Yes, it’s true, I am a one woman freak show – but then, I believe we all are, encompassing entire worlds and multitudes as Walt Whitman said, including tiny and not so tiny quirks and flaws and oddnesses. Oddities? Meh. I prefer oddnesses. The sum of being human is a combination of the sublime, boring, and freakish. In my view, that is, but then I would say that as I am a freak.
Pourquoi? Why am I a freak? So many reasons but let’s briefly explore one. It came to me – not for the first time, mind you – the other day as I was for the millionth time emptying my dishwasher. Yes, that simple task reminded me just what a freak I am. Y’see, when I take the clean dishes out (I’m an especially heavy user of bowls of various sizes), I have to place the clean, recently used bowls on the bottom of the ‘pile’ in order to be fair to the other bowls or drinking glasses or plates or forks, knives and spoons (ALL INANIMATE OBJECTS) in order to give the unused plates and etc. their fair chance at being utilized. No playing favorites.
This constitutes a waste of time, and lifting the bowls to make sure the clean ones go underneath – particularly off a shelf that is both high and a slight stretch in my kitchen – is a pain in the neck, but I have to do it. Every ‘one’ of these common household items must get their turn, their fair shake, their dose of mom’s attention, which means mine.
I realize that this weirdness is a habit born out of my childhood, which was rife with ‘favorites’ and ‘non-favorites’; I was a decided non-favorite, although I was also going to be my dad’s 2nd wife, a crazy-making twist on the golden versus brass child nightmare. Yet in school I was often a teacher’s pet, an experience that taught me a valuable lesson in that being a – or the – favorite was a double-edged sword; one reasons was that ‘favoriting’ means another person or persons are automatically disfavored, are seen as less than the apple of the person in power’s eye. Who holds and wields the power, and how, is key.
Did I want to be ‘the favorite’, at home or in school? Yes and no because I knew how dark being least favorite felt at times. Plus, it was never going to happen, not at home. And, in school, how could I celebrate give my intimate knowledge of the serpent’s tooth, least-favored hell-scape? I wanted to do well, and I needed to – school along with reading saved my bacon during my childhood – but I was made deeply uncomfortable with being favored in class. This was particularly true in my earliest grade school years, with the emphasis on ‘fairness’, except – is this fair? Is our teacher being fair? My stomach was often in knots. It was like those moments when my mom publicly declared she had no favorite child, which was hilariously, patently untrue.
Should I say something? Lying, like fairness, was another thing we were learning all about. Were we ever.
Being the favorite may also create deep-seated fear in a little person, fear that any fall from grace, any failure or fault will cause a known or unknown hurt or loss; it might even destroy you as you’ve survived on that glowing, untarnished reflection of self in someone else’s eyes. It can mean, as I powerfully witnessed with my numero uno mother’s favorite of all time older sister, that expectations and pressure from the source of power way up above has the potential to turn a person inside out.
My elder sister was turned inside out.
It seems unlikely I will stop doing this thing, this unfavoriting thing with my stuff anytime soon (it doesn’t, thankfully, apply to tee-shirts, pants or shoes), but maybe, just maybe, one day I will modify this practice? Be less of a freak? Let it go. I actually believe that one day I would like to live so simply none of this will matter. One bowl, one spoon, fork and knife, one glass for water, one wine glass, one giant, beloved cup for my tea. Maybe.