ALWAYS!!!!

Jesus, Mom. Always. You ALWAYS do this. Obviously, not this exactly, but, man…were you ever true to form on this one. The games! The little moves for…power (what does that even mean, by the way?) I guess that’s what it’s always been about for her…even if she can’t define it or own up to or whatever. I guess it just comes from being afraid all the time. Mainly, because…I guess…she’s never made the right decision on anything that really matters so she’s always behind the eight ball and always feels like someone put her there. Man. It’s weird when you make the shift from pity to…pissed…it’s a strange feeling when you notice yourself being pulled across that line and all of a sudden things are pretty f-ing different. Not to say that this is the first time I’ve been mad at her or thought about why she is this way or that, but just…we were on SUCH different wavelengths this past weekend and it’s seems clearer now than it ever has. She could never do this...what we do in this family. Ever. And while I would never have thought that she could, feeling her energy when she learned about us…it was so obvious to me that I’m not like her because I can do this. And I want to. And I love it. And it’s good. And her not getting it (and bashing it…that was motherly)…her not getting it makes it seem all the more right to me. I wasn’t looking for any kind of validation, I don’t think…I mean, a week ago, I felt the same way about it all, but…it’s like when you already like a movie and then someone that you know doesn’t like good movies says they don’t like it…it just makes you like it even more… Mom did that. Of course she hates. (She hates good movies, too.) She’s selfish and mean. You can’t be selfish and mean and do this.

Gosh…is it bad to say she’s a bad mother? I wouldn’t tell her that to her face (unless she pushed me so far that I just had to), but…she is. She is a bad mother. I think she thinks mothering is just keeping your baby alive and if you do that, you deserve a medal. And from then on, her version of mothering is just recommending the same shity short cuts she took in life, even though none of them pan out, ever. She doesn’t get any of the little parts…the subtleties. I don’t think she gets the part that’s supposed to just come from your heart. She’s too wrapped up in her own shit to do that. And it’s a killer. Always has been.

The summer between 9th and 10th grade, we went on this stupid road trip to the Grand Canyon with #12,679 on the list of total asses that she dated over the years…Leon. That would mean I was…15…and even then, I was more the adult then they were…and I was probably immature even for 15. That made them about…9 years old. And they’re in charge. It was a disaster. Leon was always smoking pot and making Mom drive (one time, it was even discussed that maybe I—the 15 year old!!—should drive…idiots). He had this huge, old police scanner thing that he would listen to to “make sure” no cops were in the area as he was blazing up. But I don’t think he could even make any sense of the chatter because he was pretty much always smoking and I don’t think it was because he learned from the scanner that there wasn’t one cop on Route 145 the whole way down. He and Mom got into this huge old fight when he wanted to stop and take a picture in front of the “Stoner City Limits” sign and, man, they went at it in the parking lot of that Popeye’s. It was bad. And it got really bad when she started yelling at him about that stupid scanner and he said she didn’t know what she was talking about and she said he was stoned and he said that was “neither here nor there.” When we finally pulled about the Popeye’s, it was totally silent for the next two hours. Eventually, they jumped right back into it. Out of nowhere. He couldn’t find his scanner. He was diving all around the car like a dog chasing a chipmunk he just saw dart into a hole. Except the scanner hadn’t darted anywhere. He just couldn’t it. “It better god damn be in here, Ginger,” he said as he rummaged…shooting his hands all around, feeling for it. She didn’t help the situation: “Yeah, like I moved your stupid little scanner,” she kept saying in this sassy little way that definitely made it seem like the might have, in fact, moved the stupid little scanner. Back and forth. Big time. YELLING. So bad, she pulled over and threatened to take me and hitchhike back home. “Like I give a pancake titty,” he kept saying…which makes no sense at all, then or now.

So she pulled over in a huff and got out all dramatically and was yelling at me to “get my shit and get out of the car”. I stayed still, of course…knowing that I would rather drive the car myself then walk down the highway with her back to Colorado, but then she stopped in her tracks outside the car and just started laughing. “Oh, yall,” she said, giggles turning into full-on laughter. “Oh, yall…look.” We got out of the car (I remember Leon took his shirt off for some reason) and she pointed and we saw the scanner and the bag of Popeye’s on the roof of the car, pushed against the little rack thing. They had been up there for the past 80 miles of fighting. The food and the scanner. Mom and Leon both just started laughing…I guess they said they were sorry (or not), and we hit the road again…this time eating chicken.

At the hotel by the Grand Canyon, Leon spent most of the first night trying to get me to smoke with him, which was weird and definitely inappropriate and lame. Mom was no help. Her take, even though she wasn’t really paying attention and was watching the MTV movie awards during all of this: “I’d rather you do it in this dump of a motel with us instead of doing it in some other dump of a motel with a bunch of shady characters who aren’t gonna do squat for you if you get too high.” That was her logic. Never crossed her mind to consider herself and Leon shady characters. Never. The next day, on the mule ride down the canyon, she fell off, drunk, and bruised her collar bone. She vomited on the trail down the Grand Canyon. I think that says it all.