Putting It to Rest

In my life, there have been three people I had screaming fights with. One was my mother when I was a teenager.

This is not and never was how I wanted to live. I haven't had a screaming fight in years and I hope to never do so again.

I don't know what was going through my mother's mind or what she was experiencing or what her goal was, but I'm clear a large part of this was her and it was nothing I wanted.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, we were alone in the car together on the interstate and she was just giving me hell about something, I no longer remember what. But I was very clear she expected me to just take her shit because I was trapped in a vehicle going sixty or whatever and I couldn't get away.

She hits the exit ramp and there's a line, so the car stops, and she's still giving me hell. Without saying one word, I got out the car and left.

I made sure to get out of sight while she was still stuck in traffic so she couldn't find me and I began walking home. I ultimately called my aunt and asked her to pick me up because I had undiagnosed health issues and it was too far to walk and it had begun raining.

My mother never did that again.

I got married and left town and it was vastly easier to say "Meh. Mom has baggage. Whatever. I don't have to scream in reply to her bullshit."

She continued to be catty and like a bulldog unwilling to let stuff go throughout my twenties. She did this to everyone, not just me.

If you didn't ask for seconds or thirds at dinner, you're insulting her cooking. If you did, it's no wonder you're so FAT!

So I was just like "Dinner is wonderful. Thanks so much for cooking. Please pass the gravy." I was a homemaker. I knew how much work it took to make dinner. She was a good cook. I was completely sincere about all of that and just unwilling to engage with her SHIT about food and weight.

After one visit home, both my kids were low-grade nuts for weeks afterwards. The youngest would tell me "You can't tell me no. Grandma doesn't." and the older one was a skinny four year old and Grandma had been chasing him around trying to feed him and had given him a complex about his weight.

So I told him "Grandma is a little cracked. She grew up in a war zone going hungry and watching people starve." And forever after he judged her neurotic behavior through that lens and largely ignored stuff and just didn't engage with it.

When he was seven, she again was chasing him around trying to feed him -- mostly sweets -- and when she ambushed him in the kitchen once, he told her "I'm here to get a banana." and grabbed a banana and walked out on her craziness.

In my thirties, I was visiting and my kids had Japanese buckwheat hull pillows to accommodate their allergies and my mom said "Let's empty them and wash the covers." And I appreciated that. She's looking out for my kids and their health.

But then I am trying to refill the newly laundered casings and she's standing over me doing her usual schtick where everything I do is wrong and stupid. 

And I said real pleasantly "When I'm you're age, I'll be as good as you at everything....and you will be ninety and still think I'm an idiot." 

She laughed self consciously and left the room. She never again did that to me and was permanently more pleasant to be around.

So I go home during my divorce with two teenaged sons who already do laundry and one son already cooks some. Heaven forbid anyone tried to cook in her kitchen. You could do nothing right and it was worse if you were male.

So she's doing this "nothing you do is right" schtick to my son and he asked her sincerely if she intended to eat it and her reply has the vibe of Cher in Clueless saying As If! To which he replied something like "Then you shouldn't care how it tastes."

It didn't take too many iterations of that before she left him alone.

At some point, in exasperation with my "crazy making" kids, she says to me "They're just like their father!" -- whom I am divorcing -- and I make agreeable noises and encourage her to go with that theory.

So one day she tells my son "You're just like your father!" in a tone so nasty even he can tell it's supposed to be hurtful and she expects him to feel cut. He replies completely calmly "Yeah. I have half his genes."

And Mr. Socially Slow takes a few seconds to come up with a zinger punchline of "And a quarter of yours." and turns around to say that and she's already fled the scene or we might have been homeless a lot sooner.

My mother had this bizarre judginess about pierced ears. My sister never left Georgia and never got her ears pierced. I got mine pierced in Germany in my twenties.

My mother never bothered me about it. I wore very conservative earrings and she never said one word about "Only a TRAMP has piercings!" or whatever her issue was.

So I think that detail -- I had pierced ears for some years and my sister only wore clip-on earrings which to me is more painful than getting them pierced once and letting it heal up -- in a nutshell says my sister never really did stand up to Mom like I quietly did while refusing to fight with her.

Which is sort of odd because I was a full-time homemaker and my sister had a career making good money, making money like a man.

So I always stood up to my mother, initially with a lot of thunder and noise and later quietly once I no longer felt so threatened by her, and I gave my kids tools for not getting sucked into this garbage without making a big deal out of it.

And that's why my sons learned to cook and clean and I eventually started websites like this one and Nutrient Dense. 

Whatever sexist pig bullshit you grew up with, it's probably not particularly worse than what I grew up with. I just did some things to actually put stuff in the past instead of making a lot of noise about how it needs to STOP while actively reinforcing the pattern in practice.