Crazy Town

I am acting like a crazy woman.  My exterior and interior life doesn't match at all.  I'd like them to match even less, actually, would like it in a way if no one knew that my grandma had died.  Everyone is so solicitous, and sympathetic.  I'd like it if instead they would ignore me completely, if I could simply melt into the furniture.  I'd like to be completely absent.

I'd like to erase myself for a while.

Curious, I was truly affronted when I was accused by my cousin this week of being a dramatic child.  That's what it felt like, an accusation.  It certainly wasn't a compliment, it was something very much "other" that she claimed not to understand, something distasteful that she was having trouble grappling with in her own daughter.  Maybe I'm being unfair to my cousin.  It's my mother who is so against any attention-drawing behavior - my mother who shushes me when I laugh at a play, my mother who says "no one wants to hear what you say", my mother who finds being dramatic in bad taste.

And right now, even though we're a thousand miles apart, I would do anything at all to make my mother happy.  To take away her pain.  I would like to remake myself into a sober, serene school teacher who lives about two hours from her and is creative in mild, sanctioned bursts in classrooms but not in public.  Who married a nice dentist.  Someone my mother could be proud of, someone whose accomplishments could be listed easily to folks passing by in a receiving line.  Someone who had the requisite number of children she could instruct and spoil. 

Someone whose mere presence would ease her suffering. 

Of course I'm none of that. 

It doesn't help to reflect that my mother, if she admitted it to herself, probably feels the same way about her own mother.  Nothing my mother did could ever truly please my grandmother - or rather, any choice my mother made for herself was sure to be in conflict with what her own mother wanted for her, expected from her.  And now, it's too late.  Well, it was always too late, because of who my grandmother was. 

I'm not sure any of the girls in that family, my mother and her sisters, ever felt really loved by their mother.  Yet I myself heard my grandmother tell them she loved them.  One day it occurred to me that I wasn't around for a lot of years.  What sort of upbringing did my mother have that she can't really believe it when her mother says I love you? 

This is all supposition, of course.  I'm so dramatic, I probably have the wrong idea entirely.

Sigh.  I wish I could disappear, take myself off like a dress and wander unthinking through the next few days like a shadow.