Wild wild west

There are a few things I’ve learned about Sydney’s wild west -“ from working west of Petersham for a whole five days -“ and I’m sure all of them, written down, will get me into trouble.

Now, I know there are plenty of gays west of the city, and it wasn’t me who joked Broadway Shopping Centre was the heart of western Sydney a few years back. And yes, there’s a bar where gay people go and drink and dance and possibly play some pokies. But I tell you what, it’s a different kind of scene out there.

The whole parenting thing, for example. In the inner west it’s so incredibly ordinary to be a couple of chicks with a couple of kids that we’ve been snubbed for being too boring. We’re thinking of affecting an accent, or going to work in Sudan for an NGO for a year, just to gain some cred. We’re feeling so mundane I’m thinking of buying one of those hairless dogs, to spice things up a bit.

Alternatively, we could just go to Western Sydney for a week.

Turns out lesbians with kids get less and less understood the further down Parramatta Road you creep. Along with the percentage of shop signs that don’t completely butcher the English language. Note to shopkeepers: I will never, ever walk through anything that has a great big arrow and the words walk thru here next to it.

Two years into the wondrous world of babyness, I find myself blushingly explaining how I’ve managed to have a five-month-old baby and still have the body of a teenage boy. You look great, they say, staring at my non-existent breasts. Well, I say, red creeping up from collar to hairline, it’s a little more complicated than that.

Of course in the end they’re fine, as people everywhere manage to be in the end. Babies are babies, and gushers are gushers, and I’m too much of a baby gusher for anyone to feel weird about my situation for very long. Now I just have to think of a way to explain why I don’t understand the rules of rugby league.