A mother's day

Today is Mother's Day. My stepbrother is dead.

It's a day for giving mothers obligatory, strained phone calls or taking them out to dinner or giving them that Hallmark card you scribbled your name inside. A day to clean the house for once or try to make a terrible breakfast with toast that's a little too burned or tea that's got too much sugar, too much love making the attempt more consumable than the actual drink itself.

My own mother has been up since morning, getting a big lunch ready since she knows we can't cook and it feeds her soul to feed our bellies. Her other little helpless one, our pup, she spent a few hours with by the vet because that's how it is for a mother: it never really ends. Not when there's a whole life completely dependent on yours.

The giving becomes an exchange. Symbiosis lets care become affection, and her life becomes dependent on yours too. Your heart is hers. It'll be the end of the world for her if anything happens to you.

So I don't know how my stepmother is dealing with this apocalypse.

Today her son should have woken up, maybe groggily slurred "Happy Mother's Day" and given her a kiss on the cheek. That's what should have happened. Instead she's got to find some sanity somewhere to put her little boy in a hole in the ground.

Because even though he's a man, he'll always be her little one. And he'll always be my brother.

Date

Sometimes I still kick myself for ever asking her out.

I won't generalise anything and just speak from my experience and understanding.

I know more or less when someone is interested in me or has the potential to be interested in me. I don't delude myself with the idea that someone will respond to my advances positively if I exude the right amount of confidence or any of that bullshit. People are right; people respond to confidence. I'm not confident, so if anyone was to like me, it'd be for other reasons.

I knew she would say "no". I knew it, in every fibre of my being. So why did I do it? I hate failure. I dislike knowing that I've done something and have nothing to show for it. So why? If I didn't learn from the experience, it's my loss. Exactly. Loss. I hate losing. So?

I don't ask women out because I don't want to get rejected and so I don't get rejected by never asking them out.

But I did this one time, and do I feel more confident about it? Like I learned to ride the bike without the training wheels? No, because all I can think about is that I fell and scraped my knees and elbows and have ugly scars now and I'm snotty and crying and it hurts.

In any case, the woman I asked out was very decent about it.  

"I'm looking for friendship".

I don't have any hard feelings about that-- I respect that decision.

Just it sucks when I have to think that I've spent  all this time envisioning the scenario where I finally muster up that shit-courage and that someone is someone I knew, deep down, was never going to give me the time of day.

I got tired of being a coward.

However, this experience has given me no good feelings. If anything, I have some kind of anger in me now. And a terrible attitude. I've been embarrassed enough by asking out someone who walks straight past me sometimes just to prove something to myself.

So what did I learn about myself at the end of everything?

I'd say "no" to me too.