Swimming With Snakes (and other thoughts at 2 a.m.)
I am sure this silence means I have, once again, in a raging, glorious color, caused my son and his wife to dislike me. I do that sometimes, make people dislike me. I try not to, but I am human after all, filled with imperfection and a lot of hot air. I don't like my oldest grandson. I love him, would feel badly if something awful happened to him...for about an hour. Then I'd feel relief. He's the father of one of my favorite people on this earth, my great-granddaughter. I'm too young to be a great-grandmother, you say? I don't look like a great-grandmother? You are too kind. And also a liar. I am more than half a century old and very unattractive. But that's okay. The time I might have spent working on my outer apparence has been spent instead trying to make my inner-being beautiful. Or some such crap. Lies. Lies I tell myself to protect me from the bitter reality that I have let myself go. And my inner-being is not all that and box of biscuits either. I am going to say I'm okay with that and pretend that you believe me. It will make us both feel better, gentle reader.
Here is who I am: a retired nurse. A mother. A grandmother. An ex-wife. A sister. A friend. A confused rider on this blue planet trying to figure out what it all means, what the purpose is, what I'm still doing here. Hey, I didn't buy a ticket to this ride. I was just minding my own business somewhere far away and woke up one day here. I'm not unhappy, most of the time. I'm confused often, but not unhappy.
So. This thing I did today that made my son and daughter-in-law dislike me. I am a woman of many words. Written words. I like them better than spoken ones. I always have. (Do you see how I'm distracting us both from this thing I did? Yeah, I noticed it, too.) I write because it feels good. I used to write to keep myself alive, struggling to put words on white space to empty out the overwhelming feeling that I had become useless and without value. It worked, as you can see. I'm clearly still here. I've been doing this now for over 40 years. My house is littered with journals and scraps of paper expressing how I feel, what I think. And now I am going to steer myself back towards the subject.
I don't like my oldest grandson. The worst thing about being a nurse with psychiactric experience is that I can quickly recognize ne're-do-wells and manipulators. That would be my oldest grandchild, the oldest child of my much beloved oldest son. I liked him enough when he was a baby, but I left my family just after he turned one. I wasn't here during the critical formative years in his life. I breezed in for about a year when he was seven, then breezed back out again. At that time, I noticed that he was a very difficult child, one of those violent, whiney, mean children that are sometimes born to remind us just how awfully things can go wrong with child-rearing. I still loved him, but loved him much better from afar.
He's eighteen now and one of the biggest wastes of the union of sperm and egg alive. He got kicked out of school when he was 15. He stole from his parents. He did drugs. He was impossible to please unless he was the center of attention. He brags constantly about how wonderful he is at this and that, but of course can never back his claims up, which makes other people distrust him. He intimidates his siblings with violence and a VERY LOUD VOICE. He created a child with a 12 year-old girl, the "love of his life", whom he now despises. He should have gone to jail, but because he was 15 at the time, and the girl turned 13 before she had my great-granddaughter, the state cut him some slack. He is eighteen now and does not have a job, a driver's license, or the desire to do much of anything except terrorize his immediate family, fornicate with his new girlfriend, play vidoeo games and go be with his friends who are all much younger than he is. I don't like him. I don't like being around him. I worry constantly about my great-granddaughter, that she's not getting the time and attention she needs to grow up in any decent sort of way. I'm told that it's none of my business, a concept I totally disagree with. He and his daughter are here on earth because of me. Without me, there'd be no them....
Here is who I am: a retired nurse. A mother. A grandmother. An ex-wife. A sister. A friend. A confused rider on this blue planet trying to figure out what it all means, what the purpose is, what I'm still doing here. Hey, I didn't buy a ticket to this ride. I was just minding my own business somewhere far away and woke up one day here. I'm not unhappy, most of the time. I'm confused often, but not unhappy.
So. This thing I did today that made my son and daughter-in-law dislike me. I am a woman of many words. Written words. I like them better than spoken ones. I always have. (Do you see how I'm distracting us both from this thing I did? Yeah, I noticed it, too.) I write because it feels good. I used to write to keep myself alive, struggling to put words on white space to empty out the overwhelming feeling that I had become useless and without value. It worked, as you can see. I'm clearly still here. I've been doing this now for over 40 years. My house is littered with journals and scraps of paper expressing how I feel, what I think. And now I am going to steer myself back towards the subject.
I don't like my oldest grandson. The worst thing about being a nurse with psychiactric experience is that I can quickly recognize ne're-do-wells and manipulators. That would be my oldest grandchild, the oldest child of my much beloved oldest son. I liked him enough when he was a baby, but I left my family just after he turned one. I wasn't here during the critical formative years in his life. I breezed in for about a year when he was seven, then breezed back out again. At that time, I noticed that he was a very difficult child, one of those violent, whiney, mean children that are sometimes born to remind us just how awfully things can go wrong with child-rearing. I still loved him, but loved him much better from afar.
He's eighteen now and one of the biggest wastes of the union of sperm and egg alive. He got kicked out of school when he was 15. He stole from his parents. He did drugs. He was impossible to please unless he was the center of attention. He brags constantly about how wonderful he is at this and that, but of course can never back his claims up, which makes other people distrust him. He intimidates his siblings with violence and a VERY LOUD VOICE. He created a child with a 12 year-old girl, the "love of his life", whom he now despises. He should have gone to jail, but because he was 15 at the time, and the girl turned 13 before she had my great-granddaughter, the state cut him some slack. He is eighteen now and does not have a job, a driver's license, or the desire to do much of anything except terrorize his immediate family, fornicate with his new girlfriend, play vidoeo games and go be with his friends who are all much younger than he is. I don't like him. I don't like being around him. I worry constantly about my great-granddaughter, that she's not getting the time and attention she needs to grow up in any decent sort of way. I'm told that it's none of my business, a concept I totally disagree with. He and his daughter are here on earth because of me. Without me, there'd be no them....
