struggling to love the people we love: Postcards from the Edge

Postcards from the Edge is the loose film adaptation of Carrie Fisher's loose book adaptation of her life as the daughter of her mother, movie star Debbie Reynolds.

It's fiction, but heavily inspired by her fiction-like but categorically nonfiction experiences. So, it's about small celebrity and drug addict Suzanne Vale (if that isn't Carrie Fisher...) who has to live with her super-movie-star-from-the-60s mother Doris (hello, Debbie) after getting out of rehab.

Now, these two, they love each other, like how a mother and a daughter do. They adore each other. And they know it. They say it. They show it. Like how a mother and daughter do.

But also... they perfectly manage to drive each other insane.

I like to think that the "teen years" officially end at 18, and so officially I'm no longer in my teen years. Im in a confusing in-between where if I'm ever arrested, I'll be tried as an adult, but also I'm still not a registered voter, and I don't do any taxes. 

I'm just floating around here, trying to make sense of things somehow, so I spend a lot of time thinking. Reminiscing about my life and whatnot.

Well, I reminisce how much I hated my mom when I "was" a teen. I absolutely could not stand her. My mother and I had passive-aggressive arguments like two dumb teenagers, which, frankly was not that uncalled for on my part since I was a teen. One time, I refused to sleep at home for a couple of days, choosing instead to stay with my cousins, because I was just so unbelievably done with my own mother. Tired of her. Just. How would I describe this? Something like, "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

She drove me crazy, and not in the good way. I don't think I can ever describe it - just how much my own mother made my skin crawl. When she started speaking, I felt my soul leaving my body in dread. My mom was loud and bossy and embarrassing and didn't understand me and--

(sigh)

--the love of my life.

So before the "teen years", I loved my mother. Maybe I still loved her in the teen years under all that angst. Who knows. When I was in elementary, I genuinely thought - amidst all the princess shows I kept watching on Disney channel - that my mother was the most beautiful, kindest, warmest, smartest, most important person in the entire world.

Now, I didn't know how big the world was yet in those times, and I hadn't yet heard about, like, Mother Teresa or Hayley Kiyoko, so give me a break alright.

My most vivid memory of my mother was during a school-mandated singing contest where I won a good-smelling piece of paper that, as I would later realize, meant nothing because it did not equate to money.

But my mother was out there, smiling like the sun, and then she hugged me, and then in a contemplative voice, she was all like, "I'm proud of you," and I don't think I've ever been that happy ever in my whole tragic life that followed.

I still get a funny feeling just thinking about it.

In hindsight, I think that moment ruined me more than help. Because that set the standard to what I wanted my relationship with my mother to be, but I never quite hit the mark again, especially when I started high school. Hence, the teen angst.

I took it out on her. I did things that made me happy that I thought in turn would make her happy but didn't, and I just didn't understand why. I mean, won't you love it when your child gets a near-failing grade on a Filipino exam because she was too busy fucking around in the computer trying to make covers of Whitney Houston songs her range will never reach?? Cause I would!

So, yeah. I didn't realize that when a 9-year-old hits fifty notes in a row, it's amazing, but when a 15-year-old does, it's a waste of time. That's why I was so angsty. Why did my old tricks not work anymore? And why did the tricks keep getting harder? I felt like my mother was ruining my life on purpose!

How does this tie up with Postcards from the Edge?

Well, so, apparently, a parent may have other basic instincts than to dedicate their whole time just trying to ruin their own child's life. Apparently.

It's revealed in Postcards that while Suzanne (Carrie) was out self-destructing and then blaming her mother for it, Doris (Debbie) was rummaging through the rubble, trying to put some version of her daughter back together.

But they couldn't just talk. That's always the problem. With Suzanne and Doris. With Carrie and Debbie. With my mother and I. We couldn't just talk.

I'm pretty sure we tried, though, so I guess the more appropriate description would be that we couldn't just listen.

And then 10 years later, the fog of emo passes, and we go crying back to mommy, finally admitting all we really wanted was to be loved by her.

In Postcards, Carrie sort of projects a bit of her teen angst at her mother, but it still shows - through the best possible vessel, Meryl Streep - that Suzanne/Carrie loved her mother with all she was, as a matter of fact, she was struggling to love her. 

In her autobiography, Wishful Drinking, Carrie talks about her mother not as a teenager but as a daughter. She talks about her mother as a constant light in her life. She only briefly mentions the teen angst, and in this one line encapsulated: "Then I became a teenager and thought she was an asshole because let's face it - it's a teenager's job to find her parent annoying and ridiculous - just ask my daughter."

I always tell my friends that I'm never gonna be a mom. Because my child will grow to hate me and then I'll hate them back because I'm childish.

My friends who are moms (no, not pregnant early. I just have really old friends. I'm weird like that) also whine about their kids a lot.

So I'm very skeptical about the whole mother thing. But the whole daughter thing, I've got all figured out. I hope to be a better one now.

Til next Sunday,

Des