Please allow me to state for the record that I realize that there is absolutely no need for one more self absorbed stream of consciousness prattling on the Internet. Further, I realize that very few people except myself, my husband under duress and a couple of odd girlfriends are ever likely to read this thing.
Ok then, why? Why, when I could be wrapping Christmas presents, getting ready for the in-laws to come to dinner on Friday, or cleaning my sadly disastrous house, am I writing this? I think it is because sometimes you lose your anchor.
I don't have a great story to tell, I have many rather ordinary occurrences to relate, but no epic. This isn't a themed blog, I am not pregnant, or going through a divorce, or getting married; there is nothing of consequence happening in my life presently that would engender the need to document my experiences.
Perhaps it is that sameness, the lack of texture that has lead me here. Maybe if I dump all of my random anxiety (and believe me, there is plenty) on this page, I will feel again productive, useful. Maybe this blog will help me to once again lose the 20 pounds, will help me finish business school, will create direction for my marketing company. I suppose the best way to begin would be to tell you something about me:
To say that my childhood was ordinary would be an enormous disservice to those who had truly ordinary childhoods. The Peanuts characters of the world, folks who knew what the expectations of their lives where and how to live into those expectations from birth onwards. The regulars. My childhood was no like theirs. No, my childhood was anything but ordinary.
Allow me to stop here and have a moment's digression. In case you are reading on hoping for a confessatory blubber I just want you to know that you should stop here. There is no confession to make, I was not abused, misused, maltreated or subject to an sort of unusual harassment. Even, if I was, I wouldn't talk about it here. My mother's family are of English Westlyan stock and those things are best kept to one's self, worked out in solemn nights of slurping vodka martinis, or by obsessive productivity, but never by discussing them. I only mention this out of politeness, I don't want you to continue to read and then to be disappointed.
The sheer unordinariness of my childhood came in the form of two rather ordinary looking people, Mom and Dad. Yes, I have siblings and cousins and nieces and nephews and I will get into all of them at some other time, but I have to take a moment with Mom and Dad. Dad is younger than Mom, by quite a bit. I always loved this little piece of scandal when I was younger, never realizing how unscandalous the whole thing really was.
I am fourth of four, the youngest by 15 years and that should tell you all you need to know about me and most things you need to know about my family. Mom owned a type setting business Dad owns a print shop. He was a customer, he liked her, he started hanging around, and Mom said she married him to give a veneer of respectability to the fact that he refused to leave.
So here I was a small, red bundle of joy. I ran before I walked and was conversant at two. And I was weird. A painfully weird child. I preferred the company of adults, having been around them more than my so called peers, and as a result I was competitive at Trivial Pursuit at 8. My parents loved in, in that obsessive, indulgent way of all good parents, and like all kids from happy homes, I liked them and wanted them to like me.
Wanting them to like me is probably where all of the trouble began. I wanted to be like my folks, and I learned by imitation and absorption. It is my observation that in most households, this is the accepted system for human development. Most kids who get along with their parents, grow up and share similar ideas, worldviews and such as the people who nurtured them.
It would seem, since I liked my parents and since they liked my that this system should work well for us. Unfortunately for me, my parents are nothing alike. I have always suspected that the rather large age gap between the two had something to do with it, but their politics, their worldviews, their religious preferences, everything could not be more different. In truth they succeed because of their differences. They enjoy the tension and the dynamism that is created by their opposing viewpoints. I enjoyed growing up in a house where thinking my own thoughts was mandatory and where there were no right answers to the questions.
So, what's the downside? I am a walking mess of contradictions. I live my life in a hundred and fifty seven different directions and all of that intellectual freedom has created a prison all it's own. I have spent years amassing half finished projects that I drag behind my life, my own psychic ballast. So maybe I can free myself of my own confusion and misdirection. Perhaps, after all these years of equivocations it is time to learn the art of the declarative statement.
