I drew an org-chart while we waited for the check; Peter Mulvey was outstanding.
mom
Bunny-Hunting
Easter does not rank amongst my preferred holidays, maybe because the Easter Bunny is not as powerful a social phenomenon as the Jackolantern or the Thanksgiving Turkey. Face it: it’s a day about the son of god coming back from the dead that is merrily glossed over with pagan egg hunts so that it’s not the religious equivalent of Thriller.
I typically spend Easter hiding from my family. This makes it, in effect, no different than any other day of the year. Past tactics have included unplugging my phone, celebrating passover instead, or having my boss invite me to her house for dinner. This year i decided that the best place to hide would be in plain view, so i invited myself, Elise, and four friends to dine at chez-krisis. The plan was that my mother would be overwhelmed by trying to chat like the merrily socially well-adjusted woman she is that i would escape largely unquestioned and unscathed. My mother, after freaking out for three weeks because she’s never had that many people in her house for an occasion not related to a funeral, seemed to take the planning of the event in stride and with only mild outbreaks of frantic chain-smoking while attempting to invoke the maternal instinct for hosting that she’s let lay dormant for all these years.
It went off nearly without a hitch. I was chastised repeatedly for serving cocktails to my guests before dinner, and told i need to seek alchohol counseling when a single drunken exploit was highlighted in conversation, but was otherwise left unquestioned about my finances, job hunt, and ever-mysterious FUTURE. It was small, as dinners go and, as is typical of such events in my family, consisted of a majority of Italian food and no turkeys, greens, hams, or yams. What wasn’t typical was that i got to enjoy the company of both my friends and my family, which made it much more festive for me.
We ended the night with copious Italian pastries and a marathon of Trading Spaces. Pretty much an ideal day.
As i stepped out of my room this morning i was reminded of Christmas; how when i was little i would always wake up before my mother to that strange stillness of the outside world, house staffed only by the tree awaiting me expectantly with gifts below.
Here, of course, it is the opposite — i wake up late to emerge into the stillness of all of my roommates gone to class or to work, and there is nothing waiting for me at all in their absence. It still feels like Christmas morning, though, so silent up here in the attic, especially with the glow of the lights Gina and i strung across the ceiling last December.
Once when i was little i woke up before my mother and, upon descending our creaky wooden stairs into the still air of our parlor, opened all of my gifts without waiting for her. I simply didn’t understand why she would care to see me open them — she knew what was inside them all already.
When she finally came down the stairs I couldn’t seem to do anything to stop her from crying, and all I kept saying was “i’ll put them back … you can take them back,” not understanding that what she was upset about wasn’t missing the act of me opening them, but my thrill at doing so.
I always feel like i’m one Christmas behind because of that year, stuck somehow out of synch — a year away from my family and friends as they open their gifts. I always react as hugely as i can to gifts i am given, and give to others with vigor, hoping that somehow my excitement will bridge the divide.
Maybe this is why my still apartment can remind me of Christmas, whereas mall Santas and candy canes and blow-up lawn ornaments and holiday sales only remind me of spoiled children who don’t get what Christmas is supposed to be about, just what it has become.
I’ve been holding on to this awful fear in the pit of my stomach for over a year now — that anytime the phone rings it’s going to be bad news about my grandmother. Maybe it’s why i hate the phone so much, how i always avoiding answering its ring and why i made sure to leave my cell phone safely ensconced within my old office building for the last two weeks … why i wasn’t surprised to finally pick it up only to hear a sequence a messages from my mother, each serving as a cold comfort as none quite claimed the worst.
I was caught, though, last night, live and on the line to my mother as she once again laid on this guilt, as if i know how to set aside my entire life and somehow make this all easier for her, or how to make my grandmom happier and not in so much pain, or how to do anything. The truth is that i don’t know, i can’t do anything, and every time my mother reminds me of how truly bad things are i see my grandmother and i convince myself that everything is okay.
I have finally been convinced now, though, that it is not okay. Sitting in the middle of the floor idly strumming my guitar and it all at once hit me that even though i made Elise promise to drive me over there tomorrow when her class is over that i missed out. I missed out on bringing Elise to meet her like i said i would, and on having her come to my college graduation, or even have her see me become successful or hold my children in some distant future. I realized all of that, and that maybe i have resisted dealing with it emotionally for all this time because i was hoping that somehow if i pushed it to the back of my mind and just kept working i would somehow make everything that she’s always dreamed for me come true.
What followed was a mess of tears and words and suddenly, two hours later, i’ve lost a box of tissues but gained a song so stupidly simple that i can’t help but keep crying as i have it on repeat because it encapsulates so very perfectly just how crushed this is leaving my life, and how much i just want to be able to have my college diploma and my successful life ready to bring with me tomorrow when i sit next to her bed, because i can’t think of anything else to give her (because she doesn’t really like songs all that much).
But, on the bright side, i’m a third of the way done my next Trio.
I sit on the end of our row, adjacent to three women from the next department. At first their chatter seemed inexorable, endless, and inconsequential, but now I see that it is what allows them to be here, to somehow reconcile whatever they care about to the reality of sitting in front of their alarmingly lo-fi DOS-like interface.
The woman who shares a cube wall with me talks the most of the three; the smile in her voice hide a constant crease of worry, which somehow makes me picture my grandmother in the next cube endlessly chatting. She is obsessed with controlling her son. I found it amusing, but today as she rambled on I started to see the simple misery hidden at the bottom of her creases.
Her son is headed straight for teenage years, sure to be ripe with youthful misbehavior and sexual experimentation. She talks about him with her creased voice, about how he does not want to wear the shirts she lays out, preferring t-shirts from Hot Topic and loose jeans. About how he tries to play money from her so that he can pay for the older kids to go to the movies with him, and how they in return take him to the drug store to explore the condom aisle. “Of course,” she says matter-of-factly, “he doesn’t have the slightest idea about all of that.”
She has an image in her head of how her son should be; what he should become. It is faceted in her mind, I’m sure, gleaming from every angle. But, maybe not as faceted as he would wind up doing things on his own. I’m not sure, actually, which is why I have become so obsessed with following her endless stories, and why I sometimes feel sad for them both.
If my mother had that image of me, she never revealed it. I think she had the barest of ideas, with no overarching goals or guides to my personality or morality. I never had to make the bed, always got to buy the music i wanted, and never had any restrictions placed on how much or how little time i had to devote to people other than myself. Did she mean for me to value art more than industry, and myself more than anyone else? I was left to fill in all of those details myself, never realizing that there was not an upper limit to the facets I could have because she never thought to impress them upon me. And now, sometimes, I feel as though because of it I have organized my life horizontally — only one layer deep. Not multifaceted.
Who has the better mom?