(no subject)
[Private]
Carol's a mess. I'm... holding it all together.
She said something last night, about being too dependent on Danny, and God knows I'm too dependent on Sam and just--
I wonder if it was easier, for my mother, for my mother's generation. Easier when there wasn't the option to choose between a family and a career, or to try and juggle both. When it was okay to be dependent. Expected, even.
She was eighteen when she married my father, and that had to make it easier too. To go from being dependent on her parents to being dependent on her husband. To never have tasted independence, to never have struggled for it for so long. Or maybe it wasn't, because how many times did she push me harder and further than I wanted to be pushed as a kid? How many times did she kick me out of the kitchen to do homework because she wanted me to be more than just a wife and mother? How much of that was her trying desperately to live through me, guide me into a life she never had the opportunity to lead?
I knew her for sixteen years and I never knew what she dreamed of, as a child. I never knew what her goals were, her aspirations, her desires. She was eighteen when she married my father, and then she had these children to support, to care for and-- And I never knew if it made her happy. If we made her happy, or if she lived her life wishing for something else, something more.
Would she have been proud of me the day I cashed the first paycheck from my first real job, that moment where I finally achieved financial independence? Would she have wanted me to live forty-odd years single and bouncing through relationships I could walk away from without batting an eye? Would she have wanted to watch me brief the press everyday? Or would she have been happier with grandchildren? Would she have expected me to give it all up, when I got married? Devote my life to my husband? Or would she have thought that the biggest mistake I could make?
If I never work another day in my life, I'll still have a roof over my head and food on my table. Would she have understood that I need more than food and shelter to be happy? If she'd been able to say the same thing, would she have walked away from my father? Would she have walked away from us? Or did she need Dad as much as I, despite my best efforts to the contrary, need Sam.
Because God, I am far too dependent on him, and the more I struggle against it, the more I need him. Would she have understood that? Did she ever wake my father in the middle of the night so he could wrap his arms around her until she could breathe again?
There is so much I'll never know, and can I in good conscience continue trying to have a child when odds are I'll be dead before she's old enough to need the answers? Did my mother even want children? Do I? Or do I just want to keep Sam close, tied to me because I'm the mother of his children, which somehow means more in our society than being merely his wife?
Does he need me as much as I need him?
[/Private]
Carol's a mess. I'm... holding it all together.
She said something last night, about being too dependent on Danny, and God knows I'm too dependent on Sam and just--
I wonder if it was easier, for my mother, for my mother's generation. Easier when there wasn't the option to choose between a family and a career, or to try and juggle both. When it was okay to be dependent. Expected, even.
She was eighteen when she married my father, and that had to make it easier too. To go from being dependent on her parents to being dependent on her husband. To never have tasted independence, to never have struggled for it for so long. Or maybe it wasn't, because how many times did she push me harder and further than I wanted to be pushed as a kid? How many times did she kick me out of the kitchen to do homework because she wanted me to be more than just a wife and mother? How much of that was her trying desperately to live through me, guide me into a life she never had the opportunity to lead?
I knew her for sixteen years and I never knew what she dreamed of, as a child. I never knew what her goals were, her aspirations, her desires. She was eighteen when she married my father, and then she had these children to support, to care for and-- And I never knew if it made her happy. If we made her happy, or if she lived her life wishing for something else, something more.
Would she have been proud of me the day I cashed the first paycheck from my first real job, that moment where I finally achieved financial independence? Would she have wanted me to live forty-odd years single and bouncing through relationships I could walk away from without batting an eye? Would she have wanted to watch me brief the press everyday? Or would she have been happier with grandchildren? Would she have expected me to give it all up, when I got married? Devote my life to my husband? Or would she have thought that the biggest mistake I could make?
If I never work another day in my life, I'll still have a roof over my head and food on my table. Would she have understood that I need more than food and shelter to be happy? If she'd been able to say the same thing, would she have walked away from my father? Would she have walked away from us? Or did she need Dad as much as I, despite my best efforts to the contrary, need Sam.
Because God, I am far too dependent on him, and the more I struggle against it, the more I need him. Would she have understood that? Did she ever wake my father in the middle of the night so he could wrap his arms around her until she could breathe again?
There is so much I'll never know, and can I in good conscience continue trying to have a child when odds are I'll be dead before she's old enough to need the answers? Did my mother even want children? Do I? Or do I just want to keep Sam close, tied to me because I'm the mother of his children, which somehow means more in our society than being merely his wife?
Does he need me as much as I need him?
[/Private]