FINDING MYSELF

Chapter 6- The weekend of guilt

It turned out I didn't go over to Max's place after all. No real reason, but I figured I'd seen Hunter and Max make idiots of themselves plenty of times before so I wasn't missing out on much. Hanging out at home was pretty usual for me these days so Mum didn't pick anything up on her maternal radar as she usually would when there was drama in the air. Anyway, I reckon she liked having me kicking around the house.

      Mum looked pretty happy with herself after our quality time in the veggie patch. She always loved a project, especially anything to do with the house. That was her thing, the house. Well, if I was really honest, it wasn't just her thing, it was her and Dad's thing. You couldn't separate the three of them. It was like the house was another member of the family.

     They bought this place the same year I was born, and it definitely needed a lot of love. It was a dump! But that's what they wanted. They were into Home makeover way before it was on telly every night of the week. They wouldn't go anywhere near a furniture shop, through, like normal people did. Oh no, the Armstrong family had to get up at the crack of dawn every weekend and go to garage sales, weird wreckers, smelly old nanna stores and freaky rundown warehouses. They would spend hundreds of hours happily trawling through crap, dirty crap, and get really excited when they found something that no one in their right mind would even touch. Then they'd spend what was left of the weekend and every weekend after that getting whatever piece of junk they'd found back to how it was originally. It seemed like a huge waste of time to me. So I'd point out that we were in the twenty-first century in case they'd missed it and they'd both smiled as if I was the idiot and kept sandpapering the latest 1850 table they'd scored from somebody's skip.

     Stuff was different now though, weekends were different. There was no junk in the backyard, and no Armstrong projects. Except for the veggie patch.

      Which was how Mum spent most of Sunday morning, staring at the veggie patch over her pot of tea. Then she flicked through the weekend papers. That was weird. Before, she'd never allow them through the front door. She'd carry on that they were a journalistic disgrace and full of trash. Dad reckoned that was exactly the reason why you should buy them. They would sit at opposite ends of the kitchen table and throw smartarse comments back and forth at one another which I had to dodge every time I went to the fridge. Now Mum actually goes and buys the papers, sits down at the table in the same position and mutter as she flicked through them. I told her she sounded like a madwoman and she told me to get used to it because it was going to get worse with age.

      Sunday nights always make you feel sick in the gut. It's that time when you remember all the crap from school that you haven't done over the weekend and are too tired to do now, which means you know you're going to get in trouble for it tomorrow. Or in my case, the fact that I had all weekend to tell Mum everything before I went through hell, but I hadn't.

      But that's how the you cam decide whether you tell your parents thing works. The whole time it sits in your belly  reminding you that there's something you have to do. Then you go and catch up with the boys, kick the soccer ball around, hang out in your room messing with chords on the guitar, and you forget. But then you hear your mum singing in kitchen, happy after working in the garden all day, or you watch her settle back with a glass of wine and a chick flick and that's when it hits. It comes up from your gut and sits in your mouth like you want to vomit it all out. Then you see that she'd dressed in her home trackies she'd never be caught dead in anywhere else, lying on the couch laughing at the telly, and you know you can't. You just can't. So you walk back to your room and decide that, like most things lately, it's better to swallow and pretend that it's gone away.

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Ahhhhhhhh.....the guilt.....so painful....bring tears to my eyes.....

I am sooooooo sorry for the late update dates.....but can't do much am on a camping trip...... U know how u have that one family member....that's goes all cave man shit....wanting to started a fire with rub two sticks or stones together to start a fire.....and takes any electronic gadgets away for u  .....well i am with that kind of relative.....so i will try my best to update in the night when he is asleep ....hahaha(evil laugh).
Plizzzzz do keep voting and commenting.
Love u all......