Gene-sis
I usually tell people that I'm a shitty driver. I don't necessarily think I am, but by conventional standards, I realize others may think so.I drive too fast, I don't always signal, I tailgate. Yet, I always feel in control and alert; aware of being cut-off and aware of sudden stops. I've never caused an accident.
I've been looking forward, perhaps a bit trepidatiously, to my trip back 'home' in April. I haven't been back to Cdale since we moved from there in 1992. I want to drive there for the first time, over the one-lane bridge near my old house. I want to drive up the hills I used to walk; sit parked outside my old BFF's house and remember; drive to my old friends' houses that have appeared in my dreams.
I mentioned my trip to the 'rents last night for the first time. Mom wants to come with. She could ride down with me and visit a good friend of hers.
We'd take her car, which I've never driven, for she guards it quite carefully. I would, supposedly, have her car for the weekend and be able to drive through town as I wish. There would be no smoking in her car or presence. There would be no speeding of any kind, nor any music I enjoy. There would be 5-6 hours of conversation with mom, stuck in the same vehicle.
I love my mother dearly. I don't, however, get along with her. Just as mom and sister rarely fought growing up, dad & I never fought. Mom & I, however...had some doozies.
This trip is important to me, for a lot of reasons. It's opening up old wounds and hoping to find scar tissue attached to others; I don't want to do that with her. I don't want her to know what it means to me.
When we found out we were moving, mom threatened - with some degree of seriousness, I suppose - to get divorced from dad, the reason we were moving. I was the one who went to her, crying in her dark bedroom, sleeping away the pain, and told her she couldn't do that. That she had no choice in the matter, that we were all leaving, and we'd do it together.
I don't know if she remembers that; she has said that she always felt I blamed her for the move. In actuality, I didn't - the whys of moving were never unclear. I did, however, blame her for looking for the easy way out and for thinking of envoking a choice that I as a child did not have. I blamed her for making me wonder if I'd have a choice as to who I'd live with, and how I would break my decision to the unchosen. And I blamed her again, once we had moved, for spending months in a depression under the bedclothes, leaving an overwhelmed, overworked father to deal with a sad, uncommunicative daughter.
I've refused to be baited into conversations with mom about this subject; I refuse to let her know how angry, how...sick the move made me. I refuse to infuse her with guilt over what a 14yr old girl had to endure. I don't know how to have that conversation without letting the anger seep from me. So I choose to hold it inside, where it only eats at one person instead of letting it loose to consume others.
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