seeking surface condition

My mother and niece left yesterday after a week long visit. I am resurfacing, reclaiming and basically regrounding myself today, a task that will take, I'm sure, much more than 24 hours.

For months now, my mom and I had talked about her coming out to Denver (from Ohio) to help re-organize the newly redone kitchen. My mother is a great organizer and cleaner extraordinaire, and she's also one of those people who cannot sit still for any length of time--she needs a "project". I should have known that the kitchen would only take her a day to organize, and we'd be left with six more days to fill with various projects, not the least of which was keeping my 15 year old niece entertained.

To her credit, though, my niece was pretty loose about the whole trip--she and I haven't really spent a whole heck of a lot of time together in the course of her life and I think it was just good for us to have a chance to reaquaint ourselves with one another. She too is a clean freak (it's in our genes, though it seems to have skipped me for the most part) and was Mom's right hand girl when it came to the Reorganization of My Lesbian Daughter's Life.

From the kitchen they moved into the pantry. Then the living room. Days passed. We took a trip to tour the Celestial Seasonings tea factory (actually great fun) and see the mountains; we ate out, went to farmer's markets, tooled around Denver's historic neighborhoods. Mom started going in the basement and poking around, "resurrecting" things that she thought would be better used upstairs. She carried a tape measure everywhere. I had visions of her finding some random film container of bud that I'd hidden in one of my pot hoarding moments and how I'd then have to come up with some bullshit explanation as to why there were drugs in the linen drawer.

They moved to the foyer. I was getting antsy. After telling myself, over and over, that my mom's need to change and organize did NOT reflect badly on me, nor did it mean that everything in my life was somehow wrong, I suddenly lost the ability to let things roll off of my back. I was disconnecting the t.v. to move it to its new perch when something in me snapped. Granted, I'd just come from the Gay Pride parade (which my mother treated like Depravity Come Home to Roost), having taken two whole hours to myself to do something I really wanted to do, and was feeling a little, shall we say, annoyed at mother's rampant homophobia. I'd had no time to myself for what felt like a year. My niece, god love her, was like velcro at my side all the time. I'd left the parade without venturing down to the Festival itself because my niece was making noises about wanting to go to the mountains and I had to get home. I didn't want to go to the mountains. It was already noon and I wanted to hang out with My People. But at that moment, my people was my family, and I had to compromise.

So I get home and the Organizational Jihad has been busy: they are ready to move the t.v. I am tired. I am tired of feeling responsible for my guest's happiness and appetite, tired of homophobic ignorance, tired of watching my mother's manicness, tired of my niece's clingyness. I want time to myself and I want people to stop fucking with my shit. I end up crying, and saying some stupid below-the-belt crapola that I don't even mean, and suddenly I'm the out of control bad guy around whom everyone must walk on eggshells. I have a familial history as this character, and I hate it. No one else sets me off like my family--isn't that always the case?--if you asked any of my friends, they would tell you that they didn't know this kind of anger existed in me. But it does. And it's not just anger. It's seething rage. It's rage I've learned to control and keep in check, anger that stems from being misunderstood and ignored and from never feeling pretty, or worthy, or seen. The difference between me when I was 20 and raging and me now is duration--I cried for about 5 minutes and felt better, and it was done. 15 years ago I would have wept for hours. Of course, my Mom knawed at my words like a dog with an immense rawhide, and she's probably still mulling over it all. Not much I can do about that.

I appreciate their help, I really do. But I also just got married, and my wife is now gone for three weeks dealing with her family, and I miss her, and my mom never congratulated me on our wedding, and the only thing my dad could say when I told him the news was "oh my goodness" over and over and then "well I guess this is what you wanted so you should be happy" and though I know I can't do anything to change the way they see gay marriage (a cancer on American morals, that's how) I still expected a little more graciousness, a little more excitement. They say all they want is for me to be happy, but the subtext has always been that they want me to be their kind of happy, a cpicture-perfect copy of suburban idyll hell, where a woman is in her place, where the good folks are Bush-loving, Fox-TV watching, Limbaugh-listening, money/status obsessed perfectionists. I'd rather grow a tail and join the circus with all the rest of the freaks, thanks.

As you can well imagine, I haven't been doing jack shit with WW. I don't know when I'll get back there, frankly. I don't have the energy right now, and I'm feeling really vulnerable and shaky. I'm still at 235, the magic number, mostly because I'm not eating much. I don't have a desire to, really. Unfortunately, I DO have a desire to drown myself in a vat of single malt or a growler of IPA, and I DO want to sit in my garden all day and smoke and write and read. I suppose the writing and reading aren't so bad, but the other stuff won't do me one iota of good. I know this. But I'm still resurfacing, coming up for air, and I'm still feeling like I can't make my lungs work right. And my heart hurts. Longing and disappointment mixing with blood and tears beating like a drum in my chest. Send oxygen. Send love. Send rice cakes.