Just Get Hit

I’m trying to work around my mother in her pit (the living room) and she is on the phone with my brother saying no one is working to decorate here.

Yeah. No encouragement, just passive aggressive shit. No participation in her own pleasure, just disappointment that no one makes her happy.

I come downstairs feeling slapped. I tell my father, demonstrating with slaps to my head.

He tells me that I shouldn’t be upset about that I can’t control. After all, he says, I have my own hang-ups too.

I laugh, slap myself more and explain the paradox. I can’t control her, and I can’t control what they want me to control in me — more compartmentalization is needed, my mother once told me — but I still get slapped for it, because I should make things happen, even when those things are out of my control.

Yeah. It’s out of my control, but within my obligation, so I still stand to be punished for that which is out of my control.

And he, with his Aspeberger’s like behaviors, well, he is out of my control too.  Ambiguity confuses him, he has no real empathy, just tries to understand thinking with the assumptions that others think like he would, and is generally in his own world.    No wonder I learned that emotions would never cut it.

Excellent crap, eh?

Feelin’ Girly

I listened to my girlfriends chat last night.

Well, actually I listened to our girlfriends chat; I watched the end of season six of Sex And The City, with Miranda getting back with Steve, Elizabeth Taylor having puppies, and Samantha having Jared cause injury when he does something as perverse as hold her hand.

And what those gals reminded me is that you can’t do holiday spirit as a chore. It’s gotta come from within, or it won’t happen.

Gawd, every time I see a woman in black tights, I ache. I think about the moments when women have affirmed my maternal nature, when kids have seen me as a good aunt. I saw the third season opener of How To Look Good Naked and cried as a Sonia rediscovered her beauty, her confidence and her smile, as she got her life back.

I even dreamt about being a manager and having to pitch in at a big confab when some legend passed away. “I’ve never worked with a tranny before,” one person said. “Cool.” A woman who worked for me years ago had some words of support. Good dream.

But here, in the real world, my mother is peeved because holiday decorations aren’t up. Of course, she fills the living room every moment I am here, because they never leave without me, and the living room therefore is filled with gifts and boxes and such. I can’t bring everything into there, because it won’t fit, and even cleaning up is impossible when she eats, sleeps and poops there.

She has taken to calling herself a lump. She used to call her father Lumpy Lump Lump. He sat in his recliner or was in hospital, a fast heart and touches of Mustard Gas from WWI. As a lump, she is a black hole, resisting energy & destroying it.

I am aware that as a woman, I’m not boring, bland or small. But those are attributes that I am expected to aspire to around here, where drama — even cheery, positive, upbeat drama — gets my sister quivery, confuses my father, and wears too much on my mother.

Yet she is who I need to get through the holiday times with brio & gusto. And getting through it any other way is just a wearing chore, too much work.

The list of what needs to get done is long, long, from decoration to cooking to hosting to cleaning to packing and unpacking, to shopping to… Well, if you are a woman, you know how long it is. And of course, add to that negotiating my parents through all their chores and choices.

So for a moment I’m feeling a bit girly, and I can actually even write again.

Sadly, though, I know that will have to pass.

Happy chores, eh?