3 March 1999: Faux Bonds

Knowledge is Wealth.
Share It.

 

In the winter after I graduated college, I lived with my parents for eight months. During this span, I decided that a nice mother-daughter bonding activity would be for me to introduce my mother to "Steel Magnolias." This is pap, but it's non-threatening pap, that is, non-intellectual and non-challenging but a good tear-jerker.

Before the movie began on HBO, I scampered to the A&P in my Omni to buy ice cream, and with ice cream in hand, I discovered Fugly wouldn't start. Hmph.

I debated whether to call my mother or ask a schoolmate I'd seen in the store for a ride home. Ordinarily I'd've walked the mile and a half, but that wouldn't get me home in time for the movie. If I called my mother, she'd get vexed and snap at me and I was trying to achieve some bondliness. The schoolmate lived about a half-mile in the other direction, had been two years behind me in school, and though we were cordial, we were hardly pals. I scurried back into the store and asked my schoolmate. "No problem," he responded, an easygoing man.

I wouldn't've hesitated to ask someone I barely knew at college, but in my town I still tread very softly. It would take me a while to trust that not everyone in Old Lyme operated like my mother, and I had only been back a month. He brought me home and I thanked him, and in the house my mother and I watched the movie and ate Ben & Jerry's Mint & Oreo.

I got home in time to tell her about the car before the movie began, and she was visibly distracted from watching it for worry about the same crime-ridden town through which I could have walked home in the dark with no fear of bother. I fully intended to leave the car until the next morning brought daylight and myself on my bike back to the incorrigible thing, but she couldn't do it.

Her worry rendered me responsible for dragging her from her house at 10:15 on a Saturday night (and the clock goes tick tick tick tick tick), and she was angry at me for that--because I had broken my car on purpose to inconvenience her. So we got in her car (another Omni) to drive to mine, and she asked me why I liked "Steel Magnolias"--what made it worth the excessive danger of abandoning my rattletrap for two whole hours in the well-lit parking lot of the one grocery store

I was trying to bond, but I have always regretted lying to her with my response: I told her I liked the mother-daughter relationships. This is a blatant falsehood. What I liked was the friendship of the two old women: "You're too twisted for color tv."

I lied on an occasion I was trying to bond. I don't know which I regret more, that or my mother's misanthropic paranoia being such that she couldn't leave the car in our town's parking lot overnight. Both are measures of failure.

Fugly didn't fail though. She started right up and I drove her home.

 

Go to previous or next, the Journal Index, Words, or the Lisa Index

Last modified 8 March 1999

Speak your mind: lisa[at]penguindust[dot]com

Copyright © 1999 LJH