Garanimals

In case you haven't figured it out, yet (because I publish to whoever happens to be reading, or not, as the case may be), my mom has a lot of really serious issues with her brain. Some are silly, but many are not. She did not adjust well to young motherhood, but given her brain, there would be no reason to expect otherwise, so it wasn't. It was pretty much exactly how I describe it, which is hard for her, because she suffers from severe limitations in her brain's ability to remember stuff, sometimes really easy basic stuff, too, which is very embarrassing for her as a self-described "feminist" with "advanced degrees in science". She simply doesn't understand how she went to school with a brain disorder and yet, people do it all the time.

Enter onto this groovy 70s scene a woman who was never very feminine, even on a good day, coupled with the unnerving task of dressing children appropriately for school and life. It's excruciating to watch now, but as a child, it was horribly abusive. She missed certain key dates and appointments, and she was excessively tardy, which she covered under a nasty princess-like attitude that allowed her to sweep into a room like she was going to some swinging cocktail party, except it was my ballet class, and she left me sitting on the curb for almost 2 hours when she was a five minute drive away, because she babbles compulsively on the phone with her similarly disordered sisters for stress relief, none of them actually healthy enough to retain the repetitive inane gossip they share.

I was privy to such revealing truths overheard by one of them as thus: "So. How ya doin'. Oh, yeah? How was _______ (insert name of local suburban chain store here). Oh, yeah? How much? Blah blah blah blah blah..." Then, at some point, someone would get up to use the bathroom, or simply run out of tiring gossip, and at that point it was understood in their OCD world that this brief pause or interruption ("NO! Go ahead! You talk now!"), was a signal among them that they could emit throat sounds and other vocalizations amounting to nothing. 
For some reason, my mom and her delusional sisters thought this placed them far above our safety and security as kids, because such is the power of untreated patterns coupled with crippling delusions. And so it went, still, to this day, as I sit here writing to you.

Fortunately for us, most of our dads worked the city as "Mad Men", which gave them the ability to sell to their desperately bored and firmly ensconced housewives. There was a bevy of products available in the 70s and 80s for every type of disorder three times over, in brightly covered and very hoard-able plastic, which gave them the same type of shopping high as if they fondled them directly in stores for hours, so as to check out from reality. "Stuff" became this way out of your domestic iron chains, when in actuality, it was another outward manifestation of a common compulsive/addictive disorder that needs firm addressing in these modern times, lest we generate more "reality" t.v. contestants and their weirdo objects, an ironic term if ever there was.

Because my mom was so challenged in such an obviously similar way to other dysfunctional females, she used t.v. to create an artificial world that she could drone out to and disappear within, and that was exactly the point advertisers wanted to make. Unhappy? Here: buy this! It was instant and immediate relief, but not the kind that ever solved their problem. Do you have to feed kids? How awful! Throw this on the table, girls. Then you can have FUN FUN FUN again! Do your growing children need clothes for school....again?! Omigosh I can't believe children grow so fast. They're like weeds! All of Madison Avenue in the city catered to their flawed senses of self (mostly lacking), and their immaturity about caring for others, by solidifying their points of view through commercials, which gave them the wrong idea that they were getting it right.

Ever year my mom used a thick Sears catalog to handle the enormity of clothing for small people by asking us to go through it, flag what we wanted, and then she would order it over the phone and pick it up in Nanuet, a task you can still perform in Rockland County today, though most "bubbies" have migrated to the internet to hide their gnawing addictions. My mom floundered even under that simple system, and like-minded disabled salespeople responded in kind, by designing a foolproof way to clothe children with as little thought as possible, you know, because the fate of the world is in your hands, SuperWoman!

It was nuts, but so were our parents. Even more pathetic than hating a rather banal and easy task was the fact that my mom mismatched the turtle icon with the giraffe pants. It may have been cruelly on purpose, so that we would be mocked in school, in retaliation for not liking her horrible dashed-together food, or simply because "Dr. Diane" didn't want to be bothered attending to the needs of others, which is the same type of patterned self-centered selfishness that each and every kid I grew up with had to contend with: the mindset of a bully, whether small or large. It didn't matter if it was clothed in a child's sized shirt, or a grown-ups tailored suit jacket back then, and it still doesn't. Gen X'ers see past advertising gimmicks easily today because we had to back then, just to get through any school day. YAY! Fashion!*

So bring it on, world. We're more than ready for any type of insanity you got. I got ten kinds of crazy flavors in my peeps, some of which you ain't never heard of before kid, ya feel me? Yeah, you do. That's 'cause it's a round-the-way type of life from NYC, babay. Everybody crazy in the hood. It's our way here, yo. Project people be snappin' out all day every day, just 'cause you there, right? Word. Your crazy-ass Brooklyn grandma is now my mom's next door neighbor, and my mom's from the Bronx, okay? Let's work through this together, people. We ain't got nobody else to solve problems for us.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garanimals