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But when I try to picture this as more than a daydream, it just doesn't compute. My mother and I don't Talk. Fact of life. My dad and I? Sure, we Talk. Over lunch, and maybe it's not a real Talk, but it's more than a talk, and he's up on what's going on in my life. I can't do that with my mother. And I don't really know why.
Actually, I do know why. It's because I'm twenty now, and grown/growing up, and when you're grown up that means your parents aren't automatically gonna be close to you, you'be to work on maintaining a good relatioship with them, and if I worked on it, I could become friends with my mother.
Except. I don't think I really want to. I don't think my mother is the sort of person I could/want to be friends with. I don't think we can connect. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's the complete difference in our basic needs and dreams; she's always wanted kids and a job she liked, while I want a job I don't hate that pays enough to get me all the toys I want, I don't want kids, and I think writing is more important (to me) than most everything else in my life. But I have that difference with my dad, too, and we connect. I don't know. Maybe it's knowing that at 16, she was a writer, and now she's not anymore, and the fear I'll end up like that.
I do know what the last straw was, though. What made me realise we're never gonna have that ideal mother-daughter relationship. Her attitude towards my lesbianism. Conversation:
Me: "Bla bla bla and I just don't like men like that."And I know she's probably got a point, and it's not like she's condemning me or anything, and I'm sure she does actually accept that I'm gay, it's just that she says things like that and then doesn't understand why I'm hurt, says I'm overreacting when I tell her that things like that make me feel like she's denying my sexual/romantic orientation.
Mother: (immediately) "You can't be sure of that."
For fuck's sake, I talked more and easier about my dykeness with Nat's mom than with my own. And sure, that was partly the fact that she's a relative stranger, but also and mostly the fact that she accepted that I'm gay the way she accepted that I'm Belgian: as a simple fact. I say I'm gay, therefore I am gay. No second-guessing, no questioning my motives or reasons. Just acceptance.
And that's what I really want from my mother, and that's what I don't think I'll ever get. My mother is good at critique. My clothes, my body, my lovers, my life, everything about me she's criticised. And no matter how self-assured I am, no matter how self-confident, every time she says something negative about me, it stings. And no matter how much I try not to, it still affects me.
Family. Fucks you up for life.
Meh.