I'll tell you what I want...

What I want, what I really, really want, has changed over the years. When this little musical gem smashed its way into the charts in 1996 I probably wanted less frizzy hair, a Union Jack dress and some platform trainers.

Later, I craved travel and adventure and independence and I headed to Turkey to teach English for the summer with little more than a suitcase full of early readers and bikinis on the vague offer of a job from a Marmaris barman's boss.

But what I want now is a little more difficult to achieve.

It's not as admirable as world peace (which clearly I do want, ideally starting within my own fucking household as we try and get everyone out the door in a morning). It's not as costly as the new rug I have my eye on to replace the one in the living room, a classy, fluffy thing which, as far as I know, no one has ever wee'd on. (It's $3000 in case you're wondering what to get for my 41st). It's not as strange as a doll that smells of vanilla that I keep entering competitions to win for Bette because I'm totally curious as to why people rave about them and their lovely odour and interested to see if she still smells like seed pods after a week with my feral smallest child. (Though not curious enough to shell out actual cash money to pay for one).

It's not dependent on other people. Though I do want things like that. Most pressingly Sean to finish his darn course so I can actually ever see him again and so that I no longer have to be subjected to various medical examinations. This is not a euphemism.

It's not even dependant on me. Which is probably a good thing since my level of success with all things of late could happily be described as 'sub par'.

What I want, really, really, really, right now, is to have a conversation about parenting with my mum. Because, while I remain grateful that she stuck around long enough to ease me into motherhood and check how many mLs of Panadol I had in the squirter at 2am when I was home alone with a teething child and my eyes didn't work so well due to sleep deprivation and crying ... things have changed now and I have a shit tonne more questions for her.

It seems that now I have two kids to parent, and neither one is really a 'baby' or even a 'toddler' and they can both talk back to me and argue with each other, things have gotten way, way more complicated. And while I thought as a teacher of bigger kids I'd be more prepared for this phase than the baby one (given my experience of all things babies was on a par with my experience of making deals on the stock exchange) it turns out, that I'm not.

Despite spending two entire summers teaching and living with two kids roughly the same age as my own now, another working as a camp counsellor and spending my entire PGCE learning about pedagogy, I am finding the 'how tos' with a 5yo and a troubling mini sidekick in tow adding her own sass into the mixture really fucking hard.

So what do I want to ask mum?

I want to ask her how you get a kid to stop wetting the bed or needing pull ups at night. I want to know what I can do about the eldest one playing too rough in the playground when I've already tried all the things I can think of short of sending him to Military School. I want to know if she ever screamed in my face when I was a kid and why - what got to her?

I want to know if she thought about just opening the front door and walking off for a while and leaving my brother and I to it. Where she got her patience from. If she swore at me. How the hell she was teetotal. How she managed to move to a whole new town, make friends and set up a business all the while parenting two small children mostly on her own while dad worked away.

I want to know whether it's worth putting some of my limited funds into classes for Abe like Jujitsu or gymnastics. Whether I should carry on with Bette's swimming lessons. Or whether it's just a big fecking waste of money I don't have and I'd be better served in life by buying fancier gin for myself.

I'd like her opinion on whether the fact I am staying at home while they are kids is a good thing or whether I'd be a better role model and more pleasant human if I went and got a job.

How much TV/iPad is actually acceptable. When they might both eat vegetables without drama and so how many more years until we can have dinner without anyone crying.

I also want to tell her what I've done and what I've said and how I've dealt with the latest drama and check that it's not going to utterly scar them that red words were involved. And on occasion the threat of violence or homicide.

I want her to tell me about the times when I was terrible and what she said and she did. Because the only real meltdown I remember is the one about the shell earrings. The shell earrings that were Nana's that I promised I wouldn't lose if she let me wear them days after I'd been left them in her will ... and of course, I did. Sobbing, grieving, she sent me back to the park alone to find them. An almost literal needle in a haystack. Of course, I never did. And I never dared tell her that, years later, I lost the much coveted buckle ring Nana left me too.

But surely there were more times she lost it? Even if not quite as spectacularly as that.

I know now that we go a bit nuts when we lose our mums - but can grief still justify my almost weekly parenting patience fails?

And while, on occasion, I do have 'conversations' with her - and on occasions I get an answer of some form as well - I'd really like to see her face and have some actual examples from our journey as mum and daughter to guide me too.

So, if you still have a mum and she's involved and present and got anything to say about the above, then please let me know. Because this time, I'm unlikely to get the answers I really really want from the place I really really want to go for them. I'm unlikely to get the rug in the next few years either - but at least on that front I can placate myself with the fact that that's probably a good thing, because hopefully by the time I can afford it no one will pee on it...