My Mother

My mother is the most wonderful, bewildering, exasperating, terrifying woman I know. I'm torn between a fervent desire to grow up to be half the woman she is, and a bone-deep fear of possessing all her strange quirks and maladies.

We look almost the same, if it weren't for my colouring, but most of our similarities end there. I'm devoutly liberal, and my mother has all the political awareness of a cucumber. I've loved music since day one, and everything from jazz to punk, to opera and back again is on my playlist, whereas my mother can't pick out a baseline to save her life. I like verbal humor littered with socio-historical and pop-culture references, and my mother likes Mr. Bean. She wanted my to be a punked-out lesbian, I ended up a straight-laced heterosexual.

We do share a few things in common though. We both get cranky as hell if we aren't fed, and neither of us has anything remotely resembling a healthy lifestyle. Diet is a four letter word, and exercise is for other people. We have managed to avoid both heart attacks and obesity through what seems to be sheer will-power alone. We like people with no qualms about saying what they feel, and as such get along better with the bitches of this world more than is probably entirely healthy. Family comes first in the list of people you take care of, and no matter how tough it gets, you had better come last.

There is one thing that terrifies me, and I know I get it from my mother.

I'm not fragile, it's true. My fracture lines are in hard to reach places, and they know that the world is a battlefield, and that the best way to protect yourself is never to let anyone see you. It's cost me more friends and loved ones than I'd like. But this armor is like a badge to my mother, and it fills her with so much pride to see that her baby girl grew up strong, that I don't know how to tell her that I'm not sure this is real strength.

That said, I've never told her, along with a lot of things, that though I don't fall in love half as easily as I'd like, but I've spent whole nights pulling petals of "he loves me, he loves me not", trembling in anticipation and fear, hanging bunches of forget-me-nots like talisman against heart-break, and falling asleep worried that I don't know how to properly show how I feel about them.

I'll fight to the death for the people I love, but I don't know how to fight to keep them. I don't know how to get up in their faces and say, "Hey! I'm worth staying for!" I don't know how to convince them to stay, because I'm not entirely certain that there is anything to stay for.

In this, my mother and I are so alike, it's frightening.