A misaddressed diatribe
Day three of winter break achieved!
Got up plenty late, since I’ve been staying up far too late doing computer stuff and screwing around. Had a nice brunch (leftover ham & smoked gouda snackwiches + oranges) and spent a while looking at old photos. I had been missing the cathartic, quiet, calm atmosphere of going home (Redmond) for my winter breaks and having nothing to do but Christmas shopping and meeting up with friends. Not that what I’m doing this year is anything more than Christmas shopping and meeting up with friends, but there’s something nice about the feeling of getting away from the usual life and being in a secluded and lonely place like that. It was nice having my whole day to kill while waiting for Mom and Dad to come home. It was nice sleeping in the cold and listening to the rain outside, and playing with Eponine and Lucky and visiting my kitty Socks.
At the heart of it, I think I just miss having a home to go home to, and the Mom and Dad I remember from 5, 6, 7 years ago. I know it’s ridiculous to expect people not to change, even if those people are your parents. I just feel lately that there’s really no way to fix the rift between me and the people who are my parents who are so different than I remember. That this will pass, I am confident, but the current situation makes me sad. Lewis and I talk about this so often and always arise at that same conclusion – that it’s an odd time right now, and that some day it’ll be better. It pains me that the more I reach backward for anything I remember (and it’s almost always anchored to places) the more the real world moves forward and the further away anything I know gets. It’s completely counterproductive to be spending my mental time and energy pining for things so categorically rejected from my life, and failing to make meaningful connections with the people and places my parents of the here-and-now represent. It makes me feel like a whiny, spoiled, undeserving and entitled child. And moving on from it makes me, the child of the people, places, and circumstances of my history, want to kick and scream and demand that someone own up and admit that giving up everything I know was cruel. And that’s the impass we’re at, and we’ve been at for years.
I’m upset by so many decisions my parents have made, and especially their last few moves (to Redmond, though that’s fading, but especially to San Diego) and I really just want my parents to acknowledge that the path their lives take effects more than just their two souls. They have children, and I wish it felt like our feelings and lives were in consideration at any point. It’s always been the subtext to Mom’s dialogue that having children so early and marrying who she did robbed her of the chance to do so many other things in her life. I can’t imagine the stress and pain this caused my sister and brother. For me, I had years of feeling like I had to live up to being my father’s only child, and that my Mom had me as a favor or a gift to my Dad, to show him how much she loved him and how she’d give him anything, even more kids. And when I hit about 15, it really felt like my Mom was done with me. I got old enough that it was clear I wasn’t a fuck-up and wasn’t going to drop out or do drugs or whatever, and she didn’t need to bother with me any more. Not that this is categorical, and that my parents cut me loose at 15… but I do feel like Mom has been mentally divorced from my life since I got through my first teenage years. Of course, this isn’t even mentioning the actual abandoning part where Mom and Dad moved 25 miles north and left me in a hotel to finish out my high school years. There’s part of me that says of that, “Mom cared enough to spend money on you for a hotel so you could finish school at the place you wanted”. And part of me says, “Who moves away from a 17-year-old kid and leaves her in a hotel? Even if they make sure to have dinner together once a week?”.
College seemed to go pretty well despite the previous bit about the end of my high school years. It’s the years since I graduated from school and got married that are so weird. First of all, my mom decided she was alergic to everything in the world. This is the major problem, since “alergic” is a much stronger word that “possibly intolerant” which is the actual situation. My mom has food intolerances. I completely agree this is probably true, since she seems to be feeling much better in the chronic-sinus-issues category. That my mother is alergic to the 70,000 things on her list I categorically disbelieve. And stupidly, this has been the only topic of conversation besides my sister’s tea shop that we’ve had since 2005. My dad is my dad, and as always we’ve not talked about anything but social issues and environmental issues, and small bits of business about the extended family. It works better when you’re in close contact, and less well when the only things we have to talk about in the once- or twice-yearly visits is straw bale houses and Noam Chomsky. It really bothers me that I want to share with my parents what I’m doing, and want them to think I’m doing good and worthwhile and important work, and that I just can’t believe that they do. They never asked what classes I’m taking, the structure of my program, the professors I have, how TAing is going… they didn’t even want to see campus when they visited. I feel like they really just don’t care what I do. And I also feel like I’ve always lived my life trying to make them proud. How do I make them proud when the only thing that seems like would have any effect is to have a well-paid, steady, social justice or do-goody, preferably third world, job? It’s not my life. And nothing about my life makes them want to know me or be friends with me or be involved in anything more than a vague, pick-me-up-when-I’m-down way. Like they wouldn’t let me starve to death, and they’d bail me out of jail if I got in trouble.
This is all so self-involved, and given the spectrum of problems people have with their parents this is just about the least troubling thing that could be happening. But it does occupy my mind so much, and I am just that sort of person that gets repeatedly chaffed by the tiniest of personal relationship troubles. And I’ve said this all before to the only people who listen or care or understand, my sister and my husband. And there’s really no fixing anything. There’s only the slow molasses drip of time, fusing this into some kind of dependable and regular relationship that either will or will not be personally fulfilling.
That was quite a digression in the deliniation of my day. Here’s the rest in digest format: went Christmas shopping, made cooking plans, biked to the Lawyers’ and made cookies and caramel, biked home, did computer stuff. Blogged. And here we are again.