(no subject)

[arliss]

We are all such products of our environment. When I was small and there was a new kid in class, I'd come home and ask, "When are we going to move?" I remember the look my mom gave my dad, full of love and gratitude at a promise kept. She was the youngest child of a widowed mother, poor, at the mercy of whoever would hire her to clean and do rough cooking. Grandmother married, for companionship, perhaps, or maybe in the hope of having someone to support her and her child, a man who was respected as a carpenter, when he wasn't drinking. Which he was, often. They moved, ahead of the landlords, a lot. My mother was pulled out of schools just as she was getting comfortable, and was the new girl in several schools in a year, in new towns, in strange places, in boarding houses and slums. Always on the edge of society, like a dog beneath the table hoping for fallen scraps, cringing and grinning in an attempt at winsomeness.

How could she know the security she lovingly provided for me was a cage, a lead tethered to a runner line. How could the "new girl" who never fit in know how I longed for the chance to move on, reinvent myself, leave my clumsy, stupidly fashioned persona behind me and become someone new, begun in new surroundings? Labeled early as lazy, slow, klutzy, fat, I knew no other course but to accept and adapt to those labels. Who knows what sort of splendid thing I might have morphed into, given the space and the clean slate to try? I might still have failed, but it would have been freeing, I would be much less fearful of change, if ... if, if, if.

Useless word. When I was coming into adolescence and dealing with my burgeoning sexual feelings, I thought of the convent as a way to not deal. Raised Protestant, I longed for the reassurance of ritual, of confining, defining ritual, and a narrow well-lit path. I've bounced wildly between a longing for freedom and a wish for confinement. It's the walking between, lumbered with tethers to the generations on either hand, elder, younger, and responsibilities to each. The assumptions that I've achieved some level of respectability, responsibility, trustworthiness.

For very little goading, I'd walk out the door with nothing, and just keep walking. I'm so tired of the horizons I've seen for all my life, save the years at school and with the military. I haven't had the chance to be homesick, to miss them to long for them. They bind me. They chafe. I would be gone from them, and from this life.

Comments

[serasempre.livejournal.com]

This is one of the reasons I love you. How can the muse be gone if you can write like this? I was your mom, without the slums, not ahead of the landlord -- my parents were gypsies; their parents moved where the crops were, mostly, especially during the depression. They got into the habit. I took up the habit as well. It's the way life is. It feels exceedingly strange that I've lived in the same apartment complex for 3.5 years. One should move every 2 years or something's wrong. Something's wrong. Ah well. Here I am. The tethers are the same. Wherever I go, the older generation and the younger pull at me.

[sail-aweigh.livejournal.com]

Heh. I'm with you two. After moving every few years as a child because dad didn't get tenure and had to find a new teaching position and then 14 years in the Navy, it just doesn't feel right to not move every few years. And move in the sense of pack it all up and move 3000 miles away. Not just a new apartment, or from an apartment to a condo. I've been back in Madison for 8 years now and I feel like I'm already dead and buried. My dad loaned me the downpayment for the condo and I knew it for what it was. A tether and a trap, but I took it anyway, because the temptation to own something finally became too great. If my mother was still alive, I wouldn't mind so much. There was a sympatico between us that kept me grounded. But now, the chains of obligation are wrapping tighter and tighter around me and I'm feeling choked and stifled. And I've only owned the damn condo four months! Ack.

[makaidiver.livejournal.com]

I've not experienced anything similar but it's written so beautifully, I feel like I have.