I am up waaaayyyy to late tonight. There will be no righteous running in the morning either, not at this rate. So. I've decided this is most likely the secrets blog of my three sites. Not that I hold much back on the main site or the other subsidiary site either (silly little Ophelia), but still, here's where very few holds are barred or something like that. Where else will I talk about rape and step-mother hate?
One thing I noticed was that when I gave myself permission to have a secrets site I suddenly didn't have as much need to rant about what I consider the really bad stuff. Hmmmn. Is that because it's been temporarily rendered harmless or because I know people read it? My guess is a little of both, permission and publicity.
I have a secret today. I've had it eating at my insides for a week and I just need to spit it out.
Here goes.
(drum roll please, there's ever so much guilt and shame rolled up in this one)....
My fifteen year old, nearly sixteen year old daughter is driving me out of my ever loving mind.
There. I said it. Doesn't sound so bad, right? Except for the fact that I rescued my daughter from her abusive father three months ago and somehow think this relationship suddenly has to be perfect.
How could it be perfect? She's been manipulating her divorced parents for most of her life and now we are suddenly glued to the hip 24/7 and life should be perfect.
k, here goes... (my snivel for the week)
I am a bad bad bad bad bad and evil mom. I get emotional and don't manage to process her needs every single living second of the day and periodically (it's rare these days but happened last week) take her head off at the abdomen leaving bloody entrails flapping in the breeze and...
She, being my daughter truly and completely, responds in kind.
Oi.
Take two passionate, powerful, strong and wilful women and put them nose to nose and look out Hiroshima!
I love my baby girl up one side and down the other in more ways than I can write or speak and yet, today, today, if I had not remembered that I'd punished her most by removing my affection and obvious out pouring of daily love, would not have thought to stop the madness by wrapping my arms around her stiff and angry body, pulling her back into the safety net of mother love and thus diffusing nearly all the noxious static that had precious little to do with she and me in the first place...
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5 comments:
...take her head off at the abdomen leaving bloody entrails flapping in the breeze and...
That's pretty .... evocative.
I wonder if the mother/daughter thing is always like that. I've only got one, so I don't know if it's b/c we're so much alike, or if it's just more than one female per house.
One of my two daughters looks like me (she's 12), and she and I can lock horns more inextricably than anyone else I know. Except maybe me and my mom. My other daughter, and my boys, are not like that. Although my eldest seems to be afraid of me. A friend of ours told him to hit me (playfully) the other day and he said, "That would be committing suicide."
There is a certain tone of voice combined with a certain look that evokes fear in a good many people. I inherited it from my mother. It's also a way of stating things that often leave people feeling like they've had their heads taken off at the abdomen with all sorts of stuff flying out in the breeze. I once had an employee tell me I was making her eyes bleed just by sitting and seething quietly into my keyboard over something someone else had done. I think that some people are just plain intense but I also think that we, as a whole, are trained to believe that women in general should be soft, sweet and relatively harmless, or at least not direct and so when we are not that at all the perception of intensity is intensified - I hope that makes sense. This is one of my all time favorite rants... if I was a man you'd have no problem with this but instead you call me a bitch...
On the subject of daughters and females in the house I just don't know. My mother and I went nose to nose on more than a few occassions (and still do, thank you very much) but it's my dad and I who struggle the hardest to this day.
this is going to sound awful, but my dad died and I have a much better relationship with him now. Not that it was bad, it wasn't. Ever.
But I certainly get the intensified intensity. Yep. Plus, I can be slow to get my dander up, but once it is, I forget to "play fair". I go for the gonads. Husband attempts to make me aware that perhaps I am over the top. With varied success, and the danger of having his own head taken off. Bless his heart. Except when I'm mad at him.
CG's comment about her dad rings true for me, too. My dad and I had a mostly silent relationship before he died. Maybe silent is the wrong word...make that a quiet relationship. We didn't need to talk much to communicate. My last wordy conversation with him was an argument, which almost never happened, but he was concerned about something I was doing and how it might affect my health. Who knew he'd be dead 3 weeks later?
Now, take my mom, please. She and I get along great on the outside, but I don't get her and she certainly doesn't get me either. The thing is that I'm not sure I WANT her to get me. There's so much guilt, anger, broken promises, etc. that should be water under the bridge, but we both have dammed up the creek. Her relationship with her mother was bad, and from my vantage point she and I have recreated that same relationship. I see it; she doesn't. We've all been through a lot of pain these past couple of years, and I don't want to exacerbate the matter by bringing the guano out of the cave concerning our relationship now. So I get mad, rant, pout, hide, etc.
But there's hope: after our trip to Virginia Tuesday and my selling the horse Wednesday morning, I came home and burst into tears. My 17-year-old son was actually out of bed and caught me crying. I told him why (see Wednesday's blog)and also asked him if he felt I had been an absentee mom. He gave me a pretty honest answer, I think. He said he used to think so, but since he's gotten to know some friends who's parents are divorced, separated, hating each other, etc. he realizes that I'm not so bad. I gave him permission to smack me when I act stupid, and I believe he will.
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