Shut Me Up

Dear Mom, I'm completely irresponsible.  Please help me.  Love, Rose.

Do you have any idea how much it rankles to have to say something like that?

Strictly speaking, that statement is not even true.  I've been doing very well, considering.  But I am faced daily with the reality that I am living in a fantasy.  I am not yet fully self-reliant.  Hear my insufficient-child-roar: waaaaauuuurrrrrggghhhhhh. *pout.*

The worst thing about it is the illusion.  I pay rent.  I pay loans.  I own cats.  I buy groceries.  It would be easy to think I'm doing it.  Me.  Only Rose.  No one else!

One of Dad's favorite stories of all time seems appropriate for this situation.  You see, Dad has been a milkman for most of my life, only recently making a switch to a retail job, which is essentially his retirement.  Delivering milk to stores, houses, schools, and daycares (sometimes at ungodly hours of the morning) has left my father with a gold mine of unique stories.  My favorite is the one with the cop and the chocolate ice cream.  But that's not the one I'm going to talk about.

The story which relates to my theme for this post took place at a daycare on Dad's route.  Normally, Dad caught the daycare well before its operating hours, but for myriad reasons, he was running late that morning.  Thank heaven for that!  If he'd been on time, he would have missed out on his Epic Parent Fable.

Anyway, Dad was waiting out of the way for the daycare's morning traffic to die down, so he could deliver the milk without disrupting their business, when he spotted a woman standing beside her minivan, looking frustrated.  She had a couple of children to drop off, and she seemed to be in a bit of a hurry.  She had already gotten one child out of the van on the far side, and had now come around to the near side to get the other child.

That was when my dad noticed this second child's odd behavior.  It was a little tow-headed boy, probably three or four (which are both positively delightful ages, as any parent or babysitter knows).  This enterprising little child had unstrapped himself from his car seat and was now standing on the van floor, wrestling with the door.  Dad thought he understood the woman's frustration.

Dad's suspicions were confirmed when the poor, bedraggled mom tried to open the door.  When the door opened, that little boy immediately let loose with a scream to rival a virgin's in a horror movie.  Barely discernible in the wall of sound were words.  These words:

I DO IT MYSELF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Shellshocked and desperate to avoid a scene, the mother quickly shut the van door.  The little boy instantly calmed and began to fight with the door again.  But his mother was in a hurry, and the little boy simply wasn't winning his battle.

She tried to coach him through it by talking through the window, but to no avail.  She tried tricking him into thinking he'd done it himself, when really it had been her doing, but he was too smart for that.

Eventually, the exasperated mom grew tired of giving her son his way.  She promptly opened the door, triggering the screams.  But she stalwartly ignored the noise and slung the flailing, protesting boy under her arm, as if he were a particularly violent sack of potatoes.

Dad says the little boy was still reaching back for the van door when he disappeared through the daycare doors, still repeating over and over again, "Myself!  Myself!  Myself!!!"

Dad likes to tell this Epic Parent Fable as a method of demonstrating that sometimes you must ask for help.  Sometimes, the story teaches us, it's better for everyone if you just let go.  Sometimes, you just look stupid when you insist on doing it yourself.  He doesn't even have to tell the whole story anymore.  We all know it so well, all he has to do is fake-scream that one line: "I do it myself."  It proves his point very effectively.

But now that I have been forced to ask for my parents' help again, right when I thought I was free of that forever, I am realizing something.

I am that little boy.

All I want to do is open the door.  I want to open it myself.  I want to be able to truthfully proclaim: I may have ridden here by someone else's power, but I am walking in now because of my own abilities!

And I can't really blame that kid.  Every time my parents pay for something, that something mocks me mercilessly, no matter how small or how necessary it may be.  Each time I aggravate a cavity, I can feel that little miniscule hole making faces at me.  It knows as well as I do that my parents are paying to fix it.  They're opening the door for me.

And every time I step into my blazing yellow car, its spoiler and the woofer in the trunk combine forces to laugh at me.  They know as well as I do that my parents are making the payments, although they do that with the understanding that I will be paying them back for it.  But I can't be tricked -- they're still opening the door for me!  I see what they did there!

I now find myself stuck in a situation where I am forced to ask for a loan, in addition to all the other things they are already doing for me.  I take little comfort in knowing that I will have the money ready to repay them in a little over a week, because no matter how short-term, a loan is still a loan.

I've tried to be grateful and courteous by not giving my parents too much crap about all this, but I am starting to feel the panic and misdirected rage welling up in my chest.  I am writing this blog post in the hopes that it will be a vent for that frustration.

Because for all my thanks and complacent acceptance, there's the echo of a monster roaring in my ears.

Myself... Myself... Myself.