Megan Black Thumb.

I want to be good at the things my Mom is good at.

I've never had the problem some of my friends have like hating their parents or wishing they wouldn't turn out like them. Spoiler alert, we all end up being our parents to a certain extent. But I've always actually wanted to be just like my parents.

And why not?! My Mom is an amazing woman and I have so many of her qualities, good and bad, but I want to be able to do the things she can do and do them as good. I am, however, destined to always live in her shadow just as she tells me she lives in her Mom's shadow. She says that my Nana was perfect at things like baking and knitting and that after all these years of practice and experience and getting it wrong and getting it right, she's still not her Mom.

But we'll spend our lives trying I guess.

And my Mom is good at so many things that I am just absolute crap at.

My mother is a great cook. Put me in the kitchen and I know you're a gambler. She can cook so well and she can do it fast, without hurting herself, and likes to. She hosted her friend Stacy's bridal shower last month and made so much food I wouldn't have been able to imagine it if I hadn't also been at my graduation party when I got my Bachelor's degree and saw her baking and cooking for the entire week leading up to it. Or been at every Christmas and Thanksgiving where she made more food than one family should ever eat.

I on the other hand, only like cooking when it's for other people. Which means I eat a lot of Peanut Butter and Jelly bagels, grilled cheese, soup, vegetable steamers, frozen pizza if it's Pizza Friday...

She's also good at knitting and sewing and all kinds of domestic things. All of my friends started knitting because they tend to do things together, but as a result I've gotten a really awesome scarf and a darling hat with the smallest pom-pom I've ever seen on a grown ups hat from my Name Twin. I used to do cross-stitch and I was pretty good--my grandmother Karen told me at Christmas this year that she started doing needle point when she first met us girls because we were doing it and now she makes some of the most gorgeous embroidered things you'll ever see. I stopped doing that when we moved to Phoenix--with weather that gorgeous all year round I picked up some outdoors sports like tennis and swimming all year. I'm sure I could pick it up if I want to. But what I've always wanted to be good at was sewing. My Mom used to make all of our clothes when we were little, many gems the likes of which can be seen in any of our old albums. But she was great at it! Halloween costumes are another blog entirely, but the woman made those too! And I've always wanted to learn. But I had her show me how to knit over the Christmas holidays and will most likely be working on this scarf until the day I die.

I screwed up a part and arranged for us to FaceTime so she could look at it and help me figure out what happened. I knew I had dropped a stitch but couldn't figure out how to pick it up in the next line. While she was looking at the mess I'd made she couldn't figure out what I had done so I had to mail it to her.

I had to mail my project to my mother to fix for me!

Ugh.

And apparently I had dropped the stitch a few rows back and didn't notice even though I'd been counting after every row...

...but she fixed it. And if I ever finish that damn scarf I want to be buried in it.

My Mom also has great gardening skills. In Canada we had a little garden and I remember eating really delicious carrots from it. In every house we've ever had there have been plants inside and out. Something I've tried to do with my apartments is have flowers around. And I decided last year that I'd try my hand at growing something on my balcony.

Now what happened next isn't my fault.

I bought all the stuff from Home Depot and followed the directions; I put the soil in the pot, put the packet of grow stuff in the watering can with water, and put the plant in the soil and left it in the sun.

The next day it snowed.

In El Paso.

I woke up and my balcony and the street was covered in snow.

My plant was dead before I even woke up since when I did wake up it was 1 degree outside.

And I hadn't tried to replace the plant because I got busy. But I decided this year I'd try again. I was in Tucson for Spring Break and I bought a couple of plants from the Home Depot, drove them back to El Paso and left them in my car overnight.

Yeah...

...I had to be on a plane early the next morning to go to AP-LS and I had ended up stuck on the freeway in Tucson for close to two hours because of an accident so I didn't get back into El Paso until midnight and I had to pack for my trip, shower, sleep a bit. I dragged all my luggage up to my apartment and completely forgot that I had plants in the car. Until the next morning when I was going to the airport and there they were! I ran them upstairs and put them in the sink, drowned them in water and hoped they'd be ok until I got back in 4 days.

And they were! They were alive and fine!! I was so glad! And, I thought foolishly, maybe they're resilient plants and can survive me!

So I popped them out of their little plastic things and put them in the pot on the balcony. Followed the directions that came with them, and put them in half shade, watered them and felt good about myself.

Short lived was this victory because I woke up the next morning, REMEMBERED to water them, and this is what I got...



So gardening isn't my thing...these flowers were fine until I came home.

I'll probably never be as good as my Mom at the things she's really good at. I may not even be good at things like cooking, knitting, gardening, maybe ever. I'm my Mom in the sense that I forget important words in my sentences and call people by the wrong name, and love dogs and all kinds of music and reading and know when I'm being lied to and can stand up for myself. So maybe being bad at some stuff gives me something to work towards.

Because I really do want to be good at the things my Mom is good at.