Laundry saves lives
I spent much of the weekend either stressed or numb or both depending on how the wind blew. It started out innocently enough but it seems when you give a woman too much time to sit by herself and work herself up, you get to see good old-fashioned Eastern European crazy in action. Now, some of you will have no idea what I mean by that but I have no doubt that some of you know exactly what I’m talking about.
Kelly graciously offered to help me do stuff at my mom’s or simply even hang and give moral support on Saturday. We decided that the girls’ room would be a good place to keep working. I had, with no drama whatsoever, already started going through things in there that my mother had piled up against the wall a few days earlier. She sat for different periods of time watching me work and we chatted pleasantly. Now, the piles aren’t a bad thing. When I last looked at the room, I was overwhelmed with the volume of stuff she had thrown in there. I wasn’t quite sure where to begin so I put it off. She went in there and put things in piles up against the wall so it didn’t look so daunting. I take it one box at a time.
After showing Kelly around she told me she did not envy my situation at all. Now, remember, I had up until that point worked a week solid cleaning things out (and I’ve done a few days work on top of that a few months back). She never saw the packed basement, laundry room, under the stairs, behind the furnace and the kids’ rooms before I started working. She was overwhelmed at what was now actually on the decline of the roller coaster hill rather than what I faced at the bottom on my way up.
We sat in what will be the girls’ room and talked about old times, some of the ugly stuff that my mom had saved for years and years and just about every topic in between. When my mom walked in, we were sitting there not even sorting anything and were met by this very odd, very cold face. She asked us what we were doing in a tone that resembled what I imagine the Hungarian Secret Police sounded like during interrogations during the Cold War. Kelly had some unopened packages of border paper in front of her and made the mistake of innocently asking my mother what she had planned for the paper. That’s when the crazy eyes really popped out and she just let go.
When my mother argues it’s hard to keep up with her for a few reasons. First, most people don’t understand a word she’s saying because she’s even less understandable when she’s in a rant than when she already is speaking her version of what I call Hunglish. Second, the woman is unable to stay on topic. It’s very frustrating when you’re trying to get to the point or to the bottom of the problem when a rant about border paper becomes a rant about being lucky for us that she had never gone out to get a boyfriend to a martyr-ish lack of logic where somehow in the play in her head she’s just about ready to be buried while we throw rose petals and dance around the grave cackling and throwing out her Valpaks from 1992.
In an argument I like to stay on topic. I like to argue in a linear fashion where we start with what the problem is and then stick to the topic at hand so that we come to some sort of logical resolution. This, my friends, is not how it’s done in the old-country. First you get bent about something small because you’re not exactly sure what you’re irritated about or you’re too passive-aggressive to say it in the first place (this passive-aggressiveness in the old-country is also known as “not wanting to fight”). Then, if the person on the receiving end isn’t being too receptive of your vitriol, you start veering onto topics that hopefully succeed in pushing the right buttons so that the lucky party in question gets thrown off track in bewilderment not unlike a five-point deer caught in a Peterbuilt’s headlights. The impact is similar in that with one you get the brief stare before something hard hits you, knocks you for a loop and then there’s blood everywhere whereas with the other you get the brief stare before something hard hits you . . . oh, wait, it’s exactly the same. Never mind.
Once you’ve succeeded in flustering the individual, begin throwing out reasons why you’ve been so wronged your entire life with heavy helpings of non sequitur nonsense until they are so mixed up the only options are either violence or sobbing. I prefer sobbing since it’s cleansing and doesn’t require a bail bondsman.
I think you can figure out what happened. Poor Kelly wanted so badly to be able to slip under the door like a piece of mail and get the hell out of there. It didn’t help that while I had driven Jeff’s car, I was frantically looking for the keys to the car I normally drive. I had found the “wrong” keys about 50 times and then it suddenly hit me that those were the fucking keys I had been looking for all that time.
We took a drive while I vented and we discussed my mother and her mother-in-law and other crazies in our lives. Feeling bad that she had to be a partial recipient of my mother’s flavor of crazy, I took her out to dinner and inadvertently a drink too. We went to Charly’s (yeah, yeah — I named my blog after the damn place. Don’t act all surprised) and the owner’s wife bought us a margarita. We’re such lightweights that they split the alcohol for one drink into two. It was quite tasty and I’m not normally a margarita fan. It was much appreciated.
Since it’s been so many years since I’ve lived with my parents, I had forgotten that my mother loves an audience. It got to the point where I would almost never invite anyone over for fear of embarrassment should my mother start complaining to try and build a camaraderie with one of my friends in the hopes of making me see my evil ways and how wrong I am. Sigh.
My problem is that she’s one of the few (if only) people who can truly push buttons with me. What I need to learn how to do is shut my yap and either diffuse the situation by simply agreeing with her or walking away. If I let her get to me and let my mouth get the better of me, I’m going to either need Xanax or a lawyer. Her behavior isn’t going to change so the only way I can help myself is to modify mine no matter how hard that might seem at times. And it’s hard, let me tell you.
So how does laundry figure in all this? Well, after this pleasant event I started feeling even more stress than I already had and Sunday I was pretty much numb and extremely tired. The more I sat the more I would think disturbing thoughts. Since the laundry was getting to the point where I was now wearing laundry-day clothes I decided to tackle that and that’s what’s kept me going today. That and my kids. I’ve tried to keep myself moving because when I don’t, I’m either wanting to cry or sleep. Neither is an option with the kids around so in celebration of the textile and detergent arts, I went to town on the mountains of laundry that needed to be done. We also ran some errands and I think the moving saved me today.
