Some things I learned this year in no particular order:
Cooking: I am not good at it. This year I ruined, notably, pumpkin pie, soup, cookies, and a take-and-bake pizza. The last one was not ruined by burning it, as one might assume, but by somehow flipping it completely over so that all the toppings fell onto the bottom of the oven and had to be scraped out. Then, we ate it. True story.
Drinking: I can now only have 3-4 drinks before I’m reduced to a puking, sobbing mess. RIP, liver.
Stress: Makes me a total bitch. Like, more than usual. I can take a ton of stress, but after I hit the breaking point, the threshold of what I can handle drops exponentially. And shit goes DOWN.
Work: Never, ever work unpaid, undocumented overtime. Unless you’re really curious to find out where your stress threshold is.
Pets: Are wonderful, until they’re peeing on your couch. There is a reason why the word is so close to “pest”. Actually, there isn’t. Etymological coincidence.
Friendship: Friends are the people you mock all the other people (non-friends) with.
Being in a Relationship: Means if you storm out of the room in the middle of an argument, you damn well better be willing to come back and work on your problems. Also, yelling doesn’t solve anything. Other than the question of “who is louder?” (Answer: I am).
Family: I wrote a really long, sad piece on this, because my family has had a very difficult year, but I don’t want to focus on that right now, so I’ll just share the last paragraph of what I wrote:
This year, my mother showed me that nothing and no one can take away the power of someone who chooses to walk away from a broken past and start a new life. Last week I called her, depressed and sobbing, and she said, “I never thought life would get better for me until I learned that I can make it better.” It’s not simple. It’s hard and painful and scary, but it beats the hell out of crippling depression, panic attacks and self-victimization. I feel incredibly thankful for my wonderful mother, siblings, aunt and uncle, boyfriend and my incredible friends (who are an extended family to me) for encouraging me, loving me, and making me laugh. I truly would not have survived this year without you.
Last night I dreamt that facebook edited my political and religious views on my profile to “Undecided”. Naturally, I was outraged by this, and wondered, not for the first time, if the “facebook-is-raping-your-privacy-and-possibly-your-dog-pls-copy-and-paste-as-your-status” people were right. I complained (in the dream) to the Viking that now people would have no way of knowing what my opinion was about anything. He suggested that maybe I could just tell people what my political and religious views are without posting them on facebook. This enraged me. Clearly, the man is hopelessly out of touch with the modern world. How aggravating.
I’m still mad at him. IRL, and in my dream. I think I’ll write a passive-aggressive status update on facebook. He doesn’t have a facebook, though, so I’d have to email it to him and that’s much too direct. This is another source of contention: on several occasions, I’ve tried explaining to him that if he doesn’t have a facebook, he doesn’t actually exist (except as a figment of my imagination – not unlike many of my past relationships). Still, he refuses. Also, yesterday he laughed at me because I wanted to know exactly how much “a pinch of salt is”. It was a valid question! I have a tendency to over-salt everything.
Excuse me, I have a passive-aggressive email to write.
My mother is human. Sometimes (and, as I age, with more frequency) this disconcerting thought occurs to me. It began, I think, when I was small and I first caught a glimpse of a tear in her eye and I crawled into her lap to comfort her, but really to have her comfort me. Her omnipotence was, for a moment, shed in a single tear; her divinity torn like the veil in the temple of Jerusalem that hid the Holiest of Holies from us, and I saw uncovered before me her humanity. It frightened me. I crawled into her lap and laid my head on her heart. Her arms enfolded me, stitching back together the torn veil and becoming again, wholly mother.
I deified her. She inhabited my spiritual world as more perfect, more kind, more holy than the Holiest of Holies. The gods men invented were far less lovely, less pure than her. She called herself human, yet I did not see it. The righteous, angry God she worshipped was more human than she. Still, as I grew older her humanity continued to surface with alarming frequency. Alarming to a growing child whose few illusions about the goodness of God and father were rapidly slipping into contempt. Children must believe some lovely lie or they cease, forever, to be children.
When I was old enough to be cynical, I took perverse delight in showing her just how little deceived I was by the beliefs that shaped me. The hurt in her eyes revealed her human shape, and oh, how it hurt me. How I longed to take my careless words back, and pretend, just a little while longer, that I believed: in her, in God, in my slipping illusions.
On the night that she held my hand in the emergency room while my body wrestled with death, she knew, I knew, that she could not save me. I was too cruel, then, to think of anything other than how very much, at that moment, I despised her grasping, frightened humanness. It was too much like my own.
When she left her husband (a man whose human shape I never doubted, except perhaps when I was very small), she curled up close to me on the couch, laid her head on my heart, like the Madonna and Child inverted, and sobbed. How very human was she. How very frightened was I.
Atheism is a cold, cold term, but what other can I apply to the shedding of my very last deity, my mother? When I lost my faith in God, I found faith in myself. When I rejected my father’s philosophies, I found my voice. But what good could come of witnessing the veil that shielded me from my mother’s humanness torn irreparably? I know it now, though: no longer need she willfully subordinate self to mother her children or to pacify her wrathful husband or to create out of herself the perfect holy idol that men so love to extol on Sunday morning and trample on throughout the week. No longer need she hide her fear, or think her thoughts foolish, or clip the wings of her own dreams.