This morning, when I saw my daughter after her weekend with
her father, she ran up to me and gave me a big hug. She then pulled me aside and whispered “Mom,
I am wearing a new bra.”
As a woman, I totally understand how new bras make you
feel. Pretty, worthy, flirty. Do I dare say perky? They are expensive items that are often rare
in a poor girl’s world. I was totally
happy for her. She picked out a totally
appropriate bra for her age and size.
She is 12. This is not her first
bra; she has been “developing” for over a year, and the “first bra” ritual was
over a year ago. The one she showed me,
and the two she described, were pretty cotton,
no push-ups or lacey things, and the exact right size for her long and
lean, but growing body.
Her excitement was palpable.
I completely understood.
So it took every bit of my energy and theater skills to not
sink in utter desperation that she did this not with her dad, but with her dad’s
wife.
I am going to out-myself right this second and say that my
main emotion was a kind of seriously fucked up jealousy. Not just envy. This was a total green-eyed monster bitch
that almost made me pull out an nail file and sharpen my nails. How the fuck did the psycho bitch my ex
fucking married end up having any kind of girl bonding moment with MY
daughter? I mean, how the fuck does that
happen? And why the fuck did my daughter
go with that bitch anyway? Isn’t buying
a bra (not the give-me-money kind of buy, THAT would have been acceptable) the
kind of thing you do either alone, with your mom, or with someone you are
having fun with (girlfriends and lovers are in the category)? So what the fuck. How was this not something
I was a part of. I am her fucking mom.
My.Fucking.Job.She.Is.My.Fucking.Daughter.So.Hands.Off.Bitch.
Yes. Thank you. That
was my rant. I felt every single bit of
that rage kind of emotion in the first five second. And then, I bit my tongue, told my daughter
how pretty she was and that she made a good choice, and choked back the
absolute knowledge that other people get a piece of her and I get no say. Not
one tiny bit. She gets to pick who and
what she wants in her life, and I get to stand back and watch. I can choose to either be the supportive
mother I hope I am modeling (93% of the time), or I can be the controlling,
angry, mean, psycho that reared her ugly fangs before getting a grip (and a
clue) and taking a stab at the highroad.
So in the 15 seconds of ugly, and the five hours since of it
rattling in my brain, I came to conclusion that kinda startled me (yeah, what
delusional world was I living in?) and maybe made me grow up just a
little. I figured out that my daughter
gets to have her own life (duh!) but that maybe, just maybe, I get my own life,
too. She can figure out what she wants,
who she chooses to get it from, how the interactions go, whom she trusts, why
someone is in her life, and what her own boundaries are. And, wow, if I can get past my own fucked up head, so do I.
She is clearly handling this better than I am, the letting
go of other people’s choices that have nothing to do with me. I still crave consistency and control, left
over insecurity from the chaos that was my relationship with my daughter’s
father. I wrap myself so tightly into
the identity of her (and her brother’s) mother from a time when if I did not
have that identity, I surely would have spun off the planet into some dangerous
nebula of toxic gases, leaving in my wake a type of destruction that only
addicts and asylum patients can relate to. (You did read my rant above,
right? Yeah, Jack Nicolson’s got nothing
on me some days.)
I will go home tonight, and do the good mom thing, and fix
dinner, and do laundry, and read over homework.
I will play some board game, and read to them, and talk about our
days. I may tell my daughter of my
feelings, admit my weaknesses, but probably not. I think I will also text some friends, read
some porn, watch an R rated movie with my headphones, and paint my toenails,
and try, somewhere in the midst of all of that, to keep trying to find my
identity, and not be afraid to have it be something else, that letting go of
the fear might just help me find another place to hang on. Maybe that next place will be kinder, and
feel like a star instead of a blackhole.
I also think I will buy myself a new bra.
