Sunday, June 13, 2004

Music: Eels - I need some sleep
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I just wish I could give up sometimes. No matter how hard I try, something's always wrong. I need to face it: I am never going to make my mom happy.

She just never shuts up. I have two more employment applications waiting for me to fill out, but I'm having reservations about applying for any more jobs. During the week...life is paradise. It's so quiet. So peaceful. Just me and the dog and no one screaming or complaining. The hours between when I wake up and 6 pm Monday through Thursday feel like life should be. No cringing in my room with passive agressive daydreams of punching my mother in the face.

I used to be able to deal with this. Right up until I went to college, I could handle her temper tantrums. Her victim complex. Now that I know that normal people do *not* live like this, I can't deal with it.

She getting angrier with me now that I talk back. She seems to take everything I do as a challenge. I take everything she does as a complaint. Neither idea is fair, but this is what happens after twenty years of this.

She comes in to my room as soon as she gets home to complain about something I either did or didn't do. Apparantly I should have been copying her phone book in to her cell phone for her like I said I'd do. When I responded that I couldn't have done that because she had taken her cell phone with her to work, she launched in to her "I wake up every day at 4:00..." speach. I could honest to God recite this rant from memory. When I did, she didn't think it was very funny.

But the straw that broke the camel's back was on Wednesday. I woke up at ten and let the dog out. She had peed her blanket again, so I put it in the laundry. I folded blankets and brought towels upstairs. After a bath I cleaned the tub and fixed up the basement. About halfway through the day, I went out with Shawn and A to see Shrek 2, knowing full well I was going to have to clean up some form of Sandy mess when I got home. When Sandy threw up, I cleaned the rug without complaint and emptied the dish washer. When the morning blankets were washed and dried, I put a load of regular laundry on and brought it upstairs to be ironed later on.

At 6:00 I was putting the last of the clothes in the ironing closet and was on my way back downstairs when I heard a full on shreik of cursing from my newly arrived mother. Sandy had wet her sheet again. This is the simplest task of the day, and yet it was cause for her to strain her vocal chords and cry about her own misfortune. She sobbed for half an hour about how unappreciated she was and how much she wanted to put the dog to sleep. The next half hour was a monologue of misery in which she detailed the many ways in which she is a "prisoner in her own home" all because of the dog.

This was too much. I had been blowdrying my hair to try and cover up her screams, but it wasn't working. My hair was a complete mess and I must have looked like I was going to kill someone. Mom was in the kitchen slamming cabinets for no apparant reason. When she saw me in the doorway, she opened her mouth to say something, but I didn't let her, for once.

My plan had been to give her a different topic to think of, like maybe an opportunity to complain about her customers at work. What came out, however, was "Will you calm the fuck down already?" I didn't launch in to a tirade about all the things I'd done that day so that she wouldn't have to. I didn't talk about how tight my schedule was because of dog concerns. I merely pointed out that she was shreiking like a crazy old witch and needed to get a reality check so she'd see that not everything in life was calculated to piss her off.

I grabbed a Snapple and walked back upstairs without a word. We didn't see eachother until the next day when we acted like nothing had happened.

She's doing it again. Acting like everything is done just to ruin her life. When she wanted to know why the washing machine was running, I told her it was because I put on some laundry. No response of "Oh okay" or "Oh good." She looked at me like I was some kind of hideous monster and walked away.

About half an hour ago, while I was still writing this, she walked in and asked me why I still don't have a job. I wanted to tell her the truth, but didn't feel like making her feel like even more of a victim.

I'll still keep helping around the house. It's a good thing to do and I'm not doing anything else. I'm just not sure how much I'll be going out of my way to talk to my mother anymore. I don't even want to look at her today.

Can't it just be Monday now?

::transmission ended::
This transmission logged byErisSaid on 4:42 PM

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