so what’s a skydramini, anyway?

A skydramini, duh, is part girl, part dragon, part two-faced gemini. That would be the short answer. Now for the long one.

There was never a point in my life where I felt it would be safe to remain as I was right then, right there. As I grow older I feel that if you were to reach that point, you would thereafter be able to consider yourself obsolete. The world is ever changing, bristling with activity, and even the smallest movement affects the grand(er) scheme of things. How, then, could anyone have nothing more to accomplish, become, grow into, or find? We are all in constant movement whether we like it or not, and it’s in the welcoming of those changes - the good and the bad ones - that we can strive to figure out where to go from there. Maybe, with a little luck, channeling those movements into evolutions that benefit the rippling around us.

I’m 30. I’m a Girl. A woman. I’m a mother. A girlfriend. A friend. An ex. I’m in advertising. Into history. Politics. I’m into psychology & human interaction. I read, write, relate, talk, goof, and escape. I fancy myself an intellectual, but not the sort that bores others to tears, I hope. I mostly keep to myself, opening up only to those around me who appear safe. I revise who I am and where I’m going constantly; my behaviours, my thoughts, my actions, my past and my future. I am constantly making lists and setting goals for myself, the things I want to do, and the things I need to learn. I’m quite fond of sitting on the couch watching Lost or legal-type shows (CSI, Law & Order, Cold Case). I haven’t found my niche yet, but I have found a myriad of potential niches. I’m constantly searching for the link between them all so that I can concentrate on bringing the whole into my lap and, at long last, domesticate it.

I grew up in Montreal, Canada - minus a 14-month stint in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia which brought on its fair share of traveling. My parents are middle-class workers; my mother works for a puzzle company, my father is a retired director of a telecommunications giant. I have a younger brother who works as an industrial mechanic. My daughter, just turned 5, is probably the brightest light in my skies. I work in advertising, in the campaign coordination sector where creativity is absent and corporattitude is key. I fit into none of the neat categories found in either family, friends or work. I’m not a unique little snowflake, but I’m not a standardized version of the modern soccer-mom either.

I had a good childhood; my parents did everything that they could for my brother and I. It was understood that they were a team, and that we were the team’s charges, and that we could do nothing to disband their coalition. We understood. I was the good girl, always; my brother was more trouble. 30 years later, my brother gets along with my parents in a way better suited for his personality than I do, but I still maintain that I’m the good child. I was a nerd all the way through school, from kindergarden to college, cutting school all of once in highschool… a half-day during the last week of my senior year, right before exams, and with a permission slip from my mom’s friend, the principal’s secretary. A rebel, evidently. My brother cut school more than he went, and I signed his absence slips, forging my mother’s name, fearful that she would catch me, but more fearful that she would catch him cutting and put a ban on our staying home alone on weekends. There’s always been pressure on me to succeed, to be better, to be perfect, and I have realized that maybe that pressure didn’t solely come from my parents, but they played a large part in that. Getting a 98 was always met with the question of ‘why I had gotten two answers wrong’, while a passing grade from my brother elicited praise and warranted top place on the fridge doors. When my brother took my mother’s car without her permission, I was asked why I’d let him take it.

But I’m of the opinion that there comes a point in life where you have to stop blaming your parents for who you are, and either thank them for the tools to become better, or find those tools for yourself. My parents told me I could accomplish anything. The fact that their tools only allowed for certain things inside limited storage facilities is not about them failing, but about my having to be creative to accomplish anything. I was not beaten, I was not abused; I was neither sheltered or let loose. I was raised to the best of the abilities of two loving people with their experiences and their hopes for their children. Those hopes were always for their children to be safe and happy. Their vision gives them an idea of how those can be accomplished, and it is now up to us to show them other ways, if need be.

It was my decision to shy from battle, right when I saw that my brother was making a trail for himself through his rebelliousness. It was my choice to avoid conflict whenever possible, though time and again this tactic failed to grant the results I’d hoped for. Issues will always need to be addressed, and as I have respect for my parents, for my friends, and for my loved ones, I refuse to cater to sensitivities anymore. I am a person that most would be proud of, or at the very least fond of, and I’m putting my foot down more and more. I’ve begun clearing my throat and saying ‘because I want to’ when I am asked to justify decisions deemed unnecessary to the pursuit of a happy middle-class sort of life. I am a realist, but not one that has lost all hopes of a better me.

In my teens, I was an awkward little girl. I wanted desperately to fit in, even though I just didn’t. I was always part of a group, but the part of the group that people remember mostly when she reappears. I wouldn’t want my funeral to be a place where you get to find out who remembered you, because I’m afraid I’d be proven right about that. I do not make a mark in people’s subconscious because I choose not to, and because I keep to myself, all the while loudly goofing and sharing almost no private details. I make myself loud so that people won’t notice that I’m saying nothing. The flipside of course, is that being introverted, intuitive, and introspective can also devolve to feeling alone, anxious, and left out quite a bit.

In college I started to take control back. I lied and hid things from my parents, and I lied to people around me to fit in, wearing the clothes they liked, and listening to the music they recommended, watching movies to quote what the people I knew quoted, but I also cultivated my own interests on the side and in the dark. I found a middle ground where I could be a social butterfly, but not lose everything that I was in the process. I didn’t share myself that much more, but I wasn’t hiding. Of the tighter group of friends I had at the time, I believe a higher number would remember me, than those people I hung out with in highschool.

In the first two years of college, I found my first love, lost my virginity, and discovered that I was a girl. My first boyfriend’s family was of the upper-class sort. He was well behaved, groomed to perfection, and probably one of the most politically correct people I’ve ever encountered (he’s since become human, thank god). His family loved me, my family loved him. We were never super passionate, but we had a good thing. I started experimenting with my sensuality. I started listening a lot more to my inner voices. I started to demystify them, and respect them, and stopped being so afraid of what they claimed I could and could not do. I broke up with my first love. I did it because I couldn’t imagine spending my life in such a dispassionate, predictible manner. I did not want his or my parents’ life. I tested my belief that friendship was possible between us, which turned out to be true. He is one of only two or three people I still talk to from a youngish age.

I moved out of my parents home for another boy. I wouldn’t say he was my second love. He was, however, one of my biggest mistakes. He was troubled, from a family quite unlike mine - disfunctional at best. His mother had commited suicide when he was 7, and his younger brother 6. He had not known the cause of her death until well into his teens, and by then, anger at his alcoholic father had made that knowledge an excuse for absolute bitterness toward love and trust. His father had forced his brother and him to deal with his lust for prostitutes, violence and general not wanting to deal with fatherhood. They’d been allowed to run free, provided they accepted the punches when they crossed imaginary ever-changing borders. They were both kicked out promptly on their 18th birthdays.

Suffice it to say that my parents hated him. Which is why I moved out. I wanted to be right about him. I wasn’t and I knew that. In hindsight, I grew up a lot in that relationship. I learned that people more often prefer the misery they know and can mold, to the promise of something better. Something better takes effort, and a lot of people are too lazy for effort. Something better also means change, trial and error, and possibly restarting in a different direction. Not a lot of people can handle these things. I try to surround myself with people that can now.

After two years of verbal abuse and control, I kicked my boyfriend out and made the decision to keep my independance rather than move back in with my parents. Partly, I felt humiliated and feared the I-told-you-sos. Partly, I craved the opportunity to test the notions of independance that had been brewing in my head. And I needed to prove to myself that I didn’t need him, because he’d imposed the belief that without him, I wasn’t much.

I started hanging out a lot with a girl I worked with. She eventually came to live with me. I followed her to bars and to the beds of different guys. I played with powers of seduction I’d never known I had. I found out that guys were actually attracted to me. I learned how easily I could attach people to myself, which I later used in conjunction with powers of discernment over who I want to attach to myself and who I do not. In the end, her life wasn’t for me. I am not casual about love, or about sex, and I stopped that stuff to find myself again. Those months, however, were pivotal in figuring out who I am and am not.

There is nothing in my life that I wouldn’t relive. Everything has worked in the way it had to, and based on the choices I made, to turn me into the woman I am today. I think I’m pretty open-minded, though I am quite opinionated. I can see people’s motivations clearly, and I can see whether or not they are for me. I can see the points of views of two sides of an issue, and find my own place between the two. I am weary of black or white stances, and find that it is through nuance that we better express ourselves.

When I was 21, I ran into a person I’d met between boyfriend no1 and boyfriend no2. He was a charmer. A lanky boy a year older than me, and he was way into me. He was quiet and shy. But determined also, and I made sure he knew I was interested. I was his first serious girlfriend, and he was my safety at a time when I needed the security of solid love. From our first dates, we never spent all that many nights alone. He eventually moved me out of the apartment I shared with my roommate when she turned out to be losing it, and a few months after that, he moved in with me. We were engaged after 6 months, and married a year and a half after that. Thirteen months later, Munchkin was born. I had it all. I had a solid family of my own, surrounded by a solid extended family, friends that respected the life we were building, and the promises of a good future.

To be continued…