Despertar

pathos, bathos and hubris

I feel like this journal is turning into a one-thing-all-the-time journal. You know how some people only write about how much they love Jesus, or only write about why they've decided to stay with their unemployed, abusive boyfriend, or only write about how much they hate work, or only write about their awesome adventures in scrapbooking? Yeah, I hate those journals, so I apologize that all I ever talk about, lately, is how badly I wish I could just find a boyfriend and have ten babies instead of graduating and getting a good job.

However, "Invalid Entry"  practically begs me to spend a few last paragraphs whining about just that, so I'm going to, but I promise, this is the last time I'm going to digress into this particular source of angst.

I think. Probably not. But anyway.

*

My mom is goddamn perfect, which sucks. She's everything all at once, and I am perpetually envious of her. There are things I do better than she does, I guess. She is always telling me I'm smarter than she ever was, and I do have more fluid intelligence, but she's definitely smarter than most, and smart enough to be successful in a career/balance a checkbook/make common-sense choices that don't land her in ridiculous scrapes all the time, unlike someone we know.

She is gorgeous. She is independent. She is homeostatic. Other people's bad moods don't dampen her spirits. She likes to talk and listen and laugh and dance and make things better for other people. Now that she's in her fifties, she has learned how to really stand up for herself when she is wronged, which has done wonders for her relationships with her friends, family, coworkers and strangers on the street.

She sort of hates her job, but she hates it good-naturedly, i.e., instead of just hating it and grousing about it, she finds ways to make it more enjoyable for herself. She's got tons of office friends and they have happy hours together, big dinners to celebrate promotions and retirements. They laugh and chatter in the breakrooms. She found a way, rather forcefully from what I hear, to pretty much yank her organization's diversity initiative so that it fell under her umbrella of responsibility, because it's something she cares about and she wanted to be in charge of it. She gets to go to conferences for Hispanics and Native Americans and women and transsexuals, and she comes back with great stories.

She is the most dedicated, most tireless mother of any mother I have ever known, ever. She put incredible hours into cultivating my brother and me. She was totally impassive about choosing what she thought were the best schools for us at every level, she shelled out ridiculous fees for piano lessons and pottery lessons and dance lessons and basketball seasons, she took us to museums, she took us to church, she bought us Raffi records. She spent her lunch hours driving back and forth from home to schoool to bring me projects I'd left on my desk by mistake. She didn't turn into a zombie when her father died of emphysema. She has yet to drop the Santa pretense, and Santa has always been fabulous to us both.

She is pretty much the only person I can call at any time of the day or night, talk about anything, however small, and hang up with greater clarity about it. She forgives me when I fuck up. Her hope is that I grow up to emulate her, with minor adjustments for my interests and career path.

She doesn't cook thaaaat well, but that's pretty much her only shortcoming. How the fuck am I ever supposed to emulate that?

*

See, the thing is, she only took one year off work, when we were five and two, and she didn't even completely take off, she taught college math classes for a few hours a day, during which we were in the care of African babysitters (of which we had many, throughout our childhood). She dressed me in the mornings and put me to bed in the evenings, she did the same for Chad, so all she really missed was lunchtime. We both learned to read and recognize colors and speak little scraps of Spanish and French, we knew the sound of her voice, we were happy during the day and happy at night, when we heard her keys jingling in the doorknob. She always answered her work phone in case the sitters called on our behalf, and she called home every afternoon to say hi.

All that is to say, part of me sort of cries bullshit when I hear it argued that you have to choose between your children and your outside career. My mother has put in twenty-something years advancing through the ranks at Verizon, and I never for a second dreamed that I wasn't the center of her world. Around twelve, I started to understand that her life had many faces, but I didn't feel affronted by that, I never worried that if I really needed something, she wouldn't be there to provide it.

That's why I'm not totally comfortable with the Jameses of the world--

*

Oh, Jesus. I just remembered I didn't even write about James.

James is thirty-eight. I met James at a club and gave him my number so he would leave me alone. (I know, I know. Shut up.) James called me approximately ten thousand times over the next two weeks in search of a dinner date. I FINALLY agreed to go out with him the Friday before spring break, mostly because I was bummed about Justin and looking for a distraction.

That was stupid. The two things I remembered about James from our brief club interaction were that he (1) talked about himself too much, and (2) didn't offer to buy me a drink (not that he was under any obligation to buy me a drink, but, you know, club protocol, and it would have been the perfect way to back up his otherwise unfounded contention that he was so ridiculously rich). Why would I want to go to dinner with a narcissist unwilling to lend credibility to his interest in me?

So we went out. He chose the restaurant, Mexican, without asking me what kind of food I like (which, had he asked, I would have said please pick ANYTHING but Mexican). He was forty-five minutes late (I would have left, but he texted me every five minutes to update me with the details of his lateness--first he was showering, then stuck in traffic, then parking, then helping a stranger parallel park). He took three shots of tequila before I even started on my mojito. He talked about himself unendingly. He STILL didn't tell me how old he is. (I know he's thirty-eight because he told Imani while I was in the bathroom at the club, but he has not yet disclosed that information to me, even though I told him I was twenty-three. I think that's a little deceptive, no? A fifteen-year age gap is a detail worth putting forth for consideration. I think.) He ate twice as much as I did, his dish was more expensive than mine, he drank five drinks to my one. Still, when the check came, he didn't even reach for it, and IMMEDIATELY took me up on my token offer to "split" it.

Plus, he's thirty-eight, trying to woo a twenty-three-year-old. His whole reason for being attracted to me was that, in his words, he really likes women who are "smart and slim," because he wants children, and he doesn't want a fat postpartum wife. When he first started hitting on me, he claimed he had never met anyone who interested him as much as I did (bullshit), and after our first conversation, he claimed he had never been more desirous of a second conversation (bullshit). I think that's bullshit, but for the sake of argument, if he's being serious, and not just running game, that basically means he spent fifteen years being a Justin, too full of himself to appreciate one individual woman, too full of wild oats to settle down, and now he's thirty-eight and starting to look it, feel it, hoping he doesn't wind up forty-five with no kids, so he's hitting on twenty-three-year-olds. UGH.

Juxtaposed with the Justin problem, this is very frustrating.

*

--reminding me, constantly, that they would take care of me, let me live out my domestic dreams, if only I would let them. It's bullshit in his case, because he won't even buy me a four-dollar drink without being asked, but I've heard it before.

It's not that I don't want a career, because I do. I think I would be immensely bored without one. I know caring for a household and a couple of little kids is a huge job, but it seems largely repetitive, too, and I hate being busy AND bored. Plus, kids grow up, and you hear no end of empty-nest laments, I have nothing to do now, I call my kids every five minutes, I had to take up knitting just to fill the hours I used to spend playing Candyland and cooking fishsticks. My mom cried when I left for college, she cried again when my brother left for college, but she didn't miss a beat, she never felt miserable and useless, because she's got a million things to do all the time, anyway.

It's just a hard thing. I just resent the implication that either thing should come before the other, or that I have to choose, or that it isn't my choice at all.

I want a baby right now. I know I'm not ready for one. I want to be established in a career right now, but I'm not ready for that either. I guess I can feel relatively certain that I'll have both, someday. I can't stand the waiting.

*

This has been the most poorly written, incoherent entry ever. I was really hopped up on coffee in the middle.