girlsdontcry's Diaryland Diary

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Mother

Thank goodness for my lax hygiene standards and willingness to eat out-of-date, dodgy-looking food -- the whole family has come down with some kind of gastric thingamyjig and I'm fine.

Hurrah!

It also means I'm not going to go out today.

Double hurrah!

Man, I'm so glad I'm not over there with three generations of vomitters. Although I'm having sympathetic beginnings of stomach cramps. But no, that's just in my head. Stomach cramps in my head? mmm... And I've got some serious hayfever this year.

So.

My mother.

My mother.

Ugh.

I'm so awful to her, but she drives me crazy.

She's got a huge issue, I think, with never having been able to have a baby herself, but either she just won't face up to it or else she thinks she mustn't grumble because she has three adopted children and she feels so sorry for people who didn't even get to adopt children.

But I'm sure that's one of the reasons she is so awful about my sister-in-law, who is pregnant again, and my sister-in-law's mother, who is very close to her children. I think it's really hard for my mother to be around pregnancy and breastfeeding, all the stuff she couldn't do. And all the stuff she wanted to do more than anything. I mean, I think that's all she wanted to do with her life, was to have children.

My mother couldn't have children because of some disastrous appendix operation when she was 17, from which she took six months to recover (although I used to think she'd probably had a backstreet abortion, but I don't think that she did). Something to do with adhesions, I think. I've never asked really.

She also now claims (oooh, do you see how unsympathetic that sounds) that her six months recuperation when she was 17 was the reason she didn't go to medical school and become a doctor. But no, that's just her rewriting history with a feminist slant, because I remember her telling me that she'd always wanted to be a nurse.

Anyway, the point I was trying to make is that I can see that my mother has all these issues about childbirth and whatnot, but it's really not for me to say anything.

I'm already a complete freak about pregnancy, I just hate that thing where women start telling you all these details like "I'm massaging olive oil in to my perineum, but most vaginal births end up with an episiotomy anyway". I'm running away looking for the nearest bloke to talk about ... cars or anything.

Also, I'm adopted, so I get to have my own issues, but we're not allowed to have adoption issues around our parents because we all have to pretend it's all OK and normal. I mean, sure, my mother used to ask us if we wanted to look for our parents, and how that would be OK, but when my brother did, it suddenly wasn't OK at all, and that is never discussed.

And you know, as much as my mother may have legitimate reasons to be so prickly sometimes, she's also just incredibly petty, in this way that her family (all women) are all petty. Like her two-and-a-year-old grandson is upstairs throwing his guts up and she standing in the kitchen saying that she's "very cross" because the christening cup she gave her granddaughter is at the back of a cupboard. Does she expect me to have opinions on these matters?

I hate that I feel like I'm being so petty in picking apart her character in such a harsh way, judging her so fiercely when I'm so lenient on others who are far more deserving of my hatred.

But then... just looking around me right now at the chaos, and thinking since they arrived everything has fallen apart. I'm only eating properly when I'm eating with my family; my allergies have flared up massively; I'm going mental; I'm drinking as much as I can when I'm with my family; I'm just losing my way, and I don't feel I can do anything about it until June 19.

June 19.

I always live like that. On some particuar date, everything will be OK. I'll be in control. I'll stop drinking and eat steamed vegetables and brown rice for two weeks, and I'll start drinking aloe vera juice! And everything will be OK, I'll be in control.

When there's no reason I can't do any of that right now.

Except I won't.

I'll do what I always do, we'll all do what we always do, we'll all blame each other and carry our little wounds, and never bother understanding, because in the end, we don't even want to understand.

10:15 a.m. - 2003-06-11

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