How embarrassing. I just realized I'd been making the titles for the last few entries -- not all the August entries, just the 5th, 6th, and 7th -- July. It's like writing your check out wrong and doing it in public. Even worse: no one noticed.
Darin and I had lunch with my parents today. I knew it wasn't going to be the most auspicious day for lunch when the phone rang at some incredibly early hour, like 10am.
Darin shook me gently. "Honey, could you hand me the phone?"
I hadn't even heard it, and the phone was less than a foot from my head. I was in the middle of a dream about a family of vampires, and the character I was following around (but I don't think I was inside of, I was just watching) was a 3000-year-old male vampire who had to stop a younger female vampire from doing something stupid that would reveal them all.
I handed him the phone. Then I made us switch places and I tried to go back to sleep. Darin always answers the phone when it rings in the morning, because he always sounds alert and conscious. I, on the other hand, sound like I'm hooked to a steady morphine drip.
The phone call was for him anyway: some problem that needed to be solved at the office. Darin talked to the engineer for a while before I decided to get up and go check my mail.
A little while later we got another phone call, this time from my father, and then another phone call, again from Darin's office. I had a feeling that some kind of crisis was going on at work, because he hasn't gotten two phone calls at home in the morning in a long time.
"You don't have to come with for lunch, you know," I told him.
"It'll be fine. I just have to be at work by 1."
We got to the Fish Market to meet my parents at 12. My parents had gotten all dressed up for lunch -- my mother likes to dress up anyhow, so I shouldn't have been surprised. I shouldn't have been surprised by very much at this lunch.
I think I've mentioned that my moving to Los Angeles is a big deal on many fronts, not the least of which is I haven't lived outside the Bay Area for 20 years. (Exactly 20 years: my parents moved us to San Francisco in August 1976.) I'm moving an hour's plane ride away.
My mother had not asked me anything about my going to graduate school since I told my parents I was going. Even today during lunch she asked me, "What college is it?" But that was later, when I was finally talking a little bit about my plans. First, my mother talked about:
I have to admit that I was so astounded by my mother's lack of interest in anything having to do with my going to LA -- not even understanding that I was going off to graduate school and couldn't dash off to NYC for a week -- that I started scribbling down the topics of conversation on a notepad.
Eventually, probably around when the appetizers arrived, she said, "Well, tell me about Los Angeles."
I don't think I'd ever so vividly understood how uninterested my mother is in anything that doesn't immediately concern her. I know, I know -- I'm living up to Portia's criticism of me as me self-centered and self-absorbed. But dammit, this upcoming move to LA is a big deal for me. I'm scared. I'm excited. And she either doesn't care or doesn't know how to show that she cares.
In fairness, my father did ask me about it, and we talked some about where I was living in relation to campus, and so on. But it's hard for my father to out-talk my mother, because he has a voice box implant courtesy of laryngeal cancer (the next time someone says cigars are better for you than cigarettes, laugh at them).
Another thing that happened that I don't think I'd ever been conscious of before was when my mother was doing something trivial -- trying to find her blood pressure medication in her handbag, or something else that was really no big deal -- and she said, "I should have put it in this pocket where I would have found it immediately. Stupid, stupid." The last part sounds like she was getting way too upset, but she was just saying it by rote; the words didn't mean anything to her. It was said in almost exactly the same tone you might say, "How are you?" or "Nice day out."
But "Stupid, stupid" is the kind of thing that I say to myself all the time. And I hear it each and every time. It's burned into my psyche as self-deprecation. I always wondered where I got it from, because my parents never railed at me or hit me or maltreated me, and yet I have this Severe Inner Critic that wallops me constantly. Now I know. I get it from my mother, who didn't know what she doing.
Oh, those magic moments when a girl realizes she's just like her mom.
I think I'm going to begin drinking early tonight.