. . . who was pushing 45, and had dry, sensitive skin even in her youth. This person's hands are beginning to look like she wears crocodile gloves, and her face is covered in fine lines.

But she's breaking out. As in, acne.

Whom would you blame for this phenomenon?

I'm going to go with the tried-and-true—George W. Bush—unless someone has a better idea. I'm certainly open to suggestions.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 12:26 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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We had drifted a bit in the past 20 years. Perhaps when I expected her to be warm and grandmotherly, she was cold and practical. And, perhaps, vice versa: when she wanted a devoted granddaughter, she was presented with the cynical thinking machine.

But something changed this time around. And I don't know why. Or maybe I do, but I don't want to dissect it quite yet. Not here. Not now.

Her mind is of course still razor-sharp, but the body has been betraying her for a few years. She's frail, and she knows that her bones are weak, so she does everything she can to avoid falling: she understands the stakes, and takes hold of anything that will help her to keep her balance. (And let us remember that our vices can be blessings. I've been addicted to milk since childhood. I tend to run the gamut from skim to 2% and back again, but I still consume plenty of dairy. If I live as long as I intend to, that might turn into a Damn Fine Thing.)

Naturally, I ask her about the years she lived in Phoenix. She tells me a little, but I don't press the issue when it becomes clear that she was miserable for the four years she lived there with her parents, from the age of 18 to 22.

She gave up crafts ten or 15 years ago, but she was an expert knitter back in middle age and her early senior years (and an expert seamstress, crocheter, weaver, and general craftswoman to boot).

I tell her I keep trying to go back to knitting. I explain that my mood swings have too strong an influence on how tight I pull the yarn, and my rows come out uneven, like a child's work. (I am exaggerating as I say this, but not by much.)

She leans forward and confides: "those mood swings come from your mother."

It wasn't said maliciously, though I doubt my mother would take kindly to the remark (and I'm very happy she doesn't read my blog). Of course it's mostly correct.

My father continues to insist that his mother once came to blows with his first wife (my own mom), several years before I was born. My mother has always denied this, but this doesn't happen to be one of the arenas in which my father makes up his own facts. It's exactly the sort of issue wherein his memory would be superior to hers.

I should have asked grandma about that today. "So, who laid on the first bitch-slap, huh?"

Well, you know: I didn't. It is Easter, after all.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:45 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Another link over at Glenn's place. This one is about ambitious teenagers and the strange signals they are sent.

I could only read the first page: the messages sent to young women today sound too much like the ones I grew up with. All of the "you can have it all" stuff eventually transmutes into "you can do it all." It's a lie, of course.

"Why," I once asked my mother, "did you tell me grades didn't matter, that you just wanted me to learn? Why did you say that when it was so patently untrue?"

"It didn't occur to me that you'd actually get bad grades," she told me. "It just that I thought the 'A' level was down here"—she brought her hand to her waist—"and I really wanted you to achieve up here." She raised her right hand high above her head.

She laughed. My aunt and my cousins were there, watching us. They've spent 44 years watching us; we must be fascinating, like a cock fight. Or, I suppose, a hen fight.

I said nothing that day, because I couldn't trust myself not to say or do something awful. But later on I figured out what she had really meant by "don't worry about grades, just concentrate on learning." She had wanted me to get very good grades, but make it look effortless.

On some level, I got the message: I manage to hold the idea of housework, for example, in complete contempt as a total waste of my time. And yet at the very same instance I'm deeply ashamed that my house isn't perfectly neat and totally spotless. I should do it perfectly without looking like I do it at all.

I require myself to be completely yin, and yet totally yang. At any given moment.

And I carry the hen fight within me, every day.

Today I had dinner with my mother. I drove her where she needed to go, and let her buy me dinner, and listened to her criticize my driving—relentlessly, and in a thoroughly illogical, inconsistent fashion. And when she got around to apologizing, I told her it was fine.

"I'm not insecure about my driving," I explained.

I'm a human bonsai: twisted by nature, and made more grotesque/beautiful by strange nurture.

But what I will do is endure. And endurance is triumph.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 08:51 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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