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| A section of DNA; All I share with my family (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Family: I know a few of you also have family issues so please indulge my short fiction and if you are my family please know you are not welcome to read this:
But, since none of you has ever read anything I have written why start now?
My mother always says I should write a book. She means fiction. Since no one but my husband and I see this situation the way I'll write it, I guess we can call the following a fictional account. It is as close to fulfilling my mother's dream tha I write a book as I will get. So, you know that disclosure at the start of novels? Good. Let's pretend I have looked it up and written it here at the beginning of my little story.
My mom has been visiting for two weeks. Yesterday, My husband and I drove to a halfway point to drop my mother off to a sister I haven't seen in four years. We don't really have anything in common except DNA, and while invited, she has never seen my home. When we finally got there we waited some time for her to arrive and then saw her for three minutes. Despite prior instructions and a google map sent days before which she apparently did not look at, then further instructions as she drove, she went to the wrong parking lot. Her excuse was that her GPS was broken..
My husband commutes about four to five housrs three or four days a week. He had zero complaints about taking my mother to the place we met my sister. It took her several days to huffily negotiate. She would not allow my mother to be taken to a train directly from one place to her destination.
My sister is very busy and very important. She is the owner of a business. And, if one is to believe my mother, her job and her busy is so much more important than any other person's. Oddly, my husband, who is a globally responsibilitied executive for a large electronics corporation, was able to take off multiple times to take my mother places, pick her up, and drop her off. He reserved time for her. And, in between he entertained my cousins at short notice and mostly his own expense, so my mother could meet her great nephew. But his importance must be lesser because he takes time for my mother as something he does for me.
My cousin, who after decades of not hanging out together due to cultural differences and employment circumstances, I have now seen several times in the past few years, has now also seen my home. Fortunately he is my husband's favorite member of my family.
There have been many occasions I have gone to our place of birth to visit my sister or attend events she forced upon us. In the twenty nine, almost thirty years I have been married, she drove my parents up here to visit one time. Instead of the two days they were to spend they spent one night. She spent most of the day on my office phone and then insisted on leaving a day early.
I've been told my sister couldn't come here because I was unable to handle her developmentally disabled son who was younger when this was suggested. He is unable to care for himself. She travels without him more often than with and has several full-time caretakers to handle him. She has also visited the area of my state where I live on my birthday and not even told me.
This summer my sister spent two weeks with my other sister in Europe while my mother and my sister's maid cared for my nephew. My mother says I do not understand but I think I have the situation pretty well sussed out.
I find my mother very hard to deal with. Aside from her near fanatic worship of this sister, I did not enjoy my childhood and have very few happy memories. I have worked hard to banish it from my mind. My mother has too remembering nothing of what she did or said. I also work at home in a very quiet environment and have a brittle temperament. My husband says I don't suffer fools and am unable to conceal how I feel. I don't have to in my home and that is where I am most of the time. I am an open book,
It's the meanness that will be remembered.
In the past two weeks I have tried to set myself aside but I failed miserably with my mother. I cannot imagine why you would ask someone if there was anything you could do to help five times in ten minutes, when the previous four times the answer was no. The only reason to do that is to piss someone off and use a complex history to encourage guilt as a way to make one's self feel better that someone was doing something on your behalf. I know I am not easy but friends tell me that like everyone else I have strengths as well as weaknesses.
One thing I remember from my childhood is my mother complaining about everything she had to do for me as her child. I was told often I was good-for-nothing and that it was a sacrifice to have had me. There is no work for her to do here, no sacrifices to make. The currency she deals in has no value here.
Last year, my sister's housekeeper was having some legal issues and my mother chose to stay a my sister's and support her instead of coming her to see me when I asked her to.
She finally has that spare time she wanted when I was growing up. Plus, there is little for even me to do in my home. Anything that is not handled by someone else requires skills or strength she doesn't possess due to age or lack of familiarity. At 83 and after an accident in Greece she can hardly get up the step in my garage, so I am not sending her up a staircase of a a story-and-a-half to do laundry. She wants me to run my home as she thinks it ought to be run (meaning start dinner at four and have the table set) and that is where we come up against my unhappy childhood that I have not done years of therapy for. It only comes up in the two to three weeks I see her each year.
I have not had new buttons installed so she has access to the ones she and the rest of my family installed.
Ninety-five percent of the time I make three courses of dinner in 20 minutes. Sometimes I make something that needs to be prepped and slow-cooked or refrigerated. Setting the table takes three minutes. Yet at four everyday the dinner litany begins. Every. Day.
I would love to free myself; free myself of this reactive state of anger and resentment. I could simply cut ties, but there is enough good girl left in me that I know I would feel guilt even though in doing so there would be no one left to make me feel guilty. What makes family "a" family?
