup I didn’t even know a GG existed. One of my GG’s has 5 fucking hooks to do it up. 5! The strap is about half a foot wide and I have to dislocate my shoulders to get it undone. I think GG stands for Gigantic Girls. Back in front of the mirror I reminisce about the days when my boobs would have been looking back at me. Now they just hang there and stare at the floor. I’ve considered a boob job. Just a lift. I definitely must NOT increase my bust but I really do think it’s time they stood up for themselves. I’ve supported them for long enough and it’s been a pain in the neck. And shoulders. And back. I can’t wear crop tops any more. Not because my post child 51 year old belly hangs out (even though it does) but because my nipples do. And about 3 inches of boob. At the hem! It’s a good thing though that I never took to high waisted pants. my boobs don’t get tucked in to the waist of my low riders. Just. Yet. When I bathe they float like enormous rubber ducks, one over each knee.
A lot happened when I gave birth. I underwent a hormonal change because of the infection that was hibernating in my body that came to life when I bore my beautiful son. Eventually that resulted in bio identical hormone replacement therapy. Without it I’m non functioning for 3/4 of the month. With it I get gigantic pendulous girls. And that’s just on my chest. I’m not even going to talk about side boobs, back boobs or under boob boobs.
Do your boobs hang low?
Do they wobble to and fro?
Can you tie them in a knot?
Can you tie them in a bow?
Can you throw them over your shoulder
Like a regimented soldier?
Do your boobs hang loooooooow?
Good Morning!
My brain wakes up before my body. If I attempt to force my eyes open at the point my brain becomes aware, I will ruin my whole day because my body won’t register that I am awake. So I lie there patiently and contemplate the fact that my eyes are not yet awake and then start to wonder impatiently when my body will be ready to conform to my brain’s awake status.
So far it has always happened eventually, so that’s positive.
When my body does finally agree that yes we are in fact awake, my eyelids peel back, I feel around the bed with my hands not moving much else, for my dogs and run my fingers through their fur. Both still breathing, so that’s positive.
I register that the sun is also awake. The bruise purple walls that matched the mood of the teenager who chose the paint swallow most of the light that seeps in from behind the black blockout curtains giving the room a gentle comfortable luminescence. So I have had a reasonable amount of sleep. Reassuring.
Still somewhat in limbo as synapses start to slowly fire, I lie there with my eyes open and my awake brain and gauge how full my bladder is. Any pain? Yes, slight. I lost the ‘urge to pee’ sensation years ago. Now it’s just about the level of pain in my abdomen. Slight means I have a few more minutes before I need to move. So I don’t. Not yet.
I listen to discern what is happening in the household. This gives me a good indication of what time it is and who is up and where they are or what they are doing. The Big Cats are butting their heads on the cat door wanting to be released into gen pop. Gen pop is the main part of the house. ‘The Brothers’ or ‘The Big Cats’, not that they are the biggest cats anymore since Mushroom has grown, and grown, have their own room, solitary confinement. They are bullies so get shut away in the evenings to avoid my sleep being punctuated with caterwauls and feline shrieking.
If they are still locked away it means no one is up yet. Usually, Mother gets up and lets them out to stop their impatient incessant head-butting of the plastic cat flap from waking me.
Hopefully, it’s just early, rather than mother having died in her sleep. I grope for my glasses and look for my phone. Early. So she still sleeps and is most likely not dead. So that’s positive.
Next step is to do a mental checklist, gauge pain levels, energy levels and quality of cognisance.
There’s no hurry. Bladder is not too full and as I said, it’s early.
The knee hurts. An old injury. That’s ok. Injuries are tangible pain that makes sense. The achilles also hurts. Again an injury. Can ignore those pains. Right hip. Flex, extend. The hot needle that’s been lodged there for the past 18 months is twisting and heating. Left hip, stinging but not too bad. Lower back. Feels like a mega cramp so I roll onto my side to try and sit up. The pain is too great to actually use those muscles to pull me up. Upright on the edge of the bed now. Sunshine is also upright on the edge of the bed. She’s keen on her morning biscuits. She seems to have an innate need to add to her already ample butt. Willo still lies flat, just his eyebrows moving, eyes following my movements. He likes the bed to himself for a bit. He’s in no hurry.
If Mother is not up I’ll have to make the coffee. Since Mother is not up, I won’t have to submit a report on how I’m feeling and how I slept. Yet. I have the same rhetoric for these questions every morning. She still asks every morning. Motherly love. Btw I’m 51 years old.
My feet hit the broken glass that has been my morning floor for the past 21 years no matter where my bed is. It's a symptom. I slowly stand up bearing it and gauge my weight. Today I am around 120 kilos. If my excellent (sarcasm) memory serves me well, if you feel heavy it is a sign of cadmium or some other heavy metal beginning with C toxicity. What I know is that if I wake up feeling heavy I’m likely going to have a tough day. The metaphorical meat hooks that are inserted through my neck and shoulder muscles and hung with weights start to pull down as I stand up. It feels like the flesh is being pulled from my bones. If it passes by the time I get to the bathroom maybe my day won’t be so bad after all. The stinging hot acid leaching up the back of my head says otherwise, but that too could dissipate once I start walking around, or it may not.
Firmly planted on the loo, I take several minutes to catch my breath. Resting SOB (shortness of breath) is a real sob (son of a bitch). I slip into yesterday’s discarded clothes because they are next to me on the floor. Already conscious of how many spoons I have, I’m in conservation mode from the get-go. I’ll worry about what I’m wearing when I work out what I’ll be capable of doing today. For now, this will do.
I get off the loo and the next 20 or 30 steps are staggery as the pains are all still there. Mainly hips and feet. After those initial morning steps, it will pass and I will start to appear normal in my gait. Translated, this means I can ignore the pain and walk mostly normally.
I wish mother was awake. I haven’t got the energy to make coffee. Well, of course, I have but as I said, I’m heavy today. My day will be like swimming through mud which uses a lot more spoons. I’m already exhausted. The brothers continue to head-butt their little door. Mushroom and Sunshine want biscuits. They are the household fat arses. Them and me. I like biscuits too. Sunny stares at me, Mushroom squeaks at me.
I broke his meow when I drowned him as a kitten. Apparently, the damage to his squeaker had already been done when I shook him upside down to evacuate his lungs of bath water. Willo is still having a lie in and Kiyani is still asleep with Mother and only Mother. No one gets near Kiyani. Not ever. That’s fine by me.
Out of the 7 cats in my nest, only one is mine. Big fat white Mushroom, Moosh, Mooshdebai, Mooshpuss. He has had biscuits and he is now eligible for outside time. As is Sunshine. Also known as Sunny, Missylissy, Missus, Wackamole and Haystack. She presently holds the title of only Border Terrier in Broome.
Coffee is ready, Mother is up, she sings good morning in an overly loud and cheery voice in order to ensure we all start the day on a good note. How did you sleep? How are you feeling today or is it too early to tell? I just want to grunt. It’s all I have for her. Yet I manage to drag forth my standard response. Morning Mum. I almost always sleep well because I’m drugged off my head at night. I’m fine. How did you sleep?
I reckon I woke up with 10 spoons today. I also reckon I’ve already used 4. Looks like yesterday’s discarded clothes will become today’s discarded clothes ready beside the loo for me tomorrow morning. I will have no need for ‘going out into the world’ clothes today.
The Evolution of the Mamma Beast
Bathroom walls know so much. A bathroom is a place where, generally speaking, people won’t disturb you, or are least likely to disturb you. Kids and pets excepted. Public and private bathrooms alike are privy to a plethora of nefarious goings-ons, secret rendezvous, self-flagellation, self-pleasure and possibly more so than all these things, bathroom walls are witness to people’s grief.
I bet most people have a bathroom story. I have many. There was that time when, regardless of the fact that I was really high, I still managed to feel disgusted when my friend snorted a long line of speed off the toilet seat at our favourite St Kilda nightclub. My overactive imagination pictured all the smelly, sweaty, shitty arses that had sat there over the course of the evening. All the dried-up pee dribbles. I still to this day marvel at how a woman manages to dribble on the seat. My friend even swiped the dregs off of the seat with her finger and licked it. I was much classier with my drug consumption. I used the lid of the cistern to snort off. Neither of us died of any nasty nasal E Coli infections and we both achieved our goal, so I guess it was a win regardless.
Years before this I was also in a bathroom in a Melbourne nightclub. My best mate Rik and I were under age. We had a membership badge we had found/stolen (its a grey area) so no one questioned our obvious youthfulness and besides, it was that bloody long ago, in an era where no one really cared and no one lost their liquor licences for serving booze to teen angels in city night clubs. We were hot nubile things and that trumped the legalities. Rik wanted to wear my bra so we snuck into the girl’s bathroom and I deftly snapped his skinny teenage boy chest into my then petite B cups. We stuffed them with toilet paper, about 2 and a half sheets per boob I think. I’d need the whole roll these days. I also stuffed a wad of it in my knickers in an attempt to simulate a very misshapen penis and we spent a large part of the night gyrating in our, not at all convincing transgender disguises on the dance floor, Rik fondling his paper tits and myself hunched forward dancing like a skinny Quasimodo girl trying to pretend I didn’t have tits, and lewdly stroking my munted paper cock through my jeans. The night ended with me pashing a very short and very gay George Michael lookalike and sleeping under a garbage bin at Flinders St station (the type that is mounted on a pole appearing like a dystopian faerie toadstool with me curled around the stem). The bin was situated outside the Flinders St public amenities which were, apparently, a beat. I spent much of the wee hours shivering from the cold Melbourne predawn frost and peeping out from under my cardboard box blanket watching guys in suits and ties sending out some sort of (unseen by straight people and country bred kids) signal to each other and covertly slipping into those bathrooms together to do with strangers what they couldn’t do at home with their wives.
One morning when my son was about 7, well anywhere between 5 and 10 actually, I seem to apply most of my memories to my son's 7th year. If I were right every time he would have had to have been 7 for around a decade. Anyway, whenever it was, I found myself on the cool grotty tiles in the small safe seclusion of our bathroom. We were still poor then and this was the first actual house we had lived in for around 4 or 5 years so it wasn’t much. At the time I think it was actually condemned but regardless we lived there as did a few of our friends in the following years. The block is now for sale for around $1.5 million. It was morning and Jaia was at school. I got down on my knees and put my forehead on the tiles and I lost my shit. I have never lost my shit like that before or since (not counting overdramatic teenage dramas and lost loves, usually also involving bathrooms and the kicking and punching of the doors within). I knelt there with the tile spaces impressing lines on my knees and head and I wailed. I wailed with pain, frustration, guilt and raw unchecked grief and when I was empty, I curled up on my side like a foetus and sobbed until I stopped. At this time I had already been many years unwell and undiagnosed. At this time I was so unwell I had to be supported when I walked. I was suffering anxiety attacks that were causing me to lie rigid and unable to move on my bed for hours. I was getting migraine with aura, dysphasia and hemiplegia several times a week. I was hallucinating on the medications the doctors had given me to try and make me better and when it didn’t work being told to ‘fuck off out of my office and deal with your own women’s problems. My whole body was in excruciating pain all day, every day. I couldn’t feed my child, drive him to school or attend to any of his needs. I was frightened. He was terrified. It was at that moment on the bathroom floor that the original mamma beast was born in my mind and a few years later that I created her likeness in oil on canvas.
She was huge. So filled with fear and guilt that her body could barely contain it. All these dark things inside her made her so heavy. She had wings but they had shrunk. They were so disproportionately small that they were useless. She would be better off without this burden of wings, a symbol of unreachable potential and partly the cause of the mental anguish she felt. She had huge feet to try and stay stable but every time she tried to move forward she would stand on her own hanging head, making any progression impossible.
This version of the mamma beast represented me for many years. I was infected at age 16. I became chronically ill at age 30. I wasn’t diagnosed until 13 years later.
I’m a new kind of mamma beast now. While sometimes my hands feel huge and useless because they can’t achieve what’s in my mind, I am, at least upright. I have more stability with the help of my tail and I’ve shed the burden of wings. My wings are now huge and detachable. I can access my creativity when I need or want to, I am for the most part inspired. My shoulders are wider to more easily bear my burden and I’m pushing against the tide instead of being swept away. Having a diagnosis helped to empower me and allowed me to purge myself of some guilt and anguish, making me less heavy. My son needs me less so I don’t feel inadequate quite so often. He’s 21 now. Whilst I still have significant pain every single day, my head no longer droops to the ground. Even though I’m still bent, I can move forward. It took a long time for the evolution of the mamma beast to get to this point and a lot changed while I was gone (I felt so gone and I wished to be gone). I’ve moved forward in my health and life journey. Sadly my body moved in a different direction, down. My butt sags and my boobs sway in the breeze like pregnant cucumbers. I have jowls!
These days my bathroom walls are privy to me avoiding the mirror and doing what is supposed to be done in bathrooms. This is usually with the audience of at least a couple of cats and sometimes Sunshine, my little haystack on stilts.
A New Language
1. I’m out of Spoons
I wake up, it's morning. I’ve had 8 hours of deep uninterrupted sleep. I have heaps to do. All very satisfying tasks I can’t wait to get to. The life of an artist is exciting.
Were I a ‘normal’ human, and I use that term in reference to having a normal level of health, I would literally bounce out of bed, pirouette across the room, do a circus leap into my undies and happily snap the waistband around my hips with a wry eye and a cheeky grin before loping like a gazelle to the loo, doing the samba down the hall to the kitchen, theatrically throwing together a huge green smoothie, bopping and jiving to the sound of the blender and then frolicking through the garden whilst sipping it with a striped ecofriendly paper straw, long blonde hair flying out, flashing golden sparks in the sunlight, all the while giggling as the daisies from the daisy chain that magically appeared on my head flew in every direction as a result of the wild cavorting.
With that done I would happily get on with the day until bedtime, climbing into a perfectly made bed with hospital corners and a stylishly tossed pom-pom throw, feeling tired and satisfied that life is so fucking good!
Unless.
Unless by the time I got to the part where I was ready to drink my smoothie, I realised my spoon supply was already near half. Ok, so cancel the garden frolic. I really should have just sat on the bed and put my knickers on like a sane person. That was a wasted spoon right there. And really? Like a gazelle? To the loo? Two more spoons I just did not have to spend. Get a grip. Who, pray tell, do I actually think I am? A well person? Pfft.
So now I slump on the couch adding up all the stuff that I still need to do today. I’ve barely done an hour and there’s a long way til bedtime. I start to feel worried. Worried I won’t achieve what I need to achieve to get the day done. Frustration seeps in. I was looking forward to all the satisfying art stuff I had to do. The stuff that feeds my soul. What do I need to cull from that list so I can make it through? Anger rises hotly from my heart to my head until tears spike in my eyes and self-pity tries really hard to peek its shitty head out. I push it back, feeling suffocated and exhausted, losing my resilience and becoming subservient to the monster inside me.
If I started at that lovely moment of waking with a full set of spoons then by lunchtime I’d have two left and half a day to get through. Two spoons are not enough for that, so borrowed spoons perpetuate a deficit cycle as each day goes by, just like the one before.
A woman with Lupus named Christine Miserandino was sitting at a cafe with her college roommate trying to explain her chronic illness to her friend. She spoke of many things to try and illustrate what her life was like around her illness. She spoke of pain, of medications and of her limits but her friend wasn’t feeling it. She looked around the cafe in frustration looking for inspiration. She suddenly grabbed all the spoons off the nearest tables until she had a fistful.
Loosely translated, she went through her daily routine putting a spoon or two down each time she talked about completing a daily living activity. The spoons are her currency. Her supply of spoons quickly diminished, gone entirely, long before her rhetoric about her daily routine had ended. Simply put she didn’t have the spoons she needed to get through the day. The visual helped her friend to understand and thus “The Spoon Theory” was born.
Christine didn’t know at the time that the analogy would become part of the language of people with chronic illnesses. Whilst “The Spoon Theory” is Christine Miserandino’s story, it has become all our stories.
Her creative and effective explanation of her energy levels and how it affects her day/life has become a valuable tool.
Before I heard of the Spoon Theory I would wake up every morning and the first thing I would tell my family was that I felt like shit. “Good morning. I’m shit today”.
I was so self absorbed, not having a diagnosis and feeling like death with no breaks in between No light at the end of the tunnel was scary and I spent all day, every day with the same diatribe in my head. What did I do yesterday that made me sick today? Did I eat something that I shouldn’t have? Did I not eat something I should have? Did I overdo it? If I rest now am I weak? Or giving up? Or not resilient? I’m letting my family down. How will I manage driving my son to school? Who can I get to go to the shops for me because I can’t face it? How? Why? When? What? And in the background, I’m useless. I'm crazy. It's in my head. If it's my head then why can’t I change it? What have I done to deserve this? And on it went, over and over 24/7 for over 13 years.
I didn’t mean to be so self absorbed. The whole time I was looking for answers. Looking for ways to cope, trying to rationalise what was happening to me and most of all looking for understanding from those around me so they could see WHY I was failing them, that I didn’t mean to. That I wanted to be so much more but couldn’t.
So every morning in order to put a wall up and protect me from them and them from me, I made sure everyone knew I felt like crap and that I would not be capable of fulfilling their needs or even my own. When I said, “I feel like shit” what I was really saying was, “I can’t do what I should be doing for you today as your other/partner so don’t expect it. Don’t expect it so you won’t be as disappointed in me as I am”.
What I actually achieved with my morning declarations was to make the people I was trying to protect from myself also feel like shit. I was dragging them down with me. When I found Spoon Theory, I also found a way to convey that I was struggling, without being negative or creating negativity in my home and life. I found a language that helped people understand what I was feeling in the moment. I believe that no one can really understand another’s pain. We go through that alone. However, to have a tool that simply and positively helps another to understand where we are at in the moment and in relation to their needs is invaluable and has changed so much. Language is so important. Thanks Christine for ‘The Spoon Theory’.
A New Language
2. Swiss Cheese Brain
Aaaaand now I really feel like I'm driving upside down.
What do you mean? How is that possible?
I have no idea.
I literally have holes in my white matter. Apparently, this doesn’t matter because it's not in my grey matter. Why do I have holes? Well, it could be from the migraine activity or maybe the migraines are from the holes.
I’ve had to lie for years in order to get the help I need around my health. Apparently, my condition doesn’t actually exist in Australia. There is no treatment plan, no PBS and no help in mainstream medicine. One Christmas I was fortunate enough to have a medical coder at my table. Fortunate, not because of his profession, but because he was a wonderful man and an absolute pleasure to spend Christmas with. His name was Bob and I didn’t really know him. He was the partner of my son’s counsellor (that he needed because he had me as a mother) and I read on Facebook that Andrew was going back to the motherland for Christmas leaving Bob orphaned. Anyway, we had Bob over and we got talking. A medical coder uses the doctor’s notes from the patients he diagnoses in the hospital and codes the diagnoses for the computer. Bob told me that day that each and every disease and malady we suffer in Australia has a code. I asked him what the code for Lyme was, although I figured I already knew the answer. There isn’t one. I am/you are, we are uncodable. (Sing it.)
Because of this when I need to appease doctors or criteria I use my symptoms as my diagnosis and I manage my own health plan. When it's time to review the holes in my brain I tell my doctor my migraines are still occurring and it's time for my annual brain MRI. I get PATS flights to the city, I have my MRI and a sneaky appointment with a Lyme Literate doctor, one of two in WA, 2400 kms from my home and very expensive. I can’t get a referral to see him, as technically he doesn’t exist either, so I piggyback my appointments with my ‘legitimate’ health care, I have my Telehealth appointment to determine the results of my MRI, yes there are more holes. Clearly, you are still having migraines regularly.
From this, I can self-diagnose that I still have neurological Lyme. That’s why I have holes in my white matter. I learned to manage my migraine years ago.
The white matter in the brain is critical for cognition. The holes in mine make me cognitively quite interesting.
I've rounded the roundabout and on my right I see the fenced off dilapidated space that used to be the Kimberley Club. But it's not on my right, it's on my left (that foopah {faux pas} happened while I was checking in my mind while I was writing this) and as I head west down Frederick st (Yes, actual West) everything seems wrong. Spatially and directionally. I feel like I’m driving upside down. It feels a little discombobulating but as soon as I get my bearings I can recognise my surroundings and all is well. It’s not frightening. It's kind of like being on a rollercoaster for a few seconds.
This is my Swiss cheese brain.
We are garage sailing. Primarily because I need more shit. We lived for many years in a ‘roadhouse’. A circa 1971 Bedford caravan back truck. So freaking goooood! When I eventually moved into a house house I expanded like one of those “add water to get an instant pet” things. Every time I moved to a bigger place I got more shit. I need it all and what I’ve gotten rid of I regret so garage sailing we go. I’m driving because it's my car so if I feel alright I drive by default. Besides, Fox is a surveyor so is the logical choice for a navigator. Broome is so small and I’ve been here so long but, whilst I know all the streets and where I think they are, sometimes I will go to the place with the street name that appears the same colour in my head as the street name we are actually looking for.
This is also my Swiss cheese brain.
At first, when Fox was navigating he would tell me to go right. So I’d go left. Time and time again. Once it's done I know it's wrong but at the time the sense that the left is actually the right is so strong, that even if I question myself several times before turning, I still go left when it's right. Now we have a workaround. A new term to add to my new language. Now when Fox is navigating he tells me Lyme left and I turn right.
Again, Swiss cheese brain.
Similarly, when I play Scrabble or Words With Friends, which I do daily to exercise my cheese, I have this constant urge to play the words backwards on the board.
A New Language
3. Colloquially Challenged
Ive always been proud of my literacy skill level. I always text YOU and never U and I’d never date a man that doesn’t put the apostrophe in the word you’re or forgoes the e entirely even!!! Can you imagine? Do not get me started on apostrophes and esses. Once my autocorrect stuck an apostrophe inappropriately on a plural and I pressed send before I saw it. I was mortified and immediately followed with a text explaining that ‘Siri did it. I swear!’ Please note that any grammatical ‘errors’ or ’misspells’ in any of these writings are intentional. I swear.
Words like statistic or colloquial, come to think of it, have always been a bit of a tongue twister but I don’t think I’m unique there. “I have a script request for an Irish wristwatch.” Say it. Fast.
I was part of an art collaboration a few years back. The brief for the project was imagining new collective nouns. It was so fun. Some examples; A dot of Dalmatians, a wig of hares, a vista of windows and a band of beatles. There were so many more and I love having conversations now about what collective nouns seem suitable and which don’t and if they don’t then let’s think of something better. A clowder of cats works in my head, did I mention I live in one? I call our house the Clowder House, but a sloth of bears ? nup. I’d prefer a bristle of bears.
A wig of hares came about when I decided I wanted to do hares as my animal for the project. I love hares because they look like rangy badass rabbits. A hare is to the rabbit world what tank girl is to the world of skinny blonde teenage girls. I decided to ask my 13 year old what he thought a group of hares was called. He very quickly and logically answered, “a wig.”
I love these divergent uses of language. In this context when paired with art it’s so fun and leaves much room for imaginings. What I also love is how polite people can be when I say a group of words in the same sentence that have only a very vague resemblance to what I actually wanted to say. I do this all the time. Most people don’t skip a beat, or some just a quick beat and then carry on. I used to stop and frown and think, ‘Hang on, That’s not quite right. Is it?’ But rarely can I dredge up the correct combination of words so nowadays I just roll with it. Yesterday I told Fox he was getting the raw end of the stick. I meant to say the rough end, or the pointy end or something. He got my meaning. He has adapted to my new language and when I’m really off the mark I have context to back me up.
More fun colloquial fuckups from me for your entertainment
Whatever floats your goat
Many hands make five finger….um… discounts.. work?
No room to skin a cat
If you can’t take the heat get out of the fucking oven
You look like the cat that got the cream cheese
Never bite a gift horse on the mouth
You woke up with wrong sided business in the bed
Pushing up six foot daisies