Memorial Day Weekend 2014

"I think the guy broke my tooth."
"Really, sweetheart, you'd drink your own piss?"
"I would!  It could save your life!"
"We're in Dewey Beach, not on survivor."
"Yeah so the guy's passed out right where the dog takes her shits and he's got a turd stuck to his face."
"Why would you walk around wearing a shirt that says "I Heart BJs?"  I mean, you don't see me walking around in a shirt that says "I Heart Sitting On Your Face."  I think it's implied."
"My worlds are colliding!"  
"See?!  I have friends!  They've got my back!"

"I have decided that my future kids will attend Notre Dame."
"You just flashed me your kitty."
"This doesn't suck."
"Ugh, why did I just post a picture of Bruce the Shark on Philip's Facebook wall?"
"Yeah, I'm a pretty hostile sleeper, sorry about that."
"He just let me grope his junk."
"The devil landed Friday at sunset."
"Look, the people in line are getting pissed that Poppa's making our pizza while we're standing here in the kitchen."

"Girls, girls.  Don't waste your time with boys right now because they have no idea what they're doing.  It gets better, trust me.  It gets wayyyyy better."






I carried the thought that the reason we all are blessed enough to have been there that weekend was only because of the brave men and women who have fought for our country.  Among the camaraderie and the American flags flying high everywhere you looked, there was the somber moment when I got the opportunity to shake the hand of an active member of the United States Army in the middle of the Starboard on Memorial Day.
"This is my friend who got home in February from his second tour in the Middle East."
"Thank you for serving our country."

Breaking Mommy Dearest - Would You Like Some Guilt With That?

Get over it.
Stop over-analyzing it.
Move on.
These are the responses I get from E-Bomb whenever I try to talk to her about any type of issue I may be having at a particular moment.  Ma sees the world in black and white, I see it in every shade of the color spectrum and am persecuted because of that - something I have no control over.  I concern myself with the hows and whys of a human being's behavior and finding a reason behind it.  Ma - not so much.  I also am passionate about the arts, about reading, music, I love to shower those I love with attention and affection.  Again, Ma - not so much.  She teases me about how worked up I get over a good book, she criticizes me for wanting to do little things for whoever I may be dating at the time because to her he's not worth it or good enough.
It sucks because I've come to realize I've spent my entire life walking on eggshells.  Instead of focusing on myself in order to live up to my own full potential, every decision I make comes with the thought, "Ugh, what is Ma going to think?"  Now, I know she supports me and any endeavors I choose one hundred percent, like when I decided to go back to school, when I decided to switch careers, things like that.  IT'S THE STUPID, TRIVIAL SHIT THAT GIVES ME PANIC ATTACKS.  
Oh, my God I didn't have time to cut the grass.
Shit, I took a nap this afternoon, I'm going to hear about it.
Is the house clean enough?
Even when I was away over Memorial Day weekend this line of thinking wouldn't disperse completely.  Following me everywhere I went was the nagging little thought that my mother was pissy about me going to the beach, even though she never gave me any reason to feel that way.  I felt guilty about not being at home to help pull out the deck furniture and finish getting the backyard ready for summer, even though I never once heard "It would have been nice if you were there to help," and I was shocked.
Mother's Day was a nightmare.  I had wanted to make her brunch since I had concert tickets that evening, (which I had told her about the night I ordered them,) but she decided she wanted the pool opened that day.  When she emailed me her plans to have the guy come out around noon, I responded that it was fine, but it nullified any plans my brother and I may have had since I wouldn't be around that evening.  Her response back led me to believe it was no big deal; she didn't really care.  Something along the lines of, "Oh, you guys don't need to do that."
So where she got the idea that I was going to cook dinner that night is beyond me.  A whole scene erupted in the garage in front of Philip and my next door neighbor, nothing short of Ma throwing the back of her hand up to her forehead and saying, "Woe is me, my children do not love me enough to cook me dinner on Mother's Day."  (I must note here that it was after my brother rebuilt the retaining wall behind the pool and Philip and I had turned over the entire length of the flowerbeds to prepare them for planting, which is what she wanted.)  I had to walk away.  Later on in the car on the way to Philadelphia, Philip remarked that while we were all standing in the garage listening to my mother cut me off at the knees he was wishing that he was married to me so he could appropriately come to my defense.
And I balked a little bit of course because he said the M-word, but mostly because E-Bomb does not handle criticism well.  At all.  Even if it's constructive.  Even if it's in an attempt to make her realize that she talks to (at) her adult daughter as if she were still a child.  But it made me sad to think that a man who cares so much about me feels he needs to defend me against my own mother.      
I didn't want to tell her that next Saturday I will be attending a birthday party for one of Philip's nieces, even though he's not in town.  His sister invited me and I thought that was very sweet of her.
"Next Saturday I want to finish the flowerbeds."
"Ma, I told you, I have to work in the morning and am going to a birthday party afterwards."
She makes her little snippy noise.  "Why are you even going to that party?"
Instead of defending my decision, I snapped right back.  "You know, I wasn't even going to tell you."  And she shut right up.
So is this how it's going to be?  I have to close most of my life off to her so as to avoid being made to feel like shit?  I was always so proud of how close her and I were, how I always made a point to fill my mother in on what goes on in my life and it used to be a good thing.  Now all it does is cause tidal waves of guilt to wash over me and aggravation beyond belief.

Breaking Mommy Dearest - Chipping at the Walls

"...Yet she her feet still hit the ground every morning.  She kept her head up.  Her faith remained strong, when most would have thrown their hands up in despair and given up.  If she did any of that, my brother never knew or witnessed any of it."
This brings me to the difficulty I have in getting my mother to open up about what's going on inside her head at any given time and why I have such a hard opening up to her.  This past weekend I had the opportunity to have a few heart-to-hearts with one of my aunts during some breaks in the craziness that is Dewey Beach during Memorial Day Weekend.  I can talk about anything and everything with my aunt.  She's the youngest of my mother's siblings (her and my mother are 10+ years apart,) and helps give me insight as to why Ma is the way she is.  Although sometimes, both of us can end up at loss.
I've come to the conclusion that it's because of the ripple effect, as is common with just about every family.  My aunt had her two older sisters to discuss "sensitive" stuff with; she didn't go to my grandmother and I can only assume that my aunts are the ones I go to when I'm in the same situation because I don't have any older sisters.  Ma has continued much in the same fashion as her own mother as far as keeping her feelings to herself and not really wanting to know much about her own kids'.  Every time I try to share what's going on in my head, Ma can be downright insufferable, sometimes to the point of attacking me verbally for feeling the way I do about particular things.
I wish it weren't like this.  I've been trying to focus on the pleasure the little things in life give me (like a good book, a song that gives me goosebumps, sweet things Philip does for me or says to me.)  I wish I could share these things with my mother and get an equally excited response from her.  But I can't because, let's face it - I don't think she ever really cares.
I do want to chip away at her tough exterior but I get exhausted just thinking about the energy it would require.  I don't want to break her completely, I just want to see that she is capable of bending.  It wouldn't make just my life a little easier, but plenty of others as well.

Breaking Mommy Dearest - Starting From the Beginning

This brings me to my first set of points.
"...so I can only imagine that they were an even more amazing set of parents to my mother and her siblings."  It's common knowledge that the relationships people have with their grandchildren are completely different than those they had with their own children when they were young.  I would balk at stories of MomMom being on the warpath because I could not imagine my sweet, chunky, salt-and-pepper-haired Italian MomMom with the singsong voice being a tyrant.  (Ironic because I threw "Italian" in there...)  But as I got older I started to get it, obviously.  And now that I have "grown up" conversations with my aunts, I learned that MomMom wasn't always sweet and may not have always spoken in a singsong voice.  Well, okay.  There's a rumor that my own mother was a bit of a troublemaker, and everyone knows that my youngest aunt was a hell of a troublemaker - to this day she claims that she learned it all from my mother.  (Yeah, that's still very, very hard for me to believe.)  
Anyway, my mother isn't the "sharing" type.*  Her personal feelings are usually pretty closed off, unless you get her mad as hell and then the whole neighborhood learns just how she's feeling.  Getting my mother to open up is like pulling teeth.  I want to know the intimate details of her relationship with her mother growing up because, dammit, maybe it would give me some insight as to how to deal with her in her role as a mother of two adults and the grandmother of my nephew.
And the light bulb just went off over my head.
My aunts will open up to me.  They don't sugar coat anything.  My first plan of attack has been laid out for me and I didn't even see it until just now.  (I knew there was a reason I decided to write this all out.)  They know my mother better than I ever will, and they haven't built up walls as tough as the ones my mother surrounds herself with.
Maybe I can prod my youngest aunt a bit while we're at the beach this weekend....

PopPop & MomMom, 1974, Ma, 1974 (?), and me, 2012

Breaking Mommy Dearest - She's My Best Friend

Yes, I am one of those girls who considers her mother her best friend.  Maybe more so than most because I live with the woman.  How have I managed to never completely desert the nest?  Well, it's really my own fault because I screwed up my financial situation and am still in the process of repairing it, thankfully getting closer to the light at the end of the tunnel with each passing month.
Anyway, I'm incredibly lucky that at age 30 and still living under the same roof as my mother is not so bad.  Usually.  The way it has typically worked in our family is that the kids move back home after college, enter into their own relationships, eventually get married and move out.
Que the old joke about Italian children living in their parents' basement until the age of 40.
Okay so, it happened for my cousin, the oldest of the bunch.  She moved home after college, within a few years married her sweetheart, moved out and begin building her own life.  Same with my brother.  He bought a house not long after school and within a few years married his sweetheart and began building his own life.  And then there's me.  I broke up with my sweetheart when we were on the cusp of getting engaged and any dreams I had of moving out of my childhood home were put on hold for an indefinite amount of time.  Just how indefinite never really occurred to me.*
Anyway, once I got my shit together and made a giant effort to calm down with the destructive behavior I was engaging in, Ma and I grew closer than ever, especially after Pop died.  I would tell her (just about) everything.  She would hold me as I cried over a broken heart.  We leave each other notes in morning just to say have a good day.  She nursed me back to health when I broke my sternum, when I had walking pneumonia, when I had the flu.  I give her pedicures, surprise her with elaborate home cooked meals when I have a day off.  She is the queen of the little things - chores or tasks that are so embedded in our brains that we don't usually think twice about them, so I make it a point to do all of those little things - taking out the trash, cleaning the upstairs of the house, picking up milk, etc.  We vent to each other when we have rough days at work or triumphant ones, we play fashion consultant if one of us isn't sure about an outfit we're going to wear out.  Just the other day that woman spent a half an hour trying to dig out a splinter that was buried almost an inch deep in the ball of my left foot.  If that's not love, I don't know what is.  
But now I feel the tables turning and I'm pulling away.  At first I didn't understand why, but it's beginning to dawn on me...*
Over the years, it has worked out.  I've been by my mother's side through everything.  For a while it was us against the world - my father had moved out and my brother was busy with his own growing family.  We came dangerously close to losing the house.  If something broke, guess who fixed it?  There was no man out cutting our lawn or taking care of the pool, shoveling our driveway, among other things.  Whatever, no big deal because bitches get shit done, right?  Ma and I bonded over these kinds of things.
Now that I am finally coming close to truly establishing my own identity, (can we say late bloomer?) Ma and I have begun to butt heads.  We are two very different people, regardless of much we look alike.  Our mantras, our outlook on life, love, sex, politics - so incredibly different...

Ma and I, Thanksgiving 2013

Breaking Mommy Dearest - A Back Story of Sorts

I don't remember my mother always having a damn near insufferable attitude, but then I think back on all she has been through in her life.  The woman is tough as nails - at least I like to believe so - despite the emotional and physical trauma she has endured.  [I'm going to do my best to be discreet out of respect for her private life and not go into gory detail of some events.  Just trust me when I say, things got bad for a while.] 

MomMom & PopPop, circa 1950s

She was 41 when her father succumbed to leukemia.  Eight years later her mother lost a short battle with pancreatic cancer (MomMom was officially diagnosed on Ma's birthday and passed away less than three months later.)  Now I know that I was blessed with the most amazing set of maternal grandparents EVER.  They were involved in every aspect of their grandchildren's lives, showered us with affection and disciplined us when need be (i.e. if Ma wasn't around.)  I could go on and on about how awesome they were but that would take days, even months.  So I can only imagine that they were an even more amazing set of parents to my mother and her siblings.*
Throughout my childhood Ma was in the hospital every other year for various operations, the biggest one coming to mind the total knee replacement she had while she was still in her early forties - unheard of at the time.  Not to mention that, well, she raised my brother and I as her marriage became a constant state of falling apart while my brother and I were still in elementary school.
So she's been through all of this shit - losing both of her parents at a relatively early age, enduring more physical pain than anyone should ever have to for an ungodly amount of time - with barely a complaint, mind you - while doing everything she could to salvage her marriage to the man she loved.
For simplicity's sake, I'll say this all took place over a fifteen year span.  The shit hit the fan with my father when I was 11, PopPop died when I was 13, the shit continued to hit the fan with Pop all through my high school and college years, MomMom died when I was 21, and Ma finally told Pop to file divorce papers when I was maybe 23, Ma's knee problems, back problems, and weight problems ensuing the entire time.  Yet she her feet still hit the ground every morning.  She kept her head up.  Her faith remained strong, when most would have thrown their hands up in despair and given up.  If she did any of that, my brother never knew or witnessed any of it.*
Then, three years ago, we got the 4 AM phone call that no one should ever receive.  Pop had been in a car accident and didn't survive.  I'm not going to go into the sordid details of this tragedy.  All I am going to say is that in the blurry nightmare following my father's death, I learned just how much Ma still loved him.*

My college graduation, circa 2003.

Breaking Mommy Dearest - A Prologue

So Philip left for his month-long road trip, his walkabout if you will, last Thursday.  He's off the grid, by choice and I'm hating it, but I get it.  The night before he left, I stuffed a card for him to find into one of his tubs packed for the trip -
"I have come to learn - and respect - how much this trip means to you.  I wish you an amazing journey and hope that you find whatever it is you're looking for and that you are returned safely home.  I will be here when you get back.  I love you, Philip."  [sic]
A picture of the front of the card made it into his daily post as he was leaving New Orleans (how appropriate) on his way to Texas and it made me smile.
Anyway, I said all of that to say this.  Since he won't be back until mid-June, I have a bit more free time on my hands.  Not much, but enough to do a little self-searching of my own, albeit from the comfort of my hometown.  For a while I was wondering just what it was that I could focus on in order to take my mind off of him not being around and then it hit me like a ton of bricks - how about I work on my relationship with my mother?  
You see, my relationship with E-Bomb is probably what most would consider atypical and the next few posts are going to be dedicated to figuring out why I'm beginning to feel resentful towards her.  I'm hoping, through this little exercise of mine, to find a way to prevent this problem from getting out of control and get my relationship with her back on a healthy level.
Love her to pieces, but right now she's driving me crazy.

Ma and I at the family reunion, August 2013

Points that I will address in following posts will be marked with asterisks.

Stay tuned...