flexagon | My mother is blithering again

Did I tell you about A---'s little rubber duckie that sits on his kayak? He found one floating in the river so we put a suction cup on it and now it's his totem. L--- M--- loves Kokopelli, and she has a Kokopelli doll that she straps onto her kayak. So now I have to do something. I'm going to make a cloth great blue heron. I'll have to stiffen it with either plastic or pipe cleaners. I guess plastic would be better, as pipe cleaners might rust. So then I'll have a totemic passenger too :-)

Why am I having such trouble holding an adult conversation with another adult? Hmmm? I mean, a little of this is cute, but it's representative of the whole damn letter, as usual. Every now and then I broach the topic of "um, I wish we talked about real stuff sometimes" and she agrees. Then she writes me and it's more of... this. The only time we ever hold semi-meaningful conversations is about men, and even then we have to tiptoe around The Dad Issue (she doesn't speak to him, I consider this 6-year-old behavior and thus don't want to tell her anything about him--and she has been known to get paranoid that this behavior on my part was asked for by him--not the case, I'm quite capable of finding her behavior childish all by my very own self, I swear). It goes better in person, sometimes. Even so, I feel like I'm missing something I could be getting out of my relationship with this person. I mean, a mother, right? There should be something deep in there somewhere, and I keep feeling like there is and she's purposely holding it back. Or maybe I just feel like the parents 'n' kids genetic/psychological link is fucking with me again.

Arrrrggghhh! All right. I've ranted. More debugging now.