Potato Bugs & Mommas

I'm afraid of committing. I'm not really sure why but it seems as though any time I come close to an opportunity actualizing itself... I throw a grenade at it and run away. It's frustrating really, the number of times I should have just stuck with something, but it seems to me like there's always a chance of something better being out there. This, of course, can't be a healthy way to approach life or relationships. Thus far it has been my M.O.

My father is the epitome of commitment. That man has been waiting for eighteen years for his lesbian wife to come back and reconcile with him. I'm not sure how much he believes it's actually possible, but he does believe that the "lord can restore the years that the locusts have eaten". I swear, I got so tired of hearing those words as a child. Over and over again, he would tell us about our "situation", how it was all his fault that our family was broken. "But son, the years can restore the years that the locusts have eaten." I surely wonder about this.

I was picking potato bugs off my plants in the garden this evening. Those damn things are reducing my potato plants to bare, green skeletons of disappointment. I pick them off and treat the plant, but they come back like every goddamned sin of my adolescent nightmares. I thought about my dad. Problems can be treated one of two ways, gardening has taught me: organically and chemically. Now, I'm not trying to sprinkle a bunch of highly chemical shit on my food. Consequently, the alternative is a very laborious and time consuming organic battle -- nature against nature, fighting bug with bug and disease with disease.

My dad, he always chose to stay in that church rather than be near us and an active part in our lives. Of course, he was 'praying for us and thinking about us every moment of every day', but damnit if he wasn't around. My mother - she may have made some questionable decisions but she was there. She was there, at the end of a long day covered in coal dust and inverted by a swing shift schedule that taught my sister and I to tip-toe with the stealth of your deepest secret. Somehow she managed to pursue whichever job she took a notion for. Massage therapist, river rafting guide, football player, three branches of the military. She was all over the place, but she was providing for us in the best way she could as a young, single, human mother. I suppose my point is that my momma was around to swat off the potato beetles everyday.