Bingo, Prompt: Any Song by Bowling for Soup "1985"
Songfic written for inusongfics
Prompt: Any Song by Bowling for Soup
Song: 1985 by Bowling for Soup
Pairing: None
Warnings: None
Debbie just hit the wall
She never had it all
One Prozac a day
Husband's a CPA
Her dreams went out the door
When she turned twenty four
Only been with one man
What happen to her plan?
Our Mom has always been a bit on the weird side. We’ve just learn to accept this the way other’s accept that their parents are clean freaks or study Nazis or super over-protective. Only most other kids don’t have to deal with weekly pilgrimages to the shrine their parents grew up on. Most other kids don’t have to sit around listening to their great-grandparents go one about an ancient heroine from five hundred years ago after whom their mother was named.
Most other kids didn’t have to watch their mother stare at a stupid, old well and cry every Sunday.
There were three of us, Yumi was the oldest at fourteen, and I, Kira, was the middle child at age twelve. The youngest was Harumi at age eight. Every Sunday Mom would pack up the van and we would drive to see our grandmother. Dad never went with us. It just wasn’t something he did. This was Mom’s time to be with us, and even though there was always an air of sadness around us when we were there, we never once wanted to be somewhere else.
But when Yumi turned fifteen there was a different type of atmosphere, a hopeful one.
It was something that we didn’t notice at first because it was so subtle. Yumi turned fifteen on a Wednesday and that next Sunday we once more piled into the minivan to make the journey across Tokyo to the Higurashi Shrine. Looking back it should have been obvious. Normally Mom was quiet on the way over, only speaking when we would make an effort to draw her into the conversation, but this time she turned the radio on full blast and actually hummed along with one of the songs. That should have been our first clue that we were heading for a change.
As the months wore on she smiled more, and joked with Dad in a way we had never seen before. Even he seemed to be taken aback by the sudden change in her mood. Yumi was the one to receive the most of her good mood and Harumi and I were too scared to be jealous. We had watched our mother drift through life for so long that we didn’t want to rock the boat and risk losing her the way she was now.
We would still go to the shrine on Sundays, and we would even stay longer than before, but Mom had stopped crying when she would take her usual hour to sit in front of the well by herself, and every so often she would invite Yumi to come sit with her.
Once again the little voices in our heads would speak up to complain about being left behind. Parents shouldn’t show favoritism so blatantly, but once again we were hesitant about raising our voices up to complain too loudly. Our mother was truly beautiful when she was happy and it wasn’t often she was like this for so long. There would always be something to drag her back down again. And it wasn’t like we were being ignored by Dad. On the days when Mom would take Yumi to the mall he would take us to the drugstore his family had owned for generations and we would get to play in the storerooms with him while his teenage clerks watched the front.
And so for a year we lived in peace, but we should have known that it wouldn’t last, that the longing look my mother would get when she used to look at the well would return, and that once it did it would be ten times worse. Back then I had never thought that I would live to see the day when I wanted to go back to when Mom would cry in front of the well, but I finally found it.
The day after Yumi turned sixteen, Mom started crying at home.
She was gonna be an actress
She was gonna be a star
She was gonna shake her ass
On the hood of white snake’s car
Her yellow SUV is now the enemy
Looks at her average life
And nothing has been alright since
Bruce Springsteen, Madonna
Way before Nirvana
There was U2 and Blondie
And music still on MTV
Her two kids in high school
They tell her that she’s uncool
Cause she's still preoccupied
With 19, 19, 1985
It wasn’t until two years later when I turned fifteen that Mom perked up again. Yumi was getting ready for college entrance exams and as such had been exempted from our Sunday shrine visits to attend cram sessions at her school. My birthday fell on a Saturday that year and Mom was all sunshine and roses as my friends and I gathered at our house for a slumber party in which we stayed up late munching on candy and watching romantic comedies until we’d laughed ourselves silly.
I had thought we would skip the shrine visit the next day. I was tired and my friends were still over, busy munching cereal in the living room while watching TV when Mom came in fully dressed and demanding that Harumi and I get ready to make our usual trip.
I had never spoken back to her to that point. She was always kind to us and to our friends. She would be the mom to drive out in the middle of the night and rescue any one of us were we to get in trouble, no questions asked. She knew our favorite songs and snacks and we never had cause to doubt her love and devotion to us. The only thing she ever did that made us even slightly uncomfortable was return to the shrine every Sunday in order to keep her strange vigil at the side of the well.
I loved her and I was the obedient daughter every parent since the beginning of time longer for, but when she looked down at me that Sunday morning and demanded that I follow her when all I wanted to do was stay with my friends, I snapped back in a way that made her pull away physically as though I had slapped her.
I wanted to stay here. I wanted to be with my friends. I was fifteen year old and I had better things to be doing with my Sundays than spending time in her past. She stared at me as though she was finally seeing me for the first time, and then she grabbed my sister by the hand and they left without another word. To my friends I was a hero. I had talked back to my mother and I had won. That was almost unheard of, but I didn’t feel like a hero. I felt like I had just crushed something deep inside my mother that could never be put right again.
And just as soon as her happiness had come, it left us and we went back to the way things were before, except Yumi and I were no longer invited to come with her on Sundays. It now fell on Harumi to provide mother with whatever it was that she had been looking for from us. Whatever it was, we had obviously failed to give it.
She’s seen all the classics
She knows every line
Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink
Even Saint Elmo’s Fire
She rocked out to Wham
Not a big Limp Bizkit fan
Thought she’d get a hand
On a member of Duran Duran
Where’s the mini-skirt made of snake skin
And who’s the other guy that's singing in Van Halen
When did reality become T.V.
Whatever happened to sitcoms, game shows
Four years down the road saw the re-emergence of Mom’s smile. Yumi and I didn’t get to witness it firsthand since I was happily away at college living my life and dreaming my own dreams. Yumi was married and living in Kyoto. She was expecting her first child.
I never asked Yumi how it was to be Mom’s favorite for that one blissful year when she was fifteen and Mom glowed like she was the same. She never said anything about it either. Only once did we talk about the day when I refused to be the subservient child I had once been and Yumi had taken my side. She and I both agreed that there was something about Mom that wasn’t quite right. There was a sadness to her that no one from this time could erase.
There was something she had lost years ago at that shrine and she had never been able to get it back.
We figured we would never know what it was that brought her back to that same spot again and again, but we were wrong. We were very wrong.
Springsteen, Madonna
Way before Nirvana
There was U2 and Blondie
And music still on MTV
Her two kids in high school
They tell her that she’s uncool
‘Cause she's still preoccupied
With 19, 19, 1985
Harumi was Mom’s pride and joy from the moment she managed to get into Mom’s old junior high. Yumi and I had always been high achievers when it came to school and we had our sights set higher than some stupid public school where anyone who wasn’t quite brain-dead could get in. We’d studied for hours to get into high level private schools and our father supported us where our mother couldn’t or wouldn’t. we went on to graduate from our respective A list schools at the top of our class and we both attended Tokyo University with degrees set in harder courses of study than necessary.
Harumi, on the other hand, was more concerned with her image and with the way she was thought of than with her studies. She joined several clubs that had no academic appeal whatsoever and she could be found in front of the TV in the evening more so than in front of her books the way Yumi and I had been. The high ranking private schools her older sisters had set their sights on were far out of her reach, and so she had allowed herself to give into our mother and she applied to and was accepted at the old junior high our mother had attended years before.
Apparently little had changed there and Mom’s eyes went misty the second she laid eyes on Harumi at age eleven in a short, green skirt with a white blouse and a red kerchief. She said it was like looking into a mirror and seeing herself when she had been making her journey into junior high.
And unlike me, she continued to accompany Mom to the shrine every Sunday and she took up the same vigil in the well house that Yumi had done years before.
I don’t know exactly what happened that day, two months after Harumi had turned fifteen, but I do know that it had something to do with the well. Apparently a baby squirrel had fallen down into the well’s dark depths and Mom hadn’t felt as though she would have been able to make the climb back up once she had gotten down. So the task had fallen to Harumi and my little sister had never been the same since.
She took frequent absences from school and when her friends called and I was home to pick up the phone they inquired about her health. I told them that as far as I knew my sister was doing fine, but that she wasn’t at home right now and I didn’t quite know where she had gone, so they were best off trying another day. In fact, now that I think about it, I don’t remember seeing Harumi a lot after she called me out of breath after rescuing the baby squirrel.
Dad sort of drifted away from them then as well. I’m sure he knew what was going on but no amount of begging on my and Yumi’s part could get him to tell us what was going on in our own family. We felt ourselves being pulled further and further away from our youngest sister and it hurt us, but there was nothing we could do.
It wasn’t until Yumi and I took matters into our own hands and returned to the shrine on our own on a day when we knew our mother or sister was not going to be there. Our great-grandfather had been gone for a long time, but our Grandmother was still there, and our Uncle Souta had returned a few years ago to help her carry on the day to day running of the place.
Yumi was so close to crying when she took up a seat in the familiar kitchen. She was due in a about a month and she was so badly for her youngest sister and for her mother to be there when she had the baby, but she hadn’t seen Harumi for two weeks and mother was hardly ever home. When she wasn’t working she was here.
The story they told us that day didn’t make sense at first. It wasn’t exactly a tale you would expect two grown women to swallow without some measure of disbelief.
It was a tale of time travel, of magic, of war, and of love, and we didn’t quite know what to do with it. We had been right all those years ago when we had guessed Mom was trying to use us to live out some part of her past. We had been right to assume that whatever it was, we were fundamentally incapable of giving he what she needed, but where we had failed, Harumi had succeeded.
We left there that day knowing that we could never go back to the time when we had been unknowing. We could never turn back the clock and be young again, and unlike our mother we didn’t want to try. We took our leave of our mother then, hugged our father with tears in our eyes and promised to still visit him and call, but we knew that our mother and Harumi were too far gone to be reached.
To this day I do not know what happened with them. I don’t know if Mom ever truly got what she was looking for, or if Harumi fixed whatever it was she had been sent back to fix, but we didn’t care. We were not the kind of people who grew up living in the past, and our mother was the kind of person who never left it. We still loved her, yes, but we found we couldn’t come to an agreement between the three of us in which we could all be happy.
And it hurt, but it got better in time.
After all, when all you do is look forward, there is little left that can leave a scar.
She hates time make it stop
Please make this stop
Stop!
Prompt: Any Song by Bowling for Soup
Song: 1985 by Bowling for Soup
Pairing: None
Warnings: None
Debbie just hit the wall
She never had it all
One Prozac a day
Husband's a CPA
Her dreams went out the door
When she turned twenty four
Only been with one man
What happen to her plan?
Our Mom has always been a bit on the weird side. We’ve just learn to accept this the way other’s accept that their parents are clean freaks or study Nazis or super over-protective. Only most other kids don’t have to deal with weekly pilgrimages to the shrine their parents grew up on. Most other kids don’t have to sit around listening to their great-grandparents go one about an ancient heroine from five hundred years ago after whom their mother was named.
Most other kids didn’t have to watch their mother stare at a stupid, old well and cry every Sunday.
There were three of us, Yumi was the oldest at fourteen, and I, Kira, was the middle child at age twelve. The youngest was Harumi at age eight. Every Sunday Mom would pack up the van and we would drive to see our grandmother. Dad never went with us. It just wasn’t something he did. This was Mom’s time to be with us, and even though there was always an air of sadness around us when we were there, we never once wanted to be somewhere else.
But when Yumi turned fifteen there was a different type of atmosphere, a hopeful one.
It was something that we didn’t notice at first because it was so subtle. Yumi turned fifteen on a Wednesday and that next Sunday we once more piled into the minivan to make the journey across Tokyo to the Higurashi Shrine. Looking back it should have been obvious. Normally Mom was quiet on the way over, only speaking when we would make an effort to draw her into the conversation, but this time she turned the radio on full blast and actually hummed along with one of the songs. That should have been our first clue that we were heading for a change.
As the months wore on she smiled more, and joked with Dad in a way we had never seen before. Even he seemed to be taken aback by the sudden change in her mood. Yumi was the one to receive the most of her good mood and Harumi and I were too scared to be jealous. We had watched our mother drift through life for so long that we didn’t want to rock the boat and risk losing her the way she was now.
We would still go to the shrine on Sundays, and we would even stay longer than before, but Mom had stopped crying when she would take her usual hour to sit in front of the well by herself, and every so often she would invite Yumi to come sit with her.
Once again the little voices in our heads would speak up to complain about being left behind. Parents shouldn’t show favoritism so blatantly, but once again we were hesitant about raising our voices up to complain too loudly. Our mother was truly beautiful when she was happy and it wasn’t often she was like this for so long. There would always be something to drag her back down again. And it wasn’t like we were being ignored by Dad. On the days when Mom would take Yumi to the mall he would take us to the drugstore his family had owned for generations and we would get to play in the storerooms with him while his teenage clerks watched the front.
And so for a year we lived in peace, but we should have known that it wouldn’t last, that the longing look my mother would get when she used to look at the well would return, and that once it did it would be ten times worse. Back then I had never thought that I would live to see the day when I wanted to go back to when Mom would cry in front of the well, but I finally found it.
The day after Yumi turned sixteen, Mom started crying at home.
She was gonna be an actress
She was gonna be a star
She was gonna shake her ass
On the hood of white snake’s car
Her yellow SUV is now the enemy
Looks at her average life
And nothing has been alright since
Bruce Springsteen, Madonna
Way before Nirvana
There was U2 and Blondie
And music still on MTV
Her two kids in high school
They tell her that she’s uncool
Cause she's still preoccupied
With 19, 19, 1985
It wasn’t until two years later when I turned fifteen that Mom perked up again. Yumi was getting ready for college entrance exams and as such had been exempted from our Sunday shrine visits to attend cram sessions at her school. My birthday fell on a Saturday that year and Mom was all sunshine and roses as my friends and I gathered at our house for a slumber party in which we stayed up late munching on candy and watching romantic comedies until we’d laughed ourselves silly.
I had thought we would skip the shrine visit the next day. I was tired and my friends were still over, busy munching cereal in the living room while watching TV when Mom came in fully dressed and demanding that Harumi and I get ready to make our usual trip.
I had never spoken back to her to that point. She was always kind to us and to our friends. She would be the mom to drive out in the middle of the night and rescue any one of us were we to get in trouble, no questions asked. She knew our favorite songs and snacks and we never had cause to doubt her love and devotion to us. The only thing she ever did that made us even slightly uncomfortable was return to the shrine every Sunday in order to keep her strange vigil at the side of the well.
I loved her and I was the obedient daughter every parent since the beginning of time longer for, but when she looked down at me that Sunday morning and demanded that I follow her when all I wanted to do was stay with my friends, I snapped back in a way that made her pull away physically as though I had slapped her.
I wanted to stay here. I wanted to be with my friends. I was fifteen year old and I had better things to be doing with my Sundays than spending time in her past. She stared at me as though she was finally seeing me for the first time, and then she grabbed my sister by the hand and they left without another word. To my friends I was a hero. I had talked back to my mother and I had won. That was almost unheard of, but I didn’t feel like a hero. I felt like I had just crushed something deep inside my mother that could never be put right again.
And just as soon as her happiness had come, it left us and we went back to the way things were before, except Yumi and I were no longer invited to come with her on Sundays. It now fell on Harumi to provide mother with whatever it was that she had been looking for from us. Whatever it was, we had obviously failed to give it.
She’s seen all the classics
She knows every line
Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink
Even Saint Elmo’s Fire
She rocked out to Wham
Not a big Limp Bizkit fan
Thought she’d get a hand
On a member of Duran Duran
Where’s the mini-skirt made of snake skin
And who’s the other guy that's singing in Van Halen
When did reality become T.V.
Whatever happened to sitcoms, game shows
Four years down the road saw the re-emergence of Mom’s smile. Yumi and I didn’t get to witness it firsthand since I was happily away at college living my life and dreaming my own dreams. Yumi was married and living in Kyoto. She was expecting her first child.
I never asked Yumi how it was to be Mom’s favorite for that one blissful year when she was fifteen and Mom glowed like she was the same. She never said anything about it either. Only once did we talk about the day when I refused to be the subservient child I had once been and Yumi had taken my side. She and I both agreed that there was something about Mom that wasn’t quite right. There was a sadness to her that no one from this time could erase.
There was something she had lost years ago at that shrine and she had never been able to get it back.
We figured we would never know what it was that brought her back to that same spot again and again, but we were wrong. We were very wrong.
Springsteen, Madonna
Way before Nirvana
There was U2 and Blondie
And music still on MTV
Her two kids in high school
They tell her that she’s uncool
‘Cause she's still preoccupied
With 19, 19, 1985
Harumi was Mom’s pride and joy from the moment she managed to get into Mom’s old junior high. Yumi and I had always been high achievers when it came to school and we had our sights set higher than some stupid public school where anyone who wasn’t quite brain-dead could get in. We’d studied for hours to get into high level private schools and our father supported us where our mother couldn’t or wouldn’t. we went on to graduate from our respective A list schools at the top of our class and we both attended Tokyo University with degrees set in harder courses of study than necessary.
Harumi, on the other hand, was more concerned with her image and with the way she was thought of than with her studies. She joined several clubs that had no academic appeal whatsoever and she could be found in front of the TV in the evening more so than in front of her books the way Yumi and I had been. The high ranking private schools her older sisters had set their sights on were far out of her reach, and so she had allowed herself to give into our mother and she applied to and was accepted at the old junior high our mother had attended years before.
Apparently little had changed there and Mom’s eyes went misty the second she laid eyes on Harumi at age eleven in a short, green skirt with a white blouse and a red kerchief. She said it was like looking into a mirror and seeing herself when she had been making her journey into junior high.
And unlike me, she continued to accompany Mom to the shrine every Sunday and she took up the same vigil in the well house that Yumi had done years before.
I don’t know exactly what happened that day, two months after Harumi had turned fifteen, but I do know that it had something to do with the well. Apparently a baby squirrel had fallen down into the well’s dark depths and Mom hadn’t felt as though she would have been able to make the climb back up once she had gotten down. So the task had fallen to Harumi and my little sister had never been the same since.
She took frequent absences from school and when her friends called and I was home to pick up the phone they inquired about her health. I told them that as far as I knew my sister was doing fine, but that she wasn’t at home right now and I didn’t quite know where she had gone, so they were best off trying another day. In fact, now that I think about it, I don’t remember seeing Harumi a lot after she called me out of breath after rescuing the baby squirrel.
Dad sort of drifted away from them then as well. I’m sure he knew what was going on but no amount of begging on my and Yumi’s part could get him to tell us what was going on in our own family. We felt ourselves being pulled further and further away from our youngest sister and it hurt us, but there was nothing we could do.
It wasn’t until Yumi and I took matters into our own hands and returned to the shrine on our own on a day when we knew our mother or sister was not going to be there. Our great-grandfather had been gone for a long time, but our Grandmother was still there, and our Uncle Souta had returned a few years ago to help her carry on the day to day running of the place.
Yumi was so close to crying when she took up a seat in the familiar kitchen. She was due in a about a month and she was so badly for her youngest sister and for her mother to be there when she had the baby, but she hadn’t seen Harumi for two weeks and mother was hardly ever home. When she wasn’t working she was here.
The story they told us that day didn’t make sense at first. It wasn’t exactly a tale you would expect two grown women to swallow without some measure of disbelief.
It was a tale of time travel, of magic, of war, and of love, and we didn’t quite know what to do with it. We had been right all those years ago when we had guessed Mom was trying to use us to live out some part of her past. We had been right to assume that whatever it was, we were fundamentally incapable of giving he what she needed, but where we had failed, Harumi had succeeded.
We left there that day knowing that we could never go back to the time when we had been unknowing. We could never turn back the clock and be young again, and unlike our mother we didn’t want to try. We took our leave of our mother then, hugged our father with tears in our eyes and promised to still visit him and call, but we knew that our mother and Harumi were too far gone to be reached.
To this day I do not know what happened with them. I don’t know if Mom ever truly got what she was looking for, or if Harumi fixed whatever it was she had been sent back to fix, but we didn’t care. We were not the kind of people who grew up living in the past, and our mother was the kind of person who never left it. We still loved her, yes, but we found we couldn’t come to an agreement between the three of us in which we could all be happy.
And it hurt, but it got better in time.
After all, when all you do is look forward, there is little left that can leave a scar.
She hates time make it stop
Please make this stop
Stop!