Cold water

I had another argument with my mother. There seems to be a lot of those these days. I won’t go into the details of it because it is too tedious but God, did she do my head in. She knew which buttons to push. It’s ironic that, considering that she complained to me not one month ago that I am the only one of her five children that she still could not figure out.

Yesterday she contradicted herself. Yesterday she contradicted me. Yesterday she poured cold water on my ambitions. Yesterday she had me fail before I even tried. There have been a lot of yesterdays all my life but it was what she said yesterday that made me feel angry and resentful towards her.

My mother is a doomsayer. She is a worrier and she is paranoid. She predicts more catastrophes than Nostradamus. But my mother is not a bad mother. Nor is she a bad person. But I wish, I just wish, that for once she would say to me, “Great idea! Let’s give it a go,” or be enthusiastic about what I want to do instead of pouring her doubts and fears into me. Can’t I just try? So what if I fall flat on my face? So what if I put my foot in it? Why is it bad to go down a wrong path then start all over again? Why can’t I throw myself whole-heartedly in an endeavour? Why must I be made to feel that I won’t succeed? Why can’t I make an ass of myself? I reserve the right to be a fool.

Why can’t you see that life is pain and joy and ecstasy and sorrow and all the messy things in between? How do you expect your children to develop as a person, as a halfway decent human being if they’ve never tasted life? You would have me fall before I even jumped. What makes you think I wouldn’t fly?

Why do you get upset when I think for myself and have opinions of my own? Because they are not your own? Because they go against what you think? You call me a socialist and to you that is a swear word. You raised your children to be independent and forward-thinking but now you find you’ve made a mistake and you want your children to fit in to accepted society’s vapidity. I listened to you before because you are my mother and I trusted you. Mother knows best, doesn’t she? But Mother is a human being and she can be wrong, and God knows no matter how much I love her, sometimes I hate her too. When she dumps on me and fears that I won’t succeed. What’s worse is that she does it because she loves me.

I always thought I did as you want me. I can be stubborn as a mule but I thought I toed the line. By today’s standards or even medieval standards, I’m no hellraiser. Heck, I’m a bookish, flat-chested homebody who has been labelled weird since she was in pigtails. Sometimes people say I’m smart or kinda pretty, or say I’m weird but mean it as a compliment. Just because it doesn’t fit your standards of success – a married, elegant, finishing-school type woman with a rich husband – doesn’t mean that I am not happy, or a success in my own way. Perhaps my friends think I’m a success. Perhaps they think I’m great because I’m their friend and because I know where Sodom and Gomorrah is.

It hurts when you don’t trust me. It hurts when you doubt me. It hurts when you pour cold water on my dreams. Sometimes this bookish, flat-chested homebody wants to be something else. It may not happen, but it was a nice dream to have dreamt.