The Mother Load

I think that it is safe to say that me and mother have problems sometimes with liking each other. We love each other, but I do not think we really like each other at times. Our relationship over the years has been, for lack of a better word, shaky for tons of different reasons. We have gone from Roseanne and Darlene to Norman Bates and his mother in the course of the past three years, coincidentally correlating with my graduation and move back home.

With her birthday coming up, I find myself wondering what she was like when she was a young woman. Seeing that she had me when she was 21, I can not envision her as a young woman minus being my mother. So I also find myself fantasizing about what it would have been like if we went to the same high school or something. She probably would have thought me to be a spoiled snob, and I would have thought her to be rude and obnoxious. I am betting that she would not have voted for me for class office and I would not have sat at her lunch table.

We just argue all the time and rarely agree with each other. Is it like this with every mother and daughter, for I feel like my friend Tiesha and her mother are so close that they wake-up in the morning to skip through their front yard hand-in-hand. Or do some mothers and daughters just pretend to get along while the rest of us don't know how?

As I think more about it, I have come to the conclusion that this is why it is important to graduate and NOT go back home. You want to live your own life, free of critiques and remarks, minus the idea of a mommy, which will cause conflict at home, but your mother will undoubtedly try to rear you, even though you are CLEARLY passed rearing age. In my opinion, this causes the Norman Bates effect, even though he technically only left home when he was escorted by they state to the nut house; however, I feel this further proves my point.

Also, riddle me this: at our age, our maternal relationships worth repairing or molding into what we have always wanted them to be? I wouldn't mind arguing less with my mommy, but I can't imagine us being the mother and daughter team that joined church fashion shows or sat around the kitchen table drinking green tea and he-heing about menstrual cramps. I can not say that I would want that.

Madonna, the singer not the deity, once said that she better understood her mother once she had her own kids. Maybe one day far far from now when I am with child, I will understand where my mother has been coming from.

But until then, she will probably still be on my last nerves.