all about eve

so i bought an optical drive to go along with my asus netbook and i'm trying to figure out how to get the media manager to allow me to make mix cds in a more ordinary and less complicated way. the os i am using is linux, which reminds me of the apple os. i dont want to eat of the storage space of the netbook so im being careful of what i upload into the player. anyway...

i have two things going on right now.

my mom is having back surgery tomorrow and its just a reminder to me 0f how our bodies wear down over time. my parents are both in their early 60's, and while that is considered to be young, the reality is that eventually they will get older and more frail and then eventually leave this place.
i accept the fact that we all die and that they too will pass and i will grieve and have absolutely no choice in the matter. what bothers me the most is that i have a few major unresolved issues with her that we have just begun to discuss. they mostly revolve around my being gay and her religious conviction that homosexuality is wrong in Gods eyes (for the bible tells her so.) its taken me a decade to work through all of the intricacies of this inability to accept an aspect of my fundamental core of being. i think (or thought) that time had healed a lot of old wounds from earlier discussions that were very hurtful and frustrating. but there was still a scab left as i found out over thanksgiving. basically mom and i were watching tv and a reality program came on about drug addiction. she knows that i have battled addiction and depression since i was a teenager but we have never really talked about it in depth. well, we started to talk about and she was just happy to see that i was on the road to recovery and she was happy to support me in that endeavor. but when it came to my being gay, that struck a nerve with her and it something she told me, that she just could not support. she didn't say accept, she has known since i came out when i was 18. she even wrote me a letter a couple of years after my coming out that she had accepted that God had made me who i was and that she loved me, but she implored me to live a celibate lifestyle because it was the sin of engaging in gay sex which was the issue. well, the letter was given to me about 10 years ago and she again re-iterated a decade later her original position. this time she told me in a round-a-bout way that she could not accept a relationship between me and another man, especially if i were to "bring him home." Hearing her say this opened up something long dormant and i became angry but refrained from reacting to what she said. i wanted to really understand and have a dialogue with her and so we talked. i wasn't trying to convince her of anything but i was trying to help her understand that it was okay to let go of old ideas. she was not willing to do that and we kind of let it open. but that situation taught me a couple of things. one, she really is misguided and that i just need to let that go. the other thing that i learned was that i could allow myself to be angry with her and still love her- just for being my mom. i was able to reconcile that fact that my relationship with her was and never will be the same as it was when i was growing up. and in fact i am now a grown man with adult problems and she is an aging woman who is just trying to be true to her own conviction. and i respect that immensely, i can see where i got that trait from.

so tomorrow my mom is going into some pretty extensive surgery and i have to just be ok with h0w i feel, which is less trepidation than i thought. i do have the thought that something could go wrong and she wont pull through. it sounds morbid but its how i feel. am i ok to be in a place where i don't know exactly how i am going to feel? how scared am i going to be? what comfort will i have if the only sure security i ever had has left?

i am grounded in the fact that these surgeries happen everyday and are successful. i have to focus on what it is that SHE wants from this surgery and that is to no longer be in chronic pain. i hope the surgery achieves this and i hope that everything goes fine. either way, i will be ok.
and yes, i love her.

ok.. that was really long.

the other thing that happened today was that i waited on dana perino, the former white house spokeswoman for george w. bush. she was surprisingly nice and to be honest, all of the animosity i felt for her kind of dissipated as her meal went on. it was like, she was a human being like the rest of us, firm in her convictions no matter how wrong i think they are, and she just wanted something to eat.