Doctor's Note

I spent my morning writing a blog that I plan on posting in a couple weeks, before going into work to prep some stuff for my pre-bake-off. It's a special blog, one that left me crying on my keyboard and in a weird mood for the rest of the day. I don't cry a lot, maybe a couple times a year, and usually only when my parents come to visit. It felt good actually, to let my current frustration and past hurt leak from my eyes. Crying always leaves me feeling vulnerable and weak, two things that I don't usually allow myself to feel. An odd start to a Sunday, but necessary.

I have started to dread weekends, even though I have off from work I still go in, and when I am not at work, I find myself pulling at straws trying to fill the hours before I can go to bed and start the next day. I am fully aware that this isn't the way to live life, but it's the reality of the way things are for me at the moment. Just bidding time until Skipper comes and The Bake-Off is out of the way. I am not proud of the way I am knocking back days, but also know that right now it's the only way I know how to do things. If sacrificing my life and happiness for the next 42 days is what it takes to achieve my goal of finishing, then that's what I am going to do. It sucks to spend hour after hour, day after day, just waiting to get to the finish line, but I have lived though worse and know that sometimes on the road of life you just have to suck it up and smile to get where you want to go.

Seeing as today is Mother's Day, and that Dr. Sylvia reads every blog, I would like to give a shout-out to my mom. If you have had the great pleasure of meeting the good Doctor, you are already aware of the fact that she is extremely special, and not in the retarded sort of way. Dr. Sylvia is in fact one hell of a bad-ass and I feel extremely proud to be able to call her "Mom." I don't know a lot of other kids that can brag about their mom hitch-hiking through South Africa during Apartide, or surviving Polio, so even as a young child I knew that my mom was something more then special. A couple Summers ago I was at Saks in San Francisco and had wanted to buy her a gift to cushion her disappointment after I had gotten a new tattoo. I was at one of the cosmetic counters (Dr. Sylvia is somewhat of beauty supply addict), I had wanted to buy her a perfume, and when the sales woman asked me what type of woman my mother is, my reply was "ballsy," and it's true, Dr. Sylvia is what even she herself would call a "firecracker."

Dr. Sylvia doesn't enjoy talking about her life, so when I came to Switzerland I took it upon myself to fill in the very large holes in her story, and luckily Grossi was always more then ready to help. Over the last five years I have come to see my mother as an amazing woman, capable of nothing less then greatness. She is incredibly smart, fluent in five languages, has traveled all over the world, posses a sense of style that heavily influenced my own, has a tendency to make people laugh until they cry, and has an inner strength that I can only hope to one day find in myself. After spending a lot of time with Swiss people I have also begun to understand her short comings. I can freely say that by living in Switzerland, far away from my mother, I was able to get to know her as a person, and not just as a matriarch.

People have always like to pass judgment on my relationship with my mother. That we are too close and that I depend too much on her opinion of how I live my life. I have been judged for the fact that we talk on the phone at least four to five times a week, and I am as open and honest about my life with her as I am. My outlook on it has always been that, if something was to happen, if I fucked up in a major way, it would inevitably be Dr. Sylvia or Chef Doug that would have to bail my ass out (not to mention she no longer has the power to ground me or take away TV privileges). I have never and will never apologize for my relationship with my mother. I know from the outside looking in it must look like I am still very dependent on her opinion, and that I can't make decisions on my own, but from the inside things looks a lot different for me. Dr. Sylvia and I have been through some gnarly shit together, experiences that have caused us to become as close as we are, and when we both found ourselves alone and lost, we always had each other. We don't always see eye-to-eye on things, she is incredibly stubborn and has a very hard time apologizing or admitting when she is wrong, and sometimes I just want to drown her in a bucket, but at the end of the day, there is no one I rather smother in hugs. At this point in my life I have just come to accept that I am forever bound to this woman, for better or for worse, not just because she is my mother, but because she owns my heart.

So, I end this with a hearty shout-out to the baddest mofo that I know, Dr. Sylvia. I love you, even when you make that weird sound when your allergies act up (Dede, you know the sound I am talking about).