Coop’s Youth Part 4 – Not Quite a Girlfriend | Lefty Parent

Coop’s Youth Part 4 – Not Quite a Girlfriend | Lefty Parent:

Coop’s Youth Part 4 – Not Quite a Girlfriend

September 20th, 2014 at 16:07

Second semester of eighth grade started in late January of 1968, along with Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In on U.S. television and the Tet offensive in Vietnam. My mom worried about an endless U.S. involvement in that war that might eventually lead to me being drafted for military service in another five years. My hands ached from the cold even with gloves on as I lugged my saxaphone case in one hand and a load of books in the other arm the nearly mile-long trek to school and back. It always seemed farther than that because of all the twists and turns on the five different streets that got me to my destination, along with the fact that given a choice I wouldn’t want to go to school, particular this one. Though my American history teacher was entertaining at times and I still had some sort of a crush on my young female math teacher, I knew at some level that I could better spend my time doing activities and being around peers of my own choosing.

Though I had begun to see my mom as a real mortal human being, struggling like me to make her way through each day, still she was a source at times of embarrassment and frustration. She had her own self-esteem issues and I projected my own challenges in that area on her. She seemed to carry herself with great importance whether gardening in the front yard or engaging with the college-town academia in her social circle, always trying to make a provocative comment and have an intelligent response to every statement within earshot. She waded into political arguments with men as her way of flirting with them. She seemed always bigger than life and trying to control the room she was in and bring attention to herself.

Part of her strategy in that regard would be to tout the talents, thoughts and accomplishments of her sons, at times trumped up, since parenting was the effort she was investing the most of her time and talent in. Things like, “My son Coop is quite a sculptor!” and then pointing out a little clay prairie I made in art class that I did not think rose to that level of acclaim. When done with me next to her and suggesting that I provide more details, I would be embarrassed and even angry and felt like she was asking me to be a trained seal, barking on command for her admiring audience. I might even respond to her negatively right then and there, saying “Mom!” and scrunching my face and rolling my eyes at her, which she would deflect as best she could.

For all her efforts to paint the perfect persona amongst company, I knew that at her low points at night in her room that she was painfully lonely and still mad at my dad for betraying her several years back now by having an affair with another woman. I could hear her in the adjacent bedroom calling him up late at night, sobbing and angrily accusing him of ruining her life. Even saying things like, if this was what her life was going to be then it wasn’t worth living. At some level I worried if she might be getting suicidal, though I also saw her repeatedly guilty of hyperbole.

I continued to do my paper route each day. I saw the headlines with the body counts of dead U.S. soldiers and pondered what real war was like as opposed to the mind-stimulating military strategy games I loved to play. At least being an Coop’s Youth Part 4 – Not Quite a Girlfriend | Lefty Parent: