Just People

“Making the decision to have a child is momentous.  It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.”  ~Elizabeth Stone

There are two people in my life who I like to refer to as Dumb and Dumber. For awhile it was Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb until someone pointed out to me that their amount of stupidity, ignorance and overdramatic nature have thrust them into a category of Dumbness never seen before in life. So Dumb and Dumber it is.

The other day Dumb and Dumber pissed me off and became the bane of my existence as they are wont to do. They riled me up and made me feel poorly about myself and current lot in life thus sending me into a tailspin of weepiness and head banging against any and all hard surfaces. When I went to my mother – with a distraught look and furrowed brow and the remnants of tears in my eyes – she shrugged me off. And agreed with the naysayers at a time when I all I wanted was for her to be understanding and pat me on the back and I don’t know BE MATERNAL and she was anything but.

I walked into my office where she followed me and then tried to be maternal and it was too late and so she did the old bait and switch where she turned into my fucking boss then went back to being maternal and tried to tell me that the reason for my woe had something to do with my age and because I’m so YOUNG and so I told her to get out of my office and she tried to back track but I was too busy googling ‘dead bolts’ for my office door therefore distracted from my “boss’” mixed looks of death and remorse.

I was offended and had every right to be. I wanted for my mother to be understanding and helpful and instead of being soothing and drying off my tears (because, I’m 2.5 not 25) she made everything so much more worse. The one time that we’re actually in the office and I need for her to be my mommy she is the opposite. But let’s say if I wasn’t wearing a slip or she didn’t like my hair: FULL ON MOMMY-MODE. And the keeping track is becoming exhausting.

So exhausted was I and full of rage that I decided that since I’d rather have my wisdom teeth taken out without Novocain than spend holidays with coworkers I found less than stellar. I put her on that list and decided that instead of enjoying stuffing with my family I would rather order sushi and reorganize my Netflix Queue.

Petulance! That’ll show her!

I feel like the icing on the cake of punishment for not being maternal was by calling her out on it. And after that brief moment of satisfaction that often comes from being a straight up bitch to someone who is well aware that they were treading water in the deep end of wrong, well it passed.

She sent me a text hours later that said: “Now you know it all: There’s no tooth fairy, Easter bunny or Santa Claus and mothers aren’t perfect but we love you the moon and the stars.”

It erased the satisfaction knowing that my mother was upset for upsetting me when I wanted her to be my mother and she couldn’t be just my mother for five seconds.

On the way home that day, I spoke to my Aunt Rachel who told me a positively comical story of my mother’s reaction when Rachel told her that she had broken up with her long time boyfriend. It was a classic reaction from my mother who doesn’t always say the right thing at the right time and after the anger dissipates you always know that despite her lack of filter that she always means well. Rachel told me that I’m learning a very important lesson that parents aren’t perfect. Imagine that! Mothers who have produced fruit from their womb, who have nursed us back to health, more often than not have the perfect answer to most everything and know what their children want before they ask for it…they aren’t perfect. They make mistakes and piss off their children just as their children have pissed them off. They say the wrong things and make their adult first born child cry and feel shitty and sometimes they don’t think before they speak. They’re just people. The thing is that ‘it’ comes from this deep place of fear and hope and always feeling like their parenting abilities will never be perfect. A well of self doubt and questioning even at a time when one – a non parent of course – would like to believe that their parenting should be over. It never is. It’s that fear that makes me wonder why anyone would want to endure such pain that comes with having children of their own. Possibly because it’s this beautiful mix of the purest forms of joy and pain that anyone can experience but these parents of ours are just people coming face to face with the full force of these emotions reaching the tip of every nerve of their body.

They’re just people. The greatest people. Full of mistakes and never able to be perfect even though that’s always what they will try to do to make their children as happy as they possibly can. It’s moments like this when I wonder if I will ever be able to do it or want to do it. I just don’t know if my being as human and fallible as I am will ever be able to endure such torture. Though I guess, as people, all we can do is try.