Square Peg, Round Hole

I don't have memories of my Mom cuddling with me or reading to me before bed. I think that she probably did on occasion but i don't have any clarity about it. Sometimes I think that's strange because I was her first girl after five boys, and being such a feminine women, you'd think that she would have smothered me with motherness.

She enrolled me in ballet class. It was there I experienced my first humiliation. "How come you're the only one here who's fat?" At the time, I had prepubescent chub, I wasn't fat. But I didn't know it.

I just remember she had me in different classes at community centers and such. I always felt painfully shy and incapable of doing what the other kids were doing. They were so outgoing and energetic. My mom said I shouldn't be a quitter. So I always felt like one.

For some reason, shopping was the main source of our difficulty, and we always fought when we shopped. It was also the thing we always wanted to do together. Weird. Who can explain it. I would see something I liked, and she would say, "Where are you going to wear that?" Why did I have to have a time and place in order to buy it? She always questioned my choices. My taste. I never really developed it because she head it off at the pass. It was the expectations that done her in. I think she had an idea of me. What she wanted me to be, what she thought having a daughter would or should be, and we weren't or I wasn't. Why aren't you? Why can't you? Where are you going to wear a thing like that? I DON'T KNOW BUT I LIKE IT!!! Isn't that enough?

She made me so angry once I tried to think of how I could really hurt her back. So I took some of her favorite things and hid them. It just tears my heart now to remember. But I wanted her to know how badly, deeply she had affected me. When it all came out, she was mad at me, but I don’t think she ever understood why I did such a thing.

One time I was so angry I screamed at her, “You want me to just off myself? Is that it?” That’s got to be one of the worst things a kid can say to their parent. And I was in college. Not a lost pre-teen or high schooler. That had to scare her. I was always trying to shock, to say the worst thing, to demonstrate my pain and frustration.

My whole adolescence felt like a big WHY CAN’T YOU?! or WHY AREN’T YOU?!