My Bipolar Journal – Episode 230
May 10, 2009
So, I hear that today is Mother’s Day. Not that it’s the first that I’ve heard this or that I don’t appreciate the sentiment, but I’ve got several messages saying people are doing the “mother’s day thing” or “they HAVE to hang with their mom”. I get these sorts of messages every Hallmark or genuinely well-felt holiday.
My mother just reached Kansas. I like to think that it’s not because she doesn’t think or hope that me or my brother couldn’t or wouldn’t do anything for her, but that she is what I feel I am. A free spirit and that life is short and you have to take advantage of every opportunity.
However, every message that I got on such holidays where my family is in other parts of the country (they only live an hour away) or just not doing anything, I seem to get some message that implies that there is some sort of tradition involved that I am either missing, too chauvinistic to entertain or that I’m too stupid to understand the important significance that someone else put into a date whether it be decades, centuries or thousands of years ago.
I appreciate tradition. I know my roommate reads this, so I apologize if anything I say is offensive because I certainly don’t mean things this way, but I know that most Christmas traditions are pagan and that Thanksgiving has nothing to do with God and that whether you partake in Easter Sunday alone or include Passover vs. Lent or what not that it all boils down to one thing. What have you done? What has brought you together with people in your family or your life? One of our Christmas traditions revolved around my grandfather’s birthday. December 22. The Payne family Christmas (my mother’s side of the family of course). It used to be a standard, traditional, this is the day kind of holiday. We’d get together with my teeny tiny side of the family and exchange gifts. We had a kiddie table. We had a birthday cake for my grandfather. It happened to be 3 days before Christmas. I don’t really think any of the actual portions of the tradition were important, but they were there. You got off work, you did your thing and it was just what we did. Even before Papaw died though it started getting more and more to the insignificant point that it didn’t matter which day it was. We were happy to work with each other’s schedules and still kept the tradition alive regardless of the date. I used to fight to keep tradition alive and would be really upset when we didn’t do the things that we always did because they were our tradition. It was one of the few things we did as a family that we kept alive for so many years.
I have a very small family and I think that makes dates and traditions even more important. I don’t have a mom or dad with 7 brothers or sisters who also have 7-14 brothers or sisters. We kept our baby-making simple. Yet, most of us are estranged from each other. I think about my mom a lot when I think of how she just in the past two years started babysitting my 1st cousin’s (one of the 4) twins. I think about how she probably didn’t even have a connection to my cousin, her niece until that happened. Not in the way that I seem to notice in the way other people identify with their families. She spends so much time with them and I know that my mother knows that she will never have grandkids from me and that my brother and his girlfriend may not be in that place either and that she has had to use my cousins to find that sense of “grandchild” with a family member that she may have never recognized as strongly as she has until she got a chance to take care of that person’s children.
My mom would be a fantastic grandmother and I feel sometimes like I’m depriving her of that, even when I know she doesn’t really feel that way. I feel like she doesn’t feel that way though because she’s being logical. Not because she doesn’t want to. I feel guilty.
Maybe I’ve done her a favor because she has a chance to have a relationship with a family member that she may have never had. My baby could have kept her from that.
These are all what ifs. It makes no difference because it changes nothing.
I’m in love with a beautiful man who would make beautiful children with me and be a beautiful father but that we would most likely royally screw up because of our lifestyles and the fact that true happiness has always become before these things that people seem to think are “normal”.
Which brings me back to a point I was trying to make when I started this. What is normal? What is tradition? Telling me that you’re doing the “mother’s day thing” or that you are being forced to be with your mother today is silly. I would love to be with my mother today, but my mother is driving through Kansas right now. On her way back from Indiana, Illionis, Wisconsin, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky and Ohio. Your mom made you go to dinner because she probably guilted you into it. Mine has a life and in turn I have my own life because somehow, without realizing it, that has been instilling in me. That life is short and that we should be living our own lives, regardless of tradition. What is a freaking mother’s day tradition anyway? I’ve never seen it in a Norman Rockwell painting because every fucking day should be a day we give a shit about anything whether it be our mothers, our families, our friends, our alone time, our jobs, our parties, our drinking, our sobriety, our religions,…… I really could just go on. Life isn’t a painting, but it can be expressed in one. It’s not about believe in a tradition because we can make our own and it’s ok if it’s based on something other people have done before. It just has to mean something. Any of this should just mean something.
The fact that my parents go to Amish country on Thanksgiving and to Montana for Mother’s Day and that if we can’t get together for a birthday or Christmas, that it’s still ok. It’s just a day and it doesn’t matter what day it is, it matter when we’re together. I personally wish it were more, but lives get complicated and even the way we have relationships with our families, let alone our friends, is always changing.
Screw you for thinking I know what yours is.
