My Mother (At 86 years old her teeth are real)

It’s 85 degrees on my mother’s porch. My mother and I are sitting here in lawn chairs, sweltering and sticky even though we have the silver awning rolled out overhead.

My mother is dressed in her loose orange wool pants (worn backwards, I notice) and a long sleeved fleecy top that matches nothing in her eclectic closet. She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. 

“It’s so hot,” she says. “I’m so hot. It’s hard to remember that it’s winter.”

I suggest she take off all the winter clothes she’s wearing and find a pair of shorts. She ambles off to do so.

I’m hot, too. My jeans grab my legs like a pair of hot hands and my short sleeved blouse just isn’t short enough. I reach under it, un-hook my bra, then slide another hand up my sleeve and pull the bra completly off. Ahhhh! Comfort.  I kick off my shoes and sling the bra to dangle over the porch railing. This is how I lose so many of my bras and shoes. I forget where I leave them.

We have a pot of hot steeping tea and two cups on the glass table in front of us. I have come to chat with my mother and apparently, to also have my leaves read. My Mother is a wonderful tea leaf reader. She sees amazing things and the woman is always right. She is spot on and she is nice about it. If she sees something that an ordinary person thinks is disgusting, my mother makes them feel like they are really lucky and indeed, they are.

Mother shuffles out of the house and onto the deck. She’s now wearing her blue see-through plastic garden shoes with socks, a pair of old stripped shorts from the 1950′s and yet another blouse that doesn’t go with anything in her closet.

She sits, ‘kerplunk!’ in the chair next to mine.

“I have to practice reading leaves,” she reminds me, “because you Venus, set me up to read leaves at the Historical Society Tea! I hope I can still remember how to do it. So, I’m going to practice on you, Venus.”

“I’m not worried,” I say. “You have the talent and you can’t lose that, even though you are Profoundly Deaf.”

Mother has been labeled ‘Profoundly Deaf” by the local hearing specialist and she does indeed have a difficult time hearing anything, but she can always hear when I whisper something about her to my sisters! We find this very puzzling, but then my mother can do many things that are out of the ordinary. She could grow gnat wings and fly over the porch railing if it struck her to do so.

Today, we sip our black tea rather quickly because even though we have dressed down it is still darn hot on the porch.

I pour most of the dregs of the tea into my saucer, then swish the leaves around in my cup with the rest of the tea and hand the china cup to my mother. I wait with high anticipation as Mother peers into it. 

Generally, I get a reading that goes something like this: “You have many ideas and are building many things. You’re taking off. You have some new job idea. There’s lots of money in your cup!”

Sometimes I get a long silence and then an, “Ah Oh.”

That’s when I start to sweat.

I used to get more exciting cups, filled with lovers and sex appeal but I have toned down a bit through the years and generally have my thoughts and actions now on so called ‘Higher Enterprises.’ Duller maybe, but higher.

Today, my mother slings me a zinger.

“Well. There you are Venus. Riding a wild horse! And look! There’s a big wedding bell over your head and you’re trying to get away from it. It’s like you want to get married but you really don’t. You’re still too wild to marry some man. You’re a wild one and none of them have been able to tame you.”

Gulp. Bam. My mother hits the truth of the matter. 

I haven’t been married for at least twenty-five years. I’ve been asked many times but I never can say ‘yes.’ Sometimes I think I want to, but I just can’t bring myself to choke out an ‘OK, good idea.’

Even lately, strangely enough,without dating them, I have had several marriage proposals and I think, ‘My, these are darling men and now that I am older and getting even older, wouldn’t it be nice to be all settled down and have a secure life and no more dating ever again?’

But, I just can’t do it. I try, but I just can’t do it. Maybe if I could marry two of them? Or three? That might work.

Even when I was a little kid I always thought I wanted to have two husbands. At once.

Or, maybe I can work out a deal where I know several or more men who adore me and I can see all of them and that will be OK with each of them?

My grandmother did that. My father’s mother was a model in New York with a waist that a man could put his hand’s around. She dyed her hair red and smoked cigarettes when only ‘bad’, ‘wild’ women did those things. She married my grandfather, a wealthy man, thirty-five years older than she was. 

My father remembers how when he was a little kid, “Momma was almost kidnapped by White slavers. We were walking down a street,” he used to tell us, “when a long, black limo pulled up beside us and a woman and two men jumped out. They grabbed Momma and tried to drag and push her into the car! Momma and I were screaming and screaming and Momma was fighting and somehow she was able to slip out of her long mink coat and she got away. We both ran screaming down the street. Momma always said it was the White Slavers trying to kidnap her because she was so beautiful!”

Momma always echoed my father’s story, with a “Yes! It was the White Slavers and they used to kidnap beautiful women and those women would never been seen again!”

Momma also had a constant and steady round of lovers. She preferred doctors and she would move them into the house with her, my father and his father, Poppa. My father said he could never understand why Poppa put up with Momma’s lovers, especially living in the same house, but he did.

When I knew her in her 70′s, Poppa had died and she was married to a much younger man, a fellow with slick black hair, who we called Uncle Bob.

When it appealed to her, Grandma would hop up on our kitchen table and do the grinding Tahitian Hula, the one where you bump your hips in mad gyrations. She also liked to belt out a song called ‘Sam, Sam The Lavatory Man’, but no matter how much we kids begged, she would never finish the song. “Your father won’t let me,” she would say piously.

Poppa had an interesting background, too. His father and his many uncles were Real Gun Slingers. They lived and died by the gun. They also had a habit, in their 80′s, I’m told, of leaping onto their horses. This is how my great grandfather eventually met his death. Close to 90, he leaped onto his horse, miscalculated and flew completely over the horse, hit the ground and broke his hip. The break eventually killed him.

I’m thinking about my genetics as I reflect on my current tea leaf reading. I look at my mother. Her mother didn’t marry until she was thirty-five. 

“Why should I get married?” my grandmother said to me. “Just because women are supposed to get married?”

When she did marry, she married a younger, very handsome man, (and younger men weren’t being done at the time) and then she drove a model T across the country, wearing jeans, (which also wasn’t being done by young women at the time!)

Now, I sigh. I think my way of thinking is just in my blood. It may be genetic and it’s hard to change the genes. It’s impossible, actually, to change a person’s Real Nature which is why, by the way, women should stop trying to change men. It’s not possible and it just wears one out. Give it up now if you’re guilty and you’ll save yourself some suffering that you don’t need.

My mother looks over at me and maybe she is reading my mind. We do that in this family.

She is trying to soothe me.

“I think you might eventually get married but you would have to feel the same way about some man, that these various men feel about you.”

She looks at me; peers at me, really.

“It’s getting kind of late in the day,” I say.

“Well, what about me?!” Mother says. “It’s a lot later in the day for me than it is for you.”

And, then she rifts off into why she doesn’t want to marry The Old Friend David or Skip The Much Younger Man or the Suitor Who Just Died, which I remind her is a given, that it’s to late to marry that one..

And as for You Out There; my friends. Think about it; man or woman, what is your Real Nature? 

When we’re young, most of us tend to go along with what our culture says we should do and be and think, which means that we’re sometimes locked  inside a little family house, intently blowing on hot oatmeal for the kids when we should be sitting outside in a long green field, naked, wearing big ruby necklaces and eating crepes while someone plays the violin for our amusement.

I think it’s time I just finally accept my genes and My Nature and see if I can ride the Wild Horse forever, perhaps just always a pace ahead of the ringing wedding bell.

Or not?

Please go to the COMMENT’S SECTION and tell us this: If you could just have it YOUR WAY, how would you do it? I mean, really? How would you do it? Take all the rules off your life and really look and see who is there and what it wants. Hey! Your sufferings may be over!! Maybe you have been suffering all this time because you have been trying to live your life in opposition to your Real Nature and you didn’t even know it.

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*FLOWDREAMING TELECLASSES FOR *LOVE AND *MONEY! I will be doing MY MOTHER’S LOVE MOJO during the Feb 14th LOVE  class. The Money and Prosperity Class is Feb. 7th.  To read about the classes and how they work to BRING GOOD THINGS INTO YOUR LIFE…or to sign up for a teleclass, please go to www.flowdreaming.com. Space is very limited.

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*And yet ANOTHER CHANCE TO WIN A FREE 15 MINTUE PHONE SESSIONS WITH VENUS.

During each live radio show I will be pulling at random, a name from my list of email addresses that you have sent me via my website. (See ‘Free sessions and More’) My show is “The Dear Venus Show,” every other Weds at 9AM Pacific/Noon eastern. You can listen to the show in the Archives BUT the offer will be valid for only one week from the time of the live show.

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FOR INFORMATION ABOUT PHONE SESSIONS WITH VENUS  please see:  www.godisalwayshappy.com  and look for “Rates” on the Home Page

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*WINNER OF TODAY’S BLOG DRAWING; A FREE 15 MINUTE PHONE SESSION WITH VENUS IS:  *Niki Giannini. Offer valid through Feb.9th, 2009. After that, null and void.