I have to go back to talking about Mother. When I saw her breaking the ice around the tarp on the new car yesterday (Sunday), I did not think, to kind of my surprise, Man, I'm so getting into trouble now. Honestly, I thought, Holy shit ... Mom's got some guts on her.
This is a woman who beat the living hell out of me, literally, for much of my childhood. It was old-school discipline to her, but it was nothing but life-stifling torture to me. I partially credit (if that's the right word) my inability to hold down a job or find a woman who I don't have to pay for fooling around with to the physical and emotional damage she inflicted upon me. But maybe it's a son's primal, desperate, even innate need to seek acceptance from his mother that I remember the few times she was genuinely sweet to me. Such as the time we were at the local grocery store and she actually held me up to play a pinball game because I was way too short to see the board and hit the flippers. Or the time she bought me a brand new remote control for my TV to replace the old one. I actually hugged her after she gave that gift to me. It was really the only surprise gift she's ever given me. And those were the only times Mother demonstrated maternal love for me, or at least the kind of maternal love that I saw on '80s sitcoms, the kind that I grew up to believe is the "right" way for a mom to treat her son.
She doesn't beat me anymore, of course. She still pisses me off though, and she often drives me crazy. Did it Sunday. We were looking at a property my parents own when she said that we needed to drive by another one. Then, she told me to drive by it again. And again. And again. She needed to see what was going on with her tenants. We even drove up through the alley behind it to see what they were up to. We drove by four times -- enough times for them to know that we were looking at them. If they got our license plate, they'll know where we live. And after that she went, "Oh! We have to take a look at one more property!" The hell? We went to see one and now we're seeing three? We've just tripled the time I thought this would take, and I have to go home to get the new car out of storage!
Mother, to her credit, did ask if we had time to go to the library because she wanted to print out something for tax purposes. But that turned into a clusterfuck too. First of all, the first library we went to was closed on Sundays. The next one we went to only opened at 1; thank goodness we got there only five minutes to 1 or else that would have been a lot of time wasted. We then spent ten minutes putting in a password that was wrong before Mother realized that she had the wrong link altogether. Then she had me print a PDF of a month's worth of expenses for one property ... and then another ... and then another before she told me that not only did she want me to print out the same thing for all of the properties my folks own, but she wanted me to do the same thing for the months of October, November and December. Now, opening up and printing documents don't take a long time, I get that. But I reacted with such exasperation at that nonetheless. Like with the two extra properties we had to go to earlier in the day, I didn't appreciate being blindsided with more things I needed to do. Also, I had wanted to devote the entire afternoon with digging this car out of storage, and this felt like yet another in what had become an unforeseen avalanche of stuff that is eating precious time away from that. Breaking through a layer of ice becomes impossible once the sun goes down, and this entire trip already took 2 1/2 hours. Another, oh, ten minutes of printing out her stuff was just the final straw with me, and she just said we were leaving.
But then I go and eat at the mall for an hour and in the meantime Mother is dealing in hard manual labor. And succeeding, too. She had her reasons to get the car out for me; she had stuff she needed to do too. But when I saw Mother do that for me, I felt guilty -- guilty for being at the mall for an hour, for being short with her at the library, for yelling at her while we were driving around, and really for being a bad son. Once again, the person who birthed you took care of you at a time of need. (And by the way, the car seems to work. Mother charged the battery [she had to teach me how, even though Father taught me a long time ago] and it started; I turned it off and turned it on a half-hour later and it started; and I drove it tonight to and back from coffee for 2 1/2 hours and it started. Now I assume that using it in the morning after 9 1/2 hours of it being off overnight won't prevent it from starting, either.
How can I ever repay her for that? She's probably going to enlist the help of a worker to get her the printouts today (Monday). The least I could do is wake up early to help her make a doctor's appointment. Apparently that is a main reason, if not the main reason, that Mother came home. I'll try and be calm as she feeds me the answers to questions the receptionist will probably have.
Why? Hey, she's my mom. She has hurt me, at times viciously, and she'll do so in the future. But I gravitate to the few morsels of grace she bestows upon me. She gets to do that, because she's a mom.
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