It�s the day before Friday and although I like my job for all intents and purposes I find myself less and less eager to be here. The workload is light and I am feeling increasingly under utilized. I suppose I shouldn�t complain there are lots of folks who would love to get paid well to do far less than they are capable of but unfortunately I am not one of those people. So I long for the weekend to escape my tedium at work. Trouble with that is the weekends bring tedium as well. Money is tight and there is not a lot to do. I want to climb on my bike but realistically I�m not sure I can safely ride. I am out of shape enough that running is not a fun activity so I find myself avoiding it. I could walk (for those of you about to �yeah but�) but I just can�t seem to drag myself out of the funk that keeps me locked away all weekend long. The sun shines and the world turns but you would never know it in my house. Why then do I long for the weekend? Perhaps I enjoy the lack of effort. I don�t have to pretend busy or make believe cordial I can simply drag around expressing the listlessness I feel but can not reveal in public. Of course it is horribly unfair of me to expect My Darling to suffer the lifeless me. It is incredibly unjust to reserve your �good� face for strangers and share your �bad� face with the ones you love.

I had yet another visit to the Doctors to diagnose yet another infection (5 this year alone) and am once again on antibiotics (which may explain my irritation.) The good news is the infection may have been responsible for my vagueness (the Doc called it confusion) so perhaps that will resolve alone with the pother symptoms.

Off topic:

I was thinking about my mother. She recently attended a family wedding (an event that my distance from home spares me) and sent me pictures from the reception. One picture in particular (of my mother and her sister) set me to pondering. My mother is a child of an alcoholic. My grandfather (who died before I was born) drank himself to death by the time he was 52. His alcoholic twin followed him not long after. My mother grew up in a violent and treacherous household.

If I close my eyes I can see the little girl she once was, a tall, gawky girl in a time when Shirley temple and Elizabeth Taylor were the definition of beauty. Women had a place in society then. It was delineated and restrictive. She played sports when women didn�t �sweat� they �glowed�. Her home was a trap set carefully by a man who controlled his family because he could control nothing else. He was mean and she was his firstborn, not a boy, no he suffered this skinny bonky girl who wasn�t even pretty. He told her this and much more. I don�t know his story but it is obvious he was an unhappy man and he took it out on my mother and grandmother. My Aunt was the baby and was thus sheltered from the man by age and my mother�s position as whipping boy. My Uncle is an enigma to me to this very day. He went out of his way to visit with my when I was home for Christmas but spent most of the time bragging about himself and �topping� whatever story anyone was telling be it my father, myself or my darling. I�m not sure why he bothered unless it was morbid curiosity as to the condition of his now divorced living with a younger man god daughter.

I have come to terms with the struggles and torture that my mother suffered during my childhood and unknowingly took out on me. I looked like my Aunt as a child and even more like Shirley Temple. I was, for my mother, everything she had always wished she could be and she hated me a little for it. Meanwhile I was miserably unhappy because when I was round faced and soft looking in a time when beauty was defined by tall boney model types with angular faces and didn�t think myself attractive at all. *Sigh* As a child I just couldn�t understand why my mother hated me so.

As and adult I understand that she loved me the best she could. Her mother didn�t know how to show affection (my grandmother may have had the same kind of Love-Hate relationship with my mother I don�t know but she was always really critical and in a really mean way), her father was a drunk with all the trappings that go with that addiction and she was just a little girl who wanted to be loved.

I find that if I am curious as to a human�s behavior often I don�t need to look farther than the child wanting to be loved. So much of our choices still come from the child in us. I find that the people who are the most �grounded� have looked at their child very carefully and are deconstructing the fantasy of their childhood by forcing themselves to see the people from their life as flawed humans doing the best they can. I can forgive my mother and she in turn can forgive her sister who can forgive my mother and so on, and so on, and so on. I don�t expect I will ever root out all the garbage deposited in my psyche during my formative years but I am happy that I can see that every human has an impossible task before them and there is not enough time to accomplish that task (I�m not sure if there could ever be enough time to clear away all that debris) and thus I continue to grow in appreciation for the enormous obstacles that my parents faced from which they shielded me.

I see my mothers love for her sister grown by the awareness of this most temporary existence. And my love grows for her for the same reason. How could I not love her, she tried so very hard to be a good mom, and she was the best mom that she could be with the tools she was given.

I wish you Peace

~alison~

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