You know how you walk into a battle you really don’t wanna be in, knowing it is gonna come but praying it doesn’t.You just would rather… not.
Seriously.
Yeah. That was my morning.
I’m writing this at 8:06 a.m., willing God to just make my day go on a up swing from here. I don’t want to argue and be ganged up on about my coat and wardrobe, or rather lack there of.
My mom and I have a very yin and yang existence. My mother is the smooth sophisticate. Hustler in her core, diva, glam squad, girly person.(note my girl at work just brought me a fruit juice from the soda machine saying ‘you looked like you needed it this morning.’ I like my friends)
I am not- I don’t own more than a quarter closet worth of clothing that I actually wear. I am not glam by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve never learned how to even apply makeup. So lipstick is the existent of my makeup bag. So logic would dictate that I don’t wear it, makeup that is. I can’t braid hair, and suck with curling irons. My kid wears pony tails cause I can do a pony tail.
My sister has always been the one. I know this, and I’m okay with that, cause she really is. She is the business person – the club goer, the one who dressed most like my mom, a whiz with the curling irons, shoot most like the traditional “girl stereotype” although my sister is so much more than any stereotype.
Me, I am most comfortable in a pair of well worn well fitting jeans and a nifty t-shirt, typically something with a smart arse line on it. Typically ones that make grown up roll their eyes are best. I liked my black boot. I like interesting sweaters (which is why I wanted to learn to knit). I like head wraps, I do. Go figure. But I actually do. But my jeans are too worn in ‘special places’ and my boots don’t fit feet grown bigger with each child birth. Who told God that would be a good idea anyway? But If I can’t rock what I really like to wear what ever I HAVE to wear is fine with me. Sweats and t-shirts from company giveaways? Fine. I do what I gotta do. My job is in the equivilent of a basement. So nobody cares, the people here don’t even speak to me – outside of a select few and the middle aged black women who take it upon them selves to mom me on occasion.
I am feeling frustrated and picked on because in the four hours since I stared this post my mother has called my aunt to get her (my aunt) to get my husband to go shopping for me with her. (my co-worker is insisting I let her take me for Orange Juice. I like juice when I am mad. I like my friends)
So now I am feeling picked on, unheard, glossed over and unseen. I feel like high school all over again, and will probably now have to face another holiday of people buying me things to make me look like they want me to look, and trying to appear grateful for the mild well intentioned slight (you hope it is well intended) , rather than letting me look like me. Just. Be. Me. I’m not one of those people who say if you don’t like my shirt buy me a new one.. my family are the type- they will. I’m the type if you don’t like – don’t like it to your self. So now I feel powerless when all I want to do is SCREAM my frustration but I am stuck in this…place… that I just don’t want to be in cause it just SUCKS MY SOUL DRY some days, and this the fourth Monday of my week, is Sahara dry. Its dark and dank and dingy and does not facilitate not throwing my PC across the room. (and now I am talking to my sister who says ‘Right!’ and ‘I totally get that!’ in all the right places) and while just writing that sentence makes me almost choke on tears while my techs are wondering what the hell is wrong with this emotional arse chick on my phone and why can’t she just tell me what my assignments are so I can do my job?!?!
I’ve had this ‘discussion’ too many times this week. I just don’t want to deal with this. At. All.
I am not rambling for pity internets. I don’t want one comment saying everything will be okay. I am screaming here because it is the only place that I can. It is the only place that I can. If you offer pity then you take this away from me too, and I will block your email.
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Scream away! Sometimes we just need to vent and get it out without hearing all the “it’s okay” lines. So go for it! And I hope it makes you feel at least a wee bit better.
You know, this might be a twisted around way of loving on you for your mom. Maybe she thinks that with two kids under five in the house and a full-time job, you’ve been forgetting to take care of herself. Maybe this is her way of trying to help out.
I know with my mom, criticisms and guilt trips are just like normal mother-daughter communication for her. Like, she thinks she is giving me loving advice, but it comes out as criticism, and I have begun to think that she doesn’t even hear it the way she says it. She doesn’t even realize how harsh or insulting some of the things she says to me sound.
I know my mom feels really bad about not being nearby to see her grandchild. But the way she shows feeling really bad about this is to constantly criticize my parenting choices. Choices she doesn’t even have a context to understand, mind you, given she’s not here to see me actually parent. In fact, sometimes she makes up things that she THINKS I’m doing and criticizes me for doing them even though I’ve never actually done them.
But I don’t think she is trying to be mean, really. She is just trying, very ineffectively, to be HERE. Which she can’t.
Anyway, I like the way you dress. And I think you’re lucky that your skin is so nice you don’t NEED makeup.
(Then again, I am sure Stacy and Clinton from What Not to Wear are coming to kidnap me any day now, so I may not be the best source of fashion advice.)
Okay, I meant YOURSELF not herself in that first paragraph. Heh.
There aren’t too many relationships that are more complicated that a mother/daughter one.
I can identify in that my mom would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE for me to come back to the Catholic faith and have “the boy” baptized. She’d LOVE for me to show up in church each week and do all of that stuff. And It. Ain’t. Ever. Gonna. Happen.
Makes me feel like she’ll never accept me or see the good in me because she’s so hung up on the religion thing. So no pity er nothing. Just saying, I hear you loud in clear with the whole mom trying to “help you” thing.
I totally get this post. Though mine isn’t about dress but about interior decorating (or my lack there of.)
I get the ‘fit into my mold’ thing. My family doesn’t get who I am, and I’m mostly over it on most days.
So, I’d rather they don’t get me anything or just get me money or gift certificates. They still question the books I might buy or the games I play. Pfft. let them.
Raquita 2008, nuff said.
I LOVE You and YOU are my 1st, my artist in every way THAT I AM NOT, I prayed that you would be comfortable with yourself and not imitate others. and when I said I was sorry I meant it even though it didn’t help. Thanks JALIETHA YOU GOT IT! AND YOU STILL DESERVE A COAT not a diva coat not a glam coat not make up JUST A COAT FOR YOURSELF TO KEEP WARM
Whenever my mother criticized my dress, because I am nothing if not ornery, I’d try my best to look even MORE appalling.
It’s weird; how we girls can handle advice or criticism but just bristle when it comes from our moms.