My roommate and I took my giant purple eggplant of a van up and thought we could double duty the trip to also retrieve our couch! We arrived, we had fun and we got the couch. Then we made like the wind back to college and work and the place that actually needed the couch only to land in Kennewick, at a gas station with a car that would not move...
It was silly really: park car for gas... move car to be courteous, park again... move car to air pump to inflate perpetually leaky tire....... Car. Refuses. To. Move. Ever. Again.
I hyperventilate and my cucumber cool roomie whips out her phone and assembles a bevy of her people to the rescue. I am from the school of thought where to ask someone for a tissue may be asking too much so I generally feel that asking people for anything is a bad idea... It's not that I think people are evil or that they don't like me, or that they wouldn't want to help me... Ok, the last two are lies... But I share a generally positive view, most of the time, about my fellow man. I just really don't feel like I deserve to have people drop what they are doing and come to my aid!! (unless you are my boyfriend, which carries a totally different toolbox of expectations... poor man...)
Within a half an hour, Rommie's friend is there hemming and hawing about the state of the now defective eggplant... After about an hour or so of deliberation and such, we are spending the night at his parent's, they are feeding us and we have a PLAN! I was still internally sputtering and freaking, but things were "under control."
So while being graciously put up at our host's home, I decide to check my email... BAD IDEA!
When It Rains, It Pours! They say, I wholeheartedly agree... So, you don't know this, but I have a terrible relationship with my mother... In a "we just don't talk" kind of way... So when I moved down here I didn't actually get around to telling her about the whole moving part of the equation... Oops. Sitting malevolently in my inbox is an email from my mother from which no good could possibly come... I open it and there she is acting self righteous and hurt about the fact that in her mind I have cut her off and unjustly hurt her with my disrespect and malice by refusing to tell her that I was moving... As such she was now going to cut off my health insurance...
Not good...
To be quite honest, she is not altogether unjustified in her feelings, but my mother and I get along only slightly better than Nazis and Jews... Maybe a little bit of an overly colorful exaggeration, but BAD, unhealthy and depressing couldn't be overused in describing our recent interactions... Now to some, this would seem to be a minor setback because, plenty of people have crappy relationships with their parents, why not me too!?
Well, my mother is an alcoholic, so while some people can argue reasonably with their messy family members, mine likes to babble somewhat confusedly and illogically about things that really don't have anything to do with the problem at hand... She also has this selective hearing mechanism that I am thoroughly convinced should be studied. My mother has the awful talent of picking apart any argument and not only internalizing anything that could even possibly be considered insulting, but also regurgitating it for you on a moment's notice, even when slobbering drunk... This makes talking about the issues we have bordering on impossible, and our relationship got so bad at one point that I honestly felt that there was no better option than ceasing to talk to her.
And it was surprisingly easy. I didn't send cards on birthdays and holidays, and neither did she. I didn't call or come knocking on her door and she never came back for me. It was so easy to just stop having a relationship with my mother that it was seeing her that would give me jitters... Now, my mother knows I have these bizarre aspirations for higher education including getting my PhD so when my parents' divorce was getting really ugly, about a year or so ago, I went to the dentist and was told that I required a crap-ton of insanely expensive work. I gave into my wonderful tendency to spaz and ran to my mother asking if she was cutting me out of health insurance because at that time, that is what she was doing to my dad... She vehemently reassured me that she would carry me throughout college and I believed her.
She has great insurance by the way, and given that I have this amazing ability to injure myself at inopportune times, or get sick from random things, I need good health insurance... So, here I am, having recently waived my Student Health Insurance Plan, freshly moved in and spazzing out over the newly defective state of my car and I start to cry... Not noticeably, but, there was that terrible stinging sensation and that feeling that the bottom of the world is opening up and and munching on your toes... I proceed to be open and honest with her in a heart-wrenching pair of emails that are only met with anger and disdain. I tell her how I miss her, how I want to have a relationship with her but I just don't know how... But I don't think she heard that... She must hear an odd conga-line of insults and jabs that I honestly don't see myself saying...
So I go to sleep and try again to make life stop biting me in the morning. It didn't. The mechanic does some magical voodoo that somehow multiplies what is considered a $150 part into over $1,000 worth of repairs and diagnostics, and it may be this, but it's probably that, until I just start bawling. At which our host comes over to me, gives me a hug and offers me tissues. I didn't even have to ask. I call my father and he attempts to rescue me and we end up abandoning the car for future dealings and summon another one of the Roomie's rescue squads to take us the rest of the way down to Boise...
Talk about an interesting contrast of events... The kindness this weekend of the people who came to our aid put in contrast to my mother's insanity is hard to comprehend. I know that she is sick and that is the only reason I resisted calling her and screaming at her on the phone for a few hours when things were getting really ugly. I know (somewhere inside of me...) that my mother is not ok, less ok than I am even after the insanity of the past week! It's not comforting, but I suppose it's just perspective...
On the positive side:tomorrow is Saturday and I can sleep in till 9:00. Boo-yah.
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