“I try to take one day at a time, but sometimes several days attack me at once.”
~ Jennifer Unlimited
I’ll get straight to the point of the dark side of being a young mom…my young mom. Looking back (fondly), I now believe mom had undiagnosed issues like today’s classic panic attacks sprinkled with generalized anxiety disorder. Maybe Mom felt a bit trapped in the reality of her world — maybe she was just a bit nuts. She may have just craved more attention, and perhaps she relished the drama just for drama’s sake (I definitely think mom loved drama, but it was most likely a combination of all of these gems).
A bad day for mom would usually mean the oven goes on. You could always smell when our gas range was on, so I’d wander down to the kitchen and see what mom was cooking up for dad and me. On my way, I’d wonder “will mom be baking my favorite treat today? Maybe chocolate fudgy brownies – or a creamy chocolate Betty Crocker cake? Lemon cupcakes with colorful sprinkles on top? Would I be able to lick the batter off the spoon?”. Licking the batter – mmmmm, one of the best yet simplest pleasures life has to offer a kid. Well, unfortunately, this was not about cakes, cupcakes or my delicious chocolately cake batter….damn!
(Italian Lesson: gas stove = cucina a gas)
No, this was all about our gas oven, a prime prop for my mother’s drama. Mom would turn on the oven, open the door – gas aflame – that “funny” gassy scent filling up our tiny kitchen. At times she threatened to stick her head in the oven and end it all, leaving me a motherless kid. Sometimes she said we were ALL doomed, and our trusty little gas oven would take us all out.
I was just a kid, so I believed her (not knowing that just lighting an oven with a working pilot light wouldn’t kill a freaking moth). However, for some strange reason I never panicked when the range of death went on. Yeah, I thought it was peculiar, but perhaps it was the frequency of this nut-job behavior that it became an in home show – a performance put on by a mom for her daughter. Masterpiece Theatre in my own kitchen. Bellissimo, Bellissimo!
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- Mom’s “end-it-all” prop
