How I miss my daughter ...sometimes you just need girl talk ....

Sometimes you just have to have a chat. Whole libraries have been written about the differences between men and women... talk shows thrive on it, TV series are rife with anecdotal trivia, women’s magazines abound with stories of difference.

But let’s face it sometimes a girl just needs girl talk.

It’s been a full on four months. Moving country, setting things up, getting organised for a new life here. It is very different but also similar. My husband’s a trouper. I love him to bits. He is just the best person ever. We met and fell in love and that was it. Five full days later he proposed and we just knew this was right. 23 years later we are still going strong despite the hurdles that life has thrown us – back surgery, breast cancer, parents dying, children and their challenges.

We have always talked. About everything. Sorted through our crises and talked about the hard stuff when neither of us have wanted to go there. Made decisions – some we got right and some we used as learning experiences for the future.

The children being young adults are good fun conversation wise. Having one of each sex has probably made the conversations more defined in their nature. I didn’t realise how far it had gone. We aligned ourselves along gender lines, the girls had similar interests and so did the boys – the conversations gravitated to each other. Like, as my favourite saying goes, “maggots on a chop”.

Being here with the man in my life has highlighted my internal craving for girl talk. We’ve been through the what car do we buy? Test drives, internet searches, conversations relayed from other owners, comparisons, prices, tyres, steering, “torque”. But not the sort of talk I needed. We’ve bought the car now we have to get it up to speed with how we like a car to be, I use the “we” word figuratively of course. Do we do a safety check, what about the tyres, who uses what garage, what do other drivers say? Where do they go for repairs?

I mean how hard is the car thing? You drive it, fill it with petrol and when it stops take it to a garage to get fixed. But then I am a girl.

The boy child has arrived for his 5 week visit. Probably symbolic that he arrived on the same day that a cyclone did. What more can I say? I now have 2 of them.
Boy talk. It’s just exhausting. There are levels of detail that-

1. I just don’t need to know,
2. Don’t want to know, and
3. Don’t even want to go there –
If you know what I mean?

There’s that wonderful movie called Children of a Lesser God that William Hurt stars in as a teacher of the deaf. After a full day of signing he just needs to have a break from it and put some music on – the continual translation is exhausting. He loves what he does, loves the people but sometimes you just need to tune out.

I really miss my daughter. The girl talk. Comparing notes, having coffee, going to a movie, shopping, browsing, going to a gallery. Having a reference point that is into a different sort of detail. Being with another woman you know really well and trust too. We’re the best of friends the girl child and I. Not that she takes notice of everything I say - she has 2 tattoos. We are still mother and daughter and sometimes I just have to tell it like it is. She shares her confidences with me – and I’m sure there’s some she doesn’t share as well. We love books, buying them, reading them and talking about them. They are precious jewels for appreciation. All these things we fit into our girl talk.

I love the men in my life. Don’t get me wrong. But I came from a family of girls. Girl talk is what I know.

I know I have to be patient. I know I have to be interested and I really do try. I know the men would do anything for me. So for 5 weeks I will manage. It’s good for the man in my life to have the boy child here because he can boy talk till the cows come home and will have someone who knows what to do and say.

Me. I’m saving up for the girl child to visit.