Speeding Ticket

I got another speeding ticket today.  This is my third in two years.  I guess my luck has run out.  I don't know how I went for 20 years without one, and now I get three in such a short time.  My insurance carrier is going to have a conniption.  Or maybe that will just be me when I get the next insurance bill.

How is it that I never get off once I've been pulled over?  What do these people do that get off with a warning?  I obviously need lessons.

I guess it's time for me to slow down and drive like an old lady.  It sure is going to take the fun out of driving!

Christmas Sadness

It's the seventh of December, and for the first time this year I listened to Christmas music in my car.  It was an accident.  I was switching through channels and landed on one that was all Christmas.  There once was a time when I could barely wait for Thanksgiving to be over so I could start playing my Christmas music.  I loved Christmas music.

Every year Christmas gets harder and harder.  I just don't have the energy to be jolly.  Just thinking of the work involved in decorating, and then taking down the decorations, makes me want to crawl into a hole and stay there until spring.

But I feel bad for my son.  I know I am shortchanging him yet again.  This year, he decorated the tree and the house, pretty much on his own.  I put on Christmas music for him while he did the work, because he asked for it.  My husband and I put the lights on the house because that seemed important to him, and I denied him that last year.

My husband's interest in Christmas seems to be limited to the giving and receiving of gifts, so it doesn't seem worth my time and energy to get excited about the season.  I know I should for my son.  I know I should...

Every year the joy of Christmas dims just a little more.  After last year, I hoped to avoid it altogether this year by booking a trip to Disneyland for Christmas.  If I can't get excited about Christmas in Disneyland, I really am hopeless.

Hearing the music today, I felt so sad for my son.  He definitely deserves better.

The Lovely Bones

There is a scene in The Lovely Bones (the book, I didn't see the movie) where the dead girl watches her mother make out with the homicide detective assigned to her case.  The dead girl had been the oldest and was 12 when she was murdered.  Watching her mother she realizes something that she had vaguely felt when she was living; that being a mother was a mask her mother put on when the first child woke up in the morning.

She knew her mother had been keeping time until the kids where grown and she could start her own life.  When her mother unexpectedly got pregnant again when the girls were half grown, it was like getting punched in the stomach.  She watched her mother deflate, and resign herself to THIS life.

About a year after her daughter's murder, tired of being the "dead girl's" mother, she ran away and started a new life, an anonymous life, somewhere else where she only had to take care of herself.  Where she was just Ruth, and not Carl's wife, or Laura's mother.  (All those names are made up because I can't remember the names in the book!)

I know there are plenty of people who would condemn her for that.  Who would think it was utterly selfish and she had no right to leave her family like that.

But I wonder how many women have watched their lives slip away like water while they are being a mother because it was expected of them.  It was just what you do because you're a woman, and your life can't be complete without it.  I wonder how many women wish they could run away, but are duty-bound to be the mom, the wife, the caretaker.  I wonder how many women strain against the routine of getting them up, getting them dressed, making their breakfast, making their lunch, getting them to school, cleaning the house, doing the grocery shopping, picking them up from school, making their snack, helping with homework, making dinner, getting them bathed, reading the bedtime story, putting them to bed, cleaning up from dinner, falling into bed.  Rinse and repeat.  Who dare not complain, or speak her dreams aloud for fear of being thought of as a bad mom, or ungrateful.

Granted, this book was set 40 years ago, and there are hopefully fewer instances now.  Although for some, I'm sure there is most of that squeezed around a full-time job.

And yes, I know there are many women who are fulfilled by motherhood, that WOULDN'T be complete without that experience. Who have waited all their lives for that moment of giving birth to that helpless little being who depends completely on her and is hers to shape and love.  Those women have the special gift of sacrifice that comes with devoting their life to the nurturing of little ones.  These are special and necessary, and god bless them.

I'm not talking about them.

I'm just wondering how prevalent the feeling is.  I was surprised to see it in the book.  I was surprised that anyone would admit those feelings exist, even in a fiction novel.