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My Profile
Fairytales for a Practical Princess - 2008-11-30
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9:47 a.m. - 2004-06-06
The rain stopped during the night. Unfortunately it’s just this side of too chilly to get out and kneel on the wet ground and clear more space in the tomato patch. Wet and dirty are a given, at least the way I garden, but 54 degrees is too cold to get soaked. Looks like I’m going to get away with yesterday’s burst of activity. Just the usual morning aches and clumsiness. The cleaning spree was desperately needed. For the house, of course. But I needed to get off my butt too. I’ve gained 6 pounds. It’s not water either. I feel bigger and dense. That lovely bony feeling is gone and I’m all tubby. Can’t eat like I’ve been eating AND sit around for a few weeks and not pudge up. You know what though? I’m confident I can work it back off. None of that “What’s the use?” despair. I’m not even giving out to myself too badly. It was important to find out what my limits are. What I can eat. How much exercise I need. Now I know. I’m not going to sabotage myself. I’m not going to give up. Just saying it makes me feel strong. And strong isn’t a word I apply to myself very often. Others apply it to me a lot. Something which mystifies me. I don’t think of myself as some tower of fortitude. I’m an average Jane who’s just trying to Do Right in the best way I know how to do it and lately finding the way is hard. My mother has been dead two years now. Funnily, even though we hadn’t spoken in over a decade before she died, just knowing she was around was enough to keep me on my chosen path. I was the Anti-Mom. Determined to live my life as a rebuke to what I considered her shallow and useless life. Where she was petty, I would be forgiving. Where she was narrow-minded, I would be broad and insightful. As she was involved in nothing but her own tiny little drama of one, I would take on the world. Not only would I live my life on my terms, I would live it as a gigantic ‘Up yours!’ sent out over the cosmic consciousness to the bitch who birthed me. That goad is gone. The judge and jury who watched my life is no more. There’s no one to prove anything to. It’s an odd feeling. Both liberating and terrifying. My past will always be there. I know it. Ran from it for a whole lot of years and it always found me. I also knew the agent and instigator of all that woe was still around. In the largest scheme I lived as though Murphy and his law were a given and never went out, never submitted something to the paper, never did anything without first deciding if this was the day I was going to run into her, would I be ready? Was I ready to face down that critic? The woman who told me every single day how badly my being on this Earth had screwed up her life? Would I be able to stand and deliver? To slap my cards of success and fulfillment down and rake in the chips of satisfaction? To prove once and for all that she was WRONG? Because she was wrong. So very wrong about everything. Her politics. Her ethics (or lack thereof). Her values. Her narrow ugly view of people. And more than anything, she was wrong about me. I am not an embarrassment, a bookish weirdo, a laughable bleeding heart, a sap, a sucker, a fool, a waste of resources, and I did not destroy her life. To be sure of that I had to be ready at a moment’s notice to rub her nose in my credentials. If we were going to play the Worthy Game I needed to have all my ammo to hand. Kids happy and healthy? Check. A marriage which for good or ill had lasted longer than all three of her marriages combined? Check. A fun and creative home full of all the ‘crap’ she scorned as arty and silly? Check. Morals on the up and up, no signs of shallowness? Check. Causes worked for? Check. No drink, no drugs, no chemical escape routes from reality? Check. Well-read and informed? Check. Was I a responsible citizen? Check. A good friend? Check. Should that mythical day come when we would finally face off, my aim would be true and she, not I, would crawl away broken and bleeding. Then like everything else about her life as my mother, she went and died without ever once allowing me my say. The woman went to her death, a death she knew was coming and didn’t reach out. She knew, you see. She knew she couldn’t keep her comfortable view of me as first, best and ONLY reason for her fucked up life. Her messes and miseries were her own damn fault. She’d rather be dead than admit that. And so she is. I have the grim satisfaction of knowing for all she was so very wrong about me, I wasn’t wrong about her. A self-involved ninny and a coward to the end. So there’s that, at least. Doesn’t help much now though. Now that she’s dead I’m left with just myself. I’m on my own to figure out who I am and what it is I want to do with my life. I can be lazy, shallow, even a bad mother and there’s no one but me who will know. The kids and Mike would, of course. But the deadly earnest game of ‘Who’s The Better Person?’ is over. My mother isn’t out there anymore waiting to pounce. Waiting for the day I scuttled off to Shoprite in my gardening grungies and I’d bump into her looking like ten kinds of hell and she in her designer duds and flawless make-up would smirk. My name on the rosters of so many community service groups and political fundraisers is just a small bit of type in the paper and not the nettle scourge meant to shame her for her lack of participation. I don’t have to maintain the mental list of my children’s’ accomplishments, nor do I have to be ready to justify their flaws. I am forever and oh so deliciously FREE! Yet, like Inigo Montoya who spent so many years on his quest for revenge and was left to wonder what to do with himself now that the evil Count Rugen was dead, I’m rather at a loss about what to do next. Maybe I’ll become a pirate. Yo ho ho, ~LA
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