Today is Max’s birthday and I want it to be good for him. I don’t want to be a drag or be irritable and a depressed mess and bring everything down. I’m doing everything I can to try to raise my mood. I started another troll post on my anonymous parenting website. The theme is ‘Lisa Kudrow should guest star on Succession.’ Of course, people will take delight in informing me that Succession is over and had its series finale. People LOVE to tell other people they are wrong on the internet.
So I’m hoping my little trollery will give me that needed pick-me-up. Refreshing the page will also give me something to do. I hope the Lisa Kudrow fans out there are not taking umbrage. I’m sure she’s a fine actress, although I never really got into Friends. Not dark and depressing enough.
Max and I are going to a real restaurant tonight where we have reservations. It’s supposed to be one of the area’s “hot” restaurants and is close to our house. The actual restaurant has been around for years and changed ownership last year. In its past incarnations, my family ate there to celebrate my high school graduation. Max and I also took my parents, my brother and SIL and their kids and Sarah there for brunch when Sarah was a toddler. So lots of memories. But like I said, it’s been under different management and been very different each time we’ve visited.
When I was in high school, the restaurant had a sort of faux Southern-colonial theme with the waitresses wearing long dresses and those lacy bonnets. It served entrees like Maryland Chicken and other 1950s classics. My mother had chosen the restaurant because, she said, she thought I loved dressed-up waitresses and old-fashioned things like out of Little House on the Prairie. I remember being outraged, thinking that she pictured me as a young child, not a young adult. I was really quite irritated at her choice of that restaurant with its antiquated theme and cuisine. I felt it was just another way she was out of touch and not paying much attention to the “real me.”
When my brother left for college in the fall of my senior year of high school, my mother went through a depression, a kind of empty-nest syndrome, and I found it immensely irritating. She would describe her memories of him as a baby and toddler and I would roll my eyes and I really had no empathy for her at all. I thought the whole thing was ridiculous and crazy. Didn’t she want him to go to college?
I also assumed for some reason that she had little to no reaction to my leaving home for college a year later. I wasn’t there of course, and I had no idea, but I always just assumed that my leaving home was a relief to her, since we had so many issues and quarrels.
Now it occurs to me that her choosing this restaurant with its somewhat childish theme was her way of trying to keep me younger a little longer. Maybe she did have empty nest feelings for me as well. Perhaps she did have a hard time losing me.
The First Year Without Sarah 