blather
when_my_mom_was_my_age
ClairE She was 110 pounds, liked to drink beer, wore large tinted glasses, and was much much tougher than I was. She'd known my dad for about a year. They took a trip by rail across the country. They have pictures of the Space Needle and of flat country and of all our relatives in California. My dad had long hair and she had a fringed bag and they were who they are, and they are who they were, although dirtied and worn down to splinters in places by life.

I have the sneaking suspicion I disappoint her. She's a woman who doesn't bother to jerk her arm away when it touches the hot iron. Who says her heart feels funny and treats it by drinking an ice_cold beer and sitting down for the first time that day. Who likes to watch football and yells at the T.V.

I was skinny in a silent way and scared all the time and read books in my room. I tied my jump rope to the porch and my mom came down the stairs and made me turn it for her while she jumped "Strawberry Shortcake" all the way through the alphabet.

I thought being a woman would be like her, that I'd know how to drive like her and drink like her and joke around like her, that all men would look at me the way my father looked like her, that I'd learn how to put barettes in my hair the way she did, and wear makeup and dresses and soft wool skirts. I didn't know I'd still be biting my fingers, worrying about death, needy for people, unable to speak her language, writing letters to her like a stranger.

I remember looking at photographs of my parents and their friends from college, remember meeting their friends when I was barely old enough to know my own name, looking quite forward to the transformation into Adult. Instead I'm at school and everyone else is the same age as me, they wear hair gel and download music and worry about themselves, talk all about the same boy every year but with different names, get depressed and cry about it, give names to their feelings, cry themselves to sleep.

Is it because I don't have to work to pay for my books (though I do anyway) that I don't have adventures like the ones my mother tells me about? I'm certainly not the one who tried out for a beauty pageant, fainted onstage, opened my eyes and had the story end with another girl finding a fridge backstage and cracking us open a couple of beers. Instead I lie in my bed and masturbate insistently.

I feel like the pail of disappointment that's swung from generation to generation was passed too roughly to me, and it's spilt all over my clothes. I need to change but I'm not three anymore, you don't dress up and wear makeup anymore, I'm not six, I don't have a new baby brother to coo at, I'm not twelve, I'm not young enough to get in trouble with boys and have you buy my clothes, I'm not sixteen, I don't cry when you catch me lying to you and we don't go clothes shopping afterwards.

We are going to a wedding next weekend and by then I'll be twenty and you said you found me a purple velvet dress and I'm old enough to look at you like you're bizarre, to miss the way you smelled when you came to my room and slept in my bed, to remember how you used to make me call you every day after school and wish that you still wanted to protect me from boys and sex and drugs, to wish that when I nearly missed calling you on your birthday, it wasn't Daddy who lectured me, that it wasn't you who told me you weren't expecting me to call, that you didn't mind my silence, that you weren't missing me, not at all. 		031113
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phil You can't anticipate what you will remember; what will be important enough to tell to your kids.

My parents think little of themeselves, I hear stories about lawlessness, jobs, and going into service. The most interesting stories are the ones that cover years and years of a person't life, from the time they were teenagers until they were married. Everything that they can look back and laugh about.

Once my neighbor said he fished, I knew what he meant. Everyday they fished and lived off the land.

And why you did, what you did, which seems like nothing, cannot be less bizzare or amazing than that.

Looking back at my time, I know now that everyday my knowledge and my place among people was always changing.

And when I have something to say, it depends more on who I am talking to than what all I had done.

My dad says life can seem easier for other people.

The choices I did have are what interest me. Anyday I could have, but? My life must seem easy and simple to some people, but I could have always gone for more, and wouldn't have lost anything. 		031113
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six hairs on my chin guy ...
who the hell is Apis anyway? well in the east it's all brrrrrrr polypropylene long underwear today..especially at 4:30 am.

click on to anything by oldephebe 040121 		040121
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who the hell is Apis indeed oops! paste much... 040121
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tyger this is a cool blather topic.

...she was married one year and attending college for the first time (she was 29).

She was valedictorian of her large high school but her parents forced her to take secretarial courses because they didn't believe in women going to college.

She worked for the telephone company for 10 years and watched her friends get married (this was in the day when they married young and anyone over 22 was an old maid). But she waited, because she didn't believe in just settling...

Then she met my dad. Who didn't believe that a woman's place was in the home. Who thought she was brilliant and worked to support her and a young child so that she could go to college. Now she has a Master's degree, has traveled all over the world and is one of the strongest, smartest, most feisty women I know. Mom, you are so cool!

And Dad, I want to thank you too. For being a liberated man in a opressive time and place. For putting action behind your beliefs. And for raising your daughter in a household where strength, intelligence, and competence were the expected norm regardless of gender. Dad, you are so cool!

Now I'm 29. I'm getting married this year too, to a man who has worked to put me through school and wants more than anything for me to reach my full potential as a woman and his partner.

We've come a long way, baby! :-) 		040121
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minnesota_chris I was 2. Her oldest boy died of leukemia. 040121
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Zoe she was at the university of georgia, majoring in art. she smoked a lot of pot, and was generally a rebel. she was dating my sister's father and he made her feel like crap. she had an aweful self-esteem. she was going home on the weekends to help her mother and sisters deal with her alcoholic father who threatened them daily. she would later marry the man she was dating, get pregnant (first i think), catch him cheating, and dump him. at the end of college she would close her eyes and point to a place on the map, that's where her and her child would live. she moved there and met my father (also an aweful man), she married him and had me. then divorced him and raised two children by herself for 20 years. she's awesome. 040121
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x she was 22. i figured this out without a calculator! 040121
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god i was 13. 1983/84. my first electric guitar. my first band. my first experience w/ me and my penis. the music on the radio sucked mostly 041003
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sweetheart of the song tra bong She was in her senior year of college in New York, and engaged to my dad, who proposed over the phone from North Carolina. 041003
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jane she was a virgin in michigan 041003
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daxle i wasn't even a thought. my brother was two-something and with my mom in san diego while my dad was in oakland trying to figure out what the fuck to do with himeself.
i guess i take after my father. 		041003
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birdmad it was 1969, my brother was 3, my sisters were 13, 12, and 9.

She and my Dad been living in the house my siblings and i just sold for six years.

i was 3 years down the horizon.

According to my sisters she was kind of strict sometimes but could be pretty cool at times too.

unbeknownst to her, she had 26 years left to live. 		041004
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idiocy personified she was in precollege like me in science like me and maybe planning to save the world one day (but i don't know)and about to go to university in two years and then get a degree in science in four and then married in five and have me in seven and get divorced in seventeen and...

adding the spaces of time, sixteen's not that young anymore 		041004
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