I M Perfect lady

Sometimes you are just floating along in your day, and out of nowhere the past comes and stops you dead.   Unexpected and loud, it blows away the energy of inspiration taking with it your happy day.  You are made to take a detour.  Unscheduled it demands your attention, now!  Overshadowing the delightful Author in my writing class.  In seconds the world tilts.

Part of you hesitates like a stubborn child reluctant, but the curiosity wins, again.  Dare you not look, dare you look.  What is the risk to just turning away, not peeping even once?  Who will it hurt more this time, the hope or the hopeless.

When my son was little and I wanted him to do something he didn’t like or if I was the Mom he was unhappy getting, he would say, “I am not going to be your boy no more.”  To him that solved it all, if he was not my boy, I no longer could tell him what to do.

When I opened the mailbox, a large manila envelope poked out behind a few innocent white envelopes.  In the corner the address unfamiliar but the scrawl was familiar and carried the weight of the world.   What do you have to say now?  Why are you so determined to come into my world, what do you have to say to me, what?!   God why?

The mind can scroll many different possibilities, but my body couldn’t take the stress, so I just simply opened it up.

Recipes?!  Recipes for real?! 

With a small square blue posted note, and the same handwritten scrawl;

Hello!

Additional recipes for the family cookbook.

I miss you very much.

Please cash check by end of May I want to balance my checkbook. 

Will stop payment June 1^st.

Love you always Mom

I flip through them absentmindedly and a few family names float around, mixing in with Taco Soup and Waikiki Meatballs.  Not knowing what else to do, I eat my tuna sandwich, looking deeper unseeingly into the many pages of how to prepare meals for a family.  This seems sort of odd, coming from a family that can’t even be one. 

Is there a recipe to put a family together?  How about one that can combine listening ears, seeing eyes and loving arms to create a different mom?  Is that in this pile of paper?  Can you make that?  How long does it take?  Is there time?

What to do with the recipe of a family that doesn’t work?  Can you just get a new recipe? Gather the right ingredients and if you follow all the directions, do it right, will a great tasting family pop out?

This cooker girl can’t find the right ingredients that I need, it seems they are all wrong for the recipe I want.  What appears is the stuff for a family that I no longer have the appetite for.  What I am craving and longing for just isn’t there.

They say you can choose your friends, but families are forever.  I guess they are right, no matter what flavor they are.  There is simply nothing I can do to change them, nothing to make them easier to swallow I am left with this dish that has been handed down from generation to generation. 

All that is left for me to do is refuse to eat.  Refuse to partake.  Go hungry.

My heart grumbles and rumbles, but this is not where it will get fed, again.

Empty and hallow it walks away.

Hopeless won again.

I am not going to be your girl no more.

The little blue note never asked how I was…….