My mother is eccentric to say the least. She is the kind of woman that will appear unannounced as if from nowhere with a bizarre story that couldn’t be possibly true but she consistently manages to provide evidence to support her wacky existence. I have managed to keep her in Australia for the last 5 years which is a real achievement considering she spent most of the 90’s in and out of Brazil. When she last turned up she had been in Melbourne and she looked rather different. She is a good looking lady, I’m pretty sure most of her trips are love fuelled but I really tend not to ask, this time she just looked different, better actually. When I asked her what she had done to achieve this look she casually told me about her lip fillers. Melbourne is apparently all about big plump lips these days and according to her I was terribly behind the times to not have known that. My mother, lip fillers! I didn’t dare question her life choices, I

had learnt by now that even inquiring about the rationale behind some of her decisions opens the floodgates to a stream of lectures about freedom, the 60’s and the sexual revolution. She is old enough to make her own decisions at this point although I am seriously scaling back her babysitting hours. We went down to the beach house with the kids and she tagged along, I haven’t seen my mother in a bikini for a while but I was pretty sure what I was seeing was not my mother’s 65 year old body. I should have guessed really, she had also has some liposuction treatments. Melbourne is big on those too apparently. When I gently and subtly inquired as to how she paid for all these cosmetic procedures she started talking about a man named Rodrigo at which point I grabbed the kids and ran for the sea. I have heard it all before but my babies were too young to hear of their grandma’s rampant ways!