On The Anti-Mom:

I am not a clone of my mother. You can’t confuse us, or my sisters, daughter and nieces either. In fact we have all tried to be as different from each other as we can be.

There are days I wish I had someone to share all this Victorian/Goth fun with. My daughter thinks I’m a little nuts. But I take that as a complement. Not so much in the goth vs. non goth sense but in a mother/daughter type thing. I am the anti-mom. That is to say I am not like my mother. My sisters (I have three.) and I agree that we have spent most of our lives in pursuit of being the opposite of our mother but in our own unique ways. Of course when we look hard enough we find the similarities. But we try not to look too hard. And I can lie like a rug to myself about it and the many times I embarrassed my mom and she me.

My daughter is of course the anti-mom of me. This stems from a mixture of teenage angst, older generation embarrassments, and the need to be an individual by the time we reached our teens. It becomes part of the self by then as we define ourselves, declaring ourselves as ‘Nothing like our mothers.’

You would think that my mother and my daughter would be like book ends to me but they are not. We are individuals all, mothers, sisters, daughters and nieces included.

Entertainer, artist, hectic woman - my mother
Gothic, creative, yoga woman - me
Mall mom, craft, nervous woman - sister one
Intelligent, stylish, eco woman - sister two
Soccer mom, knitter, mother woman - sister three
Traveler, pet keeper, nurse woman - my daughter

Not that we haven’t all worked for a living but most of us have not defined ourselves by our jobs.

We are different. And in that lies the rub. I have no one to share my Victorian/Goth dress up self with. My friend are just not into that. Where does an elder goth find like minded friends to play with if she can‘t even find them in her own family?

(The picture is one I found in a yard sale a long time ago.)