All of a sudden, I’ve been transported back to being a twelve-year-old again. Never mind that I am a grown woman, happily married, my husband and I own our own house, and we’re responsible, decent human beings.
My mother gets here for a visit and I’m twelve years old again.
I know I shouldn’t take it personally. As my husband reminded me tonight, she has ‘episodes’ where she acts like she’s drunk. She’s not, and although my father and brother and I have suspected pills for years, we can’t find them. So maybe it’s her migraines that do this. But what it basically means is that she has no filter from her brain to her mouth, and she won’t remember a goddamn thing she says when the ‘fog’ lifts. One of the reasons I put myself into the treatment program that I’m in for opiate addiction is because I’ll be damned if I ever act like that around my own kids and husband - I will NEVER treat them this way. My addiction may be different from whatever is wrong with her, but fuck, I am taking NO chances.
She hasn’t had one of these episodes in months, which is why I was hoping we’d seen the last of them. No, of course, she has one when she arrives today with my grandfather. Lucky fucking me.
We keep our house clean. Maybe it’s not perfectly de-cluttered like my brother’s house, but we keep it clean. I clean the kitchen every day as needed, we clean the bathroom at least once a week (down-and-dirty scrubbing - it gets cleaned and wiped down more than that), we vacuum, etc. I’m not embarrassed to have people over.
I was out of town most of the weekend. Mr. e. went to Cincinnati with me on Friday night to pick up a friend from the airport (we were going to a concert in Cincy last night), we came back with said friend on Saturday, and I went back to Cincy with my friend yesterday, stayed in a hotel last night, and came back this afternoon.
Mr. e did a fair bit of cleaning yesterday. The house looked quite nice when I got in - he had vacuumed the carpets, mopped the kitchen and mud room, straightened up the kitchen, our room, and the living room, and washed the sheets on the guest bed for my grandfather to sleep in. The house looked good. I got home and did a quick load of the sheets on our bed since we put my mom up there tonight, scrubbed the kitchen sink (It gets grungy, so I do it once a week), ran the vacuum by the cat dish in the mud room (twice, since they don’t understand the concept of eating right out of the bowl, and not pulling food out with their paws).
So when my grandfather and my mother arrive, typical hellos, etc. About fifteen minutes into the visit, she goes upstairs to the bathroom. We forgot to clean the sink, but it had maybe two drops of toothpaste and a couple of spots of hair dye from when I dyed my hair a few days ago. Big fucking deal.
She takes fifteen minutes in the bathroom and I’m trying to show my grandfather the upstairs of our house, so we have to wait for her to get out of the bathroom, at which point, I begin to realize what she’s doing. She’s cleaning the fucking sink.
Lovely.
Then we go downstairs and everyone sits. I’m doing a few things for work, and she makes comments about the carpet. “Oh, nice job on vacuuming the carpet!”.
There are TWO BLACK SPOTS that won’t come up. That’s what she’s looking at. No matter how many times I say we’ve vacuumed the carpet, she’s fucking insisting that we haven’t.
It’s gone on like this all night. Apparently, nothing I say will convince her that we’ve actually cleaned the house. Never mind that the fucking house is fucking spotless. She upset me so badly that I actually went into the den and sobbed on my husband. Now he’s pissed at her for making me cry.
What’s funny is that I read what I just wrote, and it doesn’t look like a big deal if I look at it from an outsider’s view. I guess when I’ve been dealing with her episodes for fifteen years, and being put down like this whenever she has one, even one comment has the ability to make me burst into tears. It’s miserable to be around her when she’s like this because her ‘jokes’ cut like a goddamn butcher knife.
Fuck, I can’t wait for her to leave on Wednesday. And I was looking forward to this visit. When she’s normal, my mother is my best friend. We get along really well, and I can tell her anything. When she’s like this…I can’t stand her. And I feel like I’m twelve years old again.
I hated being twelve.
E.