Whenever I am home, my mama likes to show me the various things she has bought in the time I have been away. Her ever-changing taste never ceases to amaze me.

"I got new jeans," she said, proudly showing off a pair of pale blue jeans.

They looked innocent enough. Until I noticed the zippers that ran along each side from the waist down to the bottom of the legs.

Essentially, my mama bought stripper jeans.

"Look at the zippers!" She said excitedly when she noticed me staring at them in shock, "they are the best part!"

I am spending this weekend with my parents in Sydney. I've not seen them since Easter and that equals almost four months without their eccentricities and salivating home cooking.

As soon as we got home from the airport last night, my mother put the kettle on. As I stood there waiting for the water to boil, she informed me that the water in the kettle was off limits but there was enough hot water in the thermos for me to make tea.

"What are you doing?" I asked, as she started to concoct a strange mix of green herbs with Indian henna dye.

"I take sick days for the next three days you here," she said while beating an egg into the mixture. "I need to dye my ankle to look like a bruise. Tomorrow I go doctors, look real and I get medical certificate."

"Why can't you pretend to have a cold? Or a migraine?"

"Not severe enough," she said with an air of experience. "Here, help me bind my ankle. Make the strapping tight."

There is a clear difference between paternal and maternal love. A fine example of which can be found in my family.

Amidst the intense heat of summer, we are all in an uproar in preparation for my departure to Melbourne. As an only child, this uproar is by no means any kind of exaggeration.

For two days straight, my mother took me shopping for new work clothes. I bought up big on crisp business shirts and conservative tops to go with the two sets of suits I already own. Momma, however, found my taste dull. She insisted on picking up sparkly low-cut tops.

"Darling, you're being boring," said Momma, holding up a sequined-neck backless number. "Your clothes should have personality!! This shirt screams attention! You'll stand out from the crowd!"

"I'll definitely stand out from the crowd after they fire me for indecent exposure."

"You should not waste your youth. If I was your age, I would only ever wear revealing clothes. Show your skin while you still can."

I stood my ground and vetoed the idea of showing up for my first proper yuppie job dressed like a skank trying to land a banker at bar on a typical Friday night. As Pixie once rightly said, "we do not get to be investment bankers by wearing fuck-me boots."

While Momma tried to diversify my wardrobe, Poppa went shopping for me as well. He stopped at his favourite Hardware House and forked out some serious cash on pliers, hammers, nails and screw drivers.

"Essential items. I wrote down a list of them. I'll get you some ropes and a small jigsaw tomorrow," promised Poppa.

He fears that his beloved only child may get trapped in the wilderness with lions, tigers and bears when in Melbourne. My super-boyscout-Poppa is prepared for anything.

Growing up, Christmas held little significance for me apart from the stifling heat in which I would wait for my parents to come home from work, whence I would complain about our lack of Christmas spirits. I was not really the modern day Tiny Tim, but my dramatic whinges about our tinsel-less existence would have made Mr. Dickens very proud.

Lest you picture a bleak Christmas with a young Polly dressed in rags and constant cries of “please sir, can I have some more?”, I should write that though I spent Christmas mornings alone in a Christmas tree-less flat, we always sat down to a scrumptious Christmas dinner in the evening. My parents fused the best worlds of Oriental cuisine and fresh Aussie seafood: Peking ducks with plum sauce, prawns and lobsters, mud crabs with shallots and ginger, cold smoked turkey and potato salads, etc. But despite having my stomach filled to such a capacity that would have brought eternal joy to Oliver Twist, I was a spoilt bratty girl who still “asked for more”.

Every year I would ask for a Christmas tree, and each time I was met with the same answer that our flat was too cluttered for a tree. I did not get over the disappointment until I was at least nineteen.

My bitterness was made worse by parents who insisted on including tree ornaments for my presents every bloody year. What they saw as an act of kindness -- to replace any feeling of loss on account of no trees -- was merely adding salt to the wound.

A few days ago, I realised that Pixie’s dad did the opposite to her. He bought her a lovely plastic pine tree, but denied her tree ornaments. If only we had discovered the polar scrooge-ness of parents earlier; we could have had one perfect tree together.

This Christmas, things are a little different. I finally got a tree to put up all those ornaments. My parents decided to make my last few months in Sydney memorable by giving me my long-wished for tree. It’s a plastic replica which we will, according to Mum, “use over and over again when the grandkids come over”.

Mir recently wrote that parents change their die-hard habits at the arrival of grandchildren. It seems my parents even change theirs for grandchildren of the phantom variety.

Shopping for the tree was quite a drama. Dad did not really care what we got, but Mum insisted on absolutely the best.

“I will not have your kids say to me: wai-pou (maternal grandmother), our Christmas tree is crap,” she said when I recommended a thin plastic one costing only thirty dollars.

In the end we settled on a plastic cashmere pine.

“Smell that! It even smells like a real one,” Mum said once I set up my long-awaited tree.

“No. I’m sure that’s the plastic you’re smelling,” I said.

“Just take a whiff. It’s pine-smelling plastic.”

“I don’t think it’s good for you to be sniffing plastic.” But I did it anyway.


And on this night before Christmas: Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

My mobile phone sprang into its polyphonic splendour while I was driving along the M4 motorway last week. I didn’t want to risk a fine by answering it. My mother, in the passenger seat, dove straight into my bag and flip opened my phone. I screamed for her to just let the phone ring out.

“Harlow?” said mummy dearest without notice to my panicked cries. “Now Polly drive at the road. She call later.”

My eyes wandered off the road and stared at her in horror momentarily. There are still moments of my life when I’m immature and bratty enough to feel ashamed of my mother’s broken English.

“Was it Pixie?” I asked after she hung up.

“No. It was a man. A man named Gay,” Mum answered, eyeing me suspiciously. “Who’s Gay?”

“Gray. G-R-A-Y.”

It was my friend Gray from uni, calling to confirm Friday night’s dinner plans with the Bear and Funk-Sole-Brother - events which in retrospect deserve their own blog post.

My mother has the habit of putting her own twist on my friends’ names: Felicity becomes Solicity, Resan (a masculine Kurdish version of Richard) turns into Roseanne, and Ricky spins into Licky.

“Why did you have to answer the phone? You said it all wrong. You sounded horrible.” I said cruelly. I drove in silence for the rest of the way home. I was not at my most dutiful-daughter-self.

As I watched her make wontons later that afternoon, I sheepishly tried to redeem myself.

“I'm a tightarse, mum. I didn't want to pay for the phone call back.”

Maybe mother knows best: she put extra shrimp roes in my wonton soup that evening. It's unclear if they were shrimp roes of forgiveness. We're not a very expressive nor transparent family.

I spent the night in melancholy reflection. While I float around with dreams of being a writer, it dawned on me that my parents will not be able to read anything that I write.

Polly's momma is not unlike Polly. She gets herself into all sorts of mess and hilarity.

Momma likes to haggle. Her philosophy in life is "don't buy if it's not half off". This applies to every store, which makes shopping at some of the more trendy establishments very embarrassing.

Yesterday, momma's haggling ways got her into a spot of bother. She still pretends to be naive, but dear readers, my momma's hot and the world is not innocent.

Just like on any regular afternoon, my momma went shopping, this time for some ugg boots and lanolin moisturiser for a visiting relative. She popped into a new souvenir store that has recently opened nearby, brewing a storm for its unknowing owner. She managed to bring the price of a bottle of lanolin down to two dollars from six.

Never one to miss out on a deal, she proceeded to buy eight dozen bottles. Yes, that's over one hundred bottles of weird sheep's fat for moisturising purposes.

Now, realising that eight dozen bottles is going to be heavy and she is forbidden to drive under any circumstances (another one of her stories, maybe for another time), she asked the store owner to hold the goods until she can get a friend to pick them up.

"Oh, no. That's all right," the store owner said. "I'll drop it off at your place after I close up."

"No, no, that's too much trouble," hot momma coyly said.

"Really no trouble. Just give me your address and phone number and I'll come over after five. "

"Oh, you're too nice," hot momma exclaimed, thinking it can't be true that her daughter claims chivalry to be dead.

"Now, just write down your details here. You can pay me when I've delivered them."