2005-07-09
Mom
i sort of hate her right now.
i guess that's rather sad.
she looks at me with eyes that shine with the moisture of birthing tears and asks me how what edward does can not be the mark of a bad childhood raising, a bad mother.
she comes home late from work and just wants to rest because the day has been so long. when she's using this computer, if she's looking up vacation itineraries so she can have us visit her two younger brothers, wives, and children and her mother who live in michigan, she is browsing ("window" shopping.. there's a good double-entendre there..) ebay for a more comfortable pair of work shoes since she is on her feet so much.
she is fed up with the mess, occasionally cleans it, but it comes right back. she hasn't screamed in a long while. i have. she tells me i will understand when i am a mother. i say i never will and i need her to let me breathe. it's easy to blame edward for all of this, compare my restrictions to his lack thereof at my age, et cetera, but that is not really fair.
she doesn't shop too much, but enough. she keeps her light hair a color that it is really not by dying it. her smallest and perhaps solitary self-indulgence is the monthly manicure she treats herself to.
her line of sight grazes the floor a little before her eyes meet my own and she offers a resounding "no" that is to be undisputed yet unexplained. we define our own rationality, just i have learned that we define our own reality. the two may go hand in hand.
i don't deserve this.
but i am being too self-centered to realize that neither does she. neither does she.
and it's all bringing me down.
this is not the future she would have chosen for herself.
i think about that sometimes.
and it just makes it worse, because nothing can change it.
she may be one of many women, whose hearts would bleed a little were they shown a projection of their live in twentyfive years at the young ripe age of twenty. i am so sorry she is not happier. i am sorry i have little will to change that. as if i have enough to deal with. i know i do not. i am the googooplex (however.. whatever..) millionth on the list of people who have had their heart ripped, people who feel unjustified discontent, people who seek more by looking outward instead of within... all of those. i wish her name as removed from all of those as well. she would put my wellbeing before her own. she is my Mother. i don't know if i could ever do the same for her. my life and thoughts suggest otherwise. but i know nothing to do.
i don't give her reason to worry. it's in her blood, it's part of her, as natural as her nose (which none of us inherited).
maybe it's just so much easier to blame her than myself.
that is even worse.
i don't know how i can even speak to her. parents have never been a bit aspect of my life. being cold to them comes just as easily as being warm. i can accept that i am generated, created, from them,
but they do not own me.
i don't care about laws or principles with this. i am my own. you need control. you won't find it here. you can't control this.
but don't be afraid. it never errs on purpose or has bad intentions. never, really. (i don't know if that "really" is to undermine it all, or add reassurance.)
Mom, just let me go.
but that would mean
that i am gone.
not in her grasp to own or control, something tangible and concrete in her life that can be a source of comfort, a reminder of what belongs. she won't ever release me.
she honestly believes that i am beautiful.
when she tells me i look good before i depart for another dismal and average day at school, she means it. she doesn't pressure me about my grades. sometimes it bothers me, her lack of participation in the school stuff, but i know it couldn't be much better. i should present less pride to her, because i am not as proud of myself as i would claim to her. i'm really not. and i don't need to be. she's got it covered.
i hate the way she would mock-giggle and tell me i was different around my friends when i knew i had not been more of myself around anyone than i had with them. i hate the way she would matter-of-factly ask about sean when there was always something underlying. her conservativism, how vinnie was a weird phase and perhaps nothing more. it scares her to think i was in love. she doesn't know it. she doesn't know all that i am capable of feeling and therefore doing. she is afraid. she doesn't know that the reason i don't do drugs is not because of her looking down on it and obviously restricting me from it, but because i have no personal desire or interest.
she doesn't know that the decisions i make are based upon my own values, not hers.
at least she acts like she doesn't know this.
i cry thinking about all this. she doesn't deserve it, either. and i am no help.
just let me go out. you keep working, it is what you do. i'll come home later. don't worry or think about where i am or what i'm doing, because i promise it's not bad. she claims it's never an issue of trust. i can believe this, probably. it's an issue of neglect. i don't make family a priority. this is all so insensitive. how can i ask her to try to understand when this is how i think.
i have never experienced difficulty like this. i pity her. you should never pity your parents, because that creates the presumption that you have given them reason to be felt sorry for. i don't know if i have done this.
Mom has been through so much. they aren't in love any more, that's just not possible, they wouldn't live and act as they do. her oldest, her son, is living directly against the values that she raised him upon, and it's hard to argue that she needs to let go a little when you see her get choked up and ponder the validity of her self-deprecation. she works almost every day, lots of hours. she curls her blond hair and sprays it and tries to look younger, sometimes unsure of what to wear. her mom calls to offer her money, money she won't take despite mounting hospital bills. her veins are thin. she has bad circulation in her arms. we might be laying on her comfy bed watching a movie together and she raises her hands and starts moving them around like a sloppy musical conductor. i can't feel them really well, she explains. she is authoritative. she has gotten better at limiting her questions because she knows even though she is only being inquistive and even at times simply conversational, the queries can be easily interpretted (perhaps not justifiably so) as irritating and cumbersome by those being "interrogated"- either my brother or myself, and now sometimes Elena as she matures and slightly adapts some of the passed-down mannerisms. mom did not want to live here. she wants to be by her family. she loves her family. her father died before her kids got a chance to know him to be as great as she did. her husband as unlikeable habits, like taking lots of vitamins and reading cooky magazines and not being sociable, and moving out here away from everything she knew and loved upon his whim of wanting to get out of the city. she was a waitress and a proprietor, dealing with the bills and numbers and finances, then a manager and yet still a manager. in a venerable position, yet not making enough of course by American standards, never making enough. that's not what matters to her. but the bills must be paid, and there are things to be bought.
she must hate waking up as early as she does some days. and i know she hates hearing about people, teenagers, that have died in the community, especially from car wrecks. this is why i am not allowed to leave the house, why i cannot travel on the roads without a strenuous plea for submission, why i am forced to be a hermit when there is nothing i want more than to get out and experience my life in this world. she doesn't watch the news. she has no real consistency in her permission-giving, besides the unspoken mindset "because i said so." she used to be charmed by how i used to weave her arguement to senselessness in the classic parent-child debates, how i would present my incontestible side. it used to be cute when it meant, okay, whosever'smom can take you two to see a PG movie. now it's NO, don't even try to explain to me why you should go to Glacier Park with your friends, that involves someone driving, driving on a road to get there and that is how people die. you will most certainly get in an accident and die or get severely injured, that would kill me inside and i can't pay for the medical bills. no you can't go, so lie to me about it instead and somehow feel sickly not bad about doing so.
she must be jealous of how all of krissy's likeable sisters are well-known by mitchell, quinton, and grace, how she must be the less-liked (in the shallow, understandable ways that kids think- this plagued me for years with the whole uncle mark/alex thing) aunt, naturally. the older one, the "less cool" one in the sense that pre-adolescent kids have any idea what "cool" is. blue tongue from a sucker type cool.
i doubt she'll let me go to tally lake this tuesday. and the concept, although not quite the profane title, "bitch," automatically presses itself into my head.
i don't understand any more than she does. i am so selfish and hard-pressed to please myself. i can tell her that she has no idea how hard it is sometimes, but know the hell cares?! it's not THAT bad, it never really is. even at the worst, it's liveable. so be quiet, stay home, clean, and be thankful. and don't be jealous of anyone else, or give them reason to think you are even remotely envious of the way their life is. that's not fair to them or to yourself. your mother is here for you. be there for her.
her voice sounds clinical on the phone. the "no" needs to be repeated a few times, as if i am a kid again when that word meant very little to me so i would repeatedly ask. No.
and i hate her.
leesah-likes at 5:05 p.m.