Your Mother’s 19th Nervous Breakdown
You better stop, look around. Here it comes…
So, I am starting to see why every once in a while my mother got a wild look in her eyes and exclaimed: YOU KIDS ARE DRIVING ME CRAZY. She wasn’t exaggerating. She was stating a fact.
If she was feeling anything similar to what I now experience as a mother, wife, employee, pet owner, laundry doer, insurance negotiator, finder and misplacer of paperwork, billpayer, taxpayer, submitter of flex spending receipts, clothing buyer, answerer of fundraising phone calls from every nonprofit that ever got their grubbies on our number, volunteer funeral salad procurer, floor wiper, sharp-edged toy picker upper, spender of hard-earned money and amateur Freudian psychotherapist, she really didn’t mean YOU KIDS are driving me crazy.
She meant: everything that happened to me today has driven me to the very edge of sanity, and you guys just sent my crazy little car careening off the cliff. Watch me go – (ball of fire). That’s all folks.
She meant: My life is a minefield of crazy.
Really, do people wonder why parents make catastrophically bad decisions at times? All of the crap the average working idiot handles in a day does not leave one in an enlightened state of being. Remember, those who achieve a higher level of spiritual enlightenment usually do so through meditation. Quiet. Solitude. Lack of other annoying human beings who feel the need to nag you just to feel good about themselves. By the time I’m heading off to bed, I’m lucky if I can remember whether to stand up or sit down to urinate.
Here’s a perfect example of my inability to parent wisely: Nate doesn’t eat anything except mini-corn dogs, bananas and pancakes. The rest of his diet consists of milk and small particles he finds on sidewalks and under furniture. I’m thankful he eats something.
So, rather than try to make him a broccoli casserole and trick him into eating something that occurs in nature, I feed him what I know he will eat. Because chances are, by 7 PM, I have already fought a number of pointless, tedious and mind-numbing battles. And lost.
You know, the Stones were talking about these 60s upper-middle class moms circa The Graduate era going insane and self medicating…Women who spent a few hours a day working on their beehives and dreading another lonely day by the pool drowning in yet another martini. And THEY were ready for a nervous breakdown. Rightfully so! Being alone, tan, groomed and wasted is hard work.
Perhaps I am being unfair. I just have to laugh sometimes when I become self-critical and wish I was doing a better job at, well, everything. Until I find a way to avoid daily burnout, I’ll keep forgetting to add water to the coffee maker, getting confused about which direction the magnetic strip should be facing at the ATM, and feeding my little monkey what I know he will eat without having to hold a G-20 Summit.
Yes, I give up, and I will just be painfully inadequate at everything, occasionally buzzed on Target’s superb boxed wine, but loving. And happy. Crazy people are often very satisfied, pop divas excluded. Embrace your psychological shortcomings, you women who want to be everything to everyone! Whose approval are we all looking for? Last I checked, everyone always has a complaint. It’s our whiny, self-satisfying nature as human beings. Continuing to try to meet some kind of ideal against these odds — that is insane.
I am starting to think it’s OK to suck at all of this. Really.
This is your mom and I remember the days you describe and have only the sweetest of memories of you and Heather while growing up. The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy – I mean that if you are happy you will be good and most importantly, when you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. Love, your mother.