momfoolery

I like my mother, Jeanne, just fine – I love her, sure – but  I don’t adore her the way that I hope to be adored when I’m old and irrelevant and my kids are stuck taking care of me. 

I always wanted to be exceptional, just like, I suppose, everyone does, which completely defeats the purpose of wanting to stand out. I would have loved to have been a standout in my ballet class. I was noteworthy because of my very high arch, but all that ended up being good for was making it difficult for me to find boots that fit, since the rest of my body refused to cooperate. I wasn’t flexible enough to even touch my toes, I’m way too long waisted, and my neck, unlike my darling sarah silverman’s, is not 7 inches totally flaccid. So I moved on to the next dream. 

I excelled in high school, because my ability to test very, very well made it possible for me to be comfortably lazy the rest of the time. College didn’t work that way, so my life as a brilliant academic was not to be. I went on to have a bunch of adventures (none of which helped me build a useful resume), but now here I am, a plump middle aged housewife who drives kids places and then splits the rest of her day between dealing with food (shopping, cooking, cleaning, repeat) and taking care of her elderly mother. 

My mom began as an exceptional person. She fell in love with science when she learned how water freezes; she was amazing at the beautiful way the crystals line up. She was feisty too. She broke her arm jumping off a swing in the playground, played a mean game of kick the can with the boys on the street, and was once the cause of a phone call my grandmother received. “Uhm, Mrs. Shultz, I thought you should know that Jeanne is chasing Mary around the front yard with a baseball bat.” Now I adored my aunt Mary, and I certainly don’t condone chasing even people that I don’t adore with a baseball bat, but as she told me these stories when I was a child, I had to admire her spirit. 

Eventually, my mom graduated with her degree in chemistry. She was one of three women who graduated all of the hard sciences in 1952, thereby hanging on to her exceptional status longer than I did. She was hired as a chemist at Shell Oil, and god she loved that job.