Life and Times of AlieMalie

I’ve always had animals growing up and now into adulthood – if you look really, really hard I’m sure you can turn up a couple of photos here and there of the two warm bodies that share my bed at the moment. But this story isn’t about Norton or Fernie, it’s about Tumbleweed.

Tumbleweed was one of the first cats my family had when I was growing up, at least that I remember, and we had him up until and past the time that my parents got divorced so he and I share a lot of stories together. Anyway, we’ve already determined that I was a holy terror growing up; what with murdering my goldfish, waffling my hand, falling off the third floor of my grandparents’ house – oh wait, I haven’t told y’all that story yet, have I? Oh well, tune in next week.

Well, being an only child, my partners in crime were usually my pets. Or maybe I just assumed I had partners in crime and they steered clear of me and I just implicated them – probably the latter, seeing that I used to explain to my mother that of course I could pull the cat’s tail, it was a handle. DUH!

Anyway, one afternoon I was left to my own devices – again, even after the goldfish incident – and decided that I would get creative. This requires a bit of history though. Whenever my mother would paint her nails she’d always paint mine too since I was a total girly-girl and had to have my nails super pink – I’ve gotten over that now, and only paint my toenails – but anyway, I knew what the nail polish was for, what the nail polish remover did, and best of all? I KNEW WHERE IT WAS KEPT. Dude, don’t ever try to hide anything from me, because I WILL FIND IT. ALWAYS. So I decided this one afternoon that I was going to paint my own nails since my mother was busy at her desk doing paperwork of some sort.

Harmless enough, right? I’d probably just get it all over myself and make a mess of the bathroom, right? Mhmm. And I did. Except I got just a teensy-weensy bit carried away. After I was finished painting my nails I decided that I could add a bit of colour to the walls of the bathroom too; after all, what was with the boring silver and gold theme we had going on? We needed some red. Yep. And how about some pink, maybe some of my glitter polishes too? C’est parfait!

Now what you need to know about the walls in the bathroom is that they were wallpapered with that atrocious foil paper of yonder years and had a print on them. It was a silver base with a gold print. Not. too. cool. Blech. So really, I did my parents a favour, right? I redecorated. And trust me, my decorating skills came in handy when my mother bought a house after her divorce and I got to redo the kitchen. No really, I did, and it looks marvelous to this day. But anyway, back to the story. I was soooooo proud of myself. And then it hit me: mother would not be so kind in her critique of my latest masterpiece. Nope. Not at all. Oh, what to do, what to do?

Enter stage right: the nail polish remover. Ahh yes, the nail polish remover would help with this little situation. So I got it out, applied it to the cotton balls I’d also gotten into and started to remove my art from the walls like the good little child I was, I would clean up my own mess.

Mhmm.

Except the gold print came right off with it.

“Fuck.”

Well, not really. I mean, I didn’t say, “Fuck.” But rest assured that whatever equivalent goes through a 3 year old’s brain went through mine. I was screwed. The evidence that I’d painted the walls was missing – right along with the wallpaper. Catch-22 situation. I’d made a mess, cleaned it up, but there was still proof of my mess. Hmm. This was an even bigger quandry.

Enter stage left: Tumbleweed; our big, black, hunk of a cat who weighed in at 18 pounds. And then it hit me: of course, I, ever the wonderful, behaving, beautiful, never-get-into-any-trouble-child would never do such a thing as paint the bathroom walls with mother’s nail polish, of course not. Tumbleweed did.

So I marched into the next room over where my mother was still doing whatever and solemnly explained to her that, “Mommmmm? Tumbleweed got into the nail polish and painted the walls. I told him not to but he wouldn’t listen.” Mhmm. Riiiiiight, that went over real well. I was told to find the cat and inform him that if he ever decided to do that again he would get spanked.

You’d think I’d learn my lesson though, right? Nope. I blamed him constantly. What else was I supposed to do? I didn’t have any other partners in crime.

Tune in next week for the next edition of Monday Stories: Losing the Dare

My fur-children came home yesterday after spending a good portion of the summer at my mother’s … it’s so nice to have them back, even if all Fernie does is sit in my lap and suck her paws when I’m writing. hehe.

Sorry to keep harping on this one topic, it’s just been bothering me for quite some time and each time I think I have it put behind me … well … this is what happens:

I honestly don’t know why I continually set myself up with certain people, namely my mother. I know I’m not perfect and I’ve never claimed to be, but I try to be honest and I do my best to follow through with what it is that I say I’m going to do. I won’t blatantly lie to your face, I won’t deny I said something, if there’s something in my past that I’m not terribly comfortable with, I might not tell you right away, but if it’s pertinent to conversation, I’ll offer it up. I won’t tell you one thing and mean another, I won’t say I’m going to do X and then do Y. My mother on the other hand thinks it’s perfectly ok to tell you what you want to hear and then deny she ever said it. I suppose it makes her feel good. She’ll also lie about what she’s doing – which as we know from previous posts, I cannot stand a liar.

Apparently my mother isn’t on this same page as I am about thinking about what comes out of your mouth.

Anyway, I know why I’m struggling with this at the moment: the one person in the world whom I held up on a pedestal for so long is now not so worthy of that pedestal. Is 23 too late to realise that your mother is a complete child? Not perfect? Immature? Just as irresponsible as the rest of the world? Or am I just coming to this a little later than most? My relationship with her is a constant struggle, a battle at times, and I’m tired of fighting. I don’t like spending the time after I’ve seen or spoken with her being upset because there are just fragments – if that – of what I’d like to have with her relationship-wise. I’ve been struggling with this for a couple of months now but it never seems to go away, and each and every time I say I’m going to put it out of my mind, somehow it comes roaring back into center focus.

I suppose this might need a bit of background to fully understand.

When my parents separated, my father was awarded full custody of me for some insanely stupid reason that I won’t go into here, but nevertheless, I didn’t see my mother for two whole years, save one accidental run-in. When the divorce decree was finally signed and the custody hammered out, it was decided that my parents would share joint custody of me all the way around. Split the time right down the middle, medical decisions had to have consultation with the other parent, 30 days notice for leaving the state, 60 for the country … if they could have sliced me down the middle, I don’t doubt that they would have. My parents absolutely HATE each other to this day, don’t ask why they got married.

Anyhoo, after two years of not ever having seen my mother save the one time my father and I accidently ran into her in the local drug store, I was expected to just move in. The school that I ended up going to was in the area she now lived in, and since she was closer, it was decided that I would live with her during the week. Because of this, the number of days I spent at her house was more than those spent at my fathers, but he got more weekends … literally my “free hours” were split down the middle between the two. But to a kid, the place where they sleep most is the place they tend to call home. Here I was with a new parent, a new home, and I was really confused. My mother didn’t have a lot of time to spend with me because she’d wanted to stay as close to my father’s residence as comfortable for her and to keep me in the same actual school district – there are 18 in the metropolitain area that I live in, which is insanely stupid, but I’ll save THAT for another post – but in staying in the same general vicinity of my father – who got the house, another immensely stupid decision on the part of our judge* – my mother had to forgo a lot of time with me since her job was on the clear other side of town. Literally. You really couldn’t get any further and still say you worked and lived in the same city.

I ended up at home alone quite a bit of the time – I rode the bus home in 5th grade – sorry, grade 5 – and walked home in grade 6. By grade 7, my mother had bought a house in a new school district. It had been decided that since I didn’t particularly enjoy living with my father, that I would sign an affidavit when I turned 13 requesting the court to change my living arrangements; while the custody arrangement legally would stay the same – medical, travel, etc – I could choose when and where I wanted to be: if I didn’t want to go to my father’s house, I didn’t have to, same for my mother’s, though I never didn’t want to be at her house.

I’m a bit distracted here, going back to third grade when my mother finally had some influence on my life again after the long drawn out divorce. She and I never really formed a parent-child relationship. Being an only child, even when my parents were married, I was held to pretty high maturity standards, as well as behaviour – and yes, I know, this doesn’t quite go with the stories I’ve been telling, but nevertheless, you’ll have to believe me here. It was understood that if I didn’t understand something I’d ask, I was expected to partake of adult conversations if I could as well as keep myself entertained at places like the dinner table and other people’s houses without resorting to having toys or games. I was about 5 going on 20. See why maybe – just maybe – I rebelled with the goldfish and such? Mhmm. It’s all making sense, eh?

Anyway, this continued into my later childhood, if you could even call it that, and when I started living primarily with my mother, it got even worse. Ever since about the age of 8, I’ve seen myself as more of an equal to my mother in our relationship. Don’t even get me started on the issues this can cause a kid, I know pretty much all of them. And it hasn’t been an easy road. I was told what was bothering her about my father, what was bothering her about work, her friends – the whole shebang. Back then I thought it was cool, I was being treated with such maturity and got to hear about all these adult things that a fourth grader would never even think of. Not good, really. But I thought it was.

There was a catch though. This only occured in private, at home. When we were out in public, visiting friends or family it was expected of me to be the child. So, 90% of the time I’m allowed equal say in what goes on around the house, but 10% of the time you’re just going to dismiss what I say and tell me to mind my business? Mmm. No workie. More confusion ensues. I didn’t know how to act, and since my normal behaviour was to put in my two cents no matter the occasion, I usually would. This would embarass the hell out of my mother because it showed her lack of parenting skills and, in my opinion, made her look like less of a parent. She couldn’t even control her own child! So I got the smack down in public quite a bit. There’s a perfect example of this. When I was in sixth, she decided that she wanted me to be going to a school that had a better music program than the one I was at currently. In my first year of playing the violin in fifth grade I’d won the district competition. Beat each and every other music student in elementary and junior high in the district. I needed a place that would help me advance, and lucky for us, the best district in Texas for strings and full orchestra is right here in my town. So she went looking for a house. But first, she sat down with me at the dining room table and asked me what I wanted in a house. ME. A TEN/ELEVEN YEAR OLD. I was thrilled, of course, and jotted down my list of things I wanted in a house.

I bet a lot of you are out there shaking your heads at this. I am too. I still do every time I think of this. But it gets worse. I’d been given the expectation that I had an equal say in the house hunting, and even when we’d go out and actually look at certain properties, if I didn’t like it, she’d tell the realtor that we couldn’t go with this house or that one because I didn’t like it. Very strange. You see? In my eyes, I was a total equal partner in the relationship; there was no parent-child dynamic.

On some level, I can see why she operated this way. She was divorced and trying to make things work; she’d gone into her marriage with my father expecting to live out the rest of her life with a double income family, one kid. Nice life. And they were well on their way to making a go of it – but it just didn’t work. Now here she was, having to pay a boatload of lawyer’s fees, raising a child pretty much on her own – my relationship with my father is yet another post that I’ll save for later – and it was really difficult. She barely had time for her daughter, let alone a friendship or significant other. So where did she turn to for validation? The one person in the entire world who loved her completely and unconditionally: me.

In my book, my mother really could do no wrong and I had the classic my parent is my hero mentality. Unfortunately, I don’t think I realised that until I was 17 and finally considering myself an adult – again, another story – though I don’t think that my mother has ever really considered me as true adult, even as I’m setting off on my own, supporting myself, living alone for 7 years, getting ready to move away for good and make my own life. On some level I think it’s really starting to slap her in the face that she never really had a child in the sense that I had a childhood and she raised me, because to be completely honest, both she and I will tell you that I pretty much raised myself. Now here I am and she’s wishing she’d done things differently and I’m feeling the ramifications of this in her trying to treat me like a child.

Yet at the same time she’s still expecting me to act like the child she knew when I was 8, 9, 10 … and she’s telling me all her sordid little details and expecting me to have no opinion. Well, Earth to Mom, I have an opinion and I do judge things nowadays. I’m not the little girl who smiles and nods and thinks everything you do is a-ok, ’cause it’s not. I’m getting ready to be 24, I have my own life in front of me, my fuse is lit and there’s only one way to go and that’s up.

I’ll never be the little girl you wanted, and I’m sorry that things turned out differently than you expected 24 years ago when you were expecting a little bundle of joy to love and nurture to adulthood. Adulthood is here and I’ve chosen my own path. I only have a vague idea of where it’s going but there’s a distinct idea of where it’s not: down the path you chose.

* There’s a funny story that brings me fully into the picture with the moronic judge who was assigned to our case. My parents’ divorce was the first case he’d ever heard in divorce court and when my father marched into court saying that if he didn’t get custody he’d do something drastic, the fucking judge decided to award custody of me to my father just to ensure that I stayed in the state. Right … that decision wasn’t reversed for two whole years. Anyway, my first summons for jury duty were from his court. I was stoked, I could finally extract my revenge for him really fucking up a good portion of my childhood. He’s known in and around town as being a tough as nails judge who holds citizens to their civic duty to serve on juries. I don’t mind, I’d love to be picked for a jury someday – though given my background now, that’s highly unlikely – but nevertheless, I was about to go head to head with this asshole. There was also the small problem of the fact that I was mere days away from leaving for my backpacking trip through Europe, but whatever. I appeared in court that day and we got the lecture about how this is our civic duty, only people with dependents, full time students, blah blah blah could have a waiver, but the rest of us, well, we were welcome to come try him with our excuses but in his 12 years of being a judge, he’d never waived anybody. I raised my hand and went towards the bench. The asshole had some smirk on his face that I really wish I could have slapped, but anyhoo. I asked him if he remembered his first case as a judge. He said yes. I asked him if he had remembered that there was a child in the case. He said yes, a little girl. You could see him starting to put a few things together and the smirk was starting to fade. I told him that I was the little girl in that court case and what he’d done in awarding custody to my father had really messed up a significant portion of my life. I then asked him if I was expected to serve on HIS jury as there was an obvious conflict of interest because I couldn’t stand him. No questions, he just signed my waiver. wo0t! Unfortunately, I haven’t been called for jury duty since then, though I’d really like to serve someday. But I already said that.

I was picked up this afternoon to go visit a friend who’s in the hospital. After locking my house, I jumped in the car and since I wasn’t driving I threw my keys in the cupholder of the car I got picked up in because I hate having my keys in my pockets. I remember thinking that I shouldn’t do that because I was going to forget them when I got dropped off at home and I wouldn’t realise it ’til it was too late. Aaaaaaaand you know where this is going.

I left my keys in the car.

Smooooooth.

So since I live in a really old house (it was built in the 1930’s) not all of the windows lock and I’m able to open them. Obviously I’ve made it inside, now I just have to wait for my keys to be returned – but that might take a while since the other person’s phone is off since you’re not allowed to have them on in the ICU.

Now y’all get to put up with me stalking y’all on the blogs since I have nothing better to do.

It’s time for another round of what have people searched the internet for only to find my blog …