new raspberry; �HATES technological I am sick to death of erectile dysfunction, pass the tampons please |
Mothers and Daughters Mothers and Daughters When I was out on Saturday, there was a woman with three kids and we ended up in three different stores at the same time. Not hard to understand when you take into account this is a small town and there are only three stores in this particular shopping center. Each time I crossed her path, she was constantly scolding, nagging, harping on her daughter, "Don't touch that..."; "Stop doing..." It was a constant litany and the kid was just being a kid. I don�t know why it irked me so much given how maternal my instincts are but I wanted to turn to the woman and tell her maybe she should have used a more effective form of birth control since she so obviously was unprepared for the fact that kids will be kids. Maybe it bothered me because that could have easily been me when I was in a very different frame of mind than the one I possess today. Maybe it touched some distant memory of my past. I don�t know. I just know it required super-human effort to mind my own business and not go off on her about how when her daughter grows up, her memories of mom are going to be that mom�s a royal bitch and that she should be thinking about that when she�s in the nursing home, wondering why it�s Mother�s Day and her daughter hasn�t even bothered to call. That what she does to her daughter today will in all likelihood be what her daughter does to her child sometime in the future. I don�t know, maybe mom was having a bad day. Maybe her husband�s been off in Iraq for God knows how long and she�s here alone, a military wife far away from her own mother and family, struggling to get through the days wondering if�Maybe I should have felt a little more compassion and �what if� myself, and offered to watch her kids so she could cruise the store in peace and her kids wouldn�t have to listen to mom be unhappy. My own mother and I have had a strained relationship. The turbulent teens, the indifferent twenties, the tentative thirties. There are so many things that we should talk about�you know�the elephant in the room that everyone pretends isn�t there. I guess if I want to have any peace in our relationship, I just need to accept the fact that we�re never going to be able to hash out the past and point fingers and accept blame and make amends. She�s just not capable of touching those areas. I�ve posted some of my short stories on my public consumption website. One of them is loosely based on her stormy marriage to my father and a lesbian relationship she had when I was a child. She has told me she has a hard time reading it, but that she reads it again and again to get more comfortable with the feelings the story invokes. She�s told me she hopes it�s a work of fiction. Maybe I should write more �fiction� to let her know the things that have gone unspoken all these years and in that way, release my demons and perhaps jump start a dialogue that is long overdue.
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