Why Men Are Scared Of Your Handbag

Every time my husband needs to pay a bill or bum some money, he asks me first.  Not because I am a scrooge and the money controller in the household, but because he is scared of my handbag.  As he should be.  A woman’s handbag is her most sacred possession; her most personal domain.  Not to mention it is a cavernous hole in which you place your trespassing hand at your own risk.

I know what’s in my handbag  There are things in there that could scratch or leave you retrieving your digits covered in an indescribable goop.   Items that could see hubby recoiling in horror (mainly my latest speeding fine or a receipt from my recent shopping expedition). But every now and then, much like cleaning out the car or defrosting the freezer, my handbag needs to be purged of all the excessive crap it has accumulated as a result of being both a woman and the mother of young boys.

So I embarked on the mission, self-assured that surely this task would only take minimal time. I was very very wrong. Cleaning out my handbag I found:

• Keys, most of which I am quite unsure as to which locks they belong too!
• A variety of makeup products, some of which still remain unopened from purchase and some that have been so well utilised that I resort to scraping the product from its plastic container with an ear bud.
• Several spare ear buds.
• Tissues, Panadol, throw up bags, baby wipes, lady products and a first aid kit pretty much a smaller version of my bathroom cabinet.
• A phone, a mobile one, which I can count on one hand how many times I have used and whose functions are limited to calling and sending the odd incomprehensive text.
• The head of a teenage mutant ninja turtle figurine.
• Enough loose change to sink a battleship (or pay for petrol when I occasionally leave my purse on the kitchen bench).
• Multiple store cards that I’ve never used (but will find have thousands of benefits as soon as I get rid of them),
• Receipts for expenses that should have been handed to the accountant in 2010.
• Feathers, rocks, dead flowers and other physical proclamations of love from my boys, picked up out of someone’s garden or off the ground.

OK, so looking at the cornucopia of treasures laid out before me that had emerged from just a medium sized bag, I realised that maybe a more concerted effort needed to be made when it comes to treating my handbag more like a small vessel of convenience, rather than a halfway house for stuff that has detoured on it’s rightful path towards the bin.

That or I could just buy a bigger bag!