A Close One
Okay, so I'm not going to tell you all about how I was a prostitute for a day, because by now all but the *counts on fingers with squinty eyes rolled up as if peering into brain* four of you have heard it already. The rest of you will have to wait. Hopefully not two months. I woke this morning to discover I had not yet been dropped from April's blogroll. I am, however, dangerously overdue, so hear goes!
I recently spent some time with the 'rents in London Town. One particular day left me inspired to write. Why I didn't write then I cannot tell you. Yes I can. Because I was on vacation. And I've been overworked all summer because of my own inability to push back. But that's been rectified. But I was tired, alright?
Anyway, yes. Inspired to write. Actually I think there may have been a few such days, but I can't remember them very well, and the ideas coming out of this particular day have come full circle, so again, here goes.
It was a pretty typical Sarah-in-London day... Sarah sleeps in, Sarah gets up shortly before mother leaves, Sarah has some breakfast, Sarah retires to couch to read, father takes mother to work/school, father comes home and cooks something for dinner. While father is cooking dinner (I think this may have been okra day, which would explain my impromptu irritability)I was suddenly overcome with a bad case of the fidgets. This was definitely not the I've-been-in-the-same-place-doing-nothing-too-long kind of fidget. Because I hadn't been. Nor was it the I-need-work-off-some-excess-energy kind of fidget, as a) I was pretty active on this particular trip home, and b) after the hellish stretch of work, work, moving, and more work I had just endured I definitely had no excess of energy. No, this was more the what-the-hell-is-wrong-with-my-environment kind of fidget.
And now, a little personal history: When my brother and I were children we used to liken our mother to Danny Tanner. Remember Danny Tanner? Of course you do! Who doesn't remember Danny Tanner? Well, I must tell you, Danny Tanner couldn't hold a candle to my mother. When that woman wanted something clean you had better be sure that not so much as speck was missed by your duster or a thread was hanging out of your underwear drawer. I once made the mistake of thinking I would get away with shoving all my blocks into my closet and closing the door. For the four years until we moved out of that house my mother would check the closet after I cleaned my room. So yes, mother of my childhood. Neat freak. You might think that explains a lot about me. You'd be mostly right. And also a little wrong.
Somewhere along the way my mother changes. After we moved to the store she stopped badgering me about the state of my room - although that may have had more to do with me than her. It took a long while, and it certainly intensified before dying away, but it did. It just up and disappeared. Perhaps it was a reordering of priorities after a multitude of family crises. Perhaps it was a natural relaxation after my brother and I moved out. Hell, maybe she just got tired of trying to be like her older sister after forty-some-odd years. Whatever it was, she dropped the need for neatness like you would a vase you got from your third-cousin when you graduated high school that's too hideous to keep within fifty feet of your home and too much of a cruel joke to pass on to an unsuspecting acquaintance. No looking back.
Good God where the hell am I going with this?
Oh right. End of history lesson.
So these days, if you were to surprise my mother with a visit (while she was still asleep, of course, because despite not caring about the everyday, the woman can still save face in ten seconds flat) you would find what appears to be the aftermath of an explosion of kitsch, bad taste, and pennysavers strewn about the living room. This of course, causes serious offense to my clean-lined, tucked away, bookshelves and big art sensibility.
So on okra day, after sufficiently tiring out my eyes with a great book, I managed to let the state of my mother's living room work me up into quite a state. There was some silent what-the-fucking and some not so silent complaining at my dad, and it took all I could muster not to tear down everything in my mother's carefully constructed world. I asked my dad what he would do to fix the space, but quickly dismissed him when he basically suggested that we rearrange the dead and dying sofa set and bring back the dining table so the space would look exactly as it had for oh so many years. If my mother and I can agree on nothing, at least we both believe that there's no sense going back to having things the way they were if that way didn't work before.
What ultimately stopped me from pitching half the contents of the room in the trash was a realization that I had just stepped into the same fury for control that made my mother seem so scary for so many years. As one would hope, as an adult I've come to understand my mother and many of her mad behaviours much better than I could have hoped to as a child or teenager. I've even managed to forgive much of her tyranny now, knowing how easily one might become that tyrant. There's no question that my mother has passed on a lot of her defining traits to me. The crazy, the control issues, the propensity for volatile flipouts... sigh... What would we be without them? Although it might have been easier, perhaps less painful to have a mother who was not a nut... I did. An now, knowing that I'm a nut, I'm definitely grateful to have her with me. If there's anyone who will ever understand all the things I've kept from the world, anyone whose mistakes I can learn from, anyone whose faults I can call my own, it's definitely my mom.
