fessing up.

i don't want to become my mother, a fearsome, broken vessel with only the shards of regret held together by anger and resentment to build her frame.

she wanted to be an artist.

to run away and become the person she always wanted to be.

but she was denied these things.

for so long, her entire being was crafted for her, forged in tradition by her parents' hands.

she went on to finally - so she thought - find escape.

but the world she came to was just as cruel and withholding as the one she left.

she had to trade her passion in for pragmatism.

raise her girls to succeed in the lives she knew and feared they would grow to hate as much as she did hers.

pass on the legacies of duty and practicality.

train them to be as realistic and prepared as she was forced to become.

but she failed.

underneath all those talks of what was right and real and attainable were whispers of an unforgotten, unforgettably passionate and angry past.

we heard the whispers.

soaked them up like sponges, more than we could ever do with the shrill call of reality.

we became passionate, too.

angry with the system that broke our mother and took her in.

i want to be an artist.

i want to say the things my mother never got to paint.

i want to prove to her and to all the nay sayers that the most real and most practical thing we can do is to have passion and to act on it.

to be the selves we were always meant to be.

to outweigh the anger with happiness and love and sincerity.

to stop breaking ourselves and to create and commit to the selves that hide, secretly, underneath all of the fear and doubt.

i don't want to be my mother as she is.

i want to be me and provide some ounce of comfort to the woman with night terrors.

i want to turn her nightmares into dreams and dreams into reality.

i want to give that secret self of hers a sense of solace.

and a voice.

going back.

the older i get, the more people i meet, the more i find out how much i've been missing out on.

i find myself reading and rereading old childhood gems that went ignored in my mother's effort to fashion 3 grown-up women out of her own regrets: a method that inadvertently let me forget to grow.

so now when i read Rowling or Silverstein or Juster, i'm learning more - or about the same - from them as i have from my fledgling adulthood or the presumptuously Big World i was once convinced had all the answers to all the questions i could ever have.

but the truth is, i'm coming to find that i haven't been asking the right questions or the most honest ones.

or any, even.

for so long my truest voice has gone unheared and unused, drowned out by that wful din of other voices - borrowed voices - that for too long spoke for me.

so now i'm constructing my own Neverland: walls built high to keep it untainted and unchecked and my own.

to guard the foundations of unconditional love and generosity and curiosity and hope and courage and the unyielding promise for change and growth that can come by taking the time to enjoy the simple pleasures of quiet nights or flapping sails or leaves that brown in fall.

all these things get lost in translation, between the jump from brief childhood innocence to supposed budding and predtermined adulthood.

all too often i see that missing glint in the eyes of passersby, jaded friends and family who, having long since passed that age of wonder, have lost that purity and strength of heart that got them here in the first place.

i wouldn't say that i'm a bad person, or an idealistic one, and i'd like to think that i'm kind and gentle, but i would also add that i'm unwise and unlearned, and the more i see those faded or absent sparks, the more i want to find out where they went.

have i lost m ine?

can you lose something you're not sure you ever had?

i'm on a quest now for my own Rhyme and Reason, to discover my own glint and help return those missing to the eyes of their desperate and rightful owners.

the fact of the matter is, though, i'm not a child.

a full recovery of what's been missing is now intermingled with the grown-up experiences - few as they are - that i've been able to collect.

so now, interspersed with mentions of spellbooks and giving trees and trusty watchdogs are cigarettes, red cups, and faulty relationships.

the point here - the upside to all of this - is that i'm learning on my own.

i'm growing.

changing.

finding and using my own voice to say things like, "No," or, "I'll give it a try."

in attempting to fashion my own person - my own beginnings, because this really is my beginning - with the pages of presumably childish fare, and the erratic events and experiences that are forging my adulthood, i am building something new, fine, and, to an extent, pure.

i'm creating me.