“Your mother is certainly on a high these days and you seem to be on a lowest of lows,” my father told me last night as we sat on my couch. (more psychoanalysis that I grow tired of) I assured him there is no rhyme nor reason to our insanity. Lately, I’ve blatantly taken to calling myself eccentric rather than mentally ill and I told dad this. Sounds better I hope? It makes me feel better. Dad agreed. There is so, so much stigma surrounding true mental illness and I tend to shy away from it.
“I want to be like my cousin Sarah,” I told my father as I glanced over towards him, “Everybody knows she is mentally ill and they just politely call her very interesting instead.”
“Your mother had another flat tire yesterday,” dad then told me exasperated changing the subject. “There was a hole the size of a silver dollar in the sidewall.”
“What is mom driving now?” I asked my father.
“Your late grandmother’s huge Buick,” dad said as he very visibly winced.
Last night, dad was all excited about the Falkland island war between Argentina and Great Britain. He was surprised at what I knew about a war that happed during my early childhood. I pulled up the Falkland Island incident via Wikipedia in seconds on my iPad and dad had the best time reading about it.
“This is revolutionary how easy you can find things and information on the Internet,” dad told me.
“It certainly is a game changer,” I replied with an approving grin.
Andrew’s Ice Cream Day…
I had told mom to quit this since I can just drive down to the Piggly Wiggly and pay for this myself. She insists on doing this once a week. I thought I would never grow to say this, but I am tired of ice cream. Mom wanted to know what flavor to get today and I told her chocolate.
3 comments:
I like "eccentric." Our family is loaded for bear, and "eccentricity." One of us may be a novelist someday.
Tired of ice cream!! NEVER could happen with me. : )
"Eccentric' and 'interesting' are SUCH Southern terms to describe any kind of mental illness -- it amuses me no end, as did so many other Southern sayings I learned when I lived in the South. You're absolutely right in that nearly every family had at least one 'interesting' person in their family tree. Out here in the West, we pretty much call it as it is, and practically everybody either has been in or has a family member in a 12-Step group of one kind of another, and talks about it freely. While mental illness is still misunderstood, it is not as much of an embarrassing stigma.
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