the other other shoe
Submitted by yellowomyn on Mon, 11/03/2008 - 12:58am
it seems like life drama conspires together sometimes and while i work on being tough about it and plowing through i spend so much damn time waiting for the other shoe to drop and things to get really, really bad some more. like i don't always feel justified in letting myself be upset because it is only going to get worse and worse inevitably. so maybe i should save up my overt misery reserves or something.
my grandfather died yesterday. my mum is a dramatic wallow-y mess. i am not being sympathetic enough. i do realize that her father just died. but her grief just seems so superficial and laughable sometimes. i am a terrible person. how could i even consider laughing at someone's grief? and my own mum's?
she does this... thing... that my sister and i refer to as 'our lady of perpetual misery.' she can just pull off this very bizzare eye-filled-with-tears look for hours on end and then whip out a good sob whenever she needs a bit 'o' sympathy thrown her way. it just seems so... contrived... like she ought to either genuinely experience her grief or buck up and put on a good front like everyone else. i am such a terrible person.
everything feels distant. but not really in the sense that i am poorly coping. although i probabally am and then the fear of 'poorly coping' makes it all that much wonkier.
throughout most of my life i was given the great blessing of having five living grandparents. i did not need to wrap my wee little head around concepts of death and mortality until i tried to take my own life. i had never really lost anyone that i was close to.
last year my grandparents started to pass away. i say that like it is some sort of epidemic. it kindof feels that way. first my dad's mum. then the step-grandfather who rasied me, and now my mum's dad. and i am doing hospice care for my mum's mum.
i feel calm about these things. i am grateful for the life/death process and the chances i've been given to walk with my elders through this process. i don't understand the need to be perpetually weepy about it. so i am being internally insensitive to my mother.
it may be that i have been debauching for the past three days. halloween extravaganza and then family clambake thing yesterday. my dog got in a fight and got her paw torn up. and folks kept coming up to me and saying how they had never seen my mother so wasted. we were all wasted.
i smoked much too much and ate about six magic brownies and then went for a walk and misplaced the road and too seriously considered going swimming at 4am.
i slept the afternoon away and now i feel gross and lost. and like i need to not let on that i think my mother is ridiculous.
heres looking forward to being well-behaved with family members for a week.
your spiritual twin