Sitting here in the almost dark of the living room, with an almost empty bottle of red wine, eyes still puffy from the drive home in which I could have cried myself to sleep--i wonder how I ended up in this place in my life. I don't mean Texas. I don't mean some tiny northern town that no one know about or really cares about except for the weekend once a year where some half-famous bands decide to play and then leave. I mean this moment in my life where I wonder how I let go of the only dream that ever mattered to me.
When I was younger, when we were all younger, our teachers used to ask us what we wanted to be when we grew up. While every one else in my class, and probably in your classes as well, said things like "fireman" "princess" "doctor" "pilot" I, in my naievity maybe, thought simply "mother...wife." But instead of saying that outloud, because even then, despite my optimisim of youth, I knew that was a silly thing to aspire to be. I knew what they wanted to hear, not really caring what I actually wanted to be. So I told them I wanted to be a vet, because I liked animals (still do). I took that idea and I ran with it. While everyone understood the game we were playing, I learned that day, that teacher really only want to hear what they want to hear. anything that deviates, does not compute. That goes for the smallest different way to come up with the answer 4 (2+2 or 3+1 or 236-232) to ten page essays on the current leader of Egypt. Every teacher through maybe your junior year of College (and possibly longer if you really try) only expects you to regurgitate what they told you in class.
I never expected that relationships would be a lot harder.
Growing up with a father in the military, you learn one simple rule; in life, you have no choice in anything you do. You go where the army tells you to go. You eat what your parents put in front of you. You go to school, you go to college. You jump when they say jump.
So tell me why, after 24 years of following orders, do they suddenly expect you to know how to handle being an adult. You get so used to someone else telling you want to do, that you don't know how to be on your own.
But here I am, in the almost dark, with a cat for company, expected to navigate the world and have learned something from the constant pressure of "doing as your told" in all aspects of life. Even when the person doing the telling isn't explicitly "telling" you, but in their actions (go back to the school analogy, you think I learned to tell teachers what they want to hear because they said "hey, repeat that thing i said five seconds ago"? no, because kids that deviate from the status quo get criticized.)
I write this, not to be mean. Not to gain sympathy for the way I grew up or to try and change any of that.
But to try to make sense of the way that I see the world now.
After my parents got divorced, my father remarried and my mother fights her own inner demons alone with only my brother who is trying to make his own way in the world to help her. And I have a cat. As I try to figure out how that young girl who only wanted to make some young boy happy and devote her life to giving her children everything that she didn't have...
How did she end up never even having a boyfriend? never going out on a date? Never finding someone who wanted to be around her for more than two weeks before they disappeared.
Only to suddenly pop up back in her life as if three years hadn't passed. As if all the tears she cried upon their leaving her hadn't been shed.
how did she end up in a almost dark living room in a 450 square foot apartment with only a cat and the sound of the running water from her cats water dish.
janainaart
izzy806
pixelskylines
gummygunk
germansingergirl
dailybridgerton
