And, This Day Again.

I never have my daughter for Mothers Day-- this is by choice. Today's call was "Hi Mommy, Happy Mothers Day! I think I'm going to go to the park, ok bye, I love you!" Click.

There may have been a little more conversation than that in there, but it was all one sided attempts by me to keep her on the phone-- when she's done, she's done. She is 6 years old, she doesn't care who her mother is and she isn't supposed to. She's not supposed to spend a day celebrating the love and attention of her mother, which at her age she is legitimately entitled to entirely. She's supposed to take me 100% for granted, she's supposed to consider me someone who needs to be here all the fucking time doing exactly what she needs me to do like it's my fucking job. Because it is.

I'll save the "Tell me how much you love me" coy ego-boost fishing for falling asleep with my boyfriend (yeah, I do that shit: Sorry, boyfriend). And on Mothers day, I'll sleep in, I'll have lots and lots of sex, I'll not do my hair, I'll watch horror movies in the middle of the afternoon, and my life will be completely fucking fabulous, laid back, and responsibility free.

The bottom line is, mothers day is a family holiday and I have no family. I have no partner. My mother is dead. Mothers day doesn't particularly apply to me. It's not a happy day, it's one I would rather didn't exist. The man who got me pregnant will never show up, all 4 feel 5 inches of him, to be the big person and say "Thank you for raising our child completely alone with no help from me while I cheated on taxes to declare her and finished my schooling with no job on the returns: And now, watch me skip out while YOU'RE going to school, because shit bitch-- I got my education so thanks for going to school full time with no help from me while I move on to the next phase of my life AGAIN. Trust me, I'll profit on your losses in my refusing to co parent over and over again, because you're the best mom ever!" (and then produce for me a bottle of Chanel Mademoiselle Coco, a Sephora gift card and a promise to babysit any time I want in the next 3 months-- ah, mine is a rich fantasy world indeed). There is no flowers or cards or anything to be sent to my own mother, and I don't know that she ever really dug on those things to begin with, every year since she died is a reminder of how really bad I was at those things when I had the chance, time to reflect on how it must have felt in those last three years of sickness that mothers day came and went with no card to be found in her mailbox from South Bend, Indiana. My 6 year old isn't really going to be sitting and reflecting on how much I have or have not done for her, or what it's going to feel like to either of us thinking back on mothers day 10 years from now-- as well she shouldn't, and I would be the worlds most fucked up parent if for a split second I thought it should be that way. All and all, mothers day is about your community, and I have none. I have a child I want nothing from but her happiness (and the adorable card she made me in her first grade art class), I have no mother, I have no family. And I just want to skip mothers day, every single fucking year.

I went with a friend and his son for lunch today, and was given chocolate from a tiny candy shop in some little town near here. I am blogging while I devour the box of chocolates unceremoniously, in my pajamas. I may watch mommy dearest, I will totally not clean my apartment as I had originally planned on, and tomorrow I will have lunch with another friend of the maternal persuasion with difficult circumstances-- ones I could never begin to fully comprehend. And I'm leaving the "Mothers Day" tag off of it, and chalking everything up to "I had a very nice weekend" of whatever sort it was.

So This One Time I Was Going To Clean My Apartment And Cook Dinner For Myself

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But, then it was 12:14 and that hadn't happened, so I let it go gently and winced through a Bauhaus set played by my charming boyfriend on a late night college radio station (seriously, he has like 20 jobs) and realizing that we will never ever ever be very musically compatible.

And this leads to other thoughts that have nothing to do with the cleaning and cooking that never happened. It leads to thoughts of the past weekend, which was very exhausting and very sad for reasons I won't go into because there's this one tiny part of me that is a private person. And it leads to thoughts of how I don't know how to talk to people. I say I do, and I can talk about what's wrong with you or what's soooo wrong with me just to the degree that my favorite friends nearly have to spit swigs of cocktails back into the glass, yes. But I can't say "I am feeling this way about this, and I don't know what to do with that", ever, ever, ever.

So this event that's none of your fucking business, we'll say I burned dinner for his parents (because that would never ever happen both on account of me not wanting to meet peoples parents without a gun to my head and being a fabulous fucking cook in equal parts, and cannot be compared to anything from a wedding to a death to buying a new home to changing my major or anything in between-- thus protecting my none of your fucking business stance), it left me with unsettled feelings and doubts and fears and sadness and overwhelming sickening preoccupation with my future and what I want it to be, and so I did what any normal healthy woman would do with her feelings: I blamed my boyfriend for trivial things that have nothing to do with the matters at hand. I picked at him for things he picked up for me to eat in the middle of the night when I said I wasn't hungry earlier. I accused him of being insensitive for being sensitive in the wrong way. I decided he was a clueless privileged jerk because he let me pay for dart games and when I ran out of quarters just stopped playing without seeing who would break the tie.

I admit, this may have been unreasonable.

But in that time, all that I didn't know I wanted to talk about fell away and the time passed that I would be able to talk about it before everything had been rearranged to fit different practical molds of what I needed feelings and ideas and plans to be. And now it's hanging there, another something that is between us, because it was never something between us. Not because we're not working out, not that at all... I'm absurdly in love and he's the most wonderful man I've ever met in my life. Just because we're in a relationship, and this is what happens in them. Relationships are like any other new little existence. They start off pure and perfect and without stains of ego and pride and fear and indifference or self involvement, resentment, mistakes and misunderstandings and all of the things that make us what we are together as much as they do who we are individually.

And from then on, things have nothing left but to get more and more imperfect by the second, and I hate that. And it's just a natural progression and I know that, but still... it fucking sucks. Not that it's happening to us too, just that it has to be that way at all.

And removed from this, I am thinking of my daughter. She wants to meet my boyfriend. It's been months in the making, she knew that first weekend when there were pictures on the computer and mommy was singing a lot and giggling at text messages that something was up. Because it's my daughter, who's fucking brilliant, she specifically knew "Mommy, you have a boyfriend. Your friend Nivas is your boyfriend I think".

Yes, 6 year old, you think right.

And since then has been the pending meeting of my boyfriend. I wanted to do 6 months, but that requires a degree of removal from my daughters life that she doesn't care for. We share everything in one another's life, and for me to have this one part that is mine she understands-- but for me to have this one part that is secret and completely out of sight from her, that is where it gets personal.

Her father has her every weekend now for absurd reasons I can't get into without starting to foam at the mouth and developing facial twitches and bulging veins over, but regardless of all that, it is happening and we're in a bad way. She clings to my leg every waking second that she is still able to be at home, she begs me to just one day lets leave early and walk to school together before daddy can come, she wants to keep a calender to count the days until he leaves town so she can just be home again. And I guess that was the point... to stop fighting so hard for the right thing for them, let him bludgeon their relationship himself if he insisted and stop fighting so hard to protect him from himself even if it is for her sake and to just be there to love her as much as I can through the years as this continues on. And I am more able to hold her afloat than to change the course of his mad and erratic current, that's true, but for fucks sake. It's hard on the kid, and she knows I love someone besides her in all the world which I don't think she's ever really realized I could before, and she doesn't even know him.

And he'll be great, I know he will, and it will be fine, I know. But I don't do shit like this, not ever. If men meet my child, it's because we are friends. Dating, then meeting my child is totally against any and all of my rules as a parent. But, this isn't a passing thing we're seeing what happens with, this is an actual thing that we're both committed to good things happening with. And that's wonderful, and yes, that means that in the spring we should get his puppy and my 6 year old together for a little walk in the park or something. I know that, I do... but fuuuuck fuuuuck, fuuuuck.

This is not how mommy rolls.

Mommy doesn't even clean her apartment and make herself a nice dinner, more or less let her 6 year old meet her boyfriend, have a boyfriend, or reflect on how she has a hard time knowing how to talk about how she really feels or what's really wrong so that she can be a better girlfriend for her boyfriend because she really wants to see this work, because she's really really happy.

And icing on the cake... by the end of this blog, I've found that I like more than half of his set list-- and I may just clean to it. Oh, and there's They Might Be Giants, and I just sighed and smiled to myself and muttered "Awwww..." . I probably bit my fucking lip and twirled my fucking hair.

Who the fuck am I? Seriously.

Fuck.

Awkward Single Mother Seeks Same

As my 5 year old lives the life of every 5 year old in the last semester of Kindergarten, there is a lesson being learned in our house... that making friends is hard. Finding something nice to say, not being scared to talk to someone you don't know, not judging someone because of how they look, not being scared that you're too different, these are hard things for a girl to get her head around. Not being jealous of someone that has nicer things than you, not feeling silly because you walk to school and they go in a car, not worrying that some people look older than you or treat you like a baby... it's not easy for anyone. And by anyone, what I really mean is it's not easy for me.

And my daughter assures me it's easier to make friends after you try for a little while... but I've also seen my daughter eat her own boogers in public. Clearly I'm not trusting her judgment regarding anything socially oriented, and clearly we are up against different types of potential friendships to begin with.

And anyway, I have friends. I have amazing friends-- warm, caring, funny, smart. We all come from sorted pasts in one way or another, we get each other. They adore my daughter, and those that have children know that I adore their as well. And not unlike a 5 year old, I don't want to make friends at the school because I already have friends. Ones I know and have already gotten to know very well based on more than simply the common age of our children.

And if I'm to be really honest about the situation in all of it's immature glory, these women are fancy and married and older. Yes, that's all it boils down to. I can call it class issues or social anxiety or uncertainty of my place in a world of women that embraces a different set of family values and goals... but no, no, it's just this: I'm scared that they'll make fun of me.

I stand like an awkward shy kindergarten student outside of the tiny doors at the end of the day with my phone pressed to my ear chatting with someone or pretending to be busy with the crossword puzzle or some book that states clearly "I am not beneath you, with your husbands and your mini-vans and your tasteful and likely real Coach handbags... to the contrary, I don't talk to you because I'm wrapped up in my own intellectual world, one complex and deep and interesting, that you could never understand. It's not at all because I'm afraid you'll find out that I live in a dinky apartment down the street from your suburban homes. It's not because I'm afraid you'll ask about my ex husband and find out that her father and I were barely even romantically involved even before her birth, and that the idea of marriage was never even considered (at least not in any real seriousness by me). It has nothing to do with the fact that I'm afraid you'll discover that I have no degree that I care to use, and am going to start college again full time in the summer, and that for money I model nude for artists. No. no, it's not that. It's just that I'm deep... reeeeal deep."

It's not always easy, if I might add, trying to select a book that says that much in the 4 to 8 minutes that I am standing by the Kindergarten door of our elementary school waiting for my daughters release.

This all comes to mind because the daughter I refer to asked me tonight how grownups make friends at school. I didn't, and I don't know at all how to tell her the truth...

"Mommy isn't very good making friends with people that are different than me".