Regressing

[poliphilo]

My parents were gardeners. I'm not. They made me not be a gardener by coercing me into weeding flowerbeds when I'd much rather have been reading books. What a futile waste of a weekend, I thought, fighting a war against Nature you're never going to win- and my sense of injury produced a kind of sentimental identification with the weeds I was uprooting.  (In the same spirit I once ripped a mole trap out of my grandparents lawn and chucked it in the shrubbery.)  My mother went out yesterday with her walker and started pulling weeds and I felt shamed into joining in. It made me angry with both of us.  Also she spotted the rabbit hole near the house that I've been keeping from her and wished a fox on it. Why? What harm do the rabbits do? Nibble a few leaves that's all. She's just down on them for being wild and out of order. Same thing with the hawthorn by the front gate she wants Matthew to chop down- a proposal that makes my heart ache. Weeds, rabbits, hawthorns- they're what I love about being here.

I mostly manage to hide it, but living like this in my mother's house, I keep turning back into a furious child.

Comments

[wyrmwwd.livejournal.com]

I have the cutest little dragon tattoo that sits on my forearm and wraps his tail around my wrist. I got it for my 36th birthday. One of the women that I used to work with loved it so much that she got a similar one tattooed on one of her breasts. She wasn't brave enough to have it somewhere that really showed, but she really loved it.

Several years later, she had to go to the opposite side of the country to take care of her aging mom. Within about 4 hours, my friend... then in her 40s, regressed to a petulant 5 year old and suddenly lifted up her shirt and yelled "Oh yeah? Well, look what I DID!"

She and I laughed and laughed about it, but it is amazing what a mother can do to us.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Undignified isn't it! :)