…Is Gonna Had Better Not Come

Spending quality time with the parent people can be frustrating. They are people who do not believe in change. I, on the other hand, have no fear of it. Let the conflict ensue.

My mother especially believes that once you state an opinion that is the opinion that you intend to hold for life. So if at the age of 14 you said that you liked a particular brand of fake maple syrup better than the real stuff then that means that you will not eat maple syrup. Discussing a recipe that includes maple syrup twenty years later will provoke an outraged, “You don’t eat maple syrup!” Pointing out that you said that about one taste test twenty years ago gets you an outraged snort.

I used to have a problem with mild lactose intolerance. I don’t any more. The only way ice cream bothers me is if I think it is going to bother me. This only happens when I eat ice cream in front of my mother and she spends the next 4 hours asking me if I’m getting sick. When I finally do get sick it reinforces her belief that I can’t eat ice cream. She’s into my bowel health. This weekend she was counting the number of times I went into the bathroom and announcing it. I didn’t realize I was being excessive but apparently it was too often for her liking.

I just wanted to bang my head on something solid all weekend. I think that she thinks that I was picking fights all weekend. She asked if I still had my West Virginia veterinary license. I said calmly that I never had one. *Disgusted sigh at my arguing* followed by “You’ve practiced there before.” When I replied that I’ve never worked in West Virginia that got another disgusted sigh and she changed the subject. Obviously I’m just being difficult to annoy her.

I went to a wedding shower with her this weekend too. I drove separately and got there before she did. I was sitting with my aunts and they asked me about the adoption. I didn’t know that they knew about it because I haven’t seen them recently but I was talking about it when the mother came in. Later she asked me how we got on “that subject.” I said that they asked me about it. Her response? “I didn’t know that they knew anything about that.” Well she would have had to have told them since I haven’t talked to them. Then she remembered that one of them might have heard something about it once. I didn’t realize that it was supposed to be a secret. That really irritated me since she and they talked all about a mistaken rumor that my SIL was pregnant. It started with a distant family aquaintance. My mother was talking about how obviously the SIL would be telling the family before she told anyone else and wasn’t it silly for them to think otherwise, etc, etc. So pregancy = let the joyous news be spread. Adoption = stunned that anyone has heard about it.

She also let me go blindly into something that could have been bad. I’ve been talking about homeschooling for years. My dad asked me something about schooling and I said that depending on B’s status when she comes here she may have to go to school since Ohio doesn’t like you to homeschool foster children. I didn’t know that she had never mentioned my homeschooling plan to my father. My father is violently anti-homeschooling. I thought maybe she’d let him know I was considering it. Nope. Let me waltz in unaware. He took it fairly well for him. He left the house without breaking anything. Oh well, she never told him that I was getting married either. He figured it out when I told him that I decided where the reception was going to be. He had been suspicious earlier but when he asked her she said that we were thinking about it. At that point the date was set and the church was scheduled.

We get along ok on the phone but visiting is painful.