GROWING UP 12/1/06

Gingerly I creep through your land mines,
marking each one for later destruction.
Fluorescent with need, you reach for me.

I am an ocean of desire.
I dance away from that which holds empty promises.
Free. Swirling, I burst into space a glittering of stars.

"I want to be loved." That is the stance of infants. And of grown-ups who refused to grow up. Or somehow weren't able to. I don't know which it was. Perhaps I never will know. That one particular incomprehensible family member in my memory, a dark bottomless pit of need. And I, the child expected to fulfill those needs. I should not have been placed under that burden. Yet, I was. Through no fault of my own. The only thing I had to do with that drama-- I got born. No, it is not something for my list of sins or omissions or self-inventory. It is not my shame any longer.

I remember more and more as days continue their countdown towards some nameless eternity or endless cycle. The more I participate in my existence, the more I remember. I am remembering. I am in a state of remembrance. There is a feeling I call pleasant that I associate with being able to use my renewed sense of recall regarding my life. I cannot as yet tell you who I was before my traumatic brain injury. But I can recount the little events in my life which helped to shape who I was.

I knew a girl who lived around the corner. I lived on Fourth Avenue. She lived on Springdale. Her name was CoraJean. Though with our accents, it got muffled into "Gor-Jean." It mustn't have mattered to her because she never corrected any of the neighborhood kids.

My mother hired Gor-Jean to walk me to church on Sundays. That ended when Gor-Jean made the senseless admission that she wished my mother was hers. My mother promptly fired her. "No girl should love someone else's mother more than their own," was her explanation to me. It went over my head. Gor-Jean did not make any profession of love.

Did that make my mother narcissistic? I don't know. Her insistence that I love her, devote myself to her, make her proud, make her happy, do the laundry, do the grocery shopping, be a perfect happy child was all-consuming. No matter what I did, it was never good enough. Report card day was always a trial. I should have gotten all As. I was stupid. Lazy. Tests, exams, papers-- the same. No grade was good enough. I was not good enough. I would forget the eggplant at the supermarket or pick out unripe fruit or purchase the wrong kind of cheese. I learned to ask the produce guy at Foodtown or some nice older lady to pick out the good apples, the nice pears, the broccoli. I was too young. Somehow, she forgot that when sending me off at a young age to do the shopping for the week for the whole family. She was always forgetting and going into rages.

She screamed at me over the telephone the day of the high school fair. She screamed that I had forgotten to tell her, she was worried sick about me. [A clever variation of, "You make me sick!" from younger days.] Hoping to placate her, I bought her a cheap Christmas ornament or some trinket. And it did placate her for the moment at least. That was not the last time. I remember bringing her two slices of pizza one Sunday evening after being out with friends for the same reason. She forgot. She was worried sick. I "made" her sick. What the hell did she think she was doing to me???

I escaped from her clutches when I left that place. It took years before I was able to breathe. It was years before I learned how to be enough. Years before I shook my mother out of my head and became truly free.

sapphoq on life