Happy Mother's Day!
Part of me felt obligated to say that. Not sure why. To be honest my relationship, if you can even call it that, with my own mother amounts to a pile of baboon poopy, and when I think of mothers my mind actually goes to my dad, who did the job of mom AND dad by himself for several years. I think my paternal grandmother even used to send him Mother's Day Cards for a while.
My stepmom is wonderful. Really, she is. And my grandmothers, all three of them, are fantastic, too. But I can't help but feel a little snarky about Mother's Day in general. Why? Take this, for example: I sat down to lunch with my mom, my maternal gma, and my ridiculously awesome Aunt Beth*. My mother, who has not seen me in
months, barely spoke a dozen words to me. Instead, she talked for a good half-hour about a cold she was convinced she was getting**, then another half-hour about getting locked inside her church in Marion***. Then she talked for twenty minutes about all these people who go to her church, none of whom
any of us know. THEN she talked for FORTY-FIVE FREAKING MINUTES about her stupid TIRES.
Yes. Her fucking
tires.
My aunt, trying to get my mom to stop running her mouth (because my mother talks a
lot), asked me about my finals and about the chuckle my grandpa and I'd had earlier that day about Jack Kerouac (whom I
loathe with all of my being). She and my grandmother and I talked about school, about profs at ISU whom my aunt had known when she'd gone to school there, about movies that I'd seen that they were thinking about seeing, all that sort of thing. Between the three of us, we maintained an entertaining conversation that was balanced between the three of us, and it lasted a good hour, maybe even an hour and a half.
The second I opened my mouth, my mother pulled out a JCPenney catalog and started ignoring me.
THEN she took a fucking
phone call.
Granted, the call was from my sister, who's still at school in Steubenville, OH, and she was just calling to say Happy Mother's Day. I'm down with that. What bugged me is that my mother started recounting to her all of the stupid, boring-ass stories she had just been telling to me and my aunt and gma.
I'm not sure there's even a word for the type of woman that my mother is. I mean, come on, the woman is more than forty years old now. Seriously. I don't even talk on the phone if there are people in the same
room as me.
I know this is a petty thing to be upset about. The entire thing is just stupid, I know. But on top of all the BS from the last twenty-some-odd years, it's just more fuel to the fire. My aunt apologized a half-dozen times to me on the way home about my mom barely talking to me while I was there, but to be honest, the less my mom talks to me, the less I have to pretend that I'm listening.
I didn't mean for this to be a whole long rant about how shitty my mom is as a mother (and sometimes as a person). But being all
bluh about my mom is a lot of what makes me who I am. My general attitude and personality is a bit more masculine than most girls my age - well, honestly, than most girls
period, and I think that's because my mother, who biologically and socially should have been the iconic woman in my life due to some child psychology thing, was so abhorrent to me in so many ways that I decided that I was going to ditch a lot of feminine behaviors and mindsets and start modeling myself more on my dad. Which is fine, I love hanging out with the guys and all and having fun, but it's also part of the reason that I am incredibly lonely at school sometimes; I have such a deep-set
issue with women because The First Woman In My Life fucked up really hard and it affects me almost every day.
Luckily, my father understands, to some degree. He's actually made reference to it out loud, and trust me, him coming out and saying that he Understands Something About Me is a big deal^. But essentially, here's what happened: my sister wanted to go hang out with a guy who was not her boyfriend. It was a platonic friend, one who wasn't particularly "interested" in her, so to speak, or vice versa, but my dad told her no because it was "inappropriate^^". Well, Emm got frustrated with him for this and came back at him with, "Well, Kayla hangs out with all guys all the time and she's only dating
one of them!"
My father coolly looked back at her and said, "Emm, Kayla is a tomboy. You might
want to be a tomboy, but you aren't. Kayla doesn't get along with girls, and if I didn't let her hang out with the guys, who see her as
one of the guys, then she wouldn't have any friends. Now go call Katelyn and go see a chick flick."
My father also understands that I hate chick flicks, for the most part, and has never raised an eyebrow at my love of action movies and superheros. I would never have said this when I was eighteen, or even when I was nineteen^^^, but my dad is Really Super Freaking Cool^^^^.
Well, I really ought to stop ranting about my parents - because I know nobody cares - and go to bed. Tomorrow Adam and I are going to Ichiban with Brian and Abby for lunch to have Super Special Awesome Bento Boxes, and then we are going to go buy fabric to get started on our Super Special Awesome Steampunk Stuff that I'm going to try and make so that we can go to Gen Con all dressed up Super Special Awesome.
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* - Aunt Beth is my mom's sister (I think younger, but I don't remember), and one of the few people on my mother's side of the family that my dad gets along with. When we first moved to Indiana when I was eleven, Beth watched me and my sister's during the day in the summer time because my dad couldn't afford daycare and my Aunt Sha was busy or something. That summer we spent with Beth was AWESOME and in my mind my real mothers are my Aunt Beth and Aunt Sha, in no order other than alphabetical.
** - She never even considered it might be ALLERGIES. I'll come out and say it right now, my mother is a
bona fide hypochondriac. I didn't know what a hypochondriac was until I read "The Sign of Four" (at least, I
think it was "The Sign of Four"... my insomniac Holmsian know-it-all friend Jason isn't answering my trivia-question-like text because - wait for it - he's actually asleep for the first time in days).
*** - Also, I'll just come out and say this, I really hate Marion. I'm sorry to anyone who lives there, but if you've grown up in Marion you either agree with me or you already hate me anyway because of the subject matter of my novels (let's just pretend they're actually published by now, or you're reading this several years in the future after I've become stupidly famous and you're going through the archives of my entires). But my point is that every time my mom starts running her mouth about Marion I just want to
punch her in the freaking throat****
**** - Although, let's be honest here again, I want to punch my mother in the throat no matter
what she's talking about, usually.
^ - My senior year of high school my father and I were screaming at each other over the stupidest shit. It got so bad that I automatically threw up every morning from sheer nerves, and couldn't eat a damn thing until as late as ten o'clock at night (later the doctor said that I have acid reflux disease and that stress makes me overproduce stomach acid, which was why I was throwing up all the time. They prescribed me Prevacid for a while (this was before you could get it over-the-counter), and pretty much I couldn't function without it for four months. Now and then I'll get stressed out enough I start vomiting again, but it has to be some pretty big shit. Like, seriously huge.
^^ - Although, as an aside here, my dad also thinks tank tops, napping while sitting on the couch with a boyfriend, and watching The Untouchables on a Sunday are "inappropriate", too.
^^^ - There was a ten-month period or so when I was definitely Not Living With Them anymore, which was a result of Fighting For Years And Never Resolving Anything mixed with Dad And Kayla Are A Little Too Much Alike, with more than a little bit of Kayla Spent The Weekend At Adam's And Dad Found Out.
^^^^ - Dad's coolness factor became cemented when he emailed me a "yo mamma" joke he found on the internet and told me he couldn't think of anyone else he could share it with... except for me.
