mommy's girl

So I went to my parents' house last night because we still have no hot water after a month so we've been going there to have showers, and since they're on holiday i'm also checking the post etc.

Anyway, after my shower I was drying my hair in my mom's room and realised that a whole corner of her room is sort of dedicated to me. There's the photo of us from a couple of years ago when we went on holiday together which I put in a frame for her for mother's day (with the gold ribbon I had from an old present which I put on as a means of wrapping still on it), a photo of me sitting on her lap from when I was little and we were on holiday, two school photos including a bigger one on the wall, the cross-stitch card I made for her for mother's day this year, the little blue china statue I bought her when I went to Holland when I was 10, and also a teddy holding the word 'mum' which I got her for some recent occasion (great memory i've got!)

Then I looked in the basket which I knew had the thimbles that my Nan left to me in, and Mom had also kept all the cards people gave me for my first holy communion and some postcards I sent when I went to Wales with my Nan from 1992 and 1993.

This might not sound weird at all but to me it is a little bit because during the ages of 14 to 18 my mom and I had a pretty crappy relationship. Again, not weird given the age group, but we'd never been close anyway. I've never been able to tell my parents 'personal' stuff apart from medical things because my mom is a doctor's receptionist so she knows some stuff - at least when you need to go and get anti-biotics and when you can get something over the counter, but I never talked about my feelings or boys or relationships and only told her I was being bullied and that I was stressed about my grades when she forced it out of me and promised not to call the school...which she did anyway but it worked out okay.

But this is the woman who forced me to go on the Rosemary Connelly diet when I was 14 (in year 10) and do loads of random exercises every day and eat bran flakes and low fat (synthetic looking) salad cream on my sandwiches instead of margarine. This is the woman who told me that the reason I wanted to get Dr Martins instead of strappy sandals to wear to my friend's 16 birthday party was that I wanted to look fat and ugly and horrible (the only thing she ever apologised for saying...and then it was about a week later in the doctor's waiting room), and who accused me of being pregnant when she was watching my periods like a hawk when I was with my first boyfriend and I had to leave her a note to say the reason why the bin wasn't full of sanitary products was because i'd had to take the morning after pill after the protection broke (in actual fact, I was on anti-bios and the boyfriend coerced me into having sex under the assurance that I could get the MAP with no protection apart from the defunct pill because i'm allergic to latex and he was too cheap to buy special ones) - this before I went off to London for a gig and came back to see the note screwed up in the corner where she'd obviously thrown it in frustration.

I went to counselling at college because I couldn't handle the way she was with me and when my Nan got ill it was worse because she had all this aggression to get out and my primary source of solace was dying. During the time that I was at counselling (which she mostly didn't know about) she had to go into hospital for a sort of operation and I only found out because my dad mentioned it like I knew and when he asked her why she hadn't told me she said she thought I wouldn't care.

So, yes I was very surprised to see a little area dedicated to me in her room like that. Even though most of it WAS from before I got hormones and went all fat and evil!