Mum vs. Mom

It's four a.m. and I should be sleeping.
This is premium mum time. Pardon my British but I'm a mum, not a mom. I have so little left of my home identity, it's been gradually eroding since I moved to Los Angeles. I think about home in these pre-dawn hours, and now I remember more and more of my childhood, too. It's only natural now that I see the growing up world from the other side of the veil. Certain images bookend the years and for a long time I shrugged off the feelings brought with those pictures. Now I realize they are inseparable and meant for the time when I might need to draw on them, to remember how exquisitely complicated things were for my mother. And for me.

I am one of five children and for those of you with sibilings, especially more than the one-best-friend kind, you know how harrowing these groups of sub-humans can be before the skin of civilization has been bound tightly around us. We didn't kill each other, but sometimes we skirted the edges of behavior so extreme it's a wonder that we all managed to survive. Girls are much more elegant, subtle, and devious in their torture of each other and we were a family of girls. We devoured as much of our competition for family love as we could manage, and plucked out feathers from each other's wings whenever we could. There was so little chance to soar back then because of what we did to each other. That's how I remember it in these dark hours, before the birds begin their morning ritual, their bright sounds so close.

I used to think that my mother should have stopped at one child. The one who read poetry and Treasure Island by age four, with fat blond curls and the world on a string, the one who sits behind me in a black and white photograph on my wall, arm locked around my neck choking the life out of my fat little baby body. I look stuptified....no I look accepting. The too-many children angle was our family's urban legend, like the woman who took the little chihuaua home during a trip to Mexico only to be told that it was a very large rat. We felt burdensome. And in the end, we took that burden on, we tried our best to help out.

I was the dark changeling, made in part by the world I came into, my small world where there were busy people with thoughts and intentions elsewhere. I internalized so much of the confusion that I look at my daughter now and feel absolutely humbled by the power her father and I have in these early years to lay a foundation for her to build on. I am also aware on a level almost too frightening to face, that my shortcomings are the internal battlefield where I must lay some of those preconceptions to waste, where I must truly mine my soul for all that I am, and not just what I choose to remember.

All I have is awareness. It's a start.