questionable

 So my dad had a date last night.  And he’s discovered online dating.  I came over to the house tonight and watched him drink a few double vodkas.  He waxed poetic about life, gave me orders to redecorate the upstairs and then yelled at me about how someone working at the company isn’t doing her fair share.

Then he asked me to get him some soup.  After I reheated soup for him, he got a call from a lady on one of the dating sites, so I am sure I’ll be heating up the soup again.

I miss my mom.  I’m trying to be a good supportive daughter and understand that he doesn’t want to be alone, but it’s only been 2 months.

And although he often says he cares about me, he never listens to me for more than one sentence- especially after a few drinks.

I certainly don’t feel supported.

I’m ready to quit everything.  How am I supposed to work full time, take care of this house, and have a life at all?  I had to ask if I could go out to dinner tomorrow night which s for my 21st anniversary in sobriety and he didn’t even ask why I wanted to go out with my friends.

I feel small, petty, bitter.  Lost and alone and not sure how to set some boundaries to improve my life but still honor the promise I made to my mother.

15 minutes

So, I read an article or heard a news story yesterday that writers should write every day.  Seems simple, but I've been slacking on both writing and visual art for about 5 years.  I figured 15 minutes a day was a pretty easy target - the low-hanging fruit, nothing too intense.  I could even write about how hard it is to write sometimes - what pressure, the stress, and painting - forget about it. 

Although I preach process not a product, progress, not perfection - I am convinced if something doesn't look or sound perfect out of the gate then I, or it, is hopeless.

Last night I tried making a toilet cleaning bomb - an easy recipe from Pinterest (yikes) which I should have known might not work.  I was so disappointed when the concoction turned into a type of growing ooze that eventually hardened into something similar to concrete ... I should have taken a photo.  For reference, here is the failed recipe.

I was about to throw everything out, and then I realized - I should just give it another try.  If at first, you don't succeed, and all that.

In other news, my dad is on a date tonight.  He has invited a lady he met on a dating website for "old people," as he describes it.  He's spent a few weeks feeling guilty, ashamed, ambivalent for inviting any woman into his life, but he affirms that "he's just not a person that does well alone."  He wondered out loud if I would be okay with this - and probably had too much to drink and doesn't remember that I said I was okay with it even though I'm really not ready to see my dad with another woman.

Even if she's just a friend or companion, or whatever.  Part of me wants Delilah not to like her because that means more to him than if I like her.  What a petulant child I am, angry and confused.  I want my dad to have friends, and not to be so sad, but I don't want her in my mother's house, looking at her things, petting her cats and dog.  So selfish, I am.

Mother's Day

    I am sure this year will be different, but as long as I can remember, Mother's Day has meant going to the nursery and planting flowers.  Occasionally my family went to a zoo, arboretum, or a botanical garden, but there were always flowers.  Mom picked out the prettiest and most prolific annual plants like begonias, petunias, geraniums, and enlisted the help of mostly me to help her.

    We would spend the day in the yard, get sunburned, or freeze and be soaked, but we would plant flowers.  Even last year, mired by chemotherapy and covid-19 quarantines, we planted flowers.  I never expected it would be the last time we would garden together.  

    When my sister died, Mother's Day was especially hard for Mom, but she persevered and tried to engage with the day, the flowers, and me.  But her heart usually wasn't in it.  I could tell that Angela's absence was a weight on the day even though Ang didn't like worms - in fact, she hated worms and would scream and run away if she encountered one.  She would help us pick out plants, bring them out, but for the most part - Angela wasn't part of the gardening.

    My dad usually didn't really participate either, he would try and take over and my mom and dad would fight.  My dad would turn the day into an assembly line ... taking the fun right away from the planting for my mother.  The fun for her was the quiet conversations, the introductions to each plant, finding the right spots for everything, and trying to keep the livestock (dogs, cats) and night visitors from unplanting the recently immigrated crops.

The fun for her were the stories of the sunflowers from my childhood in Westacres, the aguga in Kansas, and of course, the gardens of her childhood because my mother's family were are gardeners.

Now that she's gone, and not having any children, I don't have anyone to share those memories with - so I am telling you about my mother, and the sunflowers from my childhood, and the aguga from Kansas, and how much I miss my mom.

Last weekend was amazing weather, so my father and I jumped the gun and spent $200 on plants and seeds at Lowes and I went to work with Mark, my best-friend, trying to return the life and love the backyard after a dreadful winter, the winter that my mother went to the hospital on my dead sister's birthday and never left, dying 5 days later.

It was a tough weekend.  I thought all the bad, lonely feelings would go away if I stayed away from stores, people, and television.  Needless to say, that didn't work.  Facebook was the worst.

Leave it to social media to make you feel guilty in your grief for not being grateful for all the time you had with your mom rather than simply missing her on a day you used to spend with her and being mad, mad, mad that your dad won't even let you be sadder than him on Mother's Day.

On a good note, the plants appear to be alive - even after a near frost low last night.  So, with any luck, there will be peas and beans.