my stuff
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guilty
An afternoon spent with my mum.
As things change in my head, I feel myself looking back an awful lot. I feel like I’m going through some personal learning curve. The era I’m learning about, realising about, discovering at the moment seems to be my 20s. How I was, how I acted. What it all meant.
Or a growth spurt. Oh I don’t know what I mean, but I feel reflective, melancholy for my past, I feel like I should go back to it and take a poke around. Since a few people from my past have come along recently and reminded me of lots of different things, I am liking that little place that was my past. It’s like an old sleepy UK holiday town, where the beaches are all windswept and rainy, but I can’t help looking at it with a sense of pride. My little past wasn’t so bad after all.
Funny. I spent all those years running like fuck. And from what?
My poor mum. I love her so. I am really quite mean to her. I had to tell myself in the mirror today that I was NOT allowed to get annoyed at her. It’s not like she means to drive me frigging mental. And I do remember she used to get driven half mad by granny, so it’s obviously a bit of a phase that gets passed down through the daughters. The problem is, if I wasn’t so prepared to be annoyed, waiting for it, almost setting it up, I wouldn’t get so annoyed.
Today I told her a story and she really was listening to me, but doing an irritating little ‘uh-huh’ noise as she looked all around her, everywhere but at me, but the ‘uh-huh’ was to demonstrate that she really was listening to me. It started to grate. I finished my story and my mum’s response was actually very accurate to the tale I’d told but I was waiting for something else, something negative or cutting and I didn’t really listen to what she said and I then said ‘well, it just sounds like you weren’t very interested in MY story at all!’ when in actual fact, she had been and summed up the story in a very astute way.
Mum (quite rightly) said ‘well, I can’t help it that you take what I say the wrong way Heeland Lass! I can’t second guess how you’ll take everything’. And she looked tired. And she sounded tired. And I was annoyed at me, which came out as me being annoyed at her and I wish I’d said sorry.
Still. I really do love her. And we went shopping for a mother’s day present for her mother in law and we went to a lovely smelly shop with nice bath stuff and all that and she oohed and aahed and sniffed and poked and got quite excited about all the things she was seeing which made me feel guilty about the crappy gardening present I bought her and then we had lunch and had a lovely chat and everything worked out well in the end.
And this mother’s day I have learnt that I SERIOUSLY need to get over whatever it is that drives me to distraction with my mum and remember how much I love her and how important she is to me and that I kind of need to get a grip and realise that the world doesn’t revolve around me.
And also I have to remember that mother’s day, father’s day, Christmas day, easter and god knows what else, are all designed to make us all feel quite guilty and then I have to take a proper step to not allow that to happen anymore and to just be really lovely to my family instead.
Oh what am I going on about?
I’ve not had any wine. That’s the problem.
And so to this evening. Sitting on the sofa. Bandito having a bath. Music blaring as always. The green top or the red top? I can’t decide. A birthday party and then a club.
I’ll phone my mum in the morning and remind her how much I love her. If I could, I’d take her breakfast in bed, with the papers, put her favourite radio station on for her and tell her not to get out of bed till at least noon.
8:39 pm - 25 March 2006
