Monday, June 20, 2011

Journal 35 OwnLife

What the Obit did not say, Part two, will arrive shortly, but I'm having a bit of a time writing it tonight.
I'm also reading other blogs I like, ones that I categorize under the heading "cheerful" and "twenty-something" and I love their energy, their sense of fun, their playfulness, underneath I recognize the terror, (that terror of "what am I going to be am I going to BE SOMEONE?") but you can push the terror down in the under-30 mode. You can tame the terror.
Afterwards, things get tricky.

I listened to my positive affirmations today, driving home from my mom's. (I keep wanting to say "driving home from my parents"). We had dinner together again, outside in the backyard, the same persistent robin hopping from fence to grass, from tree to shrub. I like to think that the birds and animals (my sister's cat another example, he didn't leave my mother's side when she was at her house yesterday) have extra-sensory perception and are sensitive to my mom's sadness, even when she masks it behind creating a delicious meal, or having a single gin-and-tonic (I'd like to have had four). When she brings out a plastic container to the backyard to fill up with water since it hasn't rained and she wants the birds to have moisture. When she puts out stale bread.
I had been working on a Mother's Day post, in May, obviously, and it sits, unfinished, in my 'edit posts' log. I will finish it. Maybe today was Mother's Day. Maybe all last week was. Watching her put on a brave face, much like my own, while inside some part of her must have withered along with my dad's frail body.
I can't finish Obit Part Two tonight, I have to work in the morning, and I've wrung enough out of myself tonight, today, this past week. As I type, my father's ashes sit in a green drawstring bag beside my desk, his brown and beige globe (not the typical blue) peeks out shyly from a shelf, here in its new home, and I marvel at the unreality of it all.
Where did my twenty-something self go? Much like that poem I posted a few weeks ago, they were never stingy those twenties. And yes, if I met her in a bar I'd have a good few drinks and listen to just how hopeful she was, putting on yet another brave face, while falling into impossible love, and working two jobs, and praying to the facade of the church she lived across from on Bathurst Street. She would have felt so bad for me at the loss of my Dad. Probably would have wanted to know what she could have done. Her mouth would have been downturned, but not in any way mocking or false.
The word I want is more than concern...it's.....carefulness. It's tender. It's...beyond empathy.
The thirties do their work on you, make no mistake. You leave behind that self-obsessed-ness, you have to, so many are depending on you to, even if you don't have children. You take care, you give over your own life, you get used to putting the needs of other's first. It was something I first came across when reading essays by George Orwell. How he felt that after the age of thirty, most of your life was spent caring for others (children, ailing parents). In 1984, he covertly, so I think, entwined "ownlife" into Newspeak, to sum up people who lived on the fringes of family life in society. When I was in my twenties I idealized this ideology. My mission was to live my own life to the end. Now I see how impossible that is, with a heart, a brain, an age already behind me, more than a decade of adult life.

Bye Twenty-girl. I still miss you. But I've bigger fish to fry.

No comments:

Post a Comment