I was supposed to go the big family thing in South Texas this past weekend. I went…..kinda. I got there around 4 pm Friday and was back on the road racing back home to the Texas Hill Country by 4:30 early Saturday morning. When I got to party central it was so hot. Then we all went to this one restaurant/ bar with a party room where it was even hotter.
Now, I hadn’t really been to any kind of family event in seven years so this was my first time seeing my cousins looking seven years older. Or them seeing me about to lick ny medcade. Lots can happen In seven years. Everyone got old & fat or thin frail,and knocking on Death’s door. These people used to be funny, quick witted, sharp as tax’s and now they were just standing around looking and behaving way too much like my mother’s former rest home residents.
I didn’t feel good…that was undeniable, but to see my cousins look that way and act that way, made me feel this way and I had to leave because of it. I look the same to them I’m sure and Zimbabwean no longer the comedy writer of yore. Plus, It might have been too soon after my mother’s death for me to be there. Oddly enough, at home, I rarely think about mother, much less cry over her. In my hometown, I was a blithering idiot. People approached gingerly, offering the tender one arm hug and ask in that soft way, ‘are you doing ok?”
Uh, no. No I’m not.
So, I scooped up the pancake batter that was my melting body and said no to what ever grease combination dinner would have been went back to the hotel, where it was colder with a functioning shower and like the liquid terminator of the Second movie in the series, I went right back in shape of broke does gray haired me. I couldn’t get into the hotel room fast enough. It was a have with Freon. I. turned the A/C to 66°, slept a little then thought a lot about why I was here, why my sister felt the need to hold this party for mother and her siblings, especially after all that didn’t happen during the time of my mother’s illness and subsequent death , I understood the psychology that was at play here.
Her homage to her mother….to my mother, would have to go on without me. I told her I was leaving. (She was up that early) and she had nothing to say but ‘safe travels”. I’m sure my absence made it easier for her in a lot of ways. That’s fine, it really is. . If my leaving her planned event pleased her and ensured it would produce Kathy only accolades, and if leaving early would keep me from my dying of heat exhaustion in a small town hospital, then yeah…I did the right thing, I left. It was the right thing to do on a multitude of levels.
We all need our mother’s approval…and we still want it, even if we never got it in life. But getting an attagirl from the grave? Ain’t NEVER, ever gonna happen. My sister needs to believe in herself and realize like Dorothy via the Ruby Slippers , she had the power to go home the entire time, well my sister has always had the ability to believe in herself and exert fierce self-confidence, but she was never shown the release valves…..on purpose, I’m afraid.
So sad.
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