06-05-04

on family…

sitting at the hilton with my mother i finally realized how far apart her and i were. I, sitting there over my tea with cream making small talk with the maitre d’ about russian artwork and her sitting there with her elbows on the table droning on about the usual things in her little world (and of course things like money which realy have no place in a four star restaurant such as the Promenade) it struck me…she lied about alot of the things that supposably happened in her youth. My arguement is this, if the supposed events took place, like the men she dated, the places she has been and the people she once knew then why the tension when we walk into four star restaurants, why the crude comments, why the socially unacceptable behavior? I’ve caught myself blushing into my tea on more than one occasion at lunch when the unacceptable came out of her mouth.

My frustration with her hit the roof today in the car when a realization occured to me. I had asked her if i could borrow the car to get my haircut and she in her usual way through a hissy fit. She says…25,000…i say i’m insured she says her usual and i turn the radio up knowing what she wanted but refusing to give her the glory of a response. At that exact moment i realize Andy’s girlfriend is even allowed to drive the cars when i have never been allowed to. Andy’s girlfriend even lives with them for god’s sake when i was booted to the curb when i was 17.

I sat in the kitchen with her this morning listening to her try to convince andy’s girlfriend that he is dieing of cancer (medically unproven). I loose myself in the paper i am carrying as we walk down pittsburgh’s streets sloooowly as her shoes hurt her feet too bad for her to continue at a normal pace. I look at her shoes…3 inch platform sandals to walk around downtown in… She has a migraine she whines and five minutes later she is giggling over some joke she cracked as if her head were fine. She whines about her paper for school…a five page response to some reading or another…one a week, not comprehending that students at juniata and other schools write two of these a day while juggling two jobs and some volunteer thing or another, and perhaps…those of us who haven’t learned better… a relationship (or two :) ). As of next week my relationship with my mother will resort to meeting her once a month for lunch at some place or another, I can’t do this anymore.

She lends me three dollars for the bus, my brother calls her co-dependent over his cellphone from the drivers seat of his 30000 dollar nissan. She yells at me to finish his american history midterm for his cyber school as he is out riding his four wheeler and drinking beer. She bitches when the towels his girlfriend tried to wash are pulled out of the closet still damp and thrown back into the dryer.

Everyone has a mental illness, most people an addiction, everything relates to drugs. She points to a teapot at a vendor’s booth at the arts festival and asks if it could be used as a bong. I drop my head and walk to the next booth. My friend from work’s friend got caught under a MAC truck on his motorcycle as the truck burnt above him, she cuts the picture of him being pulled from under it out of the newspaper and hangs it on the fridge. She’s sick and dying, andy’s sick and dying, her cat is sick and dying. I refuse to be anything other than immortal and since she can’t make me sick anymore she does her best to make me miserable. I’m a fuck up, when i come to visit her i am not good enough to sleep on her sofa, i have to sleep on the floor. I inconvience her by staying a week or two.

But i digress, back to lunch. She is trying to come up with a story to tell her class for a presentation she must give. She wants to tell them about the mother’s day i planned a surprise picnic, had her blindfolded and driven out to the park. I suggest a running theme so she can combine more than one story… maybe tea and different events that happen around tea, maybe mothers day as a theme. She could share about the time i won her a weekend trip with four star accomidations and five star cuisine from an essay i wrote about her, or the picnic, or the time nina and i painted her laundry room in the house she had just bought the year before with dragon flys and whimsically thngs…as i said these things my heart sank. I always thought i was horrible to her, always thought that might have been the reason she treats me the way she does. I realized i wasn’t, she is alwasy the victim. I still can’t figure it out.

My father i talk to four or five times a year, him and i have a better relationship than we use to and than my mother and i have. He treats me as a business associate, filing me in on the daily processes of his job as assistant brew master at anheuser-busch. He bought darcy a 300$ dog a year ago, they have a pool, a 300m and a nice house in an affluent part of houston. I had two jobs and still couldn’t make ends meet when i went to school. He was mad at me for not finishing at juniata, but yet he couldn’t (wouldn’t?) help me when i asked.

This is my family, a jumbled mess of crap that made me who i am today. A mess of crap from which i have learned what not to be, how not to hurt, how not to behavior and in some strange way, after many, many failed attempts, how to love…myself and others by following a model set on the opposite of the compassion they have showed me.

I have learned more from my step-mom when all is said and done on the kind of person i want to become, the kind of life i want to lead, the way i want to treat others. She has showed me more compassion in the end than either of my parents combined have and for that i am eternally grateful to have someone in my life i can say that about. She truly is a wonderful role model for me.