oh great, a trip!

2006-10-27 - 9:26 a.m.

Okay, so my mom is taking me and my two sisters to Italy for a week. We're going on some kind of tour arranged by the local branch of the state university. It has something to do with eating.

It's really a lovely thing, and I'm having trouble explaining why I'm so bent out of shape about it.

Mostly, I am sure, it has to do with the wierdness of my family in general. My family is made up of three different families, and I grew up feeling like the oddball and planning to have my own family where I would not feel like the oddball.

Of course, as you get older you realize that even a "real" family is not exactly a perfect family, and even though my role is to be the oddball, I still sort of belong to that original family.

Then another annoyance has to do with the inconvenience of the whole thing. It's in the middle of the fall. The kids are busy. I don't really like leaving them. I'm still not unpacked. It's one more thing in the middle of too many things. I'm going to come back and be that much further behind and then it will be the holidays ...

Then another thing is that my mother is always such a pest. I'm sorry that she's a pest. I wish I didn't feel that she was a pest. But she is, and so I feel annoyed, too. [My younger brother thinks she's a pest, too.]

I guess I'm feeling that it's all about her -- she wants to do this thing with her "three daughters," but I'm feeling like it's all a fraud. I'm having to take part in this whole "three daughters" charade at the expense of my real family, and my real self.

And then I'm hoping that my kids never feel this way about me, which also makes me feel terribly guilty. Also, there's the whole complication of how she acts towards her mother. I'm afraid that I feel more of an allegiance to my own kids than I do to her, and partly that has to do with the fact that I think she's always felt more of an allegiance to her mother than to us.

I really do wish that I felt closer to my family of origin -- I really do feel like there's no there there. But perhaps this is more commoon than I think?

I don't know -- I couldn't really sleep last night, which never ever happens, and now I'm all in a tizzy.

It's just all too much.

out of print - new releases

find me! - 2008-02-12
where I've gone - 2008-02-07
Where I've gone - 2008-02-05
where I've gone - 2008-02-01
New - 2008-02-01