Catching up

I find it oddly disconcerting when I find myself clueless about something that everyone knows or can do. I never really learned to ride a bike. I tried, but I kept on falling off and scraping my knee I gave up on it. I also never really learned to skate, because I kept on falling on my butt that I gave up on that too. I did learn to swim, and I did so pretty well until late high school, but much to my horror, in college, I all of a sudden started panicking everytime my head was underwater. Now I know psychologists will have a field day with this, psychoanalyzing and all. I just take it as it is. I know I missed many things that regular kids take for granted while I was growing up. While everyone else had a tailor-made childhood, I had to make one up for myself. I used to blame my dad for the not too well-planned map of my childhood and adolescent years, but I know now that he did the best he could given his own resources, his nature, and his upbringing.

See, my mom died when I was very young, and I missed out on all those mother-daughter moments. It was from home ec class that I learned about what to do when I got my period, how to set a table, how to iron clothes, wash dishes and all those domestic things. I had to seek out my peers for support when I started to see boys in an entirely different light. I never got to ask my mom what books or what music she liked. (I just knew she had an Archie, Nancy Drew and Casper collection when she was younger.) I was to busy being a kid to really get to know her as a person. And I'm well-adjusted enough to know that it never would have been possible to have it any other way. Any other way would have just been wrong. And so after my mom died, I had to figure things by myself.

Of all those things I never got to do with my mom though, one of the things I regret most is that I never got to watch old movies or read the classics with her. There have been so many literary classics and old movie references over the years that I never really learned were such until I willed myself to catch up with the rest of the world. My dad wasn't really into all of that stuff, not that I hold that against him. That's just how he is. So anyway, I tried to figure out what I should have watched, what I should have read, and I willed myself to learn. At this point, I think I've come to the point of substantial compliance in that aspect. But I'd still really want to learn all those other things I missed out on. AND play the piano, the cello or the violin. And travel. And a lot of other things.