This seems like such a universal hurt.
I just saw it in the grocery store. A child wanting to help her mother, wanting to hand her things to put across the self-checkout. The mom was more intent on hurrying. I know the feeling. I remember wanting to get out of stores quickly because my boys were prone to carry on and it always felt like they were misbehaving, when they were just over-stimulated by lots of bright things, just like I was, and trying to contain us all so we didn’t burst into song or something.
For every “too much” person, dreamer, daydreamer, ADHD kid. The spontaneous people. The exuberant. The absent-minded. The people who wander off because they see a butterfly. The people who interrupt, not because they’re being rude, something exciting happened in their brain and they can’t wait to tell you.
Rebels, troublemakers, all of us, when really, maybe, no. Distracted. Can’t remember all the rules. Or something got lost in translation and a direction just didn’t make sense to our brains.
In looking at my mother, in doing some reckoning, I saw my childhood. I saw myself as scrappy beyond belief – up against that woman from day one. I did push limits, boundaries. I wanted to walk on the teetering edge. I wanted to suck the marrow out of life. I was a child poet before I knew what that meant. I was in love with the Moon. There is that delicate balance that escaped me as a poet child – the warrior side was fully engaged and intense before the poet’s heart ever learned to tread water.
So, there is that side. And yet, so much of what I remember was me living in a dreamworld. A rich, wonderful place, very in tune with Narnia, very – of the same woods. So, while I was seen as a troublemaker, a rebel, the black sheep, in my heart, I was lush with the mercy of Aslan, and surprised that my way was ever in question.
That is an exaggeration. I caught myself. I was not all whimsy. That is my heart now. I feel compassion for the little version of me who was fierce and creative and talkative and imaginative and talked to herself in the mirror, imagining accepting awards, who didn’t purposely get in trouble, but was somehow always in trouble anyway.
To be seen as a problem, when I thought I was delightful.
I saw my mom as a problem too, when only now, am I seeing how delightful she is. How alike we are in our whimsy. How have I not seen this before?
I had to learn to see her. She, the one who told me my children were the poems I was writing during their childhood. When I was scattered and they were so busy. She reminded me that my presence with them, my attention to them, was my assignment during that time. That helped me learn to be a poet mom.
Bits of her wisdom got through. Much did not. I wanted to do it myself.
She so wanted to guide me.
I so went oppositional whenever she tried.
This was the mess I was unraveling.
The manuscript: UnRibboning
Cover Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
