My daughter is the perfect child.
And all parents say that. “My son is perfect. He's a genius.”
“My daughter is wonderful, she is just so loving.”
All parents talk with pride about how wonderfully perfect their child is.
And they talk about how amazing their accomplishments are but they gloss over the fact that this “perfect child” has been angry with them and has treated them like insignificant people for years. Or they ignore the fact that the child is spoiled and demanding and takes advantage of them as human beings.
I have three perfect children. But I'm well aware of their flaws, their insecurities and their occasional bouts of self-entitlement...except my daughter.
She has never had a bad word to say about anyone. And there have been many people around her who have deserved to have really nasty things said about them. People who she has placed her trust in who don't deserve it.
When I was ready to leave her step-father; the father of her younger brothers, and I had made my decision that I wasn't going to stay in this relationship any more, I would become impatient and irritated with everything that came out of his mouth. She would say , “Mom, you need to have patience. You need to be nicer.” And she never criticized, never complained, and never questioned. She showed compassion and love and understanding towards him, even when he didn't deserve it from her.
When her father tries to dominate her and tell her what to think and what to do and how to do it, she would vent to me about her frustration, and never once use one single mean word against him and would always end her rants with “He means well. He just wants to show he cares for me.”
I have lost my patience with her many times. I have gotten angry and loud and argued with her. And she would always come back and try to understand where my anger was coming from and be patient and understanding and caring so that she and I could fix whatever was causing our argument. And she always understands me. She knows me, sometimes better than I know myself.
I see a lot of myself in her. Her fierce independence, her drive, the stubborn way she has to get to where she needs to be. But I have never had her patience. I have never had her compassion and I have never been as responsible and mature as she has always been. I am not as mature at this stage of my life as she has been all her life.
She cares about other people, their feelings and their way of seeing life. She is a genuine friend, a confidant, someone you can really count on. She is the perfect child.
She knows how unhappy I am now. How desperate and impatient I am to leave this place and erase everything that is associated with this life. I want to throw everything out, pack my truck with our backpacks and leave everything behind so no one knows where I'm going and no one ever knows where I'll be.
We have been living in chaos for a year and a half. I used to clean the grout between the floor tile with bleach and an old toothbrush. Now, I've been in various stages of packing and purging for all this time and am so overwhelmed with the enormity of the challenge that we live in a house that my children have never been exposed to. Piles of boxes and containers and papers. It's not dirty. We still sweep and vacuum and dust. It's just chaotic. And she has been trying to help me organize it all because she knows my brain doesn't function with chaos. And I keep repeating that this is no longer my house, I hate it here and I don't want to do anything that is going to make it seem like I'm going to stay here.
Last night we were texting about “home”. I told her “home” was going to be an RV that was going to take me to Santa Cruz and be parked on the beach.
“I want to be in our house with you guys and scrub and clean and vacuum and put it all in neat little piles and make it a happy place while you're there.”
“This isn't home anymore.”
“Okay, but you have to live there, right now, don't you? Why not make the best of it? You've been saying it's not your home for months now yet you're still living there, and that makes for an unpleasant state of mind that you don't need in your life right now. That's like a caterpillar being depressed the entire time he's in his cocoon because he refuses to believe that he has to stay there for as long as he does, and he just keeps saying “I'm just going to pack my shit and go someplace sunny” and God knows if he did that, he would rip open his cocoon and limp around, half-caterpillar and half-butterfly, never truly able to get on his feet in wherever new place he goes, because he was in too much of a hurry to leave.”
She is the Perfect Child. And I defy you to say otherwise.
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