Rancid Can of Worms

Rancid:  Rank in taste or smell.

Man, I opened a rancid can of worms talking about my mother.  😞

I expected the writing to be more joyous, frankly.  The therapist suggested at one point that I write about my sponsor, mom and dad, and our evil cat to see what came out.  I started with the animal and frankly, really enjoyed myself.  I had nothing but good memories.

Animals.  They're so amazing.  They give and give and never take anything.  Animals are another reason that I believe in Heaven.  Come to think of it I'm not sure that Heaven isn't filled exclusively with animals.  Maybe people just go away: no heaven, no hell, no purgatory, no additional lives.  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.  This is it, folks, so live it up.

Genesis 3:19 (King James Version): In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. 

All mom ever wanted to be was a mother.  I don't think she ever had a higher aspiration than to raise children - I don't know if she had any other aspirations.  That woman was always thinking about her kids.  I mean to tell you that birthdays and Christmas and the 4th of July were well-scripted and elaborate affairs.  She threw a legendary Derby Day party for chrissake.  Who outside of Louisville, KY, and debauched gamblers cares about horse racing?  There is no We Love Horses Day where the horses get to lay around and eat premium hay.  THAT would be worth a celebration.

She got saddled with an overly sensitive, skinny son and a fearsome, cantankerous daughter.  Man, my sister had a lip when she was growing up and yet she ended up being the normal one, the one who fashioned a life after my mother's own heart.  I went to Cambodia.

I didn't visit my folks too often after I sobered up - it was a tiresome chore, I'm ashamed and chagrined to admit, and this is only in part due to my normal antsy constitution.  I simply didn't enjoy it - these people didn't do anything but sit around in a music-less room and talk, the TV droning on in the background.  And in my dad's case he really didn't do anything.  It's not that I didn't love them but that I didn't have anything in common with them.  I've been to 40 countries and I don't think I was ever asked anything beyond did you have a good time?  and how was the weather?

This sounds critical, probably because it is critical.  I mean I never asked about the sermon or who won the golf tournament, things my parents cared about.  I didn't dispense carefully wrapped and well thought out birthday presents.  They weren't that important to me.

I brought up the fact with SuperK that so far the score was Cat: 111 - Mom: 27.  She said: "No.  This is why you write - so you can separate nostalgia and memories from facts."

She encouraged me to remember that the mother mania cut both ways: mom doted on her children but then looked for comfort elsewhere when SuperK and I didn't have kids.  She would happily spend hours at my sister's house - where there were two granddaughters - while making the long 15 minute drive to our house about 1.5 times per year, then sitting there with her coat on as if there was a rotting corpse under the floorboards.  SuperK reminded me that mom came out to visit us in Vacation City for three weeks a few years back and then spent all but one night with my very religious, very conservative, very traditional cousin as our guest room lay fallow.

I wasn't offended by this.  I certainly wasn't surprised by it although it annoyed me at the time, permitting me to wallow at length in a bog of comfortable, annoyed superiority.  But these our facts of my life that show how I reacted - fairly sometimes - to the way others treated me.

"See?  See how wrong this is?  How poorly I've been treated?" I thought.

And then there was the time I invited all of my relatives to our house - our barren, childless house - for a summer cookout.  I didn't ask anyone to bring anything, only stipulating: No alcohol.  Talk about eating and fleeing - there were vapor trails behind the vehicles as they exited the area.  On previous occasions my folks actually used the excuse that I had a very steep driveway they found hard to navigate as a reason not to visit.  I suggested that if they gave the horn a couple of toots I would have been happy to come down and pull the car up for them.  My chauffeur skills went unused and the frequency of visits did not increase.

I guess in the complex world of human relationships very little is clear-cut.  There is plenty of blame to go around when things don't run as smoothly as everyone would like.  While I understand that the solution is always with me it is understandable that I'm going to react sometimes when I'm not treated very well, whether the other person had good motives or not.  Most people aren't doing things to me - rather they're out there living their lives.  Just because I'm all I think about doesn't mean that everyone is thinking about me, too.  I NEVER think about anyone else yet I think everyone else is ALWAYS thinking about me.  It's preposterous.

Preposterous:  Absurd, or contrary to common sense.

I can spot a character defect from 1000 yards away, at night, in blinding snowstorm, while I'm making a very complicated omelette.