enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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I'm making myself ill by eating an entire garlic baguette! Yuck. I'm nearing the end of it.

So I'm in kind of a forceful mood.

I just want the next week to be over. Moving onward and upward.

I'm quite embarrassed by my lack of productivity in the last three days. Just awful. I've been woefully obsessed with myself and also with bald eagle sightings...and have taken advantage of the absence of my lovely boss.

Ben. will be back tomorrow morning, and unfortunately I have little to show him. Doh! I'll be working this weekend.

I did have ONE bald eagle sighting this afternoon. It was a completely unexpected one. It was of his butt bent over at a water cooler as I rounded a corner. He seemed to be in a bad mood so I passed by silently (stupidly!) and another opportunity was missed. I turned the corner again on my way back and his light was off and I guess he had gone home.

Probably to his wife and ten kids.

I'm being obsessive!

Not good!

I just feel so great about myself these days! I feel so strong and happy and well-liked and smart!

I feel peaceful, too.

My mother is still behaving immaturely, but at least she is responding to my emails now - if only in brief. I think she might finally be understanding that our relationship needs to be at enough distance to allow me to grow and develop my life.

It's really difficult to redefine your relationship with your parent.

The problem is that my mother has never been either 1) very confident; or 2) very mature.

I understand the reasons for this. She never really much cared for her education, although she did eventually manage to get a 3-year B.A.

She married young. She also dropped out of university the first time, in fact, to marry my father.

She had always wanted to 1) have babies; 2) have more babies.

She likes to decorate. She likes to watch 0pr-h. She likes to know everything about my life. She needs lots of attention.

My mother is not a bad person, or an unkind person, or even a stupid person. She's simply...simple.

She reads trashy novels, although occasionally if I recommend what I think is a special book she will give it a try.

I have lots of good memories of my mother from when I was a little girl - of the way that she would have fresh soup and biscuits made when we ran across the field from school for lunch when I was really young, of her silly macrame groups, of the way that she took me to the synphony every Saturday and to the zoo and the science centre and the museum whenever I asked. And in spite of her questionable taste in books, I had a library card from the time that I was two and we went there often.

I loved the library so very much. I can't think of any place I have ever liked better in my life.

But I've said that before. And you know that I trained to be an archivist.

People and their approaches to life are so very complex.

I think that my mother always thought that she was a good mother, and in some ways I suspect that she was. All three of her kids turned out to be caring, law-abiding, reasonably well-educated citizens in good health.

But the real sticking point is that as the eldest and only daughter of a young, insecure, weakly-educated woman I outgrew my mother pretty quickly.

When I was quite young -probably 8 or 9 years old - I remember my mother telling me both that she wanted to divorce my dad and did I approve? and 2) that she had known after having me that she was in a bad marriage and that she should not have continued on to have more children.

My dad was a gentle and lovely man, in general. He was highly sensitive, and he struggled in life as he had been badly treated by a physically abusive father.

His father was a successful businessman who had been raised by a man who had been a Welsh coal miner. Let it be said that this man did not believe in sparing the rod.

My grandfather ruled over the house - my father, his brother and his mother lived in fear of him. It ended very badly for all of them. And a daughter with spina biff!da died in the home along the way. It was a pretty sad life. They lived in a big house on the best street and yet there was no love in that house. None at all. It was pretty bleak.

I think his childhood weakened my father to the point of fragility. When he got sick when I was 7 somehow I knew even then that he would die. I remember that day - it was the point of before and after in my childhood.

And my father gave up after that. It was the end.

My mother, however, never gave up. For this I suppose that she deserves credit. I mean she gave up in the sense that she eventually divorced my father - when I was 14. But the thing is that she was ambitious for her children and in some respects it paid off. I was always in the best schools, always had music lessons, always had books, always had healthy food. She was quite a miracle of economy, I will say.

But the thing is that she needed to lord over her empire and for some reason needed to bring my confidence down to the level of hers. Nothing that I ever did was good enough; I had to try harder, even if it meant never going out to play with other kids. And as I've mentioned before she would moan about how plain I was - how crooked my nose was, how not pretty my mouth was, how small and flat-chested I was as a teenager. I even remember her asking me at one point if I wanted her to save for plastic surgery! (i said I'd rather stay ugly, particularly since I was getting conflicting messages from people in the rest of the world, who sometimes told me that I was pretty.)

When I did something well she would tell me not to get too big for my britches.

And, worst yet, she both listened to my phone conversations and read my mail. She snooped through my drawers, even when I was in university and came home for a visit.

The thing is that - and this is amazing given that I am stating my life publicly in an internet forum - I have always been a woefully private person. I probably have too much pride.

And my mother's teasing about boys who had written to me - and the contents of their letters - and telling everyone at an extended family party that I had "become a woman" by getting my period (UGH THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE! SERIOUSLY!) broke my spirit.

For so long I refused to tell anyone anything. And I guess you could say that it all amounts to a ginormous breaking of trust.

I feel OK about all of this now. I can't be a different person and neither can she. I hope for her more than anything that somehow she learns to grow. She continues to allow her father to abuse her (verbally and with disrespect), in spite of the fact that over the years my step-father and I have told her to STAND UP TO HIM OR TELL HIM YOU'RE NOT COMING BACK!

I had a conversation a while back with someone and we were bemoaning the fact that people are so tough on aboriginals. (They should fix their own problems, they have the same opportunities as we do, they should stop drinking and abusing drugs...)

But the thing is that it doesn't matter exactly how great you are inside of yourself, or even if you had one good parent, or well-intentioned parents and a half-decent grandparent. It takes a long time to work out the patterns of the past with which you are utterly laden from the time that you are born.

If you're lucky, if you're strong, if you're oblivious perhaps, if you're identifiably exceptional- brilliant or beautiful, you might just get enough external boosting to help you over the wall early on.

But if you're missing any one of a long list of intricate details that add up to safety you just can't do it right away. You have to wait. You have to waste sooo much time. (I go crazy when the thought passes through me that I have spent nearly 38 years loathing myself!)

If I could change anything in the world it would be to give everyone good, loving parents. I won't even pretend that there is a way to legislate this or reroute and redefine our society along these lines through policy.

I'm not sure what will do it. I'd almost be inclined to argue that we can't do it as long as we have too much. When we have too much, we have to fight so hard sometimes to see what matters. We get caught up in details.

But then again when we have too little we can't see the right thing always either.

I don't know. I hesitate to say that it comes down to basic facts about the spectrum of human genetics. I don't want to go there; I persist in taking the Rousseauvian view of human beings.

Wow! That was a long babble! I guess I'm thinking, meditating. I'm also procrastinating on the work that I should be doing.

Poor, poor Ben.

He will be disappointed and annoyed with me.

But I cannot deny that occasionally I am woefully weak, excessively optimistic, and ultimately human.

6:45 p.m. - 2007-11-15

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