Glass shelf for bricks

It's nearly Christmas and it's complicated. I am a whirled up mix of insanely busy and paralyzed financial WTF. Delighted to decorate and make good foods and tell the people I love that I love them, and also sad about the people I can't tell (even though I am supposed to) because I don't. Namely my parents. I would prefer the kind of parents that are lovable, but I did not get that kind. And this time of year there are so many simple questions to dodge. So many well intentioned references to Christmas as a season of warm loving forgiveness. I am supposed to love my parents. And not loving them comes with the burden of feeling kicked in the stomach and the head, all for the crime of not doing it right, and also for being born at all. Intellectually I know those things are stupid, I didn't do anything wrong by being born and that at this point it's my choice how I process the experiences I had. I have proven I can love and be loved. I have a great relationship with my children. I have extraordinary friends. I have an honest, healthy, delightful, strong relationship with a man who loves me completely, exactly as I am. So it's not like I wallow around in self pity, and I'm not broken. I totally get the spirit behind those well meaning phrases that pop up all over Christmas but I don't want to shit on someone else's Season of Love parade so I dodge and weave. I re-direct. I think some people think I'm an orphan. The truth is, I made my own family. I found really lovely, seriously lovely people to share my holidays and regular days with. I finally (finally) have what I always wanted, a real family full of people I love and who love me back. It's literally awesome, as in, I look at it like a natural wonder that blows me away with gratitude so big I can't even express it properly. I love it like the sky, to the moon and back. It IS the best gift ever. Some would say I got my happily ever after but that's true but also silly, time is a loop. A big glorious circle. I get a lot of love. I also get a lot of alone time, which is probably the exact combination I needed even though sometimes the alone part can suck a bug.

Somewhere in this god damned sentence I'm trying to formulate are my parents. In a tiny slum apartment. And who knows what the hell they do. They will likely spend it alone, together (at least they have that), but outside of their tobacco stained walls, and across the broken bottle field, in another house not really that far away, I will be laughing and having a great time with the love of my life, and the family of my dreams, and they will be... what? Passed out drunk? Eating a can of beans? Pretending they are orphans? Do they still have a maze of hoarded spoils? How many Pringles cans has my mother collected by now? Did she ever figure out what she wanted to do with them? Does my mother know about the internet? Did they ever manage to say yes to the universe? Did my mom start crapping in a bucket once Black Out Drunk + Stairs became an obvious recurring problem? If it's come to that I am sure my Dad has some kind of diplomatic way of handling the shit bucket, he's the master at making my mom look more together than she actually is.

I've hovered over the keyboard a million times without producing anything helpful or resolving about my parents. I've drifted over to thoughts of them just before falling asleep, which results in that jagged precipice of panic where I talk myself off the ledge, alone in my room, on a mattress that seriously needs to be replaced, staring down 4 am with eyes that hate open and shut, weary and full of Why? And Please? And Bad memories and guilt, please fuck off. I float down panic river until I talk myself back up onto the shore. I do a lot of this talking myself into and down from and out of. I am self parented. It's a skill I'm glad to have, even if I had to get it the hard way. For a smart kid, Growing Up Extra Shitty can come with it's advantages. I am aware there is a silver lining in all this. That's another skill I've picked up.

I chose to make myself unavailable to them. I did it on purpose because having them as free roaming force that could just pop up and fuck me over emotionally at any time was seriously unhealthy. It took a long time for me to cut them off. It was not at all an easy decision. It involved years of constant uncertainty and self-abasement, overwhelming shame for being alive, panic attacks and gut spilled tear stained janky one more chance declarations.

This time all these feelings came up because someone who doesn't really know me that well told me that my mother must be so proud. She isn't, trust me. But I just smiled and said Thank You. And I mean it, I appreciate the sentiment, there's no way the person who said it could possibly know it would hit me like a sucker punch and I know they intended something else entirely. But it also kind of sucks. I still wish it were true and it hurts that it isn't. My inner five year old still wants a gold fucking star, or a hug, or just to be told, “I'm glad I didn't abort you after all.” Wanting that makes me mad. Knowing I have a choice to let it go but I choose to go down It Still Bugs Me Lane makes me mad. My mother will never apologize for calling me a stupid fatass or frequently announcing how grateful I should have been that she didn't beat me. And that makes me mad.

I am not without compassion for my own mother. I know the shit she had to live through. She didn't deserve the things that happened to her any more than I did. She was hammered by a mish mash of negative feelings about sex, love and family. She was regularly hurt, betrayed by her own mother and beaten by her father. She chose to be better than that, and in some ways she did succeed. I'm grateful I didn't grow up in a world of angry lashing belt buckles that licked around my body to slam into my jaw when I didn't eat up all my leathery chicken liver at dinner. I am glad I was not taught an angry Baptist vision of what it means to be alive. Because she lived through that and was smart enough to identify that those things sucked, she tried very hard to avoid passing them down to us. I appreciate that I grew up in a house without beatings or an angry god. I really do. Sometimes I'm filled with intense empathy for her. How dare I acknowledge how great it is that I wasn't screwed over with cobbled crazy god talk and not be thankful every second of my life! Who am I to say, Hey Mom, I really appreciate that you didn't hit me with stuff but it would have been WAY MORE AWESOME if you'd also chosen to spare the psychological beat downs, constant uprooting of our lives, spectacularly loud smash-ups, horrible stories about my unfortunate birth and really creepy messages about sex because those are the things that kinda still freak my shit out.

I know that we all have to deal with where we came from. And I know I'm not alone. I know people who have honest, loving relationships with their parents. And I know some who have strained plodding obligatory relationships with their parents. And I know some who have no relationship at all because the whole thing just snapped in half and that's that. I know people who have lost their parents and now re-examine every conversation, every lesson, every dream and half memory just to be near them again.

Those things are all legitimate and raw, the strength or weakness of those relationships is up to the people in them. My relationship with my mother just straight up sucks. It always has. She has let me know that “reconciliation” would be based on me acknowledging my own essential wrongness without “bringing up stuff from the past”, a real bargain. Were I to ever accept those terms our future relationship would consist of a wimpy loser visiting the hovel of a bitter old woman out of pity and obligation. At best I can just accept the fact that she was still a little kid when I was born and she blamed me for wrecking her life (no really, she used these exact words as well as some others that were even worse but amount to the same thing). As a 35 year old woman with two kids of my own, I can recognize how absurd and dysfunctional that is. But still, for people who love their parents, even when it's difficult, me not loving mine comes off as petty and selfish. There's “Oh, EVERYONE has weird parents, you just gotta love 'em anyway!” and “It's never too late to say sorry!” and my personal favorite, delivered with a side of tisking pity sauce, “You never know how much time you'll have to fix things.” Trust me, if it were fixable I would have fucking fixed it. I spent my entire childhood trying to fix it. There's just no way to argue your worth to someone who seriously resents having you in the first place. I started to realize trying so hard was destructive to me. I got myself in a lot of relationships that also sucked because they started with me being whatever the other person wanted instead of my actual self, partly for the safety of not being rejected, and partly because I had no idea who that self was. It took me a really long time to get my own shit together. I had to learn to tell people to fuck off when they were being destructive. I had to learn to open my heart without fear, to tell people I loved them and believe them when they said they loved me.

The fact is, I found a new Mom. She's real and she's a delight to converse with and she accepts me exactly as I am. Her house feels like home. I can walk through her front door any time without knocking, and I never have to pause to intuit the mood so I know who to be. And when I get in there is hugging, and genuine smiling and we drink coffee or beer and eat delicious things and play board games and talk about religion and politics and family history. And when I look across the dining room table at the family she made, I love all of them too. It's exactly that hearth and home kind of feeling I've always suspected was possible and now I have it.

So when the well meaning lady told me my Mom must be so proud it caught me off guard. Actual Mom no, Real Mom, yes. I just smiled and nodded. It's complicated.