Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Mother and Daughter

Big excitement here. Our daughter is coming home for ten days. We only heard yesterday – she has been trying to figure out a good time to come, and yesterday she found a window of opportunity. We will spend some days at Slow Loris – she loves it almost as much as our son does. She is the only one of my relatives who regularly reads my blog. Or at least the only one who comments on it.

I have finished my review. It’s too bad I don’t get paid by the hour, or for that matter, too bad I don’t get paid at all.

Family and writing have made up the major portion of my life. I do some volunteer work – less now than before. I used to teach. I read. I used to have an herb garden. Friends.

Because my mother went into a coma before she died, I never said goodbye. She couldn’t give me her last wishes, so I made them up. I knew she that there were three things she worried about. One was that I wouldn’t tweeze the hairs from my chin, one was that I would drink too much, and one was that I wouldn’t dress my daughter in “cute” clothes. I regularly (I almost wrote “religiously” because that is how I feel about it) tweeze the hairs, I am a complete teetotaler, and for as long as she would let me, I dressed my daughter in “cute” clothes. She was five when my mother died, and she became very firm about what to wear by the time she was seven and that didn’t include “cute” clothes. However, I never did stop spending effort and money on keeping her as my mother would have wished.

3 comments:

Zhoen said...

Those are incredibly benign wishes. A bit irrational in one way, but reasonably minor as well. You sound like my cousin and her daughters, a warm and welcoming relationship that has expanded to include me this past year. I view it all with great wist.

Your mum heard you. This is not a fact, but I am sure.

Peter said...

Religiously: from the Latin for obligation. As in, you feel obliged to do these things. Sure puts a potentially different spin on your words.

litlove said...

I've written whole academic books for which I've not been paid a penny - bummer isn't it? I find nothing more striking than the strength of inheritance from mother to daughter. Sometimes it's a stranglehold, but it seems to me that your family has managed to get it just right - ties that bind but do not constrict.