Disappointments though are natural, just maybe not to the extent I've considered them, every attempt to better oneself and each regret over some action or other, either my own or another's, and as natural to me as my underdeveloped figure which at various points in history has been fashionable, and will be again probably when I'm too old to make it work or my figure, with age, will have done the opposite: grown wide or heavy.
At the beginning my face; now my body, so like I said it's natural that discontents with life's events should follow, which are mostly only uplifting for a time before a sourness or loathsomeness sets in. I'm not the first, I believe, to think, nor to admit, this, though I think there are less of us willing to own up to...to a sort of bitterness. A kind of hostility towards ourself and to everything that comes our way, to all we've agreed to or somehow, even without realising it, put in motion.
I can't say I cope with what I see as 'let-downs' very successfully. Perhaps because my initial ideas or visions are too big or too hopeful, when in reality they're not like that at all. They don't fall into place as easily as they might have done, or did in mind; nor do they fulfil all you imagined they would, in a short space of, or over, time. And dare I say people, who become known to you, can seem that way too. Different to how you thought they would be, or they react in ways you didn't think they would, in ways that don't seem to correspond with their person, that seem at odds with their outer exterior. I tend to find instances like that more surprising than disappointing, but others might take it as the latter and feel aggrieved because their character, on the surface, had suggested otherwise: that they would be in sympathy with (or could persuaded to be) their own line of thinking. That however, to me, intimates flattery and manipulation, as a means, rather than friendship; or that criticism or difference of thought cannot be borne, in any measure.
But then I too am disposed (too disposed) to deal in, and dish out, criticism when disappointments of any kind loom large in my mind. The shine rubbed off the apple; the future far from rosy. Everything rotten and wormy. I realise it's a passing cloud, and yet still give credence, and voice, to those thoughts that really shouldn't trip off the tongue, not to just anyone but to my mum, which is worse for she doesn't deserve any of my vitriol.
Is that too strong a word? Hmm, needle is more apt. I chide, I scold as if I were the parent and she the child. You hear of parents being bullies but less of grown children bullying their own parents. Though our mother-daughter relations have always had a bit of that – she was Eddie and I was Saffie (from Ab Fab) – where being cruel was meant as a kindness really, like the Nick Lowe song. The tenuous similarities to those characters have watered down even further as both of us have aged and yet if I'm feeling a certain way, anything I can find fault with I will find fault with and that extends to my mother. I don't like it, this trait, but somehow when I'm in its grip I'm powerless to prevent myself from being like it. Inwardly though I'm slapping myself. Perhaps I should wear an elastic band around my wrist? Aversion therapy. Luckily, for me, she finds it (mostly) funny, knowing, by now, the course my dressing-downs take, and that anything I've said has been said for a different reason entirely, one not at at all connected to her. Or to when she smacked me hard across the back of the calves. I was under ten, but even then, as I recall, it was strangely satisfying because I think I drove her to it. Rather perverse of me, don't you think?
But no, this is not revenge. This, in a weird way, is being cruel to myself in the right measure. Because it's quite common, in life, to disappoint and feel disappointed.
Picture credit: Portrait of a Woman Against Cezanne's Still Life with Apples, 1890, Paul Gauguin (Source: WikiArt.org).
All posts published this year were penned during the last.
