done gone crazy

Lemme just start by saying that I really do love my mom. She has an amazing soul and a huge heart. She’s passionate about school and art and beauty, appreciates all the finer (read: expensive) things in life, but still sees herself as the kind of woman that will go mountain climbing or white water rafting at any given moment, should an invitation actually come her way. She wants to hand out soccer balls to poor kids in Venezuela, teach English to Asian preschoolers and dig up landmines in Croatia. She’s wants to do it all, have it all, BE it all. A real renaissance women…. And I’ll be the first to admit that most people that know her, absolutely love her.

She’s a great person… really she is… and in a lot of ways, I’m completely okay with being similar to her. Of course, she’s not without her flaws. The woman is teeeeeeerrible with money, notorious for over-committing herself (because she CAN’T say no to people) and prone to feelings of inferiority and regret for all that she has yet to achieve in her life. She has dabbled with drugs, never pays her parking tickets and, although she hides it from pretty much everyone, smokes Cameo Extra Mild cigarettes in her basement every evening.

Not that any of that makes her a bad person. She’s just, y’know… flaky. She is kind and fun and she would give you the shirt off her back (not in a sexual way, ahem, this IS my MOTHER we are talking about here), but she’s sorta cut from a different cloth when compared to the rest of the people in my family.

See, my mom has ideas. Not that ideas are a BAD thing… but sometimes she gets so wrapped up in her ideas…the possibilities, the “coulds”, that she loses sight of what’s right in front of her face. She’s never been so great at the “shoulds”.

My case in point (and undoubtedly her greatest regret)… she flaked out and left us when I was a kid. Just up and left her husband and two kids without a backward glance. She went chasing one of her possibilities, even though it meant walking away from her responsibilities. No, she didn’t wander off to do some of the great stuff that she imagined herself doing… she just left. Poof. Gone. 6 years of my life without a mom… and we’re talking my FORMATIVE years here, people. To this day, more than a decade after she’s returned, I still don’t know what happened to her during those years or how she managed to stay away so long. And, maybe because I’m terrified of the answer, I’ve just never bothered to ask.

Now, keep in mind, she’s not mentally ill or anything. There is nothing wrong with her in a clinical sense. She has just always been in search of something. Seeking out something, some UNKNOWN, magical thing, that will finally be the answer to whatever it is she’s looking for. She’s always had the sense that something in her life is missing. In spite of all she’s tried, she’s never, EVER found out what it is.

This scares the shit outta me because no matter how I try to fight it... no matter what I do....

I feel it too.

// posted by 143 @ 8:43 PM