Sunday, February 24, 2008

Losing Sight

I have a belief that mothers the world over are all in league with one another. Under cover of darkness they sling Kate Spade handbags over their rounded, Tae Bo sculpted shoulders and steal away to secret conventions, taking scrupulous notes at lectures and seminars entitled "How to be an obvious nuisance with a roguish smile," and "How to get away with smearing a saliva-saturated napkin across a relative's face." It's all written in the pointed grins meant to conceal great dissatisfaction, and those impish looks they exchange with one another on park benches re: the daughters.

I feel that I am too old, now, for my mother to care about me. I don't need her to call up the attic stairs for lunch or ask me what I'm doing. Ironically, on the few occasions when I feel I do need parental coddling or affection they seem distant. My parents are very much in love still. They have sex loudly at night. It is all of this that I want to get away from him.

I sat on the couch today with my mother and aunt eating lunch and didn't say anything; they were talking loudly about their Espresso machines and various skin conditions. At one point my mother looked over at me and loudly said, "T, stop being so cranky. You've been in a bad mood for two weeks." She is like the mothers in Bend it Like Beckham and Bridget Jones' Diary, only black. I know when I hear her say things like this that every day we seem to be rotating towards these two different places, where she is more of an older woman's mother and I am more of an older woman. I don't know what any of this means.

I had another lunch this weekend (well, I had two. Two days...) sitting in a Chic-Fil-A downtown with a friend. We have known eachother for a long time. We have the kind of relationship that is this fierce loyalty mixed with mutual distrust or competitiveness, and, relevantly enough, throughout the course of our friendships we have both begun to become more and more like our mothers.

It was a philosophical discussion, and we were analyzing each of our friends. We turned the fingers around at ourselves. "I have lost sight of who I am, I think," she said. "I have changed for my friends."

I didn't think this was true of me until I got home, this thought still nestled somewhere in my mind. I dug up old diaries and my oldest blog, http://www.xanga.com/shindigaddict. I read the entries and I know that because I don't say it somewhere, or put my thoughts into the world, that this is in part why I feel sometimes that I am not entirely awake. Because I have put so many eggs into this basket of leaving home, my mother and my mutating friends behind, that I have been ignoring where I've come from. This is my first, ridiculous attempt to fix this problem.