Unfinished.
I sprained my little toe on Thursday. Might be broken, even, since breaks in tiny bones aren't always terribly painful. It bruised in a really weird pattern and it hurts to put any weight on it, but just sitting here it doesn't hurt and I can actually still walk, so I'm not terribly concerned.
Saw my Dad yesterday. We're a lot alike, despite having had lives so very different from each other's, and despite widely different areas of expertise. My dad is organized and mathematical. I am disorganized and intuitive, and I suck at numbers.
At Dad's place . . . you know, I lived there for 18 years, and there is nothing of me there any longer. It's still got all my parents' stuff in it, even a lot of my mom's stuff that dad doesn't use, but nothing of mine. The room that was mine last isn't really used for anything important. It's stopped even feeling weird, like my stuff should be there, you know? It's like a place I never really lived. Only the shutters on the window and the bathroom heater really remind me of when I was there. I'm slow to lose associations like that, but it's been a long time. I don't expect Mom to be there any longer, either, which is a relief, but the house -- for all that it is full of interesting stuff -- feels so empty.
Dad still hasn't taken mom's purse off the doorknob where she used to hang it whenever she came home. Not in all this time. There's a painting in her studio upstairs -- which is sort of falling apart -- that she must have started right before she got too sick to paint. I can't even tell what it was going to be. It's just a mess of clashing colors coming up from the lower right side and covering about half the canvas. Hell, I'm not even 100% sure it was hers, because it looks nothing like anything else I ever saw her do, but it's in her studio and it looks like oil paint, and . . . I don't know. I went upstairs looking for something else and I saw it and I just . . . I wish I knew what she had meant it to be, because I couldn't make any sense of it at all, and that bothers me.
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I came home with a bunch of her costume jewelry and interesting junk, including a beautiful little jewelry cabinet. Nothing of any real value, but some of it is fun and will make good pirate treasure if nothing else.
I don't know. It's moved past being something that upsets me because I miss her and is now more like . . . being reminded of it sucks because she was a huge part of my life, and these days I feel an awful lot like life is just slipping past me without any way to hold it back, so things that remind me of that make me sad.
I see a kind of echo of that in her purse on the door, like she's going to grab it any minute and ask if I want to go for a drive, no reason, let's just get in the car and go. I still remember the exact sound of her keys, but haven't had the guts to see if they're in the purse.
I see it in the unfinished painting, sitting there, so unfinished as to be meaningless except for context. That's what bothers me. She wasn't finished doing stuff, and all the stuff she left behind is stuff nobody else can finish.
And despite what people tend to say when folks talk about unfinished business and deceased parents, I don't want to finish her work. Not even metaphorically. I love her. Present tense. Always will. But I'm not her. I'm not an extension of her. I don't want to be her. I've spent years trying not to be her, despite how many of her dysfunctions I share. I've spent years trying to have a better life than she did, spurred in no small part by her difficult example, full of failures and betrayal. I've spent years telling myself, teaching myself, that I don't have to be her, even though I sometimes feel I have no choice.
I have my own stuff to finish. I have my own life to live. But I've noticed lately that I sometimes sound like her when I laugh.
Saw my Dad yesterday. We're a lot alike, despite having had lives so very different from each other's, and despite widely different areas of expertise. My dad is organized and mathematical. I am disorganized and intuitive, and I suck at numbers.
At Dad's place . . . you know, I lived there for 18 years, and there is nothing of me there any longer. It's still got all my parents' stuff in it, even a lot of my mom's stuff that dad doesn't use, but nothing of mine. The room that was mine last isn't really used for anything important. It's stopped even feeling weird, like my stuff should be there, you know? It's like a place I never really lived. Only the shutters on the window and the bathroom heater really remind me of when I was there. I'm slow to lose associations like that, but it's been a long time. I don't expect Mom to be there any longer, either, which is a relief, but the house -- for all that it is full of interesting stuff -- feels so empty.
Dad still hasn't taken mom's purse off the doorknob where she used to hang it whenever she came home. Not in all this time. There's a painting in her studio upstairs -- which is sort of falling apart -- that she must have started right before she got too sick to paint. I can't even tell what it was going to be. It's just a mess of clashing colors coming up from the lower right side and covering about half the canvas. Hell, I'm not even 100% sure it was hers, because it looks nothing like anything else I ever saw her do, but it's in her studio and it looks like oil paint, and . . . I don't know. I went upstairs looking for something else and I saw it and I just . . . I wish I knew what she had meant it to be, because I couldn't make any sense of it at all, and that bothers me.
+
I came home with a bunch of her costume jewelry and interesting junk, including a beautiful little jewelry cabinet. Nothing of any real value, but some of it is fun and will make good pirate treasure if nothing else.
I don't know. It's moved past being something that upsets me because I miss her and is now more like . . . being reminded of it sucks because she was a huge part of my life, and these days I feel an awful lot like life is just slipping past me without any way to hold it back, so things that remind me of that make me sad.
I see a kind of echo of that in her purse on the door, like she's going to grab it any minute and ask if I want to go for a drive, no reason, let's just get in the car and go. I still remember the exact sound of her keys, but haven't had the guts to see if they're in the purse.
I see it in the unfinished painting, sitting there, so unfinished as to be meaningless except for context. That's what bothers me. She wasn't finished doing stuff, and all the stuff she left behind is stuff nobody else can finish.
And despite what people tend to say when folks talk about unfinished business and deceased parents, I don't want to finish her work. Not even metaphorically. I love her. Present tense. Always will. But I'm not her. I'm not an extension of her. I don't want to be her. I've spent years trying not to be her, despite how many of her dysfunctions I share. I've spent years trying to have a better life than she did, spurred in no small part by her difficult example, full of failures and betrayal. I've spent years telling myself, teaching myself, that I don't have to be her, even though I sometimes feel I have no choice.
I have my own stuff to finish. I have my own life to live. But I've noticed lately that I sometimes sound like her when I laugh.