If my mother had her way, I would be spending the rest of my life in Aberdeen, less than a mile from my parents’ house and my childhood home, at least until they turned the farm over to me to “keep it in the family”. Sure, it was a beautiful home, comparable to something I’d want for my family in the future, but I’d already lived there. It would never feel like my home, but my parents’ still. And of course along with the house would come the farm; the cows, the early mornings, the feeling of being tied to one plot of land until I died or finally found someone crazy enough to think they could make a better profit off of it than I could. I didn’t want to feel without options, unable to leave at a moment’s notice. I wanted to travel the world, see more than my own backyard and the simple life my mother had led that I just knew was never going to be for me. To choose that would mean settling for something short of what I had seen so vividly in my mind since I was just young.
Parents always say when we’re little kids, that we can be what we want to be, do what we want to do when we grow older, but as soon as you make up your mind and have discovered your passion in life, suddenly they happen to change their minds. Whatever you believe to be your path in life is suddenly not safe enough, not as promising, not as respectable as they pictured for you. Every parent wants their kid to gain aspirations of becoming some great surgeon or a money making lawyer, but did they ever think that perhaps a prosperous career doesn’t always make a person happy? Parents want their kids to be happy until they come home claiming they’re going to be an artist painting portraits on the streets of Paris, the author of the next bestselling novel, or…a rodeo clown or something. Suddenly happiness just in not in the cards. She never flat out told me what kind of career she wanted me have, but the assumption that I’d remain for the rest of my life in a town with nothing to offer would limit that to something along the lines of breaking up drunken-man fights tending bar or price checking cat food at the general store…both of which would probably cause me to shoot myself before the end of my first week.
The most irksome of all was the way she had had my wedding planned ever since my playdates with Finn when I was four years old. Her constant little comments whenever she’d see the two of us together, and her weaseling little ways to try her darnedest to make things happen for the two of us; requesting he accompany me to run her errands on random Saturday afternoons or inviting him over for Sunday lunches. She never realized that it was never going to be that simple. Just because our neighbors happened to have “a decent young man” as a son, that did not necessarily make this girl next door his obvious soul mate, as convenient that may have seemed for everyone. This wasn’t the seventeen hundreds; arranged marriages were never going to be in-vogue.
I know that she was only looking out for me. Staying in town was the safe thing to do, the one thing that wouldn’t get my spirits snapped to pieces. There was little rejection to be had in Aberdeen unlike Boston, a "big city" and therefore something with the ability to chew you up and spit you out. She didn’t want me to get hurt, in any context of the word. Staying in Aberdeen meant staying under the watchful eyes of momma O‘Malley. Staying in Aberdeen meant that my stupid dreams, although unfulfilled, still remained intact. But since when did she assume me so fragile of a thing? One little cough and I wouldn’t crack a rib. I was not her little girl anymore, no matter how much she wished that to be the truth.
No comments:
Post a Comment