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Thu 28 Jun, 2007 10:53 am
I read that article. For a moment afterwards, I couldn't breathe. Damn. I miss my mother. Since she's been gone (2001) there's a lot of things that I've stored inside and haven't talked to anyone about. We take these things for granted but I realized just a few years ago that when my mother passed away, I lost my closest confidant.
Mom got herself out of the nursery and the kitchen. She then got out of the house. She did not get out of the church, but, instead, got the stern stuff out of it, padded the guild room and moved in more solidly than ever before. No longer either hesitant or reverent, because there was no cause for either attitude after her purge, she swung the church by the tail as she swung everything else. In a preliminary test of strength, she also got herself the vote and, although politics never interested her (unless she was exceptionally naïve, a hairy foghorn, or a size forty scorpion), the damage she forthwith did to society was so enormous and so rapid that even the best men lost track of things. Mom's first gracious presence at the ballot-box was roughly concomitant with the start toward a new all-time low in political scurviness, hoodlumism, gangsterism, labor strife, monopolistic thuggery, moral degeneration, civic corruption, smuggling, bribery, theft, murder, homosexuality, drunkenness, financial depression, chaos and war. Note that. The degenerating era, however, marked new highs in the production of junk. Note that, also. Mom, however, is a great little guy. Pulling pants onto her by these words, let us look at mom. She is a middle-aged puffin with an eye like a hawk that has just seen a rabbit twitch far below. She is about twenty-five pounds overweight, with no sprint, but sharp heels and a hard backhand which she does not regard as a foul but a womanly defense. In a thousand of her there is not sex appeal enough to budge a hermit ten paces off a rock ledge. She none the less spends several hundred dollars a year on permanents and transformations, pomades, cleansers, rouges, lipsticks, and the like--and fools nobody except herself. If a man kisses her with any earnestness, it is time for mom to feel for her pocketbook, and this occasionally does happen.
She smokes thirty cigarettes a day, chews gum, and consumes tons of bonbons and petits fours. The shortening in the latter, stripped from pigs, sheep and cattle, shortens mom. She plays bridge with the stupid voracity of a hammerhead shark, which cannot see what it is trying to gobble but never stops snapping its jaws and roiling the waves with its tail. She drinks moderately, which is to say, two or three cocktails before dinner every night and a brandy and a couple of highballs afterward. She doesn't count the two cocktails she takes before lunch when she lunches out, which is every day she can. On Saturday nights, at the club or in the juke joint, she loses count of her drinks and is liable to get a little tiddly, which is to say, shot or blind. But it is her man who worries about where to acquire the money while she worries only about how to spend it, so he has the ulcers and colitis and she has the guts of a bear; she can get pretty stiff before she topples. Her sports are all spectator sports.
She was graduated from high school or a "finishing" school or even a college in her distant past and made up for the unhappiness of compulsory education by sloughing all that she learned so completely that she could not pass the final examinations of a fifth grader. She reads the fiction in three women's magazines each month and occasionally skims through an article, which usually angers her so that she gets other moms to skim through it, and then they have a session on the subject over a canister of spiked coffee in order to damn the magazine, the editors, the author, and the silly girls who run about these days. She reads two or three motion-picture fan magazines also, and goes to the movies about two nights a week. If a picture does not coincide precisely with her attitude of the moment, she converses through all of it and so whiles away the time. She does not appear to be lecherous toward the moving photographs as men do, but that is because she is a realist and a little shy on imagination. However, if she gets to Hollywood and encounters the flesh-and-blood article known as a male star, she and her sister moms will run forward in a mob, wearing a joint expression that must make God rue his invention of bisexuality, and tear the man's clothes from his body, yea, verily, down to his B.V.D.'s.
Mom is organization-minded. Organizations, she has happily discovered, are intimidating to all men, not just to mere men. They frighten politicians to sniveling servility and they terrify pastors; they bother bank presidents and they pulverize school boards. Mom has many such organizations, the real purpose of which is to compel an abject compliance of her environs to her personal desires. With these associations and committees she has double parking ignored, for example. With them she drives out of the town and the state, if possible, all young harlots and all proprietors of places where "questionable" young women (though why they are called that--being of all women the least in question) could possibly foregather, not because she competes with such creatures but because she contrasts so unfavorably with them. With her clubs (a solid term!) she causes bus lines to run where they are convenient for her rather than for workers, plants flowers in sordid spots that would do better with sanitation, snaps independent men out of office and replaces them with clammy castrates, throws prodigious fairs and parties for charity and gives the proceeds, usually about eight dollars, to the janitor to buy the committee some beer for its headache on the morning after, and builds clubhouses for the entertainment of soldiers where she succeeds in persuading thousands of them that they are momsick and would rather talk to her than take Betty into the shrubs. All this, of course, is considered social service, charity, care of the poor, civic reform, patriotism, and self-sacrifice.
As an interesting sidelight, clubs afford mom an infinite opportunity for nosing into other people's business. Nosing is not a mere psychological ornament of her; it is a basic necessity. Only by nosing can she uncover all incipient revolutions against her dominion and so warn and assemble her co-cannibals.
Knowing nothing about medicine, art, science, religion, law, sanitation, civics, hygiene, psychology, morals, history, geography, poetry, literature, or any other topic except the all consuming one of momism, she seldom has any especial interest in what, exactly, she is doing as a member of any of these endless organizations, so long as it is something.
Phillip Wylie--Generation of Vipers
Something must have gone very wrong with my mother and myself. Or my mother. Or me.
I know a lot of daughters with exactly the same problem, urs :wink:
(And not only "urs'es"
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urs53 wrote:Something must have gone very wrong with my mother and myself. Or my mother. Or me.
You are not alone, urs53....
I envy all those women in that article...those who love to talk and c onfide in their mothers.
Every woman is not cut out to be a mother. Just like every man is not cut out to be a father. Just because you can make a baby doesn't mean everyone that can, should.
As much as I treasure having a mother and being a mother- I treasure having a daughter.
My daughter is only fifteen, and though she has her moments- during which she makes it clear that I'm hopelessly uncool and seem to have been put on this earth for no other reason than to confine her freedoms- she has proportionately more moments in which she makes me know- by actions moreso than words- that she is my most loyal and understanding supporter- that she understands, and appreciates and will always be there for me.
She tells me everything from "you have spinach stuck in your teeth" to "that woman did a terrible job cutting your hair" to "you're the most important person in my life."
She, in particular, and since she was a baby looking up at me from her crib, has displayed a very measured and fair approach to life. I often go to her for her observations and opinions and perceptions on people and situations- because I know that they will be accurate- she is so much less innately overemotional than I am.
I am so happy to have this particular relationship (the one in which I am the mother and she is my daughter) in my life. It has enriched my life a thousand fold. And the fact that I adopted Olivia- that she was on one side of the US and I was on the other, and somehow, someway we were brought together- makes me even more thankful and aware of what a miracle she is to me.
Aidan - wow. You are lucky. And so is your daughter.
I, too, am lucky. My mother is a wonderful mother and just an all-round awesome person. Someone who I'd love and value and feel honored to know even if I wasn't hers. If my daughter feels for me half as much as I do for my mum, I'll feel that I must've been a good parent for her. In the meantime, I'll just cherish and enjoy her.
sakhi wrote:
You are not alone, urs53....
I envy all those women in that article...those who love to talk and c onfide in their mothers.
sakhi, I don't even know if I envy them. I don't miss what I never had. For me, my brother and sister are very important. My parents moved from Germany to Hungary about five years ago. I do not feel guilty to say that I never missed them.
Walter, I find it amazing sometimes how many daughters have this problem. My neighbour and I have so much in common in this regards.
This is off topic, I'm sorry, but--
Aidan, I'm wondering if you'd be willing to tell me a little bit about your experience with adopting your daughter? I'm very interested in adopting children in a few years, and I don't know anyone personally who has done it; I'd really like to be able to ask some questions of someone with first-hand experience. Would you mind if I sent you a PM?
That would be fine Cyphercat. Just so you know (so you don't think I'm ignoring you) I'll be out of town tomorrow - leaving early, so I may not have the chance to get back to you until Monday afternoon- but I'd be happy to help with any information I can give that would be useful to you.
I have the same kind of relationship with my daughter as Aiden. I feel really blessed for that.
At 44, I also have that kind of relationship with my Mom. I call her several times a week. If it has been a few days, she'll call me and ask what I'm up to. She jokingly assumes that if I'm not reporting in, I must be doing something I shouldn't.
My Mom is my best friend. I can't imagine not being able to call her just to say I have my first buds on the cucumber plant, can you believe what the Senate did today, or ask how their trip to Branson went.
You'd like my Mom. She's the best.
Same here squinney. I remember calling my mother and my father (two separate phone calls. they weren't living under the same roof) to inform them of my first ever homegrown tomato.
I spent an hour & a half last night on the phone with my mum. From half-past-midnight to 2 AM. Hadn't had a chance to chat with her - just chit-chat - in too long a time. I'm feeling very content today.
I'll bet you are. I envy you.
Oh, I'm so sorry, (((eoe))). I imagine that is one of the hardest things to deal with.
It is. That's for damn sure. But I was lucky in that I had my mother for 48 years. And that we had the kind of relationship that indeed makes her passing one of the hardest things to deal with. I mentioned this earlier but what's been the hardest is, I never realized how much I shared with my mother, close, intimate things or heavy-duty family talk/gossip, that I didn't share with anyone else, for 48 years, and now that she's gone, there's alot of **** that happens and I keep it all in. Personal things concerning me and my husband and our family or the extended family stuff, like my cousins and their shenanigans or which aunt isn't speaking to who? I've tried talking to my brother, sharing these things, but it's just not the same at all. It'll never be the same, I guess.
And when she was here, I never considered her my best friend and closest confidant. As much as I adored her and acknowledged how lucky I was to be her daughter, still, I took that aspect of our relationship for granted.
Hmmm.
I think that being able to take it (my r'ship w/ my mum) is one of the most comforting things about her/the r'ship. But, you're right. One shouldn't. As to acknowledging it in her presence (how lucky I am to be hers), I think the closest I've ever gotten is saying to her that if my daughter loves me a quarter as much as I love her, I'll feel like I have been a good mother. I think I do need to pay more attention to the 'acknowledging' part...
And I know that I'll never let so much time elapse again before just 'hanging' with her on the phone.
She's going to visit us here for at least a month (two, if I can persuade her) in September. I'm looking forward to it with a deep, quiet, pleased anticipation. I'll savour her time with me here. (Maybe I should share A2K with B - he may have MIL stories to get off his chest.
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