(M)Otherhood Part the First

I can’t stop thinking about the alter egos of Butters and his little friend.  Hell, I can’t even think of Butters’ alter ego, I can only think of his friend’s:  General Disarray.  Appropriate somehow that I can’t think of this wee little minor character’s ACTUAL name, only the pretend name of a pretend person. 

Which leads me to how I’ve been feeling over the past couple of years.  Or maybe longer. General Disarray.  I can’t tell.   But right now, I’m sitting at my makeshift desk in our disaster of a makeshift office, with piles of paper and stuff that I try try TRY to keep organized, and I just can’t seem to organize it faster than it comes in and demands a fucking space in my life.  I’m in a funk (ha- almost typed “fuck”) because I just got a “Dear John” letter from a theatre company with which I am/ was/ will have been affiliated.  Deep down, I don’t feel that it’s unjustified, but it feels like a break up nonetheless.  It is a place where I generally feel wanted and appreciated, but I haven’t had the opportunity to frequent of late because I have two small children.  Still, I can’t help but feel that maybe- maybe- my talent wandered off somewhere, lost, looking for a more worthy vessel. Or, maybe I’m just not talented enough; surely someone who was talented enough could FIGURE OUT HOW TO JUGGLE IT ALL.  At least that’s the perception, although I can’t tell whose- mine or everyone else’s.  At any rate, I’m sure you know that old saying, “Perception is reality.”  So someone around here is perceiving that I’m disposable.

I started thinking about attempting a blog earlier in the year.  I was in a graduate English class studying Shakespeare trying oh so desperately to figure out some pattern or similarity between The Merchant of Venice and Othello – and what the HELL was I going to write about – blah, blah, blah, “Othello is the ‘other’” blah, blah, blah “Shylock is the ‘other’" blah, blah, blah – and then I realized something:  there are no mothers in these plays.  Alive ones, that is.  It’s as if in Shakespeare’s world, these women squeezed out their offspring and dropped dead.  Admittedly, that was a very likely scenario at that time, so maybe.  

But that’s how I’ve been feeling lately.  As if the Mommy Track runs right off a cliff into some God-forsaken clusterfuck no-man’s-land called Youdontbelongmuchofanywhereland (geographically located anywhere west of Harlem Avenue- Chitown peeps, you know of what I speak.)

So you’re dead.  Or at least perceived to be.

And it came to me, courtesy of the Moor and the Jew:  Motherhood is simply another “otherhood.”