Mama, I love you... BUT STAY HOME!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

The good news: I am going to go to a conference at my employer’s expense for one week in D.C… I haven’t been to D.C. since I was a kid and I generally want to spend every minute I’m not in conference seeing the city (particularly the Smithsonian, the White House [if it’s open at the moment], Capitol, National Archives, etc.).

The problem: My mother has invited herself along.

She’s 70, she’s retired, she’s opinionated, she has no friends to speak of, she’s had a hard life, she hasn’t been anywhere other than for an overnight getaway or to her children’s houses in a decade, and whenever she has been anywhere other than to visit family it’s almost always been with me (like this theater outing or a three day trip through hell last year at Tybee Island when she had me and my sister trying to explain her disappearance). She’s reclusive, and I feel very sorry for her never getting to go anywhere, but…

on the other hand…

  1. I’m in conferences all day

  2. Due to bad feet, a hatred of exercise, age and heavy smoking, my mother moves at a rate of three yards per hour, and D.C. is a walking city

  3. I have friends in the area who would like to go out with me while I’m up there

  4. The hotel is non-smoking, and this is a woman who boycotted her older son’s wedding because he chose a non-smoking restaurant for the rehearsal dinner (she relented literally seconds before the music started- my brother [I was best man] and I were in our tuxes at the front of the church when she walked in just before the bridesmaids)

So you’re thinking, just say “Mama, I’m sorry but this is business and not a good time for vacation”. The problem is, my mother would interpret this as “I don’t want you to go with me, there or anywhere, because you see I hate you, and I always have, and I became gay strictly to end your genetic line, and I want to spend the time that I’m away up there laughing at you and thinking up new and nefarious ways of making whatever time is left to you a living hell, because you are nothing to me and I mock the dried up womb that gave me life… and if I haven’t mentioned it, you have bad taste in clothes and I hate your squash casserole”.

She’s not a total virago by any means, but she can also be, especially when she feels rejected, one of the most irrational and unpleasant and self-pitying and melodramatic and impossible to placate human beings ever born. (I’ve mentioned in previous threads that, among other things, she left a suicide note on the door of my ex-boyfriend, once tore up every photograph she owned of her older two children [you have to explain when showing my sister’s baby pictures or whatever why it’s taped] and once, when I counter-condemned her for her treatment of my long-dead father when she was condemning me for being gay, "I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! I never one time shot at your father… the man was well over 6 feet tall and almost 300 pounds and I’m a good shot- if I’d shot at him I’d have killed him!"-one cigarette drag later-“Now I will admit I shot around him a couple of times, but it was only with a twenty two caliber and it was because it was the only way he’d listen!”

But she’s also- and I really do mean this- one of the kindest, most compassionate, most “always there for you” and gentlest of women when she’s not being a total psycho hosebeast (which is very very rare… now). She’s just insanely possessive and her ultimate trigger is feeling that she’s been excluded or, gods forbid, laughed at by those she loves.

So… my workplace has no problem with relatives accompanying me so long as they pay their way and you attend your conferences, so I can’t use that card. So I have a choice of being miserable for a week in a hotel room with her and unable to see more than three exhibits in the Smithsonian because she’s still coming out of the door of the hotel six blocks away or touring the Holocaust Museum while pretending not to know the old woman who’s telling me in a loud whisper "there’s no way that six million Jews coulda been killed… " or having her not speak for a day because I somehow offended her when I gave the bellman an extra dollar or whatever. Or I can go, attend the conference, enjoy myself, and deal with Frigitta the Ice Empress for the next six years (during which time she’ll die and leave her house to a third cousin she’s never met to spite me, and BY GOD I HAVE EARNED THAT HOUSE).

Oh well, I know what to do (bite the bullet, gird my loins, and say “Mama stay home”), but still had to vent.

2

Have this embroidered on a tapestry. Happy mother’s day! :stuck_out_tongue:

Man, you live in an Off-Broadway play!

3

You’re a good son, Sampiro. I love your stories about your mother. You should write a novel.

4

Would it be OK for you to go a couple of days before the conference with her, “so you can give her your full attention,” then have the main time to yourself? You’d have to spend two or three days seeing only three exhibits and no friends, but it might be worth it to avoid the total psycho horsebeast treatment.

5

Tell me again why you love her? I’m not seeing much that’s lovable here. I mean, I saw this part:

but also the part about it being “very very rare.” Why wait around for those few moments?

I’m also reminded of the time my mother told me in exasperation, “He may be an asshole, but he’s still your father.” I came right back with, “Well, he may be my father, but he’s still an asshole.”

Sometimes you have to let go of people who poison your life.

6

I think he meant that the psycho hosebeast moments are very very rare these days. I hope so, at least.

7

Could you maybe play up the fact that she probably wouldn’t be terribly comfortable there (given the amount of walking and the fact that she won’t be able to smoke in the hotel) and offer to take a mother-son trip somewhere another time? That does obligate you to a trip with her in the future, but you’ll be able to plan that on your own terms and you’ll be free to enjoy D.C. to the fullest in the meantime.

8

Ha ha ha… beautiful.

I just learned there’s a gay pride parade that week and it will pass directly by the hotel.

9

How deliciously ironic. :slight_smile:

10

Tell her about the parade. She’ll disinvite herself.

11

Ah, the Pride parade. I didn’t realize it was going on that weekend. I live in the Dupont/Logan Circle area and the weekend of the Pride parade and the Leather weekend are always good times to shock out-of-towners.

Don’t know what to tell you about your mom, but enjoy D.C. It’s a great city.

12

Ah yes… The title would be I Remember Frigitta the Ice Empress. :smiley:

Good luck with your mama. Throw in some bi-polar sheer hatred of all her offspring, and I swear you and I are siblings!

13

Actually, she says all the time how much she’d love to have a child who lives in Montgomery, so you could be adopted really easily… (I actually moved from Georgia to Tuscaloosa so that she could have one of her kids nearer- she’ll never know that I was offered a job at Auburn that pays more than this one and I turned it down strictly because it was “too close for comfort” (45 minute easy drive on the Interstate, and she was already pressuring me to “just live with me and save your rent money”), but Tuscaloosa is a good distance as I can make it in 90 minutes if it’s ever a real emergency (or 2 hours if it’s not).

14

Amen.

But then you have to explain to people why, after they ask where your family is, you don’t have or desire contact with them. Then they get nosy and demanding (“But your mother is the most important person in your life…she brought you into this world!”) Yes, and she also expressed her regrets for doing so, frequently and in great depth. So shut the hell up.

It’s only second to the “When are you going to/why aren’t you going to have kids?” in the obnoxiously personal regime of questions people like to ask five minutes after they’ve met you.

And they wonder why I have no use for (most) people.

Stranger

15

Man, I feel so much better now. I came in to this thread to carp about my own family coming in to town this weekend and how stressed I am as a result, but I think that would get me a solid “What the hell are you complaining about?” Instead, I’m going to enjoy the short time I have with my loving, close-knit family. Thanks for giving me some perspective, Sampiro.

16

Does she have to know that the company welcomes relatives? I’d be inclined to cry budgetary limitations.

17

Can’t you, er, lie to her? Does she know your work policies? Can’t you tell her you’d get in trouble if you brought her? Say “Oh, I heard Sally brought her mother along to the annual conference last year and people found out and it’s just Not Done, and now Sally got transfered to Receiving where she’ll be spending the rest of her days in the freezer unit”?

18

Sampiro–
I understand. When I saw that your mom lives in the south it all made sense. I thought you were talking about my mom. My parents are also from down there-- my mom’s from Mississippi. People whose moms are from up north don’t understand (“So why again do you love her?” “You . . you can’t understand.” Sorry, midwesterners, but there’s no explaining or avoiding it. We’re programmed this way at an early age and recognizing that someone is toxic doesn’t matter). The “jewish mother” stereotype has nothing on these women. It works differently. The rules are different. Like, the feeling of guilt that you get when you forget to call her for your birthday. . .

19

Amen and pass the pork chops and fried corn on that one…

The 3/5 Compromise

Aid comes from an unlikely source: my Fundamentalist sister. She called today and I mentioned this to her, explaining why it would be better if she didn’t go for professional reasons, etc., when Kathi interrupted me with “Forget the professional talk, one week in a ho-tel room with Mama and Gandhi would tapdance on a kitten. Anytime I’m in a confined space with her for more than a day I start lookin’ for places to dump the body”. So…

I’ll fly to D.C. and have about 4 or 5 days free, then my sister, her husband and my mother will join me there for the last couple (I can tolerate my mother in a hotel room for a couple of days). After that we’ll go to Jamestown, Mt. Vernon and a couple of days in Virginia, then back to Alabama with a neurosis on our knee. I think it can work and spare feelings (and my sister and I have a detente about not discussing politics or religion, so…)

(And I must reiterate: my mother can be, and in fact is usually, one of the nicest and most caring of people, but when she blows or gets offended, Christ Jesus on an out-of-control pogo stick but she’s impossible and manages to make people who live anywhere in her emotional radius absolutely miserable.)

20

Oh hell no… that’ll clench her coming.

You’ll rarely meet an elderly southern woman who isn’t a-b-s-o-l-u-t-e-l-y obsessed with what other people do sexually (especially if it’s beyond the “hetero-missionary with the lights out” 1950s stuff). You’ll also never meet one who will admit to this obsession, but Gay Pride Parades, Monica Lewinsky hearings, celebrity sex scandals- glues them to their chairs. Oh they’ll bitch about how perverse and obscene it is… but not til they’ve watched it. (I’ve seen my mother and her 80 year old sister sit through graphic sex scenes in Hollywood movies totally silent with their eyes like Jennifer Wilbanks imitating Barbara Bush, then when it’s over… “Now that was just uncalled for and unnecessary…”, but if you tried to remove the videotape/DVD before it’s over they’d hurl a grenade.)