Go to your room or, so help me, by the Macaroni Monster,
I'll kill you where you stand!
Independence
Day is a modern
day fantasy about motherhood in which a woman makes one last ditch effort to
bond with her teenager, and one of the vignettes in Because She Was a Woman.
* ~*~ *
We had a friend who after an acrimonious matrimony and a
contentious divorce, moved cross-country to be closer to her family and raise
her children with a support system. She had not intended on becoming a single
mother, but then few people dream of that particular circumstance.
As with parenthood in all its forms, there were good days and
bad days and days when infanticide seemed like a viable solution.
We were visiting them once, probably around Thanksgiving, and
the kids had been fighting for days before our arrival and the war continued
after we were settled. Finally at her wits’ end, she screamed threateningly, “If
you two can’t live together in peace, I’ll just have to separate you and ship
one of you off to live with your father!”
We fell silent, horrified at the severity of that statement.
The boy understood immediately that they’d crossed a line with
mom and quietly retreated to his room (to think about what he had done).
The girl though, she was different. Daddy’s girl, she resented
her mother for being. First she had to compete for his attention with her, but
then after the divorce, that woman took her away from the love of her life. And
obviously, as any Daddy’s Girl will assert, he didn’t do anything wrong. He
could do no wrong!
She too retreated to her own corner room and came back
out some 20 minutes later with a well rehearsed message.
“Mommy,” she said. “I believe that because I am eldest, if you
are going to separate us and send one of us to live with daddy, it should be
me.”
Her brother looked shell shocked. I looked from her mother to my
own mother and I saw heartbreak – pure and unadulterated heartbreak. The girl,
for her tweenie part, looked at her mother defiantly, ready to argue her
position and unaware of the hurt she’d caused.
How could she know? In her mind she was still the center of the
universe. But her universe was out of whack, because her universe was her
daddy. Children are infuriating that way; sometimes well into their mid-30s…
I wonder though, how many mothers fantasize about the ultimate
comeuppance for their ungrateful children. Most would never act on it, I
realize. Most, in fact, despite the overwhelming urge to kill their young,
simply love us and try to set us straight without committing felonies.
There are felonies in Independence
Day, but not the ones you presume.
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