Lana feels

She's an octopus, my mother. I keep detaching tentacles and then there's always another one and she wants to keep me buried in academia until I've shriveled up and died and I just want to leave. I want to go out into the world and make my own way and find what I'm passionate about and the only thing about this whole biology deal that bothers me is the prospect of spending my entire life surrounded by academia! Universities and students who don't want to be there and lab work that requires all the muck and process of getting grants. I just want to go out and live life a little bit, I just want to find for myself the college I want to go to, I want it to be my decision. It needs to be my decision or I'll never get anywhere! I don't thrive when I'm forced into things. I don't want to spend the summer fighting with her over this, but I also don't want to just surrender to her. She never thinks I can do anything, she never has any confidence in my abilities. I've been a failure in her eyes since the first time Ms. Rudy called home and said I hadn't handed in some stupid homework assignment. She threw a four-hour conniption fit. I came within a hairsbreadth of failing the next five years of school. I'm finally doing well, here. I've found someplace, found it myself, that makes me happy. I got into this marvelous biology program for the summer that I am so excited about, even after she told me over and over that I should just settle and do the one at Earlham because there wasn't a chance in the world that I'd get into the one at Chicago. And then I got in, and I switched, and now she's throwing fits about college visits and my wish to go to Antioch and to New York/Provincetown with Lada this summer, and all of a sudden she's planning out the getting of my driver's license which I don't even care about, and I want Daddy to teach me to drive but goddess forbid we should ever have the nerve to spend time together. I'd forgotten how much she hated it when we would ever spend time together just the two of us. She would get so incredibly jealous and it always made me feel so dirty because he's my father, for christ's sake, and she thought... Well. Whatever she thought, it wasn't nice. So the idea of us spending 25 hours together in a car this summer probably doesn't appeal to her too much, and yet she's going on and on about how I have to study for my permit test and blah, blah, blah. I don't care that much about my permit, my license, any of it! The only thing I ever really want to drive is a motorcycle! And there is plenty of time for me to get all of that done over Thanksgiving or Christmas or next summer or at college or never, for all I care! I need to figure out a simple, polite way of telling her to BACK THE FUCK OFF! Stop clinging to me, let me go, let me make my own way in the world! Let me make my mistakes and stop trying to fix me and tie me to things and let me get passionate about Antioch even if you don't think it's right and just let me be a real person instead of a transcript! I want her to see that there is so much more to me than that! I want to prove to myself that I can be more than just a quiet, intelligent child. I'm not a child, not fully, not anymore. I have my moments, but I'm growing up and I need to be allowed to do that on my own terms before I combust! Yelling at her has never worked. Saying hurtful things has never helped. I have to find a way to get this through to her so that she's hurt as little as possible, but so that she gets it. *sighs* Ah, the adolescent melodrama... Let go of me, octopus-woman!