Be a Good Girl and Do as I Say

My life has become an informercial in my head.  You know the one with the plastic bags that you can fit a swimming pool in, turn on the vacuum and voilá! You have an ice cubed sized container.  You can nearty store it under your bed, and next year wipe off the cat pee, unzip the zipper and again, voilá!  Swimming pool, cabana boy and a floaties all ready for you.

I am a inside that bag and someone has turned on the vacuum.  Only at an excruciatingly slow level.

Each day I feel my world shrinking.

Normally I would prefer this, being the anti social-socialite that I am.  

Normally I would be in control of the vacuum and at what speed, and what I will or will not bring with me inside my clear (yet durable) bag.

Now I feel like I have been shoved in the bag and as I desperately cling to the things I want with me, they are being grabbed out of my hand.  Like a cruel parent taking away a baby blanket.

I have also been eating my feelings, trying to stuff them down even further, with  half a gallon of cookie dough ice cream on top.  Surely if I cover those feelings with enough food they will stay down?

Sadly, all this has gotten me so far is ten extra pounds and a lot of silence and anger building up inside of me.

A fellow writer friend of mine warned me years ago to be honest, but know that I will piss someone off with my writing.  Mostly that has been my family.

Not always pissed off, okay maybe once or twice, but usually a phone call saying I got the facts wrong, or the dates wrong. Or not owning up to my mistakes and being a sympathy seeker.  If only they knew how much a hate sympathy.  I am not good at receiving or dolling out sympathy.  It does not mean I am unsympathetic, I just feel awkward with it.

If they are my facts as I knew them, they remain.  I can't do anything about the timeline.  Too much partying in high school has taken away exact dates.

Today living with Mom is a challenge would be an understatement.  My brother had it right when he said "Brutal".  That was after a quick two day visit.  His take away was one word, "brutal."

Oh how right he is.

One family member suggested I watch I documentary about a person with dementia, which I will but do not want to.

To me that is akin to telling someone in the throws of labor pains during natural childbirth to watch a movie on natural childbirth.

I will eventually watch it.  Maybe during one of the long hours I sit with Mom.  Not during my precious little free time.

People have the best intentions for me, which makes everything even harder to swallow.  I feel an obligation to read the book, or see the oscar award wining movie about alzheimers, which has absolutely no baring on my life.  My life is not nearly as neat and tidy as the book (or movie).  The only resemblance is the person with the disease had her partner leave her, (conveniently glossed over in the movie.)

"Wasn't is great?  So sad right?"

"Umm yeah." Thinking I wish it was that easy for me.

To make matters in my life more shrinking into the durable life sucking bag I am in, I have had a multitude of suggestions of what I can do, as a caretaker, as a person, as a friend, as a "daughter".

As if people collectively got together and said, "Hey! wouldn't it be awesome if we took away any last thing that gave Amy any pleasure at all?  Oh and on top of that let's tell her she needs to go to confession for having an abortion when she was not yet fifteen, because "You were not properly punished for it."

Oy.  This person also wants me to take Mom to mass while I go to confession.  I understand the meaning behind him wanting her to go to mass; to try and stir up any memories.

It was a bit much to tell me I have failed at ever endeavor in my life because I was not punished for something that happened when I was 14.

My entire life has been failure because of that?

I feel the bag getting tighter now.

Being the pleaser that I am, I will take Mom to Mass, I will not go to confession.  Not because the church does not want a lesbian, divorced, pro choice woman in its pews (which it doesn't), but because people think Catholics get a free "do not go to Hell card" when they go to confession.  They forget that one must be "heartily sorry for having offended thee and detest all my sins,"

I do not feel that.  I am not sorry, much less detest myself.  I am sorry for the little girl that chose a fast life and had to deal with some tough issues.  I have mothered that little girl for years.  So no, I will not ask for forgiveness, and no I have not failed at everything I have done in my life.

The bag is getting smaller now, like a little black dress that clings to everywhere, including my head.

Wait! before we zip up the bag, let's take away any free will.  Grab her cigarettes, grab her diet coke, grab her intellect and reasoning to choose for herself!

There, all zipped up.

What remains?  

Everybody is the Guru

"A woman on the radio talks about revolution
When it's already passed her by."

I often daydream about what it would be like to buy a gigantic ancient house in Italy or Spain.  You would be surprised how many of these there are available.

I would bring over my family and their partners or friends, and hopefully grandchildren and we would all live together.  There would be plenty of space for everyone to wander, to be and do as they please.

Everyone would bring their own talents to the mix.  There would be a garden, and large feasts set outside on a long wooden table.  No dishes or chairs matching, tapestries hanging in the trees.  The grandchildren would run naked, not afraid to pick up the errant lizard or paint themselves with mud.

A midwife would come for each new birth and we would light candles and all silently wait, or cook, or wrap our hands around beads to give them something to do until we heard the new cry of life echo through the walls of the tired house.

A tired house brought back to life stone by stone.  Laundry would hang on a line and let the Mediterranean air dry it with a smell of adventure.

My mother could let the dogs out the front door all she wanted because the grounds are safely protected by more stone rocks, once put in place to keep out intruders from wars, or famine, or plagues.  Now the old walls sit and relax into themselves not having to stand at attention.  They relax and witness an odd family that takes naps in the afternoon sunlight.  On the grass, in hammocks, in beds nursing their babies.

We have among our many chickens one named Lasagna, a nod to the fact that the chicken will never become its name.

"I was alive and I waited, waited
I was alive and I waited for this."

I was born too late.  These completely run down yet venerable and dignified estates sell now for millions.  Many are up for auction.  I cringe to think of the buyer who will tear them down all to have marble countertops.

I was born too late.  I want to wear flowers in my hair, and often do, but still I was born beyond the revolution of peace.

I can not even say this was some past life of mine, since I was alive, born just after the Summer of Love.
We lived in Los Angeles, during the time of the Manson era.  We lived just over the hill from the Manson house.  A few doors down was the Source Family house.

I can not say I blame my mother for packing up what she could after a particularly large earthquake and driving us across country where my father would eventually meet us.

I am aware that people aggrandize that certain time.  I know that if asked more people claim to have been at Woodstock than were actually there.  I know there was a war and it seemed to be a country divided. It was not an idyllic time.

But it could have been.  For the hermits, like myself, that in their twenties dove into books by Ram Dass, Krishnamurti, Timothy Leary.  I read about Buddhism, Mysticism, Hinduism.

I thought "YES!"

I raised my children with art and music and mud puddles.  But they were raised with the soundtrack to RENT.  They were raised in an era of the fading of AIDS being the biggest threat.  They took comfort from the Japanese and Pikachu, Charmander, Squirtle, Meowth.

"Bob Dylan didn't have to sing about
you know it feels good to be alive"

I am on a quest to find a feeling.  An elusive emotion that lives in an abandoned mansion in some distant country.

When I find it, when I feel it, when I live it, I will feel in place.  Was I born too late?

"I was alive and I waited, waited
I was alive and I waited for this"