“Acid Lamp, when are you going to come back to church where you belong?”
In addition Mum also seems to think that my financial management skill set was terminated at about age 12. Despite the fact that I’ve maintained a household, paid my bills, got married, and haven’t had a blip in nearly 8 years, she still assumes that I’m “bad with money”. On the other hand, My younger sister who is severely in debt, can’t make her bills, had to move to smaller home to save money and has a questionable contract for her employment is the “responsible one. She saves.”
Also, she “hate your tattoos.” I “need to shave off that beard, and grow your hair nice so you can comb it over.” (I’m not bald or thinning btw) She just likes the idea of me with the ‘newscaster/ republican congressman’ hairdo.
I’m a steak eater. I like my steaks rare. I’ve liked my steaks rare as long as I have been able to order them myself. I am also 30 years old. However, when I go to a restaurant with my mother, I have chosen to avoid ordering steak because of the following conversations.
Server: “how would you like your steak prepared?”
Me: “Rare”
Mom: “She means medium”
Me: “Rare”
Mom: “she means medium”
And so on. Not only am I 30, but I actually do know how to use the english language and I know what rare means. I ordered carpaccio once and I think she had a mini-stroke. So now, Pork Chops or Chicken. It’s an easier battle.
My mother has a thing about me going out of town. She doesn’t worry excessively, but every time I leave town she acts like I’m going to be gone for a year, and thus, I MUST GO SEE HER before I leave.
This typically starts two days before I leave. You know, when you leave town, the couple days before you leave is typically busy. Last minute work stuff needs to be done, you must pack, you must make sure the trip is planned correctly, need to make sure there’s enough dog food to last for the length of time I’ll be gone, etc. etc. So that’s when the phone calls start.
“You’re leeeeaaaaavvvvvinnng. I neeeeed to seeeee you before you go.”
“Mom, I’m super busy, and I saw you 2 days ago.”
“But yoooouuuu’llll beee out of towwwwn… I neeeed to seee you!”
“Mom, I have a gazillion things to do. I’m only going to be gone for 3 days. If I were IN town, I probably wouldn’t see you until next weekend. Why do we need to get together now?”
“You’re leeeaaavving town!”
Rinse and repeat.
I was out of town this past week; I managed to put her off. But now I’m back, and it’s started again. “We need to get together! So much happened! We must talk!”
This, even though I called her at least twice while I was away, and I was gone for 3.5 days. WTF? I’m debating not answering the phone today, but that’ll probably convince her I’m dead and she’ll show up on my doorstep to check.
Aww, I still contend a lot of this stuff is extremely cute. So what’s the deal? Do you automatically become crazy when you have a baby, or what?
I’m another one whose parents have a weird issue about driving distances and times of day. Freshman year of college, my mother and brother drove with me because I brought an insane amount of crap, apparently thinking my dorm was going to be my new home or something. By sophomore year I realized bringing the whole ranch was a waste of time, and all I needed was clean clothes and a tooth brush, so I decided to throw a bunch of stuff in a bag and drive up myself. No way, nuh uh.
Her: You can’t drive all that way by yourself!
Me: Sure, I can. I drive by myself all the time.
Her: Not for 400 miles!
Me: What difference does it make?
Her: It’s an eight hour drive.
Me: The way you drive. I’ll be there in 5.5 hours.
Strangely, this did little to comfort her. I relented and let her come with. What did she think was going to happen? That I was going to get mugged on the freeway? And if so, what was a small, 58 year old woman going to do? If I got a flat, what was she going to do? Having my mother there was of no use at all. By senior year, she let me win. Yes, she flipped out (I left at 5:00 AM, no less, so it was still dark out!), but I drove the whole 400 miles by myself.
Freshman year, finals week. I went 3 days without checking my voicemail. I was in my room getting ready to take a shower when there was a knock at the door. The Residence Director shows up with one of the RAs pleading with me to return my mother’s calls because she the police (the real police, not campus cops) and tried to file a missing persons report. They contacted the campus police who contacted student housing. Then I had to deal with a hysterical mother trying to send me on a guilt trip because she was having nightmares of me “cut open on an autopsy table” and because everyone, including my father and her coworkers had kept telling he she’s overreacting and I’m probally really busy with final exams, but she “just knew” something was wrong.
I think my dad was sorry the leash didn’t occur to him when he and I went to London in 2004. When I was 35. When I wasn’t allowed to hold my own plane/train/tourist trap ticket and when he parked me up against the wall in the train station in Paris and instructed me not to move “one single inch from here” while he used the restroom.
This is perhaps not entirely in the spirit of this thread, but here goes. Whenever my mother calls me and I don’t answer, she leaves a message that goes something like this …
“Hey, Jims, I just wanted to see how things were going. I guess you’re not home. Maybe you and Colleen are out to dinner, or maybe you’re taking a shower, or maybe you’re out shopping, or maybe you’re taking a nap, or …” etc.
The guessing game continues to happen even though, intellectually, she must recall that we only have a cellphones now, and I usually don’t answer because I fail to hear the damned thing.
My mom’s thing with my hair is that she doesn’t like me to have it naturally curly, because she thinks it looks “messy”. This is because she has naturally curly hair also, which she hates, and has been straightening it since the 60s, when she used to sleep with large rollers on and once had Grandma iron her hair on the low setting before a party. When I was little we always had fights about my hair because I liked it long, but she had trouble styling it because it tangled easily, so I had short hair more often than not. I finally grew it out when I was in college. For years she kept nagging me to get a straightening perm. I finally gave in and bought a ceramic straightening iron two years ago. It does look nice, I must admit, but now I have to condition the hell out of it so it doesn’t look so dry. Some days I choose to let it air-dry and not straighten it so it can rest. On those days, Mom always says, “Why didn’t you straighten your hair? It looks so messy! At least pull it back or something,” and on and on ad nauseam. :rolleyes:
Now I find I’m having the same battles with my daughter about the length of her hair. We both like it long, but I find it’s harder to style it when it’s longer than halfway down her back because it tangles easily, like mine, and she always has a fit when I go near her hair with the scissors. Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it? :smack:
I’m not quite sure if this fits but what the heck…In 1976 my father got a subscription to HBO as a gift for my brother. For those who don’t know, at this time VCRs were just starting to be advertised at $1,00, there were no video stores, a good cable system might have about 10 channels showing the same commercial TV stations from about three nearby cities. HBO at the time was a half day operation that started broadcasting around 430PM. They were not listed in newspapers or “TV Guide”. Their advertising was “First Run movies with no commercials”. What wasn’t said was first run was movies that were year old such as “The Man who Would be King”, “The Man with the Golden Gun” and “Prisoner of Second Avenue” plus some T&A movie called “The Bawdy Adventures of Tom Jones” with Trevor Howard and Joan Collins having small roles (the type of drive in schlock Collins made before becoming huge in “Dynasty”). It was a nebulous advertising campaign that implied “movies that are in theaters now”."There was also some tennis and hockey games (NY Rangers in our case), neither of which appealed to my father.
In any case my father found it a huge disappointment and canceled it a year later. But for decades after it was not unusual for him to gripe at dinner time how “they advertised first
run movies and they had nothing-what a waste of money that was! I don’t see how they stay in business!”.
