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Losing War

 The descent into becoming my mother has accelerated with age it seems. At first I was able to resist the force by sheer will but lately that seems near impossible. There is much that I like and admire about my mother but equal (if not more) that I do not. I was determined not to become that which I really did not like but not so easy as it turns out. 

I have always dreamed of a relationship with J that is completely unlike mine with my mother. While my dream may yet come true but I am starting to learn that may not bring me the closure or satisfaction I had hoped for. We will have a relationship quite different from that between my mother and I but it will be fraught with other issues that are unique to J and I, the circumstances of our lives together before she left to college. There will be no perfection, only work in progress to make corrections and improvements all the time. We will get better in some ways and worse in others. 

as I get older and throw the world’s most pathetic dinner together after a long workday, I finally understand, admire even, why my mother did the same. She didn’t give a fuck about a proper balanced meal because she had other matters she was more concerned with, like her career, or arriving in front of the television to decompress so she could then have the energy to pay attention to me again. It also proves she didn’t buy into all the domestic-goddess garbage that she grew up with and was more interested in staying an hour after school to help underprivileged students than she was spending that time in the kitchen

Like the author, I have come to realize things about my mother that now make more sense than they once did, when the resentment had first set in. She did the best she could, given her severely limited options. Could she have done different? Most certainly and so could I when I became a mother myself - my choices were very far from ideal and they were not even the best optimized for J. Becoming my mother is proof of my failures and imperfections - that is why it must be so scary undesirable.

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