I've tried to write several blogs over the last few days and found them all wanting. I'm putting this up not because I think it's that great, but because most of the readers of the blog say they like something on a regular basis. Everyday would be best. But these little pieces of writing seem to take a lot out of me sometimes. I haven't written today because it's a grown up weekend. Trinity is at her father's. We slept late, much to the dogs consternation, and had a wonderfully languorous morning. So why, with the morning starting so well am I vaguely depressed? I am simply not good at taking time off at home. I feel better if I work. But if I work too much with no break then I feel bad, too. It is the on-going balancing act between my muse, my workaholoic self, and my loves. I don't just mean my husband, love and sex, I mean everything that brings joy to my life. The dogs need their weekend trip for socilazation, and I enjoy it, most of the time. Pip and Jimmy have had two semi-serious dog fights this week. If this keeps up I think we're going to take Pip to the vet and see if anything is hurting on him, some physical cause for this renewed dominance struggle. We'd been free of it for months. There I go again, taking a fun outing with the dogs and making it dire. Taking fun and making it serious. I do have a tendency to do that. My grandmother's influence, I think. That woman could put a bad light on even the happiest news. She was one of the most profoundly negative people I have ever met. It made her own life miserable, and stole much of the joy she might have had in the people and things around her. I strive to not do that to myself and those around me. As one fan said at an event, I was the most cheerful pessimist she'd ever met. That's pretty accurate. When you finally realize that something in the way you were raised is destructive to you, and you try to fix it through therapy and just acting, as if. Acting as if you are a more positive person than you truly are, well, it works. My daughter is one of the most positive people I know. A delightful mix of happiness and cynicism. The cynicism must be genetic. Though, she, like I was as a child would rather believe the best than the worst of those around her. Life taught me to expect the worst, and if it doesn't happen, great, but at least you're prepared. I say all that, to say this; Trinity is very positive and upbeat, the total opposite of my attitude. She is a little testament that I decided when she was under two to act, as if. As if I wasn't negative, as if I was happier than I was, as if I didn't expect everyone I met to hurt me eventually. I acted as if, in thought, word and deed. I remade my interactions with my child, so that she grew up with a mother that loved herself, loved her, and loved their friends, etc . . . It worked. I see her running through life so bright and shiny and I wonder, would that have been me at her age if life had been less cruel? Maybe, maybe not. We'll never know.
I remember myself as a solemn child, painfully shy. At the viewing for my Aunt Beverly, who passed away very recently, friends that hadn't seen me for decades, and never as an adult, talked to me. They recognized me because of how much I looked like my mother. My mother who died young and tragically. Strangers came up and told me how vivacious she was, how full of life and joy, and how she never met a stranger. They were talking about my mother, but she was a stranger to me. I was six when she died. I do not remember her, not in that way. Some of them met my daughter when she wasn't running off and entertaining her younger cousin, helping distract the eight-year-old from the grief that will catch up soon. Her beloved grandmother snatched away, so suddenly. Trinity ran up, hugged me, and anyone vaguely related to her. Then she'd be off, and these women, these long time friends of Aunt Bev, who had lost their very dear friend, would say, your daughter is just like you at that age. So full of life, never met a stranger, so talkative, so social. They were talking about a stranger. I do not remember that child. That was me before my mother died, and that child died with her. Her death left me quieter, more serious, more cautious, and most of all with a profound sense that the world was not safe. That anything horrible could and did happen. Some of my relatives joined in, echoing this idea that I was like my daughter, social, out-going. I don't remember it that way. The women who recognized me from my, apparently, profound likeness to my dead mother, told me how beautiful she was, and that I was beautiful like my mother. What do you say to that? I've never thought I looked that much like my mother, I mean, yes, we look alike, but not that much. But here are strangers, that saw me last at five or six, but they knew my mother, and from that resemblance they picked me out.
I grew up with my Grandmother calling me my mother's name almost as often as my own. The last time I saw her alive she called me, Susie more than my own name. My Aunt Bonita tried to stop her, but I told her, it was okay, I was used to it. I was always the ghost at the banquet for my grandmother. I was a living, breathing reminder of what she'd lost in my mother. But my Aunt Bev's funeral was the first time I realized that there might have been more than one reason for my grandmother to try to keep shoving me into my mother's shape. Do I look that much like my mother? She was the beautiful one, everyone agreed. But I was never told I was beautiful. I wasn't the pretty one, she was. I bought the family mythology like most children do. One sister is the pretty one, another is the sensible one, another is the black sheep, and I was the smart one. Since I didn't believe I was pretty I better be smart, and work hard. I have no words to express how hard it was to have these grief-stricken, well-meaning, women tell me how much I looked like my mother, and how beautiful she was, and I was beautiful like her. Why would that bother me? I don't know, not exactly. I told them, I am over a decade older than my mother was when she died. They were surprised. I suppose that was a compliment to me and how young I look, but that's not how I took it. I don't know how I took it. I'm still processing a lot of what happened, and is still happening. All I know is the childhood that even my family remembers, I have almost no memory of. I remember feeling utterly safe, and I know it was when I was very small, but it is a brief memory, and most of my life has been spent in fear. Fear of the great bad thing happening again. Those of us who have a 'train wreck' early seldom completely believe in the safety of the universe again. We know better. Strangers, relatives tell me I was a happy child. They tell me my mother was beautiful and vivacious. Like me. I do not believe either of these things about myself. I don't even remember my mother as they do. I remember her as beautiful, yes, but sad, social and friendly, but I saw her when her public face wasn't on, and I remember her as sad. Beautiful and sad.
