Happy Mother's Day!

PostSecret's Sunday Secrets were all about moms today....some were hilarious, some touching, some downright CRABBY! It made me think on why girls' relationships with their mothers are always so volatile...hot and cold...passionate, pissy, precious.

Is it because females are pretty much always a little catty around each other? I don't mean every second of every day, I just mean that I've certainly never had a relationship with another female where it's 100% happy and sunshiney every time we're around one another. Why are we inherently so...competitive? So embittered? And then the next minute/day/week, feel like that very same woman is the most fantastic creature to walk the face of the Earth?

As much as I'd love to think my mother and I got along our entire lives together when I look at the moon and wish her good-night, that simply wasn't the case. Here's a highlight:

When I was in...I don't know, 5th grade? I was living downstairs in what became Joe's room, and is now Gilbert's staging area. I was a SLOB. A slobby slobby slob. My room was a freakin' WRECK. I was probably officially supposed to clean it once a week or so, but I never did, and at that point, my parents didn't have a system in place for chores. One day, probably disgusted by the mess COMPLETELY COVERING my carpet, Mom and Dad gave me the bad news: I had until a certain time to completely clean my room, or Mom would come in with a garbage bag and throw out everything left on the floor. They gave me plenty of time; probably 2-3 hours to get everything done.

Did I mention that, along with the slobbiness, I was also an INSANE procrastinator, even then? I swear, my last name should have been "Dawdle" instead of "Dawson."

Anyway, so that day, I took a gander around the mess....decided it wouldn't take more than a few minutes, and commenced dilly-dallying. Read some Sweet Valley Twins...listened to Huey Lewis and the News' "Fore!" on my bitchin' record player...probably called Alena to ask what we should wear on Monday...you know, your basic 10-year-old Dream Afternoon. Then, with about seven minutes left in my Window of Clean-Up Time, I figured it was about time to start.

After five minutes, I realized I might not have left myself enough time.

I raced around the room, throwing things haphazardly onto my shelf system, shoving acid-washed denim into drawers, etc.

At exactly the deadline, Mom came in, armed with a black garbage bag. Without a word, she started tossing things left on the floor into the bag. My 3-D plastic red apple plastic puzzle I got at the last Children's House garage sale (it was a totally hard puzzle, believe me)...NUMBER TEN in the Sweet Valley Twins series...how would I LIVE without these things?!!

I could NOT believe she would DO THIS TO ME! They actually kept their threatening promise?!! They'd never been this harsh before! I figured...what did I figure? That they'd forget to follow through? That if I cried and begged enough, she would stop? Maybe so, because I cried and begged and grabbed stuff right out of her hands and tugged at the bag, etc., etc., generally being very obnoxious and bratty. She demanded I leave the room, but I stayed rooted to the spot, yelling and crying....eventually she somehow got me out the door, but I pushed the door open and would NOT let her complete the job. She finally shut the door, not seeing that my fingers were clinging to the jamb, and I HOWLED. I needed to make her feel TERRIBLE! And it totally didn't even hurt...she didn't slam the door, she just shut it, and it only pushed my fingers out of the way. But I figured if she *thought* she'd just slammed my fingers in the door, I could rescue my things. My precious, valuable things.

It didn't work. I vowed I would not speak to either of my parents, but especially Mom, for the Rest Of My Life. They would Completely regret this.


I'm not sure my vow lasted much longer than dinner that night.

That was kind of silly...other, later stories are a little more serious and squirm-inducing, and I look pretty crappy in them, (even more than in this one...but that's excused, cuz I was ten) so I won't relay them now. But I do wonder if daughters *always* have such a stormy relationship with their moms, or if most other women live a "Gilmore-Girls"-like existence, where, when asked to name their best friend, they smile and say "My mother. Truly." Or, is that really just fiction?

I don't mean to say Mom and I always butted heads, at all. We had wonderful chats almost every day I lived in New York...her packages and calls brought me to tears (happy ones, I-miss-home ones) throughout my semester in London...I always felt special and loved whenever she'd make an effort to visit me at Grinnell, or in the public library, or call to have lunch together at Main Squeeze. And I like to think that if she were here for all the wedding stuff, we'd be perfectly lovely together and stress-free, popping into a coffee shop in between trying on dresses downtown, then laughing as we dashed through the rain to My Secret Garden, taking a mosey through the gardens to decide on a perfect place for the ceremony, having a girly lunch with Lily after our Dawson-Women mani-pedis, etc.

But I bet be would have driven each other a little crazy, too. :)


I love you, my sweet mama! We'll be toasting you tonight. You take care...