The cleaning/organizing bug hits Tony and me at the same time. He is working on the guest bathroom. He walks into where I am reading old journals, with a big box of blow dryers and attachments.
"Blow dryers are essential. Keep them." He glumly exits. He would rather I say, "Toss." or "Give to charity."
How do you measure your personal junk against the needs of others?
I must ask the same thing of the journal writings I find. Can they be made sense of? Do they hurt? Who was I? Just as I weigh the events in an old novella of Leo Tolstoy, I must weigh the events of my life. Are they still relevant? Just as I find the human frailties and moral conundrums the same in 1800s Russia with 2026 America, I find the questions, mistake, and triumphs I made thirty years ago, are still relevant--with an addendum.
The following piece isn't dated but it had to take place in the late 1990s.
My daughter is climbing the adjustable ladder of teenage emotion. Any faux pas on my part sends her into tirades of hate. When she overreacts, I overreact and then I start banning privileges. I threaten her with phrases that read straight from the Mother's Horror Comic Strip.
I say to her "It's hard to want to do things for someone who is so mean." This is a subtle but indirect threat that really means I'm thinking of not taking her to rent skis for her Saturday ski day. Of course I really will, but this threat has served its purpose; her angered is tempered.
I have a long internal chat with my self as the day wears on. I try to imagine cutting off all her privileges and justifying it too. That phrase keeps running through my mind, "It's just so hard to do things for someone who isn't very nice.
And then, it hits me like the revelation of a who-done-it at novel's end: I am not very nice.
This battle of wills I am participating in as a not so nice player isn't working.
I vow to treat her nicer and pick up her skis and ask what time I need to pick her up. She softens and I soften and once again we are friends.
It's a shame there is so much to learn as a mother while being a mother. It's like being thrown into the game without lessons or practice on how to hit a tennis ball, and being expected to win the match.
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