D@MN IT!

Blogger’s Note: LibraryDiva, since you were privy to much of this conversation and the frustrated venting that followed it; I hereby give you permission to ignore the rest of this post. Love, HistoryDiva

Last night my mother and I had a fight over the phone. Well, not so much a fight, more of an over heated discussion at an unusually high volume. Frustrations abound in the world of HistoryDiva and mother, and most of these arise from the lengthy collection of preconceived notions my mother seems to have about myself.

I am a two time college graduate with two liberal arts degrees floating around gathering dust. This stated it is more than fair to assume that I have both an open mind and a well rounded view of reality and the world around me. I am my own person with a vast and varied collection of likes and dislikes; I have my own way to doing things, my own way of handling different situations, and my own set of beliefs. My mother has no respect for any of the aforementioned personal traits. And there’s the rub.

My ‘mistake’ last night was indicating, very innocently might I add because the topic simply came up as part of our conversation which had hitherto been calm, that I do not consider our impending yearly trip to visit my maternal grandparents a ‘vacation.’ I never have. There is nothing about the forthcoming week that will either relaxing or enjoyable. I feel, as I rightly should, that it is my duty to visit my elderly relatives as often as I am able to. They are my grandparents and therefore have a right to my time and presence. I am in no way attempting to martyr myself by making statements like this; I simply see it as the truth.

However, there is a down side to this yearly trip which will forever prevent me from thinking of it in terms of ‘vacation.’

Now, before I continue with this rant allow me to caution you, dear reader, in regards to what I am about to say in relation to my elderly relatives. There are two things about my maternal grandparents you must understand before I go any farther. The first is that I love these two people very much. Just as with the rest of my family I would do anything and everything for them if they asked it of me, down to giving them a kidney in an effort to prolong their lives. My family is the most important thing in the world to me. And second, my grandmother is a very mean person. She comes by this trait quite honestly. Her mother, my great grandmother was, to quote every family member who actually knew her, “a serious bitch.” This comes down to a ‘nature verses nurture’ argument really. It was due to the ‘nurture’ given to my grandmother by her mother that it is now in her ‘nature’ to be a fantastically mean person…but only to the people she loves. Strange how that works, isn’t it?

There is nothing, abso-freaking-lutely nothing, about spending the better part of two days driving almost 650 miles to spend a week sitting in my elderly grandparents un-air-conditioned home listening to my grandmother making snide comments about my weight, my hair cut, my hair color, my clothing choices, my level of education, the college I attended, the job I hold, the friends I have, the life I lead, the place I live, the car I drive, and the fact that I don’t go to church every Sunday like a good Methodist, that is in any way, shape or form RELAXING or ENJOYABLE.

I am able to judge how happy she is to see me by how long it takes her to lean over and ask me the following question: “So…when are you starting your diet?” I swear I could show up having starved myself down to under 100 pounds and she would still say that my new blue t-shirt makes me look ‘a little tubby.’ Never mind the fact that she herself was decidedly overweight for the majority of her adult life, not loosing significant weight until after her open heart surgery in her late seventies. And now that she’s 89 she couldn’t be more pleased about the fact that her weight and her age are the same number.

The most tempting response to the aforementioned question is to lean over, smile gently and whisper: “The day you drop dead.”

But I don’t. I bite my tongue, smile, and attempt to change the subject. We made it all the way to 3:16 PM on Tuesday last year. (She was really happy that I was there.)

What I find the most irritating about this trip is that my mother REFUSES to do anything other than sit in my grandparent’s home and ‘visit.’ And while I wouldn’t go so far as to call Pittsburgh a beautiful city, after all much of the downtown area is actually abandoned at this point, there is still a plethora of things to see and do in and around the city. We could go to museums, visit historical homes, take a walking tour, ANYTHING to not have to sit in that house for an entire week.

But my mother doesn’t see the point in doing things like that. Hell, I’ve never even been to D*sney World (don’t want to have the copy-write people come after me) because she and my father went in the late seventies and she sees no point in going someplace she has already been and didn’t like anyway! (Never mind that this means that I am quite literally the only member of my family who has NEVER been there.) And just for another example, she and my father decided that they would do a ‘second honeymoon’ on their 25th anniversary. They planned to visit Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, and Cherokee, taking about a week to just travel in the mountains and enjoy the scenery. They came home after only three days because my mother was tired of doing ‘touristy’ things.

And here I thought the entire point of travel was to go new places and see new things…how very wrong I’ve been.