neuroses por moi

It’s a rainy Tuesday in autumn and I am not feeling inspired to say the least. Fall is not my season, people. I find the dark mornings and the early nights to be altogether life-sucking and stifling. I am not sure where in the recesses of my brain this came from, but there it is. Fall just depresses me. Fall really depresses me.

I wonder if that is because I was never crazy about school as a kid. I remember finding it all a little confusing. Life was predictable and easy before I started kindergarten. Then my mother’s father died, and our family went from 3 kids to 4, I went off to kindergarten, and things just got chaotic and never really went back to their happy predictable patterns. This is, of course a mixed bag. It may have created some neuroses por moi, but I also got 3 sisters who I adore out of the deal. Those limited resources come back in spades when you are an adult and you have not one, not two, but THREE sisters to cavort, play, eat, and cry with. They are my support system and my own personal comedians and I don't think I can properly express in words how lucky I am to have them.

I have a favorite perfume called mimosa por moi. I think I shall rename it neuroses por moi. I like the ring of that.

Speaking of kindergarten and sisters, I will share a story with you about my kinderwasp attack.

I was walking home from kindergarten. It was the day my sister Betsy was born. That would have made it September 14th, 1977. Or maybe it was the day before. All I know is that my mother was on her way out the door to go have a baby. Like IN LABOR. I have an impeccable sense of poorly timing my crises. My house would burn down the day of a family funeral. I would be diagnosed with a fatal disease the same day my sister won the Nobel peace prize. It just seems to happen that way.

I came running to the back door screaming, and covered in wasps. On my walk home from school, I had disturbed a nest of sleeping wasps wedged in a stone fence on the corner. The only vivid memory I have of this is standing in the middle of the kitchen looking at my sister Molly, who didn’t seem so small at the time, but was not even yet two. She had a wasp in her hair, one of the twenty or so that I had carried into the house trapped in my jumper, and she was screaming and flailing as my mother tried to get it off of her. I remember thinking to myself, probably whilst being stung by the wasps trapped in my clothes “I know she is little and all, but did SHE just get stung 17 times???? NO! I GOT STUNG 17 TIMES! I am covered in bee stings, and she is freaking out over one measly bee in her hair. I AM BEING IGNORED HERE!!!!! HELLOOO????? REMEMBER ME? Yeah, I am the five year old covered in welts! Help me!!!!”

Looking back on the situation I can not imagine how stressful that must have been for my mother. Molly was not much older than Maggie for crying out loud. Of course she was scared. She was practically a baby. I had just run screaming into the house covered in wasps and scared the bejeesus out of her. My mother was in labor for the love of Pete. It might have take all her strength to not fall on the floor in the fetal position, weeping. And my only memory of this is watching my mother tend to my sister instead of me and being very very bitter about it. This is what is imprinted on my brain.

I SO have middle child syndrome.