peevish mama

There is nothing like returning to the place where I grew up.  It never fails to send me into a spiral of adolescent regression.  We have been visiting my family in Michigan for five days and although it is lovely to see everyone and for everyone to see us, I don’t particularly care for my attitude.  

I have slipped into a fog – a dreamy torpor.  I can’t think.  I can’t write.  The only thing I want to to do is lounge around and read magazines . . . sleep, eat, watch TV.  In short, I want to be sixteen again.  

I don’t want to worry about my kids.  I don’t want to worry about my worries.  I want to be left alone.  I want to pick the apple skins out of my braces, throw my hair in a ponytail and race off to tennis practice.  I want to cruise over to the white colonial on Chesterfield Road, pick up my best friend Susie in my Buick Electra and drive to a matinee, shrieking and giggling and weaving in and out of traffic the whole way.  I want to stew in my juices, wallow in my angst, tape songs off the radio, daydream in a swaying hammock, drive to the drugstore just because I want a new flavor of gum, a new color of nail polish.  I want to meander up and down the cool carpeted aisles of the Bloomfield Hills Public Library, picking a pile of books to read in my yellow beanbag chair.  I want to go to a concert at Pine Knob, smoke a joint and fall over on the grassy hill because I’m laughing so hard.  

I want to go back to being the center of my world.  

I want to go back to being taken care of.

I want to go back to when everything was still ahead of me.